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A post appeared on Hatewatch, a discussion forum for the Southern Poverty Law Center, –an organization which I generally support, — Wikipedia wars: inside the fight against far-right editors, vandals and sock puppets.
The post was decent, but seemed to assume that far-right sock puppets were a serious problem on Wikipedia, and it cited RationalWiki, which was unfortunate, since RationalWiki routinely defames with misrepresentations and sometimes downright lies, and has no reliable content review process (nor does Wikipedia, but Wikipedia hews far closer to neutrality than RW, which is explicitly and openly biased, site policy is SPOV, Snarky Point of View).
A “Bill Connors” appeared promoting RationalWiki. No surprise, because this person is very likely the creator of articles being cited. (There is an alternate possibility of his twin brother, both defacto banned since 2011 on Wikipedia, the particular topic here is of Oliver D. Smith interest, but there can be some crossover.)
Characteristic of “Anglo Pyramidologist socks” (either one of the brothers) is an account that appears out of nowhere, with very high interest, highly partisan and inflammatory, and recognizable arguments (that have been repeated in many places, often irrelevant to topic, but purely or largely ad-hominem. This commentor showed all these traits. His Discus account.
For comparison, my Discus account.
I responded to a number of the Bill Connors comments on the blog. However, this is distracting from the purpose of the page, so I am creating this as a followup, to avoid adding more noise to that blog. These are comments from Connors (or possibly others) which I am choosing to answer here instead of there. And then I comment in indented italics.
Note Abd Lomax is an internet harasser who has defended Rightpedia and alt-right individuals https://rationalwiki.org/wi…
This is classic AP. I have not “defended Rightpedia,” which is a disgusting pile of far-right trash — as far as I’ve seen. The RationalWiki article on me was written as a retaliation because of my exposure of AP impersonation socking on Wikipedia, and contains many libels based on taking fact (I mentioned Rightpedia) and distorting it (I stated that a particular article on Rightpedia — on one of the AP brothers, Oliver D. Smith, very likely “Bill Connors” — appeared to be correct in its factual claims. This is hardly “defending Rightpedia.”
Some — by no means all — of the individuals attacked by AP socks are or are claimed to be “alt-right.” If I expose the deceptions and impersonations and misrepresentations of sources presented by AP socks (often on RationalWiki), this is not “defending” those individuals, it is defending the truth and the common welfare.
Abd Ul-Rahman Lomax has also defended neo-Nazi Emil O. W. Kirkegaard. https://rationalwiki.org/wi…
“Lomax claims to be a free speech advocate and protector of civil liberties. He has written a series of blog posts defending the far-right child-rape apologist Emil O. W. Kirkegaard and other alt-right activists”
Yes. I was, as an undergraduate at Cal Tech, well over fifty years ago, an officer in the campus chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union. I am a strong supporter of free speech, but not libel under the mask of anonymity. People may make anonymous statements, but it is essential that these not be given the same weight as statements made by people willing to stand up and be counted, with real reputations at stake.
What we see in the “Bill Connors” comments is an anonymous hater attacking real people with real names and real reputations. Recently, Oliver D. Smith came out of the closet and acknowledged he had created RationalWiki articles (including those on Emil Kirkegaard and John Fuerst.) I congratulated him on that, on being open, but then he more or less disappeared and has been active with new names.
“Child-rape apologist” is a favorite claim of ODS about Kirkegaard. It is a drastic misrepresentation of something Kirkegaard wrote many years ago. This is a great example of how to abuse sources, picking a phrase out of a paragraph that is actually contradicted by the rest of the source. Sloppy news media, in January, quoted this conclusion as if fact. Smith knows that the claim will elicit immediate reactions of horror, and those reactions can disable the critical thinking that RationalWiki purports to promote.
Kirkegaard denies being “far-right,” and I have seen nothing that indicates he is. However, he is a researcher with a hereditarian focus on “intelligence” in an environment where the popular and more mainstream view is more environmentalist. Both positions, taken as extremes, are unrealistic. Racists and the alt-right might like some of Kirkegaard’s research because it can seem to confirm “racialism,” which then shades into “racist” when emotional content is added, but that does not make him a racist. All of this actually confuses the scientific issues. My own view of Kirkegaard’s research is that it is not well-founded, but such research is properly assessed through normal academic process, not through political polemic.
https://rationalwiki.org/wi… for information about the banned wikipedia troll Abd Ul-Rahman Lomax.
This was irrelevant in context, simply spamming the RW article on me.
