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One such developmental milestone many miss out on is the comprehension that multiple claims can be true at once. It can be true that Arday was a plagarist and compulsive liar who represents the worst failures of academia and DEI policies and that the number of articles and focus on him was pretty excessive.
As one tweet pointed out, it's quite blackpilling to consider the difference in both amount and style that The Spectator covered with Arday vs Epstein and his associates. And as a reply to them pointed out "Or Quilette - Im still getting ads for their Arday story. Meanwhile their founder said the Epstein story is "boring""
An intentional predator ring run by a well connected elite and covered up by multiple powerful politicians gets less focus (and often in the case of The Spectator, active defense like in the case of Prince Andrew) in them than a professor getting caught in a plagarism scandal. Is this not crazy?
The solution being even more government suppression is hilariously stupid and you would think at some point the UK left would realize that their anti speech policies tend to just be abused against them (like the strong libel laws and anti terrorism support laws have been). But that doesn't negate the claims that the media reaction to him is that of carrion-eaters as Sam Kriss wonderfully puts it. After all again both can be true, free speech restrictions are dumb and the UK press hyper focused on this in a way they don't for far greater stories.
It can be true that Arday was a fraud who represented the worst of academia's failing and be true that the response to controversies is dominated by psychopathic vultures hungry for their next meal against an "acceptable" target.
I liken it to those guys who won't shut up about how they want to be home invaded. Self defense is morally okay and it's a weird thing to constantly wish to happen so a good bit of them are just sadists who are fantasizing about the legally acceptable way they can finally kill someone and part of why every once in a while you get "guy shoots at girl scout who knocked on door" stories because they saw a potential opportunity to finally shoot and their idiot brain took it without thinking. Normal people plan for self defense as a potential and necessary option, but they do not day dream about the shedding of blood.
The Sam Kriss article is very good, but you've missed part of it in a way that's understandable for American readers. To understand British tabloid culture, imagine if the most popular media outlets in the country, left right and center, were a mix of the New York Post and TMZ, except with even lower ethical standards for "human interest stories" (most famously, the News of the World was shut down after an inquiry learned their journos had hacked the phones of a murdered schoolgirl, terrorism victims, etc.). What happened to Jason Arday is not particularly unexceptional - his race, and therefore politics, is inextricable from it, because his whole career was about his race, but this is just what the British media does when they see a juicy "human interest story".
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Man, we had this convo just yesterday. See here and here. The "intentional predator ring" doesn't appear in any legal document. Pointing to the absence of wall-to-wall coverage of the most elaborate version of the story as evidence of suppression assumes the elaborate version is true in the first place. Amazing job covering up something that the man wasn't even investigated yet became globally infamous for. And I assume this is the "active defense" you're referring to, the author directly addresses your concerns in the final paragraph:
Other than the Spectator, how many articles do we have doing something so radioactive (on both sides!) as "defending Prince Andrew, the Epstein associate"? The scarcity of such pieces is what you would expect when the social cost of defending process values in this particular case has become extreme.
Exhibit A: the absurd oxygen the UK left poured into "Adolescence", a completely fictional story that flattered a particular set of priors about young males and online radicalisation. Exhibit B: every single pred catcher channel's frisson of righteous confrontation packaged as public service.
Anyway, coming to Arday, you're not wrong that a large portion of right wingers were feverishly licking their lips for a story just like this. A disgraced black academic elevated through DEI culture being outed as a fraud lines up neatly with certain HBD-adjacent priors. And yes, the discourse has unfortunately devolved into a decibel contest of validating narratives. Every inconvenient case is just a flag that must be defended. Even when the details are messy or the individual is indefensible, aura is necessarily spent defending it. The result is, both sides end up being tethered to weak or embarrassing exemplars because abandoning them feels like conceding the broader frame.
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It seems like what you are missing is that disagreement is not lack of comprehension. It certainly can be the case that the amount of articles written on him was excessive, that doesn't mean that it was.
