Helen H. Moore's Blog, page 933

Make guns as difficult to access as abortions: One Democratic lawmaker’s novel gun control proposal

Missouri State Representative Stacey Newman has just filed a creative proposal to tackle the issue of rampant gun violence and draw attention to draconian laws limiting the access to abortion in the state: Treat guns like abortions. As St. Louis Magazine notes, St. Louis and Kansas City each rank in the top 10 U.S. cities with the highest rates of gun violence, and the state has some of the most stringent anti-abortion laws in the country. And as last week's attack on a Planned Parenthood clinic in Colorado demonstrated, guns have prominently figured into America's long history of violence against abortion providers and seekers. “Since Missouri holds the rank as one of the strictest abortion regulation states in the country, it is logical we borrow similar restrictions to lower our horrific gun violence rates,” Newman said in a statement. The bill would require prospective gun buyers to jump through the same hurdlers anti-choice lawmakers in Missouri have forced women in the state seeking their constitutionally protected right to abortion to jump through. Gun buyers would be forced to travel at least 120 miles to locate a firearms dealer, which is the approximate distance that a woman must travel to get an abortion in Missouri. The bill would require that a gun buyer visit an emergency room at the nearest "urban hospital" on a weekend between 10 p.m. and 6 a.m. "when gun violence victims are present," mimicking a Missouri law requiring women to meet with a physician for counseling before abortions. Gun buyers would also be forced to undergo a 72-hour waiting period, similar to the timeout forced upon abortion seekers, before being able to purchase a firearm. Newman has attempted to draw attention to Missouri's burdensome abortion regulations in the past with a proposal to apply the same abortion restrictions to vasectomies and she is all but certain her bill will likely die in the Republican-led House. Still, Newman appears determined to make a statement. "Since restrictive policies regarding a constitutionally protected medical procedure are the GOP's legislative priority each year," she told ​St. Louis​ magazine, "it makes sense that their same restrictions apply to those who may commit gun violence. Our city mayors and law enforcement drastically need help in saving lives." [H/T: Elle] Missouri State Representative Stacey Newman has just filed a creative proposal to tackle the issue of rampant gun violence and draw attention to draconian laws limiting the access to abortion in the state: Treat guns like abortions. As St. Louis Magazine notes, St. Louis and Kansas City each rank in the top 10 U.S. cities with the highest rates of gun violence, and the state has some of the most stringent anti-abortion laws in the country. And as last week's attack on a Planned Parenthood clinic in Colorado demonstrated, guns have prominently figured into America's long history of violence against abortion providers and seekers. “Since Missouri holds the rank as one of the strictest abortion regulation states in the country, it is logical we borrow similar restrictions to lower our horrific gun violence rates,” Newman said in a statement. The bill would require prospective gun buyers to jump through the same hurdlers anti-choice lawmakers in Missouri have forced women in the state seeking their constitutionally protected right to abortion to jump through. Gun buyers would be forced to travel at least 120 miles to locate a firearms dealer, which is the approximate distance that a woman must travel to get an abortion in Missouri. The bill would require that a gun buyer visit an emergency room at the nearest "urban hospital" on a weekend between 10 p.m. and 6 a.m. "when gun violence victims are present," mimicking a Missouri law requiring women to meet with a physician for counseling before abortions. Gun buyers would also be forced to undergo a 72-hour waiting period, similar to the timeout forced upon abortion seekers, before being able to purchase a firearm. Newman has attempted to draw attention to Missouri's burdensome abortion regulations in the past with a proposal to apply the same abortion restrictions to vasectomies and she is all but certain her bill will likely die in the Republican-led House. Still, Newman appears determined to make a statement. "Since restrictive policies regarding a constitutionally protected medical procedure are the GOP's legislative priority each year," she told ​St. Louis​ magazine, "it makes sense that their same restrictions apply to those who may commit gun violence. Our city mayors and law enforcement drastically need help in saving lives." [H/T: Elle] Missouri State Representative Stacey Newman has just filed a creative proposal to tackle the issue of rampant gun violence and draw attention to draconian laws limiting the access to abortion in the state: Treat guns like abortions. As St. Louis Magazine notes, St. Louis and Kansas City each rank in the top 10 U.S. cities with the highest rates of gun violence, and the state has some of the most stringent anti-abortion laws in the country. And as last week's attack on a Planned Parenthood clinic in Colorado demonstrated, guns have prominently figured into America's long history of violence against abortion providers and seekers. “Since Missouri holds the rank as one of the strictest abortion regulation states in the country, it is logical we borrow similar restrictions to lower our horrific gun violence rates,” Newman said in a statement. The bill would require prospective gun buyers to jump through the same hurdlers anti-choice lawmakers in Missouri have forced women in the state seeking their constitutionally protected right to abortion to jump through. Gun buyers would be forced to travel at least 120 miles to locate a firearms dealer, which is the approximate distance that a woman must travel to get an abortion in Missouri. The bill would require that a gun buyer visit an emergency room at the nearest "urban hospital" on a weekend between 10 p.m. and 6 a.m. "when gun violence victims are present," mimicking a Missouri law requiring women to meet with a physician for counseling before abortions. Gun buyers would also be forced to undergo a 72-hour waiting period, similar to the timeout forced upon abortion seekers, before being able to purchase a firearm. Newman has attempted to draw attention to Missouri's burdensome abortion regulations in the past with a proposal to apply the same abortion restrictions to vasectomies and she is all but certain her bill will likely die in the Republican-led House. Still, Newman appears determined to make a statement. "Since restrictive policies regarding a constitutionally protected medical procedure are the GOP's legislative priority each year," she told ​St. Louis​ magazine, "it makes sense that their same restrictions apply to those who may commit gun violence. Our city mayors and law enforcement drastically need help in saving lives." [H/T: Elle]

