Arday's quote from the 2023 Guardian interview that challenged him on some of his achievements, Arday replied "To be honest with you, I thought you'd just believe me. Why would I lie?"
This sounds to me like it was all these institutions were the ones pushing this fame more than Arday himself, as many of Arday's "supporters" are now hastily removing their names from a letter supporting him- a very self-serving action. I've read that Arday is a pleasant person. It would be nice if he had some real friends on his side to help him, the individual, not the icon he became.
I hope he has. He is not the Messiah, just a very naughty boy. It should not be allowed to ruin his life. As he said, he has not murdered anyone. But indirectly he may have done harm to whistleblowers and his critics. He is probably “more sinned against than sinning”. I hope fate will be kinder to him than it was to Lear.
Yet another “isolated” case that should surprise no one. History repeats itself so often that somewhere there must be a form to fill out with a name (which does not even have to be the real one), fabricated qualifications, as well as virtues and heroic deeds. There must also be a large field for listing victimhood claims and the corresponding aggressive reactions justified by “inequality.” I foresee an infestation of this profile in the academic world (a shortcut to becoming an authority on anything), because now, with AI, there is no longer even any need to plagiarize anyone. And I will go further: universities will BAN the use of software that identifies the use of AI, so as not to expose wrongdoers to embarrassing situations.
I think AI may actually bring about the end of plagiarism, at least in the traditional sense. If anyone can ask an AI to generate an original argument or explanation tailored to a prompt, there’s much less incentive to copy someone else’s work word for word.
I also think we’re headed toward a point where AI-assisted writing becomes widely accepted, much like calculators did for math. That has some interesting consequences. People who struggle to write coherent or well-reasoned arguments will suddenly be able to produce polished, persuasive work with very little effort. AI won’t make them experts, but it will dramatically raise the quality of what they’re able to produce. We are lucky that the golden era of DEI / CRT passed and was largely discredited before LLMs became this good.
I think there are ways in which that can be ethical and effective and ways in which it cannot. Yet. It won’t let me link a note where I went into this!
Unfortunately, we are not out of the woods yet when it comes to DEI /CRT permeating our educational institutions. It looks like DEI /CRT has a very long half life and will be with us for many more years. Increasing number of males in US high schools are being permitted to participate in female sports competitions by simply claiming to be female. They do so under the ideological banner of "inclusion". Even more seriously, there are many hundreds of males who are incarcerated in the prisons which are supposed to be for females, and many of these males are serving prison sentences after having been convicted of murder, rape and other violent crimes perpetrated against girls and women.
As I understand things, here in California—which is an outlier in the United States—we hold about 100,000 people in our prisons and jails, of whom about 2500 say they are transgender, non-binary, or intersex (of all types), of whom about 1000 have requested to be transferred to women’s prisons, of whom 50 have been transferred, of whom one—Tremaine Carroll—was transferred to Chowchilla State Women's Prison, raped two women inmates, and then was transferred back to Salinas Valley State Men's Prison.
One transwoman in California—Carmen Guerrero—was strangled to death by her cellmate Miguel Crespo at Kern Valley State Men's Prison back in 2013.
In California's prisons, about 4% of inmates report having been raped. About 40% of transwomen inmates report having been raped.
Yes. We here in the state of California are doing an awful job here. Given how much money we spend on our prisons we should be doing a much better job of providing safety and security and humanity. And the reason we are not doing so is because we are, at least by the preferences we reveal in the systems we construct, pay for, and maintain, collectively a bunch of assholes. Along many different dimensions, one of which is transferring Tremaine Carroll to Chowchilla State Women's Prison
But, Holly—the people who have convinced you that "many hundreds of males who are incarcerated in the prisons which are supposed to be for females, and many of these males are serving prison sentences after having been convicted of murder, rape and other violent crimes perpetrated against girls and women" appear to me to be highly likely to be lying to you, and to not wish you well—they want your attention, your money, and your votes for reasons of their own that are malevolent ones. I would advise you to think hard about who is lying to you, and why.
