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Posted by: Herschelkrustofsky

I am posting this in response to comments made by Hell Freezes Over in some recent threads.

9 days ago, http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=User_talk:Herschelkrustofsky&oldid=51928349 at Wikipedia was deleted. Don't ask me why. It provided a useful chronology of how I was driven off the project. It included a description of my role in the http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Requests_for_arbitration/Nobs01_and_others arbcom case. I was the only respondent who was not named in the http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Requests_for_arbitration/Nobs01_and_others/Proposed_decision#Proposed_findings_of_fact If I had kept my mouth shut, nothing would have happened to me. Because I insisted on speaking out, asserting that the penalties doled out by the arbcom were inequitable (Cberlet was "cautioned," others who had committed comparable offenses were blocked or placed on probation,) I was place on indefinite probation. Fred Bauder justified this decision in the following way:

Since this was a little too obvious, Raul654 covered the tracks with http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia:Requests_for_arbitration/Nobs01_and_others/Proposed_decision&diff=32160720&oldid=32159273

This action set the stage for what followed. Slim and Will Beback began wikistalking me to various articles, accusing me of adding ideas which they alleged were similar to ideas advocated at one time or another by LaRouche (see http://wikipediareview.com/index.php?s=&showtopic=6666&view=findpost&p=22547) They were assisted by 172 (T-C-L-K-R-D) in setting a trap for me (into which I foolishly walked) at Synarchism (T-H-L-K-D). The article did not mention LaRouche, until 172 added a bunch of defamatory crap about LaRouche, which I should have ignored, because the article has probably been read by about six people. But, I removed it, and was charged with "editing a LaRouche-related article," in violation of probation. I protested that it was not a LaRouche-related article, and Slim's response was [paraphrase]"It is now."[/paraphrase]

Now, you can still read http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:Herschelkrustofsky/anb some great stuff which I excerpted from the ANI board. The admin who deleted my user page missed it. Hurry! Also, as a sort of postscript, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:Herschelkrustofsky/sv extracted from User talk:SlimVirgin.

Posted by: Jon Awbrey

They call that a "Courtesy".

See Also

• Kangaroo Kourtesy

Ja Ja

Posted by: CharlotteWebb

I think most people who are banned tend complain about pages that are not deleted, or at least they complain more loudly, so that might be part of the reason this is the default thing to do.


Well in this uhh day and age you would probably find enough people arguing that one can look topic bans in the face and laugh as long as they cite BLP as their reason. However in practice the judgment would probably depend more on the topic than which editor is banned from it. The final frontier as it were. :s


Of course he missed it. He wasn't born yet.

In my mind you probably have no chance of being unbanned, but stranger things are certainly possible. Consider Rootology's Nelson Mandela stunt. Of course he timed it with Obama's inauguration, which was pure genius I thought. Somehow I doubt anything like that will work in regard to LaRouche.

Posted by: Heat

Sorry I missed that. What are you referring to?

Posted by: Herschelkrustofsky

Which reminds me -- there had already been a battle over the deletion of http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:Log/delete&page=User:Herschelkrustofslky by (you guessed it) SlimVirgin. It was restored by User:Ashibaka and then survived an AfD vote. Since my username was linked all over kingdom come at Wikipedia, I wanted it to stay up so that I might have my side of the story heard. It was, of course, ultimately re-deleted and remains in http://www.wikipedia-watch.org/hersch.html courteously provided by Daniel Brandt.

Posted by: Hell Freezes Over

Your opening a thread about your WP editing puts me in an awkward position. I'm able to show that you had a serious conflict of interest (not just as a LaRouche follower), and that you misled people about your sockpuppets, but doing that would require me to post material that leads to a name, home address, telephone number, and place of work. I'd be banned if I were to do that.

So let me simply ask you this instead. Do you believe Lyndon LaRouche is a reliable source (in Wikipedia terms or in any other)? Do you believe his views should be added to WP articles? Do you believe WP articles should be created about his real or proposed projects, when his publications are the only sources that mention them?

Posted by: Kato

People here were able to show that Jossi Fresco had a serious conflict of interest. He was a PR worker for Prem Ruwat, cult leader.

No one at Wikipedia gave a crap. Jimbo Wales even wrote that Jossi was "http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=User_talk:Jimbo_Wales&diff=prev&oldid=190110417" after it was made public. What Jossi was up to on Wikipedia didn't bother me. What bothered me was that your "serious conflicts of interest" were treated in an arbitrary and unfair way with punishments meted out to some but not others.

I've looked at virtually every edit Hersch has made, and I see no difference in principle between his edits and Jossi Fresco's.

Shouldn't edits be judged on their merits? Or should users be profiled; "tracked down to a name, home address, telephone number, and place of work", and railroaded off no matter what they've been writing on Wikipedia?

---------

Here's you giving Jossi your approval:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Jossi/Awards


---------

Here's what happened when someone gave Herschelkrustofsky one of those barnstars:

http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=User:Herschelkrustofsky&diff=18179106&oldid=18172179

---------

This brings me back to my main thesis:

I believe that you, Slim, were responsible for fostering a damaging culture that warped the notions of "outing" and "conflicts of interest" - that exploited memes of "stalking and harrassment" ("I could be killed if exposed") which ultimately, like the ludicrous anti-LaRouche campaign and many others, subverted Wikipedia from within, causing massive problems for many people. Add to that the blatant cronyism, which you exemplified, and you have the definition of a dysfunctional and dangerous process.

Posted by: Hell Freezes Over

Very much so. What do you think about this article of HK's, as an example? http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Eurasian_Land-Bridge&oldid=3820805

Is there such a thing as the Eurasian Land Bridge? Is it connected to the [[Asian Highway Network]] that it redirects to? LaRouche's wife was photographed standing next to its supposed entrance, as though she were opening it, or were somehow responsible for it.

Perhaps HK can explain what it is?

Posted by: Kato

Non notable?

Was it put on Request for Deletion, for that "consensus / community" malarkey to decide?

Posted by: Hell Freezes Over

Is it just non-notable? Is there such a thing as the Eurasian Land Bridge? If there is, does it have anything to do with LaRouche?

Posted by: Kato

I suppose other than putting the non-notable and banal article up for deletion to see what the "community" thought, you could go on a quest to discover who Herschelkrustofsky is, ban him, delete all his edits on any topic, attack anyone who edits anywhere near him, and a bunch of people by mistake who didn't even do that, and pursue a bitter crusade across the internet that lasted years?

I guess you took the latter option.

Posted by: Hell Freezes Over

I'm not talking about something non-notable. Of course it would be notable if it existed. I'm talking about HK creating articles about things that, so far as anyone could tell, were non-existent.

Here is Helga Zepp-LaRouche standing next to the Eurasian Land-Bridge's terminal. http://www.schillerinstitute.org/graphics/photos/helga/hzlterm.jpg This image was added or restored to the article by one of HK's first socks, Weed Harper. http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Eurasian_Land-Bridge&diff=prev&oldid=5897949 What is it she's standing next to, HK?

As for "crusade," pls get your facts straight, Kato, and stop the kneejerk support for this person just because he's staff. I would have long forgotten him were it not for *his* crusade against me, which he started in December 2005 and continues to this day.

Look at the substantive issue for once. Here you have someone who creates articles about *entirely bogus subjects*, uses sockpuppets in an effort to keep them, then when thwarted, becomes staff on a WP criticism site in an effort to persuade people that the editors who thwarted him are evil.

And you are helping him.

Posted by: Jon Awbrey

I have about as much interest in Lyndon LaRouche as I do in Lex Luthor, Pokemon, or Ayn Rand.

If I ever did conceive a curiosity about any of those subjects, where would I go for unbiased information?

The sad fact is that Wikipedia has a far better chance of providing unpoisoned info about the middle terms than it does about either of the extremes.

Why is that exactly?

It's because the nature of Wikipedia Warkraft determines that articles about controversial subjects will be written by the victors in a War of Attrition whose Rules of Engagement are the very antitheses of everything written down in Wikipedia's declared principles.

Which is why my eyes have developed a reflex of skipping the Wiki-Poison Capsules on the top shelves of most Google caches.

Jon Awbrey

Posted by: Somey

If you're defining "conflict of interest" as Wikipedia defines it, we already know all about that. HK has (obviously) made no secret about his political affiliations, and if you managed to find an article or photo or musical composition of his that appeared on some Larouche-related website or other publication, well, congratulations. But that doesn't mean he's being paid by them, or has a title, or anything like that. Larouche supporters are nothing if not generous when it comes to contributing content, after all.

Nobody here (well, hardly anybody) is particularly sanguine on the question of HK's ties to the Larouche Movement, but he's never threatened anyone here with even a whiff of sanction for disagreeing with him about any of that stuff. So, since he admits to it, and he's doing no harm here (or elsewhere, AFAIK, other than the occasional campaign contribution), what's the point of even bringing it up, other than to pursue your standard half-baked innuendo and conspiratorial hoo-ha campaign?

Long story short, this dog won't hunt either. I wouldn't want HK or his pals running my country, and neither should you, but that doesn't mean he shouldn't have the same rights to express his opinions as anyone else.

Posted by: Hell Freezes Over

Somey, I'm not talking about creating non-notable stuff, or POV stuff, or COI stuff.

I am talking about someone *inventing* things. Making them up. Even you who wants to defend HK can surely see that that is problematic. Not least because, if he can do it there, he can do it here.

If I'm wrong -- if this is just my "half-baked innuendo" -- I hope HK will explain what (and where) the Eurasian Land-Bridge is, and what Helga Zepp-LaRouche (of the [[Schiller Institute]], which HK is also involved with) is standing next to in that image.

The point of bringing it up, as you asked, is that HK started a thread about his ban, with that as the title. And so I am giving just one example of why the ban is justified.

Posted by: Kato

One example of why his ban was justified was because he created an article on a barely (if non) notable bridge proposal?



You haven't answered why that wasn't just put up for Articles for Deletion, for the 'ol "community / consensus" thing to happen?

Posted by: Jon Awbrey

Ay, there's the rub.

What exactly justifies a ban?

To say that a ban is just is to say that equal justice is applied to all participants.

Do you really want to go there?

I don't think so.

Jon Awbrey

Posted by: dtobias

The Earth-2 Golden Age version, the Pre-Crisis Earth-1 version, the Post-Crisis John Byrne version, the current DC Universe version, or the Smallville TV version? (Among others...)

Posted by: Jon Awbrey

What part of "Not Interested" (NI) did you not understand?

Ja Ja

Posted by: dtobias

I don't think Slim's poodle is the hunting type.

Posted by: Somey

There's a whole butt-load of web pages on that Schiller Institute site about this so-called "landbridge" - it looks like they're trying to propose some sort of express rail-freight line from China to Europe, which (I'm guessing, though educatedly so) probably involves a lot of standardization of railroad gauges and various other unlikely things. The inscription on the monument is obviously photoshopped. Are you just wanting him to admit that? This is the Larouche Movement, SV - we should be glad they didn't put her in front of the First Manned Base on Mars.


Well, maybe it is.

In other words, you're saying this landbridge proposal is basically a scam to get people to donate money to the Larouche Movement, right? Why not just say so? He (assuming it really was HK) clearly didn't just "make it up" out of whole cloth, the way you'd make up an article on Kitten Huffing or something. It may be he's been deluded into thinking this landbridge thing is very, very real, or he may just be a tool of the Vast Larouche Conspiracy™, but that still doesn't mean your (and Wikipedia's) reaction was proportional to the offense.

In any event, this Larouche stuff is hardly a major focus of WR, though I will at least admit that if it weren't for HK and his experiences on WP, we probably wouldn't hear much (if anything) about it here at all.

So... happy?

Posted by: EricBarbour

This is pointless. And pathetic.

She's playing all of you. Again.

Posted by: Hell Freezes Over

I'm giving just *one* example. How much of this stuff would you need before a ban becomes proportional?

We were never able to work out what the Eurasian Land-Bridge was. Herschelkrustofsky writes that construction has begun: "Following a conference held in China in 1996, which was addressed by Helga Zepp LaRouche, construction began in earnest." http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Eurasian_Land-Bridge&oldid=3820805

Despite being asked many times by several editors, he was never able to say *where* construction had begun, but he also didn't say, "hang on, perhaps I've made a mistake." No, he continued trying to have the page say what he wanted, with no sources other than LaRouche -- who also doesn't say where construction has begun, so far as I can tell.

Posted by: Jon Awbrey

So a ban is justified if 2 people voting in the middle of the night say it is?

The Very Essence of Wikipediot Consensus (WC).

Case Closed.

The condemned prisoner will please report to the extermination booth.

Ja Ja

Posted by: The Joy

I Googled "Eurasian Land Bridge" and found some info on it. Apparently, its a proposed transportation system (not a single bridge) that spans from Europe to Asia. Supposedly, China has developed or is developing part of it using the old Silk Road.

EIRNA (LaRouche sympathetic publication?) explanation:
http://www.eirna.com/html/reports/eurasiae.htm

The Eurasian Land Bridge concept has been around since the mid-1800s (if this Rolf-Witzsche guy is to be believed).
http://peace.rolf-witzsche.com/landbridge/global-eurasian.html

LaRouche aside, a Google search does come up with some scholars and journalists discussing the benefits of such a land bridge. China has apparently launched part of it in 2008 on the Silk Road.

Inderscience Publishers
http://inderscience.metapress.com/app/home/contribution.asp?referrer=parent&backto=issue,4,6;journal,5,6;linkingpublicationresults,1:120367,1

Worldcargonews.com
http://www.worldcargonews.com/htm/n20081016.579306.htm

International Railway Journal
http://www.encyclopedia.com/doc/1G1-176903890.html

Japan Railway and Transportation Review article:
http://www.jrtr.net/jrtr28/pdf/f42_ots.pdf


Heck, you could probably get Eurasian Land Bridge up to GA status on non-LaRouche material alone!

Posted by: Kato

Not necessarily so. The whole LaRouche vs anti-LaRouche thing was a farce that had spilled out all over Wikipedia. Wholly unrelated people were getting threatened by Wikipedia powerplayers as "LaRouchies" on a regular basis. People saw it with their own eyes and have not been swayed by Hersch at this site. It was outrageous, and one of my http://wikipediareview.com/index.php?showtopic=6666&st=80&p=29702&#entry29702 was to highlight one such offense.

In April, 2007, an editor went to SlimVirgin and Willbeback and http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Origins_of_the_American_Civil_War&diff=123320504&oldid=122866641 about Mbhiii (T-C-L-K-R-D) :



The message to SlimVirgin has since been deleted. But the spirit of the message is typical. The accused had nothing to do with LaRouche, and his edits had nothing to do with LaRouche. Yet he was immediately attacked as a "New LaRouche" editor.

A group of editors, led by SlimVirgin, and accompanied by anti-LaRouche campaigners Chip Berlet and Dennis King (whose Conflicts Of Interest were never questioned) were allowed to treat Wikipedia like an anti-LaRouche version of the McCarthy witch-hunts. Thus creating massive bad feelings and subverting the whole culture of the place.

Posted by: Hell Freezes Over

That can't be the same thing, Joy, because HK wrote that construction had begun by 2004. His article was not about a proposal.

This was the problem. When you tried to find out what he was talking about, there were several things that looked like one part of the Eurasian Land-Bridge, but only up to a point; other things that looked like another part of it, but had nothing to do with LaRouche.

But there was nothing that fitted HK's description of it. I hope he'll come on here and explain what it is, with non-LaRouche sources who attribute the idea to LaRouche.

Posted by: Heat

Now this isn't fair. Hell promised to answer my questions if I addressed hers. I did that and now she's evidently decided that my questions (and those by others) were too difficult to answer so she's now ignoring the "Who is this?" discussion for greener pastures where she has an easier task - trying to prove that LaRouche's wingnut fantasies are wingnut fantasies.

Here's an idea, why don't the LaRouchies take advantage of Wikipedia's license and start their own online encyclopedia a la Conserveapedia replete with articles about Martian moonbases, Queen Elizabeth's life as a drug pusher and the evil that is the World Wildlife Fund? Ed Poor can then go start Mooniepedia and whatshisname can start an Prempedia. Maybe then Jimbo can start Randpedia and write an article about how government intervention caused Hurricane Katrina?

Anyway, Hell, I want to know whether you think Proaby should have been banned from Wikipedia for outing Krimpet (and her parents) or for outing Crum (and his parents) and why you don't think he should have been banned from WR for trying to out someone else complete with their address after having promised not to do something like that again after the Krimpet and Crum outings? You've always been adamant that outing was a red line that cannot be crossed and should merit a ban yet you actually intervened in Proab's case to try to get him reinstated at WP after his ban and you are still pal-ling around with him even after he threw your best friend, Crum under the bus in what seems to have been a pique of sycophant to sycophant puppy dog jealousy. Your explanation here would be far more interesting then beating up Hershey for being a cultist - that's easy pickins and you're not going to impress anyone by doing it.

Posted by: Somey

It wasn't just the ban, though, nor was it just one. The ban was augmented by a whole host of strictures and special policy interpretations, and what Nobs eventually called "ideological profiling" used against several people who disagreed with Berlet, Dennis King, and yourself...

Look, I'm not going to defend the Larouche Organization, their various propaganda arms, and their tactics. And hey, if you want to post some more examples of articles HK posted about questionable Larouche-inspired proposals, etc., that's fine by me - just don't bother with the exaggerations, distortions, and innuendo, okay? You're better off just presenting the facts without all the "he's trying to destroy me and everything Wikipedia holds dear" nonsense.


Is it just possible you were asking the wrong question? The way it looks to me, if this landbridge proposal is legitimate, the real work wouldn't be in "construction," it would be in getting a bunch of countries who don't like each other to agree on a whole new set of standards that might cost them a lot of money up-front. If the Larouche people are getting them to do that, maybe they really do have something. And frankly, any actual construction that might have occurred might be going on inside some rather insular countries, like Iran and Azerbaijan, and might not even be known to them.

Of course, I figured that out in about 10 minutes of reading, so don't feel bad - that's about 9 minutes and 50 seconds more than the average WP editor puts into researching something they're not already inclined to agree with.

Posted by: Jon Awbrey

And all of this happens without anyone violating any policies.

Why?

Because Wikipedia has no policies.

