Why Is Ethiopia at War in the Tigray Region? - The New York Times - 0 views
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A year of conflict in Ethiopia, Africa’s second most populous country and a linchpin of regional security, has left thousands dead, forced more than two million people from their homes and pushed parts of the country into famine.
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The tide of the civil war has fluctuated wildly. The government teetered in early November when fighters from Tigray surged south toward the capital, Addis Ababa, forcing Mr. Abiy to declare a state of emergency. Foreigners fled the country and the government detained thousands of civilians from the Tigrayan ethnic group.
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But weeks later Mr. Abiy pulled off a stunning military reversal, halting the rebel march less than 100 miles from the capital, then forcing them to retreat hundreds of miles to their mountainous stronghold in Tigray.
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The Phantasms of Judith Butler - The Atlantic - 0 views
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The central idea of Who’s Afraid of Gender? is that fascism is gaining strength around the world, and that its weapon is what Butler calls the “phantasm of gender,” which they describe as a confused and irrational bundle of fears that displaces real dangers onto imaginary ones.
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Similarly, Trump’s Christian-right supporters see this adjudicated rapist as a bulwark against sexual libertinism, but he also has a following among young men who admire him as libertine in chief and among people of every stripe who think he’ll somehow make them richer.
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Butler is obviously correct that the authoritarian right sets itself against feminism and modern sexual rights and freedom.
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Opinion | The Deification of Donald Trump Poses Some Interesting Questions - The New Yo... - 0 views
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The video, along with Eric Trump’s claim that his father “literally saved Christianity” and the image Donald Trump reposted on Truth Social of Jesus sitting next to him in court, raises a question:
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Does Trump believe that he is God’s messenger, or are his direct and indirect claims to have a special relationship with God a cynical ploy to win evangelical votes?
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“Over the years since, there has been a growing chorus of voices saying Trump is the defender of Christians and Christianity. Trump says this himself all the time, ‘When they come after me, they’re really coming after you.’”
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Diderot, an American Exemplar? Bien Sûr - NYTimes.com - 0 views
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Rare are the writers whose legacy has shifted as dramatically as Diderot’s. When he died in 1784, at age 70, the vast majority of his short stories, novels and philosophical works lay hidden away in trunks. He was remembered primarily for two things: coediting the world’s first comprehensive encyclopedia, a project to which he contributed an astonishing 10,000 articles, and being a scandalous freethinker and atheist.
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Armed with both hindsight and access to his unpublished writings, we now know a different Diderot. By the 19th century, the writer’s “discovered” texts began inspiring the likes of Goethe, Hegel and Nietzsche. Marx cited him as his favorite writer — twice. Freud, too, was a great fan.
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Readers today never fail to be amazed by Diderot’s willingness to confront both the unconscionable and the uncomfortable, often embracing subject matter that his contemporaries fled. He vehemently condemned the enslavement of Africans (and gave a philosophical voice to the slave); he challenged his era’s views on religious celibacy and forced vocations (in a tear-jerking pseudo-memoir of a sexually abused nun); and he entertained the possibility that his cherished materialism denied us free will (in his novel “Jacques the Fatalist”).
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Can America Quit Football? - Patrick Hruby - Entertainment - The Atlantic - 0 views
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To discuss the wider cultural implications of Seau's death, the Saints' scandal, and football's ongoing identity crisis, The Atlantic spoke with documentary filmmaker Sean Pamphilon. He recently released audio of former New Orleans defensive coordinator Gregg Williams imploring his players to injure opponents and is working on a film, The United States of Football, which explores the sport's dark, beloved place in America society.
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What is The United States of Football about? Why are you making it? It's a cultural examination of football from pee-wee to the pros. It's about the motivation for playing and enjoying the sport. The escapism. The violence, for sure—it feeds something in our culture. There's a reason why baseball isn't the top sport anymore. It's too slow. People aren't getting the shit knocked out of them. We're a very aggressive culture.
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I started working on it because I realized I was basically training my son to play football. Playing in the park all the time. We had this one patch of grass in a park in Brooklyn that was our field. It was our special place. In 2004, I was interviewing Kyle Turley for Run Ricky Run. He said to me, "If you have a kid, don't let him play football. Let him play any other sport." He was adamant about that. My son was six at the time. We kept playing in the park. Five years later, I read an article about Turley having a seizure. I had heard of CTE before. It never stuck with me. But after reading about Kyle, it did. I felt a personal connection with him. Because of his issues, I was becoming more interested in the health issues that players were having. And I had to decide: Did I still want my son to play football?
