I find that one of the strongest desires a person can have is to simply feel understood.

Something interesting happened in the middle of the now-legendary "Who is this?" thread: I finally felt understood (thanks to Milton Roe).

And that felt very good. And, it got me thinking.

They say that acid does far more damage to the vessel that holds it than it does to the object over which it is poured.

Every time the matter of my early clashes with SlimVirgin comes up, I'm reminded that for nearly three years, I've been carrying around some fairly strong acid, in the form of a festering resentment for the people and events associated with that time.

Well, I'm tired of it.

SlimVirgin and I have been in contact privately, and I daresay we finally understand one another. We've reached a mutual recognition of the fact that our early reactions were atypical and made worse by a particularly unusual sets of circumstances that greatly colored our frames of reference. We assumed the worst of each other and that brought out something less than the best in ourselves.

We've forgiven each other and the issue is now, officially, put to rest.

Having said that, I think there is a lot to learn from that episode, and so, while I have no intention of pretending it never happened, I'm simply done dealing with it from the standpoint of assigning blame.

And I must say, it feels much better this way.

Were it anybody else, I'd assume you intended to say "Nunc dimittis" but I know Jon Awbrey always means what he says.

I find that one of the strongest desires a person can have is to simply feel understood.

Something interesting happened in the middle of the now-legendary "Who is this?" thread: I finally felt understood (thanks to Milton Roe).

And that felt very good. And, it got me thinking.

They say that acid does far more damage to the vessel that holds it than it does to the object over which it is poured.

I just read this. And I hope you will accept that, without any trace of sarcasm, I'm glad it worked out that way, for both of you.

So it's true —

Too many ironies in the fire
Really doth quench the ire.

Do we change your name to WordSquib now?

Ja Ja

Naaaaah....

Could Wordbomb's experience ever happen with Awbrey?








Naaaaah………

It's a completely different situation.

We've forgiven each other and the issue is now, officially, put to rest.

It's a completely different situation. Awbrey contributed lots of material to Wikipedia, in a highly complex and advanced topic area (actually more than one, as I recall). Since hardly anyone else understood it, it was labeled "Original Research" and the related articles messed with, pretty badly. Once the inner circle (or ASOTAC, as he used to call it) decided they were tired of being criticized by him for their various ethical inadequacies, etc., most notably his objection to the use of the term "wikilawyering," the rest was just the usual railroad-and-ban job.

That's not to say a rapprochement is impossible (though it probably is) - but it's not going to occur just because a fellow WR member writes a really good summary of the related events, nice though that might be. IMO there's no way you could call it a "series of unfortunate misunderstandings"... If anything, such a summary would just reinforce his current thinking, I suspect.

The fact is that much of Awbrey's work was original research, some of it pretty poor.

I'll use my #300 posting to say that he was not the only editor to do so.

The fact is that much of Awbrey's work was original research, some of it pretty poor.

I don't edit the philosophy-related articles Awbrey did, so I don't have any opinion on the quality of his mainspace edits. I did, however run into him a few times elsewhere and was not favorably impressed. His battle to abolish the term "wikilawyering" because he claimed it was defamatory to lawyers seemed really silly to me, and it seemed like he was ironically wikilawyering about it. He then started posting a really pompous, full-of-himself series of messages on wikien-l entitled "Exit Interview" about why he was leaving Wikipedia (this may have been before he was actually banned, when he was claiming he was going away of his own free will), which prompted some list members to refer to the Gilbert & Sullivan scene where a group of characters makes a big deal about how they're leaving (Ta ra, ta ra!) but never quite gets around to actually going away.

Since he's been banned, he keeps making a big deal here about how stupid everybody else is for contributing free labor to the Wikipedia project … but then he hypocritically goes back into it with a series of sockpuppet accounts to resume editing about his pet obsessions. Do what he says, not what he does, huh?

get 'em while they're hot !!!

When I was a kid back in the '70s, I sometimes published newsletters using an archaic form of printing known as a "ditto machine", which had the characteristic that freshly-printed papers were cool to the touch due to the alcohol-based ditto fluid being in the process of evaporating. I would thus sometimes refer to my latest issue as "Cold off the press!"

(A rather irrelevant tangent, at that.)

