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.
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