Scoop: Eisenhower knew Adolf Hitler was in a fragile state when he launched the Ruhr offensive but went ahead without regard to the Fuhrer's mental health.
Every episode, during housekeeping, our hosts explain that Blocked & Reported is a podcast. But they never elaborate. What is a podcast? Why is a podcast? How do they cast the pods? Where do the pods come from?
Omg YES! UK listener here. First encountered JT back in 2018 when I heard her doing an early version of her grift at an academic conference. She seemed off-the-scale nuts then but by now is the Platonic ideal of a Barpod main character. Very much looking forward to this.
Brilliant, Jessica Taylor! This should be good. Both she and trauma-informed psychology are overdue a reckoning.
Re Arday, I actually cancelled my subscription to the liberal UK newspaper The Observer this week, partly because I thought their coverage was every bit as bad as that first NPR piece.
And, in a plot twist that will surprise absolutely nobody familiar with UK culture-war discourse, the person leading the campaign against the media over here is kimono fox-killer Jolyon Maugham.
YESSS! As a UK listener who has been wanting this shyster to be featured for probably 3 years now, this is exactly the type of content that keeps me subscribed
Still on the Arday part of the pod intro and wondering, has the most irrational side of the awokening not passed as I had believed, or is it just that the craziest ones are still clinging to the wreckage? Ibram X. Kendi really said he was lynched? What the literal fuck.
It didn't go anywhere, I think because it wasn't challenged as an idea/ideology. It remained as a modern, mainstream, politically acceptable manifestation of "left" politics, in remission.
I mean, Kendi is Kendi, today no less than yesterday. I can't off the top of my head think of any of these characters who repented of "left" identitarianism. AOC in her half-hearted handwave at "Woke 1" has suggested that something was done wrong, but it's still more a retreat than a reckoning with the failures of subsuming class and material concerns into identity politics.
I also don't know how you get away from identity politics when rightwing wokeness is exclusively focused on it as well. If/when a democrat leads the country again, there will be a demand to reinstate a lot of the focus on identity that the current administration has attacked, largely because the current administration is doing it in the most shitty, racist, homophobic, sexist way possible.
It's really frustrating knowing that the wheel will probably keep turning. I hope, before they take power back (as they should) we can convince them that some of their prior policies were bad actually, and if they come into alignment with voters they can probably hold onto that power for a little while.
I mean, I'll take woke libtards over the cage of shit-throwing monkeys that is MAGA, but the ideal would be actual compassionate governance.
Great work! Have you looked into Neil Sands and Donna Sands? What they've done in Belfast along with their lawyer has brought into disrepute the Northern Ireland judiciary. The full details are astonishing. They were with Dr Jessica Taylor in Westminster having meetings full of lies that tattle was the most awful site full of CSA, rape threats and death threats. When it's actually more like a PG-13 kiwi farms. They weponsised Labor MPs who fell for their BS and these people are supposed to be running the country
They covered the Sands initial "win" but that has all thrown out and it was only ever a default win because the documents were not served and they continued in private with no defense. Wasn't that much to the story at that point.
Now so many more details have come out including that the whole global forensic search by leading firm Nardello and Co was a lie and Neil Sands got a company to leak personal data (this is all true in court doc above) then used the high court to launder this data. Looks like they lied to the court many times over years to change the course of justice, I'm sure it has a name when you trick or interfere with the legal system! It's a very juicy story now.
Also someone inside the private case was leaking details on reddit while it was under reporting restrictions and leaking details is contempt of court punishable by up to 2 years in prison. Someone keeps threatening Reddit and gets the archive links deleted but there's a private group where it's all saved:
I’ve seen it a lot regarding depression and anxiety, from people who don’t want to put in the work to overcome them. “Maybe it’s a normal response to the hostile state of the world that doesn’t even want me to live!” Or you could learn coping strategies
This was so good. I've been watching Taylor's antics for a long time, very excited we get a three-parter on her.
What always strikes me about her stories is how out of date they always seem. Like she read about them in a textbook from 1973. Her origin story about being targeted for being working class at university might have made sense if she went to uni in the 50s or 60s, but not since then. A lot of her lecturers and tutors were probably also from working class families! Her descriptions of how inpatient mental health wards function and of ECT are straight out of One Flew Over the Cuckoos Nest. Her arguments about cluster B personality disorders (that the diagnosis can be misapplied, stigmatises women with histories of severe childhood abuse) have been known and discussed within psychiatry for a very long time. I think that's why some of it resonates for people - she peddles familiar narratives that feel true-ish if you aren't paying much attention to the huge volume of her stories.
