Finkelstein and Joy on Plagiarism and Slogans

To think I almost shrunk away from the 150-minute runtime of this video! It was well-worth my time, felt like it went more quickly than the runtime, and was an all-around excellent conversation. I’ve included a partial transcription of the parts I found interesting and my own notes below.

Billionaire's Anti-Palestine ATTACK on Academic Freedom (w/ Norm Finkelstein) by Bad Faith (YouTube)

You can buy literally anything

At 27:00 they are talking about the recent ousting of president of Harvard Claudine Gay, largely through billionaire Bill Ackman’s efforts.

“Norman: I don’t recall a single article that said ‘[…] do you realize what just happened? A billionaire decided who’s going to be the president of the most revered academic Institute Institution in our country.‘

“What happened to peer competence? […] What happened to faculty self-governance? That’s the basic principle. There’s a faculty senate. The faculty senate is supposed to be integral to making the decisions about who are the administrators on your campus and your university. All of that totally destroyed by what they did. So, given the rank of the people they went after—and it was such a brazen assault—it was, let’s be clear, it was in-broad-daylight blackmail. That’s what it was. It was in-broad-daylight blackmail.

“Now you might say or Robbie [Soave, Briahna’s co-anchor on The Hill] might say well it’s a private institution and […] you have […] the right to give or withhold your money, you know, as an alumnus […] which is absolutely true, if you do it quietly. You make the decision to yourself, [saying] “you know what I think? Harvard has gotten too woke for my taste. I’m not giving them any more money.‘ Sure, you have the right to do that. First of all, you know, speaking as a person of the left, I don’t think you should have that kind of money. And this is another example of the problem when you have that kind of money: yes, the problem is you can control everything.

“Briahna: That’s such an important point. There’s a democracy aspect to wanting to tax the rich because nobody should have enough money to buy and sell careers and set the academic course for an entire university or, of course, buy Congress.

“Norman: Totally agree. You not only have the money to do it, you think you’re entitled to do it. This guy, this hedge-fund manager thinks he has the right to determine who is the president of Harvard. That’s a real problem. That’s called—the technical term is megalomania—when you think you have the right to determine who should be the president of a university because you happen to have a lot of money. There’s a real problem there but it was blackmail in broad daylight because, as I said, you have the right. That’s the way the capitalist system works, you know, to give or not to give in some philanthropic or whatever venture but, when you broadcast it—when you say I’m withholding $100 million until you get rid of Claudine Gay—that becomes blackmail in my opinion. Whatever you do in private, do it in private but when you start announcing that—broadcasting it—it’s turned into blackmail.”

What does plagiarism even mean?

At 41:30 they talk about the subsequent plagiarism charges and what constitutes plagiarism.

“Norman: maybe I’m old-fashioned about this but I think a doctoral dissertation at MIT which plagiarizes extensively from Wikipedia is a whole other kettle of fish. You know, that’s very that’s problematic, in my opinion. So, I’m not ready to—my threshold does not allow for that.

“Briahna: The problem there isn’t plagiarizing Wikipedia. The problem there is using Wikipedia as a source instead of doing the more rigorous exercise of using of looking at the sources that Wikipedia is citing for the proposition and following those down the thread and and researching and making sure that there’s accuracy there yourself. That’s what she is really being faulted for when we’re talking about plagiarizing for Wikipedia. not the idea that whatever definition of whatever noun she’s trying to define in her paper. Whatever idea she’s trying to define in her paper isn’t probably accurate just because it’s on Wikipedia. It’s about the intellectual rigor of her research that’s not okay.”

This discussion about plagiarism was quite good, on the level of what “plagiarism” actually is. I think it’s a shame that these two lent too much credence to the “software” that is typically used to detect plagiarism. Plagiarism isn’t a yes/no issue. There are shades of gray. The article The plagiarism circus by Mark Liberman (Language Log) cites another article The Plagiarism War Has Begun: Claudine Gay was taken down by a politically motivated investigation. Would the same approach work for any academic? by Ian Bogost (The Atlantic), which detailed what it was like using one of these tools to investigate your own paper, a paper which the author knows is beyond reproach.

