The Official "GATTACA!!!"-gate Thread!

[Antilogic]

So let's start over at the Raves thread:

GATTACA!

Spoiler :

So a certain Republican politician totally plagiarized the wikipedia entry on this movie. Hilarious.

Here's one to a Politico piece on it, but if you search for Rand Paul and GATTACA!!! you will find several.

Wait. he's a bad guy for adhering to the Wikipedia license?



Seems like he was totally within acceptable usage to do what he did.

Yeah, copying from wiki is just poor form, not necessarily a copyright violation. But it has given me the excuse to scream "GATTACA!" at people all day long like Rafi from The League.

So it's a rave.

Both licenses include that you have to name the original author/source.
If he didn't do that, then it's not acceptable.

And, as Antilogic said, it's poor form. A politician should be able to write his own speech.

... what the heck am I even talking about, I have no clue what this all is about o_O.

So yeah, I've been screaming "GATTACA!" at random people like a looney person in my lab, but The_J is right here--it's okay to say you are quoting from wikipedia without their prior permission so long as you mention their name. Rand Paul, in his Monday speech, did not explicitly mention where he obtained the summary from, so it is plagiarism.

Now, why make a thread about it? Well, turns out this isn't the first time this has happened.

But this case has an odd twist. Mr. Paul appears to have lifted words for a speech this week from a Wikipedia entry about a futuristic movie, “Gattaca,” which imagines a world with a population that has been genetically engineered.

The senator was trying to make a point about eugenics, saying the United States was veering dangerously close to eliminating people whom society considered to be undesirable. In doing so, he made a reference to the movie and twice spoke lines that were virtually word for word from the Wikipedia description of the plot of “Gattaca,” which was released in 1997.

...

The website BuzzFeed followed up on Tuesday by reviewing other remarks by the senator and said it had found a speech from June in which he appeared to have taken the words to describe another film, “Stand and Deliver,” from Wikipedia.

In a television interview with Jorge Ramos, Randy Paul responded (the link has the 2ish minute interview and the article):

In an interview with Fusion’s Jorge Ramos, Paul was asked if there is any truth to Maddow’s claim.

“We borrowed the plot lines from Gattaca. It’s a movie,” Paul said. “I gave credit to the people who wrote the movie…Nothing I said was not given attribution to where it came from.”

But the allegations of plagiarism against Paul go deeper...

He follows up in the television interview to talk about footnoting in academic papers and speeches, and how people don't footnote speeches whether in delivery or when published. He seems to think the plagiarism charge implies that he wrote the movie GATTACA!!! and not copied the wikipedia entry on it, which is just off the mark.

So there is something here that might be worth discussing besides the immediate scandal (although we can post updates as they come in). Should we expect and ask politicians giving speeches to properly footnote their speeches? Should we expect that written and distributed copies of the speeches be footnoted? Should they refer to their sources in-line more often? Should they hold up index cards with giant bold numbers on them during the speech so we know to look for a footnote?

Inquiring minds want to know. Also, GATTACA!!!

 

[Hygro]

Another irony about him fearing the Gattaca narrative is that the Gattaca world is pretttttty libertarian. Yeah, the main character's fight against the world is also a libertarian celebration of the individual against the system, it that struggle requires its conservative-libertarianist world to make sense.

("Hygro, what do you mean the Gattaca world is libertarian? There's a whole police state!" Funny thing, libertarianism is, because the police-state in the movie is still within the framework of a libertarian legal code and mindset).

 

[Valka D'Ur]

That was one bizarre movie.

Doesn't this politician have a speech-writer?

 

[Hygro]

I dare say he has the most speechwriters.

 

[Valka D'Ur]

Obviously none of them are any good, if the best they can do is plagiarize others' work.

Mind you, plagiarism is fairly common among politicians. For some reason, they seem to think nobody will notice.

 

[sophie]

Should we expect and ask politicians giving speeches to properly footnote their speeches? Should we expect that written and distributed copies of the speeches be footnoted? Should they refer to their sources in-line more often? Should they hold up index cards with giant bold numbers on them during the speech so we know to look for a footnote?

No, but I do think we should expect and ask politicians to not quote wikipedia verbatim when they are developing their poorly-formed analogies.

 

[AlpsStranger]

Mind you, plagiarism is fairly common among politicians. For some reason, they seem to think nobody will notice.

That's generational. Even though older folks are aware that stuff can be Googled they often don't factor it in properly. I realize the guy isn't ancient, but even at my age I suffer from the jet-lag of living a formative part of my life in the pre-Net days.

I've watched people over 60 sit there, with functioning smart phones, and argue for thirty or forty minutes about some factoid. It genuinely never occurs to them to look it up.

 

[Peck of Arabia]

I'm not going to lie, as far as storms in teacups go, this seems a disappointingly tepid squall.

Couldn't he, like, have a blatant affair and whenever anyone asked him about it respond with nothing but "free market, baby"?

Now that's a scandal I could get behind

 

[AlpsStranger]

Now that's a scandal I could get behind

I'm not going to lie, as far as storms in teacups go, this seems a disappointingly tepid squall.

Eh. It's about as dumb as anything else that passes for politics, really.

 

[Peck of Arabia]

Yeah I didn't think that one through. I was too busy checking if "squall" was the correct meteorological term. Even now I'm not too sure

 

[warpus]

Yeah, this doesn't seem worth discussing for me. No penises, no sexting, and nobody's dead... yet.

 

[aelf]

I loved the movie and the feel of the movie.

 

[Leoreth]

Wait ... I haven't seen the movie in a while, but wasn't the protagonist denied access to the space program because of a pre-existing condition?

 

[JollyRoger]

What do you expect? His dad ripped Rand's name off a book cover,

 

[El_Machinae]

I think it's perfectly okay to try to have the children that you actually want to have, even if that includes not having the children you don't think you'll want.

 

[peter grimes]

You find out at ~20 weeks whether or not your baby's heart has formed outside of the ribcage or not. Is it eugenic to stop those ectocardimorphic genes from polluting the gene pool?

 

[JollyRoger]

What happens when you find out that your child's mental development stopped at about age 14 after he read Atlas Shrugged? Shouldn't there be some sort of option available to deal with that?

 

[Hygro]

Give him Lord of the Rings?

 

[JollyRoger]

It seems pretty risky - moving that much closer to reality in one fell swoop.

 

[JollyRoger]

This may hurt Sinator Paul in the GOP Presidential Primaries. What kind of real conservative thinks wikipedia has anything worth stealing? He should have stole from conservapedia.