hildurRagn 💙

Student, worker, mother and political aware. Opinions expressed are my own (unless they are retweets).

[Lewis @L_A_D_J]

Nathan Cofnas, as with every racist supremacist, is a deeply insecure little runt who feels deeply inadequate compared to Black people, especially when we are more intelligent, successful, attractive and liked than him.

He was jealous of Jason Arday and it ate away at him.

[Oladotun @Dot_E_Fresh]

This...

[Alec Gunter 🇵🇸 @PunishedAG]

You do not take your sister's feelings into account a single time in this post and that is the problem.

[Sama Hoole @SamaHoole]

Iceland has a breed of sheep that nobody breeds for meat, because for a thousand years it has been bred for one quality only. Judgement.

They are called forystufe. Leader sheep. Taller, longer in the leg, narrower through the body, oddly marked, and always at the front, with their heads up while the rest of the flock has its head down. When they move, the flock moves. Nobody votes.

A proven leader sold for two or three times the price of a good sheep. Bloodlines became famous. When a great one died, the farm kept the head.

And the claim attached to them sounds like folklore until you read the records. They know the weather is coming, sometimes a full day out. If the leader will not leave the barn on a morning that looks perfectly fine, you do not move the flock. Farmers arranged their winters around the opinion of a sheep, and wrote it down as fact.

Autumn round-up, 1884. A large flock is being driven across the interior when a blizzard comes down on open sand and rock. Every landmark goes. You cannot pitch a tent on that ground and turning back is worse than going on.

At the front is a ram called Surtur, from Svinavatn, already known as a superior leader. The fjallkongur, the man running the round-up, makes a decision. He hands the whole thing to the sheep and tells his men to stay together.

A third of the way across, Surtur stops, turns, and walks back down through the flock to find the men. His face is packed solid with ice and he cannot see. They clear it. He returns to the front and walks back into the weather.

He comes back for the same service several more times that night. Nobody has to fetch him.

Then he stops and will not move at all. The men feel about and find grass under their boots, which tells them they are off the desert and nothing else whatsoever.

At dawn the storm eases and they work out where they are.

They are standing on the exact spot the round-up stops every year after crossing the sands. Surtur had halted there since he was a lamb. Afterwards the fjallkongur told his owner that without the ram, men would have died out there as well as sheep.

There are fewer than 1,500 leader sheep left, all of them descended from one district in the north east. Iceland recognised them as a breed of their own in 2017. There is a small museum out there, run by a local teacher, with the heads of the great ones on the wall and a coffee blend named after the animals. The saying on the wall is that if you wear clothes made from their wool, you will always find your way home.

Genetic work has since confirmed they really are distinct from every other Icelandic sheep. The folklore was right. Folklore usually is, out where the weather kills people.

No laboratory. No pedigree software. No genome. Just farmer after farmer, century after century, watching which animal was at the front when the light went, and breeding from that one.

A thousand years of selecting a sheep for its judgement, and at the end of it they built it a museum.

And here we are, in the country that calls them stupid.

[Will Self @wself]

After the death of Jason Arday, Will Self asks what happens when newspapers, platforms, editors and audiences become components in a machine nobody admits to controlling.

The public interest is not the same thing as the public being interested. https://t.co/FwczdbQWsY

[Un Étrange En Terre Étrange @LoinDuTribu]

So here’s a modest proposal.

Jason Arday is dead. The circus has lost its main attraction. The tent is still up, the popcorn machine is still warm, and several of the ringmasters are wandering around pretending they were merely checking the fire exits.

Perhaps The Telegraph, The Spectator, Kathleen Stock, Julia Hartley-Brewer, Julie Bindel, Andrew Neil, Brendan O’Neill and the rest of Britain’s newly discovered Society for Relentless Academic Due Diligence could turn their tremendous investigative appetite towards Nathan fucking Cofnas.

You know Nathan.

The self-described race realist whose intervention helped detonate the Arday story.

The bloke who already believed DEI was corrupting academia.

The bloke who has argued that genuine meritocracy would leave vanishingly few Black professors at elite institutions.

The bloke who talks about a “hereditarian revolution”.

The bloke who, while discussing what comes next for his own career, joked that after “the revolution” he might become head of the department of eugenics and race science at Harvard.

That Nathan Cofnas.

Come on, lads.

You have just spent weeks demonstrating that no biographical pebble is too small to overturn in the sacred pursuit of Truth.

So get the fucking tweezers out.

Go through his history.

Interview the old classmates.

Find the former supervisors.

Call the ex-colleagues.

Dust off the teenage writings.

Read Reptiles with a Conscience from cover to fucking cover.

Check every citation.

Check every footnote.

Find out what he believed before he acquired the qualifications he now uses to defend those beliefs.

Ask when exactly the fascination with hereditarianism began.

Ask what evidence changed his mind.

Ask what evidence could change his mind.

Ask whether race realism emerged reluctantly at the end of an exhausting empirical journey, or whether the destination appeared on the map first and the intellectual road-building project came afterwards.

