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Inside the porn industry, AI looms large - The Washington Post - 0 views

  • Since the first AVN “expo” in 1998, adult entertainment has been overtaken by two business models: Pornhub, a free site supported by ads, and OnlyFans, a subscription platform where individual actors control their businesses and their fate.
  • Now, a new shift is on the horizon: Artificial intelligence models that spin up photorealistic images and videos that put viewers in the director’s chair, letting them create whatever porn they like.
  • Some site owners think it’s a privilege people will pay for, and they are racing to build custom AI models that — unlike the sanitized content on OpenAI’s video engine Sora — draw on a vast repository of porn images and videos.
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  • he trickiest question may be how to prevent abuse. AI generators have technological boundaries, but not morals, and it’s relatively easy for users to trick them into creating content that depicts violence, rape, sex with children or a celebrity — or even a crush from work who never consented to appear
  • In some cases, the engines themselves are trained on porn images whose subjects didn’t explicitly agree to the new use. Currently, no federal laws protect the victims of nonconsensual deepfakes.
  • Adult entertainment is a giant industry accounting for a substantial chunk of all internet traffic: Major porn sites get more monthly visitors and page views than Amazon, Netflix, TikTok or Zoom
  • The industry is a habitual early adopter of new technology, from VHS to DVD to dot com. In the mid-2000s, porn companies set up massive sites where users upload and watch free videos, and ad sales foot the bills.
  • At last year’s AVN conference, Steven Jones said his peers looked at him “like he was crazy” when he talked about AI opportunities: “Nobody was interested.” This year, Jones said, he’s been “the belle of the ball.”
  • He called up his old business partner, and the two immediately spent about $550,000 securing the web domains for porn dot ai, deepfake dot com and deepfakes dot com, Jones said. “Lightspeed” was back.
  • One major model, Stable Diffusion, shares its code publicly, and some technologists have figured out how to edit the code to allow for sexual images
  • What keeps Jones up at night is people trying to use his company’s tools to generate images of abuse, he said. The models have some technological guardrails that make it difficult for users to render children, celebrities or acts of violence. But people are constantly looking for workarounds.
  • So with help from an angel investor he will not name, Jones hired five employees and a handful of offshore contractors and started building an image engine trained on bundles of freely available pornographic images, as well as thousands of nude photos from Jones’s own collection
  • Users create what Jones calls a “dream girl,” prompting the AI with descriptions of the character’s appearance, pose and setting. The nudes don’t portray real people, he said. Rather, the goal is to re-create a fantasy from the user’s imagination.
  • The AI-generated images got better, their computerized sheen growing steadily less noticeable. Jones grew his user base to 500,000 people, many of whom pay to generate more images than the five per day allotted to free accounts, he said. The site’s “power users” generate AI porn for 10 hours a day, he said.
  • Jones described the site as an “artists’ community” where people can explore their sexualities and fantasies in a safe space. Unlike some corners of the traditional adult industry, no performers are being pressured, underpaid or placed in harm’s way
  • And critically, consumers don’t have to wait for their favorite OnlyFans performer to come online or trawl through Pornhub to find the content they like.
  • Next comes AI-generated video — “porn’s holy grail,” Jones said. Eventually, he sees the technology becoming interactive, with users giving instructions to lifelike automated “performers.” Within two years, he said, there will be “fully AI cam girls,” a reference to creators who make solo sex content.
  • It costs $12 per day to rent a server from Amazon Web Services, he said, and generating a single picture requires users to have access to a corresponding server. His users have so far generated more than 1.6 million images.
  • Copyright holders including newspapers, photographers and artists have filed a slew of lawsuits against AI companies, claiming the companies trained their models on copyrighted content. If plaintiffs win, it could cut off the free-for-all that benefits entrepreneurs such as Jones.
  • But Jones’s plan to create consumer-friendly AI porn engines faced significant obstacles. The companies behind major image-generation models used technical boundaries to block “not safe for work” content and, without racy images to learn from, the models weren’t good at re-creating nude bodies or scenes.
  • Jones said his team takes down images that other users flag as abusive. Their list of blocked prompts currently contains 1,000 terms including “high school.”
  • “I see certain things people type in, and I just hope to God they’re trying to test the model, like we are. I hope they don’t actually want to see the things they’re typing in.
  • Peter Acworth, the owner of kink dot com, is trying to teach an AI porn generator to understand even subtler concepts, such as the difference between torture and consensual sexual bondage. For decades Acworth has pushed for spaces — in the real world and online — for consenting adults to explore nonconventional sexual interests. In 2006, he bought the San Francisco Armory, a castle-like building in the city’s Mission neighborhood, and turned it into a studio where his company filmed fetish porn until shuttering in 2017.
  • Now, Acworth is working with engineers to train an image-generation model on pictures of BDSM, an acronym for bondage and discipline, dominance and submission, sadism and masochism.
  • Others alluded to a porn apocalypse, with AI wiping out existing models of adult entertainment.“Look around,” said Christian Burke, head of engineering at the adult-industry payment app Melon, gesturing at performers huddled, laughing and hugging across the show floor. “This could look entirely different in a few years.”
  • But the age of AI brings few guarantees for the people, largely women, who appear in porn. Many have signed broad contracts granting companies the rights to reproduce their likeness in any medium for the rest of time
  • Not only could performers lose income, Walters said, they could find themselves in offensive or abusive scenes they never consented to.
  • Lana Smalls, a 23-year-old performer whose videos have been viewed 20 million times on Pornhub, said she’s had colleagues show up to shoots with major studios only to be surprised by sweeping AI clauses in their contracts.
  • “This industry is too fragmented for collective bargaining,” Spiegler said. “Plus, this industry doesn’t like rules.”
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The Great Trump Reshuffle - The New York Times - 0 views

