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.
America's Forgotten Mass Imprisonment of Women Believed to Be Sexually Immoral - HISTORY - 0 views
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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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The stakes of November: It doesn't matter that much | The Economist - 0 views
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This is the great unspeakable fact of American politics: it doesn't matter all that much who wins.
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Democratic politics is to a great extent a war of coalitions over what the great political economist James M. Buchanan called "the fiscal commons". Think of government as a huge pool of money. Control of government means control over that pool of money. Parties gain control by putting together winning coalitions of interest groups. When a party has control, its coalition's interest groups get more from the pool and the losing coalition's interest groups get less. So, yeah, it matters who wins. When Democrats are in charge, that's great news for public-employees unions and General Electric's alternative energy division. When the Republicans are in charge, that's great news for rich people and Raytheon.
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I think you'll find that political parties tend to reliably support policies that have nice distributional consequences for the interest groups that support them. And I think you'll find politicians and court intellectuals brilliant at framing pay-offs to party stalwarts as policies absolutely necessary to the common weal.
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Hate spreads in Trump's America: "We need to root out white supremacy just like the can... - 0 views
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the media won’t give the same time of day or coverage to communities who are being targeted by hate violence. They are spending so much time humanizing white nationalists and humanizing white supremacy that in many ways the news media routinely ignore the ubiquitous and every day hate that communities of color and other diverse communities experience in this country
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a majority of white Americans feel they are victims of discrimination. What these white Americans have to do is unpack their own anxiety, discuss this rage, and understand that the project of civil rights, human rights, equality under the law are not an assault on their racial identity. I think for some white voters it is probably about what they perceive as waning demographic and economic power
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The good news is I learned from my travels around the country that the survivors of hate, people who have lost so much, are not only rebuilding but they are coming forward and they are reclaiming their lives. These survivors are working with allies to stop the hatred, building community defense programs and are willing to engage in difficult conversations with people who see the world differently from them. And I think that is something to really admire. Given what’s transpired survivors of hate have every reason to turn their backs on this country.
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