November 9th, 2022
Virginians avoid rule by a cretinous lunatic in the 7th District.

We took a look at Yesli Vega here.

In a blow to moral degenerates everywhere, she, like so many Republicans this morning, has lost.

November 9th, 2022
‘Boebert called a man born and raised in Montrose County a groomer – a term for a person who sexually abuses children. The remark, directed at Don Coram, a conservative Republican and rancher whose son happens to be gay, is just one example of Boebert’s casual yet crass cruelty.’

As the Dems do far better than predicted, UD’s watching the very close race between Incumbent Sadist Lauren Boebert and her challenger (who as of this writing holds a narrow lead) Adam Frisch.

September 24th, 2022
‘The Ukrainians’ efforts have demonstrated that liberal democracy and human dignity are causes people are still willing to fight and die for. They are showing that these ideas have great power.’

Also the Iranians’ incredibly brave efforts. The attention of the world is, rightly, on the dissenters in the streets of Tehran as well as on the Ukrainians. But the forces of illiberal democracy – A sham designation, no? Fascism is better. – in Russia, Hungary, Italy, and of course right here in the MAGA movement – are certainly on the march, and we must always call them out, and fight them with whatever weapons we have.

I do wonder about Europe’s militant hijabis. What do they have to say? Why have we not heard their opinion of this massive anti-hijab movement?

September 12th, 2022
As Ukraine Wins…

… Russia becomes more desperate

and dangerous. A frightening time.

An emotional time.

September 3rd, 2022
Dark Days for the SO WHAT IF SHE DIES SHE DESERVES IT FOR WANTING AN ABORTION AND ANYWAY GOD WILL SORT IT ALL OUT Crowd.

Voters have grown more supportive of legalizing abortion following the Supreme Court overturning Roe v. Wade, with a clear majority opposing restrictions, like bans at a certain point of pregnancy or barring women from traveling to get a legal abortion, according to a new Wall Street Journal poll that underscores the importance of the issue in the midterm elections.

According to the survey, 60% of voters said abortion should be legal in all or most cases, up from 55% in March. Another 29% said it should be illegal, except in cases of rape, incest and when the woman’s life is endangered, compared with 30% in March. And 6% said it should be illegal in all cases, down from 11% in March.

Lord, that last number’s falling fast! From a robust, representative 11% to a piddling SIX PERCENT since MARCH? Fu-u-uck.

What the no exceptions crowd needs is a catchy name and a Joan of Arc. The Joan is easy: Kristi Noem‘s a babe, a firebrand, a fine orator, and totally behind the whole let the mother ship go down thing.

And here’s an idea: Change your last name from NOEM to NOEX. It’s too obvious. It’s so good.

Name? Maybe GodBods. The one thing this miniscule minority has going for it is that God has told them that their position on abortion is the correct one. Their name must stress this metaphysical advantage over non-God-directed positions. Bods reflects the fact that this is all about what God wants women to do with their bodies once they become pregnant.

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

Some more numbers.

 In the six months before Dobbs, women [in Kansas] outnumbered men by a three-point margin among new voter registrations.  After Dobbs, that gender gap skyrocketed to 40 points. 

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

Post-Roe Supreme Court numbers? Oy, you shouldn’t ask…

September 2nd, 2022
Yesli Vega, Republican Candidate for Virginia’s 7th District (Pictured)…

… is a wife, mother, and anti-abortion fanatic. You don’t get more NO EXCEPTIONS than Yesli, whose views were recently featured in an ABC news report. Let’s see…

[T]here should be no abortion even in the case of rape. A woman does not sit and get raped without wanting it… There can be no conception as a result of rape. [A woman’s body prevents pregnancies from rape because] it’s not something that’s happening organically [and the rapist is doing it] quickly.

As to possible deaths of mothers, Yesli says let God sort it out…

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

Yes, yes, as you see I’m doing a mashup of Yesli and Metropolitan Chrysostomos of Dodoni; and that’s because once Virginia voters vote her in, they will essentially be living under the rule of a mentally unbalanced Greek bishop.

September 2nd, 2022
Uh-oh.

[A] majority of Texas voters are expressing strong support for abortion rights.

In a new survey, six in 10 voters said they support abortion being “available in all or most cases,” and many say abortion will be a motivating issue at the ballot box in November. Meanwhile, 11% say they favor a total ban on abortion.

But not to worry! The miniscule minority will simply run roughshod over the majority.

August 28th, 2022
“I’d literally just moved back here from Maryland, and they’re like, bam, you don’t have [abortion] rights anymore,” [North Carolina State student Emma] Morgan said. “It pulled the rug out from under us and got me and other out-of-state students wondering, should we transfer before it gets worse?”

Not to push the panic button, Emma, but yeah, you should transfer — before the zeeeeriously zany zygote zealots down there get their way and make it so people like you could GO. TO. JAIL.

Remember that NC hasn’t enacted every, er, conceivable restriction on/punishment for abortion yet, but it’s getting there fast.

You happen to come from a sane and humane state – good ol’ MD – and it’s got plenty of fine schools for you to attend without worrying about incarceration.

August 14th, 2022
‘The list of contemporary postliberal thinkers that [Matthew] Rose provides makes for dizzying and confusing reading since they have such varied commitments, ranging from Curtis Yarvin (an anti-democrat who has professed a kind of monarchism) to Peter Thiel (the libertarian plutocrat) to Adrian Vermeule (a Catholic theocrat) to Steve Sailer (a “scientific racist” of the Charles Murray school). Do these thinkers have anything in common aside from a hatred of modern liberal democracy?’

