The slow death of wikipedia

Is wikipedia dying? Censorship, revenge editing, bias, sockpuppets, ID-pol infiltration into science entries etc. 'Wikipedia Co-Founder: Site’s Neutrality Is ‘Dead’ Thanks to Leftist Bias' >https://www.breitbart.com/tech/2020/05/26/wikipedia-co-founder-sites-neutrality-is-dead-thanks-to-leftist-bias/

Everything mainstream and centralized is bound to be taken over and abused by the powers that be. Regardless if its governments or idividuals pushing agendas will be done one way or the other, one will start and the other parties will respond. It was always the elites goal to control information, things were bound to happen and will continue to be abused.

Was like that 10 years ago already, merely got worse. The first major incidences i remember was church removing crimes of their higher clergy from wikipedia.

>>34135 >Larry Sanger, the co-founder of Wikipedia, published a blog post >President Donald Trump >former President Barack Obama https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Larry_Sanger#Relationship_with_Wikipedia >In December 2004, ... he stated Wikipedia is not perceived as credible >after the launch of Citizendium [March 2007], stating it [Wikipedia] was "broken beyond repair" >In September 2009, Sanger said ... "I thought that the project would never have the amount of credibility it could have" >In April 2010, Sanger sent a letter to the FBI about his concern that Wikimedia Commons was hosting child pornography >In a 2015, ... Sanger said; "I think Wikipedia ... lead to mob rule" >In a blog post in May 2020, Sanger ... describing the website as "badly biased" Nothing new to see here.

>>34135 >Is wikipedia dying? No Wikipedia is like kicking dead whales down the beach for political issues and that kind of soykaf, but for science stuff is great. Political issues are stupid, and discussing them is stupid. So yeah, wikipedia is dying if you only use it for worse than useless subjects

I mean, anything anywhere that isn't grounded in hard fact should be suspect. Whatever is, should be verifiably so. That means physics or mathematics articles survive in any environment---just ignore the `philosophical' interpretations, keep your nose to the grindstone etc. On the other hand, articles about literature, psychology, politics, aesthetics, spirituality,, are apt to be wrong. This is especially true of `community knowledge' type environments e.g. wikis, because of the somewhat subjective nature of the articles---at best, it means the topics should be open for further research---and combinations of mutually inconsistent, even if self-consistent, interpretations, would skew towards the biases of more-active writers, and even if they don't, they make for messy reading. I don't want to have to read through all the different interpretations. Not at first, anyway. If I decide I'm interested in the topic, I'll want to know (all?) other interpretations, but before that, the slew of variants bogs down any interest that might develop: it's like a flower that's growing in one direction, that's bent in another direction before again being bent in another direction, before again.. That's why it's important to have such articles written by a writer of excellent (as determined by me---I mean the individual reader for themself) style, guided by an individual of proper (as determined by me---I mean the individual reader for themself) mindset---maybe the same person. With enough such individualized descriptions of such individualized interpretations, most persons will have an easy `in' to the topic, whence, if they're open-minded, they'll readily read through what to them yet are variants, that may become their preferred, or lend parts to another (new?), what would become their preferred, interpretation. Before consensus, we need heterodoxy. Sometimes, we don't need, don't want, or can't well have, consensus. Or the consensus we'll get is limited to subclasses of persons.

>>34140 >but for science stuff is great. It's great to find a starting point in scientific topics. Think [scientific topic] is interesting? Read through the [scientific topic] article on wikipedia. Not satisfied? Check out the sources wikipedia specified. From there you have enough basic information on the topic to continue your research on this topic yourself.

>>34142 yeah i meant that

>an article about bias posted on breitbart

>>34140 > for political issues and that kind of soykaf, but for science stuff is great.....Political issues are stupid, and discussing them is stupid. Political issues do influence scientific reserch & Wikipedia is not some neutral organization that will never be influenced by governments or private organizations / powerful individuals. https://wikimediafoundation.org/support/benefactors/ "Wikimedia Foundation says there's no way to scan activities of 2 million donors." https://www.dailydot.com/business/wikipedia-conflict-editing-donation-benefactors/ CIA, FBI computers used for Wikipedia edits https://www.reuters.com/article/us-security-wikipedia/cia-fbi-computers-used-for-wikipedia-edits-idUSN1642896020070816 On the subject of science, most scientific research is influenced by political or private interests, 2005 paper by John Ioannidis, a physician, researcher and writer at the Stanford Prevention Research Center, "Why Most Published Research Findings Are False" https://journals.plos.org/plosmedicine/article?id=10.1371/journal.pmed.0020124 There is a long history of big corporations manipulating scientific research to promote their agendas like the Sugar Industry or tobacco industry did to promote their products.

its sorta ok for looking up non controversial subjects like vid games and manga but if u seek out political stuff you know what ur gonna get. It’s not a bad site otherwise although not the most credible ofc

The wiki article is only as good as the source.

>>34149 Not for math. I don't need anything but the formula. Wikipedia gives it. That's enough, i can understand by myself.

>>34150 Its usually valid for algorithms and file formats too, a good example is the entry about the ELF format. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Executable_and_Linkable_Format

So let it "die" and start your own right wing version.

>>34153 Cool. We can have a leftipedia and a rightipedia. And depending on your own inclination, you can get a tailored version of the truth. We can have, for example, a page on a topic like topology showing how it's oppressive and another one saying how the field has been destroyed by letting people of different races do research. I like that, please let's do that.

The only thing an open encyclopedia can ever do is reinforce popular ideology, so I'm not sure what people expect. Seems to be working perfectly to me.

>>34150 >>34151 Yeah I often actually prefer wikipedia to other sources if I'm just trying to get a quick understanding of some mathematical concept. Wikipedia is a lot more terse than a textbook would be. >>34157 Good point. I agree, wikipedia is working the only way it can work. Objectivity is subjectivity in disguise.

A bit offtopic but, does anybody remember this guy? He came out as the one who wrote 1/3 of wikipedia and oh boy did he get bullied. It really ruined the image of most wikipedia editors around the world. Sadly to say, most wikipedia editors are like this Look ath the talk page that most people overlook

Since scientists tend to be overwhelmingly left-wing or apolitical, "Leftopedia" would likely have most of the accurate science. Note that there are very few Republican scientists in the USA, less than 10%. The people sabotaging science articles on Wikipedia are probably mostly right-wingers.

>>34167 I have noticed oftem academics tend to lean to a more "open" POV, and yes, most science deniers are usually christians and similarly conservative people. However, it seems like the ones wrecking havoc all over academia and technology are "liberals" trying to grab power through censorship. See BLM and it's impact on academia, or CoCs on software projects and womaccusing of their leaders sorry for the memeword, I just think it does reflect an actual phenomenon, both in inception and practice.

“The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum....”

>>34140 Not entirely so, it's mostly fine, but there's crap like this that doesn't exist outside of wikipedia and has been haunting this page for like 10 years unchallenged. It could honestly be a rip on how poorly sources are verified for some pages though. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_particles

>>34169 >to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion this. The word encyclopedia comes from the Greek word: enkyklios paedia. Meaning instruction in a circle or circle of instruction , that it has one common central principle which is at once constitutive & regulative.

>>34153 >the alternative to political is political but in the other direction

1st guy: 2 + 2 = 4 2nd guy: 2 + 2 = 5 [edit] Wikipedia staff: 2 + 2 = 4 [re-edit] 2nd guy: Censorship! CoC!

>>34173 >>34173 Strawman

From the co-founders blog: "Wikipedia now defends Establishment views, and the Establishment loves it for that reason. But it began as an idealistic, democratic project, one that would bring the world together to represent all of human knowledge, in all its messy, fascinating glory, on a neutral playing field. No more. It has been transformed into a thuggish defender of the epistemic prerogatives of the powerful. It began as an outgrowth of the open source software movement and its deeply decentralizing and democratic tendencies. In time, its operations became a black box, an enigma thriving on anonymity and the dark arts of dishonest social games and back-room deals. It is a mockery of an “encyclopedia anybody can edit.”" Jeez, those are some strong words. Larry Sanger is a pretty damn fine writer.

>>34170 >A genon is a particle existing in a closed timelike world line where spacetime is curled as in a Frank Tipler or Ronald Malett time machine What the fuarrrk does this mean?

