… from whom this blog has long demanded the very highest levels of institutional dementia, and in whom UD has in fact never been disappointed.

Way back in 2006, when UD encountered one of hundreds of Auburn’s fake courses / fake professors / fake departments sports scandals, she embarked upon her Auburn journey, replete with drunks and thugs and sex addicts — and that only describes the upper administration.

One of Auburn’s Scream-Jesus’-Name football coaches has just left that school for Jerry Falwell Jr’s Liberty University, on whose campus the ambient heavy breathing is either paroxysmal prayer or President Falwell watching his wife fuck the pool boy.

Auburn, like Baylor University, broadcasts its spiritual superiority to us all while behaving in all ways with breathtaking moral degeneracy. It would be too fictional to believe if it weren’t all true. But Coach Hugh Freeze is true, and Auburn is true, and Baylor is true, and Liberty is true.

Because you don’t remain a big fat ethical shit-strip without the full-hearted support of your community, UD was shocked by a recent local jury decision in favor of an Auburn professor who pointed out that the school is a hypocritical cesspool, and who was subsequently systematically destroyed by the administration — everyone, including that week’s president (filthy schools like Auburn can’t keep presidents, cuz their … uh… sins are always in danger of exposure) fucked the guy over in Jesus’ name. The guy sued and won a bunch of money and Auburn got punitive fees imposed etc.

I mean, maybe, as in the case of the tanking Mr Fuckface himself — with his Big Bible Held Aloft + sex/money crimes, treason, and fascist anti-semitism — even the Deep South is tiring of the Shit All Over Jesus Shitshow.

LOL.

Immediately! Or our name ain’t The Theocratic Republic Of Israel.

‘Younger evangelicals are clearly rejecting their evangelical parents’ politics. Growing numbers of young evangelicals and former evangelicals are questioning or rejecting the movement’s teachings on a range of social issues, including sexual abstinence (so-called “Purity Culture”), LGBTQ equality, patriarchy, racism and climate change. They are more politically liberal than their parents and are “losing interest in the culture war.”

For some time now, “younger white evangelicals have become more permissive of abortion, (even as) older ones have moved in the opposite direction,” supporting more and more stringent abortion bans.

As a scholar of religion, I have long believed that pursuing a political strategy to change the Supreme Court has deformed evangelicalism, making it a political movement more than a theological one. When evangelicals supported Donald Trump by more than 80% in 2016, some students of the movement were surprised. How could the party of “Family Values” support a man who has five children by three different women? How could they continue to support him even after hearing him laugh about grabbing women by their private parts on the “Access Hollywood” tape?

If pundits had missed the signs that evangelicalism had traded its core theological values for political gains, its younger members seem to have figured it out.

Now, many young people are rejecting the label evangelical altogether, with some declaring themselves to be exvangelicals. Having lost sight of the core meaning of their movement, evangelicals are losing their children, first as voters, then as co-religionists.’

Valerie Cooper, Duke University

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Soon Trump will command only the demographic that SPECIALIZES in being dumb, reactionary, and hypocritical: The ultraorthodox.

And since most of them – UD predicts – will be moving to theocratic Israel, in flight from American officials who might soon put real pressure on them to allow their children to go from subliterate to marginally literate, UD will now make another prediction.

Realizing that he cannot win the presidency, Trump will take his adherents to the promised land, where he will work out a power-sharing arrangement with Netanyahu and Jerry Falwell, Jr., who will already have moved his flock there.

ORTHODOX PARTIES DEMAND

LEGALIZATION OF GENDER SEGREGATION

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You know… UD always thought it was pretty cool that as the bona fide spawn of a Jewish mother, she has automatic Israeli citizenship. Yet never until now has she been seriously interested in taking it.

UD has always found strict gender separation and all the other abuse that accompanies it… uh… well, let’s just say that from the moment she watched the handcuffs scene in Goodbye Lenin! (?) she has found the idea of living in chains irresistibly exciting.

Yet she always thought she’d have to seek the realization of this fantasy in no-go Iran or Afghanistan. Now she can live in cosmopolitan Israel, where, for instance, if she gets bored with the daily staging of her masochism she’s free to leave.

Depends!

When appointing high court justices, do you avoid

1. liars?
2. hypocrites?
3. religious fanatics?

R vous fucking kidding?? We can do WAY better!!!

[E]vangelicals and Catholics… have presented themselves as these very strict arbiters of what your morality should be….. [T]his morality is used as a shield to hide from everyone else the … power that they want to have…

[T]hey don’t care about morality for themselves. This is why Herschel Walker gets a pass for two abortions; he gets a pass for beating women. He gets a pass because he’s forgiven by God. But the rest of you have to follow the rules …

GenZ wants nothing to do with these hypocrites.

In the unlikely event that one of their clueless terrified sex slaves actually even comes to understand the nature of what’s happening to them, and then actually has the courage to complain to someone about it, all of the other cult leaders will hush it up and let the abuser keep abusing. Their cult leader friends in the government will cover it up further if it needs further covering up.