Isn’t that more than enough for them to have in common?

August 4th, 2022
Roger Has No Explanation.

Sen. Roger Marshall (R-Kan.): “It was a quite a gut punch. [Kinda like an illegal abortion, Senator.] Yes, I’m shocked, absolutely shocked. [Guess you’re spending too much time in DC. Maybe you should visit your state occasionally and get to know the people who live there. Or maybe Kansans should vote for a Senator not liable to be totally shocked by lopsided electoral outcomes in the state.] But regardless, I respect the process. .. That’s not what I was expecting, not what I was told the polling showed, and I thought it was gonna be a tight race. But it is what it is. And, again, I respect the process. I don’t have an explanation. [What a telling confession. You really have no explanation at all for this result? … Let’s start real slow for you. Are you able to come up with any explanation at all for why a person might vote in favor of abortion rights? Take your time.]

August 4th, 2022
The silent majority comes roaring back.

[I]f abortion supporters could fare as well as they did in Kansas, they would have a good chance to defend abortion rights almost anywhere in the country. The state may not be as conservative as Alabama, but it is much more conservative than the nation as a whole — and the result was not close. There are only seven states — in the Deep South and the Mountain West — where abortion rights supporters would be expected to fail in a hypothetically similar initiative.

August 3rd, 2022
‘All the conservatives who insisted they merely wanted to return the issue [of abortion] to the states will surely be good sports about this.’

Kansas is just a blip.

August 3rd, 2022
‘What the Republicans failed to realize, what the Supreme Court’s partisan theocrats failed to grasp, was that their own cultural values increasingly were at odds with the basic tenets of modernity, democracy, classical liberalism, and the Enlightenment. Living in the surround-sound world of Fox News, talk radio, and far-right social media, they failed to gauge how repulsive the world they wish to create is to a majority of Americans, and to a supermajority of young Americans.’

At one level, the Republicans do realize that actually winning the culture war requires them to do what the white South did to post-Reconstruction Blacks: deny their critics the right to vote. That’s become the fundamental electoral strategy of a party that understands that they can’t hold power in an America based on majority rule. But it may be that their racism, sexism, homophobia, assault-weapon infatuation, and primitive religiosity targets so wide a spectrum of Americans that no campaign of voter suppression can encompass all the Americans they’ve threatened, or deter all the enemies they’ve made. It was the good Republican middle-class suburbs of Kansas City that doomed their anti-choice amendment last night. Does the GOP have to keep them away from the polls, too?

You take away Americans’ established rights at your own peril, as Kansans made very clear last night.

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

Harold Meyerson, The American Prospect

August 3rd, 2022
Best summary so far of the latest Republican miscarriage. There will be more miscarriages.

In putting the issue before voters on a mid-summer primary day, conservatives in Kansas were banking on a low-turnout affair that would pave the way for an abortion ban in a reliably red state.

What they got instead was a lopsided loss that preserved the status quo yet also changed a whole swath of calculations about 2022.

The push to allow lawmakers to ban abortion in Kansas backfired spectacularly. It woke up suburban voters and even those in conservative parts of the state who didn’t want to pursue something that was practically invited by the Supreme Court’s overturning of Roe v. Wade.

It also brought an explosion of activism that Democrats hope carries them through to the fall — in the few states where abortion will be directly on the ballot and the many more where the issue will be more indirectly at stake.

August 2nd, 2022
Hell yeah.

And that’s Kansas, right?

NARAL comments:

Kansans protect abortion access in the first public vote on reproductive freedom since #SCOTUS overturned Roe.

🎉

Voters are putting MAGA Republicans on notice: When you come for our rights, we’ll show up at the ballot box.

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

“Staggering” turnout, and No to ending abortion rights wins by more than 60%. In some counties, the vote against ending the right to abortion was 95%.

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

Oh, but authoritarian common good freaks know what’s best for America. You can’t just allow these… referendums to take place all over the country, since most (all?) of them will simply reveal that Americans don’t understand God’s will. As soon as Ginni Thomas and Adrian Vermeule take over, we’ll happily bow to their divinely-inspired wisdom.

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Dr. Bernard Carroll, known as the "conscience of psychiatry," contributed to various blogs, including Margaret Soltan's University Diaries, for which he sometimes wrote limericks under the name Adam.
New York Times

George Washington University English professor Margaret Soltan writes a blog called University Diaries, in which she decries the Twilight Zone-ish state our holy land’s institutes of higher ed find themselves in these days.
The Electron Pencil

It’s [UD's] intellectual honesty that makes her blog required reading.
Professor Mondo

There's always something delightful and thought intriguing to be found at Margaret Soltan's no-holds-barred, firebrand tinged blog about university life.
AcademicPub

You can get your RDA of academic liars, cheats, and greedy frauds at University Diaries. All disciplines, plus athletics.
truffula, commenting at Historiann

Margaret Soltan at University Diaries blogs superbly and tirelessly about [university sports] corruption.
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University Diaries. Hosted by Margaret Soltan, professor of English at George Washington University. Boy is she pissed — mostly about athletics and funding, the usual scandals — but also about distance learning and diploma mills. She likes poems too. And she sings.
Dissent: The Blog

[UD belittles] Mrs. Palin's degree in communications from the University of Idaho...
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Lee Skallerup Bessette, Inside Higher Education

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The irrepressibly to-the-point Margaret Soltan...
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Margaret Soltan, whose blog lords it over the rest of ours like a benevolent tyrant...
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Margaret Soltan is no fan of college sports and her diatribes on the subject can be condescending and annoying. But she makes a good point here...
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