HereAndGone2
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User ID: 4074
HereAndGone2
2mo ago
The initial police report is "unexpected but not suspicious" so that would seem to mean "not treated as suicide". He might have been genuinely ill despite all the fakery, or it could have been an accident. We won't know for sure until more information is released.
HereAndGone2
2mo ago
It's hard to know how smart Arday was, because he obfuscated so much: claims of autism and developmental delay, claims of non-verbal, claims of illiteracy, claims of epilepsy after an assault, testicular cancer in his proposal for the memoir peddled to Simon and Schuster which then morphed into brain tumour(s), etc.
I think he was clever, but not outstanding, and lazy/dishonest enough that he saw how society was holding out claims of disability and racism to him as a shortcut to getting where he wanted to be, rather than relying on native intelligence and hard work, so he took the easy path. And this worked for him, so he kept looking for short cuts even when that involved increasingly baroque levels of confabulation. Eventually he would have been found out, and he was, and this is the end result.
HereAndGone2
2mo ago
Is this how he will be remembered? Not as a cheat and a fabulist, but as a martyr for the noble cause of DEI?
Odds are very good that's how it will be. Remember the recent "Woke is dead, even AOC denies Woke 1.0" stuff? Yeah, woke is going nowhere and this will be the British George Floyd moment UK activists were craving.
HereAndGone2
2mo ago
Ah, I didn't see your comment before I posted. Let me move mine down here:
No news yet on cause of death, so it may be he was indeed as ill as he claimed to be, or he killed himself. If I'm really being cynical and horrible, this could have been a 'cry for help' (divert attention from the charges and make him into a victim) attempt that worked too well and he wasn't found in time to be saved*.
Either way, his death will be treated as the martyrdom of a scholar who was hounded and persecuted just for being black. All the plagiarism and other fantastic claims will be swept under the carpet, and it will be Professor Arday Died For Your Sins, Systemic Racism.
Arday faked so much in his life and about his life, it's hard to know what the truth of his death is, until we get more information. But it will divide into two camps: "see, he was innocent all along and racists killed him" versus "this is sad but he did do the things he was accused of doing" and camp A will be heard more, and disseminated more, than camp B.
*In case you think I'm simply being awful for the sake of awfulness, I have a family member who likes rewriting history so they were the victim of general abusiveness growing up, including fake accusations of inappropriate sexual contact by another family member **, and whose stock response to any mild 'here's how to get out of the situation you are in' advice that required them to do something other than wallow in self-pity was to turn on the waterworks and whimper about 'yes I know I'm a nuisance and a bother and you're right to hate me and want me dead'. They did two 'cry for help' attempts that were carefully calibrated not to be fatal and are now getting their 'I am a martyr and a victim' badge burnished.
** I know it's fake because I was on the premises at the alleged times this happened and unless it was done in another dimension to the one we inhabit, it didn't happen. I know this is often a claim for such accusations: "oh the accused could never have done it" but it was completely not in character for the accused person and, as I said, I was around while alleged events happened and would have seen or heard what they claimed, and I didn't see or hear it.
HereAndGone2
2mo ago
To me it feels demeaning because it implies that if I use ai, that the content produced using it does not belong to me.
Well, it doesn't, anymore than if you asked a work colleague to write that report for you. Unless it's the case of a speechwriter or a ghostwriter producing work for hire, then someone (or something) else producing the output is not you.
But I WANT to use ai for everything
What does "everything" mean? "Hey Claude, should I wipe my arse after taking a shit"? If you're on that level of dependence, you are not creating anything, the machine has replaced your brain.
increasingly the ai-using person becomes like a vessel to the model
Do you understand what you just said there? The human is the vessel for the model, not the other way round?
HereAndGone2
2mo ago
Oh I have plenty of conservative principles and I'm holding tight to them. Helps to be Catholic, because even though Western Catholicism amongst the laity (and the late Boomer/Gen X generation of post-Vatican II clergy and religious) is loosey-goosey, the official positions of the Church still hold even amongst all the "now let's just be sensible and modern and accommodating and relevant to the needs of today" persuasion going on, and those are backed up by quoted principles.
You may disagree with those principles, but it can't be denied that they are principles and not just "well I kinda feel this is the way it should be".
Haggling over whoring leads to "sex work is real work" and OnlyFans and the plaints (many and numerous) on here about "why no date for I? why no wife and kiddies? why women not reply on dating apps?"
HereAndGone2
2mo ago
"We've already established that you're a whore, now we're just haggling over the price".