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Making Egypt's Streets Safe for Women - NYTimes.com - 0 views
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making it far less likely that she will encounter the verbal abuse or physical and sexual assaults that women have come to expect on Cairo’s streets.
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“I am a woman from Egypt, so I face harassment in the streets daily,” Ms. Helal, 29, said in a phone interview this week.
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She has to be acutely aware of her surroundings every time she photographs in a crowd in public, constantly evaluate her safety and make sure there is a clear escape route in case she is attacked. While public harassment of women has been commonplace, it was not until an incident four years ago, while covering a peaceful protest on International Women’s Day, that she started documenting these encounters. It was a few months after the start of the Arab Spring in Egypt, and women went to Tahrir Square to hand out flowers in support of women’s rights.
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Grand Theft Auto V and the Culture of Violence Against Women | Malika Saada Saar - 0 views
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In GTA V, a gamer can purchase a woman (or is she a girl?) to perform a menu of different sexual acts that he experiences in first person. After purchasing the woman/girl, the gamer can choose to kill her -- and actually is incentivized to kill her to get his money back. At present, GTA V is one of the most popular and money making video games.
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If Cambodia, India, or Nigeria produced such a video game, there would be global outrage. It would serve as unequivocal evidence of their misogynistic cultures in which women and girls are systemically raped and murdered with impunity. We would critique the ways in which their cultures and values are organized around the normalization of gendered violence.
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Interestingly, there has been little to none such backlash against the American made and marketed GTA V in the U.S. The release of GTA V has been met with a very muted response. Any criticisms are reduced to being mere moral panics. Free speech advocates, GTA V fans, and other supporters insist that GTA V is simply a game, a victimless form of entertainment.
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Excerpt: 'Shame' by Shelby Steele - ABC News - 0 views
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cable
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since the 1960s, “liberal” and “conservative” have come to function almost like national identities in their own right. To be one or the other is not merely to lean left or right—toward “labor” or toward “business”— within a common national identity; it is to belong to a different vision of America altogether, a vision that seeks to supersede the opposing vision and to establish itself as the nation’s common identity. Today the Left and the Right don’t work within a shared understanding of the national purpose; nor do they seek such an understanding. Rather, each seeks to win out over the other and to define the nation by its own terms.
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t was all the turmoil of the 1960s—the civil rights and women’s movements, Vietnam, the sexual revolution, and so on—that triggered this change by making it clear that America could not go back to being the country it had been before. It would have to reinvent itself. It would have to become a better country. Thus, the reinvention of America as a country shorn of its past sins became an unspoken, though extremely powerful, mandate in our national politics
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Wildly Popular App Kik Offers Teenagers, and Predators, Anonymity - The New York Times - 0 views
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Unlike some competing apps, Kik says it does not have the ability to view written messages between users, or to show them to the police. It can view pictures and videos, but retains them only until the recipient’s device has received the message. Those practices are legal.
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With a court order or in a dire emergency — as in Nicole’s death — the company can provide the authorities with a log of a user’s sent and received messages, and in some cases can supply the user’s Internet protocol address, giving a physical location.
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In deciding what information to store, the company says, it aims to “strike a balance” between “protecting user privacy and the need to remove bad actors from our platform and assist law enforcement.”
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Shaker Aamer: In his own words - BBC News - 0 views
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Aamer, 48, was held over extremely serious claims - that he had led a Taliban unit and was an associate of Osama Bin Laden. The US military classified him as a threat, but he was never charged.
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His lawyers say the case against him came from unreliable allegations extracted during torture and that his treatment at the US military base in Cuba raises serious questions about the legality and morality of the so-called war on terror.
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The Saudi national lived in London for five years, settling with a British wife - but says he found it hard to be a practising Muslim in the UK.
