Sábado, 3 de diciembre de 2022

EspañaSocial

De la afirmación “el sexo importa” no se deriva que haya dos tipos de cuerpos, ni mucho menos dos formas de pensar o de comportarse. No significa tampoco que el sexo sea o deba ser un destino que condiciona lo que podemos o no ser. Esta idea del determinismo biológico refleja una visión tradicional muy arraigada, pero no es, en absoluto, una conclusión que se derive de la premisa.

Afirmar que el sexo importa significa sencillamente reconocer que hay un aspecto de la realidad material de los seres humanos que tiene que ver con los dos roles reproductivos (producir gametos grandes o pequeños), y con las consecuencias anatómicas y fisiológicas que se derivan de estas funciones.…  Seguir leyendo »

En el espejo del cine

EspañaCultura y Ciencia

Nos hacían una promesa tramposa y nosotros sabíamos cuál era la trampa y aun así éramos incapaces de no caer en ella. Decían: “Esta noche vamos al cine…”, aunque era ya tarde, y añadían, con esa pequeña crueldad que tienen a veces las bromas que los adultos hacen a los niños: “… al cine de las sábanas blancas”. Era desde luego a la cama aburrida y fría a donde nos mandaban, pero en el enunciado de nuestro desengaño había una cierta verdad. Al fin y al cabo, la pantalla de cine era una sábana blanca sobre la que se proyectaban mágicamente las imágenes, y el cine mismo tenía algo del refugio íntimo de un dormitorio, porque las películas se hacían visibles en la oscuridad, igual que los sueños.…  Seguir leyendo »

Fotograma de 'Mundo Extraño'. DISNEY

ReflexionesPensamiento, Cultura y Ciencia,

La apuesta de Disney para esta Navidad, Mundo extraño, no es una buena película. Es uno de esos productos destinados al entretenimiento que no sabe lo que quiere contar pero tiene muy claro de qué tiene que hablar. El mecanismo es sencillo: se seleccionan ingredientes narrativos de actualidad, se agitan, se adornan con una excelente animación y se sirven con una guinda de modernidad políticamente correcta. En esta ocasión los temas a tratar son: la paternidad, la masculinidad tóxica, la crisis climática, el futuro de la humanidad y como guinda, un niño gay. El problema es que cuando una historia no sabe adónde va, corre el riesgo no solo de aburrir, sino también de derrapar.…  Seguir leyendo »

Violación real y cultura de la violación

EspañaJusticia

Parece lógico pensar que reducir las penas a los violadores promueve las violaciones. Como alguien podría no estar de acuerdo, lo plantearemos en términos irrefutables: sumados todos los períodos de tiempo que iban a ser de cárcel y ahora son de libertad, y alcanzada una cantidad significativa de beneficiados, las violaciones aumentarán en la misma tasa en que la estadística sitúa la reincidencia para este tipo de delitos.

Existen posturas contrarias a las penas de privación de libertad: «Hay que vaciar las cárceles», postulaba Manuela Carmena cuando era jueza de vigilancia penitenciaria. Los que así piensan nunca reconocerán que promueven la delincuencia; sin embargo, en la idea que se han formado sobre los delitos y las penas, que puede llegar a ser una auténtica teoría, y seguramente en Carmena lo es, el riesgo del aumento de la criminalidad ha sido sometido a un juego de equilibrios con otras consideraciones y valores, y se ha acabado dando por bueno no ya el riesgo sino la certeza de que se cometerán más delitos.…  Seguir leyendo »

ReflexionesPensamiento, Cultura y Ciencia

Médicos, físicos y filósofos griegos, romanos, árabes, hindúes y judíos a lo largo de siglos, hasta la llegada de la medicina moderna, creían en una teoría acerca del cuerpo humano conocida como 'la teoría de los cuatro humores'. Se considera que arranca con Hipócrates en el siglo IV antes de Cristo, y se desarrolla ampliamente después con Galeno (130-201) llegando con plena vigencia hasta el siglo XVII. Expresa la idea de que el cuerpo humano se compone de cuatro sustancias básicas, conocidas como humores -refiriéndose a líquidos-, que deben mantener un buen equilibrio para evitar todo tipo de enfermedades tanto del cuerpo como del espíritu.…  Seguir leyendo »