  • In 2012, President Obama lost college-educated voters by 4 points; this year, according to Public Opinion Strategies’ analysis, Clinton will win them by 29 points.
  • Clinton should make substantial gains among voters from households earning in excess of $100,000. While Obama lost these affluent voters in 2012 by 10 points, the NBC/WSJ survey shows Clinton carrying them by 12 points.
  • There are two groups among whom Trump will gain and Clinton will lose: voters making less than $30,000 and voters with high school degrees. Both less affluent groups are expected to increase their level of support for the Republican nominee over their 2012 margins, by 13 and by 17 points.
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  • The Republican coalition of 2016, in fact, will look increasingly like the Democratic Party of the 1930s.
  • A Trump versus Clinton contest will deepen the partisan divisions that for the past five decades have set those who support the social and cultural revolutions of the past five decades on race, immigration, women’s rights, gender equality and gay rights — as well as the broader right to sexual privacy — against those who remain in opposition.
  • Tesler’s findings are illustrated in the accompanying chart. There was a dose effect: the higher you scored on racial resentment, the more likely you were to support Trump; the more you resented immigrants or professed your white ethnocentrism, the likelier you were to plan to vote for Trump.
  • Tesler and Sides ranked white respondents by their level of “white racial identity” — determined by asking white respondents questions like “How Important is being white to your identity?”; “How important is it that whites work together to change laws that are unfair to whites?”; and “How likely is it that many whites are unable to find a job because employers are hiring minorities instead?”
  • In each case, Trump’s level of support in the survey rose in direct proportion to your level of agreement with each of these statements.
  • “The Second Demographic Transition: A concise overview of its development,” by Lesthaeghe, summarizes this concept:The SDT starts in the 1960s with a series of multifaceted revolutions. First, there was the contraceptive revolution, with the introduction of hormonal contraception and far more efficient IUDs; second, there was the sexual revolution, with declining ages at first sexual intercourse; and third, there was the gender revolution, questioning the sole breadwinner household model and the gendered division of labor that accompanied it.
  • These revolutions have reordered much of society. Lesthaeghe continues:These three "revolutions” fit within the framework of an overall rejection of authority, the assertion of individual freedom of choice (autonomy), and an overhaul of the normative structure. The overall outcome of these shifts with respect to fertility was the postponement of childbearing: mean ages at first parenthood rise again, opportunities for childbearing are lost due to higher divorce rates, the share of childless ever-partnered women increases, and higher parity births (four or more) become rare.
  • Measured by these criteria, the top-ranked counties were cosmopolitan centers, with a larger percentage of affluent, highly educated residents: New York City, the District of Columbia, Pitkin County, Colo. (where Aspen is), San Francisco and Marin County, Calif
  • The counties at the bottom tended to be small, white, rural, poor and less educated and they were located in the South and the mountain West:
  • the lower the S.D.T. ranking, the higher Trump’s votes compared to his statewide average; the higher the S.D.T. level, the lower Trump’s vote
  • The nomination of Donald Trump will sharpen and deepen the Republican Party’s core problems. Trump gains the party ground among declining segments of the population — less well educated, less well off whites — and loses ground with the growing constituencies: single women, well-educated men and women, minorities, the affluent and professionals.
  • Not only are more and more Americans adopting the practices and values described by Lesthaeghe and Neidert — self-expressiveness, gender equality, cohabitation, same-sex couples, postponed marriage and childbearing — but so too is much of the developed world.
  • This transition has effectively become the norm in much of Europe, and, as Lesthaeghe points out, it is gaining ground in regions as diverse as East Asia and Latin America.
  • For decades now, the Republican Party has been conducting a racial and cultural counterrevolution. It proved a successful strategy from 1966 to 1992.
  • Since then, as the percentage of Americans on the liberal side of the culture wars has grown steadily, the counterrevolutionary approach has become more and more divisive.
  • In this respect, Trump is not, as many charge, violating core Republican tenets. Instead, he represents the culmination of the rear-guard action that has characterized the party for decades
  • There is a chance that Trump will bring new blood into a revitalized Republican coalition. It’s also possible that he will accelerate the Republican Party’s downward spiral into irrelevance.
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Christian University Resumes Inquiry in Handling of Sexual Abuse Reports - NYTimes.com - 0 views

  • Grace is led by Basyle J. Tchividjian, an associate law professor at another evangelical Christian school, Liberty University, and a grandson of the Rev. Billy Graham. He caused a stir last year by saying that in looking at the Roman Catholic Church’s mishandling of abuse cases, evangelicals should not feel superior, adding, “I think we are worse.”
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There's No Such Thing as a Slut - Olga Khazan - The Atlantic - 2 views

  • Tweet // Re-execute when the element gets attached. if (window['gapi'] !== undefined) { window.gapi.plusone.go(); }; More Email Print Lara/Flickr In 2004, two women who were long past college age settled into a dorm room at a large public university in the Midwest. Elizabeth Armstrong, a sociology professor at the University of Michigan, and Laura Hamilton, then a graduate assistant and now a sociology professor at the University of California at Merced, were there to examine the daily lives and attitudes of college students
  • The researchers interviewed the 53 women on their floor every year for five years—from the time they were freshmen through their first year out of college.
  • the researchers also dug into their beliefs about morality—sometimes through direct questions, but often, simply by being present for a late-night squabble or a bashful confession.
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  • All but five or six of the women practiced “slut-shaming,” or denigrating the other women for their loose sexual mores.
  • But they conflated their accusations of “sluttiness” with other, unrelated personality traits, like meanness or unattractiveness. It seems there was no better way to smear a dorm-mate than to suggest she was sexually impure. “If you want to make a young woman feel bad, pulling out the term ‘slut’ is a sure fire way to do it,” Armstrong said. “It’s ‘she isn’t one of us, we don't like her and she's different.’”
  • “The high-status women would literally snub or look through the poorer women,” Armstrong said. “They would blow them off entirely. We spent a lot of time asking who would say hi to who; who would let the door slam in someone's face.” According to Armstrong, one sorority member said, “I only see people who are Greek; I don't know who the other students are. They are like extras.”
  • even though the wealthy and poor women were slut-shamed roughly equally in private, it was mostly only the poor women who faced public slut-shaming. And it only seemed to happen when the poorer women tried to make inroads with the richer ones.
  • more rich women than poor women took part in hook-ups throughout college. The poorer women seemed to notice that their wealthier dorm-mates were more sexual, but felt they couldn’t get away with being similarly libertine.
  • Armstrong divided the cohort in two, with wealthier women in one group and the working-class ones in the other. Each group tended to band together, with the poorer half feeling excluded from Greek life and other high-status social activities.
  • “The term is so vague and slippery that no one knows what a slut was or no one knows what you have to do to be that,” she told me. “It circulated around, though, so everyone could worry about it being attached to them.”
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In Guatemala, Military on Trial for Sexual Slavery | Al Jazeera America - 0 views

