Perhaps I’m just getting old and weary and the scales are falling from my eyes, but the number of assholes in the world who are willing to destroy some valuable resource or community for a small benefit to themselves seems to be increasing, and also increasing their efforts and their effectiveness.
No, you and I just had the singular luck to exist at a time where computers were for weirdos, deviants, and dreamers. The internet was full of people who had naive ideas of what it would be used for and built beautiful and horrible things but they were built largely on ideology, not the banal mediocre lukewarm lawful neutral selfish tribal beige tyranny of the rest of the world. The technology is mature enough now that laws and rules and rent seeking and all the old power games are here and and will continue to increase in concentration.
My goodness, you are right. Your comment is like a cold shower, I never thought of it in this way. *We are hippies.* I'll keep being a naive optimist as I am, but this way of thinking offers an important perspective to add some realism to my judgment. Thank you, I mean it.
No. The technology is different this time. I argue software is a form of literacy, and literacy demands openness.
My great hope is the VW emissions scandal where the CTO of the company had to commit lines of code that said “do billion dollar crime”.
In a git repo.
We can see your crimes now.
Wikipedia is this in microcosm - we can see the edits, we can use software to watch for us, everything is in the open and the feudalism and rent seeking exist best in the hidden darkness
the statement of facts[0] essentially disagrees with that perspective.
"33. Supervisors B, C, and F, and others, however, realized that VW could not design a diesel engine that would both meet the stricter US NOx emissions standards that would become effective in 2007 and attract sufficient customer demand in the US market. Instead of bringing to market a diesel vehicle that could legitimately meet the new , more restrictive US NOx emissions standards, VW AG employees acting at the direct of Supervisors B, C, and F and others, including Company A employees, designed, created, and implemented a software function to detect, evade, and defeat US emissions standards.
tl;dr : Bosch (company A) along with VW employees created the evasion function at the behest of supervisors.
Alternative internet communities with higher (even if only slightly) barriers for entry and no financial incentives to ruin everything. Maybe mastodon/matrix communities or something? I honestly am not up to speed on what exists in geek online communities space nowadays.
No, the people who run those are the people who couldn't cut it as reddit mods.
If you want the old internet vibe the dark Web is the place to be. Tor, freenet, i2p.
I'm quite partial to freenet because it's completely segregated from the regular internet and refreshes as the speed of dial up. No interactive web2.0 here.
For some reason it's unpopular here, but that "place to go" is the altweb of crypto and other networks like I2P, often dubbed "web3". Yes, all of the scams and beige this-or-that are there. But it's so vast and so granular right now that you can definitely find your dreamers and weirdos doing interesting things.
When I lived in a small European town a few years ago, upon hearing that I was a software developer, regular-ass business dudes would regularly want to talk about NFTs, inbetween a conversation about football and one about cars.
I'm sure there are weirdos in the web3 spaces, but I feel like they're very outnumbered. Projects like ENS or IPFS are probably much more interesting to weirdos than most "crypto stuff". I2P too, though I don't think this twenty-year-old project should be lumped in with "web3".
I think the Fediverse is a better place to go. Lots of little communities, almost all of run by regular nerds, each one with their own quirks and petty personal drama and constant UI tweaking? It's like forums all over again, except it's now safe to use one password for everything.
I have a lot of respect for you and am disheartened to hear such a blasé condemnation of a big umbrella. The signal to noise ratio is poor, but there are genuinely interesting things going on.
If there's a space where the creative impulse is more thoroughly commidifed than crypto, I don't know what it is. I say that as an early, often, and continuing crypto enthusiast for the same naive reasons I am an internet technology enthusiast.
I do think, however, that the two movements share a common ancestor in the certain and nearly evangelical belief that technology holds the answers to messy people problems- early internet culture was largely about assuming the best in people, and crypto by it's design is about assuming the absolute worst and harnessing that to make tech.
Of the two, I think crypto is probably more sustainable!
Yeah, I think that's the biggest part of a lot of disappointing things that have happened and are happening.
There's also a separate factor in some problems, which is that the power and reach of bad actors are increased by tech. To use a familiar and relatively innocuous example, before the popular Internet, virtually no scammers from some developing nation halfway around the globe would be able to reach the US, which would effectively mean a lot fewer jerks in the world, as far as people in the US knew.
I also wonder whether sociopathy is being normalized more or faster than before (at the same time that some positive memes are also propagated). I don't know what would be a good baseline for evaluating, nor whether there are good historical analogs for some of the recent sociopathy -- including that practiced by the tech industry, and that merely enabled by the tech.
I also wonder whether sociopathy is being normalized more or faster than before
I doubt it, bad behaviour is more likely to be called out and borderline cases probably pushed towards cooperation. Sociopathy is, I think, the condition where one can't be pushed towards cooperation by social pressure.
