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Revision as of 01:51, 10 January 2017

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)

As the WhitewasherInChief I proclaim that edit unacceptable. It's not encyclopedic and utilizes too much editorializing and has no sources. As a RegularWikipediaEditor I'm gonna remind TTAAC about civility.Volunteer Marek (talk) 17:58, 17 December 2016 (UTC)

To elaborate a bit in all seriousness: The connection you making between the CIA's claims of Russian "interference" in the 2016 election and United States involvement in regime change is likely to constitute original research and synthesis. Very few, if any, reliable sources describe the CIA's current actions as a deliberate attempt to sway electors to vote against Trump. Note that Misplaced Pages is about Verifiability, not truth—and by definition perpetuates whatever biases may exist in mainstream sources. I believe United States involvement in regime change should be limited to major U.S. interventions widely covered in RS on the topic, whereas your text seems like an example of WP:COATRACK or WP:POVFORK.TheTimesAreAChanging (talk) 19:04, 17 December 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)

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)

Someone appears on Misplaced Pages knowing all the rules and noticeboards, edits in a blatantly partisan manner, and then peppers everyone's talk pages with warnings. What a bunch of baloney. -Darouet (talk) 05:01, 24 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)

Please undo yourself

Political Positions of Donald Trump is under DS, and disputed content should not be reinserted w/o consensus on talk:

Please review the DS notice at the top of the talk page and undo your reinsertion of content I've cleaned up and use talk if you disagree with my edit. Thanks. SPECIFICO talk 04:54, 18 December 2016 (UTC)

Actually, you're not supposed to change long-standing sourced material without consensus. Wash Post says: "Sputnik has a reasonably large audience: A million people like it on Facebook, and nearly 200,000 follow it on Twitter. ... BuzzFeed News' Jon Passatino notes on Twitter that the Sputnik article may not even have been the source of Trump's comments. It may have been a tweet from earlier in the day which included the precise language Trump read." The text is clearly sourced—in fact, it's quoted nearly verbatim—so why pretend it's "unsourced"? Must you use opaque edit summaries to justify purging everything you don't like? Does every single edit really need to be accompanied by threats and drama boards—no matter how uncontroversial it should be to any objective observer? In sum, SPECIFICO: What's your problem?TheTimesAreAChanging (talk) 05:09, 18 December 2016 (UTC)

I did not edit war

I merely reverted once. I did explain the matter to you and you went on to almost agree. But now you went back to "Criticise everything Mathmensch does" mode. --Mathmensch (talk) 22:33, 18 December 2016 (UTC)

Nope, I never agreed with you. Now that you've gotten reverted by more than one editor it is even more incumbent on you to stop.TheTimesAreAChanging (talk) 22:37, 18 December 2016 (UTC)

Congratulations. You just did what every strongman in history does. --Mathmensch (talk) 22:45, 18 December 2016 (UTC)

Sincere apologies

G'day TTAAC, my apologies for the block, it was wrong. You did not breach 1RR on Benjamin Netanyahu. Sorry about that. I have reversed my actions, and I unreservedly apologise. Happy Christmas, Peacemaker67 (click to talk to me) 01:33, 25 December 2016 (UTC)

Thanks. Same to you.TheTimesAreAChanging (talk) 01:37, 25 December 2016 (UTC)

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year

Just wanted to wish you a very merry Christmas and a very happy New Year. Soham321 (talk) 21:33, 26 December 2016 (UTC)

Thanks—same to you!TheTimesAreAChanging (talk) 21:48, 26 December 2016 (UTC)

Bernard Lewis

Hi-- I don't think I'll be able to move that dispute from edit warring to consensus building without additional help from constructive editors. Since your contributions indicate that you're one of them, and you already have a hand in that dispute, your renewed participation would be appreciated. Eperoton (talk) 03:36, 29 December 2016 (UTC)

Zbigniew Brzezinski

Hello TheTimesAreAChanging,
you've written in your comment: "Potentially serious WP:BLP problems with using interview that Zbig has long claimed distorted his statements; replaced and rephrased". I've the question: Can you provide a source for that? Since Le Nouvel Observateur is a very respected magazine. --Perofsez (talk) 22:21, 4 January 2017 (UTC)

Sure. See here, here (or skip ads), here, and here (starting with the question at 7:35), just for starters.TheTimesAreAChanging (talk) 22:37, 4 January 2017 (UTC)

For comments by other Carter administration officials see (in addition to the first link), e.g., Carter's own account in The Nation. Riedel had more direct access to Gates, Brzezinski, and Carter than anyone, although you won't find his book very useful for promoting the conspiracy theorist version of what happened.TheTimesAreAChanging (talk) 22:54, 4 January 2017 (UTC)

But in your source Brzezinski repeated the main fact he stated in the interview: "I didn't say it was designed to prompt a Soviet invasion. That was a very sensationalized and abbreviated version of an interview. What I did say was that we did help mujaheddin to resist the Soviet. At the time the Soviet already had political control over Afghanistan but had not yet invaded militarily." He only rejects that it was intended to prompt an invasion. But that is of secondary importance, the main part is: The CIA helped the mujaheddin before the Soviets invaded Afganistan. --Perofsez (talk) 00:48, 5 January 2017 (UTC)

(P.S. And for the other part, when a politician wants to correct an article in such a high-rank magazine more than 7 years later on, then that article would stand on its own, but here he tried to correct one part only to confirm the main part.)

