So once again, against my best interests, I got sucked back into Wikipedia. I know the game is rigged, I know they've deliberately set up provocations all over Wikipedia for the specific purpose of sucking people in so that they can be used as target practice for Wikipedia's ruling cabal of white, angry, middle-class, poorly-socialized Asperger nerds. But sometimes the provocation is so large that I simply can't help riding to their bait. And so it was this time.

After an argument over the naming of Kerepakupai merú, I decided to BE BOLD, as we are exhorted to do, and moved Angel Falls to its proper name. This lasted for about two days before the white supremacists of Wikipedia moved it back and I was told essentially that to do what needed to be done I would have to change Wikipedia's naming policies. (Never mind that these naming policies don't apparently apply to, for example, ninja, which translates into English as "endurance warrior.")

So I take my argument to the Village Pump Policy) and make my pitch. Instantly I am swarmed by nationalists, assburgs, and other forms of obnoxious asshat who not only have no interest in actually discussing the policy, but insist that I must be a troll for doing so. Then the discussion is arbitrarily closed without explanation by an administrator. I don't know why I keep doing this. You'd think someone as smart as I am would have figured out by now that Wikipedia is run by idiots, for idiots, and that the entire purpose of its existence is to give white, angry, overprivileged Trekkies a supply of targets on which to vent their Cheeto-fueled nerd rage.

So, having "Angel Falls" in the English Wikipedia, as it is known in English and is published in probably millions of sources as "Angel Falls", is some how some kind of white supremacist conspiracy?

The funny part is that wiki is biased to the left and is anti-nationalistic (unless it is Middle East or an ex-Soviet country). They also tend to think that pedophiles do no harm and other silly things, so, if they think that you are being extreme... then... well...

No, your other left …

Don't bother, Mr. State, we've all tried, but their heads are so far up their arses with a twist that they'll never know left from lol.

Jon

You have the demograhics right but oversimplify the politics. The prevailing political view of Wikipedia (and of the demographic you describe) is libertarianism something you as a "left wing libertarian" have not yet swept from your own house. The actual left/right axis is considerably less import than the libertarianism itself. The essential politics of editing consists of "be bold" and "anyone can edit" played out by hundreds of thousands of atomized edits. In Jimbo theory (aka "delusion") this is known as "Cosmos." No force or coercion. None of that evil "Taxis" of experts , credentials and the brute force of winning an argument on the merits. It operates by the visible hand of the Lesser God Wiki replicating the God Above Free Market.

Because this doesn't actually work Wikipedians turn to processes that sound non-coercive such as "discussion" and "consensus" but this is nothing more than a mockery of those processes covering for the war of all against all that this libertarian dystopia has unleashed. This situation doesn't lend itself to a clean "house POV" on topics but only a great many war lords contending with an overall advantage to libertarianism itself and the favored views of the underlying demographic. It is almost always possible to gather some evidence of POV in just about any direction. Thus we have topics on WR about the "Muslim POV Campaigns" when in fact Muslims are the most disparaged group by the dominate demographic group you described.

I have in the past attempted to distinguish between right-wing libertarians and left wing anarchists by considering that while libertarians are against all planning (and ultimately rational discussion as a basis for making decisions) anarchists are not against planning, only against the state being the locus of the planning. I was mostly trying to convince myself of this. Do you have any insights on the matter? Put another way do you support "No New Taxis" or not?

Just a quick note to add that the admin who forbid any futher discussion of the issue, has now forbid any further discussion of him forbidding any further discussion of the issue. He also finds the entire subject tedious. I should just eat his shit sandwich and go away now.

GlassBeadGame: The difference between an anarchist and an Amerikan-style "Libertarian" [sic] is that the so-called Libertarians are minarchists. They desire a strong, powerful State, but one whose sole duty is to protect wealth. This is worse than even the most tyrannical oppression, since at least the State is otherwise able to deflect the worst of the excesses of capitalism.

I was more interested in your views of planning vs. "plan-less" mechanisms such as markets and wikis. Stay away from shit-sandwiches. You know you can't eat gluten.

