San Diego State has a live webcam overlooking the new multistory Industrial Engineering building they have been slaving away at for about three years. They say they will be done in 2018, but I don't think the building will be fully operational until 2019. There are a lot of questions about how aboveboard a lot of the things involved in building this dull structure (and I call it a dull structure because it resembles all the other (older) buildings surrounding it - architecturally it speaks to pointless conformity) mostly the naming rights of portions of the building. For that you can blame the former college president, Elliot Hirshman, who left suddenly this summer. You used to have to be a professor and dead to get your name onto a building at SDSU (the exception being Manchester Hall, named in the '80s after local hotel zillionare Doug Manchester), but since they began pulling stunts like the "Mack Family Elevator Foyer" in Student Services West and all the bizarre naming rights around the new student center (which is named after the now-dead real-estate bigshot Conrad Prebys).
What the Webcam Shows
Above is the building as it was in late September. Most of the exterior work has been done and they are cementing in the stairs, which are just rebar and concrete laying on top of the clay soil. The walled-in thing on the left looks to be a wheelchair ramp. It was a cloudy day. If you look close, you will see the characteristic green window frames which are part of the Hepner Hall complex and other buildings on campus.
Three nights later (September 25). Possibly they are working on the interior day and night. All of this is fenced off and no student has been inside this yard.
Yes, the setting sun shines right into the camera, because it is locked dead at this view.
An early morning fog bank.
Working on a Saturday early this month. They must be desperate to get this thing done by 2018.
What is the point of this building?
Good question - literally it takes three single story buildings and combines them into one three story building and a two story building connected to a walkway, and it connects the two story building to the old 1963 Engineering building with a bridge (SDSU is really into bridges). The trick with those previous structures was that they didn't jut out into the sky like these ones or the C. Prebys student center, so you can see it from the freeway that runs in the valley below the university, or from the bridge that connects College Avenue. They also weren't physically imposing and some of the laboratories looked like an afterthought, much like the former radar lab building Noam Chomsky worked out of for decades at MIT.
A space like the above is far more useful to impress donors and those "all important" foreign students, and the pseudo-Spanish Colonial buildings mix with the high Spanish Colonial buildings of Balboa Park which you just know the families of the foreign students visit alongside the college. So for that they demolished a wall built by the Works Progress Administration in 1940, a former model factory built in the 1950s, and a pretty decent quad.
This is a story about a video-streaming/video-storage website
(Internet people call it "a platform") that became popular, was bought
out by Google, grew even more popular, and then a section of the video
producers ("content creators") and the commenters noisily went insane.
Some of it had to do with Anita Sarkeesian and GamerGate, some of it
with a resurgent feminism during the Obama years and the "mens' rights"
backlash that came with it, some of it with this march to the Right that
happened in the last few years of the Obama administration.
An Anti-History of YouTube
You can go to Jimbo's Jungle to find an actual historyof YouTube,
but literally it was just three employees of everyone's favorite buggy
cash-transfer website PayPal creating the YT website while working in a
jury-rigged office above a sushi restaurant and a pizzeria in San Mateo,
California. Steve Chen, Jawed Karim, and Chad Hurley were able to get
"angel investors" to pay for their idea, and Jawad Karim appeared in the
first YouTube video, shot at the San Diego Zoo.
That video appeared on the site in April 23, 2005. We bring it up because notice that Karim and his cameraman (high school buddy
Yakov Lapitsky) are at the sort of place families go and where home
movies are shot - it's one of my beliefs about the founders of YouTube
is that they didn't understand just what sort of AV stuff would get put
on the site. Early on there were no time restrictions, so one maniac
spent hours uploading the Coleman Francis clunker TheBeast of Yucca Flats in March of 2006. Why? Because the version that ran on Mystery Science Theater 3000 was under copyright.
And
that was during the early period, before Google bought the platform in
October of 2006, cut down the upload time for videos down to ten minutes
(something that did not go away for years), and before the ads
began showing up on videos. Of course the site grew by leaps and bounds
before Google took it over and it grew even more under the Crayon G,
which allowed the site to diversify: parts of it are a video junkdrawer
of high-school and college basic videography and animation class
projects, some of it is (obnoxious) combat footage left over from the US occupation of Iraq, some of it are entire movies illegally uploaded, parts of it are utterly bizarre crap, and then there are the one-person-talking-into-a-camera "channels" focused on a number of topics (Jim Sterling's "Jimquisition" video-game reviews
are a good example). That's what allows YouTube to be political beyond
the clips of news shows, late night talk shows, and recordings of
speeches - just ordinary people talking about politics, and it has been
fascinating to see that change over time.
Thunderf00t
Phil Mason (aka "Thunderf00t")
has gone through a long transformation from "atheist fighting YouTube
Creationists" to "angry man ranting on YouTube about Anita Sarkeesian" -
and let it never be forgotten that Phillip E. Mason is a working scientist who has published papers. So
I don't know why he was wasting time on YouTube. Pretty much there was a
war on YouTube between the Fundamentalist Christian Creationists and
the atheists/pro-science crowd during the final years of the
tottering/slowly imploding Bush II administration, provoked by all the faith promotion done in George W. Bush's first term, and shored up* by movies like Idiocracy (2006) and Religulous (2008). It didn't help that there was a general belief that 20th Century Fox "abandoned" Idiocracy
upon release by under-promoting it and not having a critic's screening.
