Modern dissidents argue that the chain of causality starts with biology, which bounds the culture of a people. That culture grows the institutions which define the politics and economics of society. Replace half the population of Haiti with Japanese people and you end up with a vastly different society. The Japanese would seize control of the country, impose their will and the result would be a political-economy that is nothing like anything that could exist in an African run society.
While this is a good rule of thumb for general politics, it falls apart when there is a revolution in technology. The Industrial Revolution started in England and spread to the European continent. It quickly resulted in massive cultural changes as people moved from the countryside to the cities to work in factories. It is a great example of how revolutionary technological changes can reverse the flow of the great chain of causality as the new technology is absorbed by the society.
Of course, the Industrial Revolution did not start in England by luck. The slow transformation of the people, resulting in lots of smart people looking to solve old problems, is the counter to this claim. The Industrial Revolution was the result of the changes in the European population that started in the Middle Ages. It was biology that brought about the technological revolution, so one can argue that the great chain of causality holds up even in revolutionary moments.
Putting that aside, the West is at the end of one of those revolutions, which is the microprocessor revolution. The way we live today is very different from how we lived fifty years ago, at least when it comes to how we interact with one another and how individuals interact with society. Fifty years ago, this post would not be written because there would be no way to see it even if it was written. Fifty years ago, information was relatively scarce, while today it is unlimited.
This is what makes the present plagiarism panic in the academy something more than just a tempest in a teapot. Fifty years ago, it was hard to copy and paste the work of others because copy and paste did not exist. Written words were typed with a typewriter, which meant typing out what it was you were stealing. Before publishing, many hands edited and retyped those words. The whole process moved much slower, so getting caught was also much easier.
That changed with technology, but the editing and fact checking process did not change with the new technology. Instead, it atrophied. The new technology turned the flow of written material into a firehose and those old processes were not able to keep up with the volume. Not only that, the bottlenecks were blown open like a raging river blasting through a damn. Today written content flows without restriction and without any serious scrutiny in the modern academy.
There is another issue here. Technology has created a new conception of the public domain that was unimaginable fifty years ago. Wikipedia, for example, is technically not a publisher and it has no authors. It is a crowdsourced repository of information that is explicitly intended to be in the public domain. The internet itself is the repository of all human knowledge now. Again, most of it is intended to be freely available to whoever is interested, because it is the public domain.
Can you plagiarize the internet? How about Wikipedia? The concept of plagiarism is tied to property rights. You produce a written work using your labor so you have an ownership claim to it. If on the other hand, you give it away freely on the internet or post it on a site like Wikipedia, do you still own it? Can it be stolen when your clear intent is to share it with the world, perhaps anonymously? Throw in the fact that these sources change over time and the issue gets quite murky.
Then you have the fact that there are only so many ways to state things, especially those that are part of a contextual reality. Claudine Gay got in trouble for repeating what amounts to echolalic babbling that defines her field of study. There are only so many ways to preach against whiteness, so by now every way to state the simplistic ideas within that field have been done many times. No matter how you say something in grievance studies, you sound like everyone else.
That is what will be revealed by these efforts to scan the works of academics for plagiarism using modern tools. The rigid conformity in most of these fields has led to a narrowing of what is safe to write in a paper. If everyone was fastidious about siting the work of others, all new papers would be so littered with citations that the index would be longer than the paper. The plagiarism hunters will find they are overwhelmed with examples to the point where it becomes meaningless.
This brings up another issue. The culture of the internet from the very beginning was to be open and communal. Long before the scolds were allowed online, the culture of the internet was anarchic. If you posted something online it was fair game. Anyone could use it and modify it to their purposes. Post a pic of yourself on vacation and it could end up being used by someone posting about that vacation spot. No one thought or thinks about who owns a pic, a meme or anything that is online.
In other words, the culture of the internet has changed the culture in general as people spend so much time online. Someone using a picture of your house, for example, only matters if their intent is to cause you harm or they unintentionally create a problem for you, like having a mob show up at your door. No one contacts the real estate sites demanding that old images of their house be taken down. Can you even do this, even if you had the desire? Would a court side with you?
Bill Ackman’s wife allegedly copied from Wikipedia. How can we know this when it is possible the Wiki contributor copied from Mx. Ackman? Maybe she cribbed from some third source that the Wiki author also used. Is this even copying when the whole point of the site is to collect up information for public consumption? Again, can you steal something that is made freely available? Plagiarism assumes intent and the lack of consent, which is missing in this example.
On top of all this, the biggest players in the technology space rely on ambiguous definitions of what constitutes property. They capture all sorts of things about you and your behavior and sell it to corporations and governments. They argue it is theirs to sell because you do not technically own your habits and tastes. An emerging quality of the ruling elite is an abandonment of the old concepts of ownership. You no longer own you, at least not in the traditional sense of it.
Much is said about the ideological nature of the managerial elite, but it may be that their fanaticism is simply a defense mechanism. As technology continues to erode the old rules, their ideological fervor fills the void. The free flow of information is not opening and democratizing society, but instead leading to an authoritarian reaction by the managerial elite to the threats technology brings to the old rules. Like the steam engine, the microprocessor promises to overthrow the old order.
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“Can you plagiarize the internet? How about Wikipedia? The concept of plagiarism is tied to property rights. You produce a written work using your labor so you have an ownership claim to it. If on the other hand, you give it away freely on the internet or post it on a site like Wikipedia, do you still own it? Can it be stolen when your clear intent is to share it with the world, perhaps anonymously?”
Contributions to Wikipedia are time-stamped and are supposed to be (and mostly are) cited to previously available sources. Detecting plagiarism is not much of a problem. And, no, a “Creative Commons” license does not give up ownership.
The plagiarism kerfuffle is simply a means to distract people from the anti white philosophies of the universities by changing the subject.
The volume of the screaming tells you how afraid they are that people will catch on.
The monetary impact is enormous. So to head off impacts to their endowments, they create a fake crisis to create a fake resolution.
I have a colleague who is married to a Jewish woman. Their son was looking at Harvard, and pulled his application over the Jew-hating stuff. Whether you agree or disagree is irrelevant. The point is that a lot of current and future money is going elsewhere.
It’s never about plagiarism. It’s always about money.
“The new technology turned the flow of written material into a firehose and those old processes were not able to keep up with the volume”
Not so. For example, Google is VERY good at detecting creators using other’s material on YouTube – often giving them a copyright strike within minutes of posting.
I’m sure everone in academia is aware of plagiarism detecting software – they choose not to use it because it might collapse their house of cards.
OT What’s up with the little hats with big hats in Brooklyn?
The industrial revolution started in Britain not because of biology but rather, geography. Deposits of iron and coal are cheek-and-jowel in Britain, which facilitates the making of iron tools and later, steel. Those deposits are farther way in other countries, which meant a little slower development. They caught up fast.
If DNA was not a critical factor of the Industrial Revolution, then it would not have mattered if Great Britain had been populated only by people with Down Syndrome.
So how would you explain the industrialization of Japan, which has few natural resources? I didn’t down-vote you, because a lot of eminent people have bought into the resource hypothesis. But I’d suggest you watch a “Why Guns, Germs, and Steel by Jared Diamond is Wrong” for a better understanding.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bAlEwYjaBRM
Sorry, Drive-By. My response was intended for the OP.
Africa is the mother load of resources. To this day. Millions of Africans are rolling chicken bones above some of the most valuable commodities on Earth. Will their black asses ever pick up a shovel and exploit it? Only with a Chinese whip hand.
What are the numbers on that in terms of distance for iron and coal? LOL.
The coal and iron became useful because the British developed the technology to turn them into useful assets.You are putting the cart before the horse. If your theory was correct about coal/iron deposits then surely the Arabs would have invented the car because of their oil reserves.