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Halloween Costume Correctness on Campus: Feel Free to Be You, but Not Me - The New York... - 0 views
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The term “cultural appropriation,” which emerged from academia but has been applied more broadly — say, to refer to Washington Redskins fans wearing feather headdresses or white people in cornrows — has drawn ire from opponents of political correctness. But supporters say it captures a truth: that the melding of cultures is often about which group has the power to take symbols, styles or language from another.
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The video issued by the University of Washington shows students from various ethnic groups and of various sexual orientations saying that almost any portrayal of them can cause a wound: For example, dressing in drag can denigrate the struggles of gay and transgender people.
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At Duke University, the Center for Multicultural Affairs has filled its Facebook page with images of young people holding up pictures of offensive stereotypes, including white people in blackface and a man dressed as a suicide bomber, with the hashtag #OurCulturesAreNotCostumes.
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Mississippi Fights to Keep Control of Its Beleaguered Child Welfare System - ... - 0 views
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“Who’s the baby?” Terry Latham, the director of the shelter, recalled asking.“I’m no baby,” the girl shouted, her ribs visible in her emaciated body. “I’m 4.
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The girl, identified as Olivia Y., who suffered from profound malnourishment and possibly sexual abuse, would become one of 13 children whose experiences formed a class-action lawsuit in 2004 against the state’s Division of Family and Children’s Services for “failing in its duty” to protect its own children.
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Mississippi’s foster care system, like those in other states, is designed to protect children who have been removed from their homes by a court order after a social worker’s investigation into the conditions there. Ideally, children are placed with licensed foster families, who receive between $684.90 and $1,546.50 per month per child, depending on the age and needs of the child. But, according to data provided by the state agency, Mississippi had just 1,486 licensed foster homes for 5,142 children in its custody as of December.
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Andrew Sullivan: Portrait of the President As a Con Man - 0 views
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One of the talking points for some who support continued mass immigration is the notion that the places where immigration is least popular are the places with the fewest number of immigrants. That’s how irrational xenophobia is, they suggest
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the Migration Policy Institute complicates the picture a bit. While it finds that the number of immigrants increased by 9 percent between 2010 and 2016, it also notes that it had risen by 15 percent or more in 15 states. And among those states, most are red ones: North Dakota, West Virginia, South Dakota, Nebraska, Wyoming, Alaska, Indiana, and Iowa among them.
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, the total numbers are nowhere near where they are in, say, California, but the pace of change really has increased in those states where opposition — especially to immigrants who entered the country illegally — is high. I don’t find this surprising.
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The Peter Strzok Hearing and the Death of Shame - The Atlantic - 0 views
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Decency and the sense of shame that comes from violating standards of decency depend upon a tacit consensus on what it means to do right by others.
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Decency is not justice; since the tacit consensus of the 1950s did not include full civil rights for African Americans, or for that matter virtually anyone who was not a straight white male, very decent folk all over the country lived with perfect complacency in a caste society
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Ted Poe, another Texan—another representative, that is, of the law and order capital of America—turned to Strzok and said, “You’re going to act on your bias. You’re going to ‘stop’ President Trump. How do we know that’s not rampant through the FBI?” Strzok rejoined, “A judge asks jurors, ‘Are you able to set aside your personal opinions and render a judgment based on the facts?’ and I and the men and women of the FBI every day take our personal beliefs and set them aside in vigorous pursuit of the truth wherever it lies.
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Brett Kavanaugh and what happens at Georgetown Prep - The Washington Post - 0 views
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. Why did Harvey Weinstein succeed in allegedly abusing dozens of women for dozens of years before anyone did anything about it? Why did Les Moonves allegedly get to spend 30 years systemically traumatizing his employees at CBS?
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The answer, in large part, is that just like what happened at Georgetown Prep stayed at Georgetown Prep, what happened in Hollywood stayed in Hollywood, and what happened at NBC or CBS or some of those restaurants headed by celebrity chefs stayed there, too.
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The struggle of a woman who levels an allegation against one of these men is so great because, in reality, she is never challenging only one man. She is challenging the clique and the culture he belongs to — his high school, his college, his country club, his political party, or his industry, from filmmaking to media moguling to restaurateuring.
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Beth Moore: The Evangelical Superstar Taking on Trump - The Atlantic - 0 views
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she was horrified by church leaders’ reflexive support of Trump. To Moore, it wasn’t just a matter of hypocrisy, of making a deal with the devil that would deliver a Supreme Court seat, among other spoils. Moore believes that an evangelical culture that demeans women, promotes sexism, and disregards accusations of sexual abuse enabled Trump’s rise.