But back to Thunderf00t....one of his first set of videos was titled
"Why do people laugh at creationists?" and in it he went after
then-topical Creationist Kent Hovind, aka "Dr. Dino":
In fact the "creationists" videos are still coming and he is now up to forty-five of them. Below is his newest, ranting about Ken Ham's Noah's Ark theme park:
Where I first heard about Thunderf00t was his war with a wannabe Fundamentalist preacher/Creationist called VenomFangX (Shawn Karon, a Canadian [!] of all things), which was an extremely complicated multi-year street fight where Karon would pull DMCA takedowns of videos, be pimp-slapped by Mason and a fellow Briton named dprjones (himself running a war against that faith healer/late-night cable TV shyster Peter Popoff) plus other now-obscure YouTubers like FactsvsReligion. Here is VenomFangX doing an awful Heath Ledger Joker impression because that was the then-current way YouTube dipshits told people off:
Thunderf00t has an entire playlist
of how Shawn Karon was browbeaten into submission and forced off
YouTube (of course, just like Peter Popoff, he returned.....because he
was too smarmy to be a used car salesman). And that was the second time VenomFangX was kicked off YouTube. Here is PhilHellenes lecturing Shawn Karon's father (just because he could):
I could also mention the series of videos
Mason did with Creationist Ray Comfort, but that would drag us further
off target. What dragged Phil Mason into the crazy world of GamerGate
was the onrush of accusations
in the Obama years that some of the big names in organized
atheism/"Freethought"/skepticism liked being cads with any women who
showed up to conferences, including "The Amaz!ng Meeting"**
(now-defunct) run by the James Randi Educational Foundation (not doing
too well itself). Also you have the wonderful Islamophobia of Richard Dawkins (and he managed to drag in the 2009 Rebecca Watson "Elevatorgate" issue as well) which first exploded onto the scene in 2011. (Watson wrote about the incident in 2012.) Thunderf00t
decided to blame the entire debacle and the long aftermath of
blogposts, email chains, and online video with his own take....which was
to pull a Julius Evola and double down, claiming that is the feminists that are wrecking the show (and he did a series on it, of course.)
Above is the first of seven videos....before that he was involved with PZ Myers' FreethoughtBlogs website, and that fell apart.
So whatever it was that pushed him down that path, he has decided that
this is the way to go, even though we are sure it's costing him at work.
Meanwhile former (erstwhile?) partner in crime Dick Coughlin recently
spent an hour ripping it all apart:
Where
it all started to go under was March 2013, when he made the video
below, giving vent to the subjects he would spend the next four years and counting
ranting about: Anita Sarkeesian, feminism in media, and why it's all a
scam or intellectually vapid or scientifically vapid or Something. (You
figure it out.)
He now has seventy-fivevideos on this one subject and Sarkeesian is part of all
of them. I could give a long, rambling explanation for why Thunderf00t
does what he does, but a British man has done a better job than any I
could do:
Thank you, Harris Bomberguy! We'll see him again in this, don't worry.
I
would like to state that, while I was not a fan of Phil Mason, seeing
his ability to reason rot like an egg in broken refrigerator has been
utterly horrifying. This is what happens when ideology replaces critical
thought and obsessions outstrip balance.
Jason Pullara
Also known as "LordKaT", Jason Pullara first came to my attention years ago, when he had a show called "Until We Win"
on the Internet review aggregator site Channel Awesome (formerly "That
Guy With the Glasses" - a reference to Doug Walker, the sweatshop
site owner). At the time (2007-2011) Doug and his brother Rob Walker
were getting as many YouTube reviewers as possible to come over,
transfer their videos to Blip.tv,
and "get exposure."*** Pullara was just one of those people, and unlike
most, he ditched his show to do internet streaming, usually talking to
people on Skype (he calls it LordKaT Live!). I'm not a fan of these videos, mainly because Pullara occasionally belches into the microphone. Here is the old version of LordKaT playing the Nintendo version of Ghostbusters on an emulator (it's a re-upload from a fan):
Here he is a few years later on his stream, ranting about Noah "TheSpoonyOne" Antwiler. Spoonywas the reason I stumbled on this ghetto Twilight Zone of online "entertainment" - he hosted Brad "The Cinema Snob" Jones' videos for a short time while Jones was setting up his Cinema Snob homepage because Jones had been booted off YouTube for a copyright strike (the jagoffs who own Nailgun Massacre didn't like his review). Spoony predated Channel Awesome slightly with videos, though he had written for the role-playing game magazine Knights of the Dinner Table before that. LordKaT is mostly ranting about Spoony's comedic screaming of "BETRAYAL" over a new version of XCOM at E3 2010 (it's a videogame convention; XCOM
is a game series), and somehow that kept Jason Pullara from meeting a
game developer he wanted to pitch ideas to (because he wanted to leave
the reviewing ghetto and make games instead). He also mocks Antweiler's semi-standup that he did for fans at a convention. It's all very petty, and you get to hear an hour of it.
