Designer babies, the end of diseases, genetically modified humans that never age. Outrageous things that used to be science fiction are suddenly becoming reality. The only thing we know for sure is that things will change irreversibly.
11 August 2016
Vox: Hillary Clinton doesn't want to abolish the Second Amendment. Here's what she DOES want to do.
But late in the 2008 Democratic primary, as then-Sen. Barack Obama was being roundly condemned for saying Rust Belt voters "cling to guns or religion," his rival Hillary Clinton joined in, saying that Obama’s comments offended her on a personal level, as she came from a family of gun owners. [...]
This time around, her stated position on the issue is clear. She wants comprehensive, universal background check legislation. She wants to repeal civil immunity for gun manufacturers. She wants to ban assault weapons, ban the severely mentally ill and domestic abusers from buying guns, and use executive powers to limit the current gun show loophole to background checks. She attacked Bernie Sanders repeatedly for being excessively pro-gun. [...]
By the 2000 race, then, Clinton had put together a very consistent and strong pro–gun control record. She didn’t call for anything out of the political mainstream, like a handgun ban. But universal licensing and registration and mandatory smart guns were about the outer limit of what Democrats could propose on guns in the late '90s and early '00s. [...]
Clinton's official plan on guns calls for universal federal background checks, closing the "Charleston loophole," wherein sales can proceed if a background check is not complete within three days, closing the gun show and internet sales loopholes, repealing civil immunity for the gun industry, making it a federal crime to buy a gun with the intent to give it to a felon, banning domestic abusers from buying and owning guns, and reviving an assault weapons ban. She also has a plan for an executive action to expand background checks and undo the gun show and internet sales loopholes slightly.
Al Jazeera: Swaziland and HIV: Redrawing what it means to be a man
"I thought a man was somebody who's got a family, somebody who's got authority, power, that kind of thing," says Lungelo Fakudze, one of the roughly 100,000 orphans in Swaziland, which is home to 1.3 million people.
It is a difficult image to break in Africa's last absolute monarchy, ruled by King Mswati III - who has 15 wives and can pick a new one yearly from thousands of virgins presented to him during an annual ceremony - and which is blighted by the world's highest rates of HIV, TB and intimate partner violence. [...]
The men also stay away from health clinics, which tend to be female-centred, where they could get a diagnosis and treatment. As a result, while more women contract HIV, more men die as a result of it.
"They believe that they should be big and strong and solitary and authoritative. Reasons you're less likely to go to the clinic and get a check-up and seek out medical services until it's too late," says Tom Churchyard, the director of the charity Kwakha Indvodza (KI), which means Building a Man. [...]
Researcher Bekhie Sithole believes that men's withdrawal from healthcare is a result of the "moralising" of HIV and the way that men have been painted as the perpetrators and women as their victims.
Quartz: There’s an awful cost to getting a PhD that no one talks about
It’s common knowledge that getting a PhD is hard. It’s meant to be. Some even say that if you’re not up all night working or skipping meals, you’re doing it wrong. But while PhD students are not so naive as to enter the program expecting an easy ride, there is a cost to the endeavor that no one talks about: a psychological one. [...]
I might not have felt so alone had I known how many people struggle with mental health issues in academia. A 2015 study at the University of California Berkeley found that 47% of graduate students suffer from depression, following a previous 2005 study that showed 10% had contemplated suicide. A 2003 Australian study found that that the rate of mental illness in academic staff was three to four times higher than in the general population, according to a New Scientist article. The same article notes that the percentage of academics with mental illness in the United Kingdom has been estimated at 53%.
But the stiff-upper-lip attitude that pervades the ivory tower can prompt many people who struggle with mental health problems to keep their problems hidden, while others simply accept depression as par for the course. And in the often-Darwinian culture among graduate students competing for a handful of professorial jobs, too many people assume that psychological problems are only for the weak. [...]
In essence, many PhD students are so accustomed to hard work and self-discipline that they beat themselves up when their efforts to manage depression fail to generate perfect results.
Salon: Sexist Trump revolt: His nomination is a reaction to women’s growing social and economic power
Overt misogyny of this sort is rarely heard in the more official channels of political discourse. (Though not always, as Peterson made headlines in 2012 when he argued, on Fox News, that women shouldn’t have been allowed the vote.)
But, as these quotes — collected from just the past week, the tip of a misogyny iceberg — make it quite clear, when right wingers chafe against “political correctness,”it isn’t just racism that they want to express more freely. It’s misogyny, as well. [...]
While the feminist revolution has been going on for decades now, in the past decade, there’s been a quiet but profound shift of social and economic power towards women, allowing unprecedented levels of autonomy. For the first time in American history, half of American workers are women. In 64% of these families, the mother is either the primary or a co-breadwinner. In over 40% of families with children, the mother is the main breadwinner.
Even amongst traditional nuclear families, with married parents and kids at home, the shift has been dramatic. In a quarter of these homes, the wife makes more than her husband. While most couples tend to have the same educational level, it used to be that, when there was a difference, the husband had more education. But about a decade ago, that trend reversed. Now wives have more education. [...]
Instead, many men are turning to Trump, finding reassurance of their own masculinity in his cheesy bombast and gleeful disrespect of women. In a year when we’re likely to elect the first female president, provoking even more angst over men’s declining dominance, Trump’s gross misogyny has even more appeal.
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