Chris Rufo, far-right provocateur, proclaimed his pride in toppling the President of Harvard. Is he happier with this victory than with his success in turning “critical race theory” into a national scare? Hard to say. This was a big one for Chris, not least because he found a way to incite the liberal media and to walk away with Dr. Gay’s scalp.
He boasted to Politico about his latest triumph.
In recent weeks, Rufo has been at the forefront of a sprawling campaign to force Gay to resign, which began after she delivered controversial testimony before Congress in early December about Harvard’s handling of alleged instances of antisemitism stemming from the war in Gaza. On Dec. 10, Rufo and the conservative journalist Christopher Brunet publicized accusations that Gay — the first Black woman to serve as Harvard’s president and a political scientist held in high regard by her peers — had plagiarized other scholars’ work. Together with pressure from donors about Gay’s response to the war in Gaza, those accusations ultimately led to Gay losing her job this week.
None of that happened by accident. As Rufo acknowledged to me, Gay’s resignation was the result of a coordinated and highly organized conservative campaign. “It shows a successful strategy for the political right,” he told me. “How we have to work the media, how we have to exert pressure and how we have to sequence our campaigns in order to be successful.”
While the extent of Gay’s alleged plagiarism is being disputed in the academic community, Rufo’s campaign worked because instances in which Gay apparently borrowed language from other scholars were frequent and credible enough that the allegations stuck.
For an operative who works mostly behind the scenes of Republican politics, Rufo isn’t shy about revealing the true motives behind his influence operations. Last month, he told me that his efforts to rehabilitate Richard Nixon’s legacy are part of broader ploy to exonerate former President Donald Trump. When I spoke to him on Tuesday afternoon, he was equally frank about what motivated his efforts to get Gay fired.
As Rufo makes clear, his real target was diversity, equity and inclusion programs, and he successfully painted Dr. Gay as the embodiment of DEI, meaning that she was a diversity hire and didn’t deserve her position.
He explained his strategy:
It’s really a textbook example of successful conservative activism, and the strategy is quite simple. Christopher Brunet and I broke the story of Claudine’s plagiarism on December 10. It drove more than 100 million impressions on Twitter, and then it was the top story for a number of weeks in conservative media and right-wing media. But I knew that in order to achieve my objective, we had to get the narrative into the left-wing media. But the left-wing uniformly ignored the story for 10 days and tried to bury it, so I engaged in a kind of a thoughtful and substantive campaign of shaming and bullying my colleagues on the left to take seriously the story of the most significant academic corruption scandal in Harvard’s history.
Finally, the narrative broke through within 24 hours of my announcement about smuggling the narrative into the left-wing media. You see this domino effect: CNN, BBC, The New York Times, The Washington Post and other publications started to do the actual work of exposing Gay’s plagiarism, and then you see this beautiful kind of flowering of op-eds from all of those publications calling on Gay to resign. Once my position — which began on the right — became the dominant position across the center-left, I knew that it was just a matter of time before we were going to be successful.
Why is it so important to get the story into the center-left media?
It gives permission for center-left political figures and intellectual figures to comment on the story and then to editorialize on it. Once we crossed that threshold, we saw this cascade of publications calling on her to resign.
He makes clear that the issues are not important: what matters is winning and shaming the left.
I’ve run the same playbook on critical race theory, on gender ideology, on DEI bureaucracy. For the time being, given the structure of our institutions, this is a universal strategy that can be applied by the right to most issues. I think that we’ve demonstrated that it can be successful….
What is your broader objective here, beyond forcing the president of Harvard to resign?
My primary objective is to eliminate the DEI bureaucracy in every institution in America and to restore truth rather than racialist ideology as the guiding principle of America.
Peter Greene goes into Rufo’s strategy of announcing his goal, then turning the media coverage into a horse race.
Christopher Rufo is on the dead bird app bragging that he took down the president of Harvard and announcing that he’s going to start “plagiarism hunting,” which sounds so much better than “going after liberal Black academics.”
![](https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhuNz90LLRHqSmciN81VK9drw8aSAiPdw2AaUZ2s1COlBupxrFFqASURhGQsw2mhKL_xuLSCN9DAwgDWnR68IM0fbUIsYwnp8qD0thLfCsHuxENzzewwNgq5nLkkJq9ljmMrW3iYyrAvGj6Cbv-ZvOxJLAHKJWGnDbLT3oIBDdu4QoK5XuUatjxdmwfCX8G/s280/rufo.jpg)
It is just the most recent demonstration of the Rufo technique, which is to announce the bad faith argument he’s about to launch and how he plans to use it to pwn his chosen liberal target. And then various main stream media and other well-intentioned folks proceed to amplify and engage with that bad faith argument. Even now, social media features a bunch of folks arguing about the plagiarism piece of the Harvard take down (“Well, you know the president of Rufo’s New College won’t get caught plagiarizing because he’s never published anything! Ha! Gotcha!!”) as if the plagiarism is actually the point. And media outlets keep publishing their “Harvard president taken down by plagiarism” takes as if that’s the real story here.
The New Republic took pleasure in revealing that Rufo claimed a master’s degree from Harvard, but he fudged by not admitting that the degree was not from the highly selective Harvard programs but from the Harvard Extension School, which I confess I never heard of.
It’s very hard to gain admission to Harvard College or graduate schools. But Harvard Extension School says this in its website:
Simply Enroll—No Application Required
To get started, simply follow these steps:
- Create a MyDCE account.
- Review our Enrollment Policies.
- Explore our course catalog.
- Understand our Enrollment Requirementsand complete those applicable to you and your course of interest.
- Complete preregistration in MyDCE.
- Register for your course.
- Submit your payment by the payment deadline.
- Learn and connect!
Readers may recall that I supported Dr. Gay and urged the Harvard Corporation to resist the pressure from Rufo. I did so because I knew that the campaign to force her out was not conducted in good faith. Rufo doesn’t care about anti-Semitism, nor does Elise Stefanik. I don’t recall either of them expressing outrage when anti-Semites chanted “The Jews will not replace us” at the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville nor did they speak out when Trump said that there were “good people” on both sides. Neither of them appears to care about anti-Semitism when it’s right in front of them.
As for “truth” and “beauty,” Rufo is blowing smoke. To him, they are just buzzwords. Faculty at the University of Texas called his bluff when he appeared there. Rufo spoke at a center at UT sponsored by Republican donors, and the attendees roasted him.
Ten minutes later, Polly Strong, an anthropology professor and the president of the UT chapter of the American Association of University Professors, told Rufo that she believed in intellectual diversity but that a commitment to the concept wasn’t what she heard from him. She said her personal hero is John Dewey, the pragmatist philosopher who advocated for academic freedom, due process, and neutrality in higher learning and asked if Rufo supported those values.
Rufo thanked Strong for her question but his words came faster and more insistent than before. He derided Dewey, saying it would have been better if he’d never been born, and dismissed his values. “Academic freedom, due process, neutrality – those are means, not ends,” Rufo said. “If you have an erasure of ends, what you get is sheer power politics, you get everything reducible to will and domination, and then you get an academic life that drifts into witchcraft, into phrenology, into gender studies.” Rufo concluded by saying that academics who continue to adhere to Dewey’s principles, “frankly, deserve what’s coming.”
Strong was completely unawed by the implied threat. “The ‘ends’ of academic freedom, due process, and shared governance is education for a democratic society,” she said simply. “That is the basis of John Dewey’s vision and many, many university professors believe that today.”
The audience was silent after Strong’s remark. It had become clear that Rufo wasn’t dominating his opponents. It got worse for him when Samuel Baker, a UT English professor, came to the mic. Baker reiterated that Rufo’s veneration of beauty and truth was meaningless if he provided no idea of what the concepts mean to him, and he criticized Rufo’s use of violent imagery like “laying siege” and deserving “what’s coming.”
“I just want to be honest with you,” Baker said, “your rhetoric in relation to barbarism and the way you smugly say that the university is not going to like what’s coming – I think that in the context of the world right now, where there is a lot of really tragic violence, that we ought to be careful to remove ourselves from that and from groups with white supremacist associations. I really think you should rethink the glibness.”
Rufo was exposed as a phony and called out for his connections to white supremacists. He beat a hasty retreat.
Freedom of expression and academic freedom are wonderful in action.
If you have never seen Rufo explain “laying siege to the institutions, watch his Hillsdale College speech.
Sad, but she’s only one of thousands who have lost their jobs for opposing genocide in the past three months. There has been a mass campaign to dox, harass and get people fired for any slight word against Israel or in favor of the Palestinian people. This is just the natural follow up of the neo-McCarthyist rhetoric common on this blog. Anyone who disagrees with you is a “Trump troll”, “Putin pawn” and, now, “Hamas lover” who must be silenced.
I’d like to think this might open some eyes on this blog about the cost of such rhetoric, but, sadly, all it will do is bring on more of the same. I especially look forward to hearing more from BS about Tsar Putin and his “communist propagandists”, Putin, of course, being a famous communist. LOL.
Claudine Gay did not express support for Hamas or the Palestinian people. Nor did she criticize Israel.
She made the mistake of showing up for a gotcha hearing. The president of Columbia University was far wiser: she declined the invitation and was out of town and too busy to be scolded by Elise Stefanik.
Oh, please, Diane. You know perfectly well her sin was failing to expressly condemn student protests in favor of Palestine.
Dienne, you have consistently supported Hamas, who are terrorists whose charter demands the elimination of the state of Israel and complete Islamic control of the land “from the river to the sea.” Women in burkas, persecution of LGBT, no religion but Islam. Your kind of thing.
Claudine Gay never defended Hamas. She defended free speech, as I would.
