Perhaps the most obvious comparison between Arday’s story and a fictional tale concerns Forrest Gump. The classic 1994 film features a boy compromised by both mental and physical handicaps, who, thanks to the enduring love of an unflappable, aphorism-spouting mother who dismisses the doctors who write him off, breaks free of his shackles, becomes a long-distance runner, and goes on to secure his triumphant place in history. In his memoir, Arday directly compares his inspiring life story to the “fantastical” film. He cites his unflappable mother, who is herself a font of the sort of self-help sayings women embroider on pillows, pointing out the “similarities there.
Arday fully acknowledges in his book the remarkable parallels between his life and Forrest Gump’s, quoting his mother, Giff, pointing this out.
Prone to fixations, autistic people often become superfans of narrow slivers of pop culture and other arcana. Research shows they also have a tendency to engage in “scripting”—memorizing and rehearsing, for example, lines from films or TV and weaving them into their everyday lives—and can form strong parasocial bonds with fictional characters. This can help them mirror and better comprehend real-life emotions.
Referring in particular to the penchant among people on the spectrum for role-playing games, Liam Cross, an autism researcher at the University of Plymouth’s school of psychology, told the Free Beacon: “Not only can this act as a way to scaffold social learning, but we see what’s called ‘bleed,’ where parts of the character one is playing and the self start to merge together and overlap.”
Gray Atherton, who is Cross’s Plymouth colleague, said: “One possibility of an individual ‘confusing’ fantasy with reality could be that if an individual spends an inordinate amount of time engaging with a fictional world or characters, they may begin to relate to those characters or story in a way that can feel ‘real.'” But Atherton cautioned: “It would be a stretch to characterize autism as a condition that would mean an individual genuinely confuses their own lived experience with those in a TV show, movie or book.”
Newton is remembered now as a great genius, which he was. He was also a peculiar man. He was famously rude and antisocial, with little apparent interest in friendships or romantic relationships. He was obsessed with his work, which included theology as well as natural science, and he would labor on a problem for days without food or sleep. An assistant who worked for him for five years saw the great man laugh only once: when someone asked Newton why anyone would want to study the mathematics of Euclid. His was a mind that not only voyaged “through strange seas of thought,” but did so—as Wordsworth understood—alone, for all his life. Brilliant people are not like the rest of us.
I wonder how Newton would fare in the Cambridge of today. Would he be able to negotiate funding applications? HR? Student politics? Would he demonstrate social grace, prudence and a veiled but also irrepressible drive toward acquiring power within the institution? Would he use the correct pronouns, honor the correct identity groups and keep perfectly within the confines of the Overton Window at all times? Would he succeed as a 21st-century academic? Something tells me he wouldn’t.
Nahh, Sir Isaac would be right at home in 21st century Cambridge. The Grauniad assures me that Arday was simply a strange one-off who somehow beat the long odds against him and stumbled into the university (albeit with the BBC there to videotape his arrival, along with the head of the university’s faculty of education declaring him, “the best in the world in terms of the research that you do.”)
Now the Guardian is obsessively delving into the backstory of the Arday saga, to reinforce the ‘one bad apple’ theme and quietly obscure the structural problem of which the paper is itself a part: the ideological capture of culture and intellectual life. https://t.co/yjJ2s0eGrX
Until 2015, an optimistic and liberal (in the best sense) ethos pervaded the Internet. Major Internet platforms were open and had little content policy beyond bans on real-life criminal activity (stalking, selling illegal goods, child pornography, etc). Aside from these narrow and reasonable explicit exceptions, anyone could go online and converse with interested people around the world about whatever they wanted in public. These platforms had no real means to control what people talked about on them even if they wanted to, which they didn’t; to the extent an organization can have views all believed in free1 and open online discourse, which promised to make censorship impossible and end the hegemony of 20th century broadcast media.
In this, they were backed up by major non-tech institutions, such as the UN, the EU, the US State Department, and the New York Times2, all of which saw Internet freedom as a corollary of offline freedom, and one which would liberalize the world’s remaining non-democratic states in time. These institutions both supported Internet freedom rhetorically3 and spent hundreds of millions of dollars creating and disseminating technical tools to evade Internet censorship and preserve online anonymity.
But in just a few years, every single major platform had created strict, but incredibly vague and opaque, ideological content rules backed up by a colossal moderation/censorship apparatus with tens of thousands of human moderators and an entire new field of machine learning created from nothing. The Internet went from a space for people without institutional backing to get their views out to one with regular purges and demonetizations of heterodox figures and those associated with them, encouraged by those very same non-tech organizations that formerly championed Internet freedom. This was justified as a response to (massively overblown and mostly fictitious) Russian influence campaigns4, and as fighting nebulous “hate,” the definition of which could be shifted at will to cover whatever views or ideas the organizers classifying it wanted it too and to exclude those they didn’t, and “misinformation.”