All they have is the fact that some faction doesn't like it, and has the power to edit the membership to suit their preferences.

Jon Awbrey

Posted by: Somey

Sucker!

Posted by: Hell Freezes Over

Kato, you need to stop posting here without checking your facts a little. HonourableSchoolboy was a LaRouche account. Look at the contribs. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Contributions/HonourableSchoolboy

What happened was that HK turned up on WP to try to add LaRouche propaganda right, left, and centre. When opposed, he created socks. When blocked, he created more. Then he arrived here to trash the editors who stopped him, claiming to be innocent of all wrong-doing.

You're going along with that because of "my enemy's enemy." That's fine. But if you won't criticize what HK tried to do on WP, you have no right ever to criticize any other editor, because he was one of the worst.

Posted by: GlassBeadGame

My childhood World Book Encyclopedia was so well behaved and I never even appreciated it. Without spilling and beans and earning a trip to bansville would you mind sharing with us exactly how you came to know H's name, address, phone etc? If that is to much to ask for could you at least tell us why?

Like Kato I thought that Wikipedia possessed mechanisms, like AfDs, to get shed of things that "the community" determined to be not worthy of being in an encyclopedia. Even if these mechanism were stacked and dishonest they set some limits as to what Wikipedians might stoop to in order to get their own way. How do H's doxs fit into these processes? These protracted discussions of your tenure on Wikipedia could be called When Encyclopedias Attack.

Posted by: Kato

What about the account I was talking about and specifically referring to using diffs? Mbhiii (T-H-L-K-D).

I'll say it again.

In April, 2007, an editor went to SlimVirgin and Willbeback and http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Origins_of_the_American_Civil_War&diff=123320504&oldid=122866641 about Mbhiii (T-C-L-K-R-D) :



The message to SlimVirgin has since been deleted. But the spirit of the message is typical. The accused had nothing to do with LaRouche, and his edits had nothing to do with LaRouche. Yet he was immediately attacked as a "New LaRouche" editor.

Posted by: Somey

Um, you need to stop posting here without reading the posts you're responding to. Kato was actually referring to Mbhiii (T-C-L-K-R-D) , not HonourableSchoolboy. Click on the little "C" for the contribs - you'll see that he's correct, there's no Larouche-related content in there to speak of.


Well, that sounds a lot like your own story, if you swap "Larouche" for "New antisemitism," except of course for the "blocked" part.


That's a bit of a stretch - if people don't feel qualified to criticize someone's WP activities because of unfamiliarity with the subject matter, they shouldn't feel like they have no "right" to criticize someone else's WP activities in areas they do know about.

I'll admit that's contrary to the fundamental WP principle of "pretend to be an expert when challenged," but I've never been much of one to agree with that.

Posted by: Kato

This latest "enemy's enemy" meme is false. I saw it all clearly with my own eyes independently of this site and Hersch, I wrote about it (the Mbhiii case) when I saw that two years ago, and would write about it regardless of whether Hersch was here or any other factor. Because the profiling of innocent editors as "LaRouchies" was very real and very wrong. Ask Nobs, yet another victim of it.

Posted by: The Joy

It does appear HK may have violated WP's policies and deserved to be banned. Many Reviewers have been banned for violating WP rules.

However, what others in this thread are concerned about is the problem of extremes. Pro-LaRouche editors may be a problem, but Anti-LaRouche editors are just as troublesome. Neutrality and "NPOV" should keep things objective. This is not how it has worked out.

I notice that Pro-LaRouche editors http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Long_term_abuse/LaRouche_accounts. What of the Anti-LaRouche editors like Berlet and Will Beback? Have any major Anti-LaRouche editors been banned?

Now anyone that edits LaRouche-related articles will have their contributions scrutinized. I doubt I or anyone could write about the Eurasian Land Bridge concept sans LaRouche material without some administrator watching my every edit and waiting for me to "slip."

When Jon says there are no Wikipedia policies, I think he means (I may be wrong about that) that policies exist only to benefit those who can socially and technically enforce their own POV on Wikipedia. For now, the Anti-LaRouche group holds sway. Who knows? Tomorrow, the Pro-LaRouche group may be in charge. It's like Somalia with its many warlords and who knows how "neutrality" and "NPOV" will be enforced at any given time.

You may be right about HK's edits, but your enforcement of neutrality and NPOV on Wikipedia is uneven.

Posted by: Hell Freezes Over

Mbhiii was never blocked as a LaRouche/HK sock, so I've lost track of what you're saying. What exactly did you see with your own eyes? Some examples, please.

Posted by: Jon Awbrey

That's a big part of it.

Wikipedia has no policies in the proper sense of the word. Everything advertised as a rule is negated by some other policy, guideline, or excuse for existence, then utterly demolished by ongoing practices.

The Wikimedia Foundation excuses its total lack of responsibility by saying that it's analogous to a phone company that simply provides a service. So Wikipedia is just a Big Party Line. Who denies an individual user the use of this service? Any user or group of users who can get away with doing so.

Other service providers can legitimately deny you their services if you violate the Terms of Service that you agree to abide by. Wikipedia has no Terms of Service. Period.

A "rule" is not a rule unless it is universal, that is, applies equally to all who act in specified ways. There are no rules like that in Wikipedia. We can all name dozens of active users who would have been banned years ago if there were any justice at all in Wikipedia.

Topping it all off, the rule of Ignore All Rules explicitly negates every other rule.

Without equal justice in the application of policies, there is simply no basis for saying that any ban is justified.

Jon Awbrey

Posted by: Herschelkrustofsky

1. LaRouche's publications are reliable sources for his own views under http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:SELFPUB#Self-published_and_questionable_sources_as_sources_on_themselves

2. LaRouche publications are reliable sources for the views of notable persons who have granted them interviews. (answer continues below)

The Eurasian Land Bridge was a proposal that LaRouche made back in the early 90s. Without question, the proposal exists. Your tactic was to use a bit of sleight of hand, and argue that my article claimed that it had been completed. This tactic evidently worked on credulous people who didn't read the article. http://www.schillerinstitute.org/graphics/photos/helga/hzlterm.jpg which shows LaRouche's wife being interviewed in front of a memorial built by the Chinese government, which is labeled, in English, "Eastern Terminal of Eurasia Landbridge." If you want to refer to it as the "supposed entrance," go ahead, it's a free country. Ms. LaRouche was in China at the invitation of the Chinese government, to speak on her husband's proposal. Refresh my memory -- was it you, or Will Beback that had the image deleted from Wikipedia on the grounds that it was "misleading"?

In http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Eurasian_Land-Bridge&oldid=89458517 there were two solid sources that are not LaRouche sources (one of them is now a dead link.)

Posted by: Mackan

I wouldn't defend HK's editing, since he seems to acknowledge using sockpuppets. But, I think it's notable that SV switches to addressing this topic, while refusing to answer questions about her editing.

Of course, there are strong reasons to question the idea that SV gave HK or others no reason to question her good faith. An example from experience: it was forty minutes before SV first decided to follow me to the bio of http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Folke_Bernadotte (my experience with her then consisted solely of a conflict on the Zionism article), that she requested that I "post questions on the articles' talk pages from now on, please, rather than on my talk page, because others may want to respond too." After arriving on the bio, she then immediately moved my response from her talk page to the article talk page. The series of edits is http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:Contributions&offset=20061219232228&limit=10&contribs=user&target=SlimVirgin. Who asks another editor not to comment further on their talk page, immediately before first following the editor to another article?

We aren't talking about a little rhetoric here, but flagrantly underhanded behavior. Another example I noted to arbcom was where SV adjusted a talk page several times over reversions, then immediately archived the page so that it wouldn't be undone (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Requests_for_arbitration/C68-FM-SV/Evidence#Deceptive.2Fbattleground_editing_by_SlimVirgin). Who escalates several reverts on a talk page by immediately archiving the page? It isn't even the outrageousness, but exactly the triviality of these acts that illustrated the disregard for even a semblance of good faith interaction.

If SV wants a reevaluation of her conflicts on Wikipedia, that's great, just as long as she can acknowledge what she was actually doing. The truth is I don't think anyone would try to defend WR on whole anyway, but at least there could be a meaningful discussion.

Posted by: Hell Freezes Over

Do you believe his own views ought to be added to any topic he has expressed a view on?



So what did you mean by writing that construction had begun? "Following a conference held in China in 1996, which was addressed by Helga Zepp LaRouche, construction began in earnest." http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=...e&oldid=3820805

Posted by: dtobias

JzG, for one... it's a favorite technique of his.

Posted by: Jon Awbrey

I can still remember how shocked I was, back in the day when I actually believed that Wikipedians were serious about the Words, Words, Words they spew under the name of Pillar & Policy, the first few times I saw Adminds like SlimVirgin, FeloniousMonk, KillerChihuahua, Jayjg, and JzG tag-teaming up with their sleight-of-hand jobs to do whatever they damn well pleased at any time — then raising clouds of lies, comment deletions, and talk page shuffles to cover their tracks. I quit being surprised at that somewhere around the twentieth time I saw it happen.

Jon Awbrey

Posted by: Herschelkrustofsky

I believe his views on any topic should be subject to the same notability standards as those of any other public figure. Incidentally, this, along with the question of whether I should be banned for creating an article which ostensibly would have failed AfD had it ever been submitted for one (Eurasian Land-Bridge,) is a part of the latest school of red herrings, because I wasn't banned for any of these things. I was banned because of the gambits described at the beginning of this thread.

I meant that construction had begun, not that the project was completed, which is the claim that you were implicitly making. The Chinese embraced the idea and it has continued to play an important role in their enormous infrastructure agenda. In China, Ms. Zepp-LaRouche was known as the "Silk Road Lady" and there is an ongoing dialogue between the LaRouches and government of China, typified by http://english.people.com.cn/200511/22/eng20051122_223146.html in 2005 entitled "Global Financial Crisis is Coming." Incidentally, {{fact}}

Posted by: Hell Freezes Over

Can you explain what that means? How would we judge the notability standards of LaRouche's views on any given topic, as opposed to any other public figure's views?

My question was: if you're editing an article on, say, the political aspects of stem cell research, and if this is an issue that LaRouche has strong feelings about, and has spoken or written about often in Executive Intelligence Review, do you believe it would be appropriate to add his views to the article?



Is there any evidence independent of LaRouche that construction *of his project* has begun?

I also wanted to ask you about your views on BLP, given that you're staff on a website that says it campaigns on behalf of people traduced by anonymous Wikipedians.

You created the articles on Chip Berlet and Dennis King, editing as an IP, even though by your own admission you've been a dedicated part of a political organization since the 1970s that has been at odds with Berlet and King for decades. Here's your first version of Berlet (using Brandt and LaRouche as two of your sources) http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Chip_Berlet&oldid=3597556 and here of King. http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Dennis_King&oldid=3597662

Do you regret creating those, or do you still feel it was appropriate?

Posted by: CharlotteWebb

Yeah but China isn't. Let's just call it an on-ramp for the sake of argument. Are you asserting that the yellow letters were not in fact added in post-production?


Does this have something to do with Krustofsky, LaRouche, Brautigan, or the price of land-bridges in the PRC?

Posted by: Herschelkrustofsky

That's putting it kindly. Dennis King Dking (T-C-L-K-R-D) is the most egregious policy violater, having been nailed by the WP COI team for linkspamming his ridiculous website all over the project. SV's reaction to Dking's excesses was to develop an extensive off-wiki correspondence with him: And here's a http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:SlimVirgin/archive4#Dennis_King from SV's talk page archives. Compare SV's helpful attitude toward Dking, with her http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=User:Cognition&diff=20319456&oldid=20318775 of pro-LaRouche editor Cognition (T-C-L-K-R-D) .

The moral of the story is that overly aggressive enforcement of the rules is forgivable; lax enforcement of the rules is forgivable; but selective enforcement of the rules, to further a POV agenda, is unforgivable, and ought to be grounds for swift and permanent desyssoping.

Posted by: Hell Freezes Over

How on earth do you translate that I wrote to King asking him to use reliable sources into "SV's reaction to Dking's excesses was to develop an extensive off-wiki correspondence with him"? I have had no extensive correspondence with Dennis King -- barely any.

I'm so glad you reminded me of Cognition! "Chip Berlet is a 5 cent thug in a long-range Aristotelian network, an evil, Venetian-based clique which has found its most demonic individuals in men such as Bertrand Russell, the advocate of nuclear genocide; Adolf Hitler, a perverted figure of anti-christ calibre who was installed into power by British bankers; and the Beatles, generals of a literal "British Invasion," doped-up zombie devils whose atrocious personal lives matched the Satanic musical presentation of their pop songs."

I will give her the last word. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Requests_for_arbitration/Nobs01_and_others/Evidence#Evidence_presented_by_.7BCognition.7D

Posted by: The Adversary

Do you think it was only you? They always did that, back in the bad old days of 2005-2006, early 2007. Jayjg was even coldly bragging about it back in 2005, when their wiki-stalking was the norm ("agree with us or else.."), telling an editor that: http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=User_talk:Marsden/Archive1&diff=prev&oldid=23499240.

Posted by: Jon Awbrey

That would be a consideration if Wikiputia had any policies against multiple accounts — but of course it doesn't.

Aside from the fact that Wikiputia has no policies at all, the only de facto consideration that makes an alternate account a BADACCOUNT is that the Cabal Don't Like It.

And you all know it.

Jon Awbrey

Posted by: CharlotteWebb

...and furthermore, Herschel, I wouldn't be the least bit surprised...

Posted by: The Adversary

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Administrators%27_noticeboard/IncidentArchive290#SlimVirgin.27s_sockpuppet.28s.29

Posted by: Jon Awbrey

Now it doesn't surprise me one little bit that HFO cannot respond to simple questions about justice and justification. When it comes to that, she has no leg to stand on, snow-booted, spike-heeled, or otherwise. Like the alternate accountants of her many other sets of books, she displays all the incapacities of the average sociopath to grasp and actualize the most basic concepts of ethics.

But it worries me a little that she seems to be turning the rest of your brains to Whip'n'Chill — to the point where you forget the very meanings of justice and justification.

So here's a little visual aid that I whipped up:




See how that works?

Jon Awbrey

Posted by: Somey

Apparently http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Martin_Luther&diff=50305747&oldid=50303217?

Posted by: Obesity

but... but... but.... when she does it's cute.

Posted by: Lar

{{citation needed}}

Posted by: Bottled_Spider

Yep. But you've got to admit she does it with style, goshdarnit. I say this thread'll be a 6-pager. Maybe 7, or 8. It's beginning to be tough keeping up with it all. So much material, so little time.

Posted by: dtobias

Yes, such horrendous debauchery as "I Want to Hold Your Hand", which unleashed a huge Satanic movement of unconstrained hand-holding!

----------------
Now playing: http://www.foxytunes.com/artist/the+beatles/track/i+want+to+hold+your+hand
via http://www.foxytunes.com/signatunes/

Posted by: LessHorrid vanU

Luckily the Americans responded with the clean cut Beach Boys, Crosby, Stills and Nash (Young is Canadian, doesn't count) and The Velvet Underground...

I wonder if Cognito ever listened to "Venus in Furs"?

Posted by: Mackan

I'm sorry, I thought the Bernadotte/Brautigan/land-bridge connection was obvious.

I'm just saying: It's nearly impossible to go back and tell who was being especially reasonable with who else this long ago. You can do it, just as long as you have days or weeks to throw away. What I know is that in the few cases I've been aware of, SV made an artform of tweaking people in just the right way. The way she did it also showed a basic disregard for social mores (honesty, golden rules, etc.) that I think is hard to look past as she tries to claim that all of the opposition to her on this site stems from inventions of HK.

Posted by: Herschelkrustofsky

I do?

As I have said before, I will respond to any evidence that I have used socks. The argument used by SV and Will Beback, and I assume Jayjg (who keeps his cards pretty close to his vest,) is that the various accounts that they have banned geolocate to southern California, and the idea that there could be more than one LaRouche supporter editing Wikipedia in southern California is just too big a coincidence to be believed. I mean, how many people live in southern California?

Posted by: Mackan

Not at all, and exactly the point. But then the question is who exactly was doing this kind of thing, under what circumstances, and where? Are these people still seeking to be taken seriously, and do they acknowledge what they did, or are they still trying to claim that it was someone else's fault? That's where I'm coming from.


Yeah, but then you made a comment on the subject in one place or another about how you like irony, which looked to me like an admission. Of course that was about more recent actions, but all the same.

Posted by: Sarcasticidealist

Nash is British, so I'd think he counts even less.

Posted by: Hell Freezes Over

The connection was a little closer than just southern California -- it was the same IP addresses that a developer found for at least two of your accounts, possibly three, in the second ArbCom case. Not just one shared IP address, but at least two, one of which was on an abuse list for sending out LaRouche spam.

*See the evidence from the second case involving Hershelkrustofsky (2005) here, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Requests_for_arbitration/Lyndon_LaRouche_2/Evidence#Evidence_of_sockpuppetry brought against HK by Snowspinner, Cberlet, Will, and me.

*For background, first HK case (2004), brought by HK against Adam Carr, Andyl, and John Kenney, is here -- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Requests_for_arbitration/Lyndon_LaRouche/Evidence

*Third case (2005) involving HK here http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Requests_for_arbitration/Nobs01_and_others#Involved_parties Brought by Cberlet against various parties, including HK, on BLP grounds, though this was before we had an actual BLP policy, I think, so it had to go to ArbCom.

Posted by: dtobias

Yes, the Cberlet who left in disgrace a few months ago after the decline of the clique that was formerly protecting him in his POV-pushing and conflicts of interest (citing his own material) while banning others who went against him on charges of doing the same thing Berlet was doing himself.

Posted by: Jon Awbrey

Someone please bring HFO up2date on that newfangled dynamic addressing thingy …

Ja Wohl !

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:217.237.149.143

Posted by: Cla68

This does seem to be true, which is one reason, SV why you don't have much moral high ground here. Why weren't Chip Berlet and DKing topic or indef banned if you were really interested in keeping the LaRouche article's NPOV? They're editing was almost as, if not just as, POV as many of the "Pro-Larouche" editors who were banned.

As Kato and others have pointed out here, other editors like Jossi, Jayjg, and Mantanmoreland, with which you frequently interacted, were also unconcealed POV pushers. Why didn't you ever try to call them out on their behavior?

