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PaperclipPerfector  3d ago (text post)   12711 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 21, 2026

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A recent development of the story may put holes in this defense however, as another X user has discovered that an older award winning novella of Orélien's, Où va le monde, was entirely plagiarized from a 1960s text of Louis Pauwels.

I was bewildered by this. How is it that it could be entirely plagiarized from a work from the 1960s, even if that work is by a writer on the more obscure side? He's notable enough to have an English Wikipedia entry, surely someone should have noticed something in the 14 years since Orelien's novella was published? Well, it's really just the tip of the iceberg:

Several of Orélien's other works were subsequently [after AI allegations] investigated. According to Radio-Canada's Décrypteurs team, about half of his short story "Où va le monde", which was awarded Radio-Canada's Prix du public in 2012, was plagiarized from The Morning of the Magicians, a book written by Louis Pauwels and Jacques Bergier, and published in 1960. The opening lines are identical to that of the 1960 book, but the last two words were removed.[20] According to Le Point, Orélien's opening lines also clumsily copied the original's "débonder une source" as "déborder une source", and elsewhere in the story he copied many sentences verbatim.[21] Radio-Canada also found at least five journalistic pieces by Orélien that were published by Canadian and French media in 2012 and 2013 and which it determined had been partly copied from texts by other writers. Orélien's 2012 opinion piece "Ne mettons pas nos héros sur un piédestal", published in La Presse, was found to have plagiarized a piece published five days earlier in The Philippine Star. This was acknowledged by La Presse, which has now tagged the article saying, "Since the publication of this text, we have learned that its author committed plagiarism." Orélien's 2013 piece "Barack Obama aurait pu être Trayvon Martin il y a trois décennies", published on the blog of France's RFI, included a word-for-word translation from Portuguese to French of at least four paragraphs of "Matin, Obama" by Gilberto Rodrigues, which was published by Pressenza [it] days earlier. His 2013 piece "Le prochain pape devrait être plus jeune", also for RFI, features verbatim almost half of an editorial published in India's The Hindu two days earlier. Additionally, in 2013, his piece "Sommes-nous aussi libres que nous le pensons?", also for RFI, borrowed phrases and paragraphs from "The Problem of Free Will" by Pablo Saborío, published in 2008 on Saborío's personal blog Beyond Language.[20]

I don't even know what to say. Has there ever been a prominent English language author who got away with this much naked plagiarism for this long? Do you guys not have turnitin dot com or something?

It could be that for these sjw awards and stuff nobody actually reads the work, they may just performatively buy it and put it on a shelf. Same way most Nazis never read mein kampf. So I could totally buy that nobody noticed.

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