The impulse to distribute blame for Arday as if he was some helpless child is strange to me, although Cambridge does deserve some blame for exacerbating the situation.
At the end of the day, Arday was a total fraud on basically every level, and the blame lies with him. I know social graces require us to say what a tragedy it all is, and I do feel bad for his kids, but beyond that I find it hard to feel much at all. He lived selfishly and dishonorably, and died selfishly and dishonorably.
Arday quite clearly was a charlatan whose lies got away from him, but our institutions should hold antibodies against this type of person. Instead he was embraced. Arday acted in a way that is not particularly surprising given the range of human behavior - the only reason that this is a story is that one of our most esteemed institutions fell for him entirely.
Totally agree, I was referring to Arday’s decision to take his own life. Cambridge bears all the blame for the ideological capture that led them to hire someone so patently unqualified.
The person Arday brings to my mind is Bernie Madoff, who deceived his clients and sons for decades. Both had to know their lives could, and probably would, blow up spectacularly. Of the two, Arday seemed the more unhinged, Madoff the more sinister.
Re the discussion on trans rights failing, I think there came a time when many if not most people came to know a troubled young Kayden/Aiden and thought gee, maybe this isn't the great civil rights battle of our time but more of an Anorexia 2.0. As an OG Terf (r/GenderCritical, represent!) we wondered when the detransitioners would emerge. And here they are.
Yeah, I've been feeling similarly, and everytime I think that makes me a bitch, I have to remind myself that there are consequences for actions, and if you don't want to face those consequences (as he clearly very much didn't, assuming he did in fact take the permanent way out), then maybe don't do bad things? Idk man, I also feel bad for his kids more than anyone.
Also like i feel bad for his kids had he not died. His actions (including his suicide provided that is what occured) werent just indicative of massive mental health issues, they were wholly selfish and unethical. Even his final act in life was to cause an absurd amount of trauma to his family.
I’m surprised that Cassie Prichard’s article is getting any positive traction because it seems so incredibly naïve. If people don’t accept trans women as women, then why should the law treat them as women? And then, what remains? A disability movement? An aesthetic movement? It’s like saying “You don’t have to think gay relationships are valid in order to support gay marriage.” Well, actually you do. Nobody was forced to like gays, but for gay marriage to exist, people had to see gay relationships as valid. And gay activists won the culture war by persuading normies of that very thing. Also, dismissing women’s concerns about males in their bathrooms as a “busybody” problem is exactly the kind of cluelessness that’s derailing the trans movement. There’s just so much wrong with this article, I’m not seeing what Prichard adds to the debate.
Plus the procedures and pharmaceuticals for kids have not only not been proven to help, they have no long term data to show the damage they could be doing to their bodies. To me, this is the most obscene aspect of the whole ideology. How they got any parents to go along with this is beyond comprehension. I guess it's like convincing MAGA to stop vaccinating their kids based on the advice of a drug addled lunatic. Two cults running in parallel.
Most data we have may not be great, because we're dealing with a small population that faces a lot of challenges, but it does point in the general direction of transition alleviating gender dysphoria. Other issues may persist but the dysphoria does go away with GAC.
And we know that alternative therapies do not work, so we go with the best we have.
The absolute damage done to lesbians by this kind of rhetoric by trans women with penises pretending they're gay women is maybe the worst kind of gaslighting
Five or so years ago when naive me realized how pervasive this was and how much was legislated in their favor under the radar, I was confident that it would all blow over once I saw them making a mockery of lesbian dating apps and bars. I knew regular old straight women wouldn't stand up for themselves, but mistakenly thought the LGBs would stand together against this mockery of same sex attraction. When that didn't happen, I thought it would be when they started taking sports trophies from black women. Nope. Their position at the pinnacle of the oppression hierarchy was swift and it was total and doen't seem to be waning. How anyone doesn't see this for the social contagion (for women) and forced acceptance of public fetishism (for men) carefully constructed by newly irrelevant LGB advocacy groups and powered by massive corporate money is beyond me.
I don’t think it’s naive, I think it’s incredibly manipulative. It’s saying okay don’t think of us as women - which is still wrong, but I’ll let it go - just give us everything we want. He still thinks he’s a woman and should be treated as such, just that he will no longer force his allies to say it as long as he still gets all the things that he thinks he deserves as a woman.
Jesse and Katie are acknowledging that Pritchard is an AGP (and he says himself that he likes being deliberately off putting), and still treating his demand to be in women’s restrooms as reasonable. Because….????
Well exactly - the whole “rights” infrastructure collapses if you can’t persuade policymakers and the public that males can be in some meaningful sense be women. You can protect people from being evicted or fired “for being trans” probably on the basis of sex - eg. my landlord discriminated against me because although a man, I wear a wig and dress and falsies to look like a woman.
But you can’t pass legislation or develop policy that requires women-only housing to let you to move in, unless you can convince people that the dress and falsies (or hormones and surgery) fundamentally makes you no longer a man.
I considered reading the full article and skimmed it to find the quote Jessie read. Came across a line about enjoying lesbian orgies and decided it's probably not worth my time.
Not to mention housing and employment is settled law. The conservative court held that the constitution protects them from discrimination based on their trans status.
So that's a #done situation. If you're seeing discrimination, shift into fund raising and taking it to the courts...the law is on your side.
Yep. The Pritchard article was very stupid, actually, because it did not address any of the things people actually care about here, which is why the comments section is back to arguing about those same things!
> Nobody was forced to like gays, but for gay marriage to exist, people had to see gay relationships as valid. And gay activists won the culture war by persuading normies of that very thing.
I think those might be two separate things. You could make a libertarian argument for gay marriage without believing gay relationships are valid. After all, it's plausibly you-do-you.
I don't think it's naive, just not actually a very good article. Now, from a tactical perspective, 'my political movement should drop as a key plank the demand that every single person must not only unquestionably agree with all of our demands but literally change their own thinking or else be degraded as a bigot' is a good step forward. That's not a good persuasion strategy.
The problem though is that the piece does not articulate a coherent vision. Okay, you're talking about "parents’ rights to make medical decisions for their children". What about states/jurisdictions where the parents' rights on this matter can be taken away and decisions made in their absence? Prichard, of course, is silent in that. All the leave-us-alone stuff isn't actually controversial.
I always read that line as supporting parents’ rights when they choose to let their kids go on hormones or have surgery, but not when parents decide not to. They don’t actually support parental decision-making, and would happily cut us out of the equation if they could.
An alarming issue is that anyone north of 30 in the key countries affected by trans-mania remain fairly ignorant of how trans and sex-queer non-LGB mantra has established itself as a truth amongst vast swathes of the younger demographic.
Their allies are the army of sexless women claiming they’re actually are queer/pan/poly but what they are is anything other than straight/gay/bi. IE sexless virgins hiding their lack of desirability in XXL outfits and rainbow colours of public performance. Just as we need ‘no, maybe you’re not a woman’ we need ‘no, maybe you’re not a- / poly - / ro- maybe you’re just scared of sex’.
Young folk aren’t going back to ‘well actually, it’s a mental disorder that needs sympathetic treatment’. Just as you can’t un-do Goth you won’t be able to stop disproportionate amounts of young people suddenly claiming they’re actually a woman. To address that needs a much more serious response than ‘well yes actually, that fine, have a plethora of rights’.
