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Posted by: Daniel Brandt

SlimVirgin just changed the pic on her http://twitter.com/SlimVirgin/. The previous pic was the one on the right:



A day later: Well, well, Photobucket feels that Slim's mug is too profane to grace this thread! That pic is also http://www.wikipedia-watch.org/gifs/slimpics.gif, by the way.

And here's another pic for Photobucket to censor, with a copy http://www.wikipedia-watch.org/gifs/jwprofile.png in case you need it:



I didn't create it on Google, I merely found it. Google Profiles — an entirely new sandbox for teenagers!

Posted by: dtobias

I didn't actually know she had one (Twitter account, I mean). But reporting breathlessly on every move she makes on other sites is just the sort of obsessiveness about SV that people (including but not limited to SV herself) have been criticizing people like you for.

Posted by: Jon Awbrey

Hence the humour.

And I kinda like the early Sarah Bollocks look.

Reminds me of what The Net was all about.

Ja Ja

Posted by: Daniel Brandt

By golly, she just added more makeup and reprotected her tweets from casual eyes:
—> You can't make this stuff up! I still prefer the one I made for her three years ago:

Posted by: EricBarbour

Please Daniel, we beg you, fer crissakes.............
DON'T TURN THE CRAZY WOMAN INTO A CELEBRITY.

Posted by: gomi

I agree with Eric and Lar and others, but in Mr. Brandt's defense, he may not stop in here often enough to notice Slim's propensity to take over any thread she chooses to inhabit. Perhaps we could highlight the issue by starting to refer to her as She Who Shall Not Be Named, or NAMBLA for short. Whaddya say?

Posted by: Daniel Brandt

I have to do it; it's a question of self-respect. I may be an atheist, but my father, grandfather, and brother were/are Lutheran ministers and I was taught that Martin Luther was a decent sort of fellow. And so was http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dietrich_Bonhoeffer.

When the Martin Luther article no longer mentions Hitler or the Nazis, maybe I'll reconsider.

By the way, a leading expert on Martin Luther, and the head of a Lutheran publishing house, User:Ptmccain was http://www.wikipedia-watch.org/cgi-bin/slim.cgi?Na=ptmccain because he tried to bring some common sense to that article. SlimVirgin would have none of his nonsense.

(Later edit: I changed the link because it led to a page that requires a login. Now it leads to a list of SlimVirgin's involvement with Ptmccain, aka Paul McCain, Concordia Publishing House.)

Posted by: Doc glasgow

For once, you've got a point.

I'd say not mentioning the use the Nazis made of Luther would be a bit too much. But not in the lead. And, if "the influence of Luther on Hitler's thought" is worth discussing, so is "the influence of Darwin on Hitler's thought".

Funny, that's not mentioned on Darwin's bio.

Posted by: Daniel Brandt

No, you're not quite there yet. As Somey mentioned recently, any mention of Hitler or the Nazis in Martin Luther's article is inappropriate. If you want to write about Nazi appropriation of Martin Luther's writings, then it should be in an article about National Socialism.

I have it on good authority that Martin Luther did not belong to the Nazi Party, and should not be blamed for starting it.

Posted by: Lar

What? Next you're going to claim that the article on Aristotle shouldn't mention Ayn Rand or the article on Archimedes shouldn't mention Milton Friedman or something... that's crazy talk.

Posted by: Milton Roe

I think connections of Earlier Philosophers to later events and Hitler, should go in their Pop Culture References or Cultural Impact Sections, or whatever the hell they're calling this stuff these days in order to keep it out of the hands of the rapid Trivia Section deletionists.

Posted by: GlassBeadGame

In respect to Wikipedia I find that I'm not in the shit business works best. This allows for the above the fray "I don't give a shit""but also permits the more aggressive "I don't take no shit." This also reflects balance as it covers both sides of the relevant transactions.

Posted by: Daniel Brandt

It's not crazy, and I believe that most Encyclopedia Britannica editors would agree with me. It's really a matter of historical accuracy and cultural sensitivity. You should present a person's life in the context of what that person and his/her contemporaries knew and believed at that time. It's the most ethical way to deal with something of this nature.

If you aren't writing an encyclopedia, then anything goes.

So Lar, either get Jimbo to take the word "encyclopedia" out of Wikipedia's self-description, or stick with something you know — like Legos.

Posted by: Lar

I need bigger sarcasm tags, apparently, as I was agreeing with you. None of the three modern figures has a place in their historical antecedent articles, regardless of whatever influence moderns may claim. That was my point.

