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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.
This is why, if you want to see less of this, the rational game theoretic response to this is to continue to mock him relentlessly in his death and everyone who mourns him as a retarded communist. Amongst other actions, of course, memetic warfare is no substitute for lawfare and political action.
Unceasing mockery of this farce of a man and the institution he represented is, from my perspective, good and right and quite frankly the crueler and more acerbic the better.
This whole scenario is very “late Soviet Union” in its flavor and I find it to be utterly hilarious in a bitter sense.
Every time you do this, your message ends up wasted as normies only hear "...and the actual bad thing here is that this is all a ploy to make me pay taxes".
Invoking a putative communist-SJW connection might work for rallying the troops in certain sectors of the American Right, but even if you can make some argument for why it is actually justified, everyone who possibly could have their minds changed will just tl;dr and assume you are either a paranoid schizophrenic who thinks the Soviet Union never really disbanded or one of those people who think the modern societal consensus needs to be directionally corrected in the "pre-1917 capitalism" direction, Dickensian smokestacks and lumpenproles and all.
Actually I’d be willing to bet heavily that the average American normie, even the more peripheral blue tribe normie, still hates communists and has an instinctive negative reaction to things being labeled as communist. The great awokening didn’t go deep enough to completely hollow out Cold War memories or basic intuition about equality and human nature.
As you can see from blue tribers calling anything right of Bernie sanders “Nazi”, name calling and shaming your opponents actually does work if repeated often enough. It works especially if it’s at least sort of or directionally true: a modern progressive hardcore blue triber is much closer to a communist than a Beltway libertarian is to a Nazi, but that never stopped basically all left wing institutions for implicitly or explicitly calling libertarians and centrists Nazis.
Mincing about trying to get the exact precise verbiage to soothe delicate “mmmm acktually!” type light blue or grey tribers who are hyper-sensitive to PMC class anxiety that’s firmly in the hands of blue tribe is a big part of the reason we got here in the first place.
So I reject your entire premise.
Running around calling people “Third Worldists” or “Critical Theorists” or “Queer theorists” or whatever flavor of Marxist inspired leftist ideology that they subscribe to is neither more precise nor more effective. An octopus’ tentacle is still part of the octopus.
Survey from last month:
favorable/
unfavorable
views (%)
So this does support what I’m saying and I wouldn’t be surprised if you cut the electorate in half and just looked at the top 50% of voters that vote the most often it would be even more skewed against socialism / communism.
Pro-communist Americans live in a nearly airtight informational bubble and they’re so highly over represented in media & education that they started to believe that they really are way more popular than they are.
From a red tribe perspective most of the pro-communist Americans are either such a lost cause that no meaningful political conversion can be had or are a product of such a toxic academic & educational environment that the only way to actually combat them is to destroy the rot at its source: seize endowments, squeeze the institutions, aggressively prosecute rule breakers, etc.
Calling communists out is very good and very productive culture war from the red tribe perspective and its self reinforcing as long as the targets truly have trouble credibly avoiding the accusations.
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