Good Grief !!! — It's Saturday, and waaaay too nice a day outside …

Most of the histories are still there — get 'em while they're hot !!! — anyone who wants to know the truth can still do so, for a while anyway. The rest of you e-holes are a gang of post-historical secondary revisionists who buy and sell Wikipediot Mistology like it was going out of style — let's pray it is — you are all soooo full o' beans that it's not even worth lampooning anymore and you don't deserve the respect that is due honest scholars.

The histories are there and indeed I referred to one of them on a thread here, last year. The edits were undeniably by Awbrey and they were undeniably awful, or would that be Awbrey-full in Awbrey-speak. Let me see if I can find them.

and they were undeniably awful, or would that be Awbrey-full in Awbrey-speak.

No, to produce fully native Awbrey-speak, you'd have to include some Greek letters and mathematical symbols, as well as a few pointless "e-" prefixes.

We've been through this before. We watched you regress to the level of a Hypo-Critical Wikipediot Twit, and it was not a pretty sight. Please spare yourself the e-barassment.

And so we are required, as so often happens in trying to read a writer of another age, to lift the scales of the years from our eyes, to drop the reticles that have encrusted themselves on our 'reading glasses', our hermeneutic scopes, due to the interpolant philosophical schemata that have managed to enscounce themselves in our unthinking culture over the years that separate us from the writer in question.

When we start to hear these abstract, general, uninterpreted symbols being described as 'meaningless' symbols, then we can be sure that a certain line in our sand-reckoning has been crossed, and that the crossers thereof have hefted or sublimated 'formalism' to the status of a full-blown Weltanschauung rather than a simple heuristic device.

Formal perspective
Peirce did not live or work in a vacuum. No one who appreciates his use of phrases like laws of the symbol in their historical context can fail to hear the echoes of George Boole, nor the undertones of the symbolist movement in mathematics that was inspired by the ideas of George Peacock.
At the outset of his Laws of Thought, Boole tells us how he plans to evade the horns of a dilemma that would otherwise threaten to block his inquiry before he can even begin.
In proceeding to these inquiries, it will not be necessary to enter into the discussion of that famous question of the schools, whether Language is to be regarded as an essential instrument of reasoning, or whether, on the other hand, it is possible for us to reason without its aid. I suppose this question to be beside the design of the present treatise, for the following reason, viz., that it is the business of Science to investigate laws; and that, whether we regard signs as the representatives of things and of their relations, or as the representatives of the conceptions and operations of the human intellect, in studying the laws of signs, we are in effect studying the manifested laws of reasoning. (Boole, Laws of Thought, p. 24)
Boole is saying that the business of science, to investigate laws, applies itself to the laws of signs at such a level of abstraction that its results are the same no matter whether it finds those laws embodied in objects or in intellects. In short, he does not have to choose one or the other in order to begin. This simple idea is the essence of the formal approach in mathematics, and it is one of the reasons that contemporary mathematicians tend to consider structures that are isomorphic to one another as tantamount to being the same thing. Peirce avails himself of this same depth of perspective for much the same reason. It allows him to investigate the forms of triadic sign relations that exist among objects, signs, and interpretants without being blocked by the impossible task of acquiring knowledge of supposedly unknowable things in themselves, whether outward objects or the contents of other minds. Like Aristotle and Boole before him, Peirce replaces these impossible problems with the practical problem of inquiring into the sign relations that exist among commonly accessible objects and publicly accessible signs.
How often do we think of the thing in algebra? When we use the symbol of multiplication we do not even think out the conception of multiplication, we think merely of the laws of that symbol, which coincide with the laws of the conception, and what is more to the purpose, coincide with the laws of multiplication in the object. Now, I ask, how is it that anything can be done with a symbol, without reflecting upon the conception, much less imagining the object that belongs to it? It is simply because the symbol has acquired a nature, which may be described thus, that when it is brought before the mind certain principles of its use — whether reflected on or not — by association immediately regulate the action of the mind; and these may be regarded as laws of the symbol itself which it cannot as a symbol transgress. ("On the Logic of Science" (1865), CE 1, 173).
The motive themes of the symbolist movement are familiar to anyone who has worked a "story problem" in a mathematics course. One learns to approach the story problem, a roughly realistic representation of a concrete set of circumstances, with the aim of abstracting the appropriate general formula from the mass of concrete details that make up the problem — not all of which data are equally pertinent to the solution and some of which may even be thrown in as distractors. The next step is to derive the logical implications of the abstract formula, generally speaking substituting specific values for some of its variables but just as often leaving other variables unfilled in. The bearing of the formula on the desired answer is obscure at first — that is what makes the problem a problem in the first place. But progressive clarification of the formula leads to an equivalent or implied formula that amounts to an abstract answer or a generic solution to the story problem. Given that, there is nothing more to do but fill in the rest of the concrete data to arrive at the concrete answer or the specific solution to the problem.