Posted by: The Adversary

And that is where I´m coming from, too.

Having observed them for a long, long time, I have basically drawn the conclusion that there were several "groups" of interest, who were watching each others back. Some of those "groups" could consist of one person (Jossi). Basically you had people with very strong opinions about something, or COI-issues, who then supported each others COI.
I first noticed this once, way, way back, the first time I reported someone for 3RR. You know; you enter your report at the bottom of the page, end of the line, so to speak. Of course, I then keenly watched to see what an admin would do.

And then I noticed there were some "steady" admin-workers, you could see them start with the top of the line, and work themselves down the list, one block, or warning, or "not guilty," at a time. The steady working bees. (Incidentally, those admins who are never discussed on WR )

However; I also noticed there were admins who did blocks completely out of line. See this typical from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Administrators%27_noticeboard/3RRArchive32:
*FeloniousMonk reports two 3RR; one immediately blocked by Jayjg, the other blocked (against opposition) by SV.
*Jayjg reports two 3RR; both blocked by FeloniousMonk
*SlimVirgin report one 3RR, blocked by Jossi , etc, etc.

Of course there wasn´t (and still isn´t) any "law" against this, AFAIK. But a heck of a lot of those "out-of-line" blocks were disputed. And as we know: admins are not very happy undoing other admins work, even if they disagree.

It was things like this that brought me to WR.

Posted by: Herschelkrustofsky

In the LaRouche II case, I freely admitted sharing computers with Weed Harper. From that point on, after learning that it was trouble, I discontinued the practice. That did not prevent you and Will Beback from banning umpteen accounts that got in your way, by using speculation about dynamic IP addresses.

It doesn't help your case to continue harping on this point, while ignoring questions about the Sweet Blue Water and Sunsplash accounts. My complaint is not about Wikipedia policies, but rather about the selective, POV-driven application of those policies.

Posted by: CharlotteWebb

All my socks are banned (all my socks are banned)...
And there's hell to pay (there is hell to pay)...
California livin' (California livin'), in a very sim'lar way...

Char

Posted by: Hell Freezes Over

Can you show me an edit from Cberlet that was almost as bad as the edits of the LaRouche accounts?

Cberlet did not "leave in disgrace." He left because he was tired of having to fight lunatics to improve articles.

You all claim to care about BLP. Chip Berlet and the article about him were attacked on Wikipedia by Nobs, HK, and friends, in a way that was absolutely deplorable. Nobs even implied Chip had some connection to a very serious criminal offence, at one point -- I won't post details here because it would be libel. Chip put up with it for two or three years. Did anyone here, anyone who cares about BLP so much, help him, even once?

BLP applies to people we dislike, as much as to people we love. It applied to Gary Weiss too, and that is why WordBomb was indefblocked for posting that GW = MM. Yet you oppose that block, because you don't like the people involved.

You don't even try to disguise the hypocrisy. Decisions about what's right and what's wrong are based entirely on whether you like the parties or not. It's sad that this is the standard of intellectual debate about Wikipedia.

Posted by: dtobias

Psychological projection, anyone?

Posted by: Hell Freezes Over

You shared a computer with him at work, and you shared a computer with him at home too? Because that is what the technical evidence showed.

There's other evidence that unfortunately I'm not allowed to post, but there was also an email address. Not an identical address, but a very similar handle that you both used at the time, him on-wiki, you off-wiki.

Posted by: Jon Awbrey

Gadzooks! — where is that emeticon when I really need it?

Ah, there it is —

Ja Ja Jaaaaaaa

Posted by: GlassBeadGame

This is extraordinary. You collect and release information of this nature in pursuit of of what you believe to be "unencyclopedic" conduct. No one even remotely violated any ToS or licensing provisions let alone anything amounting to serious misconduct. It is based on perceived violations of rules and policies which are nothing more than just another type of user generated content. This justified this level of intrusion? Quite an encyclopedia.

Posted by: EricBarbour

Moderator's note: extra-large-font fulminations deleted, because it was easier than tarpitting the post. --HK


(dammit....what does it take to kill a thread?)

Posted by: Cla68

I can't believe that you can ask me that question with a straight face. Look at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Views_of_Lyndon_LaRouche/Archive_7#Material_about_LaRouche.27s_anti-Semitic_theory_of_history_should_be_restored. In his comments, CBerlet doesn't even try to hide that he is, in his words, trying to protect Wikipedia from LaRouche supporters. Notice that Will Beback tries to gently coax him down from his soapbox.

DKing and CBerlet were obviously virulently anti-Larouche. Since both of them were involved off-wiki in research of LaRouche and his politics with the objective of exposing LaRouche as a dangerous anti-Semite, perhaps even trying to profit from such research, then I think that COI could probably also apply in addition to the NPOV concerns.

Your pursuit of HK and the others while leaving CBerlet and DKing alone is hypocritical. The fact that you had a secret page in your userspace with an extensive list of editors, pages, and discussion thread links related to the LaRouche articles, and also seem to have somehow come to know HK's personal information, including where he lives and works, appears to indicate that your interest in LaRouche may rise to the level of personal interest. Are you personally interested in making sure that any POV that happens to take place in the LaRouche articles is anti-LaRouche?

Posted by: Shalom

RANDOM CRAP
RANDOM CRAP
RANDOM CRAP
RANDOM CRAP
RANDOM CRAP
RANDOM CRAP
RANDOM CRAP
RANDOM CRAP

If EricBarbour can post it, I can too.

Edit: oh never mind, the mods got it.

Posted by: Somey

I think you fundamentally misunderstand the prevailing (I hate to use the term "consensus") members' position here on BLP articles, SV. If Chip Berlet had asked to have his article deleted, I think most of us would have supported that wholeheartedly - I know I would have, and I think I might have even said so at the time.

Likewise, if the article was being vandalized, someone should have protected it - and as I recall, someone did do just that, at least twice that I can recall, just off the top of my head. But if The Chipster's ultimate objective was to have the article protected in a state he personally and explicitly approved of, then that's not something anyone here should care much about, other than to point out that it's unfair to all the other article subjects who don't have friends among the admins.

As for helping him, don't be ridiculous - we were helping him, by pointing out the insufficiency of the existing BLP policies, advocating for opt-out, and proposing other kinds of reforms. He might not have recognized that we were helping him, but that's only because he was being told by certain people that WR was a "nazi hate-site" and other such nonsense. Also, Daniel Brandt was here, and he doesn't like Daniel Brandt.

I guess it would be nice if you took the time to properly understand the culture here, but I understand that you wouldn't want to risk being drawn in to the point of actually having some degree of appreciation for the place.

Posted by: dtobias

I said psychological projection, not projectile vomiting!

Posted by: The Joy

In SV's case, is there an e-diff-erence?

Posted by: Heat

What I don't understand HK is why, given the number of people in the LaRouche movement, it wasn't possible for LaRouche supporters in different cities to organize themselves and edit wikipedia in much the way the Hasbara people have. This would have bypassed the sockpuppet allegations that ended up getting you banned permanently. Meat puppetry is much more difficult to prove than sockpuppetry, particularly when a movement is involved.

Posted by: Herschelkrustofsky

Your logic is plausible, but your conclusions are incorrect. First of all, according to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Sock_puppetry#Meatpuppets meatpuppets are treated the same as sockpuppets, so it doesn't really matter. Secondly, the LaRouche organization has had no organized response to Wikipedia beyond issuing http://www.larouchepac.com/static/2007/12/10/what-wikipedia.html as part of a mass-distribution pamphlet. I am puzzled by this, since Wikipedia is probably the highest-profile platform that Berlet has ever had. I suspect that the reason for all the pro-LaRouche WP accounts in California is that California was the birthplace of the LaRouche Youth Movement, and people in their 20s are far more internet-oriented then the oldsters.

Posted by: Jon Awbrey

Which means of course that they are treated with the same double standard as everything else in Jimbo's Wiki-Peanut-Butter {{Fact}}ory.

Jon

Posted by: Kato

The biography of Chip Berlet should be deleted. He is barely notable and no encyclopedia worth anything will miss it. Berlet also requests the deletion in http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletion/Chip_Berlet_(2nd_nomination).

It is claimed that the article was originally created by Herschelkrustofsky, and I'll take Slim's word for that.

Interestingly, if you look at that old Articles for Deletion debate, where Berlet adds his request for deletion, there are a few BLP extremists resisting for their own reasons. Including the later disgraced http://wikipediareview.com/index.php?showtopic=22630&hl=John254.

Someone should try again, giving the rationale that the subject and the creator want the biography deleted, and stating the facts that Wikipedia is simply incapable of handling a biography on such a figure who has spent years claiming that Lyndon LaRouche is a "neo-fascist anti-Semite". Deleting the bio on Berlet would be a step towards closing that shameful LaRouche / Wikipedia episode.

Posted by: Somey

Quite so. However, I must correct my earlier post - discussion of the Chip Berlet AfD on WR begins here:

http://wikipediareview.com/index.php?s=&showtopic=19380&view=findpost&p=116676

And while IMO most of the participants agreed that the article should be deleted, I didn't personally chime in on that subject at the time.

Posted by: Kato

Nor me, though I have the excuse of having abandoned this site at that time in protest at Poetguy's continued presence.

Posted by: It's the blimp, Frank

There is a problem with that proposal, which is that Berlet is used so extensively as a source at Wikipedia that people who read the articles need to have some idea who he is, so they know whether to believe his claims.

Slimvirgin: Please address, in a non-evasive way, your relationship to the Sunsplash and Sweet Blue Water accounts.

Posted by: Jon Awbrey

I should think that all such cases are generically covered by WR:CORNSENUOUS To NOB RULE, my earliest acronymic e-mortalization of which goes back to August 2007, though I'm sure the idea was hardly original at the time.

Jon Awbrey

Posted by: Jon Awbrey

Once again, we have the Toxic Waste Superfund Site calling the Backyard Compost Heap e-fluvious.

But you know I don't care all that much about one darn individual after another — if it were only Jimbo's Wiki-Prevarications or SlmVirgin's Wiki-Projections it wouldn't really be all that big of a deil. But what we've got here is what anthropologists call a Tribal Face — it's a Way Of Looking @ Everything that imbues, infuses, pervades the Wikipediot Cult so through-&-though that you can't help asking that old Chicken and the Egg question about which engenders the other.

Jon Awbrey

Posted by: Herschelkrustofsky

Revisiting all this history has made me nostalgic. Here's a vignette from the Golden Age of the LaRouche wars. First, SlimVirgin demonstrates with http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Talk:Views_of_Lyndon_LaRouche&diff=9400834&oldid=9394642 that she has grasped the essence of WikiPolitics: she simply proclaims that she, Berlet, and Will are the consensus. Get it?

Will doesn't quite get it. He's still wet behind the ears; his username in those days was Willmcw, not yet the robotic POV-pusher whom we know today as Will Beback. (I have always thought that the Will Beback name was chosen because he cathexized on http://www.spiralpocus.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/05/the-terminator.jpg But I digress.) In http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Talk:Views_of_Lyndon_LaRouche&diff=9470617&oldid=9470521 Slim slaps poor Will back into line, making it clear that if he wants to run with the big dogs, he's going to have to lose that tendency to compromise. Looking back, I think this may have been a seminal moment in Will's development, sort of a rite of passage on the road to adminship.

I think another seminal moment may be found in http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Talk:Views_of_Lyndon_LaRouche&diff=203929204&oldid=203915844 Berlet and King were attempting to insert one of King's whackjob theories, that if LaRouche criticizes a banker of any religious or ethnic background, it may be attributed to anti-Semitism. And they were attempting to insert it unsourced, as if it were undisputed fact. They rejected the idea that it should be sourced to King. And, Will Beback was backing them up 100%. Alison's intervention forced Will to back down (at this point, Slim had already retired from the field.) When Berlet realized that he no longer had carte blanche, he was never the same again, and I think his decision to leave was inevitable from that point on.

Posted by: Hell Freezes Over

He did ask that it be deleted, but it was kept. But for years before that, at least two posters here (HK and Nobs) used Wikipedia as a platform to attack him via his BLP and its talk page, and I don't recall anyone here objecting.



One of the people who was attacking him, and who created the BLP in the first place, is one of only four staff members here. This board has spent a lot of time attacking Berlet, for reasons I've never understood. Chip Berlet was someone who wrote for at least one real encyclopaedia. He was a published expert on the LaRouche movement and on right-wing extremist groups in general. He should not have been driven off Wikipedia just because a few people decided to use that website and this one to ridicule him. It's very sad that he was given no support here at all, even though you all claim to support expert editors and harassed BLP victims. Berlet was both.

Posted by: Kato

For the record: I didn't write that quoted insert above, that was Somey. My http://wikipediareview.com/index.php?s=&showtopic=23773&view=findpost&p=167927 about this have already been made.

Posted by: Herschelkrustofsky

As has been noted, I enjoy irony.

Posted by: Kato

Chip Berlet shouldn't have been anywhere near the LaRouche articles - certainly not adding himself as a source. Nor should Hersch for that matter. But one minute you are putting it about that Herschel has suspected "Conflicts of Interest", the next you are allowing Chip - with a blatant Conflict of Interest - carte blanche to write what he likes about LaRouche?

And you didn't think people would have a problem with that?

This is what I mean by the fostering of a culture which "warped the notions of Conflicts of Interest".

Posted by: Heat

I think Berlet is a Reliable Source on Larouche. However, he's also very much an involved party given the thirty or so odd year feud between himself and the Larouche organization and he was certainly in a Conflict of Interest editing the articles. Even without the feud it's pretty bad form to use yourself as a source on wikipedia even if you are a published author.

Posted by: Herschelkrustofsky

Berlet is a third-rate specialist in innuendo, demonization, quote-cooking, and the other http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Propaganda#Techniques His talents are not much in demand these days, which is why he spent so much time link-spamming his website on Wikipedia, in hopes of drumming up some business.

Posted by: Hell Freezes Over

Why shouldn't Berlet be editing them? He is a published expert, and the only reason he started editing them was because Hersch, an employee of the LaRouche movement, arrived to add nonsense to them, and created an insulting article on Berlet.

Are you saying that anyone with expertise has a conflict of interest? Berlet is the kind of expert that the BBC immediately calls when it's doing a story on LaRouche. He is known all over the world by journalists who've written stories about the movement. The picture of Berlet painted here by Nobs, Hersch, and Brandt is a false one.

If you're going to say that it wasn't so much that Berlet was an expert, but that he had been attacked by them, thereby making it personal, you have to understand that the LaRouche movement attacks anyone who criticizes them. They sometimes do it to the point of serious personal harassment -- credible people have reported physical assault, the death of pets etc. At the very least, they try to blacken that person's name. If that means Berlet can no longer be used as an expert by WP, then you're playing directly into the hands of his attackers.

And he didn't have "carte blanche" to write whatever he wanted on Wikipedia. He had to stick to published sources like anyone else. People are allowed to use themselves as a published source, so long as their work is directly relevant and is the kind of thing that might be (or has been) used by other publications. Berlet's work always was in that category, because he is a world expert on LaRouche.

Posted by: Heat

COI. He's very much an involved party.

Posted by: Kato

Berlet's first edits of any significance were to tone down or remove the hatchet job elements of his biography which was created some 6 months or so earlier. Which seems pretty reasonable.

Despite the madness which ensued, it's unfair to suggest that Berlet appeared out of the blue to link spam Wikipedia.

Posted by: Hell Freezes Over

This is exactly what I mean. It was *not* his website. [[Political Research Associates]] is a company. It is not owned by Berlet. He is an employee, a professional researcher. It is a company used by journalists who are investigating PRA's area of expertise.

Posted by: nobs

Patently false, and definitely repeating Berlet tripe & smears. All my information was properly sourced per WP citation policies at the time, and the specific example you, Mr. Hell Freezes Over, cite here was most definitely cited to the Washington Post. And Berlet made the claim in ArbCom that I said it, whereas with a click anyone can see for themselves on the Evidence page the cite was to the Washington Post. Interesting. BLP didn't exist in those days. And I believe my actions & case in some small measure helped force the issue -- particularly since Wikipedia was routinely used by Berlet, and Slim, and Will Beback to regulalry demonize and denounce thier imaginery political enemies.

Posted by: Kato

Good grief. If you don't know that, then you have learned nothing from the absolute chaos of the past four years.

Slim, people here told me you were smart.

You're not. Earlier in the thread you seemed to wilfully ignore evidence presented of the LaRouche witchunts - after I posted it twice.

Now, you think it is perfectly reasonable for someone to edit articles on a BLP subject whom they've had open legal battles with in the Courts?!? You don't think that is a fucking Conflict Of Interest?!?!

Get out of here.

Posted by: GlassBeadGame

Much worse than that. Once he set himself up as the expert interpreter of LaRouchie "code talk" he lost all ability to engage in reasoned discussion. His adversary's very words mean anything he says they mean. He is now able to carry on both sides of the dialog and take it anywhere he wants. He no longer needs an encyclopedia, just a mirror.

Posted by: Rhindle

Ok, let's see if I have this straight.

HK: LaRouche fanboy (just to keep it simple)

Cberlet: anti-LaRouche activist.

HK, at worst, wants LaRouche-related subjects to show glowing support of LaRouche and purge any negative content. In essence, a promotional wp puffpiece.

Cberlet, at worst, wants to show how bad of a man this LaRouche guy is and wants to make sure that anything that looks positive toward LaRouche is never, ever portrayed anywhere on wikipedia.

Cberlet is praised by "the Cabal" for keeping out all that "pro-LaRouche propaganda" but is allowed to have his published anti-LaRouche propaganda used as a source for wikipedia. His involvement sounds like COI to me.

I'm never been involved in this issue but it seems like keeping pro-LaRouche POV out of the article is of utmost importance for NPOV presentation while anti-LaRouche POV is all fine and dandy and conforms to an NPOV presentation. This seems inconsistent to me.

What if I, or anyone for that matter, was similar in notability as Berlet and published information critical of say, Barack Obama? How successful would I be if wanted to source my material of all the bad things Obama did (if no other source mentioned these things)? Probably not a WP:SNOW chance.

This is just another example of inconsistent treatment that I've seen on WP. This seems like a major theme to why this board exists. One side on wp is portrayed the bad guy while the other comes out smelling like roses in wikiland until the real facts show otherwise and it takes a long time for some to swallow their pride and admit a mistake was made.

