Addendum: Who the Major Players of the LaRouche Edit War Were

Because I didn't want the last post to drag on, I cut out the backstory elements of the major players. If we talk about Wikipedia activity, we will relate only the barest details, because a lot of this is deserving of future longer articles.

Herschelkrustovsky (Daniel Platt)

Platt is an interesting figure, one of the few examples of "exiled political dissidents" we have on Wikipedia. As far as we know, he lives somewhere in Los Angeles County, where he has a business with a man named Peter Ruckert called "American Systems Publications", which Chip Berlet calls "[an] internet psywar shop." I believe they do LaRouche Youth Movement recruiting from that location. Platt has been involved with LaRouche since at least the 1980s; he was allegedly a donor to LaRouche's 1988 presidential bid. He also has done translation work for LaRouche's publications and wrote book reviews for Executive Intelligence Review, a magazine of LaRouche's mentioned in the last post.

Will Beback (William McWhinney)

Son of a well-known deceased psychiatrist, McWhinney is allegedly a computer operator with the Los Angeles Police Department, a high-level member of the LA Sierra Club until he quit in 2008, and gay. Allegedly never attended any gatherings of Wikipedia users.

McWhinney has a Wikipedia backstory so convoluted and long I will have to write about it in a future post, but I will say that he was opposed to Scientology, Lyndon LaRouche, Transcendental Meditation, and Daniel Brandt (for some reason.)

SlimVirgin (Linda Mack/Sarah McEwan)

If McWhinney's Wikipedia backstory is convoluted, everything about SlimVirgin is twisted in knots. We don't know which of her two names is a cover, or if one is a later married name, or a combination of a cover name, a married name, and her birth name. What we do know is that she is British-Canadian and involved with the investigation of Pan-Am Flight 103, the Lockerbie bombing. Prior to that she was studying philosophy at King's College in Cambridge. The story is that she knew somebody on the flight, then was hired (under the Linda Mack name) by the ABC-TV investigation of 1989-1991 which was run by Pierre Salinger. After pushing some theories, she supported the "Libyans did it" government case when two Libyans were indicted, while Salinger was more convinced that the Syrians were behind it, possibly paid by Iran as revenge for the USS Vincennes shooting down Iran Air Flight 655 in 1988. Sometime in 1991 the ABC offices were raided by Scotland Yard, which took videotapes and documents which few people in the office knew about; Salinger thought Mack was an MI6 agent who had tipped the Yard off and locked her out. She carried on the investigation as a freelancer, and either while as a freelancer or during her time with ABC showed up to a meeting of the victims' families wearing a hidden microphone in her coat; she was ejected from the meeting. She also later started a petition against the Allan Francovitch documentary The Maltese Double Cross: Lockerbie (1994) because it did not support the government case. Since 2002 she has been living in Swalwell, Alberta in Canada. Was she an agent, an "asset", or just a bad journalist?

Her Wikipedia history was just as convoluted; she originally used the handle SlimV in 2003; all of that was later deleted except for a user page, which claims she joined a year later, in November of 2004. As SlimVirgin her major fixations were Israel (extremely pro), animal rights, POV-pushing in certain BLPs, and slamming Lyndon LaRouche with Will Beback. She also worked with Cirt and Jayjg (allegedly Judah Gould). Wrote the Animal rights and the Holocaust article which cannot be touched in any meaningful way.

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That's the problem of Wikipedia; every topic leads to four others, then twelve after that, and it continues in geometrical progression until the blog in which you are writing about all the screwups and scandals of Wikipedia becomes a form of Wikipedia itself, a Necronomicon of Web 2.0 bullshit.