Let us all applaud that great good man, University of Oregon football coach Willie Taggart, for having the courage and moral clarity to dismiss a very valuable player from the team. Let us all read this testimonial in the local booster press about this heroic coach, who just said no to Darren Carrington. No, you might be a great player, but there are moral standards here, and we uphold them, dammit.

**********

Let’s not look too closely, though, at precisely how UO football does the morality thing. UD is the last person to want to bring up the fact that they kept Carrington on the team after he

1. broke a visiting UO alum’s arm in an act of unprovoked violence;

2. failed an NCAA-run drug test; and

3. “was cited by Eugene police for having an open container of alcohol while underage.”

No, no, all that was fine. Break an arm or two – no problem. But while using your massive footballer bulk to practically tear the arm off of a student is fine, fucking up a McDonald’s drive-through with your car is apparently the last straw. Students are just students; McDonald’s is not only private property, but a sacred symbol of what’s best about this land. You don’t come back from fucking up a McDonald’s drive-through.

It is important to remember these words of Christopher Hitchens’ as we encounter what little resistance to full-body veil bans is left in Europe.

As when a Human Rights Watch writer stages the burqa/niqab as a “choice,” and, quite perversely, an expression of female “autonomy.”

Look at the image that accompanies her article. This woman is not wearing a full face veil; she is wearing a full body veil. The writer asks us to respect the rights of women who will under the ban never be able to leave their house. They are now “forc[ed] …to remain housebound.”

Forced.

By whom? By what twisted understanding of religious texts? They are never to feel the sunlight again; never to take a walk. Because unless they look like the woman pictured in the article, unless totally wrapped to the point where they have no peripheral vision, their mouths pulled shut by tight material, they simply cannot leave their prison.

It was inevitable that democratic societies would eventually read the burqa/niqab, and the self-imprisoning (or husband/father/brother-imprisoning) of some of its wearers (most of its wearers, of course, will quietly accommodate themselves to the law, as they have in France), as a toxic refusal to engage in even the most basic forms of civic life. It is positively Orwellian for people like the HRW writer to champion the burqa as an icon of autonomy.

****************

Or think of it this way:

This goes to the foundational issue of whether anyone can want the wrong things… Some concatenation of causes has trimmed down [some womens’] world view in such a way that doors to human flourishing are closed to them. So for instance literacy for women: I think that it is an intrinsic good, and it really doesn’t matter how many women you can get to tell you from behind their burqa that they don’t want to read…

Being born a woman in Afghanistan any time in last thirty years was to be unlucky… These lives have been imposed on them. When you listen to the expressions of relief and humility and clarity that you get around this notion of wearing the veil… you are hearing that as a response to the thuggish misogyny of the men in those cultures. Women are treated like whores and considered to be whores if they are not appropriately veiled. They are groped and … beaten for not being appropriately veiled… No doubt many women feel relieved to be appropriately veiled in those cultures.

… it’s Ground Zero (well, Ground 37.6 Billion), and the multitude of comments after the article – about the possibility that Harvard will gradually phase out all fraternities and other private clubs – expresses better than almost anything else the deep structure of – one social type shaped by – institutions like Harvard (for similar observations about Princeton, go here).

(Hm. Someone seems to have removed the Crimson article’s comment thread. Why?)

Given the crucial importance of secretive sadistic clubs in the formation of super-predators like the man of the hour, Marc Kasowitz (he “brags to friends he makes anywhere from $10 million to $30 million per year. He owns an apartment in a white-glove building on Park Avenue and a mansion in Westchester County. He travels by private jet and, when in New York, is driven around in a black Cadillac SUV. He owns at least two horses, according to a lawsuit Kasowitz once filed against his daughter’s equestrian stable.”) and super-predators generally, UD assures you that America’s master-of-the-universe-nurseries are not really in danger. You couldn’t have Lehman Brothers/Dick Fuld et al without them. So relax.

But the comment section of the Crimson article is rife with anxiety. Nervously eyeing Harvard’s endowment of close to forty billion dollars (for a 22,000-student school), the commenters express fear that this palty sum will be further reduced by angry alumni withholding gifts. The article quotes a Harvard report on the matter calling Bowdoin and Williams (both have gotten rid of frats and similar clubs) “peer institutions,” which sets off another round of worry and sarcasm in the comments (“Williams and… Bowdoin – … 1.3 and 2.26 billion dollar endowments respectively… are PERFECT comparisons to Harvard… Thanks for enlightening us.”)

