Links - 2nd October 2026 (2 - More Births/Fertility)

Rapid Fertility Decline Is an Existential Crisis - "Few countries remain above replacement—except for those in sub-Saharan Africa and Central Asia. Furthermore, fertility rates are declining more significantly and, importantly, at a faster pace than anyone anticipated a few years ago. This trend is evident in both wealthy and poor nations, in religious and secular states, in countries with right-wing governments, as well as those with left-wing governments, and in nations with free abortion access and those with restrictive abortion laws. Pick any country at random from a world map, and the chances are high that its fertility rate is falling rapidly.  In the Americas, from Alaska to Tierra del Fuego, only Haiti, Honduras, Bolivia, Paraguay, and a handful of small Caribbean nations are on pace to exceed replacement levels in 2025—and only slightly. The region’s demographic giants—the US, Brazil, Mexico, Colombia, Argentina, and Canada—are already significantly below replacement. Notably, as of early 2025, the US has a higher fertility rate than Brazil, Mexico, Colombia, Argentina, and Canada...   Between 1991 and 2019, Japan’s GDP grew at an annual rate of 0.83%, significantly lower than the US rate of 2.53%. The main driver of their weak economic performance? Japan’s dramatic demographic collapse...   The consequences of significantly slower output growth will be severe for the US economy. While we consider output growth per capita when assessing welfare (and output per capita growth will not decline as sharply as total output growth), total output growth is crucial for addressing the funding of Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, servicing our public debt, and financing our armed forces in the face of increasing international competition. Once we begin to contemplate the fiscal implications of a declining population, it becomes difficult to focus on anything else.   When I reach this point in seminars, lectures, or media interviews, I invariably receive three questions: climate change, immigration, and artificial intelligence... A stable or slowly declining population can help ease pressure on the environment and facilitate the transition to net-zero CO2 emissions. However, a collapsing population, like the ones we are likely to encounter given current fertility rates, will generate so many fiscal problems that there will be no room left in government budgets for environmental concerns...   The US has a welfare state. This means that those individuals who are below 60th percentile or so of the income distribution are net receivers of funds from the government during their lifetime (i.e., the net present value of what they contribute less than what they receive later in life, like Social Security and Medicare), those between the 60th and 90th percentile are approximately net zero contributors, and only at the top 10th percentiles are net contributors. In other words, all immigrants that come to the US are below the 90th percentile and won’t help solve the fiscal woes created by low fertility. European countries that have the detailed databases required to compute these numbers carefully have found that not even the second-generation (i.e., the sons of immigrants born in the country) is a net contributor to the welfare state.   We need to assess immigration policy based on various factors in addition to its fiscal implications. My argument is more modest: “If you think that raising the number of low- and middle-skill immigrants will solve the long-term fiscal issues facing the US, you are mistaken.”...   This is Moravec’s Paradox: programming computers to perform tasks that most humans consider very difficult (e.g., advanced math) is much easier than programming them to carry out tasks that most humans find trivial (e.g., making a bed). Unfortunately, the problems we will face due to the falling population, such as the need for old-age care, require skills like making a bed and not doing advanced math.  So, what can the US do to address the fertility crisis?  This is the one-quadrillion-dollar question (yes, tackling fertility has an impact measured in discounted terms of quadrillions of dollars, not just small change like a miserly trillion dollars here or there)...   Returning to the topic of climate change, many young people are deeply concerned that we face extinction due to this issue. While I share the concern about climate change, it’s not at the level of urgency of our fertility crisis: we have already developed the technologies needed to transition to net zero emissions. The current challenge lies mainly in political implementation. This will require effort and may lead to more damage to the planet than what an ideal policy would have caused, but I believe we will achieve this goal. The true economic challenge of our time, for humanity overall and the US specifically, is the fertility crisis. Let’s get to work on it—as soon as possible."

Thread by @MoreBirths on Thread Reader App – Thread Reader App - "A recent study found that giving men a pay raise led them to have more children, while giving women a pay raise led them to have fewer children. 🧵.
For women, the effect of a pay raise was significantly reduced future fertility. A pay increase at 25 was associated with a large decrease in fertility at age 30, regardless of the skill level.  For men, a pay increase was associated with persistently higher fertility. Why? The authors argue that "the substitution effect between children and labor supply is dominating for women while the income effect is dominating for men."  Since childcare falls more on women, the competition between work and family is greater for women than for men. Policies which set out to combat pay disparities between men and women may therefore be inadvertently pushing fertility downward."
Nate Schlomann on X - "Civilization literally lives when you give men more money and dies when you give women more money. Literally. That's the Natural Law. And it is screaming at us."
Another disadvantage of equal pay

Thread by @cremieuxrecueil on Thread Reader App – Thread Reader App - "Wow!  Across basically all of Europe, people at higher income levels are now *more likely* to become parents!  This is a stunning shift! Among men, this relationship goes a while back now, and in several places, the income gradient has gotten more extreme. Among women, there are some recent crossover events, where the low-income used to be more likely parents than the rich, but now it's different. The authors' preferred explanation for this is that the cost to start childbearing has increased.  That's unfortunate, but knowing that means it is at least addressable!"

'We Can’t Even Afford to Have Sex': China’s New Condom Tax Draws Ire | TIME - "The Chinese government is testing out a new solution to falling birth rates: making sex more expensive.   Consumers will pay a 13% value-added tax on contraceptive drugs and products, including condoms, beginning Jan. 1, as part of China’s newly revised Value-Added Tax Law. Those products have been exempted from tax since 1993 as part of China’s one-child policy, which heavily penalized families for having more than one child from 1980 to 2015. As the country’s birth rate has fallen in recent years, the government has turned to seeking to boost birth rates with a range of incentives and subsidies... China remains one of the most expensive countries in the world to raise children relative to household income. A 2024 report from the YuWa Population Research Institute in Beijing found that the cost of raising a child until the age of 18 is more than 538,000 yuan ($76,000)... China has also introduced measures to curb the number of abortions not deemed “medically necessary,” as part of guidelines announced in 2021"

Meme - Way of the World @wayotworld: "While the West is dying out, its huge aid programmes are fuelling massive population growth in a continent that cannot even feed itself."
Civixplorer @civixplorer: "Nigeria currently has more births per year than all blue countries combined.
6.3 million births per year *Europe including Asian Russia*
7.5 million births per year *Nigeria*"

Thread by @cremieuxrecueil on Thread Reader App – Thread Reader App - "About a decade ago, a theory emerged:  If men do more of the housework and child care, fertility rates will rise!  Men have been doing increasingly large shares of the housework and child care.  Fertility is lower than ever. In fact, they're doing more in each generation, but fertility has continued to fall.  The original claim, that men's household work would buoy fertility, was based on cross-sectional data that was inappropriately given a causal interpretation.  The updated cross-sectional data is as useful, and it affords no assurances about the original idea.  We should move on. Source:"

James Pethokoukis ⏩️⤴️ on X - "Since 2006, South Korea's government has spent $270bn, or just over 1% of GDP a year, on babymaking incentives. Here's the dismal result:"
ɖʀʊӄքǟ ӄʊռʟɛʏ 🇧🇹🇹🇩 on X - "Lee Kuan Yew on why Government Policies aimed at increasing the birth rate which pay people money to have children will fail  “If I were in charge of Singapore today, I would introduce a baby bonus equal to two years' worth of the average Singaporean's salary.  The sum would be enough to see the child through to the start of primary school at least. Would I expect the number of babies to increase substantially? No.  I am convinced that even super-size monetary inducements would only have a marginal effect on fertility rates. But I would still go ahead and offer the bonus, for at least a year, just to prove beyond any doubt that our low birth rates have nothing to do with economic or financial factors, such as high cost of living or lack of government help for parents.  They are instead the result of changed lifestyles and mindsets.  …  Once women are educated and have equal job opportunities, they no longer see their primary role as bearing children or taking care of the household. They want to be able to pursue their careers fully just as men have always been able to.  They have very different expectations about whether or whom they should marry because they are financially independent.  There is no turning back the clock, unless we want to stop educating women.”"
Clearly, they just didn't spend enough money

More Births on X - "An extraordinary relationship: The lower the share of households in a metro area that live in an apartment, the higher the birthrate will tend to be!"
Why left wingers want to force everyone to live in an apartment with a land tax

Thread by @lefineder on Thread Reader App – Thread Reader App - ""In 2007, Patriarch Ilia II of the Georgian Orthodox Church made a decision: facing a country with a declining population...the church leader announced that he would personally baptize and become godfather to any third-or-high Orthodox child born to a married couple in Georgia"  This shifted the Country of Georgia to above-replacement fertility. The effect is concentrated on third or higher births."

Carl on X - "My big problem with this argument (that people don't have kids because kids are too expensive) is: On average, poor people have MORE kids than rich people! Explain that Mustache Man!"

More Births on X - "A stunning visual by demographer Philip Cohen. Nearly all countries that fell below replacement fertility are still stuck below 2.1 today. The only exceptions are Mongolia and Kazakhstan. What is it about 🇲🇳 and 🇰🇿? Both are purposefully pronatal and honor mothers of many kids."

Wilfred Reilly on X - "This is an obvious but rarely made point. It's not cost alone, or primarily, that is causing the fertility crisis: people had far more kids when incomes were much lower.  The proximate cause is the use of "onanist alternatives" to having procreative sex - birth control, Plan B, for that matter pornography. But, a big reason for THAT is that motherhood is often considered low-status in developed countries: in an odd twist, both feminists and aggressive male executives CONSTANTLY attack housewives and good moms as "do nothings."   Changing this, with an ~10 year campaign to emphasize the social value of motherhood, the fact that home management is a 40-50 hour a week job, the idea of the guys being involved fathers (!!!), etc would raise birth rates. This isn't theoretical - one of probably a dozen national examples appears below."

Meme - Paul Vanitas @Dr_Vanitas_: "Germans stopped having kids and are getting cats and dogs instead. Dogs now outnumber children < 10 years of age in Germany. I'm not judging; everyone should be free to choose the lifestyle they want for themselves, But my personal opinion is that this outcome is sad."
"Dogs now outnumber children < 10 years in Germany"

Freedomain - with Stefan Molyneux, MA on X - "Your ancestors lived in mud huts, and still had children."
Wilfred Reilly on X - "This is the basic problem with "kids are too relatively expensive." The claim doesn't even make sense. People aren't having kids because they get married at 33, and gibberish theories like "gentle parenting" make it an annoying pain in the ass."
Plus, poor people have more kids. But of course, expanding the state in terms of regulations and spending pushes the left wing agenda, so

'No-kids' holiday venue? Think again, says France - "While Paris is considered one of the most child-friendly cities in the world, more and more venues in France have been shunning children in an effort to shield customers from kids' unpredictable behaviour and noise.  The government on Tuesday held a roundtable meeting with key industry players to discuss a trend that France's high commissioner for childhood, Sarah El Hairy, has said should end.  Socialist senator Laurence Rossignol has introduced a bill that would make it illegal to ban children from venues in France. "Children are not a nuisance," said Rossignol, adding that the bill is aimed at promoting "a society that is open to children"... El Hairy said excluding children was infringing on their rights, putting pressure on their parents and dividing society.  "There is a growing intolerance, and we must not allow it to take hold," El Hairy told broadcaster RTL. "We are pushing children and families out, and in a way, this is real violence," she added... In France, adult-only services are currently limited.  According to estimates from a travel industry union, they represented around three percent of the market in 2024... the government's High Council for Family, Children and Age (HCFEA) warned about the lack of spaces for children, pointing to the "harmful consequences for their physical and mental health"."

