36 Comments

But Brooks is an older, white, male so unimpeachable by the Kultur war heroes.

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YES. Theft of ideas is one thing that chaps my hide as it has been done to me and it was pretty devastating as it was unpublished work. That’s a more serious kind of plagiarism but is rarely discussed.

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I was almost closing it, the cursor was hovering over the x, at "David F Brooks" when out of the corner of my eye I see "men do the hunting and women do the gathering" ... that is a canard that has been thoroughly discredited. Most (reputable) paleo-anthropologists agree that division of labor was fairly equal

On parr with "War is Human Nature"

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There were quite a few other words in that sentence. I've rewritten to make it clearer what I had in mind.

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I didn't mean to come off harsh, sometimes I type before think twice, but this is a great example of what I've wailed against for so long, these "institutionalized " as Bruce downstream put it canards handed down to us on "authority." My complaint about religion is the language we (I) use to condemn religion is rooted in religion. This is the same thing. It has been established men were the mighty hunters women the weak teepee keepers, War is human nature and that's the way it is, though we weren't there.

All established as being truth based solely on being established as truth

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I didn't think you were being harsh, I thought you were reading me wrongly. I don't support the theory you're attacking, and never have.

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How can the division of labor have been equal when women alone had to do the labor of bearing and nursing children?

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What part of "fairly equal" didn't you understand ... ?

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Please, for the love of God, do not introduce that primate behavioral study to the manosphere.

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OK sorry

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Changed link to something more up-to-date and including bonobos.

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The bobonosphere can handle it.

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It’s remarkable how stupid David Brooks can be even when he’s stealing ideas.

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To be fair, it's a pretty stupid idea to start with, and the book he stole it from (praising the kindness and generosity of capitalism, deregulation, and regressive taxation) is horrible.

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I’m looking for the additional Brooksian theft of ideas that you reference. I am interested in them

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Mostly at my blog, from 2012 or so until just now; I used to fisk all of his columns, and it came up with some regularity. You can do a search https://yastreblyansky.blogspot.com/search?q=David+Brooks+plagiarism

I was actually thinking of recycling some of the material here, with an improved style

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Thank you for responding so promptly. Yes, please re-cycle!!!

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Following your mention of Gilder, there are several blocks of quotes text accompanied by references to “Giddens.” I assume you mean “Gilder,” yes/no?

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Thanks!

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Ugh

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Your insight deserves to be shared so I just did via my comment posted to Brad Delong’s most recent Substack post.

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Philosophers are good at thinking. Brooks is good at typing. The NYT is good at publishing. This division of labor has created a wealth of ideas to inspire insipid people.

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Interesting to see people focus on their gotchas instead of the point. A button, once pushed, must ring a bell so an angel gets its wings. On the Gay Crisis (no not that one, the other one the Times is obsessed with) there's this assumption that "plagiarism" is a moral and ethical absolute, like cannibalism or treason. Conveniently this allows everyone to side-step the question of just what did she steal, anyway. I've seen a few handwavy references to missing "cites", which I'm clearly supposed to understand what that means and it's import, since it's never explained (I know what cites are, I'm not an animal for God's sake). But why these missing cites are so egregious I don't know, and probably never will. I see you resident troll has bravely pointed out that Brooks is a lowly op-ed writer while Gay was President of Hahvad and an Academic, suddenly a noble profession she has besmirched. Brooks is a synthesist while Gay is a plagiarist, and that makes all the difference.

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"as where men do the hunting and women do the gathering"

Which is wrong, and was institutionalized by white male anthropologists without a second thought, despite ample evidence to the contrary

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-theory-that-men-evolved-to-hunt-and-women-evolved-to-gather-is-wrong1/

But I don't really believe that Brooks is doing this intentionally,,,he's simply lazy, and googles (or more likely asks his assistant/next Mrs Brooks to find the quote he's looking for to make his point and plops it in, without context.

Sometimes it's like that old Mad Magazine riff where they added the un-quoted parts of the movie or book blurbs

"This book was wonderful" (at putting me to sleep it was so boring)

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That was me, not Brooks, but raising it as just one example of a division of labor that has existed in some societies, not the ev psych theory--Brooks seemed to believe that division of labor was a brand new thing around 1640.

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Brooks own division of labor contribution. 'you have the idea, I present it as my own.' I'm too lazy to do the research, but Brooks must have, at some time lost to history, done something worth notice, which got him his sinecure at the NYT and elsewhere.

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Huh. You’re comparing an op-Ed to an academic publishing academic papers.

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But Brooks’ Op-Ed are read by hundreds of thousands of individuals whereas Gay’s and Oxman’s dissertations were maybe read by a few hundred people at most. The diffusion and distribution of Brooks’ plagiarism is far more widespread than the alleged plagiarism of Gay and Oxman. Surely that makes some difference. And doesn’t it make Brooks’ plagiarism worse by far?

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Brooks' op-eds influence nobody. Harvard pumps out all the pro Hamas journalists and junior staffers in government and for legislators, and soon to be 'progressive' House representatives. Her DEI bullshit and comfort with antisemitism does far more damage to the country than Brooks, with his mild Never-Trump attitude. He represents a constituency that doesn't exist any more in the GOP. Gay and her ilk are trying to leverage the gullibility of progressive useful idiots to change the country for the worse.

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What evidence do you have that his op-Ed’s do not influence anybody? Also, What evidence do you have for your second sentence? What evidence do you have for your third sentence, or for your last sentence, for that matter. The only sentence I would agree with is the 4th.

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If you haven’t noticed the pro Hamas line taken by newer Ivy graduates, you’re trying really hard to avoid reality.

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Examples, please. Just asserting it doesn’t make it so.

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https://www.camera.org/ has all the examples you need.

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