Well said. Kriss’s position is absurd. I spend my days reading university output on cancer and what a marvel that we pay groups of scholars to spend their lives looking for ways to help us survive these diseases! If the majority of people stop trusting academia - and therefore see no reason in continued investment - we lose our one biggest source of solutions.
I have no evidence for this besides the assertion the author makes; Cofnas doesn’t seem to have mentioned her on social media or have any pictures with her, but it’s the kind of thing I’d believe.
"There are the centre-right jerks who say the real villain of the piece is Cambridge University for promoting him beyond his competence which is the ‘bigotry of low expectations’ (maybe you should … let’s not finish that thought)."
Call me a centre-right jerk who is blaming Cambridge and it ain't got nothing to do with the soft bigotry of low expectorations.
I blame them for giving an obvious psycho/nitwit a job. I don't think he is nearly the interesting person you make him out to be.
He had an IQ of 80, tops, and probably didn't even understand the concept of plagiarism, or know what a lie was, or the difference between fantasy and reality.
Shit, we don't even know *how* he killed himself - he was "found unresponsive."
The fool might have ingested some pills, not realizing they were lethal he was that dumb.
This is all really strange.
PS About Cofnas - he didn't just write a Substack post - which was the right thing to do. He then went on a victory tour of right wing podcasts, one of which included the disgusting Megyn Kelly. David Starkey needled him: weren't you out for revenge? Cofnas denied it. Why?
Cofnas joked on another about heading the Dept of Eugenics at Harvard "after the revolution." Silly thing to do if all you care about is academic probity. He should have just published the 'Stack post and gone on with his life, and not tried to profit off the publicity. He made himself a part of the story.
>He had an IQ of 80, tops, and probably didn't even understand the concept of plagiarism
Cofnas notes that Arday only plagiarized grad students and obscure international journals. He didn't plagiarize anyone who'd be in a position to hold him accountable for it. Clearly, he understood that what he was doing was wrong.
I honestly do not think that takes great intellect, just a sort of low cunning.
When I say I don't think he understood what he did, I mean that in a more subtle sense than you seem to be understanding. He just thought what he wanted, was his. "I like that," his little childlike mind thought. He had no understanding of the morality involved.
At the end of the day I still say Cambridge should have seen through this idiot.
This is beside the point of your piece and I am just a goy with no dog in the fight, but I'd be fascinated to hear what your issue is with yeshivos. In what way are they low quality? Why are they like this? I just know nothing about this and that sounded like an interesting tangent!
He killed himself. Any sane person will have sympathy for his being driven to suicide, even if he “deserved” the situation in which he was (desert isn’t real). It’s just such blatant contrarian edgelordism to write a whole article about how we shouldn’t feel sorry for him because he killed himself, we should hate him even more actually, for demonstrating how mentally unwell he was and how much pain he was in.
Attributing the guy’s *suicide* to these implausibly nefarious motives is such galaxy-brained stuff, and so clearly motivated by reluctance to let go of the emotionally satisfying pitchfork. He killed himself; you got your pound of flesh. Do you really need to keep stabbing the corpse? And do you really think anyone is buying your intellectualisation of it?
Oh and by the way, the word ‘murder’ has a specific meaning. I know you’re going for shock value, but using words wrong isn’t shocking. It’s just stupid- like saying he ‘genocided himself’, or ‘massacred himself’.
No it isn't! There's no such thing at common law and there hasn't been for 65 years, and even when there was, the term ‘self murder’ wasn’t used for it and hadn’t been for well over a century.
You’re really not being as clever as you think you are, here.
My point was completely correct; that is not the term in English law, and hasn’t been for centuries. In making that point, I used a made-up word that nonetheless perfectly conveyed my meaning.
Can you articulate any objection to any of that? Or are just going to keep sort of vaguely calling me stupid for unexplained reasons?
Nah, I gotta I agree with NZ here. It's unfortunate for the wife/kids I guess, but my net reaction here is to continue playing the world's tiniest violin. I'd say good riddance if the suicide weren't such a gift for leftist PR.
