In the Mea Shearim area, there are [illegal] signs advising visitors not to enter if dressed “indecently”. Despite complying with the community’s dress code, [female journalists] were still targeted with degrading accusations and insults, being called “impure (unholy)” and receiving death threats.

Noticias Cuatro TV broadcast footage that showed a group of men throwing bottles, trash, posters, and other objects at the journalists. 

Wowsa. Mike Bloomberg, a Hopkins grad, goes to town.

Donald Tusk, Poland’s PM, pithily summarizes the situation after the French vote.

Do you know how many mass shootings are cuz bouncers wouldn’t let a guy in a club, frat bros threw someone out of a beerfest, or celebrants barred the door at a birthday party? Today’s atrocity was probably the last one on the list: Li’l Chase Garvey, just 20 years old and already boasting an impressive sex offender record, blasted into a local gathering and shot everyone in sight. The house was a McMansion, Garvey drove a Lexus, and I’m guessing the tyke shouldered an expensive assault weapon. Rich country.

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Update: Rap sheet for violent crimes and not yet 21. Took multiple selfies proudly holding immense guns. A really, really dangerous person; but Kentucky!! You’ve got no gun control in your state. Own it, babe.

Kentucky’s gun laws are among the worst in the country, and the state has one of the higher rates of gun violence in the nation. Kentucky has none of the foundational policies in place—after legislators repealed its concealed carry permitting requirement in 2019.

The entire state apparatus is set up to make the world safe for Chase Garvey. Own it.

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As an adorable fifteen year old. [facebook]

The just-elected Iranian president seems to have a pretty good grasp of basic human decency, which certainly sets him apart from the ruling theoapparatchiks. We shall see whether he’s able to call off the mad dogs of the Morality Police.

“We are clear that the fact that FGM is considered appropriate within such cultures can be of no relevance to the seriousness of the offence. The practice is criminalised by UK law.”

And with that, a British court tossed out a mutilator’s attempt to shorten her seven year sentence for taking a THREE YEAR OLD overseas to have her clitoris sawed off.

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And see the reason the judge’s comments went to culture is that the woman’s attorney said you know I mean in her culture I mean it’s absolutely fine to do this to babies! She had to or she’d have been ostracized! It’s that important.

So if it’s that important you shouldn’t mind spending a few years in jail for it. I mean, you must be really popular in your baby clit slitting culture now.

You shouldn’t be surprised when people start monetizing the vast empty mcmansions all around you. You yourself may be happy rattling about in your own bankrupting domestic structure with no domestic life in it — because after all, here in the US, conspicuous consumption is the last sense to go.

Indeed ethically and emotionally you may be quite content to live inside a desolate, energy sucking, cave; but that doesn’t mean your neighbors think the same way. Having emptied their accounts in order to act rich, they now seek ways out of their financial dilemma, plus out of the depression that settles upon them when, morning after morning, they fetch up in an Alaskan King bed they can’t afford.

Lotsa desperate capitalists around your neighborhood is what I’m saying, and some of them are going to start cannibalizing their whale fall. They’re gonna rent their pools. They’re gonna rent their outdoor grills. They’re gonna rent their driveways. And – don’t know how to break it to you – they’re gonna find commercial uses for their nine bedrooms.

If you’d thought about your setting – hidden away cul de sacs with acres of parking and beyond that flat treeless land for more parking – it might have occurred to you that the whole setting was absolutely crying out for supermassive sex parties. That there would be more and more and more of these (“We have, you know, 200-400 strangers coming into our small, seven-house community, drinking, littering, peeing, defecating, we have people that are just screaming at the owners. We live here, I mean, my neighbor’s dog ate a condom this morning, so is that something you want your children to deal with?”) and that they might not make you happy.

Happy? You thought spending money on a house whose nihilism crushes your soul would make you happy. You thought ruining yourself financially would propel you to the land of classy rich people, and it landed you in the lap of 24/7 bullet-spewing trash. Dumbdumb.

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update: uh oh.

Having successfully seeded the United States with weapons, our gunvangelicals are moving overseas, carrying their arms through airports and onward all over the world, so that all may know the joy of gun ownership.

