Amidst allegations central to the Matt Gaetz scandal, Jonathan Freedland speaks to Peter Wehner of the Ethics and Public Policy Center. They discuss the decades-old pattern of prominent Christian political leaders and commentators, who forgive allies for the same transgressions for which they harshly judge their opponents.
Showing posts with label relationships. Show all posts
Showing posts with label relationships. Show all posts
12 April 2021
6 March 2021
The Guardian: How globalisation has transformed the fight for LGBTQ+ rights
It was no coincidence that the notion of LGBTQ+ rights was spreading worldwide at the same time that old boundaries were collapsing in the era of globalisation. The collapse of these boundaries led to the rapid spread of ideas about sexual equality or gender transition – and also a dramatic reaction by conservative forces, by patriarchs and priests who feared the loss of control that this process threatened. These were the dynamics along the pink line, particularly in places where people came to be counted as gay or lesbian or MSM (men who have sex with men) or transgender for the first time. In most societies, they had always been there, albeit in ways that were sometimes circumscribed or submerged, but now they claimed new status as they took on new political identities. And they became enmeshed in a bigger geopolitical dynamic. [...]
Particularly in Europe, these new-look nationalist movements sometimes bolstered their agendas by claiming they were protecting not just jobs and citizens but values, too. By the time Le Pen was running for office in 2017, these values included the rights of LGBTQ+ people. The man who wrote this script had been the crusading Dutch anti-immigration politician Pim Fortuyn, who was assassinated in 2002. Fortuyn, who was gay, attracted mass support when he claimed that Muslim intolerance of homosexuality posed an existential threat to European civilisation. His far-right successor, Geert Wilders, drove the agenda hard. When a troubled Muslim man killed 49 people at the Pulse gay nightclub in Orlando, Florida, in June 2016, Trump – then on the campaign trail – slammed “radical Islamic terrorism”. Wilders, fighting his own election campaign back home, capitalised on this: “The freedom that gay people should have – to kiss each other, to marry, to have children – is exactly what Islam is fighting against.” [...]
In western Europe, the issue of LGBTQ+ rights was being staked as a pink line against the influx of new migrants. At the same time, in eastern Europe, it was being staked as a pink line against decadent western liberalism. In both instances, queer people themselves came to be instrumentalised politically as never before. They acquired political meaning far beyond their own claims to equality and dignity. They became embodiments of progress and worldliness to some, but signs of moral and social decay to others.
25 February 2021
Freakonomics: Can I Ask You a Ridiculously Personal Question?
One reason I love to do what I do is because a). I am curious, which I’m guessing you are as well; but also b). I’m fairly shy — or at least I used to be. Not sure I ever really outgrew it. Shy and curious is a tough combination: there are answers you want to know but you’re not always comfortable asking the questions. These days, the internet is a big help — you can learn a lot from the comfort of your keyboard. But there are still occasions where you really need to ask another human being a question. Sometimes a sensitive question. That’s one reason I became a writer: it gives you permission to ask. [...]
This result may not surprise you. Most of us want other people to like us. And it would seem obvious that we’re more likable if we don’t ask sensitive questions. On the other hand: these were anonymous, virtual conversations; you might think it’d simply be more interesting, more fun, to ask the so-called sensitive questions. But this experiment suggests that most people don’t think that way, or perhaps that we’re so conditioned to not ask sensitive questions that even when allowed, we don’t.
24 February 2021
History Of Ideas — Talking Politics: Rousseau on Inequality
Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Discourse on Inequality (also known as the Second Discourse) tells the story of all human history to answer one simple question: how did we end up in such an unequal world? David explores the steps Rousseau traces in the fall of humankind and asks whether this is a radical alternative to the vision offered by Hobbes or just a variant on it. Is Rousseau really such a nice philosopher?
16 December 2020
SciShow Psych: The Dark Side of Disgust
We’re all super familiar with the feeling we get when we smell rotten food or see gross bodily fluids. But this visceral emotion does a lot more than that, and it’s important understand to how the darker side of disgust can influence us.
17 November 2020
The Atlantic: What If Friendship, Not Marriage, Was at the Center of Life?
In the past few decades, Americans have broadened their image of what constitutes a legitimate romantic relationship: Courthouses now issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples, Americans are getting married later in life than ever before, and more and more young adults are opting to share a home rather than a marriage license with a partner. Despite these transformations, what hasn’t shifted much is the expectation that a monogamous romantic relationship is the planet around which all other relationships should orbit.
By placing a friendship at the center of their lives, people such as West and Tillotson unsettle this norm. Friends of their kind sweep into territory typically reserved for romantic partners: They live in houses they purchased together, raise each other’s children, use joint credit cards, and hold medical and legal powers of attorney for each other. These friendships have many of the trappings of romantic relationships, minus the sex. [...]
