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Notes -
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.
At the end of the day the only person who can kill themselves is obviously, themselves. We can talk about how hard it is to weather harassment and controversies and whatever, and how much anyone in particular "deserves" to have mean stuff said to them, but I have always been against the idea of blaming others for someone else's choice, regardless of how grim it is. Just turn off the computer/leave the room/whatever if people are being mean and you don't like it, they have free speech to say awful stuff and tough shit deal with it. Tons of other people live with seeing awful stuff about them all day, just check the comments of any controversial minority group content creator like outspoken jews or trans people to see evidence of that. There is no shortage of meanness on the internet and if that existing means no one else can speak then why even have the internet to begin with?
The only place I can think of at the top of my head where there is a meaningful exception is with school bullies, and that's only because the government mandates attendence for anyone who isn't being home schooled (which isn't possible for many families) thus making "just leave" not an option.
It sucks that Arday died, but no one is at fault for a suicide except for himself. We can't give up our freedoms to criticize and mock just because someone else might do something bad (whether that be suicide or murder or whatever).
You don't seem to have studied the subject of suicide at all. It's not really a choice in many cases. But the result of burdens utterly overwhelming coping resources. Someone with major depression can't make (or not make) the same choices you can make.
Yes, a person can be sick enough that the disease kills them. It's not the case for Arday though - he was definitely healthy enough to function as a lauded professor in a prominent university, and none of the glowing profiles that were done on him had any hint of him being terminally ill. The only sickness he had is him being a pathological liar, and his woke peers enabling him and pushing him deeper and deeper in the bizarro world he invented, which he could never sustain. When it all came crashing down, he chose violence, and turned the violence onto the reason of all his troubles - himself. It wasn't a disease, at least not any medically curable one, and to advance your point of view you'd need more than "I read some books that you didn't" - it's much less convincing argument than you think, especially when you don't even point out what those books say and how they are relevant to the topic.
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We would not accept that as a justification for other acts of violence. If a very unfortunate man all in the same day got diagnosed with cancer, was fired from his job, crashed his car, got robbed walking home, and found his wife in bed with the yoga instructor - we would understand if he was in extraordinary distress to the point of howling insanity, but it wouldn't excuse him going on a killing spree. Suicide is not 'less bad' than other kinds of violence because it targets the self. It bereaves your family, it devastates those who loved you most.
We allow an insanity defence for crimes committed under the influence of certain mental illnesses.
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No but I do understand basic logic and know that "someone killing themselves" necessarily means "someone killing themselves". It is the suiciders very own action.
I'm all for suicide prevention and trying to help people out, but there is no world in which it's not their choice. If it wasn't their own actions then it wouldn't be suicide it would be murder. If you're arguing for some expansive definition of the phrase where it involves other people then go ahead I suppose, but under the general meaning that I was using suicide is necessarily their own choice, even if we agree it's an illogical one.
If not, who do you propose we should charge for Arday's death, if someone else is responsible? Maybe the writers at the Guardian or the Telegraph.
No "buts". This is where you should have stopped typing, and started reading the literature if you are to opine on the subject at all
You have been warned to stop this sort of complaining. One day ban this time. Given your rather disappointing record in the past, expect that to go up quickly if you keep acting like you own the place.
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Who's proposing to charge anybody for Arday's suicide?
It's good to distinguish between what's good and what's legal with the understanding that law can never completely account for the complexity of moral judgement. There are bad behaviors that perhaps should never be made illegal, but that doesn't mean we can't still consider them bad.
I don't know how we can say "X is responsible for Y's death" and "X should not be punished" at the same time. Causing another person's death is one of the worst things that someone can do, and should be disincentived!
I'm one of the most libertarian small government people here and completely agree, and have argued this about drugs and children transitioning and all sorts of other controversial topics. But causing the death of another person is not something I would ever make an exception for, it's literally harmful to others. That is like the one thing law is for.
The thing here isn't that causing death should be legal, it's that mean words != causing death.
I don't know why you think this is some kind of dilemma that you can't figure out. In order to punish someone, not only do they have to have done a bad thing, but you need to be able to prove they did a bad thing in such a way that you are not also going to punish or disincentivise a lot of innocent people. That may not be possible.
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It is in England.
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I'd add criminal harassment campaigns, i.e. "I go to your house, smash in all the windows with thrown rocks, graffiti it with horrible insults, and repeat this every time you fix it", which are likewise not something you can just choose to walk away from (they will likely follow). I don't think many people argue that people should have the right to do that, though, aside from the same utterly-mindkilled people who claim that [TARGET GROUP] are an exception to normal rules of civilisation and should be murdered in the streets, and it doesn't bear on the free speech issue (beyond the "people don't generally have the right to graffiti other people's property" exception which even libertines like me generally accept).