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6 essential Scott Weiland songs that you should relisten to right now

CNN & MSNBC have apparently lost their souls: Cable news vultures descend on home of San Bernardino suspects

Did that really just happen? Did a horde of cameras and TV journalists just barrel into the home of the suspects in the San Bernardino shooting case, go through their things live on air, show pictures of innocent people and barrel out again? Yep. Cable news found yet another innovative way to completely repel much of its viewing public. The insanity started because the person who owns the home formerly occupied by suspects Syeed Farook and Tashfeen Malik apparently told journalists that they were free to look around. Someone used a crowbar to pry open the door, and the fun began. Reporters from CNN, MSNBC and CBS all took viewers on a tour of the home. The FBI told reporters that the news crews were not entering an active crime scene—something network spokespeople were quick to emphasize. Whatever the case, it made for deeply unsettling viewing. Law enforcement analysts on CNN pronounced themselves shocked at what they were seeing. While none of the networks draped themselves in glory, MSNBC was undoubtedly the worst offender. As reporter Kerry Sanders rifled through pictures of children, a queasy-sounding Andrea Mitchell told him to "not show the child." Sanders, apparently overcome with eagerness, didn't get the hint. He went on to show the Social Security card and ID of Farook's mother—who is both alive and has not been implicated in any crime at all. No doubt she will thank Sanders and MSNBC for exposing her so directly to the current climate of fear, violence and Islamophobia. https://twitter.com/redsteeze/status/... Perhaps even more distressing was the way in which the suspects' religion was handled. Reporters held up Qurans, Arabic books and prayer beads as though they were sinister and strange objects—not basic building blocks of any faith. The news that the suspects may have been influenced in some way by ISIS makes it legitimate to explore religion's role in their actions, but there is a difference between trying to get to the bottom of their motivation and in casting a belief in Islam itself as a sign of wrongdoing. CNN and MSNBC, unwittingly or not, are bolstering the forces that wish to brand all Muslims as worthy of suspicion merely by the fact of their existence.

You might forgive some of this if viewers actually learned anything relevant from these dime-store Poirots. But the reporters all indulged in the flashy but ultimately totally informationless free-association journalism so typical of live cable news. Holding up pictures of children you know nothing about isn't just gross—it's pointless.

It does not take any sort of expertise in journalism ethics to know that you shouldn't randomly rifle through people's things and speculate wildly about what you find on live national television. It takes a modicum of common sense—and, possibly, some shame. Breaking news, unfortunately, often leads to the total abandonment of those things. And in an age where news outlets are either struggling to cope with the free-for-all information ecology wrought by social media, or are trying to harness it to maintain their own relevance, there is an even greater incentive to both literally and figuratively bust down more doors. It was as though CNN and MSNBC were succumbing to the freedoms granted to Periscope-wielding amateurs. It won't be the last time that happens. Many people may have felt extremely unnerved by what they saw the media doing in the Farook residence. It's probably a feeling they should get used to.

