User Tisane, this could end badly Options

[tarantino]

The Libertarian candidate in 2008 for Virginia's 1st congressional district and and one of Abd's former mentors [1] had another account blocked August 11 2010.

He recently spent 14 months in prison for threatening to kill the president, and has just now decided not to comply with his conditions of supervised release.

His autobiography is here, and the letter sent to his probation officer is here.

[1]

I had some good mentors early on, most notably an editor known by many names, a long-term Wikipedian who, for his own reasons, kept dropping accounts and starting up new ones, though under (originally) no sanctions. He never used two accounts simultaneously, never went back to old accounts, and all were acknowledged or blatantly obvious, far from concealed. One of the names was Sarsaparilla, it's not hard at all to find another going back about two years before I met him. Older accounts he never revealed even to me, and he had real-life reasons to avoid disclosing them, he claimed.

[Somey]

As if further proof was needed, this incident clearly illustrates what Jack Handey has been telling us all along: Friendly and considerate though he may seem, the court-appointed psychiatrist is not necessarily your "friend."

Presumably, the same goes for the friendly US Attorney, the friendly Secret Service agent, the friendly warden at the friendly Federal Penitentiary, the friendly members of the Parole Board, and so on.

[CharlotteWebb]

He recently spent 14 months in prison for threatening to kill the president, and has just now decided not to comply with his conditions of supervised release.

That's his problem surely.

Are you saying this user's off-site behavior (and/or statements) caused the Arbitrary Committee to stop ignoring that said user had been banned previously, or what…

[Subtle Bee]

As if further proof was needed, this incident clearly illustrates what Jack Handey has been telling us all along: Friendly and considerate though he may seem, the court-appointed psychiatrist is not necessarily your "friend."

Presumably, the same goes for the friendly US Attorney, the friendly Secret Service agent, the friendly warden at the friendly Federal Penitentiary, the friendly members of the Parole Board, and so on.

Just consider the word - "friend" -ly. Not actually a friend, just like a friend, superficially. Friend-ly.

If you don't get it, you deserve what you get.

[A User]

"I decided that I was tired of serving as the government's slave and having my goals thwarted by the state, and that I was unwilling to put up with it anymore. Once again, I considered assassinating a government official but, lacking the money to buy a gun and spend time figuring out a plan of attack, I made up my mind to instead commit an act of symbolic protest against the government by threatening assassination."

This dude sounds like a real champion (IMG:smilys0b23ax56/default/rolleyes.gif)

Maybe he should change his username to Tinsane

[Somey]

If you don't get it, you deserve what you get.

Well, life is like a box of chocolates... (IMG:smilys0b23ax56/default/mellow.gif)

I realize this probably isn't what Mr. Tarantino intended or hoped for with this thread, but I was just thinking, if I were to be asked what I consider the "typical Wikipedian" to be like, I'd probably say a male, in his 20's, with varying degrees of narcissistic tendencies; fairly opportunistic though distrusting of formal authority; in possession of decent (but not spectacular) writing skills; reasonably well-educated but almost certainly not as smart as he thinks he is; leaning towards a libertarian (or maybe "libertarian-ish") sociopolitical ideology, but not as affluent or well-off as one would expect from someone espousing such an ideology... This User:Tisane feller would be such an extreme example of those things, you'd have to say that guys like him make it very difficult for the other WP'ers to push the median/stereotype in a different (and I would say preferable) direction.

And in this case, it's difficult to say "I'm sure he's a really nice guy if you meet him in person" - it's probably just the opposite, IOW he's much nicer on the internet than he is in reality. Wikipedia is the perfect place for him, to be frank - and I suspect that's why he keeps coming back.

[EricBarbour]

.........if I were to be asked what I consider the "typical Wikipedian" to be like, I'd probably say a male, in his 20's, with varying degrees of narcissistic tendencies; fairly opportunistic though distrusting of formal authority; in possession of decent (but not spectacular) writing skills; reasonably well-educated but almost certainly not as smart as he thinks he is; leaning towards a libertarian (or maybe "libertarian-ish") sociopolitical ideology, but not as affluent or well-off as one would expect from someone espousing such an ideology...

