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Culture War Roundup for the week of August 10, 2026

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https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c1j1ye6n30no

(Non pay wall link)

Tragic end.

I feel bad for the dude - honestly a hearty laugh is all I want when people violate social norms like this and show us how frankly evil our institutions can be.

Sure I can blame the dude for every lie told but it only permeates my life several levels deep … the association of someone like Arday and my life only really touches when the walks start crumbling down.

What gets me mad is the institutions.

It’s their fault! Every step of the way someone, anyone, could have stepped in and stopped folly.

But things snowball and here we are.

I don’t even know what I’m supposed to learn from this, and I don’t know how I can help make the world a better place than I left it. People used to change the world I feel like, and I’m only changing the people around me … which is something!

I’m 100% reading the biography about this.

Perhaps relevant: https://x.com/jeremykauffman/status/2088378259427803352/photo/1

In 2020, Mike Adams committed suicide after being canceled and losing his job as a professor.

Adams was never dishonest. All he did was say things like "rioters are thugs" and "women's studies aren't essential".

Even in death, the media ran awful headlines like this.

"Professor who announced retirement after racist and sexist tweets died by suicide"

Related article: https://www.fire.org/news/blogs/eternally-radical-idea/professor-mike-adams-suicide-will-always-haunt-me

Getting sacked and piled-on publicly is pretty tough. Ideally it should only be done to people who actually deserve it.

I feel bad for the dude

I don't. Short hair don't care. Base your livelihood upon a mountain of lies and perhaps that mountain will erode one day to expose your lies.

Especially when your livelihood is dependent upon denigrating the very population that gives you and people like you a hard carry. Obligatory Norm Macdonald: That's what upsets me most about a black man lying and grifting his way to a career denigrating white people, while supported by a country built by white people—that one day some pesky Noticers might call him out for his lies and grifts.

He and his allies would not give the slightest of fucks if a wrongthinker were murdered, much less suicided. If anything, they'd celebrate it, given how the murder of someone as milquetoast as Charlie Kirk was celebrated.

Arday killing himself now merely gives his supporters "Republicans POUNCE!"-type motivation to lionize him as a martyr, that a bunch of online racists harassed and bullied an innocent Stunning and Brave black man into suicide. Well played, Jason.

I'll say it. Jason Arday did the only truly honorable thing he could do in this situation. Western truthseeking institutions can only benefit if the socialy-expected response to being exposed as a complete academic fraud becomes to seek Canadian healthcare.

Wake up babe, new euphemism just dropped.

Obviously unfortunate.

Morbid thought but it's a surprise this doesn't happen more often.

There's been multiple waves of cancellations now since the Justine Sacco situation. You'd assume quite a few suicides from people who just couldn't or refused to pick up the pieces. Maybe embarrassing cases aren't publicized.

People have suicided due to cancellation before, e.g. Mike Adams.

What gets me mad is the institutions.

The guilty parties are probably brainstorming how to blame Whiteness, and the whistleblowers, for this death.

They're already doing it:

The campaign of misinformation was too much for Jason

This is completely false. There is no evidence that “misinformation” contributed to Arday's death. The accusations of misconduct that lead to Arday's firing were true: he plagiarized his PhD thesis, the book he supposedly authored wasn't published at all, and in addition to that he made many extraordinary claims that were not corroborated by any evidence, while defying any logic, like his claim to run 6 marathons in a week and donating 5 million pounds to charity.

So what “misinformation” existed about Arday? It seems to me that the criticism he faced was based on true facts and reasonable doubts. To frame this as a “campaign of misinformation” is absolutely diabolical. Ironically, Ardays family are the ones spreading misinformation (it runs in the family I guess) when they claim that disinformation campaigns caused his downfall, and the BBC are accomplices when they copy these quotes uncritically and without commentary.

I'm not going to bother to take down the article sentence-by-sentence but it seems full of the usual bullshit that aims to disinform the reader in every way. But take for example:

self-defined "race realist" Nathan Cofnas, who was sacked from his Cambridge role in 2024

Interesting how important it is to the BBC to discredit the person who correctly called out a habitual liar as a “race realist” who was “sacked”. If Cofnas was wrong about Arday, why not mention that? And if he was right, why does it matter why he was sacked? Of course, the entire point is to convince the reader that Cofnas was a bad bad person who should not be believed, while denying the fact that he was actually correct when he accused Arday of plagiarism.

Compare this with:

The book tells the story of [Arday's] life from being non-verbal until the age of 11 and unable to read or write until 18

Given that we now know Arday was a habitual liar, and there are no other sources to back up these claims, why should we assume these claims were actually true? Why doesn't the BBC provide any caveats here, like they did for Cofnas? Of course the answer is that the BBC is fine with misinformation when they're the ones spreading it as part of their progressive propaganda campaign.

