Let this comment, from the incoming president of the Oxford Union (!), stand for all the vile statements many people are making about Kirk’s assassination. The Oxford Union used to be a pretty classy outfit; why they’re handing it over to someone dissolute enough to publish something like this is a mystery.
The loopiest litigatrix this side of Liguria just walked into a buzz saw: Harvard is suing her.
Tyler Robinson, resident of Utah (death penalty? yes), seems to be the dude. “A family member saw the photos of the suspect and turned him into police,” says here. 22 years old.
Apparently his father (a pastor? not all of this information is confirmed) turned him in. He seems to have won a big fancy scholarship to Utah State University a few years ago.
I guess when you put it like that, twenty years in prison doesn’t seem overlong.
… addresses the Judaism of one of her colleagues.
“I have a good surgeon if you ever want to get your nose done.“
… would I guess be a good poetic form of address to UD’s beloved country at the moment (the phrase titles a 1925 poem by Robinson Jeffers). The Murder of Kirk becomes a singular, symbolizing, culmination, an event that rises above the murk of our bloody country’s bloody every day. Give me back my son; he was only thirty-one wails Kirk’s father at his memorial site, a one-man tragic chorus that cuts through all of it.
Our streets are pocked with juvenile assassins, skinny boys with fat rifles, schizophrenics with steady fingers. Our bottomless gun-greed means we won’t be saving ourselves anytime soon – not under a president who won election based on his own bullet wound. Thus America makes choosing our leaders easy: Not the ones with the fatal neck wounds; the ones with the non-lethal neck wounds.
*******************
No parades, don’t you see; no sunny tented gatherings of the sort that killed Kirk. We Americans must crawl over blood and glass into bunkers while keeping an eye on the roofs and windows from which the Kirk killer and Stephen Paddock and the rest of them aim at us. We must eye one another as potential shooters.
Democracy cannot really survive the absolute death of the public realm, a realm as imperiled by our insane willingness to let incredibly dangerous people roam the streets as it is by our gun-greed. Americans continue to recite the NRA’s mentally retarded litany – “The only way to stop a bad guy with a gun is with a good guy with a gun.” – even though Utah Valley University is an open carry campus, meaning plenty of people in Kirk’s audience were armed. Lots of good guys with guns. But hey turns out they can’t do anything about a sharpshooter on a roof! Huh!
Reminders from FIRE.
What a nice idea. Some gun laws.
UD stopped watching MSNBC when she realized she’d been an idiot for believing their smug insistence that Trump would never win. So she wasn’t watching when Matthew Dowd, one of their commentators, said Charlie Kirk was responsible for his own demise:
[H]ateful thoughts lead to hateful words, which then lead to hateful actions… You can’t stop with these sort of awful thoughts you have and then saying these awful words and not expect awful actions to take place…
Dowd has been fired, which is fine, but there’s more where that came from at MSNBC.
Never a dull moment when every insane dipshit in the country has a gun. Don’t know yet whether Kirk, a prominent conservative sitting on a stage waiting to give a speech and then slumped over and bleeding from a neck wound, will survive. Or whether, if he does survive, the bullet has damaged his brain.
******************
Active shooter, Colorado high school. I think we’re almost up to one a day.
******************
Kirk has died.
******************
Trump faced two assassination attempts in 2024. Last December, a shooter targeted and killed the head of United Healthcare. Pennsylvania governor Josh Shapiro’s home was burned in an arson attack in April. Judges and elected officials report increased threats and harassment. Several instances of violence have stemmed from opposition to the Gaza war. In June, a man dressed as a police officer shot and killed a Democratic Minnesota state lawmaker and her husband, and wounded another state lawmaker and his wife. A gunman attacked the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention headquarters in August, killing a police officer.
****************
Oh, and the Colorado school shooting: Two students in critical condition. A mother at the scene:
“I think if I’m being honest with myself, I always knew it was ‘When, not if?’”
********************
Oh, and back to Utah: It’s an open carry state, colleges included, and it’s so routine to see people carrying guns that I doubt the killer – even if his AK 47 or whatever was slung in front of his chest – attracted much interest.
Commentary from one of the encampment’s residents: “There’s a school right there. It looks bad, people leaving needles all over and there’s people nodded out … like it’s just gross.”
Yeah, looks bad, elementary students walking around syringes and deadheads to get to their school building… Unfortunately, the mass murder of other local schoolchildren meant a delay in a scheduled meeting about the problem…

She has absolutely no memory of it. She just discovered this photograph – taken in the late ‘seventies, I guess – in the University of Chicago archives.
Silly boy. Make that utterly unbelievable effects. But after all your field is psychology, currently riddled with fraud, and given all that fraud, you should have acted on your suspicions about those two AMAZING PERSONALITIES, F. Giro and D. Ariely. You worked with them, after all.
Killing field cities are full of… certain… bars… Bars that do everything they can (you should look at their advertising!) to attract extremely stupid, jumpy, armed, people. The MO is to pack them in very very tightly, make them drunk and high, make them bump into each other (Fuck you for bumping into me BANG), make them fight for the prossies, make them, you know, fight. In the bar world, fighting without a firearm is like a day without sunshine, so mass shooting’s guaranteed.
So now here’s a tussle in Cleveland where a fight at or near one of the skeezy bars shot up six people, three of whom might die. The mayor’s pissed, embarrassed, whatever, and has not only closed the bar in question, but boarded it up. The owner is definitely pissed, and swears all the bullet holes were elsewhere.
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.
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