… a fraternity house. But you do have to bother to hide it.

……… an anti-vaxer.

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‘[A reporter] approached [an anti-vaxer at a rally] and queried, “Maybe you can help me out: I’m seeing signs that say, ‘Vaccine Mandates Are Fascism,’ and also signs that say, ‘Vaccine Mandates Are Communism.’ Which one is it?”

“It’s both,” she replied.

“It’s both? Those are diametrically-opposed ideologies,” he countered.

“I don’t think it’s communism—I think it’s more like a dictatorship, like we’re living in a Nazi Germany and the only thing that’s missing is the camps and the gas,” she argued.

“That’s what’s happening right now? Because you can’t go to a concert?” [the reporter] asked.

“I can’t go to a concert… I can’t go to a gym…” she reasoned.

“Do you think that’s what it was like in Nazi Germany? People were bitching about not going to a gym?”’

Beset by accusations of research fraud, Duke professor and public intellectual Dan Ariely has held his ground, admitting a bit of sloppiness but nothing like making up data. Yet an analysis of details in a 2012 paper he wrote about honesty (!) suggests that he may well be responsible for bogus numbers in one of his influential psychological experiments.

And this is not the first time questions have been raised about Ariely’s research in particular. In a famous 2008 study, he claimed that prompting people to recall the Ten Commandments before a test cuts down on cheating, but an outside team later failed to replicate the effect. An editor’s note was added to a 2004 study of his last month when other researchers raised concerns about statistical discrepancies, and Ariely did not have the original data to cross-check against. And in 2010, Ariely told NPR that dentists often disagree on whether X-rays show a cavity, citing Delta Dental insurance as his source. He later walked back that claim when the company said it could not have shared that information with him because it did not collect it.

Ariely is also up against his field’s now-notorious “replication crisis” — a nice way of saying that SCADS of psychological experimental results sure look a whole lot like bullshit. Go here for details.

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A photograph in this article features Ariely hanging with Jonah Lehrer at a 2008 science festival. Much like Ariely, Lehrer was a much-celebrated brainiac with frenetic entrepreneurial energy until he went pffff.

Jonah Lehrer’s 2012 book Imagine: How Creativity Works was pulled from shelves after it was demonstrated to contain fabricated quotes purportedly from Bob Dylan and WH Auden. He subsequently admitted to plagiarising the work of others in his blogposts, while critics noted apparent plagiarism and disregard for facts throughout his published work.

UD’s got nothing against operators. America is Land O’ Operators. He’s an operator/He’s a real player, as Fountains of Wayne puts it, and we got ’em growing on trees around here. But don’t believe anything they tell you.

A real Islamophobe, that. If she had any understanding of other cultures, she would learn, as Lily Cole has learned, that the burqa is just one more beautiful manifestation of human diversity. Maybe Cole could sit her down and have a talk with her.

Washington State’s football program has already embarrassed the university way past what the latest coach’s refusal to get vaccinated can do; but of course it’s never good to pile on, and Nick Rolovich is definitely piling on.

(And – not to pile on, but – Scathing Online Schoolmarm can’t help noting the pile-up of mixed metaphors in the sentence she quoted in her headline. Sportswriters use lots of mixed metaphors.)

Rolovich is the highest paid state employee; he’s a very high profile figure. A lot of people – like this guy – have had it with his anti-vax bullshit and want him gone. I say Rolovich should go ahead and let himself be hounded out. He will instantly become a strapping national hero, taking the place of this aged fallen god. The Voice of the Anti-Vaxxers!

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UD thanks a reader for keeping her up to date on the Rolovich mess at WSU.

Four kids, church-goers, Tea Party Patriots, the Roethles work hard to make Kansas a better place! Alana stars in a commercial attacking a Democratic congressional candidate – a commercial in which she identifies herself as just “a mom of four,” without mentioning that she’s “the secretary of Kansas’s Republican Party. She is also a member of the Kansas Lottery Commission … [and she] served as a delegate during the 2016 Republican National Convention and … attended President Trump’s inauguration.”