President Biden and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. (Khaled Elfiqi and Sergey Dolzhenko/EPA-EFE/Shutterstock)

Europa, , ,

The Biden administration would like to make one thing clear: It won’t throw Ukraine under the bus. If President Volodymyr Zelensky doesn’t want to pursue a peace deal that could leave Russia with some Ukrainian territory, America won’t use its leverage as Ukraine’s main arms supplier to push him into negotiations.

“The United States is not pressuring Ukraine”, said national security adviser Jake Sullivan in early November, the day after NBC reported that he had broached the subject of negotiations with Zelensky. President Biden said, that same week, “We’re not going to tell them what they have to do”. And a week later, national security spokesman John Kirby asserted that “nobody from the United States is pushing or prodding or nudging [Zelensky] to the table”.…  Seguir leyendo »

Protesters in Beijing hold up white pieces of paper during a demonstration against China's zero-Covid measures on November 27. Kevin Frayer/Getty Images

MundoAsia, , , ,

It transforms the most powerful man in the country into a teddy bear.

It adds to the calendar the imaginary date of May 35 to invoke a people’s uprising that government censors seek to erase from memory.

It mobilizes the public to expose sexual predators with the unlikely affirmation, “Rice Bunny!”

We refer, of course, to a quality as widespread among China’s people as it is absent among its leaders – comic ingenuity.

May 35 stands in for “June 4”, Chinese shorthand for the 1989 massacre commonly known in English as “Tiananmen”, and a phrase the People’s Republic of China censors have tried to scrub from the internet.…  Seguir leyendo »

Israeli far-right lawmaker Itamar Ben-Gvir inspects the site of an explosion at a bus stop near an entrance to Jerusalem on Nov. 23. (Atef Safadi/EPA-EFE/Shutterstock)

MundoOriente Próximo

It was Friday, Nov. 25, in Hebron, in the Israeli-occupied West Bank. A group of Israeli Jews, from a left-wing, Orthodox group called Children of Abraham, had come to show solidarity with local Palestinian families who had borne the brunt of violence by Israeli settlers and their supporters a week earlier. On the way back to their bus, as one activist recounted to me, they happened on some Israeli soldiers dancing in the street with a group of pro-settler visitors.

One of the left-wing activists criticized the soldiers for the political display. An argument escalated. Then, as someone pulled out a phone and began to film, a soldier grabbed an activist, hurled him to the ground, and slammed a fist into his cheek, hard enough to break a bone.…  Seguir leyendo »

President Biden speaks to French President Emmanuel Macron at a White House state dinner on Thursday. (Evelyn Hockstein/Reuters)

MundoAméricaEuropaUnión EuropeaPolítica Exterior, ,

President Biden’s state dinner on Thursday with French President Emmanuel Macron was a mutual lovefest. But no amount of bonhomie can mask the inevitable incompatibility between the two men’s visions for Europe’s future.

Biden is an Atlanticist at heart. He is fully committed to the U.S.-European relationship, supports NATO wholeheartedly and has courted European leaders since his inauguration. His international and cosmopolitan liberalism also aligns him closely with the values of most Western European leaders, especially on matters such as combating climate change. He is as friendly an American president as European elites could hope for.

Yet he is an American president, and as such, he acts primarily in America’s interests.…  Seguir leyendo »

Mazloum Abdi, commander of the Syrian Democratic Forces, speaks at a Nov. 26 news conference in Hasakah, Syria. (Baderkhan Ahmad/AP)

MundoOriente Próximo,

In 2014, the world learned about my hometown, Kobane, and my people, the Syrian Kurds, when we dealt the Islamic State its first major defeat in partnership with the United States and the Global Coalition. The alliances we forged there led to the end of the ISIS caliphate in 2019.