Why does a "sane" person have to feel sympathy? I'm quite sane and I don't feel much sympathy at all. As NZ said, do the crime do the time. He didn't have to kill himself, but he did. Oh well. I feel bad for his family, not him.
Hate to go straight to Hitler, but Hitler killed himself and I didn't have any sympathy for hi being driven to suicide. And I did think his suicide made him and even worse person, it was a cowardly refutation of even his twisted ideals and he made the people he supposedly loved die for him to the last possible minute when he took the cowards way out.
Hitler at least knew the alternative to suicide was a Soviet showtrial and execution. It was entirely his own fault he was in that position, but those were his options by the end all the same.
Arday, worst case scenario, would've had to work at a place to where he was actually qualified, like a vapeshop or a hair salon. He was in neither physical danger, nor at risk of deprivation. Yet he killed himself, because he didn't want to live without his ill-gotten gains anymore. It's about as unsympathetic as suicides get.
Hitler could have spared his people by surrendering. Instead he sent children to fight so he could get high in his bunker just a little bit longer, while ordering that his country be destroyed on purpose so that his people were killed alongside him.
At a minimum he could have picked up a panzerfaust and done what he was asking the children to do and die on his feet fighting reds.
He also could've just not launched a series of aggressive wars against all his neighbors, focused solely on attacking communists rather than what was to then history's most assimilated and patriotic Jewish minority, not established a totalitarian dictatorship that thought price controls were a good idea, and not done all the other countless bad decisions he made while chancellor; but by the time he'd made all these countless better decisions, he'd no longer be Hitler, but a completely different person who just shared the same name and life as our Hitler.
And what you're describing is still suicide. It's just suicide with extra steps and less certainty. The choice was still suicide or showtrial and execution. Absolutely nothing like the Arday case, where even his worst-case scenario would be a grant clawback, and a few lawsuits for defamation and violation of his publishing contract which he easily could've settled out of court. It'd be like Hitler killing himself after establishing a successful arts career, after a scandal when it was revealed he lied about graduating the Viennese Academy of Fine Arts.
History is full of people that start aggressive wars of expansion and genocide others. Most of those people would have considered Hitler's death pathetic.
Of course it was pathetic. It's normal for suicides to be pathetic! That's why tales of heroic suicide are so captivating. They're the exception.
It was also much more understandable than Arday, because pathetic though it was, there was still no longer a dignified, peaceful exit available. In any reality where he did not win the war in the East, death and ruin had been Hitler's only options since the moment he issued the criminal orders.
Arday was in no such danger, neither of violence nor deprivation, yet he killed himself anyway.
I’m surprised you like Benny Morris that much. His new Substack blog kind of sucks. You can ask Grok and get the same stream of opinion that he provides. I suppose he is old and tired now, because I wouldn’t say the same about his old books.
I don't know what to do about academia - it doesn't seem like the sort of thing that's open to me or people like me at all. Recently I reconnected with a friend who teaches at Wesleyan U, and they made it clear to me that they were hired and retained specifically on the basis of demonstrated sadomasochism. I asked explicitly and they agreed with the characterization. I get along with them at all pretty much because they're the sort of person willing to spill the beans about this sort of thing to someone like me instead of just invalidating me for not participating. This instantly ended my uncertainty about whether maybe it had been a mistake not to go into academia. I don't know whether it was like this a few decades ago, but I suspect not.
I expect academic output to decline in many fields fairly quickly if it hasn't already done so, but even so, its publications are the only place to look for scholarship on many topics. Though I think that in economics, outside of e.g. state data collection, half the really important work is going on outside the academy already.
The fact that I can't instantly tell whether you mean literal or metaphorical S&M is itself a statement about what I've come to expect of higher education
Which version is metaphorical? The one that’s integrated with one’s perception of one’s interests and social relations in life, or the one that acts out a scene that’s explicitly supposed to be pretend or in some other way not count?
Metaphorical S&M = undergoing a humiliation ritual in service of a goal (like getting a job in academia)
Literal S&M = undergoing a humiliation or pain ritual for an erotic thrill, most likely in a sex dungeon with some state of undress or fetish wear involved
I thought I was fighting for truth and standards but one has to remember that if you fight too hard or viciously you become like your opponents. I tried to retain compassion; if people doing that fogged things for you, sorry. I try not to wage war on children and those I consider mentally challenged or ill. I didn't check my privilege but I did try to check my humanity. That said, we need your intellectual toughness.
