Can we transport this e-comium to the shrine already hallowed to his worship now?

Jon

Okay, Moulton, now you're starting to piss me off, and I'm pretty sure you're not alone. There is absolutely no logical basis for making that assertion whatsoever, and coming from someone with your intellectual background, well... let's just say I'm extremely disappointed.

Why would JoshuaZ create the User:Miles_Naismith account, only to not use it in deletion debates? DUH! He was simply hoping to make it appear that User:Gothnic was a sock puppet of "Miles Naismith," who sounds like a real person, except that he's actually a character in a series of sci-fi novels. It's one of the oldest tricks in the book.

Are you doing this as some sort of joke, M? Because if you are, it stopped being funny about 36 hours ago.


Occam's razor, Moulton - Alexander Cazort Zorach is all over the web, using his full name, with all sorts of interesting details about himself and his fascinating life. Meanwhile, "Gothnic" is a common term used for meetups of goth kids, and "Miles Naismith" is a character in fiction.

Which of those three is less likely to be a sock puppet account, I wonder?

Hmmm....

He did use it in deletion debates.

Here's the diff...

http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=...oldid=179508900

Right after Gothnic. Two socks created a year apart return to the same page within a few hours. Extraordinary coincidence.

My bad...

You're pretty sure there are others besides me who are starting to piss you off?

You're not the type to easily become pissed off, Somey.

Please, Puh-leezzz, stick this ∑where the sun don't shine !!!

Jon

Can you demonstrate that no other German in the 1930's was anti-Semitic? Therefore, Hitler wasn't guilty of any crimes against Jews. I contend there was a rootkit in his moustache.

Moulton, your repeatedly going to bat here for Joshua Zelinsky is striking many of us as nearly insufferable.

Sorry, I'm not alone. I hate it when I do that...

Look, Moulton. There comes a point where we have to agree to disagree, and that time has long since come and gone. If you don't want to believe that JoshuaZ could be a sockmaster, that's fine, but you've made your case already, and now you're beating the dead horse after the horse has already been buried and started to decompose.

The only reason I don't close this thread is because it would be unfair to the rest of us, who I'm sure will find more evidence of JoshuaZ's many, many, many misdeeds, and would perhaps rather not keep adding new threads for each one because it looks overly vindictive. But you might as well know that what you're doing right now has already caused me to look into installing a board modification that would allow us to prevent individual members from replying to individual topics. Don't make me do that, M! Remember, the last time I tried to make a significant non-skin modification to the board, we were completely offline for a whole week!

What I'm going to bat here for, Greg, is evidence-based reasoning.

Greg, I could care less if JZ is guilty of sock-puppetting or not.

But I do care if people who are cheering for one outcome or the other can't do evidence-based reasoning in a rigorous and conscientious manner and come to the ground truth in a mature and professional manner.

And if all that matters to people here is the outcome of the case, I would simply point out that it would be far more embarrassing to WP to have falsely convicted one of their own than to have falsely convicted someone they really did want to get rid of.

I thought WR wasn't a monolithic entity, but rather a bunch of people who each have their own opinion. I mean, if you're going to start shutting people down for differing from the "party line", why not start with barring badlydrawnjeff from posting in threads about BLP?

I think silencing dissent is beneath the dignity of this site - this isn't wikipedia, you know...

Mod note: moved from General Discussions to JoshuaZ forum

Moulton, how about this. You go away for a couple of weeks and study this problem (as Shalom has done in Poetlister et al's case) and then come back and post your findings?

No matter where you are on the internet, you're going to find people who are needlessly argumentative, refuse to back down, and feel compelled to draw things out to ludicrous lengths. They don't necessarily do it all the time, and there's often no predicting when they will do it. We're no different from any other site, including (if not especially) Wikipedia itself, in that respect...

"Dissent" actually fuels discussion and keeps the board going. We like dissent... What Moulton is doing stopped being "dissent" almost 2 days ago - now it's just stubborn refusal to stop. What's more, it just plays into "our" hands - just about everything stated in support of JoshuaZ can probably be refuted, including IMO the notion that he's even a human being in the normative sense of the term. Keeping the argument going like this does a disservice to him. The evidence is there, the conclusions are inevitable, so why continue if not to just keep drawing more attention to it? (Which, quite frankly, I have no problem with?)

Moulton,

With all due respect, you do have the right to have a wrong opinion.

I reflect on the remote possibility that O.J. could have been innocent, much like I think that Adolf Hitler may have had some redeeming qualities, or that I may not have been an alcoholic during my drinking career.

Then I wake up from my nightmare and get to work trying to do the next right thing.

Please agree to doubt and / or disagree, or admit to being someone that has something to gain by having JoshuaZ cleared of all charges.

The kid is pathetic in many ways; maybe his family can get him some help. Are you a sockpuppet of JZ or someone else at WP? It is getting old, this argument for argument's sake.

Believe what you want and let the rest of us look at cold hard facts.

Daniel has a pretty good handle on this one.

