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About that ol’ abortion-lover Herschel:

First he bangs ’em like a champ

Next it’s forceps and a clamp —

For Georgia, this is nothing controversial.

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Andrew Sullivan:

‘[T]he Senate candidacy of one Herschel Walker… [W]ords fail. No magical realist fiction writer could come up with something so sickeningly absurd. 

… This man is running for the Senate for one of our major political parties. Not even the House. The Senate. He’s clearly incapable of understanding even a scintilla of what his job would entail, and manifestly incapable of doing it.

… Walker stalked, harassed and threatened to murder his ex-wife, threats that were enough for a judge to grant her a protective order in 2005. She had divorced him four years earlier, citing “physically abusive and extremely threatening behavior.” At one point, he put a gun to her head and said “I’m going to blow your fucking brains out.” This week, his son, Christian, claimed that he and his mother had to move six times in six months to escape his threats of violence.

… [A] man [who] makes the problem of fatherlessness a central part of his campaign … turns out to be entirely AWOL in the lives of his own four children — from four different mothers, three of whom he only publicly acknowledged after the press discovered them… In the words of his own son this week: “Family values, people? He has four kids, four different women, wasn’t in the house raising one of them. He was out having sex with other women.”

… So here we have a celebrity candidate with no political experience, neither eloquent nor honest, who abandoned his kids, threatened to kill his ex-wife, and has serious mental health problems … who may hold the balance of the Senate in his hands. That’s what the GOP now is. And if he actually paid for an abortion, i.e. in the view of sincere evangelicals, paid for the murder of an innocent child?’

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And it’s… THE JERRY SPRINGER SHOW!!!!!

How many times must it be said? There’s no scriptural warrant for the hijab, much less the medieval burqa. Iran mandates hijabs because its leaders prefer women to be stashed away. But women refuse to be stashed away, and now Iran’s leaders are shooting them dead.

Ah, but we all know the burqa represents a different category from the examples of religious attire the Toronto Star‘s public editor lists.

He’s explaining to readers why he erased part of an opinion writer’s column about the hijab revolution. At one point the columnist jumped from hijab to burqa and – rather like Boris Johnson comparing wearers to letter boxes – commented that the women in them seem to be wearing Halloween costumes. This was deemed too offensive to retain.

If, as seems likely to me, many girls and women hidden under black hoods and robes are oppressed (a lot of them probably envy the hijab that’s causing all that trouble in Iran), I don’t suppose it’s very nice to add to their downtrodden condition by taking these sorts of jabs at them… OTOH, you could argue that, short of outlawing it (which much of the world – and, for many public-facing circumstances, some of Canada – has done), various forms of verbal complaint about it might help give some burqa wearers the clarity/guts to stand up to their husbands/imams/communities and take them off.

And as for the editor’s effort to see it as equal to turbans and yamulkes (The thing about the pope is ridiculous, though it does reveal the radicality, the extremity, the editor rightly intuits about burqa-wearers — tens of thousands of ordinary citizens dressing every day in a look comparable to that of the head of the global Catholic church? You expect to see lots of people every day in Toronto dressed like the pope? Even the pope doesn’t routinely dress like the pope.), there’s a vas deferens between guys plunking a small or even large head covering on their noggin, and the astounding full-body coverage (including black gloves so you can’t even see fingers) of the burqa. The way it blocks access to basics, like sunlight, free movement, full vision — much less simple interaction with other people in the world. The way it features black cloth over your mouth. The way it subjects eight year old girls to this.

Nope. The burqa is incomparably problematic, which a glance at its legal status in much of the world will reveal.

… on Acela for business meetings in Manhattan. UD thinks all the madcap travel and jet lag has caught up with the child. Grumpy.

… in this Shakespeare and Company Bookshop appearance.

The news.

“[The] world is made to be pounced on and enjoyed, and … there is absolutely no reason at all to hold back.”

Writes Ernaux. And I … naux what she means, and I pounce on what she says, and I agree etc etc. ETC.

Live out loud!

And yet … even as I delight in images of revolutionary Iranian girls and women hurling hijabs heavenward or incinerating them, and demanding freedom in a revolution they lead… I fear for them.

… something you never see. Storm must have “stirred them up.” One was still alive, and I asked my sister to pick it up and put it in the surf. She declined, which turned out to be very smart. They’re vicious.

… the sun came out – briefly – and we all ran down to the beach to celebrate.

[T]he regime should have let go of hijab,… even if we consider nothing but its self-interest in surviving. The younger generation would have persisted in their blissful political inactivity, and the poor horny basijis would have soon learned to acclimate to the new situation, their libido subconsciously adjusting to the new normal.