No mention of the the agricultural revolution in Britain and how it created a huge surplus of capital which was subsequently invested in industrial development?What is your explanation for the ag rev-fields closer together?
No legal or educational framework or cultural advantages?
Which European country has produced more mathematical theories
than anyone else? Is is because in Britain the numbers are closer together?
Britain could do it more quickly and thus was first but Germany quickly outstripped Britain once they created the infrastructure to exploit their iron and coal deposits which are the basis of industrialization.
Its even more sight specific than that.
The industrial revolution began with coal fired engines that pumped water out of coal mines. They were horribly inefficient at first – maybe 1% of the heat generated did useful work. They were also gigantic – the size of large barns.
So to even get started you need a place that had coal mines at the surface, with the seam running deep underground, below the water table.
It had to be coal because the mined material has to be combustible. And on sight because the low efficiency makes it impossible to transport the coal any distance on the surface economically
It also has to be coal because of the low value of the material. Precious metals were valuable enough to have humans and animals extract them and water from deep mines.
There are very few places in the world with all of those variables coming together. Western England being one of them.
Copper ‘n tin
what brought Britain in
Still, someone had to figure all this out; it didn’t just happen. If you’re interested in the influence of geography on economic development, I think you might enjoy watching “Why Guns, Germs, and Steel by Jared Diamond is Wrong” on YouTube. A link is posted above.
Of course some one had to figure it out.
But there’s a reason that it happened in England and not Germany or France or Northern Italy.
All of which had white populations and a longer history of deep rock mining.
No mention of the agricultural revolution in England. What is your explanation for that Mr.Dino? How do you think that shaped the industrial revolution?
Why does this argument never apply to the Chinese and thier use of coal and iron or their invention of gunpowder?You are being disingenuous.
China and the Americas have multiple regions that had the geological advantages of England.
Plagiarism is not what iit use to be. All the same, I’d like an Ackman scan of the work of Ketanji Brown Jackson.
Here’s another whopper to add to the new order:
https://www.zerohedge.com/political/georgia-trump-prosecutor-accused-secret-disqualifying-romance-da-fani-willis
TLDR: Fani Willis hires her married lover as prosecutor in Trump case, in spite of fact that said married lover has no experience as a prosecutor so is utterly unqualified for the position. Prosecutor coordinates with Biden White House staff in preparing case. Willis and her lover use taxpayer money to take trips to Caribbean, Sonoma, etc.
In America both Willis and her lover would be disbarred and prosecuted for this behavior. In Georgia, I suspect nothing will happen.
They’re both chimps.
Nothing to see here.
And that’s not all! The Internet is only the first wave of communal info-storage depots coming down the pipeline.
William Gibson’s “Cyberspace” concept is far more immersive than the Internet is. It involves using a “deck” to interface with the subterranean, liquid world of cyberspace, wherein giant corporations guard their information storehouses with ICE — defensive firewalls.
In cyberspace, you’re free to move and do as you please, and cyberspace jockeys have the most freedom of all. The funny thing is, even cyberspace may not be the end of the line for human beings. We could end up living in a universe-as-simulation which replicates ALL OF REALITY, making it hard to tell what is dream and what is waking.
[To read more of my writings, click on my name]
“In cyberspace, you’re free to move and do as you please” until you run into a firewall and other security elements which you lack the knowledge or resources to hack. So much for that 20th century fantasy.
It’s good to be skeptical about the premises of The Matrix and eXistenZ, too. During the 2010’s, some mathematicians took up the question of whether or not it’s logically possible for the world to be a sim. Their answer was no.
Suppose, however, that it IS possible. Which of the following two scenarious then is more likely true?
(a) We could end up in a sim.
(b) We live in a sim already.
Dissidents: nearly all men are quite content to live by lies if the alternative is death or prison.
I tire of these Titles of Dissident,
As if this takes courage, as if it’s not abandoned under pressure, or even the phantom specter of any consequences…
The only dissidents in America are in prison, or just released.
GENUG.
“The internet itself is the repository of all human knowledge now.”
Not quite. Books still exist in private and public libraries and by no means is all the good stuff in the books available on the internet. As books are obsoleted and tossed, much will be lost that nobody will remember we had.
Public libraries are pulping huge quantities of books every single day. It is digital uber alles.
That “books are lost” probably mostly depends on year and rarity. Most everything published in the last few decades is in digital format. University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, had a project going when I was a sapling to digitize most everything. To that effect, they made arrangement with my university for all Thesis and Dissertations to be xeroxed/copied When I submitted, they had automatic permission to archive my work by the university.
This was something different from publishing. IIR, Ann Arbor simply retained a copy for posterity. I believe they’d ask you before releasing a copy.
I believe there is irony in the “microprocessor revolution” as mentioned here. The internet has been in general use (practical) since 1998 or so – give or take. That’s a long time for the internet to reverse or change the “grip” of the managers.
If microprocessing doubles capacity etc. every 18 months – actually purported to be much faster these days – then it really is staggering along. Isn’t it? Of course, not much can be expected of a society hampered by coerced thought – also mentioned here.
They are not doubling every 18 months now. “Moore’s Law” is running up against a more supreme law, that of physics.
We are starting to hit physical limits of what can be etched in the nanometer range on a silicon wafer.
There are new technologies that address this but the pace has slowed significantly.
I believe it may be lost on some how modern academic writing, even in the STEM fields, works. First, examine the works cited page, even of an actual chemistry experiment. A ten page write up will feature 30-40 works cited (not consulted). Modern academic writing is based on the idea of an academic conversation and, in some perverse way, a return to the era of scholasticism. In short, most academic writing is simply you placing your own writing within the field. In many ways, like scholasticism, all you do is posit a viewpoint and use the authority (just like scholasticism) to justify this position. Essentially, assemble your authority in order to justify your assertion. Thus, your entire argument is no longer akin to a Francis Bacon essay; it is simply a hodgepodge of material you selectively present.
Coupled with the lack of original thought (death of inductive reasoning) and the stupidity and conformity of the academic world, most academic writing is coprophagic regurgitation. Go to google scholar and look at any modern essay. A twenty page essay will have 80 sources. In essence, all academic writing is restatement.
This leads to what people miss: Gay cited her sources. She did not commit intellectual theft. She did what everyone in the liberal arts does (and a great deal in STEM). Her mistake was appropriating (har har) the language of the sources. I have no doubt she cited the sources, for she overtly references them as derived from another’s ideas. The issue is the wording that she stole.
Do not misunderstand the tone of this. I have nothing but contempt for ghouls like Gay. My point is people are conflating many related issues.
To wit: Academia is essentially nothing but regurgitation. Gay simply didn’t digest the language a bit more. The issue of lack of original thought is different.
For a humorous aside, check out the way people used to catch plagiarism. On the Dick Cavett show, Gore Vidal and Norman Mailer were having a big row. Vidal, that unctuous sodomite, had the crowd on his side (Cavett’s a liberal puke, but at least the level of discussion was elevated). Vidal tries to pass of a piece of witticism as his own, and Mailer calls him out for taking it from a new article they both read.
It’s hard to imagine Gore Vidal and Norman Mailer both appearing on a talk show of today. More like Donald Trump doing an imaginary interview of Donald Trump on the Tonight Show. (I like Trump, don’t get me wrong.)
The days of authors being arbiters of anything are over. We writers may have had some sway with intellectuals in the 1700s and 1800s but the world has shifted to a visual idiom. Eye candy — that sparkly, catchy visual sauce slathered all over two-dimensional screens — has taken over. With the proliferation of cheap, two-dimensional screens, striking images out-compete the written word. There is still a place for blogs like mine (click on my name to go) but that space is getting AWFULLY confining.