I've had Moulton on "ignore" for the last two days, but I keep seeing his blather when he's quoted by others. He should post copies of his PM correspondence with JoshuaZ — I suspect that Moulton has made an arrangement with JoshuaZ or other Cabalistas to deliberately flood this board with obfuscation and equivocation, any and all of which makes zero sense when dissected by anyone more intelligent than a chimpanzee.

This Board once saw a blitzkrieg from a new member who instantly started posting bizarre, inconsistent responses to challenge every single thread and every recent post on the Board, one right after another. I screamed to get her blocked, and made a reference to how she had managed to scale the wall with a machine gun, and is now spraying everything in sight. Staff agreed within a few hours after she appeared, and she got blocked. End of story.

Moulton is doing the same thing. The difference is that he started slowly and built up over a long period of time. This Board is now getting boiled alive, like that frog that doesn't know when to jump out of the pan. I say the staff should ban Moulton.

Upthread, I already said I would gladly publish the PMs, if JZ consented.

http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=...oldid=207101600

That is the official, public ArbCom findings of fact and remedies from the case they held privately.

I wonder what will happen to JoshuaZ's other "black-ops" sockpuppets User:Rookwood and User:Cyberdalek? Rockwood was created to discredit another of his enemies, Jason Gastrich, and still carries Gastrich's name.

Instead of that... Maybe just try not responding to every single post (or what seems like every single post anyway)? I think you have some important ideas to share but sometimes you have to realize you're not going to get the last word in on something and let it go.

Just a suggestion.

Well, golly, if I respond and say you're right (which you are), I've also just violated your precept.

I hate these bloody antinomies.

I strongly disagree with this suggestion.

Moulton's defense of JoshuaZ is completely ridiculous, but it's no different that the response given to every other sock report I've ever done re anyone with any friends or POV allies at all: no matter how overwhelming the evidence, there is always someone who who will say, "sure, it's suggestive, but how can you really be sure? I mean, you know, super-duper sure."

That is, when they're not screaming about "witch-hunts", accusing you of pursuing a vendetta, or blocking you for "harassment."

I'm not defending JoshuaZ. I'm expressing skepticism about the investigative work of the prosecution.

To my mind, the best outcome for those who wish to discredit WP would be a demonstration that ArbCom falsely convicted JZ, on account of disgracefully sloppy examination and analysis of the forensic evidence.

Notwithstanding anything else, JZ was not falsely convicted. He was not *any kind of* convicted.

Well, neither was Richard Nixon. But some variety of punishment was served up anyway. I'm sure Nixon hated it, and I'm sure JZ does too.

It would be, except that won't happen. It'd probably be enough to convict someone of murder, actually: suppose Joe was killed by a package which for a fact was came from Bob's address, a threaning call preceding it was traced to Bob's phone number, and Bob had a known motive for killing Joe (as the motive for vote-stacking here is clear.) Can Bob really say, how do you somebody didn't break into my house and use my phone, and sent the package in my name/address, and expect that to work? The concern here about set-ups ("Joe jobs" as Jehochman puts it) and improbable scenarios is wildly disproportionate to what you'd find in most real-world trials, and the stakes here are far lower.

Even if someone is wrongfully desysoped once in awhile, why is that a bigger deal then someone being wrongfully blocked, which happens all the time on much less, or even zero, evidence? Why is it a bigger deal than allowing rampant administrator socking just to extend the benefit of the doubt to those who are almost certainly guilty anyhow?


He was convicted in a special court for nobles only, in order to shield him and the aristocracy generally from humiliation before the peasantry.

Is this the one where by law they must hang you with a silken rope? I never considered that. Do you suppose the admins all got together on IRC and then one of them slipped old JZ a note with the Black Spot on it? Or do you think this was really his reading of "congress" and figuring he didn't have the votes to fight conviction, now that he was impeached?

You know, now that you mention it, I'm pretty sure JZ does not have the political sense of Tricky Dick or anything like it. Successfully counting up likely votes in his corner is not something that is in his personality. So somebody formally slipping him the Black Spot note seems more than likely.

I believe that is what is called the "Phoenix Wright" principle, in that sure, we've proved A, but how does A prove B and later on C and how does it ultimately come to form the conclusion of Z, which proves damning enough to make the overall claim true?

There's no doubt that JoshuaZ is a condescending prick and that his treatment of Brandt has bypassed pathetic and sad, but much though I sympathise with Brandt, I too have to disagree with the notion of banning Moulton. If I understand what Moulton is saying correctly, he believes that the evidence collected is similar to the sort of evidence that has been used to ban editors and admins who were not guilty of any such offence and thereby resulting in a travesty of judgment. I believe what Moulton is implying is that the evidence needs to be STRONGER, and by stronger I mean greater than that of the MM case, because otherwise the Arbcom people will just throw it out without a second thought (as opposed to the MM Case, where Arbcom gave it a second thought and THEN threw it out).

In cases like this, it's healthy that someone plays the role of Devil's Advocate.

All I'm saying is, if this case is typical of the quality of evidence and reasoning used to arrive at a finding, then none of the findings in comparable cases can be trusted to be anywhere near the ground truth.

Don't know it under that name — so far as I know the bit is due to Lewis Carroll, "What the Tortoise Said to Achilles".

Jon