The painting below by Paul Cézanne demands our consideration. It cannot be passively observed. The glassy patch of water in the lower right-hand corner is where the painting – “Reflections in the Water” – gets its name. Our eyes are naturally drawn to the thick tree on the bank whose ghost is captured on the surface of the pond where the foliage gives way, but really it is the slim sapling, unreflected, unbroken, rising boldly along the canvas’s left edge, that is the true subject of this piece. It is a triumph of subtlety and nerve.
Except that I’m wrong. I’ve been looking at the painting on its side and forming a completely inaccurate impression. Oh well. I’m probably not the first. There is an unconfirmed story that this painting by Cézanne was hung sideways for thirty-one years in London’s National Gallery. The origin of this gossip is from the economist Oswald Toynbee Falk (1879–1972), who lays the blame at the feet of one of its trustees, John Hugh Smith, exactly the kind of person who would in those days have had a hand in such decisions. I can find no corroboration of the story, but I do hope it’s true.
Of course, an establishment as prestigious as the National Gallery would be unlikely to admit to such a galloping blunder. And anyway, as I’ve said, the sideways version has much to recommend it. If there’s a moral to this story, it’s surely that once we commit to an error of thinking for too long it can be mortifying to correct ourselves, particularly if public humiliation is to be the outcome.
It strikes me that the culture war is largely characterised by groups of intelligent people investing in delusional ideas with such gusto that to backtrack would be a kind of social death. One might sooner teach a mule to moonwalk than persuade a celebrity who has championed gender identity ideology to admit that human beings cannot change sex. After demonising women for insisting on single-sex spaces, making excuses for the medicalisation of healthy children, and encouraging the dismantling of gay rights – all in the name of progress – it must be tremendously difficult to admit that it was all for nothing.
For many, the response to being corrected is simply to deny there was any mistake at all and to double down. This is certainly the position of the Green Party, whose representatives are now wholeheartedly wedded to the absurd proposition that human beings have an innate gendered soul that can be misaligned from their body. Their supporters are even congratulating them for their doggedness in the face of reason and evidence, so there is no incentive to course-correct.
Andrew Doyle, “The art of admitting our mistakes” ($), Andrew Doyle, 2026-05-08.
August 12, 2026
QotD: The art of admitting our mistakes
August 11, 2026
The surging Democratic Socialists of America
J.D. Tuccille on the unlikely rise of the DSA faction within the Democratic party in time for the 2026 midterm elections:
Abdul El-Sayed’s victory in the Michigan Democratic Senate primary battle is only the latest by candidates affiliated with or adjacent to the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA). Unlike many of the openly socialist officeholders and political hopefuls gaining traction in the Democratic Party, El-Sayed claims to be a capitalist, but his positions are indistinguishable from those of the left-wing figures he campaigns with, such as Sen. Bernie Sanders (I–Vt.), Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D–N.Y.), and podcaster Hasan Piker, who has aligned himself with both the Chinese government and Hamas.
As democratic socialists in general and the DSA in particular take over the Democratic Party, it’s worth examining the positions they take, the enemies they pick, and who supports them to see what they have in store for us as they seek to remake the country.
Young, Credentialed, and Unhappy Recruits
At a time when trust in higher education is sliding among Americans, the socialist surge is largely a project of young college graduates. El-Sayed “eked out his victory by winning young voters and highly educated voters”, finds a Washington Post analysis. That squares with a June Pew Research report that “Democrats who are White, younger or college-educated are more likely to view democratic socialists positively”. Credentialed but relatively low-income people make up the core of DSA recruitment.
Political analyst Nate Silver writes that “the sweet spot for the DSA” is “voters with postgraduate degrees but lower-to-middle household incomes of $30K to $60K per year”. Silver adds that “only 19 percent of Americans with bachelor’s degrees or higher had household incomes of $60K or below. The DSA rate is around twice that.” He puts this in the context of Peter Turchin’s elite overproduction hypothesis which argues that the country’s universities crank out too many credentialed graduates, with student loan debt attached to not-so-useful degrees, to be absorbed into the prestigious positions they believe they’re entitled to. The result is disillusionment and a search for somebody or something to blame.
That blame is falling on capitalism, American and western civilization in general, and Israel and Jews (the line between the people and the only majority-Jewish nation is inherently fuzzy, and “antizionism” has become a cover for bigotry the way the pseudoscientific term “antisemitism” repackaged old-fashioned Jew-hatred in the 19th century).
[…]
Socialists Revive Ancient Bigotry
DSA-aligned figures are not especially fond of the United States and its allies. It’s not difficult to find comments like New York socialist congressional candidate Darializa Avila Chevalier’s quip: “I forgot to get napkins so I just wiped my hand on the American flag behind me”. But as a group, they especially despise the world’s only majority-Jewish state.
Michigan’s El-Sayed says he believes the Israeli government is as evil as the terrorist group Hamas, which launched the October 7 attacks, and calls it guilty of “apartheid” and “genocide”. The DSA last year adopted a resolution denouncing Zionism (the belief that Jews have the right to establish and maintain Israel) as “a racist, imperialist, settler-colonial project” and made belief that “Israel has a right to defend itself” an offense punishable by expulsion from the organization. Hasan Piker claimed and repeated that Hamas is “a thousand times better” than Israel. Colorado congressional candidate Melat Kiros declined to label as antisemitic a deadly firebombing attack on a Jewish rally in Boulder.
“Some people did some things” during the pandemic, let’s move on …
I noted a little while back that I was astonished how quickly the “Spanish Flu” epidemic slipped out of the historical record in the early 1920s, but having gone through the Wuhan Flu experience, I understood it far better. In the Spanish Flu era, the survivors needed to move on with their lives, while in the Covid era, a lot of people wanted to forget how they’d treated their friends, co-workers, and fellow citizens. Different motivations, but similar results. But we shouldn’t let the Covid years slip gently out of memory, because people in positions of power and journalists who should have reported honestly all elected to go full authoritarian and need to be held to account for it, as L. Wayne Mathison explains:
This was never just an American problem, and it was never just about Anthony Fauci.
Canada had its own version of the same institutional failure.
During COVID, too many journalists stopped asking hard questions and started treating government public-health messaging as settled truth. Canadians who questioned lockdowns, mandates, school closures, travel restrictions or changing mask guidance were often dismissed as ignorant, selfish, dangerous or conspiratorial.
Some people certainly did spread nonsense. That does not excuse treating every dissenting argument as misinformation.
Good journalism is supposed to challenge power, especially during an emergency when governments are exercising extraordinary power over ordinary citizens.
Instead, much of our media became emotionally invested in defending the institutions it should have been scrutinizing.
That creates a serious problem now. Admitting that governments, public-health officials or journalists got important things wrong means admitting that people were sometimes mocked, censored or socially punished for raising questions that deserved answers.
So the temptation is to defend the old narrative rather than examine the record honestly.
Canada needs a proper accounting of the pandemic response. What worked? What failed? Which restrictions produced enough benefit to justify their cost? What happened to children, small businesses, mental health, civil liberties and public trust? Where did officials communicate uncertainty honestly, and where did they pretend to know more than they actually knew?
I followed the rules. I got vaccinated. I took COVID seriously.
But I will never accept the idea that taking a virus seriously required switching off critical thought.
Science improves through questioning. Journalism exists to question authority. Democracy requires governments to justify extraordinary powers.
We should have demanded all three.