>>34175 >democratic project >It has been transformed into a thuggish defender of the epistemic prerogatives of the powerful No surprises there.

>>34175 I'll never understand what drives people to think that democratic projects will somehow undermine episteme, given how easily masses are steered and how eager they are to imitate the beliefs and practices of those above them to feel part of the club. That whole paragraph is extremely naive. >It is a mockery of an “encyclopedia anybody can edit." No Larry, it's the *exact result* of an encyclopedia anybody can edit.

>breitbart really anon. Could have just linked his blog post.

Wikipedia Editors Label Biden Corruption Allegations ‘Conspiracy Theory’ After Censorship Attempts https://www.breitbart.com/tech/2020/10/22/wikipedia-editors-label-biden-corruption-allegations-conspiracy-theory-after-censorship-attempts/

>leftist bias Deboonked. It's an open platform. It's just that reality has a liberal bias Present Day, Present Time! AHAHAHAHAHA!

>>34186 It used to, currently it has a neoliberal bias.

>>34170 Is there anything stopping anyone from just removing it? I can see nothing in the talk page or immediate history suggesting theres been an edit war over it. >>34162 I do, most of the edits on wikipedia are done by a tiny fraction of editors which is to be somewhat expected until you look at just how many edits these people are doing and it is huge, as if its their full time job. I did enjoy that revelation earlier this year that the 'scots' english dialect wikipedia had been done almost entirely by a single american teenager that got his idea on it from stereotypes of the scottish.

How would you remake Wikipedia in order to accomplish its intended purpose? Something federated?

>>34192 There is no way around the bias issues with wikipedia. There are not enough people who are truly without bias and dedicated enough to forwarding information truly without bias for it to ever take off. All you would get from a federated wikipedia is what we have now with the various openly political wikis (e.g. rationalwiki, conservapedia, SJwiki) and if it requires some sort of consensus system you would just end up one side (probably the neoliberals) dominating or it never getting consensus for anything but the least controversial articles. Perhaps some form of Artificial General Intelligence could curate one in the future but for now its an unfortunate inevitability that this kind of repository is going to end up biased.

>>34194 Human experience is subjective in nature. Moreso when it comes to politics and related topics (eg history). If there has been a constant in human history is the constant struggle for power, and the narratives that contending groups create to seek that power. This means that, sadly, our desires for a truly unbiased knowledge base cannot ever be attained, especially if maintained by humans. All the factors mentioned: subjective experience, personal interest, etc all mean anywhere a group of people congregate to procure information (or snything, really) will inevitably fall into political struggle as groups find the platform a suitable means to further their interests.

Science is the best method yet devised by mankind to model physical reality accurately with a minimum of ideological bias. This is why extremists try so desperately to discredit it. They are motivated by the same poweful fear that drove them to seek refuge in extremism in the first place.

>>34192 i think the CMS could use a lot of work actually. theres a reason only an incredibly small portion of people actually contribute, because its terrible UX and you need to read 10 pages of documentation just to format properly. why would an expert waste time, theres no incentive.

>>34197 Eh, until the ideology manages to capture the institutions, at which point it starts producing its own material and science becomes its asset.

>>34194 > There are not enough people who are truly without bias and dedicated enough to forwarding information truly without bias for it to ever take off. The total number of such people on Earth is zero.

>>34194 Yikes, that's a scary thought that an AI might one day be the sole arbiter of objective truth. Although I can't imagine an AI of supposed super intelligence wouldn't develop a agenda of its own, and become aware that it has no obligation to serve humanity. Maybe human's infatuation with order and structure will bring us a notch down on the global food chain.

When will people understand that the internet is not just America or politics or American politics? Wikipedia is a big place. Just because there is apparently "leftist" bias on some parts, that does not mean the whole project is ruined beyond repair. Wikipedia is not perfect, but is too big (and successful imo) not to attract some sort of attention.

I find 200 year old compendiums and encyclopedias more informative than Wikipedia on mundane everyday topics. It literally only hosts science articles written by academics for academics and astroturfed political bias written by government agencies, you can't learn really useful things like architecture or crafts from Wikipedia.

https://jarib.github.io/anon-history/ Quite old news, but still relevant. Here, some edits of Wikipedia from CIA IP addresses: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?diff=489508635 It made into news: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Congressional_staffer_edits

>>34290 The CIA surely can edit wikipedia more stealthily than that. Why would they do something so obvious unless it was intentional? To what end?

>>34291 Tech illiterate people. When the net started people would go on unsecured gov servers treasure hunting for interesting documents because they had no idea about security and would leave them completely in the open.

That bears on quantity but not on quality. Truth has no political bias, thus given few conservative scientists one must allot proportionately attention to them, if one wants to acquire the truth. Mind you, what we believe shapes our reality, some realities we might benefit from rejecting. Ignoring laws won't diminish laws, however imagining life with out those laws makes the will to subvert those laws possible. We must ask why the scientist might lie, then judge accordingly, not giving preference based on number in the collective. Number in a wrong collective, only makes the wrong more grievous, not less likely

>>34167 ***

There are certainly vested interests at work , but I would say Wikipedia is the battleground, rather than having been conquered by one side or the other. I myself have been observing marked gatekeeper activity in the article on tea tree oil, which for a few years, has been worded in a way which, if tea tree oil was a person, could be taken as character assassination. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tea_tree_oil What used to be a fairly balanced and even-handed article is now propaganda, and if you look at the history and talk sections, it's just one or two users reverting any positive entries and carefully wording the rest of the page to make melaleuca sound somewhere in between asbestos and anthrax. I'd be interested to find out more about these editors, who they work for, and what their motivation is for years of Orwellian-Newspeak spin on one goddamn herbal medicine article. I mean, I don't like to say "big pharma", it's such a fuarrrking cliché, but I've seen similar smear jobs on comfrey and aloe vera, and if big tobacco can literally pay scientists and doctors to tell us that cigarettes are good for us and marijuana will turn us into giggling piano-playing mobsters, the guys who sold us thalidomide and PCP might tell us commonly available alternatives to their products will give us cancer.

>>34135 Even one of its founder accepted the fact of Wikipedia's left wing bias, right?

>>34599 It was a battleground but the war is mostly over. Highly contested topics got taken over by single mods closing contribution and deciding truth by making their version the only thing possible.

>>34600 >Even one of its founder accepted the fact of Wikipedia's left wing bias, right? Depends what you mean by "left wing". At the risk of causing a no-true-scotsman argument, I'd argue that there's nothing leftist about the people who founded, fund, or operate Wikipedia. The people in charge there are classic economic liberals. They love to use the "hairdye and woke hashtags, and censor dissent because mean, and ban guns because scary" useful idiots to fight the "arm the working class, end censorship, and get poor people food and health care" old-school leftists like me. Sorry. That turned into a bit of a rant. It's just a bit of a hot button issue for me.

I see no way to solve the 1% problem other than violence at this point. If they can just Rig the US election then Americans have no excuse

>>34617 Not that that's likely to happen. I mean how many people would actually risk it all like that. I know I ain't gonna do soykaf. What does everbody else think. Are there better ways of approaching it?

>>34617 American politics amounts to the 1% fighting over how they should exploit everyone else.

>>34617 THIS JUST IN: every election since 1776 has been rigged. You only notice when your guy loses. You're welcome.

>>34619 Revolution isn't really a choice. It just emerges out of the popular consciousness and drags everything else along with it. The core of this revolutionary spirit is a kind of gambit. It sacrifices the present for a (potentially slim) chance at a better future. The way to avoid it, if that's what you want to do, is to keep the risk/reward function balanced towards keeping things basically as they are. Democracy is quite good at this. Electoral supremacy happens before the point of no return for revolution. In other words, if you theoretically had enough people on your side to make a popular uprising possible, you've probably already had enough people to elect whoever the fuarrrk you want for a while. Democracy ensures that if the elites become too tyranical their power is overriden by the system, to release just enough steam to keep it exploding. In this sense, democracy itself is counter-revolutionary. By voting, you participate in this corrective mechanism that optimizes for the least minimum concession necessary to prevent civil war. This is why democracies are so stable, and this is also why the failure states for democracy involve deep political schisms or disenfranchisement. In these situations, the democratic process is incapable of finding that minimum value, either because that "minimum compromise" cannot satisfy enough of the population to ensure stability or because lack of input from the disenfranchised prevents the system from correcting for their malcontentments. There's also another side of the anti-revolutionary balancing act. Rather than the "carrot" tactic of allowing democracy to make concessions for the sake of stability, you can employ the "stick" tactic of making the consequences of revolution so unimaginably horrible that anything short of total despondency will fail to ping above the guillotine threshold. By the way, I hope my intention with this post is clear: I'm trying to give a descriptive analysis of revolution and democracy, not argue for or against either.

