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“Only the Americans appear to take this sort of thing seriously.”

Puritanical little buggers that we are, we alone, complains this frustrated plagiarist-outer, take seriously things like an entire career founded on stealing other people’s writing. We alone not only manage to summon disapproval of plagiarism; we also act on that disapproval. For instance, Americans are notorious for firing or fining high school superintendents who plagiarize graduation speeches; and there are simply scads of American high school superintendents who plagiarize graduation speeches… Superintendents who do many naughty things… Whereas the British (Neil Harmon, languid tennis journalist who has just languidly copped to having copied, is a Brit) are all oh reaaaaaallly about it…

Or perhaps we are being asked to pity, rather than condemn, a person whose dissociative disorder is so severe that he writes about his decades of plagiarism like this:

It has been brought to my attention that I have severely compromised my position…, having used unattributed material to form part of my writing of the Wimbledon Yearbook.

Big thanks, chaps, for bringing the fact that I’m a plagiarist to my attention. I must say, something in the way I wrote did seem… odd… Yet I couldn’t put a finger on it until you were so kind as to bring it to my attention. Good show!

Margaret Soltan, July 23, 2014 3:04PM
Posted in: plagiarism

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2 Responses to ““Only the Americans appear to take this sort of thing seriously.””

  1. adam Says:

    There we go with the Divine Passive voice again – “It has been brought to my attention…” is a good example. Couple this with a few Strategic Nonsequiturs – “I relished my time as president…” and “I did it without malice aforethought,” not to mention the idiocy about the inspiring quote on Twitter (he’s the one that must do the accepting, not the rest of his group) – and the gauzy veil of obfuscation is already settling over the ugliness. LOL.

  2. dmf Says:

    http://www.politico.com/story/2014/07/john-walsh-montana-report-plagiarism-109293.html

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