I think that the acts of calling people out (in addition to your point about tech empowering bad actors), just makes it seem like they are being normalised.
I think this is the case and appears in many shapes.
* libertarians lift their individual freedom above societal needs but they fail to see their own dependence on them, like any public services funded by taxes.
* Crypto bros advertise new "currencies" but use them as volatile investments or foster such expectations. With this volatility it will never become a fully stable currency. There is a common wisdom in traditional trading that you dont do arbitrage / speculate on real currencies because of their _intended_ stability. Another failed realization (because of personal gain attached to it).
* Right leaning people argue against criminal migrants but discriminate not by commited crimes but simply foreignness. Their percieved superior cultural identity is their solution to internal cultural problems but they fail to realize how criminal sociotopes emerge and that its independent of ethnicity.
You should take some pride that you made it this far. The world is just chock full of assholes, and for the most part the best you can hope for is to not notice.
A weird kind of solace but I hope it helps a little.
It's not that their absolute number is increasing, these people have always been around, they just weren't able to do much damage to things that weren't physically near them before.
The internet changed everything, it has given these people the power to effortlessly destroy things created by anyone, anywhere on earth, no matter where they are or how many resources they have. Making the internet so easily accessible was a massive mistake.
Well, the good news is that there aren't enough of these a*** to destroy it.
When Wikipedia started and even like 10-15 years ago that wasn't a common belief. Especially in Germany. "There are some assholes on earth, how could you dare to believe something voluntary and open to everyone will succeed?!?" (others already posted that it's not unfounded given real world experience)
Wikipedia though is my preferred counter example for that.
I work for Wikimedia and I have been one of the few weirdos assisting in its creation back in the early 2000's. The first time I got exposed to wikis predates Wikipedia and my stance was:
- a site editable by anyone on the internet? That is never going to fly
Few months later I followed a link to Wikipedia and that clicked, we can definitely build an encyclopedia online and the hope (I was in my early 20's) or bet was that more people were wiling to write article than people willing to deface it. I guess we won that bet by a large margin :-]
Even if I was younger, I was not clueless. I was well aware some people would deface it and it did happen. I have also been involved in two very long and tedious fights with editors having a political agenda, which diverting me from actually writing articles. I think that is the real danger: shifting the focus of people from writing articles toward pointless long discussions.
That burning up of resources of the good guys is exactly why a lot of stuff eventually derails. Just like the fight against the online crime rings that hold people's data ransom and that deface and destroy: the defenders have to succeed all the time, the attackers only have to succeed part of the time to be successful. So over a long enough run the attackers have an edge. Wikipedia is an exception, so far. Enough people cherish it that they are willing to put in the effort. But the day enough of them blink at the same time the assholes will take over. I hope that day will never come, but I'm not sure it will not. On a human scale Wikipedia is still very young.
Except that everything regarding contemporary politics in English Wikipedia is biased beyond any belief.
And they seem to be adamant about titling the article about Kalashnikov rifle "AK-47", which is simply wrong (there were only handful of actual units of model AK-47 produced, and the mass armament of Soviet army with AKs has started with AKM), and their justification for that is "but that's how AK called in the media" - I thought Wikipedia is there to debunk media myths, not amplify them.
That's not the full story. If you read into https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AK-47, it's clearly written as an article about _both_ AK-47 and AKM. So, all sentences like "100 million belong to the Kalashnikov family, three-quarters of which are AK-47s" and "Việt Cộng soldier armed with an AK-47" - they are simply wrong. The funniest thing is, they openly admit it in the article (deep down the article! not in the lead):
Most licensed and unlicensed productions of the Kalashnikov assault rifle abroad were of the AKM variant, partially due to the much easier production of the stamped receiver. This model is the most commonly encountered, having been produced in much greater quantities. All rifles based on the Kalashnikov design are often colloquially referred to as "AK-47s" in the West and some parts of Asia, although this is only correct when applied to rifles based on the original three receiver types
And sometimes by "AK-47" the article means the whole AK family - there's a list "manufacturing countries of AK-47", and then the list of countries follow that produce all kinds of AK-type rifles _but_ AK-47. So it's clearly a total mess.
In fact, I'm not the only one that complained about it in the past, there's plenty of complaints on https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:AK-47/Archive_6 And the response always was like "we use the most common name, we're not interested in being correct here, get out".
I was undecided on this topic, but the comment you linked convinced me of Wikipedias stance. The linked guidelines about using commonly recognizable names[0] have great examples for why this naming scheme makes a lot of sense:
I have no problem with calling Bill Clinton, Bill Clinton. He called that himself.
