Eyes on your own paper, Mr. Bean!
UPDATE: The plagiarised posts on AVFM have been taken down without explanation or apology; see my post here for more details and perhaps a little schadenfreude.
UPDATE 2: Elam has belatedly posted an acknowledgement of (some of) the plagiarism. Then he called me fat. See my take here.
You may remember Amartya Talukdar, the marital rape legalization advocate and Holocaust denier who is also a regular contributor to A Voice for Men.
Yesterday, he graced us all with a post on AVFM featuring the ominous title Feminism and Destruction of Humanity.
Not “Feminism and the Destruction of Humanity,” mind you, but “Feminism and Destruction of Humanity.” His previous post for AVFM was titled “Why Capitalists Are Playing Footsie With Feminist.” Not “With Feminists,” or “With Feminism” but “With Feminist.”
AVFM has 19 people on its masthead. It has a “managing editor,” an “assistant managing editor,” and a just plain “editor.” It has three other ostensible “editors” and three more people who are “news directors” of various sorts.
Apparently none of these people — nor anyone else on AVFM’s “staff” — bothers to read posts or their headlines before they go up on the site.
The post is full of sentences that are appalling both in what they say and in how they are written.
Here are some of my favorites:
Feminism not only ascendance in the western world but was exported to other countries through the UN, CEDAW and massive funding.
The Feminist also abhor religion and promote lesbian subculture.
It’s obvious that high divorce rates, lower birth rates and gay subcultures were instrumental in downfall of Rome. It will similarly lead to downfall of modern human civilization under the grip of Feminism.
Thing is, only portions of Talukdar’s post are grammatically disastrous. The first half is a competently written, if rather dull, discussion of Malthusianism and its supposed implications for the contemporary world. Other sections, while sort of loopy in their arguments, are also more or less grammatically correct.
Suspicious, I cut and pasted Talukdar’s post into an online plagiarism checker and, well, let’s just say that the results were about as shocking as an M Night Shyamalan “twist ending.”
Most of the post is plagiarised word-for-word from an assortment of texts easily found online.
In most cases, Talukdar didn’t even bother to alter the wording even a little bit; he basically cut and pasted various passages together from these sources, added a few misshapen sentences of his own, and put his name at the top.
Here’s the opening of Talukdar’s post:
Thomas Malthus (1766-1834) postulated in his Essay on the Principles of Population (1798), that food production, limited by the land available, can only grow at an arithmetic rate (1,2,3,4,5…), while population growth tends to grow at a geometric rate (2,4,8,16,32…).
Here’s the original passage, from some lecture notes someone put online:
Malthus postulated in his Essay on the Principles of Population (1798), that food production, limited by the land available, can only grow at an arithmetic rate (1,2,3,4,5…), while population growth tends to grow at a geometric rate (2,4,8,16,32…).
The only change Talukdar made was to add Malthus’ first name and the dates of his birth and death.
Talukdar’s post continues:
These trends, he argued, would result in a point at which a society experiences war, poverty, and famine as the need for food surpasses its availability.
That sentence came, literally word for word, from a page on Neo-Malthusian Theory put online to supplement a college course.
These trends, he argued, would result in a point at which a society experiences war, poverty, and famine as the need for food surpasses its availability.
Talukdar then moved on from Malthus to The Population Bomb:
The Population Bomb was written by Stanford University Professor Paul R. Ehrlich in 1968. It warned of the mass starvation of humans in the 1970s and 1980s due to overpopulation, as well as other major societal upheavals, and advocated immediate action to limit population growth.
Ta da! He got all that from Wikipedia.
The Population Bomb is a best-selling book written by Stanford University Professor Paul R. Ehrlich and his wife, Anne Ehrlich (who was uncredited), in 1968.[1][2] It warned of the mass starvation of humans in the 1970s and 1980s due to overpopulation, as well as other major societal upheavals, and advocated immediate action to limit population growth.
I think you’ve got the idea here.
Other cut-and-pasted sources for “Talukdar’s” post include pieces in The Economist and Forbes; a somewhat loopy post about Feminism and the Destruction of the Nuclear Family on on a site called The Radical Conservative; an op-ed on an Indian site called The Daily O, which itself seems to have been partly plagiarised from an article from The Weekly Standard that someone posted on FreeRepublic; something called the Palmetto Family Council; and an article on the fall of Rome on a site run by the United Church of God.
Even Talukdar’s sentence blaming the fall of Rome on “high divorce rates, lower birth rates and gay subcultures” turns out to have been half-plagiarised.
And there may be more; I used the free version of the plagiarism checker, which doesn’t check each and every sentence.
The obvious next question is: What about his earlier articles?
Well, I ran “Why Capitalists Are Playing Footsie With Feminist” through the plagiarism checker as well, and, yep, it’s heavily plagiarised too.
Sources for that Talukdar (Not-so) Original include: Wikipedia; Wikipedia; a post on Quora that seems to have been “borrowed” from an old version of a Wikipedia article; a giant chunk of the same Daily O article he also plagiarised in “Feminism and Destruction of Humanity”; Europa.eu; the Green Global Foundation Journal; Foreign Affairs; and (somewhat ironically) a piece by socialist feminist theorist Nancy Fraser in The Guardian.
I’m not going to bother to check any of his others.
So the question now is whether this evidence of massive and obvious plagiarism lead AVFM to finally show Talukdar the door?
I honestly don’t know. After all, they kept publishing him after I presented them with clear evidence he was a Holocaust denier, so what’s a little plagiarism between friends?
By the way, here’s the Mr. Bean skit I got the screenshot above from: