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:
Hitler is pretty popular among right wing nationalists in India. Especially people who like the caste system.
Not Alan Rickman. 🙁
OK, before I get to the penguins, my dad sent me a picture of his cat this morning:
http://i374.photobucket.com/albums/oo188/dhag85/dd4f2f73-7c67-4b97-a9de-98b3d7130062_zps7xvo0drn.jpg
Her weirdness made me miss my own feline weirdos. 🙂
http://i374.photobucket.com/albums/oo188/dhag85/966_zpsmbs0pvbj.jpg
http://i374.photobucket.com/albums/oo188/dhag85/image-ff0427b502061339292f628d337dc0fd5d83c2308597a806cf4fe70d1bf05826-V_zpsdubk0jgi.jpg
http://i374.photobucket.com/albums/oo188/dhag85/image-a8981c3135a1232c274ccddeb3a7a8aaf08e38869f50c5a090e26db26f77ddba-V_zpskpftloct.jpg
Wishing you all of the best, Mockingbird. Also, you are well liked. Also also, you have every right to to feel however you feel about this, and anyone who rolls their eyes at you for your desire to express those feelings is a doucheface.
People talking about the Eastern Empire. I am totally going to shamelessly promote a fun YouTube history series. This is the first video about Justinian and Theodora.
https://youtu.be/H_2E0RxVHH4
Also, long time no comment. Hello.
@ Mockingbird – best of luck with your consultation. I hope it’s good news, or at least something manageable.
Except, the lecture he plagiarized clearly states that societies fail when population outstrips food production… so lower birth rates = A Good Thing according to his chosen supporting evidence.
Yet, despite everything about war, famine, pestilence, death, etc… he still pins everything on Teh Gays and divorce.
Rule number 1 of plagiarism – it doesn’t work as a means to make yourself look smarter than you are, if you fail at basic reading comprehension when writing up your conclusion.
Some penguins:
http://i374.photobucket.com/albums/oo188/dhag85/b7aee310-0f1a-4786-81ba-5dc6d025e85f_zpsupmmudrl.jpg
http://i374.photobucket.com/albums/oo188/dhag85/20160114_132402_zpsq3avydpp.jpg
http://i374.photobucket.com/albums/oo188/dhag85/20160114_132327_zpsypy9nmkl.jpg
http://i374.photobucket.com/albums/oo188/dhag85/20160114_132332_zpsk3x1r6zu.jpg
@maghaven –
It was a slow game.
The deviousness of those degenerate liberals knows no bounds. /s
@VictoriousParasol @Alan @EJ @opposablethumbs @dhag @AltoFronto @Viscaria – Thanks 😀
This sucks.
I don’t want to blow what is very likely no big deal (that is, just a painful and annoying thing that can pretty easily be remedied) so I haven’t been talking about it IRL, but I keep randomly crying when I think about my husband as a widower (stream of consciousness worries: What will my ex do? He barely has any contact with our two oldest and my husband’s done the bulk of the ‘dad-ing’ for most of their lives – he left before my middle was one year old – and we’ve kept things loose with custody, etc – he sees them whenever he’s in town and would like to, he hasn’t paid full child support in years or at all in months, but we have no intention of pressing things. If I die, will he let my husband raise them? He’s said that he wants to. Will our youngest have minimal contact with her sisters? Will he be OK? He’s had a history of depression…), about its impacts on our older children, about our youngest potentially not remembering me, and (because we’re in the US) about the potential financial fallout. It’d be a nice extra kick in the teeth to be a wifeless, motherless, and with some hefty medical debt. I had life insurance for like 100k through his employer, but companies have just shifted and I haven’t yet had the new physical so I’m almost certain there’s nothing now.
But there’s exactly zero to be done about it now while I wait for tests and their results.
It’s not a bad day out, so I’ll clean out the chicken coop, see if I can haul over some wood that the neighbor’s offered us, and engage in other domesticity. Keeping busy’s the best medicine for this kind of thing.
Thanks for the space to vent.
I know this isn’t particularly the time or place for it, but it’s appreciated.
There were seels right next to the penguins. I love seels, but these seels were booooooriiiiing. My phone is not able to take exciting photos of tiny seel heads in the distance. :p
However, I did fall in love with a very cuddly thornback ray:
http://i374.photobucket.com/albums/oo188/dhag85/e03b1820-52ed-4a41-83fc-c4964bdbcdfc_zpslwjna7eu.jpg
Tastefully failed picture of an eel:
http://i374.photobucket.com/albums/oo188/dhag85/20160114_124916_zpswfpb1ca9.jpg
Invisible nightmare fish:
http://i374.photobucket.com/albums/oo188/dhag85/20160114_125033_zps1l9m9quh.jpg
I think I love fish now. The cods were adorable. I had a predictably emotional response to being close to animals. :p Dunno what’s wrong with me, but I had a moment where I had to tell myself “okay, I can’t let anyone see me crying because of how pretty this wolf fish is, get it together!”