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Liberals are not soft on, sympathetic towards, or defensive about Islamic terrorism

The FBI has announced that it's investigating the San Bernardino shooting as a terrorist incident. Newly uncovered evidence suggests that Syed Rizwan Farook and Tashfeen Malik had a religious terrorism motive behind their massacre at Farook's own holiday office party at the Inland Regional Center on Wednesday. While witnesses say Farook left the party, possibly in a tiff, and returned with his wife to shoot the place up, killing 14 and injuring 21, it's also impossible to argue this was solely an impulsive act of rage (as most mass shootings still are). They returned with a massive arsenal and were found to have been building pipe bombs at their home, all suggesting something more than a desire to be featured on the show "Doomsday Preppers." Now the evidence suggests that Farook was quietly getting radicalized, again pointing to religious terrorism, perhaps with a dollop of workplace resentment, as the motive. If so, that means that this country experienced what appears to be two religiously motivated terrorist  attacks in the span of a week: The San Bernardino shooting and the Colorado Springs shooting at Planned Parenthood. But in a demonstration of how bizarre modern American politics really are, these two nearly identical shootings somehow are seen as entirely different in the context of partisan politics. To wit, conservatives are extremely defensive about the Planned Parenthood shooting, but clearly see it as a political "win" if the San Bernardino shooting was rooted in Islamic terrorism. Even more bizarrely, there's a sense, particularly in right wing circles, that the opposite is true for liberals: That we somehow have reason to be on the defense if this shooting, as it looks like it will be, is an act of Islamic terrorism. Right now, most conservative pundits and politicians are avoiding openly linking liberalism with the religious ideology that may have motivated the San Bernardino shooting, likely because it's still a bit too raw and mostly because there's not enough information yet to be certain about the shooters' motives. (The one exception is the dog-piling of the Council On American-Islamic Relations, an anti-racism organization, who many conservatives shamelessly characterized as pro-terrorism.) But a quick perusal of social media shows that the base is already going there, blindly assuming that your average liberal American somehow has a deep love of the radically fundamentalist version of Islam that inspires and fuels this kind of terrorism. It really is only a matter of time before the pundits and politicians start to pander to that.  In fact, Chris Christie has already stuck a toe in, claiming that Obama's response to the attacks was to "wring his hands." The implication is that Obama is somehow defensive about Islamic terrorism in the same way that conservatives are defensive about Christian terrorism. We've been down this road before. After the Paris attacks, accusing liberals of somehow being protective of or defensive of the teachings of ISIS became a popular talking point on the right. Republicans harped endlessly on the Democratic candidates for avoiding the inexact and needlessly provocative term "radical Islam." It's part point-scoring, and part projection. After all, conservative Christians continue to blindly endorse radical rhetoric and beliefs that lead to Christian terrorism of the sort that we saw at Planned Parenthood, so they assume that the "other" side has a similar problem, just with Islam instead of Christianity. Sadly, it's not just conservatives who make this asinine assumption, either — there's a certain arrogant, pseudo-liberal type of atheist who also seems to think that liberals are somehow more sympathetic to or protective of Islamic terrorism than Christian terrorism. After the Paris attacks, Bill Maher, while grasping that it's probably unwise to bomb blindly, still sneered, "It was probably not the Amish," as if liberals were suggesting otherwise. Sam Harris went even farther, echoing Ted Cruz's rhetoric about how Christian terrorism isn't even really a thing, and assuming that the only reason liberals support the Syrian refugees is that we're blind to the threat of Islamic terrorism. This has gone on long enough. It's time to say it straight: Just because conservatives believe there's some kind of global battle between Christianity and Islam doesn't mean that liberals have to agree, much less that they take the "Islam" side of that equation. On the contrary, most liberals see fundamentalist Christianity and fundamentalist Islam as categorically the same and categorically illiberal in their shared opposition to feminism and modernity. This goes double when it comes to the fringe actors in either faith who become radicalized and turn to violence to impose their theocratic views on the unwilling. Liberals understand that there are theological and political differences between the different kinds of radical fundamentalism that lead to terrorism, but we are keenly aware that people who pick up a gun in the name of God have more in common with each other than they do with the rest of us. What liberals object to is the conservative tendency to erase all distinctions between the relatively few Muslims around the world who have violent views and the majority of Muslims who, whether they are conservative or not, do not agree with ISIS or Al Qaeda's distortion of Islam. Imagine how Christians would feel if liberals blamed Christianity, categorically, for the attack on Planned Parenthood. They would be angry and they would have a right to be. After all, a lot of Christians are liberal and believe abortion is a perfectly acceptable choice. And many others may disapprove of abortion, but they think it should be legal and they generally support Planned Parenthood's overall reproductive health care mission. There are even some Christians who are anti-choice but disapprove of the heated rhetoric that fueled this attack. Just as it's important to maintain these distinctions when talking about Christianity, it's equally important to keep these distinctions in mind when talking about Islam. There's nothing in that logic that suggests that liberals have some secret googly-eyes for demagoguing radical Muslim fundamentalists, anymore than we love Pat Robertson. On the contrary, we tend to see them as basically the same kind of misogynist, homophobic authoritarians who hide behind God to get their way. To suggest otherwise is not just dishonest, but irresponsible, since it can hinder the very diplomatic efforts we need to keep people alive.

