Speaking of The Stupids: Stupid people on trial for double murder should definitely not take the stand.
Murdaugh’s lawyers begged him not to; but because he’s stupid he figured he do right good at it, y’all.
Speaking of The Stupids: Stupid people on trial for double murder should definitely not take the stand.
Murdaugh’s lawyers begged him not to; but because he’s stupid he figured he do right good at it, y’all.
It’s that valuable art of any kind – painting, architecture, music, and of course literature – is the fierce enemy of nice. When the latter-day forces of Orwell’s Junior Anti-Sex League get hold of Dahl or Joyce or Nabokov or Rimbaud or whoever wrote the brilliant Stupids series and try to shove their purification of it down our throats, we need to puke the whole thing up, right back in their faces.
Because only being covered in vomit, again and again, keeps the ever-eager purificationists from their task.
All nations have the right to self-determination. All nations should be aware that if you choose to establish yourself as in important/coercive ways a religious state, you’re eventually going to look like shit. Think Pakistan; or worse. Iran.
Bill’s coming due for Israel, as we’ve all noticed. The process is well underway there in the established forms: The destruction of an independent judiciary. The surrender of the state to corrupt, bigoted, violent, and reactionary fanatics. The dismantling of national education standards. The degradation/disappearance of women. And now, out goes the money.
“From my clients I’m hearing concrete instructions to mobilize money out of Israel, to Switzerland or London,” said Eran Goren, a co-founder of Fidelis Family Office, which manages the money of wealthy Israelis. “We work closely with private banking departments of big banks, and they say it’s from every direction — people are just pulling money out.”
A withering tech industry would make Israel poorer, weaker and more religious, [another observer] said. That ought to worry anyone concerned about the stability of the Middle East, he added.
“Weaker states tend to be more aggressive, and a weaker Israel will be a more aggressive Israel.”
But emergent Israel wants the money to go. A rich educated nation will always erode the poverty and ignorance at the core of fundamentalist Judaism. Education evolves people away from the bellicose certainty that their sect comprises God’s unique anointed world-redeemers.
If backwards is what the Israelis want, backwards is what they get. If you take a long historical perspective on the thing, the core of Israel’s collapse was inherent in its willingness from the outset to cave to fundamentalism. And it was willing to do that because, as it affirmed in 2018:
[T]he Knesset passed legislation reaffirming Israel’s identity as the “nation-state of the Jewish people,” which means that the country belongs to Jews like me [the author is Peter Beinart] who don’t live there, but not to the Palestinians who live under its control, even the lucky few who hold Israeli citizenship... Ultimately, a movement premised on ethnocracy cannot successfully defend the rule of law. Only a movement for equality can.
… really shone in South Carolina last night, with the home crowd shouting GUILTY and LOCK HIM UP at one of three Bama players involved in gunplay/a fatal shooting not long ago in Tuscaloosa. There was also a fight in the stands.
Now, since the player those mean people shouted at didn’t actually himself shoot the fatal shot (I mean, yeah, he provided the gun; and he’s spending most of his off-court time talking to authorities; but he didn’t you know SHOOT the woman; his teammate did), he remains a player in excellent standing at that excellent institution.
And, you know, Gun Normalization being what it is around here, I’m sure all three players will soon be reinstated. I mean, young people hanging out on the street at night with guns YAWN. As for … mmm… let’s call it… killing some woman who in some way irritated them well think of it like this: The mere possession of a gun is liable to escalate … consequences… in these situations. People use the implements available at stressful times. If they’d had knives, the woman might have survived. Unfortunately, they had a gun. No one’s fault.
South Carolina lost the game, by the way; and who’s surprised? BAMA HAS THE BEST SHOOTERS. Now that DC isn’t using it, Bama’s changing its team’s name to the Bullets.
But take heart, SC! Alex Murdaugh himself is about to take the stand!
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UPDATE: This guy thinks murder and provision of a gun for murder are enough to shut down a program! And not just any program: BAMA.
It would be a major step for the No. 2 team in the country to suspend its season. At some point, though, [given an ongoing team-related] murder investigation, student well-being and simply doing the right thing must prevail.
LOL. Look, babe. High-powered, heavily recruited college teams assembled by rich cheater coaches always yield some naughty lads; and the lads’ teamwork may run to more than shooting baskets together. How many stories have we covered, on this blog, of college football and basketball teammates raping and robbing and hazing ensemble? Guns have always been around these programs – you’ll find them in players’ cars, frat houses, and dorms. And the guns are multipurpose: Football hero Tyler Hilinski’s suicide was made possible by dormmates who, at the moment Hilinski was really feeling down, just happened to have had an AR-15 style rifle in their room. High-level drug distribution conspiracies operating out of a bunch of San Diego State U frats wouldn’t have gotten anywhere without a cache of weapons to protect the merch. What I’m trying to say is that, exactly as in the larger culture, guns are everywhere on many campuses, especially in the Greek/football/basketball subculture. Bama’s unscandalized response to a shooting death apparently facilitated by one of its active players is what you get when everyone’s owning and carrying and shooting. No big deal.