Zman’s analysis of the impact of the microchip and the Internet on publication technology reveals some deep truths about the evolution of mass culture. It seems to me that the fundamental distinction arising from the cheap and ubiquitous nature of the new technology, when compared to print, radio, film and television, is that between value creators and parasites. Gate keeping and the expense of “publication” to a wide audience necessitated reserving the prior technology for information of relatively higher value and rewarding those who produced it. Part of that reward was protecting against the diminution of that value through measures like copyright legislation. Value was also enhanced by the approval of a recognized class of critics or peer reviewers; by honors and awards for works of excellence; and over longer periods of time, the inclusion of truly exceptional creations in the Canon of works that simply must be the shared patrimony of anyone daring to consider himself educated.
Why has this distinction between value creators and parasites exploded in the 21st century? Perhaps the very nature of “value” has been altered by the new technology. Hard cash for a book of several hundred pages no longer seems like an attractive value proposition when an endless stream of pages can be read or viewed at no cost other than the sacrifice of attention to more or less intrusive advertisers and the rarely noticeable but nonetheless real loss of privacy. The mantra of the new age is that if the product you’re using is free, then you (your data) are the true product. Aggregators of this parasitically harvested data help others extract value by crafting new information that is psychologically engineered to manipulate behavior.
And as a culture we seem to have embraced this shift in value. Young people in particular happily trade their image and their privacy for “likes” and attention. This is fueled by monetization at a threshold only a small percentage can reach, the so-called “influencers.” We are becoming a world of feminized attention whores. And others strive to earn a living by feeding this beast, parasitically publishing 10-best lists and ripped and stripped click bait, most of which is “repackaged.” As Zman notes, there’s only so many ways to say something, but the internet is the new Tower of Babel.
Meanwhile, the value created by men is disparaged as racist and misogynistic. Building and repairing infrastructure, and sharing information about how to do that job well. In our effete society, we pay men to do the dirty and dangerous work that we either won’t, or can’t, do; then we begrudge paying them and disparage their service as toxic masculinity. This is a recipe for collapse.
Sitting in my air-conditioned home and sipping an ice-cold beer, I never understood why the Luddites reacted so fearfully and violently to those factories and looms. But Zman’s insights have crystalized my own realization that I am now a neo-Luddite because of the internet and social media. Admittedly, as I type this on my pocket Moloch, a somewhat hypocritical one. But the doom that is befalling us is the way back; and the the way back is the way forward.
No one hardly thinks about infrastructure and how it affects everything they do until it doesn’t work and then it becomes crystal clear quite fast…
“ Fifty years ago, it was hard to copy and paste the work of others because copy and paste did not exist. Written words were typed with a typewriter, which meant typing out what it was you were stealing.”
I have no argument here, but perhaps another viewpoint.
MLK had no problem—pre-Internet days—plagiarizing *his* PhD dissertation! I don’t see where computerized “cut and paste” is essential nor causal. And I remember my PhD dissertation process, also before most computerized processing as we know it today—and yes, I brought my hand written work to a typist recommended by the university graduate college at the time. My citations came from paper printed journals and texts. My citations were required for the most part to be “primary” citations, not hearsay. To plagiarize was a death wish and the consideration/fear was to miss even one citation for a non-original idea or assertion. So what has changed from then to now?
What I see here, and have mentioned before, are the types and numbers of students we have in tertiary academic education. We really don’t have reason for more than the highest of the eligible population (top 15-20% or so, IQ greater than 1 SD) to attend university or college. Community “colleges” I leave out as they are often a strange mixture of post HS and trade school. They may very well meet the gap our failing HS’s are leaving behind.
Today, thanks to government propaganda and funding, we are approaching 50% of our newer generations enrolling (not nearly all graduate however and newer generational cohorts seem to be wising up). The percentage increase in postgraduate attendance is even higher proportionally.
What has happened (IMHO) is we’ve flooded the system with mediocrities who 50 years ago might not even have been admitted to university, much less allowed to graduate and then pursue a post-graduate degree. These folk can’t cut the mustard and therefore *cheat*! This is especially apparent with our minority population—who are often persuaded to attend post HS educational mainly in pseudo academic disciplines and passed along by faculty who lend a blind eye to their incompetence.
We had this problem years ago when I was a post graduate student as well, but in those days the postgraduate credentials were often found to be fraudulent or simply purchased from “degree mills”. Today, those “degree mills” seem to have moved to “legitimate” institutions and some of those with once great reputations. 🙁
What I was getting at and was not as clear as I should have been is that plagiarism in the old days required more work so the intent was easy to assume. The person doing it had to know and had to know it was wrong. These days, the ease of copying changes this calculation. A person could easily screw up and fail to cite someone by accident. Even worse, someone could copy and paste to their notes on a project and forget they copied and just assume they took some notes.
Gay wrote her PHD thesis in 1996 and used obscure sources to lift ideas from. She knew exactly what she was doing.
The larger point of a world where we’re absolutely deluged by information (that’s changing all the time) and attributing it may be a mug’s game. (I thought your essay was quite clear)
Still, “it’s not what you say, it’s how you say it.”
Perhaps academic papers need to get far less esoteric and stuffy and WAY more readable? If the purpose of academic writing is to convey new or recycled ideas, perhaps the top prizes need to go to those who can actually educate? Their peers, collogues, or the unwashed masses?
Z-man, you are too kind to Gay, but that is not a fault. Decency is never a fault (I’m old school). In the J—ish tradition it is a requirement to consider *all* alternative reasons for ill behavior *before* assuming the *worst* intent upon the part of the individual.
Modern dissidents argue that the chain of causality starts with biology, which bounds the culture of a people. That culture grows the institutions which define the politics and economics of society.
Amusing, considering that your Jesuit education included Latin, so you know the accurate definition of “cultus” and that it is derived from religion, not race, biology, planetary motion, or phase of the moon.
This is false. Our word culture comes from the French word “culture” which comes directly from the cultura, as in cultivate a piece of land or develop a knowledge of a topic.
Btw, the phrase “culture is downstream from biology” is a true winner. I’ve used it often, and you can see people take a second and think about and then nod their head, even hardcore colorblind CivNats.
Then, you complete the idea with “Institutions are downstream from culture, which is downstream from biology. Change the biology, and you’ll change the culture, which, eventually, will change the institutions. That’s why the Constitution won’t save you.”
I’ve rarely had someone challenge me on it. Somewhere deep in their soul, they know that I’m telling them the equivalent of the sun rises in the East and sets in the West. It’s not debatable.
Culture is not downstream from biology. That is obviously false. What Z wrote is that biology bounds the reality of “a people” (emphasis mine). That’s true. Culture, however, is determined by politics. There are many historical examples of a biological minority imposing a culture on a biological majority, through conquest (which is political). This imposition then destroys the biological majority as a distinct people.
So the biological minority and the biological majority didn’t innately share the same culture? Aren’t you making Z-Man’s point for him?
I guess that explains why blacks disappeared as a distinct race and culture in the United States. Thanks for clearing that up.
Look, the fact that a person can hold a chair up in the air for awhile doesn’t disprove the law of gravity.
That still means culture is downstream from biology. Politics is the means to install a new biological. The ongoing genocide against whites reflects this.
But how did these competing cultures emerge to begin with? If not from biology, what then? The trajectory of a particular culture may well be altered by politics, but it will still bear the traits of a people. It’s why after centuries of Roman rule the Britons did not become Roman; it’s why Latin morphed into dozens of mutually-unintelligible dialects, and why western efforts to impose modernity on Africa failed.
Look, take the ordinary black guy in a riot, call him Tyrone, hauling TV sets or cases of malt liquor down the street to his crib. Tyrone speaks English (more or less), has attended a western school, wears western clothing, craves western products (see above), presumably lives in a western building with heat and electricity, and digs western chicks.