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Excavating horror, live on TV: Reporters swarm San Bernardino killers’ apartment and dig through their stuff

Earlier today something like two dozen national reporters with camera crews broadcast live from inside the apartment of Syed Rizwan Farook and Tashfeen Malik, the married couple that killed 14 people dead at a holiday party on Wednesday. The apartment was still full of the couple’s belongings—baby clothes, books, photographs, and toys. The CNN reporter inside the apartment told Anderson Cooper that reporters had been let in by the landlord, who opened up a barricade over the door erected by the police using a drill and crowbar. The MSNBC reporter, who started broadcasting first, picked up a driver’s license with a full name and address on the bed and showed it to the camera. Shortly before he found the driver’s license, he was in the bathroom, going through a stack of baby pictures. He becomes briefly overwhelmed as Andrea Mitchell asks him questions. For a moment, it seems clear to him, the magnitude of what he is doing. It is presently unclear whether or not the FBI had finished with the scene before the landlord let reporters in. All circumstantial evidence suggests it was still active, however. Harry Houck, the CNN analyst brought in to comment, was aghast at the proceedings. He said he was shaking—had “chills down my spine.” Houck observed that the lack of fingerprint dust and the stacks of unseized documents suggested this was “clearly” still a crime scene. As he spoke, the camera in the apartment panned down to show a reporter sitting on the floor of a closet, meticulously going through a box of documents. Social media backlash was swift, too. If there is just one takeaway from the San Bernardino shooting this week, it is the American media has lost it. The camera crews are desperate for material and willing to do nearly anything to get it; this extrajudicial apartment spree sounds like one of William Randolph Hearst’s schemes from the heyday of yellow journalism. [In fact, it is very similar. “The Murder Of The Century,” by Paul Collins, relates how Hearst rented out the apartment of a suspected murderer from a delighted landlord before the police could declare it a crime scene, giving his paper the exclusive. To further stick it to his rivals at Joseph Pulitzer’s paper, they cut the phone lines to every payphone on the block.] MSNBC, CNN, and others seem fueled by the same desperation for information, at any cost—even if, in this case, it constitutes a major invasion of privacy, tramples on a crime scene, and makes a whole apartment full of evidence potentially inadmissible. This case comes at the epicenter of several different American horrors: Islamic terrorism, the legality of semiautomatic assault rifles, the rise in mass shootings, the inaccuracy and speculation that dovetails with an ongoing investigation, our already beleaguered social services for the developmentally disabled, and the fact that this young couple left a six-month-old baby girl at home to go commit mass murder. Especially for the media—or for anyone who would push back against the notion that Islam is not a religion of hatred, as so many of our commentators seem to think—this is a narrative that is elusive in how inexplicably awful it is. We clearly don’t have the apparatus to discuss it. The unfiltered media stream on Wednesday showed an inability to come to consensus on mere terms: “terrorism,” “gun control,” “active shooter.” The articulation of these arguments isn’t about policy; it’s about choosing a side. Conservatives say things this way, and liberals say things that way, and the media has no choice but to dog-whistle both while reporting the news. All, that’s left, in some sense, is excavating horror. If I were a reporter outside that apartment, I know that I would have absolutely gone inside, once the landlord opened the door. Because this murder doesn’t make sense, and the way we talk about it doesn’t make sense, but if I could get closer to it, maybe I’d begin to understand a little more why everything feels to have gone so wrong.