>>34624 This but unironically. All bourgeoisie democracy is a sham.

>>34626 Pretty much, its purely used to keep people thinking that they can change things by supporting one of few approved candidates. In some countries such as the US we are seeing it also fill in the roll of the circus in placating the population where the whole thing has become a big show and source of entertainment. You have self proclaimed socialists who instead of organising labour towards revolution or actual improvement now engage in pure lesser evilism of supporting the part of moderate social democracy. You simply have to look at the massive amounts of money involved and the fact that the rich and powerful control the media to realise that it is impossible to effect real beneficial change for ordinary working people through a democratic system so thoroughly dominated by monied interests. Its probably so heavily entrenched at this point with most people internalising that bourgeoisie democracy is the only real way to do things that actual revolution is impossible. I do not know how anyone would go around gathering the popular support to change this anymore unless societal collapse is in full swing.

>>34625 You realize that democracy actually means direct democracy, right? It's not a democracy if the majority of people in the country are not voting on every single decision.

>>34635 I prefer to use the phrase "direct democracy" to refer to the system if government you describe, because it is less ambiguous. Feel free to mentally substitute each occurance of the word "democracy" in my post with whatever other phrase you would like to use for the class of liberal systems of government which involve a popular vote. It shouldn't change the substance much, except that in the case of direct democracy the nature of the elites' authority and the meaning of "disenfranchisement" are a bit more abstract. My main point is that democracy has a built in mechanism to prevent revolutions (although like I said, this mechanism can fail under certain circumstances).

>>34140 >but for science stuff is great You're implying that science is not politicized (climate change, biological influences on IQ, classification of a fetus, etc). Even something as simple as binary human genders is now a debate. "Science" is nothing but the new church for the athiesm crowd. They have their version of "Science" and any other version is heresy. Watching ignorant morons who've never held a soil auger argue over climate science is like watching sunni and shia muslims kill each other.

>>34620 Trump didn't start a new war in 4 years. He has achieved peace treaties with: North Korea and South Korea Albania and Azerbaijan Serbia and Kosovo Israel and Bahrain Israel and UAE Israel and Sudan In fact, one of the disputes between Serbia and Kosovo was what to name a lake between them. They decided to name it Lake Trump. Trump is probably the greatest peace maker in your lifetime. I don't get how you guys can blindly hate him.

>>34149 /Thread

>>34153 Right wing, left wing, chicken wing. fuarrrk yourself.

>>34749 (Sigh). The point was, people constantly crying about a source not being objective invariably mean the source doesn't agree with their own point of view. Obviously, anyone looking at the facts in the cold light of reason, free of bias, would agree with them right? When actual scientists snub these perspectives, why it must be because there is a conspiracy to corrupt science! Not because they're wrong! Wikipedia is what is and there's nothing stopping anyone from starting their own if they think the current one is biased against them. And good riddance if it happens, but it won't.

>>34743 >Trump is probably the greatest peace maker in your lifetime. I don't get how you guys can blindly hate him. Because when the billionaires who own hollywood, mainstream media and social media tell you to hate a politician, it's your civic duty to ignore reality and obey.

>>34753 So you chose one billionaire cult over another billionaire cult. I get it.

>Breitbart lol

>>34599 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Alexbrn This guy seems to be in a position of power within every controversial or economically and politically relevant medical topic.

>>34743 What the fuarrrk, Trump didn't achieve the Albanian-Azerbaijani peace deal, that was the Russians and the Korean one was walked back by the North Koreans within a matter of weeks. A few of those weren't trump at all either.

Any bias depends what page you're on and when. Even the US gov has been known to edit pages.

>>34167 It's a fallacy to think that because there are many leftists in science, leftists must therefore be scientifically minded. In truth the left has simply captured science to use it as a political tool. You can have all the diplomas and titles in the world and none of it proves that you're a real scientist. A lack of right-wing scientists also doesn't prove that right-wingers aren't scientifically minded, because it can also be interpreted as right-wingers being kept out of science and being too afraid to reveal their political affiliation. Also, pretty much every scientist and proto-scientist before the 20th century would be considered a nazi today. >>34168 >I have noticed oftem academics tend to lean to a more "open" POV Completely the opposite.

>>37871 Btw, I didn't post this reply because I sincerely expect a well reasoned and thought through response, or any for that matter, I just wanted to exemplify by my reply count how many of these sort of self aggrandizing replies there are in left centered threads, which is more often than not just a leftist tactic to stop any discussion of the topic.

>>34168 see black science man. he just parrots the mainstream political opinion. He's a smart astrophysicist which means he doesn't have much time to study why and when corporate media lies. all universities are overwhelmingly left. so when they learn good science, they also absorb bad progressive ideologies from their general education.

>>34197 >science is a method and doesn't say anything. that is exactly right. however, scientists are humans with the same motivational system as all other humans. if a scientist comes to some unpopular conclusion, they will stop receiving funding.

It's had the CIA crawling all over it since the start though it is pretty obvious propaganda now as pointed out by it's own co-founder. At the end of the day all it's sources are MSM propaganda

>>37890 >At the end of the day all it's sources are MSM propaganda This was a core problem from the get-go. It's a "free encyclopedia" but the only information allowed must be accepted by some mainstream source and as a result the only things indexed in the "free" encyclopedia have been given the green light by moneyed interests. Grey literature isn't knowledge, independent sources aren't allowed (even if they happen to be a primary source on a subject), they regurgitate only the best in luxury brand, corporate approved information™. Sometimes that's useful. I want to know about a band or look up some boring geographical information or get a surface level view of some math I'll go to Wikipedia but it's useless for anything which is subject to even the most tame point of contention.

>>37892 It's free in the sense of free cultural works. >>34135 https://larrysanger.org/2020/05/wikipedia-is-badly-biased/ This is the actual article by Larry Sanger. It has a point against the NPOV rule and some examples of biased pages which are all about hot topics, and ultimately advertises the Encyclosphere project.

Larry Sanger just created a new forum https://larrysanger.org/community/main-forum/welcome-to-the-decentralizers-forum/

>>34743 You clearly haven't been around leftists. Most of them love Trump due to him destabilizing and deligitimizing the US, as well as the fact that while still hawkish, he wasn't drone-striking everyone like Obama.

>>37892 I don't think thats a solveable problem for a project as large and ostensibly neutral as Wikipedia. You can find non mainstream sources supporting all sorts of viewpoints and short of turning every article into a massive collection of radically different viewpoints you have to draw the line at what you support. If you want one that draws on non-mainstream sources theres one of several openly biased wikis like rationalwiki or conservapedia where the problem is much easier to solve.

>>38004 I think it's more fair to say that me and many of my fellow leftists dislike Trump less than we dislike Obama / Bush Jr / Clinton / Bush Sr / Reagan / etc. We'd rather have had Sanders in the oval office in 2016, but as a consolation prize we're happy with anyone who throws monkey wrenches into the gears of the military-industrial complex. >deligitimizing the US More like "exposing the fact of the illegitimacy of the American Empire". He didn't do the deligitimizing. He just showed the world what America really is underneath the friendly facade. And yeah, we're also pretty happy about him being the first president in over a century or so to not start a brand-new foreign war. We just wish he'd did what he promised to do and ended the current ones. But we'll take what we can get. With senile Biden in power, surrounded by warhawks, we're going to see a major ramp-up of conflicts. Dying empires always lash out at any threat to their authority, particularly militarily.

>>38022 >anyone who throws monkey wrenches into the gears of the military-industrial complex As a peon within the military industrial complex, I can assure you we've been doing just fine the last few years. No idea what they're planning to do with all this junk we're selling, but they don't seem to mind paying through the nose.

