I seem to have pissed off MONGO and Tony Sidaway because I have recently actually enforced the civility policy with regards to both of them. So how long will it take them to drag me before the cronies to meet my fate?

See:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Req.../Tony_Sidaway_4 (talk page mostly)

and

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Req...ary_injunctions

Some people just can't take being told to hold their tongue... Apparently I am engaging in "a pattern of admin abuse that "has not gone unnoticed"". Perhaps I should pre-emptively cascade protect my RfC so I can be a truly abusive admin.

Going against you:

1) You write here
2) You've on a few occasions done things to help people on WR
3) You've pissed off MONGO and Tony Sidaway

Going for you:

1) Who really gives a shit about MONGO and Tony Sidaway in this day and age? They've both lost all credibility.
2) A lot of people here on WR really don't like you and you are regularly attacked.
3) You don't blindly support people here, you take it on its merits.
4) You made a pre-emptive strike by making this poll.

Making the poll makes the difference. Of course, some people would say its a WP:POINT violent, but realistically the fact that this lacks any substance means that they won't be able to go through with it.

I voted for never.

WP:POINT doesn't apply here.

It might. I mean it'd be WP:POINT if he did this on Wikipedia, and sometimes they use that for outside of Wikipedia too.

Two questions;

i) What is the prize for the pool?

ii) Anyone familiar with the concept of "The Usual Suspects"?

If wikiabuse was still active, there was about 20 diffs of Tony and quotes of him cussing like a sailor and being so uncivil. Then it ends with a hypocritical statement of him saying "that was inexcusable language. A [I forgot how long] cooldown block sounds reasonable."

His hypocrisy is almost as large his ego.

The Tony quotes originated on Encyclopedia Dramatica: http://www.encyclopediadramatica.com/Tony_...storical_quotes

Wikiabuse found a lot more and tried to write it so someone could actually repeat it on Wikipedia and not be instantly banned for it. Mentioning what Tony did on Wikipedia and not getting instantly banned for it is (I tried to think up a good analogy but I can't) is next to impossible.

I voted never. Worse comes to worse, you'd end up being the new Everyking.

I'd say anywhere from 4 - 12 weeks until they assess whether you are a big enough pain in their backside and begin gathering evidence. You'd better begin to prepare a defense with David Levy and should probably get together with SevenOfDiamonds, another of their targets, if you are prepared to duke it out.

I rather like Everyking. Granted, I came to WP well after all those ArbCom cases against him, but I did see his desyopment which was heavy handed IMO.

You do have to admire him for sticking with his one account all these years despite the stigma attached to the name. Except for this one latest incident (which will turn out to be a load of nothing), I don't think he's done anything controversial in a long while.

I guess I could joke that he's been to ArbCom so many times, he should already be an arbitrator, but that might be hurtful.

Oh I am quite prepared to do that. I kind of like SOD, he hasn't backed down despite all the bullying - and I have a hunch that if (like many people) MONGO wasn't around he would be a productive user. If he is a sock - who cares? Had he been left alone I'm sure he would have never been a problem.

You're safe for now. There will be subtle "warnings" first: articles you worked on extensively will suddenly be deleted. Images you uploaded will quickly find themselves mysteriously missing their Fair Use rationales, sources, or copyright information, and get speedied. If you step back into line, stop asking uncomfortable questions, your work will be safe again. If you protest these deletions angrily, that will be used as evidence in your future ArbCom case or AN/I discussion. Things will escalate from there. Your participation on WR will come up at one some point. Allegations that you"spewed venom" will be made (without diffs, of course). Things will deteriorate from there.

Heh, if that sort of behaviour occurs they will dig a hole for themselves - my largest contribution has been to Gene therapy - good luck deleting that. All images I have uploaded are now on commons too. I would be amused if involvement with WR came up.

The issue with MONGO is that he works in articles related to 9-11, where PoV pushers thrives, so he should have some slack there but MONGO does has a civilty problem and doesn't help the situation with dealing with those PoV pushers at times, and normally make it worse. He should take a long break with 9-11 and work with those National Park articles.

so let's be clear. you'd support a NYPD thug who beats up the occasional bronx loiterer, because he's in the same neighborhood, and dresses like, some smack dealers in the area. cuz it sends a good message to the 'hood, that they'd all better stay in line and respect his author-a-tie?

i think not.

but then i also don't think that american companies listed on major stock exchanges should be subjected to the wholesale intra-day, intra-week, and intra-year counterfeiting of their stock in order to satisfy the near term alpha-seeking goals of psychotic "money managers" and their clients' quarterly statements. 'cause, don't worry, if the company is really worth their salt, their stock price should recover. eventually. never mind the mugging it took in the short term. vote early and often, beat up any thugs and "attack"''ers it sends the right kind of message you're hoping to send.

no matter how corrupt, amoral, and greedy one has become. it's all about the right message. just ask the flo and baudy show.

this just in: WP'ians, you've been hoodwinked. Bamboozled. Slave laborers for people who are going to capitalize on your work. have a good one!