The problem in the U.S. in Europe is not hard-line, self-professed Libertarians or Anarchists, but a more surreptitious kind of libertarianism that has infected the entire political spectrum, inducing all parties to embrace their own respective brands of Laissez-Faire, a sort of Adam Smith Brothers. In the US, Democrats go for John M Keynes, and Republicans go for Milton Friedman, and no one goes for an American approach. Likewise WIkipedia, which has guard dogs galore to defend the various gradations of this outlook (witness Will Beback's antics at American System (economics). Actually, you can only witness some of them, because the pre-2006 history of the article seems to have vanished.)


Good point.


Bad point. Nothing is ever as simple as you make it out to be. And, point of information, WP is biased both to the left and to right, but only certain varieties of each are tolerated.

H is right about the diffuse and pervasive nature of "libertarianism" in US. Add to that the concentration of this trend on the internet and especially on WP. I haven't looked but I imagine the libertarians and especially US Wikipedians hate the Bolivarian (Chavezist) Revolution and the renaming was probably done under his administration.

It's not Wikipedia's job to right all the wrongs of the world, or to take sides in ethnic conflicts. English Wikipedia uses the most commonly used English term for a place, which is why there is an article titled "Germany" instead of "Deutchland". Other language Wikipedias use their own language, so a Pemon language Wikipedia (if there were one) would most likely use the native name, but unless it becomes the most widespread one among English speakers (without regard for the color of their skin; there are people of all colors and ethnicities who speak English), it is not what Wikipedia will use. There's no racist conspiracy here.

So the falls ought to be called "Wha?...never heard of it."

Could I just point out that pronouncing WP'ers as "...Asperger nerds" is akin to calling them "niggers" a few decades back; as a form of invective you are promoting the stigmatisation of a section of society as being of less value, owing to perceived behavioural models (niggers being prone to laziness, crime, inability to operate at higher mental capacity, and, er, fondness for watermelons - and thus not suitable to be running any undertaking). Aspies may not manage to be able to communicate easily or easily maintain social contacts, but they are likely as capable of behaving in a polite and socialable manner as any other member of the human race - mostly most of the time, with exceptions.

I suspect that you are unfamiliar with the effects of denigrating peoples, cultures, belief systems, sexual orientations, gender, etc, and the consequences to society since (from a review of your photograph) you are likely subsumed by your desire to find a good barber and a maker of voice amplification equipment that works at normal conversation levels.

Oh, for your information I am not, regardless of my fondness for watermelon, an Aspie.

Indeed. The idea that things must to have ONE name, and that should be the name the people in the area called them first, is laughable. It sort of amounts to the idea that languages should be forbidden to evolve, and that there is only one which is The Best. That is worse than ridiculous-- it is almost... French. Twain would love the silliness of it.

In Alaska, the native name "Denali" is catching on for the English name of the highest mountain, mainly because everybody thinks it sounds way cooler than Mount McKinley (which, however, is still presently the name on Wikipedia). And you have to admit that it does. However, I doubt very much whether Mount Everest in English will ever be more widely known as Qomolangma or Zhumulangma or whatever.

Some of this gets to be tiresome. On Wikipedia if you want to know about the Navajo people you have to use that term, but you soon find out that Navajo is ultimately a Spanish spelling of a Zuni word, not the Navajo term for themselves, which is Dineh (as any Hillerman fan can tell you). And the Zunis, a Pueblo people, get the same treatment, as they don't call themselves Zuni in their own language! Instead, Zuni comes from Spanish Zuñi and nobody knows why the hell the Spanish called them that. But that is their name on Wikipedia. Meanwhile, the ancestors of the Ancient Pueblo Peoples, including no doubt the Zuni, are commonly known as Anasazi in English, but are not under that name on Wikipedia, because that's actually the name the Navajos called them (I kid you not), and it means "ancient enemies" or something, and the Pueblos don't like it. However, all archeologists use it.

Stranger things have happened. Fifty years ago, who'd have guessed Ayers Rock would be rebranded as Uluru? Anyway, if you're going with the "what do the locals call it" argument for what to call things, surely you'd call it Salto Ángel? There are what, 15,000 Pemon speakers in the entire country?