As I listened to Jessie and Katie describe the article, the argument didn't strike me as particularly moderate or reasonable. Like ok, yeah, I’m against trans people being discriminated against in housing and in theory in employment, although I think many trans/nonbinary people intentionally flag themselves as difficult to work/get along with so that’s more complicated. I don't have to believe you’re literally a woman to believe you deserve a roof over your head. Sure. I’m not sure I care whether a 30 year old goes on cross sex hormones either. But the final point is about children, and my belief that you can't literally change sex and that gender identity is an essentially religious ideology actually does prevent me from supporting children receiving scientifically unsupported, invasive “treatments,” the risks and realities of which they cannot fully comprehend. I suspect my inability to accept trans women as literal women conflicts with other stances this person apparently sees as common sense compromises as well.
The bar is in complete hell, and I’m kinda disappointed that Jesse thought this was a good piece. This article might be profound for someone who started paying attention to this issue yesterday, but that’s about it.
I think Cassie is trying to say that recognizing TW as actually women is not necessary for any particular ask. I disagree, but it is true for some--for example, Bostock provided protections under the civil rights acts against employment discrimination without claiming that TWAW. In fact, the logic of the ruling is that TW (males) are being treated differently than W (females) and thus there's discrimination based on sex in an area (employment) where that has no justification.
I’m disappointed with how many people I know IRL are piling on saying that Arday was hounded to death because of racism, all of the story was racism, the only motivation for any of this was racism.
And yet they ignore the fact that one institution after another set him up for failure because of his identity.
Yes, the same people who say it wasn’t cancel culture, it was accountability!
Worth saying as well it's a peculiar definition of 'hounded' right. Because it's not like he was doorstepped or dogged by the paparazzi or whatever. In fact one of the weird things about all this is that he hasn't really been heard from at all since it blew up except for his resignation letter. I assume there must have been invitations for interviews and so on that were rebuffed. When people say hounded they seem to mean that journos read the stuff he wrote, stuff that was on public record, and said well this sounds a bit fishy, I don't think this man in fact ran 600 miles in 6 days etc and many more etcs.
Case to be made that the sheer volume of articles was too much. But so what? Weird stuff was coming out about the original manuscript of his memoirs etc on a daily basis. And unequivocally it exposed the rot in a whole bunch of industries. Weird times.
I found the "mob seeking blood" accusations kind of disingenuous and awful.
I read maybe a dozen articles on this as the story kept developing and probably thousands of comments, some in pretty conservative spaces, and I honestly don't recall a single comment calling for violence against him. Lots of people clearly hated him and thought he was a fraud who should be totally driven out of academia. But that is not violence or "seeking blood", and it is absolutely his just deserts given the situaiton.
And there was A LOT of discussion that he wasn't even the real culprit the people who facilitated this were. Now maybe the worst shit gets moderated away in the circles I traffic, but I don't recall literally any even "I hope he dies", much less anyone calling for violence against him.
That said I find his suicide both understandable and completely untroubling. 2 people die a second. Lifelong liars abusing social trust and breaking our institutions don't need a moment of silence.
Mob seeking blood felt about right to me. Same thing with Lindy West. Another person I could care less about but sent the media elite into a feeding frenzy.
He also lied about having cancer, and that makes people mad. Granted he didn't try to raise money for his cancer treatment or sell quack treatments, but it's still really bad to lie about having cancer.
I am just shocked how many of my colleagues on LinkedIn are saying that he was unfairly maligned as it would take 60 seconds of research to see that he truly was a liar. I guess that's part of the problem.
I don’t know if it’s racism but there is a false equivalency, or maybe a marked difference between which incidents of fraud and/or instances of institutional rot gets people outraged and which are met with a shrug or no commentary at all. I think that’s what makes it suspect.
Brits might remember Johann Hari’s plagiarism scandal about 15 years ago. He was a renowned journalist, won the prestigious Orwell Prize, and it turns out he had plagiarized or fabricated lots of stories, including one about a former Japanese PM being attacked by a robot. He also used a sock puppet account on Wikipedia to vandalize entries about rivals and big himself up. He was also a big fan of threatening lawsuits! Somehow he made a comeback.
If you go on the Data Colada and Retraction Watch blogs, there are other big names who have been disgraced in data fabrication scandals - Gino and Ariely for example - but there wasn’t all the ultramarathon/non-verbal childhood/etc wackiness to go with it, which feels like a plausible counter-explanation to racism (imho).
Not in academia, which was kind of my point. After listening to the podcast, I concede that the details were so over the top which made it an story that would get a lot of traction. Still there was something about it that made me uncomfortable. I don't know who this guy is/was and suddenly he was EVERYWHERE and people were frothing mad. But here are some others that come to mind, who didn't seem to get the level of attention/vitriol that this instance did:
To be fair, these episodes got plenty of media attention (obviously Epstein does, but a lot of it strikes me as useful as a political cudgel rather than real anger/outrage from the media) and Holmes and SBF are in jail. But it shows that there are many industries full or rot, where people don't question individuals credibility/ethics (especially if they have money) and get taken in by scams, or turn away from things they don't want to see.
I'd also add that people that attend elite universities are disproportionally represented in the media which is why there is so much noise generated around these incidents.
I think it will make it easier to identify Woke 2 because people like AOC are going to roll back around and say "No, really, we're not gonna be crazy this time" in 5-6 years. Part of that will be pretending they're not doing Woke 2 because this time instead of "equity" they say "conjustifcation" or whatever; numbering the movements will make it more legible.
I say that because Woke 0 actually happened in the early 90s, it was called Political Correctness, and the people who made that link didn't get much airtime when Woke 1 was kicking up.
It doesn't refer to the people, it refers to periods of time where that set of ideological beliefs is ascendant or mainstreamed. However, I think calling it "Woke 1.0" is a forgone conclusion that there will be a "Woke 2.0," even though some aspects of circa 2020 "wokeness" are politically radioactive, and a lot of the "support" for those planks have proven to be preference falsification. It's hard to go back to pretending their emperor has clothes on, especially when preventing maniacs from holding onto power requires being reasonable and moderate enough to win the vote of the feckless, low-information swing voters in the Midwest who basically decide the outcome every every election.
The problem with calling it 'Woke 1' is that it implies that what we have now is somehow different and implicitly less objectionable, which it isn't. The leftists of today are the same people and hold all the insane beliefs the leftists of 5 years ago did if anything has changed it's that more crazy beliefs have been added.
I was referring to the people who are both low information AND swing voters. Swing-voting independents are another type. The ratio of the former to the latter varies based on turnout. Not to mention, there are absolutely low information partisans.
Well I think in the context of this discussion you sort of have to. But yeah it certainly hasn't gone away and most of its advocates are right where they were or even in higher positions than they were in 2020.
It is still EVERYWHERE in the non-profit world. The only places they have dialed back is anywhere they need federal funding and they only dial back insofar as they need to.
As we speak, a young man is pleading guilty to assassinating a healthcare CEO is cold blood. He has been celebrated as a hero by a legion of fans, including mainstream journalists (ex. Taylor Lorenz). A YouTuber was shot in broad daylight for being anti-trans less than a year ago, which was similarly celebrated by psychos online, while “serious writers” like Ta-Nehisi Coates said he brought it on himself. Yes, Woke 2 is violent.
Oh, so your theory is that a literal handful of individualized instances of murder = "more violent" than a multi-weeks long nationwide outbreak of rioting and looting?