I have some problem with calling someone/thing with a name that was pushed from the outside, and was not endorsed by that someone or the creators of that some thing. Say, Wikipedia does not call photocopiers "xeroxes", it mentions "xerox" once in the lead of the "Photocopier" article, and afterwards, photocopiers are only called photocopiers. (And so when you google "xerox", it'll tell you about Xerox the company, not the type of machines.)
And I'm strictly against of calling a thing with a name of a similar thing, which was not even endorsed. That's not useful at all. That's confusing. Perhaps I wouldn't be too wrong if I called that "relabeling" of AK with "AK-47" in the Wikipedia article, a lie. Because that's the thing with lies, they are often hard to keep straight. So throughout the article, its editors can't even figure out - what exactly do they call "AK-47"? The real thing, what Kalashnikov called AK-47, and all its different issues? Or that, and AKM? Or the whole AK family? The answer to that can change in different points in the article.
And I totally understand that people want to call it AK-47. I wouldn't even bring that up if they explained that in the article's lead. Like, "this is an article about AK-47, but what you probably wanted to read about, is actually AKM, here's why". But they don't even do that - not in the lead, at least. Why?
Perhaps because Wikipedia article's leads are used for Google search. Google is actually a major contributor to the Wikimedia Foundation. These leads are shown in SERPs, and they are probably used for Google's machine learning shenanigans elsewhere. Wikipedia is the biggest array of structured, easily-readable information in the world, and Google uses it.
Perhaps, that also was one of motivations behind the "use the common name" rule in Wikipedia, and the adamancy of the Wikipedia editors to use it in this particular case, even when it doesn't make much sense. Because when the average user googles about "ak-47", he doesn't want to be lectured about the differences between AK-47 and AKM and whatnot. He only wants to know about that thing that, as the myth in the media goes, was made by Kalashnikov in 1947, was all sold throughout the world, and has not changed ever since. And it's also on Mozambique's flag.
Because lecturing users is bad for Google's business. So maybe, this is an example how Google's interests made Wikipedia lie.
great examples for why this naming scheme makes a lot of sense
Great example when doing according to the letter just makes more stupid. Sure, in English (which one, btw? US English? UK English? Global Universal English?) it's commonly named such, but you are reading that article on the site what poses itself as encyclopedia, more so as encyclopedia which strictly relies on other documentation for the article texts and data. Anyone sane would just add a remark at the start of the article about usage of that name in English, because that's quite important thing all and all.
But not only there are no such remark, but those people actively refuse to add one.
And finally, in the article:
> The Kalashnikov Museum (also called the AK-47 museum) opened on 4 November 2004 in Izhevsk, Udmurt Republic
.. but it's not called 'AK-47 museum'! It's 'The Kalashnikov Museum and Exhibition Complex of Small Arms'!
So they just blatantly 'renamed' the museum to fit their shenanigans, completely ignoring their own principles of encyclopedia.
I’m still peeved that they don’t follow that guideline for the Sears Tower, and instead call it the “Willis Tower”. Just because the signage was changed doesn’t mean anybody actually calls it that.
It’s definitely gotten worse in politics over the last decade. It used to be the case I could look at politicians and hate their policies and values, but know that they were genuinely trying to shape their country into what they thought was best. Now it seems to be overtaken by shameless grifters who will happily tear everything down if it profits them in some way.
This is commonly attributed to Vonnegut, but apparently wasn't written by him:
``Accept certain inalienable truths: Prices will rise. Politicians will philander. You, too, will get old. And when you do, you'll fantasize that when you were young, prices were reasonable, politicians were noble, and children respected their elders.''
It's from an an essay written as a hypothetical commencement speech by columnist Mary Schmich, originally published in June 1997 in the Chicago Tribune.
Then released in several versions as a spoken word song by the Australian director Baz Luhrmann.
Vonnegut had nothing to do with it, and it doesn't preclude that there really are changes that slide one way or another, in fact when I was a kid compared to the wages of the day many prices were more reasonable than they are today, many politicians were in fact much more 'noble' (though that word doesn't really fit) than they are today. As to whether children respected their elders or not I have no opinion on but the other two definitely have shifted where I live, the kind of rabble that sits in parliament here today would never have gotten a pass in the 70's. FFS we have a guy here that believes that lizards rule us.
The fact that enough people vote for these characters has me more than a little bit worried. Democracy is super fragile and to wave away the observable fact that in the past things were quite different by quoting some random text seems to be a bit too glib and easy.
Is this still currently a thing? I would think, with Covid lockdowns, social networks designed to manipulate them from early age and a future prognosed of climate change and war, not many people could think the new generation has it easy.
