Hi readers. Thanks for coming by for a read.
The plot thickens on the politician wannabe in Montana who coincidently used identical words, sentences, paragraphs and phrases that had been used before. The paper, The Case for Democracy as a National Strategy, was also similar in content to approximately one point seven million [1,700,000] papers written by high school seniors during the past seventy years. As well as 90 million [90,000,000] papers written by university freshmen for Government 101 and Political Science 101 courses.
Back when Martin Luther King was a young man doing his doctoral dissertation he encountered approximately the same phenomenon, though nobody much remembers it nowadays. King’s dissertation was found to contain huge amounts of text previously written verbatim in dissertations earlier by doctoral candidates. And like the guy from Montana, King didn’t want to bog himself down by identifying in footnotes all the people who coincidently had been inspired to the same choice of words and thoughts as his own.
By the time the anomaly was discovered in the academic community Dr. King was a big item on the Civil Rights scene in the US [probably which is the reason it was discovered at all]. And academic reviewers were forced to conclude coincidences happen. Huge, 30-40% or more of the document verbatim coincidences.
Well, I don’t know what the Montana guy thinks about Civil Rights. And I honestly am appalled the Army War College is accepting papers from anyone on the subject of, The Case for Democracy as a National Strategy. In this instance the similar verbage found itself dually existing in the Montana guy’s paper, and a paper put together by some national think-tank foundation a few years earlier. Probably the Montanan believed nobody anywhere would have read it, and in a better world, he’d have been right in thinking so.
Maybe he just got caught up in some statistical thing being done by institutions of higher learning, scanning the web to discover how many doctoral dissertations across the country were composed of identical text from that particular document without being cited. And once they discovered a few thousand masters theses and doctoral dissertations were founded on identical text not cited from the think-tank, they concluded someone had to be made an example of.
Someone safe, not from a top-drawer university, someone white from someplace where people go to South Dakota wintertimes for the warmer weather. The Army War College and Montana seemed right. And after all, this guy already had a claim to victimhood with his post-traumatic-stress-syndrome.
They threw the word ‘honor’ in there somewhere, but the whole issue of honor went away a longish time ago around the time Martin Luther King was doing his doctoral dissertation. Honor’s just something high-ranking soldiers use to justify following orders to bomb civilian populations and whatnot. A thing of the past.
Old Jules
So Far From Heaven 