There was also an unknown birb who probably didn’t even belong there:
http://i374.photobucket.com/albums/oo188/dhag85/a3730b6d-0caf-40d0-81b1-50c167663813_zpsrhi6ekyy.jpg
Amazing city of Ålesund, from the Fjellstua terrace:
http://i374.photobucket.com/albums/oo188/dhag85/20160114_140452_zpsozodcipm.jpg
I also found out 6 bottles of Corona cost about $25 here. But other than that, things are great. 🙂
Rape apologia and Holocaust denial are one thing, but PLAGIARISM?! *faints*
@ guy
So you did! 🙂
@ Moggie
Oh God, those political cartoons. I had to see so many in history classes. I think it counts as a ‘if you have to explain the joke, its not actually funny.’
Argh, just as we’re barely getting over the loss of David Bowie, news breaks that Alan Rickman has now passed on as well. FUCK YOU TOO, DEATH. 🙁
Every time I engage in discussion with an MRA (which I try to avoid), everything they say is cut and pasted. They always discuss the same stupid talking points with the same “statistics” that they take completely out of context. The other day, this guy told me not to assume anything about him. He went on to say things that, not kidding, I had literally predicted in my head what he would say.
It is like a broken record. Talking points:
-Custody issues (completely ignore the role that women have taken for millenia as primary caregivers)
-The draft (ignore the fact that this hasn’t been relevant since the 70s and the fact that women have been fighting to have combat roles. One guy brought up feminists from WORLD WAR ONE – was feminism even a thing then?)
-Talk about male victims of sexual assault and domestic violence (ignore that services actually are provided to male victims and completely ignore the nuances that are involved in all of the issues)
-Talk about how men should be able to have more control over their own “reproductive rights” (i.e., they should be able to have unprotected sex without consequences, because if a woman gets pregnant, they should be able to just walk away with no responsibility for the child)
-Blame feminism for not addressing all of the needs of men, claiming that feminism would if it were truly “egalitarian” (although feminism does in fact address a lot of these issues, if they were bothering to listen)
What else am I missing? I am trying to get better at just ignoring the trolls, but it is still difficult for me. The other day, an MRA troll had the arrogance to tell me, after I had talked about my professional experience working at a DV counseling center, that domestic violence agencies were biased against men. And this was a young guy! I don’t get it.
How can the Metatron die? I’m not having it!
@mockingbird
Hoping for the best!
We change subjects so quickly here, and everyone is so nice I don’t think the “time and place” could be a problem.
You mean like this?
http://www.theonion.com/graphic/oregon-wildstrife-refuge-52144
yeah they’re pretty ridiculous but on the bright side its the oinion so its all satire. real satire,not ‘we got caught saying something horrible so we’re going try and excuse out horribleness by saying it was just satire’ satire.
Mockingbird: Best of luck to you, hope everything works out well. My wife’s had to deal with those cysts as well; very much not fun.
Really sad about Alan Rickman now. I can’t really express my feelings right now, so I won’t try. Two inspirations gone recently. Death is never fair.
He was special to so many, across multiple generations. I only saw him as Snape, but he holds much meaning for me.
Also, on the topic of satire that is actually indefensible shit, http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/charlie-hebdo-alan-kurdi-cartoon-1.3403085.
So we are supposed to mourn the journalists who died, but the magazine is allowed to mock any deaths they like in the most insensitive and heartless way? I’m kind of glad I never said ‘Je Suis Charlie’ in public.
@nparker
Didn’t they also have a cartoon about girls who were kidnapped by Boko Haram, in which the girls all came back pregnant and demanding welfare? Yeah, I don’t suis Charlie either. So gross.
Wasn’t it only about a year ago or maybe two that AVFM fired John Hembling (John the Other) for plagiarism? Weren’t there several strong statements about how AVFM would immediately fire anybody who plagiarized?
Of course in Hembling’s case AVFM was looking for an excuse and in Talukdar’s case they aren’t. So let’s see how they apply their strict anti-plagiarism policy.
I hadn’t heard about that actually. Well, I think I recall something about it, but not much in any case.
Of course, no one is disagreeing the shootings were sickening, but the way some people talk about them, they somehow have the impression that it is more than just an offensive rag, but it isn’t.
Clarification: the way people talk about the magazine.
David Bowie raped a 13 year old girl so in my opinion he can get bent and I feel nothing but contempt for him….but I cannot believe Alan Rickman died. THAT is what I am sad about.
Rickman too 🙁
If the universe take Ian McKellen or Charles Dance too, I don’t know what I’ll do!