Arday had the spirit of a woman. He often wore makeup, a blouse, and had hair that went past his butt. His lying was all over the place and seemingly uncontrollable. He wasn't some courageous and daring conman like Kriss would want you to believe. What he's done to his kids is cowardly and heartbreaking.
"Some have pointed out that Nathan Cofnas’s plan for fixing society won’t work. I agree, it won’t work. The only thing that will work is complete disenfranchisement of the entire population to turn this whole ghastly machine we call politics off, and no-one knows how to start doing that because Moldbug quit in the middle and started writing slop. So what? "
What it means is that while a lot of people are going to write substack articles supporting Cofnas but not much else, and people who consider his ideas an existential threat are going to keep going after him, and nobody is really going to attack their power base which will only get worse with demographic change.
Yglesias had a very on the nose article about "woke 1". It happened because most people on the left and its institutions (obviously including himself here) cared more about keeping their head down and preserving their personal careers and comfort over the truth. He called this "shrewd". These same shrewd people are going to be around during woke 2, just as shrewd.
That's the real issue Cofnas is confronting. I don't think he has a model for doing so. He doesn't want political power. He doesn't want mass appeal. Most of the people he's lobbying either hate him or are total cowards who rely on those that hate him for their careers.
Nathan's hate for politics and the right and promotion of something that's totally dead end that Charles Murray has been failing at since the 90s isn't going to lead anywhere. The elite isn't going to be shone a couple of stats and graphs and decide to remake itself and society.
At the end of the day, you've got to do politics. Deal with it. You wouldn't even like Yarvin as king, trust me. He thinks the CCP is a model of a society and he wanted permanent mass covid lockdown.
Like everyone else, I wish him the best in his current struggle, but little more, since he doesn't wish well for me either.
Having no criticism of the content of this article, or the others I’ve proceeded to read, I thought I’d mention (for what little it’s worth) that the justified text is a bit distracting.
I think the fact that even the NYT is left-aligned is probative about what looks better. I think it’s because there are so few words per row that the kerning is liable to look bad. Don’t do a poll, the public doesn’t know what it wants.
With academia, at some point if you can't go in and extract the pests it's better to just burn the whole house down and rebuild. They will use your attachment to what good remains to protect themselves and proliferate.
Granted Simon Laird is jumping the gun and the right hasn't done enough thinking about what rebuilding would look like. But I can't renounce the "burn it down" option without reservations. The left is perfectly willing to sacrifice good scholarship for political purposes. If we aren't willing to do the same we'll be raped forever.
That is unless we normalize the outcome of the Arday case: we trade the firing of one of our guys for the death of one of their guys. If this trade proves repeatable we may yet have a chance.
He didn't deserve to die for ... killing himself? I'm a little confused here. Maybe you mean he didn't deserve to die for all the *other* things he did?
I agree 100% with your verdict on Arday. Your frustration really came through. Good job.
>His edition of Rav Natronai’s teshuvot, on its own, is more of a contribution to Torah scholarship than anything that has come out of a yeshiva in 50 years.
Unfortunately (for you. I'm delighted you wrote it), tis sentence is so dumb I imagine even you are having second thoughts about writing it. You are parodying yourself at this point, which makes my life easier, so thanks again.
Well said. Kriss’s position is absurd. I spend my days reading university output on cancer and what a marvel that we pay groups of scholars to spend their lives looking for ways to help us survive these diseases! If the majority of people stop trusting academia - and therefore see no reason in continued investment - we lose our one biggest source of solutions.
I had that issue with my throat once too. Sleeping with a bigger pillow that puts your head higher helps.
Cofnas is married to an Asian woman? Somehow I’m not surprised.
(Insert joke about an Oxford study guy breaking a huge Cambridge scandal)
I hope they have some high IQ babies.
Surprising in a way and not in another, the Jewish Man, Asian Woman combo seems to be common in the USA
Only if they reproduce.
