[T]heir ideal society is one where a large and powerful modern state is integrated with the Catholic Church. The church would direct the state to use coercive and non-coercive means to support the church’s spiritual mission, such as policies like penalties for apostasy and heresy, requirements for attending mass. Integralism resembles Islamism but with Catholicism as the religion.

Sounds yummy! Go, Prof Vermeule!

… … has made postcards of one of Jerzy Soltan’s artworks – a very pretty little picture of a boat – and yesterday they sent his son, Mr UD, a bunch of them. Here’s the work’s collection page; and here’s UD‘s photo of the postcard, with one of Jerzy’s much more typical, very naughty, works as background.

… this article.

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The doctors cannot treat you if you’re dying

So all the doctors up and disappeared

Maternal deaths are secret – no fair prying – 

In Idaho!

Non-viable?  You’ll carry it to full-term

We’ll pray with you throughout it, never fear

Together we will honor all divine sperm

In Idaho!

I know it sounds a bit bizarre

It sounds a bit bizarre

But in Idaho

That’s how conditions are!

No pregnancy may end no matter danger

The zygote is a person through and through
In short, you’ll never know
A more pernicious foe

Than zealot evangelicals
Right here in Idaho

Idaho!  Idaho!
I know it gives a person pause,
But in Idaho
Those are the legal laws.

Suicide is shadowland.  Stark statistics are always available – most recently, that American gun suicides have reached an all-time high (and basically anybody who is anybody who doesn’t want to be anybody uses a gun) – but the act itself is so unaccountable, so extreme, that we consign it to the shadows.  

We can sort of make out how a very old person beset by terminal pain might want to do it; but the vast majority of suicides remain hopelessly obscure.  Most of us are too wedded to life, and too afraid of death, to get anywhere with them.

Suicide shadows lie deepest where gunshots to the head ring most sharply.  Cowboy states like Wyoming and Montana have outrageous rates of gun suicide, and their state legislatures do practically nothing about it.  Just getting suicide hot lines set up in these locations is a battle.  Shine a light on massive firearm self-slaughter, after all, and you risk giving gun control people something to talk about.

Even the little we do know about suicide is so upsetting that we avert our eyes.  Can it be that there are many people so lonely, so rejected, so alcoholic – and so bitter and angry about this condition – that they derive their last bit of pleasure from the thought of how they’re abandoning and wounding the few people who do care about them?  Or say their motive isn’t quite this ugly.  Can there really be people whose self-disgust is so intense as to make them pull the trigger?  

Yes, and yes.  

Can it be that there are many people so encased in clinical depression, and so resistant to medication, that no pill or therapy regime will be able to free them from it?  

Absolutely.

So we also press suicide into the shadows because we cannot accept the thought that suicidality often eludes cure.  The best doctors, the most loving families, may jolly it away for a while, but people who have come to hate themselves, or hate their lives, to this extent, may despite all try to do the deed.  And a gun makes it so much easier and more certain to cause death than any other form of self-destruction.  

A gun sits in a drawer by the suicide’s bed, beckoning him (statistics again – it’s overwhelmingly men) to do it.  That’s what it’s for – to kill.  It’s not like pills or ropes — innocent objects which you must struggle to make lethal.  Guns positively sing of unconditional easeful escape from anguish.  In a chorus 450 million weapons strong, they sing of instant surcease.  They even have an anthem, if you like: Bach’s Come, Sweet Death.  

Guns are the kingdom of death on earth, and their preeminent kingdom is America.  In our privileged country, we get pretty much everything we want, including a rich array of death-promisers from which to choose.

Even by pharma standards, Israel’s Teva is a real ugly standout. Where’s the long punishing article about this dirty enterprise in the NYT? Far as UD can tell, the place has long been a committed bad actor, and one wonders, with its latest massive settlement, whether anyone will bother looking at its scandalous history and writing about it. I mean, it’s clearly able to handle hundreds of millions in penalties every year as the cost of doing business, so pressure needs to come from elsewhere if we are going to stop these predators.

Amusing update on Rudy.

… Blue Ridge mountains, Shenandoah River…

West Virginia University is gradually reducing itself to nothing – no foreign languages, a lot fewer professors, no grad program in math, fewer undergrad programs.

Shit, place ain’t got no money, and customers are voting with their feet.

Lotsa boohoo about all this from the liberal elites, but hold on jest a minute! Hang on jest one sec! UD ain’t crying, and she’ll tell you why.

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As you know, UD sees no reason why a country (Hungary) or a state (New Mexico, Nevada, West Virginia, Florida) that wants to reduce itself to an intellectual desert should be kept from doing so.

The American system is already correcting for this. Notice, for instance, how Hampshire College has stepped up to offer an easy transfer to New College students who can’t take it anymore. Nevada has always done beautifully on the dumbshit tourist trade and doesn’t need fancy theories to run casinos. Its wretched state university system should call it a day; smart young Nevadans can go to California. Same deal for other pro-ignorance states – this is a big country with oodles of good (and some supremely great) universities.

