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:
Looks like someone at AVfM reads WHTM because this plagiarized patchwork masterpiece has been taken down without explanation.
@ brooked
Either they are so incompetent that they have to rely on a website dedicated to mocking them to have any sort of journalistic standards of their own, or they are trying to cover their tracks. Either way, they don’t exactly scream ‘professional’!
Julian is my favorite point of divergence for alternate history speculation. The world could be very different today if he hadn’t invaded Parthia for no good reason, without any real plan, then rushed out without his armor to help drive off a raid on his camp and taken a lucky spear toss to the side. The funny thing about his “persecution” of the Christians, is that the most effective policy was probably declaring strict religious toleration. Flipped Imperial policy from enforcing orthodoxy on early Christians to threatening to bring the hammer down if they didn’t play nice with sects they considered heretical.
Double points for being one of the Emperors who got the throne by being such a politically disinterested academic that while the rest of the family were busy murdering each other, no one bothered to kill him. “Damn, we need a male relative of the Emperor, hmmm, Oh!, well go pull Julian/Cladius out of his study.”
To chime in on the Charlie Hebdo discussion:
I read that cartoon not as mocking the kid, but as mocking media and public discussion about refugees – swinging, in the blink of an eye, from the paternalism of “oooh, they are innocent kids, we need to help them” to the aggressive racism of “they rape our women”. I still find it crude and distasteful (and a better cartoonist would probably have been able to make the point both in a more subtle and clearer way), but I didn’t think it mocked Aylan rather than presented an analysis of public discourse with which I agree. I might be too benevolent in that interpretation.
Anyway, my favourite definition of satire comes from Lisa Politt, a veteran comedian and owner of a famous club in Hamburg, who commented on Tucholsky’s famous saying that Satire is allowed to do anything (which, as usual, most people read as “I can make racist jokes”, certainly not what Tucholsky had in mind):
“Satire is actually not allowed to do anything. It shouldn’t point its weapons down. That’s not satire, that’s misanthropy.”
Charlie Hebdo has a long history of being very actively involved in anti-racism campaigning etc. and have had a lot of tributes and thanks from anti-racist campaigners in France over the years. The butt of the joke is always the Front National, Le Pen, the white anti-immigration crowd etc. (e.g. in the Boko Haram captives cartoon) and this is well known to the audience they’re addressing. BUT I do agree that the jokes sure as hell don’t travel well – or at all – and I certainly don’t like them all (Or get them all. Not that that’s the point, but fwiw).
Exhibit A: Julius Caesar himself, the man who started the process of turning the Republic into an Empire.
I’ve long believed that one of the earlier triggers here was just the sheer size. As noted before, Roman armies were mostly mercenaries. The Roman Republic had no standing army aside from what was basically the city police force. Instead a consul would get handed money, and told to go out and recruit men on his way to the border. Generally this would start right after the spring planting, because that’s one of the two times of the year when farmers need all hands available.
Once the Republic became large enough that people couldn’t march out to the border, fight, and get back before the fall harvest (the other of the two times of the year when all hands are needed), the populace became a lot less supportive of the military, and the men volunteering became a lot less happy.
Throw in a personable general like Julius Caesar, the lengthy time it took to get to Gaul, and the fact that Caesar ate with his men and became friends with them, and by the time he got back to Rome his men were more loyal to him than to Rome.
Unfortunately for him, fixing the ‘inefficiencies’ that Caesar saw didn’t fix the actual problems, and the concentration of power he helped start meant weakening the brakes on society that kept people from becoming dictators and ruining things. There’s a reason most modern political systems are deliberately built to make it difficult for any one person to make major changes.
…
With regards to Charlie Hebdo, from what was explained to me before, the point of many of the cartoons isn’t to show what they believe, it’s to make public and open the results of the dog whistles used by their opponents. (Like the infamous ‘monkey’ one.) Some of them are disgusting, yes, and they’re supposed to be, because that is the sort of thing that will happen if people like Le Pen actually get power.