John B. Holbein on X - "Do people who belong to right-wing political parties have more babies? This paper takes a look at this important question in Western Europe. In some places--like Finland, Iceland, the Netherlands, and Spain, right-leaning people do have more babies than left-leaning. But in many other places, this pattern isn't present! Right and left-leaning people have similar number of babies.    Fascinating!"

Felix Helberg on X - ""More than half the drop in America’s total fertility rate is explained by women under the age of 19 now having next to no children.""

‘One and done’: How Britain became a single-child nation - "having just one child is increasingly seen as an enviable choice rather than a consolation prize – and perhaps the best chance women today have of achieving that old adage of “having it all.” In a study of 35,000 Danes, parents of only children were found to be happier than anyone else, while European data showed that only 17 per cent of women moved to part-time work after one child, compared with more than 30 per cent of those with two.  Indeed, many millennials are looking for a way to have children while retaining their social lives and careers – along with the time, money and freedom to travel, go to concerts, the theatre and out to dinner. Of course, this often also means staying in hugely expensive cities like London, where upgrading to a bigger home is all but impossible... A lack of grandparents living nearby also contributed to their decision. Millennials, more than any previous generation, are likely to live in a different part of the country from their parents. This not only means a lack of childcare support but can also make those first few destabilising months with a newborn feel incredibly isolating. Without the support networks older generations took for granted, the thought of a second child can feel impossible... For Stuart Gietel-Basten, a professor of social science at Hong Kong University who studies family size, this shift is also happening because couples are doing something relatively novel – asking themselves exactly why they are having children. “If the answer is about passing on genes or loving someone deeply, then these evolutionary or anthropological needs can easily be met by one child,” he says. “And nowadays, it is very rare for that child to die, so you can be confident you will have them for the rest of your life.”... “Most people I spoke to said they have the first baby for themselves and the subsequent baby for their existing child,” says Sandler. “But that premise is flawed, as there is no evidence that a child with siblings is better off.”"

The chart that shows Europe is doomed - "Clearly the rise of the smartphone and the transformation of social norms are part of the answer, but what is also apparent is that desired fertility in most European democracies is higher than the current fertility rate.  In the UK, for example, surveys indicate the existence of a strong “birth gap” with women wanting on average 2.35 children rather than the 1.41 fertility rate reported in 2024.  This massive gap, found in most European countries, should be at the heart of European politics. The countless debates this continent has had on Brexit, immigration or even the war in Ukraine will be deemed to be largely secondary by future historians relative to the demographic question we have been avoiding. And yet few politicians in Western Europe had taken this existential issue seriously.  For decades talking about fertility was once deemed to be slightly paternalistic in polite society, or irrelevant when not outrightly compared with fascist regimes of the past.  The tone has shifted somewhat in the last five years. In 2024, French president Emmanuel Macron stated that “demographic rearmament” was a national priority. Prime minister Giorgia Meloni created a minister in charge of birth rates and said in 2023: “we want to give Italians back a nation in which being a father is not out of fashion and being a mother is not a private choice but a socially recognised value.”... For all the economic and political implications, it is important to remember that a childless continent will not just be smaller, poorer, and older; it will also be lonelier and sadder."

hyper(bolic) disco(unting) girl on X - "this is going to sound terminally authority-brained but at some level i find it amazing that you can just get pregnant and create a new human being without any government regulation of the process"

ZUBY: on X - "I have never seen or heard a publicly proposed solution to this that would actually work. Not once.  The truth is, you can't have widespread feminism AND high birth rates. And people have chosen implicitly that feminism is more important. Very few modern men or women have the appetite or will to cut back on these 'gains'. Including conservatives.  There are other contributing factors, but this is the uncomfortable crux of the issue.  You cannot have mass feminism (both in policy and culture) and high birth rates. They are opposing forces."
Andy Ujku-Dardania | Facebook - "And quite ironically, the biggest feminists out there and their so called “male allies” are the biggest proponents of both unfettered access to abortion and a wide encompassing welfare state.  They just can’t or won’t put two and two together. You can’t have a generous welfare state by killing off or not reproducing the next generation that is needed to pay for it.  These people are simply nihilistic hedonists who don’t care about the long term.  They got the worst traits of their boomer or early Gen X parents. They want instant gratification and not have to worry about how it is paid for or any consequences thereafter.  The post 1945 liberal democratic order is a house built on sand.  It’s a highly unsustainable system propped up by massive debt/money printing… And the blessings of a high tech version of bread and circuses.  Eventually it’ll run out of road.  And the reckoning that will come with it will make life literally unbearable for a significant number of people.  Stay strapped and batten down the hatches friends."

Meme - Andrew Torba @BasedTorba: "They always use the White people stock photos for antinatalist articles"
"Having children DOESN'T make you happy: Becoming a parent provides no boost to wellbeing, study claims - but it does ruin your relationship"

James Pethokoukis ⏩️⤴️ on X - "'Being around babies makes people want babies. ... As fertility declines and infant exposure falls, the conditions that sustain the desire for children weaken, and the decline can become self-reinforcing.' @nberpubs"

To Improve U.S. Birth Rate, Give Parents Money and Time - The Atlantic
Amazingly, this doesn't even mention that poor people have more children, or that the US has higher fertility rate than other developed countries despite not giving parents time. Curious how the "solution" is pushing the left wing agenda

Liam Out Loud on X - "The Gender Gap No One Is Talking About:
- Young men and women are 30 points apart ideologically. 5x wider than 2000.
- Only 31% of young adults are dating. Less than a third.
- 0.6 liberal men for every liberal woman. 0.5 conservative women for every conservative man. Neither side can find what it's looking for.
- 60% of liberal women rank political alignment above a stable job in a partner.
- 63% of Americans say they'd struggle to date someone who voted differently.
- US fertility: 1.7. UK: 1.4. Italy: 1.1. Every Western nation below replacement.
- 62% of countries tried baby bonuses and tax incentives. Minimal effect.
They don't disagree about tax rates. They disagree about what this is all for."

With a record-low 1.25 children per Canadian woman, stop dismissing falling fertility rates as a choice - "A 2023 Cardus study found that Canadian women without kids wanted an average of 2.2 children, and expected to have 1.9. The reality is that they’re having far fewer than that, with Canada’s fertility rate hitting a record low of 1.25 as of 2024, putting it into the “ultra-low” category, a category that includes countries like South Korea and Japan. One reason researchers have found for the decrease in fertility rates is the rising prerequisite of parenthood, specifically, what would-be parents feel they need to be ready to have kids. That bar has risen drastically over the past few decades, and it correlates with all the costs we’ve been burdening young people with: high costs of education, expensive housing costs, and a shortage of family-sized rentals.  Credential inflation is also to blame, stretching education well into the mid-20s. You’re much less likely to feel established enough in your career to have a child if you’re only just starting that career at 25.  A 2025 Brookings study put data behind what a lot of parents already feel: that child-rearing has become an arms race of educational investment. Social media plays a huge role here, offering constant glimpses into the successes of your peers’ kids and the lives of parenting influencers, who all seem to have perfect Montessori-inspired nurseries, screen-free playrooms, and organic meals made from scratch every night. The message viewers take away is that anything less is falling short. The result is a feeling that having children is a project that requires perfect conditions to begin, and we know that the later people begin having kids, the harder it is to have them.  That delay has been getting steadily worse for decades. The average age of a first-time mother has risen from 23.5 years in 1965 to 29.4 years in 2019, and even higher in B.C. and Ontario, home to Canada’s most expensive housing markets. Saskatchewan, with comparatively lower housing costs, still had the youngest first-time mothers in the country, at 27.3 years. The geography of delayed parenthood tracks almost perfectly with the geography of unaffordability.   And since those numbers are now seven years old, with the cost of living only rising since, the delay has likely grown further.  Anecdotally, we’ve noticed that society now treats having kids in your 20s as young, even though biologically, it isn’t. Part of what’s driving the shift is how dramatically the expectations of parenting have changed. A generation ago, eight-year-olds walked home to empty houses and made their own peanut butter sandwiches. Today, children are expected to be constantly supervised and enrolled in structured activities. That’s a significant increase in both the time and financial cost of raising kids, and it starts before they’re even born.  One of the most meaningful policy-driven changes to the cost of parenting has been the introduction of universal childcare. It’s too early to measure its full impact on fertility rates, but we can get a sense of how it might play out from Quebec’s experience.  In 1997, Quebec introduced $5-a-day subsidized childcare. A 2024 study looked at the results and found that for younger women aged 20 to 24, the reform increased the likelihood of having a first or second child by 7 percentage points. However, for women in their 30s, subsidized childcare actually decreased the probability of having more, by 5 to 7 percentage points.   The theory is that affordable childcare made returning to work easier, and once women were back in the workforce, the opportunity cost of another pregnancy rose substantially. Policies can simultaneously decrease the cost of having children for some, while raising it for others. There’s a parallel here to the impact of home prices on fertility rates, where increased home values simultaneously made homeowners feel wealthy enough to have more children, while pricing out younger would-be parents who felt anything but secure...   The 2026 World Happiness Report ranked Canadians 58th in the world for the freedom to make life choices, a dramatic drop from just a decade ago when the country was in 12th place. That’s an area worth taking seriously and fighting for improvement"

More Births on X - ""I don't know why people say the policies in Hungary didn't work. The trends are relatively healthy." -R.H. Efforts to raise birth rates (both in culture and in policy) do work! But there is no magic bullet, and you have work hard at it because many forces push fertility down."