You are a difficult person to communicate with, aren't you, Mr. Grinch?

Posted by: Daniel Brandt

My apologies, I had no idea you were trying to agree with me. I'm not used to that particular experience on this board.

Posted by: Lar

No worries, and me either.

Posted by: Doc glasgow

/me removes all references to Hitler from Martin Luther (T-H-L-K-D) "per remarkable consensus with D. Brandt on Wikipedia Review"

Posted by: Lar

Watch out you aren't "proxy editing for a banned editor"

Posted by: Milton Roe

Yeah. Nice to meat you, Doc.

Posted by: Cla68

I just http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Martin_Luther&diff=285125730&oldid=285124228 that sentence from the intro. Let's see how long it lasts. By the way, there is a http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Darwin#Eugenics in the Darwin article about the influence of his eugenics ideas on the Nazis.

Posted by: Somey

Thank you, Cla68!

But no, it won't last... Hmm, now we need an emoticon for crossing one's fingers, don't we?

Regardless, this is the sort of thing that astounds me about Wikipedia. I would never in a million years have imagined that a thread about someone's Twitter avatar being changed might ultimately result in someone making the one little edit I've been trying to get them to make for three long years.

And I'm not even a Lutheran!

Posted by: Kato

For the record, Darwin didn't have any eugenics ideas. That was Galton. Darwin, in fact, rejected them.

Also, Hitler's ideas were basically Cultist (or Occultist?) and had nothing to do with Natural Selection. Hitler believed heritage passed in the blood, for example, and had various other notions that were in stark contrast to Darwin's findings based on the scientific method. The link is extremely tenuous to say the least.

Posted by: Daniel Brandt

Ah, what a disappointment! I thought you might be one. They're thick as thieves in Minnesota, Wisconsin, and North Dakota (where I lived until 6th grade), and I thought Iowa might be infested too!

Posted by: Cla68

Take note what has happened in response. Although it would have been good theater for Jayjg, IronDuke or someone like that to swoop in, revert the change, ignore requests to discuss it on the talk page, and then arrogantly and imperiously warn me for vandalism or revert warring, the opposite has occurred. The editor who wants it to remain in the lede refrained from reverting and instead left two http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=User_talk%3ACla68&diff=285133434&oldid=284779234 on my talk page. Also, a civil discussion is http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Martin_Luther#Nazi_mention_in_intro on the article's talk page about it.

http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Martin_Luther&diff=285135232&oldid=285125730. It lasted about an hour. I've made a suggestion on the talk page. We'll see how that goes.

Posted by: Somey

That's all true, of course. I'm not so sure the reference is especially unfair, at least not to the same extent as the one in the Luther article, but I would absolutely say that it's unnecessary. It really depends on the interpretation -- IOW, how clear is it that the Nazis weren't using Darwin as their scientific justification? Definitely clearer, and further down in the article, which is good (relatively speaking). But again, unnecessary.

Either way, eugenics was a terrible, shameful aspect of early 20th-century history that has been, for all intents and purposes, covered up. There was really nothing good or moral about it at all... The Reformation clearly had some good aspects, even though a lot of people died because of it, and some of those people were, admittedly, Jews.

The one thing I would point out is that, to the best of my knowledge, Luther's reaction to what he saw as Jewish "betrayal" towards the end of his life was to exile them, not kill them. Whatever Jewish deaths occurred were tangential to that policy, and in any event, far more Catholics (and Protestants) were killed during the Reformation than Jews. More to the point, Wikipedia has a ridiculously lengthy article on Luther's On the Jews and Their Lies, written as he was near death, a bitter, disillusioned old man. There is no article whatsoever on his earlier That Jesus Christ Was Born a Jew, which was probably about as anti-anti-semitic a work as anything a German churchman could hope to publish at that time.

A much fairer treatment of the topic can be found at the bottom of http://books.google.com/books?id=_JDOVMDi8d4C&pg=PA675.


Oh well... I was hoping for at least three hours, but silly me.

Not the edit summary: "Restore an earlier version of this paragraph, which was better written and more precisely referenced," when in fact the "editor," Qp10qp (T-C-L-K-R-D) , simply put the whole paragraph back in.


I have a lot of good friends who are Lutherans, including one who's a minister. All of them are good people who would never dream of hating anyone because of their race, creed, color, or anything else (though they might hate someone for ripping them off in a real-estate transaction, say - I know I would!)...

