Our friends at the Good Law Project

[Gymnopedie]

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

It's about Professor Jason Arday, a Cambridge academic. The story started when there was a claim that large chunks of his PhD thesis had been taken from another (sometimes not even changing typo errors) published a few years earlier. His justification is that he's autistic and his way of coping is 'mimicry'.

Sine then his many claims about his charity work, fundraising and physical exploits have come under increasing scrutiny - much from the Guardian - and are unravelling fast. He's having to backtrack and 'explain' a lot. He's claimed to have been on a TV programme that he never was and it was chronologically impossible for him to be on it. He has claimed a lot of nasty harassment but has no evidence of it, no photos, no messages, and didn't report any of it to the police. (Well he claims he did once, but the police have no record of it and the story doesn't stack up.)

What does the GLP have to do with it? They're organising an open letter in his support, claiming that there is nothing to see here except that he's a victim of vile racism.

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

Charity casts doubts on volunteering record of Cambridge professor (The Telegraph via MSN)

Playbooks, plagiarism and a pig’s head: new claims surrounding a star Cambridge professor | University of Cambridge | The Guardian

Glasgow University denies Jason Arday visiting prof claim | The Herald

I wouldn’t be surprised if JA was autistic, as struggling with a theory of mind might explain why he didn’t expect to be ‘found out’ or challenged on his accomplishments.

https://bsky.app/profile/sophiemolly.co.uk/post/3mteb2dxyfs24

JM at the vigil yesterday, courtesy of anl MN favourite

If it was such a day, then why the hell is JM speaking? It seems that no amount of attention is ever enough for that man.

TBF, historically I think you can call any run of 26.2 miles or longer a marathon, because that's the origin of the word (distance from the Battle of Marathon in 490BC to Athens). I don't know (or care, really) if at some point that has become codified so that only official Marathons-with-a-capital-M can be so named.

Infamously he said when asked for background on some claims, " honestly, I just thought you'd believe me"

I think we're all a bit too wedded to the idea of 'truth': he should have claimed to be carrying out a decades-long sociological experiment.

Understand that - but he didn’t register to run a marathon in an organised event with other runners, did he? He ran a private endurance event without much obvious support (have been looking to see if there is any other coverage than the final 2-3miles - for example, surely there would have be a small local media presence at the start of the first marathon/the event, and periodically during i, in order to keep the funds coming through from the public? The tech is only used by externally organised events because they have to lay down mats etc to record it all? When Eddie Izzard ran his event in 2009, he had a team of pacers and verifiers, a route management team etc.

In fact aside from one article in the Wandsworth Guardian, which does not involve any contemporaneous footage, route data, photographs or an interview - ie his mum could have just called to say ‘Our Jase has just finished Marathon 24’ and they believed her - there is nothing? No day to day tracking data, GPS data, no day to day logs, not even pictures of him in ANY of the locations taken by friends or supporters.

Do you not think that this is very very odd?

So where did he do these marathon-length runs, then, and who was monitoring them to ensure they were marathon length and not just a 10k run? And that he did 30 in 35 days, some with a fracture, and not 10 in 40 days, in full health?

I have a recollection that at least some of the record-breaking feats of running used a running machine.

There are many grifters beyond Maugham who will jump on this turn of events with glee. Apparently the vigil was organised by Stand Up to Racism who are an Socialist Workers Party (SWP) front group. Amnesty is also getting in on the action. Their statement is something else…

https://www.amnesty.org.uk/get-involved/join-the-movement/join-a-group-or-network/disabled-peoples-hr-network/disabled-peoples-human-rights-network-blog/our-collective-statement-on-the-death-of-professor-jason-arday/

On his fundraising page (linked from the newspaper article posted by @theilltemperedmonster ) he says he will do various marathon trials across London.

It can't be easy to run marathons along London roads in ordinary time.

I actually thought he was, and the punchline was going to be "Ha ha ha, Cambridge University I fooled you".

"When a person’s work, health, childhood, diagnosis, relationships and private life are repeatedly exposed to the public, the line between scrutiny and cruelty is lost."