  • In Guatemala, military stands trial for sexual slavery
  • According to the prosecution, in August 1982, Guatemalan soldiers responded to a Maya land-rights campaign by raiding valley communities and taking many men — including the husbands of six of the women in the courtroom — to Finca Tinajas, never to be seen again.
  • During that war, which lasted from 1960 to 1996, battles between the state and Marxist guerrillas often served as impetus and cover for massacres that left an estimated 200,000 people dead and another 45,000 missing — the vast majority of them civilians.
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  • Sitting at the defense table, Asig sat with his head tilted toward the floor in apparent boredom. Reyes Giron flipped through case documents with one hand, his other arm clasped tight over his gut. A former lieutenant in the Guatemalan army, Reyes Giron is accused of leading what the prosecution has described as a strategic effort to crush peasant resistance.
  • They said the soldiers knew their husbands had been taken and the women were defenseless. “The soldiers said, ‘No one asks about you anymore. No one cares about you. You belong to us now,” said Petrona Choch Cuc.
  • Since 2007, the U.S. and U.N. have funded the Commission Against Impunity in Guatemala, an international mission dedicated to help Guatemala’s independent prosecutor’s office, the Ministerio Publico, prosecute difficult cases of corruption and organized crime.
  • Rios Montt and Byron Lima Oliva, who was convicted of murdering one of the authors of a report published by the Catholic Church that laid out a detailed and fact-checked record of wartime atrocities, including mass rape.
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Growing scale of Cologne attacks stokes German debate on migrants | Reuters - 0 views

  • Attacks on women in Cologne and other German cities on New Year's Eve have prompted more than 600 criminal complaints, with police suspicion resting on asylum seekers, putting pressure on Chancellor Angela Merkel and her open door migrant policy.
  • The attacks, mostly targeting women and ranging from theft to sexual molestation, have prompted a highly-charged debate in Germany about its welcoming stance for refugees and migrants, more than one million of whom arrived last year.
  • The sudden nature of the violent attacks and the fact that they stretched from Hamburg to Frankfurt prompted Germany's justice minister Heiko Maas to speculate in a newspaper that they had been planned or coordinated.
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  • Merkel's popularity has dwindled as she refused to place a limit on the influx of refugees.
  • In Cologne, police said on Sunday that 516 criminal complaints had been filed by individuals or groups in relation to assaults on New Year's Eve, while police in Hamburg said 133 similar charges had been lodged with the north German city.
  • Frankfurt also registered complaints, although far fewer.
  • The investigation in Cologne is focused largely on asylum seekers or illegal migrants from north Africa, police said. They arrested one 19-year-old Moroccan man on Saturday evening.
  • In Cologne, where a 100-strong force of officers continued their investigations, around 40 percent of the complaints included sexual offences, including two rapes.
  • The attacks, which prompted violent far-right protests on Saturday, threatens to further erode confidence in Merkel, and could stoke support for the anti-immigrant Alternative for Germany (AfD) party ahead of three key state elections in March.
  • The debate on migration will be further fueled by the acknowledgement by the authorities in North Rhine-Westphalia that a man shot dead as he tried to enter a Paris police station last week was an asylum seeker with seven identities who lived in Germany.
  • A survey sponsored by state broadcaster ARD showed that while 75 percent of those asked were very happy with Merkel's work in April last year, only 58 percent were pleased now.
  • Almost three quarters of those polled said migration was the most important issue for the government to deal with in 2016.
  • The Cologne attacks also heated up the debate on immigration in neighboring Austria.
  • There had been a handful of similar incidents in the border city of Salzburg. "Such offenders should be deported," she said, backing a similar suggestion by Merkel.
  • Swiss media contained numerous stories about sexual assaults on women by foreigners, fuelling tensions ahead of a referendum next month that would trigger the automatic deportation of foreigners convicted of some crimes.
  • The anti-Islam PEGIDA, whose supporters threw bottles and fire crackers at a march in Cologne on Saturday before being dispersed by riot police, will later hold a rally in the eastern German city of Leipzig.
  • The far-right will likely seize on reports that the Paris attacker, who was shot last week as he wielded a meat cleaver and shouted "Allahu akbar" (God is Greatest), was known to police for drug dealing and harassing women.
  • He had an apartment in an accommodation center for asylum seekers in Recklinghausen, north of Cologne, where he had painted the symbol of Islamic state on the wall of two rooms.
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The Sexual Politics of 2016 - The New York Times - 0 views

  • Donald Trump’s presidential campaign is a revolution in manners, a rejection of the civility codes of the educated class. As part of this, he rejects the new and balanced masculine/feminine ideal that has emerged over the past generation. Trump embraces a masculine identity — old in some ways, new in others — built upon unvarnished misogyny.
  • Traditional misogyny blames women for the lustful, licentious and powerful urges that men sometimes feel in their presence. In this misogyny, women are the powerful, disgusting corrupters — the vixens, sirens and monsters. This gynophobic misogyny demands that women be surrounded with taboos and purgation rituals, along with severe restrictions on behavior and dress.
  • Trump’s misogyny, on the other hand, has a commercial flavor. The central arena of life is male competition. Women are objects men use to win points in that competition. The purpose of a woman’s body is to reflect status on a man. One way to emasculate a rival man is to insult or conquer his woman.
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  • Trump represents the spread of something brutal. He takes economic anxiety and turns it into sexual hostility. He effectively tells men: You may be struggling, but at least you’re better than women, Mexicans and Muslims.
  • I’ve grappled with determining how much to blame Trump’s supporters for his rise. Many of them are victims of economic dislocation and it is hard to fault them for seeking a change, of course, even if it is simplistic and ignorant.
  • But in the realm of cultural politics, Trump voters do need to be held to account. They are participating in a descent into darkness. They are supporting a degrading wrong. This is the world your daughters are going to grow up in.
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Sexual violence is the new normal in India - and pornography is to blame | Mari Marcel ... - 0 views

  • rape is now rampant in tribal Jharkhand. Boys as young as 10 download pornography from mobile phone shops for as little as 10 rupees (12p). The combination of endless, violent porn videos and alcohol appears to be a lethal trigger for many rapes in India – a country where traditional Hindu, Muslim, Christian and Sikh society strictly forbids not just sex outside marriage but any mixing of the sexes in towns and villages. Arranged marriages are still the norm across all religions. For repressed men to be fed a constant diet of porn on their phones is a recipe for disaster.
  • Enakshi Ganguly Thukral, a child rights activist for nearly 30 years, told me: “Society is being sexualised, there is sexual content everywhere, in films and music. Rampant, vicious porn is easily available to children. Middle-class families may monitor what their kids watch, but uneducated and illiterate people haven’t a clue about what their kids see on their phones. The vegetable vendor near my house sits glued to his mobile all day. Two young boys with one wire plugged into an ear each, sharing a video. I can assure you they are not watching the news.”
  • My liberal friends have fought for civil liberties and freedom of expression over the years. As a journalist I support that. But grassroots activists like me are increasingly sick of liberals fighting for freedom to watch violent, sadistic porn. One tired human rights defender said: “It’s hard to stomach glib sermons on the right to freedom to use a potential ‘driver of rape’ [porn] when faced with a wounded, bleeding raped woman or child.”
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Is Donald Trump a Fascist? - The New York Times - 0 views

