A young Tunisian woman is sentenced to six months in jail because she retweeted a covid health advisory which uses religious calligraphy.
Making children wear burqas is criminal. Another German state – Baden-Württemberg – bans them for schoolgirls.
Conor Friedersdorf writes:
[The letter writers use] the same tenuous, abuse-prone, guilty-by-association tactics that the far right has used to tar academics by linking them to Communism or Islamism… [They are] trying to radically narrow the bounds of acceptable speech and inquiry… A closer look at the letter lays bare the specific ideological orthodoxies and political tests that at least hundreds of linguists now feel comfortable openly imposing on their colleagues… [They are] poring over years of individual tweets, asserting uncharitable interpretations of those they highlight, assigning guilt by association, and imposing multiple orthodoxies that are incompatible with academic freedom… The desire to significantly narrow the bounds of acceptable speech is not a fringe proposition; it is a project that hundreds of people in a single academic field are willing to pursue openly.
Wee UD was so excited to read the opening pages of Christopher Lasch’s Culture of Narcissism (1979). Already tutored in the Wastelander philosophy of her Northwestern University professor Erich Heller (a refugee from Hitler, he came by his despair honestly), she was way ready for the everything’s shit in America thing Lasch had going. She enjoyed imagining herself far superior to the shallow narcissists at the heart of his analysis; and she for sure enjoyed his incessant invocation of an entirely catastrophic US of A.
It took UD years to recognize that total, eloquent denunciations of the total despicableness of this or that culture are seductive and dangerous things. Fascists and communists specialized in them. Sharia-touts will gas on all night about the comprehensive decadence of America and Europe. Cathophates (UD‘s term for Catholics who want to gift us with a Catholic caliphate) write books and books and books with the following come-on: Hey, citizen of a democratic secular state – aren’t you depressed and lonely and empty? Wouldn’t you like to be part of a warm embracing community that will endow your suicidal existence with meaning and purpose and eternal life so you won’t even have death-anxiety?
Elder-UD has learned to appreciate people like Cancel-Culture-Target-du-Jour Steven Pinker. While no Pangloss, he’s not simply one more intellectual trying to snow you with the hopelessness of it all.
Of course UD still thinks things are pretty stinkin’ – what with the ascendancy of Trump – and she still thinks dark-eyed despair sexier than clear-eyed calm… But she’s wary, now, of high-gloss misery peddlers. Cuz most of them are selling something. Something extreme.
Our girl Shamima is still at it, trying this way and that way to get back into the country she left in order to be a broodmare for ISIS, whup Yazidi slave girls, and tailor suicide vests to human bombs. What an interesting sojourn that was! And now that an appeals court has ruled she can return to England to try to get her British citizenship back, it’s time to look to the future with fresh eyes.
But, as legal analysts note, Begum is still due to spend forever in the Syrian desert, because the British government is just as fanatical about keeping this incredibly dangerous woman out of the country as she was about tugging her burqa aside for long lines of ISIS sperm depositors. No one’s going anywhere for a long time.
And as for how to think about England ultimately having to spend millions in taxpayer money to transport, house, and protect a vicious, committed enemy of everything for which the country stands…. Well, dedicated UD readers know UD‘s take on that one. No price is too high when the fight is truly for the survival of a free and democratic state. Pay whatever it takes to try her, expose her atrocities, and ship her back.
Although UD‘s fascinated by Autonomies, a dystopian Israeli film, she’ll never watch it. She’s triggered by images of female slave cultures. But what’s amazing about this imagination of an Israel that devolved into bloody secular/religious civil war thirty years ago and is now entirely balkanized between a strict haredi sect territory in and around Jerusalem, and a modern territory in and around Tel Aviv, is that at least one important Israeli intellectual says dystopia shmystopia! It’s a great idea and let’s get going on it!
The series is very clever, with bracing realism (a smuggler makes an excellent living smuggling porn and pork into Haredi Autonomy), but what it’s really about, if you ask ol’ UD, is the horror of surrender to theocracy. Israel has only itself to blame for decades of cynical accommodation to massed ignorant fools who think every offense against liberty and dignity they commit comes stamped with God’s Approval; no wonder Israel’s artist class now depicts the tragicomic walls within walls within walls within walls location that place has become. You don’t reason with the lord’s anointed; they don’t do reason; they’re pre-reason; they’re non-reason; they’re anti-reason. Let them ride roughshod over your democracy and hey look ma no democracy.
