In Wikipedia, Hell Go To You.

Ja Ja

Technically, the rules permit involved admins to use the tools if they are enforcing arbcom decisions. This became, of course, a universal fig leaf for Slim and Will Beback to do anything they wanted. There was a topic ban for me on editing "LaRouche-related" articles, but soon any article I edited became "LaRouche-related" (see this extract from ANI.) Unethical? You betcha.

There's no problem with that. You see, LaRouche is an anti-Semite. Since combating anti-Semitism is inherently good, any action taken in furtherance of combating anti-Semitism is also inherently good. It is therefore appropriate to take all possible measures to ensure that LaRouche's article contains as much negative content as possible, so as to ensure that his anti-Semitic views are discredited as much as possible.

That's why there's no conflict of interest. Zealots don't ignore that they have a conflict of interest; they are simply incapable of understanding that a conflict even exists. It's really something of a form of mental illness.

(Cross-posted from another thread in a non-public section.)

For a long time, there was general disagreement as to whether arbitration remedies could be enforced by any administrator, or only by an "uninvolved" administrator. This issue split the committee in May 2007 in the Zeq-Zero0000 case (see, [[Wikipedia:Requests for arbitration/Zeq-Zero0000/Proposed decision]]), but to resolve the doubt, the remedies in subsequent cases have typically stated that blocks, discretionary sanctions, etc. may be imposed by "any uninvolved administrator."

Accepted Interpretations of "Any Uninvolved Administrator" (WP:AUA):

1. Administrators who are not currently seeing anyone.
2. Tag-team members with one foot outside the ring.
3. Jayjg.

But I mock …

Ja Ja

Indeed you do. But today you mock in English words, which can in some ways be reckoned as progress.

Why is mocking in English superior to mocking in any other language?

Because decoding many of Jon's other posts requires the services of a certified Awbreyologist.

Certainly a certified something. Probably also takes a certain committment.

Interesting. This suggests that you concede other things you've been queried on in the past week and refused to address - eg your relationships with Jayjg, Proaby, FM, your use of sockpuppets etc are not disinformation and that you cannot "correct" them.



This is evidently true for WR as well. If you build it Hell will come - eventually.

Or perhaps a secret decoder ring, which you get by sending in boxtops?

Nice to know someone's still buying Ovaltine.

Will Hell actually come or just fake it? {{fact}} Where's WP:V and WP:RS on this.




Partial comfort.

I take it that this is a rhetorical question.

The answer has been given over and over by Jon Awbrey. The only people with no point of view are dead people. The only editors on WP who think they edit without any point of view, are people with the self-awareness of wooden blocks. Of which, there seem to be quite a few.


Exactly.


Perhaps even a certain institutional committment.

We've been over this before.

This is one of those Deja Vu to the N-th Power places for me — just about everything wrong with the Crypto-Randroid-Or-Whoever-The Hell-It-Is Uncritical Unreflective Perspective of the Sanger–Wales E-Pyre of Wikipedia and Citizendium is betrayed in the above few lines. It makes me feel like I'm back in the '50s. It's a POV that seems to predate about 60 years of Dialogue & Research on Methods of Inquiry, Learning How To Learn, Systems Thinking, Values Clarification, Critical Thinking, Reflective Practice, Learning Organizations, Learning Communities — just to mention a few of the themes that I remember since I started paying attention. What sorts of attics, basements, closets, and dungholes have these bee-tles been moldering away in all these years? I have no idea. It's like they have a whole separate Cargo Cult Pidgin that makes it impossible to have an intelligent conversation with them.

At any rate, it makes me too tired to talk about now …

Jon Awbrey

I'm in Dan T.'s Inferno myself!