From all this, as an outside ethnographer, you would conclude that this man is, as a cultural matter, a westerner. His culture has been replaced with a “conquering culture.”
Take away these cultural artifacts and he would revert to his default state: A base savage whose biology intended him to be a hunter-gatherer in the African grasslands, or pounding logs at some orgiastic tribal dance. It’s in his biology, bro.
“I’ve rarely had somone challenge me on it.”
Most people who will challenge it belong to the high church of equalitarianism. Their way of opposing it commits them to explaining—without reference to DNA—why most humans don’t live like bonobos and chimpanzees.
Still, it’s misleading to say that “culture is downstream from biology”. Biology as we know it is the rigorous study of life, NOT the object of study. Life and biology belong to very different categories, just as the USA’s Constitution and truthful lawyering belong to different categories. It would much be better to say that culture is downstream from breed and species, among other factors such as location.
Maybe, however, it’s better to frame the truth in terms of limits. So if anyone ever says “culture is downstream…” to me in person, I’ll restate the claim as just above then add in a friendly tone of voice that,…
HEREDITARY MATERIAL bounds the cultures of all hominins, and biology as we know it comes from Caucausian human beings. This puts biology in the company of logic, linguistics, mathematics, physics, astronomy, as so on as we know them. It’s not the case that culture is downstream from biology, and it can’t be true. Biology is an ELEMENT of culture, and it will remain an element of Caucasian culture until shortly before the genocide is completed, assuming the success of Caucasians’ enemies, whomever they may be.
> it is derived from religion, not race, biology, planetary motion, or phase of the moon.
You forgot to mention 5G, aliens and flat Earth. I hope your commenting effort was worth the 2 cents you will get for it.
A person who believes in divinely revealed religion cannot tolerate public claims that his culture is downstream from DNA, genes, and chromosomes, or that hereditary material bounds the culture of his assembly of the faithful. He imagines that his religious culture came directly from his god. Our theocrat’s culture, as he imagines it, emerged from the positive and negative commands transmitted to humans by his alleged god, from the rituals prescribed by his god, and from his god’s arbitrary interventions in Earthly events. Sometimes the theocrat says also that his culture or others’ is under the influence of an evil spirit—which must be some sort of ally or tool of the god given the god’s reluctance to eliminate the evil spirit.
These competing claims about the origins of culture are forever irreconcilable. At least one must be false, and I think we know which one it is. So Christianish Caucasians who accept “culture is downstream…” or something akin to this idea need to shit or get off the pot. The third way of dawdling on the seat and straining to retain Semitic superstition will guarantee destruction by the other breeds and hybrids who are being organized into armies to destroy us. Retentive Caucasians may get a trip to a hospital to dig out impacted feces, but by then it may be too late.
Richard Dawkins, you lurking?
I don’t think there is an actual plagiarism panic. I have seen this same thing happen in other countries. Always used in a political context to whip the servants (politicians, journos and other system propagandists) into compliance. Once the goals have been achieved, nobody remembers the plagiarism part.
I agree. The plagiarism is real in as much as Z-Man points out that anti-whiteness is just a shallow pretext to promote the villification, demonization and genocide of European peoples. Similarly the outcry over plagiarism is a pretext of its own. The managers of The Regime can’t speak out against anti-white hatred that is systematic and codified into a massively funded, invented academic pursuit. It can however fire this woman over plagiarism.
The Regime cannot speak the truth. It cannot This incident tells us all we need to know about the system and the people who run it. They will use a pretext like plagiarism to oust down a single sinecure who committed the real heresy.
So now we know. Calling for genocide is not to be done for one group of people. However, it is perfectly fine to leave the system and people in place who are perpetrating the Regime approved genocide.
On Wikipediea, I beg to differ. Someone owns Wikipedia. The owners are those who have the power to own the narrative. Look at the change in Wiki pages for American states and important cities. Within the last few months they have been updated. The history of the place no longer starts with the Europeans who created them from nothing. Now the Wiki waxes on about the stone age people who lived there for tens of thousands of years before the Europeans.
This is done to prepare for the next phase of our dispossession. How is this related to the first topic? Certain narratives are allowed and certain are not.
We need to shift from a mindset of victims who this is being done to to fierce defenders who will not stand for it. The plans to topple William Penn has been abandoned – for now. There is a lot of my land and history for me but not for thee going on right now. We are at the center of it. Will our people use their leverage at this crucial moment? Will they ask, “So I have no border, no sovereignty, no claim on my land, yet I am to fight and fund your borders, sovereignty and claims to your land?”
We hold the moral high ground on this, but we have to be willing to take the sword out of the stone and back that claim with a credible defense.
This incident, which as you note shows that only our genocide is state-sanctioned, along with the very clarifying open border, has drawn the bright line. It is the ultimate Us vs. Them, and the latter control the monopoly on state violence without the moral or ethical authority to do so. As others have mentioned, we are at the inflection point. I don’t pretend to know how it all ends, but it is obvious we are at the final exit. Expect very oppressive totalitarianism in the interim.
I’m not sure that we can say the United States has a culture at this point. Culture implies a steady state. Nations are steady state entities. They were preserved via the tyranny of geography. Those barriers are no more. What we see in the U.S. is an intermingling and competition among many nations with no unified culture. On top of that the technological changes are disrupting whatever culture there was to begin with. The outcome of all of this is totally uncertain. All I would posit that that a steady state will eventually return to the land. What that culture and people look like and behave like I have no idea. For that matter the machines may be the ultimate victors. We as Americans do not have a human philosophy as to the meaning of life. We have done everything to mitigate human work in daily life. In so doing perhaps we have obsoleted our species. Interesting times.
We have consumer culture. You’re judged by what you consume and where you obtain it.
The old observation was that elites of nations have more in common with each other than the nations they were “elites” over, but it probably flows down from there too where people in any hyper-niches have more in common with complete foreigners than their countrymen a half an hour down the highway, even if we hypothetically assume racial homogeny.
I read your comment and thought ‘Hapsburgs’, which brought to mind private government, i.e., having ownership of a realm and its people. Seems like ownership partially solved the problem of foreign elites.
Seems like public/popular government requires domestic elites to compensate for the lack of ownership. Otherwise you get rule by pirate, I guess.
We are at the next phase of the microprocessor revolution. The first phase was either a lot of financial quackery that funded massively distorting social dynamics.
This next phase will be microprocessors and algorithms that move machines in the physical world. That stands in direction tension/opposition with the urge to flood European lands with people whose limited utility to begin with will have none in confronting the machines.
It is yet another contradiction in the chaos of The Regime. Robots will do the work but we need to mass import these people to do the work. Yet another massive crack in the facade of The Regime’s legitimacy.
The robot revolution will die on the the vine. The human capital and IQ required to get high functioning specially aware robots built and moving at scale is gone.
That ship sailed in 1965. It will be a long slow decline into mediocrity in a sea of brown faces and mud genetics. Your “robots” will be named Juanita, Paco, and Jorge.
Modern liberalism at one time was the moral authority of the country. It still is the authority of the country in every other way. It controls the apparatus of the state, education, etc. But it’s source of control is the pettiness, ignorance, and jealously of the peasants who cast pieces of paper in the mail with a box check for (insert liberal candidate).
When this ideology was in charge of everything from encyclopedia sets, to Hollywood, to weekly news magazines, to newspapers, to Walter Cronkite lying to the pleebs every day, it could also crown itself with moral authority, and they simply, wrote themselves in as heroes. “Jane Fonda with new movie on dangers of nuclear power, news at 11.”
Yesterday, they could crown themselves in the glory of being the moral superior by media dictate. Today, they have to settle for Shanequa’s greed for more WIC, hatred for whitie, and jealousy of his possessions to harness power through these pieces of paper. This was ALWAYS there in the background, but they were able to pretend for decades that this wasn’t the source of their power. Knowing today that their power rests on these pieces of paper, and the peasants who scribble on them, they scream “our democracy! our democracy!”
