Why is the insane, violent Dawoodi Bohra cult tolerated by India?
“Is this tiny speck so full of evil that it has to be removed? Do they really think there is so much spiritual power in this tiny bit of tissue?”
Why is it tolerated by the United States?
And why is Alan Dershowitz defending the mad toilet-breakers and their demonic clitoris bearers??
We just want to perform a gentle jurisdictional nick.
Congress lacked authority to enact a law criminalizing female genital mutilation in 1996, lawyers for [female genital mutilators Jumana] Nagarwala and Farmington Hills couple Dr. Fakhruddin Attar and Dr. Farida Attar [now argue].
The law “impermissibly expanded the scope and authority of the federal government’s powers beyond constitutional parameters, and the current prosecution cannot proceed without violating the Constitution of the United States,” the lawyers wrote.
And whoa. These states had better watch out cuz if the United States stands for anything, it stands for our right to cut off baby clitorises and sew up baby vaginas in the name of the Lord.
When a liar writes a tell-all, what gets told?
When a salesman writes a memoir, what gets sold?
Dirty university, dirty coach:
A story that never gets old.
It’s been a long time since this blog has featured that genre of sports journalism in which the university football coach is cast as a pietà, an icon of purity and innocence suddenly and shockingly beset by evil.
UD thinks this piece, written by a Bowling Green football fan, qualifies as Coacha Inconsolata writing.
You tend to get CI when a football team is so vile – a complete loser on the field, with a heavy emphasis on criminality – that the choice for booster/journalists becomes very stark: Either contempt or sympathy. Either you allow yourself to acknowledge – and even express – the disgust that the sickening reality of the local team makes you feel, or you cast about for some way to redeem an unredeemable spectacle. You rifle (riffle?) the mythic-familiar and conjure a fallen world whose gratuitous malignity brutalizes Our Mother of the Gridiron, the coach.
Title:
Heat Rising on Bowling Green’s [Coach] Jinks as Arrests Pile Up
Not that Jinks recruited the heat; the heat just satanically piled up from Hades.
The team, the writer notes, is at “the bottom of the standings,” but “No. 1 in the country in offseason arrests.”
Off-season, mind you; there are almost always far more crimes committed during the season.
The writer pithily sums things up:
Six wins in two years.
Five arrests in six months.
Can we say the obvious? Can we say that this is the result you get with a really really shitty coach and program?
No, no. The writer goes on to praise the coach for dismissing the naughty players (what a saint: most coaches would keep dangerous people on campus), and for spouting the most amazing stream of sports cliches in his own defense that UD has ever seen — more even than that scene in Bull Durham. The writer actually quotes the coach’s entire statement in the piece.
The coach, he concludes, is “a good guy,” tasked with the “inherent challenges of monitoring more than 100 college kids.” Problem is, his “inexperienced staff” (another cross he has to bear) “is recruiting too many marginal characters out of self-preservation.” They’re doing it out of self-preservation, after all! Nobody else wants these dudes, but Bowling Green has to take them because … no one else will …
A study published in the journal Educational Psychology found that students who had cellphones or laptops present while a lesson was being taught scored five percent, or half a letter grade, lower on exams than students who didn’t use electronics… The study also found that students in the device-permitting classroom who were not using devices also scored lower. The researchers attributed this to distraction from the devices around them.
Adorable mech engineers!
They tend to be naughty, the dears…
They act like a luv
And get grants from the gov
But then all the funds disappear.
And as FGM becomes more common in the United States, our doctors too will start specializing in the many complications of the slashing off of six year olds’ genitals. The Somali doctor quoted in my headline has of course a steady stream of bleeding mutilated children to specialize in, since 98% of the little girls in that country get hacked, mostly by local village butchers. I’m sure we’ll have our share of local butchers here in the ol’ US of A too; but some of our castrators will maybe have nursing degrees or whatever.
Meanwhile, the latest child FGM death in Somalia seems to have attracted sufficient global attention to rouse the government (“government”) to say that it will pursue the case in the courts, blah blah. I’m sure we’ll all forget the clinical details long before whoever is trying to run Somalia remembers that it was after all just a girl and really who gives a shit. There’s a war on.
One of the doctors who tried to save Deeqa after the botched procedure told CNN she suffered the most extreme form of FGM he had ever seen.
