I'm no expert,
P.J. O'Rourke: 'Very Little That Gets Blogged Is Of Very Much Worth' - Radio ... - 0 views
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One thing a professional reporter knows that I'm not always sure that a person who isn't a reporter knows is that it is very easy to see part of an event and miss the more important part of an event, to see one thing when something else has happened. You have to be very aware of how complex most events are, and how narrow one's vision of most events are. And the police will tell you -- my father-in-law is a retired FBI agent -- and he will certainly tell you that there's nothing as unreliable as an eyewitness. You don't even have to go to the movies to see Rashomon. Just take any couple that you know that's been divorced and ask for his story of what happened, and then ask for her story of what happened.
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It really isn't any one person. It's the experienced news organization that filters this out.
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Russia Weighs K.G.B. Powers for Security Agency - NYTimes.com - 0 views
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The note contends that print and electronic media “openly facilitate the formation of negative processes in the spiritual sphere, propagate the cult of individualism, violence and mistrust in the government’s ability to protect its citizens, in effect drawing youth to extremist acts.”
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On Tuesday, opposition leaders worried that the F.S.B.’s new powers would be used to suppress dissent of all kinds. “In the Soviet times, there really were warnings issued for anti-Soviet activity,” Viktor I. Ilyukhin, a Communist deputy who serves on the Duma committee on constitutional law, told the newspaper Noviye Izvestiya. “But even then, the warnings were delivered only by prosecutors,” Mr. Ilyukhin said. “Now, they spit on all that. Any citizen can be called an extremist for taking a public position, for political activity. A warning can be given to anyone who criticizes the powers that be. If you print this interview, they will announce that Ilyukhin is an extremist.”
America's Forgotten Mass Imprisonment of Women Believed to Be Sexually Immoral - HISTORY - 0 views
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the “American Plan.” From the 1910s through the 1950s, and in some places into the 1960s and 1970s, tens of thousands—perhaps hundreds of thousands—of American women were detained and forcibly examined for STIs. The program was modeled after similar ones in Europe, under which authorities stalked “suspicious” women, arresting, testing and imprisoning them.
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If the women tested positive, U.S. officials locked them away in penal institutions with no due process. While many records of the program have since been lost or destroyed, women’s forced internment could range from a few days to many months. Inside these institutions, records show, the women were often injected with mercury and forced to ingest arsenic-based drugs, the most common treatments for syphilis in the early part of the century. If they misbehaved, or if they failed to show “proper” ladylike deference, these women could be beaten, doused with cold water, thrown into solitary confinement—or even sterilized.
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beginning in 1918, federal officials began pushing every state in the nation to pass a “model law,” which enabled officials to forcibly examine any person “reasonably suspected” of having an STI. Under this statute, those who tested positive for an STI could be held in detention for as long as it took to render him or her noninfectious. (On paper, the law was gender-neutral; in practice, it almost exclusively focused on regulating women and their bodies.)
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Elise Armani with Piotr Szyhalski - The Brooklyn Rail - 0 views
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During the entire history of America, the US has not been at war for 17 years. That's incredible, mainly because if you talk to people who maybe aren't that much that interested in history, they would say, “That’s crazy. What are you talking about? There’s no war.”
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Our relationship with war and how our country functions in the world is so warped and twisted. Every time the word “war” is introduced into the cultural discourse, you know that it is already corrupted. That's why it’s paired here with “back to normal,” because it's another combination of phrases that stood out…Everybody keeps talking about things getting back to normal. Then the pronouncements that this is a war and we’re fighting an invisible enemy. It just seems so disturbing really because what that means is that we're about to start doing things that are ethically questionable. To me, what was happening is that the pronouncement was made so that anything goes, and there's no culpability, nobody will be held responsible for making any decisions whatsoever because it was war and things had to be done.
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if I think about how “war” has been used strategically in this context of COVID-19, it doesn’t feel like rhetoric that was raised to be alarmist, but almost to be comforting. That this is a familiar experience. We have a handle on it. We are attacking it like a war. War is our normal.
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The Long View-The Harms of Social Media - 0 views
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