ericbarbour wrote: ↑Sat Jul 19, 2025 9:07 pm
Jeez, I never said anything about
Naomi Wolf before.
In 2014 her biography was positive because she was a "noted feminist author". Then on 6 October, someone called
JohnValerion created a "Controversy" section. She was always a bit kooky but now she was routinely ranting about conspiracies. A few days later, that legendary asshole Philip Cross showed up to expand the hell out of the article, with as much negative information as possible. (JohnValerion was blocked as a "sockpuppet" by Courcelles a few months later, and I can't figure out the real reason.)
Wolf's article is now 143k bytes long (longer than the articles of more prominent feminists like Camille Paglia, Betty Friedan and Gloria Steinem) and repeatedly calls her a "conspiracy theorist". Fatass Gamaliel is guarding it and
preventing any attempt to remove the shrieking.
None of it has to do with actual notability, it's just who is on the private shit list of whichever Wikipedian decides "I need to make this BLP as annoying to the subject as possible". I searched for both Naomi Wolf and Naomi Klein (people confuse the two online; Klein actually
wrote a book on the subject, which Wolf refused to contribute to) on
The Encyclopedia of American Loons because those cranks have
Bernie Sanders listed*, but neither of them are on the website. Compare the BLPs of
George Adamski and
Howard Menger -- both of them were Contactees**, had some fame in the 1950s and early 1960s, wrote books that were published. The difference is that the Adamski article is extremely savage, unlike the one on the lesser-known Menger, which cuts out most of his claims (like Adamski, he claimed the "space brothers" came from Venus, and had been there; Menger also claimed that his wife Connie resembled a Venusian woman he had met.) Both BLPs use newspaper photos for both men instead of the posed shots from their book jackets, which is darkly funny in the case of George Adamski because the newspaper photo dates to the late 1930s before all of his hair went gray, and the silver-haired, professorial Adamski was the one most people who were interested in UFOs had ever seen. (Adamski had been near the Mt. Wilson Observatory for at least twenty years; he ran a hot dog stand nearby and had his own telescope.) If you go through the revisions, the Menger article has changed constantly since it was a stub. If
Wikipedia were a real encyclopedia, would they allow biographies to suffer through this much amount of churn? Also, would any true encyclopedia allow for hostile biographies?
* Like with most
American Loons targets, Sanders is on the site for alternative medicine, i.e., he has spoken positively about it at one time and tried at one point to get
Veterans' Affairs to do alternative medicine through legislation that failed. Their post on him is from 2016 and cumulative to that point.
** Contactees were the people who had alleged contact with UFO (then "flying saucer") crews in the 1950s to mid-1960s; some of the contact was in person, some of it psychic. The aliens were all very good looking humanoids, tall, sometimes with blond hair and blue eyes, and their whole point in making contact was to warn humans about nuclear weapons (they really hated hydrogen bombs) while confirming that Christianity had reached space. Serious UFO investigators did not believe Contactee claims, but that sort of alien is still being sighted in South America, and Contactee-style cases were still going on in Finland in the late 1960s. A lot of the elements of Contacteeism bled into the
UMMO letters (either a hoax or a psychological experiment or a hidden Spanish socialist jab at Francoism or all three) and the
Rational Culture group in Brazil. Also the
Unarius Academy of Science in El Cajon, California.
Still "Globally Banned" on Wikipedia for the high crime of journalism.
