Lynn: Finally, the Magna Carta provided that no free man should be hanged twice for the same offense.
I had to stop reading I was laughing so much.
It reminded me of the student term papers in certain Canadian Universities. Ask them, for example, to discuss 19th century theorists and you would get a "seamless" concoction of original work and the plagiarised excerpts. And they wondered how you knew. It went something like this (I'm reconstructing and putting the plagiarised bits in bold):
"Once upon a time there was the 19th century and it had a lot of thinkers in it. Some of them were men and some of them were women but mainly men with beards. Mr. Durkheim was a French man who thought a lot. Durkheim's concept of anomie describing the synchronic dysfunctionalism characteristic of societies undergoing atypical stress, was a big idea. And another man who had good ideas, too, was Karl Marx. Mr. Marx sat in a library in London and thought up a lot of things to write about, such as, the historical dialectic which is constructed of thesis and anti-thesis had its roots in Hegel's work: but Marx turned Hegel's reliance on the moral dimension on its head and posited instead a material dialectisim which relied upon the conflict of classes struggling for control of the commanding heights of the economy in any given age. Freud was another one with big ideas. He had a beard and glasses and lived in Vienna and they made movies about him, he is scary. He was interested in sex and some of his women wore Freudian slips. His patients used to lie down in front of him on a couch and Freud would subject them to a forensic examination of their Id - that boiling cauldron of primitive and unconstructed sexual emotion - as he methodically uncovered the architecture of their Ego in its constant state of flux between the Id and Super Ego.
I could go on. |
