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

Singapore's Bottle/Can Deposit Scheme

When you waste money (the vending machines alone might cost almost $100 million, not to mention operational costs) for questionable benefit (Singapore already could recover metal from cans at the waste plant). But virtue signalling is "free" because left wingers don't see the costs:

Fergus Tan | Facebook

Singapore's BCRS has an uncomfortable question nobody seems to be asking

 

What happens when environmental regulation accidentally becomes protection for the biggest companies in the market?

 

On 1 October 2026, Singapore's Beverage Container Return Scheme enters full implementation.

 

After that date, regulated canned and bottled drinks sold here generally have to comply with the BCRS system, including the Singapore deposit mark and an approved barcode. Consumers pay a 10-cent deposit and can recover it by returning the empty bottle or can.

 

The idea sounds almost impossible to disagree with.

 

Recycle more. Waste less. Save the environment.

 

But environmental policy should still pass a basic test:

 

Are the environmental benefits proportionate to the economic costs and unintended consequences we are creating?

 

I think BCRS deserves much more scrutiny on that question.

 

Deposit-return schemes are used around the world, especially in Europe.

 

And there is evidence that they work.

 

OECD research finds that jurisdictions with deposit systems can achieve collection rates above 90%, while separately collected bottles can produce cleaner recycling streams than mixed household recycling.

 

Singapore's domestic recycling rate was only 11% in 2025. NEA estimates that Singapore uses more than one billion beverage containers a year, representing more than 16,000 tonnes of material.

 

So there is a legitimate environmental problem here.

 

But that is only half the policy equation.

 

Singapore already had recycling companies, waste collectors and material recovery systems before BCRS.

 

Now we are building a separate nationwide infrastructure of reverse-vending machines, specialised logistics, barcode verification, payment systems and administration to recover bottles and cans.

 

BCRS started with more than 1,000 reverse-vending machines and intends to expand to around 2,000 return points.

 

That infrastructure is not free.

 

For Year 1, producers pay approximately 3.1 cents for every metal container and 3.7 cents for every plastic container, on top of the refundable 10-cent deposit. There is also producer registration, individual SKU registration and packaging compliance.

 

Those numbers become much more interesting when you look at who bears the compliance burden.

 

BCRS Ltd is Singapore's sole licensed scheme operator until 2033.

 

It is a not-for-profit company.

 

And who established it?

 

Coca-Cola Singapore Beverages, F&N Foods and Pokka.

 

Its board also includes representatives from smaller producers Wanin Industries and Chia Khim Lee Food Industries.

 

There is nothing inherently improper about an industry-led environmental scheme.

 

In fact, CCCS reviewed the arrangement and concluded that the establishment and operation of BCRS Ltd was unlikely to infringe Singapore's Competition Act.

 

But something else in the CCCS record deserves considerably more public attention.

 

Back in 2021, when NEA was developing the scheme, Singapore's competition regulator specifically advised NEA to regularly review the framework so that it "does not unnecessarily restrict competition", to review compliance costs as market conditions change, and to put safeguards around commercially sensitive information.

 

That tells us something important.

 

Competition concerns are not some conspiracy theory invented by unhappy importers. They were foreseeable enough for Singapore's own competition regulator to raise them before the system was built.

 

Imagine Coca-Cola or another multinational selling millions of units of a mainstream drink in Singapore.

 

Changing packaging artwork for Singapore is relatively straightforward when the production run is large enough.

 

The Government itself has said that producers accounting for around 80% of beverage containers should be able to incorporate BCRS requirements directly into their packaging.

 

Their continuing compliance cost would therefore be relatively close to the 3 to 4 cent producer fee.

 

Now consider a Singapore SME importing a few thousand cans of an obscure Japanese soda, Thai coffee, Korean energy drink or Australian craft beer.

 

The overseas manufacturer may have absolutely no interest in printing Singapore-specific packaging for such a tiny market.

 

So the importer has another option.

 

Sticker every single bottle or can.

 

And these cannot simply be labels printed on an office printer.

 

BCRS requires scheme stickers to be ordered through its portal from appointed printing companies. BCRS documentation says printing lead times can range from two to six weeks.

 

Government officials acknowledged in Parliament that small quantities stickered locally will cost more than mass-scale stickering overseas.

 

CNA interviewed importers who said stickers could cost roughly 4 to 18 cents each depending on volume, before manpower and other compliance costs are considered. Some importers warned that retail prices could rise considerably for affected products.

 

Then there is the barcode issue.

 

BCRS strongly encourages Singapore-specific barcodes. Using an international barcode can trigger a refundable security fee based on BCRS's fraud assessment.

 

BCRS itself gives an example where an importer putting 100,000 units into the market could face a S$28,000 security fee.

 

Yes, it is refundable.

 

But refundable capital still has to come from somewhere.

 

For Coca-Cola, this may be an administrative problem.

 

For a tiny importer, S$28,000 of tied-up working capital can be a commercial decision about whether the product is worth importing at all.

 

The biggest danger may not be that Coke becomes 10 cents more expensive.

 

The bigger effect could happen quietly.

 

That weird Japanese Pepsi disappears.

 

That seasonal Australian craft beer never arrives.

 

That cheap Indonesian canned drink in a neighbourhood discount shop is no longer worth importing.

 

The niche Korean drink selling 3,000 units a year gets dropped because registration, approval, stickering and administration make the economics ridiculous.

 

Nobody announces that competition has fallen.

 

Products simply stop appearing.

