I have been asked to write about W.E. Atchison from an EDnik I know, and to write about his victims.
Above is the man himself - he was an Encyclopedia Dramatica editor/sysop for years, allegedly a decade. By his own admission, he was a high school dropout living in what he saw was a Shitsville (Aztec, New Mexico), a town Eric Barbour called "Very mean.....Aztec High is like the concentration camp, dominated by football and bullying.....[i]t is a shitty, sucky place." We know he was on a FBI watch list, but they found it hard to track him offline because he didn't have a driver's license. In short satanicdruggie was the loseringest Loser in the history of the Kingdom of Losers - because he lacked a high school diploma or GED, he couldn't get a job, he coulden't get a driver's license (probably because his parents couldn't afford the insurance), and his hatred of high school culture and general asocial behavior meant he could never leave this (self-created?) purgatory.
Just in time for the Holidays, a look at how a nut from Turkey did a number on Wikipedia, proof that Jimbo and the higher "leadership" at the Wikimedia Foundation are out to lunch.
Why
can’t we trust Wikipedia content? Ask Adnan Oktar! by
E. A. Barbour
As
if this had not been mentioned a hundred times before, the cult
encyclopedia-thing called Wikipedia is “not censored”, according
to the simple bleatings of its inner circle. One thing they can’t
seem to figure out is even simpler. Whether Wikipedia is censored or
not is completely immaterial. Because all a hostile government needs
to do is to pass laws forcing ISPs to block certain websites within
its borders. Thus, the people who should see unpleasant facts about
their leaders — the people who actually live in that country —
will be kept in the dark anyway. And Wikipedia’s NOTCENSORED
blubbering is basically visible only to the wrong audience; mostly
the idiot Americans and Western Europeans who give the Wikimedia
Foundation the bulk of their donation income. The money keeps flowing
in, everyone is snookered, no one “wins”.
Consider
the odd Turkish figure known as Adnan Oktar, or “Harun Yahya” to
his followers. He is a little-known-outside-Turkey Islamic writer and
cult leader who is mostly famous for supporting creationism,
condemning Israel, and saying a variety of outrageous things in the
media. Plus he is known for trying to get all Internet criticism of
himself censored by Turkish courts. [1][2][3][4]
Thanks to blog entries like this,
Oktar has successfully banned allWordpress
blogs in Turkey.
Quote:
”The screens of A9 before we spoke had shown the kittens listening
with glassy-eyed attentiveness to Oktar’s daily three-hour
broadcast, part of the channel’s 24-hour programming. After a
monologue by Oktar, the kittens swayed disconnectedly to some music
while seated, as two of his male followers danced around them. Among
his causes, Oktar is an aggressive promoter of creationism, and has
published hundreds of gold-embossed books through his organization,
the Science Research Foundation (BAV), in his attempt to rubbish
Darwinian theory, often under his pen name Harun Yahya."
There
is no question that the Turkish regime has arrested
and prosecuted Oktar in the past. Yet today he claims it "never
happened".
Adnan Oktar with his Creationism book, looking like he works for Ernst Stavro Blofeld.
As
of 2017, Turkish media coverage of Oktar tends to be nothing less
than adulatory and loving. And goes on and on about his "kittens",
literally a "harem" of plastic-surgery modified bimbo
followers. [5][6]
It is utterly ludicrous to Westerners, yet Oktar is far from the only
“holy man” in Turkey having a private “harem” with siliconed
lips and asses.
So
that brings us up to the crux: how Wikipedia handles (or mishandles)
the story. As if Oktar's personal history were not bizarre enough by
itself, Wikipedia is dominated by leftists, “free-speechers”, and
pro-Israel cranks who hate him; and so his Wikipedia coverage tends
to be as negative as possible.
Wikipedia
administrator, "evil patroller", and scientific skeptic
Bbb23 fought over the en-WP article extensively in 2011, along with
Ashley “Fae” Van Haeften and other Wiki-skeptics [7][8][9]
and still patrols it for "vandalism" as of 2017. Editor
Geoffry
Thomas
tried to make it neutral in 2011 and was chased off Wikipedia for his
trouble.
"Fun
fact: Oktar's
Wikipedia article
has been a constant battleground since 2006. It is obvious he had
paid editors trying to sanitize it, and fighting with WP resident
skeptics. The top editor is one "Jeff5102", an obvious
socialist and anti-creationist. Some incredible messes in the article
history."
"Oktar
tried to get the Turkish government to remove all Wikipedia content
about him--and failed. You can tell hefailed,
because his
Turkish Wikipedia article
isn't much different. It makes an even bigger stink about his
anti-Israel writings."
From
the tr-WP article, autotranslated:
"Military
status"
"Oktar
was wanted to be sent to the military and was exempted from military
service by the report "It is not suitable for military service"
obtained from Eskişehir Air Hospital in 1993. [34] Oktar reports
from seven different hospitals that he has paranoid schizophrenia.