Here is his YouTube channel; he has now decided to change the name of his show to Drop Dead Cynical,
but we're not interested in that. Here he is this Spring ranting abut
Brianna Wu's fundraising for her Congressional run, which he thinks is a
scam. (Brianna Wu was/is one of the targets in GamerGate.)
He also spent time in 2015 riffing on Doug Walker's semi-failed gameshow Pop Quiz Hotshot. He also ranted about Walker complaining about getting a DMCA copyright strike in January 2016. The reason why I bring LordKaT up is that he went for GamerGate in a big way:
If you do a search for GamerGate on Pullara's channel, you get a long list of videos;
some of them have GamerGate in the title, some are tagged that way. And
the more thoughtful parts of Youtube are noticing, such as this Dan
Olson Folding Ideas video from October 2014 (skip to 7:05 to see Jason
Pullara named alongside people like Davis Aurini and Phil Mason):
....And that's as much as I am willing to write about LordKaT.
The Amazing Atheist
Thomas James "TJ" Kirk III, aka The Amazing Atheist (RationalWiki overview; Encyclopaedia Dramatica
semi-satirical takedown) is, like Phil Mason, one of the older
YouTubers still working on the site; he started in 2006. In the
2007-2008 time period if you typed "atheist" the choice was either him
or Pat Condell ranting in an unfinished room
of his house (or was it his garden shed?) At this point TJ has
thousands of videos out there, many of them mirrored by fans because the
originals were yanked by YouTube, and you can watch him in almost real
time shift from from Libertarian to moderate liberal Democrat all while
still denouncing feminism. Here is a video that was the basis for a
remix video that was part of the old ED article on Kirk:
That
was from some time in 2008 or 2009 because he's talking about the Great
Recession before he coins the word the video is known for, "nigggot"
which he wanted applied to fans of Billy Ray Cyrus and Miley Cyrus or
the fandom of the entire Cyrus family, he wasn't sure.
The Amazing Atheist early on got into a lot of online arguments, including with Pekka-Eric Auvinen, the Finnish teenager who later carried out the Jokela High School shooting in Finland in 2007. Auvinen was Sturmgeist89 on YouTube. Shades of Pat Condell, TJ Kirk did an angry response video
in his garage, a video that TJ Kirk flagged so that remote playback on
other sites is impossible (you can do that as a YT channel operator).
From 2009 to 2011 he also made videos for TGWTG/Channel Awesome under the name The Distressed Watcher; his show was called Trailer Failure and he ranted about movies. They were all on Blip and some of them were mirrored (by fans) on YouTube, like this rant about Kevin Smith's nullity of a film Cop Out. He talks about what happened to his show in the video below:
When the Paul Feig version of Ghostbusters became a massive online shitstorm last year, TJ Kirk was there every time it got slightly
interesting. And when the movie hit video, he and his friend Paul Zego
did a running commentary in the style of a reaction video where the
movie ran in a small box in the corner, but they did it on Vimeo to try
to dodge the copyright 'bots, and they charged three dollars to see it. That video has vanished,
though I did see a copy on YT (also since vanished) and they were
mostly smoking dope and commenting on how the lighting was wrong for a
horror comedy. Below is the only online proof they made the video:
I think it is obvious that TJ Kirk will be making videos on YouTube until he dies or the site dies, whichever comes first.
“If you want a picture of the future, imagine a human face ranting on YouTube—for ever.”
I am certain the YouTube addicts are wondering why Sargon of Akkad and Mr. Metokur
weren't mentioned, and the reason is that they are the foreseeable
future of this style of online AM talk radio. Also, they both give me
hives.
Here is more of H. Bomberguy talking about the related Pick-Up Artist movement which runs alongside the Men's Rights movement that overlaps with GamerGate. If you skip to 7:58 you will get to see Dan Olson recount how he infiltrated a Roosh V forum meetup in Canada. Below is a video H. Bomberguy did on Carl "Sargon of Akkad" Benjamin:
*
There was this general sense that Bush II was sucking us into a Second
Coming for the Moral Majority, 1980s abortion protest politics fused
with the patriotic fury unleashed after September 11, 2001. It fell
apart pretty quickly after Hurricane Katrina, the numerous failures of
the "Global War on Terror", and the Wall Street collapse of 2007.
** We had to get that ephemeral MastCellconnection in there somehow, not that he had anything to do with Rebecca Watson, Michael Shermer, et. al.
***
People were not paid by Walker - they were paid through Blip.tv which
let ads run so the videos could be monetized. I still do not understand
the Walkers' business model, though the rumors of their on-set behavior during the making of their bad satire "film" Kickassia (2010) have been hilarious to read. (Lewis "Linkara" Lovhaug says they are lies. Delicious, delicious lies.)
Before the Lolcow people complain, yes we know that Thunderf00t has a Kiwi Farms messageboard thread, and that the one for The Amazing Atheistis longer because it's years older.
