165 Comments

About 25 years ago, I was in grad school (MA, German), and I was looking through some old notebooks of mine from around 1988. I found a poem that I had written and forgotten about, I thought it had some potential, so I revised it a bit (it was already pretty good) and gave it to my girlfriend to read.

She called me in a few days to tell me she had found "my" poem in..."The Collected Poems of Dylan Thomas." I had apparently copied out the poem (an off-and-on habit of mine) and neglected to note where it came from. Ten years later, I thought Dylan Thomas' poem was my own, and even felt that it needed revision. Dylan Thomas.

I do not know whether the case of the president of Harvard is remotely similar, but just to say one can plagiarize inadvertently. So glad my friend caught it!

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Any academic with a long enough career is bound to have several pieces of text for which attribution has been forgotten, improperly formatted, or mis-assigned. When you produce hundreds of pages of work at a given time, it seems certain to me.

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His wife took money from Epstein, had her students (women) send him thank you notes and gifts.

It is not pretty.

And when he complains about MIT mentioning it his email is like, 'She has a baby and no nurse". How fucking disconnected from reality. Only a PT nurse?

https://twitter.com/BGrueskin/status/1172711645279219712

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Sure they like her for her M.R.S. degree and bad scholarship, but do wingnuts (like Harvard Extension kid Chris Rufo) realize Neri is an IMMIGRANT?

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Fuck Bill Ackman, and fuck the NYT, and fuck Ted Cruz.

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The NYT is eager to grant 'victories' to Elise Stefanik

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Ta, Gary. Yes, it's because Gay is Black and I know they don't like her name, also too. What makes Gorsuch different? He's white and has a penis.

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*Citation needed (on the second point)

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Maybe MTG could hold up a photo in the House one day?

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I felt the same thing myself. She was inadequate in her response but it certainly wasn’t a resignable offence. It’s because she’s a Black Woman. Full stop.

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Republicans are afraid of smart women. No wonder only women with high school-level and below vote for them.

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David Ferrie and Bill Ackman have Uncle Leo's eyebrows drawn on by Elaine.

https://youtu.be/5SqatyzPlJU?si=bJ1bZkVDI4DRlHA9

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Well, Chris Rufo is a Harvard alum himself, so he takes this kind of thing personally.

What’s that you say? Harvard Extension School isn’t the same thing as Harvard Harvard? I’m sure that was just an inadvertent omission on Rufo’s CV.

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I used to turn to the NR to view "conservative" ideas so as not to be locked in a bubble. They are making it awfully hard though. Are there any real conservatives left who have not drank the kool-aid?

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No, there aren't, which is why you never hear about them.

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There are real conservatives who have not drank the kool aid. Those people do not put words on a page at the NR, because the gatekeepers have drank the kook aid.

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Well, they should be ashamed of themselves. By raising hosannas for President Dementia and Bush the Dumber, they 100% enabled the rise of their own Donald J. Trump.

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It’s ok to be locked in a bubble though sometimes. For example: I’m happy to admit that I don’t mind being locked in the bubbles known as “reality” and “decency.” I don’t go to insane asylums to talk to the people there, nor do I comb the dark web for conspiracy theories, lies and rumors. I also don’t go to North American Man Boy Love Association meetings or to Nazi conventions or anything like that either. I’m perfectly content to exclude all batshit crazy and disgustingly immoral people and ideas from my brain, because I enjoy my life here in “reality” and “decency.”

And as the bubble of “conservative views” has less and less overlap with the bubbles of “reality” or “decency” eventually everyone is going to have to decide which bubble they want to inhabit. It’s all well and good to be open to new ideas, but some ideas are so horrible/dangerous/incoherent that they really should be discarded immediately and the people who espouse them should be completely shunned from rational decent society and not engaged with at all.

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Ven bubble

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I’ve used TurnItIn. It gives a percentage rating based on similar phrases found on published documents. You can basically ignore any rating of 20% or less because it’s going to be just coincidental similarities. Anything less than 50% should be reviewed, but is still more likely to be coincidental than not.

Under no circumstances should it be used as a final arbiter as to whether someone has actually committed plagiarism.

