All Posts Tagged as 'Opinion'

In a video taken by Ayala and shared with NBC News, the employee can be heard saying “hombre, mujer” repeatedly, which translates into “man, woman.” She then says, in a mix of English and Spanish, “Everything correct my family: hombre, mujer, nino y nina,” adding the Spanish words for boy and girl. In a separate video shot by Ayala, the woman can be heard repeatedly apologizing.

“That’s the thing: There are similarities in what we do, but I take all that stuff off,” RuPaul said.

“Well, I don’t. I have to always stay ready—street ready, I always say. I have to keep my makeup on and keep my hair done. Like, when I’m in L.A.—I’ve told you about it—if it’s going to earthquake, if we get an earthquake, I’m not running out in the street looking like you look now,” Dolly responded.

Bill Maher suggested the United States' staggering number of coronavirus deaths were because its an 'incompetent country' while pushing back against a guest's claim that President Donald Trump was to blame.

Maher then interjected to argue that the United States' coronavirus-related deaths were a result of widespread blundering - not simply President Trump.

'Everybody's incompetent. It wasn't just Trump that led to those deaths,' said Maher. 'He certainly did his part, but we're an incompetent country.'

'That's true,' Meacham, 51, agreed.

'And an unhealthy one,' Maher said.

There’s a pretty standard set of stereotypes when it comes to lesbian fashion. Plaid, snapbacks, Blundstones, and keys hanging off carabiners all make the cut. But looking at the way Hollywood has gone about depicting sapphic women, you might as well throw petticoats and corsets in there, too.

The film industry has developed a fascination bordering on obsession with moody-yet-sexy lesbian period dramas. On Friday, Ammonite, which features Kate Winslet as a dour paleontologist and Saoirse Ronan as a young woman who woos Winslet out of her hard shell, will become the latest addition to this obsession. It’s set in 1840, because of course it is.

Perhaps the most telling sign that these films are trying to soften their portrayal of lesbianism that no one ever has to say the word “lesbian.” Or even “sapphic.” Nevermind the nuance of a nice “bisexual.” The women desire and pine and exchange longing glances by a windswept beach with moody gray skies, but they don’t speak plainly of what’s going on. This makes sense to some extent, since historically these desires weren’t allowed in public life, leading to a lot of coded behavior and clandestine relationships. These are women overcoming societal expectations to follow their passions — they don’t need labels, right?

Lamenting the global pandemic wasn’t “deadly enough” in his opinion, porn performer Quin Quire took to Twitter yesterday to publicly express his desire for a more lethal version of the current virus to make the world a better place.

“It’s good to kill off the weak from a population to ensure the BEST survival for the group,” Quire tweeted yesterday.

Dr. Medina Culver is proof that you’re never too sexy to save lives. But her detractors don’t always see it that way.

When the now-successful family practice doctor was interviewed for a place at medical school at the start of her career, the interviewer bluntly asked her whether she had cheated on her Medical College Admission Test.

“Usually we don’t see women with your hair color score this well,” he pronounced.

The then-22-year-old blonde was shocked, but she held her head high and replied: “No, I didn’t cheat — I worked very hard to achieve that score.”

Nine years on, successfully employed as the only female partner in a Las Vegas family health practice, the doctor is still being undermined because of her gorgeous looks and figure.

“I’ve been told countless times that I am too pretty to work in the medical field,” Culver, 31, told The Post. “People say I should be doing something else with my life, like modeling or acting. It’s sexist, hurtful and shows the double standard regarding the appearance of men and women.”

Appalled at being hounded for being both beautiful and brainy, she has turned to social media to defend herself and spread the word that the two qualities are not mutually exclusive.

Fans of Betty White, former star of The Golden Girls, are often worried about her health. Whenever she trends on Twitter, most of her devoted followers become fearful something terrible has happened to the star. Now that White is close to 100 years old, some are dreading the day her death is announced.

Some might want to avoid the topic, but White has given her death some thought. She once said she thought she would die before her Golden Girls cast mates.

I think the toughest thing about loss, and the hardest challenge, is the isolation you feel in its aftermath. You spent so much time sharing your life with someone, talking through issues, even disagreeing about things, and all of a sudden there’s a hole.

The vast majority of Latinos living in the U.S. (around 60.6 million) are not undocumented, but 15.7% lived in poverty in 2019, a number that had been falling, but is still more than double their white counterparts, according to Census data.

Latinos also make up a large portion of the labor force in service sectors that were considered essential after the COVID-19 pandemic started (some 65%) -- like some construction, health care and food service workers -- leaving them at higher risk of being exposed to the disease without the protections typically afforded first responders and other traditional essential workers.

"Why are Latinos dying at a higher rate? Because we have no choice," said Frankie Miranda, the president of the Hispanic Federation, which supports Latino-led non-profits around the country. "We have to go to work, stock the shelves, deliver the food, be the sanitation workers, and of course we don't have the protective gear or any kind of information that can help us really navigate this. We know this for sure because our member agencies -- that were already underfunded and under-resourced -- were the ones that needed to step in and be the first responders for our communities."

When asked why he believes the Mexican community has not jumped into action and demanded racial equality following the Black Lives Matter protests, Alvarez suggested: "We are too afraid. Even if you want to do a peaceful protest, you don't want to be arrested because you can get deported."

Alvarez's case points to another situation that many Latinos say is affecting the community: lack of unity.

Former Strictly Come Dancing judge Len Goodman has said older viewers of the BBC series might be put off by same-sex pairings.

The long-running contest announced in September that lesbian boxer Nicola Adams would form one-half of the show’s first ever same-sex couple.

Speaking to the Mail on Sunday, Goodman said he would only have mixed-gender couples on the show if he had his way.

