George Packard’s quietly brutal takedown of Ross Douthat’s Believe defines and defends secular liberalism in an especially engaging way. His recital of the Creed (see above) is both inspiring and resolute, and he quite correctly opens the review with it, so that readers can understand right off the bat what he brings to Christian apologetics like Douthat’s. Packer makes clear that he understands, given existential panic and the tragedies of life, the emotional appeal of redemptive faith; he makes just as clear that what seem to him consoling fictions remain fictions, and thus fail to console, much less make life meaningful. We make life meaningful.

The rational, speculative approach of Believe comes to an end in its last pages, when the authoritarianism that underlies Douthat’s, and perhaps all, religion, suddenly shows its face. He adopts a darker tone as he asks what you will do if you’ve guessed wrong—if God turns out to exist and is waiting on the other side to punish you for failing to get the point of Douthat’s book.

That’s nice – for failing to get the point of Douthat’s book – and it reminds us of the amusing tendency among some believers to really let nonbelievers have it.

[Douthat] repeatedly sneers at “Official Knowledge,” the capital letters suggesting that scientific materialism is some sort of conspiracy of the legacy media and the deep state. He accuses atheists of taking the easy way out, of claiming to be serious grown-ups when their worldview is irresponsible and childish: “It is the religious perspective that asks you to bear the full weight of being human.” But even in Douthat’s own account, religion is driven by hedonistic self-interest, for it promises an escape from the suffering of this world, and it conditions the offer on a desire to avoid pain in the next. The humanist view that we have only one another in an instant of eternity—that this life, with all its heartache, is all we’re given—raises the stakes of love and imposes sacrifice beyond anything imaginable to a believer in the afterlife.

I wish Packer had mentioned something like Camus’ Lyrical Essays, full of lucid apprehensions of a world which is ours and ours alone.

UD‘s woods.

‘Sherry Zane is working on a co-edited book project, Divergent Morals: Cash and Contrivance. She recently co-edited Lessons from Audre Lorde’s The Misuses of Reimbursement.‘

“What I have seen over the last six weeks is the United States behaving vilely, vilely to our friends in Canada and Mexico, vilely to our friends in Europe. And today was the bottom of the barrel, vilely to a man who is defending Western values, at great personal risk to him and his countrymen…

And I have — I first started thinking, is it — am I feeling grief? Am I feeling shock, like I’m in a hallucination? But I just think shame, moral shame. It’s a moral injury to see the country you love behave in this way.”

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David Brooks

Senior Lecturer Alexis Jetter has an impressive journalism background, and Dartmouth seems to have hired her off the tenure track to teach the trade. But lately she’s been a bit on the loose wig:

Jetter wrote that she had lost her temper and cursed at two male students in the WGSS departmental lounge. She alleged that the students had refused to leave the lounge when asked. 

Lots of filling in needed here. How dramatically did she lose her temper? Does ‘cursed’ mean you fucking assholes at the top of her lungs, or damn fellas wish to hell you’d leave sotto voce? What hideous behaviors warranted her response – if it was warranted? Dartmouth’s thick with pissoff-artist frat boys; was one such group staging an antifeminist intervention?

But even if it were – You don’t engage. If they’re really bothering you, you leave. Maybe you ask a colleague what you should do. Maybe you call security. A shouting match is a truly bad idea.

As for the rat-as-late-stage-capitalism-icon — oy. Again, we need to fill in a lot of blanks here, but she herself writes that the lesson was about Trump as capitalism’s noxious end stage, which again you might want to be careful… Aside from the fact that you can’t take for granted every student’s agreement that Trump’s a rat, there’s the silliness of insisting – because you wish it so – that he’s the last gasp of capitalism.

Anyway, ol’ UD can’t blame her for saying fuck it when the school began coming at her with formal grievance procedures. She wisely resigned before being subjected to that shit.

UD’s in the middle.

… on all fronts.

Yours for fifteen million.

When junior Alex Acuna walks into John F. Kennedy High School in Silver Spring [Md.] to start his school day, he feels safe. But in the back of his mind, he says he’s also thinking that walking into the school means it could be his “last day alive.”  

The Guardian.

photo markus schreiber

Inside the closet? Like behind a closed door?

And now a newer version of events has the dog in a crate in the bathroom. In the bathroom? Is that where you crate your dog?

You remember the mysterious deaths of a young California family out hiking. It took some time to figure out how they, their baby, and their dog, died. Theories abounded, but it turned out to be the most likely: Extreme heat.

The Hackman deaths present an even greater puzzle, the first piece of which, for UD, is: Why did almost two weeks elapse before someone (not family; a maintenance man) found them? No housekeeper? No calls from the kids? Hackman was a frail 95 year old.

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

Here, FWIW, is one scenario. Hackman’s 64 year old wife decided to kill herself after finding him dead (of a heart attack or whatever).

Authorities reportedly discovered Hackman’s body in the mudroom, in a similar state of decomposition [to his wife]; a deputy on the scene said it appeared he had “suddenly fallen.”

So he collapses and dies, and she, distraught, runs to the bathroom:

A deputy found [Betsy] Arakawa dead and lying on her side on the floor of a bathroom, a space heater near her head and scattered pills and an open prescription bottle on the counter. 

In a sudden, hysterical, decision, she hurls a bottle of pills down her throat and falls to the floor, or lies down on the floor, and stays there until she dies.

It’s remarkable how stupid Americans are. “Before we tackle any of our daunting specific problems here in America, we have to figure out how a country can solve any problem if so many of its people are so intractably, astoundingly, mind-numbingly stupid,” says Bill Maher. “And I’m not saying that as hyperbole or just out of frustration. I mean this country just might be empirically, verifiably too fucking dumb to continue as an ongoing enterprise.”

With our new health czar, we’re indeed well on our lethal way, killing our kids because we’re too fucking dumb to understand how vaccination works. This blog will follow the approaching horrible deaths of American children at the hands of their parents.

UD‘s county still hasn’t transformed its public schools into armed camps, with metal detectors and police everywhere, cuz it thinks it’s too classy for that sort of thing. Everybody else is doing it, but Bethesda? Chevy Chase? These are among America’s most affluent, most educated, blahblahblah…

So change has to come from the parents, not the deluded county council, which seems prepared to see students die on the altar of its self-regard.

A petition, in the wake of gun possession and gun fight incidents in just the last two weeks, is now circulating.