Beliefs about sexual behavior also played a role. The historian Richard Godbeer notes that Americans at the time did not assume—as they do now—that “people who are in love with one another must want to have sex.” Many scholars argue that the now-familiar categories of heterosexuality and homosexuality, which consider sexual attraction to be part of a person’s identity, didn’t exist before the turn of the 20th century. While sexual acts between people of the same gender were condemned, passion and affection between people of the same gender were not. The author E. Anthony Rotundo argues that, in some ways, attitudes about love and sex, left men “freer to express their feelings than they would have been in the 20th century.” Men’s liberty to be physically demonstrative surfaces in photos of friends and in their writings. Describing one apparently ordinary night with his dear friend, the young engineer James Blake wrote, “We retired early and in each others arms,” and fell “peacefully to sleep.” [...]
John Carroll, who met his platonic partner, Joe Rivera, at a gay bar, describes this type of romantic relationship as “one-stop shopping.” People expect to pile emotional support, sexual satisfaction, shared hobbies, intellectual stimulation, and harmonious co-parenting all into the same cart. Carroll, 52, thinks this is an impossible ask; experts share his concern. “When we channel all our intimate needs into one person,” the psychotherapist Esther Perel writes, “we actually stand to make the relationship more vulnerable.” Such totalizing expectations for romantic relationships leave us with no shock absorber if a partner falls short in even one area. These expectations also stifle our imagination for how other people might fill essential roles such as cohabitant, caregiver, or confidant.
16 November 2020
4Liberty: LGBTQ Community Became Viktor Orban’s Latest Scapegoat
In the second half of 2019, racism was the next topic to be tested, and the Hungarian Roma community became the focus point of Orbán’s hateful rhetoric. Orbán started with a harsh anti-Roma narrative, then denied financial compensation for Roma children who were forced to learn in segregated schools for years. Orbán portrayed the victims of segregated education as people who are “looking for free money”.[...]
In May 2020 Fidesz made a radical move: they completely banned legal gender recognition for Hungarian transgender and intersex people. This is an unprecedented phenomenon in Europe: legislators usually work towards a more equal society, not the other way around. This law ended a 20 year practise with which transgender people could (although, though a very long and malfunctioning, but still existing process) get the personal documents that provide their basic safety within the society. [...]
These cases show how Fidesz shifted from the “behind closed doors” narrative to the “pathologizing” narrative. And when Fidesz started talking about changing what LGBTQ people are doing in the privacy of their own home by sending them to conversion therapies or depriving them of their right to adopt, fundamental radical groups started to disrupt LGBTQ cultural indoor events.
16 August 2020
Wisecrack Edition: REALITY TV: An Idiot's Guide to Dating
Even if you're not a fan of reality tv, you probably know that their depictions of love are, at first glance, pretty bananas. But what if there's actually a lot to be learned from the way these shows construct stories about love? Let's find out in this Wisecrack Edition on Reality TV: An Idiot's Guide to Dating.
TLDR News: Why Do Migrants Want to Come to the UK? The Appeal of Britain to Refugees Explained
With footage of asylum seekers and migrants crossing the channel to get to Britain, some are beginning to question why they're making the trip at all. I mean, they've already made it to Western Europe, why then risk your life in a dinghy to attempt to get into Britain? In this video, we explain some of their motivation and if there truly are a lot of migrants trying to get into the UK.
6 August 2020
Nautilus Magazine: Your Romantic Ideals Don’t Predict Who Your Future Partner Will Be
Sparks and her team conducted two studies exploring whether our romantic ideals—the qualities we say we want most in a partner—predict who we’re actually interested in dating. In the first study, singles went on a blind date with a stranger and reported how things went. In the second, almost 600 people (both single and partnered) nominated five friends or acquaintances of their preferred gender and rated them on how romantically desirable they were. (Partnered participants were asked to rate their current partners instead of friends or acquaintances.) [...]
But that’s not quite what the researchers found. While singles’ own romantic ideals did predict who they said they’d be interested in dating, those ideals weren’t any better at predicting their romantic interest than the ideals a random other person in the study came up with. In other words, Nadya would be just as likely to be interested in Taylor if she thought he was loyal, funny, and a good cook (her own ideals) as if she thought he was smart, outgoing, and had a good body (Mira’s ideals). Only partnered participants were slightly more self-aware—their personal romantic priorities were better predictors of their romantic interest than those of random strangers—but even in this case, the difference was small at best. Across the board, romantic “priorities” seemed to be less related to romantic interest than you’d expect.
