Mascots of The Anointed - This Story Isn't Going Away

Last week we discussed events around the downfall of Jason Arday, a Mascot of The Anointed (to borrow an idea from Thomas Sowell). Why does this story continue to grow beyond the former Cambridge professor? Excerpts from an interesting essay for your weekend, from before Arday's death:

". . .even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course
Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky"

(From: Musee des Beaux Arts by W.H. Auden)

It's over for Professor Jason Arday. The final shiv - et tu, Brute? - coming, somewhat surprisingly, by way of this excellent piece of reporting by Lanre Bakara in The Guardian. The article's last paragraph or, to use the literary term of art, 'the kicker', is a doozy:

In a recent interview to promote the memoir, Arday spoke about feeling like Icarus when he came under scrutiny after joining Cambridge. "I always wanted to be a person who flew close to the sun," he said. "But sometimes I wonder: did I fly too close?"

Well, yes, Jason, you did, rather: indeed, that's the whole point of the tale of Daedalus & Icarus: it's a warning about something the Ancient Greeks, no mean people, called hubris.

A lot of commentators here have mentioned what a film this saga might make, and it's true. It's even got elements of Morse - the Inspector, not the Code - only in the other place.

This is followed by detailed descriptions of distortions of the truth by Arday and academics around him. And this:

The leftist press starts to break with the far left

Why is most of even the leftist press being relatively honest about his dishonesty, separating themselves from the activist far left? Does this mean that the leftist press has noticed that their formative institutions are destroying themselves and that most of the press is not ready to see those institutions disappear?

The Atlantic didn't pull its punches:

The Atlantic reads Jason Arday's memoir, and finds his life story was even more inspirational than we thought He was beaten so badly as a teen he became an epileptic. When the boys who did this were caught, he magnanimously told the judge he didn't want them to go to prison. "By the time Arday started on his master's degree, he writes, he was reading at about the same level as his 3-year-old daughter."

You complain you can't get a girlfriend. Chad Arday was going through college illiterate, had his girlfriend write out his applications, and managed to father a child. He then got a teaching job. But he didn't have money, so he started working at a supermarket from 11 PM to 5AM, then a cleaner from 5:30 AM to 7:30 AM.

Remember the guys who beat him up? It turns out that two of the muggers ended up being his students. They were so moved by his compassion, that they'd turned their lives around and were now helping at risk youth. As his dissertation approached, Arday got a brain tumor and lost his memory. "More troubles follow in the years ahead: Arday’s brain tumor returns; he splits up with his wife; he suffers autistic burnout during the coronavirus pandemic and can’t get out of bed. He decides to kill himself by jumping off a bridge, but at the very last minute, he listens to his favorite song."

The author of the piece writes: "I reached out to the book’s fact-checker to ask whether this and several other stories from the book had been verified, but she did not respond." The Atlantic also got its hands on his book proposal. There are even more incredible stories in it. As a teenager, Arday got hit by a car and went into a coma. The doctor told his parents to pull the plug, but he refused. There's also a bout of testicular cancer that shows up in the proposal but is not in the book. I guess there wasn't enough room for all of that given all of the other amazing stories in his life. Oh, and the book isn't being pulled. Simon & Schuster are still going to publish it next week. The haters are just one more obstacle Arday has overcome.

But the lefty press lionized him before exposing him:

The @BBCNews says Jason Arday's death will send shockwaves through universities. It should send shockwaves through the media and the BBC. They promoted him, spread his misinformation, and are to blame for his rise and fall. They must be held accountable.

Lefty view: Exposure of Arday should have been a right-wing only project.

Imagine trying to protect the public from truthful speech. These laws exist! They're common across Indonesia, UAE, Malaysia, etc, often targeted at protecting government officials and entities. But sane people know how ridiculous it is

A non-leftist American observes the over-the-top emotional responses at a memorial for Arday. The press killed him, etc.:

Am I going crazy?

He literally made up five of his top ten papers. He said he was the 2nd best distance runner of all time! He said he was on a top-10 British documentary that aired 28 (?) years before he could have been!!!

Wot are we doing here?

What made Arday special?

A medical condition?

Pseudologia fantastica

Powerful & fascinating take: the psychiatrist & writer Dr @MaxPemberton
looks at Jason Arday...

Cambridge had time to handle this quietly before the scandal blew up.

Jason Arday epitomises a major opstacle in Britain's quest for the freedom of speech: In this excerpt from the UCL 'BAME Awarding Gap Keynote Lecture, 2021' Jason Arday discusses why speech and language must not just be limited, but "corrected" because we live in a "hyper diverse multicultural society". Accidentally, he concedes that such a society requires such delicate navigation that it can no longer be permitted to speak freely, and naturally, requires men like Arday to determine those limits. The Jason Arday affair, demonstrates that race science remains an area of academic study at Oxbridge and beyond.

Do people who have a compulsion to lie deserve protection from the press?

It's not like Jason Arday was was genius scam artist, articulate and able to fool the finest minds. No, he's a literal moron that no one dared challenge due to DEI. You could find diverse yoof saying this in a Year 10 history class.

How did academia promote Arday?

I studied in Jason Arday's department at Cambridge. Here's the crap I was taught. Like native tribesmen cah fly through the trees.

Ed Driscoll makes a 1984 comparison. It's a good one.

Jason Arday was never trained as a sociologist. Jason Arday has no degree, no Master’s and no PhD in Sociology. None. Zero. His entire formal academic training is in Education and Physical Education: BA in Education Studies and Physical Education MA in Education and Pedagogy A second Master’s in Education PhD in Education — specifically on peer-mentoring among student teachers training to become PE teachers That is a doctorate in physical-education teacher training. It is not sociology. It contains no sociological theory, no sociological methods, and no sustained engagement with the core literature of the discipline. Yet within a few years the same man was: Appointed Associate Professor in the Department of Sociology at Durham Put in front of students teaching modules called Sociology of Education and Societies in Transition Then made Professor of the Sociology of Education at Glasgow Then made Professor of the Sociology of Education at Cambridge Students were paying close to ten thousand pounds a year. Some of that money was buying teaching and supervision from a man whose highest qualification in the subject he was employed to profess was nothing. He had never studied sociology as an undergraduate, never taken a Master’s in it, and never written a doctoral thesis in it. The word “Sociology” appeared only in the job title. Institutions simply accepted the re-description. A PE-and-education academic was re-labelled a sociologist and students were charged elite university fees to be taught by him. That is not an academic career progression. That is a category error that successive universities chose not to notice. My mind has been blown by this revelation. No wonder his students report him leaning on desks talking about celebrities and inequality! He appears to have known absolutely nothing about the subject he was teaching!

The cruelty of the people who knew he was lying

The Wiki for his PhD supervisor, Phil Vickerman, was under review for deletion, Aug 18 - 22. His supervision of Arday's thesis (on peer student teacher mentoring in physical education) was reportedly entirely by phone and text.

But they told him he was the "best in the world".

Weekend

The Dog Days of Summer

Hope you have something nice planned for this weekend.

This is the Thread before the Gardening Thread.

Last week's thread, August 15, Mascots of the Anointed

Comments are closed so you won't ban yourself by trying to comment on a week-old thread. But don't try it anyway.

UPDATE on our Founder of the Week:

In his last known letter, Samuel Adams wrote to Thomas Paine in October 1802: "Do you think that your pen, or the pen of any other man, can un-Christianize the mass of our citizens, or have you hopes of converting a few of them to assist you in so bad a cause?"