Firedoglake is helping circle the wagons around Chris Hedges by posting a sneerily dismissive post about the New Republic article. (Don’t get me wrong, TNR can be full of shit and often is, but that doesn’t mean Ketcham’s article was.)

The New Republic has published a hit piece on Chris Hedges that accuses him of plagiarism — without ever really documenting any direct plagiarism as far as I can tell. I’ll admit that my eyes started to glaze over as I read the 5700 word piece, so it may have crept in there and I had simply gone catatonic.

Documentation? What kind of documentation would you expect other than what he provided? Photographs of the original copy? (Granted, he did ask for that in the case of the Harper’s piece, and was refused, so maybe that is the kind you’d expect.) [Read more…]

The Edinburgh Evening News has more on the abuse of J K Rowling and in particular that contributed by “The Dignity Project.”

CHARITY regulators are investigating after a voluntary group appeared to post a Twitter message abusing JK Rowling over her £1 million donation to the No side in the independence referendum.

The tweet, from the account of The Dignity Project, read: “What a #bitch after we gave her shelter in our city when she was a single mum.”

It was one of many strongly worded posts attacking the Capital-based writer for supporting the Better Together campaign.

A later statement posted on the charity’s website claimed its account had been hacked. It said: “We are not responsible for any tweets that have been sent. As a charity we do not take any political stance and our opinion is people are free to donate to whoever they choose.”

But other Twitter users said the message had been auto-posted from the personal Facebook account of the charity’s founder, William Wood.

[Read more…]

The Independent reports on the verbal abuse flung at J K Rowling for daring to oppose Scottish independence, but it does so without ever mentioning sexism or misogyny. Hi, sorry to bother you, but calling a woman a bitch or a cunt or both because you disagree with her is sexist and misogynist, both.

Senior figures on both sides of the Scottish Independence debate have called for an end to online vitriol in the wake of the torrent of abuse directed at the Harry Potter author JK Rowling.
…
…nationalists who Rowling described as “Death Eaterish” for “judging [her] ‘insufficiently Scottish’” scrambled online to tell her to “get to f***”, calling her “politically corrupt”, a “b****” and a “c***”.

[Read more…]

Jaclyn Glenn has another video. In this one she’s replying to someone else’s video which is replying to her video berating people who said Elliot Rodger’s adventure in murder was motivated by misogyny. (Video to video to video. It’s so cumbersome. Why can’t they just type it all, as humans were meant to do?) She starts off with a sarcastic apology for saying Rodger’s adventure was caused solely by mental illness, then drops the sarcasm to say that’s not at all what she said. Huh. She certainly did say it was definitely not misogyny, it was mental illness. She said that with great emphasis and certitude. The bit where she says “there were also other factors” didn’t take up nearly as much time or get as much emphasis. She explains that.

I never said that mental illness was solely to blame, I said several times that there were other things that played a role, and the point of the video was simply to let people know that mental illness played a role, that it wasn’t just misogyny, because I was sick and tired of seeing all these special interest groups jumping in on a tragedy and trying to capitalize on it and trying to use it to further their specific agendas.

[Read more…]

Wow.

I’ve thought Chris Hedges is a terrible writer and human being ever since I read his terrible book I Don’t Believe in Atheists which came out in 2008. I found it to be both sloppy and vulgarly abusive; both lazily written and dishonest about the people he was abusing.

Well color me prophetic then, in light of a long piece in The New Republic reporting several instances of fairly shameless plagiarism. And then for good measure there’s Hedges’s belligerence when the plagiarism is pointed out to him, and then there’s also the circling of the wagons by his friends and colleagues, who swear up and down that he’s just a great guy so please shut up and go away. Yeah that sounds familiar.

Christopher Ketcham writes that Hedges submitted a long piece to Harper’s in 2010 about poverty in Camden, New Jersey.

The trouble began when Ross passed the piece along to the fact-checker assigned to the story. As Ross and the fact-checker began working through the material, they discovered that sections of Hedges’s draft appeared to have been lifted directly from the work of a PhiladelphiaInquirer reporter named Matt Katz, who in 2009 had published a four-part series on social and political dysfunction in Camden.