It’s all they have left. Crassness and power from scribbles on paper. It’s only when “the right,” however you define it, rejects these pieces of paper themselves, knowing that the median of humanity is always base and always makes base decisions, and embrace liberalism as the ultimate baseness, will their other sources of power evaporate. Only dissidents know this. Real dissidents, not FBI informants.
Excellent comment. The rejection has started, hence they rule by force now. It works until it doesn’t. The Soviets had a 70-year run with it. Whether the fading but still-present prosperity can overcome the proliferation of accurate information will decide how long this staggers on.
Whatever consumer culture is it is not a genuine culture. I would argue we are still in a state of cultural flux. If what we have now perists for another 100 or 200 years then maybe I am wrong.
You could ask what do we have if it’s not a culture? I think that’s a good question and maybe the lack of an answer is part of the reason we have so many people taking various drugs legal or otherwise.
“No matter how you say something in grievance studies, you sound like everyone else.”
We can reduce the content of grievance studies down to a sentence on a single page, and save the forests and thousands of terabytes: It’s not okay to be white.
Not quite…the other half of GS is “proving” the superiority of minorities! They invented everything it seems. 😉
The Left relies on a dumbed-down population to maintain popular appeal and power, thus their messages invariably are short, repetitive, and couched in combative us/them terms. They are not trying to sway intellectually. That’s what the Right does.
The phrasing always aims at CNS repto-fear centers. They will do X to you. We will save you from X. Over and over.
U.S. general literacy is at middle school level, thanks to 50 years of females ‘educating’. The Left is composed of empowered women, weak men, homosexuals, race-tribes, and other elements pre-suited to manipulation via dread. Add in endless millions of illegal invaders — not many Shakespeare’s there! — and it’s shootin’ ducks on a pond.
Colleges therefore are administered by — and composed of — cesspools of weak, fearful sheeple perfectly responsive to the Regime’s narrative commands. This is covered by a facade of rage and perpetual offense on campus, to maintain victim cred and cow potential adversaries.
Check one of Tater Joe’s speeches, including his famous ‘Fourth Reich’ blatherfest. You’ll see the scam in action. We are an emasculated nation that lurches from hysteria to hysteria. Easy to rule.
Amen on that…As long as we are shifting from one crisis to the next we will never be able to plant our feet and fight back…You have to begin to wonder if that’s all the dissident writers are doing whether intentionally or not is to keep us in a state of turmoil so nothing gets done…It’s constantly to talk of outrage to outrage and nothing of solutions..Makes you wonder for sure…
The internet also changed the Old Order of dating and mating. Gone are the days when you could chat up a gal at the mall or grocery store. The overwhelming majority of people go on the internet for such purposes. Something like 20 to 25 percent of zoomers think asking a woman out for a date in public is sexual harrassment. You can’t say “hello” to a woman at work or passing her on the street without having to worried about getting fired at work or getting put on blast on Tik Tok.
This is demonstrably not true, unless you really are a creepy weirdo. For a regular guy, pretending you can’t ask girls out in person is just a cope for social cowardice. Man up.
“Putting that aside, the West is at the end of one of those revolutions, which is the microprocessor revolution.”
It seems to be an ongoing one. Take the advent of ChatGPT in the last year or so as merely one example. The increasing sophistication of what is being done with microprocessors and computing power shows few signs of abating.
“This is what makes the present plagiarism panic in the academy something more than just a tempest in a teapot. Fifty years ago, it was hard to copy and paste the work of others because copy and paste did not exist. Written words were typed with a typewriter, which meant typing out what it was you were stealing. Before publishing, many hands edited and retyped those words. The whole process moved much slower, so getting caught was also much easier.”
I’m not sure that would make a scintilla of difference. The fact that some typist was typing your dissertation would not mean he or she was catching the plagiarism. Fifty years ago most Ph.D. theses were just as bad as those of today, particularly in the social “sciences” but also in the hard sciences. If you’re getting your Ph.D. from Dogdick University, it’s probably going to be a pretty second-rate affair. Even in the hard sciences. The referees to whom the dissertation is sent will know it’s rehashed garbage and will still pass it. This held fifty years ago and it holds today. Tech has not affected it (though maybe ChatGPT will make it easier in the social “sciences”).
At the highest level, as before, the quality of your research does matter and your output is scrutinised. If you got your theoretical physics Ph.D. under the direction of a hotshot advisor and then got a tenure-track offer from Stanford, your papers will be scrutinised by experts in your area and your contributions assesses and weighed over the course of your career. That’s what genuine research and scholarship mean and this has not changed over the decades.
Yes. This explains the “Erdos number” phenomenon in mathematics. Other serious fields are similar
Ali. This I agree with. The best are still the best (but for how long). It’s the mediocre getting advanced beyond their ability I rail against. Gay should never have been put in charge over the “best of the best”. Perhaps she does no damage, but what if she does due to her incompetence/ideology? Will the institution still produce the best of the best when the process becomes geared to check boxes over merit.
Dissertations, like everything else of any consequence, have deteriorated over the last 50-60 years. Intellectual standards have been undermined by affirmative action, diversity has wrecked the human capital of the professoriate and graduate schools, and demented postmodern ideology has polluted the social sciences/humanities. There simply is no comparison between doctoral work done in 2024 and what was done in 1974.
Everything has been diluted and in many cases polluted. Billions more on the planet and tens, if not hundreds of millions now weighing in on all sorts of subjects and topics via the net. It used to be that there was an expert or perhaps a few on any given topic or field on whom you could mostly rely. Now there is such a flood of information, no one really stands out as the definitive voice – their opinions as often as not get lost in the cacophony – who do you trust anymore to base your own beliefs? I’m telling you, it’s a mad, mad, mad, mad world out there.
Excellent thought. How does one “know” the truth in an untruthful society? I’ve no solution except to use your own experience and life wisdom to discern such from the “noise”. I believe this is part and parcel of critical thinking. But it sure is a pain in the ass to have to spend such time in the process and regrettably I’ve also come to the conclusion that such ability eludes the majority of today’s population.
You’ve either got a mighty powerful BS-detector–also known as intuition–or you risk drowning in an ocean of information, and grasp the life preserver tossed into the water by the Power Structure.
There is a modern technological solution to this modern technological problem. If people are really interested in solving the problem of academic plagiarism, this sounds like it would be an ideal application for blockchain technology to address—and much more useful than the generation of pointless cryptocurrencies.
If we wanted to, we could set up a distributed ledger such that any published book, article, or thesis—before receiving the imprimatur of “acceptable for academic use”—must have its information encoded into the chain. New submissions (new blocks) are checked to make sure they do not duplicate existing blocks, and if you want to cite a source, you simply cite its identifying block in the chain.
This would pretty much put an end to plagiarism in academic circles. You simply could not get away with it if you wanted your work to receive the imprimatur. It would somewhat increase the costs of publishing; but, like the inverse Gresham’s Law, the increased costs would add value to the finished goods and would drive out the “bad money” of spam, copypasta, and fluff. The premium for imprimaturized information would be the seal of its trustworthiness.
Now let’s see if anyone has the will to make it happen. My prediction is, nobody really wants that much honesty and transparency.
A kind of “Snopes” for academic publishing. The last thing we need is an official blockchain of officially sanctioned “Truth”
There is no way this would stay with academia. We’d have “official Truth” about everything.
ID’s concern here seems to be with plagiarism, not truth. One can plagiarize lies, after all, and plagiarism is a violation of scholarly morality regardless of the truth content of what is being plagiarized.
Yes, that’s correct, Ostei. The blockchain is a citation and originality verifier, not a content approver.