People are scared because they think Harvard might actually do it. And since everyone imitates Harvard, everyone might do it. But Harvard won’t do it, because without the clubs we couldn’t have hypercapitalism. Shutting them down would be the moral equivalent of war.

… Harvard’s Ben Edelman.

Now that was a man who knew how to handle email exchanges.

The path looks open for more countries to repudiate the humiliating, annihilating burqa/niqab.

It’s a good day for women and for democracy when a writer on the subject titles her article Does the Burqa Have a Future in Europe?

…hosta!

As a couple of readers already suggested, I was way off in identifying it as an assassin bug.

I wrote to What’s that Bug? about it, and lookee here!

Not only did they write back right away, identifying “this beautiful creature” as a parasitoid Braconid Wasp, they feature my photographs of it today on the blog’s front page.

In case you don’t click over to the site, here’s what they say:

This beautiful creature is a parasitoid Braconid Wasp, and we believe it is Atanycoius longicauda based on this BugGuide image. BugGuide states of the genus: “Parasites of woodboring beetle larvae, especially metallic wood-boring beetles (Buprestidae) and longhorn beetles (Cerambycidae).”

Commentary on the plot of an ongoing work of speculative fiction:

In 2026, … on Earth, people stopped dying or being born, meaning that the future world is populated by eight billion or so adults who have been left to confront the blessings and curses of immortality. To pass all that time, many Americans have turned to football, contorting it in a variety of strange ways to suit their new reality. People play thousands of simultaneous games, most of which take place over many years and cover extreme long distances — say, from Washington State to the Mexican border. In one of the story’s funniest sequences, two teams are stuck against the walls of a narrow canyon, both unable to move the ball but neither willing to stop playing. The great joke of the story, at once darkly comic and hopeful, is that men and women, faced with eternity and all its possibilities, have decided simply to fall back on the familiar comforts of the country’s favorite sport. Like the space probes processing the information sent out from the people back on Earth, they have nothing left to do but, as Pioneer 9 puts it, “perpetually hang out.” And so, everywhere and for all time, it’s football night in America.

… [For] the doomed people of this American future, “Boredom is their only enemy. And they get up in the morning and fight it every day of their eternal lives. Recreation and play sustains them. Football sustains them.” In what might be the most striking chapter so far, called “An answered prayer,” a video pans over the curvature of the Earth while playing audio of the announcer Verne Lundquist calling the famous final sequence of a game between the Universities of Alabama and Auburn in 2013. This glimmer of a moment has been transmitted out into the universe, to float on forever.

*******************

Reminds UD of Nevil Shute’s On the Beach, only there the sports obsession (car racing, not football) was about time rapidly running out — nuclear fallout has destroyed the entire world north of Australia and is rapidly reaching Australia itself. But there’s the same underlying motivation: boredom, anxiety, despair.

A New York City doctor talks about FGM in an excellent article about it.

The Myth/Fact list at the end of the piece is especially useful, as Alan Dershowitz and his fellow right-to-cut-seven-year-old-girls enthusiasts prepare a criminal defense based on every single one of the myths.

… Bug.

Not that she knew it.
The fool kept photographing
the thing on her potted hosta
because she’d never seen
anything like it before.

She could have been very
badly bitten.

*************

A side view.

From behind.

************

Today the guys came over to
deal with our septic tank.

Good word. UD thinks that word is exactly right.

Of the many anti-FGM bills in the Michigan package, UD finds most intriguing and encouraging the one that “allows for victims to file civil lawsuits.” There are a lot of victims, and it’s time for them to get compensation.

And after all, the world can call FGM despicable until the end of time, but until you not only start locking people up, but also making them pay out large sums of money, you’re not going to get very far.

There’s a great, all-American saga playing out at that already-notorious campus, Penn State.

With multiple layers of monitoring (cameras, a live-in chaperone, a security firm), this alcohol-free frat went out and spent $2,000 on liquor and proceeded to haze to its heart’s content.

As everyone now knows, one of its pledges slowly and hideously, on camera, drank himself to death – all under the watchful yet indifferent eyes of the frat guys.

