Our friends at the Good Law Project

Agree.

It's very odd to describe "Conditions such as dyslexia and dyspraxia, autism, ADHD" as intellectual disabilities.

Perhaps her point is that people who aren't suited to academia are sometimes accommodated because they have dyslexia/dyspraxia/autism/ADHD, but if these conditions were disqualifying (using current diagnostic criteria) you would remove huge swathes of academia.

If she doesn't mean to say that these conditions are disqualifying, it's disappointing that she hasn't made this more clear.

@nicepotoftea have you read anything about the Green Party's policies and actions? Or those of the SNP, Plaid Cymru, Sinn Fein, the SDLP? All of whom consider themselves more left-wing than Labour.

I would also mention Your Party, but they've made themselves irrelevant in double quick time

From what I understand it is not government policy to change either the Equality Act or to promote self ID, and the EHRC guidelines come into force today, and we seem to have a Labour government, so if the genderwangers symbolise the political left, it's odd that they were a lot better off with Theresa May.

Hoping this works as never shared links to other threads before FFWD to bottom of p15, 00:13 today

www.mumsnet.com/talk/education/5561878-jason-arday-cambridge-plagiarist?page=2&reply=153914635&utm_campaign=thread&utm_medium=share

I agree that she had a point about promoting academics beyond their capabilities in a bid towards equality and inclusion but her actual words are problematic as written. It also seems she realised the need to explain further.

Stock might not have intended to say that nobody with dyslexia should be an academic, but I think it’s a stretch to deny that, as written, it reads that she’s implying that a) being dyslexic is an ‘intellectual disability’ and b) disqualifies one from scholarly life. It’s literally one sentence after the other. It’d have been better not to have included that second sentence at all. As we know, words matter.

There is currently some bafflement on social media about why Cambridge authorities are disclaiming the accusations about Arday with such aggressive, self-satisfied certainty. I have a possible explanation that is only secondarily connected to skin color. Namely: at some point, the university sector decided that intellectual disability was something that should be mitigated, rather than treated as disqualifying one from scholarly life. Conditions such as dyslexia and dyspraxia, autism, ADHD, speech delay (and so on) were now to be treated as unfair obstacles to a person’s dreams of pursuing an academic career, rather than constituting evidence they were unsuited. And since over-diagnosis of mental health conditions is rife in the sector, and everyone is frightened of being called discriminatory, the predictable upshot was that — at least in some cases — straightforward midwittery came to be treated like an excusable intellectual disability as well.

And looking just at the university sector, and I’m thinking as I type this, I’d argue that making allowances for SpLDs is not the slippery slope problem in relation to not knowing where you stop once you start making those allowances.

From my perspective, it’s not the reasonable adjustments themselves that have become problematic, it’s the poor judgement of the decision makers. Incontestably ‘intellectual’ decision makers I’d add who have allowed their own virtue signalling to prevent them from knowing where to stop. Instead, the virtue signallers have given in to the demands of some individual’s unreasonable allowances for their SpLDs (either real or perceived).

Similar to the slippery slope of Canada’s MAID. The idea of terminally ill people being able to end their lives has merit but it’s increasingly problematic misuse is the fault of the Canadian lawmakers who have given in to demands for the expansion of eligibility. When they could have said ‘no’.

Good old Moley.

From Mole:

In the sitcom 30 Rock there was a member of the writing team who was a gay black man. His name throughout the show was Twofer, because they got two DEI characteristics for the price of one hire. (There's a very funny scene when the rest of the staff suddenly realise they don't know his actual name at all)

It seems Cambridge has found itself a Professor Threefer and it's unwilling to let go.

Of course we question it - we know from bitter experience that the best lies are ones it's just too unkind to question (like, for instance, that men who claim a trans identity 'always knew' and no, it wasn't an icky fetish).

How would an employer even go about finding out about his mutism, his autism diagnosis?

Have been listening to the Scamanda podcast about a women who faked cancer for a decade. What kind of person questions cancer?

Edited for more detail.

Just like the LGB's need to breakaway from the TQ+'s in order to differentiate their cause from the cause that the Gender Idiots have turned it into, the left wing will need to differentiate itself from what is now accepted as the left wing. The message of the left wing is being drown out and lost by those that have hijacked it, until there is a clear separation, the protestations of the left wing will fall on deaf ears because right now the genderwagers symbolise the political left.

But as the story unravels I am now, cynically for which I hate myself, beginning to question whether any of the mutism ,developmental delay and autism diagnosis is actually true. I and my children (AuDHD) have all navigated the system over the past 4 decades - and the therapy access, support etc that he describes is not what we or any of my ASD/ADHD friends or their children have been offered. I am almost at the stage where I want to see the diagnostic report now.

Why do you hate yourself? I think all of us who have been following this story have the same doubts. It seems that almost everything Arday says about himself publicly is a lie - his time spent as a professional footballer and snooker player, the millions of pounds raised for charity, the hundreds of miles run in a matter of days, the brain tumour, the stroke, the visiting professorships at other universities. We're now at the stage where it would be completely surprising if anything he said turned out to be true.

https://www.mumsnet.com/talk/education/5561878-jason-arday-cambridge-plagiarist

3 hours of speech therapy a day? On the NHS? I don't think so...
or privately at (a guess-timate) at least £300 a day

I'd also argue that some aspects of this Arday narrative are very right wing.

Can't' walk? Get off your back side and do the work and you too could be running a marathon a day!

Can't speak? Have you not bothered to find the right speech therapist?

a sister thread on Arday

Which thread is that @AnonyMumAuDHD ?