QotD: The long lead-up to the invasion of Iraq
There’s a story that the Bush administration came into office in 2001 itching to get rid of Saddam Hussein and looking around for a pretext. Near as I can tell, this is totally false — actually, the entire US government had been looking for a pretext since at least a decade earlier than that. It all goes back to 1990 and the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait. Prior to that, Iraq was an American ally and proxy that helped contain the revolutionary regime in Iran. That relationship gave Saddam a long leash and meant he could get away with a tremendous amount. But the leash was not as long as Saddam thought, and he badly overstepped his limits when a diplomatic fight with Kuwait over the terms of some war loans escalated into a military confrontation. Improvisational decision-making was not out of character for Saddam, who had a tendency to do things like go alone into one of his many palaces and emerge wild-eyed the next day declaring that he had a prophetic dream which would henceforth guide state policy. But this time he got into some real trouble.
The Americans kicked Iraq out of Kuwait quickly and easily, and then … hesitated about what to do next. Nobody wanted to keep Saddam around (remarkably, when you have outlived your usefulness, people suddenly start to notice all of your human rights abuses), but nobody wanted to march into Baghdad and topple him either. There was some wishful thinking that the Kuwait defeat would cause Saddam’s regime to collapse, but most US foreign policy thinkers just shrugged their shoulders and figured better Saddam than chaos and a Vietnam-style quagmire. One especially perceptive official put it this way to a PBS journalist:
I felt there was a real danger here that you could get bogged down in a long drawn out conflict … and then you’ve got to worry about what comes after. And then you have to accept the responsibility for what happens in Iraq, accept more responsibility for what happens in the region. It would have been an all-US operation, I don’t think any of our allies would have been with us, maybe Britain, but nobody else. And you’re going to take a lot more American casualties if you’re gonna go much around in Iraq for weeks on end trying to run Saddam Hussein to ground and capture Baghdad and so forth and I don’t think it would have been worth it.
That official’s name was Dick Cheney.
So Saddam was left in place, and throughout the ’90s American policymakers seethed about it. There was no official policy that said we were going to overthrow him, but prominent politicians like Al Gore were out there writing op-eds saying that Saddam must be toppled and his government dismantled. This produced what Mazarr calls “destructive ambiguity” — everybody knew that everybody else knew that the real policy was to get rid of the guy, but since this was an unofficial position it went through none of the usual policymaking channels and was never formally debated. It also left a lot of room for freelancing.
For example, CIA clandestine operative Bob Baer (whose memoir is a terrifically fun read, by the way) began organizing a coup in 1995, not because he was directly ordered to do so but because he thought it was what his supervisors wanted. Even the strategy of the coup points towards this ambiguity — rather than straightforwardly overthrowing the government, it aimed to spark a rebellion that would gain some momentum but not enough to win, so that when Saddam moved to crush it the US would be pulled in and forced to act.1 Think for a moment about what an odd plan this is, and how it only makes sense if you believe the US secretly wants to invade while officially pretending not to.
The leader of this rebellion was supposed to be Ahmed Chalabi, one of the more fascinating characters in this story. Chalabi was a dapper, cosmopolitan, and erudite bank manager who got exiled from Iraq for gross financial corruption. He promptly reinvented himself as a freedom fighter, rented beautiful houses stocked with fine art in several major cities, and set about ingratiating himself with Western elites. He also began organizing his fellow emigrés and exiles into an effective political lobbying force. Unsurprisingly given his educated and aristocratic manner, he was extremely good at the lobbying part, and soon placed a special focus on the United States, wining and dining congressmen and writing op-eds for major newspapers. Soon he managed to convince the CIA that there were thousands of resistance fighters back in Iraq ready to follow him into battle.
He was good at convincing, but they also wanted to be convinced. Chalabi and his fellow emigrés were charming, cultured, westernized intellectuals who at least pretended to be pro-democracy. It was oh-so-tempting to believe that everybody in Iraq was like that, when in fact they were completely unrepresentative. As a rule of thumb, when a country has a revolution or a civil war or other social breakdown, the ones who make it out are the ones bright enough to see it coming and rich or well-connected enough to escape. Whether it’s the Russian Revolution, the Lebanese Civil War, or whatever you call what’s happening in South Africa, the people who leave are not a random subset — they’re the creme-de-la-creme. Unfortunately the US government somehow couldn’t figure this out in the case of Iraq. They met the emigrés, and were impressed by them, and decided that Iraq really was a civilized and cosmopolitan place under the surface, when in fact the society that created the emigrés had been destroyed decades earlier.
The emigrés represent one pole of the Baptists-and-bootleggers coalition that emerged in the ’90s to advocate for the overthrow of Saddam’s regime. The other is exemplified by Paul Wolfowitz, a soft-spoken academic who bounced between senior government positions and jobs at think tanks. Wolfowitz was a humanitarian in the most sincere sense. Much of his extended family had been killed in the Holocaust. The plight of oppressed peoples was not an abstraction for him, and he dedicated his life and career to the proposition that the United States should use all available means to end tyranny and oppression wherever they existed.
Wolfowitz is commonly described as a fanatical neoconservative, and he is, but I think it’s important to demystify that term. Too often it gets used as a catchall for “people we don’t like”, but at least when it comes to foreign policy the neoconservatives fit squarely within the American mainstream. With the notable exception of Donald Trump, every American president of the past few decades has had essentially the same foreign policy, driven by essentially the same core ideas: (1) Americans are the good guys, (2) it’s the job of the good guys to right wrongs wherever they are happening, (3) freedom and democracy are the non-negotiable inheritance of everybody on planet earth. These ideas drive the neoconservatives, yes, but they also drive Samantha Power and Susan Rice, not to mention Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama.
If you are an American, it may not be apparent to you how weird these ideas seem to the rest of the world. If I were to characterize how previous empires — and America’s current rivals — think about the world, it would be more like: (1) every country has core interests and peripheral interests, (2) you should not interfere in another country’s core interests if you can help it, (3) different peoples and cultures are adapted to different forms of government, and this diversity makes life spicy and interesting. Perhaps most shocking to Americans: most countries do not self-identify as “the good guys”, instead they think of themselves as a people with a history and a set of territorial claims.2
Mazarr describes this peculiar American quality as “the missionary impulse”, and notes that while it comes from a well-intentioned place, it “can produce a theological and absolutist conception of America’s responsibility as well as a romantic conviction that America can renovate other societies at will”. Or, to put it in blunter words, it makes us do insane things like invade and occupy a culturally alien country on the other side of the world, and stand there in blinkered incomprehension when people don’t like it. Perhaps the most damning thing about this missionary impulse is the way it provides a self-excusing justification for recklessness: since America is definitionally the good guys, all the horrible consequences of America’s dumb decisions must be somebody else’s fault, and anyway we meant well so you can’t really blame us.3 It’s like a speeding driver who hits and kills pedestrians over and over again, and when confronted gets huffy and points out he’s on his way to feed people at a soup kitchen.
Why is our national character like this? It’s one of those eternal questions. Maybe it’s because we were settled by various strains of fanatical Protestants, or because our ethnos was born during the Enlightenment, or some other “genetic” factor. Alternatively, it could be something about our historical development, or perhaps the large oceans that have always insulated us from most of the negative consequences of our decisions. Or maybe it’s just inevitable that whoever the current world empire is will feel this way, a consequence of our “unipolar moment”.4 Whatever the cause, it’s been a frequent source of misunderstanding between American and foreign diplomats, and few more so than Iraq’s.
The inability of the Iraqi regime, and of Saddam Hussein in particular, to “get” America or its motivations is a recurring bit of comic relief in Mazarr’s book, and one of the first big episodes of it occurs here in the mid ‘90s. This was the time when the Iraqis completely shut down their WMD programs and destroyed every trace of them. But even while halting their nuclear, chemical and biological weapons projects, they continued to loudly insist that they were operational. This appears to have been done out of fear that they would lose prestige if they admitted to backing down. Saddam also really wanted the Iranians to think that he still had chemical weapons out of fear that they’d invade if he didn’t, and he figured that US intelligence would obviously figure out that the programs had been stopped, so they didn’t have to come out and say it themselves.
