February 28th, 2022
Oh raaaahlly. Oh “concerns about applicants having acquired their wealth illegally.”

How very …. timely of you to have begun worrying about this. Perhaps if you’d worried about it decades before you let in hordes of Putain whores, you wouldn’t now be faced with this… urban renewal project…

An increasing number of Russians began to move in during the 2000s after the introduction of the so-called “golden visa” scheme allowed wealthy people to enter the UK if they invested at least £2m and Chelsea’s billionaire owner, Roman Abramovich, moved the club’s training ground to nearby Cobham. The government axed the visa scheme earlier this month amid concerns about applicants having acquired their wealth illegally.

February 27th, 2022
Who can be surprised that FIFA, world’s most disgusting international body…

… finds Russia a perfectly acceptable soccer team? I mean, why not… ? What’s the problem… ?

Well, the main problem is that all of Russia’s opponents refuse to play them.

What is Sepp Blatter’s (the song is ended, but the melody lingers on) FIFA going to do?

February 27th, 2022
Netrebko says she’s just a dummy, and Abramovich gives millions to Yad Vashem.

Putain’s money whores and fascist whores are scurrying like тараканы, seeking a safe place under the sink while the… unpleasantness… in Ukraine works itself out. A longtime, active supporter of her idol’s Russian aggression throughout Europe, the opera singer now declares herself “not a political person,” and begs to continue warbling. Look what they’ve done to my song, Vlad!

Chelsea football owner Roman Abramovich has tended to get lost among the much more insane and violent Putainists in European football (Ivan Savvidis, Putain-lover and would-be referee-slaughterer, I’m looking at you!), but now he’s handed control (he retains ownership) of the team to others, and hopes that transferring millions of Putainist dollars to Yad Vashem (ethnic cleansing cleansing) will save him. On the dead bodies of Jews, I shall rise like a phoenix.

February 24th, 2022
‘Candela’s classroom structure is not about objectivity, it is about justice …’

Nice of them to just come out and say it. But it gets better.

What many students don’t know is that despite worries about white students being ignored or missing out on participation points, Candela offers several avenues to participation credit aside from in-person discussion, including online discussion boards that everyone is encouraged to use.

You can’t even ask questions, much less make comments, in this class at SUNY Binghamton; but haha never fear! There are many other avenues open to you!

February 22nd, 2022
The latest from Credit Sleaze.

I won’t bother linking you to anything. Just put the name of the Mafia’s bank in your news search and enjoy.

January 10th, 2022
‘Americans Hope That Jim Jordan’s Refusal to Talk Becomes a Trend’

Rep. Jim Jordan’s announcement that he is refusing to talk to the January 6th committee has sparked celebrations across the nation, as Americans express hope that the congressman’s abstention from talking becomes a sustainable trend.

The guy’s a crooked old wrestling coach. (Scroll down.) UD‘s hope is that from now on he expresses himself, as our mothers always taught us, with fists, not words.

December 9th, 2021
Now that he’s been found guilty…

here are UD‘s Jussie Smollett posts from 2019, when the story broke. A most contemptible man.

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

It was too hard to believe that any of this could be made up, because what kind of person would do something like this?

A former supporter of Smollett’s gets to the heart of so many hoaxes – from people (many of them academics) pretending to be minorities, to people pretending to have been physically attacked because of their minority status. You have to be one sick fuck to conceive of this behavior, let alone pull it off, and then sustain the hoax into the indefinite future. What kind of person…?

But our job is not to stand around being incredulous. After all of the destructive hoaxers we’ve encountered over the last few years, and in anticipation of others, we owe it to our social world to educate ourselves in the ways of our Smolletts and Bourassas. We have to try to see them coming. As UD has often said (having covered such hoaxers on this blog for a long time), one common tip-off is trying too hard. These people lay it on too thick: They claim large and proliferating minority memberships (tribal, ethnic, etc.); they claim the people who beat them up did this and did that and oh yeah I just remembered they did that too… Look into almost any recent high-profile hoax and you see this characteristic of overdoing, overkill, as if the hoaxer fears insufficient minoritization/torment will fail to convince. Or – just as likely – their motive isn’t really a motive at all, but rather an uncontrolled manifestation of their madness. Nuts don’t act in measured ways.

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

Update: A Smollett juror illustrates the peril of overdoing.

December 1st, 2021
‘Dr. Oz Hopes to Replace Rand Paul as Biggest Quack in Senate’

Ah, but Rand Paul is also an asshole supreme, with whom Oz could never hope to compete.

November 18th, 2021
‘Few thought criminals enjoy the kind of soft landing granted to UATX advisory board member Summers, whose ill-fated tenure as president of Harvard was notable primarily for his sexist views on women in science, his dismantling of one of the best African American studies departments in the country, his alienation of the majority of the faculty, and his series of lapses of judgment in his relationship with Epstein. Following a one-year sabbatical, Summers was rewarded with a Harvard University professorship, the school’s highest honor for a faculty member.’

She forgot to mention his steadfast defense of Andrei Shleifer, his taking over Harvard’s endowment and promptly losing $1.8 billion, his hedge-fund freelancing while president of Harvard, etc., etc. Summers is a-fucking-mazing.

November 17th, 2021
When one of your country’s two parties is violently nihilistic, you can expect the word “nihilism” to get quite a workout.

And it does. Scan the political commentary of the last couple of years, and you’ll encounter the word again and again.

Seldom has it been invoked more powerfully than by Rep. Ocasio-Cortez today, in the discussion leading up to Rep. Gosar’s censure. She’s right – nothing matters to these people, so they feel free to act obscenely.

People like Gosar represent a kind of disease end-stage. He himself is obviously, literally, diseased: His siblings have begged people not to vote for this damaged man; his sister has described him as a “sociopath.”