“Her whole female genital tract had been removed, the labia and the clitoris had been cut off, it’s type 4 FGM.
“She was brought in two days after they cut her, she was already infected with tetanus,” Dr. Abdirahman Omar Hassan said.
If they’d been able to save her, Deeqa could have lived out her full life span: Buried under a body veil at eleven years old, married to some random old guy at twelve, finished off at thirteen in an honor killing.
Jameis Winston Says He Has “Grown And Learned” From The Experience Of Grabbing An Uber Driver’s Crotch
Students there know and respect athletic traditions. Even off-season, in the dead of summer, they gather to remind the world what has for so long made the school famous.
We can only wonder what they have in store for us once the season begins in late August. The excitement is building! Pity Aaron Hernandez can’t be there.
Rapist ‘Only Wanted Outercourse‘:
Brock Turner Appeals Sexual Assault Conviction
A commenter at Deadspin gets to the heart of what matters in the University of Pennsylvania bribery story.
The University of Miami continues to this day to proudly take … well, dirty hardly does as an adjective for Esformes money, does it?
Two sights yesterday, on a walk
before tea at the Henley Park Hotel.
A sculpture on a side
door to the Henley Park.
Massed sky on Mass Ave.
**********************
Our tea table, Henley Park.
Dr. Bernard Carroll, known as the "conscience of psychiatry," contributed to various blogs, including Margaret Soltan's University Diaries, for which he sometimes wrote limericks under the name Adam.
New York Times
George Washington University English professor Margaret Soltan writes a blog called University Diaries, in which she decries the Twilight Zone-ish state our holy land’s institutes of higher ed find themselves in these days.
The Electron Pencil
It’s [UD's] intellectual honesty that makes her blog required reading.
Professor Mondo
There's always something delightful and thought intriguing to be found at Margaret Soltan's no-holds-barred, firebrand tinged blog about university life.
AcademicPub
You can get your RDA of academic liars, cheats, and greedy frauds at University Diaries. All disciplines, plus athletics.
truffula, commenting at Historiann
Margaret Soltan at University Diaries blogs superbly and tirelessly about [university sports] corruption.
Dagblog
University Diaries. Hosted by Margaret Soltan, professor of English at George Washington University. Boy is she pissed — mostly about athletics and funding, the usual scandals — but also about distance learning and diploma mills. She likes poems too. And she sings.
Dissent: The Blog
[UD belittles] Mrs. Palin's degree in communications from the University of Idaho...
The Wall Street Journal
Professor Margaret Soltan, blogging at University Diaries... provide[s] an important voice that challenges the status quo.
Lee Skallerup Bessette, Inside Higher Education
[University Diaries offers] the kind of attention to detail in the use of language that makes reading worthwhile.
Sean Dorrance Kelly, Harvard University
Margaret Soltan's ire is a national treasure.
Roland Greene, Stanford University
The irrepressibly to-the-point Margaret Soltan...
Carlat Psychiatry Blog
Margaret Soltan, whose blog lords it over the rest of ours like a benevolent tyrant...
Perplexed with Narrow Passages
Margaret Soltan is no fan of college sports and her diatribes on the subject can be condescending and annoying. But she makes a good point here...
Outside the Beltway
From Margaret Soltan's excellent coverage of the Bernard Madoff scandal comes this tip...
Money Law
University Diaries offers a long-running, focused, and extremely effective critique of the university as we know it.
Anthony Grafton, American Historical Association
The inimitable Margaret Soltan is, as usual, worth reading. ...
Medical Humanities Blog
I awake this morning to find that the excellent Margaret Soltan has linked here and thereby singlehandedly given [this blog] its heaviest traffic...
Ducks and Drakes
As Margaret Soltan, one of the best academic bloggers, points out, pressure is mounting ...
The Bitch Girls
Many of us bloggers worry that we don’t post enough to keep people’s interest: Margaret Soltan posts every day, and I more or less thought she was the gold standard.
Tenured Radical
University Diaries by Margaret Soltan is one of the best windows onto US university life that I know.
Mary Beard, A Don's Life
[University Diaries offers] a broad sense of what's going on in education today, framed by a passionate and knowledgeable reporter.
More magazine, Canada
If deity were an elected office, I would quit my job to get her on the ballot.
Notes of a Neophyte