You wanted to know whether Jason Arday really ran every marathon he claimed.

Excellent.

I would quite like to know whether Nathan Cofnas has actually demonstrated that Black people are genetically less suited to elite intellectual life, or whether he has spent years developing increasingly elaborate reasons for believing something he found compelling in the first place.

Seems at least as fucking interesting as somebody’s 10K split time.

And while we are at it, perhaps ask why the alleged misconduct of one Black academic became so magnificently useful to a man whose existing political project already concerned Black representation, DEI and declining standards.

Was Arday merely a plagiarism case?

Or did Cofnas look at him and see Christmas morning?

Because once you have spent years arguing that progressive universities are artificially elevating Black academics, discovering a celebrated Black Cambridge professor with serious questions hanging over his work must feel less like stumbling across evidence and more like finding a fucking golden ticket inside your ideological Wonka bar.

And apparently that angle is not worth the same excavation?

Really?

Jason Arday tells a tall tale about running and Fleet Street behaves like somebody has discovered the Pentagon Papers.

Nathan Cofnas spends years developing a political programme around hereditarianism and race, then helps frame a national scandal involving a Black professor, and suddenly everyone develops a tremendous respect for intellectual privacy.

How curious.

I am not asking for another pile-on.

I am asking for the same thing you all claimed to worship while Arday was alive:

scrutiny.

Context.

Provenance.

Motivation.

Evidence.

Standards.

Those lovely grown-up words everybody suddenly remembers when they are about to put somebody else under the microscope.

1/2

[Larry the Cat @Number10cat]

Nigel Farage is once again the MP for Clacton. More than 9600 working age adults in the constituency receive disability payments - that's around 18%, one of the highest proportions in the entire country. Be careful what you vote for.

[Trades Union Congress @The_TUC]

We want to sincerely congratulate Nigel Farage.

For defeating a man with a bin on his head.

In a by-election that he called.

To avoid questioning over receiving an unreported £5 million pounds.

From an offshore, crypto-bro billionaire.

That hasn’t achieved anything.

As he can still face an inquiry over the donation.

Meaning this entire farce has been a complete waste of time.

Nigel – well done.

[Supertanskiii @supertanskiii]

If vaginal dryness was a person.

[Mark Hammond @MarkHam80780803]

“Just one more thing, Mr. Farage. If you think that the image Zack Polanski reposted was so dangerous, why did you share it with your 2.3 million followers?”

[Dissproportionately @dissproportion]

This is what every cat thinks they are due when they leave a dead mouse at your feet.

[Simon Harris @SimonHarrisMBD]

People who are treating @CountBinface like a ‘joke’ candidate should remember that an ice cream shop in Southend (just around the coast from Clacton) has already adopted one of his policies with great success …

[Parody Nigel Farage @Parody_PM]

Very sad to hear about the arrest of Andrew Tate. He has been charged with rape, human trafficking, controlling prostitution and actual bodily harm. I once described him as "an important voice for young men", which tells you all you need to know about my moral compass.

[mary beard @wmarybeard]

@AyrshireBog Can we stick to the facts folks. Mary Beard is not a member of the Labour party and has not been for c 30 years. (And by the way she think politics is the business of everyone)

[(((Dan Hodges))) @DPJHodges]

Your daily reminder that Allison sat on the main stage of Reform conference with a woman who was jailed after admitting to inciting racial hatred after using social media to post about setting fire to hotels housing asylum seekers.

[GET A GRIP @docrussjackson]

Vile, abusive, divisive convicted grifting right-wing criminal, who pleaded guilty to inciting racist violence by calling for innocent people to be burned alive for a crime they didn't commit, takes the moral high ground. 🤪

[Diana Alastair💚🤍💜 ⚢ ❌❌✡️ @sappholives83]

This is MMA fighter Sean McInnes. When Anne Marie Boyle asked him to leave her alone, he punched her in the face so hard that he broke her cheekbone and her eye socket, knocked her unconscious, and left her with a life-altering brain injury.

He was given less than two years behind bars.

It would be a real shame if this post was widely circulated and impacted his career in a negative way.

[hildurRagn 💙 @Tullutta]

Been flat sharing in the 90s in Norway many a time. She is incorrect. Very. Very much so.

[pulseby_M @pulseby_M]

Today when I got home, I heard her on the phone saying that in her country (Norway) people aren't so selfish, "especially with food." She was obviously talking about me.
I went to my room to cool off. And there, sitting on my bed, was THIS package with my name on it:
wtf is going on and why would she buy me this?

[Jordo @veryADVANCED]

a lot of people, especially westerners, especially-especially americans, conflate considering others with being controlled & respond with defiance. it’s very weird behavior.

[Harry Eccles @Heccles94]

It isn’t shady MPs who caused a by-election, it was Nigel.

And it’s not Labour investigating Nigel, it’s the Parliamentary standards commission, the National Crime agency and now the metropolitan police too.