Our friends at the Good Law Project

Id forgotten about him. Wasn't he a #BeKind writer who had various issues

I've only read one of Matt Haig's books, the Dog one, didn't enjoy it and now can barely remember it. Didn't the main character's father kill the neighbour's dog with a pitchfork(?) for reason. I don't remember anyone being particularly upset with him for doing that. I believe he got stick for an unrealistic portrayal of someone with autism.

That's Mark Haddon and Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime. Not Matt Haig.

I remember reading this story - I think her book may have been excerpted in one of the newspapers.

You do wonder how much of this stuff goes on. I don't know if anyone's read London Falling by Patrick Radden Keefe, but one of the people the book is about, Rachelle Brettler, is the daughter of Rabbi Hugo Gryn, who was a really prominent radio broadcaster in the 80s and 90s. After he died, it turned out that a key part of his backstory - that he'd attended Cambridge University - wasn't true. Yet it looks as if nobody had ever challenged it.

Oops 😬, I stand by my review of the book. I've probably been mixing them up for years. Thank you for the correction @WellQuite .

I’m afraid I give Hadden very short thrift over that novel in my PhD - no research, no attempt to actually understand autism when he wrote the book, a feint acknowledgement that lack of doing and reliance on culturally accepted (and inaccurate) perceptions of autism may have upset a few people.

The solution isn't for Cambridge, Liverpool, etc to be 'held to account' via the BBC, Twitter, etc. It is for institutions themselves to stop being performative parodies of themselves - sending themselves out as avatars in the pretendy world of media narratives - and go back to the boring work of doing their work properly in accordance with technical standards of adequacy.

To clarify, perhaps the concept of accountability was being invoked too clumsily. I wasn’t meaning Cambridge to be held externally accountable to other institutions, but more that those who appointed and promoted him have an excuse (unfairly hounded because of both his race and his disability) to tell themselves and in defence against concerns about their selection processes.

My concern is that the firestorm of accusations against a racist press will negate or muddy the waters of an internal inquiry. So internal lessons about the dangers in privileging diversity claims over robust standards (but standards that also include DEI support) will not be learned. Yes, definitely universities ought to go back to doing the boring work in accordance with standards of adequacy, but there’s real potential for the opposite to happen. That university’s will double down on ‘protecting’ faculty that may have been promoted beyond their ability for fear of another death.

Matt Haig also wrote one from the perspective of a family dog. When I realised the dog was being euthanised I stopped reading it.

Of course there’s an important place for loss and grief in storytelling, but I really hate authors blatant manipulation of reader’s responses. Creating a storyline purely for the emotional blackmail. Here, are you loving this amazing dog character? Good. And now how do you feel after I’ve killed it off? You cried? Ah great, mission accomplished.

The Donald Crowhurst story is haunting. Yes, it’s an interesting parallel. What a tangled web. Inextricable deceptions.

Also there he has his protagonist misinterpret sigmoid curves in the context of population size. That's in the final chapter, and it vexed me excessively.

More open letters, more of the Great and the Good telling the proles that we must accept that "this was all about race".

Jonny Dymond on Radio 4 was just interviewing one of the GatG who clearly sees the scope in using a public inquiry to restrict the activities of the media. The idea is that if someone can claim vulnerable status then it has to be hands off. Dymond probed tentatively but clearly sees that there's opportunism at work and it's not a good development.

I don’t really know who Matt Haig is either, I’m a bit of a pleb when it comes to modern literature.

That’s why the false narrative growing up around this absolutely needs to be challenged, however disrespectful people think that is. I predicted early on that sanctimonious people with an agenda would have no such compunction when they scented blood in the water.

Sometimes I wonder why I keep coming back to Mumsnet, and then... This. THIS is why I keep coming back to Mumsnet.

This is Sarah's review published last Thursday 5th August. It's not so much a bad review of the book as an incredulous reading of a literally incredible story. Arday must have been aware that the publication of the book would mean he would be subject to intense scrutiny not because of right-wing racists but because the whole house of cards was crashing down as the outlandish lies contained in the book were revealed.

It's the autobiography that did for Arday. It wasn't David Harries. It wasn't Nathan Cofnas. It wasn't Jack Grove. It was his ghostwriter Eve Claxton who facilitated Arday's fall by producing this fantastical memoir.

Great and Unfortunate Things is mawkish, self-aggrandising and hard to believe. Extraordinary claims are made with no supporting evidence. Arday’s story — regardless of its authenticity — feels precision-tooled to flatter the biases of the sappiest white liberals.

archive.ph/logub

It was a bad review of Matt Haig's book, not JA's. Haig sicced his followers on Sarah Ditum for her bad review of his own book, and Sarah took the opportunity in her latest article to point out that Haig seemed relaxed about social media pile-ons that were on his behalf.

I've read The Radleys, imo rubbish. Although like Mar...Mik...the other guy's book it was forgettable, so I can't remember why. I'm left with an impression that it was boring. Which for a book about a family of vampires must have taken some doing. I think Terry Pratchett did it better.