Hope you and yours are well, or, rather, as well as one can be in a world in which while one may well be, personally, quite comfortable, we live in a world in which no man is an island.
Arday is a con man of a common type, who has appeared throughout history, and today can be found on both sides of the political spectrum. It works not because of CRT or DEI, but because every one, left to right, is vulnerable to confirmation bias. George Santos played this con to become a Republican congressman. Islamophobes are especially vulnerable to people of color who are willing to make up horror stories about life as a Muslim. The most prominent of these is Ayaan Hirsi Ali, who continues to have ties with top conservative think tanks and command high speaking fees, despite have having been exposed as a fraud over a decade ago.
She claims she brought "personal experience to the table in addition to. . . scholarly expertise." Unfortunately, her so-called scholarly expertise is of the Bill O'Reilly variety i.e. she makes up facts whenever she needs them. Her stories of ill treatment are not personal experiences, but were completely fabricated.
Her version: She fled civil war in Somalia. She was forced into an arranged marriage with a man she had never met, and she was not present at her own wedding. When she fled the marriage, she was forced to go into hiding in Holland, because her father brothers and ex-husband would have been required by Somali custom to perform an honor killing.
The facts, as confirmed by several witnesses in this Dutch Documentary: She left Somalia before there was any violence, and lived a comfortable middle class existence in Kenya. She attended a Muslim Girl's school in Kenya, where she received a full western style education in the Humanities and Sciences. Her brother attended a Christian school. She lied to the Dutch immigration service about coming from Somalia so they wouldn't send her back to Kenya. She met her husband a few days before her wedding. After several meetings with him, she agreed to the marriage, even though her mother said Ayaan should finish her education so she could afford to leave him if things didn't work out. She was present at the wedding, and according to several witnesses appeared to be enjoying herself.
A week after the wedding, her husband gave her money for a plane ticket to Canada, so she could join him there. She took the money and went to Holland instead. During her stay in Holland she regularly received letters from her father, and was visited there by her ex-husband. He tried to persuade her to come back with him, but when she refused he granted her a divorce.
There is no tradition of honor killing in Somalia. This custom exists in Arabia, Turkey, parts of Africa, and Pakistan, among both Muslims and non-Muslims, but not in Somalia. The Koran has several passages that forbid anyone from killing their own daughters.
Thank you Helen for such a painstaking and lucid appraisal. I have commented elsewhere on Substack in response to an earlier post of yours before I read this latest one of yours. I have also watched today a video of Professor Andrews with his customary hyperbole complaining about Birmingham’s axeing of his Black Studies department. I have not heard the University’s side but my initial reaction is that he should be challenged about his theories and not cancelled.
Always. He is a deeply unpleasant character and a bully. He tried to sink Tom Owolade’s book by lying about it and twisting it and causing a pile-on. Appalling behaviour from a senior black academic to a very young (but brilliant) black writer. Fortunately Tom seemed to deal with this just fine, but I was worried he could have been badly intimidated by that. I’m hoping Tom will become an influential voice on race issues and I think Andrew’s feared it.
You don’t understand the reason Cambridge hired Arday. They KNEW he was a fool. That is the whole point of why they hired him. They specifically WANTED a clown and a fake and a fraud. Blacks may be underrepresented in elite academia, but obviously Cambridge could have found a smart black scholar worth having. But what is the point of doing that?
If you hire a smart and thoughtful black scholar that might, at least partly, be due to the fact that the person is good. There is no virtue in that. But if you hire a black buffoon and go through a thoroughly unconvincing pretense that you think the guy is brilliant, that is PROOF of your antiracist virtue.
Nobody is more racist and has more profound contempt for blacks than some of the white DEI people. It is frankly disgusting.
I strongly sensed that at least one use of the phrase ‘the soft bigotry of low expectations’ was imminent throughout my reading of this piece and had almost given up hope until just before the end. Thank you for providing me with the lived experience to now claim that I have the power to foresee the future.
Arday's quote from the 2023 Guardian interview that challenged him on some of his achievements, Arday replied "To be honest with you, I thought you'd just believe me. Why would I lie?"