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“Our tuition dollars fund racism and injustice”: California students protest university labor outsourcing

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“Your Coldplay jokes are almost as bad as Coldplay”: Super Bowl 50’s halftime headliners prompt halfhearted yawns

When it's announced that Coldplay is headlining the Super Bowl 50 halftime show, there are two acceptable courses of action: 1) Snowshoe to a remote cabin, play "Parachutes" on repeat, and spend a Norwegian winter line-editing your manifesto. 2) Hurry to Twitter to be among the first to tweet an "extra-long pee break" joke. (If you're reading this, it's too late.) https://twitter.com/hinojosa_david/st... I rushed into what I thought would be a burning building and found an over-microwaved bag of popcorn; Twitter's response was far less apocalyptic than I'd expected. Most reactions were truer than they were funny: https://twitter.com/oZzYbAbY18/status... https://twitter.com/daniecal/status/6... https://twitter.com/thecultureofme/st... There were some clear winners: https://twitter.com/lfitzmaurice/stat... https://twitter.com/AlmostStephen/sta... But, overall, morale and enthusiasm was way down: https://twitter.com/cpayneonaplane/st... https://twitter.com/Olivianuzzi/statu... https://twitter.com/danozzi/status/67... Barring any much-needed guest appearances, gone are the days of nip-slips and Left Sharks. This year's halftime show will be just one more thing to endure besides McConaughey's six-minute Lincoln ads.

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Photoshopping bruises onto Kim Kardashian’s face isn’t going to stop domestic violence

