A Spanish law requiring men and women to have equal speaking time on news programs will now be monitored by the National Commission on Markets and Competition (CNMC) to ensure compliance.
The gender law, promoted by the Socialist party, was first put forward by the department of Nadia Calviño, the first vice president of the government and minister of economic affairs and digital transformation. She said in February 2022 that she would no longer participate in debates where she was the only woman, but then went a step further and decided to spearhead a law requiring the presence of women.
Calviño’s law was approved by Congress in May 2022 and the fines for violating the law can be extremely high. In fact, “the broadcasting of content that clearly promotes situations of inequality for women” was defined in the 2022 law as a “very serious offense.” TV networks can be punished with fines between €60,000 and €1.5 million, depending on the offense and the income of the networks.
In practice, it remains to be seen exactly how this law will be determined and enforced.
Now, the CMAC is going to monitor Spanish news to ensure women and men are speaking equally. To do this, it will monitor 250 hours of broadcasting per year to examine the presence of females on a dozen networks, including both public networks RTVE and 24h, as well as private networks, according to El Mundo.
According to the law, newscasts must convey “an equal and non-discriminatory image” of women and men. They are not permitted to promote “directly or indirectly, situations of discrimination based on sex.”
The CMAC will review between 800 and 1,000 15-minute clips, which will be reviewed by a consulting firm that has been provided €121,000 for both 2025 and 2026.
“A worksheet will have to reflect the speaking time of each of the actors participating in the news, following the criteria established by the CNMC, and paying special attention to the representation of women in these spaces,” the contract documents state.
The CMAC is headed by Cani Fernández, who is close to Calviño.
When people who hate me get tired of calling me a fascist or a white supremacist, they let fly with “eugenicist.” But “eugenicist” may be losing its sting. Just last week, the New York Times astonished me by publishing an article called “Should Human Life be Optimized?” It included moving pictures of cute babies who had, in some respects, been optimized.
It even used the term “liberal eugenics,” to refer to the latest techniques to ensure children get the best genetic start in life by using a method called embryo selection. It works like this: You harvest eggs from the mother, fertilize them with sperm from the father, and after about 5 or 6 days, you sequence the genomes of all the embryos and then implant the ones that have the most promising traits.
This is a company [hyperlink; lifeview.com] that does embryo selection for complex traits. It advertises only screening against undesirable conditions, but it collects genetic data that could be used to predict which embryos are likely to grow into taller, more athletic, smarter people. It is widely reported that if you can pick from 10 embryos, you are likely to have a child with six more IQ points than a child conceived by chance.
TheTimes article noted only that it was “controversial” when it included the following statement from someone who thinks higher IQs are good for the country: “Societies that have more intelligent people will have lower rates of crime, of rape, of violence, because intelligence correlates negatively with those societal blights.”
It’s a great, long article, but the Times never once mentioned Adolph Hitler or forced sterilization.
Maybe even more significant was a survey from Harvard Medical School called “Public Opinion on Polygenic Embryo Screening for IVF,” or in-vitro fertilization. A poll in 2023 of 1,400 people found a lot of them liked the idea of screening embryos. People generally think it’s OK to screen out conditions such as Schizophrenia or Alzheimer’s, but they think twice about selecting for brains or height. Here are all the traits the survey asked about, with medical conditions on the left and other traits on the right.
[...] It’s pretty non-controversial to screen out genetic conditions associated with cancer or heart disease. What’s more interesting is what people thought about screening for positive traits such as intelligence, the top item on this graph.
Here, the top two bars — the red and the brown — are strong disapproval and disapproval. And, sure enough, they account for about 40 percent of responses. But 23 percent have no opinion, 24 percent approve, and 13 percent strongly approve. There is even more support for screening out neuroticism or obesity. This is not the ferocious opposition to eugenics that you might expect.
Christian writers tend not to like embryo selection. They warn against “technologies that objectify early human life and rob it of its moral standing.” Furthermore, anyone who believes that life begins at conception will oppose selecting embryos because the ones not chosen are often destroyed.
However, there may soon be ways dramatically to increase the chances of having a genius baby or an Olympic gold medalist. It’s called in-vitro gametogenesis.