Thread by @MoreBirths on Thread Reader App – Thread Reader App - "Elevating the Status of Motherhood Solves Low Birthrates: The Extraordinary Case of Mongolia For 68 years, Mongolian leaders have given the Order of Maternal Glory to mothers. This raised the status of motherhood and helped forge a remarkably pronatal culture. 🧵, please share!
Mongolia's pro-motherhood culture stands out on a fertility map. Fertility in Mongolia has consistently been 2-3 times(!) higher than neighboring areas in recent years and it has been increasing over the past 20 years, even as its neighbors have seen birthrates plunge!Mongolia's incomes are comparable its neighbors. It is urbanized. This is also not a case of religiously driven fertility: 🇲🇳 is primarily Buddhist and non-religious.  This is about the status of motherhood. In 🇲🇳, the president himself gives an award to every mother of four! Mongolian mothers of six are presented with the Order of Glorious Motherhood, First Class. Second Class if you have four.  Here celebrated mothers descend the steps of the State Palace in Ulaanbaatar on a red and gold carpet, the statue of Genghis Khan directly behind them.The Mongolian president holds separate ceremonies by district, in order to be able to give more personal attention to recipients. There is a cash award too, but it is just $60 for a mother of six. Clearly, this a story motherhood and status in Mongolian society.So important is this award that Mongolia's consulates are even tasked with conferring the award to Mongolian mothers abroad. Here, Mongolia's ambassador to the United Nations presents the award to a mother in Geneva.
Status around motherhood is a crucial and under-appreciated driver of birthrates.  We have seen this elsewhere! By honoring parents, Patriarch Ilia of Georgia created a baby boom, something generous financial incentives elsewhere could not achieve.Status is incredibly important for most people, and we strive for status perhaps more than anything else.  Status helps explain the paradox that as societies become richer, fertility usually drops. Even though absolute well-being has risen, living in a wealthy society offers no increase in relative status. In fact, the status competitions of modern life, like education and career, directly compete with family life.  This also tracks with how in cultures where parenthood is elevated to high status, such as among religious subgroups like the Amish, Haredi Jews and traditionalist Catholics, fertility can be much, much higher.  As well, this helps explain the remarkable fertility of England and Wales during Victorian Times. Queen Victoria, the personification of the era, both inherited and carried forward a culture that conferred high-status on motherhood in raising nine children.
In Korea meanwhile, the highest status people are childless, and culture is filled with every status competition but one around parenthood.  The message is that we have to find a way to honor motherhood like our civilization depends on it.  Mongolia helps show the way!"

The truth about population decline - "In general, the more prosperous the place or the people, the fewer the births. This is not just true across countries. Within India, the state of Tamil Nadu has the eighth highest GDP per head and a fertility rate of 1.8, while Bihar, with the 34th highest GDP per head, has a fertility rate of 3. Again, graduate women tend to have fewer children than non-graduates. Prosperity is the most powerful contraceptive of all. The explanation I addressed last week was the transformation in the role of women. But even that is part of a broader set of changes. Two others — urbanisation and mass education — also matter. The former moves people to places where land is relatively expensive. The latter transforms children from productive assets in the quite short term into costly long-term investments. Grown children may also now move far away from their parents. Modernity also creates capital markets, pensions and welfare states, all of which are a substitute for children’s financial support. Finally, it creates new pleasures, which compete with those of having children. We can see the effects of all these changes in the fertility data... should we be worried about the possibility of population falls in many places, perhaps ultimately for humanity as a whole? No, argues the British economist Lord Adair Turner. A favourite argument why the declining fertility rates are potentially catastrophic is that “dependency ratios” will soar. Measured in the normal way, as ratios of people over 65 to those aged 15-64, this is true. But this ignores the fall in the proportion of the young, many of whom are now dependent until their twenties. Overall dependency ratios will rise far less, except in the more extreme cases of low fertility. It also ignores the potential for people to work longer. In South Korea, 38 per cent of people over 65 were working in 2024, against a ludicrous 4 per cent in France. Furthermore, adds Turner, rising productivity, possibly accelerated by artificial intelligence, offers a way out. Note that people work far fewer hours than they did two centuries ago, because they are so vastly more productive than they used to be in, say, 1800. Thus, notes Turner, the share of available hours spent working after the age of 15 in high-income countries has fallen by at least 60 per cent since then. But real output per head has increased 15-fold. If this continues, as is likely, a modest increase in the dependency ratio would be extremely manageable. Some also argue that there will be “too few innovators”. Nonsense! The global population is not even set to fall before 2100. Moreover, we now have a far better educated labour force, the inclusion of women and the gains from AI. Moreover, radical innovation has always been driven by the few. Not least, today’s population is a multiple of what it was a century or two ago, when innovation was doing just fine. What matters far more is providing the environment for innovation, not least support for science. Again, there has been much chatter about the “demographic dividends” that supposedly come from youthful populations. In fact, notes Turner, “there is no evidence that economies with sustained high fertility rates grow faster. On the contrary, persistently high fertility often leads to a demographic disaster of sluggish income growth and widespread unemployment.” India is a sobering example... India’s swelling population has, alas, created a sea of chronic underemployment around an island of prosperity. In much of Africa, this situation is worse. Finally, growing populations impose costs — not just the global environmental ones, but local ones as well. These include the soaring prices of urban land and so of housing in many countries (themselves an explanation for low birth rates). Indeed, the competition for intrinsically scarce “positional goods” is exacerbated by rising populations and so would be ameliorated by the reverse."
This assumes that people are all identical and that it doesn't matter which populations have kids

The unspoken truth about the baby bust - "All theories for the baby bust, other than choice, get undeserved shrift. One is that practical barriers — such as lack of childcare — stops people having the kids they tell surveys they want. So, Chad has a 6.1 birth rate because of subsidised crèches, does it? Shared child-rearing duties and free IVF explain Afghanistan’s 4.8? Finland (1.3) should send a research delegation to Mali (5.6)? The United Nations, an activist group with a sideline in diplomacy, published a report last month that blamed a “toxic” mix of economic and gender rigidities for low birth rates. All we learn from this is that the use of the T-word outside a strictly chemical context has become an excellent warning of impending bullshit. And this isn’t even the silliest explanation for demographic decline that does the rounds. What is? That people can’t in good conscience “bring a child into this world of ours”. Well, the birth rate was high during the cold war. Parents were knowingly bringing kids into an open-ended nuclear stand-off. Today, the most fertile countries are those most stalked by climate change and violence. Meanwhile, the havens that are Switzerland and New Zealand are well below the replacement rate. If dystopian dread was the issue here, the numbers would be the other way round. Why kid ourselves like this? Why go through contortions to avoid the obvious?Some of it is just academic confusion. To clear up one thing: asking people whether they want more children is close to pointless. The question is whether they want them above other things. Stated desires are not useful information unless ranked. I want to be more successful, but not as much as I want to sleep until 10am. People want larger families, but not as much as they want leisure and surplus cash. The rest is politics. The notion of voluntarily small families is too awkward for either left or right to accept. For the left, there is no social problem whose answer isn’t government action. If that problem exists out of choice, that leaves them with nowhere to go. For conservatives, the family stands between the individual (liberalism) and the state (socialism). If people are choosing to minimise or avoid the domestic realm, that cuts to the quick of an entire worldview. And so we have a winner, as it were. Liberalism has had a bad electoral decade. In the “discourse”, too, it is on the back foot. But in the one way that counts — how life is lived — its triumph is total. From Ireland to South Korea, the evidence suggests that once people are rich and free enough to choose, they choose individualism. Many do so with a pang, of course. They really do want more kids. But not as much as they want to live in the city of their choice or hold out for a relationship that is fun and not just stable. Consumption, selfhood, the pursuit of happiness: all the things that are said to be not enough, seem to be enough. How telling that even the most widely heard argument for pronatalism — that we need more workers to support the old — is itself materialist."

Women and Mass Hysteria (Woke Women)

Ceb K. on X

"Women are very good at mass democracy: suddenly agree & amplify an ingroup, no matter what it says, in ways that emphasize shared vulnerability"

AI generated list:

"Mass psychogenic illness refers to the rapid spread of physical symptoms-such as fainting, tremors, or convulsions-through a group without any underlying organic or environmental cause. Psychological and sociological research recognizes these outbreaks as overwhelmingly concentrated among women and adolescent girls, with male-centric mass delusions typically manifesting quite differently through anxieties about external physical threats or bodily harm rather than shared physical illness.

Event & Year. Estimated Female Range. Specific Setting & Context

The Nuns Meowing and Biting Manias (Middle Ages). 100%. Occurred entirely within isolated European Catholic convents under strict religious and behavioral discipline.

St. Theresa's Eregi Girls" School Outbreak (2023). 100%. Struck students residing and studying at a Kenyan all-girls secondary school, leading to leg paralysis right before exam season.

1973 Singapore Factory Psychosis. 100%. Swept an electronics manufacturing facility staffed entirely by young female workers operating on high-pressure assembly lines.

Malaysian Factory Spirit Possession (1970s-80s). 100%. Massive waves of collective trances and screaming that repeatedly shut down electronics and textile factories staffed by young, newly urbanized women.

The Tabora Exam Fainting Spells (1984). Almost Entirely Female. Cascading fainting episodes highly concentrated within the female cohorts and girl dormitories of a school under strict testing pressures in Tanzania.

The Meldingen Tremor Outbreak (1892). 100%. Struck schoolgirls in a localized classroom setting, manifesting as sudden hand tremors that completely halted their ability to write.

Chalmeicac Sleep Contagion (2007). 100%. Affected hundreds of students living under highly disciplined, cloistered conditions at a massive Catholic girls' boarding school in Mexico.

Herat Province Convulsion Epidemic (2013). 100%. Swept exclusively through localized girls' schools in Afghanistan following rumors of toxic environmental poisonings.

El Carmen de Bolivar Vaccine Panic (2014). 100%. Hospitalized hundreds of pre-teen and teenage girls following a collective fear of an HPV vaccine roll-out at a local school.

The Groß Tinz Writing Tremors (1892). 100%. A localized motor epidemic that exclusively struck young schoolgirls in Germany, causing violent hand shaking when holding pens.

Dhankuta Secondary School Collapse (2016). 100%. Began during a class in Nepal when a small group of adolescent girls hyperventilated, wept, and collapsed in sequence.

Starehe Girls' Centre Epidemic (2019). 100%. Forced the complete closure of a high-profile all-girls school in Kenya when a localized group developed a high-pitched, collective barking cough.

The Redondo Beach School Faint (1989). 100%. Occurred at a California school where a localized squad of female cheerleaders fainted simultaneously after smelling a rumored "toxic leak" from a paper spirit poster.

The Chinki Seizure Outbreak (2014). 100%. Dozens of adolescent girls living inside a tribal residential school dormitory in India fell into synchronized convulsive fits, claiming spirits were choking them.

The Leiria Tremor Outbreak (1947). 100%. Struck a tight social network of young female lace-makers and textile apprentices inside a workshop following an aggressive administrative crackdown on breaks.

The Lille Witchcraft Panic (1639). 100%. Took place inside a French religious charity orphanage and school for girls, where fifty young girls collectively claimed to be surrounded by flying devils.

The Moruga Spirit Possession Outbreak (Trinidad, 2010). 100%. A cluster of high school girls in Trinidad collapsed into wild, violent fits and trance states while in their classrooms.