I remember when her first book came out and Jameela Jamil (friend of the pod, enemy of bees) heard about it, promoted it to her followers then immediately recanted when she heard Jessica was gender critical. Taylor said nothing remotely terfy again and has been chasing the anti-psychiatry market ever since.
The saddest part about her behaviour is all the clearly unwell people who pop up in her comments claiming that they're under government surveillance or hearing voices who absolutely lap up all her claims about the evils of psychiatry and psychiatric drugs. She does nothing but ignore them or promote one of her self-published workbooks on trauma to them. It's awful.
Cofnas could very well be all the terrible things he is accused of being. But it doesn’t matter, if he was right. An accusation of plagiarism and research misconduct (stealing quotes) is a factual dispute. Cofnas brought compelling evidence to bear, as did others. Journalists, academics, and commentators are being deliberately obtuse. Human history is filled with flawed people, because all of us are flawed. Some more than others!
People bring information to journalists and police all the time, and it’s often because they have an axe to grind. Mark Felt betrayed Nixon out of career resentment. Mobsters have turned states evidence to save their own skin. Ex-girlfriends of gang members are a secret threat to the gang! The motivation or the bad character of the individuals doesn’t bear on the truth or falsity of the claims. You need to investigate, and have independent evidence, but information coming from those low moral character or bad motives doesn’t mean you can ignore it.
It’s impressive. In less than a decade, elite and selective academia has burned through reputations and good will that was built up over literal centuries. 20 years ago, attempts to cut or reduce federal funding to universities would have had opposition from bipartisan supermajorities. Now, the Trump administration has done some outrageous things, and while there was coverage, there was no groundswell of support for the schools.
Had universities not literally rated Asians as having inferior personalities, and let rank antisemitism become part of the curriculum, maybe the ethnic/cultural groups that are most obsessed with education would have been relied upon to help push back. 🤷♂️
In the United States, I thought the financial aspect played a role. Tuition-paying students are costumers, and costumers get what they want. The British often catch American cultural neuroses like a cold, but you’d think organizations like Cambridge would still have a little of their self regard to not…hire a guy whose academic work was of such poor quality. That’s before considering that it was almost entirely plagiarized and fraudulent. The parts that weren’t plagiarized or fraudulent were truly terrible. Seriously, if you are going to plagiarize, at least plagiarize something worthwhile!
Continental universities are even more surprising. Say what you will be the impact of continental philosophy, but these universities had a reputation for being elitist, in the positive and negative sense of the word. They don’t let in a lot of people, and grad inflation isn’t a thing. They don’t cost much, but that goes with very high standards that lots of people can’t hack, if you are evenly allowed in the doors. The people who reach leadership roles in Western Europe, whether in politics, business, or most other areas of life, follow a very prescribed route. It makes the American status game look like downright anarchy! Plumbers running for office? People without university degrees in Congress?! It has a lot of negatives, but it does meant those few we stick around those schools, or teach at them, have met those standards. Usually.
Have you seen the state of the Cambridge Student union representative? Not representive of all the students there but they're definitely Woke 1.0, awaiting Woke 2.0.
I read Jason Stanley’s piece. It was impressive. Not in a good way. It was a really impressively bad attempt at talking about anything but the facts and claims in evidence. He was trying to argue around the fact that Arday’s work was largely plagiarized.
1) At one point he argued that the amount Arday was cited a bunch. Therefore he was an impactful scholar. The problem was these cited papers, even before considering the papers were kind of gibberish, were largely plagiarized. If anything, the citation impact should accrue to the plagiarism victims.
2) He tried to make this about AI. Anti-plagiarism software long predates modern AI, and Arday’s writings were also pre-AI. More to the point, if plagiarism technology picks up common phrases in the English language. Duh. No one would consider common language plagiarism. But entire blocs of text were matched, including grammatical errors.
3) The definition of plagiarism isn’t hard, nor are schools unclear in their codes of conduct. If a student of Stanley’s did 1% of what Arday did, they would be expelled. Students in my school were expelled for that. Students at Harvard under Claudine Gay were expelled. It would be an interesting test - if one of Stanley’s students plagiarizes and is caught, would that student have a get out of jail free card? Just email the school administrators and say the professor said it’s fine!
When Claudine was caught, people with presumably functioning brains argued it wasn’t plagiarism, it was “duplicative language,” like that was some bank shot exoneration. Yes-it was duplicated language from someone else without attribution. I think we call that plagiarism.
