Jason Arday #3

[Yel]

I do think the media needs to change, not in terms of some ridiculous arbitrary rule where if someone has X articles then no more are allowed until Y days have elapsed.

But in how they report a suicide. The current rules aren't up to scratch and it's so damaging to see the praise and gofund money pouring in when this isn't the reality for most cases.

Take the case of Princess Dickson, a child who had been exploited by TV companies and her mother since she was 4. The IPSO regulated press ran wild with blaming tattle before a coroner's investigation was opened and while it was an active police investigation. The rhetoric in the media was totally inaccurate and pushed by that awful person not a doctor Jessica Taylor who has her own selfish motives to silence valid criticism and sell books. Influencers all have PR and press contacts so getting hit pieces on tattle is easy. Tattle was the only place actually raising safeguarding concerns that no one else cared about.

IPSO said it would be too traumatic for the family to investigate, which I totally understand. But also the stuff in the press is traumatic for the family as all the articles were just her mothers opinion spurred on by awful people possibly convincing her she'll get a payday. At the heart of this case there looks to be a family dispute. If it's too traumatic for IPSO to look into then it shouldn't be reported on other than the known facts. The media all broke the Samaritans advice and IPSO do nothing.

If the IPSO regulated press can't even adhere to the very basic standards on reporting that the Samaritans set out, what hope is there?

 

[Jelly Bean]

Lived thinking he was extraordinary, exposed as being very ordinary indeed.

I often think if people realised they weren't extraordinary at all they'd be a lot happier and more content. So many Tattle subjects suffer from thinking they're marvellously special and that every mundane insight is unique.

 

[PaddyDomino]

It's something I have never seen mentioned in any discourse anywhere... that Cambridge woman gushing over him and saying he's the best in the world... she clearly fancies him, right? I guess there's no political point to be made from that, but her admiration is not strictly academic... right?

In that part of the video where they meet in Reception, she coos and bows at him, like a pigeon mating ritual or something

 

[Mogmog]

His Ma did it all for him. She’d gone to the job center (in Clapham Old Town) and him and Giff ‘agreed’ he’d be AMAZING at it as long as he only had to do some parts of the job but not others, and only the days and hours that suited him and his full-time studies for the BTEC with Sandro he’d just started.

(The part-time job itself was in a shopping center a short tube ride away in Colliers Wood and sold the biggest sports brands ‘such as’ Nike, Reebok and Adidas.)View attachment 4095088 View attachment 4095089

I was shopping earlier and was wondering how anyone could manage in retail without being able to read. If someone asked for a pair of shoes in size 8 then even if he recognised the style, how could he make sure they're the right size? Beyond keeping the shop floor tidy and chatting to customers, what could he offer? I know someone who is illiterate as an adult and by her own admission, its made life hard for her. She can't even read a menu in a restaurant and relies on whoever she's with to tell her what's available.

I don't know how to describe it eloquently but he comes across very naive in the book, like he just gets helped through life while he puts little effort in. The people around him do applications for him, escort him around and then act like it's his own greatness that got him there. That page about him being late to meet his mentor and realising for the first time that smiling and lying his way out of things doesn't always work is very telling.

 

[Hashtag Ad Hashtag Blesse]

Taken from. Twitter but cross referenced with Claude

Here's what the Free Beacon article actually specifies, per storyline:

**Testicular cancer** — matches *Neighbours* character Kyle Canning's 2021 testicular cancer storyline (which followed another character's cancer scare).

**Lifelong seizures from a beating** — matches a 2020 *Neighbours* plotline where character Levi Canning is severely beaten by an intruder and left with lifelong seizures. Arday's claim that his attackers later reconciled with him also mirrors a *Neighbours* beat where one of Levi's assailants eventually apologizes and they reconcile.

**Monthslong coma as a teen** — the article says this type of storyline shows up repeatedly across his favorite shows, not one specific one: *Home and Away* had coma plots in 1999 and 2016, and *Neighbours* had them in 1999 and 2008 (including characters needing to relearn to walk, as Arday claimed).

**Brain tumor removed, causing amnesia before his 2015 PhD defense** — matches a 2007 *Neighbours* storyline involving the character Paul Robinson, who has a brain tumor removed and suffers partial amnesia.

**Illiteracy taught by his girlfriend/wife** — the article also flags a *Neighbours* plotline about character Connor O'Neill's secret illiteracy and his girlfriend arranging tutoring for him, timed close to when Arday says his ex-wife began teaching him to read.

