They weren’t gang-raped while being beheaded.
Quebec is now ground zero for the fight between state and sect, having recently passed Bill 21, which bans all religious clothing and accessories among certain public sector employees in the workplace, and also having begun a Superior Court trial in a case brought against the province by an ex-hasid for educational neglect. Fiercely secular, Quebec followed France (which it sees as a model in the matter of laïcité) in banning burqas and niqabs from much of the public sector; Bill 21 extends this government constraint of religious expression (let’s be generous and agree that the burqa/niqab have something to do with religion – even though it’s more persuasive, it seems to me, to characterize them as pre- or even anti-Islamic and tribal) to things like hijabs and turbans and crucifixes on people who are working in the state sector. The ongoing Superior Court trial reveals that although Quebec claims to be quite secular, it’s not vigilant in secularity’s defense: If the complaints at the trial stand up, the government was perfectly aware for decades of the Tash cult, which kept its children in abysmal ignorance.
Jewish cultists all over the world, including the United States and of course notoriously in Israel, practice appalling educational malpractice, and although the court cases and school inspections and for real and we really mean it this time national education standards keep coming, the cultists persist in turning out unemployably ignorant people whose lifelong dysfunction our welfare payments support. No doubt the outcome of the Quebec trial will be a concession on the part of the province that they certainly fucked up in letting Canadian citizens raise their children according to thirteenth century standards; but without severe and unremitting penalties (school closures; unpleasant financial implications) nothing will change.
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And as to the business of believing horseshit — the sort of thing the professor quoted in this post’s title mentions — well here’s how ol’ UD feels about that.
Our current vice-president doesn’t believe in evolution. Millions of Americans don’t believe in evolution along with him. Pence is leading the coronavirus effort, and I wouldn’t be surprised if he personally disbelieved the germ theory of disease.
The vice president thinks smoking doesn’t kill, condoms are “very poor” protection against disease, and the best way to curb an H.I.V. outbreak is through prayer.
Mehdi Hasan, whose opinion piece on the burqa I linked to up there, thinks Muhammed flew up to heaven on a winged horse. Plenty of competent, upstanding citizens who went to good colleges believe a crapload of horseshit. UD has some pretty weird articles of faith – or call them intuitions – herself, come to that… I mean, not as weird as the stuff I’ve been citing, but pretty weird.
So what. It’s the essence of personal liberty in the pursuit of happiness within a liberal democratic state that you can dabble in the alchemy of your choice on your own time as long as it doesn’t put anyone in danger, and as long as you fulfill the basic duties of a citizen. Mike Pence’s entry into the age of reason might all be a ruse, but as long as he keeps up the pretense of being one of us I don’t care. We’re onto ye olde private/public distinction here; and the position you take on Quebec’s Bill 21 will ride on whether you regard the outward exposure of your inward, arguably anti-democratic, and often anti-intellectual, beliefs to be damaging to the education of citizens of a secular state, or as undermining the authority and identity of a secular judicial system.
The author of “Integralism in Three Sentences” is a man who, according to the integralists I spoke with, has done more than anyone to revive both the term and the philosophy: Pater Edmund Waldstein, a 35-year-old Cistercian monk who lives in Heiligenkreuz Abbey, a twelfth-century monastery a few miles south of Vienna. The son of two theologians, one American and one Austrian, Pater Edmund was raised in an intellectual Catholic household and educated at California’s Thomas Aquinas College. By any conventional standard, his views are extreme: in addition to rejecting the separation of church and state, he is a monarchist who argues that the Church has the right to punish baptized heretics (Protestants), including by burning them at the stake. Yet he’s gracious and warm …
And now he’s losing. Maybe Israel can save its democracy. But only if it can keep its religious reactionaries from their work of destruction.
Dropped out. At very outset of his professional career, fined $20,000 for a late hit. Arrested for trying to carry a Glock 19 onto a plane. The University of Alabama watches with excitement for Quinnen Williams’ next move!
… peace deal … Time to get our whores of all ages inside of sheets again.
Photo, by Abdul Majeed, found here.
Or, in University Diaries terms, think of it as Harvard University having lost 1.5 percent of its current endowment.
UD has begun watching, at home, the YUGE backlog of excellent foreign and domestic films she has failed to watch over many years. Her old friend Lisa Nesselson, who has done little other than watch films most of her life, finds UD‘s neglect of films outrageous, and UD agrees that it is. So here she goes.
Yesterday she watched Wizard of Lies, about Bernie Madoff, the miz and the kids. She was mesmerized by Robert De Niro’s performance, in which he seemed somehow to have crawled inside the skin of the man, but she also took note of the last name of the actor playing one of the sons: Nivola.
Nivola… Wasn’t there a sculptor by that name, and wasn’t he a friend of UD’s father-in-law Jerzy Soltan?
