The "Warrior Queen" could be worse for world stability than an isolationist Trump.
It has become accepted orthodoxy in establishment circles to view Trump as an authoritarian race-baiter who would present a major threat to the world if elected in November.
While this characterization is certainly well founded, it ignores the fact that Clinton is also dangerous to world stability. And unlike Trump, she has the blood on her hands to prove it.
The idea that white men might themselves be a threat to the women they’re ostensibly rescuing doesn’t fit the narrative.
The oh-so chivalric attempts to use the safety of white European women like myself as a justification for racist violence and hostility and to deny other human beings the basic right to refuge is particularly tiresome when women in Europe have never been safe from sexual violence, regardless of the movement of migrants. Anti-Muslim and anti-refugee advocates claim to enjoy gallantly confronting “difficult questions,” so here’s one: Why won’t we admit that many of the faults we ascribe to other cultures are equally a part of our own?
Accusations, beatings, even death threats—that's life for Muslim kids in America.
In recent months, anti-immigrant rhetoric has spiked across the country—and in local and national politics. After the Paris attacks, more than two-dozen Republican governors said they don't want Syrian refugees in their states. And Donald Trump said that if he were president he would kick all Syrian refugees out of the country; Ted Cruz said Muslims should be sent to "majority-Muslim countries," but that Christians should be provided with a safe haven in the United States. Cruz made his comments about Christians while speaking at a middle school.
During that same month, harassment and violence against Muslims—and Sikhs who wear turbans or Indian women who wear headscarves and are mistaken for being Muslim—tripled, according to data from California State University's Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism. A passenger shot a Muslim taxi driver in Pennsylvania after asking him about ISIS. A pregnant Muslim woman was assaulted in Southern California. In Florida, someone shot several bullets into the home of a Muslim family.
When employees' emotions deviate from what’s expected of their gender, they are often left to process the backlash on their own.
Jennifer Pierce, a University of Minnesota sociologist, found that the expectations for emotional labor in the legal profession apply to women working in every part of the field. In other words, while male attorneys—generally speaking—are allowed and even expected to be aggressive and domineering, that does not extend to female attorneys, who are frequently penalized if they attempt to conform to these emotional norms. Meanwhile, female legal secretaries described expectations that they would be deferential and caretaking towards (mostly male) attorneys, but male secretaries were not subject to the same norms. Thus, even when women worked in male-dominated positions, the emotional expectations deemed “appropriately” feminine still applied in ways that made it more difficult for women to do their jobs. Once again, the hidden component of this work renders it less visible but no less taxing.
White and black Floridians wear their seat belts at roughly the same rates. One would think, then, that black drivers are about as likely to get ticketed by police officers for not wearing a seatbelt as white drivers.
Nope. According to a new report by the American Civil Liberties Union, police in Florida were nearly twice as likely in 2014 to stop and ticket black drivers for seat belt violations — and that may be an underestimate, since at least one county with a history of racial disparities in seat belt citations stopped reporting its stats altogether.
The Supreme Court has been chipping away at Roe v. Wade for 43 years now.
Ever since Roe was handed down, and especially in the past five years, states have passed more than a thousand laws that restrict women's access to abortion at any stage of pregnancy. Two of these laws in particular are facing a huge Supreme Court challenge in March because they have closed about half of Texas's abortion clinics.
Reproductive rights advocates argue that for all practical purposes, these kinds of state laws have chipped away at Roe's constitutional guarantee of abortion rights for women.
Here's the thing, though: It's not just the states. The Supreme Court has also chipped away at abortion rights since Roe. A series of decisions over the past four decades has weakened the standards by which the Court has to judge state laws that restrict abortion. These decisions have set the stage for laws like the ones in Texas — and the Texas case will be a major test of just how much damage these decisions have actually done to Roe.
A really revealing anecdote about the reasons people like Trump.
Trump’s fans tend to express little regard for political norms. They cheer at his most outlandish statements. O’Reilly asked Trump if he meant it when he said that he would "take out" the family members of terrorists. He didn’t believe that Trump would "put out hits on women and children" if he were elected. Trump replied, "I would do pretty severe stuff." The Mesa crowd erupted in applause. "Yeah, baby!" a man near me yelled. I had never previously been to a political event at which people cheered for the murder of women and children.
The new rule sounds more like a high school or middle school dress code than the professional code of conduct for a state lawmaking body.
The Topeka Capital-Journal reports that Kansas state Sen. Mitch Holmes, a Republican from St. John and chair of the Senate Ethics and Elections Committee, included a rule in the committee's code of conduct that says witnesses must present themselves in "professional attire."
But he only got specific on what "professional attire" meant for women. "For ladies, low-cut necklines and mini-skirts are inappropriate," the rule says.