That's everything the article specifies — it doesn't name particular episodes/characters beyond these.

 

[VeniVidiVicki]

This is his interview with Krishnan Guru-Murthy:

At 7:25, he says "I don't have any skill. But what I do have is an indomnitable will." Jeez. You can even see his eyes look so... haunted? dead? after he says he has no skill. Then he puts the mask on again and starts being animated once again.

He did the same in his acceptance speech at st Mary’s (when he was given an honorary doctorate )

There‘s a page now set up for good memories. The overwhelming thing that people say is that he was kind.

I was lucky enough to be taught by some absolutely brilliant lecturers and academics. Some were kinder to me than others. The ones who really made a difference were the ones who pushed me to push myself harder though. Kindness is not the key quality you need in education.

 

[Valiofthedolls]

His relationship with Sandro, it comes across as way more than a mentor thing.

The extracts from his book aren’t particularly challenging to read. I would say a reading age of approx. 13 could read that, and I am being generous! I have not read any of his work or watched an interview of his which shows he has the intellectual capacity for a professorship or advanced public speaking. It’s a shame he felt he had no other option but to take extreme lengths to make it end, but I honestly believe he is a narc fantasist and it was only a matter of time before he got found out.

Honestly, his entire book reads like it was written by and about an adolescent boy. There’s nothing ‘adult’ in there beyond adult rites of passage like weddings, jobs, children (all of which are alluded to in passing only), to suggest any sort of functional or mature adult.

The entire book is all about fantasizing he’s in Rocky or playing in major some sporting event that happened a decade before, the tv he likes, the music he likes, the junk food he eats, the clothes he wears, the buses he gets in and off, how great he is at everything, all the people who’ve told him how wonderful he is/will be, all the people who’ve tried to take him down a peg or two (in Jack Monroe speak), all the words of wisdom of great sages Sandro, Giff etc.

I think the former (about his mentor) is a function of that. He writes about himself as if he’s a kid who (back then as a kid/teen) needed his Mum, his brothers, and his teenage peers like his two school mates and Debs to do everything for him/protect him from the real world and since then (and still at the time of writing) needs all these other adults around him to protect him from the real world.

None of these people have any agency or any existence outside of what sets they’re in at school, what they do for him and what they look like. His ‘half-Mauritian’ and ‘strawberry blonde’ besties from secondary school just exist to stop him and his Hendrix Afro getting on the wrong bus when his brother is busy. (They’re never mentioned again).

Also, I haven’t screenshot these parts because they’re in a load of other effing tedium, but at his Sports World job after he left school, Deb (who he met there) helped him conceal the fact he couldn’t read and write while allegedly teaching him to do so, because (he’d decided) if they knew he’d get fired. During his degree, for several years he and everyone around him hid from the Uni the fact he’d become a father because (he’d decided) if they knew, the mean white lady tutor would kick him off the course. His entire adult life he’s had people around him complicit in protecting him, parenting him, and lying for him because of consequences imaginary or real.

He’s the main character, but only if the main character is stuck in arrested development on the cusp of a not particularly precocious or interesting 13, with pedestrian tastes in...everything, but finds himself endlessly fucking fascinating and unique. Honestly, it’s like finding some kid’s Bebo or MySpace page. And nothing in any vid of him anywhere, or hearing him speak about anything, even after his appointment to Cambridge, disabuses me of that notion.

 

[goldenrodshortbread]

It’s a funny one. In a way, all grift is a matter of public interest. He denied other (we assume) credible, qualified candidates a life-changing job opportunity - including reportedly two women of colour. He committed heinous academic fraud. He conned members of the public into thinking he was someone else. He made bank off sensationalist lies through his book deal (and even posthumously the funeral fundraiser grift now stands at £218k!). He has destroyed his family’s life by taking his own. But - he had no social media. He made no real statements of any substance, and thus did very little harm in real terms. He didn’t go after brand deals or flog stuff or particularly claim to represent anything other than Jason Arday.

Meanwhile, we have ‘Dr’ Jessica Taylor, another serial fraudulent fabulist making money from vulnerable women and girls, acting far outside of her qualifications and issuing actively harmful advice which reaches hundreds of thousands of people. I would so much rather have seen her get taken down this summer. Not ‘hounded to death’ or any of that nonsense - just an interruption of her grift and exposure of her fraud. Over on the DJT threads we think this day will surely come. Or we will collectively combust into a national wildfire!

