Arday in the Mist

On this day:

1609
Galileo Galilei demonstrates his first telescope to Venetian lawmakers.
1835
The New York Sun perpetrates the Great Moon Hoax.
1894
Kitasato Shibasaburō discovers the infectious agent of the bubonic plague and publishes his findings in The Lancet.
1898
700 Greek civilians, 17 British guards and the British Consul of Crete are killed by a Turkish mob in Heraklion, Greece.
1914
World War I: The library of the Catholic University of Leuven is deliberately destroyed by the German Army. Hundreds of thousands of irreplaceable volumes and Gothic and Renaissance manuscripts are lost.
1944
World War II: Paris is liberated by the Allies.
1945
Ten days after World War II ends with Japan announcing its surrender, armed supporters of the Communist Party of China kill Baptist missionary John Birch, regarded by some of the American right as the first victim of the Cold War.
1948
The House Un-American Activities Committee holds first-ever televised congressional hearing: “Confrontation Day” between Whittaker Chambers and Alger Hiss.

***

Since 1776, there has been a 3,000% explosion in the average real income per person in the world.
Nothing earlier came remotely close.
It was caused not by the usual suspects of investment or exploitation, but by liberty inspiring a flowering of human creativity—in the arts and sciences, and in the economy.--mccloskey

***

On August 25, 1835, the first in a series of six articles announcing the supposed discovery of life on the moon appears in the New York Sun newspaper.
Known collectively as “The Great Moon Hoax,” the articles were supposedly reprinted from the Edinburgh Journal of Science. The byline was Dr. Andrew Grant, described as a colleague of Sir John Herschel, a famous astronomer of the day. Herschel had in fact traveled to Cape Town, South Africa, in January 1834 to set up an observatory with a powerful new telescope. As Grant described it, Herschel had found evidence of life forms on the moon, including such fantastic animals as unicorns, two-legged beavers and furry, winged humanoids resembling bats. It was purported to be a reprint from the Edinburgh Journal of Science.
The articles were most likely written by Richard Adams Locke, a Sun reporter educated at Cambridge University. Intended as satire, they were designed to poke fun at earlier, serious speculations about extraterrestrial life, particularly those of Reverend Thomas Dick, a popular science writer who claimed in his bestselling books that the moon alone had 4.2 billion inhabitants.
Readers were completely taken in by the story, however, and failed to recognize it as satire. Edger Allen Poe was deeply involved.

*** 

A surprising graph, ineptly reproduced:

American wages have fallen to roughly 43% of national income, the lowest share since 1970. For every dollar the U.S. economy produces, workers are receiving less of it than at any point in more than five decades.

The remainder has flowed increasingly toward corporate profits.

Interesting, especially when compared to McCloskey's quote.

***

South Carolina Republicans will decide Tuesday who will replace Sen. Lindsey Graham on the ballot in November's midterm election, after a rushed campaign in the wake of his sudden death in July. Graham's sister, Sen. Darline Graham, faces Rep. Ralph Norman in Tuesday's runoff vote.

The position is hereditary, right?

***

Combined spending related to old age and illness accounted for around 70% of total social spending in Germany last year, pushing the social budget to a new record high, according to an analysis by the Ifo Institute published on Monday.

***

2026 appears to be the first year in human history where the global population falls below replacement fertility. This includes times of war and epidemics. While many worry about climate change, Musk repeatedly argues that a collapsing birth rate is actually the biggest danger human civilization faces today.

***

Quebec's desire to preserve the declining French language has been a big factor in the trade dispute with Canada. For example, Bill 96 requires products sold in Quebec to have a French description and for trademarks using generic terms to be translated into French, while Bill 109 compels media services such as Netflix, Spotify and Apple to promote and prioritize French content for Quebec users.

***

Arday in the Mist

A note on Arday, abused and abuser:

Arday’s academic focus was not on learning new things and fashioning new ways of processing existence but on criticizing others’ morals. This is not intellection but advocacy, and that is frankly much easier than thinking. The term “scholar-activist” tries to finesse this by making the two appear to be alternate forms of the same endeavor. But the scholar-activist is often more activist than scholar, and Arday was an extreme example of the type.

Nothing in his work suggests intense engagement with a body of data (Arday himself has claimed that because of his dyslexia, he can engage only one page of academic prose in a sitting) or with a challenging way of analyzing that data. In academia, what is interesting is the counterintuitive, the discovery. Arday merely reinforced long-established and simplistic pieties. He became the equivalent of a full professor at Cambridge based on doing interviews with acquaintances about the racism they experienced, and then largely just presenting what they said. At its highest level, this could be good (but not great) journalism; it could not be academic work. On the level Arday worked, my 14-year-old could best him after some quick training in Latinate, Judith Butler-esque prose.

Arday was defrocked after the revelation that most of even this incurious nattering in the guise of research was plagiarized from others’ work. Claiming that his supposed autism made him think that learning was mimicry, he composed most of his work from generous tranches of cut-and-paste from other sources, often (but certainly not always) lightly reworded. But even if this performance art disguised as thought were all his own work, his elevation to such heights by Cambridge was an abomination.-- John McWhorter

"Claiming that his supposed autism made him think that learning was mimicry..."

Now the academic who exposed all the fraud has been suspended, and crowds of Arday sympathizers have gathered to mourn him. This is sadder than the twisted Mangioni support. This is empathy in defiance of effort and quality, the same open-mindedness that tolerates goofy but harmless positions like Flat Earth groups and abolish-the-Constitution politics.

But a lack of intellectual and moral standards has erosive consequences at the bottom of the slippery slope.