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.

Good catch, Greg. I was about to add him.

Dr. Zen used to go by Grace Note (not gracenotes) on WP before he retired in disgust.

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?).



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.

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!

It's weird that staunch capitalist The Kohser is so fervently endorsing an essay full of loony-left socialistic ideals.



Is that really the same person? Grace Note (unlike Gracenotes) was a fervent supporter of the odious BADSITES policy, and left this snide message on the talk page of my essay against it.

Yes, Dr. Zen is most assuredly Grace Note.

Yep, Dr Zen is Grace Note, and he was always a leftist. Got into a mess of trouble with the Israel cabal, as I recall, but he also interestingly believed that the site should have some sort of image content management, and edit warred over the photo at [[Clitoris]], getting sanctioned for it by ArbCom.

Lot of true nuggets in Dr Zen's post in re Jimbo and "NPOV." I'm like thekohser here: I read enough leftist crap that I tend to filter it out as simply uninteresting.

This case is worth quoting just for the flavor.


What can I say. Apparently he just wouldn't leave it alone and finally rubbed Arb the wrong way.

My one brother who voted twice for Bush calls me a "leftist". I hear where you're coming from, Dan, but it's not quite fair or correct to call me a "staunch capitalist". I do have these crazy ideas that the CEO of a company should not make more than 100 times the lowest-paid full-time employee in the organization. I think the current US average multiple is about 413x or something.

And not to be confused with Graysnots …

Jon

He hasn't retired.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Contr...ions/Grace_Note

But his only activity in several months was to show up on my talk page yesterday to sneer at me for being a "WR partisan"; for some reason, despite being a Wikipedia critic himself, he has an irrational hatred of this site and has called for the banning from Wikipedia of anybody who participates in or links to WR.

Maybe he is...

The Wiki Defender ! ! !

I thought it was that Relato soandso or someone on WP?

I guess we should have warned you, Greg, that Dr. Zen/Grace Note is banned here before you invited him to come to the forum. He and Blissy did not get along well in any sense.

How surprising.

You invited Grace Note?

Always a good idea to use the board's handy search feature to find past references before inviting folks over...

Still, now that Blissy is, errr, no longer among us, there actually might be a chance of a reconciliation with Grace Note, assuming he were willing to believe for ten seconds or more that we aren't all a bunch of Nazis. It's probably best that he not try, though - it could only lead to further heartbreak, ultimately, and besides, it might make his head explode, causing a mess.

I wonder if he's changed his IP range again by now, and can actually read this? If so, then "Hi."

I don't suppose it's politically correct to suggest anything quite so radical and enlightened as a Truth and Reconiciliation Process.