Lomax you are a bad liar. Mikemikev confirmed the socks belong to him on his racist Gab account. Mikemikev has written offensive hit-piece articles about anti-fascists on Rightpedia and you have defended the neo-nazi Emil Kirkegaard.
I love stuff where we can actually look at evidence, and that’s most of what I do with my time, compile evidence. What lie?
Here, Bill Connors had written:
Mikemikev the Rightpedia cofounder has confirmed the socks talked about in this article belong to him https://gab.ai/Mikemikev/po… and he seems to find the whole situation funny.
I responded:
[…] Mikemikev did not “confirm the socks belong to him.”
So what does the source show?
a class=”inner-post-url” title=”http://www.splcenter.org/hatewatch/2018/03/12/wikipedia-wars-inside-fight-against-far-right-editors-vandals-and-sock-puppets” href=”http://www.splcenter.org/hatewatch/2018/03/12/wikipedia-wars-inside-fight-against-far-right-editors-vandals-and-sock-puppets” target=”_blank” rel=”noopener”>http://www.splcenter.org/hatewatch/2018/03/12/wiki…
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Sockpuppet_…
Their source
http://en.rightpedia.info/w/Magnus_Pharao_Hansen
The Wikipedia link is to the SPI casepage on Mikemikev, so this would be, for him, “my socks.” Were he more careful, he might have inserted “alleged.” But he DGAF (that part was reasonable, he likely does find this “funny”). What I notice was that many of those socks were not mikemikev, that is obvious from the individual reports, so he is definitely not “confirming the socks belong to him.” As well, Mikemikev, like many other AP targets, has been impersonated. Mikemikev gives the “source” as a person he names in the Rightpedia article as Wikipedia user Maunus. Notice the first report, by Maunus. The finding: “Unrelated.” (But Mikemikev’s comment ascribing all this to Maunus was unfair.)
The article had this text on mikemikev socks:
One of the white nationalists who co-founded Rightpedia, a far-right free encyclopedia that split from Metapedia, created more than 140 accounts in the past 10 years.
That sounds like a lot, though it would only be a little more than one sock per month, and these accounts tend to make few edits before being discovered, so this does not actually bear on the problem of factional bias. However, this was an obvious reference to mikemikev. It was not sourced. However, Bill Connors supplied this:
The cofounder of Rightpedia is neo-Nazi Michael Coombs who users the name Mikemikev, he writes hit-piece articles about anti-fascists on Rightpedia. On Wikipedia he has 143 suspected socks https://en.wikipedia.org/wi…
I reviewed the issue of Mikemikev socks on Wikipedia, found on this subpage. My conclusions: Mikemikev has nowhere near that number of actual socks on Wikipedia. The actual number is unclear, because Wikipedia sock puppet investigations are erratic and a systematic error can be created by impersonations — or other misidentification, and there have been impersonations. It seems nothing is recent that is reasonably clear as Mikemikev is recent. At least two tagged accounts were far more likely to be Oliver D. Smith (Anglo Pyramidologist on Wikipedia) socks. That is very likely Bill Connors. Haters hate.
Overall conclusion: Bill Connors lied about the alleged “confirmation of socks in the article as belonging to him.” He certainly did not confirm this. Oliver Smith commonly uses accidents of language, the multiple interpretations possible for words, to make definitive claims when deeper examination shows this was not the intended meaning. And then he claimed I was lying, on top of that.
There is one person with an obsession about mikemikev and me and others, who behaves this way: Oliver D. Smith, with some minor possibility this is his brother Darryl L. Smith. He will claim that all this is a “defense of Michael Coombs,” but it is not. It is a defense of truthfulness and accuracy and rationality.
Note Abd Lomax is an internet harasser who has defended Rightpedia and alt-right individuals https://rationalwiki.org/wi..
Pure ad hominem argument, citing the article he or his brother wrote on me on RationalWiki, in a highly misleading way. This was in response to a comment about the alleged Wikipedia socking of Eleonora Dubcziki. That was not her, it was, high probability, Oliver D. Smith. I did not “defend Rightpedia,” and merely examined claims about certain alleged alt-right individuals. My position is that attacking allegedly reprehensible persons with deception and misinformation is itself reprehensible and sometimes even more so that the original “offenses.”
Abd Lomax https://meta.wikimedia.org/… has been globally banned from the Wikimedia Foundation for harassment
Abd Ul-Rahman Lomax is on the global ban list https://meta.wikimedia.org/… he was globally banned for doxing and harassing users. He is the 27th person to be globally banned by the WMF.