Because the MediaWiki software is free and the articles on Wikipedia
aren't under copyright, it is very easy to do your own version of "the
free encyclopedia." The irony is that en.Wikipedia itself was full of
retyped Encylopaedia Britannica articles early on.
When You Want Your Facts Nazified, Metapedia is Your Nazi Info Source
Metapedia
is literally as the line above describes it, a Nazi version of
Wikipedia. Originally a Swedish-language wiki created by Anders
Lagerström of Linköping, Sweden, Metapedia grew to having 15 versions in
various European languages. Anders Lagerström himself was a member of
the Svenska Motståndsrörelsen (Swedish Resistance Movement), a neo-Nazi
group founded in 1997 that later grew into a multi-national "Nordic Resistance Movement" covering Sweden, Norway, Denmark, and Finland. That wasn't good enough for Anders; he formed his own group Nordiska förbundet (The Nordic Association) in 2004 and ran a website called Nordisk.nu
that seems to be a zombie as of 2017. Before forming this group, in
2002 Lagerström started up a publishing firm, Nordic Publishing, selling
white power music and books; this is a long-running strategy first seen
with American Nazi groups in the 1980s. It should be said that
Lagerström follows in the grand tradition of neo-Nazis/skinheads/white
nationalists by having a long history with the law: he was convicted of
assaulting a police officer with tear gas in 1999, he was nailed on an
illegal weapons charge in 2000. The thing that marked the beginning of
the end for Nordiska förbundet was a 2008 break-in/assault where he and five NA members attacked a former member at his house,
stole things, and beat the man up. Their reason was that the fellow had
walked off with an encrypted list of 10,000 Nordic Publishing
customers, possibly they were afraid he would go to the press. Most of
the attackers only served a few months, some were tried in absentia,
Lagerström served three months. The Nordic Association closed down in
2010, allegedly because the Nordisk.nu website was being used for
hacking. The Swedish magazine Expoclaims that Nordic Publishing became Arktos Media, which means that Jason Reza Jorjani, the gentleman philosopher of the Alt-Right movement, is being published by the same people behind Metapedia.
In the middle of all this, Lagerström founded Metapedia in 2006, becoming Aurvandil. One of the major members is Upplysning ("Enlightenment") who probably is either Kimmo Alm or his brother Jonni (who was, maybe still is, a member of Svenska Motståndsrörelsen); if it is the former, then Upplysning is not only a violent neo-Nazi and internet spammer, he is also into child porn. There are a number of former members, many who wound up later creating Rightpedia, the "competition": site founder Hu1 (aka Vajna, Antifinnugor, Muki987, Fiala1, eleonora46, and snuki146) who is actually Eleonóra Dubiczki of Pilisszántó, Hungary and was on Wikipedia before joining Metapedia; Mussert (real name unknown; his handle is a reference to Anton Mussert, the Dutch quisling leader of the Dutch Nazi Party, and heavy supporter of the German Nazi police state in occupied Holland, 1940-45) who was Galileo on Metapedia and one of the first people Dubiczki invited to Rightpedia; Mikemikev (Michael Coombs) who has articles about him on Encyclopedia Dramatica and Kiwi Farms Lolcow Wiki; and A WyattMan, aka BjornStronginthearm (his Stormfront handle and a Terry Pratchett reference) who is also ED member KimboSlice. One of the most notable members of Metapedia is Gregory Lauder-Frost of the Traditional Britain Group, a Tory's Tory who was promoted to sysop as Cicero and then given the boot a year later by Aurvandil because he could not stop getting into arguments over Poland;
not a variant of Wikipedia's insane "is it Freistaat Danzig or Gdansk?"
dispute but rather a man's inflexible belief in German Nazi propaganda
that Poland somehow started World War II. Michaeldsuarez has proof that last sentence is incorrect, and that Aurvandildeleted Lauder-Frost's articles that were mentioned by Encyclopedia Dramatica, changed all editor names to "Pepe" (as in Pepe the Frog), then gave Cicero the new handle Matt58, in a sloppy editing of history that would make Winston Smith cringe. We should also mention Basileus, who had a long sockpuppeted history on Wikipedia before appearing on Metapedia only to slowly drive those people crazy as well. It did not end well. Finally, there should be some mention of Atlantid (Oliver D. Smith), who is Mikemikev's enemy and fellow inmate at the Lolcow Wiki.
The Horror Show That is Metapedia
Let's be honest; the worldview of Metapedia is repellent. Take for example the Holocaustianity
article, in which Anne Frank is labeled "the blessed virgin", the
creation of Israel is "the resurrection" and there is a long quote at
the bottom from the now-defrocked Bishop Richard N. Williamson, who is a Holocaust-denier. Denial of the Holocaust is a big deal for Metapedia, which is why they have a stub article for Carlos W. Porter, who thinks the entire event was faked by the Soviets. They have 53 pages of similar "Holocaust revisionists",
many of them stubs without pictures, but all of them have links to
sites that have their writings in .pdf or on simple html sites. None of
them believe the same thing; some minimize the numbers, some blame
chaotic conditions in the camps at the end of the war for all the
corpses the Red Army found in Poland. None of them believe that the SS
camp guards used carbon monoxide from diesel motors, and later the
pest-exterminating agent "Zyklon-B" (Cyclone-B, the commercial name for
the crystallized hydrogen cyanide used in the fake washrooms near the
crematoriums). Metapedia does not believe in the Einsatzgruppen as a murder-squad SS army; they are anti-partisan troops only. Metapedia cannot deny the Wannsee Conference, but it has doubts that the document produced by conference, the Wannsee Protocol, is really a mandate for genocide.
