‘Either post-liberalism is something like, in [Patrick] Deneen’s case, a continuation of a certain sort of socially conservative Christian politics that has hardly been unfamiliar to American politics for decades, and so does not represent anything particularly new or radically challenging to liberalism. Or post-liberalism is a more full-blooded and genuine challenge to the liberal order. But when it takes that mode, like in [Adrian] Vermeule’s work, it becomes driven more by an irate, passionate fury against liberalism that ends up detaching it so far from reality that I do not think it deserves to be taken seriously as a political theory. It’s more like fantasy at that point. Indeed, I think a lot of the New Right could be described in that way. And while fantasies undoubtedly have a sort of causal force in politics in mobilizing and directing the people’s more negative emotions, this is not the same thing as a genuine intellectual challenge.’

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‘Vermeule recognizes that there is little support for post-liberalism today. Most people are too corrupted by liberalism and the liberal elite to know what is really good for them. They must be brought to see what is good for them. Their beliefs and values must be changed, through the use of political power (to be grasped via non-democratic means) and the law, so that they are better aligned with what will bring them true human flourishing (the common good). We must be transformed. And when we are, we will come to recognize that we have been brought to the light and thank our post-liberal rulers for having delivered us from moral error.  … Once you think politics no longer needs to be bound by people’s actual beliefs and values, as Vermeule does, then essentially your imagination is free to go wherever it wants. People, actual people, become nothing but abstractions, and the effects on them are inconsequential… [I]ntegralism is basically the idea that the Church should have authority over the State, at least in the pursuit of humans’ spiritual ends… Vermeule shrugs off claims that integralism is highly unrealistic in highly pluralistic societies like America by saying that once the right people get their hands on the levers of power, they will use that to make people more supportive of post-liberalism. However, what integralism also requires is that the Church is willing to do its bit, so to speak, by wanting to literally get involved in the ruling of countries. And to say that the Catholic Church has neither the appetite nor capacity for that would be an understatement. But Vermeule is entreating people to act as if the Pope were there just waiting for integralists to take over the US government so he can start governing citizens’ souls, which is so far removed from reality that I think we are in the realm of literal fantasy.’

UD is intrigued that Harvard University, of all places, harbors and honors Mr UFO (now a high ranking Trump official) and harbors and honors The Madness of King Adrian.

… USA.

The judge who got drunk and said ‘cunt’

Set going a subsequent hunt.

They found what he’d done

Was hide a big gun

Inside of his desk, toward the front.

She’s trying to return to Australia, where she holds citizenship, and, for some fucked up reason, Australia can’t keep her (or anyone holding citizenship?) from doing that.

No country’s laws should be such that it can’t protect itself from evil and violent fanatics/traitors who hate and want to destroy everything the country stands for.

At best, this severely twisted and insanely dangerous woman will be arrested the moment she touches down in Sydney, held while the state prepares a case against her, and then tried for crimes against humanity. The case will easily be proven, and the Australian taxpayer will subsidize her lifelong imprisonment — along with the imprisonment of quite a few other ISIS terrorists.

At worst, the Labor government will find a way to release her into the general population, where she will no doubt continue her torture spree.

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I know, I know. It’s impossible to believe that any sane polity would arrange to welcome multiple homicidal maniacs to its shores, but Australia’s current government claims it has no option but to do that. One can only hope its pathetic and vastly irresponsible behavior (ask the community of ISIS victims in Australia how they feel about the welcoming party) tosses them out in the next election.

Everybody – even the New York Times – is beating up on historian Kerri Greenidge because she apparently plagiarizes and makes up shit in her books. Her latest book seems to have been withdrawn, and she’s no longer at her tenured position at Tufts.

She’s calling the people calling her out racists.

Her supporters note that empirical reality doesn’t exist, so no big whoop.

Gated folk never seem to figure out that gates keep trouble in.

As in — everything depends, don’t it, on who lives in the armed camp?

Say you’ve got a violent psychotic teenager sharing a big ol’ mansion with ma and pa. Put their heavily guarded utopia in Texas, where breast feeders are issued Berettas. One night the crazed babe (private Christian school, where he played football; off to Texas Tech next year — or that was the plan before he started shooting neighbors) had his big psychotic break — or maybe he just smoked a shitload of meth — and stripped off his clothes and staggered among the statelies, armed and hallucinating.

PowpowpowpowhuhwhereamI? Kind of thing.

WheredIgetthisGlockohyeahmaandpahavefiftyguns. Kind of thing.

Well the cops killed him after he shot at them too, and the thing’s getting more press than your routine everyday Texas gun death onaccounta there’s a good video of it, plus it’s rich white folks and all.

Remember the Humistons. Only there the shooter was fifteen.

