His lack of intimate knowledge of the appropriate method for attributing a quote in an academic paper does not strike me as particularly germane to his career in law enforcement.
I wasn’t aware that a Master’s degree in security studies was a job requirement for Assistant Secretary of Homeland Security for Partnership and Engagement. If I went and looked up Obama and Clinton appointees to this post, do you think I’d find that they all had comparable academic credentials? If not, would that be proof that those Dem Presidents were appointing people unqualified for the job, or that it’s not really a requirement? Personally, I think his 15 or so years as the chief law enforcement officer in a county of almost a million people is more than enough qualification for the job.
I was talking more his lack of demonstrated knowledge of his thesis topic.
A master’s is not required, I do not believe, and looking up Phil McNamara doesn’t actually tell me his educational credentials, so I couldn’t tell you whether or not Obama’s appointee had one. I can tell you though, that this guy does not have one, even though he claims to have one, and that’s really the problem.
And while this academic dishonesty is kind of like giving Ted Bundy a speeding ticket, it does speak to character, but then, as you point out his 15 years in charge of milwaukee’s’ police also shows his character, and I find that to be reprehensible all on its own.
I’ve got a question for those of you participating in this thread.
Here is the DHS Leadership page. It currently lists a guy named “John Barsa” as the Assistant Secretary, Office of Partnership and Engagement (acting). I am not certain if that is the same John Barsa that joined Twitter in 2009 (mostly because it’s such a lowly position that it doesn’t merit a bio on DHS’ website and Barsa hasn’t yet earned himself a Wikipedia page), but I think it’s a reasonable supposition given that he was “wading through the DHS Appropriations comittee conference report” in 2009 and I have a hard time imagining many people doing that if they’re not getting paid for it.
The Twitter John Barsa had a fairly regular habit of retweeting @GenFlynn (yes, THAT General Flynn) throughout much of last year.
So my question is: Would you rather have John Barsa leading the DHS Office of Partnership and Engagement or Sheriff Clark? Because those are your two choices.
Well, obviously, I would like the one that Clinton would have picked, so, you are correct in that neither of them are my first choice.
He re-tweeted a Merry christmas from flynn, not all that controversial, and then (or rather previously) he retweeted some of flynn’s pro-trump stuff during the campaign. I’ve seen worse.
But, on that matter, if you are actually asking my opinion, then, assumingthis is the same one, I would much prefer Basra.
Unless Barsa has a record of extreme callousness towards people who have died in his care, I’d vastly prefer Barsa. Monsters, or near-monsters, shouldn’t serve in government, IMO.
I’m curious, and I genuinely don’t know the answer. What is Sheriff Clark’s “record of extreme callousness”? You’ve maligned him as “compassion-free”. Is there any evidence of this? Did he point and laugh as the inmate(s) died? Piss on their expired corpse(s)? Throw a parade for the corrections officers whose malice / screw-up led to the death(s)? What were his public statements about the death(s)? Did he ever express regret / sorrow? Did he go out of his way to say he was not sorry, that the “bastard(s) deserved it” or something like that?
Clarke’s jails’ death rates are at least 3 times higher than the national average. He’s taken no responsibility and expressed no remorse. He’s blamed the inmates themselves for their deaths.
Not all of those who sit in judgement of academic papers are snotty pedants, quick to exaggerate the importance of minor flaws of formality. But enough of them are so that the smart student quickly learns these rules, and applies them.
Anyway, all we got here is someone who is smart enough to do postgraduate work but not smart enough to follow a set of fairly straightforward rules. Whateverness. Wouldn’t think better of Joe Arpaio if I found out he had a totally legit Ph.D .
I think this is a misleading statement, and I’ve got to call it out. The HuffPo article (hardly an unbiased source where conservatives are concerned) said this:
I’m not sure what “2013 figures” they’re comparing this to, and they don’t say, but I’m prepared to accept that they suggest a national average of 0.138888888% (4 / 960 / 3) or lower. You might imagine the level of regard I hold for HuffPo’s jail death “database”, but just so you can properly appreciate it’s inadequacies as a scientific source, I’ll share their own description:
Can you spot any potential problems / shortcomings in their methodology, at least if we want to use it to compare a particular jail or group of jails? To illustrate just how shitty a job HuffPo has done maintaining their “database”, you can scroll down from the link I shared above and do a search for Wisconsin jail deaths. It will return 12 results, 11 of which were not in Milwaukee County. That’s right - they can’t even “scour” their own HuffPo news articles to record the other three deaths that they’re complaining about in the database. The only one they’ve got is Terrill Thomas.
Let’s set aside all the obvious flaws in HuffPo’s “jail death database” for a moment because that’s not even my real gripe with your claim. The article makes the claim about inmate deaths in 2016. Was 2016 the only year Clarke was Sheriff? NO! He’s got a long record stretching back to 2002. How many of those years was a he a “compassion-free killer” in? All of them? Some of them? Was his jail death rate three times the national average in all of those years? If you want to make sweeping statements about “Clarke’s jails’ death rates” do you think it would be fair to him to include all the years he’s run the jail, or just the worst one? Should you provide some context around those numbers, or let them stand as if they’re statistically significant?
I’ll happily retract the 3 times assertion for now. The rest of my criticism stands. It’s possible there’s a non monstrous explanation for those deaths, and I’m open to that possibility, but until such an explanation comes to light, I’d much prefer someone with a near zero chance of being a monster in a high position than Clarke.
See the last paragraph of my post #14 earlier in the thread. They lend their accreditation credential under a contract to a HomeSec/FEMA program for extended ed courses for civilian LEOs.
(As it happens today I am attending a meeting sponsored by exactly those folks! Eerie)
Only if the previous holders of the position held credentials that were also fraudulently gained.
A master’s degree is supposed to mean that you know stuff. If you do a thesis, and a substantial amount of the work is verbatim quoted from another work, you didn’t really learn anything, or at least, you have not demonstrated that you have learned anything, you just copied someone else’s knowledge.
From what I have seen of this, it does seem that if all of the bits that were verbatim had been properly noted with quotes or indentations, it is likely that his advisors would have required him to show more original work. As those were not set off, and were essentially claimed as his own original work, with the only way to check to go into the footnotes and make sure that he did not copy verbatim from the works he is citing, his advisors would have assumed that the copied material was his own, and considered his thesis on that.
If a previous holder only has a diploma from 3rd grade, but is honest about it and shows the skills and capabilities of doing the job,then the academic qualification is not so important. If someone coasts on their degree that the fraudulently obtained, that would be a bit different, as they are making a claim to knowledge and skills that they have not actually demonstrated that they possess.
Or, possibly, he tried to set the quotes off by using indents instead of quote marks and the layout got jacked.
From your own post:
I don’t particularly care about Clarke. However, if Clarke used indents through out the whole document and the layout got jacked that could easily explain why it happened 47 times. This assumes, of course, that there were a total of 47 passages that he used. If it happened 47 times and there are 80 instances, that would be different.