I remember when I was a kid watching Dr. Strangelove, and laughing at the part where the Soviets built a doomsday device without telling anybody, completely defeating the purpose of having a doomsday device. Then I got older, and learned that no actually, in real life the Soviets built a doomsday device, and then didn’t tell anybody, because they apparently assumed that its psychological effect would be more powerful if America found out about it from its spies (naturally, we didn’t find out until after the Cold War was over). Saddam’s mistake was a weird inverse of this, destroying all his doomsday weapons and then just assuming we’d figure it out. I guess the moral of the story is that in real life, these too-clever-by-half schemes where you double-bluff your opponent are rarely worth it.5
Anyway, Saddam destroyed all of his WMD, and then kicked out the UN inspectors so as to maintain the charade that he still had them. At the same time that all of this was happening, the sanctions regime that the US had imposed was clearly falling apart. European and Asian businessmen were swarming all over Baghdad, trying to get things in place for when foreign investment inevitably flooded back into the country. All of this contributed to an ambient sense that something had to be done; the attempt to kick the can down the road was failing. By the late ’90s, the Clintons had already convinced themselves that a rematch with Saddam was inevitable, but they didn’t have time to act on it before their term was up and a new sheriff rolled into town.
John Psmith, “REVIEW: Leap of Faith, by Michael J. Mazarr”, Mr. and Mrs. Psmith’s Bookshelf, 2025-06-30.
- Yes, this was exactly Strelkov’s strategy in the Ukrainian civil war. And for similar reasons — the Russian government as an official body was dithering and indecisive, but a large faction within it wanted to act.
- My north star here is, as always, my former coworker from Bulgaria.
- Graham Greene did an exquisite job skewering this attitude in his novel The Quiet American. One character says of the titular American: “I never knew a man who had better motives for all the trouble he caused”.
- Did the Romans feel this way? Did the Chinese? I don’t actually know, but I think there’s something distinctive about the American imperial attitude. It really does come down to our belief that we’re bombing you for your own good (or overthrowing your government for your own good, or whatever). My sense is that past hegemons have been a bit more honest.
- Then again, Gaddafi did what Saddam arguably should have done, and look what that got him. I guess the real lesson is just not to make too much trouble until your nukes really work.
August 10, 2026
Clarkson’s Farm (and seven subsidiary businesses)
While I don’t watch much TV outside the NFL season, I was certainly aware of Jeremy Clarkson’s post-Top Gear/post-The Grand Tour TV show, I only started actually watching it earlier this week. And that was only because of a glowing review from The Critical Drinker. I’ve been missing a really good show, but I’ve got four-and-a-half seasons to catch up on — I’m not a binge watcher, so that’s not going to happen immediately. On the social media site formerly known as Twitter, Sama Hoole points out just how tenuous a farming business can be in England nowadays and how many other businesses Clarkson has started on his farm to try to make it profitable:
Jeremy Clarkson of Clarkson’s Farm.
Jeremy Clarkson runs at least eight businesses off a thousand acres in Oxfordshire. Seven of them make money.
Count them. A farm shop. A pub. A lager brand. A bestselling book every autumn. A streaming series. A merchandise range. And now an app, built by Lisa Hogan, connecting the public to farms.
Then the eighth. Growing food.
Year one, working the ground flat out: £144. By year six, a £5,000 loss where £37,000 had been projected. This summer, two hundred of those acres grew nothing at all, because putting wheat in them was a guaranteed loss before the drill left the shed.
Every enterprise on that farm turns a profit except the farming.
The lager tells you why, and the chain of cause is on the record. Government subsidies were falling, so in 2021 he decided to brew beer from his own barley. That is the entire origin of Hawkstone. A decision taken in Whitehall turned an arable farmer into a brewer, and the beer worked.
Nothing about the grain changed. Barley sold as barley goes at whatever the buyer offers that morning. Barley in a bottle goes at the price the man who grew it decides.
That one difference is the whole business.
The pub is the same move in bricks. A derelict barn nobody had wanted since 2013, bought for reportedly under a million, now with a queue. On the menu a sausage from his own pigs costs 74p against 18p for the imported version, and he absorbs that gap on every plate. The farm shop, meanwhile, is legally barred from selling food produced more than sixteen miles away, and still cannot keep up with demand.
Now look at what the farming has behind it that yours does not. One of the best land agents in England. A farm manager who has worked that ground since he was a teenager. An agronomist. A production company covering the costs. A queue down the lane. A name that sells anything it is printed on.
It loses money anyway.
And this is the ordinary arrangement, not an eccentric one. Defra’s own figures say 72 percent of farms in England now take income from something that is not farming, and diversification accounts for 31 percent of total farm income. The government’s own Batters Review found nearly a third of British farms were loss-making outright in 2024.
Diddly Squat is simply the loudest version. The shop subsidises the field. The pub subsidises the field. The television subsidises the field.
A thousand acres of English farmland, and the one thing it cannot do is pay for itself by producing food.
August 9, 2026
Hopefully the last word on “L’affaire Arday”
On her Substack, Helen Dale discusses the recently resigned Cambridge professor Jason Arday, the people who positioned him to fail, and what their motivations were in doing so:
Arday’s arrival to take up his professorship at Cambridge was recorded by at least two BBC cameras. Here he is talking to Hilary Cremin, head of the Faculty of Education at Cambridge.
Sometimes both institutions and people pick up a firearm and blow both feet off.
Cambridge University has done so with its gross mismanagement of the Jason Arday affair.
Oceans of ink have been spilt already on this issue, so I’m not going to relitigate the main background. Instead, I want to make four observations, in no particular order.
1. Oh, the humanities (and social sciences)
The problems across these two large disciplinary areas long predate the idiotic wokery that got Jason Arday appointed to a professorial chair at Britain’s second oldest, second most famous university. Yes, wokery has made them worse, chiefly because the theoretical frameworks animating it — which Lorenzo Warby has written about both here and at his own place — deny the possibility of truth outside that of personal experience. This means people don’t just get their own opinions, they also get their own facts.
[…]
2. Nathan Cofnas is not racist
There are two distinct things going on in the background to the Arday appointment(s). The first is that he was appointed despite being a complete doofus and as dumb as a stump. The second is that while there probably are black candidates out there qualified to be a Cambridge professor, there won’t be many, and they are highly unlikely to be the descendants of slaves (from the Caribbean, the United States, or South America). They’re much more likely to be from a posh Nigerian background, and a particular Nigerian tribe (Igbo).
In the words of computer scientist Eric S. Raymond:
This is completely predictable to anyone who has spent 10 minutes reviewing the data on racial differences in mean IQ and knows what that implies for the right end of the bell curve.
The intersection set of people with predominantly sub-Saharan African ancestry with people sufficiently bright to deserve a university professorship is not empty, but it’s vanishingly small. The demand greatly exceeds the supply.
Which is why we’ve seen this movie many times before, and will again. They can’t help it. Corrupted academia would rather hire thousands of other incompetents than let go of its “anti-racism” to hire on merit alone.
The refusal to grapple with the black-white average IQ gap is astounding, and while the (mostly) white people responsible for appointing Arday look like absolute fools, the black intellectuals who refuse to accept an established fact look both truculent and dishonest. They don’t have to accept it’s genetic. They do have to accept that it’s real. As far as I’m aware, only one major black intellectual, Wilfred Reilly, accepts the existence of the gap (disclosure: I have been a guest on Wilfred’s podcast). If there are others, I would be delighted to know their names.
Two issues fall out of this. The first is that Nathan Cofnas is not racist for pointing it out. Facts are not racist. The second is that if people disagree with Cofnas’s secondary argument that the reason for the gap is primarily genetic, then yelling racist! at him does not prove him wrong. Evidence is what you need if you want to prove someone wrong, not moral abuse.
