Dan Kennedy: I want to return one more time to NPR senior business editor Uri Berliner's long essay in The Free Press about what he regards as his employer's move to the fringe left. Mainly he seems to be worked up about diversity workshops and a change in NPR's audience from one that was more or less balanced ideologically to one that is overwhelmingly liberal and progressive -- which, as I wrote earlier this week, is more a consequence of the great national sorting-out than of anything NPR itself has done. But there were also three factual assertions he made. One is flat-out false; one is devoid of crucial context; and one is questionable.
Workers staged sit-in protests this week at the company's offices in Seattle, New York and Sunnyvale, California over Project Nimbus, a joint contract to provide the Israeli government and military with cloud and artificial intelligence services.
Conservative influencers were briefed about House Speaker Mike Johnson's latest election integrity bill well before it was publicly announced. read more
A former CIA officer explains how a vast, pro-Putin corruption network uncovered in Europe is a warning sign for the U.S. read more
Peter Wehner: Chris Sununu just showed how deep into the Republican Party the rot has gone. read more
"I cannot tell you that again because i never told it to you for a first time."
No, you didn't. I was actually thinking of Bellringer and an article he posted that made that claim. I just read an excellent article on the interconnected topic of rolling back both abortion rights and women's rights, emphasis mine:
It's not a coincidence that the early anti-abortion movement in the U.S. was one headed by men, in reaction to expanding rights, freedom, and power for women--just as it is not a coincidence that today's anti-abortion movement, formed in opposition to rapid gains in women's rights during the 1960s and '70s, has seen its most significant victory thanks to the most overtly misogynistic president in modern American history, a serial philanderer, a many-times-accused sexual harasser and assailant, a man recently found liable for sexual abuse.slate.com
The history of these laws tells us quite a bit about our present, especially what motivates the most aggressive abortion opponents. Attempts to criminalize abortion have always gone hand in hand with conservative and religious views on gender roles, with abortion bans functioning as blunt instruments that force women back into our God-given place as dutiful mothers and obedient wives. And it's equally impossible to separate out efforts to legalize abortion from broader moves toward gender equality, both in the liberalization of abortion laws--efforts led by feminists around the world--and in the feminist outcome of those liberalized laws. That would be: record progress for women and girls, from more egalitarian interpersonal relationships to greater financial power to skyrocketing educational and professional achievements to much longer and healthier lives for women and the children we bear.
Those in the anti-abortion movement are relying on the letter of the law from 150 years ago not simply because it's convenient. They're leaning on century-old laws because they want to make America a certain way again, and those century-old laws both sprang from and enabled a particular kind of society. Those laws existed only because women were legally, socially, and economically second-class citizens, their rights and liberties determined by white men who enjoyed exclusive control over every lever of political power. And those laws had the effect of maintaining that same complete male domination--that is, until generations of feminists dismantled them and put a great many cracks in the system that created them.
And this, still, is the fundamental divide. Should women's rights in America go back to what they were in 1873? Feminists have spent the past 150 years painstakingly chipping away at the laws that forced our subservience. But today's anti-abortion movement, and its representatives in the Republican Party, has a different answer, one it makes clear every time it argues that women's bodies should be regulated by laws that existed before any woman had a legal say in them.
Great. A compromised Bibi wants to be a hero to save his own political skin at home. The rest of the world be damned.