The Washington Post: President Trump is ignoring the lesson of two world wars

But looking at the wilting of America’s influence and alliances, especially the weakening of NATO, solely through the lens of long-term Russian aspirations misses the bigger picture. Trump’s fulfillment of Kremlin aspirations also violates the central tenet of America’s foreign policy since 1945: The United States must stay actively involved to keep Europe stable. Trump instead intends to leave Europe to battle its history alone — a move that threatens the security of the continent, and our own. [...]

Generations of postwar American strategists imbibed this dogma, regardless of party or politics. “The history of the past two hundred years in Europe showed that Western Europe would tear itself to pieces” without outside supervision, Republican Secretary of State John Foster Dulles explained in the early 1950s. His Democratic successor, Dean Rusk, toed the same line. “Without the visible assurance of a sizeable American contingent,” he explained, “old frictions may revive, and Europe could become unstable once more.” Advisers to Nixon, Ford, Carter and Reagan all said the same. [...]

Trump is thus fueling the very forces that previous generations of American policymakers feared as much — if not more — than the Soviets, and the real causes of Europe’s historic inability to keep its own peace. Nationalism is on the rise. Britain voted to leave the European Union. France, Austria and the Netherlands nearly elected proud xenophobes. Poland and Hungary have. More ominously, Europeans are re-arming.  Sweden has recently reintroduced military conscription. Norway expanded its own. The European Union announced plans for a new headquarters for military planning and coordination, outside of NATO control or integration.

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The Guardian: Improve the Brexit offer to EU citizens, or we’ll veto the deal

The UK response came three weeks later. It was a damp squib, proposing that Europeans obtain the status of “third-country nationals” in the UK, with fewer rights than British citizens are offered throughout the EU. Europeans will not only lose their right to vote in local elections, but family members will be subject to minimum income requirements, and it is unclear what the status of “post-Brexit” babies would be. This carries a real risk of creating second-class citizenship. The proposal is even in contradiction with the Vote Leave manifesto, which promised to treat EU citizens “no less favourably than they are at present”. [...]

While we have the greatest respect for the British legal system, courts apply the laws adopted by British politicians, who are currently unable to give sufficient guarantees for the years to come, let alone for a lifetime. British and European citizens should be able to enforce their rights under a mechanism in which the European court of justice plays a full role.

In early 2019 MEPs will have a final say on the Brexit deal. We will work closely with the EU negotiator and the 27 member states to help steer negotiations. Our wish is to deliver an ambitious and progressive withdrawal agreement; we want to be clear that sufficient progress – especially on citizenship and the financial settlement – is needed before we can define this new relationship between the EU and the UK. Brexit negotiations must be completed by 30 March 2019; we will not support any extension to this deadline, because it would require the UK to hold European elections in May 2019. That is simply unthinkable. [...]

uy Verhofstadt is an MEP, and chairs the European parliament’s Brexit steering group. The article was co-written with a cross-party group of MEPs: Manfred Weber, chair of the European People’s party group; Gianni Pittella, chair of the Socialists and Democrats group; Gabi Zimmer, chair of the European United Left-Nordic Green Left group; Ska Keller and Phillippe Lamberts, co-chairs of the Greens-European Free Alliance group; Elmar Brok, member of the Brexit steering group; Roberto Gualtieri and Danuta Hubner, both members of the Brexit steering group.

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CNN: Can this priest persuade church leaders to welcome gay Catholics?

After the massacre at the gay nightclub in Orlando last year, only a few Catholic bishops expressed their sympathy or reached out to the LGBT community, and even fewer used the words "LGBT" or "gay" in their statements. That was revelatory to me. Even in death, LGBT people are largely invisible in the church. [...]

He is absolutely right. That doesn't mean that church teaching caused the shooting, but the ways in which religious leaders speak about the LGBT community influences the way the culture at large talks about them. Oftentimes it can give people cover for simply being homophobic, and they can use church teaching as a mask for their homophobia. [...]

