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Comment by notanzaiiswear | Hacker News Reader

Or maybe you didn't like the party of Guttenberg, but you do like the party of Baerbock? It wasn't about "collections of facts" in her book, but verbatim quotes. It also wasn't her first transgression in that respect.

Nobodys says she (and others) are not allowed to quote things, they just have to provide references for it.

Personally I am tired of these people - they seem to feel entitled to have PhDs and whatnot without doing the actual work. We are even supposed to feel sorry for them, when actually, they should just do their jobs without the superfluous titles.

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Note this is about two distinct types of work: Guttenberg faked a dissertation to obtain an academic degree, Baerbock did so when publishing a pop culture book, essentially the offline equivalent of a medium/substack account.

Not a fan of plagiarism either way, but those two cases are hardly comparable. Both are copyright issues, but faking a dissertation adds fraud to the equation and disqualifies the person from future academic work.

Before the book, Baerbock was in trouble for faking her CV, suggesting qualifications she doesn't really have. I don't know what the last word on that was, though.

Pointing out the book was not such a big deal then is like pointing to a fake PhD thesis full of quotes, picking out one quote and saying "see, that is not really that bad". Yeah, a single quote is not that bad. It is the sum of them that makes it bad.

> Pointing out the book was not such a big deal then is like pointing to a fake PhD thesis full of quotes,

I didn't do that, you mis-inferred that from my post.

Funnily enough this is exactly what happened with Baerbocks CV: She didn't "fake" anything there, she e.g. said she studied in Hamburg without saying that she obtained a degree there. And she stated that she was a member of some high profile organisations, which was technically true. In both cases she wasn't lying.

"I didn't do that, you mis-inferred that from my post."

Well you didn't point out that the book was just a small part of the whole story.

"She didn't "fake" anything there"

Iirc almost every entry on her CV turned out to suggest something that wasn't actually true.

I don't know if it was lying or not. I was actually the first who said it is normal to make a CV look good by certain phrasings and so on. (like if you were a stay at home mom, you describe it as "heading a small family business" and so on).

I can imagine her problem was that she didn't realize that she is now a candidate for chancellor of Germany, so different standards apply, and rightfully so. It is absolutely OK to scrutinize a person who applies for the highest German office.

Also, againk she doesn't face any legal consequences for her "fakes" or whatever you want to call them. It just isn't a good look given that she wants to project an image of highest qualifications and integrity.

Baerbock doesn't have a PhD, this was about a political book. Guttenberg did plagiarize in his PhD, and that was entire pages almost verbatim from other sources. That was an extremely blatant case.

I haven't seen the new allegations about Baerbock, I only looked at the original set of allegations. This is one of the original alleged instances of plagiarism:

Baerbock:

    Der Wettbewerb scheint auch weltweit eröffnet. In Amsterdam ist ein 130 Meter hohes Holzhochaus geplant, in Chicago ein 228 Meter hohes und in Tokia eines mit 350 Metern Höhe

Spiegel:

    Und der Rekord dürfte früher oder später ohnehin gebrochen werden: In Amsterdam ist ein 130 Meter hohes Holzhaus geplant, in Chicago ein 228 Meter großes und in Tokio eines mit 350 Meter Höhe.

That was the point where I didn't look further into it. I don't have the time nor interest to look into every case in detail, and if they consider this example plagiarism then I can't really trust their judgement, it's simply different than mine.

And Laschet had plagiarism allegations as well shortly after these ones, those news just disappeared faster.

I seem to remember other quotes, in any case, the book only made the news because before that, Baerbock was already in trouble for faking her CV, suggesting qualifications she doesn't really have. At least they were being disputed, I haven't followed the story lately.

The book just fed into that story, especially as it was published when she was already in trouble for her CV.

I have no particular affiliation to any German political party, but I also find the Baerbock case a bit ridiculous. The book is essentially her election manifesto, you pretty much expect it to consist of various party publications glued together with anecdotes, and the bar is much lower than (say) a PhD thesis that's supposed to be both genuinely original and thoroughly cited.

She doesn't really face any consequences for it, either, no PhD to lose or anything. The reason it made the news is because before that, she faked lots of entries in her CV, suggesting qualifications she doesn't have. The book was just a piece of the puzzle.

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