Maybe when one of the many abusers- like Zvi Tau – gets to be 85 years old, enjoying the deep sexual satisfaction of decades of raping children, one of his victims finally decides to give complaining about it another try. She does embarrassing things like stage solitary protests in front of the Knesset, which only shows how insane she is and how her claims are pathetic delusions poor woman.

But then other similar psychos come forward with the same story and a few respectable rabbis back their claims and call for an investigation. Here’s one woman describing the esteemed sage in action:

“I was a new immigrant, my parents were abroad, I was all alone,” she said, explaining that she met the Taus through social gatherings and friends. She became close with Tau’s first wife, Channa Tau, and practically became part of the family, according to her testimony.

‘“One day I was in the kitchen, putting things away when he came in and closed the door behind him. He grabbed me, pulled my underwear down, and undressed,” she recollected.

“At one point, I woke up, I realized what was happening and kicked him in the groin. I ran to the balcony because he had closed the door and managed to escape without my underwear,” she said.

“I got home and just froze. I think I stayed like that for two days,” she said.’

What wisdom. To go after the most vulnerable.

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But look at Israel’s current government, folks! Nobody’s going to get in the way of all the wise eminent rabbis who rape! The Israeli authorities are going to let Zvi go to his well-deserved heavenly rest.

And remember: It’s not criminal. It’s not child abuse. In a cult it’s godly. It’s only the disgusting dirty secular world that doesn’t understand this.

What will their parents do, now that The Prince of Intellectual Darkness, that fervent ignorance-advocate Lee Zeldin, has been defeated?

As you know, UD has been predicting that if Zeldin’s defeated, many of New York’s ultraorthodox will do the obvious thing and enjoy life under the orthodox/ultraorthodox theocracy that is contemporary Israel.

We’re way out there now.

Liberal Jews like me, who chronicle the appalling ways of the ultra-orthodox, will have plenty to do.

I have predicted that significant numbers of u-o based in the US — and increasingly harassed by our democratic government — will move to Israel. And hey: Israel’s a paradise for them now. Endemic lawbreakers here, they will be among friends there:

Israeli Jewish voters elected a slate of right-wingers—and convicts at that, or at least people in deep legal jeopardy. Netanyahu is on trial for three different serious counts; Aryeh Deri, the leader of Shas, the ultra-Orthodox Sephardic Party supported by Jews from North Africa and Arab countries, resigned from the previous Knesset with a plea deal for tax evasion; and Ben-Gvir himself has been convicted of inciting racism and supporting a terrorist organization, Kahane Chai.

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“The ultra-Orthodox mutation is a transition from the exiled way of life of the minority that has lived its own life, maintained its way of life and doesn’t provoke foreign rulers, to the new way of life of the minority that lives at the expense of others, an economic parasite, a draft dodger, absolves itself of civilian responsibility and has no real respect for the democratic regime and its principles,” said [Asa] Kasher, who is a professor emeritus at Tel Aviv University and a recipient of the Israel Prize.

The nationalist mutation is a transition from the religious way of life where there is adherence to the principles of justice and fairness, honesty and compassion; [a life] that reveres God but with humane conduct, to an unruly, wicked way of life that [primarily] sanctifies the land and controls its inhabitants with violence, using methods that have no justice, no compassion, no morals and, has more than anything else, a idol-like worship of the land, the nation and its corrupt leadership.

I remain a person of Jewish origin. I will always be so. My origin and my identity are the healthy Judaism that preceded these morbid, malignant, rude and repulsive mutations…“

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[T]his is the beginning of the end of the age of liberal secular Zionism. We can send Herzl’s remains to Vienna and Ben Gurion’s to Plonsk.

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[Yitzhak] Rabin’s assassination … killed the Israel that Mr. Rabin was imagined to represent. The Israel that many Americans — and especially American Jews — fondly remember for its irreverent secularism and vaguely social-democratic ethos no longer exists. It was always more myth than reality, but the facts that enabled the myth are gone: A conservative interpretation of Judaism increasingly dominates the public sphere. The last left-wing parties are headed to the grave. 

It’s always been a little dicey, trying to get away with failing to educate your children, and stealing taxpayer money, in America, a country with a meaningful law enforcement establishment. Massive systemic welfare fraud as a way of life occasionally gets you in trouble in this country — just ask Lakewood NJ’s rabbi and his flock.

And now the major ultraorthodox yeshiva in New York City has to pay back eight million of the ten million it stole from the state through truly remarkable, contemptible, long-term, deceit. Which this blog will not detail (it violates our obscenity standards), but by all means read the article yourself.

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Why is UD confident they’ll keep stealing? It’s structural, babe. You educate a community to feel no affiliation with the US beyond lockstep voting as their rabbi instructs them … whaddaya think’s gonna happen? The “US” – that abstraction out there – exists to provide money for one’s life of grand and petty crime, and there’s nothing at all wrong with devoutly pious God-fearers lying and cheating and swindling THAT thing, that vacuous entity out there that can be made to discharge money. It’s just the way they think, and that is that.

