On his webpage, he announces his commitment to a “proto-feminist” “collective good.” Proto means ‘Primitive: … a basic or undeveloped state.‘ Zat really what you want?
There is something I know you want, and that’s attention. Man, you just waggled your dingus in front of an academic audience!
“And I think it’s very important to maybe use this tragedy as some kind of positive, try and get people to understand how to avoid these kinds of things in the future.”
The charge of manslaughter is a second-degree felony, and could mean up to 15 years behind bars.
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Math ain’t my strong suit, but let’s see. If every household in a state has, well, multiple firearms, and if said state, like all states, has a certain number of idiots, immatures, insanes, and incompetents, how many of these here “tragedies” can we expect? I mean, go ahead and throw in suicidally depressed. That’s a lot of tragedies. What a sad and shocking fate for this noble defensive/sporting instrument.
All our gunniest states have immense numbers of suicides and immense, uh, misadventures like the one people in Utah are talking about, where some idiot brought out multiple loaded guns in the living room, surrounded by his family, and started showing off with them. Oh boohoo shot my kids head off I din mean it now can I go home?
No because, at some bloodsoaked point, accident bleeds into manslaughter.
I mean, this being Utah he’ll get a boys will be boys judge who will slap his wrists and free him to slaughter another family member and the state’s butcher bill will keep going up and up and up.
All kinds of people tried to shut down this latest EU theft racket, but they either got fired by the ministers who ran the fraud, or
investigators encountered physical resistance from … staff while searching its premises. The government was then forced to fire the [farm] agency’s president for failing to cooperate and to announce it would shut down the organization.
These people fight. Physically.
And now the two ministers who seem to have run the fraud, having been duly promoted, are dealing, or not dealing, with press inquiries.
Makis Voridis, who was agriculture minister from 2021 to 2023 … is now migration minister, and Lefteris Avgenakis, who was agriculture minister from 2023 to 2024 … is now an MP.
In a column written just before it passed, Polly Toynbee writes:
The assisted dying bill’s final Commons vote today is no abstract debate about slippery slopes or what God wants: to do nothing is to inflict torture on many… Only God [some say] ordains the time of our entrances and exits. [But] his word cuts very little mustard in a country where 53% have no religion…
[The assertion that my position is a] ‘cult of death’? That sounds more applicable to those willing to let others die in painful agony…
[P]olling of those with disabilities shows 78% in favour [of] assisted dying, in line with the rest of the population…
No, as some hope, morphine is not a kindly drug wafting you away – it can’t remove all pain. Enough people have witnessed bad deaths that public opinion is strongly behind the right to die…
If it passes, it goes to the Lords, where 26 bishops will do their damnedest to stop it, reminding us why they should be removed along with the hereditaries.
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Well, it has passed, so cue the bishops… For UD, this issue is as clear a case as any that religion can really be a wild and crazy thing, peeling off penis parts and blanketing women in black and insisting that people dying in protracted agony must keep shrieking cuz the Lord who loves you also likes the sight of suffering or something.
Bizarre. Not just a minority opinion. Downright microscopic, since most people put basic humanity before dogma.
The Pompeii Archaeological Park has just unveiled the restored Garden of Hercules (so named for a statue of the mythical hero uncovered at the site), freshly planted with 1,200 violets, 1,000 ruscus plants, and 800 antique roses, as well as vines and cherry and cotton apple trees. The botanical display is intended to mirror how the garden appeared 2,000 years ago, based on the findings of botanist Wilhelmina Jashemski, who identified pollen, spores, and plant fossils in the area in the 1950s.
Dr Jashemski worked in Pompeii for decades past the 1950s, and my mother sometimes accompanied her, digging for roots in the hot sun. Both of them would be thrilled by the gardens that have now been rebuilt.
