At Yale.

“As I depart WNYC and the Gothamist, I want to share with you lessons I’ve learned from my ten (amazing!) years of plagiarizing articles.

First: You can get away with it! After having me on the staff for ten years, they found four plagiarized pieces only six months ago, and nothing much happened. In fact, I was reassigned to “mentor staff members.” LOLOL.

Second: You can only get away with it for so long before you do have to sue. Recently, a squad of people has been investigating everything I’ve (let’s go with “I’ve”) written over a decade, which is so unfair because I’ve been plagiarizing all that time! So I’m slapping New York Public Radio with a lawsuit for racism.

Wish me luck!”

In the wake of Orban’s massive victory, Les UDs have been going at it hammer and goulash on whether they should give a shit. If you read UD, you know where she stands: Countries determined to shrink to nothingness should be allowed to do so. Hungary’s population can’t even manage ten million (Orban’s efforts to get Hungarians to reproduce are going nowhere — too drunk to get it up.), and many of those are actively trying to kill themselves.

The smartest have left — Hungary is brain-drain central. Maybe these people noticed that the country had one world-class university and it threw it out. To thunderous applause from its suicidal populace.

The UN estimates a population of only 6.4 million by the end of the century.

“Can you name one famous Hungarian dissident?” UD asked Mr UD – a Pole, and a political scientist extremely well-versed in the region. Long pause. “K-Konrad?” “You can’t even remember his first name?” No. “And I don’t want to upset you, but he died in 2019.”

“Hungary is becoming the center of the intellectual far-right world…”

“Oooh, scary. Karlovich, Vermeule… the freak show freaks in Nyíregyháza!”

Mr UD looked pissed.

“Look,” said I. “The national anthem of modern Hungary is I GOTTA BE ME. Until it invades the Rhineland, Hungary, like all other countries, has a right to drill down to its essence – hyper-conservative, rabidly anti-intellectual, antisemitic, radically insular – and be that thing. The upside for us is that we can safely ignore it forever. Hell, it seems to be ignoring itself. If you want to visit faded post-imperialism, go to Vienna.”

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Update: Hungary is also a big loser in the kleptocracy sweepstakes, with the EU proceeding toward possibly stripping it of the billions of dollars for public works projects that Orban has long been siphoning off for his oligarchs.

Just the blah quotidian of American life. In a few years (as UD has said elsewhere), no one’s going to bother writing this sort of thing up.

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Just as routine: Eternal vigilance in the state of Tennessee.

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Update: The LA Times seems to think we’re shocked.

[T]he same day that this horrific shooting rocked Sacramento, at least 95 other shootings took place across the nation.

Yes, you read that correctly.

Another 95 shootings — claiming 36 more lives and injuring 95 more people — just on this one Sunday in April…

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Well shut ma mouth. If a country has a trillion legal and illegal guns – they’re starting to find rocket launchers, by the way – all over the place, turns out desperate, pathetic, and evil people will use them.

Ain’t nothin you can do either. California has oodles of gun control laws. Lots of other countries with good gun control laws indeed have much less slaughter; but ’round here, see, the cat’s out of the bag. All them guns! Guns here are a household appliance you reach for whenever there’s an itch to kill yourself or others.

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America is deeply hopelessly gunny. I don’t say we shouldn’t have stronger gun control laws. We should. But at this point in the obsequies I don’t think we should expect much.

Locking up your mad gunnies won’t help much either. Your bigtime mass killers are psycho – they either kill themselves when they’re done or happily toddle off to life in prison. Your enraged ex-hubby is unlikely to let thoughts of jail interrupt his big moment. Depraved people who let their toddlers chance upon one of the ten loaded guns around the house and kill themselves and a sibling or two are too addled even to know what the phrase “criminal justice” means.

Gunnies – in neighborhoods, in legislatures – love guns and love violence and seem to regard all the pop pop pop pop everywhere as somehow charismatic. Like the heroin addict who salivates at the very sight of a needle, gunnies light up like the fourth of July at the sight of a gun.

Prohibiting use of the burqa in schools reflects a “mindset of the past,” the Council of the Islamic Community wrote in a statement on Friday.

A witty, erudite writer in the mode of James Merrill, he was 92.

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May 26 1969: The Grievance

No one dies. That is all we can say for certain.

Something dies us,

As it lived us. We are lived. And died.

A personal pronoun is superfluous here.

It is simple;

Our grammar of death must be revised.

And we are not reduced to tears, not reduced. The thing

Our tears are for

Extends us: we are widened to the term

Which lies beyond our tears. We are not reduced.

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Fellow Philip Larkin fans might be reminded, on reading this poem, of these lines:

Life is first boredom, then fear.
Whether or not we use it, it goes,
And leaves what something hidden from us chose,   
And age, and then the only end of age.

