Jason Arday

[FourSeasonSoupObsessive]

If I‘m understanding Giff correctly here, she’s saying that as long as you really believe that what you’re doing is for the greater good, it’s all tickety-boo with God and you will get your way. Because you’re special!

I’m having fun imagining all the other people through history who thought this was a terrific way of going about things, and to what extent Jason might agree with them.

The crusades?
Genocide in Rwanda?
British Colonisation of Africa?
9/11 terrorists?

basically, everyone through history who ever perpetuated some crappy act on other peoples or nations or religions though what they were doing was for the greater good. It’s a fatuous philosphy. It explains a lot though. His mum has told him that his every act is righteous and justified if he feels it is. what a breeding ground for a fraud and fantasist.

 

[HotesTilaire]

You don’t have to read particularly far between the lines to get the clear sense he was a bleeping nightmare as an employee and for his students in every academic institution at which he was employed. He didn’t live full time in any city in which he was employed and didn’t last at any of those institutions for very long. You get the sense Liverpool JM, Leeds Beckett, Glasgow etc were just thrilled to see the back of him, particularly as it’s evident that all he gave a duck about was himself and his own self-promotion.

It’s also particularly telling that in 260 pages he spends the first 220+ of them going into great and no-detail-too-mundane detail about his Ma, including her taste in laundry detergent (Dreft) and umbrellas (cheap ones from the corner shop), his own impeccable yet quirky tastes in music, cinema, television and clothing as a teen, his expertise in singing karaoke, football, snooker etc as a teen, the sartorial elegance of Savile Row he visited as a teen, humbling visits to the less fortunate as a teen, meetings with great sages who hand down their personal wisdoms to him or evil trolls who tell him he’ll never amount to anything (the race/ethnicities of all these people are always noted), what he wore everywhere he went, all the Strong Black Women who basically did bleeping everything for him (Ma, long-suffering Deb, his mate Angela at college who it’s pretty clear he glommed onto and who carried him through that degree he scraped) his multitude of diabolical ailments as a child and teen, all his various diagnoses and great sufferings throughout his life, that his ‘university lectureships’ are all flown through and glossed over in about the last 40 pages.

And that 40 pages includes LUDICROUS levels of detail about the events surrounding his viva (which it’s clear when from his own telling was not initially going well for him), as well as a whole host of other utterly nonsensical bollox about his life outside academia. His job at Liverpool JM warrants three pages (and you’ve all seen that), Leeds even less. Thankfully tho, he ‘had a hunch that he thought like a sociologist’ which ultimately led him to Cambridge.

Spoiler: 🙄

View attachment 4087859View attachment 4087860

Will try and copy as much of this rit as I can because as amusing as the rest of his snooker playing karaoke nonsense it, this ‘academic’ stuff is staggering.

When I used to interview people for jobs an automatic red flag for me was anyone who claimed to be some sort of self-appointed psychologist/knower of people, reading from their mannerisms etc who they are and what they want/getting them to open up their “real self” (the job was never anything where you’d need or want those sort of skills) I’d have crossed his name out before the interview was over

 

[ButtonDownTheHutches]

Invite ghostwriter Eve too, and you can have an elevated experience (featu featuring dancing! )View attachment 4088428

“Such a private person who finds it very uncomfortable to talk about himself”

 

[HotesTilaire]

The use of American spelling (color, center) is very revealing. As is the dreary solipsism. Before the internet, America was a genuinely far away place, despite our exposure to its culture via TV and films. Now it's colonised our minds.

Such a weird jackism, why do they do it? Am gonna call CPS on him.

 

[Valiofthedolls]

WHY (oh why oh why) do we have a whole long paragraph about how umbrellas work? I mean, I know he has a word count to reach, but FFS.

What is all this nonsense?

On that note, whose ‘an arm’ must Giff’s mum (his gran’s) enormous pillar-shaped candle been as thick as? That festive fucker was an annual fire hazard for 15 hours a day from the early hours of Christmas morning until New Year’s Day.

Spoiler: 😢

 

[FourSeasonSoupObsessive]

Oh my god, now he’s Vonny le Clerc, he’s lost a hand!