But I myself am an agnostic-leaning-towards-atheist - my parents dragged me to a Presbyterian church for a few years, but it didn't really "take." If anyone asks me directly, I just tell them I'm "ignorant" - turns out it's a good way to avoid the subject!

Posted by: Noroton

I got interested and read the section, found I disagreed with you and Doc and put my two cents in (all right, 87 cents). I hope that with polite comments on both sides, we've set the tone and the discussion will stay that way. (Well, it's a hope, anyway.)

I don't think there was anything wrong with your edit or its revert. It's a discussion-page thing. I'm hoping people who know more about Luther will take the lead.

Posted by: Somey

"People who know more about Luther" have been banned in the past, mostly for knowing more about Luther. So why should it be any different now?

What they need are "people who know how to write encyclopedia articles that are to be read by large numbers of readers, and which bring credit to the website that publishes them."

Posted by: Noroton

WP:WEIGHT is a pretty singular concept in Wikipedia. It depends on what a whole range of sources say and how much "weight" should be given to each element of a subject. The question of just how much information to include in the lead section basically depends on WP:WEIGHT, which is where the discussion has gone, now. People who know more about Luther should take the lead on that.

Posted by: Jon Awbrey

It's called ANACHRONISM —

That's what my High School teachers used to mark on our papers if we wrote that kind of crap.

Of course, you can't really expect home skoolers and Camborgians to know any better.

Jon Awbrey

Posted by: Kelly Martin

She followed me. I don't understand why; my http://twitter.com/ab9rf/ is almost entirely about ham radio and I do not understand why she'd be remotely interested. Then again, http://twitter.com/DavidGerard follows me too. I'm not sure which one creeps me out more.

Posted by: Heat

To be fair, when I set up my Twitter account I used the invite address book option and automatically began following, and invited as my followers, every single person I'd sent an email to in the past five years including several people who I certainly wouldn't have wanted to either follow or be followed by had I known what I was doing. I've since pruned both my "followers" and "following" list.

As a side note I find this practice of collecting Slim's pictures somewhat creepy. What's next, building a shrine?

Posted by: Herschelkrustofsky

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Julian_Huxley was an important figure.


(http://new.music.yahoo.com/garrison-keillor/tracks/young-lutherans-guide-to-the-orchestra--959937)

Posted by: Miltopia

That is not what thick as thieves means.

Posted by: Somey

Could somebody un-ban them first?

Posted by: Noroton

Show Us The Diffs Or ...

Posted by: Cla68

Uh oh. A lot of people are http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Martin_Luther#Proposed_change to object to the removal of mention of the Nazi party from the intro. This is one instance where Citizendium's supervisory editorial review process would be helpful.

Posted by: The Adversary

Say, http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:Log&type=block&page=User%3APtmccain?

Posted by: Milton Roe

I think he meant thick as flies.

It's rather amusing to see people talking about how mild-mannered Lutherins are. As if the church that a founder founds, ever has much to do (after times goes by) with what the founder intended to found.

Does the modern LDS church generally accord with the philosophy of Joseph Smith, Jr? Trick question. The young J. Smith, or the middle aged J. Smith?

Answer: neither one!


Don't be naive. Slim must've contacted them and complained. Or did I miss sarcasm? You shoulda used the winky

Posted by: Cedric

Meh. If she wants to complain about something, let her complain about this:

Unleash your inner admin! In bookstores now!

Posted by: Daniel Brandt

1. "Hello, I'm SlimVirgin, and I want my pictures taken down."

2. "Hello, I'm Linda Mack, and I want my pictures taken down, but you can't tell anyone I'm Linda Mack, because everyone knows me as SlimVirgin, and you cannot email the account holder because he's a wikistalker."

3. "Hello, I'm gonna report you to MI5 unless you take down my pictures. I'm one of their agents and we're tight with the CIA and the CIA tortures people, in case you haven't heard."

Posted by: Random832

It probably doesn't take much to get photobucket to take something down with a copyright claim. The kinds of responses you're talking about imply that they're interested in a fight - more likely they'd cave in at the first sign of trouble.

Posted by: Milton Roe

Ah, Lindanetics. A precursor to Wikiology. A few sessions with the old A-meter and she'll be back, good as new, as an Operating-Wikipedian.

Posted by: jayvdb

That user http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia:Administrators%27_noticeboard/Incidents&diff=prev&oldid=66265834 to be banned. I have emailed the user to see if they would like the ban reviewed.

Posted by: dtobias

He's one of the famous cases of people running into the third rail of daring to side with WordBomb against Mantanmoreland while Slim & the Clique were protecting MM.