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PaperclipPerfector  2d ago (text post)   9017 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of August 17, 2026

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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.

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 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".

all the credentialed people who believed him

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

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).

Bro makes Leo in Catch Me If You Can look like a punk.

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

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.

For God's sake, he was a time-traveling, long distance running cyborg Rainman with 3 kinds of gigacancer!

Also a professional snooker player and semi-pro London footballer.

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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