Holmes told the Capital-Journal's Tim Carpenter that he felt the need to clarify this because he'd seen women dress provocatively in the Capitol. But he didn't lay out any specifics for men.
"Holmes said he considered stipulating men had to wear suit and tie when addressing his Senate committee, but decided males didn’t need supplemental instruction on how to look professional," Carpenter wrote.
The rising death rates for young white adults, ages 25 to 34, make them the first generation since the Vietnam War years to experience higher death rates in early adulthood than the previous generation.
There is a reason that blacks appear to have been spared the worst of the narcotic epidemic, said Dr. Andrew Kolodny, a drug abuse expert. Studies have found that doctors are much more reluctant to prescribe painkillers to minority patients, worrying that they might sell them or become addicted.
“The answer is that racial stereotypes are protecting these patients from the addiction epidemic,” said Dr. Kolodny, a senior scientist at the Heller School for Social Policy and Management at Brandeis University and chief medical officer for Phoenix House Foundation, a national drug and alcohol treatment company.
Those series — namely the Rhimes-created Scandal and Grey's Anatomy and the Rhimes-produced How to Get Away With Murder — have been lauded for how representative they are. Their casts are diverse. Their female characters are well-rounded. Their people of color are more than just smart scientists, sassy friends, and/or steamy lovers.
And because television has been lacking when it comes to representing these groups, Rhimes has been labeled a pioneer of sorts.
"It’s not trailblazing to write the world as it actually is," Rhimes said during her PGA acceptance speech. "Women are smart and strong. They are not sex toys or damsels in distress. People of color are not sassy or dangerous or wise. And, believe me, people of color are never anybody’s sidekick in real life."
A Houston grand jury was investigating the videos' claims against Planned Parenthood, but ended up indicting the videos' creators instead.
It's also ironic that the Harris County grand jury is indicting Daleiden and Merritt in the first place, since the two-month investigation was originally about looking into the Center for Medical Progress's claims against Planned Parenthood. The grand jury declined to indict Planned Parenthood, and decided to indict the two Center for Medical Progress activists instead.
A 2013 study from the CDC found that lead exposure impacts black communities disproportionately to their white counterparts.
Although blood lead levels among all US children have dropped dramatically since the late 1990s, high blood lead levels among black children were still more than twice as prevalent as among their white counterparts.
Several men discuss sexual abuse, toxic masculinity, and the word “victim.”
The ways society denies men who’ve been assaulted the space to heal, or even the right to be seen and acknowledged, are numerous—and often directly tied to the way our society defines masculinity. In the same way that women and feminine people are told over and over to be more sexual, or less sexual, by a vast array of influencers, including fellow women, men and masculine people are also given sets of rules about how they should behave. And a lot of these rules are toxic—bad both for men and for those around them. Society, for example, holds that men are only allowed to express an emotion if it’s anger. Men are also criticized for being weak when they ask their partners—or anyone—for help. A “real” man fights with his fists to protect his honor and the honor of those around him.
This set of rules, the framework of our society’s toxic construction of masculinity, robs men of the ability to express themselves fully and creates a culture where men commit suicide rather than treat a mental illness, because there is absolutely nothing worse than being “weak.” This is reflected in America’s stats on suicide, which show that the rate of suicide is four times higher among men than women.
Contributing to this devastating reality is that for men, almost everything is considered a weakness—inexperience, asking for help, feeling sad, feeling too happy, not expressing anger physically enough, knowing too little, knowing too much, and, especially, not having sex. In this system, women and other non-masculine people are defined as objects and men/masculine people are collectors of these objects; sex is the proof of this collection, which, society dictates, men should strive to make as large as possible. Sex is the goal, a proof of virility.
If the highest goal of masculinity is to have as much sex as possible, though, how can a man be a victim of rape? How can a man be an assault victim if sex is only ever considered a positive experience for him? How can a man be a victim at all, if his masculinity is based on the ability to be always strong and in charge in every situation?
LeeAnne Walters' tap water tested at 27 times the EPA limit for lead. The city offered her a garden hose.
The hardest thing, she says, is not knowing how the lead exposure will affect her kids in the long term. Gavin was the "party animal" of the twins, but lately he's lost his appetite and sleeps more. At five, he weighs a mere 35 pounds to Garrett's 53, and he mispronounces words that he could once handle. Garrett was recently diagnosed with ADHD. Both boys continue to ask, when handed a cup of water, whether it is "good water or bad water."
When I asked Walters what she makes of all the national attention, she paused. "Everybody's been asking, 'How do you feel now that people are finally listening? Do you feel satisfied?'"
Then she was crying. "Every time I get a call from another mother whose child is sick," she managed, "it doesn’t feel like a victory."