The Queen bestows OBEs on two anti female genital mutilation activists, which is great. The more publicity the better. But as one of them points out, you’ve got to start putting people in jail.

Here in the States we’re still working on putting No-Clits Nagarwala in the slammer. UD thinks that eventually this will happen. In the meantime, it’s nice to realize that her life and vocation are ruined, so she can’t cut up any more children.

Crowds of obnoxious Israeli ultraorthodox (there’s no real sense in railing against them, since they will in a few years be ruling a halachic religious state… but let’s fight the good fight anyway) scream every Saturday at people trying to enjoy their dinner at a Jerusalem restaurant. No one’s allowed to open a restaurant on the Sabbath, see.

The eatery’s owner decided she’d had enough; she and her female waitstaff waded into the crowd of ultras and pulled up their blouses to expose their bras, which scared the ultras away.

“Klil Lifshitz, the 28-year-old lesbian who opened Bastet 2 1/2 years ago with a ‘super feminist’ wait staff rather than decamp to liberal Tel Aviv as most of her friends had,” is my heroine; she scared away the ultras.

Maybe if they had some military experience the ultras would be able to stand up to a few bras.

Surely Klil’s next tactic (when the boys get it up enough to come back) is mooning… and after that, well, UD just can’t say.

Always one of the American university’s most criminalized football teams, the University of Florida Gators have lately outdone themselves. Aaron Hernandez’s Former Florida Teammate Charged With Murder runs a headline, and, yes, believe it or not, the team boasted two future murderers playing side by side! Hernandez killed acquaintances; Earl Joiner allegedly killed his wife. Earl Joiner Becomes Second Florida Gator to be Accused of Murder from 2007 Team notes another headline. Storied team! A school can’t pay for this kind of publicity!

A slice of Oberlin College’s administration, students, and faculty ganged up on a local bakery.

Oberlin College staff — including deans and professors — and students engaged in demonstrations in front of Gibson’s Bakery following the arrests of … three students, [a] lawsuit [filed by the bakery] stated. The suit also said Oberlin Vice President and Dean of Students Meredith Raimondo and other college staff members “handed out hundreds of copies” of a flier to the community and the media stating that Gibson’s Bakery and its owners racially profiled and discriminated against the three students. The court documents include a copy of the flier, which included the words “DON’T BUY.” “This is a RACIST establishment with a LONG ACCOUNT of RACIAL PROFILING and DISCRIMINATION,” the flier read, according to the lawsuit.The flier also listed 10 of the bakery’s competitors and urged customers to shop there instead.

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Students carried signs accusing the bakery owners of white supremacy or simply saying “Fuck Gibson’s.”

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All three students eventually confessed, one to having tried to steal wine, and two others to physically attacking a person from the bakery who tried to stop them as they exited the store.

A jury just told Oberlin to pay the bakery eleven million dollars. Punitive damages – to be decided later – may raise that figure quite a bit.

A subtle moral lesson for Oberlin students from the people who run their school:

1. Rush to judgment.
2. Pay for your mistake with other people’s tuition money.

Details.

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Update: Those who argue that this was a bad decision, with frightening implications for free speech on campuses, make two points:

1. It is impossible to assess what damage was done to the bakery by a concerted effort (large protest gatherings in front of the store and broadly disseminated messages to the community to boycott Gibson’s because it was and had long been a racist institution) to shut it down.
2. The attack on the bakery did not come from officials who speak on behalf of Oberlin. Thus, “to punish a college for not reining in its students, administrators, and faculty even when they are not speaking on the college’s behalf represents an extraordinary threat to academic freedom and to freedom of speech.”

