I feel honored to have been banned by Smallbones and Jimmy “Jimbo” Wales from the co-founder’s talk page for raising issues to do with Kazakhstan, the UAE, China, and Wales. It might amuse you to check out some relevant history at Wales's talk page [1] ("Kazakhstan Firewall" section et seq.), [2] (“Some may find this interesting” section),
[3] (“Congratulations” section); also at mine [4],[5]; and also at WP:AN/I [6] ("Personal attack in user space") and WP:BLP/N [7] ("Jimmy Wales").
“If you seek the removal of freedoms from an opponent simply on the grounds that they have offended you, you have crossed a line to stand alongside tyrants who imprison, torture and kill on exactly the same justifications.” — JK Rowling (who says more interesting things than she writes, IMO)
“The Internet allows people to be the worst version of themselves . . . Resist the temptation to be a jerk.” — Borrowed from Buster7
The estimable Tim Field made a study of bullying in the workplace. Characteristic behaviours he identified can include:
- “Excusitis, makes excuses for everything; shows a lot of indignation, especially when challenged; lots of self-pity; feigns victimhood when held accountable . . . claiming they're the one being bullied and harassed; presents as a false victim when outwitted
- "Denial: the bully denies everything
- "Retaliation: the bully counterattacks
- "Feigning victimhood: Variations include indulgent self-pity, feigning indignation, pretending to be 'devastated', claiming they're the one being bullied or harassed, claiming to be 'deeply offended', melodrama, martyrdom ('If it wasn't for me...') and a poor-me drama . . .
- “Other tactics include manipulating people's perceptions to portray themselves as the injured party . . . [o]r presenting as a false victim. Sometimes the bully will suddenly claim to be suffering 'stress' and go off on long-term sick leave . . . Alleged ill-health can also be a useful vehicle for gaining attention and sympathy. By using this response, the bully is able to avoid answering the question and thus avoid accepting responsibility for what they have said or done. It is a pattern of behaviour learnt by about the age of 3; most children learn or are taught to grow out of this, but some are not and by adulthood, this avoidance technique has been practised to perfection.” †
- † See also: Appeal to pity and Munchausen syndrome
See also: this pertinent question to Jimmy "Jimbo" Wales
If you discern any of these tactics in the Wikipedia workplace, simply avoid engaging with the contributions that exhibit them.
“Somewhere along the line the Information Superhighway has become Bullshit Boulevard, and truth is roadkill."— Bill Maher
(For example, the agenda-driven bullshit on talk pages here. Not to mention in articles.)
"A false tale often betrays itself." — Aesop
"The more transparent the lie, the easier it is to see the liar's stupidity" — d'Artagnan Muldoon (notorious for the ability to defeat polygraphs; became a world authority on misrepresentation and dishonesty—there really should be an article on him)
"Suffice to say, I disagree vehemently with Charlie Smith. As is common for him, his loud-mouthed rhetoric serves the interests of Chinese censorship perfectly. By attacking the only people who care enough to do something, he makes it much harder for progress to be made. If I listened to him - and I don't - I could just stay home and not go to China to lobby for change." 19 December 2015
"Recently, I had the opportunity to meet with one of my personal heroes, Charlie Smith, who is one of the key people behind GreatFire. We had a lovely chat about his work, which I strongly support." 15 April 2016
"Argumentum ad Jimbonem" is the logical fallacy that 'what Jimbo said' is The Truth" — WP:Argumentum ad Jimbonem.
The Fourth Law of Stupidity: Non-stupid people always underestimate the damaging power of stupid individuals. In particular, non-stupid people constantly forget that at all times and places, and under any circumstances, to deal with stupid people always turns out to be a costly mistake. — Carlo M. Cipolla (Acknowledgments to MastCell, from whose user page I copied it.)
"Narcissistic personality disorder is characterized by an over-inflated sense of self-importance, as well as dramatic, emotional behavior that is in the same category as antisocial and borderline personality disorders." — Narcissistic personality disorder
“People with unrealistically inflated self-views, which may be especially unstable and highly vulnerable to negative information,...tend to have poor social skills." — Smith, E. R.; Mackie, D. M. (2007). Social Psychology (Third ed.). Hove: Psychology Press. ISBN 978-1-84169-408-5.
you find yourself thinking it's run by a bunch of bananas.
"Things are going to get unimaginably worse, and they are never, ever, going to get better again." Kurt Vonnegut
talk page while I'm out that I have to lock up the silver.
Visitors please note: I have an aversion to bloviating, lying, and self-righteous denial when called out; deliberate misrepresentation of policies and other users' comments; hypocrisy (e.g. acting as a self-appointed BLP enforcer yet also flouting the policy when it suits a personal agenda); tendentious arguing long after the argument has been lost; and to the tedious, repeated, and irrelevant trumpeting of claimed personal credentials in a pathetic, narcissistic effort to impress. I mean, look at me: even though I'm a brain surgeon, an Olympic athlete and a Nobel Prize-winning geneticist, I've found time to read almost a million books, invent the jet engine and the Interweb, design Madonna's fabulous pointy bras, and teach Miley Cyrus to twerk. But I don't bang on about it.