How a plagiarism detector works

The machine does an initial run and spits out a terrible score. Every document is plagiarized, by default. It’s up to you to determine what to do with that score. If you’re actually interested in detecting real plagiarism, then you’ll analyze the results and tweak the input parameters. If you’re just interested in getting a black-box result from a tool that you can claim is authoritative, which says that an enemy plagiarized their work, then you can stop right there. The machine has provided you with the F.U.D. that you require.

Bogost used iThenticate—which is, apparently, related to Turnitin—to test. I have no familiarity with either of these tools. He took a closer look and noticed that the tool doesn’t actually detect plagiarism. It detects similarities in text to other published texts. If you have written a popular paper that has been cited in other papers afterwards, then the tool will cheerily tell you that large sections of your paper is also contained in other papers and let the lazy—or duplicitous—user simply round that up to plagiarism.

His initial analysis of his ~68k-word thesis yielded a result that 74% of the text was replicated in other documents. A facile interpretation would round that up to a shocking level of plagiarism. He had to manually filter out works that had been published after his, that were citing his paper—because why should the tool do that automatically? The software knows all of the publication dates, doesn’t it? It could do it, but it doesn’t.

There’s a checkbox to “exclude bibliography”, which causes the software to suddenly recognize that work copied from other works that have been referenced is OK and not plagiarism. A similar checkbox no longer flagged quoted material that had been footnoted, which, again, seems like a no-brainer to enable by default. The text “Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission.” was also flagged as having been found in other works. No kidding. 🫤

There were many other common phrases that it threw up as noise—because having the phrase “to preserve the” can’t in any sane world be considered to have been copied. It flagged proper names, titles, etc. It flagged phrases as having been copied from work that had absolutely nothing to do with the document being analyzed—something a human would never, ever do. If you’re writing a thesis on Shakespeare and there is a sentence or two that matches exactly two sentences found in an analysis of taxoplasmosis in Belgian cats, then no-one would imagine in their most feverish dreams that you’d stolen those two filler sentences from that paper. But this software cheerily flags it as “found in other works”. Bravo.

So, the software is doing no work to help you actually detect copies. It seems to filter nothing out, despite costing $300 to run against this one paper. That seems like a nice, lucrative business. It seems like the tool’s default settings are to pump the possible plagiarisms as high as possible. Again, it’s probably more lucrative that way. Whether there’s a knock-on effect of insufficiently substantiated accusations of plagiarism doesn’t matter to the company peddling the service. They’ve almost certainly excluded themselves from liability in a EULA.

I imagine that most people will lend these tools far too much credence because there will be no downside to their doing so, and the upside is that they personally spend much less time checking for plagiarism. Whether there is plagiarism or not will soon be determined by the output of these tools. That is, with plagiarism being such a vague topic for most, they won’t notice when the standard changes. That the standard changes because of laziness and corporate greed doesn’t seem to matter, either. It will just change.

Long story short: when someone says that they used a tool to detect plagiarism, it means essentially nothing on its own. Before you lend any weight to that “evidence”, you have to find out more details.

Coming up with a good slogan is hard

I wish Norman had made his point that it’s the politics of the slogan that’s important. Briahna was right that you can’t force a slogan down people’s throats. But I wish she’d understood that he was saying that you can’t force people to like your slogan and stop misinterpreting it, either. This would be an opportunity to say: what would be a better slogan? To collaborate with detractors to figure out what is wrong with the slogan. What is wrong with “from the river to the sea”? Is it that Palestinians should have rights at all? Or that it seems like there should be one state? Without Israelis? Without Jews? What does it mean? As Norman said, there is room for interpretation there. You can’t not acknowledge that.

Briahna’s right that there are some people who will be offended no matter what, because those people’s beef is with Palestinians having rights at all. But you also can’t just ignore that a slogan has been made politically charged. Well, you can, but you do so at your own peril. At least be honest about what the drawbacks might be.