I came across this thread on TwiX this morning and I think it sums up the behaviour and attitudes of the GLP at el for me really well:

https://x.com/CapelLofft/status/2089295719085568478?s=20

1/ A softness, a disconnection from reality, has become the default attitude in modern Britain: an assumption that no-one should have to do anything they don't feel comfortable with; that shame, stigma or punishment must be anaesthetised away by abolishing all standards of behaviour

2/ I think it's linked to a deep distaste for facing up to the realities of life, of sin & evil. A middle-class fantasy that if everyone is treated continually indulged, never given any limits or sense of responsibility, then we'd all live in some kind of soft-focus herbivore utopia

3/ They hate being reminded that actually civilisation and ethical standards are a thin crust and if they aren't maintained by instilling the right habits, education and expectations - and underpinned at some level by the threat of violence & punishment - anarchy is never far away

4/ I always come back to Orwell's comments on Kipling:
But because he identifies himself with the official class, he does possess one thing which 'enlightened' people seldom or never possess, and that is a sense of responsibility. The middle-class Left hate him for this quite as much as for his cruelty and vulgarity. All left-wing parties in the highly industrialized countries are at bottom a sham, because they make it their business to fight against something which they do not really wish to destroy. They have internationalist aims, and at the same time they struggle to keep up a standard of life with which those aims are incompatible. We all live by robbing Asiatic coolies, and those of us who are 'enlightened' all maintain that those coolies ought to be set free; but our standard of living, and hence our 'enlightenment', demands that the robbery shall continue. A humanitarian is always a hypocrite, and Kipling's understanding of this is perhaps the central secret of his power to create telling phrases. It would be difficult to hit off the one-eyed pacifism of the English in fewer words than in the phrase, 'making mock of uniforms that guard you while you sleep'.

5/ A lot of this is downstream of the decline of Christianity, and its cultural memory devolving into basically platitudes about being kind. 2 other things have dropped out: 1) That there is no kindness without truth, and 2) sin is powerful & we are all sinners in need of mercy

6/ It leads to a sort of humanitarianism that is hypocritical & unselfaware: that wants all of the benefits of feeling good but none of the sacrifices. Rant on about the evils of slavery 200 years ago but don't think too hard about the 'made in Bangladesh' label in your clothes

7/ Airy words about the need for trillions in reparations for slavery from your own country, safe in the knowledge that it's never going to happen, because if it did, of course, your country would be bankrupt and the economy that makes you comfortably off would be crippled.

8/ It is the ultimate pharisaical attitude masquerading as a sort of secular Christianity: I am kind and progressive - thank God 'that I am not as other men are, extortioners, unjust, adulterers, or even as this publican'

The weirdness of today often brings me back to the philosopher Giambattista Vico (1668—1744) who foresaw what happens when people stop abiding by a society's rules. It brings about a state called The Barbarism of Reflection.

Vico sees that history is cyclical. Vico claims that history begins in a barbarism of sense and ends in a barbarism of reflection. The barbarism of reflection is a returned barbarism in which the common sense established by religion through poetic wisdom holding a society together has been broken down by individual interests. The interests are spurred because individuals each think according to their own conceptual scheme without concern for the society, which makes it barbaric.

Vico describes the returned barbarism this way, "such peoples [in the barbarism], like so many beasts, have fallen into the custom of each man thinking only of his own private interests and have reached the extreme delicacy, or better of pride, in which like wild animals they bristle and lash out at the slightest displeasure". These private interests lead into a civil war in which everyone betrays everyone else. This takes humanity back to where it started, individual giants acting solely on their own individual passions.

https://iep.utm.edu/vico/

Sounds familiar, doesn't it.

I like Capel Lofft - he was very interesting on The Rest Is History - and that's a good thread, and his quote from Orwell about Kipling is bang on.

All left-wing parties in the highly industrialized countries are at bottom a sham, because they make it their business to fight against something which they do not really wish to destroy. They have internationalist aims, and at the same time they struggle to keep up a standard of life with which those aims are incompatible. We all live by robbing Asiatic coolies, and those of us who are 'enlightened' all maintain that those coolies ought to be set free; but our standard of living, and hence our 'enlightenment', demands that the robbery shall continue. A humanitarian is always a hypocrite, and Kipling's understanding of this is perhaps the central secret of his power to create telling phrases.

That's the greens under Polanski in a nutshell. Id reprint that somewhere but they'd see the word "coolie" and then accuse me of racism rather than absorbing his main point. The previous greens did understand this though

Wise words from Orwell. The phrase, a better man than his critics, always springs to mind.

https://x.com/i/status/2089390287395119111

Jolyon absolutely fizzing with self-righteous indignation on BBC news today. How dare anyone suggest that the big yellow DONATE button on their petition page is soliciting donations!

Holy shit, they removed the donate button at some point this afternoon. It was definitely there when the interview was broadcast, disappeared just like those signature on their original letter 🧐**

What an absolute arsehole JM is.