1.) Austria’s Conservative and Green parties have agreed plans to extend a headscarf ban in schools … [Austria’s new Conservative/Green governing coalition] deal includes banning the headscarf in schools for girls up to age 14, an extension of the garment ban that applies until age 10 approved by lawmakers earlier this year.
If women want to cover, they can decide that for themselves; the business of forcing it on children is disgusting. Note too what UD has been saying for years: Opposition to compulsory covering of girls is one of the few issues on which left and right in many countries agree.
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2.)
… “White Wednesday” and “My Stealthy Freedom” campaigns have seen women film themselves without hijabs in public in Iran, which can bring arrests and fines. [Even with the threat of jail] there have been signs of women increasingly pushing back against the requirement.
During a trip to Iran in July, an Associated Press journalist spotted about two dozen women in the streets without a hijab over the course of nine days. Many other women opted for loosely draped colorful scarves that show as much hair as they cover.
While there have been women fined and arrested, others have been left alone as Iran struggles with economic problems and other issues under re-imposed U.S. sanctions …
Lise Ravary, a writer for the Montreal Gazette, makes the simple, crucial argument UD‘s been making since Blog Day One: Despite Katha Pollitt’s lazy claim that “religion is what people make of it,” religion actually isn’t anything people might claim it is. All sorts of acts, ranging from socially destructive to barbaric, are routinely defended as religious, and secular societies have an obligation to scrutinize these acts and when appropriate call them legally out of bounds.
“When she wanted to get the party going, a very progressive lawyer friend of mine liked to argue that female genital mutilation is none of the state’s business and should be allowed under the Charter [of Rights and Freedoms],” notes Ravary, who shares UD‘s incredulity that any self-respecting state would let this progressive lawyer have her way. Few things are more subject to state concern than large-scale physical assault against children.
States similarly have the right – again, I’d say the obligation – to respond to the desire of the people to sustain their secular identity in social places where this seems important. Thus, the bill Ravary talks about, which forbids religious symbols, “applies only to public service workers in positions of authority, including teachers, police officers, prison guards and Crown prosecutors, while they are at work.” So this means no, you cannot wear a niqab and teach at the same time; and if you are unable to imagine life in the social world without your niqab on you at all times, you are going to be unable to teach in the Quebec public sector. This is of course true of many other localities, including France and England.
The high-profile arrest, in Dubai, of a spectacularly murderous drug lord based in the Netherlands, prompts a BBC article which touches on a disturbing possibility: Liberal drug laws (which UD, as an old hippie, tends to go for) attract the cartels. “… 59% of [the Dutch believe] the Netherlands [is] now a narco-state.”
[A] report commissioned by the mayor or Amsterdam in August described the capital as a “Valhalla for drugs criminals .” … The Netherlands has in a sense created the perfect environment for the drugs trade to flourish. With its extensive transport network, its lenient drug laws and penalties, and its proximity to a number of lucrative markets, it is an obvious hub for the global narcotics flow.
The Court of Appeal upholds Quebec’s secularism law.
[A]s an image, the blacked-out face of a woman, the alleged obscenity of a woman’s face and hair which must apparently be hidden from view to please God, is not conducive to the post-religious value of democratic equality and democratic engagement.
The Magic Kingdom: Where a violent demented man pursues a fine living as an Islamic preacher who throws shoes at women on the street if they’re only wearing a hijab and abaya.
“If a woman reveals her face and allows men to smell her perfume, she is an adulteress,” he spoke at the top of his lungs.
Ladies of the world! Saudi Arabia is currently making a big tourism push! Remember to pack black gloves, black tights, black flats, a hijab, an abaya, a chador, a burkini, a niqab, a burqa, Moccasin Joe, and a helmet.
[He] moved the party sharply left on austerity, spending on public services, tax cuts for the working poor, and a higher minimum wage. He outflanked the far right on Brexit and shamelessly echoed the left on economic policy.
This is Trumpism without Trump. A conservative future without an ineffective and polarizing nutjob at the heart of it. Johnson now has a mandate to enact this new Tory alignment, and he will be far more competent than Trump at it. Unlike Trump, he will stop E.U. mass migration, and pass a new immigration system, based on the Australian model. Unlike Trump, he will focus tax cuts on the working poor, not the decadent rich… [If Boris succeeds,] he will have found a new formula designed to kill off far-right populism, while forcing the left to regroup.
The political sweet spot in the next few years will be a combination of left economics and a celebration of the nation-state… If Johnson succeeds, he’ll have unveiled a new formula for the Western right: Make no apologies for your own country and culture; toughen immigration laws; increase public spending on the poor and on those who are “just about managing”; increase taxes on the very rich and redistribute to the poor; focus on manufacturing and new housing; ignore the woke; and fight climate change as the Tories are (or risk losing a generation of support). That’s where the GOP will have to go if they want to recover from becoming an authoritarian cult.
