US Politics
- Thread starter Nick 0208 Ldn
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To try to draw a parallel between say the war in Iraq and that in Ukraine is absolutely ridiculous and undermines the argument entirely. In one the US were the unjust aggressors while in the other they are simply sending weapons to a just defender.
I've no doubt it is all corrupt in Washington but the problem is the corruption stopping the weapons getting to Ukraine, not that they are. This is the art of propaganda - say a bunch of true stuff and throw in a massive lie or two with it so that people stop using their own brains and assume it's true.
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Also saw on YouTube a libertarian arguing that WW2 army logistics were inefficient and should instead have involved individual unit commanders bidding on deliveries from private lorry owner-operators.
Considering their heroes like Friedman called for unlicensed medical professionals as a solution to healthcare costs, it doesn't shock me.
Self-harm in the pursuit of ideological purity is such a weakness of humanity.
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Since I don't know where to put the news, I thought it would go here since politics are also involved. Harvard will need a new president to clean up quite a mess left behind.
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So the plagiarism is only accusations? Wasnt Harvard one of the most prominent in checking plagiarism?
She was accused of not citing previously published papers in her work. It’s tough to say if it was outright plagiarism without knowing if she was aware of the existing papers when writing her own. if she was aware of the work, and used exact or similar excerpts from it, without citing then that is pretty egregious.
Thanks for the info.
It was copy and paste stuff. Sometimes half a page.
Oof, that is bad....and to do it with no citations????
I think this happens more often than some would like to think. Someone wants to use a couple of sentences from a book, they then rewrite it in a slightly different way thinking they've changed it sufficiently to where a citation may not be necessary, only to get caught years later by a technology that didn't exist when they originally wrote the paper. Obviously being the President of Harvard and answering moral questions about the genocide of Jews with a cold and legal answer, will make Gay's past plagiarism charges more relevant for those seeking to get her canned.
Updated the post. Some of it is quite bad. Agree with your general point that it probably used to happen in past generations as there was little way to check. I do think that was the catalyst, but her lack of ability to take responsibility plus her thin academic record have made the meta discussion of why she was hired and the effects of DEI on academia more prevalent.
What is happening and has happened at some of these schools didnt at places like Clemson or UT.
You cannot rewrite yourself out of having to cite people though. If your argument or story is partly based on someone else's work or trying to refute someone else's work, then you cite them whether you rewrote it or not. Otherwise your readers can't check whether your argument is based on anything worthwhile and you might as well have pulled it from your ass.
Yes, obviously if she was citing someone else's argument by way of using their own previously published book text, then that's a much lower bar to claim someone is plagiarizing. If on the other hand, she was simply rewriting someone else's text to form her own argument about something else (ie., the central topic of what she was writing about was different), then it becomes a bit murkier.
I am not sure there is any difference, so although I am approaching this from the biomedical side of academia (my background) I would assume that other fields are the same. When writing papers we were taught to cite anything we wrote that was not:
1) A novel observation or data point from our own work. For example, you still have to cite yourself if you are discussing work you published previously.
2) A generally known fact or observation (bacteria are single celled prokaryotes, tress are plants, Scott McTominay treats the top of the box like it has the plague, etc.)
3) Original ideas you are proposing, although if these ideas are based on previous work you still need to cite that work!!
I cannot think of a reason to ever knowingly summarize/copy/reference the work of another person/group without citing them. This does not mean that unintentional oversights cannot happen, they do, but they should always be corrected as soon as possible.
Just my 2 cents.
Yes that's how it should be. My background is in physics, so still the natural sciences.
https://x.com/unusual_whales/status/1742207287966777673?s=20
https://x.com/unusual_whales/status/1742643708376555797?s=20
It's so great - our elected representatives are better at picking stocks than people who do that day in day out for a living.
Same in history. If you've written a full paragraph without citing someone you've almost certainly engaged in plagiarism already. Either that or you've written a really fecking boring paragraph.
