25 October 2016
Vox: Genetically engineered humans will arrive sooner than you think. And we're not ready.
And so, instead of transforming the world around ourselves to make it more what we wanted it to be, now it’s becoming possible to transform ourselves into whatever it is that we want to be. And there's both power and danger in that, because people can make terrible miscalculations, and they can alter themselves, maybe in ways that are irreversible, that do irreversible harm to the things that really make their lives worth living. [...]
It is, but I'm always careful about saying that, because I don't want to fall into technological determinism. Some of the writers like Ray Kurzweil, the American inventor and futurist, have tended to do that. They say it's coming whether we like it or not, and we need to adapt ourselves to it.
But I don't see technology that way, and I think most historians of technology don't see it that way either. They see technology and society as co-constructing each other over time, which gives human beings a much greater space for having a say in which technologies will be pursued and what direction we will take, and how much we choose to have them come into our lives and in what ways. [...]
Well, let's put it this way: If only rich people have access to these technologies, then we have a very big problem, because it's going to take the kinds of inequalities that have been getting worse over recent decades, even in a rich country like ours, and make them much worse, and inscribe those inequalities into our very biology.
So it's going to be very hard for somebody to be born poor and bootstrap themselves up into a higher position in society when the upper echelons of society are not only enjoying the privileges of health and education and housing and all that, but are bioenhancing themselves to unprecedented levels of performance. That's going to render permanent and intractable the separation between rich and poor.
The Huffington Post: LGBT Rights And Religious Refusals In Mississippi: What's Actually At Stake?
It’s no surprise Governor Phil Bryant of Mississippi is one of the few prominent Republicans left defending Donald Trump. Governor Bryant already proved his stubbornness when he was the only public official to appeal the enjoining of Mississippi’s radical anti-LGBT legislation passed this spring. Lawyers on both sides are currently gearing up for briefing and arguments in the Fifth Circuit over Mississippi’s religious refusal bill, HB 1523. HB 1523 provides explicit, special protections designed to allow individuals and businesses in Mississippi to discriminate against LGBT individuals and families if they believe that marriage is between a man and a woman, sex should be reserved to such a marriage, and/or that the gender a person is assigned at birth is immutable. [...]
Epstein fails to account for any of these grave realities on the ground. He also seems to not understand the reality of the bill itself. He imagines HB 1523 as limited to private “market-regulated” spaces, but the bill’s scope extends far beyond that. HB 1523 prevents the state from interfering in a foster parent’s decision to “guide, instruct, or raise” a child in accordance with the favored moral beliefs. One section of the bill allows counselors to deny mental health services to a lesbian teenager struggling with coming out on the basis that the provider believes marriage is between a man and a woman (without any requirement of a referral). The bill extends this protection to state employees, such as a school counselor at a public school, which for many young people is their only access to mental health services. This is in a state, mind you, with one of the highest risks of suicide for LGBT youth. There is nothing hyperbolic about saying that this is about life and death for LGBT individuals in Mississippi. When mental health care providers turn away HIV positive patients, doctors and public health professionals have already warned us what the likely outcome will be.
Richard Epstein believes that although racial anti-discrimination protections were previously justified as a “necessary corrective against massive abuses of state power under Jim Crow. Thankfully, that risk is gone today.” That may better describe where Richard Epstein teaches law and contemplates his academic theories: New York City. But for LGBT Mississippians who received KKK flyers in their driveways, Epstein’s assertion that the risk is gone is laughable. Don’t take my New York word for it: listen to the voices coming directly from Mississippi. For LGBT citizens in Mississippi there’s not just the “risk” of a Jim Crow South, it’s their daily reality.
The Guardian: ‘I felt abandoned’: children stolen by France try to find their past, 50 years on
Cheyroux and his two sisters were among more than 2,000 children removed from the tropical island between 1963 and 1982 as part of a French government programme to repopulate increasingly deserted areas of rural postwar France. Cheyroux now believes he was forcibly taken from his mother, Marie-Thérese Abrousse, who had three children out of wedlock and was trying to raise them alone in the impoverished neighbourhood of Coeur-Saignnat. [...]
The people of Réunion are descendants of slaves brought there by French colonisers to work on sugar plantations. The island is a departement, essentially an overseas territory of France. In the 1960s, the MP for Réunion, Michel Debré, set up a scheme to move children from the island to mainland France. His government promised islanders that their children would be sent to the best schools and be adopted by loving, rich French parents who could provide for them in a way that most creole people could not. Residents of Réunion spoke of the red government trucks that would roam the streets after school picking up children; and parents being forced to initial or fingerprint papers that they couldn’t read. [...]
Children like Cheyroux were taken to France in batches of 30. First, they were kept in a temporary home in Réunion where they were taught French and to stop speaking in their native creole.
From there, they were taken to various parts of France where adoptive parents could come to take them home. Cheyroux and his sisters were chosen by a couple from Auch, a commune in the south-west of the country. They were the only children with dark skin in their neighbourhood, and were teased and picked on by their friends. “They’d call me chocolat or negro or noireau,” he says.
Quartz: The world’s worst authoritarian leaders have realized nostalgia is way more powerful than fact
Look at the remarkably effective and remarkably inaccurate campaign Donald Trump has waged in the US: While Trump’s falsehoods are well documented, especially by his opponent Hillary Clinton, it’s surprising that politicians ever bother to try and make fact-based arguments. The only reason politicians might occasionally use facts in the first place is if they are attempting to achieve a specific political goal. Facts are annoying, but they’re useful if you want to prove a specific point.