@ Bernardo Soares
I’d say you can’t have one without the other. Mocking the media’s take on refugees was done BY mocking Aylan. One was, as I see it, instrumental in mocking the other. I think too that using a dead child in that way is utterly inexcusable no matter what it was used to do- no comedy should include a joke like that about a child that once actually existed.
I also saw a lot of illogical thinking and ignorance in how Ohlmann argued his points, because its the sort of thinking that is severely looked down upon here. (and rightfully so)
EDIT: I didn’t mean that as an ‘appeal to popularity,’ more that the type of reasoning is both mocked and seen as unwelcome here.)
All that discussion about the fall of Rome makes me want to play Total War: Attila. Does anyone have any experience with this one? Seeing as the Total War games can be great, but have equal potential to be horrible bugfests requiring tons of extra payable DLC to fix, I’m reluctant to just buy it even in a sale.
They are still making a satirical point. It still mocks a dead child. Whether they are using it against racists is immaterial, they are partaking in something that is utterly shocking. I am not going to excuse it because it satires.
@dhag:
In honor of the mythology of this blog, I feel the need to respond to your photos as follows:
WHORES! Whores whores whores whores whores whores WHORES!!!
How dare you pollute our tender eyes with this filth!
We now return you to the Roman Empire, Alan Rickman, and the ethics of satire.
That’s a good point. However, I was equally appalled at the media depiction of Aylan’s photo at the time, which I found exploitative (and at least in German media, I read some discussions about whether it was ethical to print it) and I’m wary of the same outlets now acting morally outraged at Charlie Hebdo for the cartoon.
It seems to me that Charlie Hebdo (and other, similar satirical magazines) basically take things that mass media have already pulled through a grinder of exploitation and crank that exploitative lever up to hold a mirror up to the media. Which doesn’t excuse anything – these satirical magazines constantly balannce the line between criticism and cynicism, and sometimes they fall over.
TL;DR
“Feminism bad blah blah blah fart”
In all fairness, even Mr. Bean could write stuff that is 100x wittier, less shitty, and not plagiarized.
MRAs suck at everything and prove to be more incompetent than Mr. Bean, only they’re not funny and lack any of the charm the big goofball has.
Has anyone seen this?
http://mic.com/articles/132604/people-are-accusing-emma-watson-of-exploiting-alan-rickman-s-death-by-quoting-alan-rickman#.WRoGXNjcb
Because we can’t let the world mourn when there are WOMEN TO SHAME.
I agree with the assertion that the media in some cases were rather exploitative with the photo. Not all, though- I think definitely needed have been printed.
@Jenora Feuer
and Caesar wasn’t even the first to march an army on Rome, install himself into power and re-write the political order. Sulla just did it, then retired to drink and fuck himself to death instead of try to hold onto power.
@ jenora
Indeed, also don’t forget that Julius also ‘de-nationalised’ a lot of public land, when he then divvied up amongst his legionaries. That gets you a lot of popularity with guys who have ready access to swords.
One of my favourite things about the Republic was that towards the end, a lot of the Plebian class were cash rich whereas the Patricians were struggling financially. The idea of genteel poverty versus ‘new money’ and the class issues arising is nothing new. There was also some controversy when aristocrats sought adoption into Plebian families, albeit for political reasons (eligibility to be a plebeian tribune which was quite a powerful post)
Love all this.
A minor point in the grand scheme of things perhaps, but the poor drowned boy’s name is *Alan* Kurdi. That’s one of the reasons his horrible fate resonated even more strongly with me.
Sorry to seem nitpicky but it just seems a bit more respectful to get it right.