Give in on "well okay some lives are not worth living" and you have no defence when the inch becomes a foot, then a yard, then a mile, each time the argument for extension is "but you already agreed we could do this, we just need a teeny little bit more".
HereAndGone2
2mo ago
In cases where it's not clear, e.g. Grampa has not previously expressed a wish for euthanasia, I do think relatives can be influenced into "just be compassionate" by trusting the doctors and medical authority. And sometimes that medical authority is motivated by "we need to strip the parts before the carcass gets too stale" and not so much compassion.
The problems around the Liverpool Care Pathway demonstrate that; some medical staff are a little too eager to play God and assist the shuffling off of the mortal coil before the would-be deceased is ready for it. It was meant to be a protocol for hospices and somehow it got turned into "general hospitals decide off their own bat not to give Granny food or water once she turns up with pneumonia and is a certain age":
Particular concern was raised in the Review about reports of patients being denied oral fluids, contrary to the legal requirement to provide basic care:
‘The offer of food and drink by mouth ... must always be offered to patients who are able to swallow without serious risk of choking or aspiration.’
In fact, the LCP guidance was explicit that:
‘... the patient should be supported to take food and fluid by mouth for as long as tolerated.’
The Review also identified reports of withdrawal of nutrition and hydration by drip or tube, without explanation or consultation. Decisions concerning these medical interventions are ‘not clear cut in end-of-life care’. The LCP was clear that ‘a blanket policy of no clinically assisted (artificial) hydration is ethically indefensible’, and that while ‘for many patients clinically assisted nutrition and hydration will not be required, the plan of care should be explained to the patient where appropriate and to the relative or carer.’
HereAndGone2
2mo ago
I don't think it's evil so much as a combination of 'having seen a lot of dragged-out deaths' and sincerely wanting to be compassionate, plus eventually the stresses over "look, get Grampa out of that bed he's blocking" encourage them towards "let nature take its course".
The really evil ones are the medical ethicists.
HereAndGone2
2mo ago
Okay, exact quote, bolding mine:
To which the more intelligent type of reformer will do well to answer: “If you don’t see the use of it, I certainly won’t let you clear it away. Go away and think. Then, when you can come back and tell me that you do see the use of it, I may allow you to destroy it.”
HereAndGone2
2mo ago
relying on outraged Christian pro-life gesticulating and "slippery slope" blanket denial
Well friend, as soon as people step up to fight for better medical care, then we outraged Christians won't be carrying it all on our own and the particular level of moral purity you want for the cause will be better calibrated to your needs and preferences.
HereAndGone2
2mo ago
Oh well, if we're swapping anecdotes...
My father had a sudden, drastic collapse. Rushed to hospital. Kidney failure, the works. Comatose or damn near it. Heart stopped and he had to be resuscitated. Doctors then broached "look he's very bad, do you want us to resuscitate if this happens again or you know you could just let nature take its course hint hint". My mother said more or less "Hell no" and the family demanded he be resuscitated. Happened twice more. When he was eventually discharged, it was pretty obvious the hospital thought they were sending him home to die.
Well, he didn't. Thanks to my mother and me, we nursed him back to health and he had ten more good years of life. He was on dialysis for those years, but he had recovered so well that his consultant used to brag about him to the student doctors as "my miracle man". We the family smiled and muttered under our breaths "yeah you guys wanted to kill him off, we stopped you".
If we had listened to the doctors, we would have let him die and lost those final ten years of life. By the time he came to die, it was natural: he'd been gradually fading for a year and even though it was sudden (a blood clot and resultant stroke) by then he was ready to die and we were ready to let him go.
So if euthanasia gets normalised, I do think there will be more pressure on families to "let nature take its course" and preventable deaths will happen.
HereAndGone2
2mo ago
Chesterton said "if you understand why the fence was there, then you can tear it down". If you think "that's just in my way", you may be tearing down the fence that is keeping the bull in the field from running at you and goring you.
People can be idiot fools and ignore warning signs about cliff edges, and then be all shocked when they go right to the edge and it crumbles beneath their feet. Hell yeah don't tear down 'inexplicable' fences because you may be an idiot fool and not the smart invulnerable person you think you are.
HereAndGone2
2mo ago
"That didn't happen and if it did, it's a good thing".
HereAndGone2
2mo ago
The word you are looking for is "evil"
Oh no, WhiningCoil. That is nasty judgementalism when people are only being compassionate and accepting!