I think there's a lot of handwaving by older generations as to the issues younger generations are having, yes. Children who try to become interested in social/political issues who realize their future is bleak are often dismisses as immature or idealistic and have their (usually valid) concerns ignored, etc.
From what I've seen the youth's complaints are usually "heard", but not recognized. There is definitely an arrogance to many positions from older generations and a tendency towards dismissiveness for too many reasons that do not address the concerns from the youth at all.
I don't wish ill on anyone, but it does seem that many of these issues that the youth are aware of and even want to change will not go away until the ideas die along with the older generations that continue to do everything to maintain a status quo that the youth have openly said "nah we're not going to do that anymore" -- often just because the older generation's have it so ingrained that there is no other option besides the former status quo for whatever reason.
I’m not sure that’s true? There are certainly people complaining about politicians from every era, but specifically shameless grifters? In similar volume to today?
For instance, you can find no end of people who utterly despise Margaret Thatcher and think that she’s the worst thing to ever happen to the UK. But as far as I am aware, even the people who hate her tend to think that she genuinely believed in what she was doing. The idea that she was wrecking the country for her own personal gain isn’t a mainstream belief is it?
Now contrast that with somebody like Boris Johnson. A politician who is hated in similar volume to Thatcher. But you can’t say that the accusations levelled at Johnson are anything at all alike to those Thatcher received, can you?
The same goes for American politics. Take a look at the criticisms directed at Trump compared with those directed at either Bush. There is a qualitative difference.
I don't know, I was little when Thatcher was around and not British, but I do remember her being criticized for stuff like "Margaret Thatcher had a deal with Rupert Murdoch to get elected in exchange for granting him more media control".
The Bush administration was deeply criticized for the Iraq war which was considered just a big money grab for friends and family.
Or consider JFK, which is now rated as one of the best US presidents and his actual legacy.
I am Italian, and people are now saying "you know Berlusconi was bad, but at least he had some business knowledge and charisma, compared to the idiots today".
Just give it ten years and people will say that Boris Johnson was pretty honest compared to these guys..
Newspapers and TV were much more limited and gated. I remember having no access to cable, and thus only 3 TV channels, and two "national" newspapers available easily.
So news was textual, and the TV news was only on at 7am, 6pm, 11pm.
Then came the rise of cable news, and 24 hours news. And they needed to have more news to fill the gaps.
So people turning molehills into mountains is a thing, misconstrued interpretation of actions, unproven allegations, and more is now far more common. And before a thing would vanish quickly from the news, but with 24 hour networks they would come back to it for months.
This took time to develop, so the 90s 24 hr news networks weren't like this instantly. They evolved into this.
Then came the internet. Twitter, facebook, etc. Now more news was needed.
From what I can see, this is a large part of the change.
And as an aside, quite literally "enemies of democracy" work to amplify this. And it's so easy to do.
Pick the nuttiest nut, the least tolerant of boneheads, and donate to their foundation or cause.
The nut doesn't need to even know, they are the ultimate "useful idiot", feed them and they grow into an influential nut.
Nation-states don't need to use bots, they can just donate to causes which cause the most internal friction. Then these characters run around, pointing out every flaw.
Indeed - to me it seems there are politicians, politicians using populism, populists becoming politicians, and the new class: populists milking politics. That is, populists without political goals entering politics and finding fertile soil.
Admittedly, Boris J. is more of a populist politician that keeps dialing up the populism and down the politics until it's pure populism, while Donald T. is more of a narcissist that took the "normal" path to that point.
Comments
Perhaps I’m just getting old and weary and the scales are falling from my eyes, but the number of assholes in the world who are willing to destroy some valuable resource or community for a small benefit to themselves seems to be increasing, and also increasing their efforts and their effectiveness.
No, you and I just had the singular luck to exist at a time where computers were for weirdos, deviants, and dreamers. The internet was full of people who had naive ideas of what it would be used for and built beautiful and horrible things but they were built largely on ideology, not the banal mediocre lukewarm lawful neutral selfish tribal beige tyranny of the rest of the world. The technology is mature enough now that laws and rules and rent seeking and all the old power games are here and and will continue to increase in concentration.
At least we got to see something new.
My goodness, you are right. Your comment is like a cold shower, I never thought of it in this way. *We are hippies.* I'll keep being a naive optimist as I am, but this way of thinking offers an important perspective to add some realism to my judgment. Thank you, I mean it.
You just need to be as disreputable to the current establishment as we were to the previous one.
Slap a swastika on it and you'll never have people trying to take over your project. Same way goatse kept the old forums from being overran by normies: https://web.archive.org/web/20040109213953/http://www.goatse...
No. The technology is different this time. I argue software is a form of literacy, and literacy demands openness.
