Too horny to defend the homeland, Iranian men must be kept from the sight of female heads.
While the “Woman, Life, Freedom” street protests were largely snuffed out months ago, and stricter hijab rules have been enacted, legions of Iranian women … are still refusing to wear hijab in public.
… In mid-June uniformed and plainclothes security forces again raided coffee shops in several cities and beat customers over hijab rules. And the police chief of a northern resort province was filmed telling a subordinate, “Break the neck of anyone who breaks the [hijab] norms … and I will take responsibility.”
In Deneen’s thinking, it is axiomatic that the central divide in Western politics is between the villainous liberal elite (the “few”) and the culturally conservative mass public (“the many”). The liberal elites wish to impose their cultural vision on society and attack the customs and traditions of ordinary people; the many, who are instinctively culturally conservative, have risen under the banner of leaders like Trump to oppose them.
Except how do we know that liberals really are “the few?”
Deneen doesn’t cite election or polling data to support his theory of a natural conservative majority. Trump has never won the popular vote while on the ballot; his party performed historically poorly in two midterm elections since his rise to power. Polling on the cultural issues Deneen so cares about, like same-sex marriage, often finds majority support for liberal positions.
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While reading the book, Beauchamp emailed Deneen asking what he thought of some of Beauchamp’s reactions to his arguments. Deneen completely refused to engage:
“I’m quite certain you’re unlikely to deviate from any conclusions you’ve already settled upon, regardless of what I might try to convey in response to any questions.”
Beauchamp sees in this refusal Deneen’s revolutionary commitment to “conflict” rather than conversation with the liberal enemy. UD sees it as far more insidious, the sort of snobby/nihilistic reaction you get from a person who left a position at Georgetown University because it’s not truly Catholic and “insulated” himself (to use a word Deneen constantly uses to characterize out of touch liberal elites) at the University of Notre Dame, and who – should God grant him long life – will eventually leave Notre Dame for Ave Maria University, and then Ave Maria for a pontifical campus in Rome within walking distance of the Vatican. It don’t get no more cluelessly elite than an intellectual shut-in uniquely possessed of the truth.
Given Deneen’s influence, the incredible sloppiness of the writing in Regime Change is a surprise. Many of his sentences are ambiguous if not incomprehensible, many of his paragraphs internally contradictory. There are places where the literal meaning of the words on the page [is] precisely opposite to what he plainly intends to convey. (When he says that it was “not uncoincidental” that two related things coincided, I doubt he means they happened together merely by chance.)
Even going to great lengths to puzzle out the strongest versions of the arguments Deneen seems to be making will get the reader only so far. Every one of his major claims disintegrates under scrutiny. You’re left with the impression that he barely understands his own ideas, and that he misunderstands entirely the thing he’s arguing against.
… Yes, people are ticked off about woke overreach by the progressive left. But the idea that most Americans favor a crackdown on pornography or a reintroduction of Sabbath laws or any of Deneen’s other post-liberal fantasies is comical.
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Yeah, but when Deneen and his monk take over, this reviewer will be the first heretic burned at the stake.
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To make matters worse – taken to task by two lady reviewers in the NYT and Reason.
He claimed he could alter the course of hurricanes. He claimed 9/11 was divine punishment for “pagans, abortionists, gays, lesbians, [and] the American Civil Liberties Union.” He joins Brother Falwell in the bowels of hell.
Patrick Deneen is the revolution’s Menshevik to Adrian Vermeule‘s Bolshevik; but he’s a prominent enough theocrat to score a scathing review in today’s NYT.
Me, I’ve got some sympathy for Deneen: He’s deeply invested in top-down Bang ‘Er Mandates, as in Viktor Orban’s spectacularly failed mission to get drunksuicidal Hungarians to do the missus and seed the world with Hungarians. Orban’s more than done his bit, focusing relentlessly on getting women out of college and splayed panting ‘pon the ágy; but so reluctant are the men that the state has confiscated the fertility clinics, and – in a blow to Natural Law and all that stuff – been engineering the little buggers. Sad.
The Bible has been removed from all elementary and middle school libraries throughout the Davis School District [in Utah] after someone challenged its contents.
A committee tasked with reviewing books that fall under review for sexual content last week determined that the Bible will be retained at district high schools, but removed from all elementary and middle schools…
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So predictable. Once you let people challenge library books, the sky’s the limit.