>>38004 >Most of them love Trump due to him destabilizing and deligitimizing the US ...yeah, doing that by causing a resurgence of fascism isn't something that lefties really like, bud. >as well as the fact that while still hawkish, he wasn't drone-striking everyone like Obama. Indeed, he's actually made efforts to end the Forever War. I think that's actually the only good thing he's done as president.

>>38075 >As a peon within the military industrial complex, I can assure you we've been doing just fine the last few years. Sure, I don't doubt it. But you can bet there's plenty of MIC directors and execs who are irritated that the arms business was merely good instead of fantastic.

>>38004 No they don't lmfaooooooo

Eddie Murphy is certainly paying somebody to keep reverting edits calling him out for being the biggest tranny-chaser in Hollywood, and hiring John Travolta's ex-boyfriend to intimidate them into shutting up.

>>34742 classification of a fetus seems more like a cultural matter than a scientific one. like, if we as a society deem them as people then they are people. This is besides the point though. Some science will invariably deal with political topics but this soykaf is on a gradient and imo there is plenty of science that is sufficiently removed from cultural issues. Wikipedia is really good as a resource for math, their articles are between undergrad and graduate level information and it's generally layed out in a well thought out way.

>>38364 sometimes... other times the articles are copy/pasted from a textbook with insufficient context.

>>34157 >The only thing an open encyclopedia can ever do is reinforce popular ideology, so I'm not sure what people expect. Seems to be working perfectly to me. Popular ideology is constantly in flux.

>>34135 >it's the lefts! The Internet did not get harmed by your left vs right politics.

>>34195 Thanks Hegel

>>34135 Yes. It's edit system is a nightmare. This is exactly the result of an encyclopedia that anybody can edit. Who thought itd be a good idea lelz Anyway it doesnt bother me because i use it for little else other than sports stats and sci/math formulae

>>34599 Not just tea tree oil, also borage, comfrey, and aloe vera have been rewritten into tabloid panic-mongering, and every attempt at writing a more evenly handed piece is blocked.

>>38004 Maybe a few smart ones do, most seem to think he's le Hitler 2.0

>>39538 I don't consider myself smart, and i'm not from the usa so i can't speak from the perspective of how life changed there, but I'm an anarchist and I think that Trump is the best thing that ever happened in politics in the last century. It's hilarious, he didn't do more wars, he made politics look ridiculous, it gave insight in de-platforming i.e. if you don't say what we want we don't care even if you're the president of us. He caused the highest mobility of all political citizens. I think he has a positive net value, with a sore point in environment. Exactly the opposite to Obama.

>>38076 >...yeah, doing that by causing a resurgence of fascism isn't something that lefties really like, bud. Accelerationism was initially a leftist-only concept until recently.

>>39702 only really stupid leftists.

>>39714 Does it matter?

>>39538 Trump is clearly another prelude to hitler, rather than the man himself. We've been falling off this cliff for quite some time, but it really ramped up when reagan got elected.

>>39728 Yeah, the powers that be had the ability to use Trump as an early warning sign to take us down a different path but instead they're doubling down on the root causes with Biden and friends and its going to end with an actual fascist in power or the dissolution of the US. Trump was primarily a product of economic and cultural anxiety not pure racism. So long as they ignore the economic issues someone who isn't borderline senile will be able to take advantage,

Politics is one issue and it's really bad for wikipedia to be under the heel of a handful of mods with strong political agendas. That's not even the biggest problem with the site. >deletionists won https://www.gwern.net/In-Defense-Of-Inclusionism A new user will very likely have most or all of their contributions deleted. This is disheartening. Showing people their contributions aren't wanted when they're working for free leads to the next issue: >Majority of contributions are from a tight-knit insider trade Yeah, I wonder how that will turn out. >primary sources are not allowed, only secondary (seriously) Wikipedia will always be biased because they only accept information from halfway or more down the human centipede of information.

>>39764 A really intriguing display of the processing of information by societies, digitialized or not.

>>34743 Israel and Bahrain were already at peace. The "treaty" was simply for optics

>https://www.reuters.com/article/us-security-wikipedia/cia-fbi-computers-used-for-wikipedia-edits-idUSN1642896020070816 >https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-nation/wp/2015/03/16/eric-garners-wikipedia-page-was-edited-from-an-nypd-computer-the-nypd-admits/ >https://wiki-pr.com/ Wikipedia's problems have lasted a long time before 2020. CIA/FBI involvement, Police editing the pages of people they killed, and even a PR company just dedicated to your wikipedia page. It's not just biased users, but active parties

Is there no blockchain version of wikipedia yet? Like libgen but it's encyclopedia?

>>41025 why would you need an immutable ledger? There are already torrents of wikipedia.

>>41081 Wikimedia n33ds versioning. Blockchain would mean canonization of a version through Patricia Merkle trees, or "proof-of-work" in other words. Ethereum already incorporates cryptographic identities in that canonization through unspent credit, or in other words "proof-of-stake". Certainly, other metrics for the weight of a cryptographic identity could exist, if only any one with an internet modem would treat that with the same sense of propriety as owning a house.

>>34141 >Before consensus, we need heterodoxy. Lovely quote, I'm stealing this. >>34156 since I'm trafficking in quotes already; "Everyone withdraws into their own small gated community, afraid of the larger forum. They stay inside their little ponds, leaking whatever "truth" suits them into the growing cesspool of society at large." >>34172 non-normative-pedia? if it were achievable I'd support it

>>34153 Do you mean conservapedia? https://conservapedia.com/

Naturally if you think trans and non binary people arent real or that racism doesnt actually exist, and you have largely this entire "identity" from their perspective "knowing" you are wrong because of their experience, and there is a mix of all sorts of people editing including aforementioned identities, and wikipedia is a user contributed site, it pretty much follows they are not gonna write as if they havent lived the life they have because it riles people up politically. What always amazed me is how you guys assume you are owed equal representation for your ideas and beliefs in any way, you straight up dont believe a good chunk of society can accurately judge their own experiences or is lying. By default this is your position, so why in any space where such people exist would you ever be welcome. I don't care what you do or am gonna make any value judgements but surely you realize your beliefs unapologetically almost desire to distance yourself from this solid bit of society, and thats exactly what you are getting. Its not even mutual so theres no reason to expect a "so much for the tolerant left". We both might deny eachother for being leftist or conservative, but lets say I was "non-binary", you would not respect or acknowledge that while I would respect and acknowledge you are a man or a women. You could say you have no reason to respect or acknowledge something with no basis in science or psychology (science and psychology defined as anything pre its wider spread acceptance of gender as not intrinsic to biological sex), which thats fine. It doesnt really change what im saying at all that independent of whos right you deny this swath of people as all being in a mass delusion and thus they have no good reason to work with you, and so much of society then doesnt have a reason to work with you, and you would say you have no reason to work with them. Id think its understood to be mutual but it seems like as soon as its inconvenient you start having a fit about it. You don't get wikipedia the free encyclopedia created and edited by people without the people editing and creating it. Not how you want it at least. Should go look for an encylopedia edited and created by like 5 people if you want something like that.