As to #1, you can see from these clashing financial experts at the trial that Oberlin did itself no favors by hiring as their expert someone who dismissed out of hand any evidence of harm to the business. No doubt the guy on the other side inflated stuff, but Oberlin’s problem lies in the fact that when a crowd of people vociferously and steadfastly condemns a business as racist, it’s reasonable to expect long-term damage. UD grants that we’re in a rather gray zone here, but if she consults her own response to obscene deep-rooted bigots of the sort the Oberlin literature about Gibson’s evoked (she shrinks away as fast as possible), it’s intuitively obvious to her that many people are going to stay away from the bakery. Serious damage will ensue.

On #2: Actually, a college should – must – rein in people like the Oberlin vice-president and dean of students who stirred up the student body against an innocent business (UD personally thinks the deathblow in that trial came from the parade of African American locals who testified that far from a racist location, Gibson’s Bakery was a place of love) and in texts boasted of her ability to organize the students to do her bidding. Oberlin might have saved itself a lot of grief if it at least issued a statement acknowledging that this woman acted badly. Intemperate ideologues who rush, disastrously, to judgment, don’t seem to UD the very best candidates for deans of students; but if you insist on hiring them, you should be prepared to distance yourself when they make a mess of things. If you choose not to distance yourself, you should be prepared to absorb some legal blows.

Les UDs leave Rehoboth Beach tomorrow.

It doesn’t seem to bother them that, even as their defense of full veiling is going down the tubes all over the burqa-banning world, their arguments remain the lazy, unelaborated claims – with broad-brush insults and fear-mongering thrown in – that everyone has heard and dismissed. Behold Zahra Jamal in Foreign Policy.

Her subtitle, in which she evokes the violence of virtually pan-European burqa bans now “crashing down” on these shores (Quebec may soon ban them), sets the hyperalarmist mood of a piece written in the aftermath of countless non-violent and orderly local, regional, and national full-veiling bans. What world is the author living in? And has it not occurred to her that, given present realities, she should make some effort to accommodate herself to ours?

The fundamental polemical quandary the serious burqa defender suffers is this: She seems doomed at once to assert the obviously “sordid” (Jamal’s word) nature of burqa opposition, and to note that huge left and right national majorities, as well as international courts, support bans. To put her position concisely: Everyone sucks.

From beginning to end, Jamal describes enormous populations desperately under the thumb of powerful white nationalists. Somehow these clever charismatic people are convincing mental and moral midgets like Angela Merkel to call for serious restrictions on the burqa.

“For centuries, many Western scholars, church elders, and political leaders justified colonial and imperial incursions with the call to save Muslim women from Muslim men, citing the veil as a symbol of oppression. In contrast, in European and Quebecois political and popular discourse over the past decade, hijabs and niqabs have come to symbolize terrorism, thus reconstituting Muslim women from cause to enemy, from subjugated victim to powerful terrorist. According to proponents, bans on religious coverings are meant to liberate Muslim women from oppression, emancipate them into secularism, and deter them from violence. Burqa bans thus simultaneously falsely frame veiled women as security threats and legalize Islamophobia.”

Can you detect an argument in here? There’s nothing ‘in contrast’ about rejecting the burqa as both an instrument of oppression and a security risk. There’s no religious warrant for it, all ISIS, Taliban, and al Qaeda women and girls must wear it, and it has been used to hide the identity of terrorists and ordinary criminals. In its extreme physical muzzling, it creates a population of women overwhelmingly unlikely to become assimilated into modern open European countries. So, nu?

Weirdly, most of the subsequent essay reviews the spectacular success of burqa bans in Europe, across the political spectrum. Surely this amazing massing of votes and judicial decisions against full-veiling demands a powerful counter-response, one that begins with an effort to understand the determination of millions of ordinary people to ban the burqa.

“Ultimately, veil bans are about the sordid view that human diversity is a threat, and—similar to the flurry of state abortion bans in the United States—women’s bodies must be disciplined and regulated by the state rather than by women themselves to safeguard the nation.”

Yeah, if you want to see the flourishing of human diversity at its various best, take a look at a community of burqa wearers… Veil bans are, among other things, a rejection of the sordid practice of trapping ten year old girls under cloth – of men disciplining and regulating the bodies of helpless children.

