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Revision as of 07:23, 17 December 2016

Coup d'etat by influencing electoral college

Bear with me, this was my first WP entry and my first talk about it. I added current developments about the above topics, and you undid the change with the comment "All true, but undid due to WP:UNDUE". What was wrong with my entry? I know that references needed to be supplied, but if the content was deemed "all true" how can it not fit on that page? Is there a better place to put this?

Thanks, Thomas Tauzinger (talk) 03:05, 17 December 2016 (UTC)

What the Hell; I won't revert you again if you restore this material. I'll just ping Misplaced Pages's whitewasher-in-chief—@Volunteer Marek:—and let him decide whether or not your edit is acceptable.TheTimesAreAChanging (talk) 07:23, 17 December 2016 (UTC)

Hersh

So you still insist on keeping the Hersh crap in its entirety? If Flynn had really been pushed out over disagreements on Syria, he would have said so at least once in his interview on Al Jazeera, after the interviewer repeatedly asked him point blank whether he challenged the administration on issue, to which Flynn muttered something about it not being his job, "different groups", unclear policies and getting the aid in too late (2013, whereas the memo about the Syrian opposition being supposedly dominated by Islamists—the memo that was supposed to lead to some disagreements over policy—was written in 2012). The only one who clearly says what Hersh wants his readers to hear is Lamb, and its fits in so well that I gotta wonder where Lamb gets his facts. You've already said that Lamb might be undue, since his comment only has weight in the context of Hersh's overall narrative. I'm no expert, but Hersh's narrative appears substantially nuts; it is certainly marginal. If you want a rational critique of US policy toward Syria, you could try Patrick Cockburn or something. Guccisamsclub (talk) 08:48, 20 November 2016 (UTC)

(Lamb? I think you mean Lang?) Anyway, it sounds like you're engaging in textbook OR to dispute a renowned American journalist. (Can't you just be happy at the prospect of improved relations between our two countries?)TheTimesAreAChanging (talk) 08:56, 20 November 2016 (UTC)

Yeah Lang, whatever, nobody knows who he is anyway. Hersh is not renowned for his work on Syria at all—he is infamous for it. His theories on Ghouta are the equivalent of 9-11 trutherism. Last question's loaded and irrelevant, but you can put me down for "no". Guccisamsclub (talk) 10:20, 20 November 2016 (UTC)

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Friendly Reminder

Please do not attack other editors, as you did at Ronald Reagan. Comment on content, not on contributors. Personal attacks damage the community and deter users. Please stay cool and keep this in mind while editing. I understand that placing a self-published blog in the lead is pretty egregious, but there's no reason to call anybody an idiot. It's always best to first assume good faith. Thank you. AlexEng 21:02, 23 November 2016 (UTC)

AE report

This is to let you know that I am filing an Arbitration Enforcement request against you at Misplaced Pages:Arbitration/Requests/Enforcement, for violation of the Discretionary Sanctions. --MelanieN (talk) 02:35, 24 November 2016 (UTC)

I saw your last AE comment and think you should really explain this better and fix your comment. You complain about Oneshotofwhiskey and probably rightly so, but it is completely unclear why you should " hit back twice as hard" (your expression) another user (SPECIFICO)... Why? I do not think you should "hit back" anyone at all. My very best wishes (talk) 05:13, 26 November 2016 (UTC)

You're probably right. I'll try to work on that. My issues with SPECIFICO go back to a feud from 2012 (not coincidentally another election year). I suspect she hasn't gotten over the fact that—after I encountered her as an IP at Peter Schiff (she was engaging in the same POV-pushing or carelessness that got her topic banned from the Mises Institute)—I convinced her to create an account in the first place. Her tl;dr forum shopping has utterly derailed that AE, and I hope it BOOMERANGs.TheTimesAreAChanging (talk) 05:16, 26 November 2016 (UTC)

I think you are usually doing very good content work. However, you do not make friends in the project and behave confrontationally even with regard to contributors with whom you do not have a significant difference in opinion. Obviously, this is not only your problem. For example, I have seen at least one contributor in the area of physics who behaved enormously confrontational simply because he wanted everything be described exactly as in his favorite textbook (no, this is not someone who was sanctioned, quite the opposite). Since then I do not edit physics. My very best wishes (talk) 13:20, 26 November 2016 (UTC)

