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Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
User ID: 1175
FtttG
Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
6m ago
Florence Pugh, by virtue of being Literally Me Her.
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Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
4hr ago
Malicious compliance, in other words.
Apparently Jason Arday's resignation from Cambridge has not halted Simon & Schuster's plan to release his memoir, Great and Unfortunate Things. (Perhaps there's no such thing as bad publicity.) Someone at the Atlantic got their hands on a galley proof, and boy howdy, not even the autobiographical claims he's made about himself so far could have prepared us for its contents:
The doctors who assessed him as a toddler told his mother that “there’s no one in there” and that he was “no better than a vegetable.” Even his speech therapist wasn’t optimistic that he’d ever learn to talk. (At one point, she also physically abused him, the memoir says.) ... Yet still, eventually, he started to verbalize. Still, eventually, he made his way through school... Arday is nearly deaf in one ear; he’s dyslexic; he finds simple math befuddling; he has “marked difficulties” with memory, reading, and processing skills. As a teen, he was beaten so severely by a group of kids his age that he became an epileptic...
When Arday applied to university, his girlfriend, Debs—who had been teaching him to read—“wrote out” the application on his behalf, including the personal statement. In university, a friend who took the same courses sat beside him, sharing notes. (She’s “the only reason I survived” university, he says.) By the time Arday started on his master’s degree, he writes, he was reading at about the same level as his 3-year-old daughter... His obstacles were only multiplying, though. Money was tight, so after each day of teaching, Arday writes, he had to work an overnight shift in a supermarket, from 11 p.m. to 5 a.m., and then a morning shift as a cleaner from 5:30 to 7:30. The only time he had left to write his dissertation was when he was commuting between London, where he lived, and Liverpool, where he taught. On those semiweekly five-hour rides, the book explains, he would open up his laptop on the plastic seat-back table and start typing out his thesis, hunt-and-peck style...
More troubles follow in the years ahead: Arday’s brain tumor returns; he splits up with his wife; he suffers autistic burnout during the coronavirus pandemic and can’t get out of bed. He decides to kill himself by jumping off a bridge, but at the very last minute, he listens to his favorite song, “Take It to the Limit”—delaying his attempt just long enough for a member of his family to rescue him. “In the end,” he writes, “my decision to listen to the Eagles likely saved my life.”... Arday claims, for instance, that when the kids who beat him up at the bus stop were arrested, he told the judge that they shouldn’t go to prison. Then, years later, when he took a brief teaching job at an unnamed London university, two of the muggers turned out to be his students. They’d been so moved by his act of mercy that they’d turned their lives around, and now they were coaching other at-risk youths. “Both of them gave me a huge hug, which I returned,” he writes. One asked Arday to be the godfather of his child.
Unsurprisingly for such a compulsive fabulist, Arday can't keep his story straight from one year to the next, and the contents of the galley proof are markedly different from the synopsis described in its original proposal:
That document, from 2024, cites several accolades of which no proof exists online. The proposal also lays out many of the same events as the memoir but with slightly different dates and details: The boys who beat him up were not his age but four years older; his suicide attempt happened before, not during, the pandemic. And whereas the book describes Arday as having survived two brain tumors, the proposal says he had a bout of testicular cancer. No reference to that illness appears in the memoir.
Nor does the book describe the time that Arday, then a teenager, was struck by a car and spent several months in a coma. According to the book proposal, the doctors told his parents that he would never recover, and suggested taking him off life support “as an act of mercy.” Through all of this, he was aware of everything that was going on, because he had locked-in syndrome...
The book doesn’t describe any of this, nor that he awakened “miraculously” from the coma, nor the full year he spent “relearning everything—how to walk, to talk.” Instead, the memoir tells us only that he spent those months finishing his final year of secondary school and taking his exams. “I was relieved, beyond relieved,” the memoir says, when those were done.
Arday's memoir sounds like a textbook example of misery lit. It would be remiss of me not to cite the money quote from the Wikipedia article on the genre:
The Waterstones chain of British book retailers even instituted a discrete "Painful Lives" section; Borders Books followed suit with "Real Lives". At the WHSmith chain, the section is titled "Tragic Life Stories"; in each case side-stepping the awkward dilemma of whether to categorize the books under fiction or non-fiction.
I've heard this several times before. His sister also has a Substack and she once posted an utterly sophomoric article about how gender-affirming care is safe and effective, and she'd know because her own son daughter child has been subjected to it. Upon reading said article, an awful lot clicked into place.
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Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
22hr ago
Oh damn, I forgot all about him. You don't hear so much about him ever since BLM fell off.
The lies ballooned to such levels (running marathons with a fractured leg?) that the only possible reason nobody queried him is that he was indeed a pure DEI hire and nobody expected him to actually be able to do anything.
I speculate what happened was that, before becoming somewhat famous, he told Alice a relatively mild version of one lie ("I had a cancer scare a few weeks before my PhD viva, it was pretty stressful"), a mild version of a different lie to Bob ("I injured myself running a marathon"), a mild version of yet another lie to Carol ("I was actually non-verbal for the first few years of primary school") and so on. Each of these lies sounds plausible enough in isolation, although Alice, Bob or Carol would probably raise an eyebrow if they were aware of all of the lies. Having gotten away with it (successfully curried sympathy), he tells an embellished version of each lie to Dave, Ewan and Frederick, none of whom are aware of any of the lies told to the others. On and on it goes, Arday upping the ante each time, until eventually the lies have become so heavily embroidered that telling someone just one of them causes people to raise an eyebrow, at which point they start comparing notes and realising how preposterous the whole edifice is.