[34] Adnan Oktar Deputy Attorney Kerim Kalkan claimed that Adnan
Oktar's allegations regarding mental health were untrue, citing the
report of Gulhane Military Medical Academy. [35]"
"On
August 18, 2000, Adnan Oktar paid for the estimated amount of
military service and was discharged from military service. [35]
"Drug
use claims"
"Adnan
Oktar filed a lawsuit on 10 July 1991 on charges of using cocaine by
the Istanbul Security Directorate. In accordance with the principle
that "the evidence is suspected" and "the suspicions
must be interpreted in favor of the defendant", the acquittal
was decided on February 22, 1994, with the Supreme Court open to the
case.
“
Not
that Oktar has anything to worry about from the Wikimedia Foundation.
Luckily for him, Wikipedia was blocked
in Turkey in 2017. And Wikipedia has a long, ranting article about
it. The block was set up on orders from the strongman who was elected
President in 2014, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, a man who has ordered media
outlets to close down, arrested his critics, and “allegedly staged”
a military coup d’etat which allowed him to shoot hundreds of
people he didn’t like. Remember that Turkey is a NATO member in
good standing; yet they are behaving more like a banana republic, and
have done so since the first military coup in 1980. Best of all,
there are worse people in Turkey than Erdoğan, who is at least not an
Islamic extremist. Jury’s still out on Adnan Oktar. Further helping
Oktar’s need to “heel” the Web are some Turkish court
decisions, which also prevent "defamation" of important
personalities like, well, Adnan Oktar.
And
if that’s not enough, have a few more amusing items.
Oktar's
website
is a perfect example of Web propaganda. It’s in English first and
foremost, which means his “followers” cannot read it. But they
are not the targets anyway. Oktar craves attention from the West,
where the “real money” is.
Oktar’s
RationalWiki article
openly calls him a criminal and a paranoid schizophrenic. Needless
to say, RationalWiki is banned in Turkey. David Gerard, the
Five-Cent Dracula of the Internet, has once again failed to obtain
the “uncensored Internet” as he would wish. The Turks who should
see this material cannot, without resorting to TOR or VPNs, which
very few of them are aware of. Or simply leaving their country.
Which, again, the Turkish voters who really matter in this story
will probably never see. It calls him ”President Asshole”, a
classic Gerard troll job. Which the troll-ee will probably never
know about. RW is not an “information source”, it’s a pissing
contest.
The
Jerusalem Post allows Oktar space
to rave
about various Turkish subjects, for no obvious reason.
Please
don’t ask about the Turkish-language Wikipedia. It is a joke.
One of MANY Oktar videos online.
He looks like a cross between Gregory Peck and Toshiro Mifune.
Even though we know they are sitting on 90 million American dollars, they keep on asking for MONEY - MONEY - MONEY, because is salves Jimmy's disappointment at being a barely millionaire, or possibly a multi-thousandaire after all the alimony payments. His hopes of making the Big, Big Money, possibly after listening to hours of Ayn Rand's boytoy Nathaniel Blumenthal (Branden) have never gone as he wished.
So the users of Wikipedia and the world's scraper 'bots have to suffer though these stupid appeals for cash, because the cash never made it to Jimmy's wallet.
Jimmy's need for validation reminds me of an odd little man from Austria....
The years 2007 to early 2008 were the turning point for Wikipedia, when all the scandals finally reached full flower and the insiders and the more internet-savvy portion of general population began catching on that Wikipedia was not to be trusted. The result was that editors began to defect from Wikipedia, and that the culture of Wiki-lawyering grew. If we want to understand why the Essjay mess reverberates, we have to see what happened after both shoes hit the floor.
2007
January - Essjayreveals himself to be a "Ryan Jordan" in order to get a job at Wikia early that month. He is not the graduate-level theology professor he claimed to be; he is a college undergraduate. This starts a chain of events that ends up with Essjay booted from Wikipedia and Jimmy Wales' face covered in egg. This same month Carolyn Doran is hired as Chief Operating Officer of the Wikimedia Foundation. February - Professor Taner Akçam is held in custody at the Montreal airport on the 16th over information added to his Wikipedia biography (BLP) which calls him a "terrorist." Akçam is one of the few Turkish academics not willing to stonewall on the Armenian Genocide and a former jailed dissident inside Turkey who is now a German citizen. Near the end of the month, professional golfer Frank "Fuzzy" Zoeller sued Joesph Sliny and Associates in Florida over libelous statements added to Zoeller's BLP.
March - After some drama both Brad Patrick and Danny Wool quit the WMF at the end of the month. Possibly Brad Patrick was running from the forthcoming Doran explosion, or he was forced out by Carolyn Doran, questions still need answering.
April - Larry Sanger says that Wikipedia is "broken beyond repair." On April 1st Jimmy Wales tried to blame John Siegenthaler for the vandalism of Siegenthaler's BLP on the Australian TV program Sunday, interviewed by Ellen Fanning for the piece "Wikipedia - Right or Wrong?"