Those are not speech and wouldn't be an exception as they are completely different things to begin with.
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It speaks to the inordinate amount of social and political capital that black people have today. There wouldn't be a shred of sympathy from either aisle if Arday was Israeli or Indian. I don't have a strong opinion on whether the dogpiling was deserved or not (okay, maybe I'm leaning towards not).
Academic misconduct is a serious issue, and this was a grown man who knew what he was doing, mental illness or not. His fate was sealed by his own choices, his widow and children will bear the brunt of his actions now.
Is it their social and political capital? Or is it that people subconsciously see them as lacking agency? With Arday, it's hard not to see him as a child who was in way over his head, being used as a pawn in someone's status game.
I'm not sure how "people subconsciously see you as lacking agency [(in a way that makes it morally obligatory for them to appease you)]" isn't basically definitionally "having social and political capital."
Elsewhere in this thread I gave a few examples of individuals whom I believe (1) have a great deal of social/political capital; (2) were involved in activities which could have subject them to a great deal of criticism; and (3) weathered the (potential) storm, but not by being perceived as lacking in agency.
Those 3 individuals (all white men) were Alan Dershowitz; Richard Posner; and Bernie Sanders.
So I think it's not quite the same thing.
That's fair; "definitionally" is wrong in my previous comment. But I do think that people subconsciously seeing you as lacking agency is sufficient for having social and political capital, just not necessary. There are other ways to accrue social and political capital such as by being a charismatic politician with a popular message, but in this case, going towards people who bought into a popular ideology that mandated to them that they perceive people like Arday as lacking agency seems to have been the method.
Well, let's flip things around. Looking at the Fundamentalist Latter Day Saints (to the extent they are still around), would you say that FLDS women, as a group, possess a great deal of social and political capital? Would you say that they are seen as lacking in agency?
I'm not super familiar with the FLDS, but I would guess that for the most part FLDS women are seen as lacking in agency, at least compared to men. As far as social and political capital goes, I suppose it depends on how you define the term. Certainly FLDS women are highly valued, notwithstanding the fact that they are expected to play a subservient role.
This is why I included a parenthetical in a bracket in the other comment, to clarify the type of perception of lack of agency is involved. Eg slaves in USA in 1850 were known to lack agency, but that didn't confer any particular social or political capital. But that has only a little in common with how Arday was perceived or treated.
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Maybe those two things are related. The Women are Wonderful Effect seems to relate to regarding women as less agentic too.
Well here are a few scenarios I thought of:
Alan Dershowitz, a well respected attorney and law professor who (1) was caught up with Jeffrey Epstein to some extent and accused of having relations with Virginia Giuffre (probably a false accusation, but still potentially damaging); and (2) was accused of plagiarizing parts of a book (as I recall, he blamed his research assistant);
Bernie Sanders, well respected among progressives, socialists, etc. despite having a substantial personal fortune;
Richard Posner, a well respected judge whose writings arguably contain a lot of political incorrectness.
My sense is that the social and political capital possessed by these men helped protect them. But what's interesting to me is that for the most part, people didn't take the position that the problems these men got into were the result of them being victims of circumstance, being innocent pawns who were manipulated by larger forces, etc. It seems they were all treated as having agency.
By contrast, it seems that this Jason Arday is thought of as lacking agency by both his supporters and his detractors.
I note there's another thing your 3 examples have in common. I don't think that's what protected them, but it's curious that a commonality like that exists among the 3 scenarios that came to your mind.
I would ask that you speak plainly and not cryptically. I suspect you are trying to imply that there is some dark Jewish Conspiracy which, for reasons best known to the conspirators, goes out of its way to cover for Bernie Sanders (who has led the effort in the Senate to end US military aid to Israel) but persecutes Zionists such as Harvey Weinstein.
But I am not inclined to try to guess what your point is. So . . . what exactly are you trying to say here?
Edit: Oops, I misread your post. You said that the commonality did NOT protect them. So now I have absolutely no idea what your point is. I thought of 3 outspoken Americans, two of whom are attorneys, and they all happen to be of Jewish descent? Or maybe it's not the Jewish angle? Is it that they are all white men? (That's kind of the point.)
Seriously, what are you trying to say here?
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This is not speaking plainly.
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It also helps that at least two of them are incredibly competent.
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Yeah. Not to 'imagine if this situation was reversed' this but if this entire arc was playing out along the lines of 'Conservative Professor gets #metooed on soft allegations, University publicly supports him for a week then concedes under weight of obviousness and then professor self-terminates a week later' then there'd be zero of this sympathy
In fact, we don’t even have to imagine: this exact situation happened in 2020 (Mike Adams, see links downthread)
Yeah and Mike Adams didn't violate any particular codes of conduct besides being a social media chud, from what I can see?
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