An interviewer poses a question to the head of Germany’s Central Council of Muslims.

The Austrian government banned full-face coverings in March this year. The Christian Social Union in Bavaria want to do the same. What is your opinion on such a ban?

This ban is unnecessary, and the legal decisions run the risk of being politically instrumentalized. In Germany there is not a single woman who wears the burqa, and most of the women who wear niqabs – we estimate there are not more than a hundred – are visitors from abroad. This debate gives fuel to the populists and serves the agitators.

A strange answer on many levels. The questioner did not use the term burqa, but rather the phrase “full-face coverings.” While I’m sure we can all appreciate the distinction between the generous niqab (you get an eye-slit) and the blinding burqa, I’m not sure any of us gives a shit – symbolically, humanely – about this distinction. The language of the various laws certainly doesn’t distinguish.

Nor am I sure where this guy gets his “not more than a hundred” figure, but anyway no one much cares about numbers either – something burqa/niqab defenders still don’t seem to understand, since, like this guy, they think that if they can only point to a problem in the hundreds rather than thousands we’ll be okay with it. How many cruelly constrained and erased women and little girls in my midst am I comfortable with in a democracy? Answer: None.

But hey they’re visitors!

Oh well in that case. That makes all the difference in the world.

When this man assures us the “ban is unnecessary,” and when he identifies a desire for a ban exclusively with populists and agitators, he reveals … a certain comfort with the current situation…

Lordy.

And I do mean Lordy.

Here comes this CBS sports writer who dares make himself a national laughingstock by taking seriously the Christianity Baylor University craps on. Way he sees it, if you actually do ask what Jesus would do if he got caught running a rape factory instead of a university, the answer is he’d be so ashamed he’d shut the factory.

The latest lawsuit makes clear

what Baylor football unleashed on its campus and the unfortunate coeds whose lives are permanently damaged. All because an institution meant to teach, nurture and protect them allowed football to be valued over human decency and dignity.

Something about the following account from the suit seems to have disturbed the CBS guy.

According to the suit, the football team had a system of hazing freshman recruits by having them bring freshman females to parties to be drugged and gang-raped, “or in the words of the football players, ‘trains’ would be run on the girls.”

Considered a bonding experience by the players, according to the suit, the rapes also were photographed and videotaped, and the plaintiff confirmed that at least one 21-second videotape of two Baylor students being gang-raped by football players had circulated.

The guy has even thought through how Baylor can get rid of football.

You release every student from their [football] obligations but allow them to retain their scholarships if they want to stay. You help the coaching staff find new jobs and pay them until they do. You weather raging boosters who revolt and direct their money to meaningful causes. You have the courage of your convictions.

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

What he hasn’t thought through is the got-nowhere-else-to-go problem. Without football, what is Baylor? Not much. That’s why they’re just as desperate right now as that Officer and a Gentleman guy.

The head of the NCAA, for instance, makes around two million dollars a year to “police… trifles.”

But of course he earns all that money not for policing trifles, but for lending his institution’s approval (after a few wrist-slaps) to criminal syndicates like Baylor University. He’s paid to legitimize universities that continue to bring to campus people who batter and rape their students.

That’s worth a lot.

But what do you expect. It’s the University of Florida.

In the first lady’s own social media, she made note of the “great strides being made towards the empowerment of women” in Saudi Arabia, which seems like quite a stretch in a country where women cannot drive, guardianship laws are enforced and clothing serves as a form of patriarchal control. She, like the president, may not have come to Saudi Arabia to judge or to tell others how to live, but whitewashing social inequality in a tweet is another matter entirely. In that context, her black jumpsuit became a combination of passive approval and transactional acceptance of clothing as a form of imprisonment.

Now I lay me down to sleep.
I pray the Lord my soul to keep.
If I should die before I wake,
I pray to God my clit to take.
For it would be a sin to be
Buried with that filth on me.

Bless my surgeons, make them close
My labia to please my beaus.
Keep me ever in thy sight;
So to all I say good night.

Spencer’s Fair Queen

More than most, Fair’s full of the living fire,
Kindled within to make the nazi feare:
No feare of noise to make while he perspires,
Not loath to spit upon his training gear.
Through your disdain blindsided guest
Denies his name and utters not a sound.
But you will not allow mad minds to rest
In fascist hopes on race war futures bound.
You stop his thoughts and pinion him within,
You stop his tongue, and teach his gym to freake,
You quick’n the storme his passion did begin,
Strong through your cause as you your vengeance wreake.
Dark is the world, where your rage shined never;
Sad is he borne, that may behold you ever.

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

“In 1932, some German people were probably saying between bites of wiener-schnitzel, ‘this is some fucked up shit,’ and then didn’t do anything.”

Christine Fair

… when big ol’ macho men accused of plagiarizing counterattack. Rand Paul drew himself up to his full Randian height and spat the following out to the “hacks and haters” who exposed him:

“I take it as an insult, and I will not lie down and say people can call me dishonest, misleading or misrepresenting — I have never intentionally done so and like I say, ‘If dueling were legal in Kentucky, if they keep it up, you know it’d be a duel challenge.’”

Here he is in all his finery up against Rachel Maddow. (Gets a little gross at the end.)

But now there’s David Clarke, and you just know this dude is also going to challenge someone to a duel.

So far he’s only done ye olde it’s a political smear thing. UD predicts his next move will up the ante and thrill her right down to the ground.

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

UPDATE: YES!! Calls guy who outed him a “sleaze bag.”