My great hope is the VW emissions scandal where the CTO of the company had to commit lines of code that said “do billion dollar crime”.
In a git repo.
We can see your crimes now.
Wikipedia is this in microcosm - we can see the edits, we can use software to watch for us, everything is in the open and the feudalism and rent seeking exist best in the hidden darkness
What we do with that is up to us.
We know that VW did not write the code. It was the supplier Bosch that did it. VW simply activated a feature through configuration.
I understood that the VW CTO committed the config chnage ?
the statement of facts[0] essentially disagrees with that perspective.
"33. Supervisors B, C, and F, and others, however, realized that VW could not design a diesel engine that would both meet the stricter US NOx emissions standards that would become effective in 2007 and attract sufficient customer demand in the US market. Instead of bringing to market a diesel vehicle that could legitimately meet the new , more restrictive US NOx emissions standards, VW AG employees acting at the direct of Supervisors B, C, and F and others, including Company A employees, designed, created, and implemented a software function to detect, evade, and defeat US emissions standards.
tl;dr : Bosch (company A) along with VW employees created the evasion function at the behest of supervisors.
[0]: https://www.mass.gov/doc/vw-statement-of-factspdf/download
Do you remember where you read that information?
There's zero chance that the CTO at a company as big as VW is going to be personally committing to code repos.
I thought it was already established that's exactly what happened?
Is there anywhere new for us to go? Or must we wait for some new leap forward still?
Alternative internet communities with higher (even if only slightly) barriers for entry and no financial incentives to ruin everything. Maybe mastodon/matrix communities or something? I honestly am not up to speed on what exists in geek online communities space nowadays.
No, the people who run those are the people who couldn't cut it as reddit mods.
If you want the old internet vibe the dark Web is the place to be. Tor, freenet, i2p.
I'm quite partial to freenet because it's completely segregated from the regular internet and refreshes as the speed of dial up. No interactive web2.0 here.
Outside
Deep space but not with rockets, rogue/advanced biology/medicine?
Be the change you want to see. Create quality content.
For some reason it's unpopular here, but that "place to go" is the altweb of crypto and other networks like I2P, often dubbed "web3". Yes, all of the scams and beige this-or-that are there. But it's so vast and so granular right now that you can definitely find your dreamers and weirdos doing interesting things.
When I lived in a small European town a few years ago, upon hearing that I was a software developer, regular-ass business dudes would regularly want to talk about NFTs, inbetween a conversation about football and one about cars.
I'm sure there are weirdos in the web3 spaces, but I feel like they're very outnumbered. Projects like ENS or IPFS are probably much more interesting to weirdos than most "crypto stuff". I2P too, though I don't think this twenty-year-old project should be lumped in with "web3".
I think the Fediverse is a better place to go. Lots of little communities, almost all of run by regular nerds, each one with their own quirks and petty personal drama and constant UI tweaking? It's like forums all over again, except it's now safe to use one password for everything.
Fixed that for you.
That's the polar opposite.
I have a lot of respect for you and am disheartened to hear such a blasé condemnation of a big umbrella. The signal to noise ratio is poor, but there are genuinely interesting things going on.
You should get into crypto! Seriously, all of them are still here.
If there's a space where the creative impulse is more thoroughly commidifed than crypto, I don't know what it is. I say that as an early, often, and continuing crypto enthusiast for the same naive reasons I am an internet technology enthusiast.
I do think, however, that the two movements share a common ancestor in the certain and nearly evangelical belief that technology holds the answers to messy people problems- early internet culture was largely about assuming the best in people, and crypto by it's design is about assuming the absolute worst and harnessing that to make tech.
Of the two, I think crypto is probably more sustainable!
I like to take the more optimistic viewpoint for crypto that it’s about creating resilient systems that will thrive regardless of external conditions.
Yeah, I think that's the biggest part of a lot of disappointing things that have happened and are happening.
There's also a separate factor in some problems, which is that the power and reach of bad actors are increased by tech. To use a familiar and relatively innocuous example, before the popular Internet, virtually no scammers from some developing nation halfway around the globe would be able to reach the US, which would effectively mean a lot fewer jerks in the world, as far as people in the US knew.
I also wonder whether sociopathy is being normalized more or faster than before (at the same time that some positive memes are also propagated). I don't know what would be a good baseline for evaluating, nor whether there are good historical analogs for some of the recent sociopathy -- including that practiced by the tech industry, and that merely enabled by the tech.
I doubt it, bad behaviour is more likely to be called out and borderline cases probably pushed towards cooperation. Sociopathy is, I think, the condition where one can't be pushed towards cooperation by social pressure.
I think that the acts of calling people out (in addition to your point about tech empowering bad actors), just makes it seem like they are being normalised.
