… fascist.
photo vahid salemi
“I love my black job,” [Simone] Biles wrote on X Friday… It’s an apparent dig at Trump’s controversial comments earlier this week, telling a roomful of Black journalists that immigrants are taking “Black jobs.”
The brave women of Iran keep at it, subverting the vile clerics and the even viler morality police through sheer force of numbers. Even some presidential candidates there are condemning the vicious, degrading treatment of women who hate the hijab and don’t want it anywhere near them or their daughters.
I mean, they really hate it. They are willing to be beaten and go to jail in order not to wear modesty caps and blankets. (‘On a recent afternoon in northern Tehran, women sat in cafes and other public places, as a police officer in his 50s told those passing by: “Please cover yourselves, ladies,” and then muttered audibly: “My God, I am fed up repeating this without getting any attention.”‘) A whole nasty regime with police and an army calls them whores and hunts them down and in response they say fuck you. All glory to these badasses.
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And why do they hate them, UD? It’s just a tight bit of head cloth – plus a loose evil/sexy body blanket cover. What’s the big deal? You’re willing to go to jail for refusing it? To get humiliated and beaten in public? To be fined huge sums? To lose your car? Your job? REALLY?
Well, ok. Let’s start at the very beginning. A very good place to start. Historically, the women of Iran have had serious exposure to you’ll forgive the term freedom. They actually know – they have muscle memory of – what a non-theocratic, non-authoritarian world looks like, and that world is so attractive that nothing a bunch of withered old dicks wrapped in turbans throws at them is going to stick. In respectable countries, you can be a Muslim, an atheist, a Christian, or a warlock; your government doesn’t threaten you with incarceration if you don’t take mandated Intro Islamic Chastity and Virtue courses.
In respectable countries, you might prefer energetic erotic activity to C+V; in Iran, your frisky clit might find itself subject to FGM. Frisky Islamic Republic dicks have no trouble releasing themselves from thin jeans and going at it, and here you’ve been introduced to the concept of equality and all and you know it just seems pretty graphically unfair.
To go a bit deeper: Your self-image has nothing at all to do with hiding your beauty, your character, your individuality. You want to greet the world with as much self-assertion as men are able to, because that is who you are, not the hidden nothing the withered dicks dream about. They, to be sure, are dead. You are not.
The number of times I have heard Saudi women here, who are conditioned to believe that covering is an unquestionable issue, sigh as they watch uncovered women on TV and say لهم الدنبا ولنا الأخرة (they get the world and we get the afterlife).
As opposed to an inward-looking, navel-gazing, ultra-nationalist, ultra-religious, increasingly authoritarian and illiberal Turkey, the dream of a secular, democratic, pluralistic, inclusive and modern Turkey is still very much alive. [The incoming mayor of Istanbul posted:] “As we celebrate our victory, we send a resounding message to the world: the decline of democracy ends now. Istanbul stands as a beacon of hope, a testament to the resilience of democratic values in the face of rising authoritarianism.” … [In] these elections the proportion of locally elected women has almost tripled… [One new female mayor] was applauded enthusiastically by crowds chanting, “Women, life, freedom”, in an emotional reference to the plight of women in Iran… “The essential doesn’t change,” says one of the characters in Samuel Beckett’s play. But sometimes it might.
Background here.
[Photo Michael Noble, Jr. NBC News]
Kristi Balden chairs Enid OK’s Social Justice Committee. It’s prob got like seven members, prob all of them women. (Enid’s only got around 50,000 people.) Not sure where the men of Enid are on the fight against fascism front.
When Balden discovered that a City Council member was as close to a card-carrying Nazi as you can get, she mobilized bigtime and put up with a lot of shit from a lot of townspeople, AND threw the fucker off the Council. Little Hitler (“I JUST CANT FEEL SAFE IF IM NOT PACKING AN AR WITH A 100 ROUND DRUM AND SPORTING MY SWASTIKA ARMBAND.”) just got voted out.
While UD sits on her ass and reads Timothy Snyder on the fight against fascism, Kristi Balden gets up and fights and wins against it. I salute her.
Narges Mohammadi’s Nobel Peace Prize address.
She even had the guts to clarify:
“I think he means well.”
Or, in the original German: “Ich denke, er meint es gut.”
Temple’s acting president died of what sounds like a sudden heart attack during a university event today.
Her noose dress has done its job. Tons more people are talking about the increasingly bloody theocrats running Iran. Good on ya, Mahlagha Jaberi.
Here’s hoping images of your unfettered beauty reach the coerced hijabis of your home country.
The event went off rather better than the hilarious DeSantis campaign launch. 90 of the school’s 119 graduates attended.
YES!
This year’s Templeton Prize winner is an African woman who has made it her life’s work to destroy this scourge. Her against-all-odds life story is every bit as inspirational as you’d imagine. At age 85, she’s busy training hundreds of midwives at the hospital she founded.
Vermont is close to waiving in-state requirements for end of life medication.
Photo: Valeria Mongelli/AFP via Getty Images
[T]housands of Georgians took to the streets of the country’s capital Tbilisi for two days of protests, waving EU flags and facing down riot police armed with water cannons and tear gas. The contentious [now withdrawn] legislation would have required all organizations that receive more than 20 percent of their funding from abroad to register as foreign agents. The Georgian law was widely viewed as inspired by Vladimir Putin…
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SING IT.
Georgia, Georgia
The whole day through
As you march toward
Your place in the EU
I said Georgia
Georgia, what joy I find
Freedom’s old sweet song
Keeps Georgia on my mind
Other arms reach out to you
Other eyes lie viciously
Still in peaceful crowds I see
The road leads back to you
Her husband Chad stands with her.