UPDATE: The plagiarised posts on AVFM have been taken down without explanation or apology; see my post here for more details and perhaps a little schadenfreude.
UPDATE 2: Elam has belatedly posted an acknowledgement of (some of) the plagiarism. Then he called me fat. See my take here.
You may remember Amartya Talukdar, the marital rape legalization advocate and Holocaust denier who is also a regular contributor to A Voice for Men.
Yesterday, he graced us all with a post on AVFM featuring the ominous title Feminism and Destruction of Humanity.
Not “Feminism and the Destruction of Humanity,” mind you, but “Feminism and Destruction of Humanity.” His previous post for AVFM was titled “Why Capitalists Are Playing Footsie With Feminist.” Not “With Feminists,” or “With Feminism” but “With Feminist.”
AVFM has 19 people on its masthead. It has a “managing editor,” an “assistant managing editor,” and a just plain “editor.” It has three other ostensible “editors” and three more people who are “news directors” of various sorts.
Apparently none of these people — nor anyone else on AVFM’s “staff” — bothers to read posts or their headlines before they go up on the site.
The post is full of sentences that are appalling both in what they say and in how they are written.
Here are some of my favorites:
Feminism not only ascendance in the western world but was exported to other countries through the UN, CEDAW and massive funding.
The Feminist also abhor religion and promote lesbian subculture.
It’s obvious that high divorce rates, lower birth rates and gay subcultures were instrumental in downfall of Rome. It will similarly lead to downfall of modern human civilization under the grip of Feminism.
Thing is, only portions of Talukdar’s post are grammatically disastrous. The first half is a competently written, if rather dull, discussion of Malthusianism and its supposed implications for the contemporary world. Other sections, while sort of loopy in their arguments, are also more or less grammatically correct.
Suspicious, I cut and pasted Talukdar’s post into an online plagiarism checker and, well, let’s just say that the results were about as shocking as an M Night Shyamalan “twist ending.”
Most of the post is plagiarised word-for-word from an assortment of texts easily found online.
In most cases, Talukdar didn’t even bother to alter the wording even a little bit; he basically cut and pasted various passages together from these sources, added a few misshapen sentences of his own, and put his name at the top.
Here’s the opening of Talukdar’s post:
Thomas Malthus (1766-1834) postulated in his Essay on the Principles of Population (1798), that food production, limited by the land available, can only grow at an arithmetic rate (1,2,3,4,5…), while population growth tends to grow at a geometric rate (2,4,8,16,32…).
Here’s the original passage, from some lecture notes someone put online:
Malthus postulated in his Essay on the Principles of Population (1798), that food production, limited by the land available, can only grow at an arithmetic rate (1,2,3,4,5…), while population growth tends to grow at a geometric rate (2,4,8,16,32…).
The only change Talukdar made was to add Malthus’ first name and the dates of his birth and death.
Talukdar’s post continues:
These trends, he argued, would result in a point at which a society experiences war, poverty, and famine as the need for food surpasses its availability.
That sentence came, literally word for word, from a page on Neo-Malthusian Theory put online to supplement a college course.
These trends, he argued, would result in a point at which a society experiences war, poverty, and famine as the need for food surpasses its availability.
Talukdar then moved on from Malthus to The Population Bomb:
The Population Bomb was written by Stanford University Professor Paul R. Ehrlich in 1968. It warned of the mass starvation of humans in the 1970s and 1980s due to overpopulation, as well as other major societal upheavals, and advocated immediate action to limit population growth.
Ta da! He got all that from Wikipedia.
The Population Bomb is a best-selling book written by Stanford University Professor Paul R. Ehrlich and his wife, Anne Ehrlich (who was uncredited), in 1968.[1][2] It warned of the mass starvation of humans in the 1970s and 1980s due to overpopulation, as well as other major societal upheavals, and advocated immediate action to limit population growth.
I think you’ve got the idea here.
Other cut-and-pasted sources for “Talukdar’s” post include pieces in The Economist and Forbes; a somewhat loopy post about Feminism and the Destruction of the Nuclear Family on on a site called The Radical Conservative; an op-ed on an Indian site called The Daily O, which itself seems to have been partly plagiarised from an article from The Weekly Standard that someone posted on FreeRepublic; something called the Palmetto Family Council; and an article on the fall of Rome on a site run by the United Church of God.
Even Talukdar’s sentence blaming the fall of Rome on “high divorce rates, lower birth rates and gay subcultures” turns out to have been half-plagiarised.
And there may be more; I used the free version of the plagiarism checker, which doesn’t check each and every sentence.
The obvious next question is: What about his earlier articles?
Well, I ran “Why Capitalists Are Playing Footsie With Feminist” through the plagiarism checker as well, and, yep, it’s heavily plagiarised too.
Sources for that Talukdar (Not-so) Original include: Wikipedia; Wikipedia; a post on Quora that seems to have been “borrowed” from an old version of a Wikipedia article; a giant chunk of the same Daily O article he also plagiarised in “Feminism and Destruction of Humanity”; Europa.eu; the Green Global Foundation Journal; Foreign Affairs; and (somewhat ironically) a piece by socialist feminist theorist Nancy Fraser in The Guardian.
I’m not going to bother to check any of his others.
So the question now is whether this evidence of massive and obvious plagiarism lead AVFM to finally show Talukdar the door?
I honestly don’t know. After all, they kept publishing him after I presented them with clear evidence he was a Holocaust denier, so what’s a little plagiarism between friends?
By the way, here’s the Mr. Bean skit I got the screenshot above from:
ETHICS!