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Evangelicals, Moore said, have “clearer lines between men and women and how they serve.” But sometimes, “that attitude is no longer about a role in a church. It becomes an attitude of gender superiority. And that has to be dealt with.” Moore may be a complementarian, but she is adamant that Christian men should not treat women “any less than Jesus treated women in the Gospels: always with dignity, always with esteem, never as secondary citizens.”
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events have emboldened Moore. Whereas her criticisms of church leaders were once veiled, she now speaks her mind freely. She blogged icily about meeting a prominent male theologian who looked her up and down and told her she was prettier than another famous female Bible teacher. She has castigated the evangelical movement for selling its soul to buy political wins. Moore is hopeful that a reckoning is finally under way. “There is a very strong saying that Peter used himself, that judgment begins in the house of God. And I do believe that’s what’s happening.”
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Pret a Manger and Krispy Kreme owners discover disturbing Nazi past | US news | The Gua... - 0 views
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The Reimann family are now the second richest family in Germany with an estimated net worth of €33bn ($37bin). Through JAB Holding, a private company owned by the family, they also have majority shares in Peets Tea and Coffee, Panera Bread and Dr Pepper.
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In July 1937, Albert Reimann Jr wrote to Heinrich Himmler, the SS leader responsible for the Holocaust, saying that his business was “a purely Aryan family business that is over 100 years old”, he wrote. “The owners are unconditional followers of the race theory.”
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The report contains harrowing details about the family’s treatment of forced workers: female slaves, mostly from eastern Europe, were forced to stand naked in the factory barracks during checks. Those who refused were beaten and sexually abused. Other workers were beaten, often by the Reimanns themselves, including a Russian woman who worked in the Reimanns’ private villa.
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How the Supreme Court is Expanding the Immigrant Detention System - The Atlantic - 0 views
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A quarter-century ago, in 1994, the Immigration and Naturalization Service, on any given day, was holding somewhere around 5,500 immigrants in “immigration detention.”For fiscal year 2017, Immigration and Customs Enforcement budget documents projected an average daily population in detention of roughly 31,000. That increase—nearly six-fold in 25 years—made the Enforcement and Removal Operations division of ICE roughly the 13th largest prison system in the country. On its busiest days in FY 2017, ICE housed a population well above that.
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As of 2016, only about 10 percent of detainees were held in federal facilities at all; the remainder were housed in state, county, or city jails (25 percent) or private for-profit prisons (65 percent). Each of the local or private facilities is governed by an agreement with ICE governing inmate conditions, and the agreements aren’t uniform. Some require better conditions than others. Even ICE’s defenders do not seriously contest that ERO detention facilities are rife with poor physical conditions, inadequate medical care, and physical and sexual abuse of the inmates.
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Justices Samuel Alito, joined by Chief Justice John Roberts and Justices Anthony Kennedy, Clarence Thomas, and Neil Gorsuch, read the statute as forbidding bail hearings for the immigration inmates, and thus authorizing ERO to detain them for weeks, months, or even years. Two of the five, Thomas and Gorsuch, wrote separately to suggest that the inmates should not be allowed to challenge their detention in court until after their cases are complete and they are facing deportation. The five-justice majority opinion, without quite saying so, also suggested that the constitutional issue is really not of much importance at all. Justice Stephen Breyer wrote a dissent, joined by Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Sonia Sotomayor. (Justice Elena Kagan recused herself, because she had authorized a pleading in the case when she was U.S. Solicitor General.)
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Paying the price for breakdown of the country's bourgeois culture - Philly - 0 views
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implicated in these and other maladies is the breakdown of the country’s bourgeois culture.
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That culture laid out the script we all were supposed to follow: Get married before you have children and strive to stay married for their sake. Get the education you need for gainful employment, work hard, and avoid idleness. Go the extra mile for your employer or client. Be a patriot, ready to serve the country. Be neighborly, civic-minded, and charitable. Avoid coarse language in public. Be respectful of authority. Eschew substance abuse and crime.
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They could be followed by people of all backgrounds and abilities, especially when backed up by almost universal endorsement.
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