But that’s nothing! Scott just got indicted for health care fraud!

“[B]eginning in 2017 and continuing until at least 2020, multiple telemedicine and marketing companies paid Dr. Roethle illegal kickbacks, totaling $674,026, to sign prescriptions and orders for orthotics, genetic tests, and topical creams. Dr. Roethle was typically paid $30 for each order or prescription he signed. The marketing and telemedicine companies solicited patients through the media and cold calls and then electronically transmitted patient information to Dr. Roethle through an electronic portal. In almost all instances, Dr. Roethle had no contact with the patients and did not determine if they needed the items or services before he signed the orders.  Patients often complained to Dr. Roethle that they did not want or need the items he had ordered for them.

Roethle obtained medical licenses in 22 states and signed orders for thousands of patients residing in these states. Medicare Part B suffered a loss of over $26 million based on fraudulent prescriptions and orders signed by Dr. Roethle.”

It’s that fucking federal government, meddling in Alana’s commercial and Scott’s medical practice!

Oh – and Alana seems to run Scott’s office.

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UPDATE: Scott Roethle had apparently already piled up quite a few state disciplinary actions before the federal government took notice.

Alabam’s finest expresses sympathy with yesterday’s wanna-be Timothy McVeigh at the Library of Congress. That state, and its august federal reps, just keep getting better and better.

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Donald Trump Booed at Alabama Rally After

Encouraging Crowd to Get COVID-19 Vaccine

For instance, here’s a letter to the New York Times in response to a column urging secular Americans to try turning or returning to religious faith, because “religious ideas … provide an explanation for the most important features of reality… [T]he progress of science and the experience of modernity have strengthened the reasons to entertain the idea of God… [Our world] presents considerable evidence of an originating intelligence presiding over a law-bound world well made for our minds to understand, and at the same time a panoply of spiritual forces that seem to intervene unpredictably in our existence.”

In response, one reader, David Bonowitz, writes:

On a weekend when fundamentalist Muslims were winning a war against the United States, and as fundamentalist Christians demand the right to cause their fellow Americans to suffer and die from a preventable disease, Ross Douthat had the gall to tell me that I ought to accept the same primitive explanations that led directly to their fundamentalism. Hard pass.

Now, you can make the obvious point that Douthat wasn’t talking about fundamentalism, but on the contrary about a very tentative effort to move closer to religious faith generally; but put that aside. In response to Douthat’s rather long-winded and rather vague account of the possibility of faith, Bonowitz hits hard with a “hard pass,” pointing out in one beautifully structured sentence that the actual world – not the world of yearning, souls, and NDEs Douthat evokes, but the world of the present, the world of human history – suffers inordinately from the implications of quite a few forms of religious faith. Grounded and rational, Bonowitz’s brief brief against Douthat derives its power from the packed concision of his argument, coupled with his refusal to hide the anger (“has the gall”) that underlies his position.

Longtime readers know I never bother with these unless there are wonderful little details, like they served on the faculty senate’s Ethics and Institutional Integrity Committee… And like…

Benjamin J. Herbst, a lawyer for Mr. Ennels, said in an interview on Thursday night that Mr. Ennels did what he did “only to keep up with a gambling addiction” and was “in no way motivated” by greed. He did not live a lavish lifestyle or squirrel the money away for later, Mr. Herbst said.

“He’s a good person, he loved his job, he loved his students,” he said of Mr. Ennels. “He’ll move past this.”

On the side of our house, early morning.

“Let’s embrace diversity on every level!” tweets a British influencer who photographs herself in full burqa.

Excellent timing. History has really caught up with the burqa this week! UD, who has been writing about burqas forever, couldn’t be more thrilled. Soon the streets of Afghanistan (and London!) will ring out with beautiful blue diversity.

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UD thanks John, a reader, for linking her to this au courant tweet.