In short, just the kind of guy who would have a dog-eared copy of Atlas Shrugged prominently displayed on his coffee table......

And in this case, it's difficult to say "I'm sure he's a really nice guy if you meet him in person" - it's probably just the opposite, IOW he's much nicer on the internet than he is in reality. Wikipedia is the perfect place for him, to be frank - and I suspect that's why he keeps coming back.

That is probably one of the most damning things one can say about Wikipedia.
Also one of the most accurate.

Worse still, it also well-describes any number of user-content-generated
websites, from 4chan to Something Awful to Fark to Mixx to you name it.

The World Wide Web: just like Usenet before it, a dreamland for the libertarian troll.

This post has been edited by EricBarbour:

[Somey]

That is probably one of the most damning things one can say about Wikipedia.
Also one of the most accurate.

Thanks! I wrote it myself! (IMG:smilys0b23ax56/default/smile.gif)

[Abd]

And in this case, it's difficult to say "I'm sure he's a really nice guy if you meet him in person" - it's probably just the opposite, IOW he's much nicer on the internet than he is in reality. Wikipedia is the perfect place for him, to be frank - and I suspect that's why he keeps coming back.

Well, I've spent a lot of time on the phone and in direct communication with him, and with his family.

He's one of the smartest Wikipedians I've met (though I never met him in person). He quickly taught me a great deal about how the place works. (And how it doesn't work!) But he's also got, shall we say, a problem. He's crazy. I don't know the diagnosis, but he's possibly bipolar.

He's also suicidal, from time to time, and did start talking about violence, though never directly to me on the phone, it was always in other writings he pointed out to me.

He can be extraordinarily functional for a long time, then ... he tosses it all away in a burst of intense activity that results, for example, in his being banned on Wikipedia. The first times, it really didn't make sense, he was banned for doing stuff, minor pranks, that would normally hardly raise an eyebrow. But he had tweaked the bear, that was the reality, he'd offended the power elite.

And then he gave them excuses to ban him. Blatant excuses. It was in some ways like what he did with the threat to assassinate the President. He sent it to the Secret Service and then waited for them to pick him up. It might possibly have been an alternative to suicide. Harder to commit suicide in prison. It made his life much simpler. No internet.

I'll try to contact his sister tomorrow.

I completely agree with the decision on Wikipedia to block the account. They really had no choice, and that was based on current behavior, not on the old ban.

I couldn't access Libertapedia for a bit, but now I see the letter to the probation officer. They will simply pick him up and lock him up, no question about it. He may be safer that way, unless he really does have firearms, in which case, he might not live long. Damn.

[timbo]

I've got a pretty comical (joke) pseudo-template by Tisane for warning vandals with IPs linked to Christian Schools up on my WP user page.

I've never met him or corresponded with him, but the guy seems really sharp, reading his stuff. Here's hoping he gets his chemical imbalance fixed or whatever it is that makes him go off kilter before he gets his ass killed.


t

This post has been edited by timbo:

[Seurat]

The World Wide Web: just like Usenet before it, a dreamland for the libertarian troll.

Or the other way around!

The Internet is no more and no less than what is made of it. The only thing that distinguishes it from the analog world is the ease with which one can acquire and stand upon one's soapbox.

This does both wonderful things and terrible things. Imagine the number of artists who would have kept all their work in a private scrapbook 20 years ago, and then look up some of the things that you can find online. Works in various stages of completion, of various levels of quality, but all visible for the curious. (IMG:smilys0b23ax56/default/smile.gif)

The unfortunate part is that the undesirables, the crazies, also have a shorter road to broadcasting their insanity. (IMG:smilys0b23ax56/default/rolleyes.gif)

I don't think that it is correct to indict the Internet because some of those it brings to light are crazy; the crazy people probably would have been crazy without the Internet. The Internet is simply a microscope for looking at things that were previously too small to notice, a lens that makes them look bigger. Some of those things and people are good, and some are bad, but they would have been there anyway.

We don't necessarily know the consequences of the Internet on these issues. Could the crazy ones work up a frenzy through their online activities that leads them to real and serious action? On the other hand, might it act as a safety valve, one that channels the crazy into annoying but harmless "TL;DR" rants online?