Posted by: Herschelkrustofsky

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Requests_for_arbitration/Nobs01_and_others#Cberlet.27s_original_research

Posted by: Hell Freezes Over

What you're saying is that material published by a reliable publisher, and used all over the world by journalists, including very credible news programs such as the BBC's Panorama, may not be used as a source on Wikipedia because (a) a bunch of people such as yourself have been persuaded by the LaRouche movement that the authors are evil, and (b) the authors dared to defend themselves when trashed by the LaRouche movment, which made it a personal dispute.

Normally, this board laughs about stuff like this, where WP postures in ways not recognized by the real world.

As horribly time-consuming as it is, if you want to comment in an informed way, you really ought to go through Berlet's edits, including posts to talk and to the ArbCom; then go through Hersch's and Nobs's, including Hersch's socks and IP addresses, and compare the quality of their edits and the sources. No more would need to be said.

Posted by: GlassBeadGame

I'm not surprised that you would approve of a method that deprives people you disagree with a voice.

Posted by: Kato

In a nutshell. Yes.

There really is nothing more to be said.

I'll leave it to Chip Berlet, allowed to control content on WP about LaRouche for the best part of 3 years. Try reading this with a straight face. It's difficult to tell who are more ridiculous, the LaRouchies or the Anti-LaRouchies.

http://www.publiceye.org/larouche/

Includes Downloadable Flyer!

QUOTE(Chip Berlet)

Counteract the LaRouche network's propaganda and recruitment. This double-sided, legal-sized flyer exposes LaRouche's record on sexism, racism, homophobia, antisemitism & neofascism, and anti-environmentalism as well as his crackpot conspiracies and criminal background. A great tool for leafleting campuses and anti-war rallies. http://www.publiceye.org/larouche/flyer.pdf

Posted by: nobs

Slim: Let's cut to the quick (I just been informed who you are).

When Jimbo Wales told Editor & Publisher on December 5, 2005, two weeks prior to BLP being considered,

I think we can safely surmise the only possible "reliable sources" for this inane statement are Chip Berlet, and SlimVirgin. Then all suckups in the Admin community got into the act. And look at the damage to both Wikipedia & Jimbo's credibility it wrought.

Let's not confuse the cause of anti-communism with LaRouchism. This is an assinine path to pursue, even for you. It won't work. Let's not go there.

Posted by: dtobias

That's Ms. Hell Freezes Over.

Posted by: Somey

The fact that it was "kept" is completely irrelevant to the discussion, obviously, but the fact that you mention it is somewhat telling...


Well http://wikipediareview.com/index.php?s=&showtopic=6474&view=findpost&p=21963, but it sounded earlier as though you were calling us "hypocrites" for not logging into Wikipedia and defending the guy's article. That's not something I would ever do, but as for the rest of the membership here, we're not some sort of cyber-vigilante organization (AFAIK). Even if Berlet was someone we actually liked, which might have been possible if he wasn't being protected by a substantial group of WP admins, that would have been a bit much to ask.


Well, shame on him, then. Then again, like Rhindle says, if you're going to use him as a source in a highly contentious group of articles, you really should have an article on him, at the very least. Now, if you weren't using him as a source, maybe I could see it.


I don't think so. As I recall, most of the "attack" edits to his article were attempts to suggest, if not actually prove, his conflicts of interest with regard to Larouche-related material, and to point out criticism of him by conservative groups. At no time did anyone here (to my knowlege) edit his article to claim or even vaguely suggest that Berlet is, or was, a "pedophile," a "wife-beater," a "faggot," a "child-molester," or that he fathered multiple children out of wedlock with an Albanian prostitute. Those are the kinds of things we tend to object to around here when it comes to BLP's. I'm not saying the "attack" edits in question were fair, or even factual, but there's just no equivalence for them - beyond the fact that Berlet himself objected to them.

As for him being an expert, let me give you a "hypothetical." Let's say that for the next 25 years, I make a career out of trying to convince the world that US President Barack Obama is an anti-semite, and to do so I not only use innuendo, selective interpretation, and references to "coded phraseology" in obscure Obama speeches that I worked out all by myself, but I also totally ignore published material written by Obama in which he writes or says things like "anti-semitism is one of the most despicable ideologies in human history." Or, when I don't simply ignore such statements, I dismiss them as "lies" and "rhetorical trickery."

So where am I, after 25 years? Am I considered an "expert on Barack Obama"? Of course not. I'm considered, quite rightly, a crank, a crackpot, an idiot, maybe even a traitor (if there's any justice). And yet there's no real difference between this and what Berlet has done with Larouche for the last 25 years, except for the fact that nobody likes Larouche, and Larouche doesn't like anybody else either. Larouche himself is widely considered a crackpot, as we all know. He is, basically, an "easy target," someone nobody cares much for, outside of his immediate circle of followers.

Regardless, the point here isn't that Berlet is dishonest or unethical, or even that he isn't really an "expert" on Lyndon Larouche in the sense that, say, Steven Hawking is an expert on advanced astrophysics, or even that Phil Sandifer is an expert on Doctor Who. I don't think anybody should have the right to demand that "experts" on them be impartial, though it would be nice if they were. The point is that Wikipedia ought to be able to discern whether or not any given expert is impartial, and if he isn't, don't let him control the articles in question. That didn't happen in this case.

Posted by: Herschelkrustofsky

To be fair, Cberlet didn't control the articles in question. Slim and Will Beback did. Berlet served at their pleasure.

Posted by: Cla68

You never addressed my question from yesterday, which is if you have a personal interest in making LaRouche look bad on Wikipedia? Here's why I ask:

- The LaRouche ArbCom case you were a party to found that you had committed personal attacks.
- You admit that you somehow know Herschel's name, living location, and place of work.
- You defend two rabidly (no, this word isn't an exaggeration, see the evidence others like Kato have presented in this thread) anti-LaRouche journalists' access to edit LaRouche articles while helping Jayjg and a few other admins ban all editors who appear even slightly pro-LaRouche
- You kept a secret page in your userspace that extensively documented suspected pro-LaRouche editors and sources related to the LaRouche articles.
- You often used to edit articles, frequently with Jayjg, about right-wing and anti-semitic topics, like New Anti-Semitism.
- Your editing almost, if not completely, always agreed with Jayjg's POV on those topics.
- Jayjg, as documented in a recent thread in his section in WR, is often quick and active at labeling BLP subjects as anti-semitic or anti-zionist, including, evidently, LaRouche
- You became irritated in a previous post in this thread, calling me a hypocrite, for asking why you never called-out Jayjg for POV-pushing or didn't advocate topic banning DKing and CBerlet

Now, it could be that LaRouche followers are trying to push POV on Wikipedia. But, it seems to me that what you, Jayjg, DKing, or CBerlet were doing was worse, which was pushing POV while pretending to be upholding the rules and using administrative privileges and wiki-political gaming to support your agenda. I'll give you a chance to answer before I go any further with my opinion on the issue.

Posted by: Random832

Says you.

Posted by: Milton Roe

It's true that Berlet didn't have the block-button and the others did. However, due to his subject matter, he was given free reign.

I believe it has been mentioned that the fastest way to climb the WP social ladder is much like how to climb it in in the modern media: play on Jewish paranoia, and attack in all directions outward from the NeoCon/pro-Israeli/vaguely squishy liberal center. Just use the terms neo-fascist, racist, white supremicist, and new-antisemitism a lot. Most of the time they can be interchangable.

That's what Berlet did for a living before he came to WP anyway, and it's still what he's doing after he's gone. It's also more or less what Jayjg does for a living, apparently, and Slim has edited that way for years (without using the terms, there's still not a playing card worth of difference between SlimVirgin's wiki-politics and Berlet or Jayjg's).

As to how Will Beback got any of this pineapple up his rear, I have no idea. There must be a story, there, but I don't know it.

Posted by: Somey

http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Views_of_Lyndon_LaRouche&diff=159307059&oldid=159277056

In fact, we probably wouldn't even be having this discussion right now, if it weren't for the homophobia of one of our (now former) members.

Ironically enough...

Posted by: It's the blimp, Frank

A good question, deserving of an answer. And don't forget mine:

Posted by: EricBarbour

Don't worry, she'll keep going there.

This is merely daytime entertainment, while she http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Requests_for_arbitration/Motion:_re_SlimVirgin#SlimVirgin_desysopped_.282.29
next month. Then you'll see a lot less of her on this forum.

Posted by: Somey

Well, I for one will miss her sweet, sunny disposition.

Posted by: Hell Freezes Over

Telling of what?



I'm not saying you needed to log in. I'm saying it's odd that so many other BLP issues get noticed, but the sustained (four years long roughly) attack on Berlet not only didn't get commented on in his favour -- it was added to here by Herschel, Nobs, and a couple of others, without anyone here saying, "Hang on, those are vicious attacks on someone already under vicious attack on Wikipedia *by the same people*, and we don't encourage that here." No, you *do* encourage it here, because one of the people doing it was promoted to staff.



Berlet wasn't being used as a source, so far as I know, when Herschel created the BLP on him in May 2004. http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Chip_Berlet&oldid=3597556 And you didn't use that argument when it came to Brandt -- that because he was a source for WP, we needed an article on him.



Herschel suggested in Berlet's BLP that he was corrupt. Nobs posted some awful stuff on the article's talk page that I won't repeat here, and as I recall tried to get some of it into the article too.



I suppose I wonder how much LaRouche you've read, Somey. You don't have to read much to find some very depressing material about Jews (as well as about gays and women), notwithstanding that he denies any antisemitism himself. And to dismiss him as a crackpot, as though he's a harmless one, is wrong-headed. The LaRouche movement used to be very good at cultivating young reporters in an effort to get its propaganda spread. An enormous number of prominent political conspiracy theories have been started or in some way spread by the LaRouche movement's ability to influence naive journalists. Over time, the origins of the rumours get lost, and they take on a life of their own. The LaRouchies then use those stories to spread the memes even further, trumpeting them as evidence of something they've been claiming for a long time, when in fact they made them up, and using their supposedly astonishing predictive power to bolster their credibility with the next generation of befuddled reporters.



I wonder how it would be possible to be a true expert on LaRouche, yet remain impartial.

Posted by: Kato

Perhaps by not distributing propaganda leaflets comparing LaRouche to Hitler, which carry crude caricatures of LaRouche as Superman wearing a swastika on his chest? That might be a start.

http://www.publiceye.org/larouche/

Posted by: Somey

Sorry, that was just a knee-jerk reaction on my part. It's just that I would have written it more like, "Berlet asked to have the article deleted, but he was unwilling or unable to back up his request with a massive lawsuit when a small group of mostly-anonymous revenge-obsessed cybergoons inevitably refused to delete it, and the actual publisher of the article decided (as per usual) to hide behind Section 230 of the CDA to deny all responsibility and accountability for the situation." Or something along those lines.


Well, it's hardly "odd," given some of the things he's said about us, and as for the rest of it, I think most people here have always seen him as a WP editor more than anything else. Certainly I'd never heard of him before I joined WR, and it's not like I'm oblivious to left-leaning political stuff in the US and elsewhere.


We might have, if Brandt hadn't declared almost immediately that he wanted his article deleted and stuck to it. Berlet, OTOH, became a rather active Wikipedian in his own right, and remained one for a good 2-3 years before finally coming to his senses.


I get called "corrupt" all the time, and I've decided it's not so bad really. It's probably just a USA-idiom sort of thing - it's actually considered a compliment here. I don't know about Canada...?

Anyway, I assume you're referring to http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Chip_Berlet&diff=4209099&oldid=4200789? The fact is, a whole bunch of reporters have been paid by Mellon-Scaife et al for doing all sorts of dirty tricks, most notably the Whitewater "scandal" and the effort to impeach Bill Clinton. It might be nice if the claim were cited, of course, but it's not all that hard to believe - and he did use the word "allegedly," at least. Surely no self-respecting vandal would be so equivocal as that?


That's just it, SV - I don't like Lyndon Larouche any more than you do, but I think you're the one who hasn't read enough, or else you'd be appalled at how often he agrees with you - on quite a few ideological issues. The fact is, Larouche either despises or distrusts just about everybody, including people who despise and distrust each other. For example, I keep pointing out how he totally agrees with you on Martin Luther's ultimate responsibility for the rise of the Nazis, which I (and IMO most people) would consider to be a grossly exaggerated and unfair claim, even in light of the fact that Luther was both German and a known anti-semite. But you never seem to "take the bait" on that one, for some reason...

Admittedly, Larouche also despises environmentalists, and I believe he lumps the Animal Rights people in with them. So you've got a perfectly legitimate reason there to oppose him, if not hate his guts - I'll give you that, at least.

Oh, and don't forget hippies. Larouche really hates hippies!

Posted by: Jon Awbrey

Of all the Whopping Idiocies in Wikiputia one of the Whoppingest Idiocies has got to be the Very Idea that an organization can have any sane policies about Conflict of Interest with members who will not disclose so much as their real names.

It's just one more area of Wikiputia where dishonest people get rewarded in proportion to their dishonesty and honest people get screwed in proportion to their honesty.

The same thing goes for all the members of this Review who operate under pseudonyms. They can spout generalities about Conflict of Interest all they want, but they cannot add anything but nonsense to any specific dispute until they are willing to make the pertinent disclosures, beginning at minimum with their real names.

Jon Awbrey

Posted by: CharlotteWebb

Or, more generally:

Posted by: Sarcasticidealist

Hey, look, I'm agreeing with Jon Awbrey!

(Though you'll note that as worded, Wikipedia's COI policy isn't binding in any way - it merely advises people to avoid editing where they might have a COI. Understanding of this by admins is, ah, uneven.)

Posted by: Jon Awbrey

Pertinent Disclosure. I'm a card-carrying Pragmatist (or Peircean Pragmaticist if you wanna get picky). Among other things this means that I reckon the meaning of a policy according to its practical effects, which may be hard to guess from the cloud of dust that's often as not raised by its words.

Hi Ho, Sliver, Away !!!

Jon Awbrey

Posted by: Cla68

Wow:

SV, you asked me for an edit by CBerlet that is as bad as HK's. I think this edit summary is much worse. It's a clear violation of BLP. I checked CBerlet's talk page for the days following that edit summary and saw nary a warning or block from you or anyone else who I assume were closely watching that article to make sure no pro-LaRouche editors touched it.

To be fair, SV's name is missing from what I believe was the last pro-LaRouche editor http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Administrators%27_noticeboard/Archive169#Possible_block-evading_agenda_account, but notice in that thread that Jayjg performed the checkuser, and JzG, Tom Harrison, and John Nevard were all active in pushing for action, in addition to Will Beback.



I guess you've confirmed that you have a personal stake in seeing that the content about LaRouche in Wikipedia is negative in nature. Do you see any problem with that?

Posted by: Lar

Why, exactly, do you expect her to answer this one? She hasn't answered anything substantive so far, just led everyone on one rhetorical wild goose chase after another. Why would this be different?

Posted by: Daniel Brandt

Doug Birch, "Master of the Politics of Paranoia," Baltimore Sun Magazine, 5 June 1988, p. 27:

That's just the tip of the iceberg, from a mainstream journalist. If you spend time digging into more obscure sources, there's a lot about Berlet's collusion with the right-wing — such as that domestic spy agency, the Anti-Defamation League, which has publicly thanked Political Research Associates for passing along information for its files. As long as a right-winger or a CIA-connected person (such as Roy Godson) is anti-LaRouche, that person is potentially someone Berlet is happy to work with.

He's a wannabe spy, or maybe a real one. I can see why Slim has an affinity for him. Yes, that fits my definition of "corrupt."

Posted by: Somey

Okay, but we haven't yet learned from SV that the diff we're referring to is the diff she's referring to, or if she's even referring to a particular diff at all. She's been associated with WP for a long time, so you have to wonder if she actually meant that Herschel accused Mr. Berlet of using a "sock puppet."

Posted by: Herschelkrustofsky

Here's a http://www.geocities.com/berlet_archive/QA.htm


I must admit that although I have probably read as much LaRouche as anyone here, I'm drawing a blank on this one.

Posted by: Herschelkrustofsky

Although I can see that you wrote "at worst," I don't think that the actual record reflects anything like that. My battles over LaRouche went through several stages. My first major opponent was Adam Carr (T-C-L-K-R-D) , who was certainly the most lunatic POV-pusher of them all. He seemed to think that he had a divine dispensation to write whatever he damn well pleased, and when he didn't get what he wanted, his tantrums were spectacular. He stopped editing the LaRouche articles due to tantrum-fatigue.

That left another anti-LaRouche editor, whose name went through several changes and wound up as Formeruser-81 (T-C-L-K-R-D) . By my best recollection, Formeruser was a clean fighter; he didn't try to game the system, did not try to recruit admins to ban his opponents, etc. The other thing about the period that followed, which in retrospect seems remarkable now, is that Snowspinner AKA Phil Sandifer offered to mediate the conflict, and was an honest broker. The conflict was actually resolved to everyone's relative satisfaction, producing http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Lyndon_LaRouche&oldid=6436747 which I believe will stand up to scrutiny as not a "puff piece."

This version of the article remained stable until the advent of Slim, Berlet and Will.

Posted by: Kato

The main things I'm getting from this thread are:

1. Herschel, or whoever it was, shouldn't have started the biography on Chip Berlet. That was a real mistake. That biography should be deleted at the subject's request, and for other valid reasons.
2. Chip Berlet shouldn't have been allowed anywhere near the LaRouche articles. He's been in litigation with LaRouche for starters, has a massive conflict of interest, and openly talks about his quest to counter LaRouche whom he regularly compares to Hitler. It was inevitable that his presence would cause major problems.
3. The clique of admins and users who are openly anti-LaRouche, who rallied round to protect Berlet, showed blatant double standards; dragged a large area of Wikipedia through the mud - further discredited the place. They have shown they cannot be trusted any more than any of the other disruptive forces at the site.

Posted by: Heat

You're conflating two different questions 1) Can Chris Berlet be used as a source 2) can he edit articles in which he is a source (and about whom he's been involved in litigation).

I think the answer to 1) is yes - at least in the case of his book and interviews he's done with major media and to 2) is no.