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In the day since this decision was announced, the Davis School District has also received a request for the Book of Mormon to be reviewed for inappropriate content.
University Diaries mainstay, Philip Esformes, who was convicted of running the “largest single criminal health-care fraud [scheme]” in the history of the Dept of Justice (he got twenty years), and who soon after was miraculously pardoned by Donald Trump, is on UD‘s mind this morning. Everyone’s talking about the increasingly plausible claim that DT and R. Giulianisold pardons for two million dollars apiece.
Did they? Did Esformes, a way-pious orthodox Jew (I’ve already told you how much I love shout-out-loud hypocrisy!), shell out the bucks? Can’t wait to find out.
Meanwhile, right after Esformes got sprung, the pissed off feds filed another big criminal case against him (when you’re a world-historical crook, the pickins ain’t slim) so that was maybe two million down the crapper but thanks to tens of thousands of dead and dying old people (nursing homes were Phil’s MO) Esformes has TONS of money so don’t worry.
There are 16 counties in the United States with populations of at least two million residents. Eleven of them were less religious in 2020 than they were a decade earlier...
The Florida Senate rejects one of the guv’s hand-picked nominees for New College trustee. Herr Eddie Speir is the architect of A WHOLE NEW WORLD! He has announced his plan to fire THE ENTIRE FACULTY, JA? JA! His main activity once he’s done that will be informing students that Jesus Christ is King and that vaccines and climate change are anti-Christian conspiracies.
A whole new world A new fantastic point of view No one to tell us no Or where to go Or say we’re only dreaming
[W]omen’s health specialists from states where abortion is criminalized are beginning to relocate to places like Washington state, which has strong abortion rights laws.
“[W]e are legally unable now,” explains an exiting Idaho doc, “to prevent harm to patients.”
Another: “This isn’t a safe place to practice medicine anymore.”
Not safe. Which has UD thinking along the following lines: With the removal of virtually all gun laws in some of these same states, we begin to see emerging what I guess these states have always wanted: The return of frontier life. Ain’t got no docs out here. Don’t need no docs. You’re on your own.
These same states tend to be, you know, also our big anti-vax states, our big anti-science states (schools should teach creationism, not evolution), our big anti-gay and (Idaho certainly!) our big anti-Jew/anti-black states, our big secession states… Obviously these attitudes aren’t out there everywhere in all of these places, but you can just see many maternal-death-before-abortion legislatures determined to rid their states of anything at all, say, associated with the Enlightenment.
It’s really queer, if I can transfer that term from gay provenance to, uh, the provinces. Radically queer.
… where gun ownership is mandatory, has begun to attract attention from social theorists as well as policy makers due to its sudden, exponential, growth.
The so-called ‘Flakellants’ (pronounced “flak,” not “flake”) derive their identity from the medieval Flagellants, groups of religious fanatics who marched – and march: flagellants continue to exist – through the towns and cities of Europe half naked, scourging themselves bloody with penitential whips in a public, masochistic act of self-mortification.
Contemporary “Flak”ellants – in a behavior reflecting what David French describes as “a form of gun idolatry or gun fetish that treats a gun as a quasi-sacred object” – march semi-nude in public thoroughfares while scourging themselves with guns in the shape of crucifixes.
Last week, a three thousand-strong contingent of Flakellants took to the streets of Provo (for modesty’s sake, women Flakellants wear flak jackets), their numbers increasing as local citizens spontaneously grabbed their own guns, attached heavy ropes to them, and pistol-whipped themselves.
All Flakellant marches end with at least one public suicide as an act of ultimate sacrifice/penitence; these are apparently never planned but rather the result of an overflow of spiritual/gun-bearing fervor. “Of course, it’s a sin,” one of the Provo marchers commented to a reporter covering the event, “but you can’t stop someone determined to bow to the power of the gun. For us, the pouring out of their blood in front of us is a communion as powerful as the Blood of the Lamb. We wet our fingers with this sacred outpouring and mark our foreheads and our gun crosses with it.”
The next Flakellant march (co-sponsored by the Catholic organization Rifle-Scopus Dei) will be in two days, in Salt Lake City, led by Tennessee Representative Andrew Ogles. It is expected to attract at least ten thousand participants.
