… frightens us with a robotic future.

The Rand Paul Plagiarized Speech Song

That speech:
Isn’t it Rand? Isn’t it great?
Isn’t it swell? Isn’t it fun?
Isn’t it… plagiarized…

Isn’t it, Rand? Isn’t it great?
Isn’t it swell? Isn’t it fun?
Nowadays…

The New York Times, May 2008:

Last September, Germany’s Chancellor Angela Merkel courageously broke ranks with her predecessors and met with the Dalai Lama. China predictably objected – soon joined by Merkel’s own vice chancellor and foreign minister, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, who accused her of trying to “showcase” human rights.

Now Steinmeier has one-upped himself, refusing to meet with the Dalai Lama while the Tibetan spiritual leader was on a five-day visit to Germany …

France 24, September 2013:

Germany’s centre-left parliamentary opposition leader Frank-Walter Steinmeier denied allegations Sunday that he plagiarised parts of his PhD thesis after similar charges have claimed several political scalps in recent years. … [E]conomics professor Uwe Kamenz of Muenster in North Rhine-Westphalia had said he found “extensive” evidence of plagiarism in Steinmeier’s 1991 law thesis.

“There’s nothing in there, quite honestly, that’s uniquely mine. I believe what the Bible says: There’s nothing new under the sun.”

People don’t seem very happy to find out they’ve been plagiarized. They don’t seem very flattered. They don’t seem very receptive to their plagiarists telling them it was all an act of love.

Matthew Welton, for instance – a British poet who teaches at the University of Nottingham – seems to have found it downright sneaky that serial plagiarist C.J. Allen altered Welton’s poems just enough to avoid easy detection. Indeed only Welton himself, on buying a collection of Allen’s poems after one of Allen’s poetry readings, recognized the extensive lifting.

This long article parses the difference between an homage to/being inspired by/doing a free translation of a cited work/etc. and being a lazy motherfucker who takes someone else’s artwork and publishes it as one’s own. The author quotes a friend:

‘There’s a world of difference between Prokofiev formally basing the 2nd movement of his 2nd symphony on the 2nd movement of Beethoven’s Op.111, and Graham Nunn flattening out his notebook alongside a book by Helen Dunmore’.

Yes – it’s not really subtle, is it?

And speaking of subtle: UD has zero interest in the psychological excuses offered by plagiarists when they’ve been found out and when their first line of defense (homage, pastiche, that shit) fails. They’ve always been insecure; when their mother died it really did a number on them…

When the psycho line also fails to generate sympathy, plagiarists move to Position Three, drug and alcohol abuse. I did it because I’m a desperate mess. How did I manage to conduct a grueling book tour, run university seminars, give poetry readings, and produce a new plagiarized book while so debilitated by drugs? I don’t know, but…

(Position Four)…

… I’m happy I’ve been found out! I plagiarized so blatantly in order to be found out! I craved being brought low enough, being hollowed out thoroughly enough, to find my way back to my lost faith. I have recently joined a Catholic parish, spent hours in a confessional box, and experienced forgiveness. I will share my rebirth in my next book.

Oh, by the applicant. The writing sample is supposed to be written by the applicant.…

The school superintendent who plagiarizes, word for word, his heartfelt personal welcome to students at the beginning of the school year is never embarrassed. He explains that he happened to have found on the web a heartfelt personal welcome to students at the beginning of the school year that said exactly what he wanted to say, so he used that. If you insist he contact the original author, he’ll do that, but he assures you that the guy’s gonna be flattered; what he has done, after all, is an homage.

The poet who plagiarizes the work of better poets who say exactly what he wants to say but say it ever so much better so why not take their words is similarly shocked when people act as if he’s some sort of villain. It’s a postmodern pastiche, for fuck’s sake, an appropriation art comment on the death of originality in our time. If you’ve got a corncob up your ass and can’t get with the program it’s not his fault.

