Browsed by
Category: Society

ABC only did the right thing when it could no longer get away with ignoring Roseanne’s racism

ABC only did the right thing when it could no longer get away with ignoring Roseanne’s racism

Comments 0 Comment

Roxane Gay writes: On Twitter on Tuesday, Roseanne Barr wrote that if “muslim brotherhood & planet of the apes had a baby =vj.” The message referred to President Barack Obama’s former senior adviser Valerie Jarrett, and in it Ms. Barr traded on age-old racist ideas about black people and primates. Then she shared some incorrect nonsense about Chelsea Clinton marrying into the Soros family. It was the kind of thing Roseanne Barr has been doing online for years. This time,…

Read More Read More

The Trump effect: New study connects white American intolerance and support for authoritarianism

The Trump effect: New study connects white American intolerance and support for authoritarianism

Comments 0 Comment

Noah Berlatsky writes: Since the founding of the United States, politicians and pundits have warned that partisanship is a danger to democracy. George Washington, in his Farewell Address, worried that political parties, or factions, could “allow cunning, ambitious and unprincipled men” to rise to power and subvert democracy. More recently, many political observers are concerned that increasing political polarization on left and right makes compromise impossible, and leads to the destruction of democratic norms and institutions. A new study, however,…

Read More Read More

A triumph for women and for Ireland

A triumph for women and for Ireland

Comments 0 Comment

Barbara Wesel writes: It is such a resounding victory that campaigners in Ireland are weeping with joy. After a tense last few days when the referendum seemed too close to call, it turned out to be a landslide result. Irish people voted overwhelmingly in favor of abolishing the total abortion ban in the constitution. And with this amendment, the last part of an oppressive system that subjugated women in Ireland for centuries has gone. They have achieved what has long…

Read More Read More

Americans least likely to think we have a responsibility to accept refugees? So-called ‘Christian’ evangelicals

Americans least likely to think we have a responsibility to accept refugees? So-called ‘Christian’ evangelicals

Comments 0 Comment

The Washington Post reports: In February 2017, as debate raged nationally over President Trump’s decision to curtail immigration to the United States, the conservative Christian Broadcasting Network dipped into the Bible to share what that sacred text said about refugees. “Treat refugees the way you want to be treated,” it said, quoting Leviticus. “Invite the stranger in” (Matthew) and “Open your door to the traveler” (Job). The first comment in reply to the article captures the tone of the rest…

Read More Read More

Human society is unprepared for the rise of artificial intelligence

Human society is unprepared for the rise of artificial intelligence

Comments 0 Comment

Henry Kissinger writes: The internet age in which we already live prefigures some of the questions and issues that AI will only make more acute. The Enlightenment sought to submit traditional verities to a liberated, analytic human reason. The internet’s purpose is to ratify knowledge through the accumulation and manipulation of ever expanding data. Human cognition loses its personal character. Individuals turn into data, and data become regnant. Users of the internet emphasize retrieving and manipulating information over contextualizing or…

Read More Read More

Anti-war protests 50 years ago helped mold the modern Christian right

Anti-war protests 50 years ago helped mold the modern Christian right

Comments 0 Comment

William Sloane Coffin Jr., followed by his sister, arrives at federal building in Boston on May 20, 1968. AP Photo By David Mislin, Temple University In May of 1968, a high-profile trial began in Boston that dramatically illustrated a larger phenomenon fueling the rise of conservative Christianity in the United States. Five men had been charged with conspiracy for encouraging Americans to evade the draft. One of the prominent defendants in the trial was a Presbyterian minister and Yale University…

Read More Read More

Why do so many people feel their work is completely unnecessary?

Why do so many people feel their work is completely unnecessary?

Comments 0 Comment

David Graeber writes: One day, the wall shelves in my office collapsed. This left books scattered all over the floor and a jagged, half-dislocated metal frame that once held the shelves in place dangling over my desk. I’m a professor of anthropology at a university. A carpenter appeared an hour later to inspect the damage, and announced gravely that, as there were books all over the floor, safety rules prevented him from entering the room or taking further action. I…

Read More Read More

The real villain behind our new Gilded Age

The real villain behind our new Gilded Age

Comments 0 Comment

Eric Posner and Glen Weyl write: The comedian Chris Rock once said, “If poor people knew how rich rich people are, there would be riots in the streets.” Populist revolts throughout the world may not count as street riots, but they do reflect disenchantment with not just our government but also liberal democracy itself. In the past two decades, growth rates in the United States have fallen to half of what they were in the middle of the 20th century….

