ab.politics

<robertpeffers@aol.com> wrote in message news:3ef01c11-0a96-4661-9548-c578ac663726@e4g2000hsg.googlegroups.com... > By writing about the politics of white privilege on Internet > Newsgroups and listening to the people who responded to that writing. > I have had to face one more way that privilege runs deep in my life, > and it makes me uncomfortable. However, the discomfort tells me I am > on the right track. > [snip] What _I_ know for sure is that this is a word-for-word repeat of a post made here several times before. Want proof? 1. Go to Google Groups Advanced Search at http://groups.google.ca/advanced_search?q=&oe=UTF-8&hl=en&. 2. Fill in the form as follows: with the exact phrase: "politics of white privilege" Return only messages from the group at this location: can.politics 3. Press the "Google Search" button near the top right hand corner of the page. You can see that there are several instances of the same post - word-for-word, mind you! - although the title and the poster change. For instance, the current post was also made by jlipka81@aol.com on May 15, 2006 with the title "More thoughts on White Privilege in Canada". jlipka81@aol.com made the exact same post with the title "More thoughts on White Privilege in Canada" on Mar 31, 2006. rpeffers1....@aol.com posted the same post on Sept 23 this year with the title "Canadians need to take racism, bigotry, and unearned societal privilege seriously". And again on Jun 6 this year with the title "Canadians should unite against bigotry and unearned societal privilege". I suspect that if you keep going down the list, you will see that the exact same diatribe has been posted umpteen times before under a variety of different identities. It seems _extremely_ unlikely that two (or more) different people came up with the exact same words for a post of hundreds of words so I think it is reasonable to assume that this post originated from a single source. It is harder to say whether "jlipka" and "rfpeffers" and "auldbobpeffers" are really different identities ("sock puppets") of one and the same person although the similarily of the last two IDs is certainly suggestive. If they are in fact, three distinct people, at least two of them are publishing the work of the third without citation. Or maybe all three of them are "stealing" the words of someone else altogether. It would be interesting to know the original source of these words but the poster doesn't see fit to identify them, suggesting that he is willing to publish the work of others and take the "credit" for them. That's plagiarism of course. Posting the same thing from supposedly different sources is an old trick to create an illusion that the writer is just one part of a groundswell of surging public opinion. It's simply a ploy to hide the fact that the writer is a single lone crank, rather than the vanguard of an emerging social or political movement. It's not a very honest tactic either, in my opinion. -- Rhino