I can't help but imagine an alternate timeline with today's Internet in the past, where Kennedy is spared because his would-be-killer stays home blogging, or where young people in Guy Fawkes masks get arrested while demonstrating against the Vietnam War. (IMG:smilys0b23ax56/default/evilgrin.gif)

You can discuss just about anything on the Internet, whether you're talking about art, baseball, sexual deviancy, (IMG:smilys0b23ax56/default/confused.gif) wingnut politics, (IMG:smilys0b23ax56/default/frustrated.gif) or Wikipedia. (IMG:smilys0b23ax56/default/wtf.gif)

[EricBarbour]

The unfortunate part is that the undesirables, the crazies, also have a shorter road to broadcasting their insanity. (IMG:smilys0b23ax56/default/rolleyes.gif)

And the greater tragedy: Wikipedia is unable to deal with or protect itself from them.

[Abd]

The unfortunate part is that the undesirables, the crazies, also have a shorter road to broadcasting their insanity. (IMG:smilys0b23ax56/default/rolleyes.gif)

And the greater tragedy: Wikipedia is unable to deal with or protect itself from them.

Wikipedia did not normally need to be protected from Tisane, it would have been, properly, the other way around. But his last gaffe was over the top, and unprovoked, as far as I can see.

Wikipedia, when it was functional, probably helped stabilize him, to a degree, and the reward for Wikipedia was prodigious content creation. Newyorkbrad was quite frustrated when the guy was banned. And what he was finally banned for was mostly a lie, misrepresentation of what he did, by a certain deletionist sock who took him on as a target. Long story. Easter Bunny Hotline. Not a hoax. Genuine material, a bit jokily presented in mainspace, he'd do stuff like that. That rabble-rouser got blocked. But the misrepresentation stuck. Typical wiki stuff. "Crowd sourced" can be, unfortunately, another name for "mob rule."

block discussion. Looking at this, I don't know what I was thinking. The IP is immediately recognizable as Fredrick day IP, and I would have known that then. Yellowbeard, though viciously trying at various times to get the user blocked, and kicking him when he was down, may not have been involved at all.

That an IP editor, visibly a blocked user, can start a riot on AN/I, is a sign of the WP problem. Bottom line, Larry E. Jordan was blocked for creating a stub on a real subject, with insufficient evidence of notability, and with jokey text, easily fixed. The article was immediately speedied. I later recreated the article with sources supplied by the guy, which I checked, and it's still there.

Consider, he produced a huge amount of content, his weird edits were easily less than 1% of his good content contributions. Worst was the hoax article on Obuibo Mbstpo, probably, but it was truly funny, and, again, not actually harmful. Vandals come along and do much worse all the time, and get a warning.... He was never blocked for repeating behavior he was warned against, and he was never short-blocked. Period. Except the former account, once, by mistake, the block was quickly lifted.

I put up a study of this user at Wikipedia_talk:WikiProject_Wikipedia_Reform/Attrition/Study/Reasons_for_leaving, under Sarsaparilla. I'm still not revealing the name of his immediately preceding account, though it's quite easy to find if anyone really cares. This account was in good standing when he abandoned it, no history of disruption or serious conflict.

But, then, when the plug was yanked on his Wikipedia drug ...

That was then, this is now. He's gone beyond the point where Wikipedia could be blamed for his condition. It pushed him in a certain direction, but it didn't push him into fantasies of violence against the government and government officials. The community dysfunction helped sour him on social structure, which easily becomes anomie and frustration and despair, that's about all I could say.

This post has been edited by Abd:

[Peter Damian]

This http://libertapedia.org/wiki/User:Tisane/My_story was very interesting. Fascinating and disturbing. I am a great fan of breaching experiments, as you all know. But my experiments end up in getting banned from Wikipedia, which is no great burden. This guy went to jail, and intends (it seems) to go back.

Either that or he is serious and really wanted to kill the president. Either way, a little bit crazy although in that perfectly rational crazy way that is the most difficult to deal with craziness. It seems unfair that he went to jail.

[edit]A lot of it is unintentionally comic. E.g.