The closure of the Internet occurred in two distinct phases: 2015-2019 (associated with the 2015 migrant crisis, Brexit, Donald Trump’s election, and the so-called alt-right) and 2020-2022 (associated with the lockdowns and the 2020 election). Almost all of the technical and organizational infrastructure and conceptual justifications were built out in the first phase, which successfully decapitated and destroyed the previously-independent, but by definition fringe, online ecosystem of ideas. In the second phase, the same weapons that previously targeted heterodox online discourse were turned against opposition to the COVID measures du joure and mainstream conservatives. The scale of censorship has no precedent; tens of millions of accounts suppressed or banned, billions of posts removed.
At well over 15,000 words in length, I can’t automatically just say “read the whole thing,” but it’s definitely worth perusing.
The Trump administration on Thursday released a new report detailing how hospitals have placed profits over the safety of children in prescribing so-called “gender affirming” medical treatments, such as sex-change surgeries and hormones. Vice President VD Vance announced that he has referred the matter to the Department of Justice.
In a letter to Attorney General Todd Blanche, Vance wrote that he is referring the report to the DOJ “to determine whether the providers identified have violated federal law, regulations, or policies including, but not limited to, the Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act, the False Claims Act, 18 USC 24, and federal fraud and conspiracy laws.”
He continued, “When providers miscode treatment in order to secure insurance coverage for gender-transitioning interventions that insurance would not otherwise cover, they should be held accountable. If they have done so intentionally, thereby perpetuating a fraud on Medicaid or on private insurers, they should go to prison. Rather than allow the proliferation of harmful, sex-rejecting procedures on our children, we must sent a clear message that any hospitals and providers that have participated in these practices will face justice.”
Worse, large number of so-called “trans” kids are just ordinary tomboys, gays, and even the autistic just going through an awkward adolescence. Instead of getting counsel or just letting them figure things out like kids usually do, they got permanently altered.
KRUISER’S MORNING BRIEFING: Dear Gavin Newsom — When You’ve Lost Ann Arbor… “The adoring throngs never materialized. One could hardly refer to the smattering of people who showed up for Newsom’s public events as ‘crowds.’ Democrats are very adept at astroturfing attendance, but the party wasn’t doing any favors for Newsom.”
Ahem. It wasn’t Enes Kantor Freedom or Royce White who created this problem. Sophie Cunningham didn’t create it either; an ESPN reporter demanded Cunningham’s opinion on it while Cunningham was criticizing the league’s treatment of her teammate Caitlin Clark. Minnesota Lynx head coach Cheryl Reeve made it worse by attempting to troll Cunningham at a game with a “Trans Kids Belong” T-shirt during a game against the Fever, and the Lynx made it worse by attacking women and girls who support Cunningham.
And now that two biological males want to compete in the league, the woke morons who run the league find themselves hoist by their own petard.
So when do these geniuses plan to settle on a definition of woman? Maybe they’ll drop it under the Christmas tree. No, I am not kidding:
The WNBA and team representatives from across the league met Wednesday, Aug. 12 for planned talks on various matters, including ongoing debate over transgender females’ participation in women’s basketball.
“Today’s meeting covered a wide range of topics, including ongoing discussions on transgender athletes and the continued hate and vitriol directed at players online. We will continue to engage all league stakeholders in the coming weeks and months,” a statement USA TODAY received from a WNBA spokesperson said.
“Weeks and months”? Will it take the Women’s National Basketball Association “weeks and months” to define the word “women”? What did the league think it meant for the past thirty years since its founding?
They’ll get back to Ed on that in weeks or months, or after they’ve chosen where to go for lunch, depending upon which comes first:
Sad: WNBA Task Force Fails To Define Woman After Spending Entire Meeting Trying To Pick Restaurant For Lunch https://t.co/enE6fnxsGl
Apple CEO Tim Cook was joined by government officials, including Secretary of Commerce Howard Lutnick, on Wednesday to open a new manufacturing facility offering free training and educational classes for businesses in Houston, Texas.
The facility is also where Apple will manufacture Mac Mini desktop computers later this year, the company said. AI servers for Apple are also assembled at a portion of the location.
“We stood up a factory, started production, and shipped the first advanced AI servers off the line, and with Mac Mini production set to begin later this year,” Cook said, adding that Apple had spent hundreds of millions of dollars on the facility.
What the country really needs though is more RAM and SSD fabs.
The Mac mini is great — I love mine, and the unified memory architecture makes the Pro model with upgraded RAM a surprisingly capable LLM server.
But in addition to the price hikes forced by the memory storage, it’s now a two-and-a-half month wait for the model I received overnight back in April.
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