If, however, you have no real vision for where your country is heading, then dreamy nostalgia is a much more pleasant potion to peddle. This is especially true if you don’t feel like working on the difficult, often incremental steps that push societies forward; it’s much easier to wallow in invented pasts then plan for the future. It’s no coincidence that the politicians who most dislike facts are also the most enthusiastic nostalgists. [...]
In the UK’s referendum to leave the European Union, both sides were brazen in their banishment of boring facts. In one striking example, Brexit leader Michael Gove announced that the country was “sick of experts.” Advocates of the winning Brexit campaign instead called for a reuniting of the British Empire in the form of an “Anglosphere” and a return to an ethnically pure England.
The Huffington Post: Obama's Bet On Putin Has Collapsed
Obama came to office eight years ago determined to end America’s two wars, the agonizing Bush legacies in Afghanistan and Iraq. He wanted to move America beyond a political culture of “permanent war.” He could focus on rebuilding America after the financial crisis and recession.
Entering the Syrian war with a major land force was unthinkable, and Obama has never wavered on this point. The danger of escalation to a full-scale land war explains his resistance to the urgings of Secretary of State John Kerry, former secretary Hillary Clinton, and many others in his administration to do more given the humanitarian consequences of doing less. [...]
Obama is not intellectually naive, but his history with Putin indicates an unwillingness or even an incapacity for brutality. Machiavelli wrote in The Prince that the leader who tries to be good in a world where so many others are bad “will necessarily come to grief.”
Amorality is not Obama’s strong suit in any case. He cares about “the problem of dirty hands.” Yet Putin is not evil in the sense that Hitler was evil. He doesn’t have delusions of world domination, nor is he genocidal. But he does believe that bombing and starving thousands of helpless civilians is justifiable to a sufficient Russian strategic ambition.
Quartz: To compete with online shopping, retailers must embrace minimalism
America has 70% more retail space per capita than Canada, and more than six times that of Europe. That’s about 2,375 square feet per 100 people—23 square feet per person dedicated to your personal shopping whims! [...]
The role of physical stores has changed in the consumer psyche. Shoppers are rewarding nimble digital-first brands, such as Everlane, which practices “radical transparency” in product manufacturing and pricing. They clearly explain how the supply chain works to their customers and where margins are made. Another example is the seasonal Shoe Park in New York City, where customers trade their shoes at the door for a pair from the new collection. They can take the shoes for a test stroll through an indoor park, while enjoying Blue Bottle Coffee and Glossier’s cult-status makeup. [...]
Today’s shoppers are inspired by lifestyle imagery on Instagram feeds and Snapchat stories. The result is a strong sense of FOMO—and an urge to be the first to show off a new release. Smart brands have therefore figured out how to utilize consumers’ desires to be ahead of the curve by using “limited edition” as a strategy for sales.
Atlas Obscura: Here's How Long it Would Take for Vampires to Annihilate Humanity
A surprisingly large number of academic studies—as in, more than one—have applied mathematical modeling to the concept of human-vampire co-existence. Using the depiction of bloodsuckers in various forms of media, from Bram Stoker's Dracula to True Blood, these papers look at whether Earth's vampire population would inevitably annihilate humanity, and, if so, how long it would take.
Mathematically influenced scholarship of vampire-human relations took off in the early '80s courtesy of Richard Hartl and Alexander Mehlmann, Austrian mathematicians with a mutual penchant for the undead. In 1982, their paper, titled "The Transylvanian Problem of Renewable Resources" was published in the operations research journal RAIRO. In it, Hartl and Mehlmann posited "optimal bloodsucking strategies for dynamic continuous vampires." [...]
There was a lull in vampiric math papers during the '90s and early aughts, but in 2007, another article analyzed the plausibility of human-vampire co-existence. In “Cinema Fiction vs. Physics Reality: Ghosts, Vampires, and Zombies,” published in Skeptical Inquirer, authors Costas Efthimiou and Sohang Gandhi presented a pessimistic view of humanity's future in the face of thirsty vampires. "The fact of the matter is," they wrote, "if vampires truly feed with even a tiny fraction of the frequency that they are depicted to in movies and folklore, then the human race would have been wiped out quite quickly after the first vampire appeared."
The Guardian: Roma in UK 'deeply insecure' after vote to leave EU, thinktank says
A report by the Institute for Public Policy Research (IPPR) into the implications of Brexit for Roma communities found that the group faced “a triple whammy of challenges” following June’s referendum on Britain’s membership of the EU.
Uncertainty over the group’s right to remain in the UK, the fact that they have historically been victims of discrimination and prejudice across Europe and concerns that a large pot of EU funding designed to support them may be stopped were all cited as factors leaving Roma particularly vulnerable.
Estimates of the number of Roma in Britain range from 80,000 to 300,000 and some areas – including Govanhill in Glasgow, Page Hall in Sheffield, Normanton in Derby, and Loxford in the London borough of Redbridge – have seen an influx of Roma migrants since the EU’s enlargement in 2004 and 2007. [...]
The thinktank estimates that a total of £1.1bn in European structural funds for the 2014–2020 period is available to be used to promote Roma integration, and called on the government to make up any shortfall that occurs after Brexit.
“A large amount of targeted support for Roma communities is dependent on EU funding. Without this support, Roma communities will face greater barriers in accessing employment, education, and healthcare, and local services will be placed under further strain,” said Morris.
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