The drawback might be that your opponents manage to pigeonhole your entire movement into insignificance by convincing a large part of the public that you’re all terrorists. Talk to people who read the New York Times—they definitely already think this. This tactic has worked before. Finkelstein is old enough to know. Briahna is frustrated and ready to say ‘screw it’. It’s hard to say who’s right. Capitulation to relentless, unyielding, and perennially unreasonable opponents? Or resignation to possible irrelevance and a lost cause?

I thought it was interesting when Finkelstein said that Martin Luther King didn’t want Stokely Carmichael to push the “black power” slogan because he was quite certain that it would be interpreted by those in power as “we’re taking away your power”, which, in many ways, they definitely wanted to, right? They wanted to take away the white power that whites should never have been able to arrogate to themselves in the first place. But it’s threatening and endangering to the project of equality. It’s not exactly jettisoning allies, but it’s making it much more difficult for people to become allies. It’s going to make them wonder what they’re actually advocating for. You want to be as clear as possible. “Equal rights for all” is a good slogan.

You can’t win ‘em all

She makes a good point that it’s patronizing to tell people who’ve been chanting a slogan for 50 years that they don’t understand what they mean by it. But she’s slightly off again, in that Norman is saying that they know what they mean by it, but they should be explicitly aware of the political ramifications of continuing to use a slogan that can be used as a weapon against them.

There is no easy answer: if you capitulate, then your opponents will smell blood in the water and outlaw any slogan you come up with. Meanwhile, people who continue to use a slogan that the movement has acknowledged is potentially problematic will immediately be upgraded to the status of terrorists advocating for the elimination of all Jews. They will point to the agreement to stop using the slogan as justification for this, arguing that no-one would use the slogan unless they really meant the bad thing that we grudgingly agreed it might mean in the most ungenerous possible interpretation.

It is possible that there is no winning against opposition like this! I almost agree with Briahna that we should just say “fuck ‘em” before investing a single second trying to appease opponents who will expressly never be appeased. But I think she argues inelegantly in that she jumps to the conclusion without once acknowledging Norman’s argument that there are political drawbacks—some quite severe and potentially movement-ending—to doing so. They often talk past one another like this. They’re so close to agreement, but neither is capable of fully formulating their argument in a way that the other would be able to accept the “yes, but” and be done with it, even after half-an-hour of discussion.

At 2:13:30, she finally summarizes her position quite well, though,

“[…] bad-faith actors—people with an agenda—are going to do and say what they got to do to press their agenda and at a certain point you cannot spend your entire life running away from the criticism of people who are never going to agree with you. If you’re in a place where you’re talking to good-faith people and they find a slogan so pernicious that someone who otherwise would be on your team isn’t going to be on your team, fine, but the example that you raised with your friend: either she’s down with the Zionist project or she isn’t and if she isn’t, that’s fine, but she was never going to be on the ‘From The River To The Sea, Palestine Must Be Free” team anyway.”

I think there’s the problem, though. “From the river to the sea, Palestine must be free.” doesn’t mean “end the Zionist project” to everyone. It doesn’t even mean that to people to most people actually chanting it.

Right after that, she goes off quite eloquently (which is kind of awesome).

“[…] it is a trap, in and of itself, it is a trap to thwart the momentum of a movement and to distract people from doing what they should be doing to advance righteous causes, to [instead] be stuck on a hamster wheel, trying to convince people who are being paid to disagree with you, whose incentive structure is set up to disagree with you, and I don’t care anymore. I’m tired of tiptoeing around not saying that things that are blatantly racist are racist because some yokel […] somewhere is going to think poorly of it. I have extended so much grace to these people and the returns on that investment are not worth it to me at this point.”

I do think that it’s dangerous to have your political tactics and even strategy be a reaction to the worst people you hear from online. You don’t have to engage with them. No-one is saying you have to engage with the most horrible people. You just have to be aware to what degree you’re rounding up everyone who disagrees with you to the group of people who call you a monkey online. Don’t let the din of malicious actors numb you into being completely impervious to all criticism—even valid criticism.

