Month: March 2013

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Readers relay a few customs from other countries:

Just wanted to add my two cents to this thread. In a lot of Hispanic cultures like Cuba (where I’m from), you take both your mother’s maiden name and your dad’s name. It’s not hyphenated – you just kind of have two last names. The assumption though is that when your son gets married, his wife will take only the father’s name. However, even if your kids ultimately don’t take this approach, I like the idea of the double last name. If your concern about taking your spouse’s last name has to do with whether your name will live on, you can give your kids both names and then both parents have, on average, more than 20 years to convince the kid to pass on one or the other’s last name.

Another reader:

Iranian women, on the whole, do not change their surnames after marriage. By the way, Happy Persian New Year (Norooz Mobarak!)

Another:

Québec long ago came up with the answer.

By law, no names change in marriage. All women keep their own name.  If you want to change your name, that is a different legal function – a legal name change, like anyone else who wants to change their identity. When I first moved here, I did not know this, and hearing all the politicians and their wives introduced I thought “Is everyone shacking up?” But Québec – which for 40 years has had some of the most progressive civil law in North America – was an early bulwark of feminism, and for pure equality and consistency’s sake this makes logical sense.

Update from a reader:

I’m not sure your reader from Quebec is highlighting anything different than in the US. A name change is not some integrated part of a marriage in any State that I’m aware of. I happened to get my marriage license in North Carolina (hardly a bastion of progressive civil rights) and there was nothing about a name change included. We just filled out the paperwork and mailed it in. There was no assumption (other than culturally) that her name would change and we didn’t have to opt-out of anything to prevent it from happening. In fact, from what my friends have told me it’s quite arduous to get your name legally changed.

A name change is a formal legal function independent of marriage here just as in Quebec and I’m sure it’s been that way for plenty of decades. Sorry to rain on his holier-than-thou parade.

But another clarifies:

Here in Quebec, women are not allowed to take their husbands last name. My wife and I married last summer and though I had no expectation that she should take my name, she would have liked to on account of her own conflicted feelings about her family name. Since 1981, however, Quebec law has specifically prohibited it, although one can apply to change it after a few years if one can provide evidence that one is commonly known by another name.

Not surprisingly, I see a higher percentage of hyphenated names here than elsewhere. Although there are many great things about living in Quebec, this refusal to accept people’s choice of whether to change their names or not reflects the heritage of the French nanny state that I could certainly do without.

Beinart thinks Obama’s speech today was “a great, even profound, speech”:

It was a great speech because Obama rejected the Jewish right’s endless rhetoric about Israel having “no partner.” He defended Mahmoud Abbas and Salam Fayyad, and told Israelis what their own security officials know: that Palestinian leaders in the West Bank, at political risk to themselves, have in recent years helped save countless Israeli lives. It was a great speech because Obama asked Israelis to “look at the world” through the eyes of a Palestinian child who sees her parents controlled and humiliated by a foreign army. Contrast that to Benjamin Netanyahu, who when referring to the Palestinians’ “plight” and how much “they have suffered,” in his 2000 book, A Durable Peace, put those phrases in quotation marks, as if to suggest that real Palestinian suffering does not exist.

Yossi Klein Halevi calls it perhaps ” the most passionate Zionist speech ever given by an American president”:

Of course, his embrace had an explicit message for Israelis: Don’t give up on the dream of peace and don’t forget that the Palestinians deserve a state just as you do. But as the repeated ovations from the politically and culturally diverse audience revealed, these are messages that Israelis can hear when couched in affection and solidarity. After four years of missed signals, Obama finally realized that Israelis respond far more to love than to pressure.

Elliott Abrams remains convinced that Israel has no partner for peace:

Obama was most persuasive when discussing American-Israeli bonds, and least persuasive in his descriptions of the Arab Middle East. In his remarks today he pictured an Arab world, and a Palestinian political system, yearning for peace with Israel through negotiated compromises. This ignores the vast ocean of anti-Semitism in the Arab world, and the inculcation of hatred of Jews and Israel in generation after generation of Arabs—including Palestinians. And it ignores the rising tide of Islamism in the region, which threatens to engulf all those political figures who would really like a compromise peace. The Arab world Obama described is a place far more desirous of, and far closer to, peace with Israel than the one Israelis actually see around them.

Goldblog was at the scene:

I spoke to several members of the audience, who confirmed my impression that Israelis just wanted to know that he liked them. It’s hard to understand this from the U.S., but the idea really did take hold here that Obama genuinely hated Israel. So this whole trip is a bit of a revelation for ordinary Israelis. On the other hand, I’ve run into people who were surprised President Obama took it too strong to Bibi (one conservative-leaning Israeli I just ran into suggested that Obama was interfering in Israeli politics as payback for Netanyahu’s alleged meddling in the American election).

Chait’s analysis:

Here is the progression of his speech. Having demonstrated empathy for Israel, Obama then asked Israelis to feel empathy for Palestinians. Of course there is only so much Obama can do. He can’t make Netanyahu negotiate peace, nor can he make Palestinians accept one. But as much as he could do with a speech, Obama did today. He probably wishes he gave it a long time ago.

iFixit’s Kyle Wiens makes the case that being locked out of our technology is an issue that goes beyond smartphones:

Who owns our stuff? The answer used to be obvious. Now, with electronics integrated into just about everything we buy, the answer has changed. We live in a digital age, and even the physical goods we buy are complex. Copyright is impacting more people than ever before because the line between hardware and software, physical and digital has blurred. The issue goes beyond cellphone unlocking, because once we buy an object — any object — we should own it. We should be able to lift the hood, unlock it, modify it, repair it … without asking for permission from the manufacturer. …

This isn’t an issue that only affects the digerati; farmers are bearing the brunt as well. Kerry Adams, a family farmer in Santa Maria, California, recently bought two transplanter machines for north of $100,000 apiece. They broke down soon afterward, and he had to fly a factory technician out to fix them. Because manufacturers have copyrighted the service manuals, local mechanics can’t fix modern equipment. And today’s equipment — packed with sensors and electronics — is too complex to repair without them. That’s a problem for farmers, who can’t afford to pay the dealer’s high maintenance fees for fickle equipment. Adams gave up on getting his transplanters fixed; it was just too expensive to keep flying technicians out to his farm. Now, the two transplanters sit idle, and he can’t use them to support his farm and his family.