TIL that Bubba Copeland's death was apparently a tragedy? He was a wolf in sheep's clothing, and I'm not talking about his crossdressing. He was an obsessive AGP who couldn't keep his twisted thoughts to himself. He was obsessed with transing himself and others in his community, even children. He wrote and published a self-insert slasher fanfic, in which he stalks and murders a woman in his community, stealing her identity and sleeping with her husband. That woman was a REAL LIFE friend of his, and her real government name was included in the post. He posted photos of real community members, including CHILDREN in his sick online fantasy posts. I will never mourn a malignant pervert masquerading as a man of faith.
As a woman, it's sickening to me that these men walk among us, ready to lay a comforting hand on our shoulder and then jerk off to us at night. There are too many of them- in my opinion, he did us all a favor.
Re: Central Park Karen case. One detail uncovered later was that just a few weeks before Christian Cooper’s encounter with Amy Cooper when she tried to murder him by calling the racist police on him, Christian Cooper was in some forum with other birders where he expressed a desire for more police presence in Central Park to endorse the leash rules.
Confused about Jesse’s personal framing/understanding of Laura Jane Grace: “No, she has gender dysphoria, and it sucks, and … she can use the bathroom.” Isn’t Laura Jane Grace a heterosexual male, until just recently in a sexual/romantic relationship with an actual woman? “Where did it go astray?” he then asks. Well, people became aware of autogynephilia, which is surely LJG’s underlying condition?
Is he talking strictly about the messaging from trans activists? They went from “We just want to pee!” to “We are literally women and you must believe it!” Sure, that happened, too, but also the autogynephilia and the characteristics of people who fit that typology were there all along, and more people just became aware of it. We would have been aware of it regardless of the messaging from trans activists. A bit incoherent there, tough to follow his logic.
I also don’t agree that Pritchard’s column and stance is sane. I don’t agree that using whatever public bathroom (or… other spaces too? does it end with public bathrooms?) you want to use is merely an admirable pursuit of American liberty. It sounds like Katie and Jesse don’t think women have the right to safety, privacy, and dignity?
Sadly, I got this impression. No way do I want to share single-sex spaces with men. And the huge[handed] elephant in the room is autogynephilia. Middle-aged men “suddenly” releasing the '“real” women they actually are. Like hell they are.
I have completely flipped on "bathroom bills". I now 100% support them. I don't want to see women in the mens rooms.
What made me flip was the insane number of women I see in men's bathrooms at stadium events. The law in California (Unruh, etc) can't keep them out and now it's impossible for a man who needs a stall to get access to one. The women essentially take over the stalls in mens rooms and have their own priority line for them.
I have a friend with an "Artificial Urinary Sphincter" -- a device that requires some maniuplation to operate so he can go to the bathroom. It's easier in a stall to do all that reaching and manipulation. I went with him to an event at Shoreline Ampitheatre (Luke Bryan) and the stalls in the mens room were unavailable becuse they were full of women. There was even a "white knight" male standing guard in the mens room to help the women in and use them. He finally called the police (!) and the police convinced the security guards to let the guy backstage to use the roadie port-a-johns because the police and the Shoreline security were powerless to restore order to the men's room.
I would love to see a movement of men who started using ladies rooms to bring attention to this problem, push people over the edge, and have bathroom bills in more states.
So you're saying....trans women.....will ultimately line up in men's rooms. Behind other women. Because women's bathrooms are too crowded to begin with.
It's clear this was all a devious conspiracy for women to gain unfettered access to men's bathrooms!
The irony is if trans women never rocked the boat, they'd end up going to the same bathroom but with a much shorter line.
Yes. That's the craziness of this. Stadiums in California (and many other states) can't ask anyone to leave the restroom because of their apparent or actual sex. So men's rooms are overrun by women cutting ahead to use the stalls.
Reuven, is this women who are trans-men using men’s restrooms or women who are using the men’s restrooms because some venues (Broadway theaters are the best example I know) have a comically bad ratio of women’s - to- men’s bathrooms? I am unaware of this happening in NYC except once at a Holly Near concert where there were almost no men in attendance. (and sorry if attending a Holly Near concert dates me .)
No. These were actually XX women using the men's room because the lines at the ladies' room was too long. The fact that there's not enough restroom capcity for women is a different problem. My friend with the AUS shouldn't have to suffer because the venue doesn't have enough capacity. He'd gladly wait in line if there was an orderly fair line.
I just don't like all these XX women who now use the mens room--and cut the lines to do so--and venue security is powerless to maintain order. I don't care about people who use it in an orderly manner and wait their turn.
No, but the dysphoria (which must be acutely painful) is often an "acceptable" cover for the AGP. And frankly, it looks to me as though extremist gender ideology is largely driven by middle-aged powerful AGP men. They use the pain of gender dysphoria (a mental health issue) to cover for attacking women's sex-based rights, the language we use as women to describe our bodies & their functions, and our boundaries. And AGP is a sexual fetish - since when did we legislate to enable fetishes to dominate over the rights of 50% of the population?
We know that AGP exists because some people claim they are AGP. The vast majority of trans people and clinicians/researchers reject the theory.
When trans people assert that it does not reflect their motivations or feelings, the AGP proponents (researchers) basically say trans people are just lying. Not a very strong response
Re Arday: I really don't know what to think. It's still hard for me to build a theory of mind for him. I've heard people speculate that "at some point, he must have believed his own lies" but I just can't see how that could be possible. OTOH it's hard for me to imagine him rubbing his hands together in private after putting on his Cambridge robe and wizard hat and going "hee hee hee, take that Whitey!"
Did he get some kind of thrill from getting away with a whopper (e.g. duping the mothers of non-verbal autistic kids and giving them false hope) or was he sincerely clueless about the harm his lies caused?
I guess what I'm saying is that I'm fascinated by fabulism/compulsive lying/whatever you want to call this, but I don't really understand it. Anyone want to recommend their favorite books or resources on this subfield of psychology?
I'm confident that I can count on the fans of a pod that has covered so many wild fabulists.
EDIT: Tyler Austin Harper, who is mentioned in this episode, just published another piece in The Atlantic about Arday.
I've known 3 pathological liars very well. One was a close high school friend, she was insecure and wanted attention and was new in town and wanted to be special. We all knew she was lying but no one ever confronyed her about it. She grew out of this after high school and stopped lying. So maybe she was not a pathological liars, since she was able to stop when she got more mature.
I'd say for the other two people, it was simply a profound lack of respect for other people, and a desire to manipulate them. Perhaps a way to gain a weird sense of power or superiority, and to see how far they could take it, and to intentionally use it as emotional leverage over people to make them do what these people wanted. Both these people were men, and I suspect they lied to women much more than men, but I don't know that for sure.
Interestingly, every single one of these people claimed to have cancer. I stupidly believed one of them, and it was very painful. I believe that was also one of Jason Arday's lies?
It seems like a sense of both inferiority AND superiority, and deep lack of respect and empathy for others, causes this. I give my high school friend more of a pass because it seems like it truly was a phase caused by adolescent insecurity.
PNWGirl: I knew one too in high school and beyond. He would lie even when the truth was easier. I could never figure that dude out. I guess it was manipulation? I walked away from him a long time ago…..
