While I was driving Thur. I was listening to the murder trail of
Murdaugh and thinking while listening, where is the PROOF that he killed his son and wife? I heard a lot about the money he stole, how he lied and how the drugs he was taking affected his thinking. I have knowledge of how drugs could alter you why of thinking and stealing from other to support your habit.
I found myself not willing to convict him of a double murder without some evidence. Where is the gun, bloody clothing or anything linking him to it. It has been mentioned that the police "Rushed to Judgement" and never considered anyone else. Could this be another case where they took the easy way out? Not sure but maybe there is another possibility as others wanted to punish the family due to a related death of another in a boating accident.
How about this, he came upon the person or persons killing his wife and son. They (killers) could have decided to allow him to live with a threat of killing him and his other son if he ever said anything as they felt the revenge for the death due to the boating accident had been paid. By killing his one son and wife he may be convicted and would remain quite to protect his last son. Just maybe but no one ever appears to have looked into it as they rushed.
Right now after listening to all parties, I have not heard ANY evidence showing he killed anyone. He is a liar, thief, scum and he will go to prison for theft but not murder. I could not vote to convict at this time.
John Hurt in the film adaptation of George Orwell's dystopian novel, 1984
What is it about the past that some young people find unbearable? After all, no one is expecting them to live through it. Indeed, some of us who did find the present infinitely worse. The vandalism of Roald Dahl’s writings for children by “sensitivity readers” to make them “suitable”, has brought the wickedness of rewriting, or eliminating, the past and evidence of it to the forefront of our discourse. It would also have Dahl (with whom I once spent an evening: shrinking violet he was not) turning in his grave. Sadly, it goes far beyond children’s books, and indeed books generally: films, statues, television programmes, indeed, if they are allowed into the public arena at all. Are we really so delicate? Why tolerate this lunacy?
George Orwell, to whom the Thought Police (a term he invented in Nineteen Eighty-Four) have yet to apply themselves, wrote in that very novel of a Britain in which “every record has been destroyed or falsified, every book rewritten, every picture has been repainted, every statue and street building has been renamed, every date has been altered. And the process is continuing day by day and minute by minute. History has stopped. Nothing exists except an endless present in which the Party is always right.”
We have arrived at our own endless present, or Year Zero, where the record, historical and otherwise, is readily falsified. Its rules are designed to prevent what that arrogant and self-regarding minority who feel obliged to police and alter the thoughts of the rest of us consider the ultimate crime: giving offence. Most of us have spent our lives encountering things that could, if we wallowed in self-regard, offend us deeply. We were trained to ignore them and get on with life. Now, suddenly, we cannot be trusted to do that.
Therefore books, art, films and television programmes must be censored or suppressed, statues taken down as though the lives they commemorate never happened, streets and buildings renamed to eradicate thought criminals. Like Pol Pot, that minority feels a moral duty to erase the past to attain Year Zero. Sadly for us, their main qualifications are an overbearing self-righteousness, a profound ignorance of history and a deep misunderstanding of the idea of liberty that few of us share.Simon Heffer
John Hurt in the film adaptation of George Orwell's dystopian novel, 1984
What is it about the past that some young people find unbearable? After all, no one is expecting them to live through it. Indeed, some of us who did find the present infinitely worse. The vandalism of Roald Dahl’s writings for children by “sensitivity readers” to make them “suitable”, has brought the wickedness of rewriting, or eliminating, the past and evidence of it to the forefront of our discourse. It would also have Dahl (with whom I once spent an evening: shrinking violet he was not) turning in his grave. Sadly, it goes far beyond children’s books, and indeed books generally: films, statues, television programmes, indeed, if they are allowed into the public arena at all. Are we really so delicate? Why tolerate this lunacy?
George Orwell, to whom the Thought Police (a term he invented in Nineteen Eighty-Four) have yet to apply themselves, wrote in that very novel of a Britain in which “every record has been destroyed or falsified, every book rewritten, every picture has been repainted, every statue and street building has been renamed, every date has been altered. And the process is continuing day by day and minute by minute. History has stopped. Nothing exists except an endless present in which the Party is always right.”