The now-fired Texas school superintendent who left his gun in an elementary school bathroom, where it was found by one of the tykes, uttered this immortal statement.
I wrote this two years ago, as ISIS fanatic Begum (she says she isn’t an ISIS fanatic anymore; British intelligence disagrees), stuck in a Syrian detention camp, had her request to return home at least to argue her case denied. The latest news is that — in line with UD‘s confidence she’ll never be allowed back in her home country — a court has on appeal upheld the decision to revoke her citizenship.
And, as this local points out, they’re still stiffing suicide prevention in the state which boasts by far the highest rate of self-slaughter.
The only thing baffling about the local’s commentary is his calling legislative indifference to rampant head-shooting-off in his state “baffling.” Nothing could be less baffling. Wyoming loves violence, and especially gun violence. Wyoming hates government. The two things that frighten Wyomingites the most are
Race hoaxers typically need to use a lot of face bronzer – every day, when they wake up, they must apply browning agent anew to their stubbornly Euro complexions – and the latest hoaxer is no different from her tawny precursors.
Bronzer manufacturers are not the only beneficiary: tanning salons are also having a field day.
This wise Vanderbilt student is of course right that when two high-ranking university deans get together to write the university community a letter about the most difficult and sensitive subject of all – the very real threat/trauma of mass shootings on campus – they probably shouldn’t just push a button and plagiarize the whole thing from a computer program…
Hey, fellow dean! What’s that app… You know the one … that take care of each other thing… that stay strong we’re all in it together thing… Get it going, will you? Only be sure to erase that thingie on the bottom where it says it was plagiarized!
Yeah so the dummies did NOT delete the snippet at the bottom that gave the game away… Both of them have er temporarily stepped down but UD‘s figuring they’re going to turn on each other — that’s their only option — and each one will swear she sweated over a heartwrenching way-personal uber-authentic cris de coeur but the other one rejected it and they were under deadline and..
The irony on top of the irony noted by the student is that as campus massacres become more and more common, we can expect many schools to start using the safe and inclusive environment template.
Walter Benjamin welcomes you to the Formula One Exhibition.
You got a zillion guns and very little police enforcement in the city with the highest murder rate in America – who wouldn’t carjack? It’s got to the point in New Orleans that just, say, beating up an old guy and taking his car doesn’t rise to the level of a crime.
Michael Casey, owner of Liberty Cheesecakes, was on a date in a wealthy area of the city when he witnessed an older man being beaten during a carjacking.
The police arrived relatively quickly, he said, but when Mr Casey pointed out the attacker, they wouldn’t go after him. An officer advised the victim to buy a gun, Mr Casey said.
Everybody get a gun, y’all! Shoot-out city!
Chekhov’s nineteenth century directions are in severe need of updating in our time, most potently on view in the ongoing Murdaugh familicide trial. Taking the stand on behalf of his father, who is accused of murdering his wife and son, the surviving Murdaugh son describes hundreds, if not thousands, of guns of all kinds scattered about the three Murdaugh properties.
Buster, who is testifying even as we speak, says no one put guns away properly; all three of these alcoholics (plus Alex has a twenty-year-long drug addiction) constantly used them, played with them, shared them, threw them in unlocked cars, got them stolen, lost them. These are not what you’d have considered irresponsible people – highly educated, influential attorneys from way back in the long family history, they are one of the first families of the state of South Carolina.
But – well – all the details here, if you can stomach them.
Poor Paul Murdaugh, raised by drunken savages. Amazing he made it to 22.
But… I mean… the Southland.
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So maybe we rewrite Chekhov for our time like this:
If there are two hundred loaded guns of every imaginable kind lying around the house in act one, scene one, you must kill your family with two different ones (the very likely murderer, Alex Murdaugh, used one gun for his wife and another for his son) by act three, scene two.
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There’s also the Wyoming variant of these directions:
If you have more guns than any other state in act one, scene one, you must also have the highest suicide rate in the country by act three, scene two.
[Mexican] Supreme Court Justice Yasmín Esquivel has been tarnished by evidence a thesis she presented in the 1980s was a near-exact copy of one presented a year earlier…
She … claims the earlier thesis copied her later work.