The program is called “Turnitin.com”
ID. Your idea takes one aspect of plagiarism and assumes it reflects the essence of all plagiarism. Stealing an idea is not simply copying word for word from another’s paper. Gay was accused of this as well as numerous passages which “resembled” such writings/ideas from other’s prior publications. Even ignoring specific passages that seem word for word copying, in the aggregate Gay stole the essential ideas presented in her dissertation.
Since it’s obvious you’ve never written a Thesis or Dissertation, you can be forgiven for misunderstanding Gay’s problem. A dissertation is a submission of *original* research is one’s field of study. A thesis often involves more of a summary/compilation of one’s achieved knowledge in a field of study—not necessarily created by oneself—so many of Gay’s faux pas could be overlooked at that level.
Gay failed to write an acceptable dissertation. Even the offended professor has stated after reading Gay’s dissertation that he feels Gay has taken credit for his “life’s work”. That is simply not acceptable.
I don’t know why someone would downvote this, because Compsci is completely correct. The only line of distinction I would draw is that the media furor seems to be over the misuse of paraphrasing; her lack of competency is another issue. Having not bothered to read her writings besides the snippets presented, I cannot say if she actually created an original work.
What went on behind closed doors is another matter, but I did not see anyone in the media questioning her competency.
Wholesale plagiarism is an indictment of one’s competence. At minimum, it suggest strongly that the author is incapable of creating her own ideas, and the inability to do so is a form of intellectual incompetence.
“ What went on behind closed doors is another matter, but I did not see anyone in the media questioning her competency.”
Clarification. I do not particularly question Gay’s competency as a Harvard President. I question her competency as a PhD in her field of study, based solely on the fact she plagiarized her dissertation—which is usually considered *evidence* of such professional competency. That is to say, people call her “Doctor” as an earned professional title based on her dissertation and her doctoral committee’s certifying she has completed such work as to earn veneration in her field.
And for the record, I have not read one article she has written, nor have any understanding of her field of study.
Mx. ?? As in Latinx, which so infuriates Latinos and Latinas?
By the way, “Ms” is the creation of a mail catalog company of the 60’s or so. It was intended to replace Mrs. and Miss so as not to offend the recipients. There is no “.” in “Ms” because it isn’t and abbreviation. Of course in British English abbreviations don’t get periods, so Mr, Dr, Mrs, etc.
I always thought the Mx business was about trannies and “gender identity?” But I don’t know for sure. Could be Mr or Ms, hence, X.
I remember the John Hillerman character on One Day At A Time, who was the Bonnie Frankljn character’s boss, referring to her as “M.S. Romano”
In the case of Claudine Gay, her crime wasn’t plagiarism…it was that she pushed off the jews. Her crime was antisemitism, not academic misconduct.
Exactly. Ackman himself revealed the plagiarism issue was known long before October 7. This is escalating now, so just root for injuries. I really thought the Tribe would use their usual Aunt Jemima’s and Uncle Toms as front men, but, no. They are willing to take the incoming themselves over this one, and it will be incoming a long time. The proper response from us is to laugh our asses off on the sidelines.
Agreed. I love seeing abusive owners getting mauled by their pets.😂👍
I could believe Gay was known to be a fraud long ago. This type of reserved (blackmail) knowledge is not new. I once knew a manager of a large company who told me he most often found serious omissions on an employee’s employment application and simply noted them and hired the employee anyway. The reason was that any inconsistency (euphemism for lying) on an employment application was grounds for immediate termination. This was upheld by the courts and even the union. Lying on one’s application therefore was merely an agreement by the employee to “at will” employment. 😉
They got her on plagiarism like the feds got Al Capone on tax evasion. But this time it turns out everybody is evading taxes.
Just like Al Capone was convicted on tax issues instead of his real crimes. Hurray for prosecutor!
“The concept of plagiarism is tied to property rights.”
In law, yes. In academia, the concept is tied to original thought rather than pecuniary interests. This is why this episode is, as you next posit, so interesting. The modern Academy has been forced into a religious-like conformity that precludes original thought.
“Bill Ackman’s wife allegedly copied from Wikipedia. How can we know this when it is possible the Wiki contributor copied from Mx. Ackman?”
The precise allegation is she did not attribute to Wikipedia what was copied. This ducks the issue as to why Wikipedia is considered a legitimate source in the first place. Many have an interest in avoiding that particular discussion.
Your most important point is here:
“In other words, the culture of the internet has changed the culture in general as people spend so much time online.”
Yes. If you are of a certain age, you recall the same rap against children watching too much television. While that was less insidious in that it did not act as a substitution for real life interaction, television presented a similar problem nonetheless. The answer was to turn the television off, of course, and that applies to the digital equivalent. I have noticed recent exhortations to “digitally detox.” These pieces are published with the heart in the wrong place–they are attempts at censorship of uncontrolled information–but the endpoint is right.
Some have suggested EMP’s will be used by hostile powers to disrupt communication, finance, travel, and life in general. They are correct, but that will come from inside the house and will not involve mushroom clouds from foreign entities. The mother of all lockdowns will be the day when the ‘Net gets taken down for the Little People, and that easily could be this year. It will be both a danger and an opportunity, as is usually the case. The impact on academia will be hilarious if and when that happens. The impact on your bank account, not so much. The impact on society: priceless.
This is a good point. The thing is, these cases are never about stealing the main idea, but rather relying on ideas as supporting claims. The plagiarism does not undermine the main argument. Of course, the reason for that is the thesis is usually about pointless nonsense, so no one cares anyway.
Yes. The main idea/thesis uniformly tends to be “whiteness is bad because of X.” This has expanded from Gay’s “field” to STEM, as others here routinely note. Since the supporting source material all reaches the same conclusion, it is impossible to plagiarize the thoughts they contain, hence the need for analysis that looks for repetition of words, phrases and sentences. Granted, you could substitute “white superiority,” which is factual, for “white supremacy,” which is not, and produce original material that could be used as fuel for your auto de fete, but damn it would be hard to find citations after 1965 and boy would that hurt.
The uniformity of coerced thought makes plagiarism damn nigh impossible, even more so than easily stolen digital information.
I always rip off Z’s work and wittier comments.
Gonna have to start stealing yours too, Jack!😂👍
As I told 3g yesterday, your plagiarism will be just as welcome as it is ironic.
The offended professor (one who Gay stole from mainly) is quoted as saying (after reading the dissertation) that Gay “stole his life’s work”. That’s from the horse’s mouth.
Is the author of the plagiarized work Jewish, by any chance? S/he’s obviously not a nuggra.
I think Compsci was referencing a black woman, Professor Carol Swain. From memory, she was booted from Vanderbilt Law after criticizing the New Religion. To my knowledge she is not an Ethiopian Jew or convert to Judaism. Swain produced her thesis and, yes, it was heavily sampled.
Yes, sorry. It was Swain. As far as I know all her work and Gay’s work is woke, anti-White nonsense. I simply state what Swain reportedly said and that she should—better than anyone—understand the nature of the content and intent in Gay’s dissertation. She feels Gay made her bones on her (Swain’s) work. I can understand that sentiment, even without understanding the woke gooblygook.
In academia, the concept is tied to original thought rather than pecuniary interests
Correct – that is why Gay could have copy-pastad to her heart’s content as long as she gave attribution. But then her inability to have an original thought would have been exposed.
To be fair, does the lack of original thought distinguish her from anyone else in the grievance studies establishment?
Original thought is a threat on campus. The Herd Religion neither wants nor tolerates your original thought. Including the ‘creative courses’.
The crazy thing is NO ONE REALLY CARES about so-called plagiarism; especially in these retarded academic and phd papers. Like I said, before these are all word vomit of leftists smelling their own farts in the name of their fake and gay credentialism.