TLDR: Arday bad; worse still out there…

 

[Serene Serena]

The Mother Of All Cons woman is still alive and well, as is Belle Gibson and the Salt Path couple - all of whom were publicly outed as being frauds and liars. There are numerous other examples. I hope this case doesn't make people scared to question bizarre and unrealistic claims.

 

[Valiofthedolls]

Do you think he genuinely believed his confabulations? Like the Saville Row shop staff applauding him?

It’s not even just that, it’s that he must have genuinely believed people would find everything he wore, every bus and train he ever got on and off, any music he ever listened to, all the films and tv he watched and liked, the takeaway food he ate, that his mum’s mum is his gran, every ‘pivotal’ conversation and every inconsequential happening, and every single mundane detail of his (let’s face it, in the telling, for the most part incredibly shallow) life told in great minutiae…interesting? inspiring? what, exactly?

Like, he had the incredible opportunity to tell his story, wasn’t even bound or bothered by the distinction between fiction and non-fiction, and this is what he managed to come up with?

 

[Jelly Bean]

Do you think he genuinely believed his confabulations? Like the Saville Row shop staff applauding him?

This is what I'll never understand with some people including JA.
The absolute lack of modesty. Or the cringe factor. Maybe staff did applaud him (doubtful) but who would report that without realising how utterly nauseating it sounds?
Public approval/attention seems to be their main driving factor. People either in awe or fuming at their success is so important to them. No chance of them just quietly and happily getting on with things like most people. All their achievements have to be widely acknowledged.
I cannot be believe true happiness and contentment is possible with that mind set.

 

[Tabitha D]

It looks like GLP have now turned on the Guardian. (It seems that the “turning point” in this sorry affair was Lanre Bakare’s “pig’s head” article).

As you would expect, it is not going well for GLP:

 

[FourSeasonSoupObsessive]

I'm still absolutely baffled by that autobiography. I was thinking about it in the context of interviewing someone for a role, and how I might ask about a time someone encountered X, and they respond something like, 'We had a difficult project. My manager said we'd never deliver it, but my colleague believed in me. I was determined not to give up. Eventually we delivered it successfully and everyone was delighted.' It has the shape of a nice story but you're left with no useful information about what they actually did. And that's his whole book.

Spoiler: Continued...

He starts at Point A, reaches Obstacle B, Obstacle C, then Triumphant Point D.

It looks like a narrative and has the signals telling the reader how to feel. Bully doubted me. Friend/stranger believed in me. Villain told me I'd amount to nothing. Nobody had ever seen someone like me try something like this before. They laughed at me. I nearly gave up. Nobody thought a person like me could do it. But I persevered. And now look at me. Aren't I amazing?

WHAT THE FUCK HAPPENED AT POINTS B AND C? That's the interesting part, which he omits every. Single. Time.

'Giff had me moved to a mainstream school. She 'campaigned''. Did she? How? With whom? What did she do? What worked? What didn't? Why was that the right thing to do? Why was it better than the alternative?

'Debs taught me to read and write.'
Did she? And how did she do that? What techniques did she use? How did she know about them? Why, specifically, did she succeed where Giff and at least three schools, presumably staffed with teachers, had failed? What was it like, after a lifetime of being unable to read to suddenly have a world of incredible literature and information available to you?

You got a PhD? How? Why? What did it entail, what did you research and how, what parts of the subject did you find challenging, what did you get wrong, how did you course correct, what exactly did you learn, what surprised you?

But every story is just... nobody believed in me, Giff battled for me to go to a mainstream school so that's what happened, aren't we amazing? Debs taught me to read somehow, but more importantly she's thin and beautiful and other men are jealous of me, aren't I interesting? I did a PhD on a Thinkpad branded laptop. Nobody thought I could do it but I knew I was like the character Rocky played by Sylvester Stallone in the Rocky films and I thought about Rocky and succeeded! Like Rocky!

All the supposedly verbatim dialogue and beige detail acts as a stand in for this juvenile superficiality, but there's not a second of agency or self reflection.

Everyone is childishly divided into the goodies, the baddies and the hero and his triumph over evil. We know literally nothing about him by the end of the book except for the externally imposed dramatic events through which he demonstrates he is special.

Perhaps that's why people create these wild stories? If you have no internal sense of yourself or why you're doing anything, then I suppose a dramatic external narrative is one way to anchor yourself to... something. Create the idea of a person and construct the narrative around that. But you can't reverse engineer a life.

Absolutely this! Fantastic post. If there are other writers on here, then hasn’t this just made you think of the classical Hero’s Journey?

