22 December 2016
Salon: Why are men still proposing? (MAY 12, 2013)
The truth, though, is that the male proposal is showing no signs of disappearing. Last year, a survey — of students at notoriously liberal University of California, Santa Cruz, no less — found that the vast majority of heterosexual respondents said that they would “definitely” want the man to do the proposing in their relationship. Not a single student, male or female, expressed a clear-cut interest in the woman proposing. Some weirdos like myself may toy with engagement tradition — be it through female-led proposals or non-proposal proposals — but most of us still expect to see a man on bended knee.
Stephanie Coontz, author of “Marriage, a History: How Love Conquered Marriage,” tells me that it’s unsurprising that this particular tradition has remained despite radical changes in the meaning and definition of marriage. “It’s the symbolic areas that seem to be the most resistant to change,” she said. “One of the reasons it’s so slow to change is that we have so many of these old takes about women talking about their feelings perhaps more than they should” and men not talking about their feelings enough, she explained. “As we’ve gotten to have much higher expectations of real communication and back and forth and intimacy and fairness, that’s an anxiety that both partners bring to it.” [...]
Coontz suggests that the proposal might also be a ceremonial end to the pressure a man experiences to be the romantic initiator — whether it’s asking a woman to dance or for her phone number. “There’s a certain sense in which both males and females unconsciously are saying, ‘Go ahead and do this one more time, but you’re doing it in a safe environment because you know I’ll say ‘yes,’” she says.
The New York Times: Liberal Zionism in the Age of Trump
Immediately after Trump appointed Bannon, the Zionist Organization of America prepared to welcome him at its annual gala dinner, where he was to meet Naftali Bennett, Israel’s minister of education, and Danny Danon, the country’s ambassador to the United Nations. (Bannon didn’t show up.) Ron Dermer, Israel’s ambassador in Washington, publicly announced that he was looking forward to working with the entire Trump administration, including Bannon. And Alan Dershowitz, the outspoken Harvard emeritus professor of law who regularly denounces non-Zionists as anti-Semitic, preferred in this case to turn not against Bannon, but against his critics. “It is not legitimate to call somebody an anti-Semite because you might disagree with their politics,” he pointed out. [...]
Yet insofar as Israel is concerned, every liberal Zionist has not just tolerated the denial of this minimum liberal standard, but avowed this denial as core to their innermost convictions. Whereas liberalism depends on the idea that states must remain neutral on matters of religion and race, Zionism consists in the idea that the State of Israel is not Israeli, but Jewish. As such, the country belongs first and foremost not to its citizens, but to the Jewish people — a group that’s defined by ethnic affiliation or religious conversion. [...]
Coulter gets her dates mixed up. Palestinians in fact do not demand a “right of return” to their pre-1967 homes, but to their pre-1948 homes. In other words, the issue isn’t the occupation, which many liberal Zionists agree is a crime, but Zionism itself. Opposition to the Palestinians’ “right of return” is a matter of consensus among left and right Zionists because also liberal Zionists insist that Israel has the right to ensure that Jews constitute the ethnic majority in their country. That’s the reason for which Rabbi Rosenberg could not answer Spencer. But if you reject Zionism because you reject the double standard, organizations such as the American Israel Public Affairs Committee or the Jewish Federations of North America would denounce you as anti-Semitic. [...]
This is all the more true because by denying liberal principles, Zionism immediately becomes continuous with — rather than contradictory to — the anti-Semitic politics of the sort promoted by the alt-right. The idea that Israel is the Jews’ own ethnic state implies that Jews living outside of it — say, in America or in Europe — enjoy a merely diasporic existence. That is another way of saying that they inhabit a country that is not genuinely their own. Given this logic, it is natural for Zionist and anti-Semitic politicians to find common ideas and interests. Every American who has been on a Birthright Israel tour should know that left-leaning Israelis can agree with America’s alt-right that, ideally, ”Jews should live in their own country.”
The Guardian: EU gives Poland two months to scrap changes to its highest court
The EU executive has issued a stark warning to Poland to scrap changes to its highest court which critics say trample over the rule of law, but stopped short of calling for sanctions on the member state.
Frans Timmermans, vice-president of the European commission, gave the Polish government two months to rewrite proposed amendments to the country’s constitutional tribunal that some say will put Poland on the road to autocracy. [...]
The Dutch commissioner could still recommend Poland be stripped of EU voting rights, but this unprecedented punishment is unlikely to win unanimous support from EU member states, who must take the final decision. Hungary’s strongman leader Viktor Orbán has already vowed to oppose the move.