She said in an op-Ed in the New York Times two days after she resigned:
“Yes, I made mistakes. In my initial response to the atrocities of Oct. 7, I should have stated more forcefully what all people of good conscience know: Hamas is a terrorist organization that seeks to eradicate the Jewish state. And at a congressional hearing last month, I fell into a well-laid trap. I neglected to clearly articulate that calls for the genocide of Jewish people are abhorrent and unacceptable and that I would use every tool at my disposal to protect students from that kind of hate.”
I defended her and agree with her completely. She understood that the attack on her was not just about her; it was an attack on DEI and academic freedom.
The plagiarism charge against her was ridiculous. There is probably not a single well-published academic who has not made similar errors from time to time. (I would love to have a crack at Chris Rufo’s college papers.) I have worked most my life as an editor. And I’ve edited a lot of hotshot public intellectuals. They all do from time to time the same sorts of things that Dr. Gay was accused of doing. It’s easy to make these kinds of errors. One reads something and it becomes part of one’s mental furniture to be used whenever. Or one simply makes a mistake in notetaking or in transcription from notes. Or the freaking typist does.
People think that memory is a lot more reliable than it actually is. They think it’s like a video recording in the head. It most definitely is not. The fact is that at any given moment, we can take into short-term memory about seven new items of information (that’s why telephone numbers in the U.S. are seven digits long), and then some small part of that goes into long-term memory. When we remember something, our brain calls up the fragments that went into long-term memory, connects those to our general knowledge of the world, and then constructs a plausible memory to present to consciousness. In other words, much of memory is confabulation. So, sometimes people don’t really know whether they are someone else invented a phrase.
Of course the plagiarism charge was a joke. Because that wasn’t her actual sin. After all, the president of our country is a known plagiarist (https://www.washingtonpost.com/investigations/echoes-of-bidens-1987-plagiarism-scandal-continue-to-reverberate/2019/06/05/dbaf3716-7292-11e9-9eb4-0828f5389013_story.html ). Again, the sin was insufficient zealotry for Israel.
I must remind you, Dienne, that politicians adopt the rhetoric of others whenever they want. They are not scholars and don’t pretend to be.
Your admiration for Putin and Hamas and your hatred for Biden is showing. Curb your enthusiasm for the bad guys.
Biden is enabling genocide. That makes him a bad guy. Let me know when you’ve finished reading South Africa’s Application. Would love to discuss it.
Dienne, I won’t be discussing anything with you. My cat has better political judgment than you. So does my dog.
You wrote here authoritatively that Putin would not invade Ukraine. When he did, you defended the invasion again and again.
I don’t recall any comment from you condemning Hamas’s atrocities on Oct 7. Nothing about the multiple violent rapes, the families burned alive in their homes, the beheadings, the msss murder at a dance festival. You defended Hamas and insisted that Israel deserved it.
I have criticized Israel. I have criticized Netanyahu. I hate the invasion of Gaza. The latest poll in Israel shows that only 20% of the voters want Netanyahu in office again.
Your championing of the Palestinian cause is your right. But this is my blog, not a public space or a university campus, and I am under no obligation to publish your anti-Israel, anti-Biden, pro-Hamas, pro-terrorist comments.
Did you read this article?
‘Screams Without Words’: How Hamas Weaponized Sexual Violence on Oct. 7
I’m sure you didn’t care. I expect you think those women deserved to be raped and mutilated, shot in the vaguna, subject to gang rape. They were Israelis.
Dienne,
I’m sure you didn’t read this article but it might help you understand the insane rage of Israelis.
New York Times, December 28, 2023
A Times investigation uncovered new details showing a pattern of rape, mutilation and extreme brutality against women in the attacks on Israel.
By Jeffrey Gettleman, Anat Schwartz and Adam SellaPhotographs by Avishag Shaar-Yashuv
Jeffrey Gettleman, Anat Schwartz and Adam Sella reported from across Israel and interviewed more than 150 people.
Dec. 28, 2023
At first, she was known simply as “the woman in the black dress.”
In a grainy video, you can see her, lying on her back, dress torn, legs spread, vagina exposed. Her face is burned beyond recognition and her right hand covers her eyes.
The video was shot in the early hours of Oct. 8 by a woman searching for a missing friend at the site of the rave in southern Israel where, the day before, Hamas terrorists massacred hundreds of young Israelis.
The video went viral, with thousands of people responding, desperate to know if the woman in the black dress was their missing friend, sister or daughter.
One family knew exactly who she was — Gal Abdush, mother of two from a working-class town in central Israel, who disappeared from the rave that night with her husband.
As the terrorists closed in on her, trapped on a highway in a line of cars of people trying to flee the party, she sent one final WhatsApp message to her family: “You don’t understand.”
Based largely on the video evidence — which was verified by The New York Times — Israeli police officials said they believed that Ms. Abdush was raped, and she has become a symbol of the horrors visited upon Israeli women and girls during the Oct. 7 attacks.
Israeli officials say that everywhere Hamas terrorists struck — the rave, the military bases along the Gaza border and the kibbutzim — they brutalized women.
A two-month investigation by The Times uncovered painful new details, establishing that the attacks against women were not isolated events but part of a broader pattern of gender-based violence on Oct. 7.
Relying on video footage, photographs, GPS data from mobile phones and interviews with more than 150 people, including witnesses, medical personnel, soldiers and rape counselors, The Times identified at least seven locations where Israeli women and girls appear to have been sexually assaulted or mutilated.
Four witnesses described in graphic detail seeing women raped and killed at two different places along Route 232, the same highway where Ms. Abdush’s half-naked body was found sprawled on the road at a third location.
And The Times interviewed several soldiers and volunteer medics who together described finding more than 30 bodies of women and girls in and around the rave site and in two kibbutzim in a similar state as Ms. Abdush’s — legs spread, clothes torn off, signs of abuse in their genital areas.
Many of the accounts are difficult to bear, and the visual evidence is disturbing to see.
The Times viewed photographs of one woman’s corpse that emergency responders discovered in the rubble of a besieged kibbutz with dozens of nails driven into her thighs and groin.
The Times also viewed a video, provided by the Israeli military, showing two dead Israeli soldiers at a base near Gaza who appeared to have been shot directly in their vaginas.
Hamas has denied Israel’s accusations of sexual violence. Israeli activists have been outraged that the United Nations Secretary General, António Guterres, and the agency U.N. Women did not acknowledge the many accusations until weeks after the attacks.
Investigators with Israel’s top national police unit, Lahav 433, have been steadily gathering evidence but they have not put a number on how many women were raped, saying that most are dead — and buried — and that they will never know. No survivors have spoken publicly.
The Israeli police have acknowledged that, during the shock and confusion of Oct. 7, the deadliest day in Israeli history, they were not focused on collecting semen samples from women’s bodies, requesting autopsies or closely examining crime scenes. At that moment, the authorities said, they were intent on repelling Hamas and identifying the dead.
A combination of chaos, enormous grief and Jewish religious duties meant that many bodies were buried as quickly as possible. Most were never examined, and in some cases, like at the rave scene, where more than 360 people were slaughtered in a few hours, the bodies were hauled away by the truckload.
That has left the Israeli authorities at a loss to fully explain to families what happened to their loved ones in their final moments. Ms. Abdush’s relatives, for instance, never received a death certificate. They are still searching for answers.
In cases of widespread sexual violence during a war, it is not unusual to have limited forensic evidence, experts said.
“Armed conflict is so chaotic,” said Adil Haque, a Rutgers law professor and war crimes expert. “People are more focused on their safety than on building a criminal case down the road.”
Very often, he said, sex crime cases will be prosecuted years later on the basis of testimony from victims and witnesses.
“The eyewitness might not even know the name of the victim,” he added. “But if they can testify as, ‘I saw a woman being raped by this armed group,’ that can be enough.”
‘Screams without words’
Sapir, a 24-year-old accountant, has become one of the Israeli police’s key witnesses. She does not want to be fully identified, saying she would be hounded for the rest of her life if her last name were revealed.
She attended the rave with several friends and provided investigators with graphic testimony. She also spoke to The Times. In a two-hour interview outside a cafe in southern Israel, she recounted seeing groups of heavily armed gunmen rape and kill at least five women.
She said that at 8 a.m. on Oct. 7, she was hiding under the low branches of a bushy tamarisk tree, just off Route 232, about four miles southwest of the party. She had been shot in the back. She felt faint. She covered herself in dry grass and lay as still as she could.
About 15 meters from her hiding place, she said, she saw motorcycles, cars and trucks pulling up. She said that she saw “about 100 men,” most of them dressed in military fatigues and combat boots, a few in dark sweatsuits, getting in and out of the vehicles. She said the men congregated along the road and passed between them assault rifles, grenades, small missiles — and badly wounded women.
“It was like an assembly point,” she said.
The first victim she said she saw was a young woman with copper-color hair, blood running down her back, pants pushed down to her knees. One man pulled her by the hair and made her bend over. Another penetrated her, Sapir said, and every time she flinched, he plunged a knife into her back.
She said she then watched another woman “shredded into pieces.” While one terrorist raped her, she said, another pulled out a box cutter and sliced off her breast.
“One continues to rape her, and the other throws her breast to someone else, and they play with it, throw it, and it falls on the road,” Sapir said.
She said the men sliced her face and then the woman fell out of view. Around the same time, she said, she saw three other women raped and terrorists carrying the severed heads of three more women.
Sapir provided photographs of her hiding place and her wounds, and police officials have stood by her testimony and released a video of her, with her face blurred, recounting some of what she saw.
Yura Karol, a 22-year-old security consultant, said he was hiding in the same spot, and he can be seen in one of Sapir’s photos. He and Sapir were part of a group of friends who had met up at the party. In an interview, Mr. Karol said he barely lifted his head to look at the road but he also described seeing a woman raped and killed.
