CrowsNest wrote:It's kind of sad how Jimmy cuts a pretty lonesome figure on Wikipedia now...
https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?ti ... =830758883
...What a fucked up world it is, where if you believe in small government, personal responsibility and responsible fiscal policy, you're better off turning a blind eye to the activities of fascist and traitors than embracing the principles of democracy. Similarly, if you support gun control and are pro-choice, you have to ally yourself with the extreme left, which as can be seen, Wikipedians seem to think don't even exist.
Months ago they laughingly called the issue of antisemitism in the British left (the mainstream party having recently swung hard left) a non-issue, a political diversion, not worth documenting in Wikipedia. Indeed, they tried to actively suppress it. Well, that seems to have backfired.....cue this week, protests in the streets, civil war in his party, and public apologies from their leader for not having taken it seriously. The ensuing controversy has of course overshadowed the many worthwhile issues that are pressing in politics today, that he was trying to highlight. It will probably also add to the pile of evidence that he is not fit to govern, and so seeing another right wing government's five year term, unopposed and in coalition with actual bigots.
Thank you very much, Wikipedians. You didn't do it all, but you played your part about reshaping how the world debates socio-political issues. And if you believe your own hype about your project's influence, it must have been a very big one!
I disagree about the antisemitism in the British Left; mostly this is built around the belief that a Corbyn Labour government will be less slavish towards Israel's interests than Theresa May's Conservatives; all this forgets that the British press leans heavily to the Right and any issue that makes Corbyn look like shit is amplified by a factor of 10 (they don't like change, they prefer drama.)
John Booth wrote about this mess in Lobster magazine last winter: link Which prompted a response from Colin Challen an ex-MP who had been in Parliment for nine years; link - he agreed with Booth's reporting because he had been there, both as a party activist and as an elected member; if it was this cesspit of antisemitism, why would a Jewish person like Challen hang around? Really it's about Labour Friends of Israel (the pro-Israel group set up in the late 1950s) pressuring British politics to hang in with the Anglo-American "relationship" and support Israel to the hilt no matter how crappy the government gets (and any government that kills 17 unarmed protestors and wounds 400 really needs to be looked at critically.) That set-up is doomed to change.
As for Wikipedia, yes, absolutely it should be covering this neutrally, but they won't because whomever is "in charge" of British news coverage is either too lazy, burnt out, or biased to do so. And that's why there are weird gaps in coverage of almost anything - take this pointless "List of animated works with LGBT characters" for example. Scroll down to 2013 within the "animated series" sublist and you hit Steven Universe where they list Pearl, Ruby and Sapphire (who "fuse" to create Garnet), Rose Quartz, and..... Mr. Smiley, a minor character who was originally voiced by Sinbad, now by Colton Dunn. Nary a mention of Amethyst, the fourth "hero character." Why? Probably overhang from the first "long" 52 episode season, where fans disliked both Pearl and Amethyst; after the "plot"* developed people understood Pearl, but I have the feeling that Amethyst will turn out to be aromantic (all the characters I have named are asexual space rocks with "hard" hologram bodies, except for Mr. Smiley, who is a human running an amusement park in an East Coast boardwalk town.) The weird snubbing goes down to the Steven Universe template; it's a goofy example, but if Wikipedia can't/won't handle simple issues with pop-culture articles, then how can it be trusted with real news?
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*For an 11 minute cartoon, it moves in long arcs, has lots of minor characters, and the humor is in long burns and mostly character driven; imagine the cast of War and Peace in a plot that has resembled Thomas Mann's The Magic Mountain - lots of stasis, then short bursts of action. It's becoming more conventional in story structure due to rising stakes and Cartoon Network's bizarre release schedule.