I had no idea 😮
I have no evidence for this besides the assertion the author makes; Cofnas doesn’t seem to have mentioned her on social media or have any pictures with her, but it’s the kind of thing I’d believe.
"There are the centre-right jerks who say the real villain of the piece is Cambridge University for promoting him beyond his competence which is the ‘bigotry of low expectations’ (maybe you should … let’s not finish that thought)."
Call me a centre-right jerk who is blaming Cambridge and it ain't got nothing to do with the soft bigotry of low expectorations.
I blame them for giving an obvious psycho/nitwit a job. I don't think he is nearly the interesting person you make him out to be.
He had an IQ of 80, tops, and probably didn't even understand the concept of plagiarism, or know what a lie was, or the difference between fantasy and reality.
Shit, we don't even know *how* he killed himself - he was "found unresponsive."
The fool might have ingested some pills, not realizing they were lethal he was that dumb.
This is all really strange.
PS About Cofnas - he didn't just write a Substack post - which was the right thing to do. He then went on a victory tour of right wing podcasts, one of which included the disgusting Megyn Kelly. David Starkey needled him: weren't you out for revenge? Cofnas denied it. Why?
Cofnas joked on another about heading the Dept of Eugenics at Harvard "after the revolution." Silly thing to do if all you care about is academic probity. He should have just published the 'Stack post and gone on with his life, and not tried to profit off the publicity. He made himself a part of the story.
>He had an IQ of 80, tops, and probably didn't even understand the concept of plagiarism
Cofnas notes that Arday only plagiarized grad students and obscure international journals. He didn't plagiarize anyone who'd be in a position to hold him accountable for it. Clearly, he understood that what he was doing was wrong.
I honestly do not think that takes great intellect, just a sort of low cunning.
When I say I don't think he understood what he did, I mean that in a more subtle sense than you seem to be understanding. He just thought what he wanted, was his. "I like that," his little childlike mind thought. He had no understanding of the morality involved.
At the end of the day I still say Cambridge should have seen through this idiot.
This is beside the point of your piece and I am just a goy with no dog in the fight, but I'd be fascinated to hear what your issue is with yeshivos. In what way are they low quality? Why are they like this? I just know nothing about this and that sounded like an interesting tangent!
I second this.
This is silly, vindictive stuff.
He killed himself. Any sane person will have sympathy for his being driven to suicide, even if he “deserved” the situation in which he was (desert isn’t real). It’s just such blatant contrarian edgelordism to write a whole article about how we shouldn’t feel sorry for him because he killed himself, we should hate him even more actually, for demonstrating how mentally unwell he was and how much pain he was in.
Attributing the guy’s *suicide* to these implausibly nefarious motives is such galaxy-brained stuff, and so clearly motivated by reluctance to let go of the emotionally satisfying pitchfork. He killed himself; you got your pound of flesh. Do you really need to keep stabbing the corpse? And do you really think anyone is buying your intellectualisation of it?
Oh and by the way, the word ‘murder’ has a specific meaning. I know you’re going for shock value, but using words wrong isn’t shocking. It’s just stupid- like saying he ‘genocided himself’, or ‘massacred himself’.
Self Murder is the correct term in English common law.
No it isn't! There's no such thing at common law and there hasn't been for 65 years, and even when there was, the term ‘self murder’ wasn’t used for it and hadn’t been for well over a century.
You just attempted to coin/use the term "edgelordism," so I'm going trust the other commenter on issues of semantics and/or basic common sense
What, even though I am right?
Did you understand what I meant?
If I called you a practitioner of dumbassism I would be correct but not right
You’re really not being as clever as you think you are, here.
My point was completely correct; that is not the term in English law, and hasn’t been for centuries. In making that point, I used a made-up word that nonetheless perfectly conveyed my meaning.
Can you articulate any objection to any of that? Or are just going to keep sort of vaguely calling me stupid for unexplained reasons?
Nah, I gotta I agree with NZ here. It's unfortunate for the wife/kids I guess, but my net reaction here is to continue playing the world's tiniest violin. I'd say good riddance if the suicide weren't such a gift for leftist PR.
