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Censoring journalists to prevent suicides is a fool's errand
In 2015, Scott published a post called "What Developmental Milestones Are You Missing?" He described a variety of cognitive-behavioural milestones that might seem innate but in fact have to be consciously learned, examples including "theory of mind" (the understanding that everyone's minds are distinct, and that just because you have access to a piece of information doesn't mean that another person does) and foreign languages (many young children take their native language to be the default, and people speaking foreign languages "really" know the e.g. Japanese word for a thing, but insist on converting them into their own special code before talking about them). He then moves into more controversial and potentially elitist examples of potential milestones, describing his reaction to a piece by Nathan Robinson, in which Robinson acknowledged it's hypocritical to criticise conversatives trying to get Fun Home removed from a college syllabus while also defending students' boycotting a screening of the film American Sniper:
I would like to propose another possible developmental milestone that some have reached and others haven't: the complete inability to generalise a proposed solution outside of the narrow specifics of the problem it's intended to solve.
Following Nathan Cofnas's exposé regarding Jason Arday's plagiarism and fabulism, and his subsequent suicide, many are pointing fingers at the media's handling of the case. The more charitable framing holds that Arday was "hounded" to his death by a racist, right-wing harassment campaign; the less charitable framing (furnished by none other than Ibram X. Kendi) claims that the way Arday's story was covered in the press amounts to a modern lynching. Even people who concede that the allegations against Arday were not baseless insist that the amount of coverage he received was massively disproportionate (an opinion I do not share). The good people over at Change.org have a legal solution in mind to prevent future Ardays:
3,642 people have signed the petition at the time of writing.
So, guys. Let's walk through this step by step.
How could such a law possibly be enforced? Imagine the UK government has a massive centralised database of every news article published in outlets domiciled within its borders, updated in real time, listing the primary subject of each one. As soon as the number of articles about a particular subject exceeds some threshold (e.g. 80 articles in 7 days), the UK government issues a presumptive gag order against all media outlets warning them not to publish any more articles on this subject until the articles-per-day metric has declined somewhat. Any article published after the threshold was exceeded will be issued a public order demanding the article be taken down. This petition is effectively demanding a nationwide digitised Stasi surveillance body employing dozens if not hundreds of Winston Smiths (not to mention an initial outlay of billions of pounds just to get the news article-crawling infrastructure up and running), all to prevent – I mean, how many people commit suicide in response to "excessive" media coverage every year? Aside from Arday, can you name a single British person meeting that description this year?
And needless to say, this legislation would be utterly pointless for any news story of international interest, as Arday's was. (Arday: "The New York Times and the Atlantic are calling me a plagiarist and a liar." His legal counsel: "True, but we made damn sure the readers of the Daily Record wouldn't hear about it!")
But even if there was some way to enforce such a laughable piece of legislation, it surely goes without saying that the primary beneficiary of it would be Donald Trump, who would see the number of UK articles criticising him drop precipitously. Hell, an even bigger beneficiary would be Boris Johnson, whose latest paternity scandal would be reduced to a footnote. It's even trivial to imagine how such a piece of legislation could be gamed. Nigel Farage gets wind that a scandal is going to break on Monday morning. He immediately springs into action, buying a regional newspaper with triple-digit circulation for pennies on the dollar, launching a website to go with it, and flooding that website with nothing but AI-generated articles about said scandal. Under Arday's Law, there's no way for the BBC, the Guardian or the Observer to cover the scandal: their hands are tied.
I know, I know: of the 3,000+ people who signed this petition, most surely have no expectation of any legislation being passed. Signing the petition is just an applause light, a way of saying "I feel sad that Jason Arday killed himself, and wish that he hadn't", with a fig leaf of having Called for Something to Be Done.
But I genuinely feel that some people (most likely including the person who created the petition) simply lack the imaginative capacity to generalise a hypothetical solution outside the narrow confines of the problem that prompted its proposal. During the 2010s, when conservatives were getting banned from social media left and right, a common smug refrain I heard from progressives was "Facebook is a private company, they can do what they want". I continually pleaded with these people to understand: it's in everyone's best interests for rules to be written in an ideologically neutral fashion. You really do not want to set a precedent that social media companies can ban anyone they disagree with and they have no recourse. Every company undergoes ideological drift, whether slowly or all at once: the fact that Facebook moderators share your worldview now is no guarantee that they will a year from now. "They're a private company, they can do what they want" will come back to bite you in the ass when some billionaire who doesn't share the progressive worldview buys a social media network and moulds it in his own image.
And then a billionaire who didn't share the progressive worldview bought a social media network and moulded it in his own image. There was much gnashing of teeth and rending of hair. What could I say other than "I told you so"?
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.
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.
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".
they did not believe him. You are not nearly cynical enough.
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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