One of the gunniest, dyingest, states in the union generates yet anotherdad kills sonby accident story cuz I dunno he was holding a loaded gun and fuck I dunno…
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It’s quite something to watch local commenters blame dad-on-kid killing on people who want gun control. See my headline? What exactly is the argument here? That if psycho-gun-death states like Utahhad stricter gun laws they wouldn’t start having way fewer dad on kid deaths, the way states like Massachusetts — that make it harder to whip out your gun and let fly — do? That controlling some kinds of gun purchase, some kinds of gun purchasers, and some kinds of lethal behavior with guns doesn’t decrease gun deaths?
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[A] 46-year-old man was showing family members a new barrel he had purchased for his Glock handgun...
The gun had a round in the chamber, and it went off while he was showing the gun to members of his family … Additional details on what may have caused the gun to fire remain under investigation.
[T]he man’s 18-year-old son, whose name has not yet been released, was sitting on a couch in the living room with other family members and was shot in the head. The father was standing across from him.
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What caused the gun to fire was dad. Gather round, entire family, and lemme show off my new Glock barrel! Sonny, you just sit right there on the couch and I’ll stand right across from you, with the gun level with your head. [BANG] Whoooooooopsies…..
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Later that same day…
See dat? Cops just threw out the whole “accidental” thing and arrested the – not father; stepfather – for manslaughter. The original story stank to high heaven.
I can’t do justice to this story, which makes the Murdaugh thing – three hours away in the same great state of South Carolina – look like small potatoes. Pretty girl done shot her ex in cold blood — and I mean like really cold like she just sat there at her trial and it took the jury less than two hours to convict her cuz in broad daylight with her coroner bf she jest drove over to the victim’s place took out her gun and blasted and blasted til he were daid daid daid. Fuck the four kids they had together.
What makes this one amazing is the killer and her bf work as coroners/body transporters! They make a living driving all over Horry County picking up people after they die. (Headline, Independent:“A coroner and his mistress met while moving corpses.”) Body calls, death calls, removal technicians, the language is rich indeed and so is the aspect of the thing where after they did the guy they just shoved his bloody bod in the same van in which they trundle all over town all day waiting for the body call. Expertly they bound him but instead of the funeral home or hospital they dumped him in the Little Pee Dee River. Could that name be any cuter?
A lot more good shit in this one. I can’t keep up with it, as I said, and W Faulkner and A Rice are dead, and J Berendt’s 85, and who else is equal to this multilayered deep south squalidity? The trial “consisted solely of witnesses called by the prosecution,” cuz why bother man. Her daughter trembled and wept through the most grotesque testimony about one’s mother – any mother – imaginable, and then wrote this eloquent victim statement.
This crime has torn apart my family, others’ families and friends beyond any measure. My siblings and I have all suffered greatly, not only from the loss of my father but the loss of a mother, too. This trial and getting up on the stand has been one of the most heartbreaking and painful things I’ve ever had to do. It has also been one of the most relieving and rewarding things. I finally got to say what has been sitting in my brain the last four and a half years.
To propitiateis to “win or regain the favor of (a god, spirit, or person) by doing something that pleases them: ‘the pagans thought it was important to propitiate the gods with sacrifices.'” Squint as hard as you like at Tennis World‘s use of it in my headline and you’re still not gonna get there.
SOS thinks the writer might have meant precipitate?
Bullying, threatening sports parents we have always had with us, but now that everyone’s got a gun, watch out.
Offended that his kid didn’t get enough time on the playing field, a NJ father subjected coaches and principals to extensive verbal violence/threats, because of which he’s been banned from the kid’s high school graduation. Boring details here.
One of the great things about everyone packing is that comments like you better watch your back and you wanna fight? have gone from irritants to declarations of war. People who used to be regarded as manageable assholes now present as terrifying machine gunners, and quickly the police are called in.
This particular asshole has announced he might watch the graduation standing atop a big truck in the street next to the event. Who will be surprised when this latest shit from the guy includes him pointing his AR15 at the happy families?
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