Also, I think you're exaggerating Larouche's importance. He did have some influence in the Reagan Administration and then there were those fluke primary victories by Larouche supporters, also in the 1980s but since the late 1980s when he was exposed in the major media and the early 1990s when he was incarcerated he's been a spent force. Yes, the Larouche movement can still recruit people (fewer than they used to) and wreck their lives like any cult can but their impact in the real world is negligible. The Scientologists and Moonies are a greater threat.

Posted by: Herschelkrustofsky

You've said this three or four times now, so I assume that you mean it. Ms. Hell may be correct in assuming that you haven't read much LaRouche. Permit me to give you a capsule summary of who and what LaRouche likes:

LaRouche likes the Renaissance, because it was the first movement to break with the millennia-old practice of affording the mass of humanity the same rights and dignity afforded to the livestock. He likes the American Revolution, because it was the first attempt to build a nation-state around those ideas of the Renaissance, instead of just institutionalizing the rule of some gang that managed to seize power. And although the commitment of the USA to those ideas was a bit shaky, there have been leaders who reaffirmed them and attempted to share them with the rest of the world: Abraham Lincoln, Franklin Roosevelt, and Martin Luther King, for example. LaRouche likes them, too. And the http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-Aligned_Movement These are examples of humanitarian action, an unselfish commitment to giving the vast majority of humans, who live without much hope, a chance.

Now in the late 1960s, there was a big change in American culture. I think it was manipulated, and you are free to dismiss that claim as a conspiracy theory. But regardless, the outcome was clear: Americans of all persuasions were soon frantically Doing Their Own Thingâ„¢ and any humanitarian impulse was pretty much lost. People in my age group tend to have their egos heavily invested in that Paradigm Shiftâ„¢ and they get their backs up when LaRouche stridently tells them that it sucks.

One last thing: I take offense when Ms. Hell claims that the LaRouche movement is "right wing." It is a calculated, cynical insult to people such as myself. I got involved in presidential politics as a high school student, supporting Eugene McCarthy in 1968, George McGovern in 1972, and then LaRouche in subsequent elections. I believe this demonstrates a preference on my part for humanitarian candidates, and the coherence of my choices is underscored by the fact that Gene McCarthy, late in his life, became a close friend of LaRouche, while McGovern, last time I heard, was still alive and on cordial terms with the LaRouche movement.

Posted by: Hell Freezes Over

Who do you believe manipulated it?

Posted by: Jon Awbrey

Levi-Strauss

Ja Ja

Posted by: Son of a Yeti

That's projection (in the psychological sense).

You are manipulating everyone you meet and therefore you assume that everything must be the result of some manipulation.

Posted by: Moulton

Malefactors of Great Stealth.

Posted by: Hell Freezes Over

I haven't watched the LaRouche articles for a long time.

Yes, that edit summary was a BLP violation, though nowhere near as bad as creating WP articles in order to attack people, as Herschel did. But you might want to look at the LaRouche quote that Berlet was responding to. LaRouche is here talking about the need to take action against people with AIDS -- as I recall, he wanted to quarantine them:

"We have another purpose in fighting AIDS, for our fighting AIDS — for our inducing people to do what they should have done anyway without our speaking a word. Government agencies should have done this. There should be no issue! But government agencies didn't! That's the issue. Why didn't they? Because of a cultural paradigm shift. They did not want, on the one hand, to estrange the votes of a bunch of faggots and cocaine sniffers, the organized gay lobby, as it's called in the United States. (I don't know why they're "gay", they're the most miserable creatures I ever saw! The so-called gay lobby, 8% of the population, the adult electorate; the drug users. There are 20 million cocaine sniffers in the United States, at least. Of course it does affect their mind; it affects the way they vote! ...

"Where did this nonsense come from? Oh, we don't want to offend the gays! Gays are sensitive to their civil rights; this will lead to discrimination against gays!

"They’re already beating up gays with baseball bats around the country! Children are going to playgrounds, they go in with baseball bats, and they find one of these gays there, pederasts, trying to recruit children, and they take their baseball bats and they beat them up pretty bad. They’ll kill one sooner or later. In Chicago, they’re beating up gays that are hanging around certain schools, pederasts; children go out with baseball bats and beat them up—which is perfectly moral; they have the civil right to do that! It’s a matter of children’s civil rights!" -- Lyndon LaRouche, Executive Intelligence Review, January 10, 1986. http://www.publiceye.org/larouche/context_quotes.html#gays

Posted by: the fieryangel

Actually, I did come to this conclusion concerning Wikipedia and experts myself. An expert, especially a published expert, cannot adhere to Wikipedia policy in the current way that it is applied. An expert can't help but use primary sources, and to create original research even using published sources which are for laymen. It comes with the territory.

The only solution is to avoid editing on WP in any area in which you have expertise, since you're always going to be going against the rules. I would argue that someone like Chip Berlet should either limit their suggestions to talkpages, or not edit at all (the solution that I've finally come to, personally).

Posted by: CharlotteWebb

All this talk of cocaine, gays, and baseball bats reminds me that http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glenn_Burke's bio is poorly sourced and could use some fixing up.

Oh wait, he's dead, disrega#@*%)(=%NO CARRIER

Posted by: the fieryangel

Leaving aside the moral aspects of making such a statement, let's talk about inclusion of this kind of material in an encyclopedia: Would Britannica include that sort of thing? Not in the way that WP does, I should think.

It all goes back to the core policy of NPOV: is adding this information "neutral"? I really can't see how it could be.

You know, if you people would just enforce your policies as they are written in a fair and level manner, then 99% of this type of stuff wouldn't happen in the first place.

Posted by: Jon Awbrey

Any attempt to reason on the basis of Wikipediot excuses for definitions and norms is bound to lead to despair.

They simply have no grasp of what terms like Conflict of Interest, Original Research, or Primary Source mean in the Real World.

Give it up — it's sheer and utter baby babble.

Jon Awbrey

Posted by: Hell Freezes Over

By neutral, all we mean is that we publish the views of all reliable published sources. The overwhelming majority of sources all over the western world, when writing about LaRouche, talk about allegations of cultism, homophobia, antisemitism, misogyny, his shift from extreme left to extreme right, his attempts to become president, his bizarre attacks on Britain, including that the Beatles were some kind of front for British intelligence, and that the Queen is the head of an international drug cartel. Then there are the claims by researchers who've investigated him, or former members, of their names being blackened, or their homes or pets being attacked.

Britannica doesn't have detailed articles on anything the way we do on WP, so comparing them doesn't help us to work out what's appropriate. If you're going to have a detailed article, it's impossible to leave this stuff out, because there's so much of it. Also, why would we *want* to leave it out? He did say those things, and he presumably stands by all or most of them.

Posted by: Heat

The question is would Britannica allow someone who is involved in the story to write their article? No. They might use him as a source but they wouldn't ask him to contribute. Berlet can be used as a source for Larouche articles but he shouldn't be editing them. You haven't addressed this point despite the fact that it's been brought up several times but, again, cherry picking which questions you answer is part of how you operate.

And I think you mean the Beatles, the rock band not the Beetles, the insect. It's a take off of "beat".

Posted by: Jon Awbrey

Silly Bugger … they obviously worked for Khrushchev …

Ja Ja

Posted by: Herschelkrustofsky

We have a backlog of unanswered questions on this thread. Let's get to these first, after which I will be happy to answer your question:

Posted by: Heat

True, if you want to read up on Punky Brewster or want to view David Shankbone's porn collection Britannica's not the place to look.

Posted by: the fieryangel

"NPOV" is supposed to include all positions, both pro and con, with adjustments made for "weight". This means effectively that you have to make room for all positions in any given article. If somebody finds a source which says "LaRouche is the best thing since sliced bread" and it fits the RS criteria, you have to give that fact room in the article. Verifiability, not facts, wasn't that it?

For this process to work, you have to have procedure which does not allow material to be removed because somebody doesn't like it. It should be that something which is sourced should be not removable and removing that should be the bannable offense, not the type of political jerry mongering that typically happens now.

If you had to include a source which was not your own work and the information sourced could not be removed, then you might have a chance of coming up with "balanced" articles.

There are all types of people in the World. I just wonder if it is the place of an encyclopedia to be making judgments about who is "homophobic" and who is "racist" etc. It seems to me that if you start allowing moral judgments like that, we get to the horrors of things like the old version of the Crystal Gail Mangum article. We don't want to go there again, do we?

Posted by: Sarcasticidealist

That's not true; the requirement to adjust for weight is perfectly consistent with some reliably sourced opinions not being sufficiently widely held/covered to merit any mention at all in an article.

(Not trying to cast myself in the role of defender of Wikipedia's content policies, but you were misrepresenting that one.)

Posted by: the fieryangel

Here are the first two paragraphs of the NPOV policy as it currently stands :



So, I believe that my description fits into the spirit of these two paragraphs. How this is applied in practice is another matter indeed...

Posted by: Hell Freezes Over

Britannica had (or used to have in 2007-8) its animal rights article written by a law professor who is openly and actively pro-animal rights.

Posted by: Herschelkrustofsky

We have a backlog of unanswered questions on this thread. Let's get to these first, after which I will be happy to answer your question:

Posted by: Sarcasticidealist

From the "Undue weight" portion of that page:
The classic example is whether to include in the article about Elizabeth II the (documented in reliable sources) view that she's actually an extra-dimensional lizard person. Consensus (in the real sense of the word) is no.

Posted by: Hell Freezes Over

Yes, exactly. We publish the views of all reliable sources (in accordance with UNDUE), plus in the case of a BLP his or her own views about him/herself, whether that would otherwise be a reliable source or not. That means that LaRouche's views about himself (and his movement's views about him) have to be included too.



If that's what reliable sources are saying, we do include it. We can't say that, according to NPOV, we must include all reliable sources, but then add, "except for the ones that make what we feel are inappropriate judgments."

Posted by: GlassBeadGame

So this is the guy who you can't prevail over in honest discourse with resorting to "code talk?" He doesn't seem like he is holding back, now does he?

Posted by: the fieryangel

except in the article about the "Theory that Queen Elizabeth II is an extra-dimensional lizard person" article, in which that information would have to be presented, as well as the contradictory viewpoint.

I really fail to see how LaRouche publications and sources could be kept out of any article about LaRouche and his movement, if you follow this policy.




Then why do these problems occur? They do, and according to the policies themselves and the underlying idea of objectivism, they shouldn't.

Are you saying that it is an objective reality that, for example, women should be excluded from the List of major opera composers (or more correctly, confined to a ghetto) because nobody had any sources which were current and included information about women? And if you answer that this is supposedly an evolving process, just try to change one thing on that list and see what happens.

Posted by: Herschelkrustofsky

Please note that Ms. Hell is using the Berlet website as a source of quotes from LaRouche. It's not a reliable source. Please note http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Political_views_of_Lyndon_LaRouche/Evidence_of_"cooked_quotes" from when we were fighting over it 4 years ago.

Posted by: Sarcasticidealist

Well, it's covered in http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Icke, actually. But yes, your understanding is correct.

Posted by: EricBarbour

She's quite good at pushing your angry buttons, eh?

Why don't you just slam the control-panel lid on her hand?
Then you won't have to "explain" anything, to a creature
you cannot reason with.

Posted by: Herschelkrustofsky

I posted that for the benefit of my esteemed colleague GlassBeadGame. But point taken.

Posted by: GlassBeadGame

I already noticed that H. I'm not in the business of defending LaRouche, except that I once posted around here how http://wikipediareview.com/index.php?s=&showtopic=22582&view=findpost&p=153396 with a very nice young lady. I don't think we need to be concerned about whether LaRouche is good or evil. We need to more concerned about whether Mr. Berlet ought to be a source for anything. That "code talk" stuff is just the most disingenuous and intellectually dishonest thing imaginable. I will never get past that. It just says volumes and not about LaRouche.

I also want to add that H himself is kind, slow to anger and considerate of fair process and the concerns of others, even of those who disagree with him. Even when they will never know that he is sticking up for their rights.

Posted by: Moulton

There's only one honorable way to settle this kind of dispute.

Song parodies at twenty paces.

Posted by: Hell Freezes Over

LaRouche publications aren't kept out of articles about LaRouche and his movement. The problem with Herschel was he was trying to use them as sources in other articles too.



We can only include e.g. women in lists of opera composers if we have reason to believe that women composed operas. If we have reason to believe it, it must be because someone has written about it.

Posted by: Jon Awbrey

I have no pig in this poke, politickwise, but I do observe that the technique of using controversial content to distract discussants from the more generally critical issues of process hardly ever fails to snow-blind some people.

Jon Awbrey

Posted by: Hell Freezes Over

Are you saying that LaRouche did not say or write those things about gays being drug addicts, pederasts etc?

I'll quote myself from the link you provided. The only thing I was wrong about was that it wasn't three LaRouche supporters we were up against, but one pretending to be three:

"Weed, to answer your questions: (1) the section omitted (for reasons of space) from the first quote does not affect the meaning of the remaining bold section. LaRouche is saying, as I understand it, that violence against AIDS victims, whom he equates with gays, whom in turn he later equates with pederasts, is justifiable and understandable; and (2) regarding the second, LaRouche is identifying with the views expressed. He is saying they are justifiable and understandable. Had he wanted to condemn these acts, he would have done so clearly. He is very explicit with his condemnations when he wants to be. Cberlet hit the nail on the head when he talked about Herschel and Weed's attempts to stave off cognitive dissonance. This is where the irrationality of these discussions stems from, much of which, over the last seven months, have boiled down to three LaRouche supporters unwilling to face up to what LaRouche himself says and does." SlimVirgin 02:11, Jan 23, 2005 (UTC)

Posted by: Herschelkrustofsky

We have a backlog of unanswered questions on this thread. Let's get to these first, after which I will be happy to answer your question:

Posted by: the fieryangel

Well, people have written about it, but the information is excluded from the article because of WP:OWN issues.

Let's explore this further : Have a look at the article Poseur, which gives the idea that this expression is almost exclusively part of the vocabulary of pop music genres. Yes, there is a brief mention of the French origin of the expression and then a brief mention of Norman Mailer before several long segments about Punk, Metal, Hiphop and other musical genres. Wouldn't you call this giving "undue weight" to what is clearly a sub genre of the meaning of this word, rather than the principal meaning?

Isn't this article inherently misleading?

Posted by: Jon Awbrey

So here comes Hell Freezes Over, acting like every other noob who comes to our shores from Wikiputia … preaching the Gospel of Jimbo … like we haven't already heard it till we could just barf —

Posted by: Hell Freezes Over

Well, that's a different issue. If there are good sources, the material should be in the article.



I don't know enough to be able to answer, except to say that the non-music-genre use of the term is still about people adopting mannerisms not their own, so I wouldn't call it misleading exactly. Maybe you could add some of the non-music sources to the lead, just to make clear there are/were other groups who've used the term?

Posted by: the fieryangel

Actually, I can't edit on WP because I'm under a "community ban" (which I do respect). However, if I were to edit this article, I would start by cutting a good 90 % of it as BLP violations (debating whether people are "poseurs" or not, equating "poseur" with "fags", other statements which really have no business in an encyclopedia). I would then probably create a "disambiguation" page with the "mainstream" usage and the "pop music" specific genre usage.

By this time, since I'd probably be banned and/or hauled before Arbcom by the people who "own" this article, the question is probably moot.

I'll say it for you: this article is misleading. There is clearly an agenda behind it. That seems quite clear to me. Why is this allowed to remain like this?

Posted by: Jon Awbrey

Why do you think?

Jon

Posted by: Cla68

We're starting to go off on a tangent about American cultural history. To get back to the subject at hand, Kato provides an excellent summary above of where we stand in this discussion so far. I'd say that the next step is, how can Wikipedia resolve this? Well, I suggest:

- Topic ban DKing and CBerlet (I know, I know, Berlet is "retired" from editing).
- Delete Berlet's BLP.
- Topic ban Jayjg, SV, and any of the other editors and admins who have pursued the "pro-LaRouche" editors using bad-faith tactics.

Posted by: Newyorkbrad

You mean [[Allegations of English lizardry]]?

Posted by: dtobias

If the Queen is found to have attended Hogwarts School of Bitchcraft and Lizardry, that would settle the issue, wouldn't it?

Posted by: Hell Freezes Over

Cla, you do yourself no favours with this kind of extreme bias. You seem to reach decisions based entirely on whether you like the players or not. With Jossi, you deplore his editing of [[Prem Rawat]], given that he appears to have been employed by that organization, and you applaud the editors who opposed him. (And I agree with you. If he was employed by Prem Rawat, he should not have been editing there.)

But with LaRouche, you want the experts topic-banned, the editors who opposed the LaRouche edits topic-banned, but the LaRouchies themselves, including those apparently employed by LaRouche -- for them you mention no restrictions whatsoever!

Look at the edit histories of all the LaRouche articles, and the talk pages, before you comment further, please. The LaRouche editors were a menace. Bad editors, who appeared to have been completely brain-washed, and who could not find it within themselves to post, or watch anyone else post, a single non-adoring word about the leader.

Posted by: dtobias

...and you don't?

Posted by: Hell Freezes Over

That's right, I don't, and there's an example in my post above. I like Jossi, but I can't support his editing [[Prem Rawat]] if he was indeed working for him.

Posted by: Kato

Listen, what kind of neutral fucking editing expert distributes propaganda pamphlets about the subject carrying cheap caricatures of him wearing swastikas, has been in involved in various cases of litigation with the subject, and actually makes money writing bad stuff about the guy?

I'll give you the benefit that you actually believe what you are saying, in which case I think you are simply deluded and ignorant.

Posted by: Kato

Well take another trip down WP's irony wormhole. It was Jossi and yourself who hammered out the Conflict of Interest policies back in 2006. By the time you'd finished, http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia:Conflict_of_interest&diff=83652610&oldid=83652157:



Jossi http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia_talk:Conflict_of_interest&diff=prev&oldid=83629587 on the talk page, and you agreed.

So we've got Mr Conflict of Interest himself, Jossi, ironing out the policy. Meanwhile, you http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia:Conflict_of_interest&diff=83652610&oldid=83652157 while all the time assuming its perfectly acceptable for Chip Berlet - who has been in litigation with LaRouche - to be all over the LaRouche articles editing away to his heart's content?

