+3
Making sure the offender is aware of the seriousness of the issue is key. Also, making sure the plagerized material is given proper credit is important. What bothers me is, even when the post has been edited after the fact, it leaves a wake of replies that were based on false assumptions.
My suggestion would be a warning in the post in question, plus a PM from the admin or moderator who notices it first. Second offence is a temporary 30 day ban and the third a permanent one.
Not only can respect be earned, it must be earned.
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The novelist does not long to see the lion eat grass. He realizes that one and the same God created the wolf and the lamb, then smiled, "seeing that his work was good".
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They had temporarily escaped the factories, the warehouses, the slaughterhouses, the car washes - they'd be back in captivity the next day but now they were out - they were wild with freedom. They weren't thinking about the slavery of poverty. Or the slavery of welfare and food stamps. The rest of us would be all right until the poor learned how to make atom bombs in their basements.