Again, brilliant.
At 07:11 PM 12/25/2012, Jojo Jaro wrote:
[...]
Lomax claims that my attempts to stop off-topic posts are
"coercive". I'm not sure which twilight zone Lomax live in, but of
course they are coercive.
Like Jojo can't bring himself to agree with me. I.e., he acknowledges
that what he's proposing and doing is "coercive," but wants to assert
that I'm delusional.
People must be coerced to follow the rules. We have laws in this
country where people must be coerced to follow. This forum has
rules that people must follow. It's that simple.
Sure. It's that simple. However, what are the rules? I just re-read
them. Some of them are routinely violated. I've violated some of
them. I intend to stop that immediately.
Lomax claims that I am the troll here.
I've said that.
But have you ever found a troll willing to sacrifice himself for the
greater good.
Frequently. That is, this is how a troll justifies his behavior to
himself, and attempts to so justify it to others. And I've seen this
from trolls who very openly admitted being trolls. They believe that
they are serving a greater good. And I've trolled, and actually
accomplished what I set out to do, on Wikipedia. There was a certain
abusive administrator. He banned me from cold fusion, unilaterally. I
took him before the Arbitation Committee. During the case, he claied
that his ban was still in effect. Now, generally, I respected
administrative decisions, and did not violate them, instead following
due process, which can take months, even for a minor matter,
sometimes. I decided the time was right for direct action. I
announced that I had no more intention to honor his ban. This was on
a Talk page presumably seen by Arbitrators and many administrators,
in direct response to his boast that I was still banned and he could prove it.
Essentially, I invited him to prove it, by deciding to ignore the ban
and give him the opportunity. I waited until a simple question was
asked on the Cold fusion talk page, and I knew a clear answer. It
wasn't a controversial edit, and the only thing *wrong* with it was
that he'd banned me. It took me a couple of minutes. I went to bed.
When I woke up in the morning, all hell had broken loose. I'd been
blocked by him, and my edit had been reverted. An arbitrator had
unblocked, restored my edit, and the Arbitration Committee was
considering an immediate revocation of his administrative privileges.
They didn't -- he was very popular -- but, in the end, they did
revoke the privileges when the decision was issued. He'd gone over
the edge, blocking a participant in a case involving him. They could
not ignore that, it would have been way too obvious.
They also wanted to get rid of me, that became obvious later, when
their private mailing list was hacked. I made them *very*
uncomfortable, I was *not one of them* -- they are all
administrators, and, while I almost was made an admin on Wikipedia, I
was quite new then. Later, it would have been completely impossible,
by that time the "cabal" knew what I was up to and they can easily
torpedo any candidacy that they don't like. It's part of the problem
with Wikipedia process.
But I didn't consider my own right to edit to be important. I was far
more concerned about a biased admin who would cheerfully block people
because they disagreed with him. This is an irony here. That
administrator was a climate scientist, and was famous as abusive.
People had complained about him for years, but every attempt to
sanction him was blocked by the cabal. A discussion would start, they
would pour in with enough comments rejecting the complaint that the
discussion would show "no consensus," and they would then claim
vindication. Nope. Any sane judgment would have shown there was a
serious problem.
Adminstrators had resiged in disgust over what this guy had done. I
fixed it, with an edit trolling to be blocked, took a couple of
minutes. It was probably the most efficient thing I ever did on
Wikipedia. And eventually I handled a lot of situations, but,
eventually, the Wikipedia problem was not ultimately addressed, and
what had long been expected came to pass, I was "community banned."
That's what they do when the Arbitration Committee won't do it. All
it takes is a handful of editors showing up on an obscure page,
mostly not watched by the general community, and it's done.
Theoretically, you can appeal to the Arbitration Committee, but the
politics are such that the Arbitration Committee will bail. It will
reject the case, refusing to "second guess" the Community. Really,
more than half of the Committee is sympathetic to the abusive
administrators, but they can't let that be seen. It would look bad!
I am willing to sacrifice my participation here, which I find useful
especially for my Carbon Nanotube research, for the greater good of
more signal and less noise in this forum. If you ask me, Lomax and
the other chronic off-topic posters are the real trolls cause they
insist on doing it their way or ban those who disagree or don't like
their off-topic trolling like me. Their solution is a "gang"
solution. Do it our way or we will insult you or better still, we
will ban you. It's fortunate that Bill appears to be more
reasonable and more objective than these gang of bullies.
Actually, what it looks like is Bill is paying no attention.
If Bill changes the rules, I will follow. But in the meantime,
people should follow his rules and not "make it up as we go" - as
famously said by one chronic off-topic poster here.
Jojo
So, what are the rules? I don't know if they have been changed, but
below is what I was sent. There *are* rules that could easily be
applied to this situation. Some of the rules were obviously written
long ago, because behind some of the rules are conditions that used
to apply, that hardly ever apply any more. "Off-topic" isn't a rule,
per se. What is there related to that is
3. Small email files please. The limit is set to 40K right now, those
exceeding the limit will be forwarded to Bill Beaty. If you wish to
start extremely off-topic discussions, please feel free to exchange
initial messages on vortex-L, but MOVE THE DISCUSSION TO PRIVATE MAIL
IMMEDIATELY. Some members are on limited service, or have to pay for
received email. Diagrams and graphics can be mailed to me and posted
on a webpages for temporary viewing.
In other words, "starting extremely off-topic discussions" is
specifically allowed, but the instruction is to "move these to
private email immediately." That does not resolve a certain problem,
where a poster has posted something to the list which is broadly
offensive. It assumes what is really a private discussion that merely
starts here.
I'm not "discussing" with Jojo, not any more. I responding to his
egregiously offensive claims here that attack all Muslims and what
they believe, that attack the President of the United States, that
attack almost the entire community of climate scientists, and that
personally attack and deliberately insult anyone who dares to
disagree with him, including many long-term participants on this
list, such as Jed Rothwell.
He's acknowledged it, even today. This is what he does. He escalates.
I have *not* started these off-topic threads, generally. Only very
recently, I started *this thread* and the like, to address the
problem of massive trolling. That's been made necessary by
administrative neglect. Bill is obviously busy elsewhere. I highly
recommend that he delegate some of the list responsibilities, he
could overrule a moderator decision if necessary. Frankly, I hope he's okay.
The rule that is really more on-point is NO SNEERING. And that rule
has been *routinely* violated by Jojo. He'll claim the same about me,
I'm sure, but he also claims that about many here. He perceives
sneering at the drop of a phrase. And his response is to sneer back,
escalated, drastically. And Jojo sneers spontaneously, with no
apparent trigger to justify "sneering back."
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