Conservatives Pounce! on: Kamala Harris Plagiarism. NYT: Only 500 Words! Not the Worst Kind of Plagiarism! Criticizing Plagiarism is Racist!!!!11

LOOOOOOL

My favorite part is about how it's not the bad kind of plagiarism! Because it...and here I want to emphasize that I'm not making this up...doesn't involve stealing somebody else's ideas...

   Now...this is a "rule" I've never heard before in my (broadly construed) forty years in academia.

Harris clearly plagiarized whole, huge passages from e.g. Wikipedia.

   Word for word.

   Now, people unconsciously pick up ideas here and there and eventually forget that they got it from somebody else. This happened e.g. to Thomas Nagel with respect to the central example of "What is it Like to Be a Bat," IIRC. Honestly, I'm surprised that doesn't happen more often.

   If there is a worst kind of plagiarism, it's the kind in Harris's book, word-for-word stealing of entire passages from elsewhere and misrepresenting them as your own.

   The New York Times is a gigantic piece of shit. It has pretensions of intellectual seriousness, but it is just making up bullshit rules about scholarly work to save its favored empty-suit candidate.

   Ripping off someone else's ideas might be more harmful to the wronged scholar, but it is Harris-style plagiarism that reflects most badly on the plagiarist--there's no excuse for it. It couldn't have been a mistake. It shows that you're a lying, stealing, lightweight jackass.

   All the more so when you're plagiarizing Wikipedia and advertising brochures...my God...