  • By placing Trump in transnational and transhistorical perspective, Stanley sees patterns that others mis
  • He notes the apparent paradox that Trump — like many fascist politicians — rode to power in part by attacking government “corruption,” yet practices it even more brazenly himself. The explanation, Stanley suggests, lies in what fascists actually mean by the term. “Corruption, to the fascist politician,” he argues, “is really about the corruption of purity rather than of law. Officially, the fascist politician’s denunciations of corruption sound like a denunciation of political corruption. But such talk is intended to evoke corruption in the sense of the usurpation of traditional order.
  • Stanley’s comparative perspective is particularly effective in illustrating how fascists use fears of sexual violence. He notes that fascist politicians, who portray themselves as defenders of a pure, mythic, patriarchal past, frequently play on fears that alien groups pose a sexual threat. Segregationists used the specter of black rape to justify lynchings. After World War I, Germans “promulgated racial fantasies of mass rape of white women” by African soldiers serving among the French occupying forces, fantasies embraced in the United States by the renascent Ku Klux Klan. Nearly half a century later, the wave of Middle Eastern migrants entering Germany has spawned another sexual terror, which has again crossed the Atlantic, and become a staple of pro-Trump platforms like Breitbart.
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  • links fascism to economic inequality, and he quotes Hannah Arendt, who argued that fascism flourishes when individuals are “atomized.” He explains that Hitler denounced labor unions because he feared they might create solidarity among racially and religiously diverse workers. And he shows that the “right to work” movement that today seeks to cripple unions in the United States has its roots in an effort by Southern business elites to divide black and white workers in the 1940s
  • Even the reader who finds much to admire in Stanley’s book may still wonder why he employs the term “fascist” so freely. In his epilogue, Stanley offers an answer. Citing a 2017 study in the journal Cognition, he observes that “judgments of normality are affected both by what people think is statistically normal and what they think is ideally normal.”
  • Thus, if American politicians routinely associate Latino immigrants with murder and rape, Americans may grow less outraged by such accusations simply because they occur so often
  • By calling Trump a “fascist” — a word that strikes many Americans as alien and extreme — Stanley is trying to spark public alarm. He doesn’t want Americans to respond to Trump’s racist, authoritarian offensives by moving their moral goal posts. The greater danger, he suggests, isn’t hyperbole, it’s normalization. And 20 months into Trump’s presidency, the evidence is mounting that he’s right.
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Open letter alleges sexual harassment in Illinois politics - News - The State Journal-R... - 0 views

  • An open letter alleging widespread sexual harassment in Illinois politics and urging women and their allies to come forward has been circulating around the state Capitol
  • the latest effort emerging from statehouses to address harassment and unwanted advances from men following the allegations against Hollywood mogul Harvey Weinstein
  • The letter describes incidents female legislators have faced when trying to negotiate bills or get legislation up for vote, like late night suggestive texts or unwanted touches.
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In modern mating, sex isn't the only thing that's cheap - The Washington Post - 0 views

  • Regnerus relies on the concept of sexual economics, in which mating is seen as a marketplace. In this view, women are gatekeepers to a limited, highly desired product: sex. In exchange for access to this product, men proffer commitment, fidelity and resources.
  • Regnerus believes that the sharp drop in the value of sex has shifted the market, even its more conservative parts, leading to a massive overall slowdown in the creation of committed relationships like marriage, in large part because men see less of a need to make themselves into appealing long-term partners.
  • among younger women, especially those who want that sort of traditional relationship, there increasingly seems to be a vague dissatisfaction with the state of things. Why, when women have gained so much power, are we so often at impasse in our romantic relationships? Why do men our age seem so unmotivated to grow up and so ambivalent about committing? As uncomfortable as it may be to contemplate, the shifts this book describes may provide an inkling of an explanation.
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  • When it comes to commonly held modern ideals — of gender egalitarianism, individualism, the assumption that men might seek to improve themselves even without outside prodding — his response is skepticism bordering on exasperation. “In the domain of sex and relationships, men will act as nobly as women collectively demand,” he writes. “This is an aggravating statement for women to read, no doubt. They do not want to be responsible for ‘raising’ men. But it is realistic.”
  • Throughout his book, Regnerus prods the reader to be skeptical of utopianism and see the world as it is. It’s a useful, if unpleasant, reminder for an era in which our goals seem both loftier and further out of reach than ever
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Can Anyone Hear What Caitlin Fink Is Saying? - The Atlantic - 0 views

