Have a sneer percolating in your system but not enough time/energy to make a whole post about it? Go forth and be mid - welcome to the Stubsack, your first port of call for learning fresh Awful youāll near-instantly regret.
Any awful.systems sub may be subsneered in this subthread, techtakes or no.
If your sneer seems higher quality than you thought, feel free to cutānāpaste it into its own post ā thereās no quota for posting and the bar really isnāt that high.
The post Xitter web has spawned so many āesotericā right wing freaks, but thereās no appropriate sneer-space for them. Iām talking redscare-ish, reality challenged āculture criticsā who write about everything but understand nothing. Iām talking about reply-guys who make the same 6 tweets about the same 3 subjects. Theyāre inescapable at this point, yet I donāt see them mocked (as much as they should be)
Like, there was one dude a while back who insisted that women couldnāt be surgeons because they didnāt believe in the moon or in stars? I think each and every one of these guys is uniquely fucked up and if I canāt escape them, I would love to sneer at them.
(Credit and/or blame to David Gerard for starting this.)
This may be a little bit off topic, but since it sits at the intersection of academic freedom, race science, and plagiarism I honestly canāt imagine our very good friends staying quiet on the matter for long.
Jason Arday, youngest black professor in Cambridge history, dead at 41 after plagiarism debacle
It looks like the initial accusations here came from Nathan Cofnas, a notorious racist shitheel. I am not qualified to speak on the actual validity of the plagiarism accusations, but suffice to say that my priors are very low. Cofnasā current employer seems to agree at least that the optics are pretty fucking bad, and heās been given a teaching ban and presumably a private request to stay out of the spotlight for a while.
It seems like some of the usual suspects are making noise about that from the academic freedom angle, but I think the more salient criticism is that itās get another example of academic culture being unable and/or unwilling to handle people acting in bad faith. Like, even if the plagiarism accusations were completely substantiated (Ed: theyāre quite the opposite), I donāt think itās unreasonable to assume that Cofnas was looking to harass a prominent black professor at a well-regarded university and that the low-effort āthe AI app says this is plagiarizedā attack was simply an expedient means to do so. Race āscienceā is still a political project masquerading as academic inquiry. Or rather, the line between āimpartialā academic inquiry and political activity is far less coherent than advertised and failing to acknowledge this will only empower assholes like Cofnas to continue their bullshit.
The university actually cleared him of the plagiarism charges early on, they had hearings and landed on it being within accepted limits for this sort of thing.
Itās insane how the whole thing went from the initial coverage implying heās a complete and total fraud that Cambridge didnāt do due diligence on because of woke to actually, even his more far fetched claims about endurance running seem to check out.
It would be hilarious if it wasnāt murder.
Part of the accusations were also that he faked running a lot of marathons in a short period. Which he actually did. I even heard that some news outlets who accused him of faking it actually had reported themselves on him running the marathons.
It is a kiwifarms style witch hunt but started by a racist academic, and perpetuated with help from the media.
It should be said here again that these people donāt even know what academic freedom means and are abusing the term. They mean it essentially as a synonym for free speech, but academic freedom has specifically do to with freedom from state interference in the affairs of the university born from the struggles over its sovereignty between the two in European history; it has nothing to do with academia itself having the means to proscribe the conduct of individual academics. If a geology department suspends a flat-earther, that is academic freedom (among other things) operating as intended. Ironically, the US ambassador directly intervening in the proceedings at Ghent is the actual violation of academic freedom here and these idiots are completely clueless about it.