Basically, there’s a theory that this story structure is so foundational to our collective psyches that it’s almost encoded into every human brain on some level, that we all understand it, even when we don’t consciously acknowledge it. Humans are story tellers, ”homo narrans“, and we respond on a very primal level when someone presents us with a story in this familiar form.

I am taken by the idea that if you’re a person with no strong sense of internal self, which our fabulists often seem to be, that it would be very attractive to model yourself on a story that subconsciously feels “right” and “true”.

So interesting.

 

[PurvyPanda]

Make me glad he didn't go into details about is time in Scotland, fleeting though it was.

I’m impressed by your ability to type a whole sentence whilst being high on skag and scotch, and operating the bagpipes. Now get back in your bothy and boil me a haggis. Like you do.

I hope I can make this joke if I caveat it by saying my great granny was from Troon.

 

[InkHeart]

I've been away from TL for a while but this story has brought me back. The response to the JA saga has made me think we are approaching the End Of Times.

Most of what I would say has already been said by others. I really do not understand his supporters who are obsessing over the old articles in local newspapers about his marathon running. They are concentrating so hard, looking for a grain of truth in one thing he said while ignoring all the more serious lies. For me, there are two things that have not really been spoken about so much. One is JA's manipulation of the press: the Guardian story involving the pig's head and knife man was planted by Arday himself last year. Presumably, he thought a black Guardian journo would be sympathetic; he later told Jolyon Maugham that he didn't trust the journalist. I don't think anyone on here has mentioned that in a DM article, he tries to manipulate the press again. Those who claim that the press hounded JA to death would do well to acknowledge that the DM just reported JA's request without making a big deal of his manipulative ways and that the Guardian article did not mention that JA approached them with his tales.

View attachment 4102222

Another thing that has not been examined is that JA was supposedly an expert in racism in education, yet has set the field back in two ways. Firstly, he obviously accused others of racism and made up stories about being a victim of racial hate crimes. But there is also the fact that his research into the experiences of ethnic minority ppl in education uses quotes he copied from elsewhere. He had so little respect for the field, he copied others. Despite his obvious skills of storytelling, he couldn't even be bothered to confect some interviews, let alone go out and do some proper interviews. This would be akin to a Professor studying sexual violence reporting colleagues/students for sexist behaviour and then making up false allegations of sex crimes to tell journalists when he felt he was about to be rumbled.

He did fuck all to actually help other black people, he was all about himself.

 

[nothanksbabes]

That part where he's asked what it was like being able to speak and write, he hasn't answered the question?!

“It’s a very hard thing to explain because it happened to me.” Why would that make it hard to explain? Surely being the person it happened to is precisely why you are in a position to explain what you experienced?!

Then an utter word salad. Fate, destiny, luck, a "spark", Rocky, a million to one, will versus skill, Muhammed Ali, hop on the luck train.

YOU HAVE SAID LITERALLY NOTHING.

I learned to read and write at the normal time and I could explain in detail, decades later, how I felt learning to read and what a gift I think literacy is in my life. He was an absolute fucking charlatan as well as being mind-numbingly uncurious. The fact this vacuousness was so well rewarded. I've fucking had it, honestly. Why are any of us bothering when we could just come out with this embarrassing nonsense.

 

[moldwarp]

I honestly think it's self-preservation. If they call out their workplace(s) as having awarded or hired someone woefully unprepared, producing sub-standard work and insanely out of their depth - they're scared that it will devalue their own work, even if it is entirely honest.

That's a fair take. As Upton Sinclair said, "It's difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it."

Would I have put my principles above paying the mortgage? Probably not, tbh, because my children were young and I needed to keep a roof over their and my heads.

I do think there's something else though which is that it's really hard for an ideologue to let go of their ideology. So if the Arday appointment WAS an ideological appointment (and I accept this take is still just possibly debatable) i.e. an ideology of anti-racism, CRT, DEI, identitarianism which states that the colour of your skin is more important than any other factor including skillset, then questioning his qualifications would also mean possibly questioning that ideology. And if one's entire belief system and worldview is built on that ideology then you're gonna do anything you can to prop it up. I can understand that. Where it falls down is that using a mentally ill person as the keystone to prop up your ideological wall, is really asking that mentally ill person to bear a weight he cannot and should never have been asked to bear.

I think this also relates to what @TrashleenMoron was saying, in that it kind of had to be someone like Nathan Cofnas who broke the story, because he had little to lose. A mainstream journo, mainstream academics and Arday's students had all tried and been warned off / intimidated. Cofnas had already been disgraced by Cambridge and was already an outsider / renegade by virtue of his research areas. So he was already a villain, may as well push the Fuckit Button and become more of a villain.