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Ten years ago UD wrote this essay in Inside Higher Education. Seems like a good time to reprint it.

THE BURQA, AND BEING IN THE WORLD

Cesare Pavese, the Italian writer who killed himself in 1950, when he was 41, once wrote: “Every luxury must be paid for, and everything is a luxury, starting with being in the world.”

One of the strange blessings of the burqa – the black robe that entirely hides a woman, even her face – is the way its presence among us reminds us of this truth. Existence, we remember when we pass blank sheaths on our streets, is a luxury – a brief, beautiful luxury, a flash of light before darkness. We should not extinguish that light.

The darkness of the burqa, the blindness, constriction, anonymity, and silence within it, intend to annihilate a person’s existence, to make her invisible, expressionless, lifeless. Yet far from accomplishing this erasure, the burqa has done no less than rivet the eyes of Europe. It has become one of the most expressive artifacts of the modern urban setting. It has drawn from people and governments such strong responses that, by overwhelming majorities, one European nation after another is banning them.

Why is the burqa so riveting? Why is it generating such intense responses?

I think it has to do with the way it parades total darkness, total rejection of life – a woman’s life. It parades self-nullification for oneself — and also for one’s daughters, small children just beginning their lives. And there is no way around it — however complex personal motivation on the part of the mother might be — and of course there can be no volition on the part of a seven-year-old — this sight is, for most free people, and certainly for most free women, terrible. It is generally terrible in the totality of darkness it expresses, and it is particularly terrible in its suppression of the existence of women.

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Western literature features a few symbolically burqa’ed characters, whose total rejection of life with other human beings, whose refusal to have an identity, profoundly disturbs the people around them. Non-beings like Melville’s Bartleby the Scrivener and Kafka’s hunger artist draw fascinated crowds to the spectacle of their dissolved being; their absence from the human story is so complete as to be ostentatious.

Certainly there’s a morbid curiosity about the sort of people who exhibit the possibility open to any of us to say no to existence while still maintaining a shadowy silent aspect on the street. But like the lost-to-public-existence woman in the burqa, these fictional characters also tend to make the people around them more aware than they were before of the luxury of being in the world. By showing us what it looks like when you stop the world from happening to you, when you elaborately outfit yourself to arrest the slightest overture from the human realm, these people sharpen our awareness – an awareness we usually don’t have, because almost everyone we know is letting the world happen to them – of what it means, of how precious it is, to be an existent human being in the world.

The burqa, in fact, is at once the most inexpressive and most expressive object in the city. The appareled energy it brings to the policing of every digit of a woman, its elaborate abolition of a self, tells us precisely how much some people have to pay for the luxury of being in the world. It tells us that being is indeed a luxury, for which some of us must pay very dearly.

That is what it says to us. This is what the burqa says to the woman – or child – inside it:

Yes, you may exist. If you insist. But in order to be allowed to exist, you will have to pay the ultimate price – non-existence. No one may see who you are. You may never exchange a smile on a street corner. Your thoughts you may keep. To yourself. The burqa covers your mouth, conveying to you, and to the world, your muteness.

Our response to the burqa is a variant of horror vacui; appalled at the nullification it represents, we attempt to dress it up, give it features, somehow animate it into a person. Indeed one defense of the burqa you sometimes read among Europeans and Americans has it that the burqa really makes no difference: If you look closely, you can discern a woman’s smiling or frowning eyes behind the mesh; and if you talk to her, and she talks back, you’ll begin to realize she’s just like everyone else. If her seven-year-old daughter is also in a burqa, you should make the same effort to treat her as you would any other child.

The enormously strong opposition to the burqa in much of Europe suggests that efforts like these to regard it, and the women and children inside of it, as part of normal multicultural human life have failed. Again, why?

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More often than not, when women who wear the burqa are interviewed, they say little or nothing about religion. Typically, they speak of their fear of male harassment. The burqa, they say, protects them from men.