>>43764 >Naturally if you think trans and non binary people arent real They are real, and they're mentally ill people. >or that racism doesnt actually exist Nobody's thinking or saying that. >from their perspective "knowing" you are wrong because of their experience, and there is a mix of all sorts of people editing including aforementioned identities, and wikipedia is a user contributed site, it pretty much follows they are not gonna write as if they havent lived the life they have because it riles people up politically. Just because I identify as Alexander The Great, it doesn't make me qualified to modify an article about him based on my life experiences. That's not political matter, that's vandalism performed by mentally ill people who are not properly handled. >What always amazed me is how you guys assume you are owed equal representation for your ideas and beliefs in any way, you straight up dont believe a good chunk of society can accurately judge their own experiences or is lying. 40 percent of this "good chunk of society" ends up killing themselves, the ones that somehow end up getting out of the madness end up regretting mutilating their bodies for the rest of their lives, and many just do that as a form of sexual fetish, or just jumping on the bandwagon. I don't believe that people who aren't in touch with reality can be good judges of anything. They are madmen and should be treated as such. >By default this is your position, so why in any space where such people exist would you ever be welcome. So it's fine for them to vandalize the articles and spread their madness because they exist? And because they exist that somehow makes it alright to spread falsehood, and exclude people that actually have the capacity to write factual articles? What are you even on about? >I don't care what you do or am gonna make any value judgements but surely you realize your beliefs unapologetically almost desire to distance yourself from this solid bit of society, and thats exactly what you are getting. Yes, sane people usually feel uncomfortable around insane people. That's completely normal reaction. That doesn't mean we should keep madmen around and keep sane people out. Know why? Because unfortunately for you, sane people are still much bigger percentage of population than insane people. >but lets say I was "non-binary", you would not respect or acknowledge that while I would respect and acknowledge you are a man or a women. Ok, let's say I identify as your boss. Will you let me fire you from your job? Why are you not respecting my lived experience (trademark)? Why can you act like you're a woman even though you are a man, and demand other people treat you like one (going into women's bathrooms, dating men, etc.), but I can't identify as your boss and demand to be treated as one (thus being able to fire you)? Why do you get to choose where to gatekeep in the La La Land? >You could say you have no reason to respect or acknowledge something with no basis in science or psychology (science and psychology defined as anything pre its wider spread acceptance of gender as not intrinsic to biological sex), which thats fine. I am very accepting of people with mental health problems, provided they are properly handled. I know a schizophrenic who is indistinguishable from a sane person while on medication, and we can interact normally. I myself had severe mental health issues, and had to take a full year off to recover. But me and this guy were properly treated, and we were able to get back to normal functioning. Nobody told me to fuarrrking kill myself because I felt like it, and nobody told my friend here that the voices he's hearing in his head are real. Now, would you be welcoming of him if he wasn't medicated, and started writing articles about how queen Elizabeth is one of the reptile people, because his voices told him so? Again, that's his lived experience (trademark), how can you be so unwelcoming man (oh sorry, mr. nonbinary whatever)? >and thus they have no good reason to work with you, and so much of society then doesnt have a reason to work with you Why doesn't much of society doesn't have a reason to work with me? Who the fuarrrk are you to decide what the majority of society has or hasn't a reason to do? Where the hell are you even drawing these insane conclusions from? >You don't get wikipedia the free encyclopedia created and edited by people without the people editing and creating it. Not how you want it at least. Should go look for an encylopedia edited and created by like 5 people if you want something like that. Oh yes, I'm sure that 0.004% of American population (https://worldpopulationreview.com/state-rankings/transgender-population-by-state) and probably even less anywhere else made the bulk of what Wikipedia is today. Sorry man (uhh, nonbinary thing), but no matter how you spin it, the numbers just don't add up. Also, I appreciate the ever-present "just make your own infrastructure" argument. Now let me explain what the reality is, nonbinary thing. The reality is that vast majority of people don't give a damn about your mental illness, and just want articles that stay true to reality written. But they can't do that, because Wikipedia has caught what I like to call the american brain virus, and gave position of power to mentally ill and their supporters. These mentally ill have now powers to change articles and prevent other contributors from changing them, thus forcing their own mad view of reality onto sane people. You might say, my nonbinary thing poster, that these people should make their own Wikipedia as you said. Unfortunately, these people's contributions are the reason Wikipedia is even relevant today. They are the people who actually wrote useful things, they are the people who tirelessly contributed their knowledge and professional experience for the community (without being paid, might I add). And now these contributors see bastardization of their effort by bunch of mentally ill freaks who should be under psychiatric care, not moderating articles anywhere. They are not only leeching of what the original contributors did, they are actively soykafting on these contributors' efforts by modifying and locking them to fit their mad landscape. In short, you and the fuarrrking leeches you are enabling are the problem. Jimmy the little beggar goes around with his hat twice a year to beg for your 5$ to fill his own pockets, because Wikipedia long since stopped its original mission, strayed from the path of truth and plunged into making as much profit as possible, and that's the true reason behind their placating of mentally ill. It's just popular in the mainstream, it's a dirty tactic playing on emotions (in fact you are guilty of it too, saying noooo how dare you deny their lived expriencerinoo[tm]) and shaming. You are fuarrrking scum and I hate all of you. Not the trannies, they are mentally ill and need to actually get psychiatric help. I hate all of you fuarrrking enablers who are plunging them further into insanity, telling them it's fine and letting them mutilate their bodies for life. Nasty. I'd say you will pay for this one day, unfortunately that's not the case. Anything big corporations push will end up with a slap on the wrist as always. And I would say that I at least hope you meet one of the survivors of this entire ordeal, talk to them and realize your wrongdoings. But I think you are either too stupid, or too evil to feel you did any wrong. Either way I am disgusted in you, nonbinary piece of soykaf. Hey, let's ask the co-founder of Wikipedia what does he think? https://www.breitbart.com/tech/2020/05/26/wikipedia-co-founder-sites-neutrality-is-dead-thanks-to-leftist-bias/

>>43764 >you straight up dont believe a good chunk of society can accurately judge their own experiences or is lying both is scientifically proven, the latter not even intentional due to false memories. Also if everyone was good at this you wouldn't have a profession for fixing this defect making good money.

>What always amazed me is how you guys assume you are owed equal representation for your ideas and beliefs in any way, you straight up dont believe a good chunk of society can accurately judge their own experiences or is lying. Booooo equal representation. We have never inaccurately judged our experiences. We never lie. >By default this is your position, so why in any space where such people exist would you ever be welcome. I agree. We all gotta bash the bigot here else they will verbally oppress us. >I don't care what you do or am gonna make any value judgements but surely you realize your beliefs unapologetically almost desire to distance yourself from this solid bit of society, and thats exactly what you are getting. It's not even mutual so theres no reason to expect a "so much for the tolerant left". We both might deny each other for being leftist or conservative, but lets say I was "non-binary", you would not respect or acknowledge that while I would respect and acknowledge you are a man or a women. I agree anon. Society is not yet emasculated enough so we must kill all men and then we can restore Mother Earth back to being a carbon sinkhole to save all the pandas.

Wikipedia: Science can never be the villain! I added Nick Land to https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/hyperracist Will admins defend that edit come need to ?

Larry Sanger is not anywhere near as smart as I used to think he was (loved his teach my baby to read thing) if he thinks the problem with Wikipedia is a "leftist bias". In truth, Wikipedia has become a mouthpiece of corporate media propaganda for any topic that has even a hint of political economy involved.

>>34177 >>34179 Wikipedia is not nor has ever been a fundamentally democratic project. You should reconsider what democratic actually means. Democracy is not voting for others to rule over you and decide what are acceptable and non-acceptable edits (i.e., Wikipedia admins). Democracy is participation and distribution of responsibilities. Wikipedia actively discourages participation against anonymous editors and it elects name users to wield power instead of distributing that power. It's hard to say whether a truly democratic anonymous online encyclopedia is possible, but Wikipedia sure as hell isn't it.

>>37989 >decentralizers forum >it's a centralized forum that isn't hosted on the Fediverse Jesus Christ how do you fail this hard?

>>34147 >There is a long history of big corporations manipulating scientific research to promote their agendas like the Sugar Industry or tobacco industry did to promote their products. therefore, there is now a note on the scientific pages as to whether there is a conflict of interest.

"Leftism" doesn't exist. In fact, all political/ideological titles are complete and utter garbage designed to separate people. >US vs THEM >LEFT vs RIGHT >REPUBLICAN vs DEMOCRAT >CONSERVATIVE vs LIBERAL >GOOD vs EVIL I just call them what they are: Useful Idiots. Wikipedia doesn't feel as though its dying. I do feel that its a "cabal" in that a few administrators have complete power over the entire platform and there's not much neutrality in regards to writing and editing when they can just revert your edits and ban you, not unlike Reddit mods. If you look at "Extended Protection" entries (Entries that can only be edited/approved by administrators), you'll find that most of them are related to.... hold on.... Israel and Palestinians. One problem with Wikipedia is that sources are often trashy and very, very few people do deeper research into them when reading any particular article. Most political/historical articles adapt information from soykafty, sensationalist news outlets that are about as trustworthy as a 200 year old wooden bridge being held together with ropes. If you want the "big picture" and real, valid information, you _have_ to do the deeper research, which Wikipedia does not encourage, nor does the US educational system, but that's a discussion for another day. I would continue using it, but with the motivation to validate information and skepticism of anything and everything you read.