Yup. They had in common Le Corbusier, the Harvard Graduate School of Design… When she mentioned the name to Mr UD, he said:
The Nivolas were away, and we stayed in their New York apartment one Christmas. I was eleven. At some point I figured out how to lock their bathroom with no one in it. So I did this and then sat in a nearby chair watching various family members eventually, politely, and increasingly desperately, begin asking if everything was okay, if they could maybe…
The actor is Nivola’s grandson.
And this distinction has stood us in good stead! We trail only New Mexico for the state with the most suicides, and we’re always in the top five. When sad ol’ Cowboy Jack doffs his Stetson and draws his Glock 17, tears of uncertainty beading his eyes, you wouldn’t want him to be able to be talked out of it.
… and as long as ‘thesdan weather continues springlike, we’re taking down the ruined sixty (?) year old boundary fence at the top of our property. On the other side of the fence: More (CSX-owned) woods (I mean, I think CSX owns them…), and then the deep narrow canyon the trains come through.
… or DASPO, or, literally, a ban from any sports events, is the tragic event befalling little Sandro, head of the Naples Ultras, in an upcoming weepie for guys from Netflix. How does Sandro cope when “the values he once held dear begin to falter”? How does he begin to rebuild a life suddenly bereft of violent fascist spectacle?
What do you do when your very identity is stolen by punitive outside forces? How do you even begin to express yourself when your lifelong self-expression (making jungle noises when black players have the ball; calling Jewish players kikes) is silenced? Watch as Sandro struggles with his challenging new world. And keep the hankies ready.
Er, not quite. Readers will recall UD‘s extensive, and really kind of fun, coverage of the inimitable Philip Esformes (scroll down) and his BFF, U Penn HEAD basketball coach (datz right – not coaching staff, not booster, HEAD COACH) Jerome Allen, a man who used a position of high responsibility, visibility, and salary to pretend that Esformes’ pisher was actually a Penn basketball recruit in order to get the unskilled unbright cheater into Wharton. This was a version of the Varsity Blues deal, with a $250,000 bribe going directly into the hands of the man U Penn judged ethically appropriate to run its entire basketball operation.
Lots of sports writers are okay with Allen getting thrown out of the college game (Who cares. He now has a job in professional basketball, where taking only a quarter million bribe is a mark of serious inadequacy.), but they’re all huffy cuz Penn got some penalties too. After all, they just housed a moral degenerate… and the whole bribery thing didn’t fuck up their winning average or anything, so why, God, why?
...UD reads some recent words about him from her old buddy, Lisa Nesselson:
[The best] French film of the year, hands down, is Roman Polanski’s “J’accuse.” Polanski is an absolute master of every aspect of filmmaking, he works with the best actors and technicians — which means they are eager to work with HIM — and the result is an incredibly important film that’s also thrilling to watch.
I’m typing this on Jan 29th — the Cesar nominations were announced today and “J’accuse” leads with 12 nominations. That means that a majority of the 4,313 members of the Cesars Academy are in the mood to champion excellence. Whatever you think of Polanski himself and his confirmed and alleged bad behavior in decades past, it’s impossible to deny that “J’accuse” is outstanding. I see no rationale that holds up to scrutiny for contending that he shouldn’t have been given the money to make it in the first place or that it shouldn’t be shown. The hypocrisy makes me ill. It has been a matter of public record since 1977 that Polanski raped then-13-year-old Samantha Geimer and now, all of a sudden, mostly young (but not exclusively) protestors are vandalizing the areas around theaters to write “Polanski is a Rapist” and “Theaters Are Complicit With a Rapist” on buildings and the street. The City has to remove that stuff — it costs money.
For some useful perspective, I urge everybody to read Geimer’s excellent autobiography “The Girl” from 2013. She’s very smart, very funny, very self-aware and she was delighted when Polanski won the Oscar for “The Pianist” in 2003. Hey, protestors — that was 17 years ago! They’re hardly pals but the only person he owed an apology to was her — not us, not society, not people so ignorant that they think “Somebody else could have made that film.” Geimer was delighted when “J’accuse” won the Silver Lion in Venice in September 2019 — “Joker” won the Golden Lion. We’re told that we must listen to women but hardly anybody cares to “listen” to Geimer — who is in her 50s and (understandably!) hates being frozen in time as a 13 year old to feed other peoples’ misplaced outrage. When she says that it’s pointless to protest or boycott Polanski and to please take your outrage elsewhere where it might do some good and make the world a better place, the but-but-but-he-raped-you-and-you’re-a-victim-for-eternity crowd won’t accept her own clearly stated assessment that being sodomized by a grown man at a tender age was highly unpleasant but not eternally traumatic.
I think she’s a role model for overcoming the fallout from sexual assault but hardly anybody wants to view her that way. By the transitive power of faulty reasoning, an awful lot of people think Polanski shouldn’t make movies and if he does, you certainly shouldn’t go see them.
UD is definitely a judge the art, not the artist type; but she cringes when Lisa gets to “highly unpleasant.”
… we at University Diaries explore its anagrammatic potential.
DIM REVISER
I’M DIVERSER
VIM DESIRER
RIVERSIDE M
RE: DERIVISM