Again, pure ad hominem argument, and highly misleading. Yes, I was “office banned” in February of this year. The reason, however, is obscure. There was no warning, no request to cease and desist anything, and no explanation. Star chamber process, and with unclear purpose. What did it prevent? I had filed a series of successful requests for checkuser on the meta wiki. And then something strangely shifted. Something was going on behind the scenes.
However, what is very likely from context is that there were a number of private complaints, claiming harassment. There was no harassment — unless documenting sock puppetry is harassment, which it is not, when the reports are reasonable, even if wrong, and, most importantly, no use of WMF facilities to harass. Because this is being used to defame me — as here –, I am working on a legal appeal process, but it doesn’t matter otherwise, since I wasn’t using the WMF for anything other than to protect users and resources from disruption by … “Anglo Pyramidologist,” who has never been formally banned, but many socks have been globally locked for Long Term Abuse, and I was documenting that and was attacked for it. Anglo Pyramidologist, the evidence is overwhelming, is Oliver D. and Darryl L. Smith. That’s “doxxing” to them and to RationalWiki, though they do it routinely on RationalWiki and elsewhere.
Notice that abundant claims about me, a person who uses a real name, with a real reputation, are being made by “Bill Connors” here. So if doxxing is bad, he’s been doing it for years with many people. (I only stumbled across some impersonation socks a few months ago. And when I simply began collecting the evidence, I was attacked. Which gave me a clue that I was onto something. )
https://rationalwiki.org/wi… “Lomax claims to be a free speech advocate and protector of civil liberties. He has written a series of blog posts defending the far-right child-rape apologist Emil O. W. Kirkegaard and other alt-right activists”.
Once again, Connors is citing himself. The article is heavily misleading. Let’s look at one claim here: “the far-right child rape apologist Emil O. W. Kirkegaard.
Kirkegaard is an academic, or at least his approach is academic. I think he would agree that he is a racialist and, on the matter of intelligence, a hereditarian. That does not make him “far-right,” though it might endear him to some who are far right. “Far” would, here, be hyperbole. You want to see something that looks far-right, look at Rightpedia, which Connors claims that I defend. Absolutely, I don’t, but I’m not going over every detail. A liar can toss mud with a few words that then take many words to answer, unless one just wants to say: “Liar!” And what do we think of people who cry “Liar” without providing evidence? Or, say, “fake news!” And who says that phrase over and over?
Is there evidence that Kirkegaard is a “child rape apologist”? That’s highly defamatory, designed that way, in fact.
Yes. There is evidence for the claim, if you take a comment Kirkegaard made in 2011, out of context, ignoring the rest of the page. I like verifiable evidence, but the problem is that some people — and apparently some newspaper reporters — don’t read carefully. They see a claim on RationalWiki that Kirkegaard is a “child rape apologist,” and there is a link. They follow the link, and, yes he wrote what was quoted. They don’t bother to read the rest of it! And so Oliver Smith got his defamation repeated in mainstream media and then he cited the media as proof it was true. This is the Kirkegaard comment, from 2012.
If anyone can read the whole comment and still think that Kirkegaard is a “child-rape apologist,” well, congratulations on the ability to maintain an opinion in the face of clear contrary evidence.
There is a little more. That was in 2012. Here is what Oliver D. Smith was writing in 2012, as Atlantid
He has acknowledged being Atlantid. Blatantly racist. Is this unfair? It could be. He changed his mind, see this farewell to Metapedia (which was definitely right-wing). (He did apparently lie, later, just below, about his connection to RationalWiki, but I haven’t checked the exact dates, and there is some disruption that has been attributed to Oliver Smith that was actually — more likely — Darryl.
The point is that to characterize someone prominently based on an obscure comment they made many years ago is … not fair! In 2012, Darryl was 22, and he has acknowledged a diagnosis of schizophrenia. From my direct email contact with him, he is still unstable, his sanity seems to come and go, fairly rapidly. There is correspondence with him reproduced here, and what starts out as reasonably calm and sane, as in the first part of that farewell, becomes highly reactive and blaming. “Lies!!!” Notice the mention of mikemikev, a long-term obsession of his.
https://rationalwiki.org/wi… Liar. You are not a sysop on Rationalwiki you have been trying to vandalize Rationalwiki for years because they exposed your internet harassment and racism.
This is easy. To convince communities and administrators, the Smiths rely on most people not checking sources or investigating independently. RationalWik allows any sysop to remove the sysop privilege, and it gives the privilege relatively easily. My RationalWiki user rights log.