That’s the problem with cults; and it’s why self-respecting governments surveil and, when the fraud gets too too too much, pursue them legally.

The argument in support of the hijab proceeds on a deeply flawed assumption that girls have an option to wear or not wear it. And since they have exercised their free agency and chosen to wear the hijab, the laws of the land must respect their choice. This argument fails to recognise the fact that the families that prescribe and subscribe to the hijab usually make it mandatory for their female children, when they are as young as four or five years old, to wear the garment whenever they step outside their home or when they are in presence of male family members. The choice of wearing or not wearing the hijab is already made for them by the accident of their birth. The collective pressure exerted by families, especially the male members, a deeply conservative society, and the burden of arcane interpretations of religious dogma make it virtually impossible for any of the hijab-clad girls to exercise free choice.

The head of the ultraorthodox party announces:

‘English, math studies [are] useless for Israel’s economy.’

And I trust he has been severely punished. Ultraorthodox schools can’t let this sort of thing – a student surreptitiously learning enough to pass a basic competency exam – go on: It will only encourage other students to learn things.

**********************

The details are good.

[L]etters written by the rabbi in charge of [one] school’s English department … displayed an apparent lack of fluency in English.

“Bus changes can only be made in the office of Transpiration,” the rabbi wrote in a 2019 letter. Elsewhere, he added: “Any misbehavior will be dealt with in a firm manor.”

That should be Perspiration, and manure.

See, here’s how I figure it: Most people are not fanatics. Most people are just people, with this or that personal enthusiasm, this or that religious faith, even this or that fanaticism, but they tend to keep it (because most people consider fanaticism creepy and even threatening) to themselves, or to a few other fanatics with whom they meet by night and howl at the moon or whatever. Extreme extremism just isn’t a good look for most people, doesn’t at all jibe with normal ordinary reasonably contented rather complicated human life, and indeed often manifests to the broad non-fanatic world as abnormal monomaniacal stupidity with a side order of willingness to die and to kill. One thinks of the sad insurrectionists in the US Capitol with their magical MAGA letters smeared on motorcycle jackets and Viking helmets. When these people speak to judges and January 6 committee members, their pitiable condition is broadcast to us all. Watching them, one wonders what new violent insipid Thing will capture them once they’ve served their sentence.

Now in my day (UD‘s an old hippie) the prevailing image was Charlie’s Girls, Manson’s fanatics, who marched off to courtrooms en masse, sporting each day it seemed a new magical MAGA sort of thing: identical chopped off hair, messages scrawled on their foreheads … All fanatics seem to make of the body nothing more than a vehicle for their pathetic passion; all fanatics seem to move always en masse — the larger idea behind all of this being the evisceration of any self for the sake of the God or the Cause.

A theocracy run by religious fanatics will of course try to turn a large, largely normal populace into fanatics – their particular category of fanatics – and they will always fail.

Having failed, and being rigid fanatics, they will then double down:

‘Raisi decided to confront the erosion of support by implementing a plan called “strategies to spread the culture of chastity” – in essence a repeat of a policy first adopted in 2005.

The essence of the 115-page plan, as published by Iranwire, was as follows:

• The introduction of surveillance cameras to monitor and fine unveiled women or refer them for “counselling”.
• Seminary students being placed in residential buildings to monitor how occupants dress in communal areas.
• Hospital staff being required to provide “appropriate garments” to female patients on their way to surgery.
• Fines for any individual who designs, imports, buys or sells “vulgar dresses”.
• New disciplinary policies for female actors who work with the state broadcaster.
• Mandatory prison sentence for any Iranian who questions or posts content online against the mandatory hijab law.’

Peeing myself laughing here. I’m sorry, but we really are dealing with heavy-duty idiocy; and I’d be laughing even harder at all the wonderful language — culture of chastity, counselling, vulgar dresses, appropriate garments (picture women wheeled into brain surgery in full hijab/robe, with surgeons drilling through all the modesty cloth) if the regime weren’t as I write this killing protesters.

Even a former speaker of the Iranian parliament just warned in an interview that “extremism in enforcing social mores leads to extremist reactions.” The regime will probably jail him.

So NOW you’ve got – what? 110% non-support for the hijab? Even many women who wear the hijab – and hijabs aren’t marks of fanaticism until, under the vicious imperatives of violent theocracies, they are – now protest with the no-hijab people.

The cretinous clerics are well on their way to revealing the heart of fanaticism – not piety, or any other form of moral seriousness, but death-cultishness which is always busy drilling down to its deepest truth: It is a sacred privilege to kill anyone who is not exactly like me.

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[Protesters may ultimately] be tried and charged with hirabh, or enmity towards God, which is punishable by death. This may yet get very dark.

The protesters are guilty of enmity towards the regime, not God; but then, being religious fanatics, the regime sees no difference between the two. And in any case (see above) death is what they had in mind from the outset.

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 [T]he daring women of Iran … risk their lives daily for an end to their decades-long imprisonment by medieval fanatics, in this unconscionable, real-world telling of The Handmaid’s Tale.

Bernard-Henri Levy