Wiki wiki whak, Dr Zen tells so much truth Options

[thekohser]

The blog post Wiki wiki whak by a pseudonymous "Dr Zen" is an outstanding dissection of Jimmy Wales' recent essay in The Guardian.

Please read it. It's very long, but so worthwhile.

Whenever I read the pronouncements of Jimmy Wales, I want to slap the smug fuck. His recent article in the Guardian provoked no different a feeling.

Clearly, Wales does not read Wikipedia, which demonstrates very clearly that humans are exactly that [irrational captives to their background and identity]. Contentious issues are battlegrounds, on which people show no objectivity at all. Indeed, in Wikipedia, "objectivity" is measured by how much support you have.

[Milton Roe]

The blog post Wiki wiki whak by a pseudonymous "Dr Zen" is an outstanding dissection of Jimmy Wales' recent essay in The Guardian.

Please read it. It's very long, but so worthwhile.

Well, an interesting essay, but suffering in some essential flaws induced by the stuporousness of the Leftist idea that all property is theft, and thus that anybody who "has" anything, only has it by virtue of having taken it away from somebody else who "had" it first (begging the question of how the first guy is supposed to have a better title to it-- did he steal it also?).

Randians are into the noninitiation of force thing because they are, like all reactionaries, deathly scared of someone taking what they have from them. They worship property, and conveniently ignore that all property is theft, having originally been taken from someone else by the initiation of force.

How cynical. If you really believe this, then the problem is NOT how badly America, or Wales, or any other high tech society or product mal-uses knowledge (emblematized by an encyclopedia) to oppress the masses in the rest of the world. It's worse: if you really believe the collectivist notion, it's impossible to actually use "knowledge" morally to better one's life at all. Why? Because life is a zero sum game, didn't you know?

It isn't just that Americans are bad at what they use knowledge for, rather it is impossible even in theory to do better. Everyone cannot become materially well-off (loosely defined as enough shelter, enough to eat, to wear, read, etc), without screwing somebody else (probably in Africa) over. The reason being that there isn't enough "stuff" in the world to allow this, and can never be. So says the essay. There is no way to ever make enough stuff to eliminate povery, even in theory.

Thus, we should all have given up, long ago. The problem, Dr. Zen informs us, is insoluble. So, no wonder Wales is such a boob; he'd fail even if he went about it better. He might just as well have proposed that everyone on earth should get (say) a farm and an iPhone. Everybody knows there aren't that many iPhones.

[thekohser]

Funny, I didn't get all caught up in the Leftist and Randian stuff. I was more enamored with the "Jimbo's an idiot" stuff, which I really felt was on the mark.

I guess we selectively digest what appeals to us.

[Milton Roe]

Funny, I didn't get all caught up in the Leftist and Randian stuff. I was more enamored with the "Jimbo's an idiot" stuff, which I really felt was on the mark.

I guess we selectively digest what appeals to us.

Oh, all that part was fine. Naturally I fasten on the parts I disagree with, and ignore the rest.

It just seems a little unfair to tar Jimbo with the robber-barron-West brush. Some of it's true, but the rest of the world is quite capable of doing the Rwanda thing all by itself, and I'm tired of being blamed for the excesses of every African despot and the vicissitudes of every tropical disease.

Technology and trade do bring more wealth to human beings, with less work (labor). It's a never-ending source of outrage to me how closely and carefully Marx describes this process of technical amplification of labor, while at the same time denying that it would ultimately do any good. It's not like the man had any excuses, if you've read Capital. Yes, he was right about class warfare and people's tendency to let their subordinates do the work and get paid crap and get no credit. Marx wasn't 100% wrong-- he got the class struggle spot on. However, that said, cheap consumer goods are a good thing. You want expensive consumer goods?

I suppose this nuttiness about manufacture, is due to the fact a that Marx spent his life as a monster parasite, basically sponging off Engels and writing stuff that nobody wanted to read. When you do that while your family suffers, you need to make up a very complicated story for why you're broke in the midst of an industrial revolution. And that was Marx's, and (like the joke goes) he was stickin to it.

I just wish Engles hadn't been such an enabler of such crap. The millions of lives that would have been saved!