And you didn't think people would have a problem with that? Ridiculous. Wikipedia deserves all the trouble caused by this LaRouche mess. It deserves it. What an incompetent shambles.

Posted by: Heat

Really - then why are you silent in regards to Jayjg's POV editing, FenloniousMonk's abusive adminship and in regards to Proaboviac's harassment and outing of individuals - including your friend?

Posted by: Hell Freezes Over

What trouble was caused on WP by the "LaRouche mess"? Herschel was taken to ArbCom, a number of LaRouche sockpuppets were blocked, and an expert on LaRouche stopped editing because he felt WP panders too much to lunatics. What trouble was there other than that?

Posted by: Heat

What we're dealing with here though is BLP and in particular one involving litigation. Peter C. Newman wrote a biography of former Canadian Prime Minister Brian Mulroney and is certainly an expert on him. Mulroney sued Newman over the book's contents and they settled out of court. Newman's book certainly can be used as a source for Wikipedia's article on Mulroney but if he tried to edit Mulroney's article himself he'd be clearly considered to have a Conflict of Interest. The situation is the same with Berlet and Larouche's bio.

Posted by: Random832

They're already banned; it's not worth mentioning.

Posted by: Lar

Asked and answered. But if you wanted to ask it again...

We have a backlog of unanswered questions on this thread. Let's get to these first, after which I am sure thread participants will be happy to answer your questions:


One has to wonder if your lack of support of Jossi is because sticking up for him now is not possible now that the tide has turned so definitively? Or is it perhaps because he's no longer useful to you?

But more generally, the suggestion that you don't reach decisions based on alliances (another way of saying "whether you like the players or not")... is... laughable.

Posted by: Kato

Hours and hours and hours wasted of good people's time. People who wanted nothing to do with your obviously flawed battle with LaRouche. All those RFC's and arbitrations. The not so small matter of innocent people being profiled as LaRouchies. The suspension of common sense and basic standards of neutrality and Conflict of Interest. The absolutely ridiculous state of affairs that means you are still arguing about it now.

According to Wikipedia's great proclamations, administrators are supposed should be impartial overseers of neutral content. But you started editing on LaRouche related topics within a month of editing. And you've obviously got serious personal issues with LaRouche as evidenced by this thread.

What on earth did you thing you were doing using admins tools on the LaRouche articles? What on earth did you think you were doing building up profiles of "LaRouche editors" in your private space? What on earth do you think you're doing still trying to justify the blatant disregard for tenets now?

If you still can't see the discrepancies in your conduct, and the obvious Conflicts of Interest problem caused by allowing Chip Berlet to cite himself on LaRouche articles, I can only conclude that you are simply deluded, and beyond reason.

Posted by: Hell Freezes Over

Get your facts right, please.

1. I am discussing this only because Herschel started this thread about it. I'd be quite happy not to discuss it ever again, but I don't want his disinformation to stand uncorrected anymore. He has been doing it for several years here. It's time that someone gave another side of the story. None of you have ever tried to.

2. Admin tools were used on those articles by admins who were editing them *only with the consent of the ArbCom*.

3. Show me one "innocent" person who was wrongly blocked as a LaRouchie (blocked per the rulings in three ArbCom cases).

4. I have no serious personal issues with LaRouche, just as any other Wikipedian who opposes cult editing need have no serious personal issue with those cults. I have issues with single-purpose accounts who turn up to use WP as their latest platform and who violate the content policies.

As I said earlier, there's an enormous hypocrisy here among a small number of you. You applaud the editors who opposed the Prem Rawat cult editing, yet you attack the editors who did the same with LaRouche. The difference? You have a LaRouche employee here as staff, and you can use the LaRouche articles as another stick to beat me with, your favourite pastime. It is intellectually dishonest, and reasonable readers of these posts will see that, notwithstanding the insults that a handful of you keep posting.

Posted by: Heat

And yet you're silent in regards to Jayjg.

Posted by: Jon Awbrey

And I have issues with single-minded manic mobsters who rewrite the content policies to suit their platform, conspiring to harass, intimidate, and ban anyone who gets in the way of their programme.

Jon Awbrey

Posted by: Cla68

That's exactly why I didn't mention them.

So, why shouldn't you or Jayjg not be topic banned from the LaRouche articles? Perhaps in your case it's because you haven't touched them in more than a year, as far as I know. But what about Jayjg? The AN discussion I linked to earlier in this thread showed him performing a checkuser on editors of the LaRouche articles about six months ago. Based on that and his history related to POV-pushing in topics about what he perceives are anti-Semitism, do you agree that he should be topic banned?

Posted by: Heat

Or at the very least that he shouldn't be running Checkusers against users in topics in which he's been heavily involved? Slim has been very critical of Checkuser abuse but has been silent on one of the biggest abusers.

Posted by: Jon Awbrey

SlimVirgin is solely concerned with the possibility that a Checkuser might be checking her.

Jon

Posted by: Herschelkrustofsky

SV hasn't edited LaRouche articles in a long time, and I don't think Jayjg has ever edited them -- he's just the "go-to" guy when you want somebody banned. As of late, Will Beback is the sole OWNer.

Posted by: Cla68

By topic ban, I mean anything to do with the articles, including running checkuser or any other type of admin action.

Posted by: Herschelkrustofsky

There's the problem, right there. The real corruption lay in the implied consent of Fred Bauder, Jayjg, and Raul654. It was well known that SV and Will Beback were routinely using admin tools to prevail in content disputes at these articles.

Only a person with CU access could do this. Is there anyone participating in this thread who has access?

http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?limit=50&tagfilter=&title=Special:Contributions&contribs=user&target=Dking&namespace=&year=&month=-1

Posted by: The Joy

Why would ArbCom allow administrators actively editing LaRouche articles to use their administrator tools on those articles? Administrators are not allowed to use administrator tools on articles they are actively editing. Even if ArbCom gave the unorthodox order to allow it, it's downright unethical. It gives the editors with administrator tools more power and control over the articles. Neutral administrators should have been called to watch the LaRouche articles, not administrators actively involved in the editing process.

Or have I misinterpreted something?

Could an Arbitrator looking at this thread determine if such "consent" was ever given by the Committee?

Posted by: dtobias

Was he the one who prompted the famous computer science paper, http://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/EWD/ewd02xx/EWD215.PDF?

Posted by: Jon Awbrey

In Wikipedia, Hell Go To You.

Ja Ja

Posted by: Herschelkrustofsky

Technically, the rules permit involved admins to use the tools if they are enforcing arbcom decisions. This became, of course, a universal fig leaf for Slim and Will Beback to do anything they wanted. There was a topic ban for me on editing "LaRouche-related" articles, but soon any article I edited became "LaRouche-related" (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:Herschelkrustofsky/anb) Unethical? You betcha.

Posted by: Kelly Martin

There's no problem with that. You see, LaRouche is an anti-Semite. Since combating anti-Semitism is inherently good, any action taken in furtherance of combating anti-Semitism is also inherently good. It is therefore appropriate to take all possible measures to ensure that LaRouche's article contains as much negative content as possible, so as to ensure that his anti-Semitic views are discredited as much as possible.

That's why there's no conflict of interest. Zealots don't ignore that they have a conflict of interest; they are simply incapable of understanding that a conflict even exists. It's really something of a form of mental illness.

Posted by: Newyorkbrad

(Cross-posted from another thread in a non-public section.)

For a long time, there was general disagreement as to whether arbitration remedies could be enforced by any administrator, or only by an "uninvolved" administrator. This issue split the committee in May 2007 in the Zeq-Zero0000 case (see, [[Wikipedia:Requests for arbitration/Zeq-Zero0000/Proposed decision]]), but to resolve the doubt, the remedies in subsequent cases have typically stated that blocks, discretionary sanctions, etc. may be imposed by "any uninvolved administrator."

Posted by: Jon Awbrey

Accepted Interpretations of "Any Uninvolved Administrator" (WP:AUA):

1. Administrators who are not currently seeing anyone.
2. Tag-team members with one foot outside the ring.
3. Jayjg.

But I mock …

Ja Ja

Posted by: Newyorkbrad

Indeed you do. But today you mock in English words, which can in some ways be reckoned as progress.

Posted by: Heat

Why is mocking in English superior to mocking in any other language?

Posted by: Newyorkbrad

Because decoding many of Jon's other posts requires the services of a certified Awbreyologist.

Posted by: Noroton

Certainly a certified something. Probably also takes a certain committment.

Posted by: Heat

Interesting. This suggests that you concede other things you've been queried on in the past week and refused to address - eg your relationships with Jayjg, Proaby, FM, your use of sockpuppets etc are not disinformation and that you cannot "correct" them.



This is evidently true for WR as well. If you build it Hell will come - eventually.

Posted by: dtobias

Or perhaps a secret decoder ring, which you get by sending in boxtops?

Posted by: Heat

Nice to know someone's still buying Ovaltine.

Posted by: Milton Roe

Will Hell actually come or just fake it? {{fact}} Where's WP:V and WP:RS on this.




Partial comfort.

Posted by: The Joy

Posted by: Milton Roe

I take it that this is a rhetorical question.

The answer has been given over and over by Jon Awbrey. The only people with no point of view are dead people. The only editors on WP who think they edit without any point of view, are people with the self-awareness of wooden blocks. Of which, there seem to be quite a few.


Exactly.


Perhaps even a certain institutional committment.

Posted by: Herschelkrustofsky

http://wikipediareview.com/index.php?s=&showtopic=23561&view=findpost&p=165915

Posted by: Jon Awbrey

This is one of those Deja Vu to the N-th Power places for me — just about everything wrong with the Crypto-Randroid-Or-Whoever-The Hell-It-Is Uncritical Unreflective Perspective of the Sanger–Wales E-Pyre of Wikipedia and Citizendium is betrayed in the above few lines. It makes me feel like I'm back in the '50s. It's a POV that seems to predate about 60 years of Dialogue & Research on Methods of Inquiry, Learning How To Learn, Systems Thinking, Values Clarification, Critical Thinking, Reflective Practice, Learning Organizations, Learning Communities — just to mention a few of the themes that I remember since I started paying attention. What sorts of attics, basements, closets, and dungholes have these bee-tles been moldering away in all these years? I have no idea. It's like they have a whole separate Cargo Cult Pidgin that makes it impossible to have an intelligent conversation with them.

At any rate, it makes me too tired to talk about now …

Jon Awbrey

Posted by: dtobias

I'm in Dan T.'s Inferno myself!

Posted by: nobs

http://pqasb.pqarchiver.com/washingtonpost_historical/access/137503422.html?did=137503422&FMT=ABS&FMTS=AI&date=Dec+29%2C+1975&author=&pub=The+Washington+Post++(1974-Current+file)&desc=Richard+S.+Welch, cited to both the Post & the original neutral and reliable source, the Wilcox Report. Not a word of this can be cited to me. Now let's look at the neutral & reliable smears directed at Mr. Brandt.
cited to Berlet and his own in house self publishing rag. Most importantly, put http://www.conservapedia.com/File:25may2006cberlet2.GIF. And t his is the crap that Jimbo Wales relied upon when he publicly smeared Brandt to Editor & Publisher magazine. How many violations of WP own policies can we find here?

Addendum
Again, this claim is not supported even by Chip Berlet.
I see Rangerdude's name, and Sam Spade, but no allegation by Berlet that HK & myself acted in concert to insert deragotory information in Berlet's bio.

Posted by: Milton Roe

I do not know, either. I have mentioned the Randroid connection and the mad idea that it is in possible in principle to settle in on the SINGLE best theory which fits all the presently-known facts. Presuming that there EXISTS a set of black-and-white things you know as a hard 'fact," so that you don't have to wrestle with Bayesian methods-- which naturally spit out only probabilities, since probabilities are all that they were fed....

But the other obvious route to madness is this fresh-faced journalism students' view that one can fairly represent any topic by simply (neutrally) representing all the major viewpoints about it, in proportion to the fraction of people who hold them. They actually teach this as a goal in journalism. And I suppose it's better than nothing, so long as its limitations are recognized. We've talked about these over time at WR. In no particular order:

1) The fraction of people who hold a given view is drastically different depending on which group you poll. In particular, the mass view changes depending on what culture and socioeconomic group you look at. Israel, for example, has 10% of the population of Egypt, but publishes 10 TIMES the number of books each year. Which view of the world and politics do you think might be overrepresented, in a literary effort like Wikipedia? Is a cultural viewpoint less valid because that culture has fewer printing presses? Good culturally sensitive people would say "no" in the cause of Australian aboriginies. But it gets much more complicated in the Middle East, where the view tends to be "If they can't publish in English, fuck em."

Views also change depending on level of education and expertise. As we found out with anthropogenic global warming, and Darwinian evolution. This problem comes up every time they ask the experts what they should teach in public school texts, and the public doesn't like the answer. Wikipedia, a popularly written encyclopedia, is not going to fix this tension. If anything, Wikipedia is lucky if it doesn't come out like a biology textbook written by Texas preachers and their congregations.

2) The standard journalism problem of what fraction of expert people hold what views, cannot even be approached except by experts on a given subject-- if you're not an expert, how would you even guess approximately the answer? But Wikipedia tends to be written in drive-by edits by the general public, who learn some fact about X and then go and add it to Wikipedia if they can't find it there already. Wow, magnesium is used in Mag auto wheels! That tends to give the popular wisdom of people who use the internet, and it has enormous inertia. But it intrinsically lacks expertise, and the experts themselves have no extra traction.

3) The idea that one can judge what the expert view is, except by talking to lots of experts, is wrong. Even expert review articles tend to be biased toward the research that the expert did for his or her last grant proposal (in fact, this is where most of those articles come from). At least TV journalists know they should to talk to many experts and let them present directly (if edited). Print journalists often talk to experts, but garble the results, and the experts are lucky if they are read the snippets of how they are quoted, but don't get to read the entire article. And the product of this goes into Wikipedia sources.
The idea that one can judge the depth of a view by doing a Google search on it, has the problem that Google is self-amplifying, and interest and advertisement driven, not evidence-driven. As demonstrated by the fact that top Google result for most topics is the Wikipedia article. People keep seeing that without wanting to admit the meaning of it. If that's what Google does to the topic you're looking at, why would you trust it for the #2 entry, either (which is likely to be Answers.com ). Using Google Scholar helps some, but last I checked, WP didn't even encourage using that over regular Google, for scholarly subjects.

4) The above is why any field of human knowledge is subject to short term manipulation and advertising. There is a "theme" to most science conferences, and that theme may or may not survive as conventional wisdom to the conferences down the road. Often it does not. But meanwhile, journalists who write about the latest exciting results, make the same mistakes as the scientists themselves, but worse. If you read a newspaper science section about some (supposedly) new science result, you'd think it was just discovered, when most of the time it's been known for years, but the scientific paper being covered is one currently getting hype. There are far fewer shocking and genuinely new discoveries than you'd think, from reading the newspapers or science pop journal reporting. But there are a lot of scientists who would be happy for the grant review committees to think that they were actually the ones moving ahead an entire field.

Finally, the Bayes problem mentioned at the beginning, just won't go away. There is lots of evidence, but evaluating the quality of evidence is a full-time job, and takes experts. Knowing who these experts are, and why they believe as they do, takes savvy. People with something to sell, can sometimes generate huge amounts of "science" showing that their viewpoints are correct, and this takes years to sort out. If all that is "known" about treatment of a certain disease was discovered in drug-company funded trials, what are you going to do with that "knowledge"? Does it even count as "knowledge"? And so on.

Yikes, I'm getting weary, too.

Posted by: GlassBeadGame

Posted by: Jon Awbrey

http://www.charlotteobserver.com/408/story/668286.html!

Jon

Posted by: CharlotteWebb

Hey I think I might have found http://maps.google.com/maps?t=h&ll=53.9,108.8&z=10, but why'd they have to build it there, Hersch? The tree-huggers will have a fit!

Sorry for the thread necro but I'm still trying to figure out what else could be passing over Ushan'i Island on the surface of Lake Baykal.


Yeah.

Posted by: Herschelkrustofsky

By remarkable coincidence, SV is doing a reprise of her fit over the landbridge right now at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Helga_Zepp-LaRouche#What_is_going_on_here.3F

Posted by: CharlotteWebb

But, like... I thought Baykal was too deep to build a bridge across, Hersch. They must be floating it on pontoons like the 520 bridge in Seattle. That'd make for some scary-ass driving.

The Google numbers will be skewed by the fact that "Robin Webb" is a much more common name than "Helga Zepp-LaRouche" of which the Robin Webb she refers to is arguably not the most notable bearer. Sure the Google News archive says http://news.google.com/archivesearch?q=%22robin+webb%22&cf=all, but it's hard to guess how many of these pertain to the animal-rights person as he/she does not appear till about halfway down the second page.

I'm not seeing how this person is measurably more notable than LaRouche's widow [edit: wife] or whether it really matters.

Posted by: Cla68

Somehow, I doubt that Will was able to type that with a straight face. Anyway, SV and Will really don't seem to like any information about that land bridge included in the LaRouche articles.

Posted by: CharlotteWebb

Hmm... somehow I doubt he is in a position to grant general amnesty to all current content, but hey... whatever works.

Posted by: Herschelkrustofsky

They seem to be making a comeback as a tag-team, just in time for consideration in next year's Dick of Distinction awards. Note how Will proposes that the article be merged, his proposal doesn't get off the ground, and then SV shows up and... proposes that the article be merged! And Will, delighted by this new and original contribution to the debate, is all for it.

Posted by: Cla68

What's the correct name for LaRouche's bridge between Alaska and Russia? Eurasian Land Bridge redirects to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eurasian_Land_Bridge. If there are at least two reliable sources which mention LaRouche's project to build this bridge (and actually go into detail, not just mention it in passing), I'll go start the entry and wikilink it to various LaRouche articles as appropriate.

Posted by: Herschelkrustofsky

The Bering Straits Tunnel project idea did not originate with LaRouche. I think it's been around for a century or so. LaRouche's proposal is simply an approach to combine many local infrastructure concepts into an integrated continental, and eventually global approach. LaRouche also emphasizes certain cutting-edge technologies, particularly MagLev, and the creation of what he calls "development corridors," transportation links combined with other sorts of infrastructure.