@TTAAC. Did not you see the warning Dennis gave you during closing of the AE request about you just a few days ago? After that you suppose not to edit any hot subjects related to US elections during at least a month and stay away of any users you was in a conflict. And did not you know that two sequential edits count as one after all your experience? My very best wishes (talk) 02:59, 15 December 2016 (UTC)

As documented in the AE report, it's pretty clear that SPECIFICO is the one stalking me, not the other way around.TheTimesAreAChanging (talk) 05:03, 15 December 2016 (UTC)

No, this is not at all obvious. Stalking means that someone follows your edits to create "distress to the other editor" . If she/he follows your edits to fix them in a way that can be reasonably viewed as improvement or a content dispute, this is not stalking. My very best wishes (talk) 14:47, 15 December 2016 (UTC)

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Priceless

I think you might enjoy this. Washington Post does not have enough egg on it's face, apparently. I'll probably add it to my WTF's shortly, after I figure out which aspect of this story is the most fucked. Guccisamsclub (talk) 12:39, 28 November 2016 (UTC)

That's a great read, thank you. I've always thought Glenn Greenwald is an honest Leftist deserving of great respect. (For example, he points out that Obama has incinerated considerably more Muslims by drone than Bush, and asks "Where have all the peaceniks gone?") (Edit: Then again, Greenwald fell for this obvious fake news about the horrible, horrible "shame" conferred by considering forbidden ideas, so not too much respect.) My favorite part is the following:

Two of the most discredited reports from the election season illustrate the point: a Slate article claiming that a private server had been located linking the Trump Organization and a Russian bank (which, like the current Post story, had been shopped around and rejected by multiple media outlets) and a completely deranged rant by Newsweek's Kurt Eichenwald claiming that Putin had ordered emails in the WikiLeaks release to be doctored—both of which were uncritically shared and tweeted by hundreds of journalists to tens of thousands of people, if not more. The Post itself—now posing as a warrior against 'fake news'—published an article in September that treated with great seriousness the claim that Hillary Clinton collapsed on 9/11 Day because she was poisoned by Putin. And that's to say nothing of the paper's disgraceful history of convincing Americans that Saddam was building non-existent nuclear weapons and had cultivated a vibrant alliance with al Qaeda. As is so often the case, those who mostly loudly warn of 'fake news' from others are themselves the most aggressive disseminators of it.

That's exactly right: People wouldn't be going to "fake news sites" if they thought they could trust the mainstream media. (If Facebook and Twitter are serious about preventing another 2016 by censoring "fake news" according to whatever ill-defined criteria they decide upon, many of their users will migrate elsewhere, because the distinctions made will be inherently arbitrary and capricious—besides, censorship inevitably creates the impression that there must be some "there" there.) As an example, the paragons of objectivity are guilty of considerable hypocrisy for belittling the (as of now) baseless "report" estimating 3 million illegal aliens voted for President (the data supposedly supporting that number has yet to be made public) while championing the equally dubious "213 million" views for "Kremlin propaganda" (also divined from non-transparent methodology no-one is able to check). (The major difference being that we should be able to expect more of the Times and the Post than we do of Alex Jones.) BuzzFeed, in particular, is scarcely distinguishable from any "fake news site": Consider the viral BuzzFeed article declaring false rape accusations eleven times rarer than being struck by a comet, because the calculator said so (BuzzFeed's math was "wrong by a factor of over 22,700x"). As Greenwald and Norton accurately surmise, this kind of yellow journalism is nothing more than an attempt to smear anyone—on the Right, Left, or in between—that refuses to conform to "the centrist Hillary Clinton/Jeb Bush spectrum." Sorry, Wash Post, but the genie is never going back in the bottle.TheTimesAreAChanging (talk) 23:57, 28 November 2016 (UTC)

So, do you really think that Washington Post or NYT are no more reliable sources than RT (TV network) or Pravda? Here is my point. While most of the claims above are indeed ridiculous, I am not sure you are familiar enough with Soviet and Russian history. Do you know, for example, that the bombings of buildings in Moscow and elsewhere were indeed directed/conducted by Russian state services, as the head of the FSB was well aware about? Of course they later used the comparison with 9/11 to discredit the claim. My very best wishes (talk) 18:03, 29 November 2016 (UTC)

