Mantanmoreland goes socking? (Again?), LOL Options

[dogbiscuit]

Basically, SV, Guy, Gerard, and the rest of the bunch who defended Mantanmoreland to the last (even Jimbo weighed in), following which MM recidivized , are going to KEEP doing whatever they want, the next time when it's somebody else they like. They HAVE no shame. They are NOT going to be held accountable, and they know it. ArbCom, as we've seen, cannot function in cases of people who have the favor of powerful admins, unless they are checkuser caught in the cookie sock-jar, and usually not even then (MM has been caught now 3 times, I think, and SV once). This case will have no impact at all. And no, I agree, that's not fair. If I thought David "Block Half of Utah" Gerard, and Jimbo "Shoot on Sight" Wales had learned anything from the case, I'd possibly have a different opinion. But they've very scarce right now, and I doubt they've learned anything at all

I'm open to suggestions. If it were up to me, I'd remove all their admin powers and make all of them edit nowhere but Simple English Wikipedia for a year. I think they'll all come back with better prose and clearer thoughts.

I have a simpler view. Given that SV and so on have excuses and have successfully obfusticated the evidence for some time, I know that unless they give any indication of wanting part of a reconciliation, it is not going to happen.

Wikipedia has a number of choices, public humiliation, drawing a line, pretending nothing was wrong. I'm sure there are others. Public humiliation is simply divisive, as is pretending nothing was wrong with the Wordbomb attackers' behaviour. There are too many attackers, with too many excuses to get any meaningful public apology - and it will just be cast as playing into the hands of the BADSITEs - giving us satisfaction rather than righting a wrong.

So, to those who know about the case, a clear action, such as reinstating Wordbomb by ArbCom or the community (I do not care for the internal politics as to how this happens) makes it clear that the attackers have been over-ruled. If they care to pretend that they have not been beaten, then that is for them to work out how they delude themselves. To those that know, ArbCom, the interested community, those here at WR, we will know that the wrong has been acknowledged and the lesson acknowledged.

From this point on, the supporters of Wordbomb have a large number of "I told you so points". I think this will influence thinking on the Cla68 case, the ID Crowd and so on, where there is now such damning evidence that Wikipedia processes have been derailed by inappropriate actions, that ArbCom will have to stop making protective decisions of those that they favour for unfathomable reasons.

I'm a great believer in loss of face being a strong motivator to avoid doing the right thing, therefore to achieve the right ends, sometimes we need to forget about"fairness" and simply move on, in the knowledge that the lesson of holding to a belief in the face of overwhelming evidence will have been learnt by some people.

This is a give them enough rope moment. Truth and reconciliation comes after acknowledgement, it is not a weapon of war. Of course, the alternative is a further descent into anarchy. I sense that the likes of ArbCom are starting to grasp the implications of tolerating the abuse and are considering how to turn the tanker around - without too much loss of face for ArbCom.

[Poetlister]

The best contrast to Moulton is Poetlister. She never asked the Arbitration Committee for a statement that they didn't follow due process.

No, I knew that there wouldn't be much point.

Poetlister has decided to make it work, so the result is that it does work for Poetlister.

Well, half works. I'll believe it does work when a few more people are unblocked.

So please be kind enough to educate me on this obscure point, Shalom: What is the Hebrew word for justice?

That's a bit disingenuous of you, Moulton.

[Shalom]

Moulton: you don't have to ask me what the Hebrew translation of "justice" is. There's an easy trick to find out, and I use it when I have need to find the translation to a particular word. It helps when I'm translating articles from Hebrew Wikipedia into English, as I frequently do, or vice versa. You see, there's this website called "Wikipedia" you may have heard of. On many pages of Wikipedia, there are interwiki links to other languages of Wikipedia. These interwiki links function as a kind of translator's dictionary. Indeed, I am not aware of a free translator's repository that covers as many languages as Wikipedia does. I've been reading Wikipedia for so long that I've found these amazingly arcane ways to milk information from it in places you could not expect to find anything interesting.

If you don't feel like going to the "justice" article and clicking the עברית interwiki link, I'll spoil the fun for you and link to the Hebrew Wikipedia article about צדק (tzedek).

I just listened to the NTWW episode where you reiterated your stubborn position that you refuse to be unblocked unless there is a Truth and Reconciliation process. You're spending hours on this campaign, and for what? I think you're wasting your time. (Then again, for me to tell other people they're wasting time belongs in the "pot/kettle/black" thread.) You could accept being unblocked as prima facie evidence of justice being done. (Thanks to Kurt Weber for making that phrase common among Wikipedia literati.)

