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It isn't just Ben Domenech's student work that is plagiarized. His later plagiarisms aren't quite as obvious, but there's a movie review that Ben Domenech published in the National Review which is particularly obvious.
Ben Domenech wrote:
Translucent and glowing, they ooze up from the ground and float through solid walls, splaying their tentacles and snapping their jaws, dripping a discomfiting acidic ooze. They're known as the Phantoms, otherworldly beings who, for three decades, have been literally sucking the life out of the earthlings of the human. They are swollen, insectoid, the nightmare descendents of Lovecraftian grotesque — if only the filmmakers had created a plot that was as memorable.
Steve Murray, writing for the Cox News Service, wrote:
Translucent and glowing, they ooze up from the ground and float through solid walls, wriggling countless tentacles and snapping their jaws. They're known as the Phantoms, alien thingies that, for three decades, have been sucking the life out of the earthlings of “Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within.” Swollen nightmares from a petri dish, they're the kind of grotesque whatsits horror writer H.P. Lovecraft would have kept as pets in his basement.
by silence on Thu Mar 23, 2006 at 04:06:39 PM PDT
than the original author, he can set a few details straight, can't he?
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by pigpaste on Thu Mar 23, 2006 at 04:10:08 PM PDT
[ Parent ]
What the hell is this supposed to mean?
sucking the life out of the earthlings of the human
A sign of bad plagiarism is when they take a phrase that makes sense and change it into something that doesn't really sound right. The original writer's line sounds much more logical:
sucking the life out of the earthlings of “Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within.”
So not only is Domenech plagiarizing, he's also screwing the original material up in the process.
The guy is obviously a hack.
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by existenz on Thu Mar 23, 2006 at 09:23:00 PM PDT
If you write up all these examples you found in one place, you've got one hell of a diary. Concentrate especially on the later stuff like this.
You deserve huge props for finding these.
by Hunter on Thu Mar 23, 2006 at 04:17:16 PM PDT
I've got limited time tonight. I've got a number of iffy passages that I can't quite put my finger on.
There's about a 50% chance that I'll have something worth posting by tomorrow.
by silence on Thu Mar 23, 2006 at 04:45:19 PM PDT
How are you finding these so quickly?
Your president lied to me.
by Oaklander on Thu Mar 23, 2006 at 04:21:02 PM PDT
Google.
I take little snippets of his work, and google them. Sometimes, I find nothing. Sometimes I find something.
by silence on Thu Mar 23, 2006 at 04:45:54 PM PDT
its like sequencing the Ben Plagisome
All you have to do is map each sentence he wrote to someone else. We should some sort of graphic and timeline that lays it all out. Snark it up tho like its a map of the human genome.
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by nika7k on Thu Mar 23, 2006 at 04:53:01 PM PDT
The double helix as a great big spiraling cluster fuck.
Do not meddle in the affairs of dragons for you are crunchy and taste good with ketchup.
by teeb on Thu Mar 23, 2006 at 06:12:26 PM PDT
yeah I have never thought about it tho I have to point out that the double helix is composed of DNA.. RNA happens when the DNA is read by polymerases.
DNA-RNA hybrids are not in the normal scheme of things.
by nika7k on Fri Mar 24, 2006 at 04:28:14 AM PDT
That's exactly how we catch our students!!
I hated Bush before it was cool.
by daveriegel on Thu Mar 23, 2006 at 09:16:24 PM PDT
and that obvious--fucking mind-boggling. Serious messed up shit. Is it laziness to the extreme, or is he a literary kleptomaniac? (I don't want to hand him his defense..)
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by Earl on Thu Mar 23, 2006 at 04:23:02 PM PDT
Once in a while you get shown the light in the strangest of places if you look at it right.
by darthstar on Thu Mar 23, 2006 at 04:50:18 PM PDT
A literary klepto and a retail klepto.
by ortcutt on Fri Mar 24, 2006 at 12:25:16 AM PDT
because it's become obvious that someone else must have written those, too ...
- What happens on DailyKos, stays on Google.
by Jon Meltzer on Thu Mar 23, 2006 at 04:26:38 PM PDT
because I never thought that a teenager could write that and I missed the Cox News Service passage. D'oh!
I am aware of all internet traditions
by calipygian on Thu Mar 23, 2006 at 04:37:45 PM PDT
quite eloquently about Dante's circles of hell. I asked him where he got his information on the circles of hell, and he said, "There's no need to use that kind of language with me!"...silly boy. He should work for the Post.
by darthstar on Thu Mar 23, 2006 at 04:49:56 PM PDT
Leon Wolf is claiming that it's a simple matter of 16/17 y.o. not knowing ABA style attribution.
Obviously this stretches well beyond teenage error or simple failure to attribute.
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by MissAnneThrope on Thu Mar 23, 2006 at 04:46:12 PM PDT
These guys will never learn when to put their credibility behind someone, and when to just let it go.
I'm telling you though, we live in a world where torture is a partisan issue, where the President following the law is a partisan issue, where getting bills passed by Congress before they become law is a partisan issue. I won't be surprised if before too long, we're debating whether plagiarism is really such a bad thing after all.
by Steve M on Thu Mar 23, 2006 at 05:09:04 PM PDT
they required us to buy MLA Handbooks beginning in freshman year, and made it clear to us that we were to follow the rules and that plagiarism would not be tolerated. I know that there are some crappy high schools out there that don't teach what they should, but it's absurd to claim that 16/17 year olds are too young to be concerned about plagiarism. I guess Ben's high school didn't teach him....oh wait, right.
by dtj on Thu Mar 23, 2006 at 07:57:13 PM PDT
Four Legs Good
by Spud1 on Thu Mar 23, 2006 at 08:17:32 PM PDT
That's the joke I intended in my last sentence.
by dtj on Thu Mar 23, 2006 at 08:19:54 PM PDT
by Spud1 on Fri Mar 24, 2006 at 04:17:17 AM PDT
Sorry, I'm from Texas and came from one of those public school systems that didn't have us buy the MLA handbook. In fact, I had to go look it up on wikipedia to find out what it was.
