5 ms·

My US history teacher taught me something important. He said that if you are going to steal and don't want to get in trouble, steal a whole lot.

• PontifexMinimus 2y ago
  Copying one person is plagarism. Copying lots of people is research.
  • comfysocks 2y ago
    True, but if you research lots of sources and still emit significant blocks of verbatim text without attribution, it’s still plagiarism. At least that’s how human authors are judged.
    • TeMPOraL 2y ago
      Plagiarism is not illegal, it is merely frowned on, and only in certain fields at that.
      • bayindirh 2y ago
        This is a reductionist take. Maybe it's not illegal per se where you live, but it always have ramifications, and these ramifications affect your future a whole lot.
• psychoslave 2y ago
  Scale might be a factor, but it's not the only one. Your neighbor might not care if you steal a grass stalk in its lawn, and feel powerless if you're the bloody dictator of the country which wastes tremendous amount of resources in socially useless whims thanks to overwhelming taxes. But most people don't want to live in permanent mental distress due to shame of past action or fear of rebellion, I guess.
• throwaway2037 2y ago
  Very interesting post! Can you share more about your teacher's reasoning?
  • SuchAnonMuchWow 2y ago
    It likely comes from the saying similar to this one: "kill a few, you are a murderer. Kill millions, you are a conqueror". More generally, we tend to view number of causalities in war as a large number, and not as the sum of every tragedies that it represent and that we perceive when fewer people die.