Here's some more amusing Jayjg hypocrisy in the "Jewish lobby" article:


So he rejects the use of the (widespread) expression "Jewish lobby" because it is a neologism.

But what if we look at his views on a different topic, yes, our old friend "Pallywood":


Yep, "Jewish lobby" (162,000 hits if you're interested) is an anti-semitic neologism, but "Pallywood" (90,600, must be getting less popular now there are less wikipedia scrapers) is an objective descriptive term. Of course if you attempt to point out this double standard, then, as good old Arnon points out, you're wikilawyering, you know, trying to get others to follow the rules they hold you to, and thus you lose!

Due to the hodgepodge of WP:Rules, every move except the null move is a technical violation of at least one WP:Rule. The winning way to play the WP MMPORG is to pick out the most appropriate WP:Rule to clobber your opponent with. In this regard, Tim Makinson (User:Hrafn) is my nominee for the Best WP MMPORG Game Player of 2007.

I think you have captured the essence here of what puts Jayjg in the top rank of Wikipedia admins: the ability to invoke Wikipedia rules in the most hypocritical way possible while pushing POV, and yet have the chutzpah to steamroll over anyone who calls attention to it.

In this way Jayjg is even more dangerous than SlimVirgin, at least within his chosen domain, because he actually thinks this way. However laden and offensive the term "Jewish Lobby" might be, it has been used for decades -- since at least the Truman administration. The end justifies the means, though, and since Jayjg considers the term part of the broad-based blood libel, out it must go.

Perhaps we can have a category in the nominations for WP:DICK of the Year that covers this tendency to cherry pick WP:Rules to bash one's opponent, rather than applying the guidelines in a consistent manner to everyone (including oneself).

Verily, what you describe is the very essence of DICKliness. It needs no special category -- indeed, no one could ascend to the upper ranks of WP without having mastered this basic skill.

Aha.

So a WP:DICK is someone who blatantly and routinely violates WP:IAR and WP:Lawyering?

How does one violate "Ignore all rules"? By not ignoring them?

Jayjg isn't just a dick - he's dangerously schizophrenic. See here - "the ability to hold two opposing views simultaneously, an essential tool for the aspiring leader by which he can baffle first a constituency and later the whole electorate".

Exactly. The principle is that we should ignore anything that gets in the way of improving Wikipedia; insisting on following the rules to the detriment of the project violates WP:IAR.

I wish there were a feature like Ignore All Dicks.

Alas, one cannot, as they undermine the very ground one is standing on.

An essential component is to have enough friends in high places among the WP Elite that anybody who points out your hypocrisy is labeled a troll, and ultimately banned if they persist.

I think Jayjg knows very well that he is being dishonest and duplicitous. It's his job to be dishonest and duplicitous when the situation demands it. What strains credulity is that so many people at Wikipedia, from Jimbo on down, pretend not to see it, and hold Jayjg up as a paragon of Wikipedia participation.

The most obvious explanation is that someone's palm is being crossed; perhaps one of the Hasbara organizations or one of their individual sponsors is a big donor to one aspect or another of Jimbo, Inc.

Never ascribe to malice, that which can be explained by incompetence. I think it is more likely that in the MMORPG that is wikipedia it is the social relationships that are important, once the connections have been made between Jimbo and Slim and Jay then they will go out of their way to look out for each other. Each of them has their own POV to push, but the others are more interested in the social solidarity than the actuall content.

Well, I disagree with Jayjg on "Pallywood," and you're right that the lack of a tough and consistent standard is a recipe for endless bickering. He's hardly alone in this, which is what makes a principled solution - the deletion of all articles about terms and catchprases of political discourse rather than things which all agree exist.

The problem is that if one party proposes a consistent standard and demonstrates this by voting to delete their own articles, the other party just pockets the gain. Even if one editor plays honorably, it doesn't bind other editors in his faction.

This was clearly seen in the miserable "Israeli (etc.) Apartheid" debate. This is a classic example of an article that shouldn't exist, not because it's content should be "forbidden," but because encyclopedia's don't have articles about such things. Israel exists, Palestine exists, the West Bank exists, the barrier exists, etc. Apartheid existed, and doesn't need any national qualification - it wasn't metaphor, but the literal name of the policy.

But the legion of contributors who wants to use Wikipedia to criticize Israel (supported by the sock farm of now-banned administrator Maisonsurlagamme) are enough to prevent consensus to delete.
So cynically, a number of pro-Israeli editors created absurd articles about "Chinese Apartheid", "Cuban Apartheid", etc., then vote to keep unless all X Apartheid articles - including Israeli Apartheid - are deleted.

Double standards aren't necessarily signs of deep-set personal hypocrisy, but cynical adaptations to a dysfunctional system. Pretending that one is being consistent is part of this adaptation.

What's needed is some disinterested party to be handed the delete button and rid the stables of these "term" droppings without having to go through deletion votes. Alternately, change the standards for deletion so that lack of a clear consensus to keep defaults to delete. As it is, it's much, much easier to create partisan termcruft articles than it is to get rid of them - and much easier to create a controversially-themed article than to add controversial material to an existing legitimate article.

Several of us addressed the Pallywood article and a related article in this 10-month-old thread: Muhammad al-Durrah & WP:OWN, Slim & Jayjg tag-team again. That was, for me, a particularly heartbreaking example of the triumph of zealotry and bias on Wikipedia over common sense and goodwill.

I'll repeat what I said in that thread:

Very few people are as incompetent as you suggest. I don't buy it.



Smells like bullsh** to me.

No, the Null Move is a violation of WP:BEEBOLD!

Jonny

That sounds like you've been reading the rules for Mornington Crescent ....

[Never mind, not worth responding to]

Come on Lar, you know Moulton is right. (And how often do I agree with Moulton?)

-- Philip K. Dick, Now Wait for Last Year

Very well put.

Is it just me, or are there an unreasonably large number of blatant sockpuppets showing up on the Israel-Palestine pages, lately? ForeverFreeSpeech had his meteoric kamikaze run, with M1rth defending him at ANI within 50 edits of signing up his account. "I am Dr. Drakken" suddenly lost his taste for Wikipedia after it was discovered that he edits using open proxies - of course it's only because he values his anonymity, why else?

The irony here is that one of the central activities of these guys is editing the article Jewish lobby to vigorously deny that any such a thing exists. I'm reminded of the demonstrators in London, holding up signs reading "Behead those who say Islam is violent..."

I fail to understand the objection to the term "Jewish lobby". Anyone would think that it was a blood libel accusation. Of course there is a Jewish lobby in America, just as there is an Arab lobby and a gun-owners' lobby and a farmers' lobby (several of those actually) and hundreds of others.

The problems only arise if it is asserted that the lobby is incredibly powerful and acting against the best interests of the US. Neither point is true or, so far as I can see, asserted overly much on Wikipedia. (The pro-Israel lobby is very powerful, but it's over 90% Christian.)

I follow the line that the "Jewish lobby" or the "pro-Israel" lobby is of little consequence to US foreign policy. Meaning that the US planners support Israel for strategic reasons whether they were lobbied or not. The US are more than prepared to support Turkey or Colombia and provide massive military aid to those countries when necessary, and without any lobby to push them into it. Was it a Kosovan lobby that persuaded the US to intervene "on behalf of Kosovan-Albanians" in 1999?

The dominance of pro-Israel editors on WP is a different matter altogether, stemming from the role of Jayjg when he was in the Arbcom. Jayjg sat at the center, with scores of editors around him like leaves around a tree. Their power was even greater than pro-US editors when it came to POV disputes.