That second to last sentence really nails it!! My dad is a compulsive liar, and he lies about small things where the truth would be inconsequential, but the sum of the lies is kind of unsettling… because why lie and to what end? And of course he lies about big things that cause pain and harm to the people around him. I still remember being in high school, and reading Death of a Salesman for the first time, and seeing Willie Loman in him. Or the other way around.
I mean I have personally known people who are just pathological liars. One homeschooled girl in college was like that, would lie about anything and everything, always to her benefit. Also stole, (I mean why not if you are also going to lie constantly).
I do agree it is hard to make a mental model of what they are thinking, particularly when the lies are bad and easily discovered. Do they just think everyone is an idiot? Doesn't them constantly being caught disabuse them of that notion?
The big thing I would be interested in Arday's case is were there people in his life who called him out? How many times was he caught lying? The people I have known like this weren't very strategic, and got caught constantly.
I think he just thrived on adulation and had poor impulse control, really. He wanted people to think he was amazing and special and found a large audience of willing dupes to provide his narcissistic supply in various academic institutions. When everything came crashing down and the adoration turned to contempt and scorn, he just couldn't cope. He was naive in a way. People with mental illnesses often are; they have a distorted view of the world and believe what feels good, not what is true. Some part of him definitely believed he could get away with his lies forever, even if he had another voice telling him he couldn't, and he listened to the former rather than the latter.
I think there's a lot of paths to getting to a state of perpetual lying and fraud.
But one thing I've noticed in those that arrive at that spot is they don't think they're doing anything wrong. They have an internal story that validates what they're doing.
Like he might sincerely believe that he was only doing what everyone does to get to those levels. That he was a legitimate world renown academic and just doing what academics do.
And so at the same time not believe his own lies, but also think he was being unfairly and unjustly targeted for his race.
If he's not that bright, it would be even easier since any high level academic paper would be indistinguishable to him from the pablum he churned out himself.
I don’t buy Katie and Jesse’s assessment that progressives are backpedaling about Woke 1.0. I think all progressives and DSA members are power hungry zealots who will lie through their teeth about their true beliefs to gain power. Never trust any ideologues, no matter where they sit on the political spectrum.
Yes, That's why I wouldn't believe Abdul El-Sayed if he renounced his good buddy Hassan Piker, as Democrats are urging. He believes everything Piker says; that's why they campaigned together and are good friends. "Renouncing" Piker would mean shutting up about him until November and then letting it all out after the election. No thanks.
Think what I find most offensive regarding the term “Woke 1,” is the apparent self-absolution conferred upon those who invoke it (AOC). It allows cover for an ambitious, opportunistic, virtue-preening cohort that almost gleefully indulged in the destruction of the careers and lives of those that failed to meet their orthodoxy requirements. What’s even more troubling, is its very name suggests this is merely the first iteration.
AOS is the “ambitious, opportunistic, virtue-preening cohort that almost gleefully indulged in the destruction of the careers and lives of those that failed to meet their orthodoxy.”
I’m sorry, but the gall that these people have about finger waving and contorting the concept of “mob justice” now; again, they completely ignoring the past 10 years. I’m glad you brought up the Central Park Dog thing specifically because it was that incident that made me push away from nearly all my social media accounts. The absolute vitriol I got when I cautioned for disinterested examination, noting specifically that this over the top mobbing might push this person over the edge, was staggering. In response, the amount of “good”/“she should kill herself” comments was, unfortunately, a non zero number.
Worth saying about the Arday thing - very terrible that he is dead, but he was not an innocent victim. The Carter-Ruck threats and getting the police involved were bad. But he also accused a student of racism when she complained about his poor teaching. Now if that had escalated and stuck it could quite seriously have destroyed her life. That seems really quite morally serious to me.
This is all complicated by how the onlooker is supposed to respond to what was presumably some kind of serial fabulism. And it is absolutely the fault of Cambridge not to have nipped this in the bud when they had the chance (and worth reiterating that the whole thing might have cooled down even a few weeks ago had it not been for his colleagues doubling down and the Good Law Project publishing that stupid letter in his defence). But it's been disgusting seeing a certain kind of achy schmaltz come up today, as if he were some anonymous undergraduate dragged over the coals or whatever. It is disgusting that things like this should have become tribal, but if that really is how it is then it is difficult not to think well I know who will be on my side if I ever offend the wrong shibboleth and will arrange my opinions accordingly. And this in turn is another twist of the knife in the body politic.
The other point worth making is, and sorry, but the only person who comes out of this with much credit is in fact Nathan Cofnas. I don't know how secure his position at Ghent is, but it is at least possible, given the prior involvement of the law, that had he fucked up at all in his evidence, it would have been over for him. That's no small thing and frankly I think he was kind of brave.
>The other point worth making is, and sorry, but the only person who comes out of this with much credit is in fact Nathan Cofnas. I don't know how secure his position at Ghent is, but it is at least possible, given the prior involvement of the law, that had he fucked up at all in his evidence, it would have been over for him. That's no small thing and frankly I think he was kind of brave.
In the land of the blind the one-eyed man is king.
In a fair world Cambridge would rehire him with a lifelong appointment.
It’s true that plenty of people who identify as trans just want to live normal lives. However it simply can’t be said that that is the majority of them, especially when it comes to males who identify as lesbians. The moderate position is not to continually ignore the fact that identifying as trans is a lifeline for sexual predators and chronic victims of sexual violence alike. Sure “gender dysphoria” sucks but some guys are describing not being able to adequately subjugate women as gender dysphoria. being male and wearing women’s clothing can be just self expression, and also there’s a reason it’s a red flag, because for violent misogynistic males it is appealing as well.
The impulse to distribute blame for Arday as if he was some helpless child is strange to me, although Cambridge does deserve some blame for exacerbating the situation.
At the end of the day, Arday was a total fraud on basically every level, and the blame lies with him. I know social graces require us to say what a tragedy it all is, and I do feel bad for his kids, but beyond that I find it hard to feel much at all. He lived selfishly and dishonorably, and died selfishly and dishonorably.
Arday quite clearly was a charlatan whose lies got away from him, but our institutions should hold antibodies against this type of person. Instead he was embraced. Arday acted in a way that is not particularly surprising given the range of human behavior - the only reason that this is a story is that one of our most esteemed institutions fell for him entirely.
Totally agree, I was referring to Arday’s decision to take his own life. Cambridge bears all the blame for the ideological capture that led them to hire someone so patently unqualified.
The person Arday brings to my mind is Bernie Madoff, who deceived his clients and sons for decades. Both had to know their lives could, and probably would, blow up spectacularly. Of the two, Arday seemed the more unhinged, Madoff the more sinister.
Re the discussion on trans rights failing, I think there came a time when many if not most people came to know a troubled young Kayden/Aiden and thought gee, maybe this isn't the great civil rights battle of our time but more of an Anorexia 2.0. As an OG Terf (r/GenderCritical, represent!) we wondered when the detransitioners would emerge. And here they are.
Yeah, I've been feeling similarly, and everytime I think that makes me a bitch, I have to remind myself that there are consequences for actions, and if you don't want to face those consequences (as he clearly very much didn't, assuming he did in fact take the permanent way out), then maybe don't do bad things? Idk man, I also feel bad for his kids more than anyone.
Given his lies about everything,I wouldn’t be surprised if he faked his death.
Also like i feel bad for his kids had he not died. His actions (including his suicide provided that is what occured) werent just indicative of massive mental health issues, they were wholly selfish and unethical. Even his final act in life was to cause an absurd amount of trauma to his family.
