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Will Self manages the same trick, in his own register. He recently published a piece he had the nerve to call J’Accuse, in which he put the invented term “gender criticality” in scare quotes, for fear that the rest of his prose might touch against it, and treated a position that would have been unremarkable a decade ago as self-evidently disreputable now.
Self doesn’t do Jon’s soft, sorrowful faux-concern. He does something closer to sneering, the confident dismissal of a man who’s decided which side sounds cleverer and doesn’t need to check. But it’s the same cowardice wearing a better jacket. Neither of them will say whether a man belongs in a woman’s changing room. But both of them will happily write thousands of words about those of us who simply say no.
– Graham Linehan
The N-word is very much the ultimate trigger-word right now. Despite this being a full article about this precise epithet, I am unable to easily use it. Just to be safe from malicious prosecution or algorithmic suppression, even free speech websites like the Daily Sceptic will generally use asterisks to obscure it as ‘n****r’, even though you all know perfectly well what full word the typography indicates. It’s not ‘number’ or ‘nectar’ (‘neuter’ might be quite appropriate, though).
– Steven Tucker, writing In Minnesota, words matter more than rape.
Words of Power lose their impact when overused or habitually misused, which is why “fascist” and “racist”, once useful categoric descriptions with specific meanings, now mean almost nothing beyond “someone I do not like and wish to place beyond the pale”.
However “nigger”, absolutely a word of power in a strangely inverted way, is just a crass insult. Yet it is so powerful we’re required to render it as “the N-word”, akin to saying “Adonai” rather than the true name of God. Yet bizarrely in this two-tier civilization of ours, it becomes acceptable when used by melanin enhanced rappers, in which case it becomes something more akin to “geezer” or “my crew” or various other non-taboo things, depending on context.
It’s a funny old world.
Compare the two cases and a pattern emerges. Cofnas cleared every formal bar that Cambridge erected—a competitive fellowship, a strong publication record, an eventual ruling that he’d broken no law and no policy—but he was punished anyway, and his position quietly expired while the university dithered. Arday did not clear the bars his professoriate peers had to clear, he was defended anyway, and he was propped up by administrators who failed to do due diligence. One scholar was punished for an opinion; the other was protected despite misconduct that objective methods could verify. Two different treatments, one shared instinct: expedience trumps evidence.
– Rosalind Arden
In fact, RICU has actively become biased against entirely mainstream right-wing beliefs. According to the 2023 Shawcross Review into Prevent, while its ‘products related to Islamic terrorism focus on the most serious material relating to violent Islamist ideology…much of the material covering Extreme Right-Wing falls well below the threshold’. Shawcross mentioned that he ‘saw one RICU analysis product from 2020 on Right-Wing terrorist and extremist activity online which referenced books by mainstream British conservative commentators as “key cultural nationalist ideological texts”.
The same document listed “key texts” for white nationalists as including historic works of the Western philosophic and literary canon’. Shawcross also describes RICU analysis of a ‘cohort of social media users it termed “Actively Patriotic and Proud”, listed a prominent Conservative politician and former member of the government as being among figures “associated with far-right sympathetic audiences, and Brexit”’ (who I understand to be Jacob Rees-Mogg). This then, is RICU now. An organisation which seeks to ‘counter extremist narratives’ and maintains ‘contingency communication’ materials ‘for rapid deployment after major incidents’. The methods they deploy are ‘never published’.
– Pimlico Journal
“We are Jason Arday,” say the Cambridge faculty.
“We are Jason Arday,” say the British academic establishment.
“We are Jason Arday,” say humanities faculty throughout the West.
And you know what?
They are all correct.
– Dinesh D’Souza
“Playbooks, plagiarism and a pig’s head: new claims surrounding a star Cambridge professor”, writes the Guardian’s Lanre Bakare.
Bakare has made strenuous efforts to be fair to Arday, but, alongside the extensive evidence of plagiarism and the extreme physical unlikelihood of Arday’s claim to to have run 30 marathons in 35 days, ten of those days with a hairline fracture in his leg, the pattern of behaviour Bakare describes below is difficult to explain away:
In an open letter to the government minister Jacqui Smith in July 2025, which outlined Arday’s experiences, he claimed to have been “threatened with a knife, physically assaulted and spat on; [had] rape and death threats being made to him and his family; bananas and bullets being posted to him via the university campus; and corrosive substances and mutilated animals sent to his family home”.
In a subsequent interview with the Guardian, Arday claimed to have been confronted at his faculty building on two separate occasions by a masked man threatening to harm him if he did not resign, and evading detection both times. On the second occasion Arday said the intruder produced a knife and threatened him with it.
The Guardian understands that after Arday reported the first intrusion to the university, enhanced CCTV was placed in the faculty and a panic alarm was installed in his office. The professor said he hit the panic alarm during the second confrontation, but that no one responded. It should have triggered an alarm alerting the faculty’s security team, all of whom were present at the time of the alleged incident.
The intruder was not picked up by CCTV on either occasion and no one in the faculty reported seeing anyone suspicious. Arday did not report either intrusion at the time, telling the Guardian that after the second incident he continued his working day and even conducted a PhD viva for a student less than two hours later.
He did not inform colleagues that a masked man with a knife was in the faculty building.
and
Arday confirmed in an interview with the Guardian that the “mutilated animals sent to his family home” mentioned in the open letter was a severed pig’s head, delivered in a large cardboard box to his parents’ home address in south London. He claimed to have intercepted the package and immediately thrown it away, only telling the police several months later.
In a subsequent interview he claimed the police investigated, checking with butchers in south London if they had sold a pig, eventually finding one that had sold a “whole hog” on the morning the head was left outside the family home.