He is, more importantly, the manifestation of the disease in his party.

October 22nd, 2021
“He was probably materially involved in inciting a mob to murder my brother. Should I vote to hold him in contempt?”

“Hm…. Yes? … No? … Hmmmmm…. I just don’t know!….”

October 12th, 2021
‘Those students crying about “safe spaces” and a “harmful environment” created by the showing of Othello should grow up and actually learn something. That is what a university education is supposed to be about.’

The best and strongest denunciation of the cowardly idiocy currently in action at the highest levels of the University of Michigan (background here) comes from – wait for it – the campus chapter of International Youth and Students for Social Equality at the University of Michigan, a Trotskyist group.

[Bright Sheng’s student/destroyer,] who evidently knows nothing about the play, its history, or Olivier’s career and intentions in his 1965 performance, has thus far been fully supported by the university in the baseless claim that Sheng’s showing of the film and the film itself were “racist.”… In a statement to the Michigan Daily, composition Professor Evan Chambers—who is replacing Sheng in the course—wrote, “To show the film now, especially without substantial framing, content advisory and a focus on its inherent racism is in itself a racist act, regardless of the professor’s intentions.” Chambers presents absolutely no evidence to support such an outrageous claim. The public is apparently simply expected to take his word for it… The whole incident is foul and shameful. For all the hand-wringing about students “needing context” and “trigger-warnings” about the play, there is virtually no discussion of the actual work or film adaptation…

Surprised to find the sharpest attack coming from the left? Don’t be. There’s a long history among traditional lefties of disgust with Foucauldian bullshit and its current “identity” emanations. See Richard Rorty’s contrast between the reformist left and the cultural left.

You don’t have to be anywhere in particular on the ideological spectrum to recognize the vicious unpersoning of Bright Sheng as fully reactionary, in the worst traditions of the most perverted forms of Orwellian “revolution.”

October 11th, 2021
As Lebanon bleeds to death, its vastly rich, scummy prime minister lectures it.

Wealth is not necessarily accumulated at the expense of public interest and the needy.”

I guess this is what he means.

October 8th, 2021
Preamble, State of South Dakota Constitution

“[T]ax havens” aren’t really for avoiding taxes: They exist to help elites avoid the rule of law that they impose on the rest of us. The offshore financial industry is generating much of the economic and political inequality destabilizing the world.

Therefore, the Great State of South Dakota will do all that it can to establish and sustain the world’s most secretive and powerful tax havens.

October 7th, 2021
‘I AM NOW NO LONGER THE KNIGHT WHO SAYS……. NI.’

A lawyer for [Alex] Jones said last year that the Infowars host no longer believes that the Sandy Hook massacre was a hoax.

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UD REVIEWED

Dr. Bernard Carroll, known as the "conscience of psychiatry," contributed to various blogs, including Margaret Soltan's University Diaries, for which he sometimes wrote limericks under the name Adam.
New York Times

George Washington University English professor Margaret Soltan writes a blog called University Diaries, in which she decries the Twilight Zone-ish state our holy land’s institutes of higher ed find themselves in these days.
The Electron Pencil

It’s [UD's] intellectual honesty that makes her blog required reading.
Professor Mondo

There's always something delightful and thought intriguing to be found at Margaret Soltan's no-holds-barred, firebrand tinged blog about university life.
AcademicPub

You can get your RDA of academic liars, cheats, and greedy frauds at University Diaries. All disciplines, plus athletics.
truffula, commenting at Historiann

Margaret Soltan at University Diaries blogs superbly and tirelessly about [university sports] corruption.
Dagblog

University Diaries. Hosted by Margaret Soltan, professor of English at George Washington University. Boy is she pissed — mostly about athletics and funding, the usual scandals — but also about distance learning and diploma mills. She likes poems too. And she sings.
Dissent: The Blog

[UD belittles] Mrs. Palin's degree in communications from the University of Idaho...
The Wall Street Journal

Professor Margaret Soltan, blogging at University Diaries... provide[s] an important voice that challenges the status quo.
Lee Skallerup Bessette, Inside Higher Education

[University Diaries offers] the kind of attention to detail in the use of language that makes reading worthwhile.
Sean Dorrance Kelly, Harvard University

Margaret Soltan's ire is a national treasure.
Roland Greene, Stanford University

The irrepressibly to-the-point Margaret Soltan...
Carlat Psychiatry Blog

Margaret Soltan, whose blog lords it over the rest of ours like a benevolent tyrant...
Perplexed with Narrow Passages

Margaret Soltan is no fan of college sports and her diatribes on the subject can be condescending and annoying. But she makes a good point here...
Outside the Beltway

From Margaret Soltan's excellent coverage of the Bernard Madoff scandal comes this tip...
Money Law

University Diaries offers a long-running, focused, and extremely effective critique of the university as we know it.
Anthony Grafton, American Historical Association

The inimitable Margaret Soltan is, as usual, worth reading. ...
Medical Humanities Blog

I awake this morning to find that the excellent Margaret Soltan has linked here and thereby singlehandedly given [this blog] its heaviest traffic...
Ducks and Drakes

As Margaret Soltan, one of the best academic bloggers, points out, pressure is mounting ...
The Bitch Girls

Many of us bloggers worry that we don’t post enough to keep people’s interest: Margaret Soltan posts every day, and I more or less thought she was the gold standard.
Tenured Radical

University Diaries by Margaret Soltan is one of the best windows onto US university life that I know.
Mary Beard, A Don's Life

[University Diaries offers] a broad sense of what's going on in education today, framed by a passionate and knowledgeable reporter.
More magazine, Canada

If deity were an elected office, I would quit my job to get her on the ballot.
Notes of a Neophyte

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