Verbatim from the Washington Post, cited to both the Post & the original neutral and reliable source, the Wilcox Report. Not a word of this can be cited to me. Now let's look at the neutral & reliable smears directed at Mr. Brandt.
cited to Berlet and his own in house self publishing rag. Most importantly, put in the mainspace by Berlet himself. And t his is the crap that Jimbo Wales relied upon when he publicly smeared Brandt to Editor & Publisher magazine. How many violations of WP own policies can we find here?

Addendum
Again, this claim is not supported even by Chip Berlet.
I see Rangerdude's name, and Sam Spade, but no allegation by Berlet that HK & myself acted in concert to insert deragotory information in Berlet's bio.

I do not know, either. I have mentioned the Randroid connection and the mad idea that it is in possible in principle to settle in on the SINGLE best theory which fits all the presently-known facts. Presuming that there EXISTS a set of black-and-white things you know as a hard 'fact," so that you don't have to wrestle with Bayesian methods-- which naturally spit out only probabilities, since probabilities are all that they were fed....

But the other obvious route to madness is this fresh-faced journalism students' view that one can fairly represent any topic by simply (neutrally) representing all the major viewpoints about it, in proportion to the fraction of people who hold them. They actually teach this as a goal in journalism. And I suppose it's better than nothing, so long as its limitations are recognized. We've talked about these over time at WR. In no particular order:

1) The fraction of people who hold a given view is drastically different depending on which group you poll. In particular, the mass view changes depending on what culture and socioeconomic group you look at. Israel, for example, has 10% of the population of Egypt, but publishes 10 TIMES the number of books each year. Which view of the world and politics do you think might be overrepresented, in a literary effort like Wikipedia? Is a cultural viewpoint less valid because that culture has fewer printing presses? Good culturally sensitive people would say "no" in the cause of Australian aboriginies. But it gets much more complicated in the Middle East, where the view tends to be "If they can't publish in English, fuck em."

Views also change depending on level of education and expertise. As we found out with anthropogenic global warming, and Darwinian evolution. This problem comes up every time they ask the experts what they should teach in public school texts, and the public doesn't like the answer. Wikipedia, a popularly written encyclopedia, is not going to fix this tension. If anything, Wikipedia is lucky if it doesn't come out like a biology textbook written by Texas preachers and their congregations.

2) The standard journalism problem of what fraction of expert people hold what views, cannot even be approached except by experts on a given subject-- if you're not an expert, how would you even guess approximately the answer? But Wikipedia tends to be written in drive-by edits by the general public, who learn some fact about X and then go and add it to Wikipedia if they can't find it there already. Wow, magnesium is used in Mag auto wheels! That tends to give the popular wisdom of people who use the internet, and it has enormous inertia. But it intrinsically lacks expertise, and the experts themselves have no extra traction.

3) The idea that one can judge what the expert view is, except by talking to lots of experts, is wrong. Even expert review articles tend to be biased toward the research that the expert did for his or her last grant proposal (in fact, this is where most of those articles come from). At least TV journalists know they should to talk to many experts and let them present directly (if edited). Print journalists often talk to experts, but garble the results, and the experts are lucky if they are read the snippets of how they are quoted, but don't get to read the entire article. And the product of this goes into Wikipedia sources.
The idea that one can judge the depth of a view by doing a Google search on it, has the problem that Google is self-amplifying, and interest and advertisement driven, not evidence-driven. As demonstrated by the fact that top Google result for most topics is the Wikipedia article. People keep seeing that without wanting to admit the meaning of it. If that's what Google does to the topic you're looking at, why would you trust it for the #2 entry, either (which is likely to be Answers.com ). Using Google Scholar helps some, but last I checked, WP didn't even encourage using that over regular Google, for scholarly subjects.