Violent spectacle encourages manliness, and manliness ensures a nation’s capacity to defend itself and its values in organized warfare. Max Boot, defending football in the pages of the Wall Street Journal (against those who want to shut it down or make it less violent so that players avoid brain injury), clarifies the nationally sacrificial function of the players:

[T]hough football can be a violent sport, those who watch it are, on the whole, peaceable and tolerant — especially as compared with foreign fans of soccer (“football” to the rest of the world), who make up for the relative lack of violence on the field with melees in the stands.

It’s an either/or: You either sublimate man’s intrinsic violent anarchism by allowing him regular staged access to it; or you end up with compensatory chaos. (A milder version of this argument, by Walter Russell Mead, defends university football’s firing up of male atavism as crucial to the continued survival of universities.)

It’s a delicate balance; you want a culture that makes men capable of violence; you want that capacity stoked by violent sport; but you want always to be able to control the violence. That’s why Boot stresses the comaraderie, teamwork, and discipline, at the core of football, even as he anxiously echoes Teddy Roosevelt’s worry that if you outlaw football you’ll turn out “mollycoddles instead of vigorous men.”

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What sort of person would be a mollycoddle?

Well, let’s say some guy impugns your honor. If you’re a mollycoddle, you say I’m gonna tell Mom! You say I’m gonna tell my lawyer! If you’re a vigorous man, you challenge the guy to a duel. Or if you want to be civilized and sublimate that violence, you challenge him to go public with his impugning, to go one-on-one with you in a public forum, where he can repeat his charges and you can defend yourself.

But all that football watching hasn’t made Boot himself particularly vigorous. Just as he uses a research assistant to do the grunt work on his columns, he plans to use a lawyer to do his fighting against a fellow writer who claims Boot plagiarized him:

“I will defend my hard-earned reputation with legal action if necessary if you decide to print these scurrilous and unsubstantiated allegations.”

Take that, you naughty, naughty boy!

… revisited.

Taiwan’s defense minister copies him.

Wow – now the president of the Bundestag is accused of plagiarism. UD‘s German friend Chris explains to her that in Germany (in Europe in general I guess) having a PhD is considered very important, very much the done thing, for politicians. (I explain back to Chris that here in the States it’s the opposite. We tend to like our leaders unlettered. Neither Barack Obama nor Elizabeth Warren has been able to escape the professor slam. Sarah Palin put the word professor in front of Obama’s name damn near every time she used it. In his debates with Warren, Scott Brown compulsively called Warren professor.) So perhaps in your haste to get the thing, you copy some or all of it, as Norbert Lammert seems to have done at the University of Bochum.

But Forbes should be much more ashamed for having published the mindless POS the principal plagiarized.

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Scathing Online Schoolmarm is impressed with one wrinkle here. The plagiarizing principal personalized the stolen material:

[The original author] wrote in the Forbes column about Lori Garver’s rise to deputy administrator of NASA,: “Like so many other successful people, Lori has always been driven more by what inspires her than what scares her. She’s always been willing to challenge assumptions, and push the boundaries of possibility.”

[The plagiarist] switched the focus to herself, writing: “Like so many others, I have always been driven more by what inspires me than what scares me. I have always been willing to challenge assumptions and push the boundaries of possibility.”

SOS suggests that for her next plagiarism (as you know if you read this blog, plagiarists almost never stop at one), the principal aim higher. Make Edward Kennedy’s famous eulogy for Robert Kennedy your own!

I saw wrong and tried to right it, saw suffering and tried to heal it, saw war and tried to stop it.

Aim even higher!

I am a woman, take me for all in all. You shall not look upon my like again.

Higher!!

For I the Lord thy God will hold thy right hand, saying unto thee, Fear not; I will help thee.

If you’re the plagiarism-positive German university establishment, the last thing you want is a bunch of bloggers investigating and outing biggies like education and defense ministers who plagiarized their dissertations. So it should come as no surprise that the Rectors Conference has come out with the helpful suggestion that these bloggers shut the fuck up.