June - Doran attends a WMF conference in Amsterdam, Holland at the beginning of the month and is stopped by US Immigration officers upon her return to the United States for the parole violation. This is the beginning of the end for Carolyn Doran as COO, though there are still questions at to why she was not fully vetted before being hired for the job. The WMF is unwilling to admit that Doran was fired until September 14. The cover-up involved everybody at the WMF, including their General Counsel Mike Godwin.
July - John Barberio of Oxfordshire, England goes to The Registerto complain about the OTRS system which he was involved with on Wikipedia, claims that it is becoming "an amateurish censorship board." Sue Gardner is hired at the WMF as a "management consultant."
August - Because "the Hits Just Keep on Comin'" as Dave Rabbit would say, Carolyn Doran goes through her fourth (!!) DUI, which is a hit and run this time. No word if she was still on the payroll of the WMF or living off her final COO check.
December - Greg Kohs talks to Alex Roshuk early that month, gets the killer quote: The point is he [Jimmy Wales] is pretty flaky and he does
not keep his word. He just makes statements and expects us "peons" to
forgive him for his lapses because he thinks we want access to him. I
don't need people like that, we have a word for them here in Brooklyn:
hypocrites. Roshuk was the lawyer who set up the 501-c(3) status of Wikipedia and wrote the bylaws for the organization back in 2002-2003. (We ran across his blog in 2014.) The scandal of that month was the secret mailing list that was uncovered thanks to Durova's clumsiness. Somewhere near the end of the year BADSITES became a topic on Wikipedia Review.
2008
January - More of a December issue, Professor Carl Hewitt (MIT, emeritus) was banned for being "disruptive." Looking at the list above, we can safely say that Hewitt was the least of Wikipedia's problems. The real January scandal was the infamous "Boy Scouts are For Spanking" pedophile greasiness over the now-long-defunct Wikia "encyclopedia" of spanking "art"; the conversation about it started over at Jimmy Wales' talkpage.
February - Jossi Fresco, student/supporter of Prem Rawat (formerly Guru Maharaj Ji) and deeply connected Wikipedia insider is discussed on The Register, resulting in Fresco leaving the next year after a battle that made War of the Gargantuas look like Manos: the "Hands" of Fate.
March - Literary agent Barbara Bauer begins a law suit against the WMF and seventeen other organizations concerning a list article titled "The 20 Worst Agents"; in Wikipedia's case it was linked to Bauer's stub BLP (which has been disappeared.)
May - The ultimate she said/he said in the history of the Internet; Rachel Marsden talks about her short-lived fling with a divorced Jimmy Wales at Valleywag, the Gawker's Silicon Valley focused sub-site that was destroyed with the mother blog after the 2016 Hulk Hogan/Peter Thiel legal victory over Nick Denton. Jimmy Wales is strongly suspected to be the "Colonelpanic" who tried to match wits with Marsden in 2008. There is also the Valleywag article around the same time on Erik Möller's defense of pedophila, complete with his creeper glasses and "come to my windowless van for candy, children" haircut.
Other Elements
Somewhere along the line Danny Wool revealed that Wales wasted WMF funds on "entertainment", whatever that was. Thanks to the power of non-disclosure agreements, a lot of this stuff is being buried by the passage of time; for example we still don't really know who Essjay was, there is much evidence to doubt that he was actually a "Ryan Jordan."Supposedly Carolyn Doran isn't under a non-disclosure agreement and yet we have heard not a peep from her (the humiliation probably outweighs any possible "kiss and tell" book).
As long as we are in a timeframe where we are focused on YouTube, we should talk about the things going on with it right now.
Google is getting weird with YouTube
Right now YouTube is going through the "Adpocalypse" where they have been cutting advertising revenue on certain channels, forcing the affected people to get into the e-begging circus of Patreon,always living in the shadow of Chapo Trap House, the podcast that brings in the most money on the service. That situation has been going on since February and it's now become "the new normal." Business Insider pointed out in 2015 that Google (or Alphabet, Inc. to be exact now) made no real money off of YouTube, and that issue hasn't changed. It is really expensive to run a video storage/streaming website, and YouTube has a number of issues, as this Dan Olson (Folding Ideas) video points out while also nailing the new site VidMe*:
This annoying SEO/Internet branding stuff has become a big deal because YouTube corporate is now seeing itself as this Internet version of a premier cable network (!) and they want everything to be "advertiser friendly", so they have created things like "restricted modes" while not increasing the levels of severity and other settings ("granularity"). YouTube has a massive problem in who "the face" of the site is; Felix Kjellberg, aka Pewdiepie, who became a millionaire playing video games on YouTube and is now screwing that up because he likes making Nazi jokes and saying racist statements while livestreaming. Jim Sterling discusses these issues from an insider's perspective in this video (forward it to 8:28):
.....And he's totally right, because we've never had Internet video before, we have no true historical precedents - thus the probability of regulation becomes a thing and YouTube videos will wind up with a system like movie or TV ratings....all overseen by 'bots because Alphabet, Inc. is too cheap to hire humans in America or elsewhere to look over stuff because allegedly a thousand terabytes of data hit YouTube's servers a day, and they would be forced to hire an army of video watchers.
