Everybody’s doin’ it!

Ryan Fournier, one of the founders of Students for Trump, was arrested last Tuesday on assault charges in North Carolina … Fournier, 27, was accused of assaulting a woman identified as his girlfriend, “grabbing her right arm and striking her in the forehead” with a handgun …

Isn’t something like this more or less a rite of passage for this super-Christian demographic? Along with fraud, driving over the speed limit, and drunk driving? (UPDATE: Plus threesomes and rape?) (Oh, I can hear it now: “Don’t judge us by our highest-profile leaders!”) UD’s gonna assume this latest thing happened cuz godly Fournier got hisself way fucked up one night and reached for the nearest household appliance.

The problem throughout this book, and I suspect most books about integralism suffer from the same problem, is that it is a sane analysis of madness. You make the same kind of marginal notes you do in other books — “strong argument,” “good point,” and “is this true?” — but then you put it down and wonder if you are still on planet Earth. 

… The integralists … are unhinged. 

The fact that they command a following is frightening …

It’s not really frightening, since jesus jackoffs are just, as the name has it, jacking off. They’re not doing anything.

But it’s certainly shocking that a masturbatory fantasist holds a responsible job at Harvard. Harvard even lets the guy loose in classrooms — though students are beginning to rebel against their lord and masturbator.

… to the Museum of Noble Traditions. UD will let you know when you can drop everything and go to the Soltan Gallery in Gdansk.

Almost every time hijabis sue, they lose. UD can’t pretend to be unhappy about this; secular liberal states have the right to defend their secularity, and the highest European courts confirm this right again and again.

In a decision that holds for public sector offices across the EU, [a] Luxembourg-based court said a policy of strict neutrality “may be regarded as being objectively justified by a legitimate aim”.

… Tuesday’s decision echoed several rulings previously issued by the same court. In 2021 it ruled that private sector employers could limit the expression of religious, political or philosophical beliefs when there was a “genuine need” to “present a neutral image towards customers or to prevent social dispute”.

One year later it said that such bans do not constitute “direct discrimination” as long as they are applied equally to all employees.

What hijabis overlook is the reality of secular states, of which there are many all over the world, and particularly in Europe. (Given the absolutely massive rebellion against the hijab in Iran, it looks as though some secular states are laboring under the illusion that they’re religious.) The official, public-facing aspect of secular states ought, I’d argue, present religious neutrality as its basic identity. Outside of state services, a generally relaxed attitude toward religious garb should prevail, though even here there are nuances.

[The] ultra-high-end Bentley with a 542-horsepower engine … [goes] from 0 to 60 in 3.9 seconds… Why on earth would someone want to own a car—one meant to be driven on regular old roads in, for example, upstate New York, where its driver operated a small local chain of hardware stores—that can go a reported 175 miles per hour? That’s 110 miles per hour faster than the highest posted speed limit in the state of New York… The faster drivers go on the road, the more likely they are to suffer a crash and for that crash to be fatal—a point that is both bluntly, stupidly obvious and more or less ignored by plenty of drivers, automobile marketers, and road designers…  U.S. traffic deaths are skyrocketing because the cars that are going faster and faster on our roads are also bigger and heavier than ever before …

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You need something to go with your Szecsei & Fuchs Double Barrel Bolt Action Rifle.

That’s a headline you don’t see every day. Which neighbors was it? The couple that just moved here from Singapore?

If the children of Louisiana escape being shot to death, they can enroll in one of its fine schools!

 [A] list of prices is taped to the front window of the school building: $250 for diploma services, a $50 application fee, $35 for a diploma cover and $130 to walk in a cap and gown at a ceremony.

As for your education, that’s totally nonexistent! Fork over the money and do the graduation walk.

[O]ver a dozen states allow families to open a private school as a form of homeschooling, including California, Illinois and Texas, according to the Home School Legal Defense Association. Around half the states require those schools to teach basic subjects such as math and reading; Louisiana isn’t one of them.

As the sun sets.

… to the Chesapeake Bay for a family thing.

Blogging persists.