Since that day, Sapir said, she has struggled with a painful rash that spread across her torso, and she can barely sleep, waking up at night, heart pounding, covered in sweat.
“That day, I became an animal,” she said. “I was emotionally detached, sharp, just the adrenaline of survival. I looked at all this as if I was photographing them with my eyes, not forgetting any detail. I told myself: I should remember everything.”
That same morning, along Route 232 but in a different location about a mile southwest of the party area, Raz Cohen — a young Israeli who had also attended the rave and had worked recently in the Democratic Republic of Congo training Congolese soldiers — said that he was hiding in a dried-up streambed. It provided some cover from the assailants combing the area and shooting anyone they found, he said in an hour-and-a-half interview in a Tel Aviv restaurant.
About 15 meters from her hiding place, she said, she saw motorcycles, cars and trucks pulling up. She said that she saw “about 100 men,” most of them dressed in military fatigues and combat boots, a few in dark sweatsuits, getting in and out of the vehicles. She said the men congregated along the road and passed between them assault rifles, grenades, small missiles — and badly wounded women.
“It was like an assembly point,” she said.
The first victim she said she saw was a young woman with copper-color hair, blood running down her back, pants pushed down to her knees. One man pulled her by the hair and made her bend over. Another penetrated her, Sapir said, and every time she flinched, he plunged a knife into her back.
She said she then watched another woman “shredded into pieces.” While one terrorist raped her, she said, another pulled out a box cutter and sliced off her breast.
“One continues to rape her, and the other throws her breast to someone else, and they play with it, throw it, and it falls on the road,” Sapir said.
She said the men sliced her face and then the woman fell out of view. Around the same time, she said, she saw three other women raped and terrorists carrying the severed heads of three more women.
Sapir provided photographs of her hiding place and her wounds, and police officials have stood by her testimony and released a video of her, with her face blurred, recounting some of what she saw.
Yura Karol, a 22-year-old security consultant, said he was hiding in the same spot, and he can be seen in one of Sapir’s photos. He and Sapir were part of a group of friends who had met up at the party. In an interview, Mr. Karol said he barely lifted his head to look at the road but he also described seeing a woman raped and killed.
Since that day, Sapir said, she has struggled with a painful rash that spread across her torso, and she can barely sleep, waking up at night, heart pounding, covered in sweat.
“That day, I became an animal,” she said. “I was emotionally detached, sharp, just the adrenaline of survival. I looked at all this as if I was photographing them with my eyes, not forgetting any detail. I told myself: I should remember everything.”
That same morning, along Route 232 but in a different location about a mile southwest of the party area, Raz Cohen — a young Israeli who had also attended the rave and had worked recently in the Democratic Republic of Congo training Congolese soldiers — said that he was hiding in a dried-up streambed. It provided some cover from the assailants combing the area and shooting anyone they found, he said in an hour-and-a-half interview in a Tel Aviv restaurant.
Maybe 40 yards in front of him, he recalled, a white van pulled up and its doors flew open.
He said he then saw five men, wearing civilian clothes, all carrying knives and one carrying a hammer, dragging a woman across the ground. She was young, naked and screaming.
“They all gather around her,” Mr. Cohen said. “She’s standing up. They start raping her. I saw the men standing in a half circle around her. One penetrates her. She screams. I still remember her voice, screams without words.”
“Then one of them raises a knife,” he said, “and they just slaughtered her.”
Shoam Gueta, one of Mr. Cohen’s friends and a fashion designer, said the two were hiding together in the streambed. He said he saw at least four men step out of the van and attack the woman, who ended up “between their legs.” He said that they were “talking, giggling and shouting,” and that one of them stabbed her with a knife repeatedly, “literally butchering her.”
Hours later, the first wave of volunteer emergency medical technicians arrived at the rave site. In interviews, four of them said that they discovered bodies of dead women with their legs spread and underwear missing — some with their hands tied by rope and zipties — in the party area, along the road, in the parking area and in the open fields around the rave site.
Jamal Waraki, a volunteer medic with the nonprofit ZAKA emergency response team, said he could not get out of his head a young woman in a rawhide vest found between the main stage and the bar.
“Her hands were tied behind her back,” he said. “She was bent over, half naked, her underwear rolled down below her knees.”
Yinon Rivlin, a member of the rave’s production team who lost two brothers in the attacks, said that after hiding from the killers, he emerged from a ditch and made his way to the parking area, east of the party, along Route 232, looking for survivors.
Near the highway, he said, he found the body of a young woman, on her stomach, no pants or underwear, legs spread apart. He said her vagina area appeared to have been sliced open, “as if someone tore her apart.”
Similar discoveries were made in two kibbutzim, Be’eri and Kfar Aza. Eight volunteer medics and two Israeli soldiers told The Times that in at least six different houses, they had come across a total of at least 24 bodies of women and girls naked or half naked, some mutilated, others tied up, and often alone.
A paramedic in an Israeli commando unit said that he had found the bodies of two teenage girls in a room in Be’eri.
One was lying on her side, he said, boxer shorts ripped, bruises by her groin. The other was sprawled on the floor face down, he said, pajama pants pulled to her knees, bottom exposed, semen smeared on her back.
Because his job was to look for survivors, he said, he kept moving and did not document the scene. Neighbors of the two girls killed — who were sisters, 13 and 16 — said their bodies had been found alone, separated from the rest of their family.
The Israeli military allowed the paramedic to speak with reporters on the condition that he not be identified because he serves in an elite unit.
Many of the dead were brought to the Shura military base, in central Israel, for identification. Here, too, witnesses said they saw signs of sexual violence.
Shari Mendes, an architect called up as a reserve soldier to help prepare the bodies of female soldiers for burial, said she had seen four with signs of sexual violence, including some with “a lot of blood in their pelvic areas.”
A dentist, Captain Maayan, who worked at the same identification center, said that she had seen at least 10 bodies of female soldiers from Gaza observation posts with signs of sexual violence.
Captain Maayan asked to be identified only by her rank and surname because of the sensitivity of the subject. She said she had seen several bodies with cuts in their vaginas and underwear soaked in blood and one whose fingernails had been pulled out.
The investigation
The Israeli authorities have no shortage of video evidence from the Oct. 7 attacks. They have gathered hours of footage from Hamas body cameras, dashcams, security cameras and mobile phones showing Hamas terrorists killing civilians and many images of mutilated bodies.
But Moshe Fintzy, a deputy superintendent and senior spokesman of Israel’s national police, said, “We have zero autopsies, zero,” making an O with his right hand.
In the aftermath of the attack, police officials said, forensic examiners were dispatched to the Shura military base to help identify the hundreds of bodies — Israeli officials say around 1,200 people were killed that day.
The examiners worked quickly to give the agonized families of the missing a sense of closure and to determine, by a process of elimination, who was dead and who was being held hostage in Gaza.
According to Jewish tradition, funerals are held promptly. The result was that many bodies with signs of sexual abuse were put to rest without medical examinations, meaning that potential evidence now lies buried in the ground. International forensic experts said that it would be possible to recover some evidence from the corpses, but that it would be difficult.
Mr. Fintzy said Israeli security forces were still finding imagery that shows women were brutalized. Sitting at his desk at an imposing police building in Jerusalem, he swiped open his phone, tapped and produced the video of the two soldiers shot in the vagina, which he said was recorded by Hamas gunmen and recently recovered by Israeli soldiers.
A colleague sitting next to him, Mirit Ben Mayor, a police chief superintendent, said she believed that the brutality against women was a combination of two ferocious forces, “the hatred for Jews and the hatred for women.”
Some emergency medical workers now wish they had documented more of what they saw. In interviews, they said they had moved bodies, cut off zip ties and cleaned up scenes of carnage. Trying to be respectful to the dead, they inadvertently destroyed evidence.
Many volunteers working for ZAKA, the emergency response team, are religious Jews and operate under strict rules that command deep respect for the dead.
“I did not take pictures because we are not allowed to take pictures,” said Yossi Landau, a ZAKA volunteer. “In retrospect, I regret it.”
There are at least three women and one man who were sexually assaulted and survived, according to Gil Horev, a spokesman for Israel’s Ministry of Welfare and Social Affairs. “None of them has been willing to come physically for treatment,” he said. Two therapists said they were working with a woman who was gang raped at the rave and was in no condition to talk to investigators or reporters.
Same thing happened with the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Russian soldiers raped and then murdered women wholesale, including small children and grandmothers.
Upon reading the article, I have to say I’m not impressed. It seems a very stylized argument for why we should believe the rape stories despite lack of physical evidence. “But Moshe Fintzy, a deputy superintendent and senior spokesman of Israel’s national police, said, “We have zero autopsies, zero,” making an O with his right hand.” There are lots of reasonable sounding reasons for this, of course. The frenzy of the day. Jewish burial requirements. Etc., but none of them really pass muster. Seems to me if you’re trying to prove mass rape, you get the evidence no matter what. Seems that if all these women were raped, their families would want the evidence to come to light. So get the autopsies. Exhume the bodies. Show the medical and forensic proof. Otherwise, the story is a whole lot of allegedly eye-witness stories from very traumatized people collected and distributed by the IDF and other Israeli sources with documented histories of lying (“40 beheaded babies” for instance).
For the record, I’m not denying that some rapes occurred. With that many people breaking out of a concentration camp, it would be surprising if there were no rapes. But that’s not the issue. The issue is that Hamas fighters, as ordered by their leaders, supposedly committed mass rape at a time when they had a very specific mission to take as many hostages as possible with limited time to do so.
Anyway, I know my answer is going to make your head explode because of course we have to believe women. So I tell you what, you find me an actual woman who claims she was raped by Hamas and I’ll believe her.