Don’t care about professor papers; don’t care about plagiarism. All stupid and hateful shit to begin with. Not education or learning, just indoctrination and jumping thru hoops and going into debt to do so. A stinking racket!
This brings up something I left out, but is important. These are always victimless crimes. Whenever there is a plagiarism drama, the guy being plagiarized never seems to care. Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, but plagiarism is a close second. Half a dozen times a year people tell me that someone borrowed from me. I look and it often seems to be the case, but I just smile and move on.
I’ve had different reactions to different instances.
I came within a few feet—speaking very literally—of accomplishing the actual physical death of a famous musician who’d years earlier “sampled” my work without credit or permission, in a not-legally-remediable way. A larger and less drunk friend of mine stopped me. I’ve never forgiven him and never will.
I wrote what became a briefly popular “copypasta.” Kinda neat I guess, but I never enjoyed seeing it.
People “copy my ideas” sometimes, because I have some and that’s what they’re for. Usually that’s flattering, though when it comes from more mainstream types it kinda retroactively discredits me (in my soul).
I’ve almost come around to the idea, or at least to the feeling, not just the *observation*, that crime—intentional injury, which plagiarism typically is—is like contemporary art. It’s whatever criminals do.
I think the medium is a big factor. In casual writing, the investment in the product is low. If someone copied from my book, then I would be annoyed. When it comes to music, where the investment is much greater and credit is the coin of the realm, then you should be covetous of your work and defend it. Comics put endless hours into their routines and acts, so when a hack steal their material they are stealing more than a joke.
Academic plagiarism doesn’t exist because the students are FORCED to “fluff up” there work with 100 extra pages of bullshit. So what do you expect when there is that kind of mandatory standard?
Further all these “academics” are bioleninst idiots with absolutely no honesty or integrity whatsoever. Yet they pearl clutch about “integrity” whenever some hapless 20 year old “cheats” a little because he’s FORCED to slog through and turn in some meaningless paper that NO ONE CARES ABOUT! And his poor parents put in a 2nd mortgage on their house so he had the privilege to do so!
The more the better. It shows you’re not just an old guy screaming into the wind and that you actually are having an effect.
“ Half a dozen times a year people tell me that someone borrowed from me. I look and it often seems to be the case, but I just smile and move on.”
Of course. You want your ideas exposed and tested and most importantly spread. So do intellectuals, but they get their “cred’s” from attribution and citation. It is important that they receive credit as it increases the academic esteem and value. Indeed, there are services that count the number of times your research has been cited and they are used to evaluate your standing in academic circles.
What if I started a blog and began to shamelessly steal your ideas, topics, and conclusions? What if I began to gain followers and contributions based on your work? Not so funny then. Of course, you are waay too advanced to easily be copied and crudely plagiarized—even if I were smart enough to do so. Nonetheless I’m sure you’d not take such lightly.
CNN finally openly admits who controls the media:
https://www.zerohedge.com/geopolitical/cnn-admits-all-gaza-coverage-run-past-team-under-israeli-military-censor
Just another cohen-cidence, to be sure.
The industrial revolution destroyed the old landed aristocracy. The internet is a similar threat to the managerial class. Their authority is based on their expertise, i.e., they’re ability to gather and process information, in a way that the peasants can’t.
Well, the internet is making the information available to all and, even worse, letting the peasants interact the managerial class or, at least, see how they think and act both on the job and in their personal lives via Twitter and other media outlets. And the peasants are not impressed.
In particular, the managerial class’s political wing is being exposed as bizarre and not-too-bright fanatics. Even their more technical wings – such as public health and doctors – have been shown to be either incompetent or outright liars.
The internet has stripped away the managerial class’s authority and, so far, nothing has replaced it. Elections were never very important because it was really the managerial class running the show, but, now, nobody trusts the managerial class or the politicians.
The managerial class can now only maintain its authority through force, but, historically, that’s not a great long-term solution. At some point, a society needs to be run by a group that has moral authority. I don’t see how that’s possible in a multi-everything society.
Great point. I really had not drawn the direct line from the obvious rule by force to the proliferation of widely available information, but you are absolutely right there. The now-primitive message boards of the earlier iteration of the Internet played a substantial role in bringing down the Soviet Union.
An incompetent managerial class that hates the majority of its population is going to have a hard time if information flows freely. The problem for that class is that shutting down the information just undermines them even more.
Accurate information actually was shut down for decades. The public only became aware of that fact recently. Walter Cronkite was just as big of a liar as Adam Schiff, but Uncle Walt had filters that are no longer very effective. I expect a draconian, highly public assault on the free flow of information will go into high gear later this year. It might sorta work but probably not for a very long stretch.
Citizen; this was a great post! But I’m going to offer an alternative to the following:
“The internet is a similar threat to the managerial class. Their authority is based on their expertise…”
I think what we’ve been witnessing in academia and government (and increasingly in big private enterprise) is that the authority is now based on moral claims. This is why we’ve had AA, DEI, ESG blah blah for the last 20 years – these are all fundamentally moral propositions. When I was in business school (mid 80s), it was all “shareholder value”, “kaizen”, “six-sigma efficiency” – that was expertise-based.
The power of the internet today is that the proles and the counter-Elites both can push back on the dominant moral narratives of the management class. Indeed, challenging expertise and facts is important, but I think secondary to the main event. Martin Luther had access to a printing press (internet) but it’s the moral challenge that is central.
True. The managerial class relied on both a technical/expertise authority – we’re the smart, trained people who keep the trains running on time – and a moral authority – we’re making a more just society.
The internet is crushing the technical/expertise authority with Covid putting the nail in that coffin. But, yes, the internet is also destroying their moral authority.
Colorblind CivNat types thought that the managerial class was on their side, but, now, they’re learning that it was all a sham. The managerial class always hated regular white people and their various programs were always meant to push whites into a subservient role in society.
The unfortunate part is that just as large numbers of whites are waking up, it’s already too late. Demographic changes will make whites a minority soon enough. However, those same demographic changes also threat the managerial class. Non-whites don’t want to be run by the white/Jewish managerial class anymore than regular whites do.
We’re at an inflection point.
“The unfortunate part is that just as large numbers of whites are waking up, it’s already too late. Demographic changes will make whites a minority soon enough. However, those same demographic changes also threat the managerial class. Non-whites don’t want to be run by the white/Jewish managerial class anymore than regular whites do.”
Throwing the border wide open was a last-ditch effort to cling to power. It likely is an own goal for the managerial elite, as you point out, but damn if they aren’t burning down the world in the process. They very well could literally burn down the world if the Ukraine grift turns into too big of a humiliation, too.
Actual, proven meritocracy is its own authentic moral authority.
The proving grounds. We’ve lost the honest pride of “earned it” to the hollow fakery of “overcompensated flunky”.
“Fifty years ago, copy and paste was difficult.” True, but MLK still managed to do it on his doctorate.
You focus on the legality and technical definition of plagiarism here, and you make valid points. Conceptually though, I think plagiarism has a bigger root concern. When someone graduates from the academy and writes a doctoral thesis, it’s supposed to convey that 1) this person has read all the relevant thought leaders in some field and 2) has formulated some kind of original thought or assertion about that topic. This conveys upon them the credentials of expert. In todays highly credentialed society, this is supposed to mean a lot. Digging into the thesis papers and plagiarism of all these people exposes that the entire credential system is a sham. These people are, in fact, dumb as goldfish, and have very few moral scruples. It threatens the system by taking away whatever credibility that have (or believe they have).
I was told by a person I respect and trust, that a PhD is supposed to “add” knowledge or new information to a field.
That’s the point of the exercise.
For mine I deciphered, translated, re-illustrated, etc.—field-tested, even—a forgotten medieval treatise on choral harmony. It’s been the standard version ever since, and nobody’s ever going to bother redoing it. It’s outlasted its field already.