We have arrived at our own endless present, or Year Zero, where the record, historical and otherwise, is readily falsified. Its rules are designed to prevent what that arrogant and self-regarding minority who feel obliged to police and alter the thoughts of the rest of us consider the ultimate crime: giving offence. Most of us have spent our lives encountering things that could, if we wallowed in self-regard, offend us deeply. We were trained to ignore them and get on with life. Now, suddenly, we cannot be trusted to do that.
Therefore books, art, films and television programmes must be censored or suppressed, statues taken down as though the lives they commemorate never happened, streets and buildings renamed to eradicate thought criminals. Like Pol Pot, that minority feels a moral duty to erase the past to attain Year Zero. Sadly for us, their main qualifications are an overbearing self-righteousness, a profound ignorance of history and a deep misunderstanding of the idea of liberty that few of us share.
Last year the London Borough of Haringey renamed Black Boy Lane “La Rose Lane” - PA
It is why the former slaver Sir Edward Colston’s statue was tipped into the water at Bristol, why extremists at Jesus College Cambridge (including the half-witted Bishop of Ely) wanted the Tobias Rustat memorial ripped out of the college chapel, and why others want to remove the effigy of Cecil Rhodes from Oriel College, Oxford, to punish his colonialism. Last year the London Borough of Haringey renamed Black Boy Lane “La Rose Lane” after John La Rose, “a champion of black history and equality”. None the less, the expensive new signs – the whole exercise, including compensating residents (none of whom wanted the name changed) cost £186,000 – all say “formerly Black Boy Lane”.
Cassland Road Gardens in Hackney, named after the slave trader John Cass, has gone, and is now Kit Crowley Gardens after a half-Barbadian “community hero” who experienced “poverty and racism”. A suggestion that Brent Borough Council would rename Gladstone Park after Diane Abbott, because of the Gladstone family’s links with slavery, has so far not been acted upon. Churchill’s statue in Parliament Square is considered a fair target for vandals because he favoured British rule in India: defeating Hitler is a minor consideration to historical ignoramuses. Elsewhere in the art world, Tate Britain is rehanging its paintings to put women at the centre of its display.
Protesters throw a statue of Edward Colston into Bristol harbour during a Black Lives Matter protest rally in 2020 - PA
Self-appointed censors are not new. In 1807 Thomas Bowdler, a doctor, published the first edition of The Family Shakespeare, in which his sister Henrietta Maria had “edited” 20 of the Bard’s plays to remove immorality or indecency, a task that must have given this proto-snowflake the vapours. She removed around 10 per cent of the text, leaving something she thought women and children could read unsullied. Bowdler himself took on an even saltier task, sanitising Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.
At least you could still buy the unexpurgated Shakespeare and Gibbon if you wished: the late Georgians believed in choice. However, in the last century there were still suppressions: it was not until nearly 15 years after publication that James Joyce’s Ulysses, widely considered the greatest novel in our language, could be bought in Britain; not until after the war that Radclyffe Hall’s anodyne 1927 lesbian tale The Well of Loneliness was permitted. The Lady Chatterley trial in 1960 finally allowed men to contemplate allowing their wives and servants to read that book, and changed everything. We thought we had all grown up: how wrong we were.
Instead, a section of society with high responsibility for preserving freedom of speech and discourse – the trade of publishing – now willingly sacrifices its historic principles, for which people once risked prison, to censor books. I know a novelist and a social scientist, both of great standing, who cannot find publishers prepared to put out such books as they want to write, because of fear those works might offend the self-righteous clique. Even 10 years ago they would have been published without demur.
Dahl’s children’s books have effectively been censored - Ronald Dumont
The most scandalous recent case is of Prof Nigel Biggar, the Oxford academic whose book Colonialism: A Moral Reckoning was accepted by Bloomsbury, which then – shame be upon them – decided not to publish. William Collins did; it is now a bestseller (and one imagines uncensored Dahl editions are, similarly, selling like hot cakes, too). People like an argument and in a free society deserve to be allowed one: they don’t want some affronted youth telling them they can’t read, learn and dispute something, like the Victorians covering up their table legs.
Prof Biggar’s book committed the crime of stating a simple truth: that the British Empire did good things as well as bad. The hostility with which such a contention is met today is deranged: it is literally undebatable. Indeed, a prime motivation in wiping out the past and creating the endless present is the determination of a young generation of British people – ironically almost all white, and expensively educated – to make their fellow Britons hate themselves for their heritage.
