… with anti-hijabis ignoring the law making veiling mandatory, and pro-hijabis screaming in the streets against the anti-hijabis, while also insisting that women, as per nonexistent divine command, should be far more veiled, the parts of the government that matter seem to have had enough.

Iran’s Parliament Speaker Mohammad-Bagher Ghalibaf said on Sunday that the Supreme National Security Council (SNSC) has instructed the legislature not to enforce a contentious law mandating stricter hijab regulations.

“Although I had no intention of publicly declaring this in such explicit terms, the SNSC has formally written to the Parliament, directing us not to promulgate the hijab and chastity law for now,” Ghalibaf told lawmakers.

On the other side, the religious fanatics running Iran into the ground have decided that stealing citizens’ personal information, and setting up a Stasi-like system of everyone spying on and denouncing everyone else, is a great way of enforcing an unenforceable law.

“Does the Headquarters for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice even have legal access to people’s personal data?” asked Abdollah Ramezanzadeh, a former government spokesman and law professor, in a popular post on X.

But forget legal niceties! When God decrees hijabs and chadors for all, you gotta go there.

In case you’re hankering for an update on higher ed in Iran.

Senator Josh Hawley and Kansas City Chiefs kicker Harrison Butker have announced that this September they will visit the Islamic Republic of Iran to learn more about that country’s drone technology.

The men, friends and political allies, will be escorted to selected surveillance sites by President Ebrahim Raisi of the Combatant Clergy party.

“The intention is to gather information about Iran’s innovative use of drones to police its female population,” said a spokesman from Hawley’s Senate office. Under its new Chastity Law, the Islamic Republic beats and jails any woman found not wearing a hijab and loose-fitting, full-body-covering, clothing. The drone system allows the government access to any location girls and women may congregate – schools, libraries, restaurants, city streets, parks, public and private transportation, and the home – and facilitates immediate detention and beating on the ground by Morality Police.

“The applications here at home are extensive,” said Hawley’s representative, “in particular in regard to fertile white women who may be attending college and then entering the work force instead of becoming impregnated. It’s amazing to think we’re living in a time where we can keep daily tabs on non-reproductive citizens in order to identify them, counsel them, and offer them relevant incentives and disincentives. But first the Senator and Mr Butker need to know more about the technology.”

See, here’s how I figure it: Most people are not fanatics. Most people are just people, with this or that personal enthusiasm, this or that religious faith, even this or that fanaticism, but they tend to keep it (because most people consider fanaticism creepy and even threatening) to themselves, or to a few other fanatics with whom they meet by night and howl at the moon or whatever. Extreme extremism just isn’t a good look for most people, doesn’t at all jibe with normal ordinary reasonably contented rather complicated human life, and indeed often manifests to the broad non-fanatic world as abnormal monomaniacal stupidity with a side order of willingness to die and to kill. One thinks of the sad insurrectionists in the US Capitol with their magical MAGA letters smeared on motorcycle jackets and Viking helmets. When these people speak to judges and January 6 committee members, their pitiable condition is broadcast to us all. Watching them, one wonders what new violent insipid Thing will capture them once they’ve served their sentence.

Now in my day (UD‘s an old hippie) the prevailing image was Charlie’s Girls, Manson’s fanatics, who marched off to courtrooms en masse, sporting each day it seemed a new magical MAGA sort of thing: identical chopped off hair, messages scrawled on their foreheads … All fanatics seem to make of the body nothing more than a vehicle for their pathetic passion; all fanatics seem to move always en masse — the larger idea behind all of this being the evisceration of any self for the sake of the God or the Cause.

A theocracy run by religious fanatics will of course try to turn a large, largely normal populace into fanatics – their particular category of fanatics – and they will always fail.

Having failed, and being rigid fanatics, they will then double down:

‘Raisi decided to confront the erosion of support by implementing a plan called “strategies to spread the culture of chastity” – in essence a repeat of a policy first adopted in 2005.

The essence of the 115-page plan, as published by Iranwire, was as follows:

• The introduction of surveillance cameras to monitor and fine unveiled women or refer them for “counselling”.
• Seminary students being placed in residential buildings to monitor how occupants dress in communal areas.
• Hospital staff being required to provide “appropriate garments” to female patients on their way to surgery.
• Fines for any individual who designs, imports, buys or sells “vulgar dresses”.
• New disciplinary policies for female actors who work with the state broadcaster.
• Mandatory prison sentence for any Iranian who questions or posts content online against the mandatory hijab law.’

