Stupidity Olympics
2008-07-23 09:14
Chris Roper
Yesterday, a bunch of people were asking me what today's column was going to be about. "Stupidity", I announced proudly. "Oh, so the usual thing," said a mean girl in the corner.
As much as that hurt, she was right. A lot of my columns are about stupidity, or more accurately, about stupid people. In fact, if you look at it a certain way, I make money out of stupid people. Hey, I have the same business model as McDonald's, invest in me! One day I'll have a satirical site called Sick Sense, with the pay-off line "I see stupid people."
And why shouldn't we make money off stupid people, since being stupid doesn't seem to stop those selfsame people making money. Hell, I can't be the only one who watched the television coverage of Mugabe shaking Tsvangirai's hand, and felt sick to the stomach.
Here's your reward for being an evil, corrupt, self-serving bastard - you get to be part of a mediation success story, and negotiate a fat pension fund for all your cronies while your people starve. Next, he'll be sharing a joint Nobel Peace Prize (just kidding, that was a cheap jibe).
Bribery
But the reason I was meditating on stupidity and all its discontents, is something I heard on the John Maytham show on 702/Cape Talk. For those of you not blessed to live in Die Mutterstad, as we are now forced to call it by Cape Tourism, John Maytham is a talk show host who combines the incisive intellect of a Parkinson with the kindly nature of the Duchess in Alice in Wonderland. So avuncular but deadly.
Maytham was talking in incredulous tones about the police officers in Observatory who tried to solicit a bribe from someone. When the guy told them he could only pay them later, they actually gave him a cell number to call, and arranged to meet the following day. Of course, he arrived with other cops and they were arrested. Hopefully, a case of exchanging a cell number for a cell number.
What freaked Maytham out was the incredible stupidity. You're trying to coerce a victim into bribing you, and you give them your contact details? It's not the corruption that bothers us anymore, it's the stupidity. Frankly, if you can't even take a bribe sensibly, how the hell are you going to be an effective public servant?
But that's one kind of stupidity, which perhaps we could term as functional stupidity. There's another kind, which we'll call ego stupidity, which is much worse. It's the kind that causes journalists - or at least pseudo-journalists, I don't want to offend my colleagues in the Fourth Estate, or Third Force, or whatever they're called now - to believe that they're untouchable, and above human intervention.
Plagiarism
It's the only way I can explain how, according to the Sunday Times, somebody like Siphokazi Sowazi, chief executive of Mafube Publishing, the company that owns Enterprise magazine, can allegedly lift, word for word in one case, editorial columns from the internet. For god's sake, this idiot actually lifted the subtitles! How unspeakably lazy can you get.
The online version of the Sunday Times reckons she "has plagiarised about six of her editorial columns, passing them off as her own work." Leaving aside the ambiguity of that "about", which I can see appearing in a lawsuit close to you one of these days, it's shocking stuff.
No, it's not shocking stuff. I just said that automatically. We're not shocked at all, alas. It's seems to be more and more prevalent in what I'll laughingly call "our industry". More and more, people entirely unfit for journalism jobs are being forced into positions where they appear to lose their heads entirely. I cite Jon "Man must not sleep with goats" Qwelane as a case in point, but for more on that read my blog.
Okay, time for a masterclass. In this next paragraph I'm going to both give the reader more information about Sowazi's alleged plagiarism, and simultaneously teach aspiring journalists how to plagiarise. You'll notice that the simple addition of what we in the trade call "theft marks", allows you to plagiarise entire articles legally.
"The incident, which is said to have embarrassed senior staff members at the magazine, comes hot on the heels of the resignation of its editor in chief Vusi Mona this week. Mona... said he had to resign after a fallout with Sowazi regarding her editorial interference. Mona said he later discovered that her articles were plagiarised. He said he had suspicions about the flawless articles Sowazi had submitted to him while he was in charge of editorial."
I love that. He suspected her because she wasn't writing bollocks. Publishers everywhere, that one's for you.
And now for the funny bit: "When contacted about the plagiarism allegations made against her, Sowazi pleaded ignorance, saying the matter had not been brought to her attention." Ha ha! Ignorance is right. It's the curse of invincible stupidity. But what will her punishment be? Will she be given lots of money to go away, a la Robert Mugabe, or will she be promoted to CEO, where she can't do much damage? Times will tell (and that's the last plug our rival product is getting on this one).
Chris Roper has more blah blah blah at chrisroper.co.za
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