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But this is not a post about plagiarism, it’s a post about life – specifically the lessons we can all learn from plagiarists. Because while I am professionally, legally, and morally bound to be harsh to plagiarists, I also believe that getting caught offers them an opportunity to learn some very important lessons. Lessons about living with a certain degree of grace and decency and, if they put their mind to it, lessons in redemption.
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By the late 1990s, said Chancellor Gerhard Schröder, Germany was on its way to becoming a “normal” country. That meant a normal willingness to defend its own interests, for example in the European Union, and also a readiness to send troops on such foreign missions as the war in Kosovo. The 2006 football World Cup, which Germany hosted, became a festival of easy-going patriotism.
Yet Germany would not be Germany if it did not obsessively monitor itself.
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REAL reporting is easy. Making the news up is much harder. So the weekly editorial meeting at the Onion, a spoof newspaper based in New York, is intense. One writer clutches a human skull. Another wields a threatening stick. Yet another walks in late, looking scruffy and eating a chocolate cereal bar.
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This debate matters, for the industrial revolution is quite probably the most important economic development of the past 500 years. It produced not a once-only step-up in productivity but a century-and-a-half of industrial expansion and continuing innovation that transformed lives everywhere. What is more, it stemmed from the globalisation of the early-modern period (Tudors, and all that) and gave rise to more. With global crisis raging anew, readers could do worse than ponder that long-ago upheaval.
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Back in 1971, when the web was still twenty years off and the smallest computers were the size of delivery vans, before the founders of Google had even managed to get themselves born, the polymath economist Herbert A. Simon wrote maybe the most concise possible description of our modern struggle: “What information consumes is rather obvious: It consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention, and a need to allocate that attention efficiently among the overabundance of information sources that might consume it.” As beneficiaries of the greatest information boom in the history of the world, we are suffering, by Simon’s logic, a correspondingly serious poverty of attention.
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Because, as anyone who's ever had to queue in a zig-zag for half an hour at Bristol Airport on a wet Wednesday night, there are such things as border controls. They actually do exist. I have seen them. With. My. Eyes. I've even (badly) blogged about the bloody thing previously. They do exist. So what's Dale saying? That they don't exist? Really? Surely not. Perhaps the point is that they're so insignificant as to be non-existent? Maybe. But the rules are tighter than they have been for decades, so that's demonstrably not true. And far from being 'uncontrolled', which Dale claims, non-EU immigration is stringently controlled.
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The good news is that Congress has found it easy to form a coalition with what looks like a stable parliamentary majority. It will thus spare the country a repeat of the past five years, in which the party squandered its energies appeasing its allies in an unwieldy coalition. The election was also heartening because it revealed the limits of divisive politics. India’s second party, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), remains rooted in the Hindutva (Hindu-ness) movement, which seems to believe that India’s 160m Muslims live there on sufferance. The BJP lost ground this time, showing yet again that Hindu nationalism is enough to underpin a party, but not a government.
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from 2004 – "Other members of the BNP's female contingent appear to be equally "off-message". One of the Barnsley candidates, Lorraine Lee, 37, a mother of two, said that the idea of repatriating people of overseas extraction – a BNP policy – was "dreadful". She said: "You can't do that to people. Many of them have come here because they have asked for our help and support. You can't just turn around and send them back."
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As their two children grew up, David and Carla filled their big house by the sea with visitors from Italy, where Carla was born. David played in a jazz band; Carla cooked and made clothes. David had dreamed of a retirement travelling the world together. Instead, Carla was diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease and David has devoted his days to looking after his wife. "Dealing with dementia is rather like a rugby tackle," he says. "You both hit the ground."