I guess I would make the following comparison: someone steals $100 from you. You manage to apprehend the guy and he agrees to return the $100 to you, but he refuses to admit any wrongdoing. You say, "Fine, if you refuse to admit that you stole the money, I don't want it back from you." You make a valid point, but in practice, you've lost yourself a hundred bucks, and you have nobody to blame for that but yourself. I'm not suggesting editing Wikipedia is worth so much as 100 Zimbabwean dollars, let alone American dollars, but if it's worth anything to you, take what is being offered to you. Analogous cases of out-of-court settlements where the offending party does not accept responsibility or apologize for wrongdoing but pays anyway are commonplace.

Poetlister: yes, you make valid points. I agree with you.

This post has been edited by Shalom: Fri 30th May 2008, 2:40pm

[No one of consequence]

I guess I would make the following comparison: someone steals $100 from you. You manage to apprehend the guy and he agrees to return the $100 to you, but he refuses to admit any wrongdoing. You say, "Fine, if you refuse to admit that you stole the money, I don't want it back from you." You make a valid point, but in practice, you've lost yourself a hundred bucks, and you have nobody to blame for that but yourself. I'm not suggesting editing Wikipedia is worth so much as 100 Zimbabwean dollars, let alone American dollars, but if it's worth anything to you, take what is being offered to you. Analogous cases of out-of-court settlements where the offending party does not accept responsibility or apologize for wrongdoing but pays anyway are commonplace.

I think its more like one of those lawsuits where you are offered an out of court settlement in which the defendant pays up but admits no wrongdoing. Do you want the easy money, or do you want to force a trial where you could be proven right, but at considerable cost in time and effort, and which you might lose.

[Kato]

Far be it for me to stick up for Moulton, and even though this thread has become yet another arena for Moulton's ramblings, of course he's right in this instance.

The capacity to edit Wikipedia is worthless. Anyone can edit Wikipedia. Just get a new account if one wants to piss around on an online game for hours on end. Also, getting unblocked oneself, or seeing Mantanmoreland blocked, is not important.

What is important is something called "principle" and if one presses a principle as hard as one can, that principle might just stick, and inform future processes in a positive way.

By addressing the core problems, as Moulton and Wordbomb have done, their actions are far more important than some superficial need of an individual editor to right some personal wrong.

[Shalom]

What is important is something called "principle" and if one presses a principle as hard as one can, that principle might just stick, and inform future processes in a positive way.

By addressing the core problems, as Moulton and Wordbomb have done, their actions are far more important than some superficial need to right some personal wrong.

I believe in principle up to a point. I requested the unblock of Twister Twist, a user caught up in a bad checkuser result who never violated any policy, even though Twister Twist had not edited in more than a year. I felt that, regardless of whether Twister Twist even remembers that she used that account on Wikipedia, it violates my principles to allow an unjust block to stand, so I requested an unblock on behalf of that account, and Golbez granted it.

I don't think Moulton's insistence on principle falls in the same category. Moulton got into a dispute with Wikipedia administrators. I'm not understanding exactly what happened, but the dispute escalated to an RFC, and from the RFC someone banned him, even though normally there are intermediate steps between an RFC and a ban. If Moulton had been a little more circumspect, the dispute could have been resolved without starting an RFC. (If one formula of "resolved" was "let Wikipedia say what it wants about my colleague, I quit," consider that the current situation for Moulton is not any better than that outcome would have been.) So to me, claiming that Moulton should be unbanned on "principle" is emphasizing technical details while ignoring common sense. If I felt strongly about this case, I would add my voice to those on-wiki calling for his reinstatement. Heck, if I really cared, I could meet him in person because I live in the same metropolitan area as he does. I'm not going to go out of my way to help someone who refuses to help himself. Principle, however you wish to define it, includes being reasonably responsive to other people who want to help you. Moulton has failed on that principle.

Ironically, by not trying to help himself, Moulton is being more selfish than if he just accepted reinstatement with no questions asked. By trying to correct the system in a massive blaze of drama instead of working within the system, Moulton is substantively disrupting the system without actually accomplishing anything for himself or for Wikipedia. I don't think you realize this, but Poetlister's unban actually did produce a slight change in the way the Arbitration Committee thinks about bans. FT2 basically admitted that, in the future, the Committee needs to be more open with the community about presenting its evidence in such cases, and he cited the disclosure about Archtransit as an example of such openness. If Moulton had allowed himself to be reinstated, it would have embarrassed some of the editors who were in dispute with him (which is actually happening anyway for other reasons) and it would have led people to think: "Hey, you know, maybe we really did mess up on this one." Instead all people can think about is: "Will Moulton shut up already?"