The Atlantic: The Terrifying Simplicity of the Berlin Attack
The type of terrorism on display in Berlin leaves societies with three choices: 1) Try to secure public spaces by heavily fortifying them, thus transforming people’s way of life; 2) Try to stop would-be attackers by dramatically expanding the government’s surveillance and investigatory powers, thus increasing the state’s intrusions into people’s lives; or 3) Try to minimize the frequency and lethality of terrorism, while learning to live with the threat of attacks and to be resilient when they inevitably occur.
Those choices are lurking behind debates in Germany right now about how to better protect public places (there are a variety of design and technological solutions); control immigration (far-right politicians have been quick to blame the country’s generous asylum policy for the attack, even before the identity of the assailant was known); and broaden the use of security cameras (state surveillance is a touchy subject in the country, owing to the legacies of the Nazis and the Stasi). They are the subtext of Merkel’s refusal to be paralyzed by the fear of evil. [...]
“There is nothing new about terror strikes against soft targets; what is new is that the baseline threat is now so high in so many countries,” the Soufan Group noted in another brief earlier this year:
Politico: Romania’s Social Democrats propose Muslim woman as PM
Romania’s Social Democrats (PSD) and their liberal coalition partners ALDE proposed on Wednesday to make Sevil Shhaideh, a Muslim woman from the ethnic Tatar minority, the country’s next prime minister following the PSD’s landslide election victory earlier this month.
If her nomination is approved by President Klaus Iohannis and parliament, Shhaideh would be the first woman and the first Muslim to occupy the job in a country where the majority of the population are Orthodox Christians. The PSD’s election campaign was partly based on promoting Orthodox values. [...]
Nicușor Dan, leader of the anti-corruption movement Union Save Romania which came third in the elections, said Shhaideh lacks experience for the prime ministership and was only nominated because of her loyalty to Dragnea.
Deutsche Welle: African countries fail in second attempt to block UN gay rights appointment
The United Nations General Assembly on Monday rejected a bid by several African countries, led by Burkina Faso, to suspend the work of the UN's first ever expert dealing with discrimination based on sexual orientation.
The measure was defeated by 77 votes to 84, with 16 abstentions.
Vitit Muntarbhorn, an international law professor from Thailand, was appointed in September with a three-year mandate to investigate cases of discrimination and abuses against lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and intersex (LGBTI) people worldwide.
The African Group - which has 54 member countries, making it the largest of the UN's regional groups - argued that there was no legal basis for the expert's mandate and that "there is no international agreement on the definition of the concept of 'sexual orientation and gender identity'." [...]
According to a UN human rights report published last year, at least 76 countries still have anti-gay laws in place. Homosexuality is still illegal in 34 African countries.
The Guardian: Here's a formula for bursting elitist anti-elitism
In 2016, Trump’s presidential victory took the longstanding culture war phenomenon of “elitist anti-elitism” to a bizarre new level.
During the campaign, he positioned himself as the anti-establishment candidate, a human wrecking ball smashing the American elite into pieces. Yet he did so while boasting of his wealth and his fame and his luxury lifestyle, without any sense of disconnect whatsoever. [...]
The Trumpite slogan “Make America Great Again” offers the perfect real-world example. In his rallies and press conferences, Trump implied (or simply asserted) that Mexicans and Muslims were responsible for the nation’s decline. Clinton shot back by declaring that America was already great – and so the trap was sprung.
Rather than persuading the public that immigrants weren’t to blame for low wages, the Democrats sounded like they saw nothing wrong with declining living standards. Clinton thus became the candidate of status in an election in which voters desperately wanted change.
Jakub Marian: Christmas gift-bringers of Europe
Santa Claus is relentlessly trying to enter our European households (mostly through our mailboxes rather than chimneys), but Father Christmas, Baby Jesus, Grandfather Frost, and other traditional gift-bringers have managed to fend him off so far (well, sort of).
Each country (or region) has its own traditional Christmas gift-bringer. Some of them are quite nice, such as the British Father Christmas, others are outright weird, such as the Catalan “defecating log”, but all of them are equally interesting. The following map shows the gift-bringers’ names with translations, coloured by relatedness of the concepts themselves (that is, not by etymological relatedness of the names).
Please note that some of the stripes and gradients may not represent the actual geographical distribution completely accurately; they just show general geographical trends. For example, Weinachtsmann is more common in the north of Germany, Christkind (or Christkindl) in the south, but the border is not entirely clear. The situation in Ukraine is even more unclear.
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