The Guardian: The alt-right hates women as much as it hates people of colour

Although best known for its white nationalist brand of racist ideology, there’s growing recognition that patriarchal politics is also central to the movement. Several observers have pointed out that the alt-right advocates not just white supremacy, but more specifically white male supremacy, that the movement feeds on “toxic resentment of women”, and that sexism serves as a “gateway drug” pulling a lot of young men into it. The few alt-right women who have been profiled embrace their own subordination. [...]

Consider abortion. Some alt-rightists, unsurprisingly, argue that abortion is simply immoral and should be banned. Yet many others in the movement disagree – and for reasons that have nothing to do with respecting women’s autonomy or privacy. These alt-rightists support legal abortion because, they claim, it’s disproportionately used by black and Latina women and, secondarily, because they see it as a way to weed out “defective” white babies. In other words, they support abortion as a form of eugenics. Both sides of this internal alt-right debate agree that women have no business controlling their own bodies. As Greg Johnson of the alt-right website Counter-Currents put it, “in a White Nationalist society … some abortions should be forbidden, others should be mandatory, but under no circumstances should they simply be a matter of a woman’s choice”. [...]

For 40 years, the Christian right has been the benchmark of anti-feminist, patriarchal politics in the United States. The Christian right was the first large-scale movement in US history to put the reassertion of male dominance at the centre of its programme. Since the 1970s, it has spearheaded a whole series of patriarchal initiatives, from the campaign to defeat the Equal Rights Amendment to the self-described “biblical patriarchy” movement, which tells women they have a sacred obligation to treat their husbands as “lord”.

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Haaretz: Fight for the Founders’ Vision of Israel

It is “the natural right of the Jewish people to be masters of their own fate, like all other nations, in their own sovereign State,” states the Declaration of Independence. But Israel is denying this natural right to the Palestinian people. The declaration’s key paragraph guarantees the democratic component of the Jewish and democratic state. “The State of Israel ... will be based on freedom, justice and peace as envisaged by the prophets of Israel; it will ensure complete equality of social and political rights to all its inhabitants irrespective of religion, race or sex,” it declares. But this promise has been replaced by an occupation regime in the territories, and is under violent attack within Israel itself by the government — a government of the right-wing Im Tirztu organization. [...]

The Declaration of Independence adopted the vision of Israel’s prophets — the universal values that put man at the center, the ones through which Judaism made an enormous contribution worldwide. But the nationalist State of Israel, with its fascist tendencies, scorns and derides these values. Israeli society must fight to restore the vision of the Declaration of Independence and make it the state’s vision once more. We cannot and must not accept its abolition.

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SciShow Psych: Does IQ Really Measure How Smart You Are?

The Atlantic: Why We Laugh (Jun 05, 2014)

Laughter is universal, but we know very little about the reasons we do it. Dr. Robert Provine has been studying the social and neurological roots of laughter for 20 years, and has come to surprising conclusions about how we operate as human beings. To learn more about Dr. Provine's research at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, read his latest book, Curious Behavior.

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Slate: What Segregation Looked Like in 1950s Alabama

Parks’ philosophy is eloquently expressed in his photo essay, “The Restraints: Open and Hidden,” which ran in Life magazine, where he was the first black photographer on staff, in 1956. In Mobile, Alabama, and beyond, he documented the everyday lives of Albert Thornton and his wife as well as their nine children and 19 grandchildren, who comprised the Causey and Tanner families. At the time, most of the media coverage of the civil rights era centered on political demonstrations and violence. Parks, however, highlighted the injustices of the Jim Crow era—just as, in 1950, he demonstrated the consequences of school segregation in work that we featured earlier this year on Behold—not with spectacle but with the everyday.

“He didn’t want to go to the South and take images of people protesting or people being angry or people looking really poor and destitute. He wanted to generate a feeling of empathy in the readers of the North, so they’d see the images in the story and relate to the daily activities of the people that they saw in the magazine,” said Fabienne Stephan, director and curator of New York’s Salon 94 Freemans, which is showing Parks’ photos in an exhibition, “Segregation Story,” through Dec. 20. [...]

Parks’ essay wasn’t just about denouncing segregation. It was, in a way, also about imagining the possibilities of a world in which blacks were treated equally. Causey, like her father, hoped for the end of segregation, and she personally believed it was “on the way out.” Once the laws changed, she told the magazine, life was sure to improve.

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Vox: This is your brain on terrorism (Mar 20, 2017)

Politico: Historians see a dark underside to Trump's Civil War riff

President Donald Trump on Monday once again defied the history books, this time claiming that Andrew Jackson was “really angry” about the Civil War – despite having died 16 years before the first shots were fired – and puzzled why a deal wasn’t cut to avoid the war altogether. [...]

The president's comments on Monday struck some historians as darker than a history goof, with the president seeming to minimize the painful history of slavery in the United States and to talk up Jackson’s role as a strongman leader who proudly owned many slaves. [...]

“Steve Bannon has made Jackson the epitome of the hardscrabble, American folk hero,” added Brinkley. “And Trump has bought into Steve Bannon’s version of Andrew Jackson.” [...]

The myth that the Civil War was fought over not slavery, but states’ rights, has become an article of faith for some in the South and those in the white supremacist movement. Some Southern states instituted Robert E. Lee Day, celebrating the Confederate general, to fall on the same day as Martin Luther King Jr. Day after Congress established the holiday in 1983.

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The Guardian: What would Emmanuel Macron as France's leader mean for Europe?

Macron – when pressed mainly by British reporters – has said he will not countenance a deal that allows the UK to act as Europe’s offshore tax haven with access to the single market. Like his one-time patron, François Hollande, he is determined no other EU country should believe Brexit is worth emulating. A former banker, he will also be tempted to lure many of his UK-based supporters back to France by making Paris an effective rival to the City of London.

But Macron’s ability to press this case depends largely on the relationship he manages to strike with Berlin. He visited Germany twice during the campaign and in a 70-minute lecture delivered in English at Humboldt University in Berlin in January, he promised to end the mistrust and deadlock that had disfigured the Franco-German axis. [...]

His ideas for reform of the euro, first set out with the German SPD politician Sigmar Gabriel, challenge Berlin’s adherence to trade surpluses, which he has described as unsustainable. Many of his proposals remain vague but Macron has been honest enough to acknowledge Berlin will only listen to Paris if France first establishes its credibility through economic reforms.

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Al Jazeera: Hamas accepts Palestinian state with 1967 borders

Hamas has presented a new political document that accepts the formation of a Palestinian state along the 1967 borders, without recognising the statehood of Israel, and says that the conflict in Palestine is not a religious one. [...]

While Hamas' 1988 founding charter called for the takeover of all of mandate Palestine, including present-day Israel, the new document says it will accept the 1967 borders as the basis for a Palestinian state, with Jerusalem as its capital and refugees back to their homes. [...]

The document also falls short of accepting the two-state solution that is assumed to be the end product of the Oslo Accords between Israel and the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO).

It also clarifies that Hamas' fight is with "Zionist project", not with the religion of Judaism, making a distinction between Jews who believe in Judaism and "Zionist Israeli citizens who occupy Palestinian lands". [...]

Speaking to Al Jazeera, Mohammad Abu Saada, a professor at Gaza's al-Azhar Univerity, called the new document a bid to "accommodate Egyptian conditions and calm Egyptian fears" regarding Hamas connections to the Muslim Brotherhood, which Egypt has classified as a "terror" group since democratically elected president Mohammad Morsi was ousted in a 2013 military coup.

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