NOTES FROM LOUIE'S SODA SHOP. Logically Leapin' Lileks (gave up permalinks, it seems, until Terri Schiavo and the Pope rise from the dead; update labeled April 8) finds a professor mad as hell about a Brit Muslim chick who won the legal right to wear the body-covering jilbab to school. Lileks notes: "Odd how 'women’s rights' are now defined to mean 'covering up every possible indication one might be a woman,'" which is so wrong that I hardly need explain why to such super-genii as my readers. (Oh, ok, briefly: Brit judge ≠ all feminists everywhere; dress code relaxation ≠ endorsed subjugation of women; etc.)

From Lileks' inspirator:

No expressed desire by a child or young woman to wear traditional clothing such as the jilbab can be taken as arising from free choice -- even if, in any given instance, it is the result of such a choice -- because of the oppressive nature of the subculture.

My first reaction to this was: Does this mean that now you guys will throw that anti-evolution crap out of school? Because I'm pretty sure no child comes to school really wanting to become even more of a dumbass, despite the oppressive nature of his subculture.

Of course, the endocrine storm soon passed and I recognized that this was merely, to borrow the Bowery Boys nomenclature, Routine 12: The Dusky Hordes Advance (see Footballs, Little Green for backgrounder), with a Bullshit Feminist Angle added -- not because the practitioners subscribe to any recognizable feminist priciples, but because the Angle can be used to give (for those crucial seconds before the thinking apparatus can be engaged) the impression that Western feminists don't care about women.

One day I have to classify all these Routines, and publish my taxonomy under the title Leave Us Regurgitate.