User talk:Hoof Hearted: Difference between revisions

User talk:Hoof Hearted (edit)

Revision as of 10:03, 12 December 2017

7,251 bytes added , 12 December 2017

→‎It seems like SMW never really caught on

Leucosticte

1,756

edits

@@ Line 151: / Line 151: @@
 :All that aside, you are still very welcome here.  [[User:Hoof Hearted|Sean, aka <small>Hoof Hearted</small>]] • <sub>[[:Category:Active administrators of this wiki|Admin]] / [[WikiIndex:Bureaucrats|'Crat]]</sub> • <small>[[User talk:Hoof Hearted|talk2HH]]</small> 00:55, 12 December 2017 (PST)
+::I still run into the question of, if we're going to tone down the vanity and edgy content, then what's left? Vanity and edgy content is usually what's most fun and interesting. That's where all the personality and drama are. Otherwise, it's like, "Okay, we'll put a few statistics here for each wiki, and add each wiki to a few categories, and call it a day."
+::You have a bureaucrat here who's from RationalWiki, and they always have to try to look good to their fellow RationalWikians by trying to suppress anyone they view as a crackpot or crank or whatever. I think what happened was that everyone started taking themselves (and their wikis) way too seriously in the wikisphere. Wikis are mostly about (1) fandom and (2) scientific/technical documentation of some kind or another.
+::In both cases, what people are doing is a little bit absurd. Technical documentation created by the wiki process will usually be incomplete and presented in an inconsistent way, due to the fact that the documentation has been left to the community, without much active direction by any one editor-in-chief whose job is to standardize everything. Even a site like MediaWiki.org doesn't really escape from the pervasive tendency toward fandom that affects all wikis. For example, there are a lot of unusual MediaWiki extensions listed there, since anyone can list whatever extension they want. Eccentricity is part of the charm of wikis, though.
+::As for the fandom, there's also an element of absurdity there, because people will take a seemingly frivolous topic and document it in a serious way, down to the smallest detail, and even cover every possible way of looking at minor ambiguities. So for example, they'll analyze the meaning of various minor events in Christian Weston Chandler's life, and correlate them together into various trends.
+::Then there are these supposedly lighthearted wikis (like RationalWiki, when it first started) where they say, "Let's make fun of all these nutjobs." Yet in doing this, they take themselves very seriously because they want to present a contrast between themselves (who are probably very weird, as we all are; some just keep it hidden better than others) and these weirdos they're documenting and mocking. In a way, they're taking a cowardly path by trying to be so "normal" because the easiest way to never err, or never look foolish, is just to conform to those around you. But progress comes from being a nonconformist and taking some risks. Anyway, they have to purge anyone who would give them a bad reputation, because they and their wiki are just so gosh darn important and it would be a shame to waste all that credibility they've built up.
+::On wikis like that, people will get into fights and take strong positions about stuff that, in reality, they could be wrong about. For example, if you read Hitler's ''Mein Kampf'', there's quite a lot of stuff in there that's plausible. Can't say that on a site like RW, though. And probably you couldn't say it on, say, your Wikipedia userpage either. Wikipedia has to keep bringing in those donations by avoiding controversies that will lead to negative media coverage. After all, when it comes down to it, Wikimedia has a lot to hide. They have a lot of money, yet they keep begging for more, and they waste it on big salaries for unnecessary staff. It's actually pretty scandalous, but the media doesn't call them out on it because Wikimedia is mostly pretty aligned with the left-of-center mainstream media bias. (Wikimedia is also pretty well aligned with the values of its Silicon Valley funders, most notably Google.)
+::The way that Wikipedia arbitrators operate is like a corporate HR department -- increasingly, they speak in a dehumanized legalese and shroud their decision-making process in as much secrecy as possible. Also, just like in a major corporation, the elections are pretty meaningless to the average plebe. If you own a few shares of stock in a company, and you get a proxy to vote on, do you really know who any of these board member candidates are, or have any idea which ones would be best to elect? These arbitrator candidates are pretty obscure too. And at any rate, a lot of the more interesting users, who might have been agents of change by running for ArbCom, have been banned and therefore aren't eligible to run. Or they quit the project in disgust after they get burnt out.
+::Being "welcome" is a fuzzy concept sometimes. I've been told point-blank that I'm not welcome on any Wikimedia site. Yet, sometimes after I get unmasked (aka checkusered) and kicked off again, someone will say that I should try to get right with Wikimedia so I can come back. If they were going to be strict about saying that I'm unwelcome there, they should tell that user, "Don't encourage him." Maybe they just happen to know that what people say to me won't have much effect on me, so they don't even bother to tell anyone, "Don't encourage him."
+::It's a little like rape, actually. On a politically correct site like RationalWiki, or even in the libertarian movement, people will say that rape is a very black-and-white concept. I've come to view it as more of a fuzzy or even, in some cases, meaningless concept. A girl says that she was too drunk to consent. There's no breathalyzer record; nobody knows what her exact BAC was. Was it rape, or no? That's for a jury to decide. If they don't like the defendant, maybe they'll decide he raped her. Heck, even her own perceptions of whether she was raped are probably colored by her perceptions of the guy.
+::We have all these women coming out of the woodwork now saying that they were sexually harassed. Was it bothering them all that time, or did it just start bothering them now? Or, was their perception conditioned on how events unfolded? E.g., they might have interpreted it as something other than harassment, until a bunch of other women started coming forward and saying these kinds of incidents were harassment?
+::One thing I do know, is that women get excited by guys who are willing to cross boundaries into being inappropriate. They like the guy who will bang them in some public place where they might get caught, for instance. They like the guy who keeps going even after they say "stop". They like the guy who gets them drunk at the bar and then takes them home and ravishes them. (That was the whole point of showing up at an establishment where alcoholic beverages are served, wearing an outfit that reveals about 90 percent of her body.) They like the guy who's a little bit of a rebel, and breaks a few rules.
+::There are plenty of guys who wouldn't do any of that stuff. A lot of times, the hot girls reject those guys as too boring. I think there are some women who were in the Miss America Pageant who now are saying that Trump objectified them. Uh, ladies, it's a beauty pageant. Are you going to throw a steak in front of a dog and then complain, "Hey, he was just supposed to look at it, not eat it"? Maybe they should've brought a chaperone, but that would've been no fun, because then they wouldn't have had some billionaire grabbing them by the ... well anyway. [[User:Leucosticte|Leucosticte]] ([[User talk:Leucosticte|talk]]) 02:03, 12 December 2017 (PST)