The Diriamba "Crazy Sickness" (Nicaragua, 2003). 100%. An outbreak of grisi siknis (crazy sickness) that swept a cohort of schoolgirls in Nicaragua, causing them to hallucinate and flee into nearby brush.

The Amagasaki Tremor Cluster (Japan, 1971). 100%. A tight-knit social group of junior high school girls in Japan developed synchronized muscle spasms right before major grade placements.

The Maharashtra Hostel Panic (India, 2026). 100%. Swept an all-girls residential hostel where a small group began uncontrollably crying and laughing, prompting hundreds of students to flee the building over fears of supernatural activity.

The Odisha Boarding School Faint (India, 2024). 100%. Began with an index case of a 12-year-old girl at a girls' boarding school before rapidly spreading physical fainting and shaking to nearly 100 other students.

The Kuantan Dormitory Monks (Malaysia, 1976). Almost Entirely Female. Triggered during a campus competition when a student screamed over a rumored apparition on top of a girl's dormitory, setting off mass screaming fits across the campus.

Bellevue Twitching Leg Outbreak (1939). Vast Majority (over 95%). Concentrated heavily within a localized group of high school girls in Louisiana who developed synchronized leg twitching.

West Bank Fainting Epidemic (1983). Vast Majority (over 95%). Close to 1,000 adolescent schoolgirls fainted across multiple girls' schools over groundless rumors of airborne chemical deployment.

stag on X - " I wonder if this phenomenon could be modeled as a phase transition of a far-from-equilibrium system, where a small perturbation can grow enough to change the whole structure “small interventions can be either ineffective or explosively effective depending on the system's position within the hysteresis loop”"

Ceb K. on X - "imo the best way to think of it is as “recursive/transitive endorsement/prestige” games, where you’re trying to eg endorse people/ideas who are endorsed by people/ideas who are endorsed (eg PageRank type algorithms). Sudden large phase transitions: “we all think all-X now honey!”"

Budman on X - "I explain it this way: Women made babies. They were included in the tribe by default. Men had to provide value. They were rejected by default. Men need Strength, Courage, Honor, and Mastery to make it into the tribe. Women need to follow consensus to not get kicked out."

abc on X - "ou can add every woman claiming to have ‘long covid’ and so many of them saying they’re nonbinary to the list"

Links - 2nd October 2026 (1 - Jason Arday [including Peter Jukes])

Peter Jukes on X - "Intent is key. The ubiquitous “fraud” allegations against Arday — deliberately stealing other people’s ideas, faking charity marathons etc — don’t stand up. All the remaining charges are trivial: an early book pitch, a paranoid reaction to a three year campaign against him."
Thread by @AstroMikeMerri on Thread Reader App – Thread Reader App - "Just to correct this nonsense, the level of plagiarism in Arday’s thesis was clearly not accidental. There is the possibility that he was unaware that it was unacceptable, which would bring into question his supervision, but at PhD level even that is a stretch.More problematic are the cases where interview responses from other people’s studies were mis-attributed to his own work. This is simply fraud, and occurred when he was fully qualified as a researcher.  I really don’t care about marathon claims."

Meme - "Whomst among us hasn't hired an elite law firm to harass journalists and reported our colleagues to the cops?"
Peter Jukes @peterjukes: "Arday's remaining egregious offences seem to be
A) he employed Carter Ruck to write a milquetoast holding letter
B) he felt persecuted and reported one academic to the police, and then a journalist who followed up
Not things I would do, but also things people do all the time"

Kathryn Paisner on X - ""I'm faithful to my spouse over 99% of the time. How can you possibly call me an adulterer?""
Of course, Peter Jukes blocked her too

Meme - Peter Jukes: "On the Arday is a 'plagiarist/a fraud'. Just done a survey of the small percentage of questioned attribution around two of his 33 peer reviewed papers: over 99% remains intact and unchallenged. How can anyone be called a plagiarist or fraud in that basis?"
Jesse Singal @jessesingal: "We are witnessing something very, very psychologically interesting, even if it's bad for society and for our hing prospects of shared conceptions of reality" "This post is unavailable."
Jay Van Bavel, PhD @jayvanbavel: "Francesca Gino only found to have engaged in fraud in 1-2% of her studies. By this logic, Harvard should not have fired her."
Jesse Singal @jessesingal: "i mean that whole thing was a witch hunt too"
"ITS ANTI ITALIAN DISCRIMINATION"

Neil Thin on X - "Persistent truth-deniers like Peter Jukes seem hellbent on not learning lessons from the Jason Arday tragedy. Who knows what recovery he could have made if people surrounding him had chosen honesty instead of flattery and truth-denial."

Frederick Guy on X - "It used to be part of my job to read Turnitin reports on student work (probably obsolete now, with AI, but Arday’s thesis is from that period). I know what I would have told a student whose work showed up like Arday’s. Idiot @peterjukes is telling me I shouldn’t believe my eyes."

Meme - john sturgis: "So it transpires that the self-appointed defender of Jason Arday - who has been freely accusing other journalists of failing to undertake basic research before publication - is himself not conversant with widely-reported and important details of the case against him. Astonishing:"
Sarah Ditum @sarahditum: "Don't worry Peter I'm very sure Sonia has never claimed to have testicular cancer"
Peter Jukes @peterjukes: "I'm sure this is some kind of in joke, but I don't know whether I should be mortified or reassured that columnists continue with their professional banter over a dead man who can no longer defend himself."
Sarah Ditum @sarahditum: "In Arday's book proposal, he claimed to have survived testicular cancer - a claim that, in the finished version, had vanished and been replaced with a story about surviving a brain tumor (twice). As you are going out to bat for his veracity, I assumed you would know this."

Meme - Benjamin Ryan @benryanwriter: "Here @PeterJukes makes the same mistake @carolecadwalla made: not acknowledging that Jason Arday was not just accused of plagiarism in his PhD thesis. He was also credibly accused of plagiarism and data theft that between them spanned multiple papers at multiple other universities. I provide this reasonable reply knowing he won't see it because he blocked me when I previously pointed out his faulty logic about Arday. It is very clear he doesn't know enough about this subject to pass judgement on other reporters who have covered it."
Peter Jukes @peterjukes: "I ask these questions not hoping for any kind of reasonable reply, because they mainly come from mendacious anonymous accounts who spent 99% of their time spreading malicious falsehoods. But it's always worth publicising the facts
Let's be accurate here: 3% of his thesis was questioned. The governing university found that this was a citation problem. His literature review amply cited the main methodological source, but failed in those instances. That is not plagiarism"
No surprise he blocked Jesse Singal too

Thread by @d08890 on Thread Reader App – Thread Reader App - "even stipulating to the ``tiny vanishing fraction'' claim, this does not matter, and i cannot stress this enough. the fact that 99% of a police officer's time on the job was above board in no way can rebut or outweigh 1% consisting of perjury or evidence-tampering, for example.  the ``theft of ideas'' dodge is cute but everyone knows plagiarism extends beyond that, and i am getting quite cranky about the people who are lying about this and expecting the rest of us to get gaslit. i'm in the final stages of getting a book manuscript to press with cambridge university press. the cup ethics guidelines specify that the press follows cambridge's own policy, which they give in their own words like so:
here is the university's own website, with the definition:
i'm seeing increasing numbers of ai plagiarism cases in my classes; if we as academics are not going to hold ourselves to the standards to which we hold our alstudents, we are the worst sort of frauds and hypocrites to punish them when they copy and paste from claude. arguably, this public degradation of the standards of academic integrity really rolled into full gear with cornell's craven decision not to revoke kevin kruse's phd. then, as now, the motive was quite obviously and purely political. i hope you guys are happy with yourselves. and i was quite adamant about this at the time, lest some tiresome pea-brain wants to natter on about me being a racist or some similar babble
RhythmDoc on X - "As far as I can tell, lots of them aren’t lying — they appear to believe that all academic writing is like this, and is in some sense fake, and why can’t you just get with the program."

Russell T. Warne 🇺🇸🇨🇱 on X - "A new Substack article by @Cartrarian  provides very convincing evidence that Jason Arday never had autism. The article shows that:
➡️Arday never mentioned he had autism until 2018. Even in his 2015 dissertation, he merely says he had "learning difficulties."
➡️The diagnostic history Arday reported was contradictory and anachronistic. Some of the labels he claims he had as a child were rare or nonexistent at the time. Other diagnoses he claims to have had are contradictory and cannot be present in the same person.
➡️Arday also contradicted himself in discussing when he learned about his diagnosis. Sometimes he says he knew at age 3, but he also claimed to have not been told until his mid-30s.
➡️Arday didn't seem to understand what autism is. Sometimes he said it's a "hybrid" diagnosis, and at other times Arday said it was a type of other disabilities. Hhe even said it was "a kind of intellectual disability," which is absurdly wrong.
This article exposes (and refutes) new lies from Arday that were previously unnoticed (or perhaps less publicized):
➡️Arday claimed to have been in a longitudinal study that does not exist.
➡️Arday said he attended a special needs school, but it is now documented fact that he attended the mainstream Heathbrook Primary School.
➡️New discrepancies in Arday's vita.
It's a long read, but that's because Arday told a lot of lies, and Cartrarian is careful to document and debunk them. It's definitely worth reading."

Sam Browfan on X - "How did @sbaroncohen, one of the world's foremost autism researchers, fail to realise that Arday was not autistic."
Trust the 'Experts'! Because they push the left wing agenda

Benjamin Ryan on X - "NEWS: Jason Arday Lied About Having a Masters From Birkbeck University
 I filed a freedom of information request to Birkbeck University to check the claim Jason Arday made in the video below in 2022 that he had a masters in psychodynamic practice from the university.  Birkbeck told me today they had no records of Arday ever being a student there.   What's more, the university didn't even offer a masters in psychodynamic practice.   There is no mention in Arday's memoir of his having received such a masters.  The clear conclusion is that Arday was lying when he claimed to have earned a degree from the university... Also, someone pointed out that the @guardian  reached this same conclusion. I hadn’t seen this article:"

i/o on X - "What exactly is the "discredited pseudoscience" that Nathan Cofnas argues for? Here are the main claims he's made that have offended people:
(1) Cofnas believes there are differences in average measured intelligence between population groups: Mainstream science fully agrees with him.
(2) Cofnas believes that recent human evolution outside Africa has increased human intelligence: Mainstream population genetics now mostly agrees with him.
(3) Cofnas believes that the measured differences in intelligence between population groups are at least partially due to genetic differences between those groups: Although this claim remains scientifically disputed and unresolved, the most recent published survey of intelligence scientists found that most agree with him.
The research that has been most often used to support a genetic explanation — and which has been published in established peer-reviewed scientific journals — is hardly pseudoscientific. You may not believe that it's convincing, but that's quite another thing than saying it's "pseudoscientific." The people writing about Cofnas either know this or do not care to know it. The vast majority of the public reading about Cofnas has no idea of the current status of intelligence research because its "dangerous" findings are rarely reported in the non-scientific media, and most people treat the subject as too icky to take the time to investigate."