Doubtless there is much outrage to come. In the past, our people wrote books that mocked minorities (think of Dickens’s treatment of Fagin in Oliver Twist, or Trollope’s of Melmotte in The Way We Live Now, or almost anything by Carlyle. Before long a “sensitivity reader” – someone of a mindset incomprehensible to most of us – will decree it best we do not read these works at all. The climate has changed violently, precisely because we have allowed it to.
Charles Hawtrey and Terry Scott in Carry On Up the Khyber - AF archive
Repeat channels on television warn viewers they may encounter “language and attitudes” they find offensive: but at least, for now, these programmes are still shown. There are no repeats of It Ain’t Half Hot Mum, because an actor blacked up in it (the fact that the satire’s main target was the British Army, and its officer class, seems not to have registered). Nor can Till Death Us Do Part be shown, even though Johnny Speight, its writer, was a Leftist who wished to highlight racism through his brilliant creation, Alf Garnett. By far the best Carry On film, Up the Khyber, can’t appear because Kenneth Williams and Bernard Bresslaw black up as the Khasi of Kalabar and his henchman Bungdit Din, in mocking the hated Raj. And Guy Gibson’s faithful labrador in The Dam Busters has his name bleeped out.
The notion that if you don’t like it, you don’t have to watch it is beyond our censors. Their pompous self-righteousness about “safe spaces” at their universities was never questioned: their dons lived in fear of them, in case the Stalinist Twitter mob attacked them and destroyed their careers (which very nearly happened to Prof Biggar, and has happened to others, usually for criticising the lunacy of identity politics). They inflict their control freakery on their elders, who are equally terrified to gainsay them.
It does not bear saying often enough that these are a small, unrepresentative minority whose undue influence is wrecking free expression. They seek to distort and even eliminate our past, a past they deem too unsafe for us to encounter, and in doing so squash the vital impulse of intellectual curiosity. It starts with censoring a few children’s books. If we don’t make a stand, it will end with destroying our democratic right to liberty, and sooner than we imagine.
Rep. Jim Jordan, a Republican from Ohio, caused a stir on Twitter Friday night after he said Democrats in Washington, D.C., were "ridiculous" to support a decision allowing non-citizens the opportunity to vote.
"Only Americans should vote in American elections," said Jordan, prompting backlash.
The Republican’s tweet concerned House Joint Resolution 24, or the "Disapproving the action of the District of Columbia Council in approving the Local Resident Voting Rights Amendment Act of 2022," which passed the House of Representatives on Thursday.
The Staff:
To even think allowing non-americas vote in our elections is just F-ing nuts. Why in the world should people from Russia, China, Mexico, Germany or any other country vote in ANY American election. What dumb ass liberal came up with this crap.
Rep. Matt Gaetz, R-Fla., is introducing a resolution in the House on Thursday that calls on the Biden administration to end U.S. military and financial aid to Ukraine -- while also urging all involved to secure a peace agreement after nearly a year of war in the region.
Just how damn stupid this clown is has finally come to the surface. If he thinks peace with Putin is going to stop anything he needs to get his head out of his ass. Poland or Moldavia will be next and he has already said he was going to rebuild the previous Russia. Gaetz is sounding like another idiot who tried to appease Hitler, how did that work out.
The US and Europe guaranteed safety for Ukraine if they gave up their Nuclear Weapons. The word of the US and Europe are worthless and the actions they have taken show it. If Ukraine had Nuclear, this would have never stated so much for trusting America. I hope anyone who signs a treaty with the USA protects themselves as this country can not be trusted.
Now we have Gaetz and some others who don't remember history running their mouths. America's president is feeble and has never been in charge only a figure head for others. All the world knows he is no longer able to function without someone telling him what to say and stand.
WE should give Ukraine, fighters, long range missiles and anything else they want. Maybe a few moms killing so Russians would make a difference and no the little Putin won't use Nuclear as he knows that would the end of his rule and maybe the end of Russia. Yes, it may cause us to get hit if he does but what is the true cost of freedom in this crazy world? Would China step in and force Putin to stop before he used Nuclear? May happen as it would cause global devastation.
We are the point to either pay now or pay later and later will be MUCH worse.
