Click here: to donate by Credit Card
Or here: to donate by PayPal
Or by mail to: Free Republic, LLC - PO Box 9771 - Fresno, CA 93794
Thank you very much and God bless you.
Posted on 08/15/2026 9:21:49 AM PDT by SeekAndFind
Simon Baron-Cohen, the distinguished Cambridge autism specialist, has been speaking movingly about his friend, Jason Arday, in a BBC radio interview. Baron-Cohen said the last contact he had with Arday was hours before he was found dead at an address in south London yesterday afternoon: “He really wasn’t coping. He was being subjected to relentless scrutiny…ridicule, discrediting every detail of his life… He wasn’t coping with the loss of his career, the loss of his reputation. He felt he couldn’t go on.”
Baron-Cohen went on to talk about him as “an incredibly kind and gentle and caring and generous man”. From his own perspective, he observed, “at the heart of all this was a man who was diagnosed with autism and language differences…he needed support every step of the way. [Yet] after the allegations of plagiarism, (the) media didn’t leave him alone.
It is good to be reminded of Jason Arday as a friend, by a friend. For in death we all should be remembered in our humanity, even in our flawed humanity. And Jason Arday was very human; he bled. He was not just a totem of DEI (Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion), but as the Prof said, a vulnerable man. It’s sometimes hard for pundits, self included, to remember how terrifying it is to be at the heart of a media firestorm. Jason Arday isn’t the first to feel the pressure to be unbearable. We may not feel exactly guilt at participating in the row, but it would be strange if we didn’t feel sober, chastened, by his tragic end.
De mortuis nil nisi bonum is a good motto, but in Arday’s case, the difficulty about speaking no evil of the dead is in disentangling the man, the human being, from the issue. And the issue was quite legitimate: the apparent dearth of scrutiny of his successive appointments, the uncritical and unquestioned acceptance of his work and his claims as, for instance, a fundraiser. His family, in their pain, has talked about him as the victim of misinformation. This isn’t, I would say, the whole case, though this isn’t the time to rehearse the details.
Before his death becomes weaponised – as it already risks being – in the culture wars, we should make one thing clear, as I, in fact, did before he died. It is that the problem was not Jason Arday; it was with the individuals who lionised him, who promoted him beyond his capacities, who raised him up prematurely to stellar heights at an age which would have been remarkable for anyone, regardless of ethnicity. It is the individuals behind the system which created Jason Arday, the poster image of DEI, who should be asking themselves some questions.
Arday can hardly be blamed for not resisting this inexorable trajectory. And, I would say, the fault is with Cambridge for making a dud subject like Education a faculty on the same level as history or natural sciences or classics. Jason Arday was a victim, but not quite in the way that his political champions suggest.
He was also a man, a father, a son, a brother and an uncle, as his family have said, and it is as such he is being mourned. Requiescat in pace.
|
|
Click here: to donate by Credit Card Or here: to donate by PayPal Or by mail to: Free Republic, LLC - PO Box 9771 - Fresno, CA 93794 Thank you very much and God bless you. |
Tragedy???
Yes he needed help and support. Making him a professor didn’t help.
Well, he might have been a fabulist and a plagiarizer, he might even have deserved to be fired, but I certainly didn’t want to see him dead at such a young age…
“It is the individuals behind the system which created Jason Arday, the poster image of DEI, who should be asking themselves some questions. Arday can hardly be blamed for not resisting this inexorable trajectory.”
Really? He saw an opening, and took as much underhanded advantage of it as he could.
It’s sometimes hard for pundits, self included, to remember how terrifying it is to be at the heart of a media firestorm.
DEI is a creation of white liberals to keep their power at the expense of black people. They promote the worst aspects of black culture to keep them a permanent underclass.
the problem was not Jason Arday; it was with the individuals who lionised him, who promoted him beyond his capacities, who raised him up prematurely to stellar heights at an age which would have been remarkable for anyone, regardless of ethnicity. It is the individuals behind the system which created Jason Arday, the poster image of DEI, who should be asking themselves some questions.
“A good man”? Um, good men do not steal other people’s work and profit from doing so. Arday was not a good man. I will suggest he was inherently disordered (which is terminology the poofoons use to absolve evil people of their inherently evil acts.)
Liberals on a daily basis call Trump a “pedophile” with absolutely no evidence to back it up.
“He wasn’t coping with the loss of his career, the loss of his reputation”
Huh?......he had no career or reputation....it was all fake.....I mean I’m sorry he’s dead but I’ll say this......99.9% of the time I find myself in the situation I’m in, I put me there.
Really? He saw an opening, and took as much underhanded advantage of it as he could.
We can assume no one told him the truth?
Apparently, he never understood the difference between racial flattery, and bona fide achievement.
Hubris and Nemesis.
He was an actor who got caught up in his role. For that to happen to someone they have to have a weak grasp on reality. A weak sense of identity and a weak understanding of right and wrong go along with that. He was a grifter, but the payoff in money and position wasn’t his motivation so much as the role-playing itself was. If you think you can be anything you dream of it’s very intoxicating. Such is my opinion anyway.
Every suicide is a tragedy.
Cambridge is 100% at fault here for not doing any due diligence at all. The phrase extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof should be familiar to them.
This guy’s whole life story was absolutely preposterous. Yet none of them said, “hey hang on a second, maybe we ought to verify some of this”
He was a nutjob to his chosen end. No loss.
He was a nutjob to his chosen end. No loss.
He said he ran 30 marathons in 35 days. The people at Cambridge believed him. Whether or not they believed him, he made the choice to lie about it for his aggrandizement.
That’s just one example.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.