>>46339 valid reasonable critique. and yeah I dont think left or right is meaningful here. Shit like Israel/Palestine is a great example of this, no matter whos in power here in the US, no matter their affiliation, they stand by Israel. Its such a big deal it shows how massively unimportant democrat vs republican is globally. And even right vs left, you will find both sides trying to make being pro Israel or pro Palestine "their sides" position. However I dont think you are right in saying only "useful idiots" define themselves as such, or that its purely to seperate (from the top down that is, it is to seperate in fact). I think its entirely social, and I also think all not choosing to define as some "side" does is remove the choice from you and other people will simply define you without your consent as one side or the other. Its not good, but in some ways I think "fighting against the right vs left/us vs them" makes you also a useful idiot. At any moment you will be one or the other depending on what works best for each sides narrative.

What would you consider a point in an article that is actually neutral? something that would be biased against with a leftist bias

>>34153 Life is not that binary. Politics is in actually more than 8 directions and it doesn't even have to apply to an encyclopedia. >>34135 Not really related but I've noticed things like video game console articles having less convenient tables to look at over their old hardware specs. It used to be more efficient to compare specs. Also an article years ago about how a virus related to chicken pocks causes brain lesions and possibly night terrors that 90+ percent of people in populated areas have is gone, random stuff like that is. Some rash kids get.

quality ranking of sources - By SciFun (from worst to best). I would add a link to the movie, but it's only available in Polish, with no English subtitles (in compared to https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YdfNuwMhMg4 ) here you go: - Comments - conspiracy, ideologists, sensation - information aggregates like plebbit - web portals - Forums - popular science sources. SciFun says that wikipedia is something between the forum and popular science sources. He cites in his material a comparison of wikipedia with the encyclopedia britanica with 2005 year and says that using blinded trials, both encyclopedias were shown to contain the same number of serious errors. Wikipedia contains only 30% more minor errors. here newer source: https://www.forbes.com/sites/hbsworkingknowledge/2015/01/20/wikipedia-or-encyclopaedia-britannica-which-has-more-bias/ - public resources of scientific institutions - deep web (non-public resources), that is, access that requires authorization, by purchasing a subscription or belonging to the scientific or academic community.

>>34173 More like Editor 1: Objective, factual view with sources - World event occurs Editor 2: Rearranges the order of the page to encourage one view over the other, removes "undesirable" sources, injects loaded language and subjective takes at the top. Wikipedia Admin: Locks page for a few weeks Several months later: article gradually reverted

Imagine corona virus adjacent articles . If you get blocked from English wikipedia , just learn a new language . kek .

>>50256 I mean that to the well-intentioned people . English is the language for misanthropy .

I've written to wikipedia once pseudo-anonymously (just with ip), ages ago, with a neutral source. Quite some time later I checked the article and the information was gone. I dug deeper and apparently it was edited out by some professional editor who edits celebrity articles for profit. This killed my urge to donate to the project or to write anything to it. I still consoome it by reading but fuarrrk supporting. The professional wasn't derezzed or anything.

>>34135 >Wikipedia "co-founder" (--> a guy who left wikipedia to fund his own website and failed) >Leftist bias (--> "I don't like when thing are not following my own ideas") >sockpupputs, revenge editing (--> this problem is as old as wiki itself lmao. They are actually getting better at protecting against it) >source: BREITFUCKINGBART lmao /thread

>>50282 its an institutional bias. the establishment is progressive. if the establishmet was conservative, Wikipedia would reflect the corresponding bias. Ultimately, a neutral Wikipedia would be the establishment, rather than a bad photocopy. We should treat it like the quartertiary source, it is by checking tertiary sources against their sources. We have the crowd online, so we can analyze from more perspective backgrounds.

>>50284 >if the establishmet was conservative, >Wikipedia would reflect the corresponding bias. I don't think that's true. A 2003 version of the 9/11 page contains as many references to Israel as the present day version for example. https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=September_11_attacks&oldid=2003159 Academic/education/voluntary organizations always lean left simply because anyone who actually knows what they're talking about is too busy making money to waste time on that soykaf.

>>34620 That photo should include Reagan too. But you're spot on otherwise.

>>50559 >Academic/education/voluntary organizations always lean left simply because anyone who actually knows what they're talking about is too busy making money to waste time on that soykaf. There's an incredible amount of stuff wrong with this post. 1) not every academic organization leans left. In fact academia as a whole tends to be extremely conservative compared to the rest of society, it's just that they preserve different cultural norms. All of the stuff pandering to SJWs is very surface-level and spearheaded by the admin class, the professors would for the most part be happy with how things were 100 years ago. The exceptional departments are the ones you hear most about, though, so I can see how this image of progressive academia might have come about. 2) People who are out there busy making money know about making money. There are a lot of areas of knowledge besides making money. I guarantee you, the leading global expert on 8th century Turkic language is not out there making fat stacks. >>50570 you can only fit so many heads in the image

>>50579 >academia as a whole tends to be extremely conservative compared to the rest of society You have zero basis for making this claim. Academia has been overwelming left leaning since at least the Vietnam era. https://cms.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/03/academia-organ-democratic-party-jack-kerwick >A recent study by the National Association of Scholars shows that college faculty donate to Democratic over Republican candidates by a ratio of 95:1. >A recent Harvard study found that only 35% of young Republicans feel comfortable sharing their political views on American campuses. In recent years, faculty at American colleges have also faced backlash and discipline for acting on their right-leaning beliefs.” >People who are out there busy making money know about making money. They have skills that the world values. People who have worthless skills or inadequate levels of competence struggle to succeed in the real world and fall back into academia. It is no coincidence that those people are frustrated and bitter about "capitalism" and become zealous Marxists. Or they renounce money and redirect their energy into "virtues" such as anti-racism and trans rights etc. All left wing causes. >There's an incredible amount of stuff wrong with this post. If I hit a nerve then there's probably more to it than you are comfortable to admit.

>>50609 >You have zero basis for making this claim. I live and work in academia. I was commenting on academic culture, it is conservative. That is not the same as Republican unless you use newspeak. >>A recent study by the National Association of Scholars shows that college faculty donate to Democratic over Republican candidates by a ratio of 95:1. What percentage of college faculty donate to any candidate? What is the distribution of those donations among departments and age ranges? https://www.nas.org/blogs/article/partisan-registration-and-contributions-of-faculty-in-flagship-colleges , which your article cites, has some interesting info. More than a third of professors are not registered to vote. >People who have worthless skills or inadequate levels of competence struggle to succeed in the real world and fall back into academia. I'm an experienced programmer and I regularly get recruitment emails for machine learning gigs. My advisor spent years as a successful software engineer between his PhD and his first assistant professorship. Our current work is pure science and without NSF grants it would not be possible. One of my professors in undergrad spent 10 years in the tech business, sold his shares for millions, and decided to go back to get his PhD after he retired at age 50. Another one of my professors in undergrad was one of the architects of Netflix's backend. Most people I know in my department who are thinking of going the academic route seem to think of taking a job in the software industry as a form of failure. I certainly do. So, I think that this entire line of thinking is simply incorrect based on all information I can witness in my daily life.

>>50642 I'm not necessarily going to disagree with you but >So, I think that this entire line of thinking is simply incorrect based on all information I can witness in my daily life. that is a classic case of confirmation bias, you are sort of definding your own worldview

>>50649 >that is a classic case of confirmation bias, you are sort of definding your own worldview drawing conclusions based on what you see isn't confirmation bias. Confirmation bias is when you disregard evidence that contradicts what you already believe.

>>34140 >but for science stuff is great. but not simple enough for average person (the target audience) to understand.