3. It’s the rule of law, Jim, but not as we know it
The idea that historically disadvantaged groups are entitled to extra civil rights — coupled with social preferment — over and above those held/enjoyed by people considered their oppressors is inimical to the rule of law, specifically the principle that people should not be punished for crimes they did not commit. We do not inherit criminality from our ancestors. This is in turn derived from the larger principle of treat like cases alike, which was first articulated in its modern form by the Roman jurist Ulpian.
Jason Arday got his job in large part because a lot of people — and especially humanities and social science academics — think it’s reasonable to punish whites (and sometimes East Asians) who have never wronged blacks by making it harder for them to get into university or gain employment. This punishment of whites/East Asians who have done no wrong is undertaken to compensate blacks who have not been wronged for wrongs committed by other white people against other black people in the past. This logic is the basis of all affirmative action schemes and preferential hiring regimes (provision for which exists — albeit in limited form — in the UK’s Equality Act 2010). It is also the logic of inherited vengeance.
[…]
4. Enter Carter-Ruck, or Journalism v. Law v. a bloke with a blog
It’s been widely — and accurately — reported that junior academic Nathan Cofnas broke the Jason Arday story on his personal blog. However, it shouldn’t have been his job to do. The same (or very similar) research had been done separately by both a retired academic (John Harris) and a journalist with Times Higher Education — an outlet dedicated to the tertiary education sector and owned, ultimately, by Rupert Murdoch. In response to both sets of revelations, either Cambridge or Arday or perhaps both in concert (this is unclear on the facts available to me) instructed Carter-Ruck, the most famous — and aggressive — specialist defamation law firm in the United Kingdom. Historically, Private Eye magazine (often a victim of their attention) referred to them as “Carter-Fuck” and, more recently, “Farter-Fuck”.
Despite the fact that the THE has libel insurance and Murdoch generally defends his publications, the magazine backed down. Jack Grove is the reporter who had his story spiked. I have it on good authority that several Cambridge academics — and perhaps people from other universities — then approached Cofnas with the material that they (and possibly the THE) had collated. Cofnas — being young & junior — is what lawyers call “a man of straw”. Suing him in defamation would benefit no-one, least of all Carter-Ruck. He published, scooping Jack Grove.
The drift toward socialism in the west
I’m reminded of that line from Kipling: “And the burnt Fool’s bandaged finger goes wabbling back to the Fire”, as most western countries have had plenty of opportunities to observe socialism in the wild, yet there’s always the chorus that it “wasn’t real socialism” and this time it’ll be great:
Socialism survives because it flatters the most powerful human instinct you have: the desire to believe that good intentions produce good outcomes.
The engine is pure motivated reasoning: not ignorance, not stupidity.
Venezuela collapsed from one of Latin America’s wealthiest economies into a country where citizens lost an average of 11 kilograms of body weight in 2017 because food disappeared. The Soviet Union murdered tens of millions in gulags and deliberately starved Ukraine in 1932-33. Cuba turned a middle-income Caribbean nation into a prison island. West and East Germany, North and South Korea. The pattern repeats, and yet the ideology never takes the blame.
Here’s why. Socialism’s defenders always move the goalposts. When the USSR fell, they said it wasn’t “real” socialism. When Venezuela imploded under Chavez and Maduro’s nationalizations, they blamed American sanctions. There is always an excuse, and that excuse always points away from the central planning mechanism itself.
Ludwig von Mises nailed this in 1920 in his essay on economic calculation. Without prices set by voluntary exchange, planners cannot allocate resources rationally. You get shortages and surpluses simultaneously, not because bureaucrats are evil, but because they are operating blind. The information simply does not exist in a form they can use.
Mises’s argument is uncomfortable in a specific way: it says the system cannot work regardless of who runs it. You cannot fix central planning by finding better central planners.
The real villain is the intellectual class, professors and politicians who build careers selling the promise of top-down coordination. They capture universities, media institutions, and government agencies, and they teach each new generation that the solution to failed socialism is more socialism.
Socialism survives because the people promoting it face zero personal cost when it fails. The Venezuelan peasant starves. The tenured professor in Boston gets a book deal.
That gap between who sells the idea and who pays for it is what keeps the whole rotten project alive.
Celina notes that a recent Cato Instutute report shows uncomfortably strong support for both socialism and communism in the youngest groups:
This summer, America celebrated the 250th anniversary of its founding. At the same time, the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank whose entire institutional purpose is the defence of free markets, commissioned a survey with Morning Consult of 2,253 American adults. The survey included the usual questions: pride in country, knowledge of what the anniversary commemorated, and belief in the American Dream.
Besides the typical civic questions, the Cato questionnaire also asked Americans their feelings on communism, socialism and capitalism. The responses were quite explosive; the survey’s authors reported that: 21 percent of Americans said they held a favourable view of communism.1
Not socialism but communism. The word itself, which to the older Western mind is attached to the gulag and the Stasi and the Cultural Revolution, the one that American politics spent literally seven decades treating as roughly synonymous with treason.
Among Americans aged 18 to 29, the figure was 38 percent. In that cohort, favourable views of communism (38 percent) ran only seven points behind favourable views of capitalism (45 percent), and the generation was the only age group in which favourable views of communism actually edged out unfavourable ones, 38 to 36. Socialism, meanwhile, outpolled capitalism among the young outright: 53 percent favourable against capitalism’s 45. Also, the generational gradient was almost perfectly linear. Favourability toward communism fell from 38 percent among Gen Z to 29 percent among younger millennials, 19 percent among the middle-aged, 13 percent among those approaching retirement, and just 5 percent among seniors, the Americans old enough to remember duck-and-cover drills, Brezhnev, and the Berlin Wall as a piece of functioning infrastructure.
The 2026 Cato survey was not a fluke, which would be plainly obvious to people with even a slight interest in American politics. We also know this was not a fluke because the year before, in March of 2025, a Cato/YouGov survey of 2,000 adults found 34 percent of under-30s favourable toward communism and 62 percent favourable toward socialism. Cato’s senior editor Michael Chapman recorded roughly 52 million Americans aged 18 to 29, reporting a 34 percent favourability figure implying something on the order of eighteen million young people willing to say a kind word about an ideology that the Black Book of Communism credits with approximately 100 million deaths.
If you know a bit about the history of communism in America, you can understand why these numbers landed the way they did. American attitudes toward communism for most of the twentieth century were not just slightly negative; they were extremely so. Anti-communism was one of the few genuinely bipartisan commitments in American life, embraced by Cold War liberals and conservatives alike. Congress quite literally passed the Communist Control Act of 1954, effectively outlawing the Communist Party. Having any public sympathy for communism was politically and professionally fatal, as evidenced by the loyalty oaths, blacklists, and the House of Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC). When Gallup asked Americans in 1949 what “socialism” meant to them, the largest share answered on the lines of “government ownership of the means of production”, and they wanted no part of it. Communism, the harder and more explicit term, was too unthinkable during that time to even be asked in the poll.2
https://www.cato.org/blog/new-poll-nearly-half-americans-dont-know-what-americas-250th-celebrating
https://news.gallup.com/vault/240749/gallup-vault-americans-views-socialism-1949-1965.aspx
QotD: Spoilers — threat or menace?
It turns out this may not be control freakery. How wonderful to think that I have been waiting years for science to rebrand my worst qualities as skills. Apparently, people who like spoilers are just trying to regulate their emotional response. We are not monsters, but only putting on a cardigan before the storm.
Those who hate spoilers also want control, but theirs is driven by a desire to preserve suspense. They want to receive information in the sequence designed by the storyteller. My own spoiler-seeking is also a form of control, although it works differently. I want the major facts early, so I can relax into the texture of the story rather than sit there like a meerkat scanning the horizon for emotional catastrophe.
So we are all control freaks, just wearing different cardigans.