Meanwhile, what we do know is that Israel has slaughtered over 22,000 (low estimate) Palestinians, two thirds of them women and children, who didn’t commit rape, so whatever rapes were committed on 10/7 cannot be used as justification for slaughtering those civilians.
The answer I expected.
Until you can see a woman who stands up and proves she was raped and produces semen from a man who is a known Hamas terrorist, you won’t believe it.
But you will believe the numbers issued by the Hamas-controlled ministry of health.
I feel terrible about any deaths, Israeli or Gazan. I mourn for all the victims of violence on both sides of the border. I think the invasion of Gaza was a terrible mistake. And Hamas’s terror attack on Israel was too.
The irony is that the kibbutzim near the Gaza borders were populated in large part by leftist Israelis who were peaceniks and had friends in Gaza.
But unlike you, I do not absolve Hamas of any responsibility for the horrors they unleashed on both Israelis and Gazans.
Hamas knew that their atrocities would provoke a massive response. And they did. Hamas got what they wanted: massive retribution. Not on them but in the innocent people of Gaza.
Hamas doesn’t want peace. It wants a wider war.
Timothy Snyder predicted what happened. Hamas set a trap and Netanyahu stepped into it.
I know you don’t believe there were any atrocities and if there were, it’s okay with you. You have left a string of hateful comments about Israel, many of which I deleted.
I have nothing more to say to you.
Oh, hey, I think (based on zero evidence) that there were just a few rapes. No biggie.
Seriously?
https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2024/1/3/2215139/-Cartoon-Good-plagiarism-bad-plagiarism?detail=emaildkre&pm_source=DKRE&pm_medium=email
Ha! That’s a good one!
Gay and Magill fell victim to an organized ambush from the right that twisted their words and pressured conservative donors to oust them. Left leaning leaders in private schools and groups should ignore subpoenas from the extremists in The House.
Ignoring those subpoenas is against the law.
I often wonder what is wrong with MEN that they could commit such acts against women. There is a deep sickness there that has not improved in the thousands of years of “civilization.” We usually don’t see women maiming and mutilating men’s genitals. There is something very deep in the psyche of men to mutilate women in these ways. I think about it a lot.
Yes. This is deeply disturbing. There is much debate about the etymology of the so-called “vulgar” English word beginning with F. However, it is definitely NOT an acronym. The origins of the French and Italian words are less disputed and give one pause. They say a LOT about traditional male sexuality:
French foutre and Italian fottere seem to resemble the English word but are unrelated, descending rather from Latin futuere, which perhaps is from PIE [proto-Indo-European] root *bhau- “to strike,” extended via a figurative use “from the sexual application of violent action” [Shipley; compare the sexual slang use of bang, etc.
To strike forcefully. Yikes.
One possible origin for the English word is similar. It may have come from various words in Scandinavian languages that meant both “to have sexual intercourse” and “to strike or deliver blows to.”
Bob,
Even in English, the F-word is not a term of endearment. People say they will F him over; or, “I’m F-Ed.”
Exactly.
Mamie,
There’s a level of aggression in these acts that I don’t understand. Esp when it’s complete strangers.
You’re correct, Bob, to point out the significance of word etymology. German is one of my very favorite languages because of the beautiful subtlety and nuance that words have. Of course, all languages have this but German just gets me! There is something instinctual about sex and violence. Maybe it would be better to say that sex has to have a lot of ENERGY with it -bodily and psychic energy. There’s a lot of energy needed to carry out the act. So perhaps it is very easy to use the energy of the sex act as a vehicle of a great deal of psychic and bodily energy that needs to be expelled. So when that energy is brought together with a certain idea or projection, it’s very easy to use sex as the vehicle to release that energy. I think of guns, too. Guns can give one a great feeling of power and release of energy, and again, there’s a kind of phallic and sexual image to them. So, I see both sex and guns as kind of a vehicle for the release of great psychic energy. Unfortunately, when instinct and energy come together, the consequences can come out in horrific ways. And even further, our culture doesn’t encourage and support learning about our bodies, instinct and the great power of the psyche and how to contain and attempt to direct that power in ways that mitigate harm to others. Just some thoughts….
Good morning Diane,
It’s much easier to do harm to a stranger than someone you know. A stranger easily can carry the projection of your anger and fear. Immigrants and scapegoats carry those projections. Look at the fears immigrants are currently carrying. They will rape our women. They will bring disease. They will take our jobs. They’re dirty. Our economy will suffer. They will poison our blood. They are drug dealers. I often wonder what would happen if Americans one day had to move to another country for a better life. Would we want to be treated they way many immigrants are treated here? We all know what it’s like to carry the projection of another person whether that projection is considered good or bad. We are inflated if we think that this could never happen to us. With climate change, war, natural disasters, and scarcity of vital materials like food and water, we are going to have more people moving around the world.
Small world-
Today, Bill Ackmann went to a right-of-center Canadian publication founded by Conrad Black, the National Post, to tout capitalism and to rail against DEI. In 2019, Trump pardoned Conrad Black for felony level fraud.
Also happening, in 2019, the New Yorker explored the question, why didn’t Vanity Fair expose Epstein in the early 2000’s. A V-F journalist claimed in the article that Epstein threatened to have her husband fired by his boss (Conrad Black). Then, there’s Ackmann’s wife, her MIT lab received money from Epstein which, reportedly, Ackmann preferred would go unmentioned.
Wall Streeters have many bedfellows. Ackmann is a promoter of school choice which is a political campaign associated with Catholics attempting to get money for Catholic schools. Conrad Black was a convert to Catholicism in 1986. One of the current columnists for the National Post (and, Catholic Herald and Tim Busch’s National Catholic Register) received part of his education at a university, “entrusted to…Opus Dei.” George Weigel of DC-based EPPC called the priest, “Canada’s finest Catholic commentator.” Tim Busch wrote a piece about the remarkable similarities between Catholicism and a book written by Charles Koch,.
I don’t know if the priest/National Post writer, has an opinion about DEI or not. As long as Americans vote for the GOP and neoliberal Democrats, whether they do so because they are coached by religionists, are Milton Friedman capitalists or, they embrace traditional hate patterns, the same wealthy elite win (and, their ivy leagues churn out wealth-connected rulers).
The libertarian wealthy, who financially bully while carrying the banner of protecting Jews on campus, are conveniently not very prescient.
The summary should probably be, those questing money and abusive influence, found a well-traveled path to exploit, in other words, to drum up hate for the advancement of women and Black people. Right wing capitalists/religionists keep political power.
Rufo is a liar and a phony. To say nothing of a horrible human being.
The more I read about Rufo, the more I realize how ruthless he is. He would squash another human’s life and career to advance his reactionary goals. Like his Dudebro DeSantis, he has a brain but no heart, no soul. History teaches us what people like him do.
This is a guy who shows no evidence that he has actually researched the garbage he spews.
Just look what he’s doing to New College in Florida.
As long as Rufo can get rid of any teaching about race and gender, he’s happy.
My last comment should read “no evidence”, not “any evidence”.
He is straight up about one thing: that he just makes up shit to throw at the Democrats. This is the only thing that Roofie is honest about.
Is there an actual Democratic Party in Florida?
Or is it just a mail drop?
For a long while, every election was neck and neck. It was a purple state. But the Repugnicans here have made election rigging a high art form.
It seems like every election Florida is referred to as a “key swing state”. Which it hasn’t been for years.
Not since DeSantis and Gillum ran neck and neck.
If you want to unsubscribe, do it yourself. I don’t know how.
This is hardly a new ploy. Years ago, I read a piece that tried to pin plagiarism on Martin Luther King. If you can’t argue ideas, you attack personalities. Unfortunately, we live in the age of people magazine approaches to journalism. This opens the door to distractions from the issues.
Democrats should attack by saying the truth:
Republicans have no platform for the people except for the destruction of their schools, their financial well-being, and their personal security. They want to deny the average American adequate health care, a healthy environment, and freedom of conscience and expression.
If Democrats want to win this year, they have to take the gloves off with their messaging. If they go the wimp road again, they will lose.
40 percent of the country adamantly believes that the guy who said he believes Putin over our intelligence agencies, the guy who thought we should inject disinfectants and ask Denmark to sell Greenland to us, the one who thought it would be a great idea to send astronauts to the sun, the one who took babies from their parents at our border and then LOST THEM, the one who screamed at his Secretary of Homeland Security because she wouldn’t order the Border Patrol to SHOOT unarmed asylum seekers, the one who was determined by a court of law to have committed rape, the one who started his career by refusing to rent apartments to black people, the one who has been running scam enterprises and laundering dirty Russian money for decades, the one who says that he will be a dictator “from Day 1” of his next administration should be president again.
In other words, HUGE, TRULY HUGE numbers of our fellow Americans are utter morons with no moral compass.
I used to think a lot more highly of people in general. The Trump phenomenon has been an eye opener. If you support Trump, you are a POS. If I were having a social get-together and found this out, I would show you the door. Idiotic, anti-democratic, bigoted scum.
I really had no idea, pre-Trump, that there were this many utter idiots in the United States. Many, many millions of them.
I find it remarkable that I know many people who would give you the shirt off their back and are lovely people who are taken in by trumps fear appeals. They see him as a bulwark against their fears, which is why he stokes this fear, and why Rufo and his ilk work so hard to stir the fear.
Roy,
In my opinion, giving someone you like the shirt off your back while supporting a man preaching hate and white supremacy means they aren’t lovely people and should never be characterized as such. They are lovely people to you, but not lovely people in general.
I think one of the reasons our democracy is in so much danger is because as a society, we have now decided that you can be a lovely person and support people who do awful things. It’s why Trump can say the things out loud and have supporters who aren’t ashamed to embrace him. We have normalized racism and xenophobia and fascist ideas because “lovely people” support them. That’s what happened in Nazi Germany, too.