Who is NE2? http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Eurasian_Land_Bridge&diff=283319620&oldid=283307551 is positively imbecilic, although I see that some hours earlier he did a http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Eurasian_Land_Bridge&diff=prev&oldid=283307551 which was obviously correct. Why is he doing this now? Perhaps he's reading this thread.

Posted by: CharlotteWebb

A road-and-rail geek to put it mildly (see http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Trans-Eurasia_Logistics&action=history). He has been known to read WR. Maybe he participates too and we just don't know it.

He probably redirected it to that title (as opposed to "Tokyo–Montana Express") because it is the most prominent use of this "eurasian land-bridge" term by anyone outside than the LaRouche movement. He's a good editor overall, and not part of any vast conspiracy against LaRouche I can almost guarantee. Perhaps a disambiguation page would be most appropriate.

P.S. I'm still curious whether any of the proposed routes include Lake Baykal...

Posted by: Herschelkrustofsky

http://www.eirna.com/images/eurasia1.gif the best I could find on the web.

And while I was looking I found http://static.panoramio.com/photos/original/21169483.jpg and http://www.ldz.gov.cn/pics/073.jpg and http://static.panoramio.com/photos/original/21169491.jpg all photos from various sources of the monument that Kato suspects was created by diabolical LaRouche photoshop technicians. And http://www.schillerinstitute.org/graphics/photos/helga/hzlterm.jpg to this very day.

Posted by: Kato

That comes from a LaRouche related publication.

http://www.eirna.com/



Not me, Hersch. That was Somey who likely knows more about photoshopping than me:

Posted by: GlassBeadGame

I just don't get it. The largest engineering project ever to connect two economically marginal, although currently ecologically pristine parts of the globe? A bridge to two nowheres? Neither side if of the bridge would connected to anything other than local fire roads with links connecting rail or highways systems hundreds or thousands of miles away. National Geographic did one of their neat graphic articles a couple of months ago showing the "carbon foot print" of wine purchases in New York. A bottle of wine from Chile used an order of magnitude less fuel than a bottle of wine from California. This is because the bottle from Chile arrived via container ship while the one from California came by truck. Container ships seem like a much better way to link these parts of the world.

Posted by: CharlotteWebb

It would be creative eco-accounting to imply that this it always works this way. I mean unless all the wine-drinkers live in coastal areas, the imported wine would still have to be trucked the same distance after arriving from Chile by boat (http://northberkeleyimports.com/browse/index.php?id=39). It doesn't make much sense to say that foreign goods are earth-friendlier because they travel by boat before traveling by truck.

You could say though that it has an extra month or so to age, but for most other products would be a bad thing.

One could speculate that nobody likes paying the Suez Canal Authority.

Posted by: GlassBeadGame

New York is a coastal area. Cheaper to ship via the Panama Canal than to truck across across the USA, even though the distance might be much further. This wouldn't apply to the same extent for wine purchased in Iowa or Kansas of course but it would apply for anything trucked through thousands of miles wilderness for any use in either direction across the Bering Straight.

Posted by: Somey

Well, it's not like I'm a professional Photoshopper.

The actual monument is real - it's located in http://www.ldz.gov.cn/english/prof_lyg.asp, which appears to also be a real city, despite their terrible-looking website. (I'm sure the Chinese-language version looks fabulous!) They even advertise it.

It's just the inscription that's Photoshopped, not the monument itself - I would assume this is because they're trying to sell this idea to other countries, and while English is the language of modern-day commerce, it's also the language most likely to cause Chinese citizens to want to deface the monument. SlimVirgin & Co. probably want folks to believe that the Chinese inscription on the monument actually reads "Dedicated to those who have gone down to the sea in shipping containers," but the city's website makes it fairly clear that the whole thing is legitimate, though it's difficult to say how much support it's been getting from other countries along the proposed landbridge route.

As for the cost of shipping by landbridge vs. by sea, I think that would depend on the cargo, wouldn't it? Interesting question...

Posted by: Achromatic

Apropos of anything else, I gotta say, as someone who spends a large amount of time in Photoshop (wedding photographer at times) that sign looks remarkably shopped. Despite the angle of the picture (leaning a degree or so) the text on the sign is perfectly to within 1 pixel, and that is easily an artifact of which anti-aliasing algorithm is chosen in PS.

Posted by: Cla68

OK, then, I want to see the business plan for LaRouche's version of this connector between Asia and North America. Having been a former project manager, I learned that the basic elements of a project plan are:

- A defined requirement or goal, along with an associated scope of the project
- The resources required, sometimes referred to as the budget
- An estimated completion date (ECD) or timeline

Does the LaRouche organization or anyone else involved in this shindig have any of these three elements? None of these three should be confidential information, except perhaps #2. You've probably noticed that these three elements are usually mentioned in the business section of the newspaper, as in:



Or something like:

Where is this info for the landbridge/tunnel? I'm not trying to give you a hard time, I'm just trying to decide if its exclusion from the LaRouche articles in Wikipedia is justified or not.

Posted by: gomi

[Moderator's note: the wine-realted posts have been moved to the Lounge. You may imbibe them there. -- gomi]

Posted by: Herschelkrustofsky

So, your argument is that http://www.schillerinstitute.org/graphics/photos/helga/hzlterm.jpg from the LaRouche website, and http://static.panoramio.com/photos/original/21169483.jpg from an unrelated website, were both photoshopped? The LaRouche conspiracy must be vaster and insidiouser than even I had suspected.


It's unclear from the context, but you may be talking about the Bering Straits project, which is not the same thing as the landbridge, although it is a subsumed feature of the landbridge.


Back in the '90s, LaRouche published a humongous report, some 300 or so pages. Only parts of it are available on the internet, and I'd simply recommend that you start your search engines.


It appears that they do. http://www.schillerinstitute.org/economy/phys_econ/landbridge_update1101.html provides some detail on something called the Baikal-Amur Mainline.

Posted by: Herschelkrustofsky

That's because, in today's modern world, economics is dominated by accountants. Transport by ship is always going to be the cheapest mode, at least in the immediate future. However, cheapest is not necessarily best, as the outsourcing advocates are now painfully learning. Time is also a factor in economic planning, and ship transport is slow.

But there is a more important point here. LaRouche's proposal is not primarily about moving goods around the world. It is about developing the world. There are many land-locked countries in central Asia that are trapped in economic isolation, and having access to modern rail transport would connect them to the world in a profound way. The landbridge proposal also involves http://www.schillerinstitute.org/economy/maps/maps2.html#corridor which would include high-capacity electric lines, fuel pipelines, fiber optic cables, water supply lines (perhaps including irrigation,) and so on.

Now, all this Googling has revealed something interesting to me. Back in '05 when I was at Wikipedia, I was trying to learn how the Reliable Sourcesâ„¢ game is played. At that time, the only web references to the Eurasian Landbridge were on LaRouche sites, so a reference to the landbridge would have to be fringey, OR, etc. Now, four years later, the net is teeming with sites that talk about the landbridge. So, obviously, LaRouche had nothing to do with it, someone else came up with the idea.

Posted by: dogbiscuit

Hersch,

I'd be more convinced of your "not photoshopped" argument if the wording on the two photos actually matched.

For the inattentive, what is the last word on the first line?

Clue: "of" or "the" - take your pick.

Posted by: CharlotteWebb

For all it's worth my finely honed linguistical analytic skills confirm that this does in fact say:
新亚欧大陆桥东端起点

Literally (word-for-word):
"new Asia Europe big land bridge east end start point"

Posted by: It's the blimp, Frank

But also the backgrounds don't match -- the big blue cranes are missing from the smaller photo. My hypothesis: the photos are of opposite sides of the statue, which would have English on two opposing sides, and Chinese on the others. The word placement on the English sides could then be slightly different.

Posted by: Random832

Well, considering that they don't actually have the same text on them...

Posted by: dogbiscuit

1. Big blue cranes are on rails. Big blue crane can move.
2. Note the rails that stop next to the monument in one picture which clearly aren't there in the first picture. The first picture cannot therefore from the other side. However, oddly, there do not appear to be any rails even in the background.
3. Where has the marble flooring around the statue gone? The big straight on picture seems to be taken when the statue is in good condition, the angled picture, it appears the surrounds have been dug up and the marble has several years of water staining and ageing.
4. It would seem unlikely to me that two sides of a statue would be carved in different ways.
5. Would someone explain why a monument to a land bridge would be symbolised with an anchor?

It seems the big picture was taken several years ago soon after installation. The redevelopment might be quite possible over a number of years, but without any other evidence, I'd still go with photo-shopping and it doesn't even seem to me like the monument is in the same container yard (fences, rails, tone and texture of surrounding concrete).

Posted by: Random832

http://www.ldz.gov.cn/pics/073.jpg indicates there is chinese on two adjacent sides. It'd be unusual to have nearly (but not quite) identical english messages on the other two sides, wouldn't it?

Posted by: It's the blimp, Frank

I dunno. My hypothesis could be wrong. Or maybe in China it's not unusual to have English on two adjacent sides.

Meanwhile, SlimVirgin, Will Beback and Leatherstocking are http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Helga_Zepp-LaRouche#What_is_going_on_here.3F on this very issue.

Posted by: dogbiscuit

http://www.ldz.gov.cn/english/pics_en_big.asp?bpid=280 Also shows a similar viewpoint.

It would not surprise me that the statue was genuine and the wording was faked. There is nothing odd about marking the start of a trans-continental rail route, even if it is with some spare old statue left lying around from some other revolutionary site or other. Indeed, taking a disjointed set of transport links and joining them together with a name is pretty much standard operating practice, like the European E routes. It doesn't really represent any significant development or investment other than printing the odd timetable so I am totally unclear as to what these photos would actually prove other than someone likes the idea of a rail link from east to west.

Posted by: Eva Destruction

Apologies if someone's already said this, I haven't followed the whole of this thread – but http://www.ldz.gov.cn/english/prof_lyg.asp shows a route from China to France; isn't it more likely that this monument marks the proposed end of a road route from China to Europe (which would explain the "Eurasia" name) and that the convergence with LaRouche's plan is conicidental? (Note: I have absolutely no opinion on LaRouche or shipping)?

Posted by: dogbiscuit

http://www.ldz.gov.cn/english/inv_traf_2.asp on the same site suggests it is a rail link - but I agree on the coincidence, especially as LaRouche appear to their plans in terms of MagLev and so on.

Changing the subject slightly, but MagLev is never going to be a winner if you use energy simply to offset gravity. I was not aware that friction in wheels was so great that it was going to be more energy efficient to lift a load by magnetism to propel it forward with reduced friction - especially when you think about heavy freight loads. MagLev in the UK was developed in an era of infinite and nearly free clean nuclear power.

I get the feeling that La Rouche and L Ron Hubbard would have got on very well.

Posted by: gomi

I take no position on the underlying issue, but it is with great amusement that I read this:
I cannot wait to see the fireworks when someone has the balls to use that argument against Slim's many, many inclusions of controversial self-published material in her animal-rights articles. What an astonishingly brazen hypocrite she is!

Posted by: CharlotteWebb

Doesn't matter because we've already run out of possible sides:



Thanks for the tip.

Posted by: Eva Destruction

As I understand it the advantage of maglev isn't the energy saving, but the easier acceleration and higher maximum speed, and a reduced risk of derailment (crack in a rail at high speed = trainwreck; crack in an electromagnet at high speed = momentum carries the train on to the next coil unscathed). I'd imagine that somewhere with very flat terrain and a lot of sunlight a network of solar-powered electromagnetic tracks could pay for itself by reducing the need for air traffic; IIRC Bush actually proposed such a thing when he was Governor of Texas.

Posted by: Somey

Like I was sort-of saying before, the main thing here is that the landbridge project itself is real, even if it's only just now getting off the ground. Frankly, I suppose that if I'm one of the leaders of this particular Chinese city, or of the LaRouche Organization, and I have a choice between using Photoshop to add an English translation of the Chinese inscription on a Terminus monument vs. having potential investors (not to mention political leaders and even voters) who mostly can't read Chinese just see a big anchor on a pedestal with a Chinese inscription on it, I'd probably add the English inscription too. I might also add Photoshopped Hindi, Turkish, Persian, Farsi, and Greek inscriptions in other "versions," just to ensure maximum confusion.

OTOH, if I were trying to get the US/UK governments to buy in, I'd definitely leave the photo alone...

If Slimmy and Will Beback use this as an excuse for keeping all mention of the project out of Wikipedia, that's a very small price to pay - most of the countries on the landbridge route aren't going to be reading the English language Wikipedia anyway, so the biggest risk as far as WP is concerned is that Slimmy & Co. are going to take the trouble to learn one of the aforementioned languages just for the sake of carrying the anti-LaRouche campaign onto the Wikipedias for those languages. And even then, people in those countries probably aren't likely to care one way or the other. They might have heard of LaRouche and might even be somewhat wary of him, but he doesn't carry anything like the baggage he does in the US and the UK.

It could even be that the LaRouche folks could use this to their advantage, though I doubt it would occur to them to even bother - IOW, they could say that the "Western oligarchies" want to suppress the project in order to keep land-locked Asian countries poor and isolated, and for evidence, "look how they're even trying to expunge any mention of it from the internet."

Posted by: Milton Roe

That's great blast-from-2006 stuff, Hershel. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:Herschelkrustofsky/anb


Though by now in 2009, when history and the language has changed, it needs some translation:


[1] Statement by User:174. Hi! I'm user:174. I'm Russian historian! I feel need to add unsourced comments about Lyndon LaRouche's views to pages that have nothing to do with LaRouche. I feel safe in this, because I know no one will block me for advancing a "POV." On the contrary, when such comments are removed by Hershelkrustofsky, THAT will be POV. As decreed by SlimVirgin. These become LaRouche articles as soon as I add LaRouche material. It doesn't have to be sourced, or even correct. Nobody checks! Nobody cares! What a place WP is.

BTW, in a few years I'll be leaving Wikipedia, posting a copy of somebody else's rant: One simple fact that must be accepted as the basis for any intellectual work is that truth – whatever definition of that word you may subscribe to – is not democratically determined. And another is that talent, whether for soccer or for exposition, is not equally distributed across the population, while a robust confidence is one's own views apparently is. If there is a systemic bias in Wikipedia, it is to have ignored so far these inescapable facts. Hey, I just noticed this. But now, in 2006, I can act to advance this sort of systemic problem with WP myself, using unsourced edits that reflect my own biases. Without feeling guilty. Hey, I don't have a time machine.

[2] Statement by Cberlet. Hi, I'm Chip Berlet. I've been warring with HK. I've only been warned for my POV additions by Arbcom, whereas he got topic banned. Why? I kiss major ass. You see, I have great people-skills, like Mantanmoreland (who fooled Durova, QED). That means when you agree with people all the time in public, they like you! Yes, they do. In a couple of years I'll be leaving WP myself, in a snit bacause may ass is not being kissed back. Obviously some people here do NOT have people skills. Ungrateful SOBs. But meanwhile, I'm deviling HK in 2006. I don't have a time machine.

[3] Statement by Jayjg. Hi! I've recently determined by a use of my shiney new checkuser power that user:BirdsOfFire, who HK asked to look at the user:174 addition statement about LaRouche, is using the same IP range (though not the same IP) as HK. So they're both editing with AOL out of LA in a similar way. So SlimVirgin is indef bocking BirdsOfFire as a sock of HK. Because HK asked him to look at something, and he disagreed with user:174's unsourced addition. That's meat-puppetry! Even if it is not sock puppetry. We don't like it when people disagree with us, and agree with HK. Clearly they are socks or meats and must go from the project. Doesn't matter who FIreBird is, even if not HK; this puppy is gone. I'm an uninvolved admin, inasmuch as I've never heard of LaRouche, or his views of the Jews, and I hardly know SlimVirgin, so it doesn't get much more objective than that.

N.B. In a few years I'll have checkuser taken away from me because nobody trusts me with it. You bastards. But right now, it's 2006 and nobody here has a time machine to foresee that.

[4] Hi, I'm SlimVirgin. I'm just here making sure HK doesn't insert his POV into articles by removing other people's uncited POVs in articles. That makes sense, doesn't it? We don't even have to worry about the truth of the statement, or its references, since HK has been topic-banned. And this addition of user:174 is on-topic: LaRouche! BirdsOfFire, who doesn't have that many edits and who I just indef blocked as a sock, it's true, hasn't previously been topic-banned, or even warned. But what do you want? Bby virtue of agreeing with HK rather than user:174 and myself, he's a MEAT, and thus bannable.

N.B. In a few years I'll be stripped of my admin bit for Biting Newbies and using my admin powers in service of my POV in disputed articles. But that's years in the future and I don't have a time machine. So nothing to see here.

Slim, CBerlet, 174, Jayjg, altogether: "Here we are in 2006, where anything goes! 2008-9 will suck for all of us as regards WP and our relationship to it, but meanwhile we get to screw HK all we want in 2006. You don't have a time machine, either, so you can't see our futures. Neener." Too bad, HK! We wouldn't be able to do all this 3 years from now, but it's not 3 years from now, now. Now is it?

Posted by: CharlotteWebb

I have discovered more photos of this monument, which also appears to be real.
http://www.lyggyl.com/attachments/month_0905/20090511_69eee9c47982ed94bea4xCTJiLR28riR.jpg
http://blog.cnii.com.cn/batch.download.php?aid=17166
http://blog.cnii.com.cn/attachments/2007/11/08/124099_200711081604051.jpg
http://blog.cnii.com.cn/attachments/2007/11/08/124099_200711081555001.jpg
http://www.nbradio.com/node2/zt/08ggkf/report/images/00024217.jpg
http://news.eastday.com/c/20080512/images/01273755.jpg

The Chinese inscription I translated above is clearly visible in each of these. However one of the English inscriptions appears to be real too.
http://blog.cnii.com.cn/batch.download.php?aid=17168

This leaves http://www.schillerinstitute.org/graphics/photos/helga/hzlterm.jpg from the shiller institute as the only obvious fake. Could be they needed to compensate for inconveniently photographing Helga on the wrong side of the monument.

However there is one more question to be answered. Despite all these photos, we've still only seen three sides.

