The passing of Jason Arday is a tragedy, but it is a tragedy of his own making.
This is true in both a literal sense, in that his death was apparently a suicide, and figuratively, in that the events that drove the former Cambridge sociology professor to suicide were fabulism and fabrication in the service of a career of academic stardom.
He made a Faustian bargain with the truth to achieve academic stardom — one that was so absurd that anyone who bothered to fact-check it would discover it to be a farrago of lies — and could not bring himself to face the consequences of his prevarications when they were brought to light, quite belatedly.
Now that he has killed himself because someone finally reported on his misdoings, some in the United Kingdom want to change the law so that you can’t tell the truth about someone who isn’t telling the truth, or who is doing other things they shouldn’t be doing.
In other words, your free speech should end where a famous person’s feelings might theoretically begin.
A petition on Change.org to enact something called “Arday’s Law” — which would limit the amount of coverage the media could devote to a person over a certain period of time in the United Kingdom — had garnered over 4,300 verified signatures as of Wednesday afternoon.
This comes amid a similar petition from the Good Law Project, which calls for an inquiry into Arday’s death, albeit without proposing concrete limits on speech. However, it does call his death “the direct, foreseeable and foreseen result of press harassment,” which leads to obvious conclusions about what they might want that inquiry to recommend. That petition had 121,649 signatures as of Wednesday afternoon.
Hellbound and Down 