Spoiler alerts began as a civilized courtesy. If someone on a bus was halfway through a book, it was not considered the done thing to lean across and announce the ending like a deranged town crier. There were rules. Perhaps not that many. But there were some.
Now the spoiler alert has become a moral siren. One can’t discuss a film, television show, podcast, documentary, memoir, cake reveal, or episode of Bluey without issuing a warning so elaborate that it requires its own stationery. People now approach plot discussion like bomb disposal experts. One innocent mention of a character’s demise, and the online village square bursts into flames. On “The Good Ship Murder” Facebook page, for instance, someone posts, “Can’t believe they killed Pierce”, and within seconds the spoiler militia descends.
Admins should delete this spoiler.
People might not have seen it yet.
Can’t believe you’ve posted a spoiler…You can almost hear the sirens. Somewhere, a moderator is reaching for a lukewarm tea and wondering how a cozy murder show has turned into the fall of Saigon.
Nicole James, “Tell Me Who Dies So I Can Relax”, The Freeman, 2026-05-07.
August 8, 2026
Pointing the finger of blame accurately
The Librarian of Celaeno wants you to know that former professor Jason Arday did nothing wrong:
Former Cambridge professor Jason Arday
Image from Andrew Doyle
Once upon a time, an autistic black child was born. Usually, it takes several years to figure that out (the autism, not the blackness), but so autistically autistic was the infant Jason Arday that it was immediately apparent to everyone without there even needing to be any public record of it. Perhaps there is some lost evidence of him having a Reddit account as a toddler; one can speculate. Arday was unable to talk until age 11 and has been unable to stop talking ever since, which is fortunate since otherwise many of his unbelievable life accomplishments would now be unknown.
The range of setbacks he has overcome boggles the mind. Despite being illiterate until age 18, Arday not only graduated high school, but got into college, where he finally learned how to read good. This is even more incredible when you consider that the same year he discovered what the alphabet did he was beaten into epilepsy by random teens — he forgave them so thoroughly that any documentation of the incident is now gone from police records — and that some unspecified time before that he was in a car accident that left him in a waking coma for months. He studied so hard in college that he gave himself a brain tumor, which he evidently removed by himself in the mirror, since there is no evidence of a surgeon having done so. It may be that Arday has in fact learned to read several times in his life, but keeps getting that knowledge erased by semiannual episodes of CTE.
Even though he’d accumulated a substantial amount of what for a normal person would be crippling physical trauma over the course of his short time in the world, of the sort that would require medical interventions that would otherwise severely limit active life, Arday rapidly became one of the world’s most elite athletes. He participated in a ‘30 Marathons in 35 Days’ challenge, which was actually somewhat documented by an independent contemporary account, in the midst of which he suffered a hairline fracture in his fibula, which he seemingly just shrugged off to complete the remaining nine marathons. This was apparently the last time he ran slowly enough for anyone to witness, however, because his career as an ultramarathon runner who hyperGogginsed his way through 600 miles in six days passed entirely without notice by the few other people on Earth who could conceivably do that. He played semi-professional soccer, but was so good that he got bored with it and moved on before anyone could write his name down on a roster. Along the way, Arday became one of the best snooker players in Britain, with a skill level far beyond the need to participate in any public tournaments, other than the single amateur contest he entered but was too gracious to the other players to win.
He surmounted the intellectual challenges involved in becoming a PE teacher, and from there went on to earn a Ph.D as a black man, with his thesis largely consisting of arguing that it’s easier to do well in academia if you’re not closely supervised. It was so convincing a premise that his doctoral committee at Liverpool University evidently forewent actually reading the dissertation, perhaps also having concluded that his proximity to their whiteness had burdened him enough already. It was thus that Dr. Arday came into being, following a path blazed by Ibram X. Kendi as a bedredlocked black man writing about being black while being black blackly in a world basically controlled by the bad guys in Caddyshack.
On Substack Notes, Michael Southon also points the finger at the people who enabled Arday’s rise and attributed racist beliefs to anyone who asked questions:
Arday’s arrival to take up his professorship at Cambridge was recorded by at least two BBC cameras. Here he is talking to Hilary Cremin, head of the Faculty of Education at Cambridge.
Cambridge University was so proud of its choice of Jason Arday that they invited the BBC to film Hilary Cremin, the head of Cambridge University’s Faculty of Education, welcoming Arday to his new post. In the clip you can hear Cremin gushingly tell Arday:
We are so lucky to have you. You are the best in the world in terms of the research that you do.
Arday himself is incredulous and suggests that some people will see his appointment as “tokenistic”. In response, Cremin assures him he is “world class”.
The Telegraph reports that when Arday’s students complained that they weren’t being properly supervised, they were told they were being “racist”.
The truth is that Cambridge was desperate to appoint more people of colour. His alleged autism ticked another box on the identity politics agenda. The dreadlocks were icing on the cake.
Will this episode, which has been reported around the world, finally convince the establishment that DEI is a disastrous social policy that lowers standards and turns august institutions whose reputations are based on centuries of meritocracy into the laughing stock of the world?
I doubt it.
Also on Substack Notes, GenX Anecdotes finds the behaviour of Hilary Cremin to be emblematic of a kind of condescending attitude found most frequently among liberal white women:
We know the type.
And it does tend to be a woman.
They love nothing more than to put on that awful softy, patronising voice, as if talking to a small child.
I am reminded of that excrutiating clip of Hilary Cremin (Head of Cambridge University’s Faculty of Education) “You are the best in the world in terms of the research that you do“.
Really? “The best in the world”?
Like the bestest in the whole big wide world ever! 😂
I’m surprised she didn’t lean in and give him a pat on the head.
Wtf?
And that tone. 😭
It’s bad enough when they do it to kids.
I have posted about this “tone” before.
Near where I live there’s a Waitrose. The spiritual home of such a woman.
There used to be a Muslim woman wearing a hijab who would beg for money outside. I never gave her money because she seemed fake to me.
Always clean and well presented with the latest new iPhone (!), she would look up from her phone when she saw someone approaching, visibly completely change her facial expression, tilt her head to one side in a kind of puppy dog, “poor me” way, and put on a kind of fake whimpering “please help me!” and hold her hand out.
It was so obviously fake af!
One day I was waiting outside the shop for my daughter who had run in to get something.
As I waited, these two middle class, middle aged women stopped to talk to her.
They were both fawning over her, using that same softy patronising tone, falling over themselves to praise her. One of them said “you’re so beautiful and brave” and the other put her arm around her.
It was such a sychophantic display of patronising bullshit, I think I might have thrown up a little bit in my mouth.
This pathological sickly, performative fawning over their little pet minority groups, is something to behold!
And they were both being played.
This beggar wasn’t homeless. So obviously! You’d have to be a special kind of stupid to think so.
But they really are a special kind of stupid.
They just wanted to feel good about themselves. It’s all about their need to feel like they’re “good kind people”.
Then, no doubt make a FB post about it so all their other annoying cloying phoney friends can “coo” over how much they adore their little darling minority pets.
🤮
Larry Correia’s A to Z Guide to Anti-Gun Vulture Talking Points
On the social media site formerly known as Twitter, Larry Correia reposts his talking point guide on the issue of gun control:
Looks like it is time to once again post my A to Z Guide to Anti-Gun Vulture Talking Points!
A. Gun owners are never trained enough so are dangerous and shouldn’t be armed at all.
B. Gun owners who do train are crazy psychos living out their wannabe fantasies itching to shoot someone.
C. Even though it takes orders of magnitude more effort to become marginally effective with martial arts than a gun, you are better off using martial arts and not having a gun.
D. *Real Men* use their hands. This is why your mom and grandma shouldn’t have guns either.
E. Twitter randos who have never been punched in the face are experts on real life violence, and whatever you have personally experienced doesn’t count.