This doesn't apply to everyone, but many Wikipedians ascribe to themselves the conditions of Asperger Syndrome without any medical documentation. They actually aspire to the lack of empathy, narrowed concentration, and disregard for social conventions that they believe characterizes the condition. This is of course a limited understanding of the condition which causes real disability and hardship, notwithstanding the fake ASers jokes about looking down at "neural-typicals."

So while denigrating people with a disability is deserving of disapproval it would also be good to take the matter up with the fake ASers who demonstrate the narcissism and self absorption much like suburban white teenage posers take-up parodies of Black culture. BTW I don't accept your right to appropriate the "N" word for your point. That itself seems a bit racist but thoughts might vary.

I noticed the WP Spanish article briefly mentions the native name, but omits Hugo Chávez' proclamations completely. Have the people of Venezuela taken him seriously on this? What name do they use?

In a possibly parallel situation a majority of full-time Alaska residents refer to Mt. McKinley (the mountain itself, not just the federal no-fun zone surrounding it) by the native name Denali, a case strengthened by the fact president-elect McKinley had nothing to do with the mountain and did not ever set foot in Alaska. Alaska officially renamed it Denali in 1975 but this is superseded by national law. Biennially since then, Ohio's congressional delegation has cock-blocked attempts to rename the mountain as known to the federales, and Don Young has but one vote.

I'd say Hugo's got it easy.

Yes, but patience. Denali is CLEARLY a way cooler name and almost everybody knows it, and that congressman from Ohio isn't immortal.

Simon Baron-Cohen uses "Systematizers" rather than "Aspergers Syndrome" as his preferred characterization. But at least a name supplied by Hans Asperger isn't as bad as the one settled on by Eugen Bleuler. Autism is a shortened form of Autoerotism, which was Freud's suggestion. A similar suggest was Ipsism. In the Bible, the comparable term was Onanism. Charming, eh?

But on the other hand, I think that mountain in Alaska is a suitable mountain for the purposes of honoring McKinley, one of our most under-appreciated presidents. I have no idea who Everest was.

Adam Smith is different than what people make him out to be. Read Theory of Moral Sentiments. He was a strong proponent of monarchies and the Church of England. He just believed that when it came to economies, there should not be a state run system but one that is consumer based (and thus, the consumer is given the ability to have the ultimate power). The state was necessary to break up monopolies and ultimately force the consumer's right against a corrupt business that tries to lie and mislead.

The Wealth of Nations is a very big book. Libertarianism wasn't really put together until far after. Adam Smith did have protocols and regulations that the government would impose.



I was thinking of the Global Warming stuff, to be honest. Furthermore, the copyleft movement is playing off the political spectrum way of things, as most of the originators leaned that way. Looking at contributions in the industry, most computer software based groups heavily donate to the Democratic party in the US (but could just coincide with them being based on very Democratic areas, thus recruiting from them).

That latter statement is a bad joke. The consumer's only power lies in the exercise of political rights within a republican constitutional framework, to reign in wealthy bandits. Under Laissez-faire, the bandits rule. That's the point. Smith was employed by the British East India Company as a propagandist against the ideas of the American Revolution.
In other words, don't think. Trust the Force, Luke. Greed is good. Someone else out there will decide the outcome of things (hint: it ain't God.)

Tariffs and all? Surely re-naming the capital of Ohio after him would have been adequate.

Especially the tariffs.

You mean the exorbitant ones which led directly to the Panic of 1893. Or at least, I was expected to know that much as a test question. Later one notices how the (…anyone, …anyone…) Smoot–Hawley tariff act had a similar effect in 1930. I suppose Hoover must have been Jesus F. Christ's first cousin, according to whatever you're reading from.

Yes, Keynes was British. However, Friedman was born in New York City. Aren't New Yorkers Americans?

http://www.econlib.org/library/Enc/bios/Friedman.html

Sir George Everest was Surveyor-General of India from 1830 to 1843.

http://www.biographybase.com/biography/Everest_George.html

For the most part, although Wall Street is still British. In Friedman's case, however, the operative address is the University of Chicago, which is very British.