  • Feminists have wrestled with their relationship to pornography ever since the early ’70s, when the Rimbaud-loving Jersey girl Andrea Dworkin joined forces with America’s most lighthearted legal scholar, Catharine MacKinnon, and created sex-negative feminism. Their arguments about the nexus between violence against women and hard-core pornography were powerful, but the whole enterprise was a hard sell in the midst of the sexual revolution.
  • “No woman needs intercourse; few women escape it,” Dworkin said—what happened to Rimbaud?—from deep within her overalls, and she lost the crowd. MacKinnon’s legal argument depended on pornography’s potential violation of the equal-protection clause, a delicate proposition, and one she was advancing at a time when free speech was at the very center of the youth movement
  • The women were raising important questions, but in 1988 the World Wide Web arrived, blotting out the sun and giving us porn without end
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  • Children learn about the mechanics of sex—or rather, that mechanics is the whole of sex—by watching women who may have been blood-tested and “verified” professionals, or who may have been so impoverished and desperate that they would have done literally anything for cash or drugs
  • although the party line is that consumers bring their own desires to it and simply find the porn that suits them, the influence runs in the other direction.“If you’re with somebody for the first time,” a sex researcher at Indiana University helpfully tells her students, “don’t choke them, don’t ejaculate on their face, don’t try to have anal sex with them. These are all things that are just unlikely to go over well.”
  • we can’t pretend that the things people expect to do in bed, or expect partners to do in bed, have not been hugely—almost entirely, by this point—influenced by online porn
  • Culture is progressive and cumulative, and so is porn, restlessly seeking and crossing the next boundary, and thereby making whatever came before it seem tame and ordinary.
  • The right understands porn as a thing for sale, and so has a grudging respect for it. “It’s Trump,
  • It’s natural that this would become the venue for these troubled girls; porn is the main determinant of high-school kids’ sexual imaginings. Girls who feel uncomfortable or shamed about their body are deeply drawn to it. “I liked the attention I got,” Caitlin says of her first foray into selling pictures online; she liked “being called beautiful. I enjoyed it because it made me feel good about myself.”
  • it seems to me that a troubled teenager, desperate to be called beautiful, will have her sense of self deeply affected by work in that industry, which will quickly seek to put her in ever more extreme forms of on-camera behavior
  • What has happened is that within a few years of porn’s arrival, the country quickly learned what it was dealing with—something it had no power to control, something it couldn’t even keep small children from encountering—and so modern life simply adjusted itself around the new, imperial leader.
  • The left decided to champion porn in a variety of ways, beginning with reconceiving the women who work in it as fully liberated, empowered feminists
  • Do you know what percent of the vast, global porn industry these self-actualized porn workers represent? Not a large one.
  • The problem is that there are some very old human impulses that must now contend with porn. One of them is the tendency of deeply troubled teenage girls to act out sexually as a kind of distress signal, an attempt to get the attention of adults who may not be getting the message that they’re in a crisis.
  • The right destroyed the one force capable of challenging porn’s ubiquity: social conservatism. It gleefully elected a sleazeball whose personal history is that of a man with contempt for the ideas of personal responsibility and duty to others that were once central to social conservatism.
  • there isn’t anything left of the social conservatism of yesteryear but money, and selling any valuable commodity we have remaining, from our natural resources to our international reputation to our young girls.
  • The only person questioning any of these notions seems to be Caitlin herself, who labors under the delusion that she’s not living on a darkling plain. “The only hard thing so far is making sure I have enough money,
  • Maybe she had gained—from Napoleon Dynamite and Ellen—the impression that the she lives in a society where the center holds, and where promising girls are not left to drift so far beyond the shoreline that no one feels impelled to consider a rescue.
  • “Other than that”—here she is, the daughter that you and I made together, letting us know how she’s doing—“I’ve honestly been doing really good with myself.”
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What Trump Endorsers Are Endorsing - The Atlantic - 0 views

  • it matters that thought-leaders like her no longer consider deplorability a dealbreaker. They can no longer be trusted to oppose racism or sexism. With a civic arsonist in the White House, they decline to summon the fire department.
  • In short, they have become irresponsible citizens.
  • Were Hemingway oblivious to Trump’s least defensible qualities, or the damage that his comportment does to America’s civic fabric—matters to which many enthusiastic Trump supporters are oblivious—her posture would be less damning.
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  • But she saw his flaws clearly and chose to support him anyway.
  • It is one thing to vote for Trump as the lesser of two evils, or to do too little to oppose him. It is quite another to support and extol Trump, despite his deplorable behavior, because he has advanced a domestic agenda that accords with one’s policy preferences.
  • “My expectations were low—so low that he could have met them by simply not being President Clinton,” Hemingway declared. “But a year into this presidency, he’s exceeded those expectations by quite a bit. I’m thrilled.
  • Ponder what it means to be thrilled, knowing what she knows.
  • Hemingway has written with clarity about Trump’s behavior on matters having to do with comportment, rather than policy, and their effect on American culture. “I fear the republic is lost,” she wrote after one of Trump’s debate performances. “We are an uneducated people that praise ignorance, celebrity, and entertainment over statesmanship. We are degenerates, immoral, and lost. We the people have not acted as those concerned about preserving the gift of self-government. The fraying fabric of society is putting the republic at risk.”
  • in the past, most conservative pundits ensured that the Republican Party’s leadership rejected the bigoted pathologies that threaten to tear diverse, pluralistic societies apart. Today, many of the people who once would’ve kept deplorability in check opportunistically embrace a deplorable.
  • “Another great argument to deploy against Trump is that he plays fast and loose with the facts,” Hemingway wrote in the early days of his administration. “This is an easy argument to make because not only does everyone know this, they’ve known it for decades.
  • Hemingway also called Trump “a narcissist who takes no responsibility for the negative consequences of his ill-conceived and incoherent verbal spews.”
  • When he was accused of sexual misconduct by multiple women during the 2016 campaign, Hemingway wrote, “None of it is particularly surprising for a man who spent decades bragging about his sexual prowess, adultery, handsiness, sexual entitlement, and so on and so forth. That this information is coming out is all so obvious that if you saw all these warning signs—and everyone saw these warning signs—and still supported Trump, you should look inward.
  • Even during his presidency she has referred to him as “known perv Trump.” What does it mean for her to write that one month and declare her unsolicited support the next?
  • It means that her standards have been corrupted
  • a more complete reckoning with what Trump has done goes farther toward clarifying why being tied to him puts the whole Red Tribe in peril.
  • Why would anyone who values the civic virtues necessary to preserve the republic trust those who cease to care that it is fraying, throwing support to a man they see as a lying, juvenile insult-monger so long as they’re getting their way?
  • “The Trump nomination may result in principled conservatives leaving the party or laying very low,” Hemingway wrote in 2016, “but if this election has shown anything, it’s that principled conservatives aren’t in nearly as abundant supply as they might wish.”
  • . Like all winning coalitions, the American right is having a hard time imagining how fleeting its political ascendence will be, or the consequences its lack of principle will have in the long term. I expect that its moral failures will echo across American politics for years, undermining the right’s ability to credibly advance its best and worst alike.
  • When Trumpism ends, as every coalition built around a president must eventually end, will there be enough people on the right unsullied by his indefensible behavior to rebuild? As a fan of free markets and small government I fear not. I fear the right is discrediting itself for a generation, robbing America of the benefits of having two competing ideologies at their respective best.
  • In the long run, the right’s best hope lies in the shrinking faction of politicians and pundits that is happy to note when it favors a discrete policy pursued by the president, but that remains perspicacious enough to assert the overall posture of Never Trump.
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Pope sends child abuse investigators back to Chile, 'ashamed' church didn't listen - CNN - 0 views

  • Archbishop Charles Scicluna, one of the Vatican's top prosecutors for sex abuse, and Monsignor Jordi Bertomeu will carry out investigations in Osorno over abuse by Chilean priest Father Fernando Karadima and his followers.
  • Allegations of sexual abuse in the Catholic Church stretch across multiple countries with large Catholic populations, including Austria, Brazil, Germany, Ireland, Italy, the Netherlands, Spain, Switzerland and perhaps most famously, the United States, where children accused more than 4,000 priests of sexual abuse between 1950 and 2002, according to a report compiled by the John Jay College of Criminal Justice.
  • In the statement Thursday, the Vatican said the Pope will send a personally-written letter to the Chilean church, addressing the issue, and will also meet with Chilean abuse victims in Rome over the weekend. Francis said one of the church's "main faults and omissions" was in "not knowing how to listen to victims," according to the Catholic News Agency.
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  • As part of his defense, Wilson's legal team argued that as child sexual abuse was not considered a serious crime in the 1970s, it was not worthy of being reported to authorities.
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Catholic Church joins sex abuse compensation scheme - BBC News - 0 views