 

This matters particularly because Singapore is a tiny consumer market.

 

A regulation that costs five cents per unit may be trivial at ten million units and commercially significant at ten thousand units.

 

That is basic economies of scale.

 

And regulation can therefore be formally equal while having very unequal economic effects.

 

Parallel importers create an unusual form of competition.

 

They can source identical or alternative products from Thailand, Malaysia, Indonesia, Japan, Korea, Europe or elsewhere when the economics make sense.

 

That puts competitive pressure on official supply channels.

 

CNA found exactly this price dynamic in January.

 

Some imported canned drinks sold for around 70 cents, while locally supplied alternatives were closer to S$1. Importers interviewed by CNA worried BCRS compliance costs would narrow that gap.

 

There is therefore a legitimate public-policy question:

 

Could an environmental regulation unintentionally reduce the competitive pressure that parallel imports place on large incumbent beverage suppliers?

 

That is a much more serious question than whether carrying bottles to a vending machine is inconvenient.

 

What happens when consumers don't bother returning their bottles?

 

They lose their 10 cents.

 

Those unredeemed deposits can be used by BCRS Ltd to fund the operation of the scheme. The Government confirmed this in Parliament in August.

 

BCRS is a not-for-profit organisation, so describing this simply as Coca-Cola, F&N or Pokka "pocketing the deposits" would be inaccurate.

 

In fact, BCRS's published fee formula explicitly uses unclaimed deposits and revenue from the sale of recyclables to offset operating costs.

 

But this creates an interesting economic structure.

 

The consumer who doesn't return a bottle effectively contributes towards funding the system.

 

Meanwhile every producer, including a tiny importer, has to participate in the infrastructure created to administer that system.

 

That structure deserves transparent scrutiny.

 

Supporters will understandably point towards Germany, Norway, Denmark and Lithuania.

 

Their return rates are impressive.

 

But copying an instrument does not automatically mean copying the circumstances that made it appropriate.

 

Singapore has different geography, different waste infrastructure, a much smaller domestic market, enormous dependence on imported consumer goods and an unusually dense retail environment.

 

There is also a social side to deposit schemes that receives surprisingly little discussion.

 

Germany has developed an entire informal culture of Pfandsammler, people who collect discarded deposit-bearing bottles from streets, events and rubbish bins for income.

 

A 2025 German study estimated more than one million people engaged in deposit-bottle collection.

 

One can view that positively because discarded bottles get collected.

 

One can also ask whether designing a system where discarded packaging acquires cash value changes how people interact with public rubbish bins and public spaces.

 

Again, environmental policy has consequences beyond the headline recycling percentage.

 

There is evidence that Singaporeans are using BCRS.

 

MSE reported on 8 September that more than 20 million beverage containers had been collected during the first five months.

 

That sounds impressive until we remember that Singapore consumes more than one billion beverage containers annually and that we are still in the transition period, when many bottles do not yet carry BCRS markings.

 

It is therefore too early to draw either conclusion.

 

We cannot honestly say today that BCRS has failed environmentally.

 

We also cannot point to "20 million bottles collected" and conclude that the whole system represents good public policy.

 

The meaningful evaluation comes later:

 

How many of those containers would otherwise have been recycled?

 

How much additional material was genuinely diverted from incineration?

 

What is the full carbon footprint of manufacturing, operating and servicing thousands of reverse-vending machines and transporting the collected material?

 

How much has the scheme cost producers and consumers?

 

How many SKUs disappeared from Singapore because complying was no longer economically worthwhile?

 

How have prices of imported beverages changed relative to locally distributed alternatives?

 

How much working capital has been tied up in international-barcode security deposits?

 

And has market concentration in beverage distribution increased?

 

Those figures would tell us far more than the number flashing on a reverse-vending machine.

 

The choice does not have to be between "abolish BCRS" and "change nothing".

 

Regulators can examine whether a minimum threshold makes sense for very small-volume importers.

 

They can study whether small annual volumes justify simplified registration or alternative compliance mechanisms.

 

They can evaluate whether international barcodes really require security deposits at the present scale.

 

They can publish the effective compliance cost per container broken down by large, medium and small producers.

 

They can monitor how many beverage SKUs and importers leave the Singapore market after full implementation.

 

And CCCS can continue doing exactly what it recommended years ago: periodically reviewing whether the framework imposes unnecessary restrictions on competition and whether compliance costs remain justified.

 

Most importantly, environmental performance should eventually be reported as more than "X million bottles collected."

 

Singapore should be able to measure the incremental recycling created by BCRS against its financial cost, carbon footprint, consumer inconvenience and impact on competition.

 

Singapore has always depended on being an unusually easy place to trade.

 

We are a small market.

 

That makes regulatory fixed costs particularly dangerous because every additional licence, registration process, approved vendor, specialised label and compliance system has to be amortised over a relatively small customer base.

 

Large corporations can absorb those costs far more easily than small companies.

 

BCRS may ultimately prove environmentally worthwhile.

 

But if it improves recycling while quietly reducing product diversity, raising barriers to parallel imports and favouring businesses with enormous production volumes, Singapore deserves to know.

 

Green policy should be measured by environmental outcomes, competition outcomes and its total cost to society.

 

The hardest question surrounding BCRS therefore isn't:

 

"Does recycling sound like a good idea?"

 

Of course it does.

 

The harder question is:

 

Did we design the most proportionate recycling system for a tiny, open, import-dependent economy like Singapore?

 

That is the question worth answering.