Watchful yet indifferent eyes – that seems the general theme, no? Was anyone monitoring what the cameras recorded? There are allegations at the hearing that the chaperone simply advised the guys to destroy some incriminating evidence. The security firm dropped in for a pointless cursory visit; it found no kegs because they were upstairs and the security people didn’t bother going upstairs for their three-minute stay (nice work if you can get it).

Are you, like UD, putting this picture together?

1.) An approved Penn State fraternity — Penn State, a university desperately needing to repair its public reputation — under three layers of surveillance because it’s so irresponsible.

2.) A night of total, unchecked, fatal debauchery.

3.) Defense lawyers blaming it on the victim, the national fraternity, and Penn State.

4.) A protracted and very ugly trial looming.

Ask yourself: What the fuck does Penn State think it’s doing?

With the latest European Court of Human Rights ruling, bans on this “symbol of female enslavement” are now everywhere, with challenges to them going nowhere.

This was no half-hearted endorsement.

The unanimous decision held that the ban — which, in the court’s words, specifically barred “the wearing in public of clothing that partly or totally covers the face” — aimed to “guarantee the conditions of ‘living together’ and the ‘protection of the rights and freedoms of others.’ ”

The court also determined that the ban was “necessary in a democratic society.“

UD might be wrong, but she thinks that voices in opposition to the ban are rather quiet lately. UD has become accustomed over the years to people telling her that only a reactionary would fail to support a woman’s freedom to annihilate herself as a public being. Where are those people now?

*************

UPDATE: I found one, and her tired language tells you all you need to know about the vitality of her position:

More countries are following Belgium’s ban across Europe, reflecting the lack of tolerance there is in society today.

If I found the lack of tolerance there is in society today in a student paper, I’d run a thick red line through it and write empty next to it. I always tell my students to avoid the word “society” unless it seems really necessary, since in actual use it’s often a vague and lazy generalization, and therefore a hint that as a polemical writer you’re not really giving it your all.

But since this writer wants to talk Islamophobia, here’s the reality in France, which has for quite some time, with little blowback, banned burqas and niqabs:

Most of the population – including most Muslims – agree with the government when it describes the face-covering veil as an affront to society’s values.

There’s that lazy use of society again. Yet it is easy to find muscular accounts of what is meant here.

Beyond accusing everyone around her in Europe (including every one of the European Court of Human Rights justices) of being Islamophobic, the author also puts the banning-veils trend down to sexism:

We are entering into dangerous territory when we allow parliaments – mostly male dominated – to start legislating for what women can wear.

There’s no indication that women support the ban in smaller numbers than men do.

Women, after all, have far more at stake than men in all of this, since their gender alone is the gender of people who graphically reject the public realm.

Finally, there’s this familiar argument:

Critics will say the veils are forced upon women by oppressive men. If that is the case then those poor women will not be able to go outside again because their husbands will not allow it.

Husbands and fathers, she should have said. Because children are also put inside the burqa, or kept imprisoned in their fathers’ houses.

So. As democracies, what are we to do about this practice? Well, first of all we are to note that it is illegal to hold someone prisoner, to never allow them to walk outside in the sunlight or be in the world of other human beings. What is going on in a house where people are “not able to go outside” is something in which the legal institutions of a free country must take an immediate interest. Other institutions – the mosque where the husband worships, for instance – must also become involved.

This writer is telling countries that they must collude with vicious practices because if they fail to collude with them the perpetrators of the practices threaten to engage in even more vicious practices. That calculus makes the state the same terrified victim of these men that their wives and daughters are.

Countries don’t make deals with sadists. They use their laws to punish men who imprison their wives and daughters.

Social service agencies exist to discover domestic abuse. Since we know that this form of abuse will emerge to some extent once a ban is enacted, European countries must use these agencies with determination.

Tate High Athletic Director Mitch Ashford won’t face disciplinary action from the Escambia County School District despite being arrested this week on charges of larceny and fraud.

Ashford was arrested Wednesday morning by the Santa Rosa Sheriff’s Office, who executed a warrant on behalf of Escambia County. It was the third time in four years that Ashford has been arrested on various charges related to contracting work.

… “We had our attorneys look at it, it’s a civil matter that is not connected to the students or the school district,” said Escambia County School Superintendent Malcolm Thomas. “From what I can see, it’s a non-disqualifying offense. The only way I can suspend an employee is if the offense is a disqualifier.”

Preliminary results from this Johns Hopkins experiment are beginning to come in.