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I ran a former UArizona president's dissertation through TurnItIn because I had a hard time believing that someone so apparently incurious could have written original work. There were a few passages flagged as similar, and she may have undercited in a few places, but nothing that would raise eyebrows in a college classroom. I'm sure my own dissertation has equivalent issues to Dr. Gay's.

I did have a few cases where TurnItIn showed a fairly low overall similarly index but there were copy-paste sections that absolutely needed sanctions.

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Not a mystery. Those kind of headlines about Black Harvard presidents excites the haters. It doesn't affect American's lives and yet VERY IMPORTANT NEWS that gets a lot of click, click, clicks.

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"Those kind of headlines about Black Harvard presidents excites the haters. It doesn't affect American's lives"

It affects Black Americans' lives ... very much

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3HZAoPJ2rDk

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0rbIVkM7MJ8

Part of the reason why the fascist "right" can drive these wedges is because those observations - where people are omitted, where their identities are erased - are overlooked.

And the fascist "right" knows that. They look to capitalize on it.

"There's never a *solution* for this. Racist whites just do this whenever they feel their positions of power are threatened, **and perceive that their sometimes reasonable white cousins and fraternity brothers are too weak and meek to stand up to them.**"

https://twitter.com/ElieNYC/status/1742963616079364407

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I read a little bit of the "irresponsible not to speculate" column of Peggy Noonan before the WSJ paywall cut me off -- what the actual F was it about? It was .... overwrought, which seems out of character for Ms. Noonan.

[Narrator: "Overwrought" is her whole schtick, you chump.]

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Pro tip to commenters out there. Long isn't the same as intelligent.

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Enjoying watching this guy's wife getting scrutinized. People in glass houses shouldn't get stoned while gandering at geeses.

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It's not just NYT, my news aggregators have been firehosing articles churned out at the National Review. It got so moist that I had to write to the editorial staff advocating for a name change to the "Claudine Gay Review". I doubt it will stick.

This is less an anti-black thing and more of a anti-CRT thing or just a way to keep the culture wars front and center. Plenty of white people are getting pulled down by this kind of nonsense. It takes little imagination to see that a random sampling of any academic will yield plagiarism results similar to Gay. The media, once again, is failing to report and just cranking out derivative opinion pieces. Gorsuch is just the first of many that will come up if the media is to do its job.

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As I understand it, the same genius Sugar Daddies who gave us the National Review gave us the Dartmouth Review, back in the day, which nurtured the journalistic giants Laura Ingraham and Dinesh D'Souza.

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Anti black is anti CRT.

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Nope. That's dogma.

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No, it’s anti black. Critical Race Theory is a thing specifically because it examines race relations between white people and black people. There’s a reason you have a bunch of white right wingers freaking out about it and making it a thing.

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Everyone bitches about the NYT and its slavish catering to the far-right (something it has ALWAYS done, btw). There are other outlets, people. "The Guardian" International edition (daily news plus investigative and has an environmental "desk" as well), "Pro-Publica"(investigative), "AP" (for the "just the facts" take), "The Intercept" (Lefty investigative stuff), and plenty of excellent news commentators like this site, Heather Cox Richardson, Beau of the Fifth Column...... NYT has a great Arts section (which will make you jealous that you don't live there) and a good Science section on Tuesdays. THAT'S IT.

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Hard no on The Intercept.

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Lots of us can pat our heads and rub our tummies at the same time, pal. I've read all the other 'outlets' you mention (by the way, if you mean the Associated Press, it's nearly as bad now as Pravda--the NYT--and WaPOOP, or haven't you noticed the AP's change of ownership and wild lurch to the fascist right? lol) and, like many Wonkette commenters, regularly observe and remark upon NYT's atrocities. While it has always whored itself to fascists, most notably Herr Hitler, its shamelessness and craven pandering now has reached an entire new level of shittitude. And its Arts section features ungodly poseur/assholes like Tommasini and (until recently) the EGREGIOUSLY dreadful Alistair Macaulay, whose blatant favoritism, pretentions, and pettiness made Hedda and Lolly look sweet by comparison.

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Seems like there's some backstory here with you and Anthony Tommasini .... juicy classical music critic gossip does not pop up every day. Does Wonkette have a private message function?

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The problem is: when the NYT prints something it becomes An Important Fact And Observation - which then gets quoted and cited.

The bullshit multiplies.

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Unfortunately true.

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