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PaperclipPerfector  3d ago (text post)   9877 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of August 3, 2026

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A bunch of the early tweet replies were literally 'This looks like a potential issue, but I cannot support it since Cofnas is a bad person' from Academics of decent standing. The whole thing's quite flagrantly embarrassing as an Emperor's New Clothes situation for Academia.

I can also try to put myself in the shoes of a peer of Arday's who was skeptical of him, and I get why nobody inside the tent wanted to go for him. Massive risk of getting tagged with the racism/ableism brushes, none of Arday's science actually means anything so it's not like he's really setting back any field and all of his direct competitors for jobs would also need a long list of diversity dotpoints and 'senior white Cambridge Professor casts doubts on superstar Youngest Black Professor in Cambridge history' is not a headline that anybody's career would benefit from, even if they won the war.

I can also try to put myself in the shoes of a peer of Arday's who was skeptical of him, and I get why nobody inside the tent wanted to go for him. Massive risk of getting tagged with the racism/ableism brushes, none of Arday's science actually means anything so it's not like he's really setting back any field and all of his direct competitors for jobs would also need a long list of diversity dotpoints and 'senior white Cambridge Professor casts doubts on superstar Youngest Black Professor in Cambridge history' is not a headline that anybody's career would benefit from, even if they won the war.

There's a famous tweet that was made like 10 years ago that comes up every now and then, which seems appropriate for this. I don't have the tweet, but the text was something like:

William Shakespeare was a Black Jewish woman. You might disagree. You might even have some evidence to the contrary. But you have to ask yourself: is this really worth losing my job over? William Shakespeare was a Black Jewish woman.

Black woman invented the telescope is the version of the tweet I believe gets the most push but there's lots of variants.

https://x.com/i/status/1352218757880557570

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