Given Hedges’s institutional pedigree, this discovery shocked the editors at Harper’s. Hedges had been a star foreign correspondent at the Times,where he reported from war zones and was part of the team that won the 2002 Pulitzer Prize for covering global terrorism. In 2002, he had received the Amnesty International Global Award for Human Rights Journalism. He is a fellow at the Nation Institute. He has taught at Princeton University and Columbia University. He writes a weekly column published in two widely read progressive websites, TruthOut andTruthdig. He is the author of twelve books, including the best-sellingAmerican Fascists. Since leaving the Times in 2005, he has evolved into a polemicist of the American left. For his fierce denunciations of the corporate state, his attacks on the political elite, and his enthusiasm for grassroots revolt, he has secured a place as a firebrand revered among progressive readers.

[Read more…]

There’s another one, and there was one more yesterday.

A teenager has been found hanging from a tree in a village in northern India, the fourth woman to die in such a way in recent weeks in Uttar Pradesh state.

The family of the 19-year-old say she was raped. A post mortem is under way.

It comes just one day after a woman’s body was found hanging from a tree in a remote village elsewhere in the state.

The gang rape and murder of two girls found in similar circumstances last month sparked outrage. Correspondents say more cases are now being reported.

Such attacks have long taken place in Uttar Pradesh, reports the BBC’s Geeta Pandey in Delhi, but recent outrage over sexual violence has meant that every case is being reported to police and getting media coverage.

[Read more…]

J K Rowling is opposed to Scotland’s going independent, and has said so. Open the misogynist floodgates.

What’s The Dignity Project?

The Dignity Project

@DignityProject

Scottish charity working in Africa with a CBCC programme Community Based Childcare Programme for orphans and vulnerable children.

But a woman has The Wrong Opinion? Good-bye dignity.

Reading the tweets at #womenaretoohardtoanimate is very funny.

Why it’s almost worth being the despised superfluous tiresome hard to draw alien sex, just to be able to read such hilarious tweets!

One of Soraya’s –

#womenaretoohardtoanimate because, really, in our idealized worlds, isn’t it just better if they don’t exist? They’re SO COMPLICATED.

A few others –

#womenaretoohardtoanimate i can never get the hundred flailing tendrils right

#womenaretoohardtoanimate with all the crying, menstruating, and nagging. How can we draw it ALL?!

#womenaretoohardtoanimate cos you have to start from scratch, unlike with male forms that spring whole from the designers cloven forehead.

#womenaretoohardtoanimate and it’s not historically accurate b/c everyone knows during the french rev. women and POC weren’t invented yet

Why aren’t there any female characters in this new video game? Well because it would be too much trouble, that’s why. It would take too long. It would be too difficult.

So says Ubisoft about the new Assassin’s Creed.

The next game in the Assassin’s Creed series will not allow you to play as a female character because it would have “doubled the work” for the game’s developer Ubisoft. Speaking to VideoGamer, Ubisoft technical director James Therien said female assassins were on the company’s feature list until “not too long ago,” but were cut as a matter of “focus and production.”

“A female character means that you have to redo a lot of animation,” Therien said, defending the exclusion by saying it was “not a question of philosophy or choice.” Ubisoft’s Bruno St. Andre estimated that a female assassin would’ve necessitated more than 8,000 new animations recreated on a new skeletal structure, but said that playable female characters were “dear to the production team.”

[Read more…]

Oh, Andrew Brown. Wrong in the very first sentence.

He’s writing about the Tuam babies.

Why is it that we are more shocked by what happens to dead babies than to live ones?

We’re not.

There, that’s done; no need to write the rest of that piece.

But of course he did write it.

The story that almost 800 dead babies were buried in a disused sewage tank outside Tuamin rural Ireland turns out to be problematic. It is certain that 796 babies did die under the care of nuns in a home for unmarried mothers there between 1925 and 1961 and that is in itself a shocking statistic. But what gave the story wings was the claim that their bodies had been dumped in a septic tank…

[Read more…]