Where is this going?
I have nary a clue, much like Stuart Ashen talking about his YouTube career.....YouTube might just be sold off in the end because the upkeep is just too damned expensive and any ad revenue will never cover operations. That is the downfall of having advertising pay for platforms and websites, and having lived through the rise and fall of the "New Economy", I can easily see this version of the Internet go under.
_________________________
* I've seen a lot of people from the Channel Awesome ghetto use VidMe as an alternate space to keep videos online and under their control that YouTube flagged or removed outright (their most ancient way of dealing with "problem videos") which is why Brad Jones ("The Cinema Snob") has a channel there, as does Bennett White ("Anime Abandon") and so do others....Todd Nathanson ("Todd in the Shadows") uses Vimeo for the same trick. All to hedge a bet that robots at YouTube will take down videos sooner or later.
We broke the 100,000 view mark at the beginning of this month, right now we are sitting at 102,016 views! Thanks to all our readers around the world!
Above: Every separate IP that has looked at this blog.
This is a story about a video-streaming/video-storage website (Internet people call it "a platform") that became popular, was bought out by Google, grew even more popular, and then a section of the video producers ("content creators") and the commenters noisily went insane. Some of it had to do with Anita Sarkeesian and GamerGate, some of it with a resurgent feminism during the Obama years and the "mens' rights" backlash that came with it, some of it with this march to the Right that happened in the last few years of the Obama administration.
An Anti-History of YouTube
You can go to Jimbo's Jungle to find an actual historyof YouTube, but literally it was just three employees of everyone's favorite buggy cash-transfer website PayPal creating the YT website while working in a jury-rigged office above a sushi restaurant and a pizzeria in San Mateo, California. Steve Chen, Jawed Karim, and Chad Hurley were able to get "angel investors" to pay for their idea, and Jawad Karim appeared in the first YouTube video, shot at the San Diego Zoo.
That video appeared on the site in April 23, 2005. We bring it up because notice that Karim and his cameraman (high school buddy Yakov Lapitsky) are at the sort of place families go and where home movies are shot - it's one of my beliefs about the founders of YouTube is that they didn't understand just what sort of AV stuff would get put on the site. Early on there were no time restrictions, so one maniac spent hours uploading the Coleman Francis clunker TheBeast of Yucca Flats in March of 2006. Why? Because the version that ran on Mystery Science Theater 3000 was under copyright.
And that was during the early period, before Google bought the platform in October of 2006, cut down the upload time for videos down to ten minutes (something that did not go away for years), and before the ads began showing up on videos. Of course the site grew by leaps and bounds before Google took it over and it grew even more under the Crayon G, which allowed the site to diversify: parts of it are a video junkdrawer of high-school and college basic videography and animation class projects, some of it is (obnoxious) combat footage left over from the US occupation of Iraq, some of it are entire movies illegally uploaded, parts of it are utterly bizarre crap, and then there are the one-person-talking-into-a-camera "channels" focused on a number of topics (Jim Sterling's "Jimquisition" video-game reviews are a good example). That's what allows YouTube to be political beyond the clips of news shows, late night talk shows, and recordings of speeches - just ordinary people talking about politics, and it has been fascinating to see that change over time.