The three-phase maneuver for solving a story problem, (1) teasing out, (2) cranking the crank, (3) plugging in, can be articulated in semiotic or sign-relational terms as follows: The first phase passes from the object domain to the sign domain, the second phase passes from the sign domain to the interpretant sign domain, continuing perhaps in a relay of successive passes, and the third phase passes from the last interpretant sign domain back to the object domain.
There are a number of issues that typically arise with the continuing development of a symbolist perspective, in any field of endeavor, over the years of its natural life-cycle. We can see these issues illustrated clearly enough in our story problem paradigm, with its parsing of the problem-solving process into the three phases of abstraction, transformation, and application.
Once the division of labor among the three phases of the process has been in place for a sufficiently long time, each of the three phases will tend to take on a certain degree of independence, sometimes actual and sometimes merely apparent, from the other two phases.
As a side-effect of the increasing independence among the various phases of inquiry, there tend to develop specialized disciplines, each devoted to a single aspect of the initially interactive and integral process. A symptom of this stage of development is that references to the 'independence' of the several phases of inquiry may become confused with or even replaced by assertions of their 'autonomy' from one another.
Returning to the formal sciences of logic and mathematics and focusing on the rise of symbolic logic in particular, all of the above issues were clearly recognized and widely discussed among the movers and shakers of the symbolist movement, with especial mention of George Boole, Augustus De Morgan, Benjamin Peirce, and Charles Peirce.
The first symptoms of a crisis typically arise in connection with questions about the status of the abstract symbols that are 'manipulated' in the transformation phase, to express it in sign-relational terms, the sign-to-sign aspect of semiosis. In the beginning, while it is still evident to everyone concerned that these symbols are mined from the matrix of their usual interpretations, which are generally more diverse than unique, these abstracted symbols are commonly referred to as 'uninterpreted symbols', the sense being that they are transiently detached from their interpretations simply for the sake of extra facility in processing the more general thrust of their meanings, after which intermediary process they will have their concrete meanings restored.
When we start to hear these abstract, general, uninterpreted symbols being described as 'meaningless' symbols, then we can be sure that a certain line in our sand-reckoning has been crossed, and that the crossers thereof have hefted or sublimated 'formalism' to the status of a full-blown Weltanschauung rather than a simple heuristic device.
What we observe here is a familiar form of cyclic process, with the crest of excess followed by the slough of despond. The inflationary boom that raises 'formalism' beyond its formative sphere as one among a host of equally useful heuristic tricks to the status of a totalizing worldview leads perforce to the deflationary bust that makes of 'formalist' a pejorative term.
The point of the foregoing discussion is this, that one of the main difficulties that we have in understanding what the whole complex of words rooted in 'form' meant to Peirce is that we find ourselves, historically speaking, on opposite sides of this cycle of ideas from him.
And so we are required, as so often happens in trying to read a writer of another age, to lift the scales of the years from our eyes, to drop the reticles that have encrusted themselves on our 'reading glasses', our hermeneutic scopes, due to the interpolant philosophical schemata that have managed to enscounce themselves in our unthinking culture over the years that separate us from the writer in question.

You people need to go back and read the Five Pillars, as they were written at the time. I know today that it's all hypocrisy, and always will be — Peter Demian and Dan Tobias have e-lected to provide us with near perfect examples of that hypocrisy — but the sad fact is that I was working in good faith accord with those noble ideals, however ludicrous they may sound in the current time frame.

Those who violated the Pillars & Polices of Wikipedia — the worst of them being Wikipediot Adminds like SV, KC, FM, etc. — are the worst class of Vandals ever to blight the site. But their Policy Poop has already dried and hardened into a layer of shitrock that can no longer be budged, short of a major earthquake.

Jon Awbrey

Well possibl-e. My point was only that much of your work was original e-search and that some of it was prett-e poor.