Among a certain type -certain liberal arts types,
lawyers, politicians, and people whose work involves the manipulation of language -there is this unstated idea you can manipulate reality itself through language. You don’t see this in more practical liberal arts subjects (military history, for instance) or STEM. While it may work in the short term, or color perceptions, it doesn’t actually work. And more importantly, if your goal is to convince people, telling people that their eyes and ears are wrong is a great way to lose credibility. Think males in women’s sport - the literal tons of ink used to argue in favor didn’t erase the imagine of “Lia Thomas” towering over actual female swimmers.
Stanley was right that Arday was wronged. The university clearly failed when he was made a professor. It also failed when it ignored the tips from academics in 2023. Had it been dealt with, he should have been fired (or allowed to resign), but it wouldn’t have been an international story that made Cambridge, the lesser known of the great British universities, an international laughingstock.
The excuse that Arday had insufficient supervision (only meeting his supervisor once) is not mitigation either. Arday had already got a Bachelor's so he will have been told on that course about plagiarism. And then again with his Master's ( the real one. Not the one he lied about). It's covered extensively and there's huge amounts of academic support and coaching available to guide students n writing essays at undergraduate level so why didn't he realise ‘? mimicry’ is also known as plagiarism or “copying” as it might otherwise be called
The obtuseness of academics and people of “good” character over evidence that anyone can evaluate as plagiarism is not making a good case for their ability to evaluate anything or a case for their professional judgement.
It is, in fact, lending a lot of credibility to Cofnas vs the “correct” POV.
I, a lonely man with much to be lonely about, have been whiling away the hours arguing with the good people of Threads (lol) about the Arday situation and it is astounding - I believe the kids would say I've been blackpilled - how many people are totally incapable of separating the truth or otherwise of Cofnas' blog from his broader opinions and character. Either they flat out refuse to read the thing because he's a Nazi (although Jewish) or, when confronted directly with an excerpt, will double down, with a sort of darling faith in the incorruptibility of British institutions, and say Cambridge cleared him, LJMU cleared him. This despite the fact that the entire scandal concerns their integrity.
The attitude is like something you'd expect from a parody of a stuffy bourgeois at the height of the Empire. My institutions can do no wrong. And the the very next sentence accuses said institutions of being hopelessly compromised by racism. Every one a little masterpiece of motivated believing. In my opinion this has pretty serious consequences for the so-called death of woke.
Anyway looking forward to the rest of this three parter, always a pleasure to get the teeth stuck in.
Haven't you heard? Being Jewish is like the new Nazi, or at least several steps down that road. Cofnas would have better cred with these people if he wasn't a Jew.
a) It seems there are some receipts for the marathon claims. He was 25 at the time.
b) I saw the cofnas podcast when he said he wanted to run the race science & eugenics department at Harvard. I did not think it was a joke in context. Cofnas is many things. Hilarious isn't one of them.
And that is that. Exhausted, genuinely stressed by this. Agree it's a crazy dual reality.
There is evidence that he spoke to a local newspaper and radio station about the marathons challenge, this is not analogous with there being evidence that his later claims were accurate
As with much of the Arday talking points, I suspexlct the truth is most likely that he massively embellished the story, rather than engaged in a full-blooded lie. Thus, a single marathon on the treadmill at his local gym raising a normal amount for charity turned into a world record-breaking multi-marathon challenge, raising millions in the process and completing the final few marathons with a broken leg
There are indeed some contemporaneous references to the 30 marathons in local papers. I am not sure that is enough and, although I am maybe being naive, would have thought you needed more by way of confirmation given it was for charity. But it was probably always the most believable of the stories. The 600 miles for example you will also find one or two references to - as in he said to a local journo he was training for it in 2015 or whenever - but it really strains credulity that you would do such a thing without some kind of accreditation. The hairline fracture thing also raises eyebrows etc.
I am convinced the "I ran 600 miles in six days" thing is more something like he ran 40 miles on the treadmill over 4 days, then had a buddy ask a couple days later to go for a run, ran 15 miles that day, then maybe ran 15 miles again two weeks later.
Then while bragging to someone he respects, he says he ran 600 miles in 6 days, they push back, he doubles down, they are like wow that is truly amazing because they assume no one would lie like that in the face of pushback. And then it was brought up again by someone else in front of some other people, and now he can't back down.
I am guessing a lot of his lies were like that in some sense. meant to be "white lies" told to a single person or couple people, but then they become part of his personal mythology and the story people tell about him, and then he is needing to constantly reinforce them.