As for West Virginia. Feast your eyes on UD‘s coverage, over many years, of WVU – a hopelessly drunk and disorderly party school in a hopeless state from which those who can flee are fleeing. Morgantown runs with squalid bars in which frat boys try to kill pledges via drink. The kids riot after purty near every football game. The football and basketball coaches continue to be paid like princes. It’s a world, to be sure; a party school world which is about what a state like WV can manage if you tell it to establish a university. But you’re never gonna get the yahoos in the legislature to smarten the place up, and fact is most of its students are fine with the way things are. Those who aren’t will find good schools in driving distance: FIVE states border WV, and three of them have good schools.

And the core reason Israel is now functionally a theocracy?

Israel has never created a constitution separating church and state. As a result, among other things, the Orthodox Chief Rabbinate holds a monopoly on marriage, which forces many secular Israelis to get married in other countries, or even online. Israel has no formal public transportation on Saturdays, which strands the millions of residents who don’t own a car.

As most of the school funding goes to schools that reverse engineer intelligence, having no wheels on a Saturday is going to be the least of Israelis’ problems.

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

One silver lining: Normal people are being brought together.

“We should be glad about the greatest achievement we got: the creation of a new kind of centrist identity,” [one observer says]. “This center includes various shades, from the capitalist, hawkish right that believed in Netanyahu so far but not anymore, through the liberal center and up to the social-democratic left.”

“[When] a serving coalition is acting in a frenzy, it makes us feel, every minute of every day, that we are connected,” [says another]. “The liberal camp is a country that is just being formed.”

It’s the same thing here with theocratic attacks on abortion rights; it’s the same thing in Iran with theocratic attacks on women. Outrageous acts bring normal people together in defense of liberty, democracy, decency, equality. Indeed I think we can begin to see, in the polling, the same thing happening in regard to America’s homegrown outrage-generator, Trump. Eventually most normal people can’t take gross abnormality.

… militia. I don’t think this Israeli women’s political movement is going to go after the vile and increasingly powerful ultraorthodox cult in that country with guns; but if you ask UD whether the prospect of armed female avengers against primitive theocrats is pleasant or unpleasant, she’d have to go with pleasant.

See also the millions of Iranian women whose fuck the hijab militancy grows with each grotesque effort on the part of the government to frighten them into wearing the modesty cap.

… Christie.

… enjoyed this. His sister and UD, practically on top of each other.

… so I got up and first dealt with our too-high-tech door, which would start whoop whooping if I weren’t careful, and then I walked out onto the still-hot lawn. All day boats drifted along our little canal, and the effect was cinematic, elegant, hushed, charismatic; now, at midnight, the water was empty, vaguely lit, moving only slightly in the heat.

In the darkness I started looking for the outline of an Adirondack or a chaise, and I approached a white glimmering seat of some sort and almost sat down until I realized someone was in it.

“Sorry to disturb,” I said, and settled in a chair a few feet away.

“I don’t want to scare you, but would you come with me and I’ll show you this really beautiful bird.”

The person in the chair was suddenly right in my face. I recognized him: He was the teenager with a missing tooth and thick brown hair who had brought water in a pebbled silver bottle to our table at the lodge’s restaurant that evening. We’d admired the bottle; he’d admired the bottle. “I’m going to bring your group a second bottle in a minute,” he said, “but this one won’t be beautiful.” And indeed it was a very ordinary bottle, and we all complained good-naturedly.

Now he brought me right up to the edge of the water and pointed out an egret of some sort, its whiteness startling against the black trees.

“My step-mother is picking me up pretty soon. I live with my real mother, but I’m staying with my step-mother on Tilghman for the summer. Look at the night sky. I stare at it all the time even though I don’t really know what I’m looking at. Even when things move: Airplane or satellite or…”

“Unidentified aerial phenomenon.”

“Then there’s the bottom of the ocean. From the highest to the lowest. I wouldn’t have minded dying in that Titanic submersible. I want adventures.”

“What other adventures?”

“Scuba. Scuba at a wreck or in a cave. Go into orbit. Highest and lowest.”

I thought of telling him about DeLillo’s novel The Names, where the characters are like that – some of them are fanatical archeologists, always digging deeper and deeper into the earth, and some are international consultants, always flying high above the earth. None of them seems to manage being in the middle, where the farms and the cities and the parks and the people are, very well. The whole novel, that is to say, is about efforts to avoid reality.

But I didn’t tell him about DeLillo. I asked him more questions about the adventures he wanted to have, and as he expanded on them I realized that I sort of loved him and also was very grateful to him because I’d left my room expecting at best a night sky that wouldn’t lift my restlessness, but instead, magically, I encountered an instant cure for my restless spirit, which is to say another human being. The unearthly earthly reality of another human being. Someone who moved me, and lifted me out of what was after all just a spot of convoluted ego.

BOOMERICO, n. A law which, when thrown, returns to the thrower.

An opinion piece in the Claremont Colleges student newspaper calls for a forceful public act of separation from the “disgusting” Claremont Institute, home of traitors.