Thunderf00t
Phil Mason (aka "Thunderf00t") has gone through a long transformation from "atheist fighting YouTube Creationists" to "angry man ranting on YouTube about Anita Sarkeesian" - and let it never be forgotten that Phillip E. Mason is a working scientist who has published papers. So I don't know why he was wasting time on YouTube. Pretty much there was a war on YouTube between the Fundamentalist Christian Creationists and the atheists/pro-science crowd during the final years of the tottering/slowly imploding Bush II administration, provoked by all the faith promotion done in George W. Bush's first term, and shored up* by movies like Idiocracy (2006) and Religulous (2008). It didn't help that there was a general belief that 20th Century Fox "abandoned" Idiocracy upon release by under-promoting it and not having a critic's screening. But back to Thunderf00t....one of his first set of videos was titled "Why do people laugh at creationists?" and in it he went after then-topical Creationist Kent Hovind, aka "Dr. Dino":
In fact the "creationists" videos are still coming and he is now up to forty-five of them. Below is his newest, ranting about Ken Ham's Noah's Ark theme park:
Where I first heard about Thunderf00t was his war with a wannabe Fundamentalist preacher/Creationist called VenomFangX (Shawn Karon, a Canadian [!] of all things), which was an extremely complicated multi-year street fight where Karon would pull DMCA takedowns of videos, be pimp-slapped by Mason and a fellow Briton named dprjones (himself running a war against that faith healer/late-night cable TV shyster Peter Popoff) plus other now-obscure YouTubers like FactsvsReligion. Here is VenomFangX doing an awful Heath Ledger Joker impression because that was the then-current way YouTube dipshits told people off:
Thunderf00t has an entire playlist of how Shawn Karon was browbeaten into submission and forced off YouTube (of course, just like Peter Popoff, he returned.....because he was too smarmy to be a used car salesman). And that was the second time VenomFangX was kicked off YouTube. Here is PhilHellenes lecturing Shawn Karon's father (just because he could):
I could also mention the series of videos Mason did with Creationist Ray Comfort, but that would drag us further off target. What dragged Phil Mason into the crazy world of GamerGate was the onrush of accusations in the Obama years that some of the big names in organized atheism/"Freethought"/skepticism liked being cads with any women who showed up to conferences, including "The Amaz!ng Meeting"** (now-defunct) run by the James Randi Educational Foundation (not doing too well itself). Also you have the wonderful Islamophobia of Richard Dawkins (and he managed to drag in the 2009 Rebecca Watson "Elevatorgate" issue as well) which first exploded onto the scene in 2011. (Watson wrote about the incident in 2012.) Thunderf00t decided to blame the entire debacle and the long aftermath of blogposts, email chains, and online video with his own take....which was to pull a Julius Evola and double down, claiming that is the feminists that are wrecking the show (and he did a series on it, of course.)
Above is the first of seven videos....before that he was involved with PZ Myers' FreethoughtBlogs website, and that fell apart. So whatever it was that pushed him down that path, he has decided that this is the way to go, even though we are sure it's costing him at work. Meanwhile former (erstwhile?) partner in crime Dick Coughlin recently spent an hour ripping it all apart:
Where it all started to go under was March 2013, when he made the video below, giving vent to the subjects he would spend the next four years and counting ranting about: Anita Sarkeesian, feminism in media, and why it's all a scam or intellectually vapid or scientifically vapid or Something. (You figure it out.)
He now has seventy-fivevideos on this one subject and Sarkeesian is part of all of them. I could give a long, rambling explanation for why Thunderf00t does what he does, but a British man has done a better job than any I could do:
Thank you, Harris Bomberguy! We'll see him again in this, don't worry.
I would like to state that, while I was not a fan of Phil Mason, seeing his ability to reason rot like an egg in broken refrigerator has been utterly horrifying. This is what happens when ideology replaces critical thought and obsessions outstrip balance.
Jason Pullara
Also known as "LordKaT", Jason Pullara first came to my attention years ago, when he had a show called "Until We Win" on the Internet review aggregator site Channel Awesome (formerly "That Guy With the Glasses" - a reference to Doug Walker, the sweatshop site owner). At the time (2007-2011) Doug and his brother Rob Walker were getting as many YouTube reviewers as possible to come over, transfer their videos to Blip.tv, and "get exposure."*** Pullara was just one of those people, and unlike most, he ditched his show to do internet streaming, usually talking to people on Skype (he calls it LordKaT Live!). I'm not a fan of these videos, mainly because Pullara occasionally belches into the microphone. Here is the old version of LordKaT playing the Nintendo version of Ghostbusters on an emulator (it's a re-upload from a fan):
Here he is a few years later on his stream, ranting about Noah "TheSpoonyOne" Antwiler. Spoonywas the reason I stumbled on this ghetto Twilight Zone of online "entertainment" - he hosted Brad "The Cinema Snob" Jones' videos for a short time while Jones was setting up his Cinema Snob homepage because Jones had been booted off YouTube for a copyright strike (the jagoffs who own Nailgun Massacre didn't like his review). Spoony predated Channel Awesome slightly with videos, though he had written for the role-playing game magazine Knights of the Dinner Table before that. LordKaT is mostly ranting about Spoony's comedic screaming of "BETRAYAL" over a new version of XCOM at E3 2010 (it's a videogame convention; XCOM is a game series), and somehow that kept Jason Pullara from meeting a game developer he wanted to pitch ideas to (because he wanted to leave the reviewing ghetto and make games instead). He also mocks Antweiler's semi-standup that he did for fans at a convention. It's all very petty, and you get to hear an hour of it.
Here is his YouTube channel; he has now decided to change the name of his show to Drop Dead Cynical, but we're not interested in that. Here he is this Spring ranting abut Brianna Wu's fundraising for her Congressional run, which he thinks is a scam. (Brianna Wu was/is one of the targets in GamerGate.)
He also spent time in 2015 riffing on Doug Walker's semi-failed gameshow Pop Quiz Hotshot. He also ranted about Walker complaining about getting a DMCA copyright strike in January 2016. The reason why I bring LordKaT up is that he went for GamerGate in a big way:
If you do a search for GamerGate on Pullara's channel, you get a long list of videos; some of them have GamerGate in the title, some are tagged that way. And the more thoughtful parts of Youtube are noticing, such as this Dan Olson "Folding Ideas" video from October 2014 (skip to 7:05 to see Jason Pullara named alongside people like Davis Aurini and Phil Mason):
....And that's as much as I am willing to write about LordKaT.