F. No matter how trained you are, it is never enough for the hypothetical attacker they make up. Sure, your concealed handgun might be enough to stop a regular robber or rapist, but what about if you get attacked by 20 Chechen terrorists with AKs, huh? Huh? (we call this the Dracula Riding Godzilla rule)
G. If the anti-gun vulture was ever in the military, this makes them a Military Trained Expert. Even though most of the time this means they got to put 20 rounds through an M-16 once in 1992.
H. No matter how many certified MMA bad asses or combat vets go “lol wut, dork? I’d rather have a gun.” the anti-gun Twitter vulture will remain undeterred.
I. Goldilocks Rules apply. No matter how much you know about guns, you’re either too ignorant and dangerous, or you know too much and that makes you dangerous. Whatever amount the anti-gun zealot knows is Just Right.
K. Whatever stats they pull out of their ass are sacrosanct. If you cite any numbers they reflexively scream “SOURCE?!” and then have some reason they won’t accept that source when provided. “The actual FBI Crime Statistics? LAME!”
L. At some point they’ll need to talk about how big our penises are, because guns are for compensation. Obviously the female gun owners are compensating for their tiny uteruses.
M. “I believe in the Second Amendment BUUUUUUUUT-” (insert statist bullshit here)
N. If you insist on using terms correctly and words having actual definitions, clearly this demonstrates you are a fanatic. Words mean whatever they need to mean in that moment, especially legal ones.
O. “Castle Doctrine” is a secret right wing code word that means that you can just shoot whoever you want.
P. Get ready for a history lesson about “what the founders really intended” from some dumb motherfucker who was stoned through every history class in high school.
Q. Everybody knows big blue cities are way safer than the scary red state flyover country.
R. Gun control isn’t racist! Sure, historical gun control was all about keeping guns out of the hands of the “undesirables” like freed slaves, Indians, and the Irish, but that’s totally different now!
S. AR-15s are the most dangerous gun that’s ever existed. It can fire ten thousand ultra deadly murder bullets a second and each one can explode a moose from a thousand yards away. There is nothing this miracle death machine can’t do.
T. lol your AR-15s are utterly useless against a tyrannical government.
U. The NRA is an all-powerful, super evil entity which has tricked innocent Americans into wanting ultra deadly assault rifles, to satisfy their incessant blood lust. They do this through their ultra powerful marketing, like giving out free hats.
V. Anti-gun organizations are all totally innocent grass roots movements made up of moms, orphans, and kittens, funded entirely by bake sales, who just want the best for all Americans.
W. “I grew up around guns” makes you an unassailable subject matter expert on the topic.
X. The gun industry is made up of giant soulless mega corporations who make trillions of dollars off of selling Glocks to preschoolers. This message was brought to you by benevolent small businesses like the six companies that own most of the world’s media.
Y. Even though everything the anti-gunner proposes is ass backwards and would just make the problems they are crying about worse, and everywhere they get their way good people are disarmed while evil doers are empowered…they CARE HARDER than we do. So we’re the real bad guys.
Z. “You sound angry.”
QotD: Why more men than women love videogames
Autumn Christian @teachrobotslove
I love video games. I met my husband because he hired me to QA for a Sims game. I was a game designer for companies like Zynga and EA. I was a writer on State of Decay 2.
And I still have never loved games like I’ve seen the way men love games. I was surrounded by men who would eagerly work on min-max spreadsheets during their lunch break. One designer had a cabinet full of games that he would replay over and over again to study the levels. They’d go home from making games to play more games.
Honestly, it’s a big reason I quit game design. I didn’t have that obsessive, compulsive desire to play games in a way that superseded everything else in my life. Lots of women play videogames. I’ve never seen one consumed by them as their life falls apart around them.
Autumn is right. Even women who love video games don’t become obsessed with them the way men do. I know why, and I think it reveals a tremendously important difference between male-typical and female-typical psychology.
Men. Want. Power.
Men want to be able to do things. To shape the world. To impose their will on reality. To win.
Video games are a fast, reliable superstimulus for that urge. With only a handful of exceptions, the good ones are designed to both excite the desire for agency and power, and to satisfy it.
If you doubt me, ask yourself why many men fixate harder on video games than they do on pornography. It’s very telling that this is even possible.
Women don’t work that way. I could go off on a long tear about why, but the evolutionary-biology reasons are so obvious that I don’t think I need to. If it’s not obvious, ask an LLM “why do men seek power and agency the way women seek love and social validation”. You’ll get an earful.
Of course this also explains the well-known phenomenon of women getting the ick when men play video games.
It’s not just that men doing this are chasing a goal women don’t really understand or identify with. To them, a game-obsessed man is dropping out of the real-world contest, wasting the traits and energy that would otherwise make him attractive on a pursuit that is both literally and figuratively sterile.
I don’t have a fix for the problems this mismatch creates, nor am I judging either men or women about this — instincts are what instincts are and I don’t waste any time arguing with the law of gravity either.
But understanding what’s going on increases the chances that we can make choices that aren’t doomed to fail.
ESR, The social media site formerly known as Twitter, 2026-05-07.
August 7, 2026
Brexit plus ten
Mark Nayler looks at the state of Britain ten years after the historic vote to leave the European Union. He notes that there appears to be a bit of buyer’s remorse among those who voted to leave the EU, although I would note that the political leadership, both Conservative and Labour, almost all did their level best to sabotage any positive results (although the “Boriswave” of immigrants would have swamped even a substantial economic boom all by itself).
In the run-up to the UK’s referendum on EU membership in June 2016, extravagant claims were made by both the Remain and Leave campaigns. Leaving the EU, the so-called Remainers warned, would propel the UK into recession and mass unemployment. Brexiteers, as they were dubbed, countered with promises of enhanced sovereignty, tighter borders, and liberation from Brussels’s stifling bureaucracy. The latter won the Brexit vote (as it came to be known) by 52% to 48%. But just over a decade on from that historic decision — and six and a half years since the UK officially left the bloc — it’s less clear whether they also won the argument.
This is in large part because of geopolitical turmoil since the vote. Throughout the last decade, there has been a global pandemic, Russia has launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine (which, in turn, caused an energy crisis across Europe), and Donald Trump has waged a series of tariff wars across the world. The difficulty of disentangling the effects of these events on the UK economy from those caused by Brexit is formidable. One analyst has even said that “we will never know precisely what the impacts of Brexit were”.
Overall, however, the sweeping transformations predicted by both Brexiteers and Remainers — positive in the former case, negative in the latter — have not occurred. The actual changes have been less dramatic, more gradual, and more mixed than either side forecast. One also has to factor in the UK’s lack of a stable leadership since the vote: when Labor’s Andy Burnham took over from Keir Starmer on July 20, he became the UK’s 7th prime minister in 10 years. This, perhaps, has so far prevented the theoretical autonomy now possessed by the UK from being fully realized. According to a poll conducted in June, 57% of Britons now believe that it was a mistake to leave the EU — meaning there are a lot of dissatisfied Brexiteers out there.
Remainers forecast economic ruin for the UK if it chose to leave the EU. According to the then-Chancellor of the Exchequer George Osborne, “A vote to leave would represent an immediate and profound shock to our economy [and] that shock would push our economy into a recession”. A recession failed to materialize, although the pound suffered its biggest-ever one-day drop on June 24, 2016, the day after the vote, falling 10% against the dollar and 7% against the euro (it still hasn’t returned to its pre-Brexit values against either currency, although Trump’s tariff wars and the pandemic are also factors here). That said, researchers broadly agree that Britain’s economy has contracted due to Brexit. According to a 2025 paper for the US National Bureau of Economic Research, UK GDP per capita is 6–8% lower than it would have been had the UK remained in the EU. Investment is down by 12–13%, employment by 3–4%, and productivity has been reduced by about 4%, according to its authors.