I've had decades of listening to the pushback and insults around the Catholic Church's opposition to abortion, so I am both inured to the tactics and grimly validated in what we stick-in-the-muds were warning all along. You start loosening the bolts. You pull down the fence. You cut down those trees in the way. It's all done in the name of compassion, and nobody thinks it will affect anyone except the (carefully chosen and cherry-picked) few hard cases you selected to get the laws changed and societal acceptance.
Divorce is a tragedy and marriage should be for life, but do you want to keep women stuck in abusive marriages? It will never affect marriage itself! Abortion will only be for the few cases where delivering the pregnancy would kill the mother. Birth control will only be used by responsible married couples to delay and space out their families. Gay marriage will have no effect on you. Trans people are only a tiny percentage of the population, they never did anything to you. So giving in on this one thing will not do anything except help the few desperate cases.
It won't lead to normalisation and acceptance. It won't be the first step towards the next hard case that needs compassionate understanding. Abortion won't become "it's not a baby, it's only a clump of cells" or "it's a baby if you want it, it's not a baby if you don't want it". It won't have the knock-on effect of devaluing all life. Euthanasia is compassion for the terminally ill who want to avoid gasping out their last few weeks in horrible pain. It will never be something where gradually lowering the age limits will be proposed. Granting limited rights to this minority will never be the first stepping-stone to increasing demands. Granting expanded rights will never be used as a playbook for a different minority.
There is no such thing as the slippery slope and only bigots and haters pretend there is. Nothing will change once we loosen this bolt, the machine will continue to function exactly as it always has. See, everything is fine after that bolt was loosened, that means we can remove it altogether! See, the machine is still running even with that bolt gone, let's loosen a few more bolts. Okay, now the machine is making funny noises, but that only means we haven't loosened enough bolts.
Now let's all chant together "There is no such thing as the slippery slope!"
Yeah, Canadian MAID is what I expected. But I'm just a dumb conservative traditionalist pro-lifer, what do I know? We're sawing off the branches we're sitting on but don't worry, we will continue to float in mid-air while all the nasty old dead wood tumbles away!
Why keep the useless vegetables on life support when we could strip them for parts? Trust The Science! Believe The Experts! A technocracy would be so much more efficient and better run as a society!
Fortunately, there is a relatively new method that can improve the efficacy of donation after circulatory death. In this procedure, which is called normothermic regional perfusion, doctors take an irreversibly comatose donor off life support long enough to determine that the heart has stopped beating permanently — but then the donor is placed on a machine that circulates oxygen-rich blood through the body to preserve organ function. Donor organs obtained through this procedure, which is used widely in Europe and increasingly in the United States, tend to be much healthier.
But by artificially circulating blood and oxygen, the procedure can reanimate a lifeless heart. Some doctors and ethicists find the procedure objectionable because, in reversing the stoppage of the heart, it seems to nullify the reason the donor was declared dead in the first place. Is the donor no longer dead, they wonder?
Proponents of the procedure reply that the resumption of the heartbeat should not be considered resuscitation; the donor still has no independent functioning, nor is there any hope of it. They say that it is not the donor but rather regions of the body that have been revived. How to resolve this debate? The solution, we believe, is to broaden the definition of brain death to include irreversibly comatose patients on life support. Using this definition, these patients would be legally dead regardless of whether a machine restored the beating of their heart.
HereAndGone2
2mo ago
I think in the most recent books, Harry is finally starting to grow up. He's a great guy and his heart is in the right place, but he has a long history of making really, really bad decisions.
And a lot of that is due to his background, where his mentor DuMorne very carefully shaped him to distrust and confront all authority, thus cutting him off from a lot of sources of information and education he badly needed as he was developing. This left Harry with a smart-ass attitude that, even without all the other strikes against him, would put him at loggerheads with anyone and any body he saw as trying to be the boss of him, so that even now there are breadcrumbs throughout the novels of things he should know but doesn't. He also has severe White Knight Syndrome where any baddie can easily manipulate him by putting a woman or innocent person in danger. Harry relies on the strength of his talents and magic to just bulldoze an answer to any problem, and while that was okay when he was going up against evil mages, he is now on a completely higher and more dangerous level where he will have to use his brain instead.
I like Harry, but there were times in the books when I wanted to slap him due to his "don't think, just bulldoze" approach (and eh, his views on women; there's a few too many Fridged Exes in his life but then again Butcher has been writing this character over a very long time and when he started, Harry was your typical mid-20s guy who likes tits and beer. It was fun urban fantasy with a male character as written by a guy and wasn't really intended to be anything more serious than that, I don't think.)