As the race went on, I started doubting more and more the workability of ending oppression through democratic channels, and wondering whether it wouldn't be just as well to do what Timothy McVeigh did, and truck-bomb the government. [...] I continued to research Timothy McVeigh, and after reading the book American Terrorist, concluded that mass destruction was not a good way to try to bring about reform.

The Secret Service agent became noticeably angry at my remarks about the moral acceptability of killing the President.

I am not even going to try to pursue an accounting career at this point, because I know from experience that those employers tend to be very fussy about their applicants' criminal records.

[edit] Here is another one from his letter to probation officer

For now on, I will possess firearms, ammunition, destructive devices, and other dangerous weapons whenever I want to. I have a right to protect myself from aggressors, including those who work for the government. If you happen to hear the distinctive sound of the gunfire of a Solothurn S-18/100 20 mm Anti-Tank Cannon emanating from my backyard, as cardboard cutouts of statist federal politicians, federal judges, federal prosecutors, and federal agents become riddled with large, ragged bullet holes, please know that there is nothing amiss; it is just me engaging in target practice.
http://libertapedia.org/wiki/User:Tisane/S..._U.S._Probation

This post has been edited by Peter Damian:

[Abd]

This http://libertapedia.org/wiki/User:Tisane/My_story was very interesting. Fascinating and disturbing. I am a great fan of breaching experiments, as you all know. But my experiments end up in getting banned from Wikipedia, which is no great burden. This guy went to jail, and intends (it seems) to go back.

Either that or he is serious and really wanted to kill the president. Either way, a little bit crazy although in that perfectly rational crazy way that is the most difficult to deal with craziness. It seems unfair that he went to jail.

It should be treated as with any dangerous mental illness. He might need institutional support; with it, he could be (as he often is) high-functioning. But I don't know that the institutions are available. Shame.

He has no history as far as I've been able to find of actual violence. When Jehochman blocked him (improperly, actually), he later apologized to Jehochman, sacrificing a perfectly good sock to do so. (His only "socking" was while blocked. Which would include Tisane, of course.)

But he's definitely been advocating violence. Someone might take him seriously, and he wants to be taken seriously.

If he really wanted to kill the President, though, how he's gone about it, so far, is, shall we say, ineffective. He's very smart. If he wanted to actually kill the President, he's someone who might be able to pull it off, or at least come much closer.

Could this shift? Sure, even though I don't expect it, based on the complete lack of prior violent history. He's got some violence in his life, though, a violent relative, I think. So ... I'm pretty sure they are looking for him by now, with some urgency, they'd be foolish not to.

[Alison]

Just so's you know - Tisane, aka Nathan Larson, was sent back to jail until mid-2012 (IMG:smilys0b23ax56/default/ohmy.gif) (IMG:smilys0b23ax56/default/sad.gif)

[GlassBeadGame]

Just so's you know - Tisane, aka Nathan Larson, was sent back to jail until mid-2012 (IMG:smilys0b23ax56/default/ohmy.gif) (IMG:smilys0b23ax56/default/sad.gif)

Hey what's up with the "Purge" button on Libertapedia? Sounds useful.

[Michaeldsuarez]

Just so's you know - Tisane, aka Nathan Larson, was sent back to jail until mid-2012 (IMG:smilys0b23ax56/default/ohmy.gif) (IMG:smilys0b23ax56/default/sad.gif)

Hey what's up with the "Purge" button on Libertapedia? Sounds useful.

If only. The "Purge" button is basically "F5" or "Refresh". It's from the "Purge" extension. Tisane is also a MediaWiki enthusiast.

This post has been edited by Michaeldsuarez:

[Milton Roe]

Just so's you know - Tisane, aka Nathan Larson, was sent back to jail until mid-2012 (IMG:smilys0b23ax56/default/ohmy.gif) (IMG:smilys0b23ax56/default/sad.gif)

How rude:

http://libertapedia.org/w/index.php?title=...911&oldid=25896

[Milton Roe]

The community dysfunction helped sour him on social structure, which easily becomes anomie and frustration and despair, that's about all I could say.

I first read "anime and frustration and despair...." (IMG:smilys0b23ax56/default/fear.gif)