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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.
I'm getting a serious "two movies, one screen" effect reading about this. Cofnas's painstaking demonstration of the plagiarism Arday committed is irrefutable. The claims Arday made about his personal history are so ludicrous that I can't fathom how anyone ever believed them, and the fact that so many of them were quietly softened or retracted by organisations associated with Arday in the last few years is a tacit admission that he was a fabulist. Not even the Guardian believed he was really a victim of racist harassment. I assumed (perhaps naïvely) that everyone would interpret his resignation as an admission of guilt. Likewise his penchant for threatening his critics with legal action or reporting them to the police.
But when the Journal reported on his suicide, the comments were full of people mourning him who apparently believe that he was a nice, well-meaning academic hounded to his death by a racist right-wing misinformation campaign, and that he was innocent of all of the allegations made against him.
I cannot understand it. Is this how he will be remembered? Not as a cheat and a fabulist, but as a martyr for the noble cause of DEI? Is his Wikipedia article being updated as we speak to reflect that narrative? Poor Comrade Ogilvy, a noble goodthinker cruelly snatched from us in the prime of his life.
I described the Henry Nowak case as an anti-scissor statement, in which there's absolutely no way one can possibly spin it which is remotely favourable to the progressive worldview. I thought this was another example of the same. But I underestimated the vindictive ingenuity of progressive journalists. All they had to do was keep hitting the "NATHAN COFNAS IS A RACIST" button, and enough people arrived at the desired conclusion that there's nothing to see here.
I assumed that, where the Guardian goes, the Journal follows. Maybe not.
Of all the things that make me realize I just do not see the same world as the rationalists - and there are many! - the reaction to "Sort By Controversial" is the greatest by far. To me, the meanign of the post was obvious, particularly in light of Scott being a fan of The Last Psychiatrist; people were so deluded by their own ideological bubbles that nothing, no act, no statement, could make them question it, and there was nothing that could be twisted to support the preferred worldview (this is part of the TLP definition of narcissism, in which the subconcious desperately tries to maintain the prefered narrative of one's own life, because to fail to do so would be worse than death, and in fact, death is preferred to confronting reality). Any statement, no matter how clear, could avoid reinterpretation to fit the preferred narrative. And yet, everyone else in the community took away that there exist magical superweapons that could cause strife just by their existence.
You mention the Henry Nowak case as an "anti-scissor" yet this did not change anything in the UK, did it? Has any leftist proposed immigration restrictions? Elimination of the exception to open carry of dangerous weapons (I saw a tweet the other day of a white kid buying a baseball bat from a store for a sporting event, and immediately upon exiting the store being violently arrested by a cop for "brandishing" an item still clearly bagged and sealed. No such footage exists of bobbies slamming Sikhs to the ground for their weapons). No? Of course not.
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