It just reeks of a gross exaggeration that was told to someone, and then he feels like he cannot back down.
Not saying that makes it better really, but I kind of doubt he just decided to make many of these up out of whole cloth, I think most of them probably started with a small kernel of truth.
My mum, in her late sixties, completed a half-marathon with a leg injury that turned out to be a stress fracture, but she was in terrible pain by the end and then in a wheelchair for a week or two after. (She's fine now and back to running.)
Of all Arday's claims, if an otherwise trustworthy extreme endurance sport nutter told me this one, I could believe it, as the personality type tend towards pushing well past the point of all good sense. In the context of the late and his many lies though, I'm less inclined to do so.
Yeah it's not crazy unbelievable or anything. Eddie Izzard obviously did something comparable and was hardly an athlete. You just think there would have been some sort of clear corroboration. I think some of the ultra-marathon crowd are pissed off about it for this reason. But certainly more reasonable than the rest of it.
My understanding of the issue is that there were no organisers, bib numbers, race times etc and it was all done entirely on his say so. Such corroboration as there is is found in his personal blog and a few local newspapers. It's kind of just a dude going on a bunch of runs and talking about it. Hence the scepticism. I incline to think he probably did intend to do and did some of something and the stories got out of hand and all the rest of it.
None of these things are hard to verify, if the person at the center of it just provides the evidence. For example, I have a copy of most of my medical records. If challenged, I can produce it within seconds. If you're claiming to have run 600 miles in 6 days, or 12 days, or ran many marathons, or were non-verbal till age 11, you should be able to produce evidence for that on a dime. Say your medical records *are* lost (and most are not in the UK, record keeping is good). Track down old teachers. Get letters from them. And so on. If you are a professional academic, which I am, obviously you need to be keeping records of every bit of data that is important. If you miss a bit, ok. We are all human. But not having anything to hand when people ask suggests poor standards in itself.
I was thinking it mostly seemed like lazy journalism… because I’m not saying that some dummy writing human interest stories has to investigate every claim like an investigator, but surely if someone says they did something so incredible, one might corroborate the facts in a very basic way.
Even if some claims end up being substantiated, nobody will admit it. They'll double down. And I say this as someone becoming increasingly skeptical that Arday wasn't on some weird Intelligence payroll and could have faked his own death/never really existed
Re the marathons most of the receipts are secondary sources - this doesn't count as source in journalism. It appears he ran some of them, while making strange claims about others (“15 workers left their site to run with me for a few kms”, “I start at 3 today because I was invited to my boss’ wedding afterwards”). His blog also show a very strong appetite for media appearance's and a genuine talent for personal branding.
Most lies are anchored in reality and I think there is a kernel of truth in everything Arday said (selective mutism becomes non verbal autism, leanring disabilities become developmental delays etc.). It’s very easy for people who are still engrossed by his stories to continue on the same path.
I feel so sad about his children who will have to struggle with this terrible loss and probably one day come to terms with the paternal legend. I really hope the media leave his family alone, and I hope no well meaning idiot push them towards the media to defend Arday's memory.
Scoop: Eisenhower knew Adolf Hitler was in a fragile state when he launched the Ruhr offensive but went ahead without regard to the Fuhrer's mental health.
Every episode, during housekeeping, our hosts explain that Blocked & Reported is a podcast. But they never elaborate. What is a podcast? Why is a podcast? How do they cast the pods? Where do the pods come from?
How many pods could a podcast cast if a podcast could cast pods?
Omg YES! UK listener here. First encountered JT back in 2018 when I heard her doing an early version of her grift at an academic conference. She seemed off-the-scale nuts then but by now is the Platonic ideal of a Barpod main character. Very much looking forward to this.
Brilliant, Jessica Taylor! This should be good. Both she and trauma-informed psychology are overdue a reckoning.
Re Arday, I actually cancelled my subscription to the liberal UK newspaper The Observer this week, partly because I thought their coverage was every bit as bad as that first NPR piece.
And, in a plot twist that will surprise absolutely nobody familiar with UK culture-war discourse, the person leading the campaign against the media over here is kimono fox-killer Jolyon Maugham.
YESSS! As a UK listener who has been wanting this shyster to be featured for probably 3 years now, this is exactly the type of content that keeps me subscribed
Still on the Arday part of the pod intro and wondering, has the most irrational side of the awokening not passed as I had believed, or is it just that the craziest ones are still clinging to the wreckage? Ibram X. Kendi really said he was lynched? What the literal fuck.