I hate when people perpetuate misunderstandings about autism - of course they/we can lie. What most of them have is a tendency to fixed/black and white thinking that usually lends itself to the formation of a very rigid moral codes. This usually evolves into a rejection of lying and deceit because, well, life is complicated enough trying to read others’ vocal tone and myriad facial micro expressions, right?

My one ‘concern’ for Arday given the level of blatant fantasy about his life and the evidence of plagiarism throughout all of his work, not just his phd, is that autistic people [in tandem with triggering/environmental tiggers such as childhood trauma, parental abuse etc] are massively more likely to develop schizophrenia and/or bipolar. I am concerned that this may underly his conduct, that the uni/academia and even his family, have been so invested with the reflected glory, prestige and money that flows from his celebrity persona that noone has stepped in to check whether he may actually be unwell.

But as the story unravels I am now, cynically for which I hate myself, beginning to question whether any of the mutism ,developmental delay and autism diagnosis is actually true. I and my children (AuDHD) have all navigated the system over the past 4 decades - and the therapy access, support etc that he describes is not what we or any of my ASD/ADHD friends or their children have been offered. I am almost at the stage where I want to see the diagnostic report now.

As an aside, on a sister thread on Arday, the marvellous @boiledbeetle has suggested a wonderful thesis proposal for Arday framing the events of his life and years in academia as a carefully planned social experiment conducted to explore the extent to which academics demonstrate progressive blindness in the face of DEI. It’s genius and well worth popping over to read.

The fact that some people identify as being left wing without being left wing does not mean that we don't still need a coherent concept of 'left wing'. (See also 'woman').

An ideology that prioritises individual wants over collective needs is not left wing.

But 'left-wing' has a meaning.

I agree with you, and I think you’d find that many of us here would consider ourselves left or left leaning. But the left has very much been hijacked and no longer means “Supporting a society that looks after its weaker members, allows everyone to have a decent standard of living paid for by those who can afford to contribute more, and addresses inequalities” but instead it’s “You will be kind or else. There is a rigid, unnuanced and narrow set of accepted views and anything outside of that means you’re a screaming bigot who deserves everything you get”.

And that’s before we get to the resurgence of misogyny that runs through left wing thinking (women’s rights being something we’ll get to when the class war has been won), which arguably never really went away.

Unfortunately, the accepted meaning of “anti-racist”’is not what it says on the tin. “Not being racist” is basically what it says on the tin - it means you, as an individual, do not think or act in a racist way. “Anti-racism” is a movement to break down and remove any institutions, thought processes, cultural practices, collective histories, etc, that are deemed to be racist. This encompasses DEI-type actions, and also includes things like statue removal, campaigning for reparations, land-acknowledgements. It’s not apolitical, basically.

I think you might have to consider that the left has been hijacked from within and the left wing no longer means what you think it means.

We were all on the left once until the left jumped the shark and left us politically homeless, we're all now on on the right of the left because they've gone so overboard every sane person is.

We don't get a choice of not identifying it as on the left, there are too many on the left who are happy to accept this obsessive, counterfactual ideology as a left wing philosophy.

Interesting...

https://x.com/benryanwriter/status/2084357066144059423

On July 28, when the letter had 605 signatures, it claimed that both universities that received the allegations "conducted thorough investigations and found no evidence whatsoever of wrongdoing."

By July 31, with more than 11,000 signatures, that sentence had been softened to say only that "investigations have found no evidence." The claim that both universities conducted thorough investigations was deleted. The "no evidence" language stayed.

Then the signatories changed, in particular from two heads of house at Cambridge. Professor Dame Ijeoma Uchegbu, President of Wolfson College, Cambridge, was listed second on the letter on July 28. Sometime between the night of August 1 and the morning of August 3, her name vanished entirely. In the same window, Lord Simon Woolley went from "Lord Simon Woolley, Principal, Homerton College, University of Cambridge" to just "Lord Simon Woolley." His name survived, but his Cambridge affiliation was scrubbed.

This is a peculiar way to run an open letter—rendering it a living document. Nearly 14,000 people have now signed a document whose factual claims and marquee names keep shifting underneath them. What the first 605 signers endorsed is not the letter on the page today, and there's no note anywhere disclosing the changes.

Ah yes. Sokol, a physicist, deliberately wrote a nonsensical fake word salad article to see if it would be published in an established academic journal and it was. He wanted to expose what he saw as arcane rubbish routinely published in sociology (maligning Derrida’s deconstructivism) and culture studies. That was 30 years ago. What might have he thought about Butler’s gender studies?

But 'left-wing' has a meaning. It doesn't just mean 'whatever policies people who call themselves left-wing espouse'. I guess that my go-to definition of it is a conception of social justice, rooted in a materialist analysis, that holds various forms of inequality to be fundamentally the consequence of economic factors.

I think that the populism of the last decade or so has caused formerly left vs right allegiances to have been displaced by single-issue clusters based on social media dynamics. If we start identifying any of those clusters with 'the left' we lose a set of objective concepts expressive of real political values.

And transactivism has fuck all to do with the left.

Except most of the energy behind this cause is coming from people who consider themselves to be on the left.

All of the handmaidens, the ally's, the 'feminist' would disagree with you. It's all part of the Global Left, most of the governments that have stripped women of their sex based rights and protections have been on the left.
If it quacks like the left, talks like the left and actually says it's the left, then maybe it is the left.

I did wonder. But I find that strange. To me, its overwhelming meaning is exactly what it says on the tin. In which bubbles has it come to mean something more contentious, and what is that contentious meaning?