You could make the "scandal" case about a whole raft of people: people who are divorced; people who are divorced and remarried without an annulment; women who have given birth to, or men who have fathered, a child out of wedlock; an unmarried couple who are living together. All these things are very public and we chose not to thunder over them. That, to me, is classic discrimination. Either you require everyone to adhere to church teaching -- on everything, not just sexual morality -- or not. But you don't put one person's life under a moral microscope simply because they are LGBT.

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Vox: An atheist Muslim on what the left and right get wrong about Islam

Rizvi’s book is partly a plea for secularism and partly a defense of Islam as a culture. It’s also an internal challenge to Islam as a body of doctrines. Rizvi speaks directly to agnostics, atheists, and humanists living in the Muslim world, enjoining them to embrace secular culture without abandoning their Muslim identity. [...]

I think the left has a blind spot when it comes to Islam and the right has a blind spot when it comes to Muslims. When Christian fundamentalists like Pat Robertson say something that's homophobic or misogynistic, people on the left descend on them like a ton of bricks. They’re very comfortable with criticizing and satirizing fundamentalist Christianity. But when it comes to Islam, which has many of the same homophobic and misogynistic teachings, they throw their hands up, back off, and say, whoa, hold on, we must respect their religion and culture. [...]

But this still doesn’t take away from the point. It still stands that religion — and I say religion in general this time because while Islam is especially dangerous today, the other Abrahamic religions have served the same purpose when they were — lends itself extremely well to the goals and whims of authoritarians, tyrants, and the violent everywhere, whether it’s being used as a prop or driving them by belief. [...]

One thing Christians and Jews don’t always understand, because it’s hard to relate to, is that most Muslims do revere their holy text very differently from them. It’s not just divinely inspired or written by men of God. It is written by God himself, every letter, every punctuation mark. It’s literal, and it’s infallible. You can’t even touch the book unless you’ve performed an ablution ritual. It’s very serious. [...]

I say that the first step to reform in Islam is rejection of infallibility. This seems outrageous to some. They say it’ll never happen. But it has happened in the past. Reform Jews today make up a majority of American Jews. None of them believe the Torah is the literal word of God anymore. But for a long time, that was the deal — the Torah was revealed to Moses at Mount Sinai and the Tabernacle like the Quran was to Muhammad starting in the Cave of Hira at Mecca. It was error-free. Suggesting otherwise was blasphemy — and look up Leviticus 24:16 to learn the consequences of that.

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Vox: Why small talk is so excruciating (Nov 23, 2016)

The problem, of course, is that small talk precedes big talk in the normal course of human affairs. Most people feel the need to get comfortable with one another before they jump into the deep end of serious conversation or ongoing friendship. Which means if you hate and avoid small talk, you are also, as a practical matter, cutting yourself off from lots of meaningful social interaction, which is a bummer. Also, research shows that more frequent small talk, even among those who identify as introverts, makes people happier. Also, despite recent advances in technology, small talk remains an unavoidable part of many basic life tasks. [...]

In the 1970s, however, sociolinguistics became more attuned to the everyday forms of speech that, after all, constitute the bulk of our verbal communication. And feminist sociolinguistics in particular noted that a dismissive attitude toward speech that establishes and maintains relationships — as opposed to task-oriented or informational speech — was of a piece with patriarchal disrespect for traditionally female roles. Think of the derogatory implications of the term "gossip," which is, after all, social talk about social dynamics. [...]

Malinowski was wrong — small talk is not just important for those seeking companionship (or avoiding silence). It's also important in a whole range of social, commercial, and professional settings. It weaves and reweaves the social fabric, enacting and reinforcing social roles. Think of the different varieties of small talk between doctor and patient, vendor and customer, employer and employee. Each has its own rhythms and rules. And of course the character of small talk differs from place to place, culture to culture. For example, silence, contra Malinowski, is not viewed as threatening or uncomfortable in all cultures. [...]

On another level, talking is a social behavior. Every speech act is an act, meant not only to communicate something but to do something: reassure, acknowledge, nurture, enjoin, reject, dominate, encourage, or just fill awkward silence. We can think of this as the social function of a speech act. Unlike semantic content, social function cannot be understood in isolation, just by examining the words. Social function depends entirely on context, on tone and body language, on the interpersonal roles being played, on historical and environmental cues. It only makes sense relative to context.

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