E-barassment, that's very funny! how does this joke work? Any word with an 'e' in it, and you isolate the letter with a hyphen or two. Why actually is this funny? Is it meant to be? Or is it providing us with some insight? What is that?

Meanwhile I found the edits in question, to the Peirce article, link is here

en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Charles_Sanders_Peirce&diff=61546825&oldid=59059034

Huh? ??? Did you even bother to click on that link yourself, or did you just cut-&-paste it from your JzG-feed?

Or maybe you've taken all your lessons in evidentiary sleight-of-hand from SlimVirgin herself?

Jon Awbrey

Returning to the formal sciences of logic and mathematics and focusing on the rise of symbolic logic in particular, all of the above issues were clearly recognized and widely discussed among the movers and shakers of the symbolist movement, with especial mention of [[George Boole]], [[Augustus De Morgan]], [[Benjamin Peirce]], and Charles Peirce.
+
+ The first symptoms of a crisis typically arise in connection with questions about the status of the abstract symbols that are 'manipulated' in the transformation phase, to express it in sign-relational terms, the sign-to-sign aspect of semiosis.
+ In the beginning, while it is still evident to everyone concerned that these symbols are mined from the matrix of their usual interpretations, which are generally more diverse than unique, these abstracted symbols are commonly referred to as '[[uninterpreted symbol]]s', the sense being that they are transiently detached from their interpretations simply for the sake of extra facility in processing the more general thrust of their meanings, after which intermediary process they will have their concrete meanings restored.
+
+ When we start to hear these abstract, general, uninterpreted symbols being described as 'meaningless' symbols, then we can be sure that a certain line in our sand-reckoning has been crossed, and that the crossers thereof have hefted or sublimated '[[formalism]]' to the status of a full-blown [[Weltanschauung]] rather than a simple [[heuristic]] device.

I don't know how much these private apologies are worth.

I too received a private email from SV, in this case acknowledging that she had retagged/undeleted pages concerning me and apologizing and that she wouldn't do something like that today. Well, of course not, she's not an admin.

I don't know how much these private apologies are worth. I don't have any particular rancor towards SV and have (mostly unbeknownst to her) intervened at various times against some of the more egregious attacks against her. But I don't see any point in forgiving her if she's not even able to apologize publicly for her past misdeeds, take responsibility for them and at least try to correct the damage she's done. In my case I was a user who had never been banned or sanctioned but who "quit" WP but ended up continuing to edit under other accounts and when I did try to come back fully she interfered with Jimbo and Fred Bauder to try to stop that and then, when they largely ignored her she helped get me blocked through a lynch mob inspired community ban and even changed the rule that had been in place until then which stated that there could be no community ban if a single admin objected. Given that the lynch flash mob that pushed for my community ban consisted of the usual suspects who, in that period, would magically appear to vote the same way as her on RFAs, RFDs and other matters I suspect she sent emails to her posse putting the community ban ball into motion.

Huh? ??? Did you even bother to click on that link yourself, or did you just cut-&-paste it from your JzG-feed?

Or maybe you've taken all your lessons in evidentiary sleight-of-hand from SlimVirgin herself?

Jon Awbrey

In my case I was a user who had never been banned or sanctioned but who "quit" WP but ended up continuing to edit under other accounts and when I did try to come back fully she interfered with Jimbo and Fred Bauder to try to stop that and then, when they largely ignored her she helped get me blocked through a lynch mob inspired community ban and even changed the rule that had been in place until then which stated that there could be no community ban if a single admin objected.

However, I have to correct the above, because it's the opposite of the truth.

Slim, as we have establish beyond any doubt, few of us believe that you and the truth have even a passing acquaintance. And suggestions of "massive sockpuppetry" coming from you are about as convincing as Grawp crowing about the massiveness of his endowment.

I'm a little tired of seeing allegations fly fast and furious in all directions without proof. Who was it that came up with the line

Show Us The Diffs Or Shut The Hell Up

Oh yeah, Awbrey. Damn useful principle. Thanks, Jon.

To save time in the future, we should eventually use just the acronym SUTDOSTHU. Looks like it'll come in handy.