He's also obviously someone not bright enough to realise that being a Baron von Munchausen is no longer compatible with being a public figure. If he'd lived a couple of hundred years ago when there were no TV cameras and most people were illiterate, he could have happily told his tall tales as long as he pleased. If the listener noticed discrepancies or inconsistencies with earlier tales, they would probably have just shrugged them off or assumed that they (the listener) were remembering the details of the earlier tale wrong. But nowadays, any tall tale told via the Internet is there forever, as is any told verbally during a television appearance. Under these circumstances, being honest is the only viable option: you will eventually be caught in a lie and face the consequences. (Unless you're Donald Trump.)
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Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
1d ago
Mindy Kaling's brother is apparently one such?
He may have faked being black, but he certainly wasn't a white male.
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Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
1d ago
He gave me 70% on my essay, with no feedback, which sounds good except that my average score for the year was 75% and this was my lowest mark of the term and actually dragged my average down. I asked for a meeting with him to ask him to explain why he had given me the mark and provide feedback. At Roehampton marking is blind so he didn't know whose essay it was when he marked it but in the meeting he implied that I was racist and that the only reason I wasn’t happy with 70% was due to my white privilege.
That is appalling. He should have been sacked on the spot.
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Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
1d ago
IIRC Dudley New-Right does actually have children, which puts him head and shoulders above most of the people he's mocking in this post. But I take your point.
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Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
1d ago
Well, if you're the kind of talented person who would naturally thrive in a legitimate meritocracy, any policy designed to make it easier for untalented people to thrive must intuitively feel like an effort to undercut your own status, even if it isn't presented like that.
Oh I know, I don't care about the resignation letter specifically. But I am curious about the general case. There have been quite a number of literary competitions embroiled in scandals recently when it turns out the winning entries were AI-generated. Ought that to be considered plagiarism?
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Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
1d ago
Incredible story. Out of curiosity, what made your aunt suspect she was malingering?
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Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
1d ago
If you haven't already, I think you will really enjoy reading this article: https://newrightpoast.substack.com/p/the-four-commandments-of-reddit
First, how sure are we that he is actually black, given that he lied about everything else?
Freddie deBoer refers to this phenomenon (white people passing themselves off as non-white to advance their careers) as Dolezalism, and calls it an entirely expected byproduct of the incentive structures in academia, activist NGOs and so on. (When someone pointed out how his argument applied to – uhh, another thing that people can pass themselves off as, he closed the comments on the article. Never change, Freddie.)
He cited many examples of Dolezals, and the thing I found fascinating was that all of them were women. (And by "women" I mean "female people".) I have literally never heard of a white male academic attempting to pass himself off as black, Hispanic or similar. I vaguely recall Johnny Depp claiming to have partial Native American ancestry, and there's a Wikipedia page called "Indigenous identity fraud in Canada and the United States" in which male examples outnumber female. But a white man passing himself off as black is unheard of, to the best of my knowledge.
But yeah – if this was a story about Jacinta Arday being accused of plagiarism, I'm sure Cofnas would be going full forensic accounting, purloining her bank statements in an effort to determine if she'd purchased a tanning bed or had been to Istanbul to undergo a Brazilian butt lift.
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Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
1d ago
As an aside – this whole affair started with an accusation of plagiarism. Does passing off AI-generated text as your own writing also qualify?
Plagiarism, as I understand it, means taking a piece of text (or music, art etc.) that somebody else created and attempting to pass it off as your own original work. What if the "somebody else" is a computer? Is that still plagiarism?
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Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
1d ago
I couldn't believe my eyes when I learned that Sabrina Rubin Erdely, who wrote "A Rape on Campus", was in the same journalism class as one Stephen Glass.
What the hell was that professor teaching?
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Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
1d ago
Don't forget Liberty measles!
Using ChatGPT certainly sounds very on-brand for Arday, and there was a quote in the Daily Mail article that certainly gave me a whiff of it.
I've never used Pangram, but Freddie deBoer recently got into a back-and-forth with the founder in which he argued that it's extremely easy to produce false positives and mutually contradictory results. His argument seemed convincing enough to me that I'd take any Pangram result with a pinch of salt.
Well, yes, I'm not terribly concerned about my hypothetical future child staring at his laptop for hours because he's hard at work studying for his Leaving Cert.
I am concerned about him spending so much of his formative years consuming short-form brainrot and meaningless slop that his literacy, ability to socialise with his peers, executive function etc. are permanently compromised.
The purpose of the lock box is to prevent my fiancée and I doing things which look more like the latter than the former, so we can set a good example for our hypothetical future children. Endless scrolling on Instagram is an example of the latter. Neither of us claim that it's an edifying way to spend our time. It doesn't even make us feel happier in the short-term (never mind in the long-term), which is almost the textbook definition of an addiction.
Your final paragraph is dead on. I like how the Henry Nowak murder made "don't think you have, mate" the default way to mock and belittle anything a British police officer says. So too should it be here.
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Gheobhaidh mé bás ar an gcnoc seo.
1d ago
Shortly after the invasion of Ukraine, my dad mentioned the capital of Kiev, then stopped and corrected himself: "sorry, I should have said Kyiv."
This was a conversation we were having in his kitchen. There was no one outside of the family in attendance. I don't know who he was doing this performative virtue signalling for. Very embarrassing for a man of his advancing years.
Bahaha, not at all what I intended but I loved those "do you have Battletoads?" memes.
The entire Dave Chappelle routine linked in the header is hilarious, but the punchline will have you doubled over laughing.
XCOM 2, Commander Ironman mode, of course.
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