Read More Read More

Say goodbye to the information age — it’s all about reputation now

Say goodbye to the information age — it’s all about reputation now

Comments 0 Comment

By Gloria Origgi, Aeon There is an underappreciated paradox of knowledge that plays a pivotal role in our advanced hyper-connected liberal democracies: the greater the amount of information that circulates, the more we rely on so-called reputational devices to evaluate it. What makes this paradoxical is that the vastly increased access to information and knowledge we have today does not empower us or make us more cognitively autonomous. Rather, it renders us more dependent on other people’s judgments and evaluations…

Read More Read More

Two mass murders reveal how difficult—and important—it is to correctly identify terrorism

Two mass murders reveal how difficult—and important—it is to correctly identify terrorism

Comments 0 Comment

J.M. Berger writes: Two mass murders took place within 48 hours this week. Both attackers were adherents of extremist ideologies. Both terrorized people. But one of these two attacks was clearly terrorism, and one was apparently not. What’s the difference? Early Sunday morning, Travis Reinking walked into a Tennessee Waffle House wearing nothing but a jacket and started shooting, killing four and wounding several more. Early reporting indicates that Reinking had a history of apparent mental illness. But Reinking also…

Read More Read More

Palantir knows everything about you

Palantir knows everything about you

Comments 0 Comment

Bloomberg reports: High above the Hudson River in downtown Jersey City, a former U.S. Secret Service agent named Peter Cavicchia III ran special ops for JPMorgan Chase & Co. His insider threat group—most large financial institutions have one—used computer algorithms to monitor the bank’s employees, ostensibly to protect against perfidious traders and other miscreants. Aided by as many as 120 “forward-deployed engineers” from the data mining company Palantir Technologies Inc., which JPMorgan engaged in 2009, Cavicchia’s group vacuumed up emails…

Read More Read More

Leaders worldwide are falling for a ‘deadly illusion’

Leaders worldwide are falling for a ‘deadly illusion’

Comments 0 Comment

In an editorial, the Washington Post says: Although his audience was the European Parliament, French President Emmanuel Macron articulated truths on Tuesday that resonate for the entire globe. Nationalism and authoritarianism are on the march. Democracy as an ideal and in practice seems under siege. The United States, traditionally a beacon for freedom, has dimmed the light, at least for a time. Mr. Macron filled the gap with a thoughtful and bracing warning. He declared that Europe is being torn…

Read More Read More

The internet promised utopia and instead gave us Trump

The internet promised utopia and instead gave us Trump

Comments 0 Comment

Noah Kulwin writes: To keep the internet free — while becoming richer, faster, than anyone in history — the technological elite needed something to attract billions of users to the ads they were selling. And that something, it turns out, was outrage. As Jaron Lanier, a pioneer in virtual reality, points out, anger is the emotion most effective at driving “engagement” — which also makes it, in a market for attention, the most profitable one. By creating a self-perpetuating loop…

Read More Read More

The battle to ban plastic bags

The battle to ban plastic bags

Comments 0 Comment

A plastic bag floats in the ocean in this 2016 photo. Creative Commons By Sylvain Charlebois, Dalhousie University and Tony Robert Walker, Dalhousie University There are increasing concerns about the use of plastics in our day-to-day lives. Single-use plastics of any kind, including grocery bags, cutlery, straws, polystyrene and coffee cups, are significant yet preventable sources of plastic land-based and marine pollution. In Canada, bans on plastics have so far been left up to municipalities, and some are taking action….

Read More Read More

A suspect tried to blend in with 60,000 concertgoers. China’s facial-recognition cameras caught him

A suspect tried to blend in with 60,000 concertgoers. China’s facial-recognition cameras caught him

Comments 0 Comment

The Washington Post reports: The 31-year-old man, wanted by police, had thought playing a numbers game would be enough to allow him to fade into anonymity. The population of China is a staggering 1.4 billion people, give or take a few million. More than 45 million of them live in Jiangxi province in southeast China, and 5 million of those people are concentrated in Nanchang, the province’s capital. On the night of April 7, nearly 60,000 people — or roughly…

Read More Read More

In America’s new civil war, one side must win

In America’s new civil war, one side must win

Comments 0 Comment

Peter Leyden and Ruy Teixeira write: This is no ordinary political moment. Trump is not the reason this is no ordinary time — he’s simply the most obvious symptom that reminds us all of this each day. The best way to understand politics in America today is to reframe it as closer to civil war. Just the phrase “civil war” is harsh, and many people may cringe. It brings up images of guns and death, the bodies of Union and Confederate soldiers….

Read More Read More