We used to know better. We never called the Germans who voted for Hitler “lovely people” even though I am absolutely positive that some of them were very lovely and generous people to those they thought deserved their generosity.
I think that our country will continue to be in grave danger as long as the people who support those who want to destroy democracy are normalized as lovely people.
I am sympathetic to them because if one side is telling you that your repellent beliefs are actually good and will make this country great, and the other side is afraid to tell you that your repellent beliefs are extremely repellent but does see you as a “lovely person”, I understand that they would be unlikely to change their repellent beliefs. In fact, since they keep hearing how great those beliefs are from one side, those beliefs would be even more entrenched. Unfortunately, the so-called liberal media has for 10 or 15 years completely embraced the “these are lovely people” narrative about those drawn to the message of Trump, and what was once seemed like a crazy neo-fascist sect has taken over the Republican party.
We have normalized racism and xenophobia and fascist ideas because “lovely people” support them. That’s what happened in Nazi Germany, too.
Exactly so. Never forget.
BTW, one correction of the main post, above. The Harvard Extension School is a truly outstanding public service offered by the college. It offers courses just like the ones offered by Harvard itself, taught by distinguished faculty, as a service to anyone who wants to sign up and pay the reasonable fees. I have taken courses there myself, and I HIGHLY, HIGHLY recommend them. They are of the first caliber.
I also highly, highly recommend the Yale Open Courses available online. I’ve taken a number of these, and they are wonderful. I particularly recommend these:
Introduction to the Old Testament, taught by Christine Hayes
Game Theory, taught by Ben Polak
Introduction to Theory of Literature, taught by Paul H. Frye
The American Revolution, taught by Joanne Freeman
The Early Middle Ages, 284–1000, taught by Paul Freeman
Early Modern England: Politics, Religion, and Society under the Tudors and Stuarts, taught by Keith E. Wrightson
Each of these classes is a revelation (or, rather, a bunch of revelations). Great stuff.
You can thank me later.
Bob, did you put your degree from the Harvard Extension School on your resume?
HAAAAAA! No. Of course not. I did say on my resume at one point, under Education, “additional coursework at The University of Chicago and The Harvard Extension School. That was the sum of it.
Good to hear this. A lot of the commentary on this point is coming off like, “haha, what a loser, the extension school is a joke.” I saw a comment on Twitter from someone who teaches extension courses and said that her students in those courses are nowhere near as smart as those in Harvard College.
What are the social rules on telling people you went “to Harvard.” Can dentistry students say it? Divinity students? I need to understand the mores and manners of referring to Harvard.
Note that when I refer to the commentary on this topic, I’m referring to Twitter, not this blog. (I only skimmed this thread.)
My profs in the Extension school were tenured Harvard professors. This was quite a long while ago. Of course the students differ. That’s the point. It’s outreach to the general community. I took advantage of it because it was cheap and of very high quality and I am a lifelong learner. I’m very serious about my education beyond college and would not waste my time if it were garbage. Life is too short and the universe of human accomplishment and gleanings about the mysteries is too great.
Make no mistake about it. Hawley is smart. That makes him particularly frightening. I can so imagine this guy in the uniform of an SS Obergruppenführer.
He’s also extremely manly.
Rufo, Bill Ackman and Betsy DeVos show us the ugly underbelly of school choice.
Rufo is a Senior Fellow at the Koch’s Manhattan Institute and Amy Comey Barrett’s friend, Notre Dame Prof. Nicole Stelle Garnet, is also a Fellow at the Institute. She’s credited as the most influential legal scholar advancing religious charter schools.
Certainly there are degrees of plagiarism. There are degrees of almost everything. But the university policies I’ve seen define plagiarism broadly, to include the use of ideas OR language without proper attribution, including citations and the use of quotation marks. And I was raised and educated to understand plagiarism as a strict liability standard, where intent was irrelevant. That is how many professors framed the issue.
I firmly believe Gay should not have resigned over her (terrible) testimony in the House. (She was accurately describing Harvard’s policies, albeit in a completely tone-deaf and in my view idiotic way.)
But I don’t really have an opinion about whether Gay should have resigned over plagiar-gate. Obviously the motivation for the attacks on her were political. But I do understand the reality that having someone widely known as a serial plagiarist—even if the offenses were in the category of “errors” and the errors appear sloppy than nefarious—at the helm of Harvard is difficult if not untenable, given how seriously the University purports to take plagiarism.
Is it really true that most academics at top universities routinely (e.g. the majority of their publications) commit plagiarism of the variety of “duplicative language without proper citation or use of quotation marks”? We may find out, now that Ackman is pledging to fund a review of all MIT faculty.
The bright side of all this is we’re getting an extended, vigorous public discourse about what plagiarism is or is not. In the long run, “both sides” will have been represented in this discourse, and hopefully we come out the other side with a better public understanding of the issue.
We’re getting a view of what being a donor to Harvard buys. We certainly saw/see it at Harvard School of Education, a leader in school choice, something championed by Bill Gates, Bill Ackman,…
https://x.com/alicefromqueens/status/1743265844094800268?s=46&t=vV_4bJ7GuABaalzetJofQA
Everybody knows exploitive and illegal behavior (Jeffrey Epstein) didn’t stop Harvard from taking donations.
Good people should think twice before associating themselves with legacy admission colleges that have no scruples about funding from billionaires.
Expanding- If the president’s position was once filled by someone like Larry Summers, what institutional morality is reasonably expected?
Nikole Hannah Jones got a read on the school that attempted to screw her and she didn’t take the job (even happens at public universities).
Anybody who takes the helm at George Mason should expect that donors will do him or her harm.
I suppose, on occasion, things could shift at some institutions but, I wouldn’t count on Harvard to be one.
My take is that plagiarism is intentionally using another’s work and presenting it as one’s own. Other definitions SIMPLY DO NOT MAKE SENSE unless they are qualified by an adjective, as in “unintentional plagiarism.”
People (including punitive professors) who don’t grok this probably don’t because of various sorts of deficiencies in their understanding that fall into roughly three categories, misunderstandings about a) how memory works, b) the complexities of the research process, and c) how language works.
I could make a list right here, right now, of dozens and dozens of phrases that first appeared in and were possibly coined by Shakespeare. But if people say, today, that something is fair play or dead as a doornail or a laughing stock or neither here nor there or that one is in a pickle or being eaten out of house and home, it is not necessary to put quotation marks around these. Why? Because phrases, once introduced, enter the common currency of the language. I have over the course of my life as a writer coined a number of phrases that I have then seen later all over the internet. Should I start suing people over this? I think that that would be idiotic because it would run counter to my understanding of how language works. It is constantly changing. Should Richard Dawkins sue people who use his word “meme”? I don’t think so.
Again, I have edited a lot of famous public intellectuals, and almost all of them from time to time committed in their manuscripts, almost always inadvertently, the errors for which Dr. Gay was purportedly asked to resign. I think that that’s, in a word, uniformed and, in another, stupid.
I don’t follow Chris Rufo’s Twitter feed but I read somewhere that when he heard about Dr. Gay’s resignation, he tweeted “SCALPED.” So the headline I chose was appropriate.
And he is a barbarian.
Here’s another example. Many years ago, I wrote a sample screenplay that appeared in the 11th-grade textbook of a grammar and composition series that sold millions of copies nationwide. Well, about ten years after that text appeared, a film was made that contained MANY of the components of my screenplay, including the raising of clones, without their knowledge, for use of their bodies as mines for replacement parts, all set in a resortlike setting. When I saw this film, I thought, I bet the writer or writers of this were in high school about the time when my screenplay was in the grammar and comp text being used by MOST OF THE HIGH SCHOOLS IN AMERICA.
Should I have sued about this? Well, as a creative writer (among other things) myself, I know well the pall that copyright litigation casts over creative processes, and I didn’t want to be ONE OF THOSE GUYS. If the kid or kids learned the lesson from me THAT WELL, so be it. I accomplished what I set out to accomplish.
And, of course, all this was coincidence. Perhaps the writer or writers independently came up with all these elements and independently put them all together in a single screenplay. It’s possible.
Oh, and literally hundreds of thousands of poems, short stories, fanciful histories, screenplays, and artworks of all kinds are cribbed from Ovid or Herodotus. Or in Shakespeare’s case, from Ovid and Boccaccio and Plutarch and Holinshed.
cx: all this could have been coincidence
flerp! says:
“Is it really true that most academics at top universities routinely (e.g. the majority of their publications) commit plagiarism of the variety of “duplicative language without proper citation or use of quotation marks”?”
It is true that Ackmann’s wife is a known plagiarist by the standards set by her own husband. Most embarrassingly, she plagiarized from Wikipedia! She has already apologized from what she – being a privileged white person – calls “errors” and not plagiarism. I’m sure forgetting to cite Wikipedia was just an oversight.
This happens all the time, as Bob correctly pointed out. It doesn’t bother me except when Black scholars are held to a standard that white scholars almost never have to meet. It reminded me of those who viciously and nastily attacked Nikole Hannah-Jones for making the kinds of so-called “errors” that other privileged scholars make without those with an agenda trying to discredit their body of work. (In Hannah-Jones’ case, it wasn’t even plagiarism, but the “weight” she gave to a historic fact, despite Harvard historian Jill Lepore making the same analysis!) I found it odd that some critics here believed they had special historical expertise to judge Nikole Hannah Jones and condemn her instead of just saying “I don’t know enough about the facts to have an opinion.”
This isn’t always about race — it is about privilege. Charles Ogletree was a scholar who was treated like white Harvard plagiarists like Alan Dershowitz and Laurence Tribe were treated.
Among more recent plagiarists:
Princeton professor Kevin Kruse
Brown professor Vanessa Ryan (she’s a dean now!)