I think this is the case and appears in many shapes.
* libertarians lift their individual freedom above societal needs but they fail to see their own dependence on them, like any public services funded by taxes.
* Crypto bros advertise new "currencies" but use them as volatile investments or foster such expectations. With this volatility it will never become a fully stable currency. There is a common wisdom in traditional trading that you dont do arbitrage / speculate on real currencies because of their _intended_ stability. Another failed realization (because of personal gain attached to it).
* Right leaning people argue against criminal migrants but discriminate not by commited crimes but simply foreignness. Their percieved superior cultural identity is their solution to internal cultural problems but they fail to realize how criminal sociotopes emerge and that its independent of ethnicity.
I could go on if i had time.
You should take some pride that you made it this far. The world is just chock full of assholes, and for the most part the best you can hope for is to not notice.
A weird kind of solace but I hope it helps a little.
It's not that their absolute number is increasing, these people have always been around, they just weren't able to do much damage to things that weren't physically near them before.
The internet changed everything, it has given these people the power to effortlessly destroy things created by anyone, anywhere on earth, no matter where they are or how many resources they have. Making the internet so easily accessible was a massive mistake.
Well, the good news is that there aren't enough of these a*** to destroy it.
When Wikipedia started and even like 10-15 years ago that wasn't a common belief. Especially in Germany. "There are some assholes on earth, how could you dare to believe something voluntary and open to everyone will succeed?!?" (others already posted that it's not unfounded given real world experience)
Wikipedia though is my preferred counter example for that.
I work for Wikimedia and I have been one of the few weirdos assisting in its creation back in the early 2000's. The first time I got exposed to wikis predates Wikipedia and my stance was:
- a site editable by anyone on the internet? That is never going to fly
Few months later I followed a link to Wikipedia and that clicked, we can definitely build an encyclopedia online and the hope (I was in my early 20's) or bet was that more people were wiling to write article than people willing to deface it. I guess we won that bet by a large margin :-]
Even if I was younger, I was not clueless. I was well aware some people would deface it and it did happen. I have also been involved in two very long and tedious fights with editors having a political agenda, which diverting me from actually writing articles. I think that is the real danger: shifting the focus of people from writing articles toward pointless long discussions.
That burning up of resources of the good guys is exactly why a lot of stuff eventually derails. Just like the fight against the online crime rings that hold people's data ransom and that deface and destroy: the defenders have to succeed all the time, the attackers only have to succeed part of the time to be successful. So over a long enough run the attackers have an edge. Wikipedia is an exception, so far. Enough people cherish it that they are willing to put in the effort. But the day enough of them blink at the same time the assholes will take over. I hope that day will never come, but I'm not sure it will not. On a human scale Wikipedia is still very young.
Except that everything regarding contemporary politics in English Wikipedia is biased beyond any belief.
And they seem to be adamant about titling the article about Kalashnikov rifle "AK-47", which is simply wrong (there were only handful of actual units of model AK-47 produced, and the mass armament of Soviet army with AKs has started with AKM), and their justification for that is "but that's how AK called in the media" - I thought Wikipedia is there to debunk media myths, not amplify them.
Other than that, yes, Wikipedia is a miracle.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kalashnikov_rifle
links to the English page about the Kalashnikov rifle family.
It's titled Kalashnikov Rifle.
The first image is of an AK-74.
There's a comparative table of about 20+ different members of the family. Each of the types has a seperate page.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AK-108
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AKM
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AK-47
etc.
Perhaps you went directly to the AK-47 page and assumed that was all that was there?
That's not the full story. If you read into https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AK-47, it's clearly written as an article about _both_ AK-47 and AKM. So, all sentences like "100 million belong to the Kalashnikov family, three-quarters of which are AK-47s" and "Việt Cộng soldier armed with an AK-47" - they are simply wrong. The funniest thing is, they openly admit it in the article (deep down the article! not in the lead):
And sometimes by "AK-47" the article means the whole AK family - there's a list "manufacturing countries of AK-47", and then the list of countries follow that produce all kinds of AK-type rifles _but_ AK-47. So it's clearly a total mess.
In fact, I'm not the only one that complained about it in the past, there's plenty of complaints on https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:AK-47/Archive_6 And the response always was like "we use the most common name, we're not interested in being correct here, get out".
I was undecided on this topic, but the comment you linked convinced me of Wikipedias stance. The linked guidelines about using commonly recognizable names[0] have great examples for why this naming scheme makes a lot of sense:
- Mahatma Gandhi (not: Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi)
- Bill Clinton (not: William Jefferson Clinton)
- Aspirin (not: acetylsalicylic acid)
- Sailor Moon (character) (not: Usagi Tsukino)
All of these are technically incorrect, yet they are much more useful than the "correct" names.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Article_titles#Use_c...
