And oh those rabbinical courts! Really get the job done.
And oh those rabbinical courts! Really get the job done.
Babe, that’s okay. On AK-47s we’re good. Might use you for grenades and belts, but our kids are already cool with AK-47s.
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She will proudly plead guilty today, her only regret being her failure to carry out 9/11-style mass murder on an American college campus.
Trump-Backed Candidate Who Said Christ Would ‘Reign in Idaho’ Loses Primary
No fear of life in prison either, I guess.
‘Everyone was citing a survey from 2020 which suggested that 57 percent of young Muslims believed that the law of God was superior to the law of the French Republic.‘
Results like these are kinda funny, if you ask ol’ UD. I mean, at the gathering of French Muslim intellectuals and secular French intellectuals described in this NYT essay (the essay is about the increasingly popular French political right), somebody cites this numerical result, and quite a few Muslim attendees get all huffy. One of them walks out.
Yet how big a deal, really, is the result? After you draw a shocked breath, do you pause to ask how this belief is liable, in most cases, to play out in actual civic life? A lot of religious people, if you asked them pointblank, would probably say they feel like this – that divine trumps secular law. Why do you assume this means that they would fail to obey secular law if they live in a secular state? How often are they compelled to choose between the two? To take an example I’ve talked to death on this blog – The French have with remarkable success, far as I can tell, imposed a burqa ban. Nobody seems too bent out of shape about it. Most even marginally rational people know that they will have to make some concessions when their religious enthusiasms hit hard against the rule of law in a non-theocracy.
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I’ve drawn the comment in my headline from the same essay.
But since Meadows and Thomas did it all under orders from Jesus (their texts are shot through with Good v Evil), we can only join the editorial board of Compact (see post below) and applaud these servants of the Lord. Satan stole the election, but they fought the good fight and will be granted sainthood by President Waldstein in the Cathophate to come.
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Meanwhile, Justice Thomas has been hospitalized with Lying Low Syndrome.
Ben Burgis:
Compact’s founders seem to believe that the ruling class is imposing social liberalism on an unwilling majority. But the majority of our society is wildly socially liberal by historical and global standards — or even by recent American ones.
According to a recent Pew poll, fewer than 10 percent of Americans think that marijuana should be illegal, for example. Almost three quarters agree with the Supreme Court decision on same-sex marriage assailed by [Compact writers]. Two-thirds oppose laws that limit trans rights. As young conservative Nate Hochman recently acknowledged, polling shows that even young Republicans are “more liberal than their older counterparts on everything from diversity to LGBT rights to immigration to climate change.”
Few European countries have been as historically friendly to the kind of laws [Compact‘s editors] might support to defend “familial and religious” communities against “libertine” encroachments as the Republic of Ireland — and within the last decade, abortion and same-sex marriage were both legalized there by popular referendum. And they were playing catch-up. At least until some unforeseen cultural shift dramatically realigns public attitudes, any scenario by which neo-medieval traditionalists succeed in wielding state power to smite gay people who want to get married and women who want to control their own bodies and drag queens who want to read to children at the library is a scenario by which social conservatism is imposed against the will of a large majority of the American populace.
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In the words of Eric Levitz, Compact‘s editors share “the delusion that their own esoteric misgivings about liberalism reflect those of a silent (or latent) majority.”
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Compact calls itself “radical,” and UD‘s heart goes out to it. She knows radical – the smell of it, the sweat of it, the aching sweetness of it. Her radical lover, David Kosofsky (brother of radical Eve), massaged her feet after their long march together on the Pentagon and it all went directly from UD‘s feet to her head. Started feety, ended heady. She was swept up in the edgy epater les bourgeois truth of existence, and her sense of excitement, clarity, and superiority was … she could taste it, man. UD remembers attending a John Cage concert around thirty years ago at Harvard – it was put on by a group of undergraduates – and, you know, some affectless madwoman drags herself forward onstage and begins chewing her violin – and, bored out of her gourd, UD began glancing around, and there entwined on the floor behind her were two students involved in the staging of the show, and the way they looked at each other! The certainty, the arrogance, the excitement! Tell me about it, babes, thought UD, smiling at them. Tell me about it.
Right rads got the same thing going, only they’re clenching in the back row of a heretic getting burned at the stake. As I say, my heart goes out to them.
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Update: Thanks go to my friend Rita for telling me about the phrase RAD TRADS — “young Catholics who prefer traditional liturgy, including the Latin Mass, and subscribe to more conservative political beliefs and religious practices.” UD was reaching for this when she wrote “Right rads,” but Rad trads is double-plus-good! Rad trads are like the Rad rois Lucien Goldman recalls encountering when he first arrived in France in 1934:
There was a very strong royalist movement among the students and suddenly a group appeared which was equally in defense of royalism, but which demanded a real Merovingian king!
Seems reasonable to ol’ UD, and in making this law for at least one of its regions, India is acting in accord with a lot of other countries.
Karnataka’s high court, that is, has ruled that the hijab is not a required religious garment. Those who want a different outcome can appeal the ruling to the supreme court, though I doubt a higher court will reverse it.