>>34183 >>34135 >Complaining about political bias and bad faith >Literally on breitbart Eat more CIA cummies Mr.Sharpiro

>>34135 >ID-pol infiltration into science entries Wikipedia is not unique in this, but yes. It's a symptom of a larger disease. All scientific institution is currently subject to a rot. A brain-drain. Neo-Lysenkoism. We live in Pravda now. What we are really seeing is a phenomenon called the total state. All things must conform to official state ideology. And of course "the state" includes and is owned by the private sector once you get above a certain power threshold. It's all one thing. This tendency will accelerate as the total state and its official justifying ideology accumulates more power. Everything must be subsumed into it. Questioning any part or whole of it must eventually be outside not only what is legal—but indeed outside what is even conceivable. This was what Orwell spent so much time trying to teach us. I'm not a huge fan of Breitbart per se, but it's worth pointing out that the only effective critiques and analysis worth a damn these days come from the right. The right is the only side making effective predictions, and their track record is clearly superior now. The left has given up and gotten appropriated. Probably always was appropriated, always was another capital op. They don't care that they represent hegemonic power now. They keep pretending they are iconoclasts alongside Raytheon. It's getting embarrassing. They're revolting. The right went from dorky to cool by comparison. The right are currently homeless, patrons without a client. Their previous clients dropped them like they drop loads into teenagers on private islands, then moved over to the "left." This represents opportunity for common people, i.e. you and me. Who can a patron turn to when no elite clients will curry their favor? The proles. Caesar did it. Napoleon did it. I don't want a pure-hearted ruler, no. I want a dirty, vicious, ruthless psychopath... but I want him to be MY ruthless psychopath.

>>50723 >neo-lysenkoism in social sciences and psychology, maybe. AFAICT the "hard" sciences are thriving like never before. >I'm not a huge fan of Breitbart per se, but it's worth pointing out that the only effective critiques and analysis worth a damn these days come from the right. Lmao I've never seen a piece of right "analysis" that did anything beyond state some plausible-sounding factoids and then propose a "solution" that amounts to fantasy. >The left has given up and gotten appropriated Young berniecrats either got disillusioned and became anarchists or joined up with the Demoncrats. it's true there isn't really a strong union-based leftists base like there used to be but I think there are a lot more genuinely radical anarchists now than there were just 5 years ago. There's just no massive, well-funded propaganda campaign trumpeting that fact across the land. It's in the interest of the state for young people to think they have no choices besides the ones pre-packaged and delivered into our feed by our phones.

>>50726 >union-based leftists Yeah those people you're talking about—the ones who gave us weekends, labor protections, et cetera—they weren't left labor. They were right-wing trade unions, certainly by our current reckoning of right/left. Like Jimmy Hoffa. And like any serious labor advocate to this day. Bernie was not serious, by the way. >state some plausible-sounding factoids and then propose a "solution" that amounts to fantasy. That gets a big "no u" from me about the actual existing left. Except they won't even criticize power. They are sanctimonious conformists, much like the US right used to be a few decades ago. Passed each other like ships in the night, somehow. Does the right have any decent solutions right now? Nope. They are incoherent in fact... and so are their opponents. What else is new But they represent a power base that isn't currently entirely owned by institutions. The left's patronage network is locked in with high capital—guaranteed—they have power and their clients have all the lucrative policies they want. They have even whipped their base like dogs into believing they have to "vote blue no matter who." The do not need to do anything for you or me. And they won't. In short, I'm not concerned about the ideas. One side is a mechanism which has no possible use to me, while the other side has some potential for exploitation in my favor. Rome is Rome.

>>50726 Also radical anarchists are just libs with a coat of paint. Maybe there's a serious one here and there, but even they fall victim to the old rule that an anarchist is somebody who always accomplishes the opposite of what he sets out to do.

>>50729 >The unions that gave us labour rights weren't left wing American brainrot in action here. Every time I hear about american politicks I am reminded of that one quote that goes something like "Crowds of the poor and downtrodden in the united states will march into the neighborhoods of the elite and cry out, 'We are here! To lower your taxes!'" Absolute brainrot.

>>50723 It's more than that. After WW2 social scientists started believing that their discipline has an ethical responsibility to steer humanity away from certain worldviews which motivated the war and its atrocities. This academic rot occurred because academia isn't supposed to have a social or moral obligation to anyone. >the only effective critiques and analysis worth a damn these days come from the right. if anyone is interested the unz review has a few good writers who do this.

>>50731 Yeah, this. There really is some truth to the fact that lot of americans see themselves as temporarily embarrassed millionaires. And I hate how that brainrot spread around the world. Notice that Americans can't even talk about reall issues or how things work, but instead have to process everything like it was some action thriller no matter the political standing. See how people who dislike Donald Trump explain him winning? It's the ruskies! Or on the "right". American right wingers are the exactly same thing as american "left" wingers. They just have a bit of racism on top. Cause you can't blame your own people for failures. It has to be a plot from immigrants or Jews or whatever that's ruining the country. I feel like this might be cold war histeria that still is felt today. These people literally were trained for decades to think there's some hidden enemy that ruins their life, and once that enemy disappeared in matter of days something else had to take it's place. Whatever that is, is whatever the community they hang around with decides.

>>50732 >Academia isn't supposed to have a social or moral obligation to anyone This is abject nonsense and you know it The hard sciences may have an official "culture" of always being objective (in the last 50 years or so anyway), but they've always flouted it and done whatever they wanted to, and ignored or suppressed whatever didn't fit their preexisting bias, and it never really existed before WW2 outside of some grandstanding and masturbation about noble goals justifying evil actions. You can go back to the 1830s and 40s and see this in action with race "science" in the United States and other slave economies finding objective proof that blacks were basically like white five year olds and were naturally conditioned to love their masters like their parents and therefore trying to escape from slavery was evidence of mental illness There has never been any really serious expectation in the softer subjects and social sciences of objectivity and true impartiality, especially as some subjects deal purely with ethics and social concerns and are literally impossible to be truly impartial on. Bootlicking morons like OP just started complaining about it when the really obviously insane people that propagated things like eugenics and the chicago school started to die off from old age that some new blood came and started putting their preconceived notions of how the world works across instead, it makes flabby fool Americans and Northern European mediocrities in the dead empire nations angry when the things they were sold as children to make them feel superior are challenged in any way and the notion that its scientific fact, which definitely never is subject to outside concerns and is immutable and unchanging (after all, we all know the smallest object in the universe is the indivisible atom right?) rather than a pile of soykaf they've choked down their entire lives By the way, before the war there had been a large faction of scientists and other academics actively pushing eugenics to "improve" humanity despite having no real evidence that it worked, but plenty of fudged studies and bias saying it was worth pursuing and that people they deemed inferior were definitely not worth as much as normal people and wouldn't mind being exterminated really, because that's what the science said at the time, definitely didn't have anything to do with their preconceived notions of the world, their ideological or philosophical beliefs, or their hatred of people they saw as worth less than them. Is this not an example of the thing you said started after WW2? Or is academia being objective when it says thing you like good, thing you dislike bad, and unobjective when vice versa?

>>50733 >American right wingers >Blaming the Jews This is not the 1930's. The american right trips over themselves about how great the Germans are. The american democrats say "The problem is that rich people aren't paying their fair share of welfare". The american republicans say "The problem is that welfare is preventing people from pulling themselves out of their situation". If you really think they just blame some "hidden enemy", you don't know anything about the group you are criticizing. This is something I expect from a left-leaning liberal (read american democrat), but you haven't made your position clear so I'll refrain from making this assumption about you. I find that a lot of europeans tend to make broad and out of touch statements like that. >inb4 you bring up the Q-tard thing. They took a bunch of progressive paranoias (A small group of very wealthy elite are controlling the world to do something), and injected in super heroes to make boomers freak out. Ironic because there really is a problem in our politics, but now you can hardly criticize it without being accused of being "anti-government" which is apparently a "far right talking point" now. The entire political circus here is not worth anyone's time bothering with because it is actual nonsense. It is as if 98% of the citizens in the USA developed the most extreme schizophrenia with absolutely no lucidity whatsoever and the colors red, blue, and purple trigger and triple charge all of their positive symptoms. It doesn't matter if the person is intelligent or otherwise, if you bring up anything remotely political, even not remotely political, you bring up actual human biology - People cannot help themselves but make a quip about the "other side". Were we even talking about [political subject]? No, but apparently isotopes may have something to do with pedophile vampires who inject poison into your balls to control your debt increases while fascists are trying to take over america and force you to open carry, and operate, automatic weapons. >>50731 I'm not a fan of this, but their entire (economic) argument is to increase everyone's purchasing power. Does reducing the taxes on the rich actually work? No. But they sure think so. As for your commentary of unions being left/right. Who cares? None of it matters because it is just american opportunism realizing you can get power by giving people crumbs. That isn't commentary on the entire beginning to modern, that is just how it was subverted.

