Opus 2024-331: Headlines: Just Look

One of the “Look at me” themes I am seeing lately on the Internet expounds about Kamala Harris and plagiarism.  Today I saw a Clickbait headline about information she had in her books being lifted straight from Wikipedia.  This would not be hard to verify.  All you have to do is look.

A regular tool when I was teaching middle school was Google search.  I required a serious project:  Write a term paper.  I didn’t just dump them in, sink or swim.  We went through note taking, outlining, bibliographies, and everything else necessary to write a good paper.  When it was time to evaluate the results if I saw something suspicious all I had to do was type short selection into the search engine, hit return and see what came up.  I would have been embaraced but they didn’t blink.  Often they didn’t even delete the hypertext, and sometimes even printed the addresses at the bottom of the page.  Another clue would be two paragraphs that had nothing to do with each other, kind of an early “word salad.”

It was easy to do.  All you had to do was look.  Of course, the hard part was in the head of the reader.  You had to be bright enough to realize that what you were reading could not have been written by an eighth grader.  You had to recognize hypertext as hypertext.  You had to recognize the fact that internet addresses at the bottom and the top actually came from sources not located in the head of the eighth grader.

I had kids come up for my inquisition.  I would show them the actual page on my computer screen and they would look at it and still claimed that they wrote the material.  I wasn’t training future Democrats, I was dealing with eighth grade Democrats.

Don’t blame Kamala too much.  Somewhere there is an eigth grade public school teacher who let her slide.  Somewhere there is an editor that continued the tradition.  We are getting close to the time when the American people, assuming they actually count the votes, are going to decide what kind of government they deserve.

homo unius libri