Vile Little Bullies

There are some vile, vile people out there.   Particularly on social media, but also in the regular media. After Jason Arday resigned, I speculated as to whether those in the press and social media who had hounded him out of his job as a Cambridge academic were happy now that they had destroyed his career.  Because, driven largely by racism, that seemed to have been the metaphorical lynch-mob’s aim. To recap, the Cambridge academic had been accused of plagiarism – accusations that appear to have originated with a now suspended American academic at Ghent University, who has a track record for promoting what, for want of a better term, would seem to be white supremacy.  Now, the key word here, with regard to Arday, is ‘accused’ – investigations were ongoing and nobody knows whether or not Arday actually had done anything wrong.  But that never worries those internet lynch mobs, who treat even the most innocuous of misdemeanours as capital offences.  In this case, the victim’s main crime appeared to be that he was black and from an underprivileged background, which inevitably leads to all the murmurings of ‘positive discrimination’ and how he obviously didn’t deserve his position on merit and had therefore blocked all manner of hypothetical better qualified (white) candidates.

Unfortunately, these social media ‘pile ons’, where some individual who is in the news for some reason, finds themselves pilloried online by bevies of self-styled experts and commentators, with the rank and file of social media all jumping in as they smell blood, are all too common.  Most of the rank and file participants are individuals who really should know better, who have probably themselves suffered bullying either online or in the real world, but they just can’t resist the opportunity to lay the boot into someone else, doubtless relieved that it takes attention away from them.  If they appease the bullies by joining in, then maybe, they think, just maybe, they’ll leave us alone. Except that it never works that way – the bullies will still eventually come for them. The mob achieved its first objective, when he resigned. Yet still, they wouldn’t stop with their campaign of vilification and humiliation, begging the question of what their objectives now were.  Then the news broke that he was dead, presumably having taken his own life.  So, are they ecstatic now?  Jumping with joy, having driven a man to apparent suicide?

You’d think that maybe, just maybe, they’d exhibit some remorse: if not the main instigators of this horrible shit show, the right-wing ‘influencers’ and their ilk, but maybe the rank-and-file social media users who had retweeted and liked their bile.  But no, the morning after, there they all were, busily repeating the excuses being put out by the prime movers of the whole hate campaign – it wasn’t their fault, it had nothing to do with anything they had said or done, in fact, it was all the fault of those woke lefties, (presumably because, for reasons of ‘political correctness’ they had been complicit in getting a black man a prestigious professorship which, obviously, his sort aren’t cut out for), or even Arday himself for having the audacity to try and put himself on the level of obviously superior white academics.  Indeed, even his suicide was simply a self-serving attempt to make himself a martyr – the attention seeking bastard! Like I said: vile.  Utterly, irredeemably, vile.

Of course, these unrepentant arseholes won’t learn anything from this tragedy – as soon as they see an opportunity to humiliate someone else whose very existence seems to offend them, they’ll swing into action, whipping up the hate, cheering on the lynch mob.  But, hey, they’ll tell you – they most definitely weren’t motivated by racism, just a concern for maintaining proper standards in public life.  Except that allegations of plagiarism aren’t that unusual in academia, but never attract this level of attention, let alone these sorts of consequences.  Most of these, though, concern white academics, so one can only surmise that what really enraged these bastards was that the allegations drew to their attention that a young black man had been appointed a Professor at Cambridge.  Oh horror of horrors!  As I said, I have absolutely no idea whether Arday was guilty of plagiarism or not  – but I do know that we are meant to consider people innocent until proven guilty.  There was an ongoing academic process to ascertain the veracity of these allegations – but these evil shits just couldn’t wait for that, they decided to jump the gun, assume guilt and round up a lynch mob.

So, again – are his persecutors happy now?  Or more pertinently, are they proud of themselves?  I mean, how fragile does your own ego have to be, how insecure and inadequate must you feel about yourself and your own achievements if you feel the need to publicly utterly trash and humiliate a complete stranger? The fact that they seem so unwilling to accept any responsibility for their actions just makes what they have done even worse.  They clearly have no consciences – any of them, from the instigators to the followers.  Let’s be clear, even if ‘all’ you did was re-post some of the ill-informed and poisonous bile flying around social media, you are just as guilty as the instigators. Really, they can all go fuck themselves, from those self-appointed instigators with their bought-and-paid for ‘Blue Ticks’ they like to use to try and establish that they are ‘someone’ and therefore their opinion is more significant to yours, all the way down to the shits, scumbags and bottom feeders who travelled on their coat-tails.  Every one of you is equally culpable with regard to the death of Jason Arday.  Not that you care, obviously, you soulless, utterly vile little bullies. Look, at the end of the day, Arday might, or might not, have been guilty of plagiarism, I neither know nor care, but at least he wasn’t a bullying coward hiding behind a ‘Blue Tick’ on Twitter.  I abhor bullies of all kinds.  So, fuck ‘em all!

Doc Sleaze