In an odd reverse way, JK Rowling played a similar role in exposing the trans cult. Many, many women had tried to speak out against it, but they were fired / sued / intimidated, or they simply had little social capital, little platform and couldn't make themselves heard. Or they kept quiet because they had a mortgage to pay. JKR kind of had a Fuckit Button in inverse proportion to Nathan Cofnas - her huge wealth and elite status made her kind of similarly immune in the opposite direction. So she was able to say it (and thank GOD she did).

it sometimes takes an outsider to expose a grift is what I'm saying. Like in the old story, it's deliberate that it's a CHILD that points out that the emperor is naked. The town notables, the burghers, the nobility - they had a higher social platform than the child, and therefore more to lose, so they kept their mouth shut and pretended the emperor had clothes on.

 

[GabbyJ]

'Fighting' for him to be placed in mainstream where he preceded to learn the sum total of nil, if he is to be believed. This is crazy to me, as a mum of an actually diagnosed autistic son, who would have done anything to get him a special placement, where he would have had far more hope of succeeding.

Exactly! My son is six, non verbal ASD, ADHD and learning disability and he would not have coped in a mainstream school. I’m extremely lucky he is at a SEN school but it would be utter madness to send him to mainstream where he would not have got the 1:1. And also why would I impose a child like mine on a teacher whose focus and training is not SEN? I can
only imagine the disruption he would have brought to the class and other kids.
I also think this part of JA’s story is bullshit but if it’s true then it was selfish and inconsiderate on Giffs part.

 

[InkHeart]

From here: https://thedispatch.com/article/jason-arday-cambridge-journalism-media/

Which is worth a read.

Arday "openly stated that due to his autism, when he was at work, “90% of the time I don’t know what is going on but I am having to pretend I know what is going on.”

Shit. I don't believe he was autistic (he at least lied about the diagnosis) but even if he was, people should not hold jobs where they don't know what's going on. Somehow, at some point, we've got lost in the idea that if anyone is unsuitable for a job due to disability, there must be a way around it. Accommodations must be made until this person can do this. But as someone who had to give up jobs I loved because of a disability, I know too well that disabilities are disabling and often you just can't do what you wish you could do. In many cases, there is no accommodation, because the disability precludes the very basis of the job.

Arday, and maybe the people who hired him, seemed to believe that his autism is like dyslexia, where he could do the cognitive load of the work if he had the information formated to him in a certain way. But some people can't do cognitive load and that's that. [Not due to autism, which can occur to very intelligent people as well], but while he is blaming his claimed autism, the fact is that with or without it, he can't manage the job. By his own admission. Autism can cause people to be confused if they are dealing with a lot of different tasks, but IMO Arday just wasn't clever enough to be a Cambridge Professor. Or even have a PhD.

Sometimes inclusivity isn't the right thing to do - no one should be employed to do a job that they don't even understand.

 

[Valiofthedolls]

I’ve no idea how Arday’s viva went. Perhaps it’s in the book. No doubt he was the first 29 year old black PhD candidate in history to complete in 2.5 years (!!) while working full time (!!!), running 609 marathons and pass his viva with no corrections.

It’s in the book, and based on the utterly ludicrous story he weaves around it, including the mean examiners who didn’t make small talk before starting, it seems fairly clear he scraped it by the skin of his teeth and it remained a narc wound for him.

That chapter is in the spoiler here. It’s quite a ride.
https://tattle.life/threads/jason-arday.53156/post-25318062

Edit: It’s also odd as fuck that a thirty year old adult man with a full-time student-facing academic job at Leeds and holding down multiple other jobs, a family (a father of two by this point), and who’d already attained multiple degrees and had (allegedly) lived in Liverpool, needed his old Sports BTEC mentor ‘father figure’ Sandro to parent chaperone him through the entire viva trip to Liverpool because “I knew couldn’t get through it without him” including Sandro driving him to Liverpool, spending every moment with him, sleeping in the same effing bedroom as him for support (allegedly in case he ‘had a seizure’ after his alleged short-term-memory-loss-causing alleged ‘brain tumor’), coming to the viva with him and sitting outside (getting there early “because Sandro didn’t want us to be late”, bestowing upon him numerous words and platitudes of wisdom throughout the visit, including, according to Arday a mid-viva pep-talk that together with memories of Giff’s words of wisdom saved the day.