I think the awokening is no longer attracting new followers, but the true believers are becoming even more fundamentalist and extreme.
Yes. Local to me, they are not bloody going away.
It didn't go anywhere, I think because it wasn't challenged as an idea/ideology. It remained as a modern, mainstream, politically acceptable manifestation of "left" politics, in remission.
I mean, Kendi is Kendi, today no less than yesterday. I can't off the top of my head think of any of these characters who repented of "left" identitarianism. AOC in her half-hearted handwave at "Woke 1" has suggested that something was done wrong, but it's still more a retreat than a reckoning with the failures of subsuming class and material concerns into identity politics.
I also don't know how you get away from identity politics when rightwing wokeness is exclusively focused on it as well. If/when a democrat leads the country again, there will be a demand to reinstate a lot of the focus on identity that the current administration has attacked, largely because the current administration is doing it in the most shitty, racist, homophobic, sexist way possible.
It's really frustrating knowing that the wheel will probably keep turning. I hope, before they take power back (as they should) we can convince them that some of their prior policies were bad actually, and if they come into alignment with voters they can probably hold onto that power for a little while.
I mean, I'll take woke libtards over the cage of shit-throwing monkeys that is MAGA, but the ideal would be actual compassionate governance.
Great work! Have you looked into Neil Sands and Donna Sands? What they've done in Belfast along with their lawyer has brought into disrepute the Northern Ireland judiciary. The full details are astonishing. They were with Dr Jessica Taylor in Westminster having meetings full of lies that tattle was the most awful site full of CSA, rape threats and death threats. When it's actually more like a PG-13 kiwi farms. They weponsised Labor MPs who fell for their BS and these people are supposed to be running the country
https://freespeechunion.org/publications/obtaining-damages-by-deception.pdf
https://www.bailii.org/cgi-bin/format.cgi?doc=/nie/cases/NIHC/KB/2026/20.html
I think this was covered on an episode
They covered the Sands initial "win" but that has all thrown out and it was only ever a default win because the documents were not served and they continued in private with no defense. Wasn't that much to the story at that point.
Now so many more details have come out including that the whole global forensic search by leading firm Nardello and Co was a lie and Neil Sands got a company to leak personal data (this is all true in court doc above) then used the high court to launder this data. Looks like they lied to the court many times over years to change the course of justice, I'm sure it has a name when you trick or interfere with the legal system! It's a very juicy story now.
Also someone inside the private case was leaking details on reddit while it was under reporting restrictions and leaking details is contempt of court punishable by up to 2 years in prison. Someone keeps threatening Reddit and gets the archive links deleted but there's a private group where it's all saved:
Archive links
https://arctic-shift.photon-reddit.com/search?fun=comments_search&author=meanhope5227
https://arctic-shift.photon-reddit.com/search?fun=posts_search&author=meanhope5227
https://arctic-shift.photon-reddit.com/search?fun=posts_search&author=Entire-Window9132
https://arctic-shift.photon-reddit.com/search?fun=comments_search&author=Entire-Window9132
MeanHope had access to the Sands social media accounts https://www.reddit.com/r/TattleLife2025/comments/1mpuq2s/meanhope_had_access_to_the_sands_social_media/
You should email them/Jessica the 80s baby.
"Jiff"?? "JIFF"????!?!??!!
Blocked. Reported. Canceled. Unsubscribed.
Man I hope you’re referring to the peanut butter, otherwise I may have to protest.
I thought the creator/inventor of GIF had confirmed it's said JIF. Like Gif-raffe. Which blew everyone's mind before they continued to ignore him
Jessica Taylor's philosophy of mental illness sounds like a narcissist reacting to being diagnosed as a narcissist.
“I’m not narcissistic. I’m actually that amazing. Bow down before me!”
This is very Trumpy! “Very stable genius”
I’ve seen it a lot regarding depression and anxiety, from people who don’t want to put in the work to overcome them. “Maybe it’s a normal response to the hostile state of the world that doesn’t even want me to live!” Or you could learn coping strategies
I thought that as well
This was so good. I've been watching Taylor's antics for a long time, very excited we get a three-parter on her.
What always strikes me about her stories is how out of date they always seem. Like she read about them in a textbook from 1973. Her origin story about being targeted for being working class at university might have made sense if she went to uni in the 50s or 60s, but not since then. A lot of her lecturers and tutors were probably also from working class families! Her descriptions of how inpatient mental health wards function and of ECT are straight out of One Flew Over the Cuckoos Nest. Her arguments about cluster B personality disorders (that the diagnosis can be misapplied, stigmatises women with histories of severe childhood abuse) have been known and discussed within psychiatry for a very long time. I think that's why some of it resonates for people - she peddles familiar narratives that feel true-ish if you aren't paying much attention to the huge volume of her stories.