I have no problem with calling Bill Clinton, Bill Clinton. He called that himself.
I have some problem with calling someone/thing with a name that was pushed from the outside, and was not endorsed by that someone or the creators of that some thing. Say, Wikipedia does not call photocopiers "xeroxes", it mentions "xerox" once in the lead of the "Photocopier" article, and afterwards, photocopiers are only called photocopiers. (And so when you google "xerox", it'll tell you about Xerox the company, not the type of machines.)
And I'm strictly against of calling a thing with a name of a similar thing, which was not even endorsed. That's not useful at all. That's confusing. Perhaps I wouldn't be too wrong if I called that "relabeling" of AK with "AK-47" in the Wikipedia article, a lie. Because that's the thing with lies, they are often hard to keep straight. So throughout the article, its editors can't even figure out - what exactly do they call "AK-47"? The real thing, what Kalashnikov called AK-47, and all its different issues? Or that, and AKM? Or the whole AK family? The answer to that can change in different points in the article.
And I totally understand that people want to call it AK-47. I wouldn't even bring that up if they explained that in the article's lead. Like, "this is an article about AK-47, but what you probably wanted to read about, is actually AKM, here's why". But they don't even do that - not in the lead, at least. Why?
Perhaps because Wikipedia article's leads are used for Google search. Google is actually a major contributor to the Wikimedia Foundation. These leads are shown in SERPs, and they are probably used for Google's machine learning shenanigans elsewhere. Wikipedia is the biggest array of structured, easily-readable information in the world, and Google uses it.
Perhaps, that also was one of motivations behind the "use the common name" rule in Wikipedia, and the adamancy of the Wikipedia editors to use it in this particular case, even when it doesn't make much sense. Because when the average user googles about "ak-47", he doesn't want to be lectured about the differences between AK-47 and AKM and whatnot. He only wants to know about that thing that, as the myth in the media goes, was made by Kalashnikov in 1947, was all sold throughout the world, and has not changed ever since. And it's also on Mozambique's flag.
Because lecturing users is bad for Google's business. So maybe, this is an example how Google's interests made Wikipedia lie.
Great example when doing according to the letter just makes more stupid. Sure, in English (which one, btw? US English? UK English? Global Universal English?) it's commonly named such, but you are reading that article on the site what poses itself as encyclopedia, more so as encyclopedia which strictly relies on other documentation for the article texts and data. Anyone sane would just add a remark at the start of the article about usage of that name in English, because that's quite important thing all and all.
But not only there are no such remark, but those people actively refuse to add one.
And finally, in the article:
.. but it's not called 'AK-47 museum'! It's 'The Kalashnikov Museum and Exhibition Complex of Small Arms'!
So they just blatantly 'renamed' the museum to fit their shenanigans, completely ignoring their own principles of encyclopedia.
https://en.museum-mtk.ru/
I’m still peeved that they don’t follow that guideline for the Sears Tower, and instead call it the “Willis Tower”. Just because the signage was changed doesn’t mean anybody actually calls it that.
It doesn't take a large number of assholes to undo the work of a much larger number of good people.
It’s definitely gotten worse in politics over the last decade. It used to be the case I could look at politicians and hate their policies and values, but know that they were genuinely trying to shape their country into what they thought was best. Now it seems to be overtaken by shameless grifters who will happily tear everything down if it profits them in some way.
This is commonly attributed to Vonnegut, but apparently wasn't written by him:
``Accept certain inalienable truths: Prices will rise. Politicians will philander. You, too, will get old. And when you do, you'll fantasize that when you were young, prices were reasonable, politicians were noble, and children respected their elders.''
It's from an an essay written as a hypothetical commencement speech by columnist Mary Schmich, originally published in June 1997 in the Chicago Tribune.
Then released in several versions as a spoken word song by the Australian director Baz Luhrmann.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wear_Sunscreen
It reached peak parody when further mangled and released by John Safran as Not The Sunscreen Song https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8YwqFz14xY4
Vonnegut had nothing to do with it, and it doesn't preclude that there really are changes that slide one way or another, in fact when I was a kid compared to the wages of the day many prices were more reasonable than they are today, many politicians were in fact much more 'noble' (though that word doesn't really fit) than they are today. As to whether children respected their elders or not I have no opinion on but the other two definitely have shifted where I live, the kind of rabble that sits in parliament here today would never have gotten a pass in the 70's. FFS we have a guy here that believes that lizards rule us.
https://www.lemonde.fr/en/international/article/2022/10/21/d...
The fact that enough people vote for these characters has me more than a little bit worried. Democracy is super fragile and to wave away the observable fact that in the past things were quite different by quoting some random text seems to be a bit too glib and easy.