The Amazing Atheist
Thomas James "TJ" Kirk III, aka The Amazing Atheist (RationalWiki overview; Encyclopaedia Dramatica semi-satirical takedown) is, like Phil Mason, one of the older YouTubers still working on the site; he started in 2006. In the 2007-2008 time period if you typed "atheist" the choice was either him or Pat Condell ranting in an unfinished room of his house (or was it his garden shed?) At this point TJ has thousands of videos out there, many of them mirrored by fans because the originals were yanked by YouTube, and you can watch him in almost real time shift from from Libertarian to moderate liberal Democrat all while still denouncing feminism. Here is a video that was the basis for a remix video that was part of the old ED article on Kirk:
That was from some time in 2008 or 2009 because he's talking about the Great Recession before he coins the word the video is known for, "nigggot" which he wanted applied to fans of Billy Ray Cyrus and Miley Cyrus or the fandom of the entire Cyrus family, he wasn't sure.
The Amazing Atheist early on got into a lot of online arguments, including with Pekka-Eric Auvinen, the Finnish teenager who later carried out the Jokela High School shooting in Finland in 2007. Auvinen was Sturmgeist89 on YouTube. Shades of Pat Condell, TJ Kirk did an angry response video in his garage, a video that TJ Kirk flagged so that remote playback on other sites is impossible (you can do that as a YT channel operator).
From 2009 to 2011 he also made videos for TGWTG/Channel Awesome under the name The Distressed Watcher; his show was called Trailer Failure and he ranted about movies. They were all on Blip and some of them were mirrored (by fans) on YouTube, like this rant about Kevin Smith's nullity of a film Cop Out. He talks about what happened to his show in the video below:
When the Paul Feig version of Ghostbusters became a massive online shitstorm last year, TJ Kirk was there every time it got slightly interesting. And when the movie hit video, he and his friend Paul Zego did a running commentary in the style of a reaction video where the movie ran in a small box in the corner, but they did it on Vimeo to try to dodge the copyright 'bots, and they charged three dollars to see it. That video has vanished, though I did see a copy on YT (also since vanished) and they were mostly smoking dope and commenting on how the lighting was wrong for a horror comedy. Below is the only online proof they made the video:
I think it is obvious that TJ Kirk will be making videos on YouTube until he dies or the site dies, whichever comes first.
“If you want a picture of the future, imagine a human face ranting on YouTube—for ever.”
I am certain the YouTube addicts are wondering why Sargon of Akkad and Mr. Metokur weren't mentioned, and the reason is that they are the foreseeable future of this style of online AM talk radio. Also, they both give me hives.
Here is more of H. Bomberguy talking about the related Pick-Up Artist movement which runs alongside the Men's Rights movement that overlaps with GamerGate. If you skip to 7:58 you will get to see Dan Olson recount how he infiltrated a Roosh V forum meetup in Canada. Below is a video H. Bomberguy did on Carl "Sargon of Akkad" Benjamin:
* There was this general sense that Bush II was sucking us into a Second Coming for the Moral Majority, 1980s abortion protest politics fused with the patriotic fury unleashed after September 11, 2001. It fell apart pretty quickly after Hurricane Katrina, the numerous failures of the "Global War on Terror", and the Wall Street collapse of 2007.
** We had to get that ephemeral MastCellconnection in there somehow, not that he had anything to do with Rebecca Watson, Michael Shermer, et. al.
*** People were not paid by Walker - they were paid through Blip.tv which let ads run so the videos could be monetized. I still do not understand the Walkers' business model, though the rumors of their on-set behavior during the making of their bad satire "film" Kickassia (2010) have been hilarious to read. (Lewis "Linkara" Lovhaug says they are lies. Delicious, delicious lies.)
Before the Lolcow people complain, yes we know that Thunderf00t has a Kiwi Farms messageboard thread, and that the one for The Amazing Atheistis longer because it's years older.
We have made it past the 100 post mark, and we will shortly have 100,000 views. Unlike last summer, this has not been an easy ride, for a number of reasons.
"He went AWOL for two months, sir", the Sergent said.
Thanks to computer issues since resolved, we could not work on the blog during the crucial May and June months, a period that would be a good bet for when Wikipedia finally closes shop and the WMF staff slinks out of San Fransisco with the millions taped to their bodies. Suffice it to say, that won't happen again.