I remember when her first book came out and Jameela Jamil (friend of the pod, enemy of bees) heard about it, promoted it to her followers then immediately recanted when she heard Jessica was gender critical. Taylor said nothing remotely terfy again and has been chasing the anti-psychiatry market ever since.
The saddest part about her behaviour is all the clearly unwell people who pop up in her comments claiming that they're under government surveillance or hearing voices who absolutely lap up all her claims about the evils of psychiatry and psychiatric drugs. She does nothing but ignore them or promote one of her self-published workbooks on trauma to them. It's awful.
Cofnas could very well be all the terrible things he is accused of being. But it doesn’t matter, if he was right. An accusation of plagiarism and research misconduct (stealing quotes) is a factual dispute. Cofnas brought compelling evidence to bear, as did others. Journalists, academics, and commentators are being deliberately obtuse. Human history is filled with flawed people, because all of us are flawed. Some more than others!
People bring information to journalists and police all the time, and it’s often because they have an axe to grind. Mark Felt betrayed Nixon out of career resentment. Mobsters have turned states evidence to save their own skin. Ex-girlfriends of gang members are a secret threat to the gang! The motivation or the bad character of the individuals doesn’t bear on the truth or falsity of the claims. You need to investigate, and have independent evidence, but information coming from those low moral character or bad motives doesn’t mean you can ignore it.
Frankly I trust him more than the median academic. Seems like his brain works. Can't say that for many of them.
It’s impressive. In less than a decade, elite and selective academia has burned through reputations and good will that was built up over literal centuries. 20 years ago, attempts to cut or reduce federal funding to universities would have had opposition from bipartisan supermajorities. Now, the Trump administration has done some outrageous things, and while there was coverage, there was no groundswell of support for the schools.
Had universities not literally rated Asians as having inferior personalities, and let rank antisemitism become part of the curriculum, maybe the ethnic/cultural groups that are most obsessed with education would have been relied upon to help push back. 🤷♂️
In the United States, I thought the financial aspect played a role. Tuition-paying students are costumers, and costumers get what they want. The British often catch American cultural neuroses like a cold, but you’d think organizations like Cambridge would still have a little of their self regard to not…hire a guy whose academic work was of such poor quality. That’s before considering that it was almost entirely plagiarized and fraudulent. The parts that weren’t plagiarized or fraudulent were truly terrible. Seriously, if you are going to plagiarize, at least plagiarize something worthwhile!
Continental universities are even more surprising. Say what you will be the impact of continental philosophy, but these universities had a reputation for being elitist, in the positive and negative sense of the word. They don’t let in a lot of people, and grad inflation isn’t a thing. They don’t cost much, but that goes with very high standards that lots of people can’t hack, if you are evenly allowed in the doors. The people who reach leadership roles in Western Europe, whether in politics, business, or most other areas of life, follow a very prescribed route. It makes the American status game look like downright anarchy! Plumbers running for office? People without university degrees in Congress?! It has a lot of negatives, but it does meant those few we stick around those schools, or teach at them, have met those standards. Usually.
Have you seen the state of the Cambridge Student union representative? Not representive of all the students there but they're definitely Woke 1.0, awaiting Woke 2.0.
I read Jason Stanley’s piece. It was impressive. Not in a good way. It was a really impressively bad attempt at talking about anything but the facts and claims in evidence. He was trying to argue around the fact that Arday’s work was largely plagiarized.
1) At one point he argued that the amount Arday was cited a bunch. Therefore he was an impactful scholar. The problem was these cited papers, even before considering the papers were kind of gibberish, were largely plagiarized. If anything, the citation impact should accrue to the plagiarism victims.
2) He tried to make this about AI. Anti-plagiarism software long predates modern AI, and Arday’s writings were also pre-AI. More to the point, if plagiarism technology picks up common phrases in the English language. Duh. No one would consider common language plagiarism. But entire blocs of text were matched, including grammatical errors.
3) The definition of plagiarism isn’t hard, nor are schools unclear in their codes of conduct. If a student of Stanley’s did 1% of what Arday did, they would be expelled. Students in my school were expelled for that. Students at Harvard under Claudine Gay were expelled. It would be an interesting test - if one of Stanley’s students plagiarizes and is caught, would that student have a get out of jail free card? Just email the school administrators and say the professor said it’s fine!
