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Notes -
I basically agree. I think it would have been "roughly equivalent" if (1) he had claimed to have been a medal of honor winner who singlehandedly prevented the massacre of a village; and (2) he had publicly made the claim BEFORE he had been made professor in 1979.
The world, of course, is full of liars. But a rarer breed is a person who I would call a "compulsive liar." What I mean by this is a person who instead of telling lies which are occasional, calculated, plausible, and difficult to falsify, tells lies which are outrageous on their face (or at least highly suspect), and much less likely to stand up to mild scrutiny.
When a person is a compulsive liar, it usually becomes pretty clear after the second or third whopper, at which point most people stop taking the person seriously.
I think it would be extremely difficult, perhaps impossible, for a straight white man to make it through college and grad school and to get hired as a professor if he were a compulsive liar. Because at each level there are recommendations, interviews, etc. and it's difficult to get past these hurdles if (1) people don't take you seriously; and (2) for whatever reason you are unable to stop yourself from making statements which damage your credibility.
So what was different about Jason Arday? It seems to me it's pretty obvious the difference was race. That Cambridge was desperate to hire a black professor and people in the academy are (reasonably) scared to death to question or criticize a black academic.
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