Immigration was a major theme of the Leave campaign. The UK Independence Party’s widely criticized poster showed a large group of Syrian refugees at the Croatia–Slovenia border in 2015, next to a massive slogan reading “Breaking Point” — and, underneath it, in smaller letters, “The EU has failed us all”. The center-right party was playing to concerns about a surge in migration over the decade and a half preceding the referendum, triggered by EU enlargements in 2004,when ten new countries joined, and in 2007. In 2000, migration to the UK from other EU countries stood at 6,000, but by 2015 it had risen to 330,000. In 2015 and 2016 alone, more than a million migrants arrived in Britain. According to a poll conducted on the day of the referendum, 33% of Leave voters said the main reason for their decision was a belief that leaving the EU “offered the best chance for the UK to regain control over immigration and its own borders”. It seems the poster had done its job.
The composition of Britain’s migrant population has changed radically since Brexit, with an increase in non-EU migration more than compensating for the reduction in arrivals from the EU. But immigration has not decreased. In fact, the UK has witnessed record levels of immigration over the last decade. In the year ending March 2023, just over three years after Britain’s withdrawal from the bloc, net migration peaked at 944,000.
Microsoft has zero incentive or desire to fix Windows
As ESR points out, Microsoft has a long history of not fixing issues that anger users, so Windows 11 isn’t going away and it isn’t getting fixed (in ways that users demand, anyway):
Microsoft will never fix Windows, because the features that enrage users in Windows 11 are exactly the ones that generate recurring revenue and market control. That is exactly *why* they enrage users!
Yes, you’ll get reversals of some idiotic user interface decisions. You’ll get some speed tweaks. These will be loudly hyped in hopes that they distract you from what you’ll never get.
Don’t take my word for this, look at what Microsoft is hyping as fixes in their reform program and Windows 12. Do they say a word about no longer requiring a Microsoft account to do a local installation? Or about removing the repeating nag prompts for OneDrive? Do they make any promises to end the advertising spam?
No. And they won’t. Because that’s where the money is. Windows now exists to broker your eyeballs to third parties and upsell you into Microsoft subscription services.
I’ve been warning anybody who would listen for 30 years that when you install closed-source software you’re accepting a power asymmetry with the vendor. All of their incentives say they should use the control you grant them to take more control. Induce more dependency. Lock you in.
Microsoft has been on this path for a very long time. “DOS isn’t done until Lotus won’t run!”
You might think these tendencies would be restrained by their fear that when they increase the pain level above some threshold they can’t predict in advance, a critically large percentage of their userbase will pay the aggravation cost to escape their clutches. There are two reasons this won’t happen, one general and one specific to Microsoft.
The general problem is that corporations differentially respond to market incentives according to how easily they can be measured. Revenue from cloud services and the adtech vampires is a strong, visible signal; exit by pissed off users creates multiple signals that are diffuse and easy to misinterpret.
The Microsoft specific problem is Azure — which, ironically, mostly runs Linux instances. Microsoft now makes most of its money from Azure, which reduces its incentives to care about pissed-off desktop Windows customers bailing out.
Indeed, if I were a cold-blooded Microsoft strategic planner, I might be tempted to deliberately burn up the desktop business for short-term revenue, knowing that that’s not where my long-term fortress is. I’m not saying they’re actually doing that, but from outside the difference between this move and an over-focus on measurable revenue streams leading to accidental destruction is difficult to make and probably not very informative even if you could.
The bottom line is that it’s just not going to get any better. Ever. In fact, bailing out is doomed to get more painful over time. The more process habits you form around Windows, the harder the dependency gets to break.
The conclusion is obvious. Get out now. A lot of major tech influencers have noticed over the last 18 months that after decades of sour jokes about the year of the Linux desktop, Linux is finally ready for you. It’s time.
QotD: A provisional taxonomy of “stupid smart guys”
If we assume this is a universal mental process, I suggest, then saying someone has a low-normal IQ does not mean he’s always going to do stupid things. He has those three-B flashes too. It might take a while for him to cotton to something that seems obvious, but cotton he will, in three-B fashion.
Moreover, Jaynes is good on the complexity of unconscious tasks. The mechanical parts of driving, once learned, are completely unconscious. Try teaching someone to drive and you’ll see it right away. You’ll find yourself literally side-seat driving — your foot pushing down on an imaginary brake, unconsciously. And you never really forget those unconscious patterns, either. You may not have ridden a bike in 30 years, but you could go out and do it right now. Same way with swimming, or the manual of arms — if you’ve been through Basic, a guy with the proper tone of voice can have you twirling around like a marionette, even if you got out of uniform decades ago.
The actual low IQ guys might be the most dangerous cogs in the machine.
The Dunning-Krugerrand. That’s Larry Correia’s phrase, and it’s great. This is the person who believes he’s way smarter and more competent than he actually is. Which on the one hand, they all do. But on the other hand, there are levels above D-K, so please hold fire for now.
The Artiste. It’s been my great … fortune, actually, to have been around a lot of Media people in my youth. I dated a gal who did production work for one of the big tv news programs in a fairly large city, so I saw the video side of it, at least, from close range. The on-camera bobbleheads are all Ron Burgundy, of course, but the production people are usually quite bright … but in a very odd way. They have what I came to think of as “the artist’s eye”. They naturally see everything in terms of camera angles and visual presentation, and training develops this to a very high degree.
This leads to wildly divergent takes on things. You or I see the police approaching a stopped car with their guns drawn, or firemen pulling up in front of a burning building, and we think something like “Damn, crime is out of control!” or “I hope everyone’s ok.” News people — video people, at least — think “What a shot!” They frame the visuals first, then start processing the propositional content … if they ever do. The longer they work in “news”, the more the propositional content — “the cops are arresting a bad guy”; “there are real people in real danger in that burning building” — drops away.
Same thing, I imagine, with the folks on the verbal end. They have a novelist’s sense of pace, structure, and so on. Is what they’re writing true? Of course not! At one point about 30 years ago they felt the need to justify this, and created a whole new category of writing: “creative nonfiction“, aka lies, aka “the news”. The “creative nonfiction” people will tell you, in Wiki’s words, that it “uses literary styles and techniques to create factually accurate narratives”. Emphasis mine, because like the cameraman who ends up exclusively focusing on the shot and never thinks about the life behind the shot, so the writer of “creative nonfiction” gets caught up in the creative part, and just kinda forgets the “nonfiction” part.
Medicalization. Not a category of people, but a technique. We say smart people tend to be spergy, and stupid smart people tend to be really spergy, but that’s mistaking effect for cause. They’re not very good at reading people, and have no social savvy, but that’s because they don’t practice — because they don’t need to practice. They medicalize their deficiencies. Instead of acknowledging a weakness in their game, they attribute it to a pathology.
Severian, “The Stupid Smart Guy”, Founding Questions, 2022-07-13.
August 6, 2026
More threads unravelling from Professor Jason Arday’s backstory
As I mentioned the other day when I first noted this fascinating tale, I don’t think I’d heard of Professor Jason Arday before this week, so pretty much any new facets of the story will be news to me. Here’s an extensive survey of what’s been revealed so far by Donna Louise Flowers:
Cambridge professor Jason Arday
Image from Andrew Doyle
Cambridge Knew in 2023
On 19 May 2023 Martyn Hammersley emailed Hilary Cremin, Head of the Faculty of Education, and Rhys Morgan, Head of Policy. He flagged substantial plagiarism in Arday’s 2018 paper, including quotes attributed to Arday’s own interview subjects that matched quotes from another researcher’s participants. (emails first reported by Nathan Cofnas and later confirmed in The Telegraph)
On 21 June 2023 Morgan replied that it was “not within our remit”. Cremin said Arday had the department’s full support.
