I have a lot of negative things to say about Dr. Ben Carson but my understanding is that he was a tremendously talented pediatric neurosurgeon. And when you are separating conjoined twins or performing an hemispherectomy, it seems to me that one of the key requirements for success is an unusual capacity for attention to detail. Yes, it’s important to have better than average hand-eye coordination and a talent for three-dimensional reasoning skills, but you also need to make sure that you’ve prepared for every contingency and understand the details of every task you will have to undertake. Somehow, however, these skills simply haven’t translated from the surgical field into the world of letters.
Dr. Ben Carson apologized Thursday for plagiarizing parts of his book America the Beautiful: Rediscovering What Made This Nation Great and said he’s working with his editors to “rectify the situation.”
I think Dr. Carson needs to set aside his quest for the things that made this country great and focus on the things that made him a great surgeon. For some, plagiarism is the result of carelessness, but with people like Carson it is the act of a simple scoundrel.
Plagiarism? Cut’n’Paste!
He’s sure an expert in the “cut” part.
I would agree with you, Booman, except that surgeons are extremely well trained plumbers. Period.
Old Joke:
A cardiologist and a cardiac surgeon approach a elevator door which begins to close. inorder to prevent the doors from closing, the cardiologist sticks his hand between the doors. The cardiac surgeon sticks his head.
The humor is that each risks the part of the body they use least. I had to have it explained to me, also.
LOL.
Surgeons greatest professional asset is their ego. 🙂
you are exactly correct. The amount of chutzpah required to LITERALLY hold someone’s life at the point of a knife is enormous. Fortunately, the training received by surgeons is specifically designed to weed out people to whom any kind of humility is present.
I have no doubt that there are humble surgeons …. someplace. But I haven’t seen one in 35 years of exposure to physicians on a daily basis.
Not one.
There are decent ones, but a lot of them are just plain old assholes.
“For some, plagiarism is the result of carelessness, but with people like Carson it is the act of a simple scoundrel.”
Actually all Carson is doing is practicing the well supported and numerously used TP/GOP standard. This standard of conduct is called the How dare you call me on plagiarism! Do you not realize I am a member of the TP/GOP and all of us are above puny things like moral,ethical conduct and or laws!
I guess I just don’t understand what draws people to plagiarize. Hell, I’m just a lowly, cheeto eating blogger. And if I can’t find a way to formulate and express my own ideas in a thoughtful and original way, then I figure I should just keep my damn hands in my pockets and away from the keyboard. Why is it so hard for people to attribute and footnote? In most cases it seems to be a conscious decision on the part of the writer. I caught a friend the other day on Facebook stealing something verbatim from a diary on Daily Kos. I pointed it out to him and all kinds of people got up in his shit about it. Didn’t mean to cause him grief, but I just thought it was wrong.
When you have no new ideas the old ones tend to get retreaded
So, in his book he actually relates an incident from his college days when the naive young lad accidentally committed plagiarism.
And then he proceeds to plagiarize some more. In the same book in which he relates earlier committing plagiarism? Yeah, that earlier incident really made an impression on him.
“Researching a paper for an advanced psychology course, I found some passages that seemed particularly appropriate, and I included them in my writing. I did not, however, indicate that this was the work of someone else; frankly, I had never even heard of the term “plagiarism.” P. 98 America the Beautiful.
Also, “never even heard of the term “plagiarism”? Puhleeze.
Republicans often go with the lowest bidder, and as a result find themselves with a poor-quality end product. I suspect that’s what happened here; Dr. Carson subbed out the writing of his book to the lowest bidding writer (maybe one of those online college paper-writing schemes?) and now he’s stuck with a low-quality fake memoir.
Not that Republican primary voters will care who wrote what.
That’s the most plausible explanation I’ve heard. Not that I care to defend him, but ghostwriting a memoir isn’t unusual. Perhaps he had a hard time finding a ghostwriter who fit his ideology, and ended up with a hack who ripped him off.
So perhaps a lesson learned is that if you’re hiring a ghostwriter, also subscribe to one of those plagiarism services to check their work…
Sharing his ideology and practicing plagiarism sort of go hand-in-hand. Have you noticed the number of wingers who have been caught out for stealing another writer’s words? There will be a brief swirl of outrage, then the miscreant will go on as if nothing has happened. Stealing workers’ wages, stealing investors’ money, stealing writers’ words, it’s all good.
And yes, if you hire a writer from a thesis mill, you should hire a plagiarism service to check the output.
I wonder why plagiarism is spelled so weird.
Apparently plagiarism comes from Greek for “kidnapping.” Just looked that up. Love it.
Regardless of the change in standards, Carson has committed the Biden error. By precedent, that totally disqualifies him ethically for the office of President.
He might as well fold his tents now. But watching his supporters bleed so much cash on his campaign might be an nice indulgent bit of schadenfreude.
Ha ha ha! No really, there’s a rule for that: IOKIYAR.
The one that is dislike the most is a vascular surgeon. This guy is abusive, prickly, and treats me like a nurse – I find out from the clinical research people that I need to do a report with 2 weeks notice. Annoying.
The ones who are the best to work with are pediatricians and internists. These guys have to talk to people, and have to talk to parents about their children. They are nice folks mostly, and compassionate too.
Surgeons are arrogant assholes mostly.
Ophthalmologists have a bad track record at the present time, oddly enough, in that Rand Paul and Bashar Assad are trained in that specialty.
Well, nurses shouldn’t be treated like nurses, if you view it as pejorative.
It’s the nurse who takes care of the patient. Doctors just treat a condition, which is why a lot of them are asswads personally.
Apparently, in the fair doctor’s run for greatness he has tripped over his ego.
It was beaten into my head that there are only two fundamental sins in science; making up data to corroborate a pet theory, and plagiarism.
The fair doctor has proven that he is a familiar advocate of the first sin, so it is of no surprise that he buggered the second one too.