4) The above is why any field of human knowledge is subject to short term manipulation and advertising. There is a "theme" to most science conferences, and that theme may or may not survive as conventional wisdom to the conferences down the road. Often it does not. But meanwhile, journalists who write about the latest exciting results, make the same mistakes as the scientists themselves, but worse. If you read a newspaper science section about some (supposedly) new science result, you'd think it was just discovered, when most of the time it's been known for years, but the scientific paper being covered is one currently getting hype. There are far fewer shocking and genuinely new discoveries than you'd think, from reading the newspapers or science pop journal reporting. But there are a lot of scientists who would be happy for the grant review committees to think that they were actually the ones moving ahead an entire field.

Finally, the Bayes problem mentioned at the beginning, just won't go away. There is lots of evidence, but evaluating the quality of evidence is a full-time job, and takes experts. Knowing who these experts are, and why they believe as they do, takes savvy. People with something to sell, can sometimes generate huge amounts of "science" showing that their viewpoints are correct, and this takes years to sort out. If all that is "known" about treatment of a certain disease was discovered in drug-company funded trials, what are you going to do with that "knowledge"? Does it even count as "knowledge"? And so on.

Yikes, I'm getting weary, too.

George Will plaguerizes me yet again!

Jon

Hey I think I might have found part of it, but why'd they have to build it there, Hersch? The tree-huggers will have a fit!

Sorry for the thread necro but I'm still trying to figure out what else could be passing over Ushan'i Island on the surface of Lake Baykal.


Yeah.

By remarkable coincidence, SV is doing a reprise of her fit over the landbridge right now at Talk:Helga Zepp-LaRouche.

But, like... I thought Baykal was too deep to build a bridge across, Hersch. They must be floating it on pontoons like the 520 bridge in Seattle. That'd make for some scary-ass driving.


The Google numbers will be skewed by the fact that "Robin Webb" is a much more common name than "Helga Zepp-LaRouche" of which the Robin Webb she refers to is arguably not the most notable bearer. Sure the Google News archive says 869 results, but it's hard to guess how many of these pertain to the animal-rights person as he/she does not appear till about halfway down the second page.

I'm not seeing how this person is measurably more notable than LaRouche's widow [edit: wife] or whether it really matters.

Somehow, I doubt that Will was able to type that with a straight face. Anyway, SV and Will really don't seem to like any information about that land bridge included in the LaRouche articles.

Hmm... somehow I doubt he is in a position to grant general amnesty to all current content, but hey... whatever works.

They seem to be making a comeback as a tag-team, just in time for consideration in next year's Dick of Distinction awards. Note how Will proposes that the article be merged, his proposal doesn't get off the ground, and then SV shows up and... proposes that the article be merged! And Will, delighted by this new and original contribution to the debate, is all for it.

What's the correct name for LaRouche's bridge between Alaska and Russia? Eurasian Land Bridge redirects to this article. If there are at least two reliable sources which mention LaRouche's project to build this bridge (and actually go into detail, not just mention it in passing), I'll go start the entry and wikilink it to various LaRouche articles as appropriate.

The Bering Straits Tunnel project idea did not originate with LaRouche. I think it's been around for a century or so. LaRouche's proposal is simply an approach to combine many local infrastructure concepts into an integrated continental, and eventually global approach. LaRouche also emphasizes certain cutting-edge technologies, particularly MagLev, and the creation of what he calls "development corridors," transportation links combined with other sorts of infrastructure.

Who is NE2? This redirect is positively imbecilic, although I see that some hours earlier he did a different one which was obviously correct. Why is he doing this now? Perhaps he's reading this thread.

A road-and-rail geek to put it mildly (see [1]). He has been known to read WR. Maybe he participates too and we just don't know it.

He probably redirected it to that title (as opposed to "Tokyo–Montana Express") because it is the most prominent use of this "eurasian land-bridge" term by anyone outside than the LaRouche movement. He's a good editor overall, and not part of any vast conspiracy against LaRouche I can almost guarantee. Perhaps a disambiguation page would be most appropriate.

P.S. I'm still curious whether any of the proposed routes include Lake Baykal...

Here's a link to a relatively detailed map, the best I could find on the web.

