NYB on The Volokh Conspiracy, Some First Thoughts on Wikipedia Options

[tarantino]

http://www.volokh.com/posts/1242098183.shtml

Ira requests:

I make only one request: that regular Wikipedians who are looking over my shoulder, as well as Wikipedia critics from Wikipedia Review and elsewhere, bear in mind that this is a general-interest audience. Please don't hijack the comment threads with our own internal disputes and debates. No one here wants to read who is a sockpuppet of whom or whether so-and-so's block was fair or not. We have ANI and Wikipedia Review to hash those things out later.

[Jon Awbrey]

Now here's a WikiPediot "Administrator" who is apparently too cowardly even to use his or her "real" pseudonym:

One of the espoused ideals of Wikipedism is often expressed as "Mind the Edits, Not the Editor" — in other words, it is only the value of the content that matters, not the identity of the contributor. This is indeed one of the ways that Wikipediots excuse their use of anonymous sources, the rationalization being that one can always vet the content without having to know the particulars of the person (or bot) who placed it on the page.

Anyone who thinks about it for a second knows this is nonsense in real world terms.

But let us thank the anonymous "administrator" {{citation needed}} Timekeeper for demonstrating how this bit of wiki-preaching works in practice.

Jon Awbrey (his real name), 17 May 2009, 3:16pm

[Somey]

Now here's a WikiPediot "Administrator" who is apparently too cowardly even to use his or her "real" pseudonym...

That's Horologium (T-C-L-K-R-D) , another laissez faire "libertarian" right-winger, using the classic but wait folks he isn't telling you that he's banned from Wikipedia!!! rejoinder.

Zzzzzz...

[dtobias]

another laissez faire "libertarian" right-winger

...not that there's anything wrong with that...

[Somey]

...not that there's anything wrong with that...

Not necessarily, anyway. I shouldn't risk alienating any Volokh Conspiracy readers who may be checking out our helpful little website, but the sad fact of it is, there are a lot of Bush-baby Neocon Republicans out there painting themselves as "Independents" and "Libertarians" so that they can avoid the Bush Stigma™ whilst carrying on the fight for various aspects of the Anti-Obama, Anti-Abortion, Pro-Censorship, Anti-Gay, etc. etc., agenda. If I were one of those real libertarians who were into it before it was "cool," dutifully following the smaller-government, fiscal-responsibility agenda, I would be extremely pissed off about this. Unfortunately, there's probably very little they can really do about it.

Then again, maybe they can turn a few of those people into Ron Paul supporters, by getting them really, really drunk the night before Election Day?

[Jon Awbrey]

… not that there's anything wrong with that …

Not necessarily, anyway. I shouldn't risk alienating any Volokh Conspiracy readers who may be checking out our helpful little website, but the sad fact of it is, there are a lot of Bush-baby Neocon Republicans out there painting themselves as "Independents" and "Libertarians" so that they can avoid the Bush Stigma™ whilst carrying on the fight for various aspects of the Anti-Obama, Anti-Abortion, Pro-Censorship, Anti-Gay, etc. etc., agenda. If I were one of those real libertarians who were into it before it was "cool," dutifully following the smaller-government, fiscal-responsibility agenda, I would be extremely pissed off about this. Unfortunately, there's probably very little they can really do about it.

Then again, maybe they can turn a few of those people into Ron Paul supporters, by getting them really, really drunk the night before Election Day?

I have known some Card-Carrying Conservatives and some Card-Burning Libertarians, but I don't see a lot of either on the Internet. Pseuds of a feather pseud together, I guess.

What see in Wikipedia is neither fish nor fowl but a kind of Permanent Adolescent Philosophy (PAP), and all their Gang Colors and all their Battle Cries amount to the same thing in the end — sucking up to the Biggest Bully On The Block.

Jon Awbrey

[Somey]

I have known some Card-Carrying Conservatives and some Card-Burning Libertarians, but I don't see a lot of either on the Internet. Pseuds of a feather pseud together, I guess.

Count yourself lucky, then! It may be that I encounter more people like that because I'm a businessman (just not a very successful one at the moment), and you're one of these Academia-with-a-capital-"A" guys. But these folks are definitely out there, trust me on that one...