Can a Photoshopped picture of a battered Kim Kardashian help stop domestic violence? Artist Alexsandro Palombo thinks so. To raise awareness for the International Day for the Elimination of Violence Against Women, Palombo posted photos to his Facebook that depicted female celebrities including Kardashian, Gwyneth Paltrow, Angelina Jolie, Miley Cyrus, and Madonna as abuse victims. Their faces appear bloodied and beaten—with blackened eyes and swollen jaws. Although Palombo initially released the pictures on November 23, they’re gone viral in the past week—catching the eye of Kim Kardashian’s legal team, who has promised to take action. A spokesperson for the artist responded in a statement to U.K.’s the Independent: “Palombo's new series is not a campaign, not an advertisement, not for sale, it's the artist point of view of a social issue, his contribution to break the silence.” While speaking up about domestic violence is important, how we do so matters. The biggest problem with Alexsandro Palombo’s activism is that it sensationalizes an issue that should speak for itself. The reality of domestic violence in America—as well as across the world—is so graphic and disturbing that we shouldn’t need a doctored image of Kim Kardashian being beaten up to elicit our outrage. Studies from the Centers for Disease Control show that 1 in 3 women will be the victim of intimate partner abuse in their lifetime—and it’s their stories that we should be talking about. If violence against women is a global epidemic, too often it’s a silent one. In the United States, one woman is killed by her partner every single week, and as Amanda Marcotte points out, “men kill women in the U.S. so often that it’s usually not even newsworthy.” When U.S. troops were being killed in Afghanistan and Iraq, it was a national crisis—and a sign it was time to bring them home. However, between the years of 2001 and 2012, nearly twice as many women were beaten and killed by their partners than the number of soldiers lost in the Middle East. Women bear the brunt of violence in America, but they continue to be made its invisible victims. While stories about mass shootings make headlines nearly every day, we rarely focus on the fact that most of these fatal incidents take place in the victims’ homes—such deadly killings are largely the murder of women and children. Take these numbers from a must-read 2015 survey from the Huffington Post: “In 57 percent of mass shootings, the shooter targeted either a family member or an intimate partner. … 64 percent of mass shooting victims were women and children.” As Vice President Joe Biden has argued, the numbers of women who are killed in mass shootings or targeted for abuse by their partners isn’t just a problem for America’s criminal justice system. It’s also one of the great public health crises of our time. “According to the CDC and other research, the chronic stress from domestic violence is toxic to the body,” Biden said. “It's associated with long-term health problems like asthma, diabetes, anxiety, depression, alcohol and drug abuse.” In addition, physical and sexual trauma has also been linked to long-term brain damage. While the lifelong effects of physical violence are shocking, what’s most horrifying is our continued cultural complacency around domestic violence. In a critical thought experiment, Medium’s Charlie Pickering asks us to imagine that it were energy drinks or shark attacks harming or killing women at these rates. “Imagine the level of public outcry, media hysterics and political action it would elicit,” he instructs us. But we don’t do that. Instead, we talk about what the victim could have done to prevent her abuse. After photos of showing pop singer Rihanna beaten by her then-boyfriend Chris Brown went viral in 2009, MTV received a surprising amount of feedback alleging that it must have been her fault. “I don’t think Chris would just a hit a girl like that,” one commenter wrote. “She had to do something or say something out the way for him to really hurt her.” Another repeated a common justification in the wake of the assault: “If what I hear is correct and Rihanna gave Chris an STD, then she needed it.” A poll from the Boston Examiner showed that 50 percent of teens agreed with these statements. A piece published in the Los Angeles Times back in 2009 shows that it wasn’t just Internet trolls shaming her but industry insiders—who branded her “irresponsible” and argued that it would taint her “good girl” image. As disgusting as that is, it proved accurate: She was quickly labeled a “bad role model” for young women—first for being friends with her abuser and then for going back to him. These judgments ignore the reality of domestic violence—on average, a victim will attempt to leave their abuser seven times before it sticks—but they are all too common. The stigma against coming out and speaking up forces many women to remain silent, but that doesn’t mean we should be. If an estimated 4.7 million women face abuse from their partners each year, these women are our friends, our neighbors, our coworkers, and our relatives—whose pain isn’t a hypothetical photo posted to Facebook. These survivors need our support and our advocacy. They deserve a culture that not only encourages them to seek whatever help they can but one that fights for them—by reminding us that their lived experiences matter. No one deserves to be abused by their partner. They also don’t deserve a culture that would rather pretend it never happened.Can a Photoshopped picture of a battered Kim Kardashian help stop domestic violence? Artist Alexsandro Palombo thinks so. To raise awareness for the International Day for the Elimination of Violence Against Women, Palombo posted photos to his Facebook that depicted female celebrities including Kardashian, Gwyneth Paltrow, Angelina Jolie, Miley Cyrus, and Madonna as abuse victims. Their faces appear bloodied and beaten—with blackened eyes and swollen jaws. Although Palombo initially released the pictures on November 23, they’re gone viral in the past week—catching the eye of Kim Kardashian’s legal team, who has promised to take action. A spokesperson for the artist responded in a statement to U.K.’s the Independent: “Palombo's new series is not a campaign, not an advertisement, not for sale, it's the artist point of view of a social issue, his contribution to break the silence.” While speaking up about domestic violence is important, how we do so matters. The biggest problem with Alexsandro Palombo’s activism is that it sensationalizes an issue that should speak for itself. The reality of domestic violence in America—as well as across the world—is so graphic and disturbing that we shouldn’t need a doctored image of Kim Kardashian being beaten up to elicit our outrage. Studies from the Centers for Disease Control show that 1 in 3 women will be the victim of intimate partner abuse in their lifetime—and it’s their stories that we should be talking about. If violence against women is a global epidemic, too often it’s a silent one. In the United States, one woman is killed by her partner every single week, and as Amanda Marcotte points out, “men kill women in the U.S. so often that it’s usually not even newsworthy.” When U.S. troops were being killed in Afghanistan and Iraq, it was a national crisis—and a sign it was time to bring them home. However, between the years of 2001 and 2012, nearly twice as many women were beaten and killed by their partners than the number of soldiers lost in the Middle East. Women bear the brunt of violence in America, but they continue to be made its invisible victims. While stories about mass shootings make headlines nearly every day, we rarely focus on the fact that most of these fatal incidents take place in the victims’ homes—such deadly killings are largely the murder of women and children. Take these numbers from a must-read 2015 survey from the Huffington Post: “In 57 percent of mass shootings, the shooter targeted either a family member or an intimate partner. … 64 percent of mass shooting victims were women and children.” As Vice President Joe Biden has argued, the numbers of women who are killed in mass shootings or targeted for abuse by their partners isn’t just a problem for America’s criminal justice system. It’s also one of the great public health crises of our time. “According to the CDC and other research, the chronic stress from domestic violence is toxic to the body,” Biden said. “It's associated with long-term health problems like asthma, diabetes, anxiety, depression, alcohol and drug abuse.” In addition, physical and sexual trauma has also been linked to long-term brain damage. While the lifelong effects of physical violence are shocking, what’s most horrifying is our continued cultural complacency around domestic violence. In a critical thought experiment, Medium’s Charlie Pickering asks us to imagine that it were energy drinks or shark attacks harming or killing women at these rates. “Imagine the level of public outcry, media hysterics and political action it would elicit,” he instructs us. But we don’t do that. Instead, we talk about what the victim could have done to prevent her abuse. After photos of showing pop singer Rihanna beaten by her then-boyfriend Chris Brown went viral in 2009, MTV received a surprising amount of feedback alleging that it must have been her fault. “I don’t think Chris would just a hit a girl like that,” one commenter wrote. “She had to do something or say something out the way for him to really hurt her.” Another repeated a common justification in the wake of the assault: “If what I hear is correct and Rihanna gave Chris an STD, then she needed it.” A poll from the Boston Examiner showed that 50 percent of teens agreed with these statements. A piece published in the Los Angeles Times back in 2009 shows that it wasn’t just Internet trolls shaming her but industry insiders—who branded her “irresponsible” and argued that it would taint her “good girl” image. As disgusting as that is, it proved accurate: She was quickly labeled a “bad role model” for young women—first for being friends with her abuser and then for going back to him. These judgments ignore the reality of domestic violence—on average, a victim will attempt to leave their abuser seven times before it sticks—but they are all too common. The stigma against coming out and speaking up forces many women to remain silent, but that doesn’t mean we should be. If an estimated 4.7 million women face abuse from their partners each year, these women are our friends, our neighbors, our coworkers, and our relatives—whose pain isn’t a hypothetical photo posted to Facebook. These survivors need our support and our advocacy. They deserve a culture that not only encourages them to seek whatever help they can but one that fights for them—by reminding us that their lived experiences matter. No one deserves to be abused by their partner. They also don’t deserve a culture that would rather pretend it never happened.