[dogbiscuit]

Far be it for me to stick up for Moulton, and even though this thread has become yet another arena for Moulton's ramblings, of course he's right in this instance.

The capacity to edit Wikipedia is worthless. Anyone can edit Wikipedia. Just get a new account if one wants to piss around on an online game for hours on end. Also, getting unblocked oneself, or seeing Mantanmoreland blocked, is not important.

What is important is something called "principle" and if one presses a principle as hard as one can, that principle might just stick, and inform future processes in a positive way.

By addressing the core problems, as Moulton and Wordbomb have done, their actions are far more important than some superficial need of an individual editor to right some personal wrong.

So Wordbomb shouldn't be unblocked on principle due to his badness, even though in principle he was driven to it.

When people do something only for the principle, it is a fair bet that they are heading for trouble. Being a liberal sort of a guy, I can recognise the David Steel concerns of power without principles vs principles without power. It is a grey world, and while we can look to principles to guide us, there is also a need to be pragmatic. The art is understanding that the balance of these is not fixed and when to stick to principles and when to be pragmatic. If you like, principles are guidance, not law.

...and another thing.

I think that is why Wikipedia sucks when it comes to process. People are always looking for hard and fast rules, binding precedent, things that make decisions easy.

Wikipedia is too complicated for that. You just have to look at the basic policies to realise that taking judgement out of things like assessing reliable sources does not work.

Perhaps, in the end, sticking to your principles is about making sure you have precious few principles, but the right ones. Wikipedia has too many and some of them are plain wrong.

[Milton Roe]

I guess I would make the following comparison: someone steals $100 from you. You manage to apprehend the guy and he agrees to return the $100 to you, but he refuses to admit any wrongdoing. You say, "Fine, if you refuse to admit that you stole the money, I don't want it back from you." You make a valid point, but in practice, you've lost yourself a hundred bucks, and you have nobody to blame for that but yourself. I'm not suggesting editing Wikipedia is worth so much as 100 Zimbabwean dollars, let alone American dollars, but if it's worth anything to you, take what is being offered to you. Analogous cases of out-of-court settlements where the offending party does not accept responsibility or apologize for wrongdoing but pays anyway are commonplace.

But you'd be surprised how often people hold out for the justice,even if it costs them. We're wired for it.

There's a classic psych experiment where a game is set up as follows. Person A is given control of a pot of $10. Then person B makes a one-time take-it-or-leave it offer (no feedback allowed) for how the pot will be divied up between A and B. If B's offer is accepted, both A and B split the money according to the proposed deal. If rejected, neither get any money, and it goes back to the experimental fund.

Now the joker is that B's offer is "fake" and is controlled by the experimentors. They still abide by the deal on dividing the money, but there's no second subject B.

If B offers A anything more than about $5, the pot is divided and both sides get money. But the interesting thing is that as B begins to offer about $3 or less, A starts to balk, and both sides get nothing, as they know they will. This is truely wierd, because even if B offers 50 cents (meaning B keeps $9.50), A should in theory and rationality take the offer, since A has nothing but gain so long as B offers ANY money to A at all. But in practice, the lower B's offer, the more A is usually willing to forgo ANY money, in order to stand on principle and fairness, and punish B for "greed" when really lopsided and selfish and narcissistic offers by B are made. That is, A is willing to forgo $1 almost all the time, just to see that B doesn't get $9 from a greedy division. I've seen divorce cases like this. One partner, rather than see the other get 80% of a house, will fight until the house-equity is burned up by attornies. They could have settled for 20% instead of effectively nothing, but they could not abide the injustice.

Now, there's no point is saying that all of this is irrational. Irrational or not, there are very good reasons to think that we're all socially wired for it. The reason being that if we let somebody get away with 90% THIS time, just so we get %10, we're setting ourselves up for a social predator who figures they can do that to everybody, and is being taught this by experience. You've met people like this in business, if you've done much business.

