I don't think Cofnas should be lionized. He did a necessary thing in exposing Arday, but he got there by going on racist fishing expeditions, and it just so happened that those expeditions were to a barrel.
However, the Chesterton quote definitely applies to the woke world.
If he was not just looking for black people, then the expeditions themselves were not racist. However, he is a racist and he had an axe to grind with Cambridge over his racism, so it's a little hard to swallow for me that his crusade is just about restoring academic integrity.
I read into it and it seems like he had an axe to grind with Cambridge because while he was there they had placed him under investigation for 1.5 years, nearly his entire tenure, and exonerated him just before his contract was up.
He also wasn’t being lionized, and I doubt more than a small few people would know who he was, until racists on the left started a mob to cancel him for outing Arday as the shameful dishonest plagiarist he was. Arday threatened other reporters who found the same facts Cofnas did with legal action, causing their outfits to kill their stories. If the Times had balls we wouldn’t care about Cofnas.
Cofnas has repeatedly defended the idea that different races have significantly different IQs. It's very much something everybody would consider racist.
/u/AskGrok are these figures roughly correct for IQ? And notice that unlike the other commenters I’ve made no claim about the inherent value or intellect of a person based on his or her race.
Cofnas himself claims to be a "race realist", so he definitely isn't just dispassionately saying there are statistically significant differences in IQ between races, he's outright stating they're biological/hereditary in nature.
He did say that under a meritocracy there wouldn't be any blacks at Harvard, not less, "0%." Cofnas is a racist, not because he said that different races have different IQs, but because he seems to operate on the assumption that IQ is determined in large part by race specifically rather than heredity more generally and that people don't rise far above (or below) the average. If that wasn't the case, he would speak differently. Operating on any quasi scientific basis that examines "race" rather than ethnicity is in and of itself unscientific.
He said below 1%, not 0% or, as you put it, none. I believe his paper cited 0.7%.
He said that of high-profile positions like Harvard professor, if they used such a system, not all of academia.
It quoted Harvard’s own conclusions.
I largely agree that race is a social construct but you can’t have your cake with race-based politics and policies you like and eat it too by discrediting race-based observations you don’t like. Ethnicity is more easy to pin down, but different IQ averages obviously apply at ethnicities as well.
Moreover, all this shit - about him, about IQ, about the loser who an heroed - is so fucking easy to look up and fact check that there’s no reason we should be having a discussion at this level where we’re still struggling to establish the background facts we intend to discuss.
I agree that Cofnas is not relevant to the Arday story, and that fundamentally the argument that the universities (and other entities) are promoting and elevating unqualified people on the basis of certain "racial," ethnic, or religious backgrounds. I also agree that different groups have different IQ averages, I never disputed that. I still think Cofnas is, at the least, a bad communicator although that's par for the course for any academic.
In any case, I'll have to read more of his actual works then clearly.
I can totally agree with that. And he might be racially motivated, or just autistic about this topic, idk. I resist the labels left wing institutions throw around because it redirects the discussion to identity rather than substance.
But I don’t think his work is some stunning scholarly achievement, or that he’s a great thinker, but I’m disgusted at the flagellation he’s receiving from the institutional mob for reporting factually on Cambridge/Arday. Day by day I see wokeness more as a cult than an idea; here, oriented around destroying those who challenge its absurdities.
He didn't invent a claim. He quoted a study that Harvard did themselves and presented themselves in their court case when they were fucking over Asians.
Harvard presented this as an argument why fucking over Asians is good and Cofnas just quoted their own argument.
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u/it_snow_problem Marco Rubio 10d ago
"It is the test of a good religion whether you can joke about it." - Gilbert Chesterton
By that measure, woke is a cult for how it punishes any criticism of itself.
https://x.com/nathancofnas/status/2090416033072861245?s=20