Dr Arday's work, health, childhood, diagnosis, relationships and private life were repeatedly exposed to the public by..
Dr Arday.
He wrote a book about himself, which is Exposure with a capital E.

The whole affair is gaslighting on a massive scale, isn't it?

Good grief how that man mangles the English language. I had to re-read so many sentences to work out wtf he was trying to say that I just lost the thread of most paragraphs. If his self-aggrandising love letter, Bringing down the Baddies, was written like this then it'd be a cruel punishment to have to read it.

Especially since this was for fundraising. Wouldn't you need the people you want to to donate be aware of what you are doing?

If you're a particular kind of person, then any claim you make about yourself, no matter how extraordinary, must not be open to any scrutiny whatsoever.

Hang on, that rings a bell ...

Aaran Bastani has apologised following a pile-on for initially having the “wrong” (i.e. his own) opinion.

https://x.com/novaramedia/status/2089804526500954586/mediaViewer?currentTweet=2089804526500954586&currentTweetUser=novaramedia

"Why were Black and Brown journalists at the Guardian asked to do so the heavy lifting? Isn’t it the responsibility, too, indeed especially, of white people to help clear up a mess that white people have made?"

Why was rape apologist Weyman Bennett leading the response on this from the SWP? JM is simultaneously asking for white journalists to do "heavy lifting" into an investigation but also that they're simultaneously all responsible anyway?

This article in the Spectator exposes the BBCs role

https://archive.ph/AB5QY

https://spectator.com/article/will-the-bbc-apologise-for-its-role-in-the-jason-arday-story/

I've not watched the vigils for JC...sorry JA, but what i've read of some of the more incendiary rhetoric is alarming. That the people saying it may be grieving is possibly some mitigation. I think much of it is performative, playing the crowd and, probably, wanting to top what the previous speaker said.

The MBE's for 2017 are in alphabetical order. No surprise that Arday is not on there.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2017_New_Year_Honours

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2017_Birthday_Honours

The MBE's for 2017 are in alphabetical order. No surprise that Arday is not on there.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2017_New_Year_Honours

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2017_Birthday_Honours

This is all such a mess. The only thing that is a constant in the news is conflict, all day, all the time.

When this dies down, something else will take its place. Another pointless march will happen, and nothing will actually change.

JA was not hounded because of his race. He lied, a lot, for a very, very long time to a lot of people. People are angry and disappointed; they fell for it, and that feels awful. The only people they can lash out at are the ones they feel like they have to do something to.

This, the trans stuff, etc.- it's all so confusing, and it's making people feel so mistrustful of their neighbours. For example, women are being told that if they say no, they will be sacked from work and kicked out of society, and young, confused people are told that if a woman says no, the only possible reason is that she is a bigot.

It's time to pull the plug on Meta.

It's quite something to see the Good Law Project attack Lanre Bakare, a black journalist who did an excellent job of exposing Arday's lies. Why is Maugham so confident about supporting Arday, when two months ago he didn't even know the guy?

What is now clear is that the Guardian - unlike the other newspapers - didn't "go after" Arday. On the contrary, Arday approached the Guardian about a year ago and asked them to write a story about him. This allegedly autistic and shy man was actively seeking publicity from a national newspaper. The story he wanted them to write was based on a falsehood - a series of falsehoods - about being the victim of racist attacks. He didn't expect the Guardian journalist to check his account, but simply to publish what he'd told them, possibly because this was what his previous experience of journalists had led him to expect.

For the Good Law Project - and the rest of the self-styled progressive left - to be attacking a journalist so viciously simply for publishing his findings shows a remarkable combination of self-delusion, self-importance and outright narcissism, even by their standards.

It is interesting to see the political divide on JA and his demise. On a UK cycling forum which I belong to, there are three or four people calling others racist or far right, simply for questioning the astonishing claims of JA and the plagiarism, which they claim did not happen. These people all happen to share the view that transwomen are women and therefore should be allowed to compete in women's sports.
I have always considered my political views to be centre/left, but I think the left has for a decade, become infected with critical race theory and gender ideology, so because of this, my politics has probably shifted to centre/right, because I have nothing in common with the policies of Labour, LibDems or the Green Party.