I’m surprised that Cassie Prichard’s article is getting any positive traction because it seems so incredibly naïve. If people don’t accept trans women as women, then why should the law treat them as women? And then, what remains? A disability movement? An aesthetic movement? It’s like saying “You don’t have to think gay relationships are valid in order to support gay marriage.” Well, actually you do. Nobody was forced to like gays, but for gay marriage to exist, people had to see gay relationships as valid. And gay activists won the culture war by persuading normies of that very thing. Also, dismissing women’s concerns about males in their bathrooms as a “busybody” problem is exactly the kind of cluelessness that’s derailing the trans movement. There’s just so much wrong with this article, I’m not seeing what Prichard adds to the debate.
Also on the issue of healthcare, we literally don't know if any of the treatments the trans rights advocates promote actually alleviate dysphoria.
Plus the procedures and pharmaceuticals for kids have not only not been proven to help, they have no long term data to show the damage they could be doing to their bodies. To me, this is the most obscene aspect of the whole ideology. How they got any parents to go along with this is beyond comprehension. I guess it's like convincing MAGA to stop vaccinating their kids based on the advice of a drug addled lunatic. Two cults running in parallel.
“Two cults running in parallel”.
You just coined the perfect description of our present time. I am going to use that one.
The rest of us are on no man’s land in between the cults.
Most data we have may not be great, because we're dealing with a small population that faces a lot of challenges, but it does point in the general direction of transition alleviating gender dysphoria. Other issues may persist but the dysphoria does go away with GAC.
And we know that alternative therapies do not work, so we go with the best we have.
That's not the case. For instance the Cass review couldn't find good evidence that it reduces gender dysphoria.
Are you referring to adult or adolescent treatment? For the former the evidence is as I described.
The Dutch also have a more positive report on adolescent GAC.
The absolute damage done to lesbians by this kind of rhetoric by trans women with penises pretending they're gay women is maybe the worst kind of gaslighting
Lesbian women have no one to blame but themselves tbh. (Saying this as a lesbian woman).
Five or so years ago when naive me realized how pervasive this was and how much was legislated in their favor under the radar, I was confident that it would all blow over once I saw them making a mockery of lesbian dating apps and bars. I knew regular old straight women wouldn't stand up for themselves, but mistakenly thought the LGBs would stand together against this mockery of same sex attraction. When that didn't happen, I thought it would be when they started taking sports trophies from black women. Nope. Their position at the pinnacle of the oppression hierarchy was swift and it was total and doen't seem to be waning. How anyone doesn't see this for the social contagion (for women) and forced acceptance of public fetishism (for men) carefully constructed by newly irrelevant LGB advocacy groups and powered by massive corporate money is beyond me.
I don’t think it’s naive, I think it’s incredibly manipulative. It’s saying okay don’t think of us as women - which is still wrong, but I’ll let it go - just give us everything we want. He still thinks he’s a woman and should be treated as such, just that he will no longer force his allies to say it as long as he still gets all the things that he thinks he deserves as a woman.
Jesse and Katie are acknowledging that Pritchard is an AGP (and he says himself that he likes being deliberately off putting), and still treating his demand to be in women’s restrooms as reasonable. Because….????
Well exactly - the whole “rights” infrastructure collapses if you can’t persuade policymakers and the public that males can be in some meaningful sense be women. You can protect people from being evicted or fired “for being trans” probably on the basis of sex - eg. my landlord discriminated against me because although a man, I wear a wig and dress and falsies to look like a woman.
But you can’t pass legislation or develop policy that requires women-only housing to let you to move in, unless you can convince people that the dress and falsies (or hormones and surgery) fundamentally makes you no longer a man.
It seems arrogant to me rather than naive or clueless.
Yes, also he causally refers to himself as a lesbian, and err, no sir, you are not.
I considered reading the full article and skimmed it to find the quote Jessie read. Came across a line about enjoying lesbian orgies and decided it's probably not worth my time.
I'm curious if these pre-op trans women lesbians have relationships with other pre-op trans women lesbians.
I have a hunch what the answer to that usually is.....given what's typical about sexual orientations.
From my observation of online communities, I think it's very likely that these "lesbian orgies" are mostly intact males.
It's a strawman argument. The controversy is about women-only spaces and resources, not housing and employment.
Not to mention housing and employment is settled law. The conservative court held that the constitution protects them from discrimination based on their trans status.
So that's a #done situation. If you're seeing discrimination, shift into fund raising and taking it to the courts...the law is on your side.
Seems more like a strawwoman argument.
Yep. The Pritchard article was very stupid, actually, because it did not address any of the things people actually care about here, which is why the comments section is back to arguing about those same things!
> Nobody was forced to like gays, but for gay marriage to exist, people had to see gay relationships as valid. And gay activists won the culture war by persuading normies of that very thing.
I think those might be two separate things. You could make a libertarian argument for gay marriage without believing gay relationships are valid. After all, it's plausibly you-do-you.
You-do-you fails when it's zero sum.
I don't think it's naive, just not actually a very good article. Now, from a tactical perspective, 'my political movement should drop as a key plank the demand that every single person must not only unquestionably agree with all of our demands but literally change their own thinking or else be degraded as a bigot' is a good step forward. That's not a good persuasion strategy.
The problem though is that the piece does not articulate a coherent vision. Okay, you're talking about "parents’ rights to make medical decisions for their children". What about states/jurisdictions where the parents' rights on this matter can be taken away and decisions made in their absence? Prichard, of course, is silent in that. All the leave-us-alone stuff isn't actually controversial.
I always read that line as supporting parents’ rights when they choose to let their kids go on hormones or have surgery, but not when parents decide not to. They don’t actually support parental decision-making, and would happily cut us out of the equation if they could.
An alarming issue is that anyone north of 30 in the key countries affected by trans-mania remain fairly ignorant of how trans and sex-queer non-LGB mantra has established itself as a truth amongst vast swathes of the younger demographic.
Their allies are the army of sexless women claiming they’re actually are queer/pan/poly but what they are is anything other than straight/gay/bi. IE sexless virgins hiding their lack of desirability in XXL outfits and rainbow colours of public performance. Just as we need ‘no, maybe you’re not a woman’ we need ‘no, maybe you’re not a- / poly - / ro- maybe you’re just scared of sex’.
Young folk aren’t going back to ‘well actually, it’s a mental disorder that needs sympathetic treatment’. Just as you can’t un-do Goth you won’t be able to stop disproportionate amounts of young people suddenly claiming they’re actually a woman. To address that needs a much more serious response than ‘well yes actually, that fine, have a plethora of rights’.
As I listened to Jessie and Katie describe the article, the argument didn't strike me as particularly moderate or reasonable. Like ok, yeah, I’m against trans people being discriminated against in housing and in theory in employment, although I think many trans/nonbinary people intentionally flag themselves as difficult to work/get along with so that’s more complicated. I don't have to believe you’re literally a woman to believe you deserve a roof over your head. Sure. I’m not sure I care whether a 30 year old goes on cross sex hormones either. But the final point is about children, and my belief that you can't literally change sex and that gender identity is an essentially religious ideology actually does prevent me from supporting children receiving scientifically unsupported, invasive “treatments,” the risks and realities of which they cannot fully comprehend. I suspect my inability to accept trans women as literal women conflicts with other stances this person apparently sees as common sense compromises as well.