When Claudine was caught, people with presumably functioning brains argued it wasn’t plagiarism, it was “duplicative language,” like that was some bank shot exoneration. Yes-it was duplicated language from someone else without attribution. I think we call that plagiarism.
Among a certain type -certain liberal arts types,
lawyers, politicians, and people whose work involves the manipulation of language -there is this unstated idea you can manipulate reality itself through language. You don’t see this in more practical liberal arts subjects (military history, for instance) or STEM. While it may work in the short term, or color perceptions, it doesn’t actually work. And more importantly, if your goal is to convince people, telling people that their eyes and ears are wrong is a great way to lose credibility. Think males in women’s sport - the literal tons of ink used to argue in favor didn’t erase the imagine of “Lia Thomas” towering over actual female swimmers.
Stanley was right that Arday was wronged. The university clearly failed when he was made a professor. It also failed when it ignored the tips from academics in 2023. Had it been dealt with, he should have been fired (or allowed to resign), but it wouldn’t have been an international story that made Cambridge, the lesser known of the great British universities, an international laughingstock.
The excuse that Arday had insufficient supervision (only meeting his supervisor once) is not mitigation either. Arday had already got a Bachelor's so he will have been told on that course about plagiarism. And then again with his Master's ( the real one. Not the one he lied about). It's covered extensively and there's huge amounts of academic support and coaching available to guide students n writing essays at undergraduate level so why didn't he realise ‘? mimicry’ is also known as plagiarism or “copying” as it might otherwise be called
The obtuseness of academics and people of “good” character over evidence that anyone can evaluate as plagiarism is not making a good case for their ability to evaluate anything or a case for their professional judgement.
It is, in fact, lending a lot of credibility to Cofnas vs the “correct” POV.
"Mental health Twitter can be a little insane" - Katie Herzog
I, a lonely man with much to be lonely about, have been whiling away the hours arguing with the good people of Threads (lol) about the Arday situation and it is astounding - I believe the kids would say I've been blackpilled - how many people are totally incapable of separating the truth or otherwise of Cofnas' blog from his broader opinions and character. Either they flat out refuse to read the thing because he's a Nazi (although Jewish) or, when confronted directly with an excerpt, will double down, with a sort of darling faith in the incorruptibility of British institutions, and say Cambridge cleared him, LJMU cleared him. This despite the fact that the entire scandal concerns their integrity.
The attitude is like something you'd expect from a parody of a stuffy bourgeois at the height of the Empire. My institutions can do no wrong. And the the very next sentence accuses said institutions of being hopelessly compromised by racism. Every one a little masterpiece of motivated believing. In my opinion this has pretty serious consequences for the so-called death of woke.
Anyway looking forward to the rest of this three parter, always a pleasure to get the teeth stuck in.
I know a former external examiner for LJMU who failed at least one PhD candidate but the university over-rode her decision and passes him anyway
I'm not au fait with the exact protocols but imagine that is pretty poor. What was the subject if you are comfortable saying?
Haven't you heard? Being Jewish is like the new Nazi, or at least several steps down that road. Cofnas would have better cred with these people if he wasn't a Jew.
Three part series?! Is this the new Keffles? Keffals? Kerfuffles?!
I haven't been paying attention, but are we sure Arday is dead? If anybody was going to fake his own death it would be this guy.
You are waiting for the Prestige!
Underrated comment.
Confirmed by the Metropolitan Police who will have attended the property. This is standard for all unexplained deaths at home.
dude, i was thinking the exact same thing! but i think he truly is dunzo.
Now, don't get all shitty on me but ….
a) It seems there are some receipts for the marathon claims. He was 25 at the time.
b) I saw the cofnas podcast when he said he wanted to run the race science & eugenics department at Harvard. I did not think it was a joke in context. Cofnas is many things. Hilarious isn't one of them.
And that is that. Exhausted, genuinely stressed by this. Agree it's a crazy dual reality.
There is evidence that he spoke to a local newspaper and radio station about the marathons challenge, this is not analogous with there being evidence that his later claims were accurate
As with much of the Arday talking points, I suspexlct the truth is most likely that he massively embellished the story, rather than engaged in a full-blooded lie. Thus, a single marathon on the treadmill at his local gym raising a normal amount for charity turned into a world record-breaking multi-marathon challenge, raising millions in the process and completing the final few marathons with a broken leg
There are indeed some contemporaneous references to the 30 marathons in local papers. I am not sure that is enough and, although I am maybe being naive, would have thought you needed more by way of confirmation given it was for charity. But it was probably always the most believable of the stories. The 600 miles for example you will also find one or two references to - as in he said to a local journo he was training for it in 2015 or whenever - but it really strains credulity that you would do such a thing without some kind of accreditation. The hairline fracture thing also raises eyebrows etc.