That is three years of Cambridge knowing. Everything that followed sits on top of that decision.
In the BBC’s 2023 video marking his appointment, Cremin went further. She said: “We are so lucky to have you. You are the best in the world in terms of the research that you do.” (BBC video, 2023)
Eight months later, on 2 February 2024, Arday was appointed to ITV’s Cultural Advisory Council. Sixteen months after the concerns were raised, on 19–20 September 2024, he led sessions on equity, diversity and inclusion at the National Aspiring Vice Chancellor Development Programme at Bolton.
He was teaching the next generation of vice-chancellors while the questions about his own record remained unanswered by the institution that employed him.
[…]
The Claims, Laid Out Together
Here, in one place, is the full set of claims Jason Arday has made about his life:
- Diagnosed with autism and global developmental delay at the age of three.
- Non-verbal until the age of eleven.
- Unable to read or write until the age of eighteen.
- Four to five hours of speech therapy every day from the age of three.
- A mother with five degrees.
- A benign brain tumour removed a fortnight before his PhD viva, which wiped his memory of the entire thesis; he re-learned it and still passed.
- Two further brain tumours diagnosed after the PhD, later found to be benign.
- Deaf in one ear.
- Ran 30 marathons in 35 days, the last nine after sustaining a hairline fracture that made his leg swell to twice its normal size.
- Covered 300 miles in three days.
- Covered 600 miles in six days (later quietly amended in some citations to twelve days).
- Raised £5.5 million for more than 80 charities.
- Installed water points in South America and West Africa with WaterAid.
- Received a severed pig’s head at his parents’ home.
- Faced a knife-wielding masked man.
- Received bullets in the post, rape threats against his daughter, threats to make him “top himself”, and other forms of intimidation including corrosive substances and mutilated animals.
- Came through a professional football club’s academy system and later played semi-professionally.
- Was on the verge of turning professional at snooker.
- Awarded an MBE in 2017 and turned it down.
- Olympic Torch Bearer for London 2012.
- Appeared in the ITV documentary series Seven Up!
- Obtained a Masters degree in “psychodynamic practice” from Birkbeck and became a qualified counsellor.
- Held visiting professorships at the University of Glasgow and Ohio State University.
This is the origin story as it has been told. Almost none of it has been independently verified. Several of the most dramatic claims have been directly contradicted by the organisations or records that should corroborate them.
That is the real failure.
In the rush to be diverse, to be inclusive, to champion a Black, autistic, working-class success story who ticked every box, almost no one stopped to ask the simplest question of all: when you look at these claims as a totality, how plausible are they?
Each claim on its own might have been given the benefit of the doubt. Taken together they form a pattern that should have been obvious long before Carter-Ruck letters and police complaints were required to shut the questions down.
The institutions that elevated the legend spent years repeating it. When the contradictions began to surface they did not investigate. They defended. They edited the websites quietly. They called the scrutiny a vile campaign. They treated the act of checking as the real offence.
Jason Arday did not need to invent a modest success story. He invented a legend. And for years almost no one dared to ask whether any of it was real — because he is Black, and in the current climate that was supposed to be enough.
It was not enough. And it never should have been.
Update: Reportedly after Cambridge opened an investigation into the plagiarism allegations, Professor Arday has submitted his resignation.
Jason Arday, who was touted as the university’s youngest black professor, announced on Wednesday that he was resigning effective immediately from both the university and Jesus College. His resignation came just hours after Cambridge had said it opened an investigation into the allegations after “new information” came to light.
In a statement published by the Good Law Project, Arday said that the “relentless accusations” had taken a “profound toll” on him. He added that he has decided to resign for his “own wellbeing”.
“I have tried to continue because I believe deeply in the values of higher education, in rigorous scholarship, and in the transformative power of universities. I have tried because of my students, my colleagues and the countless people who have written to tell me that my journey gave them hope,” he wrote. “But there comes a point when the personal cost becomes too great. I have a family. I want to be present for them. I want to reclaim some peace, some privacy and some semblance of an ordinary life. I no longer wish to feel as though I am living under a constant spotlight, where every aspect of my life is subject to public examination and judgement.”
The next shoe was funny enough that I assumed it was from the Babylon Bee, but apparently is not parody:
Following Arday’s resignation letter, social media users claimed that the statement itself appeared to have been AI-generated. According to Panagran, the leading AI writing detection software, Arday’s resignation statement was deemed to be 100 percent AI-generated.
Frederick Alexander decrys the fools that bought Arday’s fantastic stories as nothing but the truth and moved mountains to get him advancement at all costs:
The main entrance of Jesus College, Cambridge from Jesus Lane.
Photo by Verbcatcher via Wikimedia Commons.
We may never know the full extent of Jason Arday’s talents. Perhaps he also sang the difficult half of Milli Vanilli, crossed the Atlantic on a lilo with a shattered pelvis, and designed the SpaceX rocket catcher in the margins of his PhD thesis. There is, in truth, no claim he could have made that the intellectual class would not have believed, provided it flattered their view of themselves as good and righteous people.
Did it not occur to him that someone might check? Confronted by the Guardian, Arday has since offered a defence that will live on his Wikipedia page forever despite the efforts of its editors: “To be honest with you, I thought you’d just believe me. Why would I lie?”
It’s probably the most honest thing he’s ever said. More importantly, it describes the workings of his career in the sort of plain language that the sociology department hadn’t quite trained out of him. He thought the Guardian class would believe him because he understood that they wanted to believe him. They were falling over themselves to grant legitimacy to anything he said simply because he was the one saying it. His story bore out their politics, advertised their virtue and bolstered their status. Scrutiny would only spoil the party.
Perhaps this explains why Arday’s writing also got a pass. Here, for instance, is Arday explaining … well, you figure it out.
As the researcher, textual units concerning the narratives and biographies were identified based on the criteria that the identified themes were fit for purpose in supporting the themes associated with the study.
You would get more sense from a gibberish generator. Academic writing is hell at the best of times, but sociology has mumbo-jumbo built in. Banalities disappear beneath layers of abstraction presumably in an effort to make them sound deep or insightful. Next to this, the plagiarism comes as a relief, another person’s sentences at least making the effort to mean something.
The writing should be disqualifying by itself, but it’s not like Arday tiptoed into the academy while nobody was looking. Cambridge signed him up in the manner of a Premier League football team landing the next Ronaldo, but on the strength of highlight reels that turned out to be AI-generated.
The remarkable thing is not merely that Arday appears to have invented stories about himself. Lots of people do that. I did it when I was nine, trying to convince people I was invisible. Nobody appointed me to a professorship at one of the country’s most prestigious universities. Or rather, formerly prestigious universities. Who can look at these institutions now and not see the wreckage of ideological capture?
They’re calling the fallout “a vile campaign” to undermine Arday’s credibility – of course they are. It’s a smear by “right-wing newspapers” intended to embarrass Arday and those who elevated him. Of course it is. But the embarrassment was born of their own vanity and gullibility. They demanded that everyone believe the story, then labelled anyone who checked it as morally suspect and worthy of a police investigation.
Nearly 15,000 people have signed an open letter declaring the allegations “entirely false”, even as the evidence points the other way. How long before they withdraw their names, reframe events and reposition themselves as the full truth comes to light? Soon they will talk solemnly about the importance of integrity, dissociate themselves entirely from Arday – yesterday a useful idiot, today a serious liability – and somehow still make it about race and right-wing bigotry. This stuff is hardcoded. The rest is just presentation.
The administrators who made the appointment will survive with a few bruises, scapegoating Arday until the media get bored of it. Then they’ll pick up where they left off, a little more careful next time – running the checks, scouring the next candidate’s PhD for plagiarism, testing every fantastical claim against reality, except where reality conflicts with ideology. Which is likely most of it.