And this is a surprise because…. Why exactly? Did you expect MRA types to be capable of original thought? That’s sooo adorable!
OMG you had to pick my favorite Mr Bean sketch!!
Also, FYI, the fall of Rome had a hell of a lot more to do with lead poisoning than the decadence of Roman women.
If a writer on a feminist site posted a plagiarized article, there’d be no end of the griping from MRAs. They’d post an endless string of foul responses and call the author every name they know.
@Moocow:
I always thought that the Germans had something to do with it too.
@MexicanHotChocolate:
Don’t they anyway?
Can I just say that the idea of a Feminist playing footsie with an anthropomorphic version of Capitalism sounds hilarious?
Especially since most Feminists tend to frown on capitalism because it tends to treat minorities like shit, protect companies over people, and it encourages people to become like Mr. Pancake Mantrum (The Douche Formerly Known as Kyle)?
Hell, they did that to journalists who dared say that Return of Kings was an MRA site, when they’re so obviously PUAs thank-you-very-much.
Honestly though, they complain about “context” and “lies” and all that other bullshit all the time anyways. It wouldn’t be a surprise that they’d accuse someone of plagiarism.
It’d be a surprise if they were right.
EDIT: Ninja’d by EJ.
At least Talukdar isn’t a grammar nazi?
I’d be shocked if AVFM cared at all about Amartya Talukdar’s plagiarism.
And hey, he didn’t steal everything.
This is Talukdar’s version:
And this is Wikipedia’s version:
Anne Ehrlich’s contribution has disappeared.
Of course, Paul Elam would have a stroke if a previously uncredited woman were given credit on the AVFM website. Misandry!
This just means they can fire him without having to mention the Nazi stuff.
Rule of thumb: any historian who blames the fall of the Roman Empire on one thing is probably pushing a specific agenda opposing said thing. Germanic invaders get kill credit for actually deposing the last Western Emperor, but there’s a ton of factors that went in to letting them do that. Honestly they were probably less decadent and lead poisoned when the fall really started to gain momentum than they were at the height of Imperial power.
An empire that gets too big and has many enemies tends to get chipped away at until the smaller pieces are absorbed by their invading foes.
Then there’s also plagues-a-plenty to worry about. So. Much. Plagues.
That’s two of the reasons, yes. They also had a lot of civil wars, partially because they never did set up a succession protocol, quite a few instances of short-lived emperors leading to succession crises at inconvenient times, and a bizarrely terrible system of government that somehow managed to conquer most of that territory before realizing that governmental public works projects should probably be funded by taxes. Not that they didn’t collect taxes; they just weren’t spent on the public works projects. Elected officials paid for them out of pocket.
I will get to see penguins in a few hours. 🙂 So happy.
:DDDD
@guy:
At the risk of further derailing into a deeply interesting topic: in your opinion as someone who seems to know something more about the topic than the rest of us, was the eventual collapse of the Western Empire inevitable given the circumstances of its rise and of its social characteristics, or was it something that could have been avoided had events played out differently?
@dhag85:
Penguins are almost the very best animals there are. This is a scientific fact. Enjoy them!
I’ll post pictures!
Also, at the time of the fall of the roman empires, Roma used almost only mercenaries as army. That can’t end well.
Executing competent generals who felt out of political favor didn’t help either. The general who repelled Attila fell that way, if memory serve me well.
In what ways were Romans less decadent when the Roman Empire was declining? (I’m not trying to be a manosphere douche. I’m genuinely interested in your answer.)
Right wing bloggers tend to blame all sorts of “liberal” stuff for Rome’s fall, like “broken families” for example, based on conjectures and not serious study.
When discussing the fall of the Roman Empire it’s worth considering what we mean by that term. Although the Western part of the Empire was pretty much stuffed by the fifth century it remained strong in the East for nearly a millennium.
It perhaps made sense to split the empire when it just became too big to handle from one central location. The Western part then became victim to all sorts of factors, perhaps the key factors were the willingness to sell the leadership to the highest bidder or allowing the Western Empire to become a series of fiefdoms to be ruled by whichever General had the support of his own troops in any given area.
The ‘traditional’ model of Imperium had just followed the money to the more prosperous Eastern part. The Byzantine empire carried on just fine and argubaly existed in reality if not name until the rise of the Ottoman Empire.
The Gibbons interpretation of the ‘collapse’ reflects a very west-centric view of what the Roman Empire actually was.
@dhag85
Can’t wait to see the penguin pix! Have fun!
I’m going to take the opportunity to share a link to my buddy Mike Duncan’s award-winning podcast:
http://thehistoryofrome.typepad.com/
Mike is one of the best historical interpreters I’ve ever run across–and he has a lovely sense of comic timing. Here’s a video of his, on another historical topic:
O/T but related to the site and a call back to a previous post (TW for potential ablism):
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/jan/13/louisiana-theater-fatal-shooting-trainwreck-journal-released-john-houser-dylann-roof
Apologies if it’s already been mentioned, haven’t read through comments. Browsing the web while starting a fire. Well, while enjoying the fire I’ve started.
Paradoxy:
I’m imagining one of those terrible political cartoons, where everything is labelled and Lady Liberty is crying again.
«sees comments re: impending penguins and the Roman empire»
I love this comments section.
Oh! I saw something that may interest some of you guys.
«scurries off w/o posting b/c she’s on her RAM-starved lower end Kindle»
Is this a good moment to mention Professor Beard of Cambridge University? On the grounds that not only is she a very highly respected expert on Roman history, she’s also particularly loathed by manospherians and has addressed their pathetically tiny-minded online harassment of her.