When Metapedia isn't a defense of the Nazis, it's a keen supporter of old-timey race science. They have a page on "Dysgenics", aka "racial degeneracy" which, like a lot of the pages inside Metapedia, was originally a Wikipedia article that was made Nazi. Race and intelligence has an article on Metapedia, as does Wikipedia; Metapedia leans heavily on the data, will not discuss any controversies. It
would be fascinating to find out if the Metapedians started out with an
earlier version of the Wikipedia article (which we know was fought over
like mad), or if they built their own counter-article by scratch. And
that's something that should never be forgotten: many of the articles on
the site seem to have come from Wikipedia and then were re-written
offline. Look at their "Race and crime" article; it's a long article (possibly filled with bogus statistics), then compare it to the Wikipedia version. Wikipedia is so touchy on the subject they broke it into four articles; one for the concept, one for the US, one for the UK, and one for Brazil (which is part of the "Social apartheid in Brazil" article). Meanwhile if you try to look up Metapedia's article on Black people, the article is called "Sub-Saharan Africans",
lacks any photographs of African-Americans, Africans, Afro-Brazilians,
etc., and is full of scare quotes and treats the article subject like a
menace. It is probably the most purely racist article on the website
beyond their idiotic famous Jews list (aka "Persons of Jewry").
The Endpoint
The point of Metapedia is to make Nazi ideologyacceptable again, full stop. That has been a long-running project of far-Right groups for decades (Reason magazine used to publish Holocaust-deniers in the 1970s, because Charles Koch's personal guru to 1980 was Robert LeFevre, who was neck-deep in that world). The difference now is the Internet; instead of buying books from the Institute for Historical Review or the Noontide Press,
you can download .pdfs for free. At the end of March, 2017, Metapedia
vanished for a week and it reappeared with no statement as to why it had
gone. Why the site disappeared is still unknown; what can be guessed is
that Metapedia will exist as long as the Wiki model is still viable.
"RationalWiki
is a genetic-egalitarian race denialism propaganda website that is run
by Ontario resident Trent Toulouse. RationalWiki is a wiki founded by
secular humanists in response to Conservapedia. They regard Richard
Dawkins as their messiah. It is based on MediaWiki, like Metapedia. The
wiki has around 4200 English pages middle of May 2010. The information
is inaccurate and sparse. The wiki begs for donations. The site is
extremely anti-Christian and anti-Conservative and promotes sodomy and
gun restriction."
"Trent Toulouse has
promoted like-minded people on the wiki to the rank of bureaucrat, and
let themenforce the site’s propaganda and promote other like-minded
people to bureaucrat, whereas Trent Toulouse himself does not directly
enforce the propaganda. That serves to make Trent Toulouse appear
blameless; the same tactic is used by Wikipedia owner Jimbo Wales. Trent
Toulouse's primary surrogate is the user “Human”; Human has done much
of the bureaucratizing that Trent did not want his name attached to."
RationalWiki poses as thisrationalist/secular
humanist/skeptics encyclopedia out there to "fight the good fight"
against cults, paranormal claims, and lifestyles while promoting
science. The truth is, it's a home away from home for Wikipedians and a
place for co-founder David Gerard to get his lulz out, among other things.
RationalWiki was begun in the economic meltdown of 2007, founded by Wikipedian Trent Toulouse (Tmtoulouse) and David "Assisted Living Dracula*" Gerard. Their earliest target was Conservapedia, which members of RationalWiki vandalized repeatedly. Conservapedia
(founded 2006) was/is this American conservative variation of
Wikipedia, begun by Andrew Schlafly (son of longtime, now-dead,
Republican activist Phyllis Schlafly) in the Bush II years as this
right-wing "antidote" to the alleged liberalism of actual
Wikipedia.....and thus two Wiki-knockoffs locked horns, with
RationalWiki flooding Conservapedia with fake conservative users who
vandalized the site and Conservapedia squealing like a stuck pig about
it. RationalWiki also slammed Moonie Wikipedian and Conservapedia honcho
Ed Poor, just because. Certainly "Andy" Schlafly deserves some criticism for running Conservapedia with as much of an iron hand as Upplysinig did
Metapedia (IP range blocks, drop-of-the-hat bans, etc.), but it's
bizarre that another Wiki took it upon themselves to "discipline by
vandalism" the site into whatever "normalcy" the RationalWikians found
acceptable. Meanwhile since 2014 there has been a complaint on the Ripoff Report website on the RationalMedia Foundation that owns and runs RationalWiki.