[T]he Rectors’ Conference – Hochschulrektorenkonferenz, or HRK – seeks to restrict the activities of internet forums like Guttenplag or Vroniplag, which played a key role in developments.

Yes, you go ahead and try to do that. Already 1300-plus German and other academics have petitioned against you. (Ol’ UD is of course among them.)

Here’s the problem, as I see it, for Loose Lips Sink Plagiarists Hippler: He and his organization have no good options. Here are their options.

Option One: Become the butt of free speech jokes.

Option Two: Add publicity and outrage to the campaign to bring legitimacy to German academia, thereby increasing the number of people investigating plagiarism.

Option Three: Remind people of the hilarious details of the von Googleberg case — and of others — thus refreshing and deepening the ridicule your educational institutions have already suffered.

Since they’ve already showed their hand as a secretive, plagiarism-enabling guild, it’s too late for the good rectors to do what they ought to have done. Probably some day, after they’ve suffered enough contempt, they will do it:

Try reading the dissertations your students submit to you. Hell, try working with them as they write their dissertations.

I know how busy and important you are… How unbelievably degrading such scutwork is… I mean, where would you start? For decades you’ve sat on your ass and passed one unseen thesis after another. But a journey of a thousand miles starts with one step.

Ulrich Ulrich Lichtenthaler
Is a most peculiar scholar:
Fucks with data for a dollar
Ulrich Ulrich Lichtenthaler.

Alas poor Ulrich’s just been collared.
Mass retraction – ach, the squalor.
Now his output looks much smaller.
Ulrich Ulrich Lichtenthaler.

… and it’s been clear for years to UD that she needs – like some highlight/copy/paste Draculetta – regular infusions of the stuff.

After following academic and artistic plagiarism over the course of a decade, UD knows that a new high-profile p-story pops up on average every twelve days. But sometimes – lately – things dry up. No politician has been found to have lifted her dissertation from Wikipedia. No fancy schmancy pundit has been found to have plagiarized his columns. No law professor has been found to have plagiarized his books. No wunderkind has been found to have copied his neuroscience best sellers. Etc.

BIG etc. You can just count on plagiarism.

So maybe it’s spring fever… a certain lassitude among the paste-chasers as the summer begins… But I could swear it’s been at least a month since a really solid case of word theft.

Keep in mind that we’re not counting, here, the high school principal (heartfelt commencement speech) or the man of God (sermons). Although they always bring a sparkle to UD‘s eyes, these cases are too measly to be worth noticing.

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Award-winning poets who have stolen their intensely personal ruminations on suffering and passion – that’s good.

The poetry community is now asking itself just how widespread plagiarism is.

Yes, and that’s because there’s now a second case within just a few months of a poet having transferred his palpitations directly from the palpitations of others.

Many others. As you know if you follow this blog, UD has seen confirmed again and again the reality that almost all plagiarists plagiarize promiscuously and obsessively. Whenever, wherever, whoever. Once people start looking in a particular plagiarist’s direction, they almost always find a solid wall of stolen words.

This is heartening to plagiarism-buffs like UD, since extensive theft extends each story. But eventually the thrill is gone. You can only enjoy the revelation that a particular person is a sneaky unscrupulous creep for so long. You begin to seek fresh blood.

So here is David R. Morgan, whose “Monkey Stops Whistling” is his raw sardonic hard-bitten Dylan Thomasesque lament about the

dark glass we look through darkly when we
want to see the ghosts of our former selves

dear God the booze and how it’s undone me … dear… uh… oh, dear Colin Morton. That’s Colin Morton’s scotch-soaked mulling…

Okay so the rule is: Every tormented poet gets to be an alcoholic. Alcoholism is community property. But every poet has to render his drunken despair in his own words.

After doing absolutely everything he could to hold onto his job – lying, blaming his plagiarism on his ghost writer, lying low and hoping it would blow over, smearing a dead man, pompously claiming that quitting would be “desertion” – France’s chief rabbi Gilles Bernheim has been pushed out.