British book thieves are abundant, quirky.

Some people steal cars, others jewelry. But the inner geek in some thieves has them gravitate toward their local bookstore for a little bit of Freddy Fast Fingers action.

According to The Guardian, British bookstores report that theft hasn't abated despite security measures, but yet they also accept book loss as a way of life. "[The thieves are] simply reselling them on eBay," says James Daunt, the chief executive officer of Waterstones.

Daunt believes Waterstones kleptomaniac clientele tends to be the high-minded, intellectual type, as they tend to steal the textual works of philosophers. "Whenever I’d go past Kierkegaard I’d make sure they and Wittgenstein were all there, but often the odd one or two would be gone and it always made me smile."

Elsewhere in the country, tastes vary. In the small industrial town of Walsall at Southcart Books, it's Anton LeVey's Satanic Bible being pinched as some light reading. In Oxford at Blackwell's, it's J.R.R. Tolkien (he taught at Oxford University after all) and George R.R. Martin's works going out the door unpaid. And at The Beckenham Bookshop in Beckenham along with City Books in Hove, both notice Beatrix Potter is a favorite freebie to be snatched.

But John Clepp of the London Review Bookshop recounts one thief who asked for some understanding for their thieving ways:

"We caught a gent last Christmas with £400-worth of stolen books in his trousers and elsewhere. We grabbed all of the bags back, but he returned about half an hour later to reclaim a half-bottle of whisky and his dream journal, which had been at the bottom of one of the bags of stolen books. As we showed him the door he told us: 'I hope you’ll consider this in the Žižekian spirit, as a radical reappropriation of knowledge.'"

If it was quality whisky, can you blame him?

Philosopher accused of plagiarizing white separatist journal. No, really.

Slavoj Žižek is one of the world's leading modern philosophers, a scholar and thinker with a tendency to call his students "boring idiots" who write "shitty papers." In other words, he's subtle.

Now Slavoj Žižek is being accused of plagiarism, and not for stealing from Noam Chomsky or Aristotle--but a white separatist magazine called American Renaissance, which I imagine is only the classiest of white separatist magazines.

A blogger found the nearly identical passages between the philosopher and American Renaissance in which Žižek allegedly plagiarizes heavily, a giant swath of copying largely unseen outside of a lazy 5th-grader's essay on the War of 1812.

NPR reached out to Žižek, who replied via email that a friend of his wrote the passages in question, and that he--Žižek--didn't plagiarize at all. "As any reader can quickly establish, the problematic passages are purely informative, a report on another's theory for which I have no affinity whatsoever; [...] In no way can I thus be accused of plagiarizing another's line of thought, of 'stealing ideas.' I nonetheless deeply regret the incident."

Deny, deny, deny--and then drop in a "thus" and a "deeply regret"--it's straight out of the elitist academic public relations plan. But Žižek continues with the charm, going full-on CAPS when he replies to NPR again, really driving home the point that he's entirely not to blame.

"I find it difficult to consider plagiarism using a brief resume of a book written by a friend FOR THE EXPRESS PURPOSE OF ME USING IT. If this is plagiarism, then quite a few academics I know are plagiarists," Žižek writes.

Throwing everyone under the bus is straight out of the Panic 101 handbook. Apparently the key to not writing "shitty papers" is to allegedly steal from the upper crust of white separatist journals--all while being a deadbeat and having your friend do all the work.





photo: The Guardian



Doesn't Žižek kind of look like a lower-level James Bond villain from the 1970s? Not the mastermind thwarting Bond, but some Eastern European strongman with a group of henchman that die way too easily at the sight of a British secret service agent?