So yeah, if you were ever curious where the profits go every time you fill up your car with gas… there.
I thought I was just building media websites. I didn’t even see the content until after six months. I put in my one month notice, finished what I was working on, and left. The amount of money they offered me to stay was ridiculous. I don’t blame people at Fox News for bending the knee and taking that Saudi money -- I just couldn’t make myself do it.
“Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbor.” A lot of people are going to spend eternity in hell for propaganda and lies.
Over time this led to Saudis being involved in just about everything. For instance the biggest owner of 'old Twitter' under Dorsey was Alwaleed bin Talal Al Saud. Needless to say the zeitgeist on old Twitter and Saudi Arabia have basically nothing in common, so you're probably seeing ideological motivation where the real motivation is generally just monetary. Not every country is conspiring to subvert other countries to their ideology.
Basically Saudia Arabia is filthy rich because of oil, but they fully understand that even if we continue burning oil until we run out, we will run out, within the lifetime of some people living today. So they have to migrate their economy away from oil and, on the timeline for such a revolutionary shift, they have very little time left. This is likely what MBS sees as what will define his legacy.
Personally I'd say that lying to perpetuate a system that is leading to various populous parts of the world becoming uninhabitable is on the wrong side of that line.
i'm allowed to judge you based on who you take money from.
i do, and i judge people who take money to push harmful things. i don't see why this is bad.
I have a responsibility not to lie and kill, as commanded in the Bible. I also have a responsibility to tell people not to lie and kill, as commanded in the Bible.
At the same time, our understanding of the science of the mind, as described by Carol Dweck in "Mindset", is that people are not fixed and can change. That is why understanding, forgiveness, and redemption matter. They are essential for helping other people through the process of repentance -- the changing of a mindset.
"I understand why you took oil money from the royal family famous for murdering journalists; money is nice to have. However, I judge you for it and will not associate with you until you redeem yourself through seeking forgiveness and changing your behavior."
The need to belong is extraordinarily motivating. It became obvious that the cults leveraged the need in the individual to belong to a group by accepting the person without judgement first rather than attacking the person they are trying bring into their group pushing them away.
The leaders who understand that are winning.
It’s about what your actions do to everyone watching, and what it does to you.
Plato makes the point that you don’t make a dog better by beating it. You just make it worse. Same with people. You’re not persuading, you’re escalating.
If the goal is change, you don’t have to be nice, but you do have to be effective!
Personally I'm not interested in running a cult, but I'm very interested in anything that empowers people.
In the case of an anti ICE protest where we shout mean things at the gestapo, a couple side effects include the empowerment of participants and locals. See for example how the dynamic shifts for the woman sheltering a door dash driver from ICE once more neighbors start showing up: https://www.reddit.com/r/minnesota/comments/1q8vvwa/st_paul_...
In the case of the various anti Nazi protests I've been to (proud boy rallies) it's also been good for generating images of just how many people are in opposition to racists.
It's not necessarily always about persuading, sometimes it's more about, well I suppose "circling the wagons?" Solidifying community support, demonstrating capabilities, empowering people and communities, and disempowering, defanging, or scaring racists and fascists. Finally, it's great for recruitment: fed up liberals turn up to their first protest, get one hell of an adrenaline rush screaming at cops and running away from tear gas, and then may later ask the person pouring milk onto their face how they can help outside of protesting. In that sense the cop's escalations, while barbaric and inexcusable, are the unconvincing escalation you mentioned that in fact helps us.
But for you then, I'm not sure your opinions on ICE as gestapo but perhaps humor my position on their danger, how would you instruct anti-fascists to operate in the USA right now in the face of ICE raids? The original idea is, what, applying Christian values? Jesus threw out the merchants and moneychangers, did he not? For certain people, he decided he wasn't in the business of forgiveness.
For what it's worth, I generally agree with what you're saying, my goal in conversation is always to just pull people left. I just have a practical and situationally pragmatic limit.
We should keep talking about the issues and improving things, but don't throw out the baby with bathwater.
Yeah, I wonder what solution people propose that claim that Wikipedia is 'hijacked' or 'compromised' and pushing agendas? While Wikipedia is not perfect, it is the best encyclopedia we currently have, mostly due to collective efforts and maintainers that care about the state of Wikipedia. I would even say that it is a good thing that there is this transparency, that states and capital are trying to influence Wikipedia because then you know that you may take some articles with a grain of salt or can actively push against it. Every alternative to Wikipedia that I have seen so far is one that claims to be more truthful than the original, but in the end these are platforms that push agendas without the transparency and attempt to further obscure power relations under the pretext of truth.