Why does a "sane" person have to feel sympathy? I'm quite sane and I don't feel much sympathy at all. As NZ said, do the crime do the time. He didn't have to kill himself, but he did. Oh well. I feel bad for his family, not him.
Hate to go straight to Hitler, but Hitler killed himself and I didn't have any sympathy for hi being driven to suicide. And I did think his suicide made him and even worse person, it was a cowardly refutation of even his twisted ideals and he made the people he supposedly loved die for him to the last possible minute when he took the cowards way out.
Hitler at least knew the alternative to suicide was a Soviet showtrial and execution. It was entirely his own fault he was in that position, but those were his options by the end all the same.
Arday, worst case scenario, would've had to work at a place to where he was actually qualified, like a vapeshop or a hair salon. He was in neither physical danger, nor at risk of deprivation. Yet he killed himself, because he didn't want to live without his ill-gotten gains anymore. It's about as unsympathetic as suicides get.
Hitler could have spared his people by surrendering. Instead he sent children to fight so he could get high in his bunker just a little bit longer, while ordering that his country be destroyed on purpose so that his people were killed alongside him.
At a minimum he could have picked up a panzerfaust and done what he was asking the children to do and die on his feet fighting reds.
He also could've just not launched a series of aggressive wars against all his neighbors, focused solely on attacking communists rather than what was to then history's most assimilated and patriotic Jewish minority, not established a totalitarian dictatorship that thought price controls were a good idea, and not done all the other countless bad decisions he made while chancellor; but by the time he'd made all these countless better decisions, he'd no longer be Hitler, but a completely different person who just shared the same name and life as our Hitler.
And what you're describing is still suicide. It's just suicide with extra steps and less certainty. The choice was still suicide or showtrial and execution. Absolutely nothing like the Arday case, where even his worst-case scenario would be a grant clawback, and a few lawsuits for defamation and violation of his publishing contract which he easily could've settled out of court. It'd be like Hitler killing himself after establishing a successful arts career, after a scandal when it was revealed he lied about graduating the Viennese Academy of Fine Arts.
History is full of people that start aggressive wars of expansion and genocide others. Most of those people would have considered Hitler's death pathetic.
Of course it was pathetic. It's normal for suicides to be pathetic! That's why tales of heroic suicide are so captivating. They're the exception.
It was also much more understandable than Arday, because pathetic though it was, there was still no longer a dignified, peaceful exit available. In any reality where he did not win the war in the East, death and ruin had been Hitler's only options since the moment he issued the criminal orders.
Arday was in no such danger, neither of violence nor deprivation, yet he killed himself anyway.
I’m surprised you like Benny Morris that much. His new Substack blog kind of sucks. You can ask Grok and get the same stream of opinion that he provides. I suppose he is old and tired now, because I wouldn’t say the same about his old books.
I don't know what to do about academia - it doesn't seem like the sort of thing that's open to me or people like me at all. Recently I reconnected with a friend who teaches at Wesleyan U, and they made it clear to me that they were hired and retained specifically on the basis of demonstrated sadomasochism. I asked explicitly and they agreed with the characterization. I get along with them at all pretty much because they're the sort of person willing to spill the beans about this sort of thing to someone like me instead of just invalidating me for not participating. This instantly ended my uncertainty about whether maybe it had been a mistake not to go into academia. I don't know whether it was like this a few decades ago, but I suspect not.
I expect academic output to decline in many fields fairly quickly if it hasn't already done so, but even so, its publications are the only place to look for scholarship on many topics. Though I think that in economics, outside of e.g. state data collection, half the really important work is going on outside the academy already.
The fact that I can't instantly tell whether you mean literal or metaphorical S&M is itself a statement about what I've come to expect of higher education
Which version is metaphorical? The one that’s integrated with one’s perception of one’s interests and social relations in life, or the one that acts out a scene that’s explicitly supposed to be pretend or in some other way not count?