This sounds to me like it was all these institutions were the ones pushing this fame more than Arday himself, as many of Arday's "supporters" are now hastily removing their names from a letter supporting him- a very self-serving action. I've read that Arday is a pleasant person. It would be nice if he had some real friends on his side to help him, the individual, not the icon he became.
I hope he has. He is not the Messiah, just a very naughty boy. It should not be allowed to ruin his life. As he said, he has not murdered anyone. But indirectly he may have done harm to whistleblowers and his critics. He is probably “more sinned against than sinning”. I hope fate will be kinder to him than it was to Lear.
Yet another “isolated” case that should surprise no one. History repeats itself so often that somewhere there must be a form to fill out with a name (which does not even have to be the real one), fabricated qualifications, as well as virtues and heroic deeds. There must also be a large field for listing victimhood claims and the corresponding aggressive reactions justified by “inequality.” I foresee an infestation of this profile in the academic world (a shortcut to becoming an authority on anything), because now, with AI, there is no longer even any need to plagiarize anyone. And I will go further: universities will BAN the use of software that identifies the use of AI, so as not to expose wrongdoers to embarrassing situations.
I think AI may actually bring about the end of plagiarism, at least in the traditional sense. If anyone can ask an AI to generate an original argument or explanation tailored to a prompt, there’s much less incentive to copy someone else’s work word for word.
I also think we’re headed toward a point where AI-assisted writing becomes widely accepted, much like calculators did for math. That has some interesting consequences. People who struggle to write coherent or well-reasoned arguments will suddenly be able to produce polished, persuasive work with very little effort. AI won’t make them experts, but it will dramatically raise the quality of what they’re able to produce. We are lucky that the golden era of DEI / CRT passed and was largely discredited before LLMs became this good.
I think there are ways in which that can be ethical and effective and ways in which it cannot. Yet. It won’t let me link a note where I went into this!
Unfortunately, we are not out of the woods yet when it comes to DEI /CRT permeating our educational institutions. It looks like DEI /CRT has a very long half life and will be with us for many more years. Increasing number of males in US high schools are being permitted to participate in female sports competitions by simply claiming to be female. They do so under the ideological banner of "inclusion". Even more seriously, there are many hundreds of males who are incarcerated in the prisons which are supposed to be for females, and many of these males are serving prison sentences after having been convicted of murder, rape and other violent crimes perpetrated against girls and women.
As I understand things, here in California—which is an outlier in the United States—we hold about 100,000 people in our prisons and jails, of whom about 2500 say they are transgender, non-binary, or intersex (of all types), of whom about 1000 have requested to be transferred to women’s prisons, of whom 50 have been transferred, of whom one—Tremaine Carroll—was transferred to Chowchilla State Women's Prison, raped two women inmates, and then was transferred back to Salinas Valley State Men's Prison.
One transwoman in California—Carmen Guerrero—was strangled to death by her cellmate Miguel Crespo at Kern Valley State Men's Prison back in 2013.
In California's prisons, about 4% of inmates report having been raped. About 40% of transwomen inmates report having been raped.
Yes. We here in the state of California are doing an awful job here. Given how much money we spend on our prisons we should be doing a much better job of providing safety and security and humanity. And the reason we are not doing so is because we are, at least by the preferences we reveal in the systems we construct, pay for, and maintain, collectively a bunch of assholes. Along many different dimensions, one of which is transferring Tremaine Carroll to Chowchilla State Women's Prison
But, Holly—the people who have convinced you that "many hundreds of males who are incarcerated in the prisons which are supposed to be for females, and many of these males are serving prison sentences after having been convicted of murder, rape and other violent crimes perpetrated against girls and women" appear to me to be highly likely to be lying to you, and to not wish you well—they want your attention, your money, and your votes for reasons of their own that are malevolent ones. I would advise you to think hard about who is lying to you, and why.
Hope you and yours are well, or, rather, as well as one can be in a world in which while one may well be, personally, quite comfortable, we live in a world in which no man is an island.