Letting them get to you

That is the danger: that you become the kind of person who dismisses anyone who doesn’t already agree with everything they have to say, including signing on to the interpretation of a slogan which, quite frankly, people only chose because it rhymes in English. If more than half of the people to whom you’re directing the slogan—the people you’re trying to convince of the rightness of your cause, the people whom you’re trying to convince to help you achieve justice—are misunderstanding the implication and are afraid of being ostracized for using the slogan or for associating with people who do, then you have a problem that you have to look squarely in the face.

If your reply is “I don’t care,” that may be the smartest reply given the situation. But it might also be too easy. Because you have to at least explicitly acknowledge that your cause may end with that slogan, that this will be the thing that your opponents use—rightly or wrongly—to torpedo your whole cause. And they won’t care how unfair or shockingly meretricious they behaved in getting what they wanted. They will have won because they managed to make you and your movement inconsequential. You will have died on the hill of the slogan when your original goal was to gain freedom for a people.

And also because—even just a little bit—it became about you. It became about you not giving in to trolls. And that’s the shitty thing about trolls: they win either way, as long as you engage. Even by not engaging, by continuing to do what you were going to do, their influence over what others think about what you’re doing and saying and advocating for might end up being what matters. You’ll end up sitting there, staring at the shambles of your movement, wondering where it went wrong, how it is that you lost support.

People suckare difficult

What went wrong is that building movements is about convincing a bunch of ADHD adults to care, to be empathetic. And your opponents just have to appeal to the inner asshole in a bunch of anonymous people. It’s an uphill climb, to say the least.

Perceived versus actual security

Right at the end, there was a segment of Krystal Ball’s show with a cohost (who I didn’t recognize). I think she (Joy) thought the segment would show that the Congressman being interviewed was no longer able to just push people into silence by implying that they’re anti-semitic. What it looked like to me was that the Congressman was actually quite reasonably asking the host to have some empathy with the Israeli people, who fear for their lives.

This is absolutely true! They 100% fear for their lives! I’ve spoken with some of them. They think that an attack on their country is imminent, not from Gaza, but from the north, from Lebanon. They’re positively paranoid about Iran. Just because I empathize with the pain and fear they must be feeling doesn’t mean I lend credence to their feeling that they’re going to be invaded. They’re deluded, but they’re still in pain, is the point. They’re not unlike Americans that way, who see danger in every corner, despite being some of the most secure people on the planet (at least from military attack).

I thought that the Congressman said that quite well and quite eloquently, at least at first. Once the host badgered him more, he quickly fell back on the hoary tropes of a perennially persecuted people, of ghettos and pogroms. None of that has relevance today. The people in Israel have lived in safety for generations by now. They haven’t had a single thing to legitimately fear for 60 years. They make up all of this shit so that they can bristle outwards and justify preemptive aggression in the service of colonialism and empire-building (if much more modest, of course, than papa bear’s).

Speaking of papa bear: this is the same thing that the US does. Talk to an American and you will hear of ludicrous fears that they legitimately feel. It’s been like this for generations in that country, as well. They think the Russians are going to invade. I get stuff from my father-in-law with intricate plans of how the Chinese are going to make a pincer movement from the Canadian and Mexican borders. Their pain is real. We can empathize with it without believing in the things that cause it.

So, no, I don’t think that the clip showed what they thought it showed. It was more a kind of dunking on a guy who was actually trying to be reasonable. The guy said he empathizes with Palestinians. He said that he also empathizes with Israelis. Ask him what he means by that exactly rather than just assuming that he uses it as code for saying that he supports the extermination of Palestinians.

Stop trying to go for a win for yourself and figure out if you can get the guy to hang himself. Imagine if you’d expressed empathy for the people of Israel, most of whom are just as trapped in the fear-spiral of bad foreign policy and a completely morally bankrupt leadership and media as Americans are. Imagine if you’d asked him what he thought they feared, exactly. What are we being asked to empathize with? The fear that Hezbollah will attack? Or the fear that they won’t get a cheap home in a new settlement in Gaza?