I did not claim to be a sysop. I claimed that I was a sysop. The log shows that the right was first given in February 2012. That went back and forth, as these things do when someone is not a hard-core RationalWikian, but a neutral skeptic — with some opinions or wanting to present unpopular evidence. David Gerard removed the right in August, 2012. Gerard was still only a tech, not yet a moderator, he was elected in 2013. There is a story there…. Two weeks later, the right was restored by Blue, who was a moderator. (Moderators have the power to prevent a user from being “demoted,” they call it, to sysop. The removal reason shows how RW used to operate. No “cooping,” i.e., discussion of the removal of rights. Later, Gerard had enough power to ignore that, and he removed the right, after a complaint by Anglo Pyramidologist socks, 9 October, 2017. So I had the rights for over five years.
However, my contributions and the history of my RW user page shows the situation. The page was vandalized in 2012 by Occasional use. I indicated an intention to avoid RW, This edit shows the summary.
The harassment that appeared in October was preceded by my first edit in years. That edit told what had preceded the creation of the article on me, which was created 5 October 2017 by an obvious AP sock, almost certainly Darryl L. Smith, with this, and other actions, carrying out threats to retaliate for documenting Wikipedia socking. This pattern of threats and libel and impersonation — which appeared in strength after I was blocked on RW — is a widely-known behavior of AP socks. Oliver D. Smith, who was, from interests, probably Oliver D. Smith, and the RW sysop who later blocked me (Skeptical), claimed in an email to me that most of the socks were his twin brother, Darryl. Sometime around this point, I suspect that Oliver became involved in the attack on me on Wikipedia (where I had not edited since 2011) and Wikiversity (where I had been mostly inactive for two years, but returned to deal with impersonation socks and attacks on Wikiversity and a Wikiversity user).
Those RW attack socks have names characteristic of socks created by AP, probably Darryl, but there is crossover with the brothers. Oliver admitted creating two articles that were started with an impersonation name, and there is circumstantial evidence that Oliver created the lulu book impersonations.
(It is possible it was his brother. There are no other reasonable suspects. Bill Connors appears there, claiming to be an RW sysop. Yes. He is, through several accounts. The photoshopped image of with my face on an obese almost-naked man was definitely first published by Oliver D. Smith, that evidence is very strong. There is a worse image (the man is completely naked) on a book pretending to be by Rome Viharo, but like all the impersonation books so far, the content is from RationalWiki. The image is of Tim Farlyy. Why him? Well, because Viharo suspects him of behind-the-scenes involvement with the AP socking. I am unconvinced.)
This is a common AP tactic: using impersonations, present the imagined arguments of his targets as parodies, extreme, and do this especially with something that might have some truth to it. It creates an apriori “paranoid conspiracy theory” impression. I’ve seen it work. On RationalWiki all the material relating to the AP socking has been deleted, some of it revision-deleted so that even sysops cannot see it. Yet anyone else socking in other places is documented in articles. It’s a fascinating public relations technique, that can work for a time.
Abd Ul-Rahman Lomax you have been globally banned by the Wikimedia Foundation. Its funny when you call other people socks. You have also defended the neo-Nazi Emil Kirkegaard. You have 0 respectability.
Again, repetitive and irrelevant. It would imply that I am massively socking, which I have not done. This is coming from a person who has about 200 tagged socks on Wikipedia, and who has claimed to have more active accounts. He definitely has active accounts on RationalWiki, see rationalwiki/anglo-pyramidologist/list-of-articles/
(With the retirement of ODS, the current Oliver account appears to be MrsBlintz, and Debunking spiritualism has returned to strenuous activity.)
As to Kirkegaard, I have defended the truth. A judgment of Kirkegaard as “neo-nazi” is not apparent from what I’ve seen. However, he’s been accused of being a “child rape apologist,” which claim is radically unsupported by the evidence, which has been cherry-picked and presented out of context, and the actual context would lead to very different conclusions. Technically, yes, this is defending him from false claims. Is that reprehensible? Apparently, Bill Connors would have it be so. Who cares about the truth? Lynch the lying rapists!!!
https://rationalwiki.org/wi… “Lomax takes issue with the Southern Poverty Law Center which he claims is “highly political”. He criticizes their report on Richard Lynn, claiming “this hit piece is simply hitting on stereotypes about racism and sexism, knee-jerk expectations”. On his blog, Lomax links to the neo-Nazi encyclopedia Rightpedia as a “valid” source of information”.
This is a clear example of the divisive AP tactics. The RatWiki article sources the claim about the SPLC to a page where I studied the claim of Oliver D. Smith in a short-lived blog about Kirkegaard that information was “well-sourced.” In fact, the media cited got their leads from RationalWiki or Oliver Smith himself, and apparently did not carefully check. So I looked at the sources claimed by Oliver, hence that page.
