Duh. But young-man-in-a-hurry Ross Barkan thought he’d give plagiarism via hyperlink a try.

It worked for awhile; but eventually some of the writers whose words he lifted got pissed and called him on it.

He’s been fired.

… aggravated assault with a firearm, disrupting public schools, receiving stolen property, possession of a handgun by someone under 18 and possession of a gun in a school safety zone.’

They grow up so fast!

Deprescribing. A new word, and not a pretty one; but we can expect to see it a lot as the 17 percent of Americans on antidepressants begin to wonder why it’s so hard to get off of them.

The New York Times.

When I read this observation the other day, it seemed correct. “[Jason] Arday is a serial fabulist who seems quite unwell.”

True, true. Access has been denied. But we do know antediluvian Islamist Farah Ahmed works there, and her personal page still allows us access.

What about the rest of the Arday/Ahmed/etcetc crew? What else ya got?

In the dear dead days beyond recall of this blog, we covered paltry neighborhood pill mills as we traced America’s addictions from sea to shining sea.

Now, along with education and religion, Mother’s Little Helpers (see pharmed-up poster girl Lindsay Clancy) are all going online, so you don’t have to wait all day in squalid parking lots with fellow deadheads/pushers for your oxy. Now – just like UD when she wants a dragonfruit lemonade from Starbucks – you press a few buttons.

They grow up so fast!

If you’ve been missing Tariq Ramadan – update on this Oxford U professor here – there’s always the latest pride of Cambridge (they had to let Jason Arday go), Farah Ahmed.

Unlike the innocuous Arday, Ahmed’s the real thing, a real intellectual who likes terrorists and hates democrats. I mean to say she’s an authentic radical Islamist, promoting veiled enchainment of little girls, along with the death of the liberal state.

In short, she’s a stunner! It don’t get more titillating than a real live Sharia firecracker to give a pop of color to the old place.

Yes, it’s another visit with UD’s guru (who desperately doesn’t want to be anyone’s guru, and is very insulting toward anyone pathetic enough to want a guru), British psychoanalyst Adam Phillips. He has an awful lot in common with UD’s other guru, Richard Rorty.

Hint: It’s about pragmatism.

*******************

The thing I’m most wary of is one’s wish to be controlled. I’m interested in how ingenious people are at finding ways of being controlled, either by people or ideas, or whatever.

Wanting a guru is wanting to be controlled, says Phillips; but I think the observation also gets us back to the academic story of the day (of the month? It keeps going.), Jason Arday. Tyler Austin Harper is describing Bates (and Cambridge) professors absolutely controlled by, suffocatingly in the grip of, a maniac’s understanding of white supremacy. This understanding makes them a joke. It makes them hire Jason Arday.

They have given themselves over to a turgid universalism, to Casaubon’s Key to All Mythologies. They bow before it the way Pyongyang robots bow to Kim Jong Un. They seek dehumanizing and debraining control by a viselike idea.

********************

The thing I least like is people having inner superiority. That’s the death of sociability, really. In psychoanalysis, I want to free people to lose interest in themselves—not entirely, but enough to be able to be absorbed in other people and things in the world.

So this is why rabid social justice warriors seem – ironically – narcissistic: Much more than improving the world (this is Harper’s point about the Bates people’s lack of interest in actual progressive activism, like militating for campus unions), they are about feeling superior to you, and displaying that superiority in more and more melodramatic ways. The death of sociality here means everyone retreating in disgust, fear, and incredulity from the Self-Regarding Robot show.

*******************

I’m really uninterested in self-knowledge. This is not the sort of thing I should be saying as a psychoanalyst, but I’ve never found self-knowledge very interesting or engaging. It doesn’t mean I don’t have thoughts about myself, but I don’t find it fascinating. I don’t find it very useful. Self-knowledge is very useful if you want to vote, but it’s not really useful if you want to fall in love or write a poem. So it’s really a question of what you want to do. Self-knowledge is a decoy. The thing is to have experiences, and the risk is that knowing oneself becomes a way of preempting experience. I think it’s the wrong project.

I went through New York University when Avital Ronell was there. I had watched a lot of supposedly leftist professors line up to defend somebody I knew to be rather credibly accused of serious wrongdoing.

You recall Ronell? Mes petites, if you have the stomach for it…

Me? Nah. But, please, go ahead and read it all. From a series of 2018 posts.

**************

Other excerpts from Harper’s interview:

[Many Bates (College) faculty and administrators were] committed to an ontological claim that white supremacy is a mystical force that suffuses every aspect of society.

One thing that makes my head fucking explode is hearing from people with tenure saying, “Thank you for speaking up. I could never do so.” My reaction: ‘What the fuck are you talking about? You have tenure. You have the most secure job in the American economy…”

[Jason] Arday is a serial fabulist who seems quite unwell, who had no business being at [Cambridge.] But the whole scandal was allowed to unfold because of the racial neuroses of largely white progressive academics…

This shit’s a dime a dozen. Has been for a long time. University Diaries stopped bothering with it years ago.

But it’s timely because of the Jason Arday story. (See below.)

John McWhorter never minces words.

In what sense? Memphis is the most dangerous city in America, so after, say, any mass shooting in Memphis, it makes little sense for the police to assure us it was isolated. It took its place as part of incessant local warfare.

“Police said a fight broke out [at a graduation party] just after 11:15 p.m. in the 1700 block of Brookins Street before multiple people opened fire.”

At least a hundred people had gathered at the party, which is Memphis for “Ten heavily armed teenagers did what they rather often do when there’s a party.” That ain’t isolated. That’s a pattern.

$102 million. You read that right. How pleasing.