… Don DeLillo.

Yes. People really don’t take kindly to finding out that their taxes are paying for campaigns aimed squarely at the liberal values they cherish most.

Plus, there’s a major… er… branding problem with the hijab. Our global associations with it are routinely, completely ick.

[T]he campaign was more interested in promoting sexist modesty codes than upholding human rights or opposing anti-Muslim bigotry… While the campaign would have been in poor taste at any point in time – given that the hijab continues to be enforced upon millions of Muslim women around the world – for it to have come out as the Taliban’s gory gender segregation is endangering Afghan women’s lives is truly repugnant. The hijab is not ‘freedom’ for the women in Afghanistan being killed and threatened for defying Islamic mandates. In Afghanistan, the Taliban are tearing off clothes and even targeting women who do Fighting bigotry against Muslims is no excuse to endorse the hijab, derailing the everyday struggle of millions of women pushing back against religions hegemony in the Muslim world. Those designing the next Council of Europe ad campaign would be best advised to acknowledge that any religious mandated code for women, embraced by autocratic regimes, does not signify freedom.not wear the ‘right’ kind of hijab…

The hijab continues to be enforced on women across the Muslim world, even when it isn’t codified in law.

[And of course on girls: “[Indonesian] schools in more than 20 provinces still make religious attire mandatory in their dress code.”

“Many public schools require girls and female teachers to wear the hijab that too often prompt bullying, intimidation, social pressures, and in some cases, forced resignation.”…]

[I]n Afghanistan or Iran, … many risk imprisonment to defy the hijab’s imposition. It is little surprise that Iranian feminists, such as the Belgian Member of Parliament Darya Safai found the Council of Europe’s campaign, and its misrepresentation of hijab as a symbol of feminism, especially repulsive...

Fighting bigotry against Muslims is no excuse to endorse the hijab, derailing the everyday struggle of millions of women pushing back against religions hegemony in the Muslim world. Those designing the next Council of Europe ad campaign would be best advised to acknowledge that any religious mandated code for women, embraced by autocratic regimes, does not signify freedom.

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The reason the CoE launched a love the hijab campaign is that it knows millions of free, and struggling to be free, women hate it. Okay. But they had far better options than trying to make us love it. Here are two.

1. Do not launch a campaign of any kind. Do not go there. As with the burqa, so with the hijab: You have millions of fellow citizens upset in a suppressed way by modesty code women. Since these citizens value tolerance, they are willing to seethe, firmly direct their female children out of eyesight of this reactionary garb, and leave it at that. If you make a big deal out of it, forcing their eyes upon a problem they’ve been able to avoid looking at directly, you’re simply going to make a shaky latency powerfully manifest. What they’ve been hiding from themselves – they really find the hijab pretty dreadful – you yourself will blast out into the open. Drop the idea and make do with the uncomfortable peace secular women have forged with the hijab.

2. If you decide to try again, deal honestly and forthrightly with the hijab’s significant unpopularity with your audience. Do not mindlessly, mendaciously celebrate it and excitedly invite free women to join in the hoedown. Acknowledge that in real terms the hijab is irredeemable. It is not beautiful. It is not joyous. It is for much of your audience an off-putting statement of self-abnegation.

Okay, NOW write your ad campaign. The only real card you have to play is religious liberty. Not that the hijab is beautiful, or diverse, or elating – but that it is a mark of religious fervency, and we are bound as liberals to tolerate religious fervency. Don’t sex it up, in other words. You make yourself ridiculous when you try to make one of the world’s most powerful icons of sexlessness sexy.

I AM A MUSLIM. I EXPRESS MY LOVE AND OBEDIENCE TOWARD ALLAH THROUGH MY HIJAB. WHEN I WEAR MY HIJAB I FEEL CLOSE TO GOD. PLEASE UNDERSTAND THIS. Something of this sort will do.

At an appearance in Drancy, Zemmour asked a woman in a hijab to remove it.