I am convinced the "I ran 600 miles in six days" thing is more something like he ran 40 miles on the treadmill over 4 days, then had a buddy ask a couple days later to go for a run, ran 15 miles that day, then maybe ran 15 miles again two weeks later.
Then while bragging to someone he respects, he says he ran 600 miles in 6 days, they push back, he doubles down, they are like wow that is truly amazing because they assume no one would lie like that in the face of pushback. And then it was brought up again by someone else in front of some other people, and now he can't back down.
I am guessing a lot of his lies were like that in some sense. meant to be "white lies" told to a single person or couple people, but then they become part of his personal mythology and the story people tell about him, and then he is needing to constantly reinforce them.
It just reeks of a gross exaggeration that was told to someone, and then he feels like he cannot back down.
Not saying that makes it better really, but I kind of doubt he just decided to make many of these up out of whole cloth, I think most of them probably started with a small kernel of truth.
My mum, in her late sixties, completed a half-marathon with a leg injury that turned out to be a stress fracture, but she was in terrible pain by the end and then in a wheelchair for a week or two after. (She's fine now and back to running.)
Of all Arday's claims, if an otherwise trustworthy extreme endurance sport nutter told me this one, I could believe it, as the personality type tend towards pushing well past the point of all good sense. In the context of the late and his many lies though, I'm less inclined to do so.
Very cool of your ma, elite ma behaviour.
Yeah it's not crazy unbelievable or anything. Eddie Izzard obviously did something comparable and was hardly an athlete. You just think there would have been some sort of clear corroboration. I think some of the ultra-marathon crowd are pissed off about it for this reason. But certainly more reasonable than the rest of it.
I’m assuming marathon organizers record bib numbers and race times? Can’t be that hard to verify if the dates and locations are known.
My understanding of the issue is that there were no organisers, bib numbers, race times etc and it was all done entirely on his say so. Such corroboration as there is is found in his personal blog and a few local newspapers. It's kind of just a dude going on a bunch of runs and talking about it. Hence the scepticism. I incline to think he probably did intend to do and did some of something and the stories got out of hand and all the rest of it.
None of these things are hard to verify, if the person at the center of it just provides the evidence. For example, I have a copy of most of my medical records. If challenged, I can produce it within seconds. If you're claiming to have run 600 miles in 6 days, or 12 days, or ran many marathons, or were non-verbal till age 11, you should be able to produce evidence for that on a dime. Say your medical records *are* lost (and most are not in the UK, record keeping is good). Track down old teachers. Get letters from them. And so on. If you are a professional academic, which I am, obviously you need to be keeping records of every bit of data that is important. If you miss a bit, ok. We are all human. But not having anything to hand when people ask suggests poor standards in itself.
I was thinking it mostly seemed like lazy journalism… because I’m not saying that some dummy writing human interest stories has to investigate every claim like an investigator, but surely if someone says they did something so incredible, one might corroborate the facts in a very basic way.
Even if some claims end up being substantiated, nobody will admit it. They'll double down. And I say this as someone becoming increasingly skeptical that Arday wasn't on some weird Intelligence payroll and could have faked his own death/never really existed
You are ranting a bit Jesse about the guardian, so you know. I agree it is completely unreasonable.
Re the marathons most of the receipts are secondary sources - this doesn't count as source in journalism. It appears he ran some of them, while making strange claims about others (“15 workers left their site to run with me for a few kms”, “I start at 3 today because I was invited to my boss’ wedding afterwards”). His blog also show a very strong appetite for media appearance's and a genuine talent for personal branding.
Most lies are anchored in reality and I think there is a kernel of truth in everything Arday said (selective mutism becomes non verbal autism, leanring disabilities become developmental delays etc.). It’s very easy for people who are still engrossed by his stories to continue on the same path.
I feel so sad about his children who will have to struggle with this terrible loss and probably one day come to terms with the paternal legend. I really hope the media leave his family alone, and I hope no well meaning idiot push them towards the media to defend Arday's memory.
He didn't enter marathon races, where time and completion are tracked. He said he ran marathons, unverified by any third party.
Such wonderful, soothing opening music…..