Hahahahahaha!! I really think he is the final boss of fabulists and grifters. He’s got the domineering parent and the dreadful medical debilities like Jack, he’s as thick as Jess, he’s got Raynor Winn’s fondness for improbable physical feats, he’s patronised the poor with bad plumbing like Depher, he’s as pompous and as much of a bleeping dullard as Simon Harris. All he needs now is a good saltening like Carly from Harlow and he’ll have covered it all.

Lads, he might be it, the Ur-grifter, the chosen one. Like the mystical Brazilian woman, or the midwife who prophesized what a gift to the world he was, we may well be bearing witness to an ineffable greatness here.

 

[ChastityDingle]

What an almighty bore he is. I can't imagine what it's like to be so fascinated with yourself.

 

[ButtonDownTheHutches]

On the matter of colour, center, etc, often publishers insist on US spelling even from UK-based authors, because the US is a much bigger market and they want to pre-empt the inevitable complaints that a book is riddled with spelling ‘mistakes’ (i.e. British spellings/punctuation).

What’s odd to me, though, is that S&S were so keen that JA should appeal primarily to a US audience, when he’s presumably much less well-known over there than he was here (which was barely at all, before he achieved his current notoriety). The US spelling, the US book launch coming before the UK launch - what was the end goal, I wonder? Was JA angling for an Ivy League placement?

 

[Valiofthedolls]

Such a weird jackism, why do they do it? Am gonna call CPS on him.

Fear not, ye UK-and-Ireland-dwellers! Ol’ Jase thanks his anglicizer in the acknowledgements, so hopefully you SHAN’T be getting any thrift stores or Tblisi Church Suppers and the like in the version that hits your fair shores, or any of the other ghastly Americanisms in this absolute banger of a Yankee Doodle Dandy edition.

Mind you, he also thanks “The Best Editor in The World”, the person who “sharpened the telling of his story” and all his ‘friends’ who work in the shop that flog him all his overpriced suits, so it’s hard to know what you should expect really.

Spoiler: Acknowledgements

Hopefully The Great And Unfortunate Things Playlist (of page 271 fame) survives the transatlantic journey, that’s all I can say. How else will all you crazy kids know who Jase wants you to rock out to otherwise?

Spoiler: Just remember, all y’all…

The sun’s gonna shine on everything you do.

 

[nothanksbabes]

It’s proper bleeping nuts. I mean WHY? He says it’s because his family needed him at home, but what bleeping good would he be to them when he’s up at three and not getting back until the late evening? What caring is he doing and when? If you do that commute (and I have ), you do it once a week and stay over a night or two. You don’t do it three times (thrice??) a week!

And the “I went to Savile Row for a shirt and came out with an ENTIRE SUIT, which was like all my dreams come true!”- duck me.

Sir, the clever chaps saw you coming and upsold you to buying a suit on credit. And given what a bleeping fraud you are, I’d be curious to know if you ever actually settled the bill.

This is making me rage. How can he tell such tall tales and simultaneously be so bleeping boring I want to peel my own skin off?

It's all so bleeping mundane too. His dad had sciatica and his mum glaucoma, whuch he reports as if they're previously undiscovered and fatal illnesses and not... pretty run of the mill.

He's an academic, but has written basically nothing about his field, his career, his research. A father but has written the square root of duck all about his kids, and despite his enviable position in academia, the best he can come up with as a frame of reference is Rocky and Oasis, like a bleeping 15 year old boy who thinks he's terribly profound.

I've said this in the Jess Taylor threads because she is exactly the same. Nothing these fantasists tell you is about giving you information. Every story is an engineered vehicle to let you know what a uniquely special, talented, interesting or victimised individual they are.

The suit story is particularly telling. He's a vacuous, empty shell of a person more interested in creating a particular image of himself than being anything. That's why he can tell us more about a bleeping suit than his entire body of work as a professor and chair of one of the most prominent educational institutions on earth.

 

[nothanksbabes]

Also, it annoys me that he doesn't know what short term memory is when he forgets his thesis before his viva. Short-term memory is 15-30 seconds. Anything beyond that is long term memory.