The results raise questions about whether we really have special insight into what we want. When it comes to romance, many people like to think they have a “type,” and they know what it is. Sparks’ research suggests this is an illusion. “Are we just describing positive qualities that everyone wants?” she says. “We might not fully understand our own preferences.”
19 July 2020
Daily Dot: Public sex is at the center of a queer culture war
Public sex has lost some of its popularity over the years thanks to the internet and modern cybersex, but its taboo nature—and, ironically, increased privacy away from home—still renders it popular. Still, there’s an ongoing culture war within the queer community between those who advocate for public sex and those who believe it’s abhorrent. As radical queers go toe-to-toe with burgeoning purity culture, issues of class, race, gentrification, sexual consent, and the long-term legacy of the AIDS crisis merge together to create one of the most complex issues the LGBTQ community deals with. [...]
During the 20th century, public sex was a cornerstone of LGBTQ sexual expression. By having sex in public, queer men, women, and nonbinary folks reclaimed public spaces from heteronormative society and turned them into hubs for queer eroticism and desire. Queer cruising for public sex is born out of necessity, author Alex Espinoza argues in his book Cruising. [...]
Instead, moral panic over gay public sex has grown. While cisgender heterosexual couples are much less likely to be seen as boundary violators for hooking up in a bathroom stall or the backseat of a car, queer sex is inherently transgressive, so queer public sex quickly becomes a target for homophobia from within and without the queer community. This past June, one queer Twitter user argued public sex at Pride is akin to being “flashed and traumatized by someone who decides its [sic] okay to pull their dick out.” The year prior, another queer user criticized “dumbasses who [have] public sex at pride” because the event is “family-friendly.” The user, who has acronyms for Black Lives Matter and the abolition slogan “All Cops Are Bad” in their profile, promised to “call the police” on these attendees and vowed to “bring a bat to pride and shut shit down.”
13 July 2020
Aeon: Love shouldn’t be blind or mad. Instead, fall rationally in love
As the title of the memoir makes plain, Steiner’s love is deeply irrational, verging on madness. Victims of domestic violence sometimes stay with their abuser out of fear of repercussions and backlash if they leave. This makes sense. But Steiner didn’t stay out of fear. Not initially, at least. When Conor broke a glass frame over her head, slitting open her face, her only thoughts were: ‘Don’t let this happen. I do still love him. He is my family.’ Staying with your abuser out of love, as Steiner did, is irrational because it vitiates prudential – or ‘self-regarding’ – concerns, which are the hallmark of practical rationaling.
As I have argued in my book On Romantic Love (2015), rational love – love that is sane, sound and sensible – is reason-responsive, grounded in reality and consonant with your overall mindset. These are lofty ideals but not unachievable goals. For love to be reason-responsive it must yield to reasons against it – reasons that your love is inimical to your interests. Your interests are those states of affairs that further your overall flourishing, or wellbeing. Performing an unpleasant activity might be in your best interest if it promotes your overall wellbeing. Think pelvic exams, colonoscopies and root canals – or breaking up with someone you are madly in love with. Despite knowing that Conor presented a threat to her safety and wellbeing, Steiner didn’t get out until she had suffered four years of domestic abuse. Instead, she rationalised the beatings and hid her bruises. Her love was immune to reason. [...]
To be consonant with your overall mindset, love must cohere with your beliefs, desires and emotions and not breed internal inconsistency. The love part of love-hate relationships is a paradigm example of love that vitiates this ideal. To love someone is to have a strong desire to promote their interests. But when you hate someone, you don’t want to promote their interests, and probably want to impede them. Simultaneously loving and hating someone thus breeds internal inconsistency, or what is also known as ‘cognitive dissonance’. It’s a kind of defence mechanism, where you often suppress your hatred to avoid the uncomfortable realisation that your relationship is dysfunctional. During her four-year relationship with Conor, Steiner’s rationalisations of his egregious behaviour become increasingly riven with internal contradictions and efforts to suppress her own anger and hatred.
21 June 2020
BBC4 Analysis: Modern Parenting
More time and money is being spent on children than ever before. And it's a global trend. Professor Tina Miller, who has studied how parenting styles have changed over several decades, considers what this investment in our sons and daughters tells us about the modern world. She considers whether the gold standard of educational achievement goes hand in hand with rising inequality and individualism. What might the unintended consequences be and how difficult is it for parents to opt out?
Cautionary Tales: A Tsunami of Misery
Saving people from an urgent threat can cause their lives to be blighted in profound, yet hidden ways. A monstrous wave and then a nuclear disaster forced Mikio and Hamako Watanabe from their home. But being saved from the potential dangers of a radiation leak destroyed their lives in a different way. Why do urgent dangers prompt us to take action, when far worse long-term ills are so often ignored?