I will prove Herschelkrustofsky that your beliefs about Adam Smith's contents are wrong, and I hope that after I do that you will look into how Adam Smith argued against a system where the government controlled the corporations and forced consumers to accept goods without any recourse, and that Adam Smith believed in a system that was competition based and a government that was open to the concerns of the consumers (instead of being inline with the corporations and thus doing their bidding). If you understand his background and history, I think you will find that he is inline with your values and against both extremes (government run business and laissez faire) as both extremes seek to destroy the voice of the citizen and deny them any legitimate recourse.




Um, no.

I think you were given some really bad history combined with never reading the work. What you state above has nothing related to either Smith's works or his biography.

He was one of the main opponents to the East India Company and the Wealth of Nations mentions it regularly as being the source of the problem. He argued that it should be separated from government control and put into a competition based system: "But those which concern the trade to America and the East indies derange it perhaps more than any other; because the trade to those two great continents absorbs a greater quantity of stock than any two other branches of trade. The regulations, however, by which this derangement is effected in those two different branches of trade are not altogether the same. Monopoly is the great engine of both; but it is a different sort of monopoly. Monopoly of one kind or another, indeed, seems to be the sole engine of the mercantile system."

Continued: "Since the establishment of the English East India company, for example, the other inhabitants of England, over and above being excluded from the trade, must have paid in the price of the East India goods which they have consumed, not only for all the extraordinary profits which the company may have made upon those goods in consequence of their monopoly, but for all the extraordinary waste which the fraud and abuse, inseparable from the management of the affairs of so great a company, must necessarily have occasioned. The absurdity of this second kind of monopoly, therefore, is much more manifest than that of the first. Both these kinds of monopolies derange more or less the natural distribution of the stock of society:"


Out of the whole of "The Club", only Johnson really took any active stance against the American Revolution, and that had nothing to do with the East India Company.



That is not what he says at all, but that "people pursue pleasure and flee pain". Hobbes said the same thing, was he libertarian too? He makes it clear that individual people decide whereas laissez faire removes the individuals from stopping things. Instead, what Smith is arguing is that since people are so obsessed with their public perception, that they can be pressured by that public perception and they can create cabals or put forth other misleading actions in order to lie to the public and get the benefit of praise without deserving it. He stated that good and bad actions were mostly based on ego, which is something modern psychologists ran with for quite a long time.

Ottava, is there any topic you can't distort into a rant about what an unappreciated genius you are?

To be fair, I don't think he's doing that in this particular thread. True, this particular digression has virtually nothing to do with the original thread-subject, but the original thread-subject isn't really all that interesting, nor is it particularly well-related to the thread title (i.e., a dispute over the name of a geographical feature doesn't necessarily mean that "policy" is being discussed any more than the idea that Adam Smith's writings are related in some way to the naming of geographical features).

In effect, he's simply disagreeing with the notion that Adam Smith believed in "laissez-faire" to the extent that some (including HK) might suggest, and despite being off-topic, he's essentially correct. Smith believed that capital markets were self-organizing, but as I recall he did not explicitly advocate that governments should avoid regulating them or interacting with them, directly or indirectly.

The subtext here is that HK is a Larouchie and generally believes that most ideological and economic ideas coming from England are bad. Right now, laissez faire is considered a bad thing because it's blamed (rightly) for the recent corruption-driven downturn of the financial markets, so linking it with historically English economic thinking is something HK could be expected to do - I don't blame him for it (after all there's plenty of historical blame to go around), but we should always bear in mind what his perspective is.

I'm not following this.

The link says that Friedman trained a batch of Chilean economists at Chicago. He was helped by the equally American Arnold Harberger (born in Newark, New Jersey). I'm prepared to believe it. But how does that make either Friedman's work or the University itself British?



Wasn't Adam Smith Scottish, not English?


You can even get the t-shirt for that.

http://www.zazzle.co.uk/adam+smith+scottis...onomist+tshirts

As I have previously noted, on the Autism article talkpage, how few people identify in having low achieving level Autism...