These pages are generally study notes, finding sources and summarizing or analyzing them, and this writing is not generally polemic, i.e., succinct, sound-bite, and is not designed to rabble-rouse. The issue I was looking at was attendees at the London Conference on Intelligence.. Richard Lynn was listed, and I wrote about him (with comments now inserted)
Richard Lynn (Wikipedia article). A link is given to a web site about Lynn: https://www.splcenter.org/fighting-hate/extremist-files/individual/richard-lynn That is the Southern Poverty Law Center, which is highly political.
This was a comment about Wikipedia reliable source. “Highly political” is not an attack on the SPLC, which is particularly valuable for its political work! SPLC would not be a reliable source for fact on Lynn, by Wikipedia policy, if policy were being followed. That is generally true for political sources, it is like blogs. I could look at how the source was used, but this was not “taking issue with the Southern Policy Law Center.” I might agree with their conclusions, in fact. I was, instead, examining the solidity of sources, faced with a claim that they were “well-founded.”
In 2016, Lynn spoke on “Sex differences in intelligence.” If Lynn is smart, he would be talking about how much smarter than men, women are. Seriously, I have two immediate reactions: comparing intelligence between woman and men is extremely difficult, what one can do is to compare measures only. and there are hosts of stereotypes to deal with. Men have trouble understanding cooking and taking care of babies, right? And especially men have trouble understanding women, famously.
Does Lynn give a decent speech, raising questions worth considering, or was this uninterrupted racist or sexist propaganda? To know, one would probably have to be there! This hit piece is simply hitting on stereotypes about racism and sexism, knee-jerk expectations. The Wikipedia article provides much more balance. I’d be amazed at a Conference on Intelligence that did not include Lynn. Yes, his views might be highly controversial, and he might take positions on social issues that I might find offensive, but the man does have academic qualifications.
This does not defend views. It is about objectivity, neutrality, and the SPLC article isn’t neutral, it leads with conclusions. I read what Lynn allegedly wrote there, and I don’t have time to research it in detail. The SPLC page has an apparent political purpose: to discredit Lynn, it is not simply to inform about his views.
I’m starting to smell academic censorship, rejection of research because it offends political correctness (which is more or less what Kirkegaard has been claiming). The existence of that kind of bias does not mean that the research is sound, but a free academy will not be reasoning from consequences. Data is data. Interpretation of data is distinct from that, and interpretation is often quite biased. According to the Wikipedia article on Lynn, he sits on the board of the journal Intelligence, published by Elsevier. He is also 87 years old. Someone is surprised that he attends and speaks at a conference on intelligence?
This was much more abou the general academic milieu than about the SPLC article, which would simply be reflecting it, from their own political perspective.
The purpose here was to examine how a collection of selected facts were used to create an impression in media of a blatantly and offensively racist conference. The problem, from my point of view, is that racialism and racism are not the same, and, if we are careful about language, statements that might appear racist, knee-jerk, may simply be factual. These kinds of semantic difficulties foment and foster division among people, and if the goal is to “hate nothing but hatred,” if hatred is the true enemy, polemic that fails to allow diversity of thought fosters and creates hatred.
On RationalWiki they claim I am vague about racism. I’ve been explicit: racism is, in my view, an extension of ancient and probably instinctive survival reaction. We evolved under tribal conditions, small groups, family groups, not large populations with high genetic diversity. The visible markers that people use to quickly discriminate “race” are signs that a person is probably different, from some different tribe, and under some conditions, that would be a danger signal, requiring rapid response for survival.
There are many examples where our instinctive survival responses (fight or flight, generally) have become dangerous in themselves. It is difficult to define “intelligence.” It is obvious, though, that there is a genetic component to intelligence, but core to intelligence is experience. Intelligence doesn’t exist in the human brain when it has no training or experience. It is obvious that genetic variations might lead to differences in brain performance under differing conditions, but I see no sign that these differences are major; rather, all the evidence I have seen is that it is the programming of the brain, the accumulated experience, which includes the learning of technique and analysis, is environmentally based. It is that programming that is crucial, the hardware, so to speak, is less fundamental. However, no hardware, no intelligence.
“IQ” is not the same thing as “intelligence.” IQ is a test result, on a standardized test. I have no doubt that the tests will include cultural bias, or, more subtly, may include “triggers” that can statistically alter group performance.