12 June 2020
Aeon: Money and modern life
Time is no longer governed by the seasons or celestial bodies, but is abstracted and measured. The city also compresses space, social and geographical. Diverse classes, strata, cultures, linguistic groups and vocations are brought into close proximity. This is why, as Simmel observed, the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche preached against the city bitterly: it threatened to subsume his noble individualism into a mass.
While Simmel was a deep reader of Nietzsche and shared his romantic attraction to ‘an endless succession of contrasts’, he took an urbane distance from the latter’s aristocratic radicalism. Instead of seeking extremes in the mountains of Sils Maria, Simmel found them in the metropolitan crowd, where one can feel the uniquely modern loneliness of passing a thousand faces without recognising a friend. Nietzsche’s peaks and valleys produced noble heights and abject depths. Simmel’s metropolis instead cultivated blasé citizens who, afraid of being subsumed, distinguish themselves with externally cool indifference. [...]
Instead, he concluded that ‘truth is valid, not in spite of its relativity but precisely on account of it’. Simmel saw that the individual’s quest for truth would inevitably fail, revealing itself to be as perniciously circular as the movement of money. Thus, relativism – a doctrine of constant flux – was to be the only viable absolute. Simmel presented this as liberating: ‘the expropriator will now be expropriated, as Marx says of a process that is similar in form – and nothing remains but the relativistic dissolution of things into relations and processes.’ But there is also an element of tragedy here: to love truth is to love something we feel duty-bound to seek, even though it remains always out of reach. Like Herman Hesse’s protagonist in Steppenwolf (1927), Simmel chased an elusive absolute.
3 June 2020
Kurzgesagt – In a Nutshell: The Past We Can Never Return To – The Anthropocene Reviewed
In September of 1940, an 18-year-old mechanic named Marcel Ravidat was walking his dog, Robot, in the countryside of Southwestern France when the dog disappeared down a hole. Robot eventually returned but the next day, Ravidat went to the spot with three friends to explore the hole.
And after quite a bit of digging, they discovered a cave with walls covered with paintings, including over 900 paintings of animals, horses, stags, bison and also species that are now extinct, including a wooly rhinoceros. The paintings were astonishingly detailed and vivid with red, yellow and black paint made from pulverized mineral pigments that were usually blown through a narrow tube, possibly a hollowed bone, onto the walls of the cave. It would eventually be established that these artworks were at least 17,000 years old.
21 May 2020
UnHerd: Parents don’t want tips from the childless
In truth, the myth of parental satisfaction is at least half over-compensation. Being a parent is hard. You sacrifice your social life, your sleep, your disposable income, your once-reliable lack of contact with humans waste. Such great cost is more bearable if you can fool yourself that it’s purchased access to knowledge and goodness. But claims of individual illumination hide the fact that bringing up children is a collective enterprise. Lockdown has cut us all off from the collective. And so, the cracks begin to show. [...]
Much of this has a tone of you-made-your-bed to it. You wanted children? Well now you’ve got them all the time, and if you really loved them you’d be fine with it. You chose your choice. Part of its cruelty is that it denies parents the space for ambivalence: say you’re happy, or you may say nothing at all. And we should be able to be honest about the fact that parenthood is ambivalent. Its pains and its rewards are tightly poised, particularly for women, which helps to explain why it is that wherever women’s prospects improve, a lower birthrate follows. [...]
Without at least some babies to grow up into new adults, after all, the whole state begins to topple over. Parents who believe that having children makes them automatically wise are wrong. Non-parents who believe that not having children makes them free are wrong too: we are all tangled up in this together, and there is room for more kindness all round.
10 May 2020
Wisecrack Edition: HER - Why You Suck at Dating
Spike Jonze's 2013 film "Her" is ostensibly a movie about a man who falls in love with his computer. But if you look a little closer, it's actually more like an advice manual about how we can get better at human to human relationships. Allow us to explain in this Wisecrack Edition on Her: Why You Suck at Dating.
27 March 2020
Freakonomics: What Does COVID-19 Mean for Cities (and Marriages)?
There are a lot of upsides to urban density — but viral contagion is not one of them. Also: a nationwide lockdown will show if familiarity really breeds contempt. And: how to help your neighbor.
10 March 2020
BBC4 Thinking Allowed: Loneliness
Loneliness - Fay Bound Alberti, Reader in History at the University of York, charts the emergence of loneliness as a contemporary emotional state. Also, Janne Flora, postdoctoral scholar at Aarhus University, explores the deep connections between loneliness and modernity in the Arctic, tracing the history of Greenland and analysing the social dynamics that shaped it.
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