And in law and torts, same way. Yeah, you can more easily get back the money your employee embezzled, without wrong doing-being admitted, if you agree not to go after them hammer and tongs. But with no conviction, and no penalty, that employee goes on to work for somebody else stupid enough not to do a background check and collect references. In fact, that's how YOU got stuck with them. What goes around, comes around, if you allow it to. So there are reasons for these fairness genes, and some of them are NOT irrational, if you see life as a repeated tit-tat game with more than one cycle of play. Which of course, it usually is.

Philosophically,

Milton

[Shalom]

Good comments, Milt. I don't have a response if only because I've said what's on my mind already.

[Random832]

Okay, so I had a dig around. From what FT2 said;

On May 14 2008, Bassettcat edited from his normal IP range at both 00:12 and 00:15, followed by an edit made on a second IP located over a thousand miles away at 00:18, and then an edit at his normal dialup IP at 00:21.

That was weeks after Thatcher ran the first RFCU case on April 3, so he'd no chance of catching him until MM goofed with that single edit.

I find this reassuring - it means the checkusers are doing their due diligence on editors in these areas, and not just letting them slide entirely or checking once and considering an account "clean" after that.

[Piperdown]

For those of you wondering where Gary is venting his....something....these days instead of WP (for all you know, lol).....he's "stockperson" on this message board:

http://www.investorvillage.com/recentposts.asp?mid=46950

Patrick Byrne is "Hannibal" on the same board. One of them is having a "meltdown" and it ain't Patrick.

[LamontStormstar]

For those of you wondering where Gary is venting his....something....these days instead of WP (for all you know, lol).....he's "stockperson" on this message board:

http://www.investorvillage.com/recentposts.asp?mid=46950

Patrick Byrne is "Hannibal" on the same board. One of them is having a "meltdown" and it ain't Patrick.

I dug through that link, but didn't find anything good. Mind highlighting relevant examples?


I do wonder what Weiss is doing now that he's got a big ban. I expect him to have snuck back or something.

[Aloft]

I do wonder what Weiss is doing now that he's got a big ban. I expect him to have snuck back or something.

He probably has. I imagine he'll stay away from the articles in question until he builds up some history and makes a friend or two.

[Piperdown]

here's one. Weiss was very assertive....it took 4 of his sock puppets 2 years of sustained "consensus by sockpuppetry"..... in placing an op-ed piece (curiously devoid of any factual content, lol) by his buddy Joe Nocera into the Byrne-Overstock-Weiss-NakedShorting-etc WP articles. Guess what? Check this out, lol:

Deep Capture has come to possess a great number of emails between various journalists and miscreants. In one, the former BusinessWeek reporter brags to the crooked mortgage broker of influencing the contents of Nocera’s “Campaign of Menace” article in The New York Times. “This is totally my doing,” Gary writes. “Yuk. Yuk. Yuk.”

http://www.investorvillage.com/smbd.asp?mb...msg&mid=5086308

That's Patrick Byrne writing that, and he's not kidding.

this is more about what sort of "journalist" that WP was letting run roughshod over its own rules and taking down the credibility of WP's "leaders" with it:

In another email, Gary recounts his successful campaign to keep a reporter named Liz Moyer from getting a job at BusinessWeek because she has written favorably of companies victimized by short-sellers. Moyer, who is now with Forbes, is one of the few journalists who have accurately described the phantom share problem.

Oh yeah, these emails are going to find a very popular audience someday. Wonder if it will be via a book or via a court transcript (this fall finds Byrne Vs The Baddies in front of a jury)? Since there's 8000 of them, and only 1864 involve Weiss, I'd say that either the Byrne Vs Rocker-Gradient or the Byrne Vs The Brokerages trials are going to let them see the light.

I would place very high odds on some mentions about WP in these matters going forward, so I feel it's on-topic for WR, so I bring it up here....although IMHO WP is just a small, funny, sideshow in alll this stuff...

This post has been edited by Piperdown: Mon 30th June 2008, 12:07am

[Moulton]

The best contrast to Moulton is Poetlister. She never asked the Arbitration Committee for a statement that they didn't follow due process.

No, I knew that there wouldn't be much point.

I presume you didn't ask them because you already knew the answer.

I asked them because I didn't know if the way I was treated was considered normal practice at the English Wikipedia, or if it was a one-off case of a miscarriage of justice.

I finally learned (from Lar, mainly) that it is not customary on the English Wikipedia to attempt to be fair. And I learned from WAS 4.250 that it's customary to treat newcomers as mugging victims in Central Park.

I honestly didn't expect to learn that. But that's what I learned from Sam Korn, Lar, and WAS 4.250.