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Donald Trump & Alex Jones: A match made in wing-nut hell

If one thing is clear from the first several months of the GOP primary, it's that Donald Trump can do just about anything and not take a hit in the polls. But he tested the limits of that rule on Wednesday when he appeared on conspiracy theorist Alex Jones' radio show. For those of you just joining us, Alex Jones' InfoWars universe is ground zero for every loony conspiracy in circulation these days -- from chemtrails and gay juice boxes to this past summer's thoroughly ludicrous Jade Helm 15 uproar. And that's before we mention the lizard people. More politically toxic than any of those fringe beliefs, however, is his insistence that the Boston bombing was a false-flag operation and the Sandy Hook massacre never happened at all. Throughout the interview, Jones could barely contain his enthusiasm for Trump. But considering his resume, it's not quite clear why Trump would ever want such an endorsement. Yet there he was -- perhaps because , when push comes to shove, he himself is nothing more than a wealthier and more popular version of Alex Jones. They're both sideshow barkers, suckering gullible people into accepting make-believe stories. Trump, for his part, is never shy about dealing in wacky conspiracy theories, going so far as to dispatch investigators to Hawaii back in 2011 in order to discover whether President Obama was really born there. Trump has also been standing by his debunked claim that literally thousands of Muslim-Americans in New Jersey were celebrating the 9/11 attacks, a theory Trump hastened to defend at the outset of his appearance with Alex Jones, even though it's been thoroughly debunked by both independent fact-checkers and law enforcement in New Jersey. During the segment, Jones said Trump's false claims about 9/11 celebrations have been "vindicated." The Donald also repeated his idea that mosques and Muslim-Americans need to be surveilled, and Jones that radical Islam and the influx of Syrian refugees is the biggest issue facing the United States today. In fact, Jones went so far as to praise Trump for being a "modern day George Washington." (That thumping sound you hear outside your window is George Washington spinning in his grave.) It's worth noting here that Jones doesn't even believe the 9/11 attacks were perpetrated by terrorists. For 14 years now, Jones has been telling his listeners that the towers were brought down by the government in a stupendous false-flag operation designed as a pretext for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. None of this is at all surprising. This is where the modern Republican Party has been headed for some time now -- slowly converging with far-right conspiracy theorists, as well as nullificationists and right-wing extremists, to create a party which Barry Goldwater or Ronald Reagan would hardly recognize. Trump represents the first serious presidential contender to wrap his puffy arms around Jones and his hypertensive gaggle of weirdos. It represents a massive shift in the GOP toward the paranoid fringe and away from the mainstream. While there's always been a libertarian strain inside the GOP, featuring a basic distrust of government, Trump has blown right on by the libertarian right and gone further, embracing the fringiest of the fringe. At one point, Trump assured Jones,