It was Mary Schmich and later Baz Luhrmann turned it into a song: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wear_Sunscreen
While I share the same feeling (and we likely are not thinking of the same politicians) it's worth noting every age has had people complaining about
* The current government/politicians, which are worse then the ones we had
* The youth, who have it easy and are not as good as the old generation
We have actual texts from ancient civilizations saying this, so _maybe_ it's just a seesaw, or _maybe_ it's just getting old.
"The youth, who have it easy "
Is this still currently a thing? I would think, with Covid lockdowns, social networks designed to manipulate them from early age and a future prognosed of climate change and war, not many people could think the new generation has it easy.
I think there's a lot of handwaving by older generations as to the issues younger generations are having, yes. Children who try to become interested in social/political issues who realize their future is bleak are often dismisses as immature or idealistic and have their (usually valid) concerns ignored, etc.
From what I've seen the youth's complaints are usually "heard", but not recognized. There is definitely an arrogance to many positions from older generations and a tendency towards dismissiveness for too many reasons that do not address the concerns from the youth at all.
I don't wish ill on anyone, but it does seem that many of these issues that the youth are aware of and even want to change will not go away until the ideas die along with the older generations that continue to do everything to maintain a status quo that the youth have openly said "nah we're not going to do that anymore" -- often just because the older generation's have it so ingrained that there is no other option besides the former status quo for whatever reason.
I’m not sure that’s true? There are certainly people complaining about politicians from every era, but specifically shameless grifters? In similar volume to today?
For instance, you can find no end of people who utterly despise Margaret Thatcher and think that she’s the worst thing to ever happen to the UK. But as far as I am aware, even the people who hate her tend to think that she genuinely believed in what she was doing. The idea that she was wrecking the country for her own personal gain isn’t a mainstream belief is it?
Now contrast that with somebody like Boris Johnson. A politician who is hated in similar volume to Thatcher. But you can’t say that the accusations levelled at Johnson are anything at all alike to those Thatcher received, can you?
The same goes for American politics. Take a look at the criticisms directed at Trump compared with those directed at either Bush. There is a qualitative difference.
I don't know, I was little when Thatcher was around and not British, but I do remember her being criticized for stuff like "Margaret Thatcher had a deal with Rupert Murdoch to get elected in exchange for granting him more media control".
The Bush administration was deeply criticized for the Iraq war which was considered just a big money grab for friends and family.
Or consider JFK, which is now rated as one of the best US presidents and his actual legacy.
I am Italian, and people are now saying "you know Berlusconi was bad, but at least he had some business knowledge and charisma, compared to the idiots today".
Just give it ten years and people will say that Boris Johnson was pretty honest compared to these guys..
https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.theguardian.com/uk-news/201...
https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2021/06/jfk-accomplished-lit...
One thing though, one difference. The media.
Newspapers and TV were much more limited and gated. I remember having no access to cable, and thus only 3 TV channels, and two "national" newspapers available easily.
So news was textual, and the TV news was only on at 7am, 6pm, 11pm.
Then came the rise of cable news, and 24 hours news. And they needed to have more news to fill the gaps.
So people turning molehills into mountains is a thing, misconstrued interpretation of actions, unproven allegations, and more is now far more common. And before a thing would vanish quickly from the news, but with 24 hour networks they would come back to it for months.
This took time to develop, so the 90s 24 hr news networks weren't like this instantly. They evolved into this.
Then came the internet. Twitter, facebook, etc. Now more news was needed.
From what I can see, this is a large part of the change.
And as an aside, quite literally "enemies of democracy" work to amplify this. And it's so easy to do.
Pick the nuttiest nut, the least tolerant of boneheads, and donate to their foundation or cause.
The nut doesn't need to even know, they are the ultimate "useful idiot", feed them and they grow into an influential nut.
Nation-states don't need to use bots, they can just donate to causes which cause the most internal friction. Then these characters run around, pointing out every flaw.
Indeed - to me it seems there are politicians, politicians using populism, populists becoming politicians, and the new class: populists milking politics. That is, populists without political goals entering politics and finding fertile soil.
Admittedly, Boris J. is more of a populist politician that keeps dialing up the populism and down the politics until it's pure populism, while Donald T. is more of a narcissist that took the "normal" path to that point.
grift seems to wax and wane with the seasons. It was certainly complained about at equivalent levels to today during the Grant administration.
But _were_ they? (That's rhetorical, they were not.)
You’re seeing the entire society now.
In the early days it used to be a very selected bunch.
Fight back if you can. I keep an eye pages for subjects I know well, especially if contentious in some areas.
The commons needs more tragedy!