To make a long story short, for me this article is nothing but a reminder that I still don't hate journalists enough.

Tragic, and @faceh's sign needs a lot more tapping. The demand for diversity exceeds its supply, with awful consequence.

I'm reminded of the casting of Domino in Deadpool 2 (2018). In the comics, an image search shows her on covers in a variety of pale tones ranging from Caucasian-white to body-paint-white. The movie cast a woman with mixed German/African-American ancestry and gave her a big Afro. Then, they had to find a stunt double and tried to match the actress's sex and ethnicity. They went with Joi Harris, a motorcycle racer with no previous stunt experience. Domino's Afro meant Joi was performing stunts without a helmet, and during a take she lost control of the bike, was thrown through a plate glass window, and died.

What does an action movie character not wearing a helmet (quite common) have to do with their haircut?

I have a feeling you meant to say "the stunt double was a DEI hire" but then the Afro remark doesn't seem to fit.

What does an action movie character not wearing a helmet (quite common) have to do with their haircut?

I'm assuming the Afro doesn't fit into a helmet/the point of casting the woman was more for the hairstyle than her stunt ability and experience

I'm assuming being a superhero movie character had more to do with not wearing a helmet than having an Afro (it's hair, it can fit into a helmet if you want one), and that casting a stunt double had more to do with her ethnicity than hairstyle.

He probably died from exhaustion after running 1,000 miles in a few days

When society indulges someone's insane fantasies and privileges them beyond what reality can bear, tragic things happen.

It’s their fault! Every step of the way someone, anyone, could have stepped in and stopped folly.

The sign is getting dented, but I'll keep tapping it.

Someone(s) must pay a price, and be removed from having any decisionmaking authority for there to be any meaningful 'learning' at an institutional or social level.

A tragic and pointless loss of life.

In a proper world, he would still be alive, and every person who participated in elevating him into a position he was clearly unqualified for would be experiencing the things that made him want to commit suicide.

He lived the life of an ardent political extremist and killed himself on his last mission to prevent greater damage to his cause. In a way, that’s actually admirable. It’s like Mishima’s seppuku, or the Croat Praljak drinking cyanide immediately after his conviction for war crimes. But I don’t have any compassion for people who write things like —

”The challenging of normative Whiteness is paramount in dismantling the cycle of inequality that permeates society. The persistent and operant nature of Whiteness within the Academy is enduring and depicts faculty of colour as deficient or incapable. The articulation of racialised experiences has become an instrument of empowerment for faculty of colour in an attempt to reclaim power and disrupt the operant tools of Whiteness.”

“Global resistances to racism and the Whiteness that sustains it must now consider the unrelenting labour, suffering and burden of this plight on Black communities continually tasked with the responsibility of extrapolating themselves from the inequitable stranglehold of White supremacy.”

Arday knows that he can’t destroy the West directly, but can do so indirectly by targeting their bleeding heart, their Achilles’ Heel. He’s a very smart enemy combatant. If he got his way he would cause more damage than almost anyone else. He was found out and did a 21st century hybrid warfare version of, like, sinking the flagship with himself on board so it doesn’t get in the hands of the French. Commendable in the sense of respecting an enemy, but definitely not worthy of any pity.

Yeah but he probably could have done more 'damage' if he'd just laid low for a year or two, waited for the wind to change on wokeness and then managed to find some new sinecure as an example of somebody who got 'cancelled by icky racists'. I don't think his career and/or ability to extract money from racism enthusiasts was even over.

It just shows how little grit younger generations have. An experienced boomer, gen-x or even elder millennial grifter would have white knuckled it through, and just reinvented themselves in a new grift a few years later.

Terribly sad. Of course it was good to see him exposed for cheating and lying, and he made the right move by resigning his post, but I certainly didn't wish ill upon him. He may have lied and cheated, but to the best of my knowledge he never really hurt anybody.

Not directly, but someone with actual academic ability could have held that professorship, and several classes of students were given substandard education so that activists within the institutions could feel good about themselves. If you mapped it all out, you could probably argue for a fair amount of diffuse damage, and a lot of diffused responsibility. But since our systems aren't very good at reckoning that sort of thing (and are currently uninterested in even trying), the scrutiny fell mostly on Arday. I would not want to find myself in a position like that, watching my entire world crumble because I'd been promoted far beyond my competence and had been found out.

Whilst I'm sure Arday's competition would probably be slightly less prone to lying, it's hard to imagine anybody taking a job that he was applying to actually contributing to the aggregate knowledge of humanity. It's not like he was competing against hard Mathematics professors to fill in his diversity of diversity diversity positions