Discussion: Columnist Makes Same Argument Against Slave Reparations That He Made A Decade Ago

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Discussion for article #224004

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Sorry, but I think “self-plagiarism” is an oxymoron. If you’re being paid for a column, it’s a different issue, one that’s between the columnist and the publication that’s shelling out cash for his prose. But it isn’t “plagiarism.”

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I am with Mr. Neutron.

You can’t “steal” your own words. and if your points are still valid, why rewrite them?

Since Coates is familiar with what Williams wrote previously, familiar enough to charge plagiarism, he should have addressed Williams’ argument in his essay.

That he did not (I read Coates’ essay, no mention later arrivals to the U.S. bearing responsibility for reparations in it, for example), indicates that Williams criticisms remain valid.

If Coates want Williams to craft a new response to his position, he has to write something germaine enough to the old responses to make the effort necessary.

I see this as a criticism of Coates’ ability to craft a valid argument a whole decade after initial criticisms stuck. Says more about the lack of freshness in Coates’ position than Williams’ work ethic if Williams can just pull out an old column and have it relate effectively to Coates’ most recent work.

I wouldn’t be bragging about how my latest work was effectively debunked a decade ago. I’d get to work polishing my position.

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The right to make derivative works is one of the six “exclusive rights” protected by copyright. Calling someone out for exercising that right (assuming he didn’t sell it) is a rather uncharacteristic descent into ad hominium.

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Looks like Ta-Nehisi Coates has no argument and pulls stuff out of somewhere.

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Exactly. At worst, Williams is saying that Coates doesn’t deserve original arguments for a rebuttal. But I’m not seeing what the big deal is. If I feel my earlier writings on a subject are relevant, where’s the need to re-invent the wheel as opposed to borrowing from my own work?

Now if we were talking about academic work, where there’s a need for every submission to be original, there would be an issue. We cannot have students submitting the same paper to multiple professors. But in the real world, people do this kind of cut-and-paste fairly often.

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Pure projection. Fecal projection, in fact.

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I think the difference is reintroducing your previous work as if you’ve given it more thought and have come to the same conclusions. Printing the exact same article is slightly misleading, it could’ve taken five seconds to say" I wrote about this ten years ago, and after seeing Mr. Coates article, my opinion stays the same."

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Commentators are, generally speaking, paid to provide something utterly useless. However, if they’re writing about current affairs they have an obligation to write contemporaneously. If you have a deadline for an article and you just submit a link to something you wrote a decade ago, your editor would rightly have a problem with that. Besides, all Ta-Nehisi Coates did was point it out and say that those involved should be “embarrassed.” No, it’s not a situation where the author claimed work that wasn’t his; but this isn’t about what it “wasn’t”—it’s about Walter Williams not taking his work seriously, being a disingenuous hack, and misleading his readers.

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Did any of you read Coates’s original article, and Williams’s “rebuttal” to it? I read both. They were totally orthogonal to one another.

Williams’s “points” might be valid in some argument, but they don’t actually address what Coates wrote this year. So no, they’re actually not valid.

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This “reparations” crap sounds very “Iraqi”:

“Your great, great, great grandfather slapped my great, great, great grandfather in 1781 so now is time for me to exact some revenge and kill you.”

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You’ve really nailed the concept of slavery there, Libs – it clearly never amounted to anything more oppressive than a single slap on the face.

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This is one of the goofiest ‘arguments’ I have ever seen.

How on earth does one do ‘self-plagarism’?

The whole point of plagiarism is passing off someone ELSE’S work as your own.

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So you didn’t read the article, haven’t the slightest clue what the actual argument was, and are mouthing off about it anyway. Typical.

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Yes I did.

Williams point about much of the U.S. population arriving here after slavery ended is a direct rebuttal to Coates’ call for reparations.

Coates never addressed that directly. Obliquely, he may have touched on it in his cases of continuing exploitation most recently by sub-prime promoters, but that is also one of the weakest parts of his argument.

Why should people who arrived here after the Civil War pay for slavery reparations? If that question isn’t answered, it isn’t answered.

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You, like Williams, don’t really seem to have grasped or grappled with the most important part of Coates’s essay: the savage and continuing discrimination and, particularly, theft of land, that continued into the late 20th century.

And while you glibly assert that it’s “one of the weakest parts of his argument” to a first approximation Williams doesn’t address that part of the argument really at all, and you don’t actually raise substantive criticisms. You say it’s “weak” but don’t say why.

See also: http://www.newrepublic.com/article/118001/ta-nehisi-coates-interview-case-reparations

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You pass off old work to a portential buyer as new work.

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If “self-plagiarism” is a problem, I am in real trouble. I’ve used the same arguments, and even the same words in college papers, legal briefs, etc

I wrote it, I like the way I wrote it, so I re-use it. So what?

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I have not been following closing any reaction to Coates’ piece since I read it, but I was expecting an outcry from the Right.

Nothing, till now.

I am right to assume that the Right was scared to be called racist and just waited for the ‘appropriate’ messenger to formally respond? Just askin’…

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I believe you showed up here yesterday to applaud Hillary’s explanation of her Iraq war posture (she owed it to the troops to keep them mired down there, remember?). Now it’s Walter Williams. We’ll look forward to your future contributions.

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