Our friends at the Good Law Project

Au contraire cher OP...this opening sentence...

I know this doesn't belong here but given the bollocks from the GLP about issues that do I thought people might be interested.

Anything to do with the GOOD LAW PROJECT is relevant here, due to the GLP and MUMSNET sharing a director.

Someone somewhere raised the issue that people with autism can't lie, or find it very difficult perhaps, which doesn't fit with what we know Arday says of himself.

While I find the whole thing very funny on one level - all those goody two shoes who will soon have egg+++ on their face - I'm wondering how much money students & parents etc are wasting sending their children to Cambridge to be taught by him.

I wouldn't be laughing at that.

Forgot to say I very much doubt Arday is paying for Carter Ruck from his own pocket.

Stock isn't saying people with dyslexia aren't suitable for academic careers! Let's quote the whole paragraph (my bold):

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.

She isn't saying nobody with dyslexia should be an academic, or that the original idea to mitigate some disabilities eg dyslexia was a bad idea; but that, once you start making allowances it isn't automatically clear where you should stop. She's right.

(I typed more but it needs to be more carefully worded than I can manage on my phone right now! Maybe later.)

I’ve just read about this! It’s utterly baffling! How are the police being weaponised like this? It’s utterly farcical.

Support for a left wing cause that bears no relationship to the facts? Where have I heard that before?

I take issue with this sentence in the OP. Neither anti-racism nor trans activism are 'left-wing causes'.

Anti-racism is consensual among all but the far right. And I think that the alleged wrongdoing of Arday is severe enough to mean that both racists and anti-racists have to work quite hard to see the scrutiny of him through the lens of racism. (I do accept that black academics in general are more aggressively scrutinised for potential failings, I'm just not convinced that he is an appropriate target for expressing concerns about that issue.)

And transactivism has fuck all to do with the left. It is a men's rights movement, and men of all political shades are equally capable of the misogyny and disregard for women that feeds it.The attempt to position it as a left-wing cause is a manipulation perpetrated both by the activists themselves (who attempt to wrongfoot sex realists with bullshit about far-right funding) and by the growing right, which has (as the gender critical movement fully predicted) used the idiocy of gender ideology as a recruiting sergeant, and to undemine the former consensus around equality and diversity practices.

And sometimes people who aren't neurodivergent do the same.

Neurodivergence is sometimes a difference, sometimes a disability, never a sloganised superpower.

@fanofBen

"She isn't saying nobody with dyslexia should be an academic, or that the original idea to mitigate some disabilities eg dyslexia was a bad idea; but that, once you start making allowances it isn't automatically clear where you should stop. She's right"

I agree with this. Further, they appear to have appointed someone on the basis of his skin colour and disability who seems clearly to not be up to the job. That can never be right. It lowers standards in academia.

Anti-racism is consensual among all but the far right.

Say what now? Can you expand? Who is consenting here to what exactly?

I take issue with this sentence in the OP. Neither anti-racism nor trans activism are 'left-wing causes'.

I'd argue that trans activism very much is, but both are also very much part of the Omnicause of anti-racism, trans rights, net zero, anti colonial “correct think” found in hyper-progressive left wing circles.

I suspect it was meant to be consensus before autocorrect/type “helped”

I also agree with this. And I say this as someone with skin in the ND game.

Actually, I listened to an interview with Kathleen Stock about this very topic yesterday, and she said, like PPs remarked above, that she's not saying that autistic people can't be academics and that, in fact, half the great academics she knows are autistic.

The issue is where to draw the line, and that the bums on seats approach taken by universities is letting everyone in, even the ones who would ordinary not pass muster.

She also made the point that it creates a victim/special treatment mentality which is detrimental to everyone once they enter the real world. As we've seen with Arday.

Consensus/consensual, whichever. I mean that there is widespread agreement that there needs to be a set of social actions/policies to combat racism. Not very complicated, surely?

I think the raised eyebrows were with respect to the phrase “anti-racism” which has a very specific meaning, not completely aligned with “not being racist.”

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?

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

a sister thread on Arday

Which thread is that @AnonyMumAuDHD ?