DCP's ongoing problem with plagiarism

[Marcus]

Uttered only yesterday, as he consistently and without shame continues to plagiarize and profit off it.

I have no idea how much Patheos bloggers make (is it based on page views?), but it seems that he should be paying Mike Dash and others for use of their work.

Agreed. Looking back at Tom's link, he shows quite clearly that DCP plagiarized Mike Dash's work in his Jan 6, 2026 SEN blog entry.

I'd like to just point out some additional evidence of DCP's plagiarism.

Here is the start of Tom's post:

In reviewing one of the Proprietor’s possible sources,* I note that the source addressed the issue regarding the size of the Queen’s donation. According to a 2014 blog post by Mike Dash:
<snipped>

And here's where Tom quotes Dash's work about a James Joyce reference:

...
3. MD:

But while Victoria’s actions were found wanting, the story of Abdülmecid’s munificence was held to shame the Queen, and it became such an article of faith that it was immortalised in Ulysses. “Even the Grand Turk sent us his piastres,” one of Joyce’s characters explodes in the midst of a harangue against the British. “But the Sassenach [Englishman] tried to starve the nation at home while the land was full of crops that the hyenas bought and sold in Rio de Janiero.”…

Tom also quotes SEN plagiarizing Dash's use of the quote, but I think an embedded quote didn't make it due to posting weirdnesses here, so if Tom doesn't mind, I'll add it back, in blue:

As one of the characters in the Irish novelist James Joyce’s Ulysses puts it,

Even the Grand Turk sent us his piastres. But the Sassenach [Englishman] tried to starve the nation at home while the land was full of crops that the hyenas bought and sold in Rio de Janeiro.

And here is the problem. It's clear DCP took that quote from Mike Dash and not from Joyce, for two reasons.

1. Dash added the "[Englishman]" after the Sassenach; it's not in Joyce's original. DCP copied Dash's change.

2. Dash left out the word "British" before the word hyenas; it reads "British hyenas" in Joyce's original. DCP copied Dash's removal of the word.

Here's the actual quote:

Even the Grand Turk sent us his piastres. But the Sassenach tried to starve the nation at home while the land was full of crops that the British hyenas bought and sold in Rio de Janeiro.

https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Page:Uly ... 2.djvu/319

Peterson gives no credit to Mike Dash, even though he clearly plagiarized his work. He just exacerbates the situation by implying he was quoting Joyce.

[drumdude]

It’s clear Dan doesn’t believe in basic honesty. Sad for a former professor (of what is otherwise a fairly reputable school) acting with such an unsettling lack of integrity.

He can’t publish any of the books he’s been “working” on. It’s just too easy to find all of his examples of copying and pasting. He doesn’t have enough original prose of his own to fill more than a paragraph a day on his blog.

[I Have Questions]

For reference, and should Peterson not correct his blog post plagiarism, Mike Dash can be reached Here.

Peterson highlights his own plagiarism:

For purposes of my own writing, I’ve slightly modified an available online chronology of the history of Islamic-era Iran that I thought some readers here might find of value.

Unfortunately Peterson doesn’t link to the “available online chronology” to show how slightly he’s modified it, nor to give proper credit.

[Physics Guy]

I'm still confused about plagiarism. If I'm chatting with friends over beer, and somebody talks about Persian history, I'm not going to expect that they are reporting only things that they personally dug up out of the Iranian sand and translated, nor am I going to expect that they tell me exactly where they learned all the things that they report. (I'm afraid that the kind of people whom I feel that I know are indeed likely to drop little lectures on Persian history, or anything else, into chats over beer. It's a lifestyle.)

And I've also read quite a lot of popular history books. The good ones do have some footnotes and endnotes, but they definitely don't pepper every line with citations. If I read a physics paper, every statement is either a) something that everyone knows from undergraduate lectures, b) a new result being reported, or c) followed by a citation giving the source. So as you read through the paper, the middle sections are mostly reporting new things and the citations are relatively sparse, but the beginning and end sections tend to be chock full of superscript numbers referring to endnote citations. Popular history books don't have anywhere near that density of citations, but some of them are written by professors, who seem to have high reputations. It seems to be perfectly respectable to recount common historical knowledge in one's own words, without supply a citation for every assertion. Authors even seem to be acclaimed for presenting that common knowledge in an insightful perspective, making emphases and connections that count as original thought.

So what are the rules for a blog? I don't know.

I don't necessarily mean to defend Peterson. Plagiarism can happen even in physics. I once got a manuscript to review that I had reviewed before, identical word for word, submitted by different authors. I recently had to evaluate a thesis that was largely a sentence-by-sentence re-write of a previous thesis.

There is a line somewhere, all right. I'm just not sure where it is for Peterson's blog.

[Doctor CamNC4Me]

He’s an academic. He should cite his sources as a matter of practice.

[Physics Guy]

He’s an academic, but that’s part of what’s confusing. For academics, a lot of knowledge is just stock in trade.

