As opposed to an inward-looking, navel-gazing, ultra-nationalist, ultra-religious, increasingly authoritarian and illiberal Turkey, the dream of a secular, democratic, pluralistic, inclusive and modern Turkey is still very much alive. [The incoming mayor of Istanbul posted:] “As we celebrate our victory, we send a resounding message to the world: the decline of democracy ends now. Istanbul stands as a beacon of hope, a testament to the resilience of democratic values in the face of rising authoritarianism.” … [In] these elections the proportion of locally elected women has almost tripled… [One new female mayor] was applauded enthusiastically by crowds chanting, “Women, life, freedom”, in an emotional reference to the plight of women in Iran… “The essential doesn’t change,” says one of the characters in Samuel Beckett’s play. But sometimes it might. 

Background here.

… for the eclipse.

… the tree.

But this one wasn’t about solitary pleasures; my friend and neighbor Tammy came along, and we talked and talked about art. As usual, UD liked all the muted-color paintings (browns, blacks, tans, grays) like ter Brugghen’s Bagpipe Player. The garish reds (robes, blood) of the big Christian canvases do little for your blogueuse.

87’s amazing. But let’s go for a hundred! You’re not going to kill scads of our kids as long as the number of guns in private hands here is a mere four hundred million plus. Our under-eighteen cohort will only be shot to death when there’s at least one gun in easy reach everywhere in this country – school, home, church, car, playground, public transportation, airports, campus, boardwalk, amusement park, zoo, corporate office, library… Handguns need to be liberally sprinkled about for teenage suicides, gangbangers, and the criminally insane to get hold of instantly.

I’m not worried about the private home or the high school. Guns are already strewn about with abandon at many of these locations. I’m more worried about places like airports, where they actually search you for guns.

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True, airports do a poor job of screening for weapons, but technology is improving all the time. The one thing we have going for us is significant increases in gun purchases. More guns, more deaths by guns, and this under eighteen group is arguably our most fertile killing field, because a lot of them are really young and they don’t even realize what’s happening when they find a gun and play with it by killing their sister. It’s simple to think of tons of scenarios like that among toddlers and the like, and all you need is negligent gun-strewing parents, which describes millions of Americans.

[Photo Michael Noble, Jr. NBC News]

Kristi Balden chairs Enid OK’s Social Justice Committee. It’s prob got like seven members, prob all of them women. (Enid’s only got around 50,000 people.) Not sure where the men of Enid are on the fight against fascism front.

When Balden discovered that a City Council member was as close to a card-carrying Nazi as you can get, she mobilized bigtime and put up with a lot of shit from a lot of townspeople, AND threw the fucker off the Council. Little Hitler (“I JUST CANT FEEL SAFE IF IM NOT PACKING AN AR WITH A 100 ROUND DRUM AND SPORTING MY SWASTIKA ARMBAND.”) just got voted out.

While UD sits on her ass and reads Timothy Snyder on the fight against fascism, Kristi Balden gets up and fights and wins against it. I salute her.

“If you don’t believe in God, something’s wrong with you… [P]eople don’t really understand that our path was divinely ordered. And the order was for us to be national champions on this day… For all those crushed in defeat by the favor of God having been exclusively directed at my team, I will pray for you to rebuke Satan, to get Satan out of your lives, so that someday you can experience what I am feeling – the glory of having been singled out as one of the elect, and the sincere desire, from my mountaintop, to help infernal losers like you up the path to victory.”

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Okay, only some of that was Miss Christian Visibility 2024; UD embellished a bit.

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RETREAT FROM RELIGION

CONTINUES SWIFTLY

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Gee. Wonder why.

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And… Mr Christian Visibility Day!

LOL diversity statement counseling but as ever UD stands amazed and impressed by the money-agility of capitalists. Now that even Harvard academics are reduced to pledge-reciting Girl Scouts (I promise to do my best to help other people at all times, especially those at home.), it’s time to cash in on coaching.

But let’s see what else Randall Kennedy, Harvard prof and man of the left, has to say.