  • The Catholic Church has confirmed it will be part of a national redress scheme for victims of child sexual abuse in Australia.The nation recently held a five-year inquiry into sexual abuse in the country's institutions.Among harrowing stories, it heard that 7% of Australia's Catholic priests abused children between 1950 and 2010.
  • Mr Turnbull has previously said that survivors could receive payments of A$150,000 (£85,000; $110,000) each.
  • The inquiry made more than 400 recommendations, including calling on the Catholic Church to overhaul its celibacy rules.It also called on priests to face prosecution if they did not report sexual abuse disclosed to them during confession, a move the Church has strongly resisted.
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George Conway: Trump Is Unfit for Office - The Atlantic - 0 views

  • Behavior like this is unusual, a point that journalists across the political spectrum have made. “This is not normal,” Megan McArdle wrote in late August. “And I don’t mean that as in, ‘Trump is violating the shibboleths of the Washington establishment.’ I mean that as in, ‘This is not normal for a functioning adult.’” James Fallows observed, also in August, that Trump is having “episodes of what would be called outright lunacy, if they occurred in any other setting,” and that if he “were in virtually any other position of responsibility, action would already be under way to remove him from that role.”
  • Simply put, Trump’s ingrained and extreme behavioral characteristics make it impossible for him to carry out the duties of the presidency in the way the Constitution requires. To see why first requires a look at what the Constitution demands of a president, and then an examination of how Trump’s behavioral characteristics preclude his ability to fulfill those demands.
  • Though the Constitution’s drafters could hardly have foreseen how the system would evolve, they certainly knew the kind of person they wanted it to produce. “The process of election affords a moral certainty,” Hamilton wrote, “that the office of President will never fall to the lot of any man who is not in an eminent degree endowed with the requisite qualifications.
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  • “Talents for low intrigue, and the little arts of popularity,” might suffice for someone to be elected to the governorship of a state, but not the presidency. Election would “require other talents, and a different kind of merit,” to gain “the esteem and confidence of the whole Union,” or enough of it to win the presidency. As a result, there would be “a constant probability of seeing the station filled by characters pre-eminent for ability and virtue.” This was the Framers’ goal in designing the system that would make “the choice of the person to whom so important a trust was to be confided.”
  • In a nutshell, while carrying out his official duties, a president has to put the country, not himself, first; he must faithfully follow and enforce the law; and he must act with the utmost care in doing all that.
  • can Trump do all that? Does his personality allow him to? Answering those questions doesn’t require mental-health expertise, nor does it really require a diagnosis. You can make the argument for Trump’s unfitness without assessing his mental health: Like James Fallows, for example, you could just ask whether Trump would have been allowed to retain any other job in light of his bizarre conduct
  • More than a diagnosis, what truly matters, as Lincoln’s case shows, is the president’s behavioral characteristics and personality traits. And understanding how people behave and think is not the sole province of professionals; we all do it every day, with family members, co-workers, and others.
  • its criteria for personality disorders—they don’t require a person to lie on a couch and confess his or her innermost thoughts. They turn on how a person behaves in the wild, so to speak.
  • Donald Trump, as president of the United States, is probably the most observable and observed person in the world. I’ve personally met and spoken with him only a few times, but anyone who knows him will tell you that Trump, in a way, has no facade: What you see of him publicly is what you get all the time, although you may get more of it in private
  • accounts of a person’s behavior from laypeople who observe him might be more accurate than information from a clinical interview, and that this is especially true when considering two personality disorders in particular—what the DSM calls narcissistic personality disorder and antisocial personality disorde
  • These two disorders just happen to be the ones that have most commonly been ascribed to Trump by mental-health professionals over the past four years. Of these two disorders, the more commonly discussed when it comes to Trump is narcissistic personality disorder, or NPD—pathological narcissism
  • it touches directly upon whether Trump has the capacity to put anyone’s interests—including the country’s and the Constitution’s—above his own.
  • A certain amount of narcissism is healthy, and helpful—it brings with it confidence, optimism, and boldness. Someone with more than an average amount of narcissism may be called a narcissist. Many politicians, and many celebrities, could be considered narcissists
  • “Pathological narcissism begins when people become so addicted to feeling special that, just like with any drug, they’ll do anything to get their ‘high,’ including lie, steal, cheat, betray, and even hurt those closest to them,”
  • The “fundamental life goal” of an extreme narcissist “is to promote the greatness of the self, for all to see,
  • To many mental-health professionals, Donald Trump provides a perfect example of such extreme, pathological narcissism: One clinical psychologist told Vanity Fair that he considers Trump such a “classic” pathological narcissist that he is actually “archiving video clips of him to use in workshops because there’s no better example”
  • The goal of a diagnosis is to help a clinician guide treatment. The question facing the public is very different: Does the president of the United States exhibit a consistent pattern of behavior that suggests he is incapable of properly discharging the duties of his office?
  • Even Trump’s own allies recognize the degree of his narcissism. When he launched racist attacks on four congresswomen of color, Senator Lindsey Graham explained, “That’s just the way he is. It’s more narcissism than anything else.” So, too, do skeptics of assigning a clinical diagnosis. “No one is denying,” Frances told Rolling Stone, “that he is as narcissistic an individual as one is ever likely to encounter.” The president’s exceptional narcissism is his defining characteristic—and understanding that is crucial to evaluating his fitness for office
  • The DSM-5 describes its conception of pathological narcissism this way: “The essential feature of narcissistic personality disorder is a pervasive pattern of grandiosity, need for admiration, and lack of empathy that begins by early adulthood and is present in a variety of contexts.”
  • The diagnostic criteria offer a useful framework for understanding the most remarkable features of Donald Trump’s personality, and of his presidency. (1) Exaggerates achievements and talents, expects to be recognized as superior without commensurate achievements?
  • (2) Preoccupied with fantasies of unlimited success, power, brilliance
  • (3) Believes that he or she is “special” and unique and should only associate with other special or high-status people?
  • Trump claims to be an expert—the world’s greatest—in anything and everything. As one video mash-up shows, Trump has at various times claimed—in all seriousness—that no one knows more than he does about: taxes, income, construction, campaign finance, drones, technology, infrastructure, work visas, the Islamic State, “things” generally, environmental-impact statements, Facebook, renewable energy, polls, courts, steelworkers, golf, banks, trade, nuclear weapons, tax law, lawsuits, currency devaluation, money, “the system,” debt, and politicians.
  • (4) Requires excessive admiration? Last Thanksgiving, Trump was asked what he was most thankful for. His answer: himself, of course. A number of years ago, he made a video for Forbes in which he interviewed two of his children. The interview topic: how great they thought Donald Trump wa
  • (5) A sense of entitlement? (9) Arrogant, haughty behaviors? Trump is the man who, on the infamous Access Hollywood tape, said, “When you’re a star, they let you do it. You can do anything you want”—including grabbing women by their genitals. He’s the man who also once said, “I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody and I wouldn’t lose any voters.”
  • (8) Envious of others? Here’s a man so unable to stand the praise received by a respected war hero and statesman, Senator John McCain, that he has continued to attack McCain months after McCain’s death;
  • (6) Interpersonally exploitative? Just watch the Access Hollywood tape, or ask any of the hundreds of contractors and employees Trump the businessman allegedly stiffed, or speak with any of the two dozen women who have accused Trump of sexual misconduct, sexual assault, or rape.
  • Finally, (7) Lacks empathy: is unwilling to recognize or identify with the feelings or needs of others? One of the most striking aspects of Trump’s personality is his utter and complete lack of empathy
  • The notorious lawyer and fixer Roy Cohn, who once counseled Trump, said that “Donald pisses ice water,” and indeed, examples of Trump’s utter lack of normal human empathy abound.
  • “It made no sense, Priebus realized, unless you understood … ‘The president has zero psychological ability to recognize empathy or pity in any way.’
  • What kind of human being, let alone politician, would engage in such unempathetic, self-centered behavior while memorializing such horrible tragedies? Only the most narcissistic person imaginable—or a person whose narcissism would be difficult to imagine if we hadn’t seen it ourselves. The evidence of Trump’s narcissism is overwhelming—indeed, it would be a gargantuan task to try to marshal all of it, especially as it mounts each and every day.