When the Guardian checked those details with the local butchers Arday named, they said no police officer had come in to ask them about a pig. When asked if they were sure, the butcher said “that’s the kind of thing we’d remember”.
When the details Arday gave about the pig’s head investigation were checked by London’s Metropolitan police, the Guardian was told they were “categorically” incorrect and no investigation had taken place.
He’s going down, and the only remaining question is which of his gullible academic sponsors he will drag down with him.
In the Telegraph today:
The messages that show Covid scientists secretly suspected a lab leak
Scientists who were instrumental in shutting down the Covid lab-leak theory admitted in private “we can’t rule it out”, newly released messages show.
In March 2020, a group of influential virologists published a paper in the journal Nature Medicine arguing that an animal spillover event probably caused the pandemic.
The article, known as “The Proximal Origins of Covid” [Link to the paper here. In fact its title refers to “Origin” in the singular- NS] concluded “we do not believe any type of laboratory-based scenario is plausible” and was hugely persuasive in stifling debate globally.
But messages obtained and published by US senator Rand Paul show that behind the scenes the scientists voiced concerns that the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) had been carrying out experiments on coronaviruses at insufficient biosecurity levels.
The virus emerged eight miles from WIV laboratories and was seemingly pre-adapted to infect humans
and
The messages also reveal that authors were aware that Dr Shi – the lead bat virus scientist at WIV – was herself worried that Covid had been caused by a lab accident.
In September 2021, it emerged that before the pandemic Dr Shi had applied for a grant to insert a furin cleavage site (FCS) into bat coronaviruses – the very addition that made Covid-19 so infectious to humans.
Although the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency dismissed the grant because it was too dangerous, Slack messages showed that scientists feared the work had gone ahead anyway.
Prof Andrew Rambaut of Edinburgh University wrote that “it isn’t beyond plausibility that someone went ahead and tried some of this stuff”, adding, “We just need to re-convince ourself it is coincidence.”
You may be saying, “I’ve read Viral. This is not news to me”. The news is that it is being reported in a major “quality” British newspaper.
Here is what the Telegraph was saying about the “Proximal Origin” paper on 1st May 2020:
The study that proves conspiracy theorists wrong – coronavirus came from nature
Covid-19 is not a “laboratory construct” but emerged as a result of natural evolution, according to a report which demolishes conspiracy theories about the origins of the disease.
The virus first emerged in Wuhan, China, at the end of December and has since spread rapidly across the globe, with more than three million people worldwide now infected.
But fear and misinformation have escalated alongside the pandemic, with the World Health Organization warning that the globe is fighting an “infodemic” as well as an epidemic.
One common myth has been that the new virus, called SARS-CoV-2, was originally made in a laboratory. But in a study, published in Nature Medicine journal, researchers analysed the genome sequence of the coronavirus and found strong evidence it evolved naturally, probably from a bat or a pangolin.
Sarah Newey has more details on the evidence that debunks President Trump’s latest theory.
Nice touch in linking the thing you don’t want people to take seriously to Trump, though that trick no longer works as well as it once did.
There is no shame in having been wrong, so long as you then work sincerely to put things right. In today’s article the Telegraph goes some way to atone for its past errors. Let’s see how the rest of the British media covers this story. Let’s see if the rest of the British media covers this story.
Christopher Nolan’s flick The Odyssey is probably a work of marketing genius, or maybe not, we will see.
Many are now saying ‘based’ culture warriors and those repelled by certain very outré casting choices have got it wrong and it is actually good.
However, you will never convince me the casting was not epic trolling: a black actress as Helen of Troy, possessed of a face unlikely to have launched a thousand ships, at least not in her direction; an African-American rap singer; a transgender actress playing Sinon (a character actually from Virgil’s Aeneid); and the goddess Athena played by Zendaya Coleman, an actress known for practicing economy of expression.
I have not seen Nolan’s Odyssey and probably never will, not for any particularly ideological reason but because of what an old chum of mine with whom I did Classics observed after seeing it.
“They replaced the trickster polytropos Odysseus with some other chap, who strangely was also called Odysseus.”
Yes, my friend is a bit of a wag, but he does read Latin and Greek, and if I am going to watch something called The Odyssey, I want the protagonist to be Odysseus, not just called Odysseus.
Musa al-Gharbi is an American academic – a sociologist and a professor of journalism – who is an occasional columnist for the Guardian. He describes himself as a Democrat.
If you were asked to guess from the information in the sentence above what he would say in a talk giving an overview of sociological research about American voters in the era of Trump, you’d probably be wrong, just like I was.
I found his talk “How Researcher Homogeneity Distorts Knowledge Production” informative and entertaining, particularly the section that starts at 28:02 and continues until about 40:00 on what is commonly called “the public loss of trust in science”.
(As Professor al-Gharbi points out, there has scarcely been any public loss of trust in science.)
Left window doesn’t know what right window is doing.
The other day I found this Swedish video giving a perspective (from around 2018) on radical feminism. Tip is to set the video to give you English subtitles if you aren’t fluent in Swedish.
Assuming that it is satire, let it be put in the balance when one assesses the contribution of the land of Olaf Palme and Gunnar Myrdal to the World,
And again, if this was so obvious in 2018, why did it take so long for these types to be called out for what they are elsewhere?
The BBC reports,
UN votes to recognise enslavement of Africans as ‘gravest crime against humanity’
The United Nations General Assembly has voted to recognise the enslavement of Africans during the transatlantic slave trade as “the gravest crime against humanity”, a move advocates hope will pave the way for healing and justice.
They’ll never get reparations. But this move might end up paving the way for healing and justice – by being annoying enough to finally kill off the MOPE Olympics and the self-destructive mindset that mopery promotes.
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