Further, even if there were substantial genetic differences affecting intelligence, that does not automatically lead to what amount to racist political decisions. In fact, some people have disorders or diseases which impair performance. “Eugenics” has a very bad name because of mixing up the possibly laudable goals of eugenics with racist and inhumane policies. Remarkable, here, is what I found about the RW user behind the hatred of the racialists and hereditarians: blatant racism, expressed on Metapedia, that would indicate what kinds of traits he would consider “good,” i.e., “improvements.” Definitely not kinky hair! He later renounced the racism, though I’m not sure he really understood the issues, but kept the high intolerance, the attempt to attack any views different from his, the intellectual fascism.
Racism is not going to be long-term addressed through hating racists. Absolutely, violent racists should be disempowered, but racialism (which I’ll define as the belief in race as a biological reality, more than simple population genetics) is very common. When we label people with these views as “deplorables,” we lose elections. To combat racism, our goal must be to educate (Not indoctrinate, i.e., forced education) and when we do that, people will transform themselves. At least most will.
I should mention: Black Lives Matter.
Of course, all lives matter! But that slogan arose in a context where black lives, too often, did not matter. It’s a medicine and certainly not a claim that “white lives” don’t matter, or that police lives don’t matter. An antidote to racism is caring about people. All people.
Continued comment
“Bill Connors,” an obvious fake account, continued to attack. Responding to my single comment, place in lieu of individual responses, since this mess is not likely the interest of the SPLC blog, he wrote two comments. My responses are in italics.
Abd-Ul-Rahman Lomax says in the above link his friend Emil Kirkegaard is not racist or far-right, that is laughable https://rationalwiki.org/wi… for the real facts.
For starters, I did’t say that. I wrote that I had seen no evidence that Kirkegaard is these things, but that he is a racialist, and might have some views that are right-wing. “Far-right” is not generally a fact, it’s a complex judgment relative to an overall view. The RationalWiki article includes much which is not “real fact,” such as the claim that Kirkegaard is a “child rape apologist.” From the evidence, that’s preposterous. And this is irrelevant to the issues raised in the SPLC article.
Racialism is not racist, though some racialists might be racist. See also this HuffPost article, explicitly on this point. The confusion causes political damage to the cause of disempowering racism, a cause which I firmly support. The Wikipedia article on this is … weird, and shows evidence of POV pushing. Instead of a focus on racialism and the history of it, it is mostly an argument that racialism is wrong. I happen to agree with that, but … on a separate page, I explore the distinction between racialism and racism, and what is said in that Wikipedia article.
However, the postings of Bill Connors are an example of how hatred is neither right-wing nor left-wing, and my view is that the real enemy of humanity is hatred, which sometimes masks itself as anti-hate. Falling into hatred is an obvious hazard for anyone who is confronting hatred.
The end of racism will not come from hatred of racists, which perpetuates conflict. Even less will it be furthered by hating racialists, the fundamental concepts of which are very common. Yes, they are in error, but the error is not corrected by hating people with those beliefs, at all. The opposite, in fact.
RationalWiki is a joke wiki, started by mostly adolescent refugees from Conservapedia. It is founded in snark, and snark — dismissive and contemptuous comment — is policy there. (I was a sysop there until the AP affair, but I had given up on using it for anything serious.) Citing it as if reliable source is proof of ignorance or extreme bias, full of hate. In the case of the author of the article, it would be ignorance, in the case of “Bill Connors,” who, from evidence, is the primary author of the articles cited, it’s effectively the lies of a hater.
“Inflammatory claims”? No all factual. You are globally banned by the Wikimedia Foundation for harassing users https://meta.wikimedia.org/… and you spend your time defending racists like Emil Kirkegaard and Mikemikev.
Bill Connors is not a known person. On another site, he claimed to be a RationalWiki sysop, almost all of which are anonymous, but there is no sysop by that name. However, behaviorally, he may well be one.
Yes, I am globally banned, but Connors has invented the reason for it. Others think I was banned because I was a critic. Global bans never stated a reason, it is private (even if a user waives privacy, they don’t explain.) I did not harass users, but it is entirely possible that I was accused of this, and, if so, the WMF believed lies. That happens on occasion.
This claim of defending racists is just another deception from one who has been attacking Kirkegaard and Mikemikev — and many others not arguably racist — for many years. I defended a target of this person from the consequences of his impersonation on Wikipedia, and there is clear and abundant evidence of that, which will be cited on request. I exposed the abusive socking and was attacked, and threatened with deletion of all my work. And, remarkably, that happened! Extensive work that had stood without disruption for a decade was deleted. (Though I was able to recover all of it.) How did that happen? I became even more interested! How did an obvious long-term abuser, globally banned as such by stewards, manage to accomplish this?