Why is it blackpilling? We had a teenager smiling the wrong way become an international scandal. An actual fraud in one of the world's top universities being exposed having such coverage seems like a nothingburger.
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What was the Spectator's coverage of Epstein?
Your link only shows "the Spectator published 12 Arday stories over a 14-day period". I can't see any info about their Epstein coverage. It invites us to compare them, but doesn't actually present the latter thing to compare.
So: what are we supposed to be comparing? Epstein is a story that's been running for a decade or so. Is the complaint that Epstein should've been more prominent than Arday in that 2-week window? Or that, at the peak of the Epstein scandal (I guess around his suicide? idk) the Spectator published fewer articles than they did around Arday at his peak scandal? I expect that, on net, the Spectator published an order of magnitude more articles on Epstein than Arday. So is the issue the timing, the density, the frequency, the consistency, the tone, or what?
I have no opinion on the Spectator, and I'm certainly willing to be persuaded that they under-covered Epstein. But the tweet and your comment both take it for granted that we all know exactly what their coverage was, with no summary or evidence provided, and I'm reluctant to just accept that without even knowing exactly what I'm supposed to accept for the comparison.
And 12 stories over a 14-day period, by itself, seems completely reasonable to me, given how egregious the situation was. Arday wasn't excessively covered, regardless of whether Epstein was under- or over-covered.
Epstein seems an interesting comparison, because he also killed himself [citation needed], doubtlessly because of, at least in part, a bunch of negative press coverage. Surely if we need these sorts of protections for plagiarizing, fabulist sociology professors, we also need them for pedophile financier socialites: think of how much blood is on those journalist's hands, too!
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Who defines "excessive"? Epstein is convenient but it would be more interesting to compare either a different "DEI suicide" like Mike Adams (much lower profile school, provocative but not a fraud) or a different kind of academic fraud like Dan Ariely or Francisca Gino. I'd imagine Ariely/Gino also generated hundreds of articles, but maybe not in quite such a concentrated period.
But off the top of my head no example captures a proper parallel, because a proper parallel doesn't exist, can't exist; there's too much intersectionality to the situation. Mike Adams is the Tony Timpa to Arday's Floyd moment. A huge swathe of modern Western culture is optimized to pay attention to that intersection; that focus remains for good and ill.
Normal people don't become journalists.
Not even intersectionality. Most people didn't have an "autobiography" that's seeming to be chock full of more lies than Marco Polo's journal about to be published that they were gearing up to do a press tour for at the time the scandal reared up.
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Arday wasn't the major story, it was Cambridge circling the wagons and essentially upgrading Arday to the walking avatar of 'Academia is a stupid circlejerk more concerned with DEI than actually doing anything productive' that really drew the media attention. If the immediate response hadn't been a week of Cambridge's best and brightest circling the wagons around a clearly naked Emperor, the whole thing plays out considerably differently. Epstein genuinely isn't that interesting a story beyond the maybe Intelligence links. If anything, the sheer confabulation of Epstein with braindead 'billionaires are sacrificing 4 year olds to Cthulhu'-posting or acting like he's any sort of a unique level of depravity provider are the bigger issues with how the story is portrayed.
I just realized this is basically Gamergate, but for respectable people.
That's a great comparison. The Emperor is so palpably naked and they just can't help themselves.
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Spice leads to attention. I'm sure that if you did a full review of academia you could find quite a bit of misconduct, some of it similarly blatant. "Someone makes extremely outlandish claims, holds a prestigious job for years with seemingly no one checking, and multiple attempts to expose him lead to nothing or are actively quashed" is already a pretty spicy story, even in a world where Arday was white.
There's the whole meta left-vs-right debate about "Did Arday get away with it because of DEI?" vs "The right only cares because he's black and they can blame DEI/black people" but the right has the upper hand in this fight because as mentioned above this was a pretty unforced error by Cambridge and even if the left's argument is correct it doesn't change this takeaway. The left just looks like it's engaging in "Republicans pounce."