Stephen Ambrose, plagiarizing historian (surely you think of plagiarism when you think of him, right?)
Doris Kearns Goodwin
It’s not just America — Cambridge University professors get a pass, too:
Financial Times, June 16, 2023:
“A Cambridge university professor who copied parts of an undergraduate’s essays and published them as his own work will remain in his job, despite an investigation upholding a complaint that he had committed plagiarism.
Dr William O’Reilly, an associate professor in early modern history, submitted a paper that was published in the Journal of Austrian-American History in 2018. However, large sections of the work had been copied from essays by one of his undergraduate students.” Oops, no biggie!
Maureen Dowd, after writing extensively about Biden’s plagiarism scandal back in 1987, was found to have absolutely plagiarized from a Josh Marshall post from Talking Points Memo in 2009. But that certainly didn’t hurt her career at all. after all, it was an “honest mistake” but her excuse was as cockamamie as it comes — she claimed someone else who told her about it must have gotten it from Josh Marshall, which never addressed why she would have copied this other person’s words exactly but since she is in the privileged class, no problem.
And extensive plagiarism did not hurt the career of Monica Crowley or discredit her as an expert.
Gay did exactly what she should do, apologize for the errors and made corrections. Many people in privilege get that pass all the time.
Unfortunately, those on the far right and their enablers specialize in making scandals out of things that aren’t serious scandals and minimizing real scandals that affect our democracy with willful blindness.
None of that responds to the question I posed and you quoted.
Let me give a concrete example that will make this discussion of “duplicative language” clearer, I think.
Suppose that I write an essay for inclusion in a new volume of criticism of the poetry of W.B. Yeats. In my essay, I write,
“Everyone knows Yeats (well, lots of people do), but few are familiar with the work of another Irish poet, James Clarence Mangan, even though Mangan wrote before Yeats about many of the same subjects and in language that has an uncanny resemblance to that found in Yeats’s mature work. Indeed, even budding Yeats scholars might well mistake poems by Mangan for ones by Yeats if these were mislabeled. Clearly, it is often the case that the history of poetry is not distinguishable from that of poetic influence.”
Well, in his book The Anxiety of Influence, Harold Bloom writes, “Poetic history, in this book’s argument, is held to be indistinguishable from poetic influence, since strong poets make that history by misreading one another.”
Is this plagiarism? Well, on the one hand, the idea is repeated with only minor changes. “Poetic history” becomes “the history of poetry.” “Indistinguishable” becomes “not distinguishable.”
On the other hand, facts are not copyrightable, and it is simply a fact that poetic history is often molded by the influence of poets of successive generations on one another. Furthermore, Bloom’s book was highly influential in critical circles, and his idea of the significance of poetic influence has become common currency, so common that one could argue that it’s no longer “his,” as the phrase “in a pickle” is no longer Shakespeare’s and no longer requires quotation marks.
As this example illustrates clearly, I think, plagiarism exists on a continuum, and it is not always simple to determine if plagiarism has occurred, even when there is “duplicative language” without citation or quotations marks.
And how am I supposed to remember, from the literally thousands of essays in literary criticism and books on literary criticism that I have read or sampled over the years that Bloom in this one place expressed this now common idea in pretty much exactly the same way? And, of course, it might be the case that his language entered my head and became part of the furniture of my mind to be used in a quotidian fashion as furniture is, typically not even in a manner in which one is aware of using it, as one might plop down on a sofa without taking account of its design as one did when first looking at it in a design catalogue.
I made a post, Flerp, with a concrete example where it’s inconclusive that plagiarism has occurred, but it’s in moderation.
Not in moderation anymore.
Thank you, Bob. Your reply was much better than mine. I think it is quite clear that Gay’s so-called plagiarism was no different than the so-called plagiarism of Neri Oxman (Bill Ackman’s wife), and yet Bill Ackman does not have the grace to admit he was wrong to attack Gay for plagiarism and apologize.
Ackman does not have the grace to admit he made a mistake in attacking Gay so viciously for doing the very same thing his wife did multiple times over many years.
flerp!’s question is odd, since the vague “most academics at top universities” seems pointless.
Maybe just SOME academics at top universities — like Neri Oxman — frequently do this. Does that make Neri Oxman’s plagiarism worse, flerp!?
What is not in dispute is that Neri Oxman committed arguably worse so-called “plagiarism” than Gay, and her husband, who condemned Gay, called his own wife’s plagiarism just “errors” for which all that was necessary is for her to do what Gay did months ago– apologize and correct.
Bob, what I believe you are saying is that all cases of “plagiarism” that are like Neri Oxman’s multiple instances (over years) of “plagiarism” should be treated equally. That seems like a no-brainer.
What I haven’t heard flerp! acknowledging is that Oxman and Gay committed the same offense, and it is the same offense whether “some” or “many” or “most” academics at MIT have committed it at some point in their writings.
To me, the bottom line is that hypocrites like Ackman condemn Gay for doing what Ackman’s wife did.
One really doesn’t need an MIT review to know that what Bob is saying is true. It’s common sense, and the fact that the more Neri Oxman’s non-dissertation writings were checked, the more instances were found, confirms this.
flerp!, do you believe Neri Oxman’s multiple examples of plagiarism is far out of the norm for an academic, unless a MIT review tells you otherwise? If you don’t have enough information to know, then you should not treat Oxman any differently than you treated Gay, musing about Oxman as a plagiarist and how Oxman’s plagiarism would be perceived. It seems reasonable that you would either give both Gay and Oxman the benefit of the doubt, period, until an MIT review gives you more information, or you explain that in both cases, their multiple commissions of plagiarism raises serious questions about their career and how knowing they are serial plagiarists would affect their students.
I prefer Bob’s take, but I apply it to both Gay and Oxman equally. Bill Ackman’s characterization of what his wife did as “errors” certainly indicates he agrees with Bob, but ONLY when it is someone he likes. And that should be condemned. One doesn’t need an MIT review to condemn it. Because whether “many”, “most” or “some” academics do it, we know for a fact that Oxman and Gay did it, and they should always be treated the same.
Sorry my question seems odd to you.
Agree Bob’s comment was better.
flerp!,
I’m very glad you found Bob’s comment convincing. He made excellent points and I thank him.
There is way too much faux outrage about Claudine Gay’s “plagiarism” from hypocrites like Bill Ackman who minimize that kind of “plagiarism” as no big deal when that plagiarism is found in the dissertation and writings of someone they like. Ackman seems to embrace all of the points Bob made when his wife makes what he calls “errors”, but he has no principles so he will still weaponize and attack and discredit Gay. Ackman should have apologized to Gay, and shown some integrity. But he did not.
It will be nice not to have to read any of that hypocrisy and faux outrage on this blog in the future.
Golly that would be wonderful!
Rufo plots to keep a patriarchy in place.
A female face (M4L) must be found for the campaign’s broader appeal. So, Bridget Ziegler volunteers or is recruited, a woman whose husband is being investigated for an alleged rape involving the agreement of a 3 way with two women.
A failure of strategy or implementation?
Oh, Bob Shepherd—PLEASE review Rufo’s so-called academic work for plagiarism. If you need to be paid for your time, I’d gladly set up a GoFundMe if it means you can take down this clown.
If someone here is affiliated with Harvard and can get access to Harvard Master’s theses via a HarvardKey login at ProQuest Dissertations and Theses Global, and if sharing theses so obtained is legal, then I would be happy to have a look.
It’s my understanding that a Master’s thesis is required in order to get a Master’s degree from the Harvard Extension School.
Rufo’s masters thesis should be checked for plagiarism. I noted that Bob is willing to do the job. Yes!
Let’s be clear that the ONLY news organization that bothered to see the hypocrisy in how Rufo and his pals go after folks is Business Insider. The NYT just dutifully wrote multiple stories amplifying how “serious” the plagiarism charges against Gay were. When Ackman’s wife made arguably worse mistakes (wikipedia??), the NYT dutifully reported it as part of a story about plagiarism being weaponized. Funny how their many stories about Gay were simply about the serious charges of plagiarism.
So it won’t matter if Rufo’s dissertation has 100 instances of plagiarism.
Bill Ackman explains exactly how this double standard works when someone who is a friend to the powerful commits plagiarism:
“Part of what makes her human is that she makes mistakes, owns them, and apologizes when appropriate.”
Ackman is referring to his wife of course, not Gay, who he viciously went after despite her owning her mistakes and apologizing. Ackman accidentally (or intentionally) revealed his belief that some people like his wife are human and others who don’t do what he wants are not.
I don’t know, NYC. I believe many journalists would definitely latch onto a story of Rufo committing plagiarism. Proper sourcing is kind of their thing. If enough report on it, it could be enough to convince MSM to do the same. Might even re-open this story.
LG,
I agree with you that it would be fantastic if Bob or anyone else could find instances of plagiarism by Rufo. I am just cynical about the MSM. They should have already run multiple stories in which every one who criticized Gay is forced to publicly condemn Ackman’s wife. No exceptions allowed.
LG, of course the media would latch onto a story about Rufo committing plagiarism. Pretty much all the major papers have already covered the Neri Oxman plagiarism story, too, and more will follow.
Neri Oxman is one of the designers featured in the Netflix series Abstract: The Art of Design. She appears to be doing interesting work at the Media Lab, but she comes off as breathtakingly vain, and that’s a turn-off. And does she give credit where credit is due when members of her team achieve dramatic design breakthroughs, or do these simply become more of HER accomplishments? In academia and in the business world, that kind of bs happens ALL THE TIME. Getting that senior or well-known researcher on the paper as author can help get the thing published, and this happens frequently even when the researcher with the name did nothing or next to nothing of the work described in the paper.
Because of her looks and her extreme wealth, she is also a media darling. Lot of ass-kissing stories about her.