Jamal’s essay is so lazy that UD begins to think burqa-defense has degenerated into virtue signaling. The author knows perfectly well that the tidal wave (to use her metaphor) of burqa banning is unlikely to be stopped, even if you spit Islamophobia and white supremacy at everybody. In lieu of serious appraisals of the banning trend, and serious arguments against banning, burqa defenders are left with vacuous indignation.

Ah the still soft voice of the Quaker community that is Sidwell Friends, where simplicity and selflessness are bywords of the faith… To be part of this educational community is to feel and reflect the values of the Society founded by George Fox so long ago.

Or not. Apparently so many Sidwell parents have verbally assaulted the counseling staff for failing to get the kid into Harvard that most of the staff has resigned, and the head of school has written a sweet letter to all parents about how “love blurs our vision” when it comes to the little ones; when we shriek obscenities at the staff we know not what we do.

To which UD says Awwww.

Has headmaster had a chance to look up close and personal at the Varsity Blues folks about to go to prison? Is it really your sense that the problem these people have is fuzzy over-fondness?

Quite a few of your students are cubs of America’s most brutal predators. (See p 113 Gillian Rose, Love’s Work.) Said predators don’t take kindly to kinks in the multigenerational winner-take-all masterplan.

Masters of the Universe don’t barely get into U Minnesota; they power their way into Princeton.

And now Brothers and Sisters, let us pray.

… UD thinks a little caution is in order.

But this is America, land of the bold, where mere undergrads majoring in biology can open ponzi schemes and use them to finance the Vegas strip club lifestyle one associates with people in their thirties at least.

The scheme – call it a kedge fund – couldn’t have worked without a supportive community of drunks/the mentally challenged/fellow criminals. It takes a village.

… pink flowers at the beach.

‘The first year of [Richie] Incognito’s retirement was marked by erratic and threatening behavior. This was not the old shirtless barroom rages of his Dolphins years but stuff that suggested serious distress—telling the police that he was “running NSA class level 3 documents through my phone” when they showed up to stop him from assaulting a stranger at a gym, showing up at an Arizona funeral home with a half-dozen guns in his truck and threatening employees after they refused to honor his request that they cut off his late father’s head “for research purposes.” Last Tuesday, Incognito signed a one-year contract with the Oakland Raiders.’

And now for some Freudian (see post below this one) thoughts about human beings and aggression.

‘The NFL has sold football as a shelf-stable retail version of war for generations, and it’s hard to imagine the league ever settling on a more compelling pitch. Humanity has only ever come up with so many ways to justify the fact that people admire and enjoy things that we’re taught should be abhorred, and squaring all these contradictions is not just a problem for [former Bills coach] Rex Ryan, or football. American culture admires bullies more than it dares let on, primarily because Americans are much closer to the edge than they dare admit.’

Seems to UD we’re absolutely fine about letting it on, having elected a bully president. He’ll probably be re-elected.

Some people really like bullies, and the fact’s right out there. The Deadspin writer cautions us that “cruelty and violence are [not] the same thing as strength.” But Incognito’s brilliant career conveys the fact that fans already know that. They just prefer cruelty.

‘When the inner life is not easily disturbed it has achieved what is to Freud as nearly ideal a condition as he can imagine. There is something Oriental in the Freudian ethic.’

In light of the controversy over its authorship, UD, beachside, is revisiting The Mind of the Moralist.

And go figure. As she reads Sontag’s/Rieff’s/Freud’s repeated … mantra that we simply cannot reconcile, and are stupidly self-destructive to try to reconcile, instinct and civilization, UD experiences a vivid memory of Agnieszka Osiecka – an alcoholic – raising a very full glass at a lunch table in Hanka and Jerzy Soltan’s Cambridge house. This would have been a few years before her death in 1997.

“To the continued success of our hopeless cause!” she shouted to the gathering, and we all laughed.

… to the beach.