The sheer outlandishness of the claims is a factor as well. Bro makes Leo in Catch Me If You Can look like a punk. For God's sake, he was a time-traveling, long distance running cyborg Rainman with 3 kinds of gigacancer! This is amplified further by how breathtakingly gullible and stupid it makes all the credentialed people who believed him seem.
Basically, the story is a lot more fun than "Academic #3475 faked a data set".
they did not believe him. You are not nearly cynical enough.
I think you're not nearly cynical enough if you don't believe that the vast majority of them did believe him. Intentionally modifying one's own judgment faculties in order to honestly believe in things that are convenient for one's status within the ideology is basically ubiquitous among the more involved in the ideology, which is basically everyone in one of these departments. It's something Arthur Chu referenced a while ago on Slate Star Codex, that he "mindkills" himself regulary so that the tendencies in his brain that would be reluctant to SocJus claims can be appropriately suppressed
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I know. Calling them breathtakingly gullible and stupid is one of those fun insult "conclusions" where any defense just makes it so much worse.
It's a gotcha question. Either:
a) they believed him (meaning they're stupid and gullible, hence unqualified to make hiring decisions), or
b) they didn't believe him, but hired him anyway (meaning they knowingly hired a con artist).
Third option: they plead ignorance to those claims, and argue that they only looked at his academic and interview credentials, and didn't know about anything else other than that a routine background check came up clean. Also damning, but less obviously so to the public eye (who is likely to be unfamiliar with how Arday's work compared to any other sociologist or academic), and therefore able to be clung to.
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If you're trying to point out that reality is stranger than fiction, then you might be interested to know that Frank Abagnale Jr. was a real person, so it's more like reality being stranger than another reality.
I think the consensus now is that Abagnale Jr. is a meta-fraud. Most of the exploits in the movie were made up. See his wikipedia.
Yeah, but I can't decide if that's more or less impressive
They should make a meta-comedy sequel about Frank Abegnale scamming Steven Spielberg and just hanging out on set stealing food/making up random lies to keep himself entertained.
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That's what I meant by spiciness. "Guy makes completely believable lies and is eventually caught" doesn't have that factor that makes it memorable or that you want to talk more about it. This caught attention because of the layers of absurdity and incompetence to the extent that if it wasn't because he was black then you have to wonder how it happened. Either way you choose to spin it a bunch of people besides Arday come out looking really bad and that's why this story has legs.
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Also a professional snooker player and semi-pro London footballer.
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As an example, does anyone even remember that Stanford's (white) president was forced to resign in 2023 over research misconduct brought forward by the student newspaper? Fabricating (literal data manipulation!) Alzheimer's research in Nature you'd think would be a bigger deal. He's still a professor there, even.
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Attention ≠ importance is a general problem. e.g. Far more articles on celebrities than the ongoing Sudan genocide, or the outsized attention on trans rights.
Fortunately, you can ignore the repetitive articles, and they do provide more general insights. e.g. In many arguments, trans can be substituted for other minorities.
In this case, I feel sympathetic towards Arday and that the system failed him, he was in a distorted world and suddenly forced to confront reality. But it was more important he got help than affect others' actions that he could've largely ignored (by not checking the news, or only checking a sympathetic outlet).
Isn’t this just a sign that what you think is important just isn’t important. 30m Argentinian Ants die per year in San Diego in a colony war. Sudan is a technologically unsophisticated country on land that no technologically sophisticated country wants. Nothing that happens in Sudan has any effect on first world nations or the broad arch of human civilization.
TransCulture has an effect on first world fertility and feeds into the replication of advanced western civilization.
I don't think so. News has incentive to be sensational and over-dramatic, and it is. More people are afraid of shark attacks than car crashes, because a run-of-the-mill shark attack will reach the news but a car crash won't, but the latter are more likely and dangerous.
Why would mass Sudanese genocide not be sensationalize? I’m sure there are piles of bodies to photograph? But no one cares about Sudanese because they have no influence on anything.
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