Jacobin Magazine: Passing the Baton

It’s an apparatus that was built by both parties. George W. Bush massively expanded the system after the September 11 attacks, taking measures that were at the time viewed as extreme and unprecedented. But Obama’s ready acceptance and expansion of this national security state upon coming to power has helped entrench it, while also making it more powerful than Dick Cheney’s wildest dreams. Now it’s in Trump’s hands. [...]

Anyone willing to trust President Obama with the power to secretly declare an American citizen an enemy of the state and order his extrajudicial killing should ask whether they would be willing to trust the next president with that dangerous power. [...]

Some were. After all, back in 2012, when the prospect of Mitt Romney becoming president was looming, the Obama administration rushed to establish rules around its totally lawless and oversight-free drone program in case he won. After Romney lost the election, these efforts again took a back seat. [...]

The targets for assassination appear to be currently determined through a process of intelligence gathering, then sent up the chain to be approved for killing. However, with no real oversight or legal limits on the program, it’s hard to see what would legally prevent President Trump from ordering the assassination of anyone he chooses. [...]

And in 2013, Obama’s Attorney General Eric Holder declared that this power of extra-judicial assassination even extended to US soil. While “entirely hypothetical” and “unlikely to occur,” he wrote in a letter to Kentucky Senator Rand Paul, “it is possible, I suppose, to imagine an extraordinary circumstance in which it would be necessary and appropriate … for the president to authorize the military to use lethal force within the territory of the United States.”

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The Conversation: Why we’re more likely to date someone who has an ex

Research has found people with relationship experience, all else being equal, tend to be more romantically desirable than people without relationship experience. In other words, people are attracted to others who have already been “pre-selected” (or pre-approved). We call this phenomenon “mate copying”. [...]

Women, however, are generally attracted to less observable characteristics (social dominance, kindness). Where men can get a fair bit of mate-relevant information from simple observation of a potential partner, women can’t, and are encouraged to look for additional information. One cheap source is knowing what other women think of a man, specifically, whether or not he is considered a good romantic prospect.

While some researchers have found evidence of mate copying in men, there is a fair bit of literature suggesting the phenomenon is quite a bit stronger among women. [...]

However, evidence doesn’t support the idea married men are more desirable than single men. A big reason for this is married individuals are so much harder to attract and/or date than single individuals. Also, there are some strong moral proscriptions against pursuing a married person.

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The Atlantic: How to Get Better at Expressing Emotions

Part of that is expressing emotions, be it through writing, body language, or talking with other people, and researchers are finding that unlatching the cage and letting those emotional birds fly free could have some real health benefits. Some studies have linked the repression of negative emotions to increased stress, and research suggests that writing about feelings is associated with better health outcomes for breast-cancer patients, people with asthma, and people who’ve experienced a traumatic event. And in a study of people who lived to be 100 years old, emotional expression was found to be a common trait, along with a positive attitude towards life, among the long-lived. [...]

I spoke with the psychologist David Caruso, who is a co-founder of the Emotional Intelligence Skills Group (not the actor with the sunglasses from CSI: Miami), and who trains organizations and schools on emotional intelligence, about overcoming personal and cultural barriers to expressing emotions. [...]

American culture demands that the answer to the question "How are you?" is not just “Good,” but sometimes “Great.” Or—this drives folks around the world crazy, who might be based in another country but they work for an American company—we need to be “Awesome.” There's this relentless drive to mask the expression of our true underlying feelings. It's almost inappropriate. [...]

Caruso: I will now have people tell me, “Oh, David, have you seen Inside Out? Because don't you know that even sadness and even anger can be [helpful]?” It's really made my job so much easier.

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Social Europe: The Populist War On Women

For nearly two decades, Poles believed that the country’s abortion laws could not be changed, owing to the power of the Catholic Church and the subordination of the political class to religious authorities. But the actress Krystyna Janda, who starred in Andrzej Wajda’s film Man of Iron, called on Polish women to launch a general strike. On October 3, instead of going to work, women across the country turned out to protest, following a model established by Iceland’s women in 1975, when 90% did not go to work and effectively paralyzed the country.

The demonstrations occurred even in small towns, and despite dismal weather. Women also congregated outside PiS headquarters, the true seat of power in Polish politics. In solidarity with Polish women, women from Kenya to Berlin took to the streets dressed in black.

For the first time since PiS’s return to power last year, Kaczyński was frightened. The next day, he had his party vote to reject the anti-abortion proposal. Never before had he acted in a similar manner. [...]

And yet neither Trump nor Kaczyński seems willing – or perhaps able – to reverse course. After withdrawing his support for the Ordo Iuris proposal, Kaczyński couldn’t leave the issue alone. “We will strive to ensure that even pregnancies that are very difficult, when the child is doomed to die or is seriously deformed, are brought to term so that the child can be baptized, buried, and given a name,” he announced on October 13. Women held another general strike on October 24.

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The Atlantic: How Many Photographs of You Are Out There In the World?

And those are just numbers from a handful of social-media companies. Weibo, What’sApp, Tumblr, Twitter, Flickr, and Instagram all add to the pile. In 2014, according to Mary Meeker’s annual Internet Trends report, people uploaded an average of 1.8 billion digital images every single day. That’s 657 billion photos per year. Another way to think about it: Every two minutes, humans take more photos than ever existed in total 150 years ago. [...]

After all, that 657 billion number is just photos that were uploaded online, not ones that are stored on someone’s computer. It also doesn’t include security cameras, or closed-circuit systems, or body-worn camera footage, or aerial-drone shots. The United Kingdom has 6 million surveillance cameras in service. According to CrimeFeed.com, the average American is caught on camera 75 time a day. Some of that footage is stored and backed up, while some of it is lost immediately. There’s a channel on my television that broadcasts traffic cameras across the city, including one at Times Square, where there are always people who probably have no idea I’m watching them in my living room. There’s a livestream of Abbey Road. And real-time footage of Piazza di Spagna, one of the famous public squares in Rome. [...]

Schoenebeck studies how parents and teens relate to digital photos—she looks at things like moms posting baby-photos online, and how teenagers feel about their earlier selves immortalized in digital images on Facebook. She and Hand both talked about how teens today take a lot of care in the photos they post. Instead of dumping all 30 photos they took at the Eiffel Tower into a Facebook album, they’ll post two. Their relationship with photos isn’t one of personal memory, but rather of public identity. Hand describes the thinking: “Of course you take images in order to distribute them, that’s what they’re for.”

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