No, I'd not go that far. One obvious difference is that, as of this writing, the Russian media have a lot more glaringly indefensible stuff to defend. This is quite similar to the American media in the run up to the Iraq War. Propaganda becomes glaring when the gap between reality and apologetics becomes too wide. The Russian media is also much more monolithic and unprofessional. In the US, you can at least read between the lines and cross-reference numerous establishment sources to get information. This is basically impossible to do with the Russian mass media (there are a few serious papers remaining, but not enough for the kind of stuff I'm talking about). The point about the "serious" American media is that, under the pressure of market forces, it is gutting investigative journalism and continuing its transformation into a bullshit echo chamber. This dynamic kills journalists' ability to ask the right and difficult questions. Patriotism, respect for power and socio-economic (elite) background of those involved in the mass media: these guide the way when this path of least resistance is taken. It leads to the Bush-Clinton spectrum today, maybe the Trump-Clinton spectrum in the future, depending. So the free-market media is by no means immune to playing a propaganda role. It is true that RT plays a far more transparent and direct propaganda role for an autocracy. The corporate media is less bound to such a role. This is why several journos at RT made on air statements saying they won't toe the propaganda line of their employer: unlike their colleagues in the corporate media, they know the score. Their soviet predecessors knew the score too. But contrasts aside, the fundamental reason for the outcry in the American media against RT is not that it puts out egregious and weirdly eclectic propaganda, but that it puts out the wrong kind for the wrong people. It is no surprise that RT gets a following, not unlike Voice of America did back in the USSR. Guccisamsclub (talk) 00:00, 30 November 2016 (UTC)

I was going to leave a general comment saying that I care more about my own country's media, and that RT's large U.S. audience attests to the fact that it must be meeting some need that has been neglected by the mainstream U.S. press, but Gucci put it far better than I could have. The comparison with Voice of America is particularly apt.TheTimesAreAChanging (talk) 00:24, 30 November 2016 (UTC)

As someone who lived in both countries, I must tell that mainstream mass media in Russia and US are extremely different. One should judge them not on the basis of what they tell (they tell a lot of different things), but on the basis of the final "product", i.e. the listener: what general public think and most importantly feel after watching TV. Main purpose of real propaganda is not to simply misinform the listener or reader, but to incite bad feelings, such as fear, extreme prejustice and hatred. That is what modern Russian propaganda does with a much greater success than old time Soviet propaganda, based on views by majority of people who now live in Russia (there are still a few good media and intellectuals who are fine). There is nothing even remotely similar in US. There are maybe a few obscure hatred websites which I did not even see. In Russia, this is entire state-sponsored TV. My very best wishes (talk) 04:08, 30 November 2016 (UTC)

• Just adding a citation for my "bullshit echo chamber" allegation.

Note

• I am posting this as your well wisher since I respect the fact that you are intelligent and knowledgeable.
• This edit summary is unacceptable: "This is wildly undue weight to an opinion piece by an author that is, quite obviously, insane. In particular, he is using "explicitly" like a verbal tic, even though Trump has never said one "explicitly" racist sentence." The word "insane" makes it a violation of WP:BLP.
• The structural problems of Misplaced Pages do not concern your AE appeal. They are suitable for discussion and addressal in a different forum.
• I still think you will be better off striking your words which Melanie found problematic if you want to succeed in your AE case. Soham321 (talk) 23:15, 6 December 2016 (UTC)

I realize that worse BLP violations have gone unnoticed and/or unpunished, but you obviously need to be more careful when there is an ongoing AE case against you and your edits are being scrutinized very carefully. Soham321 (talk) 23:24, 6 December 2016 (UTC)

Partially stricken.TheTimesAreAChanging (talk) 00:47, 7 December 2016 (UTC)

I am actually in agreement with what RexxS wrote on my talk page: Misplaced Pages takes any violation of BLP policy extremely seriously. This isn't a trivial matter or even a matter just for Misplaced Pages. The Wikimedia Foundation board was concerned enough to pass a resolution on the issue - see wmf:Resolution:Biographies of living people.