What They Do for Fun
Members blocking each other seems to be where some people get their kicks, as the block log clearly shows. They also are extremely friendly with Susan Gerbic's Guerilla Skeptics group (who fought with people over deceased UFO skeptic Phillip Klass' Wikipedia biography in 2013). Really though, they like writing snarky articles on people they don't like, such as Rupert Sheldrake
(notice at the bottom of the RationalWiki article the piece is part of
the categories "shysters", "batshit crazy", "woo-meisters", and
"pseudoscience.") It states literally what the skeptics groups on
Wikipedia would like to say about Sheldrake in the BLP they fought over for years, but cannot because it would break the rules of "Wikipedia POV." Of course by mentioning Sheldrake, I have to mention Rome Viharo, who tried to keep the edits of the Sheldrake BLP reasonable and was slandered by RationalWiki for his trouble. Viharo has a site dealing with his issues with RationalWiki, Tim Farley (Vzaak, Manul), and the rest....I feel I can't write about Viharo because he was/is involved in both versions of the Wikipedia Sucks! messageboard. The links speak for themselves.
Ryulong
Because David "Low-Rent Nosferatu" Gerard loves drama and lulz, he gave sysop powers to noted Wikipedia loon Ryulong (Michael Cohen)in late December of 2014 and he only lasted there a few months, trying to push an anti-Gamer Gate line while being generally annoying. And so we got this on the "Chicken Coop" (RationalWiki version of a noticeboard):
Two days ago, Nuttyreopped Exiled. Ryulong removed Exiled's sysop. Nutty removed Ryulong's sysop. Neither of these removals was the result of a discussion on the Chicken Coop. As such, I reopped Exiled and reopped Ryulong. Ryulong hasbroughtthisup on numerous pages and mentioned
a previous Chicken Coop incident. If we are going to discuss anything
in this matter, we should discuss it here, rather than on 50 pages. αδελφός ΓυζζγςατΡοτατο (talk/stalk) 15:59, 28 December 2014 (UTC)
Deop all 3 and call it a day? 141.134.75.236 (talk) 16:14, 28 December 2014 (UTC)
Or don't. Since all three currently have sysop status, just leave things as they hang. ŴêâŝêîôîďMethinks it is a Weasel 16:19, 28 December 2014 (UTC)
Pretty obviously people randomly removing sysop status because
they personally think it's a good idea is a bad way of going about
things. If somebody is abusing their sysop status then this is the
place to talk about it. --Bob"I think you'll find it's more complicated than that." 17:11, 28 December 2014 (UTC)
FWIW - The opping of EE struck me as a terrible idea - he's not
only a bloody worthless waste of space as a contributor (and a good
example of the principle that if you just got kicked off Wikipedia, you
won't do any better on RW without changing your ways - really, Caligula in Category:Engineer woo?
Wasn't woeful categorisation what he got kicked for?), but also has
posted copyvios that then needed removing. Though I don't see any in his
blather this week. The key point is that EE lacks the minimal judgement
needed not to actually piss all over the carpet, all the time going
"what? what? what's the problem? you're so MEAN" and if you were looking
for an example of a poor newbie harassed by cantankerous old guard,
he's sorta not a great one - David Gerard (talk) 17:38, 28 December 2014 (UTC)
I am no particular fan of EE but I'm at a loss to see where he's
misused his sysop status. And if that's not the offence he is accused
of I don't see the point of removing it.
I don't care. People are being inconsistent, few have any idea
what they're talking about, and this kind of shit is always more about
personalities than merits, but do whatever you want. Nutty Roux (talk) 18:03, 28 December 2014 (UTC)
I want aware of process to actually know that this was necessary but
CensoredScribe is a mess that should not be trusted on any MediaWiki
software site with anything beyond reading ability. outside of my
action, his bit has been on and off since registration. IRS not even
like he was banned from Wikipedia for personality issues or whatever is
rumbling there for me. He got banned because he wouldnt stop making bad
content decisions when they were discovered and violated his ban on
doing anything regarding categories, which he is wont to do here as
well.—Ryūlóng (琉竜) 18:57, 28 December 2014 (UTC)
I largely concur, but at least almost nothing you can do in
MediaWiki is irreversible (which is why sysop is actually not a big
deal) - David Gerard (talk) 19:00, 28 December 2014 (UTC)
[plain old editor hat] I move we all calm down and back away
slowly and have more Christmas drink and it'll be as resolved as
anything ever is in a wiki full of argumentative skeptics all convinced
of their own perspicacity and everyone else's stupidity - David Gerard (talk) 19:00, 28 December 2014 (UTC)
I third the motion. I may personally dislike Ryulong; however he
has done nothing here to warrant having sysops privileges removed,
beyond vengefully removing mine which I've never done to anyone. Ryulong
may have committed the capital crime of not capitalizing their O's and
using apostrophes correctly, but I do that when stressed by the thought
of every post being my last as well.