*****************
[Israeli media conglomerate] Keshet is also in the early planning stages of an English-language adaptation of the format, set in the United States and using America’s own blue state-red state divide as a substitute for the original Israeli plot.
Oh really? Oh reallllllyyyy? So let me tell you something, Buster. Happy to have you do that; plan away. But the overlay ain’t working for me.
Let’s see. Half of America is dirt poor (the other half is unimaginably rich); no one there has any occupational skills and anyway everyone refuses to work because keening over religious texts will feed their children. So their children are starving. They don’t believe in the germ theory of disease so coronavirus is killing everyone over sixty. Anyone interested in their territory is making a play for it since except for a small group of secular mercenaries no one fights. Daily street riots rage between teenyweeny ultraorthodox sects headed by senile warring rabbis. Women are totally absent from the world. There aren’t any. No one knows where they are; where they went. There aren’t any.
This is totally cool drama-wise for sure. I just don’t think we can manage it. I’m seeing plenty of yahoos waving Confederate flags, yes. Absolutely someone’s breaking into a gender theory class at Oberlin waving an AK-47. I’m not saying our blue-red state divide is without dramatic potential. I’m saying we just totally do not measure up.
I mean, they do, don’t they? They voted for it. They will vote for it.
Donald Trump has been the worst president this country has ever had. And I don’t say that hyperbolically. He is. But he is a consequential president. And he has brought this country in three short years to a place of weakness that is simply unimaginable if you were pondering where we are today from the day where Barack Obama left office. And there were a lot of us on that day who were deeply skeptical and very worried about what a Trump presidency would be. But this is a moment of unparalleled national humiliation, of weakness.
When you listen to the President, these are the musings of an imbecile. An idiot. And I don’t use those words to name call. I use them because they are the precise words of the English language to describe his behavior. His comportment. His actions. We’ve never seen a level of incompetence, a level of ineptitude so staggering on a daily basis by anybody in the history of the country who [has] ever been charged with substantial responsibilities.
It’s just astonishing that this man is president of the United States. The man, the con man, from New York City. Many bankruptcies, failed businesses, a reality show, that branded him as something that he never was. A successful businessman. Well, he’s the President of the United States now, and the man who said he would make the country great again. And he’s brought death, suffering, and economic collapse on truly an epic scale. And let’s be clear. This isn’t happening in every country around the world. This place. Our place. Our home. Our country. The United States. We are the epicenter. We are the place where you’re the most likely to die from this disease. We’re the ones with the most shattered economy. And we are because of the fool that sits in the Oval Office behind the Resolute Desk.
******************
Why do people want barbarians? Read Cavafy’s Waiting for the Barbarians.
… night has fallen and the barbarians haven’t come.
And some of our men just in from the border say
there are no barbarians any longer.
Now what’s going to happen to us without barbarians?
Those people were a kind of solution.
This man is a solution. Like all primitive ideologues he shushes our anxiety about enlightenment and tucks us in to the dark. Around him, in our new America, range viciously authoritarian Harvard law professors and whorishly indifferent attorneys general – a whole pack of barbarians at the very highest levels to take us where we want to go. These people are a kind of solution.
**************
Recall Roger Shattuck’s words about Trump’s dada, Ubu the king.
[Ubu is] the representative of primitive earthy conduct, unrelieved by any insight into his own monstrosity, uncontrollable as an elephant on the rampage… [M]ankind in the shape of Ubu dredges the depths of its nature…
Can we really laugh at Ubu, at his character? It is doubtful, for he lacks the necessary vulnerability, the vestiges of original sin. Not without dread, we mock, rather, his childish innocence and primitive soul and cannot harm him. He remains a threat because he can destroy at will, and the political horrors of the twentieth century make the lesson disturbingly real… [Alfred] Jarry’s humor [in the play] may be regarded as a psychological refusal to repress distasteful images. He laughed and invited us to laugh at Ubu’s most monstrous behavior, not because we are immune – we are, in fact, deathly afraid of the ‘truth’ of Ubu – but because it is a means of domesticating fear and pain… [Humor] demands that we reckon with the realities of human nature and the world without falling into grimness and despair.
The sleep of reason produces monsters, doncha know. Donald Trump is the specifically American monster that happened while we were sleeping.
***************
Less artsy discussion here.
... Lincoln Project ads, carefully targeted to appear during Fox News shows the president watches, have so successfully enraged Mr Trump that his reaction has generated days of news coverage – in turn raising the group millions of dollars in grassroots donations.