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Quotes of the day
"You wanna raise the tax on tobacco so kids don’t get cancer? OK. But let’s put one on Sunday school, so they don’t get stupid." — Bill Maher
“All I know is what’s on the Internet.” — Donald Trump
"Sorry losers and haters, but my I.Q. is one of the highest - and you all know it! Please don't feel so stupid or insecure,it's not your fault."— Donald Trump
“When you believe in a talking snake, you can believe an orangutan will transform into a statesman.” Bill Maher
"With the invention of Wrongopedia this man [Jimmy "Jimbo" Wales] made people think it was okay not to be educated, because now anyone can pretend to know anything just by getting it off a website. Then, by ensuring that everything on it was wrong, he basically killed knowledge itself, which is quite a feat. Like something Lex Luthor would try to do." — Giles Coren
“Heck, naw, I ain’t gawn let my kids use no ‘cyclopedia! They kin walk to school like I did!”— George “Kingfish” Stevens (Freeman Gosden), Amos and Andy
"Anyone who says "Wikipedia is not censored" has never paid particularly close attention to the way talk pages are treated by third parties."— WP editor Carrite, 2012
"“In the last century—in the twentieth century—counting military deaths, both civilian and soldiers— counting civilian deaths sponsored by government activity—we sacrificed a hundred and ninety-six million people in this world. A hundred and ninety-six million people. And for us to worry about three thousand, or a hundred here, or five hundred there—I mean, if you have grief, fine, good inside; same with religion, keep it inside, keep it to yourself. If you want to share it a little with friends and family, fine. But don’t be coming and taking over things that are kind of public, and thrusting your grief on me.” — George Carlin
“The pain is shared by all of us, but a golden rule should apply: don’t capitalise on grief, don’t profit from it. Perhaps this is why big companies imposing their sympathy on the rest of us leaves a bitter taste in my mouth: it is hard for me to see these gestures as anything but profiteering. Companies are now posing as entities capable of compassion, never mind that they cannot possibly speak for all of its employees. This also brings us a step closer to endowing them with a human trait: the capacity to express emotions. They think they’re sentient.
If this sounds crazy, it’s because it is.” — Jessica Reed, on corporate affectation of compassion and grief [9]
The truth about corporate lies — Oliver Burkeman's essay
"The easiness and redundancy of what we call “beauty” in modern photography is jading our souls and wrapping our hearts in honey. Not even real honey: we are drowning in honey substitute. All the glory of the world is being reduced, second by second, snap by snap, to instant, mechanical tropes of the picturesque. Amazing. Spectacular. Dazzling. Dead." — Jonathan Jones
"Faith may be defined briefly as an illogical belief in the occurrence of the improbable. There is thus a flavor of the pathological in it; it goes beyond the normal intellectual process and passes into the murky domain of transcendental metaphysics. A man full of faith is simply one who has lost (or never had) the capacity for clear and realistic thought. He is not a mere ass: he is actually ill. Worse, he is incurable, for disappointment, being essentially and objective phenomenon, cannot permanently affect his subjective infirmity. His faith takes on the virulence of a chronic infection. What he says, in substance, is this: 'Let us trust in God, Who has never fooled us in the past.' " — H.L. Mencken, Prejudices: Third Series, 1922
"My own personal theory is that Joseph build the pyramids in order to store grain. And all the archaeologists think that they were made for the pharaohs' graves." — Republican presidential hopeful Ben Carson [10]
“Trump image straightened” — Edit summary at Wikipedia’s 2016 US presidential elections article
“He always talked about issues that had to do with fish.” — A neighbor of the Juneau, Alaska mayor Greg Fisk the day after Fisk was found dead
"The trial of a Turkish man accused of insulting the president, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, by comparing him to Gollum has been adjourned so that a group of experts can study JRR Tolkein’s Lord of the Rings character, Turkish media has reported." — News report
“We do not for any reason have permission from this community to repeatedly call people liars.” — A user at Jimbotalk, February 20, 2016
“Thank you. I’m used to it.” — Jimmy “Jimbo” Wales’s reply
“I am specifically checking with every board member to try to get some idea of what, if anything at all, this accusation could be based on, and I have so far come to a preliminary conclusion that it is a flat out lie.” — Jimmy “Jimbo” Wales, Jimbotalk, February 10, 2016
“It's an interesting hypothetical which has not been part of any serious strategy proposal, nor even discussed at the board level, nor proposed to the board by staff, nor a part of any grant, etc. It's a total lie.” — Jimmy “Jimbo” Wales, Jimbotalk, February 11, 2016
