A lawsuit filed on Oct. 2 in Manhattan federal court against [Columbia University] and the historian, William V. Harris, 79, an expert on Greco-Roman history, said Dr. Harris repeatedly forced himself on [a female graduate student] and belittled her when she rejected his advances… Dr. Harris, the complaint said, … once forced her against his office desk and kissed her. He once put his mouth on her breast, the complaint said, and explicitly asked her for sexual intercourse on numerous occasions.

“That [Tariq Ramadan] had many mistresses, that he consulted sites, that girls were brought to the hotel at the end of his lectures, that he invited them to undress, that some resisted and that he could become violent and aggressive, yes, but I have never heard of rapes, I am stunned,” [Bernard Godard] told French magazine L’Obs.

Hereafter known as The Lewd Republic.

… exist as a human being.”

I would like to emphasize this cultural fact: we women of Muslim faith know how much we have been accustomed, from a very young age, to submit, to obey, and even to be silent when we have been attacked. We are often treated as inferior from childhood; we are programmed to submit.

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

“You’re either veiled, or you’re raped.”

No problem. Stay inside or wear a burqa.

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

The struggle continues. Promising developments here.

Garrett Park’s octogenarian,
chain-smoking tree crew

removes a stump from
UD‘s front yard.

… Insys.

[The former vice president of sales at Insys told a national sales meeting that] the cancer market [for fentanyl] was “small potatoes. That’s nothing.”

[T]here are a lot of people who, like me, are not used to showing school spirit through sports and don’t really see the point…

And I don’t understand why that is such a bad thing. [Why the] underlying assumption … that Penn “should” do something to increase attendance at sporting events and therefore increase school spirit[?]

… it.

I own three Land Rovers, wear Place Vendome suits
I get all me money from Russkies and Ukes
It’s laundered in Cyprus and also Seychelle
But now I’m indicted, it’s all gone to hell

And it’s no nay never
No nay never no more
Will I overlook FARA
No never no more

… for her Dublin Halloween.

Conservative MP Mark Garnier is to face an investigation into whether he broke ministerial rules after he admitted asking his secretary to buy sex toys.

The international trade minister also confirmed calling her “sugar tits,” according to the Mail on Sunday, but he said it did not amount to harassment.

As for [Leon] Wieseltier, the longtime New Republic literary editor who lost funding for a magazine startup, he “simply did not consider women to be public intellectuals,” wrote Clio Chang in Splinter.

He harassed women, according to credible accusations, but he rarely published them or chose for review books written by women: “The lowest points were in 2012 — when there were only nine female reviewers compared to 79 male reviewers — and in 2013, when Wieseltier’s section published four reviews written by women.”

Just beyond our canal-side hotel room, the Rehoboth Beach Halloween parade gathers itself for an 11 AM start. Drummers practice.

Les UDs are here with a bunch of friends who met last night and unanimously agreed that the thing about the beach is that it puts you to sleep. So we’re having a little trouble pulling ourselves together for the long walk along the parade. We’ll get there.

An attack on rich smug postmodern people whose moral vacuity is matched only by their moral preening, the film has drawn rebukes from the New York Times and the New Yorker reviewers. The NYT is the milder of the two:

The condition it depicts will be familiar to just about anyone who buys a ticket, and its insights might have been generated by a Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism smartphone app.

Nicely written. But the New Yorker reviewer is more than dismissive; he is hopping mad. He argues that mindlessly toxic films like The Square, and many like it, which unfairly accuse a class of educated and not entirely depraved people of brutal, clueless, narcissism, destroy liberal culture and make the world safe for reactionaries:

[Films like this one work to] feed the maw of populist resentment, to exacerbate hostility toward liberal society, to propose no change or improvement, to lament no tragic conflicts, but, rather, to reject liberal society with a muffled, derisive frivolity, to despise institutions, norms, mores, and—above all—the educated urban bourgeoisie and the professional competences and administrative order that it sustains. Lacking artistic originality to propose or effect a shift in consciousness or a new mode of experience, they offer a constipated realism that rubs others in their filth while keeping their own hands rigorously pristine. Theirs is a cinema of reactionary snobbery, a righteous snort of contempt of exactly the sort that feeds far-right rejectionism all the way around to where it meets far-left rejectionism—in haughty, self-righteous, and humanly challenged cynicism.

The artwork that comes to mind reading this is Wallace Shawn’s performance piece, The Fever, where he attempts precisely to take seriously – in emotional, intellectual, and ethical ways – the costs of what the New Yorker’s critic calls “bourgeois comfort and sophistication”:

[Hyper-realist films like The Square display] the conspicuous restraint of aesthetic nonintervention, of falsely bland repudiation of visual expression, as if to let the facts onscreen speak for themselves. But the actual artistic point of these satires on bourgeois comfort and sophistication is a visual simplicity that matches the dramas’ repudiations of technological, intellectual, and bureaucratic modernity… The bureaucracies [these films] despise are, so to speak, the bureaucracies of others; their films aren’t shot through with the discourse or the intricacies on which they depend—as many of the best films of the time are, often in surprising ways. (Such a varied films as “The Wolf of Wall Street” and “Get Out,” “The Future” and “Let the Sunshine In” grapple with the increasingly abstract complexities of modern life in styles that reflect those complexities.) In short, cinematic invention goes together with societal investigation; for Haneke and the Hanekets, the social cinema is a sneer under glass.

And now what comes to mind is Richard Rorty’s Achieving Our Country, in which he distinguishes between what he calls the cultural left (post-structuralist theorists, mainly) and the progressive left (politically pragmatic, not terribly theoretical people who write within a basic acceptance of liberal democracy that Richard Brody sees missing in these films). Rorty writes about a “spectatorial, disgusted, mocking Left,” which seems, in regard to The Square and its ilk, apt.

Les UDs are on their way
to Rehoboth Beach,
for the Sea Witch Festival.

Of course UD will
blog from there.