Outside of countries like Afghanistan, it is abnormal to harbor so extreme a fear of public interaction with men that you feel you must wear a burqa. Women this traumatized, this imprisoningly beset by distorted perceptions of the world, should be helped to overcome their distortions and rejoin the human race. It’s bizarre, and inhumane, to respond to women who say these things by nodding your head understandingly and keeping them in their sacks.

Or do these women say these things because their husbands have made them afraid of men? Because their husbands have told them that if they go outside uncovered their husbands will kill them? That if they ever look at a man in public their husbands will kill them?

If my husband told me these things, I would certainly be afraid of men. I would also be living in a situation in which the courts of my country should take an interest. But since I’m afraid to say anything because of my husband’s threats, there is no way for the state to know that I’m living with a criminal. As are my daughters.

It is also possible that there are burqa wearers who truly believe that men will rape them or harass them mercilessly if they walk outside wearing a dress rather than a sheet and a mask. I mean, these women believe this on their own; they have derived a sort of Andrea Dworkin on steroids sex philosophy in which it is literally true that the act of being a visible woman in the world is simply impossible. Can’t be done. Woman equals red flag to a bull.

When interviewed, these burqa wearers typically berate women who go outside in jeans and blouses and make men rape them. They express a complacent moral superiority to loose women who instead of parading their nothingness parade their life, their equal share of the world. Women do not get to have a world. Only men do. Good women know this.

Self-nullified women, today’s Bartleby’s, tell modern democracies that they can extend equal rights to all, but there will always be some people who disdain the hard-fought right to exist, to be part of the social world. Not for them the luxury of being; it costs too much, this business of leaving your private retreat and venturing into the world of other human beings. These women will live in horror – they will teach their daughters to live in horror – of the free world. They will parade that horror every day.

This self-nullification, imposed or embraced, is why, one after another, the countries of Europe are saying no to the burqa. The burqa is one luxury no self-respecting democracy can afford.

UD‘s pretty excited about the prospect of new and noteworthy fatwas coming from the government in Afghanistan. She’s not sure they’ll be able to surpass the famous breastfeeding fatwa:

Sheikh ‘Abd Al-Muhsin Al-‘Obikan, an advisor at the Saudi Justice Ministry, recently issued a fatwa allowing the breastfeeding of adults. The fatwa is aimed at enabling an unrelated man and woman to be secluded in the same room, a situation which Islam considers forbidden gender mixing. The rationale behind the fatwa is that breastfeeding creates a bond of kinship between the man and woman, … thus making it acceptable for them to be together in seclusion.

She is sure, though, that they’ll come up with some great stuff.

Catholic integralism has enjoyed a small renaissance on the right in recent years, taken up by prominent apologists like Adrian Vermeule, a law professor at Harvard, and Sohrab Ahmari, the op-ed editor at the New York Post.

[In this connection, a] sort of authoritarian tourism [is emerging among] a new generation of right-wingers who, alienated from the secular liberalism of America, are attracted to illiberal alternatives. The same impulses that took [Brent Bozell] to Franco’s Spain now attract the Tucker Carlsons and Rod Drehers of the world to Orbán’s Hungary. Theorists like Vermeule and Ahmari might dream of a Christian commonwealth, but Orbán is showing how it is actually done, providing a real world model to emulate…

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Afghanistan’s caliphate will no doubt be Vermeule and company’s next stop on the authoritarian theocracy tourist trail. Excise Mohammed and you’re in the same spiritual universe, with a close to identical social ethos. Mawlawi Hibatullah Akhundzada, with his global ambitions, is a far better tourist attraction than provincial Orbán, for while integralist Hungary contents itself with its iota of irrelevant territory, Akhundzada is just getting started.

… will appear today on The Lead with Jake Tapper, to talk about Afghanistan.

I’ve been chronicling his recent activities in ISIS prisoner camps, identifying and seeking to release/repatriate some women and children.

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Here tis.