[T]he Claremont Institute is not a normal think tank: their values and platformed beliefs are extremely far outside of anything [the Claremont Colleges stand for]… As a set of small schools we must acknowledge that our small reputation risks association with bad actors such as the Claremont Institute. Combatting that association cannot be a passive process — it requires active combat against the Institution.

Having besmirched the word “Claremont” with their vile and inhumane social positions, and with a hatred of American liberal democracy so intense as to turn their leadership into aiders and abettors of the unspeakable John Eastman, the Claremont Institute has become a damaging embarrassment for the colleges that share its name.

Many extreme ideas that first look wacky and disreputable and then end up sweeping the country originate in California, and such is definitely the case with the Claremont Merry Pranksters and their thing: The urgent need to blow up American democracy.

Named after their ‘sixties precursors who drove a school bus all over the US while similarly denouncing The Establishment, the Claremont group also shares with the original Pranksters a virtually all-male membership, a belief in “the power of a certain kind of approach to politics that’s sensational,”  and a commitment to overthrowing the country.

Their creed: Human society is incapable of the kind of rational, deliberative government that liberal democracy requires, man. Y’all need a dictator, like Donald Trump, cuz without him you is making one shitty stinky mess of things.

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Given their belief that (in the slightly altered words of SNCC, another ‘sixties precursor) ‘the only position for women in CMP is prone,’ it must be quite the provocation that not one, not two, but three women have lately written the most in-depth and scathing denunciations to which the organization has ever been subjected. “We’ve been warning people about Vagina Dentata from day one, and here it is,” one Prankster (He goes by the anonym Santa Monica Centurion. Okay, I made him up.) has commented in response to the girl essays. “Now they’ve really gotten their teeth into us.”

The first essay appeared around this time last year and, in a more in sorrow than anger way, noted the increasingly Dennis the Menace feel of the group. This year, as the CMP’s escalating hatred of liberal democracy, coupled with rage at Donald Trump’s and John Eastman’s post-Jan 6 travails, has taken it way, way off the reservation, Laura K. Field and Katherine Stewart both openly express horror at the combination of juvenility and violence inside the organization.

Why has so much of the American conservative movement embraced the story that the principles of equality and the pursuit of a more just society are the greatest threats to Western civilization today? Who or what is responsible for giving these paranoid ideas an intellectual veneer? The Claremont Institute gets you much of the way to an answer.

The paranoid Claremont men have convinced themselves that they must kill nihilist, relativist, progressivist, female-fetid, American democracy before it kills them:

“Given the promise of tyranny, conservative intellectuals must openly ally with the AR-15 crowd,” argues author Kevin Slack, a professor at Hillsdale College, in a lengthy book excerpt published in Claremont’s online magazine, The American Mind. “Able-bodied men, no longer isolated, are returning to republican manliness in a culture of physical fitness and responsible weaponry. They are buying AR-15s and Glock 17s and training with their friends, not FBI-infiltrated militias or online strangers but trustworthy lifelong friends to build a community alongside.”

The armory might not have been necessary had Eastman’s traitorous January 6 plan, in which Claremont continues fervently to believe, worked.

[C]onsider the cynicism and nihilism necessary to believe in [Eastman’s] theory—or even to take it seriously as a possibility… You must believe that our institutions are so top-to-bottom corrupt that nothing and no one is worthy of civic trust. Not the neighbors who served as election observers, not the poll workers, not county officials, not city governments, not state legislators, and certainly not Republicans in Congress. This is conspiracism in its most unaccountable form... Once you begin understanding our national politics as a matter of emergencies, corruption, and lies reparable only by figures of exceptional heroism, there is no returning to a politics of the everyday, of democratic choice and representation, and of disagreement, contestation, and compromise. There is … no easy weaning from the dystopian hype.

For evidence of the survival of the non-cynical world, read this.

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I remember my first encounter with dystopian hype (“[M]any Republicans … are pushing the view that America is a degenerate society that cannot be saved.”), and I remember how sexually exciting I found its dark Eastwood (Wood, not Man; Clint, not John) pathology: It was my reading, as a Northwestern undergrad, of Kit Lasch’s (I got to know him when we were both at U Rochester) Culture of Narcissism, a book whose utterly black disposition in regard to every aspect of America has been shamelessly adopted by Patrick Deneen and other contemporary theocrats who want to convince you that your secular life in this country is so unbearably empty that you’re desperate to embrace existence under an all-male, all-powerful, Vatican.

Lasch himself, I was excited to discover, was a handsome, brooding, chain-smoking, dead-ringer for John Cassavetes, and the whole spectacle – intellectual, erotic – had me weak at the knees.

But, tu sais, I was twenty-two years old and really dumb and immature – pretty much where the leadership of Claremont is today – and then I grew up and saw how cheap and manipulative radically dystopian anti-Americanism is, left and right variety. I mean, it’s the oldest sales pitch in the world – your Dodge Charger is a total piece of shit you should be embarrassed to be seen in. I’ve got a late-model Mercedes C-Class you’ll feel much more meaningful inside of…

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“They just want to blow the place up,” concludes Katherine Stewart, and oh how the UD I used to be loved this disrupter shit.

Yes bring it on baby pistol whip me with your AR-15 make me feel young again.