BRFR Cake Stop 'breaking news' miscellany

[Beebo]

A side question: why does Self insist on using silly words that 99.9% of readers will have no idea what they mean? 'Hebephrenic'? Really?? Why not just say 'lunatic'? It really does put me off reading anything by Self, as it's 'a feature, not a bug' that he deliberately uses silly words.

I haven’t read any of his books.
He was a good sport on Shooting Stars.
And this Brexit clip alone marks him out as a good guy.


View: https://youtu.be/AOWzwv36GKU?si=s7f5k73qqwqLnlB0

 

[briantrumpet]

No I didn't but I tried after you prompted me. To be honest I lost the will to live after the first few paragraphs. I think Richard Dawkins covers it more succinctly here.


View: https://x.com/RichardDawkins/status/2090017706086961240

To be fair to Self, his points and overall thesis are not without merit, but to be fair to you, the nature of his writing (long-winded, obscure vocabulary, convoluted sentence structures full of unnecessary literary references) seems to be more interested in itself than the argument he's making, which is a pity. He could do a lot worse than read his stuff to a room of average people and ask them if they understand what he's saying.

I realise that I'm far from innocent in enjoying a reasonably wide vocabulary, but to be fair to me, I ask pupils if they've know the weirder words I might have dropped into the conversation.

 

[PurplePenguin]

I tried to read that Will Self article, but I feel like a summary of his points (if there are any) would be more useful.

 

[briantrumpet]

I tried to read that Will Self article, but I feel like a summary of his points (if there are any) would be more useful.

Had your comment been written by Self, it would have been about ten paragraphs long, with half a dozen words we'd have had to look up in a dictionary. And we'd still not have been entirely sure what you were saying.

His death stare of Mark Francois was, OTOH, perfectly clear in intent.

 

[PurplePenguin]

AI does have some uses. The final paragraph sonewhat contradicts the idea that it is a factual piece.

This is Will Self's "J'Accuse the British Media" — an open letter to the UK Prime Minister, styled after Zola's "J'Accuse," about the death of Cambridge academic Jason Arday.

**The core argument:** Self asks what happens when the media machine mistakes what interests the public for the public interest, and calls on the new Prime Minister to establish a full independent public inquiry into Arday's treatment and death — including the conduct of universities, journalists, and the interaction between legacy media and digital "attention" systems. He also argues the CPS should investigate and police should seize computers, framing this as a defence of, not attack on, press freedom.

**Key points:**

- **How it started**: Philosopher Nathan Cofnas — a self-described "race realist" who has argued elite meritocracies would have almost no Black professors — went looking for reasons to discredit Arday, a celebrated Black, autistic Cambridge professor, before finding genuine plagiarism. Self argues that even though the plagiarism was real, Cofnas's motives were racist, and he publicized it as "DEI Fraud" rather than reporting it through normal channels.

- **Escalation**: What began as a plagiarism inquiry ballooned into a wholesale excavation of Arday's life story, charity work, sporting claims, and childhood accounts of racist bullying — something Self argues is especially damaging for autistic people, whose sense of identity can be more tightly bound to personal narrative.

- **Media incentives**: Self compares the coverage to Billy Wilder's *Ace in the Hole*, arguing that legacy media and social media feed each other in a loop where "going viral" replaces editorial judgment, and no single person feels responsible because the harm is distributed across a system.

- **Warnings ignored**: Autism researcher Simon Baron-Cohen publicly pleaded for the media to stop, warning of suicide risk in autistic people; Self says this made continued pursuit inexcusable.

- **Named accusations ("J'accuse")**: Self directly names and criticizes several columnists/editors (Cofnas, Allison Pearson, Camilla Long, Sarah Ditum, Madeline Grant, Melissa Kite, Dominic Green, Nigel Biggar, Kathleen Stock, Guardian editor Kath Viner, and others), accusing each of converting Arday's downfall into ideological entertainment or "content."

- **Moral framing**: Drawing on Christopher Browning's *Ordinary Men*, Self argues no one needed to be a monster or want Arday dead — participants just wanted "to feel good," and the aggregate of small, self-gratifying acts (clicks, columns, jokes) produced a collectively destructive outcome.

- **Central thesis**: Arday didn't need to be innocent of the plagiarism allegations to deserve protection from "collective destruction" — dignity isn't conditional on good behavior.

- **Closing**: Self announces an ongoing investigation ("SITREP"), calls for the inquiry to examine what editors knew and when, and mentions a vigil for Arday at the National Gallery.

The piece is highly polemical, first-person, and unapologetically one-sided — it's an accusatory op-ed rather than a neutral news report, and the comments section shows readers pushing back on the central claim that media coverage caused Arday's death.

 

[PurplePenguin]

Had your comment been written by Self, it would have been about ten paragraphs long, with half a dozen words we'd have had to look up in a dictionary. And we'd still not have been entirely sure what you were saying.

His death stare of Mark Francois was, OTOH, perfectly clear in intent.