But, regardless, as I mentioned in another response here, the teachers in the schools I went to hammered the idea that plagiarism is wrong and how to avoid accidentally committing it by quoting and paraphrasing.
Amateurs talk strategery, professionals talk logistics
by Young Freud on Thu Mar 23, 2006 at 08:41:25 PM PDT
your school didn't focus on MLA style specifically, the fact that they focused on plagiarism shows that they were doing their job. Frankly, I think that some schools are in such bad shape that homeschooling makes sense for some students. But many conservatives--no doubt motivated by their hostility to "teachers' unions" and the tendency of teachers to discuss horrible liberal things like evolution--attack public schooling and insist that homeschooling is almost invariably better. The example of Ben Domenech does nothing to support their theory.
by dtj on Thu Mar 23, 2006 at 09:04:48 PM PDT
Most grammar books used in Texas schools have sections in them which address the skills involved in writing formal papers. In those sections, there are always examples of proper citations according to MLA, APA, Chicago, and sometimes even Turabian styles.
The TAAS and TAKS tests also cover these points on the required Reading and Writing tests, so every Texas high school student would have had to be exposed to these things at some point in the last 10 years -- unless they had really lousy teachers who didn't bother to cover the state education standards.
by Brooke In Seattle on Fri Mar 24, 2006 at 01:27:13 AM PDT
I'm pretty sure we were exposed to it at one point. All that stuff is more than 10 years behind me, but I sure as hell know about the TAAS test, so if what you're saying about the MLA et. al style standards in the TAAS and TAKS is true, and I have no reason to deny it, then most likely I have seen it but just didn't recognize it until now.
by Young Freud on Fri Mar 24, 2006 at 02:26:41 AM PDT
at my high school, when I was 16/17 (and I'm Ben's age - gah) - if you plagiarized, you failed (if not worse). Period. And, BTW, I went to high school in one of the worst states in education (I think we achieved #50 in at least one category during my tenure there).
You weren't penalized if you didn't get the citation right - but you had to say where you got the information.
And I can't imagine all the time it must have taken Ben to continually search for articles to use. Heaven forbid he actually use that time to develop his own thoughts, his own ideas. It never once even crossed my mind to do something like that. His mom must be so proud.
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by iheartbooks on Thu Mar 23, 2006 at 10:09:07 PM PDT
for "high school MLA APA" came up with the following high school webpages dealing with plagiarism and MLA/APA format. All of these results appeared in the first two pages; there are many others.
http://www.glenn-co.k12.ca.us/...
http://www.oslis.k12.or.us/...
http://www.wolves.k12.mo.us/...
http://www.sbschools.org/...
http://mciu.k12.pa.us/...
http://www.awrsd.org/...
http://www.hopkins.k12.mn.us/...
http://www.hatboro-horsham.org/...
by dtj on Thu Mar 23, 2006 at 08:07:39 PM PDT
academic...
Good find!
by darthstar on Thu Mar 23, 2006 at 04:51:28 PM PDT
this is how I have busted every student I ever caught plagiarizing a paper.
google a key phrase and thanks to the magic of "the internets" they get nailed "toot sweet"
nice one.
Anyone start a pool on how long it will be before this cheater is fired?
Anyone start giving the anal probe to every other right-wing fuckhead yet?
Maybe there are similarly flawed characters out there ripe for the picking?
by steveeboy on Thu Mar 23, 2006 at 08:06:13 PM PDT
click here
:-)
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by Trix on Thu Mar 23, 2006 at 08:49:14 PM PDT
GoogleBomb "Manshake" to http://www.proteinwisdom.com.
by astanhope on Thu Mar 23, 2006 at 09:00:58 PM PDT
One of the obvious drawbacks of home schooling, seems to me.
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by eecee on Thu Mar 23, 2006 at 09:53:54 PM PDT
Michelle Malkin, acknowledged mistress (heh, she said "mistress") of the venomous spittle-throwing rant, has linked to your comment (one from the "determined moonbat hordes") as one of the reasons she's suddenly backing way, way away from defending Our Very Own Benjy.
Of course, she defends his other blatant plagiarisms as college indiscretions and notes that Young Box Turtle is "blaming an editor for these transgressions." But to lift whole hunks from the NRO? Apparently that's beyond the limits of what even the Gorgonblogger will defend.
I certainly understand the impulse on the Right to rally around Domenech. But I can't ignore the plain evidence. And the charges can't be dismissed as "lies" or jealousy attributed to Ben's age.... The bottom line is: I know it when I see it. And, painfully, Domenech's detractors, are right. He should own up to it and step down. Then, the Left should cease its sick gloating and leave him and his family alone.
I can only imagine the nausea she had to fight down to even be able to key in those sentences. Would that I had been there. No wonder she was suddenly "late heading out the door" as a way to excuse further comment on an issue that, if it had involved liberals, would have been good for at least six paragraphs. As it is, I expect that this is the one and only comment we shall hear from Maleficent on the whole issue. To say more would require a humility and self-awareness that she totally lacks.
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by Sharoney on Fri Mar 24, 2006 at 09:24:53 AM PDT
wide narrow
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