And while I was looking I found this, and this, and this, all photos from various sources of the monument that Kato suspects was created by diabolical LaRouche photoshop technicians. And here's the one that SlimVirgin is still snarling about to this very day.

That comes from a LaRouche related publication.

http://www.eirna.com/



Not me, Hersch. That was Somey who likely knows more about photoshopping than me:

I just don't get it. The largest engineering project ever to connect two economically marginal, although currently ecologically pristine parts of the globe? A bridge to two nowheres? Neither side if of the bridge would connected to anything other than local fire roads with links connecting rail or highways systems hundreds or thousands of miles away. National Geographic did one of their neat graphic articles a couple of months ago showing the "carbon foot print" of wine purchases in New York. A bottle of wine from Chile used an order of magnitude less fuel than a bottle of wine from California. This is because the bottle from Chile arrived via container ship while the one from California came by truck. Container ships seem like a much better way to link these parts of the world.

It would be creative eco-accounting to imply that this it always works this way. I mean unless all the wine-drinkers live in coastal areas, the imported wine would still have to be trucked the same distance after arriving from Chile by boat (probably to California). It doesn't make much sense to say that foreign goods are earth-friendlier because they travel by boat before traveling by truck.

You could say though that it has an extra month or so to age, but for most other products would be a bad thing.

One could speculate that nobody likes paying the Suez Canal Authority.

New York is a coastal area. Cheaper to ship via the Panama Canal than to truck across across the USA, even though the distance might be much further. This wouldn't apply to the same extent for wine purchased in Iowa or Kansas of course but it would apply for anything trucked through thousands of miles wilderness for any use in either direction across the Bering Straight.

Well, it's not like I'm a professional Photoshopper.

The actual monument is real - it's located in Lianyungang City, which appears to also be a real city, despite their terrible-looking website. (I'm sure the Chinese-language version looks fabulous!) They even advertise it.

It's just the inscription that's Photoshopped, not the monument itself - I would assume this is because they're trying to sell this idea to other countries, and while English is the language of modern-day commerce, it's also the language most likely to cause Chinese citizens to want to deface the monument. SlimVirgin & Co. probably want folks to believe that the Chinese inscription on the monument actually reads "Dedicated to those who have gone down to the sea in shipping containers," but the city's website makes it fairly clear that the whole thing is legitimate, though it's difficult to say how much support it's been getting from other countries along the proposed landbridge route.

As for the cost of shipping by landbridge vs. by sea, I think that would depend on the cargo, wouldn't it? Interesting question...

Apropos of anything else, I gotta say, as someone who spends a large amount of time in Photoshop (wedding photographer at times) that sign looks remarkably shopped. Despite the angle of the picture (leaning a degree or so) the text on the sign is perfectly to within 1 pixel, and that is easily an artifact of which anti-aliasing algorithm is chosen in PS.

OK, then, I want to see the business plan for LaRouche's version of this connector between Asia and North America. Having been a former project manager, I learned that the basic elements of a project plan are:

- A defined requirement or goal, along with an associated scope of the project
- The resources required, sometimes referred to as the budget
- An estimated completion date (ECD) or timeline

Does the LaRouche organization or anyone else involved in this shindig have any of these three elements? None of these three should be confidential information, except perhaps #2. You've probably noticed that these three elements are usually mentioned in the business section of the newspaper, as in:



Or something like:

Where is this info for the landbridge/tunnel? I'm not trying to give you a hard time, I'm just trying to decide if its exclusion from the LaRouche articles in Wikipedia is justified or not.

[Moderator's note: the wine-realted posts have been moved to the Lounge. You may imbibe them there. -- gomi]

So, your argument is that this photo, from the LaRouche website, and this different photo, from an unrelated website, were both photoshopped? The LaRouche conspiracy must be vaster and insidiouser than even I had suspected.


It's unclear from the context, but you may be talking about the Bering Straits project, which is not the same thing as the landbridge, although it is a subsumed feature of the landbridge.