The bar is in complete hell, and I’m kinda disappointed that Jesse thought this was a good piece. This article might be profound for someone who started paying attention to this issue yesterday, but that’s about it.
I think Cassie is trying to say that recognizing TW as actually women is not necessary for any particular ask. I disagree, but it is true for some--for example, Bostock provided protections under the civil rights acts against employment discrimination without claiming that TWAW. In fact, the logic of the ruling is that TW (males) are being treated differently than W (females) and thus there's discrimination based on sex in an area (employment) where that has no justification.
So, essentially, all the rights that TW really need they already have by virtue of being men?
I think it's fair to discuss other asks uncoupled from a demand that you buy into gender ideology.
Goring at nuremberg; 'Wow Nazism 1.0 was crazy am I right?'
lol
FFS
I’m disappointed with how many people I know IRL are piling on saying that Arday was hounded to death because of racism, all of the story was racism, the only motivation for any of this was racism.
And yet they ignore the fact that one institution after another set him up for failure because of his identity.
Yes, the same people who say it wasn’t cancel culture, it was accountability!
Worth saying as well it's a peculiar definition of 'hounded' right. Because it's not like he was doorstepped or dogged by the paparazzi or whatever. In fact one of the weird things about all this is that he hasn't really been heard from at all since it blew up except for his resignation letter. I assume there must have been invitations for interviews and so on that were rebuffed. When people say hounded they seem to mean that journos read the stuff he wrote, stuff that was on public record, and said well this sounds a bit fishy, I don't think this man in fact ran 600 miles in 6 days etc and many more etcs.
Case to be made that the sheer volume of articles was too much. But so what? Weird stuff was coming out about the original manuscript of his memoirs etc on a daily basis. And unequivocally it exposed the rot in a whole bunch of industries. Weird times.
I found the "mob seeking blood" accusations kind of disingenuous and awful.
I read maybe a dozen articles on this as the story kept developing and probably thousands of comments, some in pretty conservative spaces, and I honestly don't recall a single comment calling for violence against him. Lots of people clearly hated him and thought he was a fraud who should be totally driven out of academia. But that is not violence or "seeking blood", and it is absolutely his just deserts given the situaiton.
And there was A LOT of discussion that he wasn't even the real culprit the people who facilitated this were. Now maybe the worst shit gets moderated away in the circles I traffic, but I don't recall literally any even "I hope he dies", much less anyone calling for violence against him.
That said I find his suicide both understandable and completely untroubling. 2 people die a second. Lifelong liars abusing social trust and breaking our institutions don't need a moment of silence.
Mob seeking blood felt about right to me. Same thing with Lindy West. Another person I could care less about but sent the media elite into a feeding frenzy.
Seeking blood has a pretty specific meaning. Especially as regards mobs.
I think he was doorstepped actually, and apparently the press were lurking around his house while he was in there, likely topping himself.
I mean it is what it is. That is the press.
He also lied about having cancer, and that makes people mad. Granted he didn't try to raise money for his cancer treatment or sell quack treatments, but it's still really bad to lie about having cancer.
I am just shocked how many of my colleagues on LinkedIn are saying that he was unfairly maligned as it would take 60 seconds of research to see that he truly was a liar. I guess that's part of the problem.
I don’t know if it’s racism but there is a false equivalency, or maybe a marked difference between which incidents of fraud and/or instances of institutional rot gets people outraged and which are met with a shrug or no commentary at all. I think that’s what makes it suspect.
Can you offer another example of such a high profile, elite institution professor on the same scale of confabulation and plagiarism?
I'm really curious. What I found fascinating about this case was just how extreme and uniquely, wildly bonkers the specifics are.
So I'm all eyes if you can list some more examples.
Brits might remember Johann Hari’s plagiarism scandal about 15 years ago. He was a renowned journalist, won the prestigious Orwell Prize, and it turns out he had plagiarized or fabricated lots of stories, including one about a former Japanese PM being attacked by a robot. He also used a sock puppet account on Wikipedia to vandalize entries about rivals and big himself up. He was also a big fan of threatening lawsuits! Somehow he made a comeback.
If you go on the Data Colada and Retraction Watch blogs, there are other big names who have been disgraced in data fabrication scandals - Gino and Ariely for example - but there wasn’t all the ultramarathon/non-verbal childhood/etc wackiness to go with it, which feels like a plausible counter-explanation to racism (imho).
That's definitely what caught my attention. I'm an endurance athlete and was like "wtf? he said what??" lol
Not in academia, which was kind of my point. After listening to the podcast, I concede that the details were so over the top which made it an story that would get a lot of traction. Still there was something about it that made me uncomfortable. I don't know who this guy is/was and suddenly he was EVERYWHERE and people were frothing mad. But here are some others that come to mind, who didn't seem to get the level of attention/vitriol that this instance did:
- George Santos, a fabulist who was sworn into Congress (and stayed awhile!) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Santos
- Elizabeth Holmes (Theranos)
- SBF
- Epstein
To be fair, these episodes got plenty of media attention (obviously Epstein does, but a lot of it strikes me as useful as a political cudgel rather than real anger/outrage from the media) and Holmes and SBF are in jail. But it shows that there are many industries full or rot, where people don't question individuals credibility/ethics (especially if they have money) and get taken in by scams, or turn away from things they don't want to see.
I'd also add that people that attend elite universities are disproportionally represented in the media which is why there is so much noise generated around these incidents.
No spoilers please I need to finish Woke 1 before I start this
DNF, let me know how it ends
Guys, don't fucking say 'Woke 1' Woke 1 isn't a thing. The woke are the same people and ideas they always were, don't let them launder themselves.
I think it will make it easier to identify Woke 2 because people like AOC are going to roll back around and say "No, really, we're not gonna be crazy this time" in 5-6 years. Part of that will be pretending they're not doing Woke 2 because this time instead of "equity" they say "conjustifcation" or whatever; numbering the movements will make it more legible.
I say that because Woke 0 actually happened in the early 90s, it was called Political Correctness, and the people who made that link didn't get much airtime when Woke 1 was kicking up.
It doesn't refer to the people, it refers to periods of time where that set of ideological beliefs is ascendant or mainstreamed. However, I think calling it "Woke 1.0" is a forgone conclusion that there will be a "Woke 2.0," even though some aspects of circa 2020 "wokeness" are politically radioactive, and a lot of the "support" for those planks have proven to be preference falsification. It's hard to go back to pretending their emperor has clothes on, especially when preventing maniacs from holding onto power requires being reasonable and moderate enough to win the vote of the feckless, low-information swing voters in the Midwest who basically decide the outcome every every election.
The problem with calling it 'Woke 1' is that it implies that what we have now is somehow different and implicitly less objectionable, which it isn't. The leftists of today are the same people and hold all the insane beliefs the leftists of 5 years ago did if anything has changed it's that more crazy beliefs have been added.
I don’t think swing voters are feckless and low information. By definition, aren’t they the ones who are putting new information above blind loyalty?
I was referring to the people who are both low information AND swing voters. Swing-voting independents are another type. The ratio of the former to the latter varies based on turnout. Not to mention, there are absolutely low information partisans.
Well I think in the context of this discussion you sort of have to. But yeah it certainly hasn't gone away and most of its advocates are right where they were or even in higher positions than they were in 2020.
