The jobs picture has changed profoundly since the 1970s. This map shows how those changes played out across the country.
Source: Map: The Most Common* Job In Every State : Planet Money : NPR
This map is going to look very different in 20 years, and that may be a rough transition…
The American public and its political leadership will do anything for the military except take it seriously. The result is a chickenhawk nation in which careless spending and strategic folly combine to lure America into endless wars it can’t win.
A people untouched (or seemingly untouched) by war are far less likely to care about it,” Andrew Bacevich wrote in 2012. Bacevich himself fought in Vietnam; his son was killed in Iraq. “Persuaded that they have no skin in the game, they will permit the state to do whatever it wishes to do. to do.
Source: The Tragedy of the American Military – The Atlantic
I think this is a very important point, possibly the most important point in the article. Those men, women, and students who actively protested the Iraq and Afghanistan wars were largely those who cared a lot about the lives and wellbeing of those in *other* countries. Their numbers would surely have been much higher had the average American personally known someone who had a significant chance of becoming a combat casualty.
Rocket experiment captures glow attributed to renegade stars in intergalactic space.
Source: Half of stars lurk outside galaxies : Nature News & Comment
How would our philosophies today be different if our solar system were not part of a galaxy? If we developed in a cosmic void with as little hope of ever reaching another star as of swimming across the Pacific ocean?
The Patriot Act continues to wreak its havoc on civil liberties. Section 213 was included in the Patriot Act over the protests of privacy advocates and granted law enforcement the power to conduct a search while delaying notice to the suspect of the search. Known as a “sneak and peek” warrant, law enforcement was adamant Section 213 was needed to protect against terrorism. But the latest government report detailing the numbers of “sneak and peek” warrants reveals that out of a total of over 11,000 sneak and peek requests, only 51 were used for terrorism.
I think the most frightening thing is considering this information alongside the “targeted killing” drone assassination program permitted to target even American citizens for death, anywhere on Earth, at any time, for secret reasons that a person meets a secret definition of the enemy, based on secret evidence, in a secret process undertaken by unidentified officials. Oh sure, the first few targets were legitimate terrorism targets, but what about the next thousand?
Under the banner of free speech, companies like Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube have been host to rape videos and revenge porn—which makes female users feel anything but free.
All of this raised a series of troubling questions: Who’s proliferating this violent content? Who’s controlling its dissemination? Should someone be?
Jillian C. York, director for international freedom of expression at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, is one of many civil libertarians who believe Facebook and other social media platforms should not screen this, or any, content at all. “It of course must be noted that the company—like any company—is well within its rights to regulate speech as it sees fit,” she wrote in a May 2013 piece in Slate in response to growing activism. “The question is not can Facebook censor speech, but rather, should it?” She argues that censoring any content “sets a dangerous precedent for special interest groups looking to bring their pet issue to the attention of Facebook’s censors.”
When the problem involves half the world’s population, it’s difficult to classify it as a “pet issue.” What’s more, there are free speech issues on both sides of the regulated content equation. “We have the expressive interests of the harassers to threaten, to post photos, to spread defamation, rape threats, lies on the one hand,” explains Citron. “And on the other hand you have the free speech interests, among others, of the victims, who are silenced and are driven offline.”
Soraya, Bates, and Jaclyn Friedman, the executive director of Women, Action, and Media, a media justice advocacy group, joined forces and launched a social media campaign designed to attract advertisers’ attention. The ultimate goal was to press Facebook to recognize explicit violence against women as a violation of its own prohibitions against hate speech, graphic violence, and harassment.
As President Obama put it in mid-September, “It is on all of us to reject the quiet tolerance of sexual assault and to refuse to accept what’s unacceptable.”
Source: The Unsafety Net: How Social Media Turned Against Women – The Atlantic
I think the platform is an extremely important factor in the seriousness of communication because of its foundation for the context of that communication. Furthermore, specifically for the internet, there are jurisdictional issues which would have far ranging consequences if solved with only “violence against women” in mind. Many empowered western-culture women may reasonably wish to have threatening internet comments prosecuted the same way as if those comments had been physically snail-mailed to them, even if the sender/commenter is foreign from abroad. However, that opens the door to the question about prosecutions in the other direction, which I would find far more problematic.
This to me begs the question “What is good enough?”