We've talked about Lazer recycling his posts before, most notably in 2009 when he wrote a post called "Hashem's Signature," which it turned out was a word-for-word repeat of something he had written back in 2005 under the name "The Creator's Autograph."
Well, whether due to High Holiday busy-ness or just general laziness on the Emunah Rebbe's part, he's done it again. Remember his 2008 post about not ignoring dents? In which Lazer counseled a young woman named Suzanne that the reason she kept getting into minor car accidents was that she wasn't covering her hair?
Well either Lazer's run out of ideas or Suzanne has a creepy identical twin sister who suffers the same tznius problems as she does (and drives the same car), because a scant three years later, we get to read about the exact same story, only this time, the lady's name is Ricki.
Interestingly, if you try to find the original "Don't Ignore the Dent" story from 2008, it is now unavailable via Lazer's blog. Thanks to the almighty power of Google-caching, however, we can see that it was still there as recently as last August, shining in all its now-plagiarized glory.
Seriously, the only things changed are the woman's name and the date she's writing to him. (Apparently October 30, 2008 doesn't have the same poignant ring as September 11, 2011. Classy, Lazer.)
I wouldn't mind if Lazer just rehashed a post about why tznius is important (setting aside the ridiculous magical thinking of dissecting a complete stranger's letter about how she's a bad driver to guess at random personality failings), but I don't understand why he rips off his own writing and presents it as totally new material, without even bothering to change the title!
When this happened with Creator's Autograph, I didn't really care. It was silly, but that was about it. This is a little more serious, though, because this post is purporting to be a real letter from a real reader asking for help and advice-- and clearly, it's been fabricated. There is no way this "Ricki" person could be for real. Not that I was taking anything Lazer says as gospel to begin with, but it's sad to be faced with the real possibility that some of the stuff he posts that people have "supposedly" written to him are made up. What's even sadder is that he thought no one would notice.
For a guy who claims to be trying to reach out to the whole world as his audience, Lazer sure doesn't think very highly of his readers.
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