The woman in turn asked Zemmour to remove his tie, arguing that her hijab is a similarly personal clothing choice. She then proceeded to remove her hijab …

… “Hijab is not what makes religion,” she added, “just as wearing a tie does not make you smarter”.

So let us examine this equivalence between a hijab and a tie. Not very convincing at first blush, is it?

It would be convincing if the symbolic value of a tie involved expressing your personal submission to Brooks Brothers. But a tie is devoid of powerful symbolic meaning, beyond maybe saying I’m corporate, or I’m bourgeois, or something. When I was a hippie, ties were worth something symbolically, but that’s gone now. Nor are our thoughts liable to wander, in spying a man in a tie, to countries in the world where men are jailed for not wearing ties; or countries where men risk their lives to be free from having to wear ties.

So, step one in the renewed campaign to increase respect for the hijab: Be honest. Don’t play us secular people for fools. The hijab is very very far from a personal clothing choice. Parents stick hijabs on ten-year-olds and keep sticking them on. Obviously for these millions of little girls it’s not at all a personal clothing choice, and ten-year-olds are perfectly capable of choosing their own clothing. It’s fully imposed on someone incapable of knowing very much about, much less assenting in an informed way to, the laws of Islam. Having from a very young age known no existence in the public realm without a hijab, our ten-year-old is highly unlikely ever to take it off. Doesn’t sound very much like the history of your typical tie-wearer.

And no one will mind – or even notice – if Zemmour ventures outside without a tie on. His family, and larger community, will not shun him. Of course there’s not necessarily community pressure to cover up. But there certainly might be.

Plenty of adult women wear the hijab by choice. Again, I would ask that they not trivialize it so as to make people who might be uncomfortable with it more comfortable. Be honest enough to acknowledge the potent message about modesty and submission to God you mean to carry into the liberal public realm when you wear it.

“The unbridled discretion exercised by the City; its use of the heckler’s veto as an explicit justification; its shifting, post hoc rationalizations; and the City’s invocation of political rhetoric by rally organizers and speakers, point to the conclusion that plaintiff is likely to succeed on the claim that the City engaged in viewpoint discrimination with respect to plaintiff’s political views.”

Hapless, hopeless, Baltimore, city of UD‘s birth, attempts to keep a group of vile people from assembling there. The people sued, and the judge… well…

What does a country destroyed by the debauched greed of five men still produce?

Fantastic photographs. Even their captions can be versified (scroll down).

A baker in Beirut by candlelight.

Beiruti bathed in gossamer at night.

Tonsured by a barber without sight.

Bluewash through the darkened urban blight.

The idea that critical race theory is an academic concept that is taught only at colleges or law schools might be technically accurate, but the reality on the ground is a good deal more complicated. Few middle or high schoolers are poring over academic articles written by Richard Delgado or Kimberlé Crenshaw. But across the nation, many teachers have, over the past years, begun to adopt a pedagogical program that owes its inspiration to ideas that are very fashionable on the academic left, and that go well beyond telling students about America’s copious historical sins.

In some elementary and middle schools, students are now being asked to place themselves on a scale of privilege based on such attributes as their skin color. History lessons in some high schools teach that racism is not just a persistent reality but the defining feature of America. And some school systems have even embraced ideas that spread pernicious prejudices about nonwhite people, as when a presentation to principals of New York City public schools denounced virtues such as “perfectionism” or the “worship of the written word” as elements of “white-supremacy culture.” …

For anybody who cares about making sure that Donald Trump does not become the 47th president of the United States, it is crucial that Democrats avoid repeating the mistakes that just put a Republican in Virginia’s governor’s mansion. It is impossible to win elections by telling voters that their concerns are imaginary. If Democrats keep doing so, they will keep losing.

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And Brett Stephens:

[N]ote the way in which the controversy over critical race theory is treated by much of the left as either much ado about an obscure scholarly discipline or, alternatively, a beneficent and necessary set of teachings about the past and present of systemic racism in America.

