Topics Covering Workplace Sexism, Automation, Genocide and Fashion

1) Workplace Sexism
"One plaintiff described an environment run like a 'sex-fueled, Playboy Mansion-like cult' under former Fox chairman Roger Ailes, who resigned in July amid accusations of sexual harassment and suggestions that he fostered an atmosphere where women were judged by looks and pliability and men weren't judged at all." "Women reported being groped and propositioned by male National Park Service employees on trips into the parks, and if they rejected the advances, they were subject to verbal abuse and other kinds of bullying." "This summer, a number of fire departments are coping with allegations that the few women in their ranks are routinely bullied and harassed." Other female firefighters across the country have reported that they've had their shampoo bottles filled with urine, semen put on their bunks and holes cut in their clothing." [1]

2) Automation Bomb
"The deeper problem facing America is how to provide meaningful work and good wages for the tens of millions of truck drivers, accountants, factory workers and office clerks whose jobs will disappear in coming years because of robots, driverless vehicles and 'machine learning' systems." "Currently, only 5 percent of occupations can be entirely automated, but 60 percent of occupations could soon see machines doing 30 percent or more of the work." "The 'automation bomb' could destroy 45 percent of the work activities currently performed in the United States." The White House Council of Economic Advisers says that the density of robots per 10,000 workers is actually higher in Japan and Germany than in the United States. [2]

David Ignatius warns that politicians "need to begin thinking boldly, now, about a world where driverless vehicles replace most truck drivers' jobs, and where factories are populated by robots, not human beings.

3) American Genocide
"In the words of the United Nations Genocide convention, acts quality as genocide if they are 'committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethical, racial or religious group.' It is intent, not motive, that matters in establishing the fact of genocide.' "

Benjamin Madley, the author of An American Genocide,  describes the massacre of California Indians as a 'killing machine' composed of U.S.soldiers, California militia and volunteers, slavers and mercenaries (so-called 'Indian hunters') in it for the money. The killings of Indians in California were sometimes a few at a time, sometimes massacres of 100 or more, continued year after year for roughly a quarter of a century. "For every American who died, 100 Indians perished." "Americans held Indians collectively responsible for any injury suffered by whites. And they were relentless." [3]

"Fighting Indians became a source of profit; men enlisted for the pay, and the government provided it." "Madley estimates that between 1846 and 1873, the number of California Indians -- already halved during the Spanish and Mexican periods --plunged by another 80 percent, reaching a nadir of about 30,000 people."

4) Dress Code
The Orthodox Jewish dress code conveys a notion of female-only 'modesty,' which, in turn,  brings about the acceptance of the female body as the site of sexuality. Therefore, the female body must be concealed as a danger and provocation to men. "We could learn something from France about our own First Amendment, which seems to be morphing from the separation of church and state into the  [making] of all sorts of religious bigotry and backwardness." "Even if you think Islamic garb -- or Orthodox wigs or fundamentalist-Mormon prairie dresses -- is a fashion prison, it doesn't follow that banning it is the path to liberation." "Why not trust Muslim women to figure all this out for themselves over time, as other immigrants from patriarchal cultures have done?" [4]

Footnotes
[1] Susanna Schrobsdorff, "A distressing summer of workplace sexism ...," Time, September 5, 2016.

[2] David Ignatius, "Superpower battlefield in new era,"  Albuquerque Journal, August 20, 2016.

[3] Richard White, "Rather a Hell Than a Home," The New Yorker, August 22, 2016.

[4] Katha Pollitt, "France's Cultural Panic," The New Yorker, August 22, 2016.