Hostile takeovers among Japanese firms were considered almost taboo for years, but a flurry of bids in 2019 suggested a long-predicted wave of consolidation could finally have arrived.
Consumers are filing lawsuits claiming that makers of CBD supplements engaged in “false, fraudulent, unfair, deceptive, and misleading” marketing of their products. But the FDA has struggled to set clear rules of the road over regulations for the industry, muddying the waters for the consumers. In other public health news: taboo topics about women‘s health, superfund sites, recalls, and more.
NPR: These Women’s Health Taboos Are Overdue To Be Busted
As the decade changes and we consider the state of women‘s health in America, who better to turn to than the authors of five taboo-busting books from 2019 that took on issues that generations of women haven’t been talking about, but need to. We asked these outspoken doctors and health advocates to give us their Top 7 messages to women for 2020. Here’s what they said.
Read describes taboo words as “serving as scapegoats ministering to the deep-rooted need for symbols of the forbidden. They analyze a certain emotion and thus leave the remainder of the language free from it.”
To explain another taboo of the era, Read quotes an 1839 account by a British traveler in the U.S.
It simply reflected differences in which words were taboo.
Language needs taboo cuss words, and whichever ones you find unacceptable most likely would be just fine in other times and places.
However, the non-use of nuclear weapons since 1945 can be misunderstood, and the wrong lessons can be learned. It is sometimes assumed that the absence of nuclear war since World War II proves that nuclear weapons are not relevant for national security, will never be used in conflict, or that a taboo against nuclear weapons will deter their use in the future. This thinking is dangerous, and may bring about the very event it assumes can never occur.
The Nuclear Taboo Exists, But it Can Be Broken
It is sometimes argued that a normative basis of restraint, a “nuclear taboo,” is responsible for the lack of inter-state nuclear conflict.
While such a taboo almost certainly exists, it is unlikely to prevent states from using nuclear weapons on its own.
This is not to say the nuclear taboo has no effect on policy.
The taboo, combined with the mindset that the weapons would not be necessary for victory, contributed to President Harry Truman’s decision to not use nuclear weapons in the early days of the Korean War, and prevented Gen.
Arms control agreements, for their part, have reinforced the nuclear taboo by seeking to control potential escalation, provide transparency, and minimize the situations where it would be advantageous to use nuclear weapons.
Considerations of nuclear warfare have become taboo, which has contributed, in part, to the non-use of nuclear weapons for so long.
But the taboo does not guarantee that nuclear weapons will not be used in the future, and history shows us that taboos are often broken.
Recent evidence suggests that the nuclear taboo may not be as robust as many assume.
The Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, or “Iran deal,” meant to slow the inevitable proliferation of nuclear weapons in the Middle East, but was undermined when the United States withdrew from it in 2018. North Korean nuclear weapons and ballistic missiles have proven to be an effective means of deterring U.S. intervention and will not go away anytime soon, bringing fears of proliferation both in East Asia and to other dictatorships around the world. Bilateral arms control agreements are becoming less relevant as they weaken signatories against states outside of the agreement, and multilateral arms control agreements have become less likely to have meaningful content due to the wide variety of conflicting capabilities, arsenal sizes, and security concerns. The unfortunate reality is that the nuclear taboo is falling apart. If we wish to continue to see a world where nuclear weapons are not used, deterrent postures must be based on the assumption that states will use these weapons when it is in their interest to do so.
How can poetry be a tool for resistance and liberation? In this lesson, students explore landais, a short form of poetry used primarily by Pashtun women to speak openly about taboo topics, and find out more about the women who write them. In the process, students challenge their own ideas about Afghanistan and its people and consider the ways in which they can use this artform to open dialogues about important issues in our own communities.
This lesson introduces two journalism projects that explore how poems can communicate information. First, students will explore a project about Afghan women addressing taboos through anonymous landai poetry. Then, they will explore a multimedia documentary poetry project by poet Kwame Dawes and filmmaker Andre Lambertson about people living with HIV/AIDS in Haiti.
What explains the current taboo on topics regarding the coronavirus?
Similarly taboo was questioning the notion that everyone who died with COVID-19 died because of it, even when the dying and the deceased were not tested for the virus and the methodology of ascertaining causes of death seemed too often reinvented or changed weekly.
More Taboo Questions
And after the Fed broke the taboo of buying junk-rated corporate bonds, could central banks add equities or emulate the Fed’s high-street lending schemes? New Zealand’s central bank is even looking at adding foreign asset purchases to its list of “deployable” tools.
Such options remain taboo to some extent but policymakers have come mighty close to them during the latest shock. The idea isn’t new; it was coined back in the 1960s by Milton Friedman as an option to battle deflation, and sounds like a plausible option given stubbornly low inflation.
But more existential questions about reforming police unions are still taboo.
This Jan. 1, 2019, file photo, shows a new housing project in the West Bank settlement of Naale. Peter Beinart, an influential American commentator, has shocked the Jewish establishment and Washington policy-making circles by breaking a long-standing taboo.
JERUSALEM — An influential American commentator has sent shock waves through the Jewish establishment and Washington policy-making circles by breaking a long-standing taboo: He has endorsed the idea of a democratic entity of Jews and Palestinians living with equal rights between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean, arguing that a two-state solution — Israel and Palestine — is no longer possible.