Today, Kobane is again under threat — and all the gains of those partnerships are also in danger.

This time, the threat comes not from Islamic State terror, but from a U.S. ally and a member of NATO. For more than a week, the government of Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has rained bombs down on our cities, killing civilians, destroying critical civilian infrastructure and targeting the Syrian Democratic Forces working to keep ISIS down.…  Seguir leyendo »

View of a dust storm across the Sahara Desert, September, 2014. Stocktrek/Getty Images

MundoÁfrica

In a cramped, fluorescent-lit office in Tripoli up several flights of stairs, a middle-aged official and his staff labor on what is perhaps the most important work for future generations of Libyans. It’s a command center of sorts: flashing computer monitors on desks, cables everywhere, and satellite maps on the wall marked with great swirls and arrows. The battle isn’t against a military opponent, like the innumerable armed groups and their political backers who have been fighting for power and economic spoils in this oil-rich state since the ouster of Muammar Qadhafi during the NATO-backed revolution of 2011. The scourge is far more insidious, and the country’s bickering elites seem woefully unprepared to tackle it.…  Seguir leyendo »

The humbling of Xi Jinping

MundoAsia

For Chinese football fans watching World Cup matches on television, the first sign there was something amiss was when they realised they could hear the crowds in the stadium, but could not see them on their screens.

As nationwide protests against President Xi Jinping’s draconian zero-Covid policy gathered pace last weekend, the censors decided it was too embarrassing to see fans enjoying themselves in crowded stadiums in Qatar, with no one wearing a mask. So after every goal, Chinese television feeds focused only on the players and coaches on the pitch and ignored jubilant fans embracing each other in the stands.…  Seguir leyendo »

Europe Is Wrong to Blame the U.S. for Its Energy Problems

MundoAméricaEuropaUnión EuropeaPolítica Exterior,

As the depth of winter approaches, Europeans are increasingly worried about their ability to heat homes and power factories. Although natural gas storage levels are nearly full and prices have eased, the European gas price is still four to five times higher than average in recent years — and President Vladimir Putin of Russia has just threatened to cut what little Russian gas still flows to Europe.

Despite the economic pain and Mr. Putin’s best efforts, the West has remained largely united in confronting his aggression in Ukraine. Yet fissures are now beginning to show in the trans-Atlantic alliance as European leaders — especially President Emmanuel Macron of France, who has been visiting Washington this week — blame U.S.…  Seguir leyendo »

China Has an Extraordinary Covid-19 Dilemma

MundoAsia, , ,

More than one-sixth of the people on the planet live in China. That’s 1.4 billion people who have spent the last three years in the world’s most intrusive pandemic surveillance state, designed to limit the spread of Covid-19 at almost any cost.

Americans, particularly on the right, have spent an awful lot of time and political energy complaining about pandemic overreach for the last two years. But our restrictions had nothing on China’s. In the United States, many statewide stay-at-home orders lasted just a few weeks. None exceeded three months, and most were only sporadically enforced. As protests erupted across China last month, one-third of the country was in partial or total lockdown — workers stuck in quarantine facilities, neighborhoods sealed, businesses and schools closed.…  Seguir leyendo »

No, la obesidad no es un fracaso personal

ReflexionesSocial  

Un grupo selecto de los principales investigadores del mundo que estudian la obesidad se reunió hace poco en las salas doradas de la Sociedad Real, la sociedad científica en la que participaron Isaac Newton y Charles Darwin y donde alguna vez se debatieron ideas como la gravedad y la evolución.

Ahora los científicos discutían sobre las causas de la obesidad, que afecta a más del 40 por ciento de los adultos estadounidenses y le cuesta al sistema de salud alrededor de 173.000 millones de dólares al año. En la sesión de clausura de la reunión, el biólogo John Speakman ofreció esta conclusión sobre el tema: “No hay consenso sobre cuál es la causa”.…  Seguir leyendo »