Shortly after finishing “Pragmatism and Romanticism,” I was diagnosed with inoperable pancreatic cancer. Some months after I learned the bad news, I was sitting around having coffee with my elder son and a visiting cousin. My cousin (who is a Baptist minister) asked me whether I had found my thoughts turning toward religious topics, and I said no. “Well, what about philosophy?” my son asked. “No,” I replied, neither the philosophy I had written nor that which I had read seemed to have any particular bearing on my situation. I had no quarrel with Epicurus’s argument that it is irrational to fear death, nor with Heidegger’s suggestion that ontotheology originates in an attempt to evade our mortality. But neither ataraxia (freedom from disturbance) nor Sein zum Tode (being toward death) seemed in point.

“Hasn’t anything you’ve read been of any use?” my son persisted. “Yes,” I found myself blurting out, “poetry.” “Which poems?” he asked. I quoted two old chestnuts that I had recently dredged up from memory and been oddly cheered by, the most quoted lines of Swinburne’s “Garden of  Proserpine”:

We thank with brief thanksgiving
Whatever gods may be
That no life lives for ever;
That dead men rise up never;
That even the weariest river
Winds somewhere safe to sea.

and Landor’s “On His Seventy-Fifth Birthday”:

Nature I loved, and next to Nature, Art;
I warmed both hands before the fire of life,
It sinks, and I am ready to depart.

… about which Leon Cooperman weepingly complained, is nothing. Now they’re profiling them!

Indianapolis Colts owner Jim Irsay said his March 2014 arrest for driving under the influence was a result of prejudice against him for being white and wealthy…

“I am prejudiced against because I’m a rich, white billionaire.” 

People also probably take against him for his tendency toward redundancy (“rich… billionaire”) and his tendency to endanger us all by driving while high as a kite.

 Irsay had the painkillers oxycodone and hydrocodone as well as alprazolam, which is used to treat anxiety, in his system at the time of his arrest. Officers on the scene said he had trouble reciting the alphabet and failed other field sobriety tests.

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Get yours today.

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And UD pledges to be kinder to this much-misunderstood demographic.

Read the whole thing and understand. Read, read, read.

Whew! Two Cal Poly students basically spent part of an afternoon, last week, strolling the campus and shooting various guns into occupied buildings and at street signs and at anything else that caught their fancy. But in a bit of luck they had not yet started shooting people (their activities were pretty quickly reported to the police), so that’s good! That’s great!

“During a search of the students’ on-campus residences, police located and confiscated additional weapons and ammunition.” Well I mean of course and I’m sure all indications are that the students are NOT amassing an arsenal for an eventual mass slaughter and this is nothing to worry about. Just a coupla kids.

As for professors: UD would have loved to be on the search committee that decided a permanently disbarred thief who packs loaded heat on campus would be just the thing for the students at Santa Rosa Junior College.

… plays out in Walmart (where else) as we contemplate our many blessings. An ordinary mom in ordinary Ohio searches the shelves for Thanksgiving decorations while her two year old sits in the shopping cart figuring out how to shoot the loaded Taurus PT92 9mm stainless pistol he found in her purse.

It’s such classic Americana that it calls to mind the famous Norman Rockwell painting, “The Runaway” (1958), in which the policeman leans over to the runaway to say Fine kid but take my gun with you.

Back to the Walmart: The baby shoots at the ceiling and mom’s pissed cuz that thing cost close to six hundred dollars and the reason she’s shopping at a discount outlet is that she’s bought like five of them plus other more expensive firepower plus ammo ain’t cheap and if the cops get wind of this she stands to lose the guns at least temporarily and she still owes around five thou on them all.

Of course she’s proud the kid took the hint and started sharing the gunny life with mom (“Shootin before he can walk“) and she certainly had a laugh when she saw all the shoppers around her scatter! “HAHA he’s just a baby he don’t got no sense of direction chill out.”

And fuck now they’re arresting her and talkin nuts about child endangerment (he only got a itty bitty head wound for godsake) and … ok you can have the kid but gimme back my guns.

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Of course, this particular scene in Walmart is nothing:

Walmart Speaks Out After Two Mass Shootings Occur at Stores Within 24 Hours

There’s a whole lot more going on in your Walmart every day besides a two year old shooting a Taurus!