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I don’t know if this is too post worthy, but many black activists have called the cancellation of Jason Arday and the resulting suicide a lynching. It makes me believe they don’t understand why many people found lynching to be bad.
The classic case is Emmet Till. He was accused of raping a white woman but didn’t. Less people would be worried about the irregular justice of lynch mobs if they accurately hung rapists and Till wouldn’t be martyr if he actually raped the white woman. It was his innocence that really made the lynching galling.
In the Arday context, no one argues he isn’t guilty of the charges. Instead, they claim accurately castigating Arday repeatedly for his crime is a modern day lynching. So either they believe any criticism of blacks is per se illegitimate and blacks are naturally innocent regardless of their actions or they are trying to use powerful iconography to prevent criticism of blacks. But that’s destroying their seed capital.
There are, in fact, some who argue that he isn't guilty of the charges, though possibly this is state-supported trolling.
I believe that they believe BOTH that "any criticism of blacks is per se illegitimate" AND that "they are trying to use powerful iconography to prevent criticism of blacks". (probably a few believe "blacks are naturally innocent regardless of their actions" as well). I don't see how this is destroying their "seed capital" though; their argument amounts to yelling "SLAVERY! LYNCHING! JIM CROW!" over and over until their opponents yield or are destroyed, and none of those things will go away.
ETA: Here's a New England Journal of Medicine contributor also supporting Arday's innocense, at least partly (he claims he doesn't care if Arday is innocent, but...): "Besides making the point that his Ph.D. advisor and the university cleared him of any deliberate plagiarism allegations"
Hmm, the first linked thing dug up an article from a real local Bri'ish newspaper dated something 2010 about the guy's intention to do the marathon thing.
I fed the url of that to the Wayback Machine and the first snapshot is from, like, three days ago, which is suspicious.
But then, I don't know what' the Internet Archive's policy for which pages they snapshot and it seems, uh, implausible that some random irrelevant publication would falsify their records to stick it to the chuds.
But then the article has a quote: "He will be setting off on Monday, July 19, and is aiming to complete each marathon in less than six hours." Which means he'd be running them at a rather casual jogging pace. Maybe doing ~40 km per day like that isn't some kind of implausible superhuman achievement.
But the leg fracture thing still sounds like bullshit.
And the article also has this amazing quote in it:
Yeah, I think gettting less than 4 hours of sleep per day while running a daily marathon split into two parts for several months would be an implausibly superhuman achievement.
So perhaps some of Arday's claims weren't completely made up, but significantly embellished.
(And none of this matters with regards to the plagiarism accusations and the fact that he got kicked out which probably wouldn't have happened if there wasn't a there there.)
I once knew someone who only required 2-3 hours of sleep per night to function perfectly.
Of course, she was a project manager who was the sort to literally make a schedule space for "spontaneity" when on vacation, and as far as I could tell not very physically active, so I don't know if the physcial part of a body has different sleep/rest requirements than the mental.
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