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Also: An interview before the election with Nimco Ali.
It’s rare – because politically incorrect – for academics to admit that burqas pose a real problem in intellectual settings. Instead they end up saying the most moronic shit about the glories of teaching silent invisible women. So bravo Robshaw for stating the obvious but still socially unacceptable: Burqas make teaching pretty much impossible. Good on Robshaw, too, for disposing of the whole Islamophobe thing.
If someone offers arguments why the burqa should be banned, you can call them an Islamophobe if you like – you might even be right – but you haven’t engaged with their arguments. Even if the arguments are advanced without sincerity, they still need to be judged on their merits. Someone else who decidedly wasn’t an Islamophobe could come along and advance the same arguments, and then what could you say?
We’re getting there, folks.
… endures legal harassment from the same. Background, and a protest letter, here.
This Vox piece is the best summary of Hoda Muthana’s situation I’ve seen; it predates a judge’s recent ruling that she is not in fact an American citizen. Certainly the details in my headline suggest that, along with requesting Yemeni citizenship (her father was born in Yemen), Muthana could approach Tunisia on behalf of herself and her son.
Furthermore, ISIS remains wealthy; it is certainly in a position to give Muthana and her son money to buy citizenship in any number of countries that trade citizenship for hard cash. She might ask private wealthy sympathizers (from the Gulf states?) to give her money; or a Go Fund Me page might be set up by family and friends for this purpose.
The only full-throated defense of welcoming Muthana back to the States that I’ve seen is Noah Feldman’s sober warning that revoking her citizenship will “set a terrible precedent for others whom the government might try to strip of their citizenship in the future.”
To which ol’ UD says: Well, there’s precedent and there’s precedent. How often, in fact, has the US government revoked a person’s citizenship? My sense is that it happens exceedingly rarely. And why? Because it’s exceedingly rare that a US citizen voluntarily leaves the country to become a terrorist in an organization at war with the US, an organization that carries out mass murder all over the world, and in its own territory tortures, takes slaves, and publicly beheads. As her first act abroad, Muthana filmed herself burning to ashes her despised passport; and as her second act she broadcast international propaganda calling for the extermination of Americans. This series of acts Feldman characterizes as “offending public sentiment.”
The next time a U.S. citizen abroad offends public sentiment, you can expect the government to start looking for ways to pull his or her citizenship. That prospect is worrying to say the least.
Yes, the next time some old hippie in France burns the American flag you can expect… Really? Muthana did much more than hurt our feelings; she tried to fucking kill us. UD‘s beloved Christopher Hitchens said it best: My enemies are the theocratic fascists… I want to destroy them. In the case of Hoda Muthana we want to keep her out of our country rather than destroy her.
Feldman points out that this desire originated with the politically liberal Obama presidency; his administration was the first to tell her no. In this extreme case of indeed virtually unprecedented degeneracy and obvious threat, public sentiment is not offended; it is united in being justifiably terrified and disgusted.
The proposed ban has received cautious and somewhat surprising support from the Indonesian Ulema Council (MUI), a powerful and traditional Islamic group whose former chairman Ma’ruf Amin is now vice-president.
Ikhsan Abdullah, who heads the MUI’s law and regulatory Commission, told The Weekend Australian the niqab was “not in accordance [with] the culture and values of Indonesia.”
If it seems incomprehensible to you that the British don’t want to be in the EU, consider what the Danes just subsidized with their membership: A high-profile formal report condemning the fifth strongest democracy in the world as a reactionary ethnocracy — and this judgment courtesy of that well-known champion of democratic values, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. (Ooooooops!)
European Parliamentarian Niels Fuglsang, who represents the ruling Social Democrats, has said that he will demand an explanation from the European Commission. “I don’t think our taxpayer money should go to such a propaganda business for Erdogan.”
“We are so to speak paying for a report that spreads lies and propaganda about ourselves,” notes Social Democrat MEP Christel Schaldemos.
EU to Denmark: Get with the program! Marry your girls off at thirteen, stick ’em in a burqa, and shut the fuck up.
Finally, we all have a voice.
… and various Islamic groups keep lazily saying yes. I mean, they don’t even bother arguing the thing, making a case — they just say dude no problem so what’s your problem?
Ali Abu Shwaima, the chairman of the Lombardy Islamic Center, said there has never been a problem due to women wearing a burqa or veil, thus such a ban is pointless. “Everyone should be free to dress as they wish,” he said.