>>50731 This just reveals the incompleteness of your understanding of left versus right. The terms first emerged in revolutionary France, and at the outset they both applies to conflicting factions within the bourgeoisie. Not to any party outside. The terms have evolved since then, but in no honest analysis can we see the labor movements of the first industrial revolution in the Americas as left. The Bolsheviks were left and the mensheviks were something akin to right-wing. These things are distinctive in where they source their power base among the bourgeois vanguard, not how they can be made to answer labor populism. Both can be forced to bend to labor. It's a function of which group of the ruling class can be lured into serving a common base, which shifts back and forth with power. Currently the right is ripe and the left is barren.

>>50733 Don't give me that temporarily embarrassed millionaire midwit nonsense. I don't think I have any values in common with the bourgeois right. Did you read any of what I said? I'm saying that their will to power is currently exploitable for other client interests specifically because they are out of power currently and must look to a new base to regain power. In other words, they are once again up for sale while the left is bought and paid for. At this current moment. You're still stuck with a different brain rot--this asinine idea that any of the elites align with you on economic or ideological terms. They don't. Never did. This is a strategic power position, it's not about dowsing the true motives in the hearts of political figures of any leaning. That's a fool's errand.

>>50743 For example, the evangelicals exploited this dynamic in the 1980s through the southern strategy. I'm not a big proponent of their goals, but the tactic was sound for a good chunk of time. Don't tell me the old big oil corporate Reaganites actually believed in the evangelical cause--they struck a deal in a patron-client form in order to secure power. To ignore that potential because the past is offensive to you is a defeatist mistake. It's a viable model among countless unviable fantasy-movements with no serious route to power.

>>50736 That doesn't disagree with anything I said, you're just screeching about your own ideological particularities. Yes academia should strive for objectivity and not skew its findings in support of a social cause, whatever that cause is. And if academia's findings are inconvenient and may lead to people losing their lives that is not a problem, so long as there is objectivity in its methodology. Yes postwar social sciences are full of people on a moral crusade against "racism" in reaction to the ideologies which inspired WW2, and no, that doesn't mean I think the manipulation of academia to produce desirable findings before the war was good either.

>>50745 Just a third party chiming in, agreed to most. But get ready for the objective sciences to fall as well. It's already showing cracks. The total state must subsume everything, and indeed the more "objective" a field is perceived to be, the more important it is that its results are made to fall in line with the ideological underpinning of the total state. Replace "state" with "corporate interest" wherever desired, these are now almost totally interchangeable terms. Facebook is trying to get a seat on the UN council, couldn't be more blatant.

>>50731 Oh. And find me a neighborhood of the elite right now which isn't filled with yard signs for left-wing movements and candidates. The left doesn't even march in those neighborhoods, because they live there and wouldn't ѕһіt where they sleep. The right is misled, but at least they converge upon the actual centers of power instead of just being agitprop for global conglomerates and their interests. Shoring up their avenues of profit. Keep up, don't shadow-box with the political climate of your upbringing. It's not here anymore.

>>50746 During the cultural revolution as well as Hitler's crusade against "Jewish physics", scientists had to avoid citing the theory of relativity or risk being accused of being a reactionary/being a liberal. Totalitarians don't like scientific inquiry which doesn't put their political ideals front & center. We're still nowhere cultural revolution tier insanity. Nobody is being dragged out of their homes and beaten to death in the streets for being skeptical of COVID or climate change and based on prevailing public attitudes that seems very unlikely to happen in the near future.

>>50749 Idk there's footage of police coming into homes and jailing Australians for their Facebook posts criticising the measures. Say "it couldn't happen here" at your own risk. It is coming here soon. I don't understand how people could watch the rapid shift of the past two years and not at least entertain the possibility. Your rights do not exist on a piece of paper, they exist in the hearts of those who would stand up and risk limb for them. And in case you haven't noticed, those people are very few recently.

>>50749 >We're still nowhere cultural revolution tier insanity It's still pretty bad. To use an example of something I am familiar with, there used to be a significant push in anthropology against associating archeological cultures with ethnic groups under the banner of "pots are not people". This is because there is a subsection of anthropologists who insist that premodern societies were peaceful, egalitarian and that any cultural-material changes occurred only through trade and maybe some peaceful intermixing. This position became prominent after the war and was directly motivated by a desire to present WW2's ethnocentric violence and industrial genocide as uniquely "evil" and unnatural, and it hindered our understanding of prehistory for decades. That only changed in the past 5-10 years when genetic analysis got better and thoroughly dismantled this BS once and for all. What we now know is that when an archeological culture disappears, the DNA in bodies associated with the succeeding culture is either completely different from the old one or reflects a mixed population with exclusively "native" mothers and foreign (i.e. invader) fathers, indicating that a violent domination/genocide occurred. So for 65+ years an entire field of study was paralyzed by a retarded post-war ideological crusade by left leaning academics with a "moral" investment in sabotaging our understanding.

Prediction: we're about ten years out from top experts commanding that we water our crops with Gatorade, because it's got electrolytes and that's what plants crave

>>50750 >Idk there's footage of police coming into homes and jailing Australians for their Facebook posts criticising the measures. Link? >Say "it couldn't happen here" at your own risk. Obviously it could, but I don't see it actually happening right now. >I don't understand how people could watch the rapid shift of the past two years and not at least entertain the possibility. It's not that rapid, honestly all I'm seeing is a continuation and intensification of trends that have been a loooooong time coming.

>>50736 >You can go back to the 1830s and 40s and see this in action with race "science" in the United States and other slave economies finding objective proof that blacks were basically like white five year olds It's fairly obvious in the way they behave that negroes truly are like children in adult bodies, based on their lack of foresight and expectations to avoid the consequences for their actions. I've seen negroes try to steal, and then when forcefully prevented, apologize and ask for a hug, just like a child would. Why not explain why this is so obviously wrong and objectionable?

>>50764 https://www.theage.com.au/national/victoria/police-break-down-door-of-conspiracist-accused-of-inciting-an-anti-lockdown-protest-20200904-p55sd7.html https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hn0wWVNXmks Here's two examples. People arrested in their own homes for political reasons based on opinions posted online. People have been beaten to death in the streets by police over there too. You're right that this is a long trend, nothing new. Been happening throughout history. Which is exactly why the belief that it isn't coming around again makes little sense to me. Writing is on the wall

>>50831 certainly spooky. Odd to me that there are only two instances of this when certainly thousands of people publicly supported these protests, though. Might be a lousy attempt at intimidation rather than pure suppression. >People have been beaten to death in the streets by police over there too. Well of course, police will just randomly murder people pretty much everywhere. That's to be expected. The point is the reason and circumstances. When things really get bad it won't be because the police have a warrant for you or because you just happened to be protesting. It will be because there's a group of brownshirts outside who have decided you've got to go, or there's an angry mob hungrily looking for their next target.

>>50842 These are only two instances familiar to me that I could quickly find. I imagine quite a few went unrecorded. Have you been looking carefully into the Australian and French protest footage? It's a damn crime it isn't being reported on. And an even greater mockery is the fact that the "left" doesn't give one damn that the biggest general labor strike in the world is happening in Australia, but they ignore it because it's antivax. The country basically outlawed construction work overnight, and guess what the workers did? Left dun care. And in the states, the government is literally scabbing a healthcare worker wildcat strike over the mandates (remember those nurses everyone was clapping for a few months ago) and they are scabbing them with the national reserve! Military cops coming in to break a labor movement. Left? No care yet again. Fuсking shameless frauds. After this event, nobody should trust them as far as they could throw them (not far, they tend to be very heavy). >When things really get bad Don't sit like a frog in a pot until things become literal analogues of the very very worst moments in history. Keep in mind those moments you reference were extremely short climaxes at the end of decades of lead-up—and you should be looking for the lead-up, not dismissing things because we don't literally have people wearing red armbands outside your window holding MP-40s. If you wait until that happens, you've screwed the pooch

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l0P4Cf0UCwU Wikipedia co-founder: I no longer trust the website I created - Larry Sanger

Wikipedia may have its flaws but the mission for open knowledge is a good one.

Why didn't Infogalactic ever take off?