2016 United States Election

[Primula Baggins]

A lot of people here are scholars or scientists or writers or teachers, and they do tend to take plagiarism seriously; in their professional lives, it's handled without mercy, and it can destroy an established career.

And there is a difference between repeating ideas (which as you point out happens all the time, especially in political speech) and repeating almost word for word through a couple of paragraphs. It is worthy of the fuss that's being made.

[yovargas]

I don't think it's "worthy of a fuss", but I do think it's funny and weird and interesting, and it's absurd to expect people not to talk about such a funny and weird and interesting screw-up by any national figure.

[JewelSong]

...if a speechwriter was stupid enough to review past speeches and lift a portion of one with so little effort at disguise, I would expect him to be quickly unemployed, wouldn't you? So has anyone been fired yet?

Not yet. But it's early days...

It makes me want to go out and vote for Trump, out of sheer irritation.

I suppose there are worse reasons to vote for someone. But, I think, there may be better sources of irritation (so to speak.)


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[JewelSong]

David Frum, conservative political commentator and speechwriter for President George W. Bush, thinks the fiasco over Melania Trump's speech last night is much more important than it would appear - he details why in the article below. But here is the heart of his argument -

"Confronted with this comically absurd failure, their instinct is not only to lie, shift blame, and refuse responsibility, but to do so in laughably unbelievable ways. It’s all a big joke when the crisis in question is a plagiarized speech by a would-be first lady. It won’t be so funny when a President Trump tries to manage a truly life-and-death crisis in the same blundering, dopey, and cowardly way."

http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/arc ... rs/492038/



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[River]

Cerin, your defense of Mrs. Trump would fall on deaf ears in an academic institution. I'm not sure how my current employers would handle it.

Actually, I suspect that my supervisor would get the offender fired. I haven't asked, though, much like I haven't asked what would happen to me if I was caught chugging beer in the lab or doing something equally and obviously wrong.

Anyway, on one hand, it's a tempest in a teacup. On the other, it says some rather alarming things about the people the Trump campaign is hiring.

[Cerin]

Cerin, your defense of Mrs. Trump would fall on deaf ears in an academic institution.

Such a defense would never be made in an academic institution, because such basic, universal concepts would never be offered or accepted as original thinking in such a setting. This is my very point. These ideas are too universal, unoriginal and generic to attach to an accusation of plagiarism.

[Primula Baggins]

"Plagiarism" is using someone else's words without attribution or credit. There aren't "special" subjects on which plagiarism is irrelevant. It's wrong in any context.

In my years working in publishing I've seen the reaction when even a couple of paragraphs of plagiarism are found in a whole book. It isn't pretty for the author.

[River]

The student who got thrown out of my cohort didn't get tossed because her mock grant proposal was derivative (it probably was, as were all of ours). She got tossed because she copied and pasted stuff out of papers and tried to pass the writing off as her own. There were citations in the copy-pasta but it was conclusively proven she was trying to take credit for someone else's writing.

[yovargas]

This is my very point. These ideas are too universal, unoriginal and generic to attach to an accusation of plagiarism.

You do realize plagiarism is about words, not ideas, right?

[Inanna]

Cerin, your defense of Mrs. Trump would fall on deaf ears in an academic institution.

Such a defense would never be made in an academic institution, because such basic, universal concepts would never be offered or accepted as original thinking in such a setting. This is my very point. These ideas are too universal, unoriginal and generic to attach to an accusation of plagiarism.

In academia, this would be outright plagiarism. To give you an idea, my co-author and I submitted a paper based on his dissertation; one paper from it had already been published. Same economic model - different industry studied, different results etc. etc. etc. We got our paper back because we had 3-4 sentences and ~nine phrases (4-5 words together) spread out in the entire 50-page paper which were identical to my co-authors's published paper. They recognized that we were plagiarizing from ourselves, so it was likely just a mistake, and told us to change all those sentences. The paper was not even submittable because of those few sentences in 50 pages -- new idea, new result, new everything. But it was still plagiarism.

(and by the way, the senior co-author on our paper was _furious_ with us).

[River]

Yes, we had a lengthy discussion about self-plagiarism in our ethics class that first year.

It can make writing up a little interesting. Your papers are supposed to be the dissertation chapters but since they're already published you have to effectively rewrite everything. Fun times.

[Primula Baggins]

I see a fair amount of it, though in the worst case it turned out that the writer really didn't know he wasn't allowed to do it. The usual clue is a big stretch of decent, edited writing in the middle of bad writing. If there's only one author....

And all you have to do to find the source, usually, is Google two sentences.

[JewelSong]

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/20/us/po ... ipad-share

--->

Jon Favreau, a former chief speechwriter to President Obama, was home on his couch half-following Ms. Trump’s speech on TV while catching up on work Monday night. At first, he was skeptical of the criticism.
“Everyone says ‘You work hard,’” Mr. Favreau said, reciting a line from the speech. “Political speeches are filled with clichés that are impossible to avoid.” But when he got to Ms. Trump saying “Your word is your bond,” Mr. Favreau recalled, he stopped short.
“I remember Michelle saying, ‘Your word is your bond,’ and thinking I’ve never heard of someone saying that in politics,” Mr. Favreau said. “That was when I knew it might have been copied.”