“XYZ [WP user's name redacted] has made a lot of noise about why he was dismissed which is utter and complete bullshit. He wrote a nice piece for the Signpost about transparency which implied that the Board got rid of him for wanting more transparency. Utter fucking bullshit." — Jimmy "Jimbo" Wales, Jimbotalk, 25 January 2016
"If he [someone else] says that he's lying." — Jimmy "Jimbo" Wales. Jimbotalk, 17 December 2015
"Writegeist is spreading lies about me, and should be permanently blocked." — Jimmy “Jimbo” Wales, Jimbotalk, 5 January 2016
Wales, the Kazakh dictatorship, and having kittens:
"Your clarification comes as very welcome news, not least in light of past connection to the Kazakh dictatorship, described by Human Rights Watch as implementing "a growing crackdown" on free speech, which came under scrutiny by the media [11] at the time." — Writegeist, Jimbotalk page, 14 December 2014
"Past connection to the Kazakh dictatorship" - total and utter and complete bullshit. I have no past connection of any kind to the Kazakh dictatorship. — Jimmy "Jimbo" Wales, Jimbotalk, 14 December 2014
"I've been following the story of Kazakh Wikipedia [ … ] and I also I've been getting in touch with the government there. I've been talking to the Prime Minister there. [ …] I'm going in December and I'm gonna give the award in the presence of the Prime Minister [ …] I think that if we really try hard on this, instead of having sad puppies and sad kittens, we'll have happy puppies and kittens." — Jimmy "Jimbo" Wales, 2011 closing ceremony speech at Wikimania 2011
Wales and The Jerusalem Post:
‘ “I was given a prize by the leader of Dubai, which I couldn’t in good conscious [sic] accept, but I couldn’t give it back, because it’s very oppressive there,♦ so I started the Jimmy Wales Foundation for Freedom of Expression,” a foundation that promotes access to information in oppressive countries.
'Wales had no such compunctions about accepting the $1 million Dan David Prize that occasioned his current visit to Israel.’† — The Jerusalem Post, May 20 2015. The article does make it clear that Wales is a co-founder of Wikipedia. (Wales peddles a "founder" narrative.) It doesn't tackle the ludicrous non-sequitur in “I couldn’t give it back because it’s very oppressive there”.
♦Wales told the Middle East Monitor’s Alastair Sloan that he consulted with Israeli human rights lawyer Orit Kopel and asked her "If she would help me use the money to fuck with them," adding: "Yes, I could have declined the money, but why give money back to horrible people? So they can use it to pay for more jails?" Sloan commented: "Denying the UAE govt of $500,000 is not going to stop it 'building jails' or 'fucking with them.' The country's GDP is over half a trillion dollars, and government spending is over $100bn." [19] (See here for more on the UAE.)
†Alon Liel, former director-general of the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs and former Israeli ambassador to South Africa, writing in 2012: “The military oppression of Palestinians is out of sight and out of mind for the average Israeli.” [Also, evidently, for at least one American.] “The Palestinian West Bank is being gobbled up by growing settlements, erasing the Green Line - the internationally recognised pre-1967 line…” Israel continues to build settlements on “occupied land outside Israel’s internationally recognized borders [and they are] illegal under international law.”
Number of Israeli settlers in the occupied territories in 1993 at the time of the signing of the Oslo peace accord: approx. 250,000. In 2000: 390,000. In 2012: 550,000+.
Wales and toxicity:
"I have a longstanding view that . . . a fair number of toxic personalities need to be shown the door immediately. If anyone wants my personal list, I can give it.” Jimmy "Jimbo" Wales, Jimbotalk, 15 August 2015. (Several editors then requested this “personal list” of “toxic personalities”. Wales welched on the promise.)
Wales and search:
“ I do not want to build a search engine.” — Jimmy “Jimbo” Wales, Jimbotalk, 17 February 2016
“[Wikia Search is] something I care about deeply. I will return to again and again in my career to search, either as an investor, a contributor, a donor, or a cheerleader.” — Jimmy “Jimbo” Wales, jimmywales.com, 31 March 2009
And see the Signpost exposé here
Papal bull:
Pope Francis: "American Catholics are committed to building a society which is truly tolerant and inclusive to safeguarding the rights of individuals and communities and to rejecting every form of unjust discrimination."
American Catholic and Republican presidential candidate Marco Rubio: Marriage is "the most important institution in our society and should be between one man and one woman."
From WP:Reference desk/Science:
Can scratching athlete's foot be more enjoyable than sex?
How?
(Please provide references, if you can). The Transhumanist 10:50, 20 January 2015 (UTC)
- I Googled "'athlete's foot' 'more enjoyable' sex" and found Seven Reasons to Get Out More at the top. Might be worth a ponder. InedibleHulk (talk) 11:09, January 20, 2015 (UTC)
Best song intro ever
Oh, my God, Becky, look at her butt! — Baby Got Back