I dunno. I think what’s most salient about Trumpian thinking is its quality of being simply embarrassing. To betray your titillation at the thought of the big boys rushing in and bashing democratic dissent is to prompt blushes rather than revulsion. To write a love letter to the president, begging his approval of your convictions about deep state and deep church conspiracies, is to inspire us to twist about uncomfortably in our chairs. To try – and fail – to be as sadistic as your master is to humiliate yourself. To “dream of a world in which we will ‘sear the liberal faith with hot irons’ in order ‘to defeat and capture the hearts and minds of liberal agents'” is to reveal the extremely peculiar eroticism at the core of your being — something most people would try to hide.
So it’s not really disgust that we feel at Trump-thought. The feeling is closer to how we feel witnessing a person with middle-functioning autism work his way around a room. His passions clearly control and mark him; and though he does not understand them, he cannot help barking them out.
A law school doesn’t have to stand for much but it at least has to stand for the rule of law or it’s just $200K and three years of reading Enlightenment fan fiction. Gassing peaceful protesters, illegally bringing National Guard troops into Washington, and hiring… whoever the hell these paramilitary shocktroops are, all safely fall outside the confines of “respecting the rule of law.” Taking away a fake degree — and perhaps the “William P. Barr Dean’s Suite” that graces the school — would seem the very least that the school could do to protect their legacy.
Joe Patrice at Above the Law notes that UD‘s school – GW – has plenty of reasons not to want to be associated with Trump’s militarized attorney general; and, having awarded him a “fake degree” — that is, an honorary one (he also has an actual law degree from GW) — it shouldn’t have much ambivalence about revoking it. Patrice also notes the bs about slippery slopes universities always generate when this very rare event – degree revocation – occurs:
The slippery slope … continues its undefeated reign as the logical fallacy of choice for anyone interested in draping immorality in the faux high-minded vestments of amorality.
As you know if you’ve read this blog for any period of time, a recent GW president lustily and certainly amorally defended Bill Cosby’s right to hold on to his GW honorary degree, despite Cosby’s having drugged and raped all those women. (For UD‘s posts on that revocation story, go here.)
As for the Dean’s Suite, I think they should maintain that, and simply add a dollop of commentary. Post six of these at the entrance. It would only set the school back three hundred bucks.
The unease associated with a concealed face is not an antique prejudice: Just a few years ago, but in what already feels like a bygone era, many European nations, confronted with the Islamic practice of veiling, prohibited face coverings. In 2014 France successfully argued in the European Court of Human Rights that “the voluntary concealment of the face is … incompatible with the fundamental requirements of living together … [and] the minimum requirement of civility that is necessary for social interaction.” … [But now, under threat of the virus,] we are forced to abandon the physical intimacy and openness that normally foster trust and community…
Anti-burqa talk, already accepted and routine in European nations, now becomes something you can read in Slate. Expect more American keening, in these plague times, about the terrible damage done to civic life (And hey: Imagine if world governments currently mandated that masks must be worn only by women.) through masking.
… is its treatment of female terrorists. To read deeply, as UD does, in the literature of ISIS women is to conclude that qua gender we are incapable of understanding ideology, much less committing ourselves to ideologically motivated activity. We certainly can’t breed people excited by the sight of infidels getting beheaded. ISIS women are always innocents led astray by men exploiting their pathetic need for love; they are such damaged traumatized people that they will go with anyone who presents himself as caring even a little bit about them.
Even in obvious cases, like Canada’s hardened veteran Ayan Jama, experts are always being wheeled out to assure us that chicks itching to explode themselves and bystanders in an act of martyrdom are really drifty ethereal lost souls, gentle troubled Amanda Wingfields… We are intended to listen to their bullshit with interest and sympathy…
While she acknowledged wanting martyrdom, she said that did not only mean to die in battle…
To be sure, certain forms of interpretive dance can also be expressions of martyrdom..
So, like, Canada wants her out, has refused to renew her passport, etc., and she’s complaining that not only has this meant the poor woman has “lost marriage proposals,” but she’s a fine upstanding etc etc and the bomb-making stuff government investigators found is just … I mean… who hasn’t experimented, especially during these tedious at-home coronavirus days, with building a bomb?
“I remember thinking this Trump thing is insane, but when it was down to him and Hillary, I kind of said, ‘Well, you are a Republican, and yeah he’s nuts, but maybe he’ll get better and you know he’s going to lower taxes,” Taylor said. “I slowly talked myself into it. ‘He can’t seriously be this deranged once he gets in there,’ and he’s even more deranged now than I thought then. So, I take the blame. I voted for him.”