Yours, J. Bradford DeLong
Arday is a con man of a common type, who has appeared throughout history, and today can be found on both sides of the political spectrum. It works not because of CRT or DEI, but because every one, left to right, is vulnerable to confirmation bias. George Santos played this con to become a Republican congressman. Islamophobes are especially vulnerable to people of color who are willing to make up horror stories about life as a Muslim. The most prominent of these is Ayaan Hirsi Ali, who continues to have ties with top conservative think tanks and command high speaking fees, despite have having been exposed as a fraud over a decade ago.
She claims she brought "personal experience to the table in addition to. . . scholarly expertise." Unfortunately, her so-called scholarly expertise is of the Bill O'Reilly variety i.e. she makes up facts whenever she needs them. Her stories of ill treatment are not personal experiences, but were completely fabricated.
Her version: She fled civil war in Somalia. She was forced into an arranged marriage with a man she had never met, and she was not present at her own wedding. When she fled the marriage, she was forced to go into hiding in Holland, because her father brothers and ex-husband would have been required by Somali custom to perform an honor killing.
The facts, as confirmed by several witnesses in this Dutch Documentary: She left Somalia before there was any violence, and lived a comfortable middle class existence in Kenya. She attended a Muslim Girl's school in Kenya, where she received a full western style education in the Humanities and Sciences. Her brother attended a Christian school. She lied to the Dutch immigration service about coming from Somalia so they wouldn't send her back to Kenya. She met her husband a few days before her wedding. After several meetings with him, she agreed to the marriage, even though her mother said Ayaan should finish her education so she could afford to leave him if things didn't work out. She was present at the wedding, and according to several witnesses appeared to be enjoying herself.
A week after the wedding, her husband gave her money for a plane ticket to Canada, so she could join him there. She took the money and went to Holland instead. During her stay in Holland she regularly received letters from her father, and was visited there by her ex-husband. He tried to persuade her to come back with him, but when she refused he granted her a divorce.
There is no tradition of honor killing in Somalia. This custom exists in Arabia, Turkey, parts of Africa, and Pakistan, among both Muslims and non-Muslims, but not in Somalia. The Koran has several passages that forbid anyone from killing their own daughters.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ho3BpnpAagQ
Thank you Helen for such a painstaking and lucid appraisal. I have commented elsewhere on Substack in response to an earlier post of yours before I read this latest one of yours. I have also watched today a video of Professor Andrews with his customary hyperbole complaining about Birmingham’s axeing of his Black Studies department. I have not heard the University’s side but my initial reaction is that he should be challenged about his theories and not cancelled.
Always. He is a deeply unpleasant character and a bully. He tried to sink Tom Owolade’s book by lying about it and twisting it and causing a pile-on. Appalling behaviour from a senior black academic to a very young (but brilliant) black writer. Fortunately Tom seemed to deal with this just fine, but I was worried he could have been badly intimidated by that. I’m hoping Tom will become an influential voice on race issues and I think Andrew’s feared it.
You don’t understand the reason Cambridge hired Arday. They KNEW he was a fool. That is the whole point of why they hired him. They specifically WANTED a clown and a fake and a fraud. Blacks may be underrepresented in elite academia, but obviously Cambridge could have found a smart black scholar worth having. But what is the point of doing that?
If you hire a smart and thoughtful black scholar that might, at least partly, be due to the fact that the person is good. There is no virtue in that. But if you hire a black buffoon and go through a thoroughly unconvincing pretense that you think the guy is brilliant, that is PROOF of your antiracist virtue.
Nobody is more racist and has more profound contempt for blacks than some of the white DEI people. It is frankly disgusting.
That's a very interesting fairy tale. Any evidence for it?
Lol. Some people are blind to obvious truths, not because they can’t see, but because they choose not to.
Very woke reasoning you have there.
I strongly sensed that at least one use of the phrase ‘the soft bigotry of low expectations’ was imminent throughout my reading of this piece and had almost given up hope until just before the end. Thank you for providing me with the lived experience to now claim that I have the power to foresee the future.