Questioned in Parliament about banning burqas, the PM got all How Dare You? flustered, as did a bunch of other politicians. In a country where comfortable majorities support a ban, this was not a brilliant move, because now UD‘s Google News alerts are exploding with BURQA stories out of Britain. Everybody’s talking about it.

The minute a country initiates a serious debate about the burqa, it is on its way to a ban. Talking and reading about it all the time unburies a latency: Latently, millions of modern people really dislike burqas and what they blatantly say about women; and all it takes is manifesting the subject for their dark inchoate messes of feelings about them (pity, guilt, repulsion, studied indifference, helplessness at their small daughters seeing invisible women) to firm up into opposition. I’ve followed this narrative many times; it’s a step by step process into referenda, partial restrictions, etc etc.

So the latest thing is an important Conservative party member announcing that “employers should be able to ban their staff from wearing face coverings.” Also, she will not talk to constituents in “surgeries” if they are fully covered. These announcements will activate religious and political indignation, which will in turn inflame the other side, and so it goes.

The problem is that there’s absolutely no reason for a modern democracy to tolerate gender-based repression and a total refusal to join civil society, and even good people who pride themselves on their tolerance know this. This is why so much of the world already bans/restricts this garment.

… an old post of mine about one of his poems.

“Is it caring for people’s different experiences and making sure no one is mistreated because of them, which I will always fight for?” [Pete Buttigieg] said in a forum at the University of Chicago earlier this year. “Or is it making people sit through a training that looks like something out of ‘Portlandia’? …. [This] is how Trump Republicans are made.”

[T]he gunmen positioned themselves on elevated ground in a wooded area and fired down at the crowd. Some partygoers returned fire, which may have prevented further injuries.

[Danish PM Mette] Frederiksen emphasized that while individuals have the right to practice their religion, democracy must take precedence. “God has to step aside. You have the right to your faith and to practice your religion, but democracy takes precedence,” she told Danish news agency Ritzau.

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The Danes are probably going to extend their full face ban to schools and universities; the PM is also working to shut down prayer rooms there.

The police chief can come out with all the horseshit he likes about isolated incident/no threat to the neighborhood, but groups of armed teenagers hiding behind cars while gunfighting on your street – and don’t matter none if your street is a hoitsy toitsy historic district – is A THREAT TO THE NEIGHBORHOOD. Any idiot knows that.

And isolated? Like, don’t worry cuz it won’t happen again?

Let’s see. Elmwood Park SC has twenty Airbnbs, one of which hosted this mass shooting. Neighbors have tried hard to rid the place of short term rentals, but SC seem to like these as much as it likes guns.

Guns, guns, guns. Among the best states in the union to stockpile and shoot ’em. Jest about the best state to kill/die from ’em. Tykes can strut around openly carrying ’em on their way to kiddie party shootouts. It’s a fuckin way of life.

Now yall wanna add that the long hot summer is upon us, which brings out much more bangbang.

“No motive is known at this time” lolololol. Motive. You’d think the cops would have some knowledge of the phenom.

… or else.

The Indiana Bible College has caught hell for plagiarizing (it seems a clear case — listen to two performances) Auburn University professor Rosephanye Powell’s The Word was God.

Instead of doing the Christian thing and taking it down, IBC has sued Powell for defamation. And the beat goes on.

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UD thanks Andrew.

It’s part of this (for sale!) wonderland.

‘As for Trump, I find it difficult to hold him morally responsible for anything. He’s a creature of appetite and instinct who hunts and feeds in a dark sub-ethical realm. You don’t hold a shark morally responsible for mauling a swimmer. You just try to keep the shark at bay—which the American people failed to do.‘

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Dark sub-ethical realm is beautiful. It’s very very good writing. Maybe all the way to poetic.

It’s banned in Cameroon, Chad, the Republic of the Congo, Gabon, Tunisia,  China, Kyrgyzstan, Sri Lanka, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Austria, Belgium, Bulgaria, Denmark, France, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, and Switzerland. There are also tons of partial bans, in Muslim and non-Muslim countries. Burqa bans have regularly been upheld by the courts.

In short, however you personally feel about the burqa, its restriction has become a routine and largely uncontested part of the life of many countries and territories, and discussions about banning, or further banning, are ongoing in lots of locations.

It’s a thing, babe, in Morocco as much as in Italy.

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Now, UD‘s own US, largely because it’s so large (most people here don’t ever encounter burqas), hasn’t had anything to say about burqas; but, well, England. Now England…

England’s the big holdout; no burqa bans here!

Many of its neighbors, as we see, have gone the total or partial ban route.

And at the very least, these neighbors don’t consider mere debate about the burqa to be an abomination. How can it be, considering what’s going on in the world with the garment? Do you really want to hold yourself snobbily aloof from this widely shared/discussed concern?

Embarrassingly, yes. An MP brought the matter up in PM’s Questions the other day – the sort of thing one would expect to happen, and one would want to be prepared for – and got a fierce appalled Lady Bracknell put-down from the PM and others.

I mean how dare you. How dare you.

It is amusing – embarrassingly so – that England continues to feign indignation that anyone, anywhere, would have the nerve…

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Here’s the deal. The story is now all over the British press, which means the latent unhappiness in much of the population with full facial veiling is now being made manifest.

Dig. You’re supposed to shut up about the burqa and keep it out of the press precisely because the moment you break the uncomfortable national silence about it, millions of Brits will realize that now that you mention it they are quite unhappy with the thing.

I mean, uh, strong majorities, when asked, support a ban.

It’ll be interesting to see whether the government’s attempt to strangle vox populi through incredulous contempt will work.

‘[The garden’s director] once saw a man taking pods off the cacao trees, and when he confronted him, the man’s justification was that he’s a taxpayer and Brookside Gardens is publicly funded.‘

‘A man who overdosed on fentanyl in an Indiana Planet Fitness was dead inside a tanning bed for days before his corpse was found.‘

Twenty years old, spectacularly armed, with a long criminal history featuring repeated apparent efforts to kill lots of people gathered in public spaces, he was apparently one of the treetop snipers in Hickory NC who shot into a large house party. He’s so young, so precociously accomplished, and he lives in such a gun-lovin’ state, that UD sees far more slaughter from this li’l guy. His kill rate remains poor, true; but each outing teaches him something, and I’m sure he’s got far more murder in him. Best of all, he’s a team player — doesn’t go anywhere without fellow shooters.