Normally, I’d get indignant at plagiarism and any student who tries it with me is likely to get axed on the spot. In Ann Coulter’s case, though, while not disagreeing with the assessment, ripping off “33 word passages” and such just doesn’t get me worked up. That she literally transcribed scattered chunks of her book is nothing compared to the wholesale intellectual dishonesty of the work. Why get upset that she lifted a sentence, when whole chapters are exercises in numb-skulled vacuity?
I flunk students out of a course when they plagiarize. When they do things on a level of stupidity similar to Coulter’s book, I take them aside and recommend that maybe they need to switch majors. Actually, that’s not fair; I’ve never had a student as horrible as Coulter. In that kind of case, I’d probably gently suggest that not everyone needs a college degree, and maybe there’s a world of satisfaction out there away from the life of the mind.
Off topic : Has anyone heard about fainting goats ? They freeze just like a buggy program does. They surely weren’t intelligently designed, were they ? Or… maybe they are beta version goats ?
I don’t read her, but I have a feeling she resorts to a lot of Doggerel as well.
Doggerel, I mean.
That Coulter plaigerizes isn’t surprising or shocking, but just satisfying, seeing that her intellectual bankruptcy is so complete that even in writing a pack of lies, which are, by their nature, unconstrained by facts, evidence or reality, she doesn’t even have the integrity to make up her own lies. It’s not like it is the one thing that will finally convince a reasonable person that everything Coulter says or writes is a steaming pile, but it just ups the justifiable sense of superiority we can feel over those who lap up Coulter’s effluvia.
BTW, are there any German speakers out there who can tell us if they have a word, similar to schadenfreude, for a malicious enjoyment of someone making a fool of themselves? The best I can manufacture using my aged pocket German-English dictionary would be ‘torheitfreude’.
Coulter is like someone else’s evil kid….she keeps pressing and pressing til she gets a reaction…just to make you yell at them or get all bent out of shape so she can point and laugh. She has NO relationship with truth, integrity, or even human emotions and values as far as I can see, and is engaged only in maintaining an audience. So feh. She’s a worthless bag of water.
In short: if you need to steel your ignorant rants, like Coulter (and Kevin Trudeau keeps popping up in my mind), no one should care.
Paul wrote:
“Actually, that’s not fair; I’ve never had a student as horrible as Coulter.”
Once again, a needlessly spiteful and self-debasing overreaction.
Coulter graduated with honors from Cornell University School of Arts & Sciences, and received her J.D. from University of Michigan Law School, where she was an editor of The Michigan Law Review. She clerked for the Honorable Pasco Bowman II of the United States Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit and was an attorney in the Department of Justice Honors Program for outstanding law school graduates.
Say what you like about her opinions, you’re on shaky ground when you disparage her qualifications as a student.
So, what happens to her, then? Nothing, I predict.
Who’s going to sue her? Not William “Let’s see if Ann will swallow this argument for a quarter” Dembski. I think that Ann has admitted that she knows nothing about evolution [eye-roll] and wrote her chapters while coming down from the Behe/Dembski/Wells hit. What do they care? (She screws up creationism in her own unique way, so there’s a loophole.)
Isn’t the right wing propaganda machine all about plagarism, anyway? There are now websites offering young pundits-in-training bullet points to go, and “would you like some atheist-bashing with that?” along with a generous dollop of “you-ain’t-Christian-if-you-cringe.” Is Ann really an example of plagarism or something even scarier, this paint-by-numbers, mass-produced, “I can’t believe it’s not communism” youth movement (led by adults)?
I doesn’t matter how many titles, magical letters after her name, or whatever she has. She says a lot of profoundly stupid stuff. Therefore, it is not unreasonable to concluse that she is profoundly stupid.
T_U_T:
Obviously, they were designed by Satan to facilitate the numerous goat sacrifices required by the Prince of Darkness.
There’s nothing in ID that says you cannot have a malovent designer, is there?
Oops, I mean malevolent.
Charlie Wagner:
I see nothing in her resume to suggest that she’d make a good science student. Lawyers are skilled in advocacy and debate, which is fine as far as it goes, but which is nearly the diametric opposite of scientific discourse. A scientific paper needs to hold up even after making every reasonable concession to possible objections.
