A few days ago when some blog awards were handed out, my favorite editorial cartoonist Chris Muir was a winner for his awesome Day By Day daily cartoon serial. In reviewing the other award winners, one particular blog caught my attention and stuck in my craw. When I commented at DBD, congratulating Chris, I also used the opportunity to criticize that particular site and compare it to the long-running theft and misattribution of another outstanding gunnie essay; it so happened that Ted Nugent had been mentioned in the same thread, and as explained below, he played prominently in the misuse of this writer's essay, making the comparison a good illustration of my opinion on plagiarism.
When another commenter and apparently occasional contributor at the award-winning ripoff site complained about my complaint and said they were the awesomest gunnie site in the whole wide, I was prompted to answer his thusly, and since it would be improper to drag Chris Muir into the mud, I reactivated this long dormant erstwhile blogsite of mine just for the purpose.
@Cliff H, my criticism of TTAG as a user and abuser of others’ work product without attribution is hardly unilateral, and is nothing new; this dirty-laundry list is more than two years old:
http://www.wallsofthecity.net/2012/10/the-truth-about-the-truth-about-guns-and-robert-farago.html
But my recent comment after seeing that poser site given accolades in the company of genuine editorial artists like Mr. Muir here, was brought on by this very recent pathetic and sickening example:
http://twowheeledmadwoman.blogspot.com/2015/12/stop-thief.html
And it so happened that in the same DBD thread was mention of Ted Nugent, one of the few celebrity types on our side, but who unfortunately was responsible for another pretty egregious misattribution in his book “Ted, White, and Blue: The Nugent Manifesto”, where two full pages are devoted to the reprint of Marko Kloos’ essay “Why the Gun is Civilization”, listing the non-existent Maj. L. Caudill USMC (ret) as author. The same thing happened at the huge Front Sight Firearms Training Academy website, and was later correctly attributed.
In the case of the Why the Gun essay, most of the reprintings and forwardings are inadvertent, except of course by the original scoundrel who created the marine Major out of wholecloth (a case of reverse stolen valor?). Still, even unintentional intellectual property theft is harmful, and does nothing to feed the true creator’s bulldog.
But at TTAG there’s nothing inadvertent about it; it is instead a long and documented pattern of intentional use of others’ work product without attribution, and when called out as in the case of that creative little gunshow jingle, it is simply deleted, without explanation or apology.
Cliff, I’m sure that you and many other contributors there are unaware of this nauseating behavior, and I guess my own long and close connection to the business and principles of RKBA causes me to react strongly when I think those principles are being crassly and commercially exploited and mocked…but that’s the truth about “The Truth About Guns”.