Peeing myself laughing here. I’m sorry, but we really are dealing with heavy-duty idiocy; and I’d be laughing even harder at all the wonderful language — culture of chastity, counselling, vulgar dresses, appropriate garments (picture women wheeled into brain surgery in full hijab/robe, with surgeons drilling through all the modesty cloth) if the regime weren’t as I write this killing protesters.

Even a former speaker of the Iranian parliament just warned in an interview that “extremism in enforcing social mores leads to extremist reactions.” The regime will probably jail him.

So NOW you’ve got – what? 110% non-support for the hijab? Even many women who wear the hijab – and hijabs aren’t marks of fanaticism until, under the vicious imperatives of violent theocracies, they are – now protest with the no-hijab people.

The cretinous clerics are well on their way to revealing the heart of fanaticism – not piety, or any other form of moral seriousness, but death-cultishness which is always busy drilling down to its deepest truth: It is a sacred privilege to kill anyone who is not exactly like me.

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[Protesters may ultimately] be tried and charged with hirabh, or enmity towards God, which is punishable by death. This may yet get very dark.

The protesters are guilty of enmity towards the regime, not God; but then, being religious fanatics, the regime sees no difference between the two. And in any case (see above) death is what they had in mind from the outset.

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 [T]he daring women of Iran … risk their lives daily for an end to their decades-long imprisonment by medieval fanatics, in this unconscionable, real-world telling of The Handmaid’s Tale.

Bernard-Henri Levy

An Iranian filmmaker offers his all-hijab all the time movie at Cannes, where, interestingly, all of the film’s actresses showed up hijabless.

And big thick black robeless! MOST immodest. I hope someone has reported them to the Chastity Law’s Morality Police.

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Ah. That’s more like it.

Navratilova nails it on the Sadeian sick boys of Iran, who elaborate upon their torture fantasies with each iteration of the beautifully named Chastity Bill.

And keep your eye on the Islamists who just took Syria. UD’s optimism about them is high; but they too may want to scrape clits off, force black robes on, forbid going outside, etc. etc.

Sure hope not! But wouldn’t be surprised if it’s in the cards.

The brave women of Iran keep at it, subverting the vile clerics and the even viler morality police through sheer force of numbers. Even some presidential candidates there are condemning the vicious, degrading treatment of women who hate the hijab and don’t want it anywhere near them or their daughters.

I mean, they really hate it. They are willing to be beaten and go to jail in order not to wear modesty caps and blankets. (‘On a recent afternoon in northern Tehran, women sat in cafes and other public places, as a police officer in his 50s told those passing by: “Please cover yourselves, ladies,” and then muttered audibly: “My God, I am fed up repeating this without getting any attention.”‘) A whole nasty regime with police and an army calls them whores and hunts them down and in response they say fuck you. All glory to these badasses.

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And why do they hate them, UD? It’s just a tight bit of head cloth – plus a loose evil/sexy body blanket cover. What’s the big deal? You’re willing to go to jail for refusing it? To get humiliated and beaten in public? To be fined huge sums? To lose your car? Your job? REALLY?

Well, ok. Let’s start at the very beginning. A very good place to start. Historically, the women of Iran have had serious exposure to you’ll forgive the term freedom. They actually know – they have muscle memory of – what a non-theocratic, non-authoritarian world looks like, and that world is so attractive that nothing a bunch of withered old dicks wrapped in turbans throws at them is going to stick. In respectable countries, you can be a Muslim, an atheist, a Christian, or a warlock; your government doesn’t threaten you with incarceration if you don’t take mandated Intro Islamic Chastity and Virtue courses.

In respectable countries, you might prefer energetic erotic activity to C+V; in Iran, your frisky clit might find itself subject to FGM. Frisky Islamic Republic dicks have no trouble releasing themselves from thin jeans and going at it, and here you’ve been introduced to the concept of equality and all and you know it just seems pretty graphically unfair.

To go a bit deeper: Your self-image has nothing at all to do with hiding your beauty, your character, your individuality. You want to greet the world with as much self-assertion as men are able to, because that is who you are, not the hidden nothing the withered dicks dream about. They, to be sure, are dead. You are not.

The number of times I have heard Saudi women here, who are conditioned to believe that covering is an unquestionable issue, sigh as they watch uncovered women on TV and say لهم الدنبا ولنا الأخرة (they get the world and we get the afterlife).