And now we have an RFC, and what's more, an ArbCom case Options

[-DS-]

Requests for comment/Cirt

Who wants to bet on whether this will go anywhere or not?

[Abd]

The comment on the RfC talk page by Will Beback

It is lost on Will Beback that there might be a difference between chatter in a local bar, and comments in a decision-making process for an encyclopedia.

In pursuit of my agenda to make every thread be about myself, I present:

You're right that many of the accounts are "faceless", in that we don't know which, if any, accounts on WP they're connected to.

However we do know in some cases. Jayen466 here has identified as being HRIP7 there. I believe that Cla68 there is the same persona as Cla68 here. I also assume that ABD, Herschelkrustofsky, et al., are also the same people as their WP accounts. I don't think I'm deluded when I say that many people on WR have and freely express very negative views towards WP and its editors. The tone of the Cirt forum is certainly not positive or appreciative. Will Beback talk 21:19, 12 July 2011 (UTC)

I thank Will for the on-wiki mention, I was beginning to feel left out. Gee, there are many people on WR who have been attacked, libeled, defamed, and banned from Wikipedia, like it's a big surprise that there are negative views. There are others who still participate on-wiki, but they are at least occasionally disgusted by the spectacle.

However, expressing disgust in the local bar is not at all the same thing as expressing it within dispute resolution process. I called Raul654 a "fat asshole" here, but I never insulted or attacked him on-wiki, he managed to humiliate himself quite effectively. AGF and all that, and fat people may edit Wikipedia, even they are assholes, as far too many of the core turn out to be. Maybe we should look at that some day. Maybe it's ... ah ... the structure?

Looking at the flap about Cirt, I come across an edit to est. Gee, I know something about that, having just completed the Landmark Education Advanced Course. Fascinating. To use Landmark jargon -- literally -- Cirt "doesn't know his ass from a hole in the ground."

Generally, Landmark has cleaned up the language, Erhard was pretty, ah, blunt, at times, but "You don't know your ass from a hole in the ground™" is still a Landmark "distinction." A very useful one, in fact. You know something unusual has taken place when the Forum leader, and I later saw the same thing in the Advanced Course, stands up and asks, "You paid $495 for the Forum and what did you get?"

And many voices say, at once, and gleefully, "Nothing™" "Tell your family and friends!" he goes on.

When I got home from the Landmark Advanced Course, about two weeks ago, my 9-year-old daughter asked me, "How was the Advanced Course, Dad?"

"Look at me!"

"Awesome, Dad!"

Her mother, who doesn't get along with me recently, long story, heard about this. She's horrified. Cult! Obviously I was brainwashing my daughter. Yeah! Just letting her see my face.

Yeah, they use jargon, but what Cirt called jargon wasn't. Any field that explores stuff out of the ordinary needs jargon. To build comprehension requires efficient language, or it would become impossibly cumbersome. Landmark advises graduates not use the jargon outside of Landmark circles, but people do, anyway, especially newbies, so, then, the Already Always Listening™ leads them to occur to others as enthusiastic graduates and thus arise the stories about "cult." But life is empty and meaningless, and it is empty and meaningless that life is empty and meaningless™. Further, it is what it is, it is not what it is not.

When my kids tell me "Mom is being mean again," I need to be careful not to say, "That's your story," though it certainly is, because kids are accustomed to "story" meaning "lie," but stories are only interpretations, and human beings are meaning-making machines™. The problems arise when we collapse the stories with what happened™.

These are ancient concepts (er, distinctions™), repackaged and taught with efficiency by skilled and highly experienced people who might as well be called highly efficient and effective salesmen. Same skills.

So you can send a check for me for $450 and you didn't even have to sit in a room wishing you could go to the bathroom for 13 hours.

(That, by the way, is a story about Landmark that was probably never true. You can get up and go to the bathroom, but you might have been, in the old days, reminded of your commitment to stay in the room for the three hours between breaks, that's all. And then the story was told, "They wouldn't let me go to the bathroom." Sounds awful, eh? "Ain't it awful" is often the point of stories!)

Seriously, though, Landmark conveys those old concepts, with which I was very, very familiar, in ways that turn them into operational skills, with everybody gets it™ as a declared and effective intention.

This post has been edited by Abd: Thu 14th July 2011, 8:02pm