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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.
Many will now claim that trollish insults and ridiculing memes are responsible for this, rather than the truth about his lies stated plainly and reasonably, even though the latter was by far the more devastating. Presuming he killed himself, it was likely because his sins were so egregious that even his own tribe could not overlook or excuse them. Nasty and vicious jeers from the outgroup are merely badges of honor, but the disappointed glances from the ingroup hit like a freight train. People like Arday don't kill themselves when they are exposed to the outgroup; they kill themselves when they are exposed to the ingroup. He lost status hard and fast. The only injustice here is that many of his colleagues should also be brought down a few pegs.
He should never have resigned.
I'm skeptical he wasn't going to be able to land on his feet within a year or two, anyways. Sooner or later the prevailing narrative would become 'this young black man was cancelled by racist conservatives' regardless of what he did to achieve that. His book was likely going to do incredible sales for that kind of ridiculous hagiography, and it's not like he doesn't get paid for the sales.
Failing that, he could also have written a tell-all book about how he lied his way to the top. People love that sort of thing. He could have been a modern-day Frank Abagnale.
And then he could go on Fox News every other week and talk about he made himself the caricature of liberal fantasies for money and they all fell for it.
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It would have been a very easy pivot to do the podcast circuit with a 'Here's why I felt I needed to do it. Once I started I felt trapped and had to continue' angle.
Reminder that even Hunter Biden is currently laundering his reputation in a 'redemption arc' right now.
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