If Coulter’s college papers were anything like her current output, she’d be selling insurance now.
Coulter graduated law school around ’87, when the wherewithal for professors to check for plagarism wasn’t what it is currently. A cynical person with a lot of time on his hands might run Coulter’s juvenalia through iParadigms or some such.
Anyway, appeal to paper credentials is a poor substitute for recent evidence of having something intelligent to say. People really do get lazy and stupid if they let themselves. They get a fixed idea and become impervious to any new thinking that might change it. Coulter was probably a bright law student at one time, although I’m sure I would have disagreed with her on nearly everything.
She now has a gig that pays her millions of dollars not to think. Suppose you had a track star who could collect a large legal settlement by feigning a back injury for a few years. If they took up the offer, then they might get rich, but none of their old trophies would ever make them into that track star again. When you sell out like Coulter has, you trade in your potential.
When I read her one of her columns, what strikes me next after the sheer hostility is the total lack of organization. Rarely does one see anything resembling a coherent thesis and logical justification. Her writings are just tirades with a lot of button pushing designed to polarize people. Her paper credentials may support the hypothesis that she can do better (assuming no organic brain damage in the meantime) but they cannot be used to prove that her recent writings are good.
Note that even conservative publications (e.g. National Review Online) have recognized that her writing is so bad that they do not wish to be associated with it.
Wow! She’s stealing from our look Paper! At least she steals from the best.
That’s probably true. Coulter is an expert at knowing her audience. I’m sure she’s able to write perfectly acceptable papers for coursework when she knows that her audience will be well informed and critically evaluating her work. When she thinks she can get away with laziness and dishonesty, though, she does it without batting an eyelash. You can bet that she never would have made it out of Cornell if she had taken the route she takes these days with her work.
“There’s nothing in ID that says you cannot have a malevolent designer, is there?”
Here is a paper entitled “Rumors of Angels: Using ID to Detect Malevolent Spiritual Agents.” It claims, “The point to be made here is this: organisms which possess incredible complexity beyond what natural selection could ‘design’ from the available offerings of chance, and which also seem to be clearly malevolent, might well be the work of malevolent spirit beings. There are, of course, other possibilities. They may be the direct or indirect work of God and we are mistaken in viewing them as malevolent. They might be the work of non-spiritual intelligences (extra-terrestrials). ”
“maybe there’s a world of satisfaction out there away from the life of the mind.”
Coulter seems to have found it.
BTW, are there any German speakers out there who can tell us if they have a word, similar to schadenfreude, for a malicious enjoyment of someone making a fool of themselves?
Schadenfreude is a German word.
What’s great about the Ann Coulter plagiarism story is that it’s beyond politics. Sure, it’d be great if she could be taken down because of her inability to pull together a cogent thought that wasn’t just “ooh, me hate liberals.” But that won’t work. It’s gotta be something that can be objectively measured. Like, you know, plagiarism.
You can make whatever excuses you want, but it’s either plagiarized or it’s not. And here, it is.
> “Coulter graduated with honors from Cornell University School of Arts & Sciences, and received her J.D. from University of Michigan Law School, where she was an editor of The Michigan Law Review.”
My mother-in-law’s sister was at Michigan Law School with Coulter, of whom she says: “She was just as nuts then as she is now”.
Where you went to school, in and of itself, means very little about your qualifications for anything.
Anyone who has been in academia for any length of time has met plenty of desperately mediocre people with impressive place names on their resumes.
Much like a penis, it’s what you do with your degree that counts.
So she has orbited around The Law… big deal. I can think of a full-fledged Lawyer who dabbled in biology, for one example, but Philip Johnson has nothing useful to say about evolution for all his training in precedent and rhetoric.
What qualifies Coulter for her present post is her hostility. All she has to do is talk tough, just like our no-brainer president.
“BTW, are there any German speakers out there who can tell us if they have a word, similar to schadenfreude, for a malicious enjoyment of someone making a fool of themselves?
Schadenfreude is a German word.”
Yes, but it refers to finding joy in the pain and misfortune of others, right? I think the question was if there is a slighlty less malevolent version regarding someone looking like an idiot.
My guess is that Schadenfreude would cover both.