Meme - Helen Lovejoy from the Simpsons: "WON'T SOMEONE PLEASE THINK OF THE FRAUDSTER?"

Thread by @epkaufm on Thread Reader App – Thread Reader App - "OUR NEW REPORT: EQUITY REDUCES EXCELLENCE. Jason Arday was not an aberration. He was a feature, not a bug, of a system that replaced merit with identity. Our new study of nearly 2,000 prestigious Canada Research Chairs provides the hard numbers. 🧵
Canada imposed hard DEI quotas on its most prestigious academic appointments after 2017. The result? White men fell from around 80% of new chairs in 2000 to 25% in 2025. Women rose from 30% to 60% in just eight years.This is not a vague diversity aspiration. Canada Research Chair ads openly tell straight white men they need not apply. In Canada, race and sex discrimination is allowed and routine.The effect on research impact is stark. Average h-index: White or Asian men, 38. Women, 28. Black or Indigenous chairs, 18. DEI hires widened representation by appointing weaker candidates to positions they didn’t deserve.The usual excuses don’t explain the gap. It persists after controlling for career length, appointment year, chair tier, research council, and 178 academic disciplines. Each female or black/indigenous chair imposes a 12-15% research impact penalty.
This is not a uniquely Canadian result. Independent US data on hiring and promotion reveal the same race and sex gaps in academic output. Different country. Different institutions. Same equity-excellence trade-off. And the damage goes beyond hiring. Scholar-activist research - ideology imposed on facts rather than conclusions drawn from them - consumes an estimated further $18m of the CRC budget. DEI language in chair descriptions has doubled since 2016.
Ideological capture is concentrated in the social sciences and humanities. The average SSHRC chair description contains two DEI terms. SSHRC chairs are 17 times more likely than science (NSERC) or medical (CIHR) chairs to use far-left activist language.
Trump has slashed scholar activism in American NSF grants. In Canada, it just keeps on soaring. Same for UKRI grants in Britain, which funded Arday into the millions.
Science and medicine meet their nonwhite targets by appointing high-performing Asian scholars. Social sciencs and humanities (SSHRC) absorbs indigenous chairs, many lower performing or doing activist work, to meet the CRC target.
Total DEI bill: $36m a year. That's 12% of the $300m Canada Research Chairs budget.Taxpayers fund discrimination against whites and men while impairing research output and funding political activism. It’s a national scandal."
Left wingers hate excellence, after all
Clearly, this is proof that people who are not white men or Asian men are discriminated against in academia (since their h-index is lower), and precisely why DEI is needed

Andrew Dunn on X - "Massive scandal at Cambridge University in which Jason Arday was treated more favourably due to his skin colour, and they've employed race activist Nazir Afzal, of all people, to preside over an investigation into the LACK OF help Cambridge gave Arday!! 😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂"

Steve McGuire on X - "Cambridge is no longer planning to investigate Jason Arday’s academic record or the university’s decision to hire or cover for him. Instead, the investigation will focus on “his welfare, his care, his well-being” and “whether the school offered him sufficient support amid accusations that he plagiarized.”"
In death, he did them the biggest favour possible to enable their coverup

Benjamin Ryan on X - "Cambridge Said Jason Arday Was an ‘Aberration.’ So Why Was the Shaky PhD Thesis He Approved Sealed Until 2031?...  The thesis, which we have obtained and which we review in this Substack, raises important questions about whether the Faculty of Education, including Dr. Arday’s own contributions, let down the basic standards of higher education.  The lengthy embargo raises further questions about what Cambridge, which is among the most elite universities in the world, and the paper’s author might have to hide where her scholarship is concerned.  Written by Damilola Folayan, the thesis is entitled Of, but not in: A poetic exploration of how Black women students respond to the coloniality of Oxbridge—referring to the portmanteau of Oxford and Cambridge. It garnered her a coveted Cambridge PhD in 2025. Following what’s known as an autoethnographic style, it is in essence an epic poetry-slam interpretation of the plight of Dr. Folayan and three other black women at Oxbridge and their experiences navigating, with considerable ambivalence, these historically, and still overwhelmingly, white elite institutions.  The sprawling thesis unabashedly thumbs its nose at the rigors and demands of academia even as it demands in return an elite PhD and all the rights and privileges pertaining thereto."
Cathy Devine on X - "Absolutely enough now. Take any issues you have to Cambridge. Stop harranging students/academics in disciplines you know nothing about. Bullying & harassment doesn't begin to cover it."
Darrell (Daz) Croston on X - "Why would this qualify as harrasment of a student when it's merely critiquing someone's thesis and thereby academic rigour?"
Cathy Devine on X - "Neither Ben nor Colin are qualified to critique this student's thesis. They know nothing about the discipline. They should not expose this student to ridicule & harassment on SM. Not behave like vigilantes. Genuine concerns should be sent to the universities involved."
Colin the Barbarian @OXSOC@sciences.social on X - "In your opinion what disciplinary background does one need paper qualifications in to comment publicly on an autoethnographic style, epic poetry-slam interpretation of the Oxbridge experience of three women? English literature? Media Studies? Or what?"
Cathy Devine on X - "Not developmental biology or journalism. And not this despicable public shaming of a named student. It's abhorrent."
Colin the Barbarian @OXSOC@sciences.social on X - "With the greatest of respect, that avoids the question. You *chose* to frame it in terms of qualifications to speak, so surely you must have some positive idea about who is qualified to criticise the work. Only members of an education department? Only auto-ethnographers? And  they are no longer a student. They now have PhD after their name. Surely the whole point of scholarship is that it is open to public scrutiny. That is the bargain you make when you enter the field."
Prof Ian Pace on X - "And in much of continental Europe, PhDs have to be published, and so can be subject to wider scrutiny."
Colin the Barbarian @OXSOC@sciences.social on X - "And the writers of them are not students but employees with a salary & pension entitlement."
More proof that left wingers see scrutiny and criticism of people they support as harassment and bullying
As usual, left wingers rely on credentialism rather than engaging with the argument. Because it's easier to intimidate and/or capture a smaller group
Insisting people who find problems with the thesis need to take it up with the university, which can then cover it up, is awfully convenience

Colin Wright on X - "Jason Arday reviewed and approved this student's PhD thesis, which portrays black women taking trips to London and attending potlucks as forms of "marronage"—the historical practice of Africans fleeing enslavement.   The 70K-word thesis is based on conversations with just 3 black women, which were converted into poems and then, after being infused with the author's own subjective experiences, analyzed via "Critical Poetic Inquiry."  The thesis can only be described as a tribute to black women such as herself, channeled through an amalgam of slam poetry and activism.  She describes her research project in bizarre terms such as: "a lament, a war cry, a chant and a belly laugh" and "a joyful, painful rupture, a disruption, a deliberate transgression, a riff, and a drum beat… a prayer for all we have lost and for all that we can be."  She is also openly hostile to academic rigor, quoting other scholars when admitting that her project "does not align with notions of 'neutral' research or 'objective' researchers."   Academic standards, such as "marking criteria, rubrics and journal requirements that favour written knowledge over that which is communicated creatively (i.e. through painting or performance)" and also "notions that knowledge must be scientifically tested and proven to meet coloniality's contorted standards of fact" are deemed by her to be forms of colonial oppression.  This raises the question: Why is Cambridge awarding its highest academic credential to a project whose author openly presents accepted academic standards as oppressive constraints to be undermined and resisted?  It's clear the problem of academic standards at Cambridge wasn't isolated to the case of Jason Arday, but appears to be a form of systemic rot.  Because the thesis was suddenly embargoed for the next 5 years immediately when the Arday scandal broke, we are legally unable to share it in its entirety. So we have performed a very long and thorough exegesis of it, which you can read at the link below."

Carole Cadwalladr on X - "NEW: French researcher Stephanie Lamy exposes the network of “race realists” who hunted Jason Arday like prey, and the media who fell into his trap. If it seems like the news cycle has “moved on” from this story, ask yourself why? 🔗 below"
Colin the Barbarian @OXSOC@sciences.social on X - "This is a thoroughly nasty article and the smearing of Martyn Hammersley is beyond the pale. Hammersley is a scholar of unimpeachable reputation; disagreement with standpoint epistemology or with activist conceptions of social research is not remotely equivalent to race science"

Thread by @ComAcFreedom on Thread Reader App – Thread Reader App - "Something very worrying has been happening since controversy erupted over the open letter signed by more than 950 academics raising academic-freedom concerns about disciplinary proceedings against Dr Nathan Cofnas at Ghent University.  Cofnas, a philosopher who describes himself as a “race realist”, was among those who publicly scrutinised the academic work of Cambridge University’s youngest ever black professor, Dr Jason Arday. The letter argues that academics must remain free to raise evidence of alleged research misconduct without being punished for doing so.  CAF has since been contacted by a growing number of signatories worried about professional repercussions and ostracism within their departments for having put their names to it.  They have shown us ideologically charged abuse from colleagues and peers, outlandish accusations of being funded by billionaire right-wing political figures in the US, and complaints denouncing them as racists or supporters of race eugenics. Some complaints have been sent to senior university administrators and institutional bodies with which the academics are affiliated, in some cases explicitly calling for disciplinary action.  In one case seen by CAF, a senior academic manager wrote directly to a signatory to tell them they were wrong to sign, before reminding them that, under university policy, academic freedom and freedom of speech are qualified rights.  CAF is taking up some of these cases directly with the universities concerned, reminding them of their legal duties to secure freedom of speech within the law and protect academic freedom.  The wider chilling effect should not be underestimated. Academics who experience this themselves, or simply hear about it through departmental gossip, will inevitably think twice before adding their voice to the next important but contentious public debate.  If you signed the letter and are now facing pressure from colleagues or your institution, please get in touch. CAF can advise, intervene with universities, and arrange specialist legal assistance where necessary.  Email manager@afcomm.org.uk.
CAF is also taking action over press reporting which has helped erase what we had rather hoped was the elementary distinction between defending someone’s academic freedom and endorsing their substantive views.  The National, for instance, named eight Scottish academics and described them as “defending” and being “in support of” Cofnas, whom it described as the researcher who “sparked the pile-on which preceded the death of Jason Arday”. It then named their universities and reported that those institutions had been “approached for comment”.  Our complaint is not simply that this recasts a limited intervention about academic freedom as support for Cofnas in the wider Arday controversy. It also draws the signatories’ universities into that framing, inviting the question of what view their employers might now take. Needless to say, once an employer is brought into a controversy framed in those terms, the possibility of disciplinary attention is placed squarely on the table.  Nor is this merely our interpretation. It is precisely the framing now being put before university managers in complaints about individual signatories.  We have asked for the headline and article to be corrected, with a correction acknowledging that the signatories were misrepresented both in what they endorsed and in the capacity in which they signed, so that academics facing complaints can point to an accurate public record of both."

"I Am Lindsay Clancy" — What the Women in Pink Actually Believe

"I Am Lindsay Clancy" — What the Women in Pink Actually Believe
Hundreds gathered outside a courthouse for a mother who strangled her three children. The slogan on their shirts explains more than the trial does.

On August 20th, hundreds of women stood outside a Massachusetts courthouse in pink shirts and prayed for a mother who strangled her three children. Countless more showed their support online. What follows is my attempt to work out what a person has to already believe before they can absolve a murderous mother of moral culpability. 

"Madness is rare in individuals — but in groups it is the rule."

— Friedrich Nietzsche

The Crowd That Chose the Killer

What happens when a society’s institutions adopt an ideology that portrays one sex as inherently flawed and “toxic,” while casting the other as unquestionably virtuous?

The reaction to Lindsay Clancy’s trial for the murder of her three children gives us some disturbing insights.

At first, feminist TikTok questioned her guilt, hypothesizing that the husband was the real killer — based on “forensic astrology,” one reading of which “basically states that he did it… & drugged her.” Nearly two thousand readers gave the comment a thumbs up. The hypothesis being that “Leo’s don’t kill. Geminis do.” Thousands more found this to be compelling. Another argues this is evident beyond doubt: “oh he’s a GEMINI? jail for him, that’s all i need to know.”

An entire movement grew out of these TikTok and Facebook posts. Users live-streamed the trial and dissected testimony — through their rigorous process of baseless speculation — posting about "Justice for Lindsay Clancy," how they "Stand With Lindsay," and even identifying with the murderous mother by stating "I Am Lindsay Clancy." This led to a trend of mothers posting videos with their children captioned "Same, Lindsay."

While you’d be justified in chalking these responses up to astrology induced retardation, I think there is a more plausible explanation. If you have accepted the presupposition that women and virtue are inextricably linked — which so much of our political and academic class has — then all arguments downstream have to fortify that belief. Information that reinforces the belief is accepted without questioning, while anything that contradicts it is ignored or viciously attacked.

Although, there's just one problem: these delusional hypotheses have hit a brick wall, considering Clancy admits to the killings. So while the astrological readings must be dispensed with, the underlying belief that created them remains. Hence why the movement now focuses on bolstering Clancy's legal argument that she experienced a psychotic break induced by postpartum psychiatric disease aggravated by overmedication. Perhaps true, but as we can tell by the appeal to astrology, truth isn't what is being selected for. Instead, the selection mechanism is whether the argument absolves Clancy of moral culpability.

The mob psychology around this case became visible on August 20th when hundreds of supporters, many in pink, gathered outside the courthouse. Shirts read “Believe,” “She Needed Help,” and “Peace for Lindsay.” Supporters made heart shaped hands, prayed, and claimed it could have been any one of them.

The sympathy and support is not merely emotional. Tens of thousands of people have resonated with Clancy deeply enough to send over $1 million to her parents — nearly 31,000 donations in roughly a week. The campaign explicitly disclaims any position on the criminal case, stating its purpose is to help her parents rebuild the financial stability they sacrificed over the past three years. It was created by a TikTok mother with her father’s permission.

I — like those practicing “forensic astrology” — have little interest in the granular details of the trial. The reaction and debates that have followed the case are what I find far more important.

One (female) X user claimed that “after watching the trial play out, not only am I convinced we should repeal the 19th Amendment, but we should also limit women’s interactions online.” To which another woman replied, “imagine applying this logic to men. Every time a man commits an act of violence, should we reconsider men’s voting rights? Restrict their internet access? Of course not because we understand that one individual’s actions do not justify stripping civil liberties from an entire sex.”

Except there are many problems with this counter-reasoning. First, not all acts of violence are equal in nature. If a man kills a home intruder threatening his family, he’s rightfully declared a hero. If a man kills his family, he’s rightfully declared a monster. Second, the act of violence committed by Clancy may have been individual, but the support is collective. The mass sympathy for the individual’s monstrous actions cannot be ignored.

Let’s reframe the scenario. Imagine an ex-NFL player suffering from CTE brutally murdered his three children. One could understand his legal team leaning on the violence inducing brain trauma as a defence. Except it’s inconceivable that hundreds of men would show up in person, backed by thousands — if not millions — online, to paint him as the primary victim to be empathized with.

Even if one was to empathize with the CTE sufferer, it’d likely come in a similar manner to Of Mice and Men. Lennie Small is an enormous, physically powerful man with the mind and emotional understanding of a young child. He starts stroking the hair of Curley’s wife, who then panics and screams, causing Lennie to become frightened. This oversized man-child responds by shaking her too forcefully and accidentally breaking her neck. George — Lennie’s closest companion — realizes that Lennie cannot understand or control his own strength and that similar tragedies will keep happening. He also knows that an angry mob led by Curley will seek revenge for the dead woman in a brutal fashion. To spare him from torture or capture, George comforts him by describing their dream farm, especially the rabbits Lennie hopes to tend to, and while imagining that happy future, George shoots him in the back of the head.

That is about all the sympathy I have for someone who murders the innocent and defenceless — much less children who look to you as their primary source of love and protection. As the book depicts, the collective response to such a murder — even if the murderer is truly mentally incapable of understanding such actions — is likely to be death or confinement until death. If Of Mice and Men instead depicted a mob declaring “We’re just like Lennie” or “Stand With Lennie,” the reader would not only question whether the townspeople went randomly insane but whether they should face the same fate as Lennie.

This is not even a men vs. women issue. Rather, it is yet another litmus test for sane vs. insane. A society which affords more sympathy to murderers than their victims — even gifting their family a million dollars — is undeniably morally corrupt.

When the unthinkable becomes debatable — whether it be the Lindsay Clancy support, the celebrations of Charlie Kirk’s assassination, or downplaying the institutional failures behind Iryna Zarutska’s murder — a civilization’s immune system is surely suppressed to a deadly degree.

The Women in Pink

The online and in-person support of Lindsay Clancy is best viewed as a mob — or what Gustave Le Bon would call a crowd. What defines a mob is not its physical assembly but a shared psychological state. The women supporting the child murderer say themselves that this stems from identification with Clancy. They do not see a woman separate from themselves but a reflection — “I Am Lindsay Clancy.”

What can explain such a horrid statement? The current feminist explanation is that mothers commonly face intrusive thoughts in the postpartum period. This may be true, and frequent, but whether someone experiences intrusive thoughts does not absolve them of the moral responsibility for acting on them.

A classic Bill Burr bit illustrates this perfectly: “I have a lot of f**ked up thoughts. You ever drive down the street and see thirty people and you just think [to run them over]?” The crowd erupts in laughter and applause, signalling they too have had similar intrusive thoughts. Burr continues: “You don’t do it, you just think it. That’s what separates the psychos from the functioning psychos.”

Every single person who is being honest with themselves will admit they've had unconscionable intrusive thoughts. Yet am I now expected to extend sympathy to someone who acts on the thought of mowing down a sidewalk full of people with their car? Of course not. Deciding whether to act on those thoughts is the defining difference between a monster and everyone else. We are only expected to elicit sympathy because Clancy is a woman. Not one of these feminists would return the moral leeway if it were a man.

Now I want you to consider the possibility of a feedback loop being created in the fallout of this issue. Social status is very important to humans. It is one of our fundamental drives. We first want to fit into a group and then to be held in high regard by that group. What do you think happens when the price of admission to a group is admitting to or vocalizing your intrusive thoughts? Even further, what happens when that group awards attention and status to those who have the worst thoughts — up to and including murdering their children? Do you think this will lead to fewer or more people within that group having those thoughts? Do you think this will increase or decrease the likelihood of someone acting on those thoughts? Now consider those in the group seeing a seemingly endless supply of emotional and financial support flowing to those who do act.

This is not to say we are going to see COVID-level mass hysteria of otherwise normal mothers now murdering their children, but I would argue that this creates a social environment where the small share of demented mothers now see an opportunity to remove their mask of sanity and get rewarded for it.

It’s truly terrifying that we’ve reached a state where this needs to be said, but if we cannot make clear moral distinctions between the universal experience of having intrusive thoughts and the very particular experience of acting on those thoughts then we are doomed.

Feminist Doublethink

The proclivity for TikTok feminists to argue that Lindsay Clancy cannot be held criminally responsible because her postpartum intrusive thoughts amounted to psychosis not only directly undercuts their entire movement but is also an example of doublethink. Orwell defines doublethink as the ability to hold two contradictory beliefs as true, signalling the erosion of critical thought.

The same movement that insisted the husband was the real killer and Lindsay could not have done this because of her astrology chart, pivoted to insisting she cannot be held responsible for having done it. The belief that women are inherently innocent remains, the argument required to protect it is what changes.

Let’s consider the following propositions:

1. Women are just as rational, competent, and emotionally stable as men. Therefore, they deserve equal social and political representation.

2. What Clancy experienced is a normal and relatable part of motherhood — "Same, Lindsay," "I Am Lindsay Clancy" — and that experience is sufficient to remove her legal responsibility for killing her three children.

These two beliefs cannot coexist. I’m not here to tell you whether one or neither of these beliefs is true, but to point out that they can’t both be true.

Note that the second proposition also contradicts the defence it claims to support. Clancy’s lawyers argue particularity by alleging this happened to a single woman, with a rare disorder, and a cascade of medication issues. The movement argues universality, claiming it could have been any one of them. The crowd is taking the the argument of a rare-disease in a specific case to make a claim about all women.

Schrödinger’s feminist is a term popularized by meme culture, but it maps onto the Lindsay Clancy story quite well. The movement portrays women as simultaneously empowered and victimized, choosing whichever state best suits their immediate advantage or argument.

Vying for political power or career opportunities? Women are strong, independent, and capable. Giving in to intrusive thoughts and murdering your children? Women are victims of postpartum depression and cannot be held morally liable for their actions.

AOC recently referred to Woke 1.0 as “crazy.” Well, if this is Woke 2.0, it’s genuinely psychotic, and it will continue to get worse unless we muster the courage to stop giving in to the emotional blackmail.

If women want equality of representation, then they need to exhibit equality of responsibility. If society is to return to sanity it must accept that men and women have both success and failure modes, and stop pretending one sex is toxic by default while the other innocent by nature.

