Jake Elwood XVI 🏏 🇦🇺 ✝️ 🇮🇱

Mongrel from the Antipodes. Descendent of the Scottish Diaspora.

[Dale Chu @Dale_Chu]

“There’s no benefit that came out of you putting me in those schools. No benefit at all.”

Brutal 2 minutes of NHJ’s daughter dismantling her mother’s school integration experiment on @ThisAmerLife.

[Neil O'Brien @NeilDotObrien]

Posted without comment

[Jake Elwood XVI 🏏 🇦🇺 ✝️ 🇮🇱 @JEXVI]

New series dropping, “Bishop in my pocket”.

[Martin Downes FRSA 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁷󠁬󠁳󠁿 @martin_downes]

Genuine photo of when I opened a package with a book by Rowan Williams inside.

[Charles Fain Lehman @CharlesFLehman]

A fixed speed limit — a single number — was always inefficient. The safe speed at which to drive is a function of how fast everyone else is going, and also of exogenous variables — you should drive slower in a rainstorm, e.g.

But dangerous driving is not going above a certain speed. It's going at a certain speed in a context where that speed is unsafe.

Almost no one drives the speed limit on the highway, for example. In fact if you get in the left lane and start going the speed limit, you are actively making the highway less safe.

If you're doing traffic enforcement in the analog age, though, a single number is the best you can do. You can't *know* how fast traffic is moving, or what the conditions are.

But we don't live in the analog age. We live in the digital age, where cameras can measure exactly how fast people are going, and therefore can know the speed of traffic.

So ... why not just make speeding a multiple of the median speed of traffic? If you're going twice as fast as the flow of traffic, you get ticketed. If you're going even faster, penalties escalate.

We *couldn't* do this sort of thing when cars were invented, or even 25 years ago. But we absolutely could today. It would punish actual antisocial behavior without sweeping in people driving *reasonably* over the artificial speed limit.

So why not do it?

[Jake Elwood XVI 🏏 🇦🇺 ✝️ 🇮🇱 @JEXVI]

London has a statue to Republican Oliver Cromwell and the Monarchy has been restored for centuries . History is complex.

[James Surowiecki @JamesSurowiecki]

I know I'm a Yankee, but it's bizarre to claim that it's "woke" to think we should not have statues on public land honoring traitors who waged war against the U.S.

[Jaimee Michell @JaimeeUSA]

What a genocide looks like in population data — and what it doesn’t.

[Jake Elwood XVI 🏏 🇦🇺 ✝️ 🇮🇱 @JEXVI]

@MirrorCeleb Was expecting to see Simon Pegg.

[Jake Elwood XVI 🏏 🇦🇺 ✝️ 🇮🇱 @JEXVI]

@BDSixsmith Lol. Was expecting to see Simon Pegg.

[Steven Pinker @sapinker]

Much of the vilification of Israel acting in self-defense is unjust, but the terrorism against Arab villages in the West Bank by settler thugs, tolerated by the Netanyahu government, is horrific. It deserves harsh criticism pressure to stop it. https://t.co/D6FTyNODZL

[Jake Elwood XVI 🏏 🇦🇺 ✝️ 🇮🇱 @JEXVI]

It can't just be the amount of money but a level of accomplishment with her creative work that is part of JK Rowling reaching FUmoney level.
Any way I am happy to have contributed to her bank account as enjoying her work.

[J.K. Rowling @jk_rowling]

Attention, cult members: no matter what the OP says, I'm pretty sure you should be giving me money, not the other way round. Now go hence and force social detransition. The cultist who racks up the most desisters this week will go to heaven and/or get a slightly fancier kaftan.

[Jake Elwood XVI 🏏 🇦🇺 ✝️ 🇮🇱 @JEXVI]

@northumbriana The People’s Player

[nigel biggar @NigelBiggar]

“He’s trapped in a world of fantasy. Whatever his personal guilt, there’s a tragic quality to his predicament. For, when reality does finally break through, Nemesis will enter, too. A terrible reckoning will cause the self he’s constructed to disintegrate. I fear for his life. And that makes me angry—not with his critics but rather with the adults who failed to call him out. Who lowered the threshold so he could clamber over it. Who encouraged him to dismiss criticism as expressions of racist bad faith.”

[NPRG @CptHastings1916]

"Arday's work was not noticeably worse or more obscurantist than most academic writing in the social sciences" is a magnificently double-edged statement.

[NYTimes Communications @NYTimesPR]

This is reporting about Cambridge University and its judgment calls as a major institution that has long been a model of excellence in academia. Arday’s death is a tragedy that provokes questions and demands answers. The role of the news media is to thoughtfully and carefully explore both.

[The American Tribune @TAmTrib]

@IterIntellectus “It only becomes a baby if it’s wanted by the mother” is a really freakish form of leftist transubstantiation.

[Greg Lukianoff @glukianoff]

I think what happened to Jason Arday is tragic and heartbreaking, but this counterfactual did actually take place in the United States, involving a professor and right-wing jokester who I became friends with over the years of having to defend his free speech rights. Mike Adams was mobbed and cancelled in 2020, and he killed himself shortly thereafter, and the American press largely treated it like he had it coming. Also, some commenters on the Internet seemed almost gleeful about his death. That was wrong then and it would be wrong now.

https://t.co/BMuS3hb8v3

[NPRG @CptHastings1916]

"Fabulist conmen in important national institutions who use libel law to intimidate journalists shouldn't be investigated & exposed because it is likely to cause them significant personal difficulties, & they may respond in extreme ways" is not a sustainable principle.

[Anna Lulis @annamlulis]

This is what a 34 week old baby looks like outside the womb.

Massachusetts Governor Maura Healey just legalized killing an unborn child at this age. For no reason, just because someone wants to

They call it “reproductive rights” because they refuse to call it what it is: murder

[Andrew Hammel @AndrewHammel1]

A few thoughts on Arday:

1. I'm not going to formally diagnose Arday, but he's got narcissistic character traits. Narcissists are not always malign like Trump, they can be charming people with other, more positive character traits.

2. Much of the blame goes to the people who fawned over Arday and promoted him without doing their due diligence. None of this stuff was hard to validate or verify. If his dishonesty had been revealed earlier, he could have been discreetly shunted off into a position more suited to his abilities, such as a teacher at a comprehensive.

3. If you ever wanted confirmation the humanities are a woke echo chamber, boy howdy here it is. Thousands of people agreed to rely on recommendations from people they trusted because they shared the same "right-on" worldview. Half of these people put "critical" in their book and course titles ("Critical Whiteness Studies", "Critical Perspectives on Fat Sex"), but of course no criticism was ever allowed of Arday. Cambridge's disastrous decision to immediately leap to his defense was the crudest kind of groupthink.

4. The person who revealed this massive fraud, @nathancofnas, should be receiving humble thanks and plaudits for taking on literally the entire British educational establishment and the most bloodthirsty UK media-law sharks. Instead, he's either dismissed or attacked as a crank because he holds some right-wing views. Yet gadflies like Cofnas belong in academia, because they will articulate take-no-prisoners critiques of positions they oppose, forcing *fundamental* debates and sharpening arguments on both sides. As shown by this episode itself.

5. And to my German readers -- if you don't think there are 100 Jason Ardays in Germany, I have bad news for you. The only difference is that nobody in the German academic or media establishment wants to expose them.
https://t.co/sn5khsg8vG

[Oliver Traldi @olivertraldi]

Worth remembering that Nathan Cofnas in particular, who wrote the initial Substack on Arday, was actually hounded out of Cambridge, while Arday remained.