While going through the TSA (Taurus Shotgun Ammo) Pre-Check, some of these people are caught by security (here’s today’s high-profile case); some of those who make it onto the plane are subsequently jailed by countries that have the gall to apply their own gun-control laws to, like, us??? WTF. We’re the ones with the tourist dollars keeping pathetic places like Turks and Caicos afloat. WTF.

The question of whether or not Israel should recognize—and fund—the right of yeshiva students to pursue their Torah studies rather than join the army has been a political hot potato since at least the 1970s…

Given that tens of thousands of Haredi men do no Torah study of any actual meaning or value – they lack the motivation/intelligence/training to do little other than show up in a building occasionally and hang around open books – the writer misstates the problem. It’s sweet that he assumes that we assume that all male babies born into this population transform into Torah scholars. But since we have eyes in our heads, we do not assume this. Because we know it is not true.

[T]here are already 6,000 Haredi men serving in the army … hundreds of them are combat soldiers, and … they volunteer in such solid and consistent numbers … the IDF saw fit, in 1999, to establish an independent battalion just for Haredi soldiers, called Netzah Yehuda.

Netzah Yehuda is nothing to be proud of. The US gov has singled this unit out for sanctions, so atrocious has its conduct been in the West Bank. And who can be surprised? A subculture taught to consider pretty much everyone not an ultraorthodox Jew pretty close to subhuman can’t be trusted with serious weaponry. Unless you don’t care about the law of warfare.

And the IDF didn’t create a unit just for Haredim cuz it was wowed by their solidity and consistency: Haredim are so unassimilably weird and demanding in their general and specific orientation (no mixing with women ever!) that nothing short of total segregation will work with them.

Indeed, “fully integrating Haredim into its ranks would require a wide array of logistical challenges—providing strictly kosher food, for example, or addressing concerns rising from coed military service—it currently cannot and does not want to address.” And why is it only the IDF that has to address ways of being that allow this group of Israelis to contribute to the Israeli state’s existential crisis? How about the Haredim meeting the army halfway, and, say, suspending strict observances for the duration of their service? Suspending their inhumane attitudes toward everyone not a member of their religious group?

OOOH, say their rabbis, that would be the first step to secularization.

So?

The author goes on to argue that the war is going desperately badly — a position rather at odds with his initial argument that the Israeli court should leave an enormous population of unemployed young men alone.

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UPDATE:

At least 22 percent of ultra-Orthodox yeshiva students under the age of 26 are illegally employed, in violation of the terms of their exemption from military service, a new study has found, appearing to undercut the community’s argument that its members do not enlist due to their total immersion in Torah study.

Well.

Gotta admire their honesty.

Not my photograph; Melissa Bouter’s.

Took me awhile to figure out why it kept flying off and then perching on the same flower again. It was hunting insects.

I don’t like hosta flowers, but if they bring hours of dragonflies to my window, okay.

They’re putting them in jail.

Yes. That’s why no one talks about nuclear disarmament; the problem is violence, not the means of violence.

Time is full of changes, and now you’ve got to go.

Goodbye, Joe.

So let’s see what the good reason is.

Haredim believe—deeply, strongly and sincerely—that religious devotion in the form of Torah-study, no less than the actions of foot soldiers or intelligence officers, is important for Israel’s security. Indeed, a vital, essential part of it... [A]t least in Haredi eyes, [fit young men who only pray] are not evading public service but contributing to it—and in a way that, they sincerely believe, is essential to the safety and security of all their fellow Jews.

Indeed, in Haredi eyes, they sincerely believe they don’t need to work instead of pray; sincerely, they believe Israeli taxpayers should subsidize their prayerful unemployment. Sincerely, in Haredi eyes, vaccination against disease is evil, so sincerely they allowed thousands of their old and very young to die of covid. Many Haredi sincerely believe that stealing funds from the Israeli state (in which they sincerely disbelieve) is okay. In Haredi eyes, during Israel’s national minute of silence on holocaust remembrance day, you should make a lot of noise to show your contempt. In Haredi eyes, violence against the “state” – which extends from constant destructive rioting/traffic disruption to attacking children dressed insufficiently modestly – is essential to the safety and security of all their fellow Jews. (Oh except that in Haredi eyes no person who is not Haredi is really a Jew. Sincerely.)

These are all good reasons. Because Haredi people think they are good reasons. Sincerely.