 

 

 

 

Links - 1st October 2026 (Jason Arday)

Meme - Melissa Chen @MsMelChen: "The meltdown from the British left after Jason Arday is pure derangement. Even American leftists refuse to defend the plagiarist. They learned the hard way to keep their most unhinged woke ideas private after watching them deliver Trump 2.0
The bio of the person who shared it. Honestly thought it was a parody account
"Queer disabled gender-fluid vegan antiwork Marxist ecofeminist (any pronouns)""
"Where is the line Ill: Microfascism and Fascism. The billionaire-funded squadrisimo came for Jason Arday. We didn't do enough to stop it. Now he is dead.
SEAN JOHNSON ANDREWS
I don't know how many of you outside of academia have been following the horrific hounding of the Black British Cambridge Scholar Jason Arday, his resignation from his post at the university, or his tragic death - apparently by suicide - last week. But from"

Axel Folio, PhD, White Tears Distiller 🪁 on X - "Appreciation post for the folks staying on the necks of journalists media outlets, racist scholars & a moronic public that led to the death of Prof Arday. No stopping until his family gets justice. He deserved justice."
Donna-Louise on X - "Anyone else have issue with this post about “staying on the necks” of those who outed the lies of Jason Arday?! Wow. 😮 George Floyd, anyone?"

Donna-Louise on X - "The Rot in the Faculty at Cambridge
A professor whose claims collapsed under scrutiny. A colleague who called Western education a threat. A panel that prioritised ideology. And a leadership that treated questions as the problem. The first four pieces set out the claims, the evidence against them, the resignation, and the immediate defence that followed — the solidarity letter, the Guardian framing, the quiet withdrawal of signatures, and the insistence that scrutiny itself was the problem. This fifth piece is about what the institution that employed him knew, what it did, and what it is only now being forced to examine."

Sander Sassen on X (Translated from Dutch) - "You'd expect a university professor to be able to reason well. Is Tijl De Bie then the exception to the rule? He proclaims that anyone who defends Cofnas but dropped Pettit is the gravedigger of academic freedom.  As if an academic who posts on X that it's time "to finish what the Palestinians started on October 7" and that Israel "must be destroyed once and for all" is actually doing the same thing as a researcher who publishes studies on heredity and IQ.  Be honest for once, @TijlDeBie . Isn't that just a clumsy attempt to equate a pro-Palestine activist who incited students, contributed to an atmosphere of intimidation and violence on campus, and constantly targeted Israel and the Jews, with the man who dares to name uncomfortable data? That's not remotely comparable.  Pettit crossed the boundaries of free speech by cheering on and encouraging violence and terror. Cofnas crossed an entirely different line: that of the woke ideology that reigns on campus. Of course you don't want to see that difference, because then you'd have to critically examine your own moral self-image—or worse, start questioning the woke ideology.  One thing, however, is not up for debate, Tijl. You can't use academic freedom as a shield for those who express support for violence and terror. For those who call to "finish what began on October 7": a massacre of Jews. Anyone who does that isn't concerned with academic freedom at all, but with promoting an ideology. And those two things are not compatible.  Clear now, Tijl?"

The Jason Arday vigil was everything psychologists warn against - spiked - "We have known for centuries that suicide can be contagious. After Goethe published The Sorrows of Young Werther in 1774, reports emerged of young men imitating his suicidal hero. It became known as the Werther effect. The removal of the shame and secrecy that once surrounded suicide was welcome. But it created another problem: how do you talk openly and compassionately about suicide without encouraging contagion? That is why, back in 1989, suicidologists, psychiatrists, psychologists, public-health officials and journalists gathered in the United States to establish recommendations to reduce suicide contagion. Their conclusions were explicit. They warned against glorifying people who died by suicide and against presenting suicide as a means of accomplishing an end. They also cautioned against public eulogies and memorials that might give vulnerable people the impression that society was honouring the suicide, rather than mourning the death. For these reasons, the vigil for Jason Arday in Trafalgar Square last week should never have taken place. Stand Up To Racism organised this vigil in order to remember Arday and, presumably, to highlight the dangers of racism. But in doing so, it risked encouraging copycat suicides. Thousands of people gathered beneath Nelson’s Column for the Arday vigil. There were flowers, speeches and placards reading ‘Rest in Power Professor Jason Arday’. Speakers presented Arday not simply as a man whose death was desperately sad, but as a victim and even a martyr. A villain was identified – Nathan Cofnas, one of the researchers who drew attention to Arday’s plagiarism – and he was booed by the crowd.The irresponsibility of this is almost impossible to overstate. People who are suicidal fantasise about exactly this kind of overblown romanticisation of how they will be mourned, appreciated and valorised after death. They imagine everyone crying their eyes out at their funeral... In 1994, five years after the release of the media guidelines on suicide, Kurt Cobain killed himself. There were enormous fears about what would happen. Cobain was almost the perfect candidate for romanticisation – young, beautiful, troubled, world-famous and an icon of alienated youth. Yet the response was remarkably restrained. Researchers subsequently found that the expected rise in suicides did not occur, although calls to crisis lines increased substantially, especially in Seattle, where he died. It is believed that the unusually responsible media and public-health response may have helped. The response deliberately worked against making his suicide heroic. Twenty years later, when Robin Williams died by suicide in 2014, the media environment had changed. Social media had ridden roughshod over the old media guidelines. Researchers subsequently found 1,841 more suicides in the United States between August and December 2014 than their statistical model predicted, an increase of almost 10 per cent...  Arday’s treatment was not unique. Others have come through similar public maulings. James Frey endured an onslaught after parts of his supposedly autobiographical A Million Little Pieces were exposed as invented. Rachel Dolezal and Belle Gibson became international objects of ridicule when their fabrications came to light. More recently, The Salt Path controversy had many of us glued to our screens as another inspirational life story was ripped apart... The response to Arday’s death was depressingly predictable. The academics went to war against the journalists. The journalists retaliated and turned on academia. The right blamed DEI while the left blamed the right...  people choose suicide for a whole raft of reasons – typically, many different issues have converged. It is therefore not only dangerous but also inaccurate to reduce his death to a simple morality tale in which journalists criticised him and he died as a consequence... we should never turn his suicide into his apotheosis. We should never give suicidal people reason to believe that death is the moment when the world will finally love them."

Jason Arday and the Merciless Lie - "Arday laid claim to athletic as well as intellectual greatness, including the clearly ludicrous alleged feat of running six hundred miles in six days. Yet he wasn’t without athletic ability. Schoolmates remember him as a talented football goalkeeper. Before setting his sights on higher education, he worked as a PE teacher. What might his future have been, had he been content with the little life he was given? What fulfillment might he have found, had he believed that even our modest talents bear a divine stamp, and that we can offer them up to the Creator who delights over us as we are, not as we imagine ourselves in our daydreams?"

What Ghent University Just Taught Every Academic Whistleblower - "Ghent is instead suspending Cofnas because his expressed public views are misaligned with the university’s values and therefore “creates a reputational risk”. This is not how academic freedom should work.  At this point, the timeline of events over the past month is clear... The statement by Ghent on their suspension of Cofnas is bizarre for anyone who cares about academic freedom. It’s framed as a statement on the university’s values rather than anything specific to Cofnas’ writings or any alleged misconduct that would warrant a disciplinary investigation. The statement then goes on to specify that Ghent University’s view of academic freedom is predicated on specific values... It is true that academic freedom is not unlimited. Yet, it should alarm every academic who holds any potentially contentious view on any subject that a university such as Ghent is openly declaring that academic freedom is only protected insofar as one’s publicly expressed values are aligned with the university’s.  Ghent is suspending Cofnas because they don’t like his views. In a leaked letter that appeared online the day after the public statement, university officials detail the reasons for his suspension by citing (among many disputable things) “offenses committed in private life” that argue his views on race and intelligence “may be interpreted” as racism, which is against the university’s values. This is despite Cofnas being hired in the spring with years of published writing on group differences in intelligence. His hiring at Ghent this past spring drew a petition with more than 2,000 signatures within weeks (with a new petition now appearing for him to be dismissed, along with a counter letter to keep him). Ghent defended the hire anyway, with Ghent rector Petra De Sutter (now ironically) stating at the time that “Dissenting opinions are allowed to exist and debate must take place at a university. It is primarily up to experts and fellow researchers to test ideas, criticise them and, where necessary, contradict them.” The only thing that has changed since March is that Cofnas’s views are now too big a liability to the university’s reputation for them to defend, and therefore now he must go.  Now with Ghent’s decision to suspend Cofnas, academia should be alert to the precedent such an event leaves for scholars who criticize the work of other scholars. First, if you express views that are unpopular, could cause “tension,” or “may be interpreted” in any type of way, keep your mouth shut. Second, such unpopular views are subject to the heckler’s veto via public pressure campaigns, so again, keep your mouth shut. The suspension of Cofnas only serves to entrench academic self-censorship and erodes trust in the academy’s ability to reform itself. If academics cannot trust that alleging academic misconduct about another scholar won’t cost them their job, then who is going to risk sticking their neck out to criticize scholarship when warranted? Criticism of scholarship comes with the job, and in today’s environment, that is certainly going to play out online, especially when the scholar being criticised is a publicly lauded academic at a nation’s top university. To academics who think public criticism of a lauded scholar at a prestigious university is too harsh, consider how this situation could have played out differently. Had the original Times Higher Education story run, backed by an even more extensive dossier of alleged plagiarism, the scandal would likely have broken anyway, just under a different byline. Outlets like Retraction Watch exist specifically to call out academic misconduct — as they should. Scholars, no matter their background, personal characteristics, or public standing, are subject to scholarly standards and peer criticism. That is what happened here: at root, this is a case of one scholar exposing another’s misconduct. Academics need to police our own scholarship and take the lead on intentional reform to build back public trust in scholarship. And if we don’t, we’re handing the reins over to legislators and politicians eager to regulate campuses themselves. For the scholarly record and the institutions that safeguard it to be trustworthy, they must be seen as places that uphold scholarly standards to generate knowledge that can be trusted."

