Alan Connor’s brilliant dissection of “Anders Breivik’s plagerised manifesto” should be required reading for everyone. Extract:
The lengthy “how the world is” section, for example, is a barely-finessed paste of a 2005 report called Political Correctness: A Short History of an Ideology by American think-tank the Free Congress Foundation; Life Site News hosts what appears to be the original. Breivik might have found it all together, or in the various forms it’s been scattered across the net.
Paul Graham’s “Maker’s Schedule, Manager’s Schedule” made me think “Ah – so that’s why I can’t manage my diary”.
Nevali’s summary of his first six months at the BBC suffers from that strange tendency of people who work there to be over cautious in what they say. However as a description of what working at the BBC is actually like it’s about 60-70% correct – which is a lot higher than usual.
N.B. So I was fed up with the amount of noise (or as I shall call it from now on “drivel”) I was getting from Twitter. So I culled my twitter account, and stopped following people (even nice people) who were tweeting me drivel). I realised later that this drivel was little to do with social media but was actually coming from “media”, or what used to be called “mainstream media” or as I shall now call it “people who are paid too much money to churn out drivel to an arbitrary deadline set by a publisher”. This drivel was then being retweeted by people who really ought to know better. As soon as I did my cull the quality of what I was getting from Twitter improved. It’s interesting to note that neither Nevali or Alan Connor probably got paid for writing the very useful things above (I don’t know about Paul Graham). Alan certainly should have been.
Nick Reynolds At Work 