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More tersely, fellow Adam Phillips fans might simply quote this remark:

When people say, “I’m the kind of person who,” my heart always sinks.

It’s been a long sit-down, but an appeals court has topped off the college v. bakery court case with a flourish: Gibson’s will indeed be served an abundant money feast from Oberlin (background here). So: bitter for Oberlin, sweet for Gibson’s.

The main miscreant in the matter, a VP at the school who sicced a student mob on an innocent local bakery (screamed all over town it was racist, organized a boycott, when all it did was confront a shoplifting Oberlin student), has moved on to generate her own particular form of magic at Oglethorpe. No doubt she is as we speak scanning commercial life in Atlanta to find a cafe against which she can organize a student mob. The obscenity she staged at Oberlin will cost the school thirty mill; here’s hoping Oglethorpe has a large legal payout fund.

It’s all about defending the dignity of the unborn.

‘Everyone was citing a survey from 2020 which suggested that 57 percent of young Muslims believed that the law of God was superior to the law of the French Republic.‘

Results like these are kinda funny, if you ask ol’ UD. I mean, at the gathering of French Muslim intellectuals and secular French intellectuals described in this NYT essay (the essay is about the increasingly popular French political right), somebody cites this numerical result, and quite a few Muslim attendees get all huffy. One of them walks out.

Yet how big a deal, really, is the result? After you draw a shocked breath, do you pause to ask how this belief is liable, in most cases, to play out in actual civic life? A lot of religious people, if you asked them pointblank, would probably say they feel like this – that divine trumps secular law. Why do you assume this means that they would fail to obey secular law if they live in a secular state? How often are they compelled to choose between the two? To take an example I’ve talked to death on this blog – The French have with remarkable success, far as I can tell, imposed a burqa ban. Nobody seems too bent out of shape about it. Most even marginally rational people know that they will have to make some concessions when their religious enthusiasms hit hard against the rule of law in a non-theocracy.

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I’ve drawn the comment in my headline from the same essay.

…. currently talking about Ukraine here.

… headlines the National Review; and when she read the headline UD thought Hm not bad. Be pretty cool if my little home state, Maryland, were declared America’s Switzerland…

But no. NR is keening over Oregon’s Swissification, cuz it’s now an assisted suicide state for anyone – including out of staters – nearing death and wanting to die. (The Swiss have been fierce defenders of the right to die for almost a century. Hence NR’s nod to the moral and spiritual cesspool which that blighted country has become as a result of this godless policy.)

Chacun à son goût for damn sure, but UD doesn’t mind sharing that she keeps an updated mental tab of convenient lethal locales in case whatever does her in does it slowly and painfully. She’s eager not to beat around that bush, eager not to lie moribund in morphine, or in unmanageable agony, for months on end. For UD, there’s a rather off-putting good-girlism about achieving a perfect attendance record for one’s own disintegration. Better to skip.

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Another reason NR should relax about Oregon becoming the suicide capital of America: That distinction has long belonged to Wyoming, where per blown-off capita the numbers are, and always will be, MUCH higher than anything Oregon’s assisted suicide program could reach. A few carefully controlled barbiturates here and there can never hope to compete with twenty loaded Berettas per household.

SPEED, WEED, AND GUNS:

JUST ANOTHER I-77 TRAFFIC STOP

Cleveland.com

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As you know, UD anticipates that in five or so years no gun-related event in the United States will be significant enough to be covered as news, unless it involves terrorists and/or at least fifty fatalities.

… he advocated violence, diminished women, insulted the entertainment industry, and perpetuated stereotypes about the Black community…

Smith’s slap was… a slap to women. If Rock had physically attacked Pinkett Smith, Smith’s intervention would have been welcome. Or if he’d remained in his seat and yelled his post-slap threat, that would have been unnecessary, but understandable. But by hitting Rock, he announced that his wife was incapable of defending herself—against words…

This patronizing, paternal attitude infantilizes women and reduces them to helpless damsels needing a Big Strong Man to defend their honor least they swoon from the vapors. If he was really doing it for his wife, and not his own need to prove himself, he might have thought about the negative attention this brought on them, much harsher than the benign joke. That would have been truly defending and respecting her. This “women need men to defend them” is the same justification currently being proclaimed by conservatives passing laws to restrict abortion and the LGBTQ+ community.

[His acceptance speech] was about justifying his violence… Young boys—especially Black boys—watching their movie idol not just hit another man over a joke, but then justify it as him being a superhero-like protector, are now much more prone to follow in his childish footsteps.”

Kareem Abdul-Jabbar

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Next year’s Oscars: Another attack, this time with a gun.