Back in the '90s, LaRouche published a humongous report, some 300 or so pages. Only parts of it are available on the internet, and I'd simply recommend that you start your search engines.


It appears that they do. This article provides some detail on something called the Baikal-Amur Mainline.

That's because, in today's modern world, economics is dominated by accountants. Transport by ship is always going to be the cheapest mode, at least in the immediate future. However, cheapest is not necessarily best, as the outsourcing advocates are now painfully learning. Time is also a factor in economic planning, and ship transport is slow.

But there is a more important point here. LaRouche's proposal is not primarily about moving goods around the world. It is about developing the world. There are many land-locked countries in central Asia that are trapped in economic isolation, and having access to modern rail transport would connect them to the world in a profound way. The landbridge proposal also involves development corridors which would include high-capacity electric lines, fuel pipelines, fiber optic cables, water supply lines (perhaps including irrigation,) and so on.

Now, all this Googling has revealed something interesting to me. Back in '05 when I was at Wikipedia, I was trying to learn how the Reliable Sourcesâ„¢ game is played. At that time, the only web references to the Eurasian Landbridge were on LaRouche sites, so a reference to the landbridge would have to be fringey, OR, etc. Now, four years later, the net is teeming with sites that talk about the landbridge. So, obviously, LaRouche had nothing to do with it, someone else came up with the idea.

Hersch,

I'd be more convinced of your "not photoshopped" argument if the wording on the two photos actually matched.

For the inattentive, what is the last word on the first line?

Clue: "of" or "the" - take your pick.

For all it's worth my finely honed linguistical analytic skills confirm that this does in fact say:
新亚欧大陆桥东端起点

Literally (word-for-word):
"new Asia Europe big land bridge east end start point"

But also the backgrounds don't match -- the big blue cranes are missing from the smaller photo. My hypothesis: the photos are of opposite sides of the statue, which would have English on two opposing sides, and Chinese on the others. The word placement on the English sides could then be slightly different.

Well, considering that they don't actually have the same text on them...

1. Big blue cranes are on rails. Big blue crane can move.
2. Note the rails that stop next to the monument in one picture which clearly aren't there in the first picture. The first picture cannot therefore from the other side. However, oddly, there do not appear to be any rails even in the background.
3. Where has the marble flooring around the statue gone? The big straight on picture seems to be taken when the statue is in good condition, the angled picture, it appears the surrounds have been dug up and the marble has several years of water staining and ageing.
4. It would seem unlikely to me that two sides of a statue would be carved in different ways.
5. Would someone explain why a monument to a land bridge would be symbolised with an anchor?

It seems the big picture was taken several years ago soon after installation. The redevelopment might be quite possible over a number of years, but without any other evidence, I'd still go with photo-shopping and it doesn't even seem to me like the monument is in the same container yard (fences, rails, tone and texture of surrounding concrete).

http://www.ldz.gov.cn/pics/073.jpg indicates there is chinese on two adjacent sides. It'd be unusual to have nearly (but not quite) identical english messages on the other two sides, wouldn't it?

I dunno. My hypothesis could be wrong. Or maybe in China it's not unusual to have English on two adjacent sides.

Meanwhile, SlimVirgin, Will Beback and Leatherstocking are duking it out right now on this very issue.

http://www.ldz.gov.cn/english/pics_en_big.asp?bpid=280 Also shows a similar viewpoint.

It would not surprise me that the statue was genuine and the wording was faked. There is nothing odd about marking the start of a trans-continental rail route, even if it is with some spare old statue left lying around from some other revolutionary site or other. Indeed, taking a disjointed set of transport links and joining them together with a name is pretty much standard operating practice, like the European E routes. It doesn't really represent any significant development or investment other than printing the odd timetable so I am totally unclear as to what these photos would actually prove other than someone likes the idea of a rail link from east to west.