Pointless Drama
The little world of Wikipedia criticism keeps getting roiled by things; in the last month it was HRA1924, which is the collective account of a group claiming to be part of the India Against Corruption movement within India. On the Wikipedia Sucks! board one or more of them was going under the name Moneypenny (with an avatar taken from Wikipedia of Lois Maxwell as the James Bond character), after that was banned, they were using the creative title Username3 (also banned). Of course they were involved with en.Wikipedia, which has a "long-term abuse" page on the group, and a list of the sockpuppets they were using:
Primary target is India Against Corruption but also people and political parties mentioned in the article, Indian journalists, and Indian Institute of Management Ahmedabad
(and its related articles). Since October 2014 this has extended to
articles mentioning both the words "India" and "Corruption", e.g. this one and this one, and then to articles on Indian topics which are the subject of controversies/edit wars.
Repeated assertions that all independently published sources which
do not support their claims are hoaxes or written by corrupt
journalists.
Repeated references to cartels/cabals of compromised Wikipedia administrators
Extensive use of legal threats directed at both the WMF and individual editors
Extreme harassment both on and off-wiki, attempts at outing, demands to know the real-life identity of editors.
Tactic as of 2014 has been to launch various claims of copyright
violation, impersonation, defamation, sexual harassment, paid editing,
racism, pornography, forgery, and "violations of terms of use" on:
In September 2014, much of this was done via accounts claiming to
represent the company "Name Defend", which in turn claims to legally
represent "India Against Corruption 2", but whose website was created
the day before the first Name Defend account was created and is
registered to the National Convenor of "India Against Corruption 2"
(background here).
Engage in off-wiki canvassing and mail list spamming via "Wikimedia
India Editors Forum"/"Wikimedia XYZ editor forums", which have no
connection whatsoever to the WMF or to the official Wikimedia India chapter (see here and here) and via blogs and Google Groups impersonating other Wikimedia initiatives.
They call the group "India Against Corruption 2" because they claim it isn't the original one (the original split in half after existing from 2011 to 2012 and they both went in different directions). We decided to copypaste all of the above so you can see what the list of alleged sockpuppets looked like at the end of August 2017; knowing Wikipedia, this list might change or vanish entirely.
The other thing, somewhat related is that Auggie's Wikipedia Review was yanked by ProBoards this last week. Allegedly some of the takedown had to do with HRA1924 writing insane stuff similar to:
Hey guys -- I'm Carlos the Jackal. I'm an international
terrorist and am gonna blow up the WMF office in San Fran. Just thought
I'd let you know so you can stay clear of the area and avoid collateral
damage.
Auggie bannedthem, but the board vanished anyway. The Dark Knight tried to ask the ProBoards people on their complaints forum about transparency, and it did not go well:
Is anyone here actually aware of any occasion when the abuse department
has responded with anything other than a pointless form letter after
deleting a forum citing Section 25(a), which of course gives them carte
blanche to delete a forum for "any reason at all" (said form letter
simply reminds the victim this is the case). Since the reason for my
post is that I have never heard of it occurring yet, despite two pretty
big forums being yanked in this fashion, and with all emails to the
abuse department having been brushed off with form letters failing to
give a reason, which is all anyone is after (presumably so they can take
retaliatory legal action against the reporter), I would appreciate not
being directed to mail the abuse department. A simple "no" would suffice
as an answer, if that is the case. Or if "yes", some idea of the case
in question (no identifying details needed, obviously), as I doubt it
could have involved the loss of more data or the annoyance of more
customers than the two cases I am aware of. If this is standard
operating procedure for ProBoards, I am amazed you get any custom, and
can only presume it is because your Support documentation doesn't give
fair warning to customers signing up that this is how the business
operates.
- The Dark Knight (as "darkknightthe")
Which was responded to by Scott the ProBoards Admin:
Is
anyone here actually aware of any occasion when the abuse department
has responded with anything other than a pointless form letter after
deleting a forum citing Section 25(a), which of course gives them
carte blanche to delete a forum for "any reason at all" (said form
letter simply reminds the victim this is the case).
Yes - I have been witness to this.
Since the reason for my post is that I have never heard of it occurring
yet, despite two pretty big forums being yanked in this fashion, and
with all emails to the abuse department having been brushed off with
form letters failing to give a reason, which is all anyone is after
(presumably so they can take retaliatory legal action against the
reporter), I would appreciate not being directed to mail the abuse
department. A simple "no" would suffice as an answer, if that is the
case. Or if "yes", some idea of the case in question (no identifying
details needed, obviously), as I doubt it could have involved the loss
of more data or the annoyance of more customers than the two cases I am
aware of. If this is standard operating procedure for ProBoards, I am
amazed you get any custom, and can only presume it is because your
Support documentation doesn't give fair warning to customers signing up
that this is how the business operates.
Our
Terms of Service are very clear on what is expected and these terms are
agreed to when a forum is created. If someone chooses to not adhere,
then that is their choice. And unless a forum is so egregious in their
violation of the Terms of Service that deletion is inevitable, admins
are notified of any infraction and given the chance to rectify it.
Your
thread title speaks of transparency and yet your "first" time here and
first post broaches this topic? Seems there may be more to the story.