I ask that this matter be dropped and no ones sysops privileges
removed; but if that is too much to ask, than before anyone is tried,
may they at least be given warning that a decision is pending, so that
they may present their case before a certain time. It will take some
time for me to compile a list of my best edits here to refute the less
than 10 examples that are cited against me. I have more than 10 good
edits, just to science articles.
Inconsistency is correct. I understand I make a lot of edits, but
I find it hard to believe you would the majority of them objectionable;
this is cherry picking a few bad cherries in a field of hundreds. Also,
I'm not an expert on Roman history, however that Caligula article sort
of made it sound like he was an engineer who thought he was a god. I
would be more than happy just to leave any additions to engineering woo
up as a discussion on the respective talk pages, as I've done with UFO;
just inform me now what is a personalized banish-able offense for me,
and I will avoid it ahead of time.
You never even bother to just ask me politely to discuss
categorizations. Nor does anyone bother to demonstrate what is and isn't
copyright violations like Drmies did for me the two times I did that as
Cassandra Truth. It seems to be like a DNA test done with words, where
as little as 6 shared words between the reference cited and the
summation of that text constitutes copyright violation. What is the
number exactly and if you have a concrete number why isn't it stated
somewhere on the site? Try not using a single word from the reference,
and see if that's possible and not just completely unrelated to the
source at that point; a single drop of plagiarized words like and, the
or the article name, poisons the entire well.
We are all in the same boat; the one that isn't Noah's ark. Shiver me timbers! Exiled Encyclopedist (talk) 22:38, 28 December 2014 (UTC)
Just an aside, you're not at all obligated to write verbose edit
summaries for every edit, you know. Not that there's anything wrong
with it, though the effort could be spent on more worthwhile things. 141.134.75.236 (talk) 23:16, 28 December 2014 (UTC)
Worthwhile things like taking a few seconds to consider whether adding links to Watergate whenever a -gate topic pops up is really such a splendid idea. >.> 141.134.75.236 (talk) 01:36, 29 December 2014 (UTC)
Now the reader knows why there is very little mention of Ryulong's time on RationalWiki.
The Great RationalWiki Break-In of 2017
Just to prove that they don't know what the hell they are doing, there was a massive data breach on a server.....which they announced in June, 2017 but the breach had taken place in February. Did I mention that Gerard is going to shortly e-publish a critical book on cryptocurrencies entitled Attack of the 50-foot Blockchain? Well he is.
What They Think of Us
One of their throwaway accounts posted the following stub article, which was yanked and kept on their user page. Wikipedia Sucks is a forum/blog that focuses on cyberstalking and harassing Wikipedia admin and users. Many of its members are former users of Wikipedia either banned for trolling or having their edits reverted and are hence disgruntled, alongside a medley of internet kooks, pseudo-scientists and conspiracy theorists. The forum supports a tin-foil hat conspiracy theory there are "organised skeptics" who control Wikipedia and the forum owner ("Strelnikov") has criticized scepticism.[1]
Wikipedia Sucks also targets Rationalwiki editors.
After closing once, sitting gutted for a year, the last third of the original Kensington Video store space was reopened as "Kensigton Video and Vidajuice" combining the bulk of the DVD stock of the video store organized in giant bookshelves along one wall. After a year of operation, the Hanfords have decided to close the store again.Update 2018: The website is still up! Check out the new-ish tasting room that is now at the location. Their website. ____________________________________________________________________________
In
1984, the Hanford family added a video store to the front area of their
Hallmark gift shop. The video rental space measured a mere 15 by 19
feet. Rich and Winnie, the parents, were planning on retiring, but their
son, Guy, approached them with the concept of opening a video rental
store at the height of the video rental business. They agreed, and the
Kensington Video store opened with approximately 200 VHS and Beta
titles.
As
the success of the store grew, the video store overtook the gift shop
and eventually occupied the entire 3,500 square foot space. The success
of the mom and pop store can be attributed to several components. First
of all, Winnie, the godmother of movie picks, great customer service, a
knowledgeable staff, and an incredible selection of movies. Through the
years, Beta disappeared, then VHS became scarce as DVDs and Blu-Rays
soon dominated the market.
70,000 titles later, the Kensington Video became a well-known name in San Diego.
After
32 years, the video store owners decided to retire; however, Winnie and
Guy still had the business pumping through their veins, and it took
only a few months to decide upon a return of the video business.
The
iconic old-fashioned video store would break all of its former rules in
regards to technology and finally enter the 21st century with an
amazing website, full-featured searchable database, and an electronic
checkout system. The video store would occupy a smaller space to be
shared with a new family business, Vidajuice, a fruit juice and smoothie
bar conceived by Guy’s nephew, Marc Sisneros, and partnered with
parents, Willie and Pam, and Uncle Guy.
The
venue of the video store is a true film destination for movie lovers,
juice and smoothie connoisseurs, and burgeoning student filmmakers. We
hope that you will come by and enjoy the new and improved Kensington
Video and refresh yourself with a Vidajuice.
This guy is one of those creepers that comes lurching out of the
swamp to look through the windows at "th' purty goils", except A.W.
Morrow does this through the Internet.....and now the creeper is back on
Google's biggest profit black hole, YouTube.