It's probably petty and pedantic to point this out in every day conversation, but considering this is a book by a professor, a ghost writer and with the involvement of various editors, it really bleeping annoys me.

 

[HotesTilaire]

Can someone tell me what he wrote about Liverpool? I cant bring myself to actually read too much for fear I will cringe so hard, i will disappear up my own hole. Thanking you

He reckons someone called the police about a black man breaking in because he was living in a flat in Penny Lane, and they’ve never known black people round that way you see, South Liverpool has never known such diversity, not only a black man but a black man paying to live there.

Im literally going to explode. As if I can’t name a bleeping list of actual west African people and second Gen from that postcode in the actual 80s, let alone the intergenerational heritage, I might have to him if I ever see him in Elevenerife

 

[Tabitha D]

On the matter of colour, center, etc, often publishers insist on US spelling even from UK-based authors, because the US is a much bigger market and they want to pre-empt the inevitable complaints that a book is riddled with spelling ‘mistakes’ (i.e. British spellings/punctuation).

What’s odd to me, though, is that S&S were so keen that JA should appeal primarily to a US audience, when he’s presumably much less well-known over there than he was here (which was barely at all, before he achieved his current notoriety). The US spelling, the US book launch coming before the UK launch - what was the end goal, I wonder? Was JA angling for an Ivy League placement?

Well the original plan was to have a big book tour in the US, presumably backed up by interviews on big US talk shows and an enormous publicity budget - so that would have made him better known. (Not going to happen now, of course). I think the end goal for this chronic narc was to get a massive US bestseller, and then a Hollywood movie of his incredible () life story.

 

[Tabitha D]

Also, it annoys me that he doesn't know what short term memory is when he forgets his thesis before his viva. Short-term memory is 15-30 seconds. Anything beyond that is long term memory.

It's probably petty and pedantic to point this out in every day conversation, but considering this is a book that by a professor, a ghost writer and with the involvement of various editors, it really bleeping annoys me.

Indeed.

Although in this case the reason he didn’t remember his thesis is because he didn’t write most of it.

 

[ChastityDingle]

Indeed.

Although in this case the reason he didn’t remember his thesis is because he didn’t write most of it.

[pretends to be shocked ]

 

[I'm not actually here]

https://archive.is/H633W

New fail article from max Pemberton trying to explain why this twit lies so much....

 

[Valiofthedolls]

Well the original plan was to have a big book tour in the US, presumably backed up by interviews on big US talk shows and an enormous publicity budget - so that would have made him better known. (Not going to happen now, of course). I think the end goal for this chronic narc was to get a massive US bestseller, and then a Hollywood movie of his incredible () life story.

For which he would no doubt have been handsomely remunerated with an additional advance of ‘1.4 million’ of some random undisclosed currency or other.

 

[Tabitha D]

In the acknowledgements, he’s thanked the Simon & Schuster CEO, Jonathan Karp.
Who stepped down as CEO a year ago.
Now that is one detail you’d think the Simon & Schuster people might have picked up, if they’d read the thing. Quite easy to insert the word “former” before CEO.

 

[Tabitha D]

For which he would no doubt have been handsomely remunerated with an additional advance of ‘1.4 million’ of some random undisclosed currency or other. View attachment 4088635View attachment 4088636

That “1.4 million” is looking even more unlikely now we’ve actually read chunks of this book. Even if it were true, it’s so badly written. I can’t see any experienced publisher getting so excited about this that they’d pull out the big money.

But I think for a Hollywood film he’d be claiming $20m or something daft like that.

 

[Abominatrix]

For which he would no doubt have been handsomely remunerated with an additional advance of ‘1.4 million’ of some random undisclosed currency or other. View attachment 4088635View attachment 4088636

It's the least important aspect of all this, but the faces he makes kill me every time, like I laugh out loud with every single one, especislly when he's all shiny. Never mind his body of work, how could people see this man making this mug right in front of them and not see there's something off about him?

I bet that's part of the reason he claims autism, to explain away the "off" feeling people get from him.