  • A second disorder also frequently ascribed to Trump by professionals is sociopathy—what the DSM-5 calls antisocial personality disorder
  • Central to sociopathy is a complete lack of empathy—along with “an absence of guilt.” Sociopaths engage in “intentional manipulation, and controlling or even sadistically harming others for personal power or gratification. People with sociopathic traits have a flaw in the basic nature of human beings … They are lacking an essential part of being human.” For its part, the DSM-5 states that the “essential feature of antisocial personality disorder is a pervasive pattern of disregard for, and violation of, the rights of others that begins in childhood or early adolescence and continues into adulthood.”
  • Trump’s sociopathic characteristics sufficiently intertwine with his narcissistic ones that they deserve mention here. These include, to quote the DSM-5, “deceitfulness, as indicated by repeated lying, use of aliases, or conning others.” Trump’s deceitfulness—his lying—has become the stuff of legend; journalists track his “false and misleading claims” as president by the thousands upon thousands.
  • Other criteria for antisocial personality disorder include “failure to conform to social norms with respect to lawful behaviors, as indicated by repeatedly performing acts that are grounds for arrest”; “impulsivity or failure to plan ahead”; and “lack of remorse, as indicated by being indifferent to or rationalizing having hurt, mistreated, or stolen from another.
  • As for impulsivity, that essentially describes what gets him into trouble most: It was his “impulsiveness—actually, total recklessness”—that came close to destroying him in the 1980s
  • And lack of remorse? That’s a hallmark of sociopathy, and goes hand in hand with a lack of human conscience. In a narcissistic sociopath, it’s intertwined with a lack of empathy. Trump hardly ever shows remorse, or apologizes, for anything. The one exception: With his presidential candidacy on the line in early October
  • In a way, Trump’s sociopathic tendencies are simply an extension of his extreme narcissism
  • articular, “They change reality to suit themselves in their own mind.” Although Trump “lies because of his sociopathic tendencies,” telling falsehoods to fool others, Dodes argues, he also lies to himself, to protect himself from narcissistic injury. And so Donald Trump has lied about his net worth, the size of the crowd at his inauguration, and supposed voter fraud in the 2016 election.
  • The latter kind of lying, Dodes says, “is in a way more serious,” because it can indicate “a loose grip on reality”—and it may well tell us where Trump is headed in the face of impeachment hearings. Lying to prevent narcissistic injury can metastasize to a more significant loss of touch with reality
  • Experts haven’t suggested that Trump is psychotic, but many have contended that his narcissism and sociopathy are so inordinate that he fits the bill for “malignant narcissism.” Malignant narcissism isn’t recognized as an official diagnosis; it’s a descriptive term coined by the psychoanalyst Erich Fromm, and expanded upon by another psychoanalyst, Otto Kernberg, to refer to an extreme mix of narcissism and sociopathy, with a degree of paranoia and sadism mixed in
  • In the view of some in the mental-health community, such as John Gartner, Trump “exhibits all four” components of malignant narcissism: “narcissism, paranoia, antisocial personality and sadism.”
  • Mental-health professionals have raised a variety of other concerns about Trump’s mental state; the last worth specifically mentioning here is the possibility that, apart from any personality disorder, he may be suffering cognitive decline.
  • His “mental state,” according to Justin A. Frank, a former clinical professor of psychiatry and physician who wrote a book about Trump’s psychology, “include[s] so many psychic afflictions” that a “working knowledge of psychiatric disorders is essential to understanding Trump.” Indeed, as Gartner puts it: “There are a lot of things wrong with him—and, together, they are a scary witch’s brew.”
  • when you line up what the Framers expected of a president with all that we know about Donald Trump, his unfitness becomes obvious. The question is whether he can possibly act as a public fiduciary for the nation’s highest public trust. To borrow from the Harvard Law Review article, can he follow the “proscriptions against profit, bad faith, and self-dealing,” manifest “a strong concern about avoiding ultra vires action” (that is, action exceeding the president’s legal authority), and maintain “a duty of diligence and carefulness”? Given that Trump displays the extreme behavioral characteristics of a pathological narcissist, a sociopath, or a malignant narcissist—take your pick—it’s clear that he can’t.
  • To act as a fiduciary requires you to put someone else’s interests above your own, and Trump’s personality makes it impossible for him to do that. No president before him, at least in recent memory, has ever displayed such obsessive self-regard
  • Indeed, Trump’s view of his presidential powers can only be described as profoundly narcissistic, and his narcissism has compelled him to disregard the Framers’ vision of his constitutional duties in every respect
  • Trump’s incapacity affects all manner of subjects addressed by the presidency, but can be seen most acutely in foreign affairs and national security.
  • All in all, Trump sought to impede and end a significant counterintelligence and criminal investigation—one of crucial importance to the nation—and did so for his own personal reasons. He did precisely the opposite of what his duties require. Indeed, he has shown utter contempt for his duties to the nation
  • hat constitutional mechanisms exist for dealing with a president who cannot or does not comply with his duties, and how should they take the president’s mental and behavioral characteristics into account?
  • it turns out that impeachment is a more practical mechanism
  • In short, now that the House of Representatives has embarked on an impeachment inquiry, one of the most important judgments it must make is whether any identified breaches of duty are likely to be repeated. And if a Senate trial comes to pass, that issue would become central as well to the decision to remove the president from office. That’s when Trump’s behavioral and psychological characteristics should—must—come into pla
  • One of the most compelling arguments about the meaning of those words is that the Framers, in Article II’s command that a president faithfully execute his office, imposed upon him fiduciary obligations. As the constitutional historian Robert Natelson explained in the Federalist Society Review, the “founding generation [understood] ‘high … Misdemeanors’ to mean ‘breach of fiduciary duty.’
  • Eighteenth-century lawyers instead used terms such as breach of trust—which describes the same thing. “Parliamentary articles of impeachment explicitly and repetitively described the accused conduct as a breach of trust,” Natelson argues, and 18th-century British legal commentators explained how impeachment for “high Crimes and Misdemeanors” was warranted for all sorts of noncriminal violations that were, in essence, fiduciary breaches.
  • why the discussion of Morris’s suggestion was so brief—the drafters knew what the words historically meant, because, as a House Judiciary Committee report noted in 1974, “at the time of the Constitutional Convention the phrase ‘high Crimes and Misdemeanors’ had been in use for over 400 years in impeachment proceedings in Parliament
  • Certainly Alexander Hamilton knew by the time he penned “Federalist No. 65,” in which he explained that impeachment was for “those offenses which proceed from the misconduct of public men, or, in other words, from the abuse or violation of some public trust.
  • What constitutes such an abuse or violation of trust is up to Congress to decide: First the House decides to bring impeachment charges, and then the Senate decides whether to convict on those charges. The process of impeachment by the House and removal by trial in the Senate is thus, in some ways, akin to indictment by a grand jury and trial by a petit jury
  • As Laurence Tribe and Joshua Matz explain in their recent book on impeachment, “the Constitution explicitly states that Congress may not end a presidency unless the president has committed an impeachable offense. But nowhere does the Constitution state or otherwise imply that Congress must remove a president whenever that standard is met … In other words, it allows Congress to exercise judgment.”
  • As Tribe and Matz argue, that judgment presents a “heavy burden,” and demands that Congress be “context-sensitive,” and achieve “an understanding of all relevant facts.” A president might breach his trust to the nation once in some small, inconsequential way and never repeat the misbehavior, and Congress could reasonably decide that the game is not worth the candle.
  • It’s also an appropriate mechanism, because the constitutional magic words (other than Treason and Bribery) that form the basis of an impeachment charge—high Crimes and Misdemeanors, found in Article II, Section 4 of the Constitution—mean something other than, and more than, offenses in the criminal-statute books. High Crimes and Misdemeanors is a legal term of art, one that historically referred to breaches of duties—fiduciary duties—by public officeholders. In other words, the question of what constitutes an impeachable offense for a president coincides precisely with whether the president can execute his office in the faithful manner that the Constitution requires.
  • there’s another reason as well. The people have a right to know, and a need to see. Many people have watched all of Trump’s behavior, and they’ve drawn the obvious conclusion. They know something’s wrong, just as football fans knew that the downed quarterback had shattered his leg. Others have changed the channel, or looked away, or chosen to deny what they’ve seen. But if Congress does its job and presents the evidence, those who are in denial won’t be able to ignore the problem any longer.
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Prisoner-transport officer accused of sexual assault - 0 views