It is still EVERYWHERE in the non-profit world. The only places they have dialed back is anywhere they need federal funding and they only dial back insofar as they need to.
Especially since “Woke 2” is already proving to be more violent.
[CITATION NEEDED]
As we speak, a young man is pleading guilty to assassinating a healthcare CEO is cold blood. He has been celebrated as a hero by a legion of fans, including mainstream journalists (ex. Taylor Lorenz). A YouTuber was shot in broad daylight for being anti-trans less than a year ago, which was similarly celebrated by psychos online, while “serious writers” like Ta-Nehisi Coates said he brought it on himself. Yes, Woke 2 is violent.
Oh, so your theory is that a literal handful of individualized instances of murder = "more violent" than a multi-weeks long nationwide outbreak of rioting and looting?
TIL that Bubba Copeland's death was apparently a tragedy? He was a wolf in sheep's clothing, and I'm not talking about his crossdressing. He was an obsessive AGP who couldn't keep his twisted thoughts to himself. He was obsessed with transing himself and others in his community, even children. He wrote and published a self-insert slasher fanfic, in which he stalks and murders a woman in his community, stealing her identity and sleeping with her husband. That woman was a REAL LIFE friend of his, and her real government name was included in the post. He posted photos of real community members, including CHILDREN in his sick online fantasy posts. I will never mourn a malignant pervert masquerading as a man of faith.
As a woman, it's sickening to me that these men walk among us, ready to lay a comforting hand on our shoulder and then jerk off to us at night. There are too many of them- in my opinion, he did us all a favor.
Re: Central Park Karen case. One detail uncovered later was that just a few weeks before Christian Cooper’s encounter with Amy Cooper when she tried to murder him by calling the racist police on him, Christian Cooper was in some forum with other birders where he expressed a desire for more police presence in Central Park to endorse the leash rules.
That is irrelevant. Here is the run-down from Perplexity. She was the one who racialized the situation and, in my view, is clearly the asshole in the situation: https://www.perplexity.ai/search/878d2c34-5c2e-4f4c-b48e-ba9bbb737796
Confused about Jesse’s personal framing/understanding of Laura Jane Grace: “No, she has gender dysphoria, and it sucks, and … she can use the bathroom.” Isn’t Laura Jane Grace a heterosexual male, until just recently in a sexual/romantic relationship with an actual woman? “Where did it go astray?” he then asks. Well, people became aware of autogynephilia, which is surely LJG’s underlying condition?
Is he talking strictly about the messaging from trans activists? They went from “We just want to pee!” to “We are literally women and you must believe it!” Sure, that happened, too, but also the autogynephilia and the characteristics of people who fit that typology were there all along, and more people just became aware of it. We would have been aware of it regardless of the messaging from trans activists. A bit incoherent there, tough to follow his logic.
I also don’t agree that Pritchard’s column and stance is sane. I don’t agree that using whatever public bathroom (or… other spaces too? does it end with public bathrooms?) you want to use is merely an admirable pursuit of American liberty. It sounds like Katie and Jesse don’t think women have the right to safety, privacy, and dignity?
Sadly, I got this impression. No way do I want to share single-sex spaces with men. And the huge[handed] elephant in the room is autogynephilia. Middle-aged men “suddenly” releasing the '“real” women they actually are. Like hell they are.
I have completely flipped on "bathroom bills". I now 100% support them. I don't want to see women in the mens rooms.
What made me flip was the insane number of women I see in men's bathrooms at stadium events. The law in California (Unruh, etc) can't keep them out and now it's impossible for a man who needs a stall to get access to one. The women essentially take over the stalls in mens rooms and have their own priority line for them.
I have a friend with an "Artificial Urinary Sphincter" -- a device that requires some maniuplation to operate so he can go to the bathroom. It's easier in a stall to do all that reaching and manipulation. I went with him to an event at Shoreline Ampitheatre (Luke Bryan) and the stalls in the mens room were unavailable becuse they were full of women. There was even a "white knight" male standing guard in the mens room to help the women in and use them. He finally called the police (!) and the police convinced the security guards to let the guy backstage to use the roadie port-a-johns because the police and the Shoreline security were powerless to restore order to the men's room.
I would love to see a movement of men who started using ladies rooms to bring attention to this problem, push people over the edge, and have bathroom bills in more states.
Wait, wait ,wait.....
So you're saying....trans women.....will ultimately line up in men's rooms. Behind other women. Because women's bathrooms are too crowded to begin with.
It's clear this was all a devious conspiracy for women to gain unfettered access to men's bathrooms!
The irony is if trans women never rocked the boat, they'd end up going to the same bathroom but with a much shorter line.
Yes. That's the craziness of this. Stadiums in California (and many other states) can't ask anyone to leave the restroom because of their apparent or actual sex. So men's rooms are overrun by women cutting ahead to use the stalls.
Why does the law allow them to cut line though?
I've been to several Taylor Swift concerts at Gillette Stadium and all the women here just use the men's room.
Reuven, is this women who are trans-men using men’s restrooms or women who are using the men’s restrooms because some venues (Broadway theaters are the best example I know) have a comically bad ratio of women’s - to- men’s bathrooms? I am unaware of this happening in NYC except once at a Holly Near concert where there were almost no men in attendance. (and sorry if attending a Holly Near concert dates me .)
No. These were actually XX women using the men's room because the lines at the ladies' room was too long. The fact that there's not enough restroom capcity for women is a different problem. My friend with the AUS shouldn't have to suffer because the venue doesn't have enough capacity. He'd gladly wait in line if there was an orderly fair line.
The more challenge issue is forcing trans men to use women's room. Do you really think this person should use a women's room?
https://share.google/00gFHIfvzIiGCQN34
I just don't like all these XX women who now use the mens room--and cut the lines to do so--and venue security is powerless to maintain order. I don't care about people who use it in an orderly manner and wait their turn.
Autogynephilia and gender dysphoria aren’t mutually exclusive.
No, but the dysphoria (which must be acutely painful) is often an "acceptable" cover for the AGP. And frankly, it looks to me as though extremist gender ideology is largely driven by middle-aged powerful AGP men. They use the pain of gender dysphoria (a mental health issue) to cover for attacking women's sex-based rights, the language we use as women to describe our bodies & their functions, and our boundaries. And AGP is a sexual fetish - since when did we legislate to enable fetishes to dominate over the rights of 50% of the population?
AGP is supposed to be the *cause* of gender dysphoria.
We know that AGP exists because some people claim they are AGP. The vast majority of trans people and clinicians/researchers reject the theory.
When trans people assert that it does not reflect their motivations or feelings, the AGP proponents (researchers) basically say trans people are just lying. Not a very strong response
Re Arday: I really don't know what to think. It's still hard for me to build a theory of mind for him. I've heard people speculate that "at some point, he must have believed his own lies" but I just can't see how that could be possible. OTOH it's hard for me to imagine him rubbing his hands together in private after putting on his Cambridge robe and wizard hat and going "hee hee hee, take that Whitey!"
Did he get some kind of thrill from getting away with a whopper (e.g. duping the mothers of non-verbal autistic kids and giving them false hope) or was he sincerely clueless about the harm his lies caused?
I guess what I'm saying is that I'm fascinated by fabulism/compulsive lying/whatever you want to call this, but I don't really understand it. Anyone want to recommend their favorite books or resources on this subfield of psychology?
I'm confident that I can count on the fans of a pod that has covered so many wild fabulists.