You take basically any animal cell, reprogram it into a stem cell, and turn that into an egg. In 2016, Japanese biologists did this with cells from a mouse’s tail. They fertilized the eggs in vitro, put them into a mouse womb and got 10 pups. Some of the pups went on to have pups of their own.
It would be a huge breakthrough to do that with people. The biggest bother with in-vitro fertilization is getting the eggs from the mother. You can get only about a dozen eggs each cycle, and the whole procedure is pretty awful. Sperm are plentiful. So, if you could just take a woman’s skin cells and turn them into eggs, parents might have hundreds of embryos to choose from.
There’s no telling what you might end up with.
And this could be possible in 10 or 15 years. [hyperlink; https://www.brown.edu/news/2023-10-23/adashi-ivg] Two years ago, a Brown University doctor was already saying, “It’s time for the public to get a sense of the possible.”
It’s also time for the country to return to common sense. Eugenics improves people, just as selective breeding improves plants and animals. Its why cows give more milk, ears of corn are bigger and taste better, and turkeys are fatter and more tender.
[...] In the early part of the 20th century, we understood that these principles apply to us. It was common for people to attend free public lectures on eugenics.
There were “fitter families contests,” in which experts judged families on their desirable qualities.
Here are three generations of winners, with their trophies.
[...] Should we optimize human life? Of course we should.
White applicants from a British or Eastern European background are at a disadvantage when applying for entry-level police constable roles at one of the U.K.’s largest police forces, according to reports by The Telegraph newspaper.
It has emerged that West Yorkshire Police permits Black, Asian, and Minority Ethnic (BAME) candidates to submit job applications all year round, but White people must wait for specific recruitment drives, sparking accusations of positive discrimination.
The police force claims the move is designed to boost diversity numbers and make the police more reflective of the area’s multicultural society.
An internal whistleblower told the U.K. newspaper that Black and Asian applicants are labeled as “gold” category candidates and are encouraged to apply at any time. White candidates from Britain, Ireland, and Eastern Europe, meanwhile, are “bronze” applicants.
[...] According to documents reviewed by The Telegraph, the whistleblower expressed concerns to senior management over the application process, stating: “The process restricts progression opportunities for White British candidates, while individuals from other backgrounds are swiftly advanced through recruitment stages.”
“We are currently accepting applications for the two police constable entry programmes (uniform and detective) from people from our under-represented groups… If you are not from one of these groups, please keep checking this page for future recruitment opportunities,” reads the recruitment page of the West Yorkshire Police website.
The force, Britain’s fourth-largest, insisted that “enabling people from an ethnic minority background to apply early does not give them an advantage in the application process” and that all applications are held until recruitment is opened for everyone.”
It claimed the current system simply allows the force to “attract talent from a pool of applicants who reflect the diverse communities we serve.”
West Yorkshire, a county in the north of England, has become an increasingly diverse area of Britain with a large Asian population, particularly from India and Pakistan.
According to the 2021 Census, 23.4 percent of the population in West Yorkshire identified as belonging to non-White ethnic groups. This had more than doubled from the 11.4 percent registered two decades previously at the 2001 Census. Some 15.9 percent identify as Asian and 3.1 percent as Black.
In certain areas, particularly cities, this percentage increases considerably. In Bradford, for example, 61.1 percent of residents are White, with 31.1 percent identifying as Asian, Asian British, or Asian Welsh — over three times the national average.
A West Yorkshire Police spokesperson told the newspaper, _“The most recent census found that 23 percent of people in West Yorkshire identified as being from an ethnic minority background. Our current police officer representation from ethnic minority backgrounds is around 9 percent. To address this under-representation, we use Positive Action under the Equality Act 2010.
Positive Action allows people from under-represented groups who express an interest in joining the force to complete an application, which is then held on file until a recruitment window is opened."_
@BowsacNoodle@sickburnbro I have a variety of immuno-related diseases (asthma, chronic rhinosinusitis, etc.), and Vitamin D supplementation (< 2000 IU per day) both smoothes their symptoms and increases the bodily energy that used to be wasted on net in taking care of them. Of course, it requires, to be effective, more than simple supplementation (exercise first).