The answer is that there is a much deeper problem than a pair of crazy brothers. The problem cuts to the core defects in Wikipedia and its vulnerability to manipulation by factions. These factions need not have majority support, and years ago, I concluded that a handful of users could strongly manipulate Wikipedia through off-wiki coordination to promote their point of view and attack what offends it.
I previously had seen evidence of such coordination, but … I had dismissed it. “Never ascribe to a conspiracy what could merely be ignorance.” I no longer dismiss it, because, particularly with the ban, and the evidence I found researching this matter, the evidence becomes overwhelming that collusion exists. To discover the full extent of it may take legal action, and the ban gives me a wedge into discovery.
I certainly don’t believe that people are machines, in the sense of determinism or physicalism. I was merely describing myself as what I am, someone with Asperger’s syndrome. It’s easy to forget that most people don’t think this way.
People are machines (biological machines) and people are not machines (i.e., mechanism is not enough to explain our experience). In this case, my reference is to fixed response, associated with “identity.” “I’m just that way” is a reference to machine-resemblance. Skilled manipulators of public opinion rely on “machine” behavior. Key words can trigger “knee-jerk” responses, with high emotional content. Kirkegaard’s essay (really just a blog post, a quick reaction from him, long forgotten until dredged up by Smith) was easily used to manipulate opinion. His “words” created the desired response, particularly as primed by the references to the most outrageous words, completely ignoring other words (such as “castration.”) Haters manipulate in this way.
In addition, haters will present a past incident using the present tense. So, even if that post had actually been supporting “child rape” — major trigger words –, that was six years ago, and not followed up by any support for the claim of a continuing “apology,” there is zero evidence of an ongoing position like that. This was all hatred, defamation, and not actually address possible real, ongoing issues. With Kirkegaard, this would be “racialism,” — the idea that race has some biological reality — and “hereditarianism” — which, applied to “intelligence” — is the idea that intelligence is strongly affected by genetic differences.
When the conversation becomes filled with hatred, the reality becomes difficult to discern. Others have written about this with more depth and experience than I, but it’s obvious that genetics influences intelligence and the real question becomes “with the human population, how much?” I find it reasonable to suspect “not much,” but with a polarized context, people line up to support extremes, and consequentialism reigns. I.e., an alleged fact must be wrong because it supposedly leads to disliked conclusions. But fact and conclusion are not at all on the same level. Facts are facts — and require detailed assessment to even begin to draw rational conclusions. “Intelligence” is often confused with “I.Q.” which is performance on a test, numbers when can then be averaged over a population. “Intelligence” itself is not simple to measure, to tease out “native intelligence” from environmental influences. I am not convinced it is possible, but people like Kirkegaard are making the attempt. Perhaps the research is flawed, perhaps the conclusions are unwarranted from facts found, but those are questions to be addressed scientifically. To claim that a researcher who has unpopular findings is therefore a hater (or hated category, like “neo-Nazi” or “child rape apologist” is … being a hater, unless “hatred” actually characterizes the person and their work.
Smith and Kierkegaard are both despicable hate-mongers. Being enemies of each other is irrelevant to the fact that they are both enemies of the free world.
You have been taken in by their “Gog and Magog” act. They are in this together.
I have approved this comment because it could be sincere. The enemy of freedom is hatred, and I will agree there with “Collin.” However, Smith and Kirkegaard are not the same. I have had direct communication with both Oliver Smith and Kirkegaard.
Oliver Smith is clearly a hater, he firmly believes, it appears, that he is fighting evil. Those who fight evil are subject to a special hazard: infection with evil, which hides itself by justifying the hatred.
Darryl L. Smith is not so obvious as a hater, and the confusion between the brothers makes assessment difficult, but my conclusion is, from a preponderance of the evidence (including a great deal that is not public), that he is also a hater, he hates “pseudoscience” and “irrationality,” believes that they are evil and must be eradicated. (I suspect that the obvious Smith sock commenting on Hatewatch is Darryl, but don’t consider that proven.)
Emil Kirkegaard does not appear to be a hater. He might be wrong about this or that or even about many things, but I don’t see hatred in what he has written. He has written a great deal over the years, and it is possible that one could cherry-pick this or that quotation, as the Smiths have done with him about various subjects. But I haven’t seen any of it, showing hatred. He is called a “neo-Nazi” by Oliver, and we might assume that this means he hates, (aren’t all neo-Nazis filled with hate?), but that idea would be nothing other than knee-jerk hatred — and even “far right” may be inaccurate about Kirkegaard. Collin, if you have evidence that Kirkegaard is a “hate-monger,” please provide it, I’ll look. Meanwhile, you are making a vicious claim without evidence, one that supports and attempts to spread hatred. You are being what you intend to attack. Is that your intention?