In my case I was a user who had never been banned or sanctioned but who "quit" WP but ended up continuing to edit under other accounts and when I did try to come back fully she interfered with Jimbo and Fred Bauder to try to stop that and then, when they largely ignored her she helped get me blocked through a lynch mob inspired community ban and even changed the rule that had been in place until then which stated that there could be no community ban if a single admin objected. Given that the lynch flash mob that pushed for my community ban consisted of the usual suspects who, in that period, would magically appear to vote the same way as her on RFAs, RFDs and other matters I suspect she sent emails to her posse putting the community ban ball into motion.

Oh, I thought it was Show Us The Diffs or Tell 'Hell' to Shut Up. My mistake. But maybe we need a special rule for SlimVirgin apologists like you.

Oh, and here's the diff: SlimVirgin: Pathological Liar and Demagogue

It wasn't only sockpuppetry that was the issue. Creating BLPs about people you don't like was a major issue, which led to complaints about you to the Foundation.

The main problem here is that our Hellish friend is a liar and a hyporcrite.

Hell, you are in absolutely no position to self-righteously go after anyone for "sockpuppetry" when you yourself are a sockpuppeteer and have refused to ever explain or even acknowledge your behavior (yet you've never denied that Sweet Blue Water was your abusive sock). Until you take responsibility for your own behavior don't bother talking about other people's socks.

Yes, by Rachel Marsden but that's a whole other story and we know how that turned out.

You created a large number of BLPs about public figures you dislike and whose politics you disapprove of, two of which (that I know about) led to complaints about you to the Foundation.

As for posting Jimbo's e-mail, that's really not on, first because you don't have his consent, and secondly, because it gives a very false impression.

fromslimvirgin@gmail.com
to xxxxx@sympatico.ca>

dateTue, Aug 9, 2005 at 10:50 PM
subjectFeloniousMonk adminship

All I can do here is to ask readers to reflect on the fairness of Heat posting my emails and Jimbo's without our consent, out of context and selectively, while I'm not even allowed to say what his accounts were on Wikipedia, under threat of being banned from this board if I do.

Even though it's an open secret what his main account was, it is very difficult for anyone trying to find his other accounts to recreate the trail broken by his requests for deletion, and his insistence on having his remaining edits moved to three new accounts. That means he is free to posture here as though he did nothing wrong.

All I can do here is to ask readers to reflect on the fairness of Heat posting my emails and Jimbo's without our consent, out of context and selectively, while I'm not even allowed to say what his accounts were on Wikipedia, under threat of being banned from this board if I do.

Even though it's an open secret what his main account was, it is very difficult for anyone trying to find his other accounts to recreate the trail broken by his requests for deletion, and his insistence on having his remaining edits moved to three new accounts. That means he is free to posture here as though he did nothing wrong.

Sweet Blue Water was not an "abusive" sock, or really a sock of any kind, as I explained to people at the time. It was an account I was going to start editing with instead of SV. I changed my mind after a very small number of edits.

It's a fair point you make that you don't know who I am, but at least I don't pretend to be more than one person, as you have clearly done above. Featured article status tends to be awarded based on numbers of objections, so if you're pretending to lodge more than one, you're cheating. Anyway, I see you've set up a User page now, so I will drop you a further note there instead of here. Slim 21:37, Dec 9, 2004 (UTC)

So, you are asking people to believe that shortly after you talked repeatedly about how it was cheating to double vote on a featured articles nomination, you then did this only by accident.

Yes, of course, that's exactly what I'm saying. I voted with Sweet Blue Water one night, went to bed, looked at it the next day, forgot I'd already voted, and voted again with Slim. Or it may have been the other way round. It's obvious to any reasonable person who looks at it, and the context, that that's what happened.

You already know this, Mackan, because I emailed it to you a few months ago, so it's odd that you're posting here as though you have no information.

The FA I *accidentally* voted on is one I had very little interest in -- certainly not enough to even *want* to double vote -- and my doing so made no difference. If it had, I would have told Raul.

But you see, here we are again. Every single thing I do -- no matter whether it's positive or negative -- is put under the microscope here. *No* editor's contribs could withstand this, including yours, Mackan. It's doubly absurd because the board has invented a rule that only applies to me, that says I'm not allowed to say -- or even to *ask*! --what people's Wikipedia names are. So you have someone like Heat posting, with his 40-plus, very active, and seriously abusive, socks. And then you have me with ONE accidental double-post to an FA page, in an account with very few edits.

But guess which one Mackan wants to question? :-)