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[Frelga]

I am no longer sure if we are watching a Convention or a Dali painting come to life.

RNC official cites 'My Little Pony' to defend Melania Trump

"Melania Trump said, 'the strength of your dreams and willingness to work for them.' Twilight Sparkle from 'My Little Pony' said, 'This is your dream. Anything you can do in your dreams, you can do now,' " Spicer said.

Which, incidentally, is rather damning to his cause, as this is a good example of expressing a similar general idea in completely different words.

In the meantime, if someone says the convention makes them want to hurl, they probably mean it literally.

Norovirus Outbreak Reported among GOP Convention Staffers

The outbreak currently affects California delegation's advance team, who complained about being shunted off to a remote hotel because Republicans don't care about California.

[Cerin]

"Plagiarism" is using someone else's words without attribution or credit.

Yes. And the words used by Mrs. Trump can't be said to be someone else's, because they are cliches. Everyone knows them, everyone has heard them a thousand times, everyone will hear them a thousand times again.

[Primula Baggins]

Not in precisely those words, in precisely that order. That is the distinction you don't seem to be seeing.

Plagiarism isn't stealing ideas—that's something else. Plagiarism is stealing words. Representing someone else's words, their work, as your own.

People who write own their words (unless they're doing the work for some organization that, by contract, owns them). Plagiarism is a form of theft, either from the writer herself or from whatever entity owns the writer's work.

[Túrin Turambar]

But if you just held all elections for all offices without any parties the result would be anarchy in the worst sense.

I find that a very strange statement. It would be democracy, not anarchy.

Parties are there to benefit the candidates, not to benefit the voters or the country.

Parties do actually benefit the voters, as voters do not need to personally vet all the views of every candidate running for every office - they know if someone has an (R) or (D) next to their name that their views must be broadly-consistent with the particular set of ideas behind those parties and that the party has already subjected them to some sort of due diligence (although they do sometimes fail on that).

Additionally, while too much party discipline is a bad thing, too little party discipline can allow legislators to vote for any popular measure and to oppose any unpopular one, without having to think in the longer term. Parties allow legislators and other office-holders to be bound to sometimes difficult and unpopular policies.

Finally, from my knowledge of legislatures which operated in the days before political parties, anarchy was frequently the norm. This is true of the early parliaments of the Australian colonies, where governments often fell within months or even weeks because the parliament would turn on them whenever it was politically-convenient for the individual members to do so.

[yovargas]

Parties do actually benefit the voters, as voters do not need to personally vet all the views of every candidate running for every office - they know if someone has an (R) or (D) next to their name that their views must be broadly-consistent with the particular set of ideas behind those parties and that the party has already subjected them to some sort of due diligence (although they do sometimes fail on that).

I do not view this as a good thing. At least here where we only have 2 major parties, what it means is that candidates feel forced to act like "their views must be broadly-consistent with the particular set of ideas", regardless of whether or not that's true. And we all get conned into thinking that there are only 2 such sets of ideas.

[Cerin]

Not in precisely those words, in precisely that order. That is the distinction you don't seem to be seeing.

Plagiarism isn't stealing ideas—that's something else. Plagiarism is stealing words. Representing someone else's words, their work, as your own.

People who write own their words (unless they're doing the work for some organization that, by contract, owns them). Plagiarism is a form of theft, either from the writer herself or from whatever entity owns the writer's work.

I do understand what plagiarism is, Prim. This type of political speech follows a standard order (the parents, the values of hard work and respect for others, there's nothing that can't be achieved if you work hard enough (and the implied, and thus I stand here before you . . .).

It would be refreshing if someone stood up there and said they had crappy parents, no one ever taught them anything, and there's no limit to what can be achieved if you lie, cheat, steal and grease enough palms. But that's not the great American myth that people in this position are required to trot out at such events.

As for the words themselves, they aren’t the same, apart from the standard clichés, which can’t be said to be owned by anyone:

And Barack and I were raised with so many of the same values (insert cliché)
From a young age, my parents impressed on me the values (insert cliché)

and you do what you say you're going to do
you do what you say and keep your promise

Because we want our children — and all children in this nation — to know that the only limit to the height of your achievements is the reach of your dreams (insert cliché)
Because we want our children in this nation to know that the only limit to your achievements is the strength of your dreams (insert cliché)


This is nothing but hackneyed, standard political cliche. There is absolutely nothing unique or original said here by either woman, and there is nothing I can see that rises to the level of theft.

[yovargas]

trump_obama_speeches_in_text.png (120.48 KiB) Viewed 3107 times

Individually, sure, any of those phrases is just another cliche that maybe could be said by anybody anywhere. Strung together, the odds of the exact same set cliches being in exactly the same exact order by pure coincidence are basically zero . Sorry Cerin, you are simply factually wrong about that.