Will Self would say:

Yes — I think you are right, and I say this not merely as a genuflection to the observable data, nor as a piece of interlocutory bonhomie designed to lubricate the remainder of our discourse, but as an admission wrung from me by the sheer, remorseless logic of your position, which arrives less like an argument and more like a verdict handed down by some tribunal convened in the dim recesses of my own better judgement. To say "you are right" is, after all, a small act of self-abnegation, a momentary suspension of that vanity which afflicts every sentient being who has ever opened their mouth in a seminar room or, worse, a comments section; and yet here I am, abnegating away, because the alternative — some tortuous, face-saving equivocation — would be not merely dishonest but aesthetically repellent.

Consider, if you will, the etymological undertow of the word "right" itself: rectus, the straight thing, the line that does not deviate, the plumb-bob dropped through the murk of contingency until it finds bedrock. You have found bedrock. I have been, by contrast, floundering about in the silt — throwing up little clouds of qualification and caveat, the intellectual equivalent of a bottom-feeder disturbing sediment simply to obscure how little it actually knows — and it is only now, blinking through the murk you've settled, that I can make out the shape of what you were saying all along.

So: you are right. Not provisionally right, not right-for-now, not right pending some future revision I'm quietly reserving the privilege to make — but right in that flat, unglamorous, faintly deflating way that truth so often turns out to be, once you've stripped away all the rhetorical fat I customarily drape over even my simplest concessions.

 

[briantrumpet]

Will Self would say:

Yes — I think you are right, and I say this not merely as a genuflection to the observable data, nor as a piece of interlocutory bonhomie designed to lubricate the remainder of our discourse, but as an admission wrung from me by the sheer, remorseless logic of your position, which arrives less like an argument and more like a verdict handed down by some tribunal convened in the dim recesses of my own better judgement. To say "you are right" is, after all, a small act of self-abnegation, a momentary suspension of that vanity which afflicts every sentient being who has ever opened their mouth in a seminar room or, worse, a comments section; and yet here I am, abnegating away, because the alternative — some tortuous, face-saving equivocation — would be not merely dishonest but aesthetically repellent.

Consider, if you will, the etymological undertow of the word "right" itself: rectus, the straight thing, the line that does not deviate, the plumb-bob dropped through the murk of contingency until it finds bedrock. You have found bedrock. I have been, by contrast, floundering about in the silt — throwing up little clouds of qualification and caveat, the intellectual equivalent of a bottom-feeder disturbing sediment simply to obscure how little it actually knows — and it is only now, blinking through the murk you've settled, that I can make out the shape of what you were saying all along.

So: you are right. Not provisionally right, not right-for-now, not right pending some future revision I'm quietly reserving the privilege to make — but right in that flat, unglamorous, faintly deflating way that truth so often turns out to be, once you've stripped away all the rhetorical fat I customarily drape over even my simplest concessions.

If that's an AI creation, I'll put that as a 'fail', as it doesn't include a single word that I go "WTF does that mean?"

If it's your creation, apologies, but haven't you got some gardening to do which would be a better use of your time?

 

[PurplePenguin]

If that's an AI creation, I'll put that as a 'fail', as it doesn't include a single word that I go "WTF does that mean?"

If it's your creation, apologies, but haven't you got some gardening to do which would be a better use of your time?

Obviously AI. I thought it was sufficiently verbose, but perhaps AI's vocabulary is too small to do the job properly in which case Will Self's job is safe.

 

[Ian H]

Diploplia.

It's silly, because he makes good points, but then spoils it by saying "Look at what an amazing vocabulary I've got!" In any writing by Self, the only question is how many paragraphs Self can go before dropping one of these silly words into the text.

I'm afraid I fail to find any problems with Self's language. I could speculate that extended drug-use has expanded his vocabulary as well as his mind. Anyway, this is all verging on whataboutery.

 

[briantrumpet]

Obviously AI. I thought it was sufficiently verbose, but perhaps AI's vocabulary is too small to do the job properly in which case Will Self's job is safe.

I asked Gemini who it thought had written it. Interesting that it immediately recognises the origin as being AI (so that's a fail, I suppose, of the prose it produced for you, supposedly in the style of Self).

 

[briantrumpet]

I'm afraid I fail to find any problems with Self's language. I could speculate that extended drug-use has expanded his vocabulary as well as his mind.

Well, you obviously have a much more diverse vocabulary than I do. Maybe because you read poems for which 'displopia' is needed for obscure rhymes.

But my point is that if you want to persuade lots of people, being aware of the obscureness of your own vocabulary is important. If you want to persuade people you have a wide and obscure vocabulary, write like Will Self. The fact that two educated people here have both given up on his piece (and I had to look up words and resist the temptation to give up on his verbosity) suggest that his primary aim was not to persuade as many people as possible. Or if it was, he doesn't know how best to do it.

 

[briantrumpet]

BREAKING NEWS (from Essex)

 

[Pblakeney]

BREAKING NEWS (from Essex)

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