Yup. She is attractive. She does interesting work. She’s rich. Her money and fame enable her to do amazing things. So, it’s sort of a recipe for media adulation.
LG, someone here who doesn’t understand the media wrote: “of course the media would latch onto a story about Rufo committing plagiarism. Pretty much all the major papers have already covered the Neri Oxman plagiarism story, too, and more will follow.”
The NYT has not actually covered the Neri Oxman plagiarism story itself. Instead the NYT has written a single article about how charges of plagiarism are being weaponized, citing Neri Oxman as an example of plagiarism charges being weaponized.
The FRAMING of a story matters, and this is the first paragraph of the SINGLE story in the NYT about Oxman:
“Accusations of plagiarism appear to be the newest weapon in the raging battle over the leadership and direction of elite universities.”
Later, in the article is the same “weaponizing” language: “The first volley from Business Insider against Dr. Oxman
The article includes quotes from her husband about how his wife is being victimized by this weaponization. The language in the article reinforces that this isn’t a story about Neri Oxman, it is a story about how charges of plagiarism are being weaponized but instead of presenting Claudine Gay as a victim of this, the story gives Ackman ample space to present Neri Oxman as a victim. And finally, when the article alludes to the actual charges, you barely know what they are and there is little context about how much more serious they are than what Gay did. You would have to read the original Business Insider pieces to be shocked at Oxman’s blatant disregard for academic integrity that is much worse than Gay.
Why didn’t the NYT do a story about plagiarism being weaponized when they were running multiple stories about the serious plagiarism charges against Gay? The NYT amplified Gay’s so-called plagiarism as serious, and Oxman’s as barely newsworthy, except in a story about how charges of plagiarism are being weaponized.
The NYT could have framed the Oxman story as a story about hypocrisy. It isn’t debatable that Ackman is a hypocrite – it is a fact. And in a story about plagiarism being weaponized, Ackmann gets to give a quote presenting his wife as victim without explaining why he weaponized it against Gay.
If anyone believes a one day story about how charges of plagiarism have been weaponized against Chris Rufo would be “coverage” that would make any difference, then I have a bridge to sell ya.
Now if by some miracle the NYT covered future discovered Rufo plagiarism the way it covered Claudine Gay, instead of how it covered the privileged and connected Oxman, it would look like this:
The NYT wrote multiple stories about Gay and they did a deep dive into the specific plagiarism charges, with side by side comparisons of them.
The FRAMING of a story matters.
Here is framing – the first pargraph – of the multiple NYT news stories about the Gay plagiarism charges:
Dec. 12, 2023
“The battle over the fate of Harvard’s president, Claudine Gay, took an unexpected turn this week, as accusations of plagiarism in her scholarly work surfaced, along with questions about how the university had handled them.”
Dec. 21, 2023
“Harvard University, in the face of mounting questions over possible plagiarism in the scholarly work of its president, Claudine Gay, said on Wednesday that it had found two additional instances of insufficient citation in her work.
The issues were found in Dr. Gay’s 1997 doctoral dissertation, in which Harvard said it had found two examples of “duplicative language without appropriate attribution.”
Dec. 21, 2023
In headline: “Here are five examples of work by President Claudine Gay of Harvard that have been spotlighted by critics who have accused her of plagiarism.
First paragraph:
“Harvard’s president, Dr. Claudine Gay, is accused of lifting words, phrases and sentences from other sources without proper attribution. Most, if not all, of the examples below are written in technical and academic jargon, not meant to convey sweeping or original ideas.
But her papers sometimes lift passages verbatim from other scholars and at other times make minor adjustments, like changing the word “adage” to “popular saying” or “Black male children” to “young black athletes.”
Here are five examples of Dr. Gay’s work that are under scrutiny, comparing her writing with that of the scholars listed.”
Multiple Gay story started with amplifying that she had committed a grave academic breach.
The single Oxman story started with how charges of plagiarism are being weaponized with Oxman as the victim.
If there is a single story about Chris Rufo being victimized by the weaponization of charges of plagiarism, that isn’t real coverage of his plagiarism. It is minimizing the plagiarism and implying that other people are bad for weaponizing it.
If there were stories about the HYPOCRISY, that would be worthy of multiple days, forcing him on record as either having to acknowledge his double standard or presenting him as having no credibility anymore.
The NYT covered Oxman not as a story about her plagiarism and a discussion of what would be appropriate punishment she should receive for it. The NYT didn’t cover Oxman as a story about hypocrisy, with Gay as the victim. Instead the NYT wrote a single story framed as a story about the weaponization of plagiarism charges, with Oxmat as the victim.
We can expect the same “coverage” for Rufo.
Stop it, NYC. Please.
Bob,
No. Why do you have to be so gratuitously rude?
I am speaking to LG. The single article coverage of Nexi Oxman’s plagiarism has been framed completely differently than the coverage of Gay’s plagiarism. And I wrote a long post to explain how it was different.
And if you are able to find evidence of Chris Rufo’s plagiarism – which I hope you do and would salute you for finding – but the NYT writes a single article about how charges of plagiarism are being weaponized, using Rufo as an example, with lots of sympathetic statements from Rufo’s friends, it will very likely make no difference at all, and the right will use plagiarism charges to destroy academics who are too progressive. But I would be thankful if you did it anyway.
someone here who doesn’t understand the media?
You are speaking of Flerp. Flerp is an educated person, a lawyer. He typically has interesting things to say and good arguments, even when we disagree. Why would you make such a blanket statement? It’s like saying, someone here who understandings nothing of the United States today of someone who lives in the United States. You really need to think a little more carefully before you blurt.
^^by the way, given that I was the one who started this thread, and LG replied to me, it would be nice if you had the grace to apologize for telling me to stop participating in a discussion in the thread that was started by me. But I won’t hold my breath. While I disagreed with flerp!, I never told him to shut up, which is essentially what you did to me, Bob. Saying “please” shut up doesn’t make it more acceptable.
When did it become acceptable here to tell someone to stop posting on a thread that they started, because other people believe they are the only ones who have the right to speak? I spent quite a bit of time to write a post offering evidence of the bias in the way the NYT framed plagiarism stories about Gay and Oxmet, just like I have in the past spent quite a bit of time presenting evidence for why I have a big problem with how the NYT frames its stories about public education, especially their dismissive treatment of Diane Ravitch as a biased public school shill while presenting pro-privatizers as if their only concern was getting students the best education possible. I try to back up my opinion with specific examples and evidence, which makes my posts long, but I don’t expect anyone who isn’t interested to read it.
I do NOT expect to be told to shut up. Especially when I haven’t hijacked someone else’s thread, but I began my own thread and other people responded.
For the record, I didn’t tell the two people who hijacked my post in order to have a discussion of Nexi Osman’s physical attractiveness to “Stop It.” They should be allowed to have that discussion, even if it’s on a thread I began.
I don’t know what you are going on and on about, NYC. We all agree that Gay and Oxman did basically the same thing and that Ackman is being soft pedaled in the media because he is breathtakingly rich. So why all this drama?
Bob,
If you don’t understand how condescending it is to tell someone “why all this drama” when they aren’t being particularly “dramatic” but writing about a subject they care about, then there is no point in discussing this with you any further. Your words speak for themselves. But I do find it surprising that someone like you, who often writes many posts one after another because you care about something, would really ask that question.
I admire you because you care about the world, and when you take the time to post multiple posts I don’t think “why all this drama”, I think “Bob cares about something passionately and I respect that he does.” And whether I happen to agree with your POV or not is entirely irrelevant.
But whatever. I’m done.
Bob, I just read your earlier post defending flerp!. I didn’t say that flerp! doesn’t understand the law. I said he doesn’t understand the media. He isn’t an expert. But that did not stop him from responding to my thread, after I wrote: “When Ackman’s wife made arguably worse mistakes (wikipedia??), the NYT dutifully reported it as part of a story about plagiarism being weaponized. Funny how their many stories about Gay were simply about the serious charges of plagiarism.”
flerp!’s response in a thread that I started, Bob, was: “LG, of course the media would latch onto a story about Rufo committing plagiarism. Pretty much all the major papers have already covered the Neri Oxman plagiarism story, too, and more will follow.”
I had just made a point about the media coverage in a NEW post, and flerp! posted to tell LG that the opposite of what I said was “of course” a fact.
If flerp! posted about a point of law in his own thread, and I interrupted it to say that of course the opposite of that point of law was true, it would be perfectly reasonable for flerp! to say that I have no expertise in the law and explain why I was wrong. But glad to know you would tell Flerp! to shut up if I posted to say that every point he just made about a legal matter was wrong, of course.
I don’t get what impresses you so much about the remark “LG, of course the media would latch onto a story about Rufo committing plagiarism. Pretty much all the major papers have already covered the Neri Oxman plagiarism story, too, and more will follow.” It isn’t well-argued nor is it a “good argument”. It isn’t an argument at all. It’s just random stuff that someone “thinks”, with no evidence to back it up. And it is especially poorly reasoned as a direct response to contradict the point I made about how the NYT’s coverage of Oxman was framed to minimize the plagiarism, and emphasize that the people who were making that charge were “weaponizing” it.
But no worries. If you find any instances of plagiarism by Chris Rufo, flerp! the lawyer has asserted that of course the media will give it major coverage that doesn’t make you the weaponizer and Rufo the victim, and the evidence flerp! gives for why my concerns were unwarranted was so compelling. My worthless account with specific examples can’t compare to “all the major papers have already covered the Neri Oxman plagiarism story, too, and more will follow.” If only I was a lawyer, maybe I’d be a better media critic.