"You’ll be very, very impressed, I hope, and I think we’ll be speaking a lot, but you’ll be looking at me in a year, or two years—give me a little bit of time to run things—but a year into office, you’ll be saying, ‘Wow, I remember that interview, he said he was gonna do it, and he did a great job.’"

Any actions that will impress Alex Jones will be, in a word, crazy, and whether you're a Republican, Democrat or independent, Trump's association with this known flimflam artist should, again, in a sane world, disqualify him from ever getting within 100 miles of the Oval Office. If one thing is clear from the first several months of the GOP primary, it's that Donald Trump can do just about anything and not take a hit in the polls. But he tested the limits of that rule on Wednesday when he appeared on conspiracy theorist Alex Jones' radio show. For those of you just joining us, Alex Jones' InfoWars universe is ground zero for every loony conspiracy in circulation these days -- from chemtrails and gay juice boxes to this past summer's thoroughly ludicrous Jade Helm 15 uproar. And that's before we mention the lizard people. More politically toxic than any of those fringe beliefs, however, is his insistence that the Boston bombing was a false-flag operation and the Sandy Hook massacre never happened at all. Throughout the interview, Jones could barely contain his enthusiasm for Trump. But considering his resume, it's not quite clear why Trump would ever want such an endorsement. Yet there he was -- perhaps because , when push comes to shove, he himself is nothing more than a wealthier and more popular version of Alex Jones. They're both sideshow barkers, suckering gullible people into accepting make-believe stories. Trump, for his part, is never shy about dealing in wacky conspiracy theories, going so far as to dispatch investigators to Hawaii back in 2011 in order to discover whether President Obama was really born there. Trump has also been standing by his debunked claim that literally thousands of Muslim-Americans in New Jersey were celebrating the 9/11 attacks, a theory Trump hastened to defend at the outset of his appearance with Alex Jones, even though it's been thoroughly debunked by both independent fact-checkers and law enforcement in New Jersey. During the segment, Jones said Trump's false claims about 9/11 celebrations have been "vindicated." The Donald also repeated his idea that mosques and Muslim-Americans need to be surveilled, and Jones that radical Islam and the influx of Syrian refugees is the biggest issue facing the United States today. In fact, Jones went so far as to praise Trump for being a "modern day George Washington." (That thumping sound you hear outside your window is George Washington spinning in his grave.) It's worth noting here that Jones doesn't even believe the 9/11 attacks were perpetrated by terrorists. For 14 years now, Jones has been telling his listeners that the towers were brought down by the government in a stupendous false-flag operation designed as a pretext for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. None of this is at all surprising. This is where the modern Republican Party has been headed for some time now -- slowly converging with far-right conspiracy theorists, as well as nullificationists and right-wing extremists, to create a party which Barry Goldwater or Ronald Reagan would hardly recognize. Trump represents the first serious presidential contender to wrap his puffy arms around Jones and his hypertensive gaggle of weirdos. It represents a massive shift in the GOP toward the paranoid fringe and away from the mainstream. While there's always been a libertarian strain inside the GOP, featuring a basic distrust of government, Trump has blown right on by the libertarian right and gone further, embracing the fringiest of the fringe. At one point, Trump assured Jones,

"You’ll be very, very impressed, I hope, and I think we’ll be speaking a lot, but you’ll be looking at me in a year, or two years—give me a little bit of time to run things—but a year into office, you’ll be saying, ‘Wow, I remember that interview, he said he was gonna do it, and he did a great job.’"

Any actions that will impress Alex Jones will be, in a word, crazy, and whether you're a Republican, Democrat or independent, Trump's association with this known flimflam artist should, again, in a sane world, disqualify him from ever getting within 100 miles of the Oval Office.

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