Unless the word nigger is used in a self (cultural) referring manner, then it is almost always racist - and I was deliberately invoking that inappropriate use. Aspie is also a self referencing term, often by the more militant behavioural modellers, on the same basis. I was very deliberately conflating the issues, since I believe that stigmatism of any human subset is liable to promote prejudice. I would, however, apologise for any discomfort its use may cause you.

First you indicated that racism against black people was a thing of past decades which is incredibly clueless. Second the experiences of affluent white people with a mild or outright imagined disability is hardly deserving of comparison to to people that have and are experiencing the impact of chattel slavery, Jim Crow Segregation and institutional racism with the attendant consequences of disproportionate levels of poverty, incarceration and overall lowering of life circumstances. I let one such reference slide... figuring, you know...you couldn't help it. But your second pass looks all the more racist.

Why on earth would I care what you wrote on a Wikipedia talk page?

Of course racism against black people still exists, but it is socially not so acceptable to casually infer racist attitude in general conversation. My point is that Smash The State casually denigrated people on the AS by inferring that Asperger's was an indicator of worthlessness. I hoped he would have been rather shocked to have been called a racist for doing so, but he also seems to have missed the point. Ah, well...

Not where, but when and why - I am long aware of a tendency to glamourise autism, and to then self diagnose with that condition; and the fact that it is always high achieving autism or Asperger's and never the more prosiac behavioural models that is the more common. As I ended previously, I know I am not an Aspie - because I was fucking diagnosed as not being on the AS by the expert who diagnosed my son with severe communication disorder, and other indicators on the spectrum.

Hope your son does well. I agree if would be better if StS would simply use the term "Wikipedian." With a little practice I have found the word can be used as a sufficient insult.

I'm going to respond to this, although I fear that I may wind up in TLDR territory.

There is a distinct epistemology associated with British science, philosophy and economics, and it is consistent with the fact that the British (along with the Dutch) developed the last remaining colonial empire. They made a smooth transition from gunboat imperialism to financial imperialism, and they are still going strong.

The imperial conception of what it means to be human will forever be at odds with a republican conception. An empire is premised on the exploitation of the large mass of humanity by a clever few, and the Weltanschauung associated with it is essentially bestial; in nature, the stronger species prevail over the weaker, and no one raises any moral objection to this arrangement. It is simply "survival of the fittest" (remember that one?) The British approach to science is marked by empiricism, logical positivism, and other isms that proclaim that your only connection to reality is through your senses -- which holds true for animals, not humans. The Malthusian view is that the earth has a fixed carrying capacity -- which holds true for animals, not humans. Adam Smith believes that we are motivated by "hunger, thirst, the passion which unites the two sexes, the love of pleasure, and the dread of pain" -- that's for animals; humans are a more complicated, and, dare I say it, higher kind of creature. But the British doctrine of "human rights" does not differ in any meaningful way from SlimVirgin's doctrine of Animal Rights: there is no right to progress or development. Instead there is Utilitarianism.

This bestial view of man runs consistently through the entire corpus of British ideology. Beyond that, there are many gradations. While Thomas Hobbes believed that you need a brutal and omnipotent government to protect you from your neighbor's natural urge to rob and rape you, John Locke held that you ought to be able to do a little bargaining with the government, over how best to stifle your neighbor's natural urge to rob and rape you. The idea that human beings could jointly plan the improvement and progress of their shared civilization is dismissed, and lumped in with "collectivism" and other failed projects (ignoring the embarrassing fact that the American approach was a rousing success.)

What I am identifying as a "British ideology" is not some sort of natural outgrowth of English, Irish, Scottish or Welsh culture; it was essentially imported when the imperial center moved from Venice to the Isles and the Low Countries on the continent. And there have been powerful dissenting voices on the Isles, Jonathan Swift and Percy Bysshe Shelley for example.

OK, I'm weary now.

Et tu, Bruté !?

Patricius knows …

Jon

Sounds like bollocks but is still more interesting than the digressions about Aspergian-American History Month.

Uh, I think Smash The State has abandoned this thread.....

So?

Please reread what I quote from Smith.