Such pressure constitutes an encroachment upon the intellectual freedom that ought to be part of the enjoyment of academic life… By overreaching, by resorting to compulsion, by forcing people to toe a political line, by imposing ideological litmus tests, by incentivizing insincerity, and by creating a circular mode of discourse that is seemingly impervious to self-questioning, the current DEI regime is discrediting itself… I am a scholar on the left committed to struggles for social justice. The realities surrounding mandatory DEI statements, however, make me wince. The practice of demanding them ought to be abandoned, both at Harvard and beyond.

But hey whoa! Not only are arrogant snobs like Kennedy (‘make me wince’) shutting down TWO viable industries (DEI statement generation/enforcement, and DEI statement coaching), they are also impeding the suicide mission of Democrats as the coercive, “easy to parody DEI lingo” makes us look like assholes to the world and thereby makes the world safe for Donald Trump.

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More of the same.

“Donald Trump is facing 91 felony charges. If Republicans want to name something after him, I’d suggest they find a federal prison,” Fairfax-area Rep. Gerry Connolly (D-Va.) said in a statement to POLITICO.

… Asked if he had any response to the legislation, an aide to Sen. Mark Warner (D-Va.) replied: “lol.”

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Apparently a breakaway group of SuperMAGAs in the House proposes the Vladimir Putin International Airport.

Praise the Lord. I’ve been looking at that endowment and really worrying. Where’s the next fifty billion coming from?

The Winchester Va. voting public really knows how to pick ’em.

UD wondered if David Brooks’ moral endorsement of limits on the display of wealth extended to, well, David Brooks.

At first, finding he not long ago sold a house for $4.5 million, she was ready to pounce.

But when she realized that the UD houselet, bought in 1996 for a virtuous pittance (by ‘thesdan standards) and owned outright, is valued at $1,041,300 — not all that much less than what Brooks paid for his current non-showy house on Capitol Hill — she was inclined to shut up about it.

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As to other stuff in this defense of liberalism: Brooks, fundamentally a religious cultural conservative, is always going to have trouble truly defending liberalism, which tends toward secularity and restless change. He puts the search for meaning, transcendence, and community at the forefront of everyone’s basic life demands, but if you’re really itching for these, liberalism ain’t your best bet. Let me cite a passage from an earlier blog entry.

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In a recent interview, Adam Gopnik, who wrote a book defending liberalism from left and right attacks on it, observes that

[O]ur hunger for [collective] identity, our need for connection, is overwhelming and … liberalism [some argue] impedes it. Liberalism acts as a stopper on it. [This is Charles] Taylor’s point: We [have a] need to ask, “Where am I?” and liberalism [which is much better at giving us time and space to ask “Who am I?’] doesn’t seem to give a good answer to that.

But, Gopnik continues:

What liberals, I think, would say in response, what my liberalism would say in response, is first of all, liberalism has actually been very good at the project of making community. It’s why we live in New York. You know, I never get over the miracle of New York… A tolerant community is another kind of community. A pluralistic community is another kind of community. I delight exactly in the variety of kinds that I can find every time in New York. That’s not an absence of community. It’s a particular kind of community that we relish.

Is it, though, a community without roots, without stable collective identity, without inherited meanings, symbols, rituals?

Damn right it is.

“Is a lack of meaning really worse than a lack of freedom? … What liberalism’s critics appear unable, or unwilling, to address is whether a lack of meaning is a worse problem to have than a lack of freedom.”

Maybe liberalism – “the political order that privileges non-negotiable rights, personal freedoms, and individual autonomy” – issues in some degree of conceptual confusion, and maybe even in a difficulty or refusal to commit oneself to clear philosophical/theological convictions and collectivities – but is this really so unbearable a position to be in?

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UD thanks Tammy for the link.

‘I am now hoping the country will become a more secular country, respecting human rights, women’s rights and childrens rights.’ Yesim Albayrak, Nurse [photo, bbc]

Score one — a big one — for our side.

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UPDATE: Given Mr Erdoğan’s grip on institutional networks of patronage and influence, consolidated over the course of more than two decades in power, it would be premature to see these results as marking a definitive turning point. But they offer considerable grounds for optimism among secular, liberal voters… [I]n a period in which a similarly authoritarian brand of politics is making inroads in countries around the world, a dramatic night at the polls is a cause for wider celebration.

Five AM this morning.