I think that this is the most realistic course of events, probably...

I noticed this FoR post previously but didn't comment because he might take it the wrong way coming from me. The fact is the post is dark, sinister and very intelligent. I am not certain which way the irony is pointed but it is certainly there.

I am, but are you saying Viridae is somehow analagous to Kaiser Sosay? Or is Viridae in the Chazz Palminteri role, and MONGO is Kaiser Sosay?

9/11 happened what 6 years ago now. Why is there still so much interest in it that MONGO has to write solely in that area? Surely he can broaden his scope beyond that.

Take a look, if you can stand it, at video footage of the World Trade Center collapsing. Your eye will naturally jump to the top of the screen, where huge fountains of dark debris erupt out of the falling towers. But fight your natural instincts. Look farther down, at the stories that haven't collapsed yet.

All wars, even the noblest, bring a reckoning of means and ends. The war on terrorism has long since lost its crisp moral lines. We may agree that terrorism is wicked, but we're still unsure about how to answer it

In almost every clip you'll see little puffs of dust spurting out from the sides of the towers. There are two competing explanations for these puffs of dust: 1) the force of the collapsing upper floors raised the air pressure in the lower ones so dramatically that it actually blew out the windows. And 2) the towers did not collapse from the impact of two Boeing 767s and the ensuing fires. They were destroyed in a planned, controlled demolition. The dust puffs you see on film are the detonations of explosives planted there before the attacks.

People who believe the second explanation live in a very different world from those who believe the first. In world No. 2, al-Qaeda is not responsible for the destruction of the World Trade Center. The U.S. government is. The Pentagon was not hit by a commercial jet; it was hit by a cruise missile. United Flight 93 did not crash after its occupants rushed the cockpit; it was deliberately taken down by a U.S. Air Force fighter. The entire catastrophe was planned and executed by federal officials in order to provide the U.S. with a pretext for going to war in the Middle East and, by extension, as a means of consolidating and extending the power of the Bush Administration.

The population of world No. 2 is larger than you might think. A Scripps-Howard poll of 1,010 adults last month found that 36% of Americans consider it "very likely" or "somewhat likely" that government officials either allowed the attacks to be carried out or carried out the attacks themselves. Thirty-six percent adds up to a lot of people. This is not a fringe phenomenon. It is a mainstream political reality.

Although the 9/11 Truth Movement, as many conspiracy believers refer to their passion, has been largely ignored by the mainstream media, it is flourishing on the Internet. One of the most popular conspiracy videos online is Loose Change, a 90-min. blizzard of statistics, photographs, documents, eyewitness accounts and expert testimony set to a trippy hip-hop backbeat. It's designed to pick apart, point by point, the conventional narrative of what happened on Sept. 11, 2001.

For all its amateur production values--it was created by a pair of industrious twentysomethings using a laptop, pizza money and footage scavenged from the Internet--Loose Change is a compelling experience. Take the section about the attack on the Pentagon. As the film points out--and this is a tent-pole issue among 9/11 conspiracists--the crash site doesn't look right. There's not enough damage. The hole smashed in the Pentagon's outer wall was 75 ft. wide, but a Boeing 757 has a 124-ft. wingspan. Why wasn't the hole wider? Why does it look so neat?

Experts will tell you that the hole was punched by the plane's fuselage, not its wings, which sheared off on impact. But then what happened to the wings? And the tail and the engines? Images of the crash site show hardly any of the wreckage you would expect from a building that's been rammed by a commercial jet. The lawn, where the plane supposedly dragged a wing on approach, is practically pristine. The plane supposedly clipped five lampposts on its way in, but the lampposts in question show surprisingly little damage. And could Hani Hanjour, the man supposedly at the controls, have executed the maneuvers that the plane performed? He failed a flight test just weeks before the attack. And Pentagon employees reported smelling cordite after the hit, the kind of high explosive a cruise missile carries.

There's something empowering about just exploring such questions. Loose Change appeals to the viewer's common sense: it tells you to forget the official explanations and the expert testimony, and trust your eyes and your brain instead. It implies that the world can be grasped by laymen without any help or interference from the talking heads. Watching Loose Change, you feel as if you are participating in the great American tradition of self-reliance and nonconformist, antiauthoritarian dissent. You're fighting the power. You're thinking different. (Conspiracists call people who follow the government line "sheeple.") "The goal of the movie was just really to get out there and show that there are alternate stories to what the mainstream media and the government will tell you," says Korey Rowe, 23, who produced the movie. "That 19 hijackers are going to completely bypass security and crash four commercial airliners in a span of two hours, with no interruption from the military forces, in the most guarded airspace in the United States and the world? That to me is a conspiracy theory."

