I wasn't thinking about blogging about Ms Nikita Alamango's paraphrasing of an article from a respected writer for the Financial Times, but out of idle curiosity, I visited her Facebook page (she's open to all, I'm no friend of hers) and came across her spirited defence of her actions, a defence made against one of the more enlightened members of her own party's request for her to resign her positions within the party.
This request was not met with great approval by others, incidentally, which makes one wonder whether it's not true that Labour accepts virtually anyone in its ranks, irrespective of their poor standards of propriety.
In order to drive home the point that when you're in hole, the nifty idea is to stop digging, my resolve not to blog was overcome and I thought I'd make a few points to the young lady and her supporters.
First point: "paraphrasing" does not involve lifting chunks of excellent writing wholesale, deleting a few phrases and linking the chunks with – not to put too fine a point on it – lousily written sentences. In fact, this is one of the indicators I use, when assessing dissertations in my real life, to see if plagiarism has been resorted to: if the candidate's normal mode of expression is, to be charitable, less than perfect, and suddenly he or she breaks into idiomatically perfect and syntactically excellent English, my antenna start twitching and I reach for Google.
Second point: screeching, even if only virtually, that others on the other side of the political divide have done worse things (let's say for the sake of argument that this is true, if utterly irrelevant) does not excuse you from being stupid enough to think you can commit one of the worst crimes in the field of intellectual endeavour and get away with it. And nor does it excuse you from being arrogant enough to think you can fool all the people all the time.
Third point: the fact that your plagiarised piece sat in the public domain for three days before being rumbled does not actually mean that it was acceptable and therefore that the reaction to your piece of larceny was actually driven by a political agenda. It means that no-one bothered to check, perhaps because no-one much reads the stuff in the first place. I know I didn't.
Fourth point: it's useless whining, or having people whine for you, that this is nothing, that you have your heart in the right place and that your work for the party should be taken into consideration. Plagiarism is not "nothing", it is as bad, say, as claiming academic distinction and lying about where you studied: it is contemptible. Your heart may be in the right place, that's an anatomical fact that can be verified, but this does not mean that you can play fast and loose with other people's property, even if it is only intellectual property. And lastly, careful about being so proud about your work for the party, the most recent result of your work was dumping Cyrus Engerer into your leader's unsuspecting lap and look where that got your party: up the creek without the proverbial.
It has to be faced: if you're one of the Labour Party's bright young things, it has a bright young thing deficit and a half, no mistake.
See other blogs on plagiarism:
http://www.timesofmalta.com/articles/view/20100820/blogs/your-cheating-hearts.323249
http://www.timesofmalta.com/articles/view/20080418/blogs/bearing-false-witness.204634