Can you be guilty of plagiarism...

If you work in a discipline that’s a total fabrication to begin with?

It’s an interesting question.

I’ll shortcut the answer: NO. Because…

Who cares if you steal from liars and pretenders and prime cut bullshitters?

For instance, suppose you’re an academic whose field is psychology or education or psychiatry or climate science or Critical Race Theory or vaccinology or sociology or literature (as it’s taught now) or journalism or economics (where every answer leads to ten new questions).

Bullshit from top to bottom. Useless pretend-knowledge.

So you copy three passages from another bullshitter’s published paper. So what? Yes, technically you plagiarized. But lying about another liar has to be a misdemeanor on the level of parking your car so it barely overlaps the next space in an underground garage.

Or you didn’t put a tip in the jar for a counter person in a café who took your order.

“My specialty is hot air. I steal from other hot air enthusiasts.”

Musical chairs. That’s what this reminds me of. Claudine Gay happened to be without a chair when the music stopped. Oops.

“You see, I took from Professor Grimberg who took from Professor Drippy Nose who took from Professor Lunger who took from Professor Poofster who made up his work based on nothing. So what?”

This happens every day when domeheads don’t know what they’re talking about.

I recently wondered about HEAT. What is it? I checked an encyclopedia. As far as I could tell (which wasn’t very far, owing to the confusing language) heat is energy transferred from something with a higher temperature to something with a lower temperature.

Never heard that before. So what is temperature? Supposedly, the measure of how much heat an object contains. Hmm. Sounded like circular reasoning to me. I read further. Heat was called a form of energy.

But what form?

That’s where I stopped.

I concluded: heat is heat.

I assume at least a hundred thousand papers have been written about heat. Probably more. Probably a million. Do any of them tell us what heat actually is?

“Ahem, heat is change of temperature, and temperature is a measure of heat, and around and around we go…”

So as an academic I steal two paragraphs of monkey gibberish from an author who knows exactly nothing about heat itself and then I’m caught and then I try to wriggle out of the woo woo scandal.

When I should be saying, “You know, we can produce heat, we can certainly feel heat or the loss of it, and some heat is hotter than other heat, but I and my colleagues have no idea what it is. We really don’t know why some energy is hot and some energy isn’t. Is energy carrying something called heat or is that energy itself heat to begin with? I’ll be damned if I can figure that out. If I strike a match and light a nice fire in a little pile of paper and twigs, am I exciting molecules? Is that where heat comes from? If so, what about a snow storm? There must be quite a bit of excitation of molecules there, but the result seems to be cold. So what IS heat? I’m in the dark. So I’ll steal a few passages of text from some pretentious colleague, submit my latest paper to my favorite journal where I know the editor, and take the family to Bermuda for Christmas…”

Or how about this? An academic writes a paper exploring the possibly positive effects on black teachers in a school when the percentage of black teachers in that school exceeds 22.

Who in his right mind cares? The real question is: Can a given teacher, black or white, actually teach a class to students and make something good happen? And what does “something good” mean?

That isn’t an academic discipline at all. That’s an on the spot inquiry. Can Joe Smith teach a class? What the hell is he doing in that classroom?