It's also not much of a story line. As a narrative, the official story that the government--echoed by the media--is trying to sell shows an almost embarrassing lack of novelistic flair, whereas the story the conspiracy theorists tell about what happened on Sept. 11 is positively Dan Brownesque in its rich, exciting complexity. Rowe and his collaborator, Dylan Avery, 22, actually started writing Loose Change as a fictional screenplay--"loosely based around us discovering that 9/11 was an inside job," Rowe says--before they became convinced that the evidence of conspiracy was overwhelming. The Administration is certainly playing its part in the drama with admirable zeal. If we went to war to root out fictional weapons of mass destruction, is staging a fictional terrorist attack such a stretch?

But there's a big problem with Loose Change and with most other conspiracy theories. The more you think about them, the more you realize how much they depend on circumstantial evidence, facts without analysis or documentation, quotes taken out of context and the scattered testimony of traumatized eyewitnesses. (For what it's worth, the National Institute of Standards and Technology has published a fact sheet responding to some of the conspiracy theorists' ideas on its website, www.nist.gov. The theories prompt small, reasonable questions that demand answers that are just too large and unreasonable to swallow. Granted, the Pentagon crash site looks odd in photographs. But if the Pentagon was hit by a cruise missile, then what happened to American Airlines Flight 77? Where did all the real, documented people on it go? Assassinated? Relocated? And what are the chances that an operation of such size--it would surely have involved hundreds of military and civilian personnel--could be carried out without a single leak? Without leaving behind a single piece of evidence hard enough to stand up to scrutiny in a court? People, the feds just aren't that slick. Nobody is.

There are psychological explanations for why conspiracy theories are so seductive. Academics who study them argue that they meet a basic human need: to have the magnitude of any given effect be balanced by the magnitude of the cause behind it. A world in which tiny causes can have huge consequences feels scary and unreliable. Therefore a grand disaster like Sept. 11 needs a grand conspiracy behind it. "We tend to associate major events--a President or princess dying--with major causes," says Patrick Leman, a lecturer in psychology at Royal Holloway University of London, who has conducted studies on conspiracy belief. "If we think big events like a President being assassinated can happen at the hands of a minor individual, that points to the unpredictability and randomness of life and unsettles us." In that sense, the idea that there is a malevolent controlling force orchestrating global events is, in a perverse way, comforting.

You would have thought the age of conspiracy theories might have declined with the rise of digital media. The assassination of President John F. Kennedy was a private, intimate affair compared with the attack on the World Trade Center, which was witnessed by millions of bystanders and television viewers and documented by hundreds of Zapruders. You would think there was enough footage and enough forensics to get us past the grassy knoll and the magic bullet, to create a consensus reality, a single version of the truth, a single world we can all live in together.

But there is no event so plain and clear that a determined human being can't find ambiguity in it. And as divisive as they are, conspiracy theories are part of the process by which Americans deal with traumatic public events like Sept. 11. Conspiracy theories form around them like scar tissue. In a curious way, they're an American form of national mourning. They'll be with us as long as we fear lone gunmen, and feel the pain of losses like the one we suffered on Sept. 11, and as long as the past, even the immediate past, is ultimately unknowable. That is to say, forever. http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/...1531304,00.html

Government denies 9/11 conspiracy theories: http://usinfo.state.gov/xarchives/display....amfuaK0.2676355

No irony was intended. All of these terrible things (and more) have happened to good Wikipedia users. Some of the above things happened to Poetlister, to Masssiveego, and (to some extent) Freestylefrappe. These things are happening right now to Neutralhomer. Those with the loudest voices and the most time on their hands will win their arguments, and those who are unwilling to continue arguing will eventually be driven off.

Viridae has asked questions which are awkward for certain users and has threatened to enforce the civility policy evenly to all users. I fear his time on WP is short because of this. But before he is brought before arbcom, I believe he'll receive the sorts of "warnings" I listed above. The warnings will be subtle at first, and then grow more blatant. I've seen it enough times to know it by now.

Does he actually write, or is he just protecting he article against the conspiracy theorists?

This reminds me of all of those who have been convinced for decades, in spite of the lack of any compelling evidence, that FDR had advance knowledge of the Japanese plans to attack Pearl Harbor and let it all happen because he was hell-bent on getting the US involved on the Allied side of World War II. This theory conveniently ignores the facts that 1) the Japanese Empire was not itself a combatant in WWII until Pearl Harbor and the nearly simultaneous attacks on British, French and Dutch possessions in East Asia, and 2) public exposure of the impending attack by the Japanese still would have provided the US Congress sufficient cause to declare war on Japan. And then there is that old chesnut of a conspiracy theory that Secretary of War Edwin Stanton was the chief conspirator in a plot to kidnap and/or assassinate President Abraham Lincoln. I started a couple of articles relevant to this theory on WP. The more things change, the more they stay the same. *sigh*

Still, none of this serves as any excuse for MONGO and other members of his Elk lodge to go about as if they were The Biggest Douche in the Universe.

My druthers would be to drain the Arbscum Pool, but I didn't see a checkbox for that.

Jonny