"He only rejects that it was intended to prompt an invasion. But that is of secondary importance, the main part is: The CIA helped the mujaheddin before the Soviets invaded Afganistan." Right, and that's in the article now.TheTimesAreAChanging (talk) 00:50, 5 January 2017 (UTC)

THANKS, re link to text of Richard Helms, early career

First, I want to thank you very much for the link to the saved text of this article (which earlier had been split-off from Richard Helms).

Late last year I looked for "RH, early career" but was surprised to discover that the article apparently no longer existed. Instead when entering its name there is a redirect to the "RH" article. At a loss of where to find the missing text of "RH, e. c.", I searched the sections at the end of Talk:Richard Helms. No reference to it appeared. Yet later, I came back to read through the entire "RH" talk page. At the top of a 2012-era section on 'POV', was your added NB entry dated March 2016. In it you included a link to the deleted article. Thank you, again!! And thank you for your kind words.

After additional reflection, I went back but found no real discussion about the deletion, or why the decision to delete was made. Not on either talk page. Since I had contributed substantially over several years to the text, I reckon I should have been included, or at least informed.

But my main point is to thank you. Not only for the link, but for your comments about the two RH articles, and other articles as well. Elfelix (talk) 03:03, 6 January 2017 (UTC)

Happy to help. Thanks again for your superb editing.TheTimesAreAChanging (talk) 03:50, 6 January 2017 (UTC)

Edit summaries

Please keep it civil.Volunteer Marek (talk) 08:22, 7 January 2017 (UTC)

Also, in regard to your revert, please keep in mind this AE report and the closing statement: "You are at the edge of getting topic banned or blocked. I would remind you that Arb restricted areas have little rope and you just used yours up. Discuss before reverting when you know it is going to be contentious. " Volunteer Marek (talk) 08:28, 7 January 2017 (UTC)

And while I'm here, I *strongly* suggest you remove the BLP vios from your user page concerning Ana Kasparian and Anita Sarkeesian. Remember that WP:BLP applies to ALL Misplaced Pages pages.Volunteer Marek (talk) 08:33, 7 January 2017 (UTC)

There are literally hundreds of sources that covered the revelations about Saudi and Qatari support for Islamic State. That material has been long-standing, and—given the sheer volume of coverage it received—it is inconceivable that any summary of the Podesta emails would exclude it, except possibly Misplaced Pages's. You've been highly effective at wielding DS veto power over that article to hollow out discussion of the content of the emails to almost nothing—as the edit history attests—but if you want to go even further and delete the entire "Contents" section outright (presumably because you believe it distracts readers from the far greater evil of Putin), then I hope your efforts are met with resistance. Alternatively, I wish you would recognize that just because Putin may be a bad guy, the U.S. government is not composed of perfect angels.TheTimesAreAChanging (talk) 09:26, 7 January 2017 (UTC)

If there are "literally hundreds of sources" then you can find better ones than the ones presently in the article. Also, please keep your speculation about my motives and beliefs to yourself - I know it's much easier to argue with strawmen but it's also a sort of self-delusion.

And on that note, are you going to remove the BLP vios from your user page or do I have to? Volunteer Marek (talk) 20:08, 7 January 2017 (UTC)

What did I say about Kasparian that you feel is a BLP vio? My reference to "horrible, hate-filled people" did not name her specifically.TheTimesAreAChanging (talk) 22:45, 7 January 2017 (UTC)

The part starting with "who previously called for..." Volunteer Marek (talk) 05:37, 8 January 2017 (UTC)

I don't care about calling Kasparian or anyone else bad names outside of articles, but accusing Fusako Shigenobu of a transparently ridiculous crime which she has never committed is particularly egregious. That's a BLP-vio par excellence. Guccisamsclub (talk) 23:13, 7 January 2017 (UTC)

But that's a quote from a reliable source, and all you have is original research. (And I'm sure you can understand that it makes little difference for the point being made whether the story is true or merely apocryphal.)TheTimesAreAChanging (talk) 23:18, 7 January 2017 (UTC)