“Is Hilton Head the new Myrtle Beach?” one commenter wrote under an Island Packet Facebook post about the shooting. Myrtle Beach has the highest violent crime rate on South Carolina’s coast and third-highest in the state overall, according to FBI data. Many islanders fear Hilton Head’s natural beauty and tranquility could give way to overdevelopment, traffic and crime.

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You think being hoity toity keeps you from being South Carolina? You’re the ones who want among the weakest gun laws in the country, so your beach is gonna be just as shot up as trashy Myrtle.

Maybe try electing a legislature that doesn’t have shit for brains.

https://local12.com/news/nation-world/child-shot-himself-gun-couch-purse-unsecured-2-year-old-protection-killed-died-self-arrest-arrested-mother-mom-sleeping-pled-guilty-sentenced-10-years-prison-jail-fled-scene-living-room

ELLSWORTH COUNTY, Kan. (KWCH) – The parents of a small child who, investigators said, shot and killed two siblings with an unsecured gun at home in Brookville face charges in the case. 

Sexual activity declines as people age (including, presumably, Atlantic readers), so it shouldn’t surprise us that The Atlantic repeatedly announces the end of sexual congress. “Why Are Young People Having So Little Sex?” was a reasonable question to ask in December 2018, as the word incel was starting to acquire currency. But did we also need “The Bored Sex” (i.e., women, sexually) in February 2019 and “The Death of the Sex Scene” in February 2023 and “The Slow, Quiet Demise of American Romance” in December 2024 and “Sex Without Women” (about hetero male preference for porn) in March 2025? After all, Atlantic readers had already been fed “Dear Therapist: My Husband Doesn’t Want to Have Sex Anymore” in 2018 and “The Real Problem With Hookup Culture: Bad Sex” in 2013. What’s it going to take to get a little fucking going in The Atlantic?

This blog has upchucked again and again over the supernauseating corruption of world soccer — a degree of vomitivity that leaves our own local football/basketball bad boys looking bush league. Soccer’s got the whole world in its hands, and even my big fat rich country can’t compete with that.

‘Soccer is the world’s game, and the world is a corrupt place. All this corruption only makes international soccer a better representation of the world we live in.’

You have to go back to Schopenhauer’s Die Welt als Wille und Money Laundering to get to the metaphysical core of global soccer corruption; but if you don’t want to read that deeply, just scan the Argentine Football Association.

‘Perhaps the Nazi Tattoo Was a Clue’

… runs the Washington Post headline. I walked there last week, laboring through big heat and uphills from the Reflecting Pool (an old Garrett Park neighbor is accused of having damaged it).

I took this picture of the tarp covering the absence of DT’s name and then headed inside the massive building.

The place, says the Post, is “eerie,” and “has the air of a ghost ship” foundering on the thin river off its balcony.

When I entered, a gray haired woman, moored at the information booth, looked rather embarrassed — aware of her absurdity.

‘A runner stopped in, briefly, to cool off in the air conditioning and headed back outside. A video of the National Symphony Orchestra played to a theater of vacant seats.’

A theater of vacant seats is nice.

”Welcome to the Kennedy Center” a staffer said to me when I got to the second level. No one else was there.

The halls were alive with the sound of nothing. UD tried filling it with a memory of her last time there, which featured the impossibly high soprano of Erin Morley – but even Morley’s voice couldn’t stand up to the present pianississimo.

Certes, the KC has never been a warm burbling human scale sort of place, and UD should know cuz she’s been attending performances there since 1971; but its lobbies have always hummed with perfumed theater-goers, and its performance spaces with passion. It was impossible to miss the caesura, the jarring way everything was suddenly set at pause.

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UD thanks Bill, a reader, for correcting her on the date when she began going to the KC.

Wonder what kind of weapon he had!!?

This classic southern oath has been transformed in our time to ‘What in tarnishion,’ as folks down there worry that the daily blood bath is – to quote Dothan Alabama commissioner Dave Stock – beginning to “tarnish the image of our city.”

Ol’ Dave worries in particular about Dothan, but y’all know it’s the whole bloody state. Bama by some measures is America’s gunniest, bloodiest, state. As in why (reads a recent headline) Does Alabama have more Gun Deaths than New York?

It’s fun to follow what folks say about blood bursting everywhere in Bama (A related transformation: Not Stars Fell on Alabama, but Brains Dripped on Alabama), folks down there being real dumb and all. One guy, asked why insane people shouldn’t be kept away from guns, explains that in the olden days ifn you were nuts they might could put you in a mental hospital. Damn sight better now you got ‘em runnin round with AK47s.

Ol’ Dave notes sagely that more cops would be good cepn problem there is would you wanna police a town where your chance of getting injured or kilt on the job is as high as the thirteen year old gunnies all over the streets? You wouldn’t want to introduce any gun laws, so that means that — citing the Buddhists — Bama must learn to sit with tarnishment.