Supposedly, Monica Crowley (who btw seems like a generally vile human being) plagiarized some portions of her book What The (Bleep) Just Happened.

Here’s the evidence.

Again, this is the sort of plagiarism that no one outside of academia gives a crap about. It’s meaningless. I don’t feel like unpacking this fully sociologically at the moment, but it springs from the academe’s apparitional and aspirational notion that all ideas should be novel, springing ex nihilo from one’s uncompromisingly dazzling intellect.

This is not how the world works. This is not how the world has ever worked. This is not how the world will work any time in the future. In fact, the world is moving ever further away from this state of being.

Crowley’s book was not an academic tome where it is and should be important to cite all sources. It’s a damn pop politics book. Who cares if she assembled it from cutting up a bunch of old magazines, tossing the slivers up in the air like graffiti and then re-assembling the shreds on the bathroom floor.

Plagiarism most of the time is a senseless charge designed to dispose of political and ideological opponents. This is absolutely no different, despite my antipathy to Crowley herself.