Amorrow on YouTube
Above is his first video, posted on New Year's Eve; he talks about Alison Cassidy and Rebecca Watson
in vague terms in this creepy flat yet sing-song voice, like a movie
pedophile enticing a child. Viewers should be warned that he takes off
his shirt (the thumbnail photo is him in the middle of taking off his
long-sleeve dress shirt) to show off some tattoos, says he is going to
conduct "brinksmanship" to get a Wikipedia BLP by 2019. At the end of
the video he addresses Alison Cassidy directly, wants a meeting, even
one moderated by a lawyer. Complete delusions of grandeur.
Next video is thirty minutes long;
rambles about Catholicism, Mormon missionaries he met at a McDonalds,
going after Ayn Rand, advising Jimbo Wales to go to church, mentions
Fred Bauder, mentions "Wiki-Luv", Aaron Swartz and his suicide, "going
to church because they're nice guys" even though he has no real faith
that the Bible is true, Alison Cassidy mentioned, Rebecca Watson
mentioned, threatens to out where Watson lives. And all this is
in the first five minutes! Claims he will hunt down Sydney "Redshirt"
Poore....he's doing all of this because he wants to be unbanned on
Wikipedia, thinks that if he can scare Cassidy and Poore into relenting
from "search and destroy on AWM (meaning imagined endless sockhunts for Amorrow)"
that he can go back. He gives out his social security number "because
he has LifeLock and insurance". Rebecca Watson is called "honeybunny"
and is told she isn't a child anymore. Claims he has tattoos of daughter's and ex-wife's names and titles on separate shoulders.
Explains that he has these names permanently written on him as ID "in
case I wash up on the shores of Japan or something." Daughter won't talk
to him because he is "a weirdo." Claims both ex-wife and daughter are
in medicine. Rants about a female chemical engineering teacher at "RPI"
which might be Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, a private science and
engineering college in New York state where he got a Bachelors of
Science in the early 1980s. We are now thirteen minutes in. Uses
the RPI rant to tell Jimbo that Wikipedia needs to foster a "boy
scout-girl scout" tradition of editing excellence. Talks about eating
restraining orders. Reveals that he stalked a girl at the age of
thirteen, blames his (self-diagnosed?) autism.....
And
that's where I gave up, after nineteen minutes. Pretty much he is
telling all the people that he had restraining orders or issues with
that he hasn't jumped into the void of real life and forgetting all the
online horseshit that he was involved in, that he's returned to be the creepy stalker weirdo that Encyclopaedia Dramatica wrote about
years ago. And yes, both videos look like they were filmed in a creepy
back closet inside Morrow's probably creepy-looking house.
The Background
Andrew William Morrow (Amorrow, LegalEagle2, Amorrow2
[on ED]) was banned from Wikipedia, from Wikipedia Review, from
Facebook, from Encyclopaedia Dramatica (list not chronological). He has
served short stints of jail time repeatedly since 2007 for assaulting
his now ex-wife (whom he had battered when they were married in the
1990s - his first jail stretch was in the Clinton years), then a
probation violation in 2008, six months in 2011 for stalking the chief
of police in Mountain View, CA, and a 2013 stint for stalking and
harassing the police again. Proving the ineptitude of Facebook security,
we have been told that Amorrow still has an account on the website, because he is using it to keep creepo tabs on various female CEOs in Silicon Valley.
What Now?
He
will keep this crap up forever because he is an intelligent person, but
not a wise one; his obsessions with women as objects are dangerous and
his expanding-contracting delusions of grandeur might result in some
sort of kamikaze run to make Rebecca Watson like him. He reminds me ofa number of assassins; both John
Warnock Hinckley Jr. (the failed killer of President Ronald Reagan) and
Mark David Chapman (the man who gunned down John Lennon) stick out
because both men were living in their own partial fantasy worlds;
Hinckley was trapped inside the 1976 film Taxi Driver, allegedly wanted to impress Jodie Foster. Chapman had a series of fantasies both revolving around the novel Catcher in the Rye
and Chapman's own God-fantasy of being the all-powerful king to a
nation of tiny people. It would be best that A.W. Morrow lose his
American citizenship, be granted a Swiss one, and never leave a Swiss
mental hospital. He needs to be kept away from the Internet at all
costs. Facebook and YouTube need to cut him off - now.
Aftermath
This is all part of some crazy plan that is growingon the Internet day-by-day, because Andrew Morrow is a narcissist bisexual who loathes his own bisexuality. He has released another ranty video
talking about his immortality and the President of the US and
Wikipedia. At least this time he turned the lights on to his creeper
lair. He now has a creepier "bounty list" on a webpage I can't link to
because it has personal details of "the target's" life; he will pay people
to somehow get used tampons, snip hairs off Alison Cassidy's head,
other super-creepo requests which prove that he is too far gone to be
allowed to live in the same area as her. Rebecca Watson needs to be
warned before Amorrow starts sending her sticks coated in raccoon
blood and ranty "love" letters with ASCII drawings. People need to save
those videos before Google yanks them; they are now documents in a
future sanity hearing.
