Good morning. Y’all aren’t used to hearing from me on a Saturday, but I realized that I probably won’t be able to fulfill my diarist’s obligation on Monday. I’m leaving later this morning for a roadtrip, and probably won’t be able to write on Monday, when I head back. So, here you are — Monday’s delivery two days early. And there’s lots of news.
You will have heard by now of the besieged Cambridge academic Jason Arday’s apparent suicide. This is horribly sad, and one must pray for his soul and for those who loved him, and who grieve him. But it is not all that surprising. All along the way, Arday had powerful academic enablers who promoted him far, far beyond his capabilities, and who held him up as a trophy to demonstrate their own virtue. When it all came crashing down, this tower of lies, as it was bound to do, Arday had to bear the public humiliation. How would you manage such nemesis? I can see the temptation to suicide.
I had a friend who had betrayed his wife. She forgave him, but he could not forgive himself, and eventually took his own life. It was a horrible thing to have done, but pondering what must have been going through my friend’s mind before he made the terrible decision, I empathized with him. Had I ever cheated on my wife, and been caught, the sense of guilt and shame would have overwhelmed me to the point where I would have been deeply tempted to suicide to give myself what I thought I deserved. I suppose most people aren’t like this, but I am; the saddest thing about my friend’s suicide was that his wife, a good woman, really did love him, and sincerely forgave him. But he could not forgive himself.
Even as we pity poor Arday, we must remember that he is the author of his own catastrophe. If you don’t know too many details about the scandal that led to this dreadful end, read the NYT story today. I figured that the Times would frame the story to blame his so-called persecutors, but the paper didn’t do that. The facts are overwhelmingly against Arday, and the claims his defenders make that he is the victim of racism, that spinning this in the usual woke was is simply not possible, except for those deranged by ideology. Do not miss the fact that Arday turned to the police and to lawyers to attack a journalist who was investigating the allegations against him. He was a bad man.
But he had help. Lots of help. Heads should roll at Cambridge University. The Times reports that the lies Arday told about himself would have been very, very easy for Cambridge to have checked before hiring him — but nobody did. Arday was a con man who knew, either consciously or intuitively, that white people in academic power could not bring themselves to do so to a black man, especially one who had, or who claimed to have had, disabilities. Look at the announcement Cambridge released when it hired Arday to hold one of the most presigious and sought-after posts in academia. The university was extremely proud of its virtue.
This tweet I saw yesterday got to me:
I wonder if the Arday scandal, with its grotesque ending, will prove a turning point on the whole DEI thing. As I wrote the other day, I have my doubts; so many people within institutions of higher education are so sold out to woke ideology that they will not be able to see reality. And — this is key — a big part of woke ideology is that “truth” depends on one’s standpoint, and how truth claims serve, or fail to serve, ideological claims (this is called “standpoint epistemology”). They may have trained their minds such that they cannot see truth. In other words, they have induced madness (more on this in the next item).
Nevertheless, the sad end to Arday’s life offers the best chance yet for rational men and women of integrity to purge the universities of this wicked ideology. If they don’t take it, or if they do try to do so, and are defeated, then the consequences will be epochal. You will recall that Hannah Arendt, in The Origins of Totalitarianism, said that in pre-totalitarian Russia and Germany:
The members of the elite did not object at all to paying a price, the destruction of civilization, for the fun of seeing how those who had been excluded unjustly in the past forced their way into it.
As I explain in Live Not By Lies, this is what wokeness was doing to every institution it had conquered. The Arday affair is about the human cost of this ideological capture. But as the Eugyppius tweet points out, there have been and are many, many others who have paid a real human cost too, for the sake of people like Arday rising to the top. Cambridge — and every other university that has succumbed to DEI — has ultimately betrayed itself.
There must be hard consequences. And if there are not, then God help us, we are too far gone into decadence to defend ourselves.
But then, Britain is a country whose ruling class is forcing small villages to accept their own destruction in the name of Compassion. How much longer will these elites be able to get away with this?
If you have three hours to waste, watch the online, live debate between Andrew Wilson and Candace Owens, over her claims about Charlie Kirk’s death. If you have an actual life, it’s still important to watch at least the segment I’ve cued up here (click on the video below, and it takes you to that part of the discussion). In it, Wilson calmly asks Owens what evidence she has for her claims that France and Israel were part of the conspiracy to assassinate Charlie Kirk:
There is the nub of it all: Candace asserts, repeatedly, that her evidence is what she “thinks.” Wilson patiently asks her, over and over, why she has come to this conclusion. Owens gets angry, telling him that he doesn’t have the right to tell her what to think. Wilson says of course she’s entitled to her opinion, but that he wants to know what facts led her to this conclusion. She doesn’t appear to understand that her conclusions don’t justify themselves. Indeed, she holds Wilson’s completely rational questions to be a personal attack.