But C.R.T. is neither obscure nor anodyne. It is … a “politically committed movement” that often explicitly rejects notions of merit, objectivity, colorblindness and neutrality of law, among other classically liberal concepts.

That’s no reason to ban teaching it or any other way of looking at the world. But it is dishonest to argue that it is anything less than ideologically radical, intensely racialized and deliberately polarizing. It is even more dishonest to suggest that it exists only in academic cloisters…

No wonder the debate over C.R.T.-influenced pedagogies in public schools — which liberals insist don’t even exist in the state’s public schools – although they clearly do – had such a galvanic effect on the Virginia race. It exposed the myth that the illiberal currents at play in the United States today are solely a Republican phenomenon. They are not.

See the post directly below this one for background.

One needs to parse the pro-hijab Council of Europe message to understand the problem here.

BEAUTY IS IN DIVERSITY.

AS FREEDOM IS IN HIJAB.

Let’s start with the first statement. Variety is the spice of life, I grant you. But surely not everything that meets the eye in a highly diverse environment will strike everyone as beautiful; and indeed given the notorious subjectivity of the concept “beauty,” mixed in this case with the feel-good vacuity of the sentence’s sentiment, it’s not terribly surprising that a lot of people were turned off. Karabash has a richly diverse urban setting, with unusual bright red water features, but I don’t find it beautiful. Los Angeles is highly diverse, with gated communities for billionaires down the road from rancid encampments, but I don’t find this diversity beautiful. The hijab campaign means to educate me, to make me more tolerant of people who wear hijabs; but it starts with an insult to my intelligence.

Plus, I’m not sure defending hijabs as diversity really… works anyway. I mean, they’re diverse from what non-hijab wearers wear, to be sure; but within the hijab community the whole modesty point is to make children and adults all pretty much look alike, right? Not a very diversity-positive community.

With the second statement, real trouble ensues. Beauty is to diversity as freedom is to the hijab. So… beauty inheres in diversity, just as freedom inheres in the hijab. The hijab is as obviously about freedom as diversity is about beauty. To wear a hijab is to say I am free. I am a free person, a free woman.

Now, if the campaign stated

FREEDOM OF CHOICE IS AN IMPORTANT FREEDOM.

I AM FREE TO WEAR A HIJAB.

no one would have complained. But if you are trying to say to me that you are free because you wear a hijab, that when I see a woman (or, horribly, a child) in a hijab I’m supposed to say There goes a free person. The hijab proves it. I’m going to refer you to Orwell’s 1984. You are not going to be able to make me believe that the very opposite of the truth is true.

I’m perfectly okay with all sorts of religious people marking their submission to God in any number of ways, but the whole point of this gesture, you understand, is to publicly reject “freedom” as the French, and ol’ UD, understand it. So the campaign lies, and since most people don’t find lies very persuasive, the campaign fails.

“Freedom is in hijab” crows the new Council of Europe anti-discrimination campaign — in which we are to applaud a mark of religious submission as a mark of personal freedom.

It’s not sitting well with the French.

“Reminding that women are free to wear the hijab is one thing,” Socialist Senator Laurence Rossignol said, “but saying freedom is in hijab is another. It’s promoting it. Is this the role of the Council of Europe?”

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Gabriel Attal, [French] government spokesman, said after a cabinet meeting on Wednesday that the campaign defied common sense “because one shouldn’t confuse religious freedom with the de facto promotion of a religious symbol”. Such an “identitarian” approach was “contrary to the freedom of conscience that France supports in all European and international forums”, Attal said.

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Taking note of the universal fury, and perhaps reflecting upon an anti-hate campaign that has given the French right one hell of a shot in the arm, the Council has, er, issued a statement. “These tweets have been deleted and we’re going to think about a better presentation for the project. [The wording reflects] individual statements from people who took part in one of the project’s workshops, and doesn’t reflect the position of the Council of Europe or its secretary-general [Marija Pejčinović Burić].”

