Politics:
Things are grim in Whyalla and for the manufacturing industry in Australia.
IDEK, knee-jerk reaction to this is not being able to keep your faith/rampant homophobia apart from your profession disqualifies you from said profession but then I wouldn't want to receive treatment from a medical professional struggling with this anyway (but what if there are no other professionals available in your area?)
Medical exemptions, though, deserve to be considered in a category of their own. Doctors and therapists interact with people at their most vulnerable, and their training and expertise gives them incredible power over patients. The advice they provide—or refuse to provide—to an LGBT patient could influence the treatment that person seeks. It could make that person less likely to seek primary care or identify themselves as LGBT to other doctors, which can lead to the “failure to screen, diagnose, or treat important medical problems,” according to the American Medical Association. The medical community has a problem: What should hospitals, private practices, and medical associations do about doctors and therapists who say it’s against their beliefs to provide care to LGBT patients?
The Atlantic: When Doctors Refuse to Treat LGBT Patients, April 19, 2016
And in Armenia, the intersection of nationalism and homo- and transphobia.
The biggest climate news this year is that the global economy is growing while carbon emissions are staying flat.
On gun culture in the U.S.:
Most of the stories I read about gun rights focus on the problem of mass shootings, but there is a more complicated matrix in which anti-blackness, the dehumanization of women, the lack of childcare and mental health care and the ready availability of guns creates an ongoing national crisis. For too long our country has treated incidents like the Trayvon Martin shooting as separate from the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting as separate from the Gabrielle Giffords shooting as separate from the Wisconsin Sikh Temple Shooting, all of it separate from, say, any recent murder-suicide, in which a husband kills his wife and children before killing himself. But these are not separate. They are incidents in which someone’s bigotry or anger or despair or delusion is enlarged into a murderous force that could have been minimized and made non-fatal with gun control regulations. And what we see now is that some states have actually loosened gun control laws in the aftermath, calling these new laws protections for gun owners, and lawmakers who support gun control regularly receive death threats instead.
Longreads: Our Well-Regulated Militia, April 2016
Donald Trump considers Roy Cohn one of his mentors.
And there is a generational divide within black families when it comes to opinions on the Clinton administration's history of crime policies.
Pop Culture:
The history and implications of content moderation on social networking platforms:
The moderators of these platforms — perched uneasily at the intersection of corporate profits, social responsibility, and human rights — have a powerful impact on free speech, government dissent, the shaping of social norms, user safety, and the meaning of privacy. What flagged content should be removed? Who decides what stays and why? What constitutes newsworthiness? Threat? Harm? When should law enforcement be involved?
While public debates rage about government censorship and free speech on college campuses, customer content management constitutes the quiet transnational transfer of free-speech decisions to the private, corporately managed corners of the internet where people weigh competing values in hidden and proprietary ways. Moderation, explains Microsoft researcher Kate Crawford, is "a profoundly human decision-making process about what constitutes appropriate speech in the public domain."
The Verge: The Secret Rules of the Internet
About the death of Joanie Laurer:
It all ended in 2001 and she was released by WWE. Without the financial support and the marketing prowess of WWE behind her, Chyna lost much of her relevance. According to a video interview with Vice Sports, she was not allowed to use the name Chyna, nor anything related to that character, which was her entire career. WWE owned the character of Chyna the same way Marvel Comics owns Spider-Man, even if Spider-Man isn’t technically just a person in a latex outfit. From there, Chyna fell into substance abuse, appeared on reality shows clearly intoxicated, and ended up doing adult films for Vivid Entertainment.In a sense, Joanie Laurer lost the legal right to be herself. Of course, she wasn’t actually Chyna, but she worked around 350 days out of the year in that persona. Wrestlers are also encouraged not to break character in public. In her first Playboy appearance, she was billed as Chyna, not Joanie Laurer. Unlike an actor who appears in multiple films and TV shows, playing different characters, a successful wrestler plays the same character every single day for years. It’s as though your job was to be a mall Santa year-round, but you couldn’t take the costume off to get almond milk at the grocery store. Every thing that she had become, her entire identity, was taken from her in an instant.
The Guardian: Deaths such as Chyna's are worryingly common in the world of WWE, April 22, 2016
The fight for the future of NPR, podcasts and reaching younger audiences:
This distinction between “news” and podcast-style “storytelling” has emerged as a key fault line in the debate over NPR’s future. And while it is considered impolite to value one above the other, there’s a tendency among some podcast people to think of themselves as too ambitious and creative for the constraints of the four-minute radio news spot, and a tendency among some radio people to look askance at the pretentions of podcasters and their twee, personality-driven soundscapes.
An interview with scientist Gregory Pence about the depiction of human cloning in science fiction, the future of the technology and the accuracy of Orphan Black, which has just returned for a fourth season.
Better Call Saul had a very good season.
An extensive and very interesting interview with Nina Hoss about her work in Christian Petzold's Phoenix.
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