Re: Why progressives were desperate to believe Jason Arday

On Tue, 4 Aug 2026 14:18:27 -0700, dart200
<[email protected]> wrote:

>On 8/4/26 12:00 PM, Julian wrote:
>> The Jason Arday affair has been a great revealer. On the one hand, it is 
>> a glorious romp that has brought much-needed mirth to the nation. On the 
>> other, the exposure of Professor Arday isn’t really about the guileless 
>> Arday himself, but the establishment that elevated him. It has served up 
>> a moment of unavoidable clarity in which the nonsense of progressivism 
>> stands exposed like the imperial scrotum.
>> 
>> It is a perfect storm. We have a fantasist in an environment where, for 
>> political and social status reasons, everyone takes his claims at face 
>> value, or pretends that they do because to express doubt would be to 
>> invite unwanted attention. In such fertile ground the fantasist’s claims 
>> (which he continues to deny fabricating) inevitably become increasingly 
>> outlandish – epic marathon runs, prophetic blessings, an appearance in a 
>> television programme that began 20 years before he was born – because he 
>> is increasingly secure that they will never be questioned. This is what 
>> inevitably occurs when a fantasist encounters people who want, for 
>> whatever reason, to believe his fantasies.
>> 
>> It can be quite uncanny to see a fantasist at work. I once heard of a TV 
>> project that met for its first big production meeting. It was only then, 
>> after weeks of prep across different departments, that it gradually 
>> occurred to everybody that the show hadn’t actually been commissioned. 
>> The writer had just told everybody that it had. And they’d wanted to 
>> believe.
>> 
>> Arday himself can hardly be blamed for this scandal. Like Puff the magic 
>> dragon, he is notable only for the effect he had on others. Who would 
>> dare to speak up against a wunderkind that made a lot of powerful people 
>> feel better about themselves? Like love, mediocrity will always find a 
>> way. DEI is its great enabler, but this can never be acknowledged.
>> 
>> Even now we can see the reluctance of Arday’s cheerleaders to throw in 
>> the towel. LBC’s James O’Brien, for example, who at the height of 
>> Arday’s fame nodded along to his rambling tosh, is currently fighting a 
>> desperate rearguard action, telling his Bluesky followers that the 
>> Telegraph and the Times have crossed the line into ‘studied [and] 
>> deliberate ignominy’ with their Arday stories. I love how O’Brien goes 
>> all Victorian in his vocabulary on these occasions. He must think it 
>> makes him look very serious. He goes on, ‘If there is any case to answer 
>> here, it is about Liverpool John Moore’s supervisory failure of an 
>> obviously unique PhD student. Something, I imagine, their own exhaustive 
>> investigation concluded… [it] would be comical if the motivation of 
>> Jason’s enemies were not so hideously obvious.’
>> 
>> Like all of Arday’s fans, O’Brien’s only remaining option is to throw 
>> murky aspersions of racism on the people who have revealed him to be 
>> such a colossal, credulous prat.
>> 
>> And of course, O’Brien has form on this as long as your arm, with his 
>> enthusiastic vaunting of the claims of the fantasist and later convicted 
>> paedophile Carl Beech. In both cases, O’Brien wanted very badly to 
>> believe a very obvious fantasy.
>> 
>> Such scandals can often be mistaken optimistically for an end to the 
>> whole shebang of  progressive nonsense – for who could ever take them 
>> seriously again? But the roots of progressivism are too deeply embedded 
>> in the soil of public life. These hilarious exposures – see also Jussie 
>> Smollett – are not strong enough to dislodge them. The daring young man 
>> on the flying trapeze may fall to the ground with a splat, but the 
>> progressive circus is so big that it just moves on.
>> 
>> People who want to believe are easy marks for the not-very-good and 
>> delusional. The Labour party is currently in the grip of just such a 
>> mania. Andy Burnham is only another kind of fantasist. According to him, 
>> after all, the big problems facing Britain in 2026 are Mrs Thatcher, 
>> Sainsbury’s and not enough mayors. Is that really much less bizarre than 
>> Arday’s claims? It feels a bit like he’s pulled three things out of a 
>> hat. Another dip would have brought up unicycles, Toyah and not enough 
>> people called Steve. And on the right, enough people want to believe in 
>> Rupert Lowe as the next prime minister, despite his actual status as 
>> nothing much more than an electoral irritant to Reform.
>> 
>> As Arday shows, we need safeguards against that common human failing: 
>> ignoring the truth in favour of what we’d prefer to be real.
>> 
>> 
>> Gareth Roberts
>
>do u think this journoslop actually saying anythning?

Nothing you like I suspect, maybe even nothing I like.  He wouldn't be
the first.,
-- 
Noah Sombrero mustachioed villain
Don't get political with me young man
or I'll tie you to a railroad track and
<<<talk>>> to <<<YOOooooo>>>
Who dares to talk to El Sombrero?
dares: Ned
does not dare: Julian  shrinks in horror and warns others away