That is the angle Jason used when he created his steaming pile. It doesn't mean that anyone in the industry agrees with Jason's strategy.

And if you want to place the blame where it belongs remember that Google is the company funding all this content scraping with their ads programs.

I just tried searching for a recent post from an official Google blog (about AdSense using referral data for more relevant ad targeting) and found a scraper site with their ads outranking them for their own content. Pretty sad.

Not everything that uses the phrase "SEO" should be painted with the same brush. A lot of SEO best practices are making the HTML markup more semantic and human-readable. White-hat SEO dovetails pretty well with a human-readable web and accessibility standards, and is one of the better business cases for kicking the Flash habit. Just because Calacanis makes his name by abusing loopholes in the algorithms doesn't mean that's the only sort of thing that the name "SEO" applies to.