Metaphorical S&M = undergoing a humiliation ritual in service of a goal (like getting a job in academia)
Literal S&M = undergoing a humiliation or pain ritual for an erotic thrill, most likely in a sex dungeon with some state of undress or fetish wear involved
I thought I was fighting for truth and standards but one has to remember that if you fight too hard or viciously you become like your opponents. I tried to retain compassion; if people doing that fogged things for you, sorry. I try not to wage war on children and those I consider mentally challenged or ill. I didn't check my privilege but I did try to check my humanity. That said, we need your intellectual toughness.
Arday had the spirit of a woman. He often wore makeup, a blouse, and had hair that went past his butt. His lying was all over the place and seemingly uncontrollable. He wasn't some courageous and daring conman like Kriss would want you to believe. What he's done to his kids is cowardly and heartbreaking.
"Some have pointed out that Nathan Cofnas’s plan for fixing society won’t work. I agree, it won’t work. The only thing that will work is complete disenfranchisement of the entire population to turn this whole ghastly machine we call politics off, and no-one knows how to start doing that because Moldbug quit in the middle and started writing slop. So what? "
What it means is that while a lot of people are going to write substack articles supporting Cofnas but not much else, and people who consider his ideas an existential threat are going to keep going after him, and nobody is really going to attack their power base which will only get worse with demographic change.
Yglesias had a very on the nose article about "woke 1". It happened because most people on the left and its institutions (obviously including himself here) cared more about keeping their head down and preserving their personal careers and comfort over the truth. He called this "shrewd". These same shrewd people are going to be around during woke 2, just as shrewd.
That's the real issue Cofnas is confronting. I don't think he has a model for doing so. He doesn't want political power. He doesn't want mass appeal. Most of the people he's lobbying either hate him or are total cowards who rely on those that hate him for their careers.
Nathan's hate for politics and the right and promotion of something that's totally dead end that Charles Murray has been failing at since the 90s isn't going to lead anywhere. The elite isn't going to be shone a couple of stats and graphs and decide to remake itself and society.
At the end of the day, you've got to do politics. Deal with it. You wouldn't even like Yarvin as king, trust me. He thinks the CCP is a model of a society and he wanted permanent mass covid lockdown.
Like everyone else, I wish him the best in his current struggle, but little more, since he doesn't wish well for me either.
Having no criticism of the content of this article, or the others I’ve proceeded to read, I thought I’d mention (for what little it’s worth) that the justified text is a bit distracting.
Really? I thought it looked smart. Maybe need to do a poll.
I strongly dislike it.
I love justifying! How did you do it? (I mean, the answer is probably blindingly obvious, but I somehow overlooked how one does it on Substack.)
It's a new option from a couple of months ago. At the top of the editor just pick it instead of the default left-align.
I think the fact that even the NYT is left-aligned is probative about what looks better. I think it’s because there are so few words per row that the kerning is liable to look bad. Don’t do a poll, the public doesn’t know what it wants.
With academia, at some point if you can't go in and extract the pests it's better to just burn the whole house down and rebuild. They will use your attachment to what good remains to protect themselves and proliferate.
Granted Simon Laird is jumping the gun and the right hasn't done enough thinking about what rebuilding would look like. But I can't renounce the "burn it down" option without reservations. The left is perfectly willing to sacrifice good scholarship for political purposes. If we aren't willing to do the same we'll be raped forever.
That is unless we normalize the outcome of the Arday case: we trade the firing of one of our guys for the death of one of their guys. If this trade proves repeatable we may yet have a chance.
Even if I wished to grant this absurd premise, you have to *have* good scholarship to be willing to sacrifice good scholarship.
"he didn’t deserve to die for what he did"
He didn't deserve to die for ... killing himself? I'm a little confused here. Maybe you mean he didn't deserve to die for all the *other* things he did?
Yes.
I agree 100% with your verdict on Arday. Your frustration really came through. Good job.
>His edition of Rav Natronai’s teshuvot, on its own, is more of a contribution to Torah scholarship than anything that has come out of a yeshiva in 50 years.
Unfortunately (for you. I'm delighted you wrote it), tis sentence is so dumb I imagine even you are having second thoughts about writing it. You are parodying yourself at this point, which makes my life easier, so thanks again.
Speaking of which, Reb Gavriel, where can we read your work on 17th century anti-catholicism in England?
If you DM me, I can send it to you.