The fear … is that the BJP is trying again to impose its Hindu majority agenda on the minorities by depriving them of their right to religion and their freedom of choice.
That’s a very reasonable fear; yet given the routine nature, around the globe, of restrictions on school uniforms, I’m not sure it pertains in this case. In the matter of India, UD is more scandalized by this:
[A recent] government introduced Vedic astrology as a subject in college curricula, despite opposition from several leading scientists.
Some of it, anyway. She was one of hundreds of people who increased the Ridgeland Library’s funds after the town’s homophobe mayor refused funding when he found out that libraries have books and all.
[The Freedom from Religion Foundation contacted] Cabell County Schools administrators in 2017 and 2019 regarding religious activities taking place in schools. … “Despite FFRF’s prior warnings, … adults have continued to promote religion to Cabell County students during the school day, including through religious assemblies,” the lawsuit states.
Three strikes you’re sued, I guess. And it’s about time. No fan of promiscuous litigation, UD nonetheless has long argued on these pages that hopeless recidivists – and fanatics just can’t help it – can only be controlled, in many cases, via the legal system.
Horny haredim, for instance, are always going to stand up on airplanes and demand seating that does not torment them through the proximity of female flesh; and the only way to control this behavior has been to throw them off the airplane when they do their thing.
I mean, the only way for an airline to avoid endless $500,000 a pop successful lawsuits brought by harlots publicly forced to change their seats is to throw the haredim off the plane. Or threaten to do so. Which now routinely happens.
Similarly, it’s quite clear from the incorrigible behavior of Huntington High School’s principal that he perceives his teenage charges as lambs of Christ whether they like it or not, and no heathen “foundation” is going to stand in the way of his herding and revivaling them. Only the principled removal of the principal, plus painful financial penalties against the school district, will begin to perform the miracle of making the blind see in West Virginia.
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‘Course ol’ UD is also waiting for the part where it turns out the principal’s receiving kickbacks from Nik, the mentally challenged revivalist in question, per teenage hellion butts the principal puts in seats. Or whatever. There’s got to be some form of money corruption at play here; it wouldn’t be Jim Bakker-style revivalism without it. Let’s wait and see.
Google News is full of the Good News this morning. It’s all over the place!
Try it in your community — Just take one public school, stage a religious revival meeting, and lock students out of their classrooms so they have no choice but to attend. It’s that simple.
Once her giggling fit subsided, UD , a Jew, gave the matter some serious thought…
“Maroon me on a desert island with nothing to read but First Things.“
Such as this 2015 event at the University of Chicago, which wee UD only just discovered.
Let me frame my remarks by recalling this comment from Christopher Hitchens:
When the Washington Post telephoned me at home on Valentine’s Day 1989 to ask my opinion about the Ayatollah Khomeini’s fatwah, I felt at once that here was something that completely committed me. It was, if I can phrase it like this, a matter of everything I hated versus everything I loved. In the hate column: dictatorship, religion, stupidity, demagogy, censorship, bullying, and intimidation. In the love column: literature, irony, humor, the individual, and the defense of free expression.
One of the heroes of free expression I’ve found through writing this blog is Geoffrey Stone, a law professor at the U of C. I’ve had two occasions to feature him, one when he defended Laura Kipnis against silly Northwestern, and another when he shared an email exchange he had with American Nazi Richard Spencer. Stone is a wise calm rational defender of pretty much unfettered free expression, and he introduced the guest speaker on my cosmic convergence youtube, which – I dunno – already the combination of Stone and the U of C – a school which welcomed wee UD generously and lovingly for her graduate education – had UD warm and runny…
This is from Stone’s introductory remarks:
We the people acting individually … get to decide what we think when we think it. We do not allow a government or a university or a corporation or a religion to make those choices for us. That’s the essence of what it means to be free.
Stone goes on to introduce the U of C undergraduate who unwittingly set in motion a big event at the school. Eve Zuckerman, president of the school’s French club, wanted to invite heroic free speech advocate Zineb El Rhazoui to speak to the club. But getting a person living under five thousand fatwas to the United States ain’t exactly a matter of paying for a flight from Paris. Zuckerman ended up needing serious help (help which was happily provided) from lots of French and American government and security officials, some of whom ended up attending El Rhazoui’s talk. So that’s impressive and heartening.
Yet more impressive was the tough, articulate (in her fourth language), non-negotiable defense of free speech and free thought launched by El Rhazoui, who has been particularly visible in the French media lately because of the notorious “dolls without faces” documentary which features the apparently Muslim-radicalized French city of Roubaix.
It’s funny how these dolls, on sale at a toy store there, have taken on a powerful symbolic life across France — I guess because they’re a simple, very graphic evocation of the social reality whereby some Muslim children are trained up very early indeed in a sense of their nothingness, their invisibility. Veiling is hardly scandalous, even to a six-year-old, if you’ve always understood yourself to be without even a face.
Anyway, there it all was: The University of Chicago, Stone, El Rhazoui. What a pleasure.
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UPDATE: The president of UD‘s George Washington University might want to watch the Stone/El Rhazoui youtube.