There is a commonly accepted idea that contains a hook: “hate hatred, not the hater.” No. Don’t hate hatred, hatred leads to extremities. Recognize and identify hatred, see it as a common human reaction, factor for it in yourself, rise above it and act with love, for the protection and transformation of humanity.
I admit I’ve made a category error when I spoke of Kirkegaard himself. My concern is rather with the cherry-picked version, as claimed by Oliver and then retold by you. Specifically his essay on pedophilia. I found it on his site and read his own words, and my sense of horror is not diminished.
I arrived at this site after having read a quite nasty and divisive post by “RenaultRetainer”, and googling his name to find out what’s up with him. I assume he’s Oliver, and from what you’ve revealed about him, he seems to be yet another example of a Leftist who, by acting monstrously illiberal, gives cover to a Rightist opponent. Perhaps I’m missing your point, but you seem to be glossing over Kirkegaard’s infelicity in order to counterpoint your grievance with Oliver.
I don’t make a habit of lashing out with epithets at whatever I disagree with (if that’s what you mean by “hating hatred”). But everyone’s tolerance has a threshold, and when something exceeds mine, I don’t mince words about it.
Congratulations on recognizing the error. The cherry-picked quotation was chosen and contexted specifically to lead you into that reaction. I and others have covered that. Pedophilia is a Mirkin Phase I topic, one that cannot be rationally discussed because of the intensity of social and emotional reactions. (“Phase I” does not mean that the topic would necessarily go on to become merely controversial or Phase II). However, some aspects, such as boundary issues, i.e., age of consent, can shift. In Massachusetts, where I live, a 16-year old girl may give her own consent to intercourse, but cannot marry without parental permission. I find that downright weird. Some who have attacked Kirkegaard and others for alleged “pedophilia” were really talking about
hebephilia, which is more or less normal.(This was an error. Teleophilias in general are not “more or less normal,” ‘philias are about sexual preference, not attraction. It is attraction that becomes more normal as maturity progresses, and this is not a matter of age, but of biology and context.)
On this topic, simply stating legal or medical fact often leads to charges of “defending pedophilia.” I’ve seen this for years. Kirkegaard’s comments on the page were inept, but, after all, he was only about 21, and spouting off about topics where his knowledge was thin. I think I’ll create a page to look specifically at the page you mention. In any case, it definitely wasn’t “hate-mongering.” The attack on Kirkegaard as being a “child rape apologist” was based on that comment, six years ago, as if it characterized his entire career. That is what hate-mongers do, blow up the thinnest claim in an attempt to arouse hatred. It worked, you are the proof!
I looked at RenaultRetainer. Probably a man, to be sure, women rarely write like this. He has a Disqus account with privacy turned on. However, he has 19656 comments and 60380 Upvotes. which is high (for both), and the ratio also. This is very unlikely to be a Smith brother, just another very opinionated hater, arrogant, dripping with sarcasm and contempt. One of the difficulties with social media can be how popular hatred and snark can be.
The only “infelicity” mentioned here is the comment relating to pedophiles. My study of the Smith began with impersonation socking on Wikipedia, socking to defame the target, pretending to be the target. The Smiths have targeted many people, and many of them might be reprehensible in some way or other, but even if they are, that’s irrelevant to the problem I was addressing: impersonation and defamation. I can, and have, criticized the views of Emil Kirkegaard, but he does not deserve defamation, with gross misrepresentation of his positions and work.
My comment was more general. You are, however, describing yourself as if you are a machine, with a fixed threshold for detection and with fixed reactions. Yes, we are all that, but we also have a deeper possibility, that can arise when we notice our reaction and make a choice to back up and become very clear about reality, and notice the extent that our reactions are rooted in clear reality, and how much they are rooted in interpretation and story, when many varied interpretations are possible.
The comments on Kirkegaard’s blog were collections of words plus interpretations. No actual harm to children was involved, this was all hypothetical possibility, a possibility then rejected. In your mind, for someone to write what he wrote could seem as a proof that he has a deranged mind, as if he were actually proposing what he wrote. But he was not, and the rest of the post made that very clear, plus his later comments. So your reaction was to your own imagination. Apparently you are capable of imagining some really nasty stuff!