Poetlister has decided to make it work, so the result is that it does work for Poetlister.

Well, half works. I'll believe it does work when a few more people are unblocked.

So the jury is still out on whether it can be made to work. The prospects do not look good.

So please be kind enough to educate me on this obscure point, Shalom: What is the Hebrew word for justice?

That's a bit disingenuous of you, Moulton.

Why is it disingenuous?

I realized that, while I knew the Hebrew word for Peace, I didn't know the Hebrew word for Justice. It occurred to me that Shalom probably could just tell me.

[Moulton]

I'll spoil the fun for you and link to the Hebrew Wikipedia article about צדק (tzedek).

Oh. I understood that word to mean Righteousness.

I just listened to the NTWW episode where you reiterated your stubborn position that you refuse to be unblocked unless there is a Truth and Reconciliation process. You're spending hours on this campaign, and for what? I think you're wasting your time. ... You could accept being unblocked as prima facie evidence of justice being done.

I didn't say I refused to be unblocked. I said I wasn't asking to be unblocked, because I wasn't planning to edit any mainspace articles under the prevailing culture of the site. My objectives do no require me to edit on Wikipedia.

We are very very far from Justice being done, Shalom. Very very far.

I guess I would make the following comparison: someone steals $100 from you. You manage to apprehend the guy and he agrees to return the $100 to you, but he refuses to admit any wrongdoing. You say, "Fine, if you refuse to admit that you stole the money, I don't want it back from you." You make a valid point, but in practice, you've lost yourself a hundred bucks, and you have nobody to blame for that but yourself. I'm not suggesting editing Wikipedia is worth so much as 100 Zimbabwean dollars, let alone American dollars, but if it's worth anything to you, take what is being offered to you. Analogous cases of out-of-court settlements where the offending party does not accept responsibility or apologize for wrongdoing but pays anyway are commonplace.

What they took away from me, Shalom, is my good name. That's what I want back. I'm not interested in an MMPONWMG masquerading as an encyclopedia. I just want my good name back.

[Piperdown]

Byrne's active on WP talk.....apparently to point out to the current Point Man on WP, Nevard, the curious picking of nits, and curious lack of intiative to mention that Samiharris (Gary Weiss)'s championing of a SEC investigation lead-in on Byrne's "Biography" hasn't been updated...odd, lol, since all negative press is immediately plugged in by the usual suspects from sources of the usual suspects ....its nice to see Byrne be allowed to participate in Talk page discussions, just as Mark Devlin should have been as he requested nicely, and more such folks railroaded by Slimmy, Gary, and their merry band of Jimbo's ShootOnSightSquad:

http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=...oldid=219359497

this is a swell example of the kind of absurd picking of nits that underlies the vast bulk of the criticisms cited on this page. Notwithstanding any of this: does it seem odd that, weeks after the newspaper stories have appeared confirming that the SEC investigation has been dropped, unequivocally, and with no action, that the page here still says "an SEC investigation of Byrne and Overstock.com was initiated and remains ongoing"? I mean, the fact that the SEC dropped the investigation and issued a no-action letter is not in any dispute. Here is [http://biz.yahoo.com/prnews/080606/laf022.html?.v=101 my "Yipikaye" press release] on the subject. Here is [http://biz.yahoo.com/ap/080606/overstock_sec.html?.v=1 the AP story] confirming it. Here is a BusinessWeek? article confirming it. Here is http://blogs.barrons.com/techtraderdaily/2...od=yahoobarrons a Barron's story. Yet nearly one month later, the article still says, "an SEC investigation of Byrne and Overstock.com was initiated and remains ongoing" while John Nevard insists upon a Talmudic distinction between a two-old old subpoena addressed to my office and a nearly identical one sent to me ''care'' of my office a week later. Lecture me all you want on "Good Faith": John Nevard's bickering is an ideal example to use to open people's eyes to the agendas and systemic bias that lie beneath these putatively neutral processes.[[User:PatrickByrne|PatrickByrne]] ([[User talk:PatrickByrne|talk]]) 18:05, 29 June 2008 (UTC)

[guy]

What they took away from me, Shalom, is my good name. That's what I want back.

Careful, Moulton. Look what happened to Poetlister when she said that here.

[Moulton]

What they took away from me, Shalom, is my good name. That's what I want back.

Careful, Moulton. Look what happened to Poetlister when she said that here.

Can you tell me where to look to find that?

[guy]

Can you tell me where to look to find that?

All over WR for the last few months.