Things are coming along nicely, and UD pants for Clarke, like Rand Paul, to upgrade to direct threats.

Could Clarke take it one step further than Paul’s mere fantasies about duels? Be still my heart…

… for awhile. Blogging
continues throughout.

Abolition is the only answer. All social fraternities — alongside the sycophantic sorority life that they exploit — must go. They must go permanently and forever, at Penn [State] and everywhere else. Reform is simply not possible.

… Reform is not possible because the old-line, historically white social fraternities have been synonymous with risk-taking and defiance from their very inception. They are a brotherhood born in mutiny and forged in the fire of rebellion. These fraternities have drink, danger and debauchery in their blood — right alongside secrecy and self-protection.

They cannot reform.

Abolition is “… impossible,” [people] say, their [incredulous] faces a testament to the power fraternity men still wield.

Fraternities may no longer decide who’s in the yearbook, but they still exert control. The proof is in the knee-jerk insistence that they are too formidable to fight. But we must push through this sense of impossibility. What happened to Timothy Piazza was a predictable tragedy, and there will be more unless we end Greek life for good. I make no claims that it will be easy. Fraternities have dominated campuses, defied authorities and rebuffed efforts at suppression for nearly 200 years. But in that time we have ended slavery, given women the vote and put men on the moon. Of course we can get rid of fraternities. College presidents, administrators and trustees just have to muster the will to do it. As for the rest of us, we need to keep pressure on them to do so, and keep counting the bodies until they act.

She’s right that abolition is the only answer. With some exceptions, frats are utterly lawless and defiant and cannot be controlled.

But I’m afraid she’s wrong that we can push through and make presidents, administrators and trustees — many of them rah-rah frat/sorority people — shut them down. First of all, there are large swathes of universities in this country – many of them our big public institutions – that are little more than fraternities and variations on fraternities (athletes are of course one of the variations; as are still almost entirely male groups of trustees, etc., etc.). On-campus or off, formal or informal, male cults and the – what was the word? – sycophantic sororities they exploit are these universities. Abolish the raison d’être of your institution and watch everyone apply to another school.

The second reason is one I noted in an earlier post. The character formation generated by fraternities – cynical, hypocritical, conscienceless, sadistic, status-obsessed, rigidly loyal to the group – is precisely tailored to the American hedge fund. We couldn’t have Bernard Madoff, Dick Fuld, T. Boone Pickens, and Steve Cohen without them.

Well. That’s refreshing. A French academic admits that there are women in countries like France and Austria (Austria just joined the long list of counties banning the burqa) forced – forced – to wear a burqa in order to leave their house.

Now I ask you. Is that a nice thing for a democracy? That women are treated like that?

UD also likes the way the article’s writer rapidly softens what Alouane just said. Haha those pesky “more traditional” families – not flat-out traditional, not that, but just, like, more traditional than other French and Austrian families… Wouldn’t want to get anywhere near a word like reactionary for a man who forces his wife to cover her mouth and her eyes and every digit on her hands before she can go outside. No it’s just one of many diverse traditions, like female genital mutilation. And although Alouane clearly says “forced,” our cleanup crew hastens to use the word “reluctant”…

Sooooo… The argument here is that we should oppose burqa bans because the men who are currently threatening their wives with violence if they don’t wear them will, under the ban, threaten them with violence if they go out of the house at all.

Great headline. The piece is pretty good too.

Scathing Online Schoolmarm sees it all the time: When people find their beloved institution – with which they strongly identify themselves – in the swill, they defend it by turning on their grandest, haughtiest, most auspicious, rhetoric. Our Glorious Penn State is a Bright and Shining Light! We must do battle with the barbarians who distort the record of our heroic coaches! That sort of thing.

The problem is that this approach makes you look like Blanche DuBois defending her virtue and rhapsodizing about Belle Reve.

Grand and glorious Baylor University has fallen on hard times. It sold its soul to football victory at any cost (just like Penn State) and is currently, er, reaping the whirlwind. There’s a new gang rape allegation almost every week. What to do? What to say?

Well, this is what people are saying. Many people are saying that Baylor is a solid candidate for the death penalty. Some say the regents should resign. Some say Baylor should be kicked out of its conference. Some say withhold federal funds. Here’s a typical comment:

Shelving the football program for a few years would send a needed message in college athletics that enabling criminal behavior for the sake of maintaining a program’s national ranking and economic power won’t be tolerated.

And then there’s C. Stephen Evans, a Baylor professor who grandly implores people in and around Baylor to shut up.

I implore those continually criticizing Baylor in a public way to cease and desist. You are doing serious damage to Baylor’s reputation and demoralizing those of us who work to make Baylor a great place for students. Perhaps those of you who are not on campus every day do not realize how dispiriting it is to read such diatribes in the daily paper several times a week.

The reason this sort of writing makes you a laughingstock is that now everyone knows precisely how great a place Baylor has been for students.

[A] student-athlete told her coach that five football players had raped her at an off-campus party. The coach then took a list of names to [football coach Art] Briles, who said, “Those are some bad dudes. Why was she around those guys?”

Baylor’s the kind of place where students need to know before they get there that there are bad dudes on the football team and that it is the student’s responsibility to stay out of their way. There’s Belle Reve, and there’s reality. That’s the Baylor reality.

Critics of Baylor’s criminal disregard of its students are not doing damage to Baylor’s reputation. The regents, the president, the people with power at Baylor who paid Art Briles six million dollars a year to protect very dangerous people who could catch footballs did the damage.

Ο stars:  No sense of humor; no grasp of free speech.