Or you are one deeply profound motherfecker.
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Absolutely agree. I always considered plagiarism as making claims about something that is not original, rather than rewriting some sentences. So to me:
- claiming something that is your own work but has been done by someone else (e.g., someone discovers something, I rewrite and obfuscate it to not be easily recognizable and then publish it as original work) -> plagiarism, very harmful, disgrace.
- copying and slightly rewriting a few sentences from here and there that are stating facts but you are not making claimabout them e.g., ‘planet Earth is the third nearest planet to Sun and it takes light 8 minutes and 18 seconds to reach Earth from Sun’. Even if this is taken verbatim from someone else (who has been cited somewhere earlier in the text), I would not consider it as plagiarism. It is a well-known fact, I am not claiming that I did this observation, just giving some background. It is probably poor scholarship though but not plagiarism, it does not harm anyone.
I think that I have done cases of the later in my thesis. For example, if I am describing some method in related work, as background, then most likely I went to the original paper (or some book) copy-pasted a few sentences and kinda rewrote it. Thing is, I am not making any claim that is my work, just describing something. Feels like most of the plagiarism from Gay was like this, which in general is as harmless as it gets. While the other form of plagiarism where you take someone’s finding and rewrite them as your own is harmful especially if you are more famous (thus the other people cite your work instead of the original one).
A lot of things can be argued about her, such as her CV being quite unimpressive, or her thin academical work and poor metrics for someone at that level. And I think that her testimony at the Congress was quite disgraceful. But at the same time, I think she did not do real plagiarism and was a victim of Ackman and co. In some sense it is ironical that she both got and lost her position on political reasons rather than academical ones.
Ironically, as counter-attack, Ackman’s own wife is now accused for plagiarism too, and it is very similar to Gay’s case (copy pasted factual sentences but not meant as original/novel claims).
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I reiterate my point again that the biggest problem is that it is seemingly so much easier to gain wealth and fame pandering to the far right. They will literally throw it at you if you just confirm their insane beliefs - even if you don't believe in it (which seems to be the case for a lot of these grifters). It isn't much different from people selling diets and other snake oil. They hate celebrities etc but they keep coming up with new idols.(which btw, the Bible had a thing or two to say about). Perhaps I should make it my financial backup plan.
I also think the other part of the problem is that we've allowed it to become way too lucrative to half a half assed career in public service just to set themselves up with cushy private sector engagements outside of it.
It's one thing to be a dumb cnut, but I swear there has to be a limit somewhere as to how stupid one can be as a public figure.
Talks around that GOP might be fed up with Mike Johnson, simply for possibly accepting a deal to keep the US government funded, guess he too, will shortly become a RINO.
I think you have to go some way to beat Trump changing hurricane path prediction charts with a Sharpie to include an area only he saw was going to be hit.
That is without a doubt the dumbest shit I've ever seen any politician do.
That was not even the dumbest thing he did/said regarding that hurricane
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edit: I think it was the same hurricane....and the fact I have to qualify that is absurd.
Yeah, that's up there for sure. Didn't he also blame the California wild fires on not raking the leaves and poor forest management? He also said he could keep the forest floors damp and that would stop the fires, and he could get it done so quickly. He also looked directly at the sun during the Eclipse. We could go on forever with the feckwittery that man has accomplished.
The horrible thing is that that's partially true in a weird way. Extinguishing wild fires successfully for about 100 years has left way more flammable material than usual around making the fires more dangerous now. I definitely remember reading about that (and confident it was before Donald became a politician)
He also looked directly at the sun during the Eclipse. We could go on forever with the feckwittery that man has accomplished.
I know it's early in January, buy I am not sure anyone is going to beat this in the "Most Embarrassing Performance by a Politician" category.
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"I wish you'd...." has only one or two conclusions.
1. would go away
2. would stop asking that question.
fecking ghouls, they just want to throw money to friends and ideology. A republican will ALWAYS choose the worst way imaginable to implement policy.