If you do, you will see that he attacks the British Imperial Machine, i.e. the Indies Companies, as holding monopolies and unfairly squashing other countries' ability to sell their goods. He attributes this imperialism as hurting the consumers and creating an economic imbalance that directly leads to abuse.

This is a position that you should agree with. He was also Scottish and witnessed a lot of anti Scottish sentiment. If you know your 18th-century history, there were many problems between Scotland and England.

And the obvious solution, which printed encyclopedias and works of reference figured out a long time ago, is to have one or more credentialed experts adjudicate such cases in a consistent manner. A laughable proposition from WP's point of view, of course.

That was funny.

Allow me to suggest a change of curriculum.

With all due respect to Comrade Smash, the Angel Falls "crisis" came off very much like an intentional provocation of a controversy. Wikipedia is not going to change the name of the article "Germany" on the English Wikipedia to "Deutschland" on the grounds that is what the German people call it. They are even less likely to make comparable changes restoring indigenous names to cities, towns, rivers, mountains, lakes, or oceans. That seems axiomatic.

The fury and intensity with which the proposition continued to be pushed in light of this seemingly obvious state of affairs was, to me at least, baffling.

— Tim Davenport
"Carrite" on Wikipedia
Corvallis, OR

One should correct their spelling of 'monarchists'. As rackjite used to say squeeze on and all you get is gun-oil and pimple puss.

Give the man a coconut ... absolutely correct!

Bloody right too, old boy ...

You cant have the natives getting ideas about going around naming things we cannot read never mind bloody pronounce, can we? They'll end up wanting to own the place next.

And let's get Zimbabwe topic back to having a proper name ... like Rhodesia.

Cue: a quote from Roland Barthes.

Am I the only one who thinks Istanbul needs to be renamed Byzantium?

I imagine MBisanz would probably concur.

This is all nonsense and straw men. Libertarian "minarchists" (as opposed to anarchists-- the word means "small goverment") want a government, but want it to be a small one (no welfare state, no public works projects), not a "strong powerful state." This is one of those arguments where critics are not accepting a group's own statements about their own beliefs.

Minarchists: "We want a small government, and think that that government governs best, that governs least."
Critics: "No you don't! No you don't! You lie!"


How fucking stupid can an argument be?

Now, it is true that minarchist libertarians want the government to be mostly concerned with preventing murder, rape, robbery, burglary, and other such violent mayhem. But once again, their critics will not listen, and we have this agument:

Minarchists: "We want government to prevent initiation of force: such as murder, rape, robbery, burglary, and other such violent mayhem. Also fraud, which is theft by deception."
Critics: "No, you don't! No you don't! You lie! You only want to protect rich people's wealth! You don't care about murder, You don't care about the property of the poor and middle class!"
Minarchists: "Yes, we do."
Critics: "No, you don't! No, you don't!"

Again: How stupid can an argument be?

The miniarchist idea of a perfect world is one giant swap-meet-and-bazaar, with everything on-sale, and government acting only as the swap-meet security guards. You can't buy a weapon and use it on somebody outside the swap meet, because there isn't any "outside." The whole world is heavily securitized swap-meet.

There are many reasons to crticize minarchism, but you might as well use the good ones, not the ones based on misrepresenting their views. Minarchists are short-sighted on national defense, and probably would have let the UK fall to the Germans in 1940-41. They are also notably resistant to the idea of government ensuring that its citizens have enough to eat, an education, and medical care, holding that taxation of people to pay for even emergency services for those who need them, is "theft." So there are a lot of beggars and sick people lying around on blankets at this swap meet. Salvation Army people everywhere, too.

However, it's a long way between opposition to taxation of everybody to build sports stadiums, community swimming pools, and fund struggling artists and fertility treatments for the poor-- on to the idea that minarchists only care about rich people's money. It completely bypasses the debate about what things it's proper for the goverment to pay for, for one thing. And the answer to that isn't obvious.

I've got a better reason: if the Minarchists get their way, Progress with a capital P, which I hold to be a necessary precondition for the very survival of mankind (there is no "steady state economy" or treading water,) is dependent on sheer luck, or the even more unlikely beneficent role of "market forces."