‘Frankly, He Has Been Killed’: Angry Scholars From UK’s Top Academics’ Union Blame Jason Arday’s Death on Racist Mob, as ‘Race Realist’ Who Ignited the Firestorm Is Suspended - "As anger grows among the left over the apparent suicide last week of former Cambridge professor Jason Arday, an influential band of activists within Great Britain’s largest academics’ union is moving to fuel that raw sentiment into action. These academics—from the University and College Union—want to shield other black academics from scrutiny from what they view as a racist, right-wing conspiracy... the UCU Solidarity Movement, an activist caucus within the academics’ union, held a virtual organizing meeting... the angry scholars repeatedly denounced the attacks on Arday as the product of a racist, right-wing mob seeking to drive blacks out of the academy.  The meeting’s organizer, Sean Wallis, a principal research fellow in English at University College London, or UCL, suggested time was of the essence. He already knew, he said, of one black British academic facing scrutiny for alleged plagiarism.  The central purposes of the meeting were to draft a public statement on the Arday tragedy and develop a toolkit to help the union respond if black academics are targeted with attacks on their credibility. Wallis further proposed a UCU hotline for members "who have been threatened."...   "I think there is a campaign going on" against black academics in Britain. He said there is a conspiracy to "target black colleagues because politically that is what they want to do. They want to hound out our black brothers and sisters." He further said, "I am convinced that’s already happening"—in Britain—"because I’ve seen it with my own eyes."  "Jason is not the only person who is being targeted right now," Wallis said, claiming that a purported Substacker had put an unnamed academic’s thesis through plagiarism-detection software. This, Wallis said, evidently "found some overlap with some other PhD’s, which had been written a few years previously."... attendees appeared primed to regard scrutiny of black academics as illegitimate almost by default. Wallis said the group challenges racism "even when it’s disguised as concern for standards."... Eva Hartmann, a university associate professor in Cambridge’s education department, where Arday served until resigning August 5, smiled and gave a thumbs up in response...   Lyes Kahouadji, a chemical engineering researcher at Imperial College London, who is non-white and whom Wallis appointed to chair the meeting, later replied to Wallis that "it’s really important what you mentioned about textual overlap and plagiarism." Kahouadji insisted that plagiarism is "completely different, and academics are supposed to come forward and say, ‘No, this is not plagiarism.’" Regarding Arday, he continued: "It’s really a shame that people who are supposed to protect from this plagiarism fantasy didn’t speak up."  All of the academic institutions where Wallis, Kahouadji, and Hartmann work, as well as Liverpool John Moores University, from which Arday received his Ph.D., clearly and explicitly define plagiarism as including the lifting of text without clear attribution... Arday himself did not dispute that he had lifted text, blaming his autism, but attributed the plagiarism accusations to a cynical racist plot against black academics... the meeting’s attendees appeared to overlook the fact that Arday has more recently been credibly accused of plagiarism and academic fraud involving multiple academic papers—written at multiple institutions—in addition to his thesis... [it is] alleged he stole another academic’s research and fabricated data... extra-academic issues were never mentioned at the UCU meeting. Jeffrey Vernon, a principal teaching fellow in postgraduate medicine at Imperial College, was an outlier in his skepticism of Liverpool John Moores’s findings. He wrote in the meeting’s chat that it was "clear" that the university "did not supervise him properly." He said, "They were anxious to find ‘no problem’ and move on." No one responded to this counterpoint... "The agenda of far-right ideologues who attacked Jason Arday while openly boasting that their goal is to create a ‘meritocracy’ in Higher Education by chasing Black scholars out of academia should be confronted, challenged and exposed, instead it was amplified by the right wing and liberal press."  The academic-activists’ statement also points to the "common struggle against institutional racism and management failure in Cambridge and beyond." It commits the group to defending "colleagues and students from racist harassment and victimization and building an anti-racist movement on our campuses and in the streets."  Vernon was also among a minority who noted that not all media coverage was so deserving of fierce condemnation. Pointing to Retraction Watch, which was one of the first to publish an article on Jason Arday after Cofnas last month, Vernon wrote in the chat, "I don’t think that can be called right wing, non-academic, or unscientific." He continued, "I don’t want us to go overboard on the ‘right wing racist’ argument."  At least one of the meeting’s attendees envisioned a counteroffensive against James Orr, who is an associate professor of philosophy of religion at the Faculty of Divinity at Cambridge and the head of policy for Reform UK. Orr has been accused of racism, including for expressing negative attitudes toward Palestinians.  Talat Ahmed, a senior lecturer in South Asian history at the University of Edinburgh, said if she were a student at Cambridge, she would want "a mass student insurgent campaign to get rid of that racist fucker from my institution."   Decrying those who endorse race science in particular, Wallis compared them to climate denialists and said of scholarship that validates such a theory: "Academic freedom is not the freedom to publish garbage."   The meeting’s attendees also argued that Arday was egregiously held to a higher standard because of his race. Megan Povey, a professor of food physics at the University of Leeds, said that, by comparison, "you see these white academics getting away with murder, literally."  Povey, who is transgender, further drew a parallel to the darkening climate surrounding trans issues in Britain. "You know the right is going for trans because it’s a wedge issue," Povey said. "They’re trying to pull back gains that have been made over the years by Black Lives Matter and so on."  Petra De Sutter, the Ghent rector who, according to Cofnas, suspended him, is also transgender. De Sutter was also found to have drafted an inaugural address with the aid of generative AI, which inserted multiple "hallucinated" quotes, the Brussels Times reported in January. In the speech, De Sutter had warned to "not blindly trust" AI.   The activist-academic group was especially angry at journalists. Hartmann called for academia to assert its authority and preempt reporters’ efforts to use their own "crude text comparison" to examine plagiarism accusations (as Cofnas and multiple news outlets did with Arday’s texts). Wallis noted that one member "rightly said" in the chat that journalists themselves plagiarize. "They all do," Wallis said emphatically. "They all—yes!" Kahouadji replied. Sardonically quoting reporters, Wallis said, "It’s kind of like, ‘How dare you do plagiarism? That’s our thing!’"  The Free Beacon could find no examples of accusations, credible or otherwise, of plagiarism levied against any of 34 identified journalists who covered the story in Britain."

Why Are Academics Falsely Claiming Plagiarism Can’t Be the ‘Mere Overlap Of Sentences’ In the Wake of Jason Arday’s Death? - "When I was in the 7th grade in 1991, my terrific social studies teacher, Mr. Corkran, taught us what plagiarism was and why it was to be avoided at all costs. And importantly, he taught us strategies—which I still use today—for how to avoid even inadvertently plagiarizing, such as taking notes from another text only in paraphrase. That way you don’t later forget that what you jotted down was someone else’s verbatim text.  I wish everybody had had Mr. Corkran as a teacher. It would’ve saved, perhaps, left-wing pundit Ross Barkan from getting fired from New York magazine after they found 67 columns of his had citation problems, and also from having Penguin announce this week, per the Washington Post, it was shelving his upcoming book about his longtime friend Zohran Mamdani. When Mr. Barkan was first found out in the spring, he tried to make out like it didn’t matter if he had clearly lifted verbatim passages from another writer absent quotation marks around the text, so long, he said, as he cited them explicitly or hyperlinked to them. Mr. Corkran would tell him that is not a loophole in the plagiarism rules! The Jason Arday affair is much more complicated and ethically fraught, given, in part, that I find it hard to believe any of the sweeping overlap in the text between his work and other scholars’ papers was ever inadvertent—Liverpool John Moores University’s baffling decision to clear him of plagiarism charges on his 2015 PhD thesis notwithstanding... it seems that multiple academics in good standing have missed the message that plagiarism, by definition, can include, absent the stealing of ideas, the mere lifting of someone else’s words if that verbatim text is not put within quotation marks.  Take Jason Stanley, a professor of philosophy at the University of Toronto... You know who disagrees with Dr. Stanley? His employer, the University of Toronto. The university defines plagiarism in its Code of Behavior for Academic Matters like this... I obtained a video recording of a fraught and impassioned planning meeting, held Tuesday, of the UCU Solidarity Movement—an activist collective of the University and College Union, the largest higher-education union in Britain—in which two professors claimed a similarly narrow definition of plagiarism that excluded the mere overlap of text. And yet none of the other dozens of academics on this Zoom meeting objected to this narrow definition. Instead, one Cambridge professor seemed delighted that they were at least moving the plagiarism conversation away from textual overlap and recentering it on the stealing of ideas. (Dr. Arday stood credibly accused of stealing both the words and the research of other academics, mind you, per a devastating investigation by The Times. No one in the meeting specifically acknowledged that his accused offenses were this broad in scale.)... Sean Wallis, who organized the meeting, is a principal research fellow in the University College London’s English department, the UCL branch secretary of the UCU, and sits on the union’s national executive committee. So he is no slouch. The most astonishing single thing Dr. Wallis said about plagiarism during Tuesday’s planning meeting was: “Plagiarism is not using the same phrase that somebody else has used in a previous article.”"

Academic Activists Said The Telegraph and The Times Led a ‘Lynch Mob’ Against Jason Arday—Papers They Said They Don’t Read - "The central thrust of the meeting was that these academics, who were predominantly white, but who also included a substantial cohort of South Asians, was that there was a racist right-wing conspiracy to hound black academics out of their jobs in the United Kingdom. This notion was short on specifics.  The only person they clearly identified as behind this conspiracy was Nathan Cofnas... Sean Wallis, a principal research fellow in English at University College London, said at the meeting that the goal in this conspiracy was to make cynical and bad-faith use plagiarism-detection software. He said that “it’s leveraging existing algorithmic tools, and of course you could do it in a targeted way. You target black colleagues because politically that is what they want to do. They want to hound out our black brothers and sisters, and I think we have to recognize the nature of what’s going on right now.” Led by Wallis, who is a major UCU organizer (and who, on Oct. 7, 2023, retweeted an approving post about the attacks of Oct. 7, 2023), the group sought to lay the groundwork for an action plan that could leap to the defense of any black academics who were targeted in Britain with accusations of academic misconduct... Lyes Kahouadji, a chemical engineering researcher at Imperial College London, was among those at the meeting who falsely asserted that Arday had been cleared of all accusations of plagiarism. Liverpool John Moores University did investigate Arday’s 2015 PhD thesis and, despite substantial textual overlap between the thesis and the work of another scholar, they cleared him of the charges in March. However, an Aug. 5 investigation in The Times found considerable evidence that Arday had committed plagiarism and data theft in multiple papers he published while at multiple other universities. The members of the UCU meeting seemed overwhelmingly unaware of this. Eva Hartmann, a university associate professor in Cambridge’s education department, where Arday held his prestigious professorship, was especially eager to hear Wallis shift the focus of the definition plagiarism away from textual overlap and toward the stealing of ideas (as if this would exonerate Arday, who was accused of that too). She gave Wallis an enthusiastic thumbs up when he did that... Wallis was especially keen to lambast right-leaning Telegraph and the more centrist Times as culpable of targeting Arday with harassing coverage. But he admitted that he did not read either publication. This could perhaps explain why he and others in the meeting seemed unaware of the accusations against Arday that were more serious than mere textual overlap. Wallis wondered aloud why in the world the British press even considered Arday a news story. It was one only because they said so, he said."

Wesley Yang on X - "Some media organs (NYT and Atlantic) are fitfully trying to extricate themselves from the morass of extreme wokeness, while some of the dominant peer-reviewed scientific publications of the Western world have no capacity to self-correct. A civilizational danger that nothing is contesting."
BH on X - "Arday wasn't a physician, his fabrications and plagiarism had nothing to do with the medical system or medicine, so what is NEJM even doing?"
Genetics Realist on X - "This is the gender-medicine pattern with different stationery. York/Cass reviewed 50 puberty-blocker studies and found one high-quality paper. No reliable conclusion on dysphoria, mental health, or cognition. Bone and height risks were the clearer signal. Meanwhile the Endocrine Society and WPATH guidelines cited each other and treated dissent as harm. That is not peer review. It is a closed loop. A journal that will print “I don’t care whether the allegations were true” has already left the scientific method. Cass is what self-correction looks like. Those specialty societies are what capture looks like."
Trust the "Science" that doesn't care what is true or not