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‘The cases were identified by officials in May, and both were living in a “severely rat-infested” RV about a mile from the Harrison Street encampment.’

The use of pejorative terms here (‘severely rat-infested’) by Berkeley health officials is both insensitive and offensive. The hundreds of rats in the RV mentioned were pets that the two occupants (one died of leptospirosis; the other almost did) bred; their chosen form of animal companionship, while not perhaps yours – or the larger society’s – is neither illegal nor immoral. It is a free choice. Recall Nellie Bowles:

Policy makers and residents largely embraced the exciting idea that people should be able to do whatever they want to do, including live in tent cities and have fun with drugs and make their own medical decisions, even if they are out of their mind sometimes. But then fentanyl arrived, and more and more people started dying in those tents...

[It’s] a sort of progressive-libertarian nihilism, …the belief that any intervention that has to be imposed on a vulnerable person is so fundamentally flawed and problematic that the best thing to do is nothing at all. Anyone offended by the sight of the suffering is just judging someone who’s having a mental-health episode, and any liberal who argues that the state can and should take control of someone in the throes of drugs and psychosis is basically a Republican. If and when the vulnerable person dies, that was his choice, and in San Francisco we congratulate ourselves on being very accepting of that choice...

I would urge SFGate, in its next article on the outbreak, to try phrases like lively melange of rats, or bustling brood of rats.

Margaret Soltan, September 16, 2026 7:53AM
Posted in: kind of a little weird

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