I can explain something about the Navier-Stokes equations, say. I didn’t invent them. They’re nearly 200 years old. I didn’t even first learn them from any book. I learned them in a lecture from some old professor. Heck, I don’t even really remember them. I know what they are, so if I need to use them, I can probably derive them about as fast as I can get them from Google or ChatGPT.

Should I be giving footnotes whenever I mention them? It doesn’t seem necessary. It’s not even clear what I should cite, if citation were necessary. Papers by Navier or Stokes? I’ve never seen them, or seen them cited by anyone.

[drumdude]

He’s an academic, but that’s part of what’s confusing. For academics, a lot of knowledge is just stock in trade.

I can explain something about the Navier-Stokes equations, say. I didn’t invent them. They’re nearly 200 years old. I didn’t even first learn them from any book. I learned them in a lecture from some old professor. Heck, I don’t even really remember them. I know what they are, so if I need to use them, I can probably derive them about as fast as I can get them from Google or ChatGPT.

Should I be giving footnotes whenever I mention them? It doesn’t seem necessary. It’s not even clear what I should cite, if citation were necessary. Papers by Navier or Stokes? I’ve never seen them, or seen them cited by anyone.

In Peterson’s case he copies and pastes large amounts of texts verbatim and then changes the wording slightly. Reposts that text on his blog without attribution where he gets paid for views. I’m not an academic but I wonder if that is common practice.

[Marcus]

The question has been asked and answered so many times. Today's answers were on point:

...It seems to be perfectly respectable to recount common historical knowledge in one's own words, without supply a citation for every assertion. Authors even seem to be acclaimed for presenting that common knowledge in an insightful perspective, making emphases and connections that count as original thought....

In Peterson’s case he copies and pastes large amounts of texts verbatim and then changes the wording slightly. Reposts that text on his blog without attribution where he gets paid for views…

Regarding blog entries, Patheos requires bloggers to explicitly represent that they own or have properly acquired the rights to post what's in their entries. Of course, it may be that Peterson considers following rules to be optional for those who've covenanted not to drink coffee.

As for "plagiarism happens," I seem to recall a delightful little piece early in this thread by Dr. Steuss on how much he hates it when those pesky little Crtl-C and Crtl-V commands just take over, all by themselves, during his online participation!

[I Have Questions]

It’s worth noting that a public blog isn’t a private personal journal. You are publishing it for public consumption in the same way that an online article in, say, LDS Mag or Deseret News is published for public consumption. Plagiarism rules still apply.

Mosaic Plagiarism
Mosaic Plagiarism occurs when a student borrows phrases from a source without using quotation marks, or finds synonyms for the author’s language while keeping to the same general structure and meaning of the original. Sometimes called “patch writing,” this kind of paraphrasing, whether intentional or not, is academically dishonest and punishable – even if you footnote your source! [See examples.]

https://www.bowdoin.edu/dean-of-student ... arism.html

Alerting your readers in advance that you are going to be plagiarising something (as Peterson does in the example about the chronology that I quoted earlier) is not the same as giving proper citation, and it’s not the same as not plagiarising. But it does show that Peterson knows what he is doing when he plagiarises, and that it is deliberate not accidental.

Peterson excuses himself by pretending that his public blog posts are just his personal notes. But the moment he publishes them on a public blog they cease to be personal notes. The bottom line is Peterson is too lazy to do things properly so he cheats. And then pontificates about people drinking coffee. You simply cannot make this up.

For the record this is the entirety of the blog post in question…

For purposes of my own writing, I’ve slightly modified an available online chronology of the history of Islamic-era Iran that I thought some readers here might find of value.  In what follows below, I will sometimes use the terms Iran and Persia more or less interchangeably but, in a more complete treatment, I will need to clarify the significant differences between them.
Early Islamic Period & Caliphates (636–821 AD)
- 636–651 AD: Arab invaders defeat the Sasanian Empire, putting an end to the status of Zoroastrianism as the official state religion and integrating Persia into the Rashidun Caliphate (i.e., the rule of the four “rightly guided” caliphs — Abu Bakr, ‘Umar, ‘Uthman, and ‘Ali
- 750–821 AD: The Abbasid Caliphate rises to power with significant support from Persian revolutionaries and bureaucrats, moving the Islamic capital to a new city named “Baghdad,” which was closer to historically Iranian lands
The Iranian Intermezzo & Renaissance (821–1055AD)
- 821 AD: Establishment of the independent Tahirid dynasty, marking the first native Iranian rule under Islamic governance.
- 867 AD: The Saffarid dynasty is founded by Ya’qub-i Laith Saffari, actively promoting the public revival of the Persian language (which had continued to be spoken at home for two and a quarters centuries under Arab rule but now resurfaced) and the early emergence of a Neo-Persian literature, heavily influenced by Arabic and by Islam.
- 9th–10th Centuries: The emergence of New Persian written in Arabic script, alongside rule by other Iranian dynasties like the Samanids and Buyids.

