QUOTE(Yale senior Josh Zelinsky @ 21:03, 11 March 2007 (UTC))
No. His personal opinion is irrelevant, the AfD is not a soapbox for him any more than the article talk page is. Under the unlikely event that he said anything useful (the comment about the Washington Post may turn up a decent source) one can look in the history.
Brandt's personal opinion is most definitely
not irrelevant, although Josh "JoshuaZ" Zelinsky's opinion certainly should be. Of course, since he's basically turned the whole process into his own personal self-promotion platform, the
whole thing is essentially irrelevant, not to mention a complete travesty.
And let's not make any mistake about this: Zelinsky is about to graduate from Yale, and I'm sure he'd just loooove to get a nice job with a Web 2.0 company, either as a hatchet-man (he seems good at that) or as a "cyber-enforcer" - the guy who takes over any discussion or rule-making effort to ensure that any opposing or dissenting opinions are quashed by intense browbeating, intimidation, or outright stalking, if we're to use the Wikipedian definition of the term (i.e., the really, really broad one).
What gets me is this: Yale's a good school, so why would he set his sights so
low? Why not aspire to be something that's actually
useful to society, like a sanitation worker, or maybe a truck driver? Maybe he could move furniture or do landscaping work? Or maybe something more culture-oriented, like being a ticket-taker at the local multiplex?
Why go for something that's so, you know, totally shitty?Unlike most of the people in the Keep Brandt Brigade, Josh has been around for a while, and he should know that this isn't going to end well for Wikipedia. The others are mostly n00bs and occasional users who haven't had to deal with the controversy in any sort of meaningful way - obviously
they don't care about the suffering of others, but that's hardly surprising - making other people suffer is, after all, what Wikipedia is all about. Many of them are probably just worried that deleting the Brandt article will set a dangerous precedent for them, whereby their own preferred libel and slander targets might actually have a way to stop them. Heaven forbid something like
that might happen!
But Josh... The only reason I can see for him to keep this going is if there's something in it for him personally, like maybe a book deal or a job or something. Nothing else makes any sense whatsoever.