Openly discussing sex had quickly become taboo in the USSR, reserved only for conversations between friends or lovers in the privacy of their homes.
The taboo words include “market,” “barriers to entry,” and “network effects,” which is when products such as social networks become more valuable as more people use them.
Premarital sex is largely seen as acceptable, but most view sex on a first date and open relationships as taboo
When it comes to open relationships – that is, a committed relationship where both people agree that it is acceptable to date or have sex with other people – the public is less accepting. Some 32% think this can be acceptable at least sometimes , while 48% say open relationships are never acceptable. Having sex on a first date is also still seen as taboo by some. While 30% say it can be acceptable under some or all circumstances, 42% say it is never acceptable.
Hedges, whose research focused on the expanding power of the UAE’s security services since the Arab Spring, said his experience should serve as a warning that scholars of any nationality face serious risks in the Emirates and that the government is increasingly aggressive about shutting down debate on a litany of taboo subjects.
As mental health awareness is becoming a less-taboo subject, positive outcomes are becoming more common.
Citing national security at the WTO used to be unthinkable, but the taboo has been broken in disputes between Russia and Ukraine and between Qatar and several of its neighbours, and last year the United States also used national security to justify its steel and aluminium tariffs.
President Donald Trump has accelerated the collapse of taboos on all issues including Israel’s standing and relations within the U.S. political landscape.
The Cold War allowed Israel to play an essential role in U.S. foreign policy, but the diligent and systematic organizing work of AIPAC and American Zionist organizations translated the alliance of convenience into an untouchable taboo in American politics and media discourses.
The push to commit U.S. troops directly in the Arab world and the move toward military operations in the region is directly connected to the collapse of the political taboos related to Israel and Zionism.
The consequences of direct U.S. military intervention and troop deployment into the battlefields in Iraq was the beginning of the cracks in public discourses around Israel and Zionist taboo in politics.
As long as the debates in the U.S. were confined to AIPAC’s efforts to cement the alliance with Israel, increase foreign aid, provide protection for Israel against international consequences and isolate the Palestinians regionally and globally, then the taboo and limits in public discourse were maintained.
However, once the U.S. committed troops and became involved militarily, then all bets were off, whereby discussions and debates regarding Israel and the political taboos on its role in U.S. foreign and domestic policies were no longer sustainable.
Initially, it was on the margins of America’s political landscape, but as the military deployment dragged-on and the complexity of the conflicts became apparent, Israel and its lobby were no longer in a position to maintain the political taboos, which included a split within the ranks of the American Jewish community itself.
The current realignment in the Democratic Party is a definite indication of the shattering of the political taboos in relation to Israel and Zionism underway in the country. This process started much earlier than the arrival of the 2018 midterm elections and the newly elected class of Democrats, which includes a number that was not only ready to take Israel to task on human rights violations but also to speak on the untouchable taboo, namely the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement.
Everyone that watched the Republicans give a standing ovation to Netanyahu’s speech in Congress, in opposition to Obama’s Iran deal and Secretary of State John Kerry’s attempts at curtailing settlements, understood that Israel had become a partisan issue in the U.S. The fact that democratic members in Congress are ready to push back against AIPAC and Israel is evidence of the breaking of the taboo and a readiness to shift the conversation. More importantly, the Democrats rank and file across the country are emboldened and ready to push the debate further than it is at the national level, and this will become more evident in the 2020 election cycle.
Trump’s arrival on the political scene and his readiness to break all political, social, racial, gender and cultural taboos is another critical contributing factor to the shift. Trumpism and its attacks on established political norms and discourses created an opening for every conceivable issue under the sun, including Israel and Zionism. Here, the alliance and public embrace between Netanyahu and Trump brought Israel and Zionism into a head-to-head confrontation with the resistance movement that developed in opposition to what Trumpism represents. Netanyahu has put all of Israel’s eggs in the Republican and Trump’s leaking political basket, which accounts for the Republican base but nothing else. Yes, Netanyahu and Adelson got the U.S. Embassy moved to Jerusalem, a tacit recognition of the legitimacy of the settlements and the ending of UNRWA funding for the Palestinians; but what all of this accomplishes is only a delay of the conflict with the Palestinians and not its solution. The push toward annexation of Golan Heights or even the West Bank and a possible military campaign against Iran is only adding muck to Israel and Zionism standing in the U.S. and the world while bringing it further into the ongoing fragmentation of America’s politics. Israel and its allies in the U.S. are operating as if nothing has changed and from a pre-collapse mindset, which is beginning to compound AIPAC’s and other Zionist organizations’ failure.
The marijuana industry has undergone a rapid transformation in a relatively short amount of time. Heading into 2018, this was an industry that, while gaining momentum, was still largely considered taboo. But with the legalization of recreational pot in Canada and the passage of the Farm Bill in the U.S., legalizing hemp and hemp-based cannabidiol, that’s no longer the case.
Why uplist? For starters, listing on the NYSE or Nasdaq places marijuana stocks side by side with time-tested and profitable business models. It casts aside the notion that cannabis is a taboo industry once and for all.
The text of this article was generated by the Breaking The Silence system that collected 42 news articles posted on the web from January 2019 to September 2020 and clustered for the taboo subjects related to the U.S.