One, no one is allowed to present themselves to any public realm I’m aware of in any way they wish. Two, a logic issue: If there has never been a problem of this sort, why is northern Italy, along with many regions and countries all over the world, passing burqa bans? UD detects a problem. This guy might at least do everyone the favor of offering reasons why banning burqas is a bad idea. As you know if you follow UD on the subject, burqa fans are strikingly lazy (banners are Islamophobes is about as far as many of them think they need to go) in its defense. I’m guessing it’s because it’s hard to defend.
Her neighbors live in rural Arkansas, ground zero for nihilism, American-style. Their worst enemy is Elizabeth Warren, the Plan lady who not only thinks she can improve rural education and health care, but who thinks people in rural Arkansas want to improve them. Au contraire: they appear to like the chaotic destructionism of Trump. “[M]any here seem determined to get rid of the last institutions trying to help them.”
The intense hostility to political establishments of all kinds among what could be called “chaos voters” helps explain what Pew Research and others have found: a growing distrust among Republican voters of higher education as well as empirically based science, both of which are increasingly seen as allied with the liberal establishment.
As for caring whether Trump betrays Kurds and Ukrainians: “It’s an attitude that is against taxes, immigrants and government, but also against helping your neighbor.” If they’re not going to care about their neighbor, imagine how they feel about Kurds and Ukrainians.
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Matt Taibbi puts it like this:
Implicit in this campaign of bureaucratic dismantling has been the message that pandemonium is a price Trump is very willing to pay, in service of breaking the “disaster” of government. Many of his top appointees have been distinguished by their screw-it-all mentality.
The world is ending, so fuck it, let’s party. As crazy as it is, it’s a seductive message for a country steeped in hate and pessimism. Democrats still don’t understand it.
Think of the final scenes of Nevil Shute’s On the Beach. The world is ending (nuclear annihilation), so the inhabitants of the last city the fallout will reach stage endless insane suicidal car races, where drivers who have nothing to lose gun their engines until the final spectacular flame-out.
Leaving nuanced definitions to the philosophers, I would define nihilism as a combination of three basic elements: a refusal to hope for anything except the ultimate vindication of hopelessness; a rejection of all values, especially values widely regarded as sacrosanct (equality, posterity, and legality); and a glorification of destruction, including self-destruction—or as Walter Benjamin put it, “self-alienation” so extreme that humanity “can experience its own destruction as an aesthetic pleasure.” Nihilism is less passive and more perverse than simple despair. “Nihilism is not only despair and negation,” according to Albert Camus, “but, above all, the desire to despair and to negate.”
A nihilist is someone who dedicates himself to not giving a shit, who thinks all meanings are shit, and who yearns with all his heart for the “aesthetic pleasure” of seeing the shit hit the fan. Arguing with a nihilist is like intimidating a suicide bomber: The usual threats and enticement have no effect. I suspect that is part of the appeal for both: the facile transcendence of placing oneself beyond all powers of persuasion. A nihilist is above you and your persnickety arguments in the same way that Trump fancies himself above the law.
Another go at it:
[Evidence suggests a] significant share of Trump supporters are as nihilistic and destructive as Donald Trump himself, [which] supplies a sort of Occam’s-razor answer to all the questions about why they put up with him: His worst traits are a feature, not a bug, for those who take pleasure in chaos.
Democrats still don’t understand it, says Taibbi. Okay, so let’s zoom in a bit:
Self-destruction is apparently many Arkansans’ middle name. If they’re not panting piously after the end of days, they’re offing themselves with opiates, or putting one of their abundant guns to their heads. They make the Sex Pistols look like the Lennon Sisters. The Donald Trump Show is what they’re laughing at on tv while kissing their ass goodbye, exactly like their fellow end-stagers from states with similarly massive gun ownership/suicide rates (Montana, Alaska, Wyoming). We’re killing ourselves! But before we do, we’re voting Trump.
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And on that chaos thing. UD has always liked William Arrowsmith’s comment about an education in the humanities:
[The] humanities are largely Dionysiac or Titanic; they cannot be wholly grasped by the intellect; they must be suffered, felt, seen. This inexpressible turmoil of our animal emotional life is an experience of other chaos matched by our own chaos. We see the form and order not as pure and abstract but as something emerged from chaos, something which has suffered into being. The humanities are always caught up in the actual chaos of living, and they also emerge from that chaos. If they touch us at all, they touch us totally, for they speak to what we are too.
So, you know, distrust higher education all you like. But be aware that it’s trying to make some serious moves against your chaos, that its novels and poems both acknowledge the foundational reality, and exploit the generative energy, of that chaos as we seek to emerge from it, on occasion, into form and order. Into organized life.