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    A prisoner-transport officer is arrested after three female inmates said he sexually assaulted them while taking them to jails in Arizona and New Mexico.
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Their Pledges Die. So Should Fraternities. - The New York Times - 0 views

  • at least 380,000 male undergraduates belong to Greek organizations, which he says represents a 50 percent increase over the last decade.
  • “If we could create higher education from scratch, would we have organizations that divide people by race, class and gender at institutions that are supposed to be encouraging diversity?” he asked. His answer was immediate and emphatic: “No.”
  • fraternities segregate. They discriminate. They concentrate and enshrine privilege at a time when we’re ostensibly trying to be more mindful of that. In so doing they reveal the hollowness of many of our vows.
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  • We profess outrage about sexual assault and abuse, the dimensions of which have been rendered even clearer by the galling revelations of the last month and a half. Still we indulge fraternities, which abet that behavior. Persuasive research — along with common sense — tells us that members of all-male fraternities are more likely to have a warped view of permissible sexual contact and that women who frequent fraternity parties are more likely to be assaulted. Additionally, the binge drinking so prevalent at fraternities is the enemy of informed consent. Advertisement Continue reading the main story
  • , we resolve to assemble more heterogeneous campuses. But then we blithely watch and even celebrate the retreat of students into fraternities and sororities, which are in many cases largely homogeneous enclaves antithetical to the broadening of perspective and challenging of ingrained assumptions that higher education should be all about.
  • “These fraternities have drink, danger and debauchery in their blood — right alongside secrecy and self-protection,” Lisa Wade, an Occidental College sociology professor and the author of “American Hookup: The New Culture of Sex on Campus,” wrote in a Time magazine essay that called for an end to fraternities. “They cannot reform.”
  • colleges could at least stop promoting and even romanticizing them. Hechinger said that campus websites and tours have presented gauzy propaganda extolling Greek life. Why not provide detailed information about individual fraternities’ disciplinary records instead? And why not put more energy into nurturing other groups and living arrangements that might siphon students away from fraternities?
  • 150 years ago, fraternities were regarded with enormous suspicion by many college presidents, who described them as “un-American,” a “plague” and a force for “greater unkindness and ill feeling than almost anything else in college.”
  • “Imagine a world,” she said, “in which everything was the same about higher education except there have never been Greek organizations. An 18-year-old waltzes into a dean’s office and says, ‘I want to start an exclusive club on campus that doesn’t allow women and serves mostly white and privileged students and we’re going to throw parties all the time that are illegal, and at these parties, all the bad stuff that happens on campus is going to happen disproportionately. What do you think?’ ”
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