A classmate wrote a fictionalized diary (“autoethnography”) about being the only black girl at the rave and the trauma of buying black records from white store clerks—among them, me.
One of us is rich and famous.
“No matter how you say something in grievance studies, you sound like everyone else.”
I think that this is really one of the biggest problems. Most people in academia ought not to be there; even in the STEM fields. These tax-leeches just need to make what they say slightly different, avoid the plagiarism mob and then publish their “research”.
In a sane world, the solution would be immediate cutbacks and termination of these peoples’ employment. Naturally, this would create other issues, but I doubt anyone here will be contributing to Karen’s Unemployment GoFundMe after xzhe was booted out from the Social Studies department at Cornell.
It goes back to what I mentioned yesterday concerning originality and genius, and the ideal of a university as a place for a few brilliant minds to roam free. Even in STEM, most research is, well, “research”. Just grunt work. In fact, it seems to me that a genius (if one existed) would never excel in modern academia because it is against genius!
We simply have pushed too many people into universities and have created a monster. I pray to the Good God that my sons, to be homeschooled, will find their way to either a trade or a sensible degree (civil engineering, electronic engineering etc.).
Yes – grievance studies students have a hard time saying things differently because they are not smart and have been trained like seals to repeat what they learned,
It doesn’t seem to me that the “intellectuals” in the west today have noticed that, in order to be an “intellectual,” you have to believe/espouse the same things as all the other “intellectuals.” Which negates the very concept of the intellectual.
Yes. Academia is the ultimate Ponzi scheme so of course the numbers have to keep expanding. Black Studies are as much for the lesbian administrators as for Shitavious and Shanika.
Civilization is the ultimate Ponzi scheme (considering civilization is significantly larger than academia). Even so, empires are larger Ponzi schemes than academia.
Academia is relatively speaking a small Ponzi scheme.
It’s a fine line between hierarchy and Ponzi. I think the line is probably trustworthiness.
High-trust society? Trustworthy society is more like it. Which, paradoxically, takes some lack of trust. Trust but verify. The Yankee Doodle bit.
“ We simply have pushed too many people into universities and have created a monster.”
Very well said, OrangeFrog. Please accept my apology for not citing you above in my late response. 😉
I would say push them in the trade route that has a 4 year apprentice program…The engineer route is already being taken over by woke and will become worse until it crashes…If they don’t mind heights, electricity, and working outdoors have them look into my trade…
I have to give you mad props, Z. You have a great way with words. I tried saying the same thing yesterday in the comments, albeit my writing is always so clunky. The following, on the other hand, summarizes the issue I was meandering about so succintly and beautifully:
“Then you have the fact that there are only so many ways to state things, especially those that are part of a contextual reality. Claudine Gay got in trouble for repeating what amounts to echolalic babbling that defines her field of study. There are only so many ways to preach against whiteness, so by now every way to state the simplistic ideas within that field have been done many times. No matter how you say something in grievance studies, you sound like everyone else.
That is what will be revealed by these efforts to scan the works of academics for plagiarism using modern tools. The rigid conformity in most of these fields has led to a narrowing of what is safe to write in a paper. If everyone was fastidious about siting the work of others, all new papers would be so littered with citations that the index would be longer than the paper. The plagiarism hunters will find they are overwhelmed with examples to the point where it becomes meaningless.”
Thank you, Z, for being a wonderful writer.
>Can you plagiarize the internet? How about Wikipedia? The concept of plagiarism is tied to property rights.
A more serious question is, “Can a third party feed in your written works and artwork into an A.I. that will use it to train itself without your permission?”
The answer should be no, of course, but that’s going to be a brutal hill to climb.
This, I think, is the problem. Is A.I. training even covered under existing copyright law? It’s not exactly commercial use as was understood by those drafting or agreeing to the terms and laws.
This is one genie who won’t go back into the bottle. I doubt training models on freely available internet content can be halted. At the same time, there is a lot of hype about so-called AI, and it won’t deliver what is promised. I’m not a big fan of the guy, but this is useful:
https://locusmag.com/2023/12/commentary-cory-doctorow-what-kind-of-bubble-is-ai/
Thanks. That was an insightful read. Doctorow has the dot com chops from experience, despite his hipster vibe. Like a lot of the post-Bubble 1.0 types, he’s more artist than technologist, with the glass-half-full optimism that seems endemic to creative types. But all his essay did was confirm my neo-Luddite biases. AI and self-driving cars are just the sort of pie-in-the-sky fantasies that carny barkers like Elon Musk and his ilk use to enthrall our society. Idleness leads to incapacity, which leads to servitude. We all need to do our own research and writing. We all need to drive our own damn cars. If its being handed to us on a silver platter, we are NOT being served. Rather, we are being paid, and poorly so, for our service. Non serviam!
Fifty years ago tunnel-noticers were also scarce.
On yesterdays post, a person named “Zaphod” posted late a question regarding tunnels. I read it and wondered what that was about.
Fast forward, and I read this morning that a Synagogue (can we say that, I mean it with no disrespect), in NYC has some tunnels that go under the city from the location. My first thought was, it that an escape route in case things go sideways?
I haven’t seen anything else regarding said tunnels. (A Musk experiment?)
What’s all the kerfuffle about?
Looks like some kind of dispute:
https://www.timesofisrael.com/chaos-ensues-after-nypd-tries-to-fill-in-secret-tunnel-in-chabad-hq-synagogue/
I read the article. It appears to be an internal dispute, but who knows?
I thought they weren’t supposed to have conflicts with each other.
It probably is an internal dispute. There have been all kinds of internecine squabbles going on within the Lubavitcher thing since the Rebbe kicked the bucket.
But the imagery coming out on Twitter and TG was for the ages. And will live on in Memedom forever. The only thing missing was a bunch of them deserting a sinking ship.
My only regret was it was all in colour. In monochrome there would have been a real Mid-Century Ufa Studios vibe to the whole sorry scene.
Regardless of what it *is*… how it’s portrayed and interpreted … well let’s just say it’s Open Season — they’d do no less to us if the tables were turned.
An “illegal secret tunnel” connecting the synagogue with a womens’ bathhouse. Sounds perfectly innocent.
When will the Haters stop tormenting these wonderful people??
Funny that I don’t get news anymore by…reading the news. I encounter it through memes. So today I open Telegram and see that there’s a bunch of memes showing Hasidics underground with soiled mattresses. WTF? Cue Starship Troopers: Want to know more?
That’s why I love the microprocessor revolution. I come at everything sideways.
Great film, Starship Troopers, saw it when it as first released on VHS (too young to pass as an 18 year old in the cinema in 1998!) when I was 14, I guess. Everyone panned it, but I thought the whole thing was brilliant. It still looks good today, and caught some of the more comical aspects of big governments and jingoism.
The propaganda videos you mention was great, too.
Also enjoyed the book, but read it years after.
With respect. Starship Troopers only looks good without reading the original book. Yes, I know you mentioned such. But really, the screenwriters left out half the book and turned the movie into “kill the bugs” flick. There is much more to Heinlein than that. Much of his philosophy that ran through the book was left out or belittled through being overplayed.
They are all over this on /pol/ at 4chan, as one would expect. Say what you will about /pol/, it is one of the last places on the internet where you can find content that has not been edited by our overlords in the media.
The MSM has studiously avoided the pictures and videos of the blood-stained, child-sized mattresses being removed from the tunnel. Exposing this kind of perversion is precisely why /pol/ is valuable.
Less need for labor, now less need for thought. Less need for human beings iow. Progress!
In all seriousness, what’s good about making yourself obsolete?
Spirit got obsoleted a long time ago. Matter has been taking its turn; now idea. It won’t stop because there’s not a will to stop it.