EDIT: Tyler Austin Harper, who is mentioned in this episode, just published another piece in The Atlantic about Arday.
I've known 3 pathological liars very well. One was a close high school friend, she was insecure and wanted attention and was new in town and wanted to be special. We all knew she was lying but no one ever confronyed her about it. She grew out of this after high school and stopped lying. So maybe she was not a pathological liars, since she was able to stop when she got more mature.
I'd say for the other two people, it was simply a profound lack of respect for other people, and a desire to manipulate them. Perhaps a way to gain a weird sense of power or superiority, and to see how far they could take it, and to intentionally use it as emotional leverage over people to make them do what these people wanted. Both these people were men, and I suspect they lied to women much more than men, but I don't know that for sure.
Interestingly, every single one of these people claimed to have cancer. I stupidly believed one of them, and it was very painful. I believe that was also one of Jason Arday's lies?
It seems like a sense of both inferiority AND superiority, and deep lack of respect and empathy for others, causes this. I give my high school friend more of a pass because it seems like it truly was a phase caused by adolescent insecurity.
PNWGirl: I knew one too in high school and beyond. He would lie even when the truth was easier. I could never figure that dude out. I guess it was manipulation? I walked away from him a long time ago…..
That second to last sentence really nails it!! My dad is a compulsive liar, and he lies about small things where the truth would be inconsequential, but the sum of the lies is kind of unsettling… because why lie and to what end? And of course he lies about big things that cause pain and harm to the people around him. I still remember being in high school, and reading Death of a Salesman for the first time, and seeing Willie Loman in him. Or the other way around.
I mean I have personally known people who are just pathological liars. One homeschooled girl in college was like that, would lie about anything and everything, always to her benefit. Also stole, (I mean why not if you are also going to lie constantly).
I do agree it is hard to make a mental model of what they are thinking, particularly when the lies are bad and easily discovered. Do they just think everyone is an idiot? Doesn't them constantly being caught disabuse them of that notion?
The big thing I would be interested in Arday's case is were there people in his life who called him out? How many times was he caught lying? The people I have known like this weren't very strategic, and got caught constantly.
But he is divorced...
I think he just thrived on adulation and had poor impulse control, really. He wanted people to think he was amazing and special and found a large audience of willing dupes to provide his narcissistic supply in various academic institutions. When everything came crashing down and the adoration turned to contempt and scorn, he just couldn't cope. He was naive in a way. People with mental illnesses often are; they have a distorted view of the world and believe what feels good, not what is true. Some part of him definitely believed he could get away with his lies forever, even if he had another voice telling him he couldn't, and he listened to the former rather than the latter.
I think there's a lot of paths to getting to a state of perpetual lying and fraud.
But one thing I've noticed in those that arrive at that spot is they don't think they're doing anything wrong. They have an internal story that validates what they're doing.
Like he might sincerely believe that he was only doing what everyone does to get to those levels. That he was a legitimate world renown academic and just doing what academics do.
And so at the same time not believe his own lies, but also think he was being unfairly and unjustly targeted for his race.
If he's not that bright, it would be even easier since any high level academic paper would be indistinguishable to him from the pablum he churned out himself.
Anyone remember George Santos, people like this abound. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Santos
I don’t buy Katie and Jesse’s assessment that progressives are backpedaling about Woke 1.0. I think all progressives and DSA members are power hungry zealots who will lie through their teeth about their true beliefs to gain power. Never trust any ideologues, no matter where they sit on the political spectrum.
Yes, That's why I wouldn't believe Abdul El-Sayed if he renounced his good buddy Hassan Piker, as Democrats are urging. He believes everything Piker says; that's why they campaigned together and are good friends. "Renouncing" Piker would mean shutting up about him until November and then letting it all out after the election. No thanks.
Ugh, I’m really not looking forward to this upcoming election. 😑
Agreed. I'd rather he just be honest about his unpleasant views.
Melat Kiros, too.
https://youtu.be/X_aDS9qeknA?si=NsxsqoW2cuc-dUZI
When people tell you who they are, believe them.
Think what I find most offensive regarding the term “Woke 1,” is the apparent self-absolution conferred upon those who invoke it (AOC). It allows cover for an ambitious, opportunistic, virtue-preening cohort that almost gleefully indulged in the destruction of the careers and lives of those that failed to meet their orthodoxy requirements. What’s even more troubling, is its very name suggests this is merely the first iteration.
AOS is the “ambitious, opportunistic, virtue-preening cohort that almost gleefully indulged in the destruction of the careers and lives of those that failed to meet their orthodoxy.”
And it assumes that the current iteration is sane.
I’m sorry, but the gall that these people have about finger waving and contorting the concept of “mob justice” now; again, they completely ignoring the past 10 years. I’m glad you brought up the Central Park Dog thing specifically because it was that incident that made me push away from nearly all my social media accounts. The absolute vitriol I got when I cautioned for disinterested examination, noting specifically that this over the top mobbing might push this person over the edge, was staggering. In response, the amount of “good”/“she should kill herself” comments was, unfortunately, a non zero number.
Jesus fucking Christ in hand basket!
AOC sounding suspiciously like she’s gaslighting one corner of the electorate while winking to another.
Worth saying about the Arday thing - very terrible that he is dead, but he was not an innocent victim. The Carter-Ruck threats and getting the police involved were bad. But he also accused a student of racism when she complained about his poor teaching. Now if that had escalated and stuck it could quite seriously have destroyed her life. That seems really quite morally serious to me.
This is all complicated by how the onlooker is supposed to respond to what was presumably some kind of serial fabulism. And it is absolutely the fault of Cambridge not to have nipped this in the bud when they had the chance (and worth reiterating that the whole thing might have cooled down even a few weeks ago had it not been for his colleagues doubling down and the Good Law Project publishing that stupid letter in his defence). But it's been disgusting seeing a certain kind of achy schmaltz come up today, as if he were some anonymous undergraduate dragged over the coals or whatever. It is disgusting that things like this should have become tribal, but if that really is how it is then it is difficult not to think well I know who will be on my side if I ever offend the wrong shibboleth and will arrange my opinions accordingly. And this in turn is another twist of the knife in the body politic.
The other point worth making is, and sorry, but the only person who comes out of this with much credit is in fact Nathan Cofnas. I don't know how secure his position at Ghent is, but it is at least possible, given the prior involvement of the law, that had he fucked up at all in his evidence, it would have been over for him. That's no small thing and frankly I think he was kind of brave.
>The other point worth making is, and sorry, but the only person who comes out of this with much credit is in fact Nathan Cofnas. I don't know how secure his position at Ghent is, but it is at least possible, given the prior involvement of the law, that had he fucked up at all in his evidence, it would have been over for him. That's no small thing and frankly I think he was kind of brave.
In the land of the blind the one-eyed man is king.
In a fair world Cambridge would rehire him with a lifelong appointment.
It’s true that plenty of people who identify as trans just want to live normal lives. However it simply can’t be said that that is the majority of them, especially when it comes to males who identify as lesbians. The moderate position is not to continually ignore the fact that identifying as trans is a lifeline for sexual predators and chronic victims of sexual violence alike. Sure “gender dysphoria” sucks but some guys are describing not being able to adequately subjugate women as gender dysphoria. being male and wearing women’s clothing can be just self expression, and also there’s a reason it’s a red flag, because for violent misogynistic males it is appealing as well.