I pulled the Agonist from my war blogroll and added Stratfor; this won’t do anyone without a subscription much good, alas. Sorry about that. I’m pretty sure I had good reason, though.
When Sean-Paul Kelley admitted he was pulling stuff from Stratfor without attribution cause of “time constraints” I chalked it up to newbie enthusiasm. It’s one reason I decided to get the Stratfor account — I’d been reading their reports for free over on the Agonist, which made me feel a touch guilty. However, it now seems that he misattributed several Stratfor bits in order to gain credibility. In other words, he wanted people to think he had insider connections so he copied some Stratfor pieces and claimed they came from secret sources.
Thanks for doing the image of the Internet all kinds of good, Sean-Paul.
2 Comments
Oh, blah. And I really liked the Agonist. 😛
I think the best part of this story is the “surprisingly amicable resolution”: “[Kelley] can use no more than two Stratfor items per day, and always with attribution.”
I knew this reminded me of something, and now I’ve found it:
http://www.sacred-texts.com/cla/aesop/aes058.htm
JUPITER DETERMINED, it is said, to create a sovereign over the birds, and made proclamation that on a certain day they should all present themselves before him, when he would himself choose the most beautiful among them to be king. The Jackdaw, knowing his own ugliness, searched through the woods and fields, and collected the feathers which had fallen from the wings of his companions, and stuck them in all parts of his body, hoping thereby to make himself the most beautiful of all. When the appointed day arrived, and the birds had assembled before Jupiter, the Jackdaw also made his appearance in his many feathered finery. But when Jupiter proposed to make him king because of the beauty of his plumage, the birds indignantly protested, and each plucked from him his own feathers, leaving the Jackdaw nothing but a Jackdaw.