Oh, so the sec gen didn’t see the thing before it went out to the whole world, either! In fact, nobody knows who the hell…

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Next up in the Council’s anti-discrimination campaign: A young Brooke Shields smolders at the camera and purrs: Nothing gets between me and my Calvin Klein hairshirt…

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Another case in point.

… Bared.

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Caroline Tait, a Métis professor and medical anthropologist who has worked alongside Bourassa for a decade at the University of Saskatchewan, said she grew suspicious of [Carrie] Bourassa’s story because she initially only claimed to be Métis, but later added Anishinaabe and Tlingit heritage…

Winona Wheeler, an associate professor at the University of Saskatchewan and member of the Fisher River Cree Nation in Manitoba who helped Tait research Bourassa’s genealogy, told CBC that she was disgusted when she witnessed Bourassa’s TEDx speech.

“I was repulsed by how hard she was working to pass herself off as Indigenous,” Wheeler said. “You’ve got no right to tell people that’s who you are in order to gain legitimacy, to get positions, and to get funding. That’s abuse.”

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And listen. Now that we know this is a thing, that on a regular basis people are going to be faking minority identities in order to gain advantages, we need to start noting common features of the con.

As a dedicated follower of all sorts of identity frauds, UD has certainly noticed a few characteristic elements, most of them arising from the fact that the sort of person capable of conceiving of, let alone carrying out, such a wacky, brazen, incredibly high-risk act tends to be mentally unstable.

Call their most self-damaging syndrome Fulminating Fraudulence, in which they can’t leave fake enough alone and must always be metastasizing (Anishinaabe, Tlingit…), and always be appearance-embellishing (for that TED talk, Bourrasa practically disappeared under the weight of native drapery).

Recall a GW student’s description of Jessica Krug in the classroom:

[S]he was very adamant that she was from the Bronx — she had a very heavy accent throughout the whole class. She would come in with huge hoops and a nose ring and a crop top and tight, tight cheetah pants. She has a big tattoo on her arm of the socialist symbol [the hammer and sickle]…

If she hadn’t been unmasked, Krug would have been twirling Enver Hoxha nipple tassels.

Wealth-tax-wise, it’s certainly a question, and Paul Krugman, rather lamely, tries to answer it (They need to keep their competition with other billionaires going; they are petty insecure egomaniacs).

Hoarding of pointless billions, more generally, is a fascinating behavior. Harvard University – closing in on a $55 billion endowment – still asks UD‘s husband every few weeks to leave it all his worldly goods. Unimaginably rich people grasping self-destructively after money they don’t need is fascinating.

Greed on a much smaller scale we know all about; we couldn’t have classic literature without it. (Start at 1:50.) But refusal to shear off the odd billion from, say, $335 billion, for the common good, is truly puzzling. That is, one can sort of perceive a kind of panic in people like Fanny Dashwood (again, see 1:50); the intimate, familial, cruelty of her grasping, and the comical fact that she literally does fall upon every single stray farthing in her vicinity, sketch a human type, a baleful character, recognizable from our observation of, say, certain children who steal other children’s toys, and throw a tantrum if you try to take any of theirs away, even temporarily…

But words like pathological tend to get rolled out when unconscionably vast sums are hoarded, or trivialized, as in Robert Hughes’ comment about the 2004 sale of a Picasso:

When you have the super-rich paying $104m for an immature Rose Period Picasso – close to the GNP of some Caribbean or African states – something is very rotten. Such gestures do no honour to art: they debase it by making the desire for it pathological. As Picasso’s biographer John Richardson said to a reporter on that night of embarrassment at Sotheby’s, no painting is worth a hundred million dollars.

And that was 2004. We’re up to $450.3 million for a da Vinci. No painting is worth … five hundred million dollars?

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How bout this.