HereAndGone2
2mo ago
Put it down after just a couple of pages, because I couldn't stand Chesterton's insufferable smugness.
I am filled with deep sorrow for your affliction. To be cut off from sources of joy due to incompatibility - alas!
HereAndGone2
2mo ago
She has claimed Taino and Jewish ancestry, and probably there is some truth to that (but I'm very sceptical of "my ancestors were Sephardic Jews who fled the Inquisition" part, much more likely to be more recent:
"During the early 20th century Jews began to settle in Puerto Rico. The first large group of Jews to settle in Puerto Rico were European refugees fleeing German–occupied Europe in the late 1930s. Puerto Rico's economic boom of the 1950s attracted a considerable number of Jewish families from the U.S. mainland, who were joined after 1959 by an influx of Jewish emigres from Fidel Castro's Cuba.")
"Ms. Ocasio-Cortez, a New York Democrat, made the reveal on Sunday evening at a Jackson Heights synagogue in Queens, telling the crowd that “a very, very long time ago, generations and generations ago, my family consisted of Sephardic Jews.”
She dated her ancestry to those who had to flee Europe during the Spanish Inquisition more than 500 years ago, and sought refuge in the New World. “Some of those people landed in Puerto Rico,” she explained.
“As is the story of Puerto Rico, we are a people that are an amalgamation,” she said. “We are no one thing. We are black; we are indigenous; we are Spanish; we are European.”
She is majority white, though, as is the Puerto Rican population in general:
"Puerto Ricans, on average, have genetic contributions from Europeans, West Africans, and Native Americans of approximately 66%, 18%, and 16%, respectively."
I think Polymarket and other prediction markets took a hammering on Hong, which makes me laugh also (because I don't think prediction markets are the be-all and end-all), but to be fair, all the polls up till then were showing her leading by a country mile. The margin of loss was so small, I'm sure the conspiracy theories in some quarters will start rumbling if they haven't already.
What I'm really interested to know, if we get any analysis, is why Crowley (the eventual victor) was brought back into the race. Hong was doing extremely well in the polls, but this doesn't seem to have been reflected in the internal party views? Crowley had already dropped out, then as other candidates (who had got party backing) dropped out, Crowley was called back in. Was this because the party wanted an actual Democrat, not a DSA member, as their nominee? He seems to have received the endorsement of the party, but the question remains: how were the polls so wrong, or was this a case of "give us an electable candidate and we'll pick them" for the Democrats? In which case the progressive victories of Mamdani and El-Sayed are not indicators of where the party should turn.
But yeah - "candidate who spent years making herself as unlikeable as possible loses due to mean tweets dug up from the past, well well how the turn tables" will always be funny because of Woke or SJW or PC or the name of the time digging up old tweets and calling for heads on spikes as a result.
HereAndGone2
2mo ago
But laughing is considered rude, don't you know? It's called just being a decent person, bigot! To be polite and kind! To go along with the fantasies!
HereAndGone2
2mo ago
Well, yeah. That was the problem - there was nothing there (and I think that also is Newsom's problem trying to break out of California to the national stage). But the turn hard left really was terrible, even if her fans lapped it up at the time (OMG, she schooled old white guy Biden on busing! Racism KOd! Never mind everyone with half a brain knew Biden was going to be the candidate because His Turn Now).
HereAndGone2
2mo ago
Mom is (or was) prettier, at least by my judgement.
Having watched it again, no, she's not attractive (to me). I think the difference is that Walken is dancing in his video, while she's grimacing and convulsing. And to me at least, her mouth is too big and her eyes are wrong (they look like they're upside-down, there's something off about the lower lids and the shape there).
But I'm not a straight guy, so what's hot about her to you is not going to be the same to me. She is able to control her body and do the jumps, I'm not denying that, but she's not what I'd call hot. At the very start of the ad, I think the two older women seated at the table with her are more attractive. She looks - unfinished? doughy? too young? Something, anyway. Like there's not much there yet, and a few more years will fill up this shell with a person, not the larval stage she is at there.
I agree that he probably had been relying on fixers all during his career, and this time the heat was too much so they advised him to step back and lie low until it blew over. But his vanity and ego couldn't take it that for once, the magic get-out-of-jail-free card didn't work.
If it was suicide, I am leaning towards "not really intentional", he would have hoped to be found in time and then recover in hospital so then the story would have been "brave black academic hounded towards suicide by racists" and he could have spun that into getting the accusations softened or dropped. Unhappily for him, it worked.
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