The late republic/early imperial army wasn’t mostly mercenaries; it was a professional military with lengthy enlistment terms. However, as previously mentioned the Republic and thus to a lesser extent the Empire was by modern standards completely incompetent and nonfunctional. One of the big flashpoints- and this led to quite a few people conquering Rome by strength of arms before Caesar made it stick- was retirement benefits. Soldiers were supposed to be issued land allotments once they retired. But the Senate had to actually specifically assign land for this purpose, and it was massively corrupt and senators were illegally privately using the land and didn’t want to give it up.
Another problem is that once Rome set up a professional military, they forgot to actually have the central government pay them. I forget if they at least theoretically funded the base salary, but a large part of the soldiers’ pay was gifts from the general out of his own funds or loot. So the general was the guy who led and paid them and the Senate was the organization that cheated them on their retirement benefits. Then a bunch of complicated legal shenanigans meant Caesar was ordered to report to Rome to face criminal charges before a court of his political opponents, who had successfully negated his efforts to be immune to prosecution*, and the soldiers sided with the person you’d expect.
However, I usually put the Republic becoming completely dysfunctional at around the time of the Gracchi brothers, reformist plebian tribunes in 120-110ish BCE, one of whom got openly murdered and another of whom committed suicide to avoid being openly murdered. The persons of the tribunes were sancrosact and harming them or interfering with their duties in any way was a capital offense. Their deaths heralded a long period of open bloodshed in the streets for political gain.
Quite a few Emperors, especially early on, did manage to keep substantial loyal defensive forces in place. It’s hard to say exactly why some managed it, aside from Augustus being so wildly popular he once had to talk an angry mob into giving him less power than they wanted to**, but it was particularly difficult when an Emperor died with no clear heir.
*As proconsul, he couldn’t be prosecuted in Gaul but that did not apply in Rome itself. A consul would be immune to prosecution in Rome, but his opponents in the Senate prevented him from running for consul in absentina. The charges were almost certainly true and could almost certainly apply to his opponents with equal validity.
**During a famine, the citizenry besieged the Senate and threatened to burn them all alive if they didn’t make Augustus Dictator***, and he talked them into just having him made grain commissioner.
***His precise legal status was unclear and mostly consisted of giving him the powers of multiple political offices for PR reasons
@Alan:
Wow, I just looked that up. It’s interesting how most media chose to represent his name as Aylan instead of Alan (Wikipedia gives both names, but “Alan Kurdi” is the actual name), the first one being closer to Western audiences’ idea of an “Arabic” name instead of an “English” one.
Thanks for the info.
It’s spelt differently in multiple sources. Some say Alyan, some say Alan and some say Aylan. I’ve been in no way disrespectful.
Mockingbird,
I sincerely hope this all works out for you, and it’s just some cysts you can deal with.
This is not strictly true. I don’t know that I would recommend jumping to work before you heard anything back — that seems like a way to heighten anxiety — but if your children’s father is willing to let your husband raise them, there are almost certainly (I don’t know where you live) legal ways to arrange that in advance. I’m sure that even if the results are bad, you should have plenty of time left to set it up, but if it would make you feel better to start researching it now, you could do that. Should you enjoy a long and happy life, it still can’t hurt to get your husband whatever legal rights you can.
According to Al Jazeera, the name was initially misreported by Turkish authorities as Aylan but is properly spelled Alan.
@ Bernardo
Yeah, perhaps normally it wouldn’t matter but there’s already enough “othering” of migrants as it were.
I’d like to think I’d have empathy anyway but the fact that he’s another Alan just highlighted the ‘but for accident of birthplace that could have been me’ aspect to all this for me.
@ nparker
Not suggesting anyone was being deliberately disrespectful; I appreciate his name is commonly misreported
@Guy
The aforementioned Mike Duncan has a book deal for “The Storm Before the Storm” about the Roman Republic from Tiberius Gracchus through the dictatorship of Sulla. The Roman Republic was very very broken in it’s late stages and it ended up falling in such a way that there’s a century plus of flex in saying when it was the Empire, rather than the Republic.