Melanie Klein … saw greed as part of human nature, [and] she traced it back to the death drive. Human beings are unavoidably self-destructive, she argued, and we project that destructiveness onto the outside world in the form of insatiable acquisitiveness, envy, and hate. “At the unconscious level, greed aims primarily at completely scooping out, sucking dry, and devouring the breast,” Klein wrote, describing the primal instincts of infants and psychotics. Though later psychologists have questioned Klein’s all-pervasive belief in the death drive, or Thanatos, many agree with her that there is an existential connection between our mortality and our desperation to acquire good things. Essentially, it’s death that makes people “greedy for life”; we seek to get as much as we can for ourselves before the game is over.

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Some suggested reading. An excerpt from it, taking a position a tad different from Klein’s.

A woman who titled a collection of essays The Virtue of Selfishness, [Ayn] Rand was given to brackish candor. Yet at a time when many people think that the common good is more often imperiled than empowered by unbridled greed, she provides an alternative defense of the acquisitive instinct by appealing to an ethics of gross achievement and a formulation of personal liberty that looks with suspicion and disdain on any talk of civic duty, moral obligation, or even prudential restraint. Her aim was simple: To relieve greed, once and for all, of any moral taint.

As Sepp Blatter (talk about a blast from the past!) finally gets indicted, this New York Times writer does his best, within the length restrictions of typical American newspaper articles, to summarize the hundred or so years of everyone within fifteen feet of FIFA stealing all of its money. The hilarious larcenous briberous free for all which is professional soccer just keeps rolling along, of course; but nothing in the organization’s history will ever come up to the tightly organized crime that Blatter oversaw. No wonder he is the recipient of so many honorary degrees.

Emory University’s Decatur Hospital is a “Compassion-Centered Spiritual Health Site” which… great, great. The name’s something of a mouthful, but whoever named it is clearly trying to cram a lot of good stuff in. Could have named it Community Centered Compassion Centered Spiritual Health and Wellness Center or something even longer, so fine.

It’s also a hospital, of course, with an emergency room and all…

But the reality of Emory Decatur’s emergency room is more like the stygian depths than the spiritual heights… By which I mean that, as described in this article, it’s more like hiring a plumber than leaning on the everlasting arms. When you hire a plumber (at least around these parts), you start paying the minute he walks in the door – seventy dollars for the first hour, a little less for after that. Dude could walk around doing nothing and you’d still owe him seventy.

Same thing at compassionate Emory, which explains in the email I quote in this post’s title that hell you could sit in the ER waiting room for seven hours with a head injury and then give up in frustration and you’d STILL get a bill for, let’s see, $688.35.

… but the ignominy lingers on. The University of Michigan just sits there refusing to acknowledge/apologize for its craven abandonment of Bright Sheng. The faculty is getting restless; seven hundred professors have written to the school to say what the fuck.

Of course the school had to suspend its grotesque “investigation” of an eminent composer who made the mistake of showing his class Olivier’s Othello; but now there’s the matter of setting things to rights and getting Sheng back in the classroom.

Sixty music department students have also written the school asking for their professor, and their school’s reputation, back.

But the school is still scared shitless, and must be pondering the truth commission one segment of the faculty proposes, where Sheng would publicly admit his centuries of injustice and beg forgiveness.

[Brett] Kavanaugh theorized that a left-leaning state could offer a $1 million bounty against those who sell an assault rifle, like an AR-15, then claim it wasn’t using state power because only private parties could bring the suits.

Hadn’t thought of that. Ha.

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You and Me Against the World

‘It’s hardly traditional to get injunctions against judges, injunctions against everybody, right?’ [Chief Justice] Roberts said. ‘That’s part of the relief you seek, isn’t it? … So you’re seeking an injunction against the world?’

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Genius Loco

Much of the debate revolved around a 1908 case, Ex Parte Young, where the Supreme Court ruled that state officials could be sued in federal court to prevent  them from trying to enforce unconstitutional laws. 

‘Some geniuses came up with a way to evade the commands of that decision as well as the command [of] the broader principal that states are not to nullify federal constitutional rights,’ Justice Elena Kagan said. ‘To say, ‘Oh, we’ve never seen this before, we can’t do anything about it,’ I guess I just don’t understand that argument.’