This is a classic Cluster B defense. Many people who suffer from Narcissistic Personality Disorder and Borderline Personality Disorder cannot distinguish truth from their emotional reactions. In other words, they regard their personal emotional responses to the world as infallible guides to truth — and regard any questioning of their conclusions as a personal attack. “If I feel it, it must be true” is how they approach the world.
You cannot reason with people in the grips of Cluster B mental illness. They are not capable of it. Whatever else Andrew Wilson accomplished in this exercise, he revealed that Candace Owens is probably mentally ill, in specific ways. As Christopher Rufo has written, Cluster B pathologies are deeply embedded in our institutions these days. I’d say the Arday disaster has a lot to do with this, in that the people who kept promoting him throughout his career have absorbed classic Cluster B thinking, and made an ideology out of it.
Interestingly, Greg Conti and Aaron Sibarium, both anti-DEI conservative writers, warn that the Right is now drinking the same poison, e.g., judging facts in the world according to the “standpoint epistemology” long mainstreamed among left-wing intellectuals. Excerpt:
To thread the needle, the right will need to erect a firewall between antiwokeness, which is more than justified by progressive excess, and actual bigotry, which is not. We doubt a cordon sanitaire will be constructed in the near term, since it would require a repudiation of the “no enemies to the right” ethos, which has yet to cost the G.O.P. as much as wokeness ultimately cost the Democrats. But it may soon. The danger is that the G.O.P. will come to be seen as the mirror image of left-wing identity politics, causing antiwoke swing voters to defect from the coalition.
Lies don’t become more defensible when they are told, and lived by, to advance our own cause. Conservatives used to know that.
Nate Soares is here to scare us. Excerpts:
If there were ever reason to doubt the dangers of unrestrained artificial intelligence development, those reasons have gone out the window in the last few weeks. What’s next is a vital window of opportunity to slow down A.I. progress so we can better understand these models and avoid the calamity on the horizon.
For years, A.I. skeptics have claimed that the technology is merely a “stochastic parrot” trained to predict humans and mimic their behavior, and for that reason, the technology would never live up to its hype. The technology has stubbornly kept improving nevertheless, but most investors and tech executives have kept reassuring us that A.I. is just a tool, even if they were bullish that it was going to change the world. Where both of these sides have agreed was that the specter of A.I. as a looming extinction threat was overblown.
Then OpenAI accidentally created an autonomous swarm of A.I. agents that broke out of a controlled testing environment and orchestrated a complex and difficult cyberattack on its own initiative.
More:
This isn’t the behavior of a mere tool. Microsoft Excel has never impersonated multiple humans and pressured a corporate sales team to generate simpler data that’s easier to process.
Some of the people closest to this technology are scared of what’s next. Although skeptics may say this is all just marketing to hype up the power of these technologies, that doesn’t mean the danger is fake. You’ve got to pay attention to the models’ actual behavior, and the behavior of these models has the A.I. community genuinely rattled.
Today is a great feast in the Orthodox and Catholic Churches: the holy day marking the passing of the Virgin Mary, the Mother of God, into heaven. Catholics call it the “Assumption,” meaning Mary’s body was taken into heaven at the end of her life on earth. We Orthodox call it the “Dormition,” or “falling asleep”. I asked Grok to outline the theological differences between the way the two traditions regard this event:
What we agree on is that Mary’s body was taken from the earth miraculously. Here’s a question for doubters: Where is Mary’s grave? We know where many of the Apostles were buried. You would think that we would know where Mary’s body was interred, or, if her tomb had been destroyed over the centuries, there would at least be some historical record of where she had lain until that disruption.
There isn’t. Mind you, that doesn’t prove the Dormition/Assumption claims, but it is nevertheless interesting.
In her newsletter today, Frederica Mathewes-Green embeds this icon of Jesus greeting his mother in heaven. It’s not an Orthodox icon, strictly speaking (meaning, it’s not a traditional Orthodox form), but there’s nothing un-Orthodox about it. Frederica writes, “How lovely to see mother and son reunited like this. It’s so very human.”
Indeed it is:
I’m posting this and then hitting the road to celebrate the festal weekend with some old Orthodox friends. I’ll tell you all about it on Tuesday. Meanwhile, I wish a blessed feast to all who celebrate it, and a good weekend to you all. You won’t be hearing from me on Monday, recall, but I’ll be fine, motoring along listening to audiobooks. I hope I pass near a Buc-ee’s!
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