*The side facing the rails, on which is written "新亚欧大陆桥东端起点", let's call this the front.
*The side to the right, err... counter-clockwise from that, featuring the wild Cǎoshū scribbles.
*The back side, opposite the rails, with the English inscription "THE EASTERN TERMINAL OF THE\n
NEW EURASIA LANDBRIDGE"

The fourth remains a mystery, but I can almost guarantee it's not a duplicate of the English side, nor anything in Tibetan or Uyghur.

Posted by: Herschelkrustofsky

Damn! Is there no end to the fiendish cleverness of those LaRouche people?

Posted by: Kato

Apparently there is an end. The end is when they photoshopped a picture of a landmark to move the inscription and thus make it inconsistent with other photos.

Which wasn't very clever.

Here's http://thebristolblogger.wordpress.com/2007/04/26/bristol-labour-photoshop-horror/ about a Labour politician in the UK.

Congrats to Charlotte and Dogbiscuit for some good debunking. Who needs http://www.youtube.com/user/CaptainDisillusion?

Posted by: Herschelkrustofsky

Since we are considering all possible angles on this, let us also consider the element of time. The photo with Helga Zepp-LaRouche standing in front of the monument was taken in 1996. According to the http://www.schillerinstitute.org/strategic/sdi.html the inscription at that time was "Eastern Terminal of Eurasia Landbridge." I would not rule out the possibility that the inscription was subsequently changed to include the word "the."


To make your accusation consistent, are you also claiming that Google photoshopped their photo as well on the Panoramio site, but did it with a slightly different wording?

Posted by: CharlotteWebb

Not likely?

I take it you mean this:
http://static.panoramio.com/photos/original/21169483.jpg

The English inscription here is (and the position of the sculpture—anchor, rails, and chain are) consistent with this photo which features what appear to be Chinese construction guys in the foreground:
http://blog.cnii.com.cn/batch.download.php?aid=17168

Posted by: Herschelkrustofsky

It's not entirely coincidental. I found this http://www.schillerinstitute.org/russia/rus_eal_chronology.html of the LaRouche campaign for the landbridge. It says that the Chinese had their own version of the idea as early as 1993. In 1996 China held a conference to discuss the various proposals, and Helga Zepp-LaRouche was an invited speaker. It was during that trip that the disputed photo was taken. According to a http://www.schillerinstitute.org/conf-iclc/2001/Labor%20Day/conf_sep_2001_hzl.html Sir Leon ended up attending the conference to speak against the proposal.

Posted by: CharlotteWebb

The decor suggests that it (or at least this part of it) is a rail route, ending—or perhaps beginning—in a shipyard amid several stacks of con-ex boxes.

Posted by: Hipocrite

I would. The "of" goes right to the end in http://www.schillerinstitute.org/graphics/photos/helga/hzlterm.jpg, and the text certainly appears to be carved into the monument by the lighting in the picture. How would they fit the "the" in there?

Posted by: Kato

No. I'm stating that the photograph featured on the LaRouche site http://www.schillerinstitute.org/graphics/photos/helga/hzlterm.jpg has been doctored. The other photographs are consistent with each other. The LaRouche photo has an inconsistent inscription.

The most likely explanation is, as Charlotte notes, to compensate for inconveniently photographing Helga on the wrong side of the monument.

Posted by: Herschelkrustofsky

According to the article where the photo appeared, there was no "the" at the time the photo was taken. The Chinese could have replaced the entire inscription some time in the past 13 years.




What would be the motive? SlimVirgin, of course, was arguing that since there was no such thing as the Eurasian Landbridge, the inscription could not possibly be correct: I don't think this POV is tenable at this point.

Posted by: Kato

See above.


Regardless of Slim's typical bullying manner, the fact remains that no unattached researcher in their right mind would have looked at the available evidence, doctored photo and all, and written it up in a credible journal in the way you'd have liked. There are several of us on this thread looking right at it, and we still can't figure it out.

1. The nature of this Landbridge is still too vague and needs substantiation
2. LaRouche is surrounded by misinformation, and downright lies on occasion, meaning that everything would need to be examined with a toothcomb.

Fortunately for you, Wikipedia is not a credible journal, and is full of unsubstantiated misinformation, so as far as I'm concerned, these articles can say what they like!

Posted by: Herschelkrustofsky

All that would be appropriate, to my mind, would be to say that LaRouche made a proposal to do X,Y,and Z, and he made it beginning in the early '90s. That's actually in the "Views of LaRouche" article now, and I see no problem with it. The problem with the "LaRouche articles" historically has been that Slim, Will, the Chipster and Dennis King want to frame those articles in such a way that LaRouche's ideas and proposals, the actual basis for his notability, are obscured by the Berlet/King theories about secret coded messages in his writings.

By the same token, LaRouche's wife is notable for energetically campaigning all over the world for her husband's ideas (and some of her own.) She manages to get access to ranking politicians in order to discuss them. SV wishes to suppress any mention of this in the BLP, substituting some vague innuendo that since Ms. LaRouche is German, she must have lurking Nazi sympathies, like her countryman, Martin Luther.

Posted by: Kato

The problem is that LaRouche and supporters seem to have a completely different perception of his influence to most other people. By most other people, I mean those who have even heard of LaRouche. Like other fringe figures, LaRouche exploits tenuous links between himself and a major figure or important incidents to give the impression of exaggerated credibility. Supporters seem either gullible, or knowingly prepared to further exaggerate LaRouche's involvement for political reasons.

I've seen plenty of examples of this. A recent example was during a discussion here, you crowbarred a LaRouche BBC interview http://wikipediareview.com/index.php?s=&showtopic=23940&view=findpost&p=172373. You insinuated they may be related. I know that LaRouche's minor interview on a Radio Station that interviews hundreds of people a day played no part in the affair.

I also know that Helga LaRouche is prepared to tell extraordinary false stories about events. She made a bold claim about Thatcher and Kohl that I know to be false, for example.

Given these facts, people should treat LaRouche claims with extreme skepticism. Even announcements by LaRouche of proposals should be treated with caution, because the chances are that they are being used to exaggerate LaRouche's influence and create a distorted picture of events for political reasons.

All this is immaterial to Wikipedia really, because that place is such an uneven mess it deserves to have LaRouche propaganda appearing all over the place. And it is unfortunate that the combatants are SlimVirgin and Willbeback who are difficult to defend. But the facts remain that when they question claims made by LaRouche, they are doing what anyone in their right minds would do if they were creating a credible report on the subject.

All said, the involvement of Berlet and King was an outrage and helped debase the whole business long ago, and I said that http://wikipediareview.com/index.php?showtopic=13371&hl=. Compared to them, the LaRouchies seem like naive martyrs.

Posted by: Floydsvoid

Regardless, the idea of a railway or road across the Bering Strait seems incredibly naive to me.

The problem seems to be the tundra. This http://www.gutenberg.org/files/12328/12328-8.txt has some excellent descriptions of the situation. Here, a 140 odd years ago, Western Union is doing a feasibility study about stranding telegraph wire across the strait to Europe (with the side benefit of going to China). Ultimately it proved that an overseas cable worked and was surprisingly repairable.

In the summertime, the permafrost on the tundra melts leaving a milkshake like goo that's best to ignore. The time to travel is in the winter, when it's 20 below and colder than you know what you know where. However, in Siberia, you can trudge across the tundra mile after mile, and never sight a St. Alphonzo's Pancake Breakfast place like you can in ca.

Point is, any transportation path is going to have to be elevated for a very long ways.

Posted by: Sarcasticidealist

At least one of us is mistaken about the meaning of that word.

(Hey, remember when I used to spend my time on WR offering valuable commentary about things Wikipedia-related? Me neither.)

Posted by: Floydsvoid

Yo, I've got it on good http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Permafrost that the top layers can thaw a bit during the summer

Doh, I haven't tried it out yet. Must be here for the lulz. Sorry, I'll go into lurk mode again.

There'll never be another Frank.

[edit]This is the quote from the http://www.gutenberg.org/files/12328/12328-8.txt that I had in mind:

Posted by: dogbiscuit

http://www.ldz.gov.cn/english/inv_traf_2.asp seems to suggest the real route has been in use since 1992.

Posted by: CharlotteWebb

However the following things remain unclear:
*The proper English name for this infrastructure
*The LaRouches' actual level of involvement
*What the fuck I saw half-crossing Lake Baykal in the satellite photo

Guess I'll do some more research tomorrow or the next.

Posted by: Rhindle

Google earth has a pic. From the website http://panoramio.com/photo/21169475

Posted by: Cla68

If you say that LaRouche published a business plan in the 90s, I believe you. My follow-up question would be, "Doesn't it need to be updated?" If they want some publicity, they should make a big to-do when they release the new plan. If it gets reported in the ''Wall Street Journal'' or some other business sheet, voila! into Wikipedia mention of it goes.



I agree, SV's and Will's support for those two "journalists" was appalling. Anyway, it could be that mention of the landbridge was made in Chinese newspapers at the time of the construction of that statue. If anyone can find those articles, and I doubt that they're posted on the web, we'll have our reliable sources and we can mention the landbridge all over Wikipedia. Can anyone here read Chinese and has access to archives of old Chinese newspapers?

Posted by: sbrown

But thats the great thing about wikipeida. I could go and edit the article and take out that bit and even find a half baked source to justify it.

Posted by: Cla68

I was going to bring this up also, which is the weather in that area of the world. I've done some reading about that area, because I eventually plan to improve the Wikipedia articles about the http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aleutian_Islands_Campaign. From what I've read, the weather around the Barents Sea is absolutely atrocious. Gale-force winds are the norm, rough seas, continual, dense fog, and ice storms. How are trucks and trains supposed to keep on schedule moving through weather like that? Even if the bridge over the Barents is a tunnel, there's still the exposed road and railways on either side approaching the tunnel entrances. Even with the benefits of milder weather that global warming may be bringing to the Arctic areas, I still think that severe weather will be a factor in the viability of that transportation corridor.

Posted by: Herschelkrustofsky

The prevailing idea is to build a http://www.larouchepub.com/other/2007/3427cerny_on_bst.html

Posted by: Eva Destruction

I think he's talking about getting to the tunnel – as anyone who's been in Alaska during summer knows, the ground there (and I assume in Siberia as well) has the structural soundness of oatmeal as the frost melts, so any tracks would either need to be elevated, floating in some way, or anchored to bedrock. It's not insurmountable – Russia has a lot of railroads this far north – but it would add to the costs (and we no longer have the "slave labor" option used by the Russians).

Posted by: GlassBeadGame

I think that Lyndon is quite literally missing the boat. In the late 70's and early 80's he was advocating massive development of fusion reactors, which he deemed ought to be concentrated in India, although I don't think anyone asked India what it thought. Why not a synthesis of these two ideas? Massive "trophy container ships" powered by fusion reactors? The first one could even be called the "Helga" without so much as raising an eye brow. Widen the Suez and Panama canals for good measure. Fits in with the global warming "bonus" of a navigable Arctic.

I need me an Institute.

Posted by: Herschelkrustofsky

I found in the http://www.larouchepub.com/eiw/public/2007/2007_20-29/2007_20-29/2007-27/pdf/66-69_727.pdf a postscript of sorts, which includes this assertion:

I would add my own observation that the question of costs is a very "relativistic" one, depending on whether you are talking about short term or long term, or a local project versus the sort of global conception LaRouche presents. Beware of accountants. But to give a simple illustration: the Chinese MagLev line between Shanghai and its airport is fairly expensive per mile to build. But the much larger routes that they are presently contemplating will be much less expensive, due to economies of scale.

And then, when you are discussing infrastructure, you need to take into account the nonlinear effects, the complex ways in which an economy benefits from building it. LaRouche often uses the Transcontinental Railroad in the U.S. as an example of this. Another example, which may seem unrelated but is not, is the Apollo Program -- by conservative estimate, the US government got back $14 in increased tax revenue for every dollar invested in the project, due to spin-off technologies and whole new categories of businesses that sprang up around them.

Posted by: Hipocrite

I'm pretty sure that LaRouche believes that global warming is scientific fraud. Correct me if I'm wrong.

Posted by: dogbiscuit

As opposed to the Wikipedian "Correct me even if I'm not wrong."?

Posted by: Herschelkrustofsky

http://larouchepac.com/node/9916

Posted by: Hipocrite

Further, having spent the lesser part of two evenings reviewing, I cannot bless the conduct of either side of the main topic, the Herschelkrustofsky ban. While Herschelkrustofsky and his cadre were using Wikipedia as a promotional tool, which I despise, Bertlet was doing exactly the same thing.

I would have banned everyone.

Posted by: Cla68

Why weren't both sides banned? In the recent Israel/Palestine case, both sides were, basically, banned. In 2005 and 2006 in the LaRouche cases, only one side was banned. Does this mean that Wikipedia's treatment of such issues is improving or becoming fairer?

Posted by: Somey

I'm tempted to say that you can't really compare the two situations because the potential for bad PR in the Israel/Palestine case is so much greater, but IMO the only people who should have been banned (or rather, "topic-banned") in the LaRouche dispute were Dennis King and Berlet - they're waaay too close to the situation to be "neutral," not to mention the fact that they were using their own writings as source citations. You could also make that argument for SlimVirgin and Will Beback, because they were facilitating them, but that's not quite the same thing.

That's not to say that the related articles shouldn't have been watched closely for insertion of questionable content sourced to LaRouche publications too, of course. I'm just saying that if they'd somehow removed Berlet and King from the equation, they would have had a fairly ordinary ideological dispute, with no need for extreme one-sided measures like the ones that were taken.

Posted by: Kato

Those following this need to go back to the early stages of this thread because it is all there.

http://wikipediareview.com/index.php?s=&showtopic=23773&view=findpost&p=167667

Not only did the anti-LaRouche crowd, led by SlimVirgin, completely over react by attacking anything associated with LaRouche completely outside process (deleting articles without discussion / banning random people by fiat etc), they fostered a nasty culture, where totally innocent people who had nothing to do with LaRouche were accused.

I showed an example of someone being falsely accused http://wikipediareview.com/index.php?s=&showtopic=23773&view=findpost&p=167693. If you follow Slim's replies to my example, you can see she doesn't acknowledge it, and tries to misdirect my complaint.

LaRouchian nonsense notwithstanding, I stand by my original observation of the causes behind the dispute:

If LaRouchies were really to blame, this would have been an isolated incident. But it wasn't. The same practice occurred all over Wikipedia on numerous topics; Naked Short Selling, Israel and so on.

Posted by: Herschelkrustofsky

Actually, the http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Origins_of_the_American_Civil_War&diff=123320504&oldid=122866641 would have set off major alarms within the anti-LaRouche camp, because according to Will Beback's "LaRouche under the bed" doctrine, mentioning Alexander Hamilton, Friedrich List and Henry Carey in the same breath is tantamount to quoting LaRouche. This was essentially the technique used to drive me off the project: you can't bring up ideas that LaRouche is known to favor.


For all intents and purposes, Berlet and King have been removed from the equation, Berlet by way of a spectacular tantrum, and King because he doesn't seem to have the stamina to do it without Berlet. Slim & Beback are canny enough to be reluctant to engage in persistent violations of policy; they had a symbiotic relationship with Berlet and King, where Berlet and King would do the dirty work, and then Slim & Beback would wikilawyer and rationalize their behavior, with minimal risk to their own WikiStatus.

Since Berlet and King left, the LaRouche articles have essentially become a "fairly ordinary ideological dispute."

Posted by: Cla68

And no history of Wikipedia for the years 2005-2009 will be complete without mentioning this. Are any of the POV-pushers and bullies who took refuge with that loose cabal still left or operating in the same manner? Jayjg's gone (at least for now), Jossi is banned, JzG, MONGO, JPGordon, and Crum375 are editing quietly, SV appears to be toeing the line, Berlet and King are gone, the ID Cab has been keeping their heads down, Gary Weiss is effectively banned, Will Beback has been more or less following the rules (he was slapped on the wrist in the recent Rawat case), FloNight left that group over a year ago, and I haven't seen ElinorD (or whatever she's called now) around lately. I haven't checked to see if IronDuke has been keeping his POV-pushing in check. If not, then he may be the last one standing.

If anyone wants to discuss the current status and legacy of the former Ruling Clique, then perhaps we should start a separate thread on it. As Kato says, that group was responsible for a lot of abuse in addition to the LaRouche situation, and that's their legacy.

Posted by: CharlotteWebb

Show me anyone still standing and I'll show you an unwitting decoy.

Posted by: Cla68

Yes, it could be that some of them have simply changed their methods. If so, then that may be a topic worth exploring sometime.

Posted by: dtobias

That particular clique seems to have faded away. That doesn't mean there isn't abusive stuff going on there, of course, but it's being done by different people on different topics.

Posted by: Herschelkrustofsky

News flash -- Will Beback has gone ballistic. He has suffered a rash of minor defeats lately, including the reversals of his POV-speedies on http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletion/Wilhelm_Lautenbach and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletion/Stanislav_Menshikov and his failed attempted to suppress a http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia:Reliable_sources/Noticeboard&oldid=299060622#Forum_International that worked to his disadvantage in a LaRouche dispute. In the latter instance, SlimVirgin briefly stepped in on his side, so it was old home week for a few days, but she withdrew from the dispute after testing the wind. So Will Beback, frustrated and alone, seems to have gone kamikaze. He has resurrected an old http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Talk:Political_views_of_Lyndon_LaRouche/Gays_%26_AIDS&action=history which "exposes" LaRouche as a raving homophobe, using the typical array of misquotes, bogus quotes, and some serious dumpster-diving among his press clippings, looking for any scrap of gossip. He is demanding that this concoction be substituted for the current flawed but semi-reasonable section of http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Views_of_Lyndon_LaRouche#Gays_and_AIDS

Posted by: CharlotteWebb

Views of Lyndon LaRouche is an ambiguous title and should clearly be renamed depending on whether we are referring to "Lyndon LaRouche's views", or "[Other people's] views of Lyndon LaRouche [and of LaRouche's views]".

But first we'd need to agree on which one it is.

Posted by: Herschelkrustofsky

Historically it has meant "Lyndon LaRouche's views," but Will is going for mission creep: first, LaRouche's views that are deemed notable by the press, and now, LaRouche's views as paraphrased by the press (no primary sources.)

Posted by: Herschelkrustofsky

And now Will sets out to recruit new allies http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_talk:WikiProject_LGBT_studies#Lyndon_LaRouche.27s_views_on_AIDS_and_gays