In 2006, in the second issue of the second year of this journal I wrote an essay, Homo Superior, and said, “What could be more natural than wanting a healthy beautiful baby? Has there ever been a time in history when parents, even in the midst of disasters and despair, did not wish to be delivered of a healthy child? And who wouldn’t want to have a son or daughter who was as smart as Einstein, as athletic as Michael Jordan, and as attractive as well, name the person whose looks you find most appealing? What could be more natural? But this deep-seated drive when linked to the onrushing train of genetic medicine is creating a trend that will shape—both literally and figuratively—the future of our species”.1
For most of our history as a species, we sapiens of the genus Homo have shared the planet with other hominid species. We know this because genetic science, by extracting DNA from ancient bone fragments, has transformed paleoarchaeology from speculation to certainty. This new research, which is amended and extended almost weekly, tells us we still retain, you retain, genes resulting from encounters Homo Sapiens had in Deep Time with Denisovans […]
What could be more natural than wanting a healthy beautiful baby? Has there ever been a time in history when parents, even in the midst of disasters and despair, did not wish to be delivered of a healthy child? And who wouldn’t want to have a son or daughter who was as smart as Einstein, as athletic as Michael Jordan, and as attractive as¦. well, name the person whose looks you find most appealing? What could be more natural? But this deep-seated drive when linked to the onrushing train of genetic medicine is creating a trend that will shape – both literally and figuratively – the future of our species. You haven’t heard of this? It is not surprising. The linkage and its implications have almost no place at the table of the public conversation. Here are just a few examples of what I mean: Quietly in a laboratory in Vancouver, Robert Holt, head of sequencing for the University of British Columbia’s Genome Science Centre, is working to create the first made to order life form -what is being called ‘synthetic life’- a microbe.1 Dr. Holt is part of a project […]
How do you feel about people all over the world seeing the United States, as a bully, a source of violence, and a spreader of hate? Frankly, it makes me quite angry that criminal Trump and the MAGAt world he has created has trashed our reputation throughout the world.
In its decades-long fight against terrorism, the United States regularly criticized countries such as Iran, Pakistan, and Saudi Arabia for exporting extremist ideologies and violence. Ironically, today the United States stands accused of doing the same. The spread of homegrown American conspiracy theories, beliefs in racial superiority, antigovernment extremism, and other manifestations of hate and intolerance has become such a problem that some of the United States’ closest allies—Australia, Canada, and the United Kingdom—have designated both American groups and citizens as foreign terrorists.
Although little reported by the U.S. press, the October 2022 killing of two people at a gay bar in Bratislava, Slovakia, by a man espousing racist and homophobic views is an example of the pernicious effects of this “made in America” ideology. In a now all-too-common pattern, the gunman posted a manifesto explaining his intent just before the attack. Written in English, the document displayed all the racist, anti-Semitic, and homophobic justifications that have become de rigueur for this type […]
Why are so many white people throughout the liberal democratic world moving to the illiberal Right? The conventional explanation is that they are being driven by fear of the ‘demographic shift’. That is, because of immigration, both legal and illegal, and differing fertility rates among the relevant groups, white people of specific ethnic and religious backgrounds will soon no longer make up the electoral majority in the regions they currently dominate. Losing their majority status, in turn, is understood as meaning that the days of white privilege and political dominance in liberal democratic societies are now numbered.
An alarming number of whites, however, are not prepared to allow a commitment to liberalism to stand in the way of resisting the threat that the demographic shift seems to pose to their self-interest. They are accordingly embracing nationalist, racist, homophobic, Islamophobic, anti-feminist and other anti-liberal attitudes, and the parties and politicians that express them, in an effort to retain their social, political, economic and cultural dominance.
This view of what is driving whites to the Right has lots of adherents. The demographic shift […]
Significance
Donald J. Trump’s history-making ascension from nonpolitician to president of the United States has been attributed to the antiestablishment, antielitist, and nativist populism of Trump voters, as well as to sexism, racism, homophobia, and xenophobia. Based on the findings of seven studies involving 2,007 people, men’s and women’s endorsement of hegemonic masculinity predicted support for Trump over and beyond the aforementioned factors, even when controlling for political party affiliation. Results highlight the importance of looking beyond social identity–based conceptualizations of masculinity to fully consider how men’s and women’s endorsement of cultural ideologies about masculinity legitimate patriarchal forms of dominance and reify gender-, race-, and class-based hierarchies.
Abstract
This work examined whether the endorsement of the culturally idealized form of masculinity—hegemonic masculinity (HM)—accounted for unique variance in men’s and women’s support for Donald Trump across seven studies (n = 2,007). Consistent with our theoretical backdrop, in the days (Studies 1 and 2) and months (Studies 3 through 6) following the 2016 American presidential election, women’s and men’s endorsement of HM predicted voting for and evaluations of Trump, […]
Remote Viewing the Year 2060
