August 10, 2023
OF COURSE HE'S A NIETZSCHE FANBOY:
GOP Candidate Plagiarized Massive Segments of His College Thesis (Daily Beast, August 10, 2023)
[Right-wing Florida Republican congressional candidate Anthony ]Sabatini's honors thesis--a 2012 treatise on the political legacy of German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, titled "A Profound Logic of The Blood"--is wildly plagiarized. [...]In fact, the very first sentence is plagiarized."The twentieth century has seen countless appropriations of the ideas of the philosopher Freidrich [sic] Nietzsche for cultural and political ends, yet nowhere have these attempts been more frequent or important than in Germany," Sabatini wrote at the outset of his thesis. (The honors student misspells "Friedrich" as "Freidrich" throughout the paper.)A near-verbatim version of that same sentence first appeared 20 years earlier. "The twentieth century has seen countless attempts to appropriate the ideas of Friedrich Nietzsche for diverse cultural and political ends, but nowhere have these efforts been more sustained and of greater consequence than in Germany," according to an abstract for an academic book from the University of California Press titled, "The Nietzsche Legacy in Germany, 1890-1990" (Aschheim, 1992).Sabatini actually properly cites a block quote from that same book on the very next page, though he gets the original publication date wrong. (He also somehow still misspells "Friedrich.")However, it's possible that Sabatini never even opened that book. That block quote--which wasn't written by the author, Aschheim, but was a quote Aschheim had attributed--appears on a Wikipedia page, attributed to Aschheim's book, added in June 2006.In another example pulled at random, Sabatini lifts from another old Wikipedia entry about Nietzsche's conflicted torchbearer, Martin Heidegger. That passage--which has been widely cited across the internet--comprises a stretch of totally uncited writing so long that it's almost courageous.
Comic gold.
Posted by Orrin Judd at August 10, 2023 8:02 AM