And please folks, don't get me wrong - I have nothing against small-government, fiscal-responsibility conservatives at all, whether or not they call themselves "libertarians." My only beef here is with these people who elected George W. Bush, twice, and now refuse to own up to it, like leopards trying to change their spots overnight. (Bush obviously having nothing to do with small government or fiscal responsibility in any way whatsoever.)

What see in Wikipedia is neither fish nor fowl but a kind of Permanent Adolescent Philosophy (PAP), and all their Gang Colors and all their Battle Cries amount to the same thing in the end — sucking up to the Biggest Bully On The Block.

True... Sometimes I wonder, though, to what extent political ideologues take advantage of simple human nature, or maybe I should say good-natured humanity, to achieve their often-nefarious ends on WP. There's actually a Wikipedia article on something called the Abilene paradox (T-H-L-K-D) that sort of explains what I'm thinking here. At first it will probably seem completely inapplicable, because after all WP'ers argue with each other all the time - that's the whole point of WP, in fact - and yet, putting aside whatever specific issue they're arguing about, they're all pretty much in agreement that their participation there is worthwhile and that they should all continue doing it.

[Milton Roe]

And please folks, don't get me wrong - I have nothing against small-government, fiscal-responsibility conservatives at all, whether or not they call themselves "libertarians." My only beef here is with these people who elected George W. Bush, twice, and now refuse to own up to it, like leopards trying to change their spots overnight. (Bush obviously having nothing to do with small government or fiscal responsibility in any way whatsoever.)

I'm not convinced that small government people elected "Feds will fix your K-12" Bush in 2000. I think it was simply a knee jerk reaction against "Feds will control every aspect of your lives to make Earth better" Gore. And a near thing it was, too. After eight years of Clinton and Wife, it was time to see if maybe the Feds couldn't start minding their own business. And except for the schools and presumably a lot more pork-barrelled baseball stadiums, it might even have worked if bin Laden hadn't attacked us so successfully.

Then came 9/11 and everybody started acting paranoid and you couldn't tell Republicans from Democrats for the longest time, which is how we GOT the term "NEO-Con." After 9/11 even liberal New Yorkers wanted to go somewhere far away and bomb the shit out of somebody. Anybody. This lasted right through 2004. Or at least enough of it did to put Bush in a second time.

Had 9/11 not happened, I think we'd have seen 8 years of harmless muddling and probably less government than we'd have gotten with Gore. Sure the environment would have suffered more than it would have under Gore, but I doubt Gore would have seen the housing/borrowing bubble coming, either. That was a 7 trillion dollar pot of equity just waiting to be invaded, borrowed, and spent living the good-life, by everybody (both Republicans and Democrats-- we're talking everybody whose mortage is underwater right now-- which is a quarter of them). And I think it would have happened, no matter who was at the helm.

And thus, absent 9/11, we'd be right here at the same place, except without the extra trillion or so of debt that we've spent on Iraq. Which would be a help right now, but with 7 trillion of US housing debt, that doesn't mean everything would have been fine. I'll bet 25 cents Gore would have figured out some way to spend a pile of his own social program money, had he been elected.

It's not clear to me that Bush's No Child Left Behind could have possibly spent as much money as our military expenses the first 8 years of this century, as a Gore Democrats-Gone-Wild program (think Obama with training wheels) would have. There's just no way to dump that much money INTO K-12 education in such a short time. They'd have had to have kids riding to magnet schools in solid gold cadillacs.

So, absent 9/11 (and that's a big thing which nobody forsaw in 2000), I think we'd be in marginally better shape right now, with Repuplicans.

Anyway, don't blame any of this present Perfect Economic Storm on libertarians. Conservatives, sure. Liberals, sure. Homeowners and Preditory Banks and idiot economics with these new derivative weapons of mass financial destruction-- sure. Geez, the whole government of Iceland went belly up when fisherman made enough money to buy banks and leverage them at 30:1 fractional reserve. And that's with essentially no defense spending crisis or 9/11, there.

Anyway, libertarians, no way is their thinking especially responsible for this. Do you think the people of Iceland are libertarians? Hell, they're more or less watermellon Green-outside Red-inside eco-socialists. With a good non-pathological highly-educated culture. Gore's wet dream. They got pounded by the global housing bubble, anyway. Just as Gore would have.