In my reply to Rex, this is what I wrote: "Besides everything else it is a fool proof method to place the burden of responsibility for any negative content about the living person on the referenced source." Let me elaborate: if you or I write anything negative about a living person(s) then they have the right to sue us (and possibly sue Misplaced Pages). If we stick to the reliable source(s) when framing any negative adjective(s) pertaining to a living person then we have placed the burden of responsibility for the negative content on the reliable source(s). So using the method of carefully sticking to the reliable source's characterization of a living person when attaching any negative labels to a living person is something you and I ought to do for our own protection, and also for the protection of Misplaced Pages. Soham321 (talk) 00:58, 7 December 2016 (UTC)

In one of his AE comments, Rex wrote: "WP:BLP is a "bright-line" policy. There's no gradation like "slightly contentious"; a term is either contentious or it isn't...The bar is set at zero: we allow no contentious terms at all." I am in agreement with this view. Now I understand this interpretation of WP:BLP is not being uniformly followed by all Admins, but I think it should be. Possibly, the wording in WP:BLP needs to be tweaked to make all Admins interpret the policy in accordance with Rex's interpretation.Soham321 (talk) 01:16, 7 December 2016 (UTC)

Thanks

Thanks for caring, Jake. And yeah, there's quite a few very thought-provoking points on your userpage, and some I totally disagree with. (Aristide for example) a right-handed lefty who grew up not so far from your neck of the woods, SashiRolls (talk) 23:33, 6 December 2016 (UTC)

Thank you for your best efforts to keep Misplaced Pages sane.TheTimesAreAChanging (talk) 00:26, 7 December 2016 (UTC)

The edit summary

It might make a difference if you publicly retract your statement in that edit summary regarding BHO, apologize, and ask Bishonen to revdel it.--v/r - TP 01:41, 7 December 2016 (UTC)

Agree completely with the suggestion of public retraction, apology, and revdel of the 'insane' edit summary. Also edit summaries like this one should be avoided in future: "SPECIFICO, you're just too easy to bait into revealing your stalking & double standards. Did you warn or redact Oneshot when he called D'Souza "a pathological liar, delusional, mentally-unstable, and an adulterer"? OF COURSE NOT—& you opposed sanctions!" Soham321 (talk) 02:06, 7 December 2016 (UTC)

Archiving 1up

The cite web template has archiveurl and archivedate parameters. Please use them and stop removing the old urls when archiving web sources. --The1337gamer (talk) 09:17, 11 December 2016 (UTC)

Edit

Since I addressed both your invalid concerns, I suppose that the current version is now acceptable to you. --Mathmensch (talk) 16:53, 11 December 2016 (UTC)

Hello,

keeping faithful to the facts ultimately helps you assessing decisions and moving to a future that is acceptable to the many. --Mathmensch (talk) 08:50, 12 December 2016 (UTC)

Discretionary sanctions alert

Please carefully read this information:

The Arbitration Committee has authorised discretionary sanctions to be used for pages regarding all edits about, and all pages related to post-1932 politics of the United States and closely related people, a topic which you have edited. The Committee's decision is here.

Template:Z33 Sagecandor (talk) 18:02, 14 December 2016 (UTC)

Gulp

Just FYI the alert above had zero ill will or bad intentions. Also I hope you'd notify me or ask me to undo an edit if something looked disruptive in the future, and I'd gladly do so ! Sagecandor (talk) 00:39, 15 December 2016 (UTC)

@Sagecandor: You don't know the full context of SPECIFICO's interactions with me. SPECIFICO has been making my life Hell for the past two months by reporting me directly to three admins, initiating a topic ban proposal against me at ANI, and aggressively pushing to have me sanctioned at AE. SPECIFICO has also been fairly blatantly stalking and reverting my edits, all the while vowing: "TTAAC needs to be blocked or banned." For what its worth, I am quite familiar with SPECIFICO's recent edit history, and I have not seen that user make a single constructive edit to any article; it sure looks to me like mighty close to 100% of SPECIFICO's "contributions" are threats, deletions of sourced material SPECIFICO mercilessly considers "UNDUE," censorship of talk page comments, and appeals to have any editor SPECIFICO disagrees with blocked or banned—all accompanied by a subtle but unmistakable unpleasantness and hostility. In marked contrast to SPECIFICO, it's quite obvious that you are a well-meaning editor more concerned with article improvement than advancing any POV; I believe I've already thanked you for some of your edits, and I don't suspect (whatever our private disagreements) that we should have any difficulty collaborating.TheTimesAreAChanging (talk) 04:50, 15 December 2016 (UTC)