“A lot of older people are traditionalists – they used to go ballroom dancing and most people’s nans and grandads met probably in a dance hall,” the former judge, who quit the show in 2016, said.

In what’s shaping up to be one of the most counterproductive social media activism campaigns since millions of people posted plain black squares to their Instagram feeds, a legion of largely (though not exclusively) white Twitter gays have attempted to “reclaim” a hashtag most commonly associated with the Proud Boys, a white nationalist hate group.

"white gays “reclaiming” a phrase rooted in white supremacy is very spot on. it was actually on my 2020 bingo card. i’m two away from bingo."

"How many of the white gays "reclaiming" the #proudboys tag you wanna guess have "no Blacks" in their grindr profile"

As many have noted, turning the name of a Southern Poverty Law Center-designated hate group into a photo-op is not just politically empty; it actively obscures the very real presence of white supremacy in the LGBTQ+ community. The trend is a display of vanity masquerading as organizing. It is a manifestation of privilege to believe — and then act on the belief — that one can “reclaim” a potent symbol of white supremacy by reformulating it in the context of Gay Pride. You can claim that “love wins” and that the more powerful way to be a “proud boy” is living out and proud, but the reality is that for millions of Black and brown folks, this is still a terror organization that actively threatens their lives, livelihoods, and right to exist in America.

How can you be sure your child is really your child? Could that innocent-seeming baby be a changeling – a cuckoo in your nest? There is something about the evil elf child, reborn as the alien walking among us, that continues to fascinate and terrify us. So much so, the broadcaster Sky has announced it has commissioned a third version of Village of the Damned from David Farr, the writer of The Night Manager.

The first, filmed in 1960, is a cult classic of understated British horror. The 1995 version, starring Christopher Reeves, translated the nightmare to small-town America.

Both were based on John Wyndham’s The Midwich Cuckoos, in which a whole village briefly loses consciousness. Nine months later, eerily identical alien babies with telepathic powers are born to the women. They are smarter and grow faster than normal – and are soon threatening not just their “parents”, but all humankind.

Teenagers are again euphorically embracing revolution, literally toppling statues in joyful Black Lives Matter protest and skipping school to protest climate change.

Meanwhile, the widespread use of social media in itself can produce a hive mind effect. Although social media was intended to support free speech and allow anyone to share their opinion, the effect of a Twitter pile-on can be to crush nuance, doubt or divergence. Commentators, such as Gavin Haynes, have highlighted the resulting purity spirals in which nobody can stand alone.

Both the single-minded power of the Chinese state and the collective force of an online horde echo the strength of the Midwich aliens versus the fragmented, conflicted arguments of the humans opposing them. The aliens’ power was that they were not individuals – they were parts of a single entity with a single idea – to survive. As in Wyndham’s time, we again face a real contrast between individualism and groupthink.

Research has shown that we tend to follow a script at the beginning of a courtship: we ask many of the same questions to get to know a potential partner in those early days of dating. But now, a new study reveals that breakups function in much the same way, by following certain steps to help us through what can be an emotionally messy process.

1

A partner loses interest in his or her significant other. (He watches more football.)

5

The partners spend less time together. ("I wonder how his emergency business trip to the Bahamas went?")

8

The partners communicate their feelings with each other. ("I hate you, you old shrew.")

The first began in 1989 with the film simply titled Batman, directed by Tim Burton. The movie introduced viewers to Michael Keaton as Bruce Wayne/Batman and Jack Nicholson as the Joker, all with that dark and gothic style that has made Burton’s work stand-out. Three years later, Burton returned to Gotham City with Batman Returns, with Michelle Pfeiffer as Catwoman and Danny DeVito as Oswald Cobblepot/The Penguin. Batman Returns is considered among the best superhero movies ever, but it also drew a lot of criticism due to its darker tone, and Burton didn’t return to direct more Batman movies. Instead, Joel Schumacher was brought in and directed Batman Forever and Batman & Robin, both with different actors playing Bruce Wayne (Val Kilmer and George Clooney, respectively). Burton not only gave Gotham a darker tone, but he also understood the city better than Nolan and Snyder did years later.

Kristie Higgs, 44, had been employed at Farmor’s School in Fairford, Gloucestershire, for seven years, but was sacked for gross misconduct in 2018 over Facebook rants about LGBT+ inclusive education.

In one post, sharing a petition from anti-LGBT+ lobbying group CitizenGo, Higgs accused schools of “BRAINWASHING OUR CHILDREN” [sic] through inclusive relationships education, claiming: “[This] means, for example, that children will be taught that all relationships are equally valid and ‘normal’, so that same-sex marriage is exactly the same as traditional marriage, and that gender is a matter of choice, not biology, so that it’s up to them what sex they are.”

Higgs described inclusive education as a “vicious form of totalitarianism”, adding: “Please sign this petition, they have already started to brainwash our innocent wonderfully created children and it’s happening in our local primary school now.”

But this week, Higgs announced that she would be taking legal action against Farmor’s School, claiming that she was subjected to discrimination and harassment on the grounds of her religious beliefs.

On top of the ongoing threat of the coronavirus pandemic, which is limiting the ways families and professionals can live, work and take care of each other, many people are now contending with environmental threats like wildfires and hurricanes. And that’s with everything else going on in 2020.

The understandable physical stress all this causes makes doing work, at times, impossible. Lara Hogan is a management coach based in Portland, Oregon, which in the second week of September recorded the worst air quality in the world among major cities as fires raged nearby. Towards the end of that week, Hogan was feeling lightheaded, experiencing a “weird cough,” and could not focus on her job, she said.

“It was much harder to do that work, like thinking, speaking, answering questions, normal stuff,” Hogan said. She asked herself, “Can I do a good job for the people I’m trying to support?”