I guess, but as you well know WP:RS does not mean "good enough for WP:BLP." We unfortunately have to live with the fact WP:RS are frequently UNreliable, but when they level extraordinary accusations against living people without evidence or consensus—in fact contrary to both—that's potential libel. Whether or not the accused individual or group is "bad" is completely immaterial. In other words, it does not matter what point you are trying to make. A "noble lie" is still a lie. Although in the scheme of things, I don't really care. Keep it if you want. Guccisamsclub (talk) 00:28, 8 January 2017 (UTC)

The part where you first mention Kasparian and then follow it up with "Leftists really are horrible, hate-filled people" needs to go too, since it is very clearly meant to imply that Kasparian herself is a "horrible, hate-filled person". So yeah, it's a BLP vio.Volunteer Marek (talk) 00:31, 10 January 2017 (UTC)

But "Vladimir Putin is a thug and a murderer and a killer and a KGB agent. He had Boris Nemtsov murdered in the shadow of the Kremlin. He has dismembered the Ukraine. He has now precision strikes by Russian aircraft on hospitals in Aleppo."TheTimesAreAChanging (talk) 00:44, 10 January 2017 (UTC)

I did not get it. Why do you quote senator John McCain here? My very best wishes (talk) 00:59, 10 January 2017 (UTC)

Volunteer Marek believes in one set of policies for people he likes, and another for people he dislikes. He does not even pretend to be consistent or fair (nor does anyone think that he is): Putin and Assange are enemies, Hilary is an ally, so the former are demonized and the latter gets a hagiography. If the same were true of my edits, I would take a hard look in the mirror. However, although I have been called a Right-wing, anti-Communist, pro-Israeli, possibly CIA-sponsored propagandist, it is not hard to find edits I have made that undermine my own alleged POV: , , , , , , , , , , ect.TheTimesAreAChanging (talk) 01:19, 10 January 2017 (UTC)

SPECIFICO

Your comments on SPECIFICO are a distraction on the talk page and have gone too far. Please take concerns about user conduct here. However, I would ask you to stop the comments on article talk pages. Casprings (talk) 22:37, 7 January 2017 (UTC)

Alright, point taken. I certainly intend to report SPECIFICO; I'm just not sure my list is big enough yet to guarantee action will be taken. (In addition, it seems that SPECIFICO can't go more than a few days without misrepresenting something or other, so I'm inclined to wait ... )TheTimesAreAChanging (talk) 22:42, 7 January 2017 (UTC)

I would suggest that your behavior might also be questioned. Might want to work things out.Casprings (talk) 01:23, 8 January 2017 (UTC)

TTACC. Did not you see my advice above ? I supported you once on WP:AE. Can not do it next time. My very best wishes (talk) 22:06, 8 January 2017 (UTC)

I'll never voluntarily censor myself from editing on any topic.TheTimesAreAChanging (talk) 22:09, 8 January 2017 (UTC)

I think you had to restrain yourself in response to conclusion by Dennis on AE. Now you are making serious personal accusations (intentional misinterpretation of sources) on article talk page . This is not the place. If you really believe it, such claims should be only made on appropriate administrative noticeboards and with proofs. My very best wishes (talk) 22:26, 8 January 2017 (UTC)

It seems you are going to be just fine, but looking at your sandbox I must tell that your evidence of intentional misinterpretation by S. is weak, to tell the least. You tell this was an intentional fabrication, however the quoted source actually tells: The 170-page report said such Iraq/al-Qaeda statements were “not substantiated by the intelligence,” adding that multiple CIA reports dismissed the claim that Iraq and al-Qaeda were cooperating partners – and that there was no intelligence information that supported administration statements that Iraq would provide weapons of mass destruction to al-Qaeda. Well, I think this is more than enough to think that S. acted in a good faith, whatever else this source tells. My very best wishes (talk) 19:18, 9 January 2017 (UTC)

The source says that the claims about WMD were substantiated by the intelligence, but the claims about al Qaeda were not. SPECIFICO used it to declare Trump's statement false and to deny that the CIA ever said Iraq had WMD, even though the source explicitly says the opposite, noting: "The Trump team kept its complaint isolated to intelligence findings that Hussein had weapons of mass destruction." All of SPECIFICO's "errors" support their POV, but it really makes no difference whether they are misrepresenting sources on purpose or out of incompetence; they've been doing it routinely for four years, and I find it mind-boggling that they've been able to get away with it for so long and remain a respected (if topic-restricted) member of the community. (Nor do I see anything to suggest that SPECIFICO's misconduct is limited to a single topic, or even to any set of topics.)TheTimesAreAChanging (talk) 01:51, 10 January 2017 (UTC)

I have started a discussion concerning you on WP:AE, here.