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:
As a french, I am not surprised people don’t understand the Charlie’s humor. It’s not just an offensive rag, but one of his goal is to actually do the blackest sort of humor.
It’s the newspaper for which nothing is sacred, in all sense of the term. It’s not for everyone, and I would prefer people to remember that Charlie Hebdo is about attacking everyone and everything, not just acceptable target.
Now, the question being, is it a good newspaper ? Well, the articles are good. The comics aren’t all that great, and they lost their very best caricaturist in the attentat. The one who did the controversial drawing is pretty much the bottom of the barrel to me. I still stand by the fact they should be authorized to do that and that their antics are a lot less bad than … about anything from the far right.
Also, context is importants. This drawing is a graphical depiction of one of the commonly mocked by Charlie Hebdo line of though, AKA immigrants are all the same. I can think that better done parody would make the point easier to see, but the removal of all context from the picture is problematic.
Je suis Charlie, and not just when they do thing that are easy to agree with.
Sleep well, Rickman. You drink at Christopher Lee’s table now.
@mockingbird – Hoping for all the best for you. Please keep us posted.
Re: plagiarism, I’m actually fine with not adding anything new to the total quantity of manosphere crap. Let’s keep it constant. Let them all just keep re-circulating and ripping off the same tired old ideas. Let them turn into parrots, unable to formulate a single original thought. Let their readers get bored with reading the same stale passages over and over again. It just goes to show that there’s no intellectual vigor behind the movement.
@dhag – Great photos. Looks like you’re having a wonderful time! I’m seeing some cute penguins myself this evening (it’s Antarctica Night at my kids’ preschool and they’re going to be doing a penguin dance).
mockingbird – Best wishes and kitten snuggles. Please keep us updated on your condition.
Late to the Rome party but have to share.
Second the Mike Duncan recommendation and appreciate the other reading rec.
I’ve always liked the line (can’t remember where from, and probably paraphrasing) that “There are 1001 reasons why Rome fell and most of them are true.”
Though my particular favorite as the biggest reason was that once Rome was so large and so openly a military dictatorship it became impossible to both keep large well-led armies on all of the frontiers and avoid frequent coups and civil wars. Anyone leading an army large enough to effectively defend the borders had a pretty good shot at making himself emperor, so quite often they took their shot.
*sigh* Looked at my Instagram feed this morning, saw Alan Rickman’s face all over it, and went, “Oh, shit.” Here’s some penguins beng jerks to help us all feel better.
http://i.imgur.com/CiXJjXc.gif
http://a.fod4.com/misc/Penguin%20Cross%20Sea%20Lion.gif
http://i.imgur.com/PF5ji.gif
@Buttercup Q. Skullpants
Yay for penguins!
While I am still thinking of the penguins, I have just found out we will be visiting a giant husky farm with 500 huskies (including many puppies) and we’ll be going on a 35 minute husky sled ride. So that’s all I can think about right now. :p
Funny how every vacation ever turns into me desperately chasing cute animals around.
I don’t know who Charles Dance is but I’ll miss McKellen when he goes. Though I think that the celebrity death that will most affect me will be Patrick Stewart.
That puts a happy image in my mind. Thanks EJ.
http://data.whicdn.com/images/68462232/large.gif
Charles Dance, however, knows exactly who you are.
The last thing I watched Charles Dance in was that And Then There Were None adaption I think was for the BBC? (I’m not going to mention the original book’s title.)
He was really good in it, but one thing bugged me about the whole thing: I don’t know how much they changed for the adaption, but how on Earth could the great Agatha Christie have written something so.. crap?
(Sorry, had to get the frustration off my chest somehow. It just… wasn’t for me.)
Again, Charles Dance is great though!
Best wishes, Mockingbird.
(I just found out Brian Bedford also passed away. Amongst other things, he was the voice of Disney’s Robin Hood. The fox.)
This has been a hard week.
@Dhag85
There’s absolutely nothing wrong with desperately chasing cute animals around, whether it’s on vacation or the opportunity comes along during regular day to day life.
Seeing as I do that myself and all, and am thoroughly against processionals of shame be they accompanied by bell-ringing stone-faced matrons chanting “Shame. Shame. Shame.” or not.
Time to go squeeeee! over baskets of baby otters, piles of squishy-faced puppies, and rambunctious herds of kittens. 🙂 Maybe a bunch of baby goats playing “king/queen of the mountain” with the ‘mountain’ being people/bales of hay/random barnyard pals with resigned expressions/trees/a roof.
Pagan Rome was fairly patriarchal and misogynistic without Christianity and not much changed. Christianity became popular for a number of different reasons, but partly it happened because churches were better at providing services to poor people than Pagan temples and the government. Julian the Apostate recognized that as a flaw in traditional Paganism and tried to institutionalize charity and welfare as Pagan religious duties.
The Western empire was very weak and couldn’t even enforce religious uniformity.
Adding Idris Elba to the protective bubble we need to put the cool British men in.
Dance was Tywin Lannister in Game of Thrones. He was also one of the people in the MGTOW colony in Alien 3.