It’s all so neat and easy. What’s so hard to understand? You remove girls’ clitorises so they don’t sexually excite themselves; you remove their hair, faces, and bodies from the public realm so they don’t excite men. Women happily, proudly wear the hijab, because “it is the duty of women.” Men protect their spiritual well-being by draping cloth over women and numbing women’s capacity to feel anything sexual, thus making them even less threatening to men’s spiritual well-being. A beautiful world any of us would wish to live in.

Or, you know, failing that – a really … interesting, different world we would never think of judging.

Wisconsin fired Paul Chryst on Sunday, fired him five games into the 2022 college football season, fired him with a career record of 67-26. Just sent him packing, humiliated the former Wisconsin quarterback, as if his previous seven seasons — all ending in bowl games, the Badgers winning six of those — hadn’t happened.

This is where college football has gone. Into the dumpster, into the land of toxic make-believe.

Into the SEC.

Trees aren’t even shedding leaves yet, and already five Power 5 schools have shed their head football coach. Wisconsin on Sunday joined Nebraska (Scott Frost), Arizona State (Herm Edwards), Georgia Tech (Geoff Collins) and Colorado (Karl Dorrell), firings that will cost those schools more than $50 million in buyouts. All five are public schools. The money comes from somewhere, a shell game of shady boosters in the background writing checks, money diverted from more noble potential causes. Cleaning up a landfill, for example...

[University coaches?] Clemson’s Dabo Swinney, Georgia’s Kirby Smart, Texas A&M’s Jimbo Fisher and Alabama’s Nick Saban have contracts in the $100 million range…

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You know, toting up all the money pathetic states like Alabama give their coaches, blah blah. It’s like NFL concussion stories. Blah.

Being on the tail end of a hurricane turns out to be a real tonic for ol’ UD, who must share this odd trait with others, because she’s far from alone beside the raging ocean. The restaurants – on a dreary sodden Monday night – were packed; we had to wait at the bar for a table, but that was fine cuz the bartender wanted to know the details of the Rapoport/Ocean City legal case, so actually we had to tear ourselves away from him.

Obviously there’s a drama to it all – the shimmying trees, the wind/waves roar, the watery watery world – and everyone’s pleasantly stirred. The inner/outer contrast is a thing too – our zennish hotel has hearths aplenty, and perfumes from their spa drift along the air; and in case you need more tranquillizing, they’ve just this year inserted a glowing bar into the glowing lobby.

My drink, however, is black, fruit-flavored, tea; and I stare at a fireplace and watch my tea’s smoke curl up while I listen to an audiobook version of AVENTURES D’ALICE AU PAYS DES MERVEILLES (one must continue to set oneself challenges, even into one’s dotage) through my earbuds.

Off to two days at the soggy beach. Blogging continues.

“They[‘ve] had mass arrests in the past few days of journalists, and of people who they thought could potentially be leaders. They did that, but the protests haven’t been shut down. They couldn’t shut it down. In fact, it has become more widespread.

Nasrin Sotoudeh is a human-rights lawyer who has represented many of these women who, over the past ten years, have been sentenced to jail or summoned to court on the basis of not observing the compulsory hijab. She recently said this movement is leaderless and is only led by those women who are doing this one revolutionary act. And that revolutionary act is not carrying a weapon. They’re not armed. This is completely peaceful.

And the only thing that they’re doing is they’re harmlessly taking something off of their head and they’re walking in the streets of Iran. The figure of this revolution is the body of these women, these unveiled women who are walking in the streets without harming anyone. Without even chanting “death to the dictator” or saying anything harmful against anyone.

Their bodies have become the revolutionary figure of this movement. And this is unprecedented.”

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Once you understand what the hijab – and its revolutionary repudiation – represents, the US/Euro feminist championing of the hijab as liberatory (“Hijab Means Power, Liberation, Beauty, and Resistance”) looks so perverted, mes petites.

We also see [in Iran] a change in gender-related norms and values. These are the concepts that refer to virtue and honor, and traditionally relate to the male protection of females virtues, and the female body.

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And what of gender fluidity, little ones? Ain’t you a mite embarrassed, throwing your lot in with I. AM. WOMAN. SEE ME SHEATHE. ?…?

Of course it’s completely hohum for soccer matches to end in bloody slaughter all over the field, but UD wondered about this comment. I think it must mean that the crowd that killed itself the other day was made up exclusively of supporters of the home team. The slaughter wasn’t even about opposing fans – just the local guys unhappy that their guys lost. What an achievement.

When will Repubs give in to their deepest passion of all and welcome The Dear Leader to the next CPAC?