ericbarbour wrote: ↑Tue Oct 27, 2020 3:15 am
Strelnikov wrote: ↑Mon Oct 26, 2020 11:28 pm
The most powerful users seem to be involved only for the drama they can create. This is why I keep talking about kicking out all users, hiring real editors, cleaning the place up and locking it, with updates ever six months. OR we can have en.Wikipedia,Alpha (the clean and "perfect" one with the editors) and en.Wikipedia.Beta (the site as it is) and let the userbase choose what they want.
None of which will ever happen. Too many complete bastards reached adminship and used WP as a stupid FPS game. Even a total purge of the admin rolls wouldn't get rid of the sockpuppet accounts most of them keep ready, so they can RFA each other and maintain power. It's basically Pinochet-era Chile reduced to a website.
Speaking of which, today the Chileans voted to dump the old Pinochet constitution ( it was very Napoleonic, guilty till proven innocent, inequality under the law, the president is inerrant etc. ) in favor of something more modern and equitable. For weeks prior there were violent protests and chaos--things were BAD. Yet it was barely mentioned in the news media today. What I do see is endless Amy Coney Barrett this and that.....
https://www.npr.org/2020/10/26/92785927 ... start-over
Two responses:
1. Then Wikipedia is doomed, because it cannot change with how the Internet is changing. You had a chart. Mr. Barbour, of how the number of Wikipedians was falling and I think the bottom-out point was either in 2022 or in 2019. That it still trundles on is a minor miracle. Any of my ideas would have to be approved by the WMF, NOT the gang of admin idiots that thinks it has power over en.Wikipedia. Somebody has to stand up and tell these dysfunctional, Wikipedia-addicted people that they are screwing themselves up alongside the site they claim to love (and I know that the Wikimedia Foundation is watching this messageboard.)
2. American culture (or at least the institutional part of it) never seems to give a Damn about what America does to the world, and the Pinochet constitution of Chile is the product of the "minds" of Henry Kissenger and his flunkies in the State Department, plus Milton Friedman and his goons from the world of American "libertarianism" (they stole that from the European anarchists.) It was a corporate document written for a quasi-fascist government talking orders from the farthest-Right in power inside the United States (various corporations doing business inside Chile, the GOP, the Chicago School of Economics, etc.) That Chile is free of
El General's piece of paper is a step forward for freedom in the Americas.
The newspapers/electronic media squeal about Amy Coney Barrett because they think
Roe v. Wade is done. If you aren't lucky to live in a coastal state,
Roe v. Wade was done anyway because abortion clinic bombings, abortion doctor shootings, the GOP war on Planned Parenthood, etc. has removed clinics from the South and large parts of the Midwest, last I checked. If the election comes down to the Supreme Court, that will be her first major use to the Elephant Party, because she will vote for Trump. If Biden wins, he will be pressured to expand the number of Supreme Court justices. He punted this question on
60 Minutes two nights ago*, but if you check the Constitution,
there is no set number of Justices, it's been as little as five and as large as ten but
nine was decided in 1869. So this "rule" is just a tradition. We live in extraordinary times and if it takes
twenty Justices, so be it. Also they need ten or fifteen-year terms, not lifetime appointments. This
Baffler article on getting rid of the Senate also covers the Supremes and junking the antique Electoral College:
https://thebaffler.com/salvos/abolish-t ... -geoghegan
________________
* Biden said he wants to set up some bipartisan committee to look into it, which is just bullshit. READ THE CONSTITUTION, JOE!
Thomas Geoghegan's argument for the TL;DRs out there is that the Senate is built to oppose "one man, one vote" and that by going unicameral the government would be more democratic. He also wants to give Puerto Rico and Washington D.C. residents the ability to vote. Actually I'm not doing his article justice, just read it TL;DRs!
Still "Globally Banned" on Wikipedia for the high crime of journalism.