The Dark Knight's response:
Your terms are indeed very clear - forums can be deleted for "any reason
at all", so talk of egregious violations is nonsensical, particularly
when no reason is given except to refer back to "any reason at all" - a
customer cannot egregiously violate an open ended term, whose
application is decided entirely by the enforcer, as any logician would
point out. And if this is the unspoken rule, understood by people like
yourself, but not the poor saps who sign up for a forum here, then it
might be worth clarifying it in your support documentation and these
pointless form letters, which certainly make no mention of egregious
violations (of your open ended terms) as the reason for wholesale and
unrecoverable deletion. It seems the only people who think these
violations are so obvious and unworthy of being pointed out, are the
abuse department. They might need to rethink their strategy, as due to
these deletions, ProBoard's reputation is now in the toilet in the
community these particular forums cater for (and happily still do, on an
independent and proudly 'not ProBoards' footing). Indeed, ProBoards are
being seen as complicit in preventing legal action being taken against
the people who either complained or posted whatever it was that was seen
to be egregious, by being so reluctant to identify reasons (because
naturally, knowing the reason would identify the person or persons
guilty of endangering a forum). Not that it is really possible to
endanger a forum whose existence is solely at the discretion of people
who think "any reason at all" is a perfectly reasonable Term of Use that
any sane person would willingly sign up to in advance. They would not.
And then he posted again:
As for transparency, there is nothing more to this that what was
outlined - to my knowledge, the abuse department has twice blown off
forum owners with a form letter after a 25(a) board deletion, which
pointlessly refers them back to the rule which refers board owners to
their error in signing up for a service where "any reason at all" is
considered a fair and reasonable, never mind legally enforceable, term
of use. It is not, not from the standpoint of reasonableness. Certainly
not when the reason is not given. You would be well within your rights
to delete a forum for any reason at all if you really thought that
commercially wise, just as board owners are well within their rights to
decide your stated reason is unreasonable and merits further action. You
appear to be avoiding this possibility merely by deliberately avoiding
giving a reason. Hence the call for transparency. I appreciate the
natural response then is to try to turn the tables and accuse the
accuser, but I owe you now such courtesy, especially since I am not the
owner(s) in question, thus have no say in the matter according to your
own oft repeated policy here. I'm just a very interested observer, and
sometime media commentator.
Which got a response from Kami:
A vast majority of Terms of Service for various services come with a
clause that states either party -- the Service and the User -- is able
to terminate their agreement at any time for any reason. It is a
frequent part of contract writing to allow a clause that would allow one
or both parties to terminate the relationship without breech of
contract.
If you are under the impression that "no one" would
sign up for something with these terms, then my supposition has to be
that the people included in this do not read the TOS of a Service prior
to registration otherwise they would not have registered.
Additionally,
ProBoards clearly outlines prohibited content and uses in their TOS. I
have personally received warnings to fix prohibited content, which PB is
always reasonable about when the forum purpose as a whole does not
countermand the terms outlined in the service agreement.
ProBoards
would be foolish to arbitrarily remove forums based on unfounded
accusations because it's a loss of revenue. If a forum is removed
without warning, it is either a) because the warnings sent to the admin
account were unheeded; or b) because the entire purpose of the forum
went against, or intended to go against, the terms of service.
There
are also legal ramifications to disclosing the reasons behind a
termination of contract to persons who are not involved in said
contract. Without the ability to verify identity, and without legal
representation on behalf of the querent, ProBoards can open itself up to
legal trouble if they responded to emailed demands for an explanation.
If
you are under the impression, or are confident you "know" the reasons a
forum is entirely removed, then you must have better contacts than I in
the 12 years that I have used this service.
It
is clearly obvious that you are one of those individuals who does not
read terms of service or does so after the fact in an effort to justify
an action you should not have done.
Our terms are quite in line with other social sites. In fact a competitor of ours has this in their terms:
"_____ Forum Hosting, may at its sole discretion, terminate any Customer and their site for any reason or no reason. _____ Forum Hosting is not required to tell any Customer why their account was terminated."
While
I can appreciate your attempt to besmudge ProBoards, blithering on with
nothing constructive to say is pointless and does not belong on this
Support Board - which you would know if you, again, read the rules of
this board.
I'm locking this thread as it's not appropriate
for this board and offers no constructive help in using the forum
software (the intent of this board). If you have concerns about the
process used by the Abuse Department, then I suggest you contact them
via email at a-----e@p--------s.com
Thank you.
In full disclosure, I should write that I had dealings with Kami, possibly Scott, when the ProBoards version of the WS! board was trashed, and they were just as unhelpful then as now. Probably it is impossible to use ProBoards for Wikipedia work, possibly because there are links between the two.
This is the world we live in online, where you can't run a board criticizing a nearly-dead Internet encyclopedia project for fear of having it taken down if you don't have the cash to have your own server space. This is absolutely lame. Wikipedia is sixteen years old (which is 10,000 years in Internet time) and yet still commands such respect from the internet business community it's astounding.