Foreign Rule and Cultural Integration (1055–1501 AD)
- 1055–1194 AD: The Seljuk Empire (Turkic nomads) rules Iran, quickly adopting Persian culture, language, and administrative systems. (Iran has a remarkable history of absorbing its conquerors, culturally and linguistically.)
- 1220–1256 AD: Mongol forces led by Genghis Khan overrun Persia, eventually establishing the Ilkhanate.
- 1370–1507 AD: The Timurid Renaissance sees a flourishing of Persian art, architecture, and literature under Turco-Mongol rule.  

The Safavid Empire & Shi’ism (1501–1736 AD)
- 1501 AD: Shah Ismail I founds the Safavid dynasty and declares Twelver Shi‘a Islam as the official state religion, permanently shaping Iran’s modern religious identity.  (This is vitally important to note.  Some early orientalist scholarship, influenced by relatively benign versions of the same racial essentialism that, in its more toxic forms, gave rise to European anti-Semitism and supported slavery, professed to see in the Shi‘i form of Islam that dominates Iran an “Indo-European” or “Indo-Aryan” resistance to the “Semitic” Islam brought by the Arabs.  But Shi‘i Islam has only been officially dominant in Persia/Iran since the founding of the Safavid dynasty at the beginning of the sixteenth century and, anyway, the Safavids were Turkish- or Turkic-speaking, although they may have been of Kurdish or originally Iranian ethnicity.)
- 1571–1629 AD: The golden age of the Safavid Empire under Shah Abbas I, featuring capital development in Isfahan and expanded trade with Europe.  (The Safavids, with the Ottoman Turks based in Anatolia and the Mughals of India, count as one of the three “Gunpowder Empires” identified by the late, great historian of Islam Marshall G. S. Hodgson that dominated “The Era of the Gunpowder Empires” (1500-1800 AD).
- 1722 AD: The Safavid dynasty collapses following an Afghan invasion.

Afsharid, Zand, and Qajar Dynasties (1736–1925 AD)
- 1736–1747 AD: Military commander Nader Shah rules the Afsharid dynasty, expanding borders into India.
- 1750–1794 AD: The Persian Zand dynasty restores relative peace, centered in Shiraz.
- 1794–1925 AD: The Qajar dynasty rules Iran, losing vast territories in the Caucasus to Russia and granting early petroleum concessions to Britain amid intense imperial rivalry.
- 1906 AD: The Persian Contitutional Revolution establishes Iran’s first parliament (Majlis) and limits royal absolutism.

The Pahlavi Era (1925–1979 AD)
- 1925 AD: Reza Khan establishes the Pahlavi dynasty, later crowning himself Reza Shah Pahlavi and pursuing rapid state secular modernization.
- 1941 AD: Reza Shah is forced to abdicate by an Anglo-Soviet invasion during World War II, passing power to his son, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi.
- 1953 AD: Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh is overthrown in a joint US-British engineered coup, restoring absolute monarchical control to the Shah and fostering deep resentment against perceived “Western imperialism” that helped to create the later revolution that created the Islamic Republic of Iran.
- 1963 AD: The Shah launches the “White Revolution,” accelerating Westernization and land reform but also triggering fierce clerical opposition that will come to be led by Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini.

The Islamic Republic (1979–Present)
- 1979 AD: The Islamic Revolution forces the Shah to flee; Ayatollah Khomeini returns from exile, and a national referendum establishes Iran as a theocratic Islamic Republic.  The Shah eventually finds refuge in Egypt, at the invitation of Egyptian President Anwar al-Sadat.  (It is in Egypt that I eventually meet him while serving as a private tutor to his daughter.)
- 1980–1988 AD: The devastating Iran-Iraq War takes place following an invasion by Saddam Hussein, resulting in massive casualties.  (Saddam, I think, had expected an easy conquest of the territory he coveted, having grossly underestimated Iranian military resistance.)
- 1989 AD: Ayatollah Khomeini dies; Ali Khamenei assumes the role of Supreme Leader.
- 1999–Present: The country experiences waves of socio-political protest movements driven by economic crises, reform demands, and public unrest (including the 2009 Green Movement and the 2022-2023 Mahsa Amini protests).  2026 AD:  Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei is killed by a target Israeli bomber and missile attack during the joint Israeli and American joint air assault on Iran.  His son, also reputed to have been seriously injured, is chosen to succeed him, but has still not publicly appeared.

It would be interesting to locate the online chronology he references to see just how much of it Peterson has changed into his own words…

I would suggest Peterson has “borrowed” from more than one online chronology, including Q-files, supplemented with Wikipedia and Encyclopaedia Iranica. Dan, am I right?

Here’s what I think has gone on…Peterson acknowledges adapting an unidentified online chronology. Q-files, dated March 31, 2026, is a strong candidate for one of the underlying sources: numerous dates, events, period boundaries, and their sequence closely correspond, in several cases with distinctive combinations that are unlikely to be accidental. Other portions appear to derive from additional online reference chronologies. Peterson does not identify or credit these sources in the post. Is that Mosaic Plagiarising?

[drumdude]

Even if Daniel only made a single penny from posting that, it’s immoral and dishonest. It shows a distinct lack of integrity.