Flerp “doesn’t understand the media” is an overly broad statement, an overgeneralization that negatively characterizes him in a way that is clearly untrue. He clearly understands a great deal about “the media.” Sometimes you do this, NYC. You make these overgeneralizations, and you make assumptions that people who don’t disagree with you must have various extremist points of view or be deficient in major ways. You commonly say things like, “then you must think that [insert something the person did not say or even imply].” You might want to rethink these habits. They don’t make for civil discourse.
And, btw, I suspect that given the events of the last few weeks, major media would jump at the chance of running a verified story illustrating plagiarism by Rufo. It would be a sensational story, and sensational stories win eyeballs which sells advertising.
In the event it matters, before I became a lawyer, I worked for a few years as a reporter for a major newspaper. I did a couple cable tv spots, too. So I do have a bit of firsthand knowledge about media. But I wasn’t forced to draw from that knowledge to conclude that news organizations would run with stories about Rufo plagiarizing if those stories existed. That’s just common sense.
What’s your occupation? Have you ever worked in media?
To be clear, my last comment was not directed at Bob.
For the record, Ackman seems to have completely embraced Bob’s view and unlike flerp!, he no longer seems to need a study on the plagiarism of MIT professors to “prove” to him that plagiarism is no biggie (when his wife commits it.)
Business Insider:
“Billionaire hedge fund manager Bill Ackman softened his tone on academic dishonesty after a report by Business Insider found his wife, Neri Oxman, plagiarized portions of her doctoral dissertation.
In an extensive, 5,139-word post on X made Saturday evening, Ackman — who led the crusade to get Harvard President Claudine Gay to resign over plagiarism allegations — said it is “a near certainty that authors will miss some quotation marks and fail to properly cite or provide attribution for another author on at least a modest percentage of the pages of their papers.”
hahahaha “A NEAR CERTAINTY”
What a hypocrite. Still no apology to Gay.
By the way, as I predicted, there seems to be almost no coverage of this hypocrisy in the media. The NYT continues to have the one story from days ago about how they just realized – along with Ackman – that plagiarism can be weaponized! With poor Oxman as victim. “We’re shocked, shocked that weaponization of plagiarism is going on here!”
Hackman – a more appropriate name for him – wrote a ridiculous twitter piece about his wife’s use of wikipedia.
“Neri has yet to vet yesterday’s plagiarism allegations, but she will get to them when she has time to do so. Notably the first 15 of the 28 examples that came from Business Insider’s “thorough review of her published work” were definitions of words or terms that Neri may have used from Wikipedia including the definition of: “weaving,” “computer graphics,” “computer-aided design,” “pain,” “manifold,” “heat flux,” “optimization,” and “sustainable design,” to name more than half of the examples BI calls plagiarism.
Is this plagiarism? Let’s assume that in writing her dissertation Neri used Wikipedia as a dictionary for these terms and it is deemed to be plagiarism, does it any way affect the quality and originality of the research in her dissertation? I think that’s worth an important discussion among the experts.
It does not strike me as plagiarism, nor do I think it takes anything away from her work. I am not sure who would even complain that they were not cited properly.”
What a tool Ackman is.
Here is my FAVORITE because it is just so full of privilege:
“I am sure that when Neri wrote her dissertation she thought that there was nothing wrong with using Wikipedia as a dictionary. When I was a student, I remember having a thesaurus and a dictionary on my desk that I would consult when I wrote a paper and needed a synonym or a definition of a word. I never thought to quote or cite my thesaurus or dictionary for basic words, term or synonyms.”
Unlike Hackman, I learned in 3rd grade that copying entire definitions from dictionaries and presenting them as your own isn’t right. But I do love how Hackman pretends that his wife lifting entire passages and illustrations from Wikipedia without attribution is just like using a thesaurus to find a synonym for a word you want to use! OMFG!
This hypocrisy SHOULD be covered in the news. It isn’t.
Bob, Marcy Wheeler at EmptyWheel demonstrates what media criticism is. You should read her piece from Jan. 5 or 6 on the NYT coverage of Biden’s excellent Valley Forge speech. Anyone who believes that media criticism ends with “the NYT covered this” doesn’t understand media criticism at all. That is where media criticism BEGINS. It reveals someone’s ignorance if they believe it ends there.
I suspect I have a lot more direct experience working in the media than flerp! does. I also once worked in a law firm – and yet if someone made a good, evidence-based argument about the poor quality of lawyering at big law firms, I would understand that despite once working at a law firm, I would be foolish to dispute it without having any knowledge.
If working as a reporter meant that one understood the media, than the NYT reporters with their many years of experience would not be completely mystified that anyone could criticize their work. And reporters with years of experience like Eliza Shapiro would not treat Diane Ravitch as some partisan hack (while presenting privatizers as trustworthy and truthful folks whose altruism led them to work to help kids get the best education possible.)
“Covering” a story about charter school corruption by writing a single story that frames the charter schools as being victimized by big bad public school people out to get them, is not the same as “covering” charter school corruption by writing a series of stories that present charter school corruption as a serious issue that is extremely harmful to students.
Someone who understands media knows this. Marcy Wheeler at EmptyWheel knows this. Which is why she wrote her piece decrying the lousy NYT coverage of Biden’s speech. The story didn’t end at “The NYT covered the speech, let’s talk about something else.”
As someone else noted, the comments at EmptyWheel are often excellent. If someone replied to Marcy Wheeler carefully writing about the lack of real coverage of that speech by replying to challenge her view: “of course the media would latch onto a story about Biden making a great speech, pretty much all the papers have already covered Biden’s speech!” , I suspect the commenters there would also question why this person who had just demonstrated by that reply they had no understanding of the media, was so determined to discredit Marcy Wheeler’s point.
Stories about how public school partisans have weaponized attacks on charter schools is NOT “coverage of charter school scandals”. Stories about how the poor right wingers are victims because their critics have weaponized charges of plagiarism is not coverage of plagiarism.
People who understand the media don’t confuse the two. Many people who work in the media don’t understand how their own reporting is problematic.
There was more “coverage” of Oxman today in the Washington Post. It was about how the owner of Business Insider was going to investigate why reporters had written a negative story about Oxman. How dare they mention her plagiarism! Now flerp! can crow that he told me so, because look how the newspaper keep covering the Oxman story.
But people who understand the media understand that stories that make accusers the bad guys and those who commit plagiarism the victims are not the same as the coverage Gay got — many, many stories about how serious her plagiarism was.
I have wasted way too much time to explain something that I suspect flerp! already knows. I have no idea why flerp! felt compelled to reply to my post at all. I made it clear to LC that while I was pessimistic about the news media giving charges of right wing plagiarism any coverage, I would be pleased to have someone look for plagiarism in Rufo’s dissertation. There really was no need for flerp! to assure Rufo the media was certain to give any findings of Rufo plagiarism serious coverage when that is far from being guaranteed. And citing the Oxman coverage to support his certainty of what happen made it clear that flerp! has no understanding of the media, since the Oxman coverage was about Oxman as victim (followed by the later story of how those who victimized Oxman at Business Insider would now be investigated.)
Feel free to stay off my threads in the future.
And Bob, because I know you care, I strongly recommend EmptyWheel (especially the posts by Marcy Wheeler) and the wonderful Kathleen Hall Jameison who has been doing media criticism for many decades. Those are folks whose writings demonstrate they understand the media.
Sounds like you just want to see more op-eds about The Hypocrisy.
I would like to see Oxman’s plagiarism covered the way Gay’s plagiarism was covered. Why is that concept so hard for you to grasp?
Or rather, what I would have liked is for Gay’s plagiarism to be covered the way Oxman’s was covered. If it was, Gay would likely still be Harvard’s president instead of branded as a suspect scholar whose presence on campus at all shatters Harvard’s reputation.
I’m surprised you don’t see the hypocrisy in how Ackman minimized his wife’s plagiarism in his latest tweet. Perhaps we disagree whether that’s newsworthy – I suspect Ackman would agree with you.
I believe that we agree that if anyone finds similar “plagiarism” by Rufo, it will be covered the way Oxman’s plagiarism was covered. If you don’t understand why that is a problem, well, that speaks for itself.
As I said some twenty posts ago, no one, NO ONE, disagrees that Gay and Oxman did basically the same thing and that the press has for the most part given Ackman a pass because of his wealth and power.
no one here
Bob,
Everyone also agrees the sky is blue! Everyone also agrees that the media will cover Rufo’s plagiarism the way they covered Oxman’s plagiarism. At least, flerp! and I seem to agree on that.
In fact, that’s what I posted that started all this. I started a new post to express my doubts that the media would cover Rufo’s plagiarism in the way they covered Gay’s, BECAUSE their coverage of Oxman’s plagiarism was minimal and what little there was often framed the story as one of Oxman being victimized.
I have no idea why anyone could be certain that OF COURSE a discovery of Rufo’s plagiarism would get significant media coverage and cite the coverage of Oxman’s plagiarism to support their view. But it certainly demonstrates a lack of understanding about the media.
It is POSSIBLE that the media would make Rufo’s plagiarism a serious issue. But citing their coverage of Oxman to support your view that “of course” there is no disputing that Rufo’s plagiarism would get a lot of coverage demonstrates a lack of understanding about the media.
Bob, I am glad you explained that flerp! agrees with us that “Gay and Oxman did basically the same thing and that the press has for the most part given Ackman a pass because of his wealth and power.”
I didn’t realize that “of course the media would latch onto a story about Rufo committing plagiarism. Pretty much all the major papers have already covered the Neri Oxman plagiarism story, too, and more will follow” actually meant “the media gave Ackman a pass because of his wealth and power”. My bad.
Now we all agree. Let’s stop.
Great idea. Stop. The topic is finished.
Here’s hoping that SECDEF Lloyd Austen is recovering quickly and completely.
Oh, and to those calling for this great man’s resignation, I can only say,
Oh, wait. Diane doesn’t allow such language on her blog.