To follow up on my earlier comment where I wondered if AVFM will give Talukdar, who Elam loves, the same heave-ho he gave Hembling, who he ceased to adore. It looks like he took down the Talukdar article unless I missed it somehow and am dreaming a happy dream. I hope Elam has contacted you David to thank you for bringing that to his attention.
*clicks the article*
The first fucking line. The first fucking words out of this writer’s keyboard was to immediately label this man “mentally unstable”.
(The gif seemed appropriate considering the sad, sad news of his passing. Rest in peace, you beautiful, beautiful human being.)
Also, sending out good wishes into the world for you Mockingbird. I only apologize I can’t do much more than that.
It’s actually very much stuck to this day. I’ve been doing a little bit of research into how to traditionally celebrate pagan holidays, and most places I looked at said that Yule especially embodies charity and doing good for your fellow hoomans.
@Ohlmann
Oh God. Where the hell do I start?
I’m certainly surprised- surprised that someone could think mocking a dead child is ever acceptable.
I believe that what the magazine did was disgusting. I don’t give a damn whether it was ‘satire’ or not, I think it was a particularly nasty, offensive, disgusting thing to do. I don’t care how good the reporting and the articles are, and I don’t care one jot about the artistic quality of the cartoons.
I never once said they should not be allowed to do that. Never said that once. I am not in any way saying we should deprive them of free speech. What I am doing is saying that it was terrible to use their free speech in that way. The right to free speech does not mean that saying anything that comes to mind is right. It just means we have the freedom to say it or display it if we like.
The ‘goal’ of the magazine is irrelevant. If the goal is to set out to offend everyone and anyone that is a bad goal to have. I will defend their right to do this, but the ‘goal’ is stupid.
The fact that the magazine mocks everyone, not just one or two groups of people, is not a defence for what they published. If the magazine mocks everyone, that is still absolutely no defence for what they did. If I stood up at a film ceremony and made fun of all the directors during my presenting stint, that is fine. It would never automatically justify any comment I could make. I only have the right to say it, not the right to not be met with disgust, and it doesn’t make jokes that sound reprehensible not so.
“The one who did the controversial drawing is pretty much the bottom of the barrel to me.”
Because of the artistic quality? Really?
As feminists and fans of this website, we CANNOT deride Roosh V making his ‘rape legal on private property’ article and calling it ‘satire,’ if we then turn around and excuse Charlie Hebdo from MOCKING A DEAD CHILD to make a ‘satirical’ point.
The mocking of a real life, living not that long ago, dead child is NEVER alright.
And no, really, really don’t imply this is because of some form of cultural differences. This is about fucking HUMAN differences.
Dhag, your vacations sound kind of like my vacations!
There’s nothing wrong with chasing cute and fluffy (or feathery, or scaley, or slimy) animals around.
Have fun on the sled ride! May the dogs be happy, healthy, and want to run-run-run. 🙂
Condolences and hugs for all you all with the tough times, too. 🙁
Important for any discussion about the “fall” of the Roman Empire (which many historians describe more as a “transformation” or “disintegration” nowadays anyway) is Alexander Demandt’s 1984 list of every reason ever given for it: https://web.archive.org/web/20151011002723/https://www.utexas.edu/courses/rome/210reasons.html
Personally, I think that the important factors are Caracalla’s extension of the franchise to all natural-born inhabitants of the empire, which removed a lot of its ability to keep manpower reserves full with second-class citizens eager to become first-class; the conquest of all traditionally profitable territory around it starving the engine of endless war that fed the empire with land, loot, and slaves; the diplomatic and economic pressure that the empire exerted on its neighbors creating enemies in its own image that wanted to be Rome rather than just fight it; and the slow consolidation of wealth and power into family clans that looked after themselves and not the empire. And that’s not even comprehensive!
As much as Christianity is responsible for a lot of the “bad” things in history, I’ve never seen any convincing argument that it’s responsible for the fall of Rome (if that can even be considered a bad thing), although I’ve seen plenty of otherwise good historians embarrass themselves trying.
The image that came to mind for me was Pink sumo-wrestling Uncle Sam from the Raise Your Glass video.
@nparker
Seconding basically all of that. Saying that mocking everyone absolves them from scrutiny is similar to the idea that presenting both sides of any given argument with equal weight is “balanced.” Distributing an equal layer of shit over everyone doesn’t mean that you’re not shitting on people that don’t deserve it.
@ dlouwe
“Distributing an equal layer of shit over everyone doesn’t mean that you’re not shitting on people that don’t deserve it.”
I think this would be my title if my comment was an article!
I hope my anger didn’t overshadow the points I was making. I was just really furious that I had to go through those points in the first place- I really shouldn’t have had to, especially not here.
Also going to say the ‘balanced’ argument is a good point.
@nparker
I would also like to add that if your “satire” is 100% indistinguishable from what actual 4chan nazis say and believe, then why the hell should anyone give you the benefit of the doubt. Behave like a nazi and I will assume you’re a nazi. Can someone give Charlie Hebdo a link to the wikipedia article on satire?