Every alternative to Wikipedia will have to solve the problems that Wikipedia already has to be a better alternative. However, I do think these are fundamental unsolvable problems and everyone who claims to have solved this is part of a power struggle over who defines what is considered true.
Accuse the site of of exactly what you’re doing at this exact moment.
- Oppose the "Super Mario" effect: if admins do something ordinary users would get banned for, they get banned too, they don't just lose their admin title.
- Implement restrictions on Arb Com to make it worthy of its "supreme court" moniker. Provide prior notice, allow representation, access to evidence ahead of the case, and require the Arb Com to disclose the logic of any automated scripts they use for mass judging (e.g. counting proportion of edits being reverts, or that counts every change to a reference as "reference vandalism"). Grant defendants the ability to force the Committee's judgment to be disclosed to the public, with PII redacted if necessary.
- Require that precedent be recorded for unclear meta rules: what counts as a violation of e.g. canvassing? When do reversions become evidence or proof of "ownership"?
- Create an independent appeals body for Arb Com decisions. Like the Arb Com itself, the logic or source code for any scripts they use to aid their decisions, should be public. Ideally, choose the independent appeals body by different means than the Arb Com itself is chosen, e.g. by random selection of users with a certain activity level, independent of the ordinary admin track.
- Grant all users the right to be forgotten (courtesy vanishing), not just users in good standing, so that users bullied off the platform can remove their proverbial stockade.
- Create a mechanism that forces rules to be refactored or reduced in scope. Just spitballing, one possible way might be to limit the growth of any given WP: page per unit time, require negative growth for some of them, or in some way reward editors who reduce their extent.
There may be fundamental unsolvable problems, but that doesn't mean the current system can't be improved.
Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. That Wikipedia has been co-opted by mentally ill people is an extraordinary claim. You should provide more than feelings.
* ASD is not a mental illness but it can produce quirky and obsessive behaviour.
For example, this article goes over disinformation by polish nationalists on Holocaust related articles. There's a chart with 10 editors accounting for 50% of the edits and another chart that shows disproportionately citing authors that in reality are not academically are under-cited
German Scholars Reveal Shocking TRUTH About China’s Xinjiang Province
>...Uyghur terrorists killed dozens of Han Chinese in coordinated attacks from 2009 to 2016. These included the September 2009 Xinjiang unrest, the 2011 Hotan attack, the 2014 Kunming attack, the April 2014 Ürümqi attack, and the May 2014 Ürümqi attack. The attacks were conducted by Uyghur separatists, with some orchestrated by the Turkistan Islamic Party (a UN-designated terrorist organization)...
Officially wikipedia is NPOV but an especially contentious and murky political mudfight decides what counts as a "citeable" source and what doesnt and what counts as notable and what doesnt.
It also has an incredibly strong western bias.
Every government, corporation and billionaire pays somebody to participate in that fight as well, using every dirty trick they can.
Until we have a model that can sidestep these politics (which Wikipedia seemingly has no real desire to do) and aggregate sources objectively I think it will continue to suck.
> It also has an incredibly strong western bias.
What's the issue with that? Why shouldn't English Wikipedia have a strong Western bias? I've explored and participated in several other Wikipedias and other collaborative projects, and each is biased towards the worldviews common to the culture that its main editors come from. I don't think there's a way to have an encyclopedic project without any cultural bias at all (if such a platonic ideal could even be properly defined), and seeing how Western values include a significant focus on pluralism, freedom of expression and scientific inquiry, I think this situation is much better than the alternatives.
Compared to what? I dont really see much aggregation being done at all on Wikipedia's scale.
>What's the issue with that?
It's supposed to be impartial and objective and it sells itself as such but if you see how the sausage is made it is patently the exact opposite.
>I don't think there's a way to have an encyclopedic project without any cultural bias at all
I think it's perfectly possible to have an encyclopedia which is more liberal about allowing more sources to be used and which provides tools and metadata about those sources and gives tools to the user allowing them to filter accordingly.
Whereas "Blessing" one group of sources and condemning another will inevitably turn it into a propaganda outlet for whomever controls it. You might think that this is the only way but that represents more of a failure of imagination than a lack of options.
internet altered the way society communicates and why, a lot of discussions now end up by "show me your sources" aka "what is the truth" and it's often centralized into some accepted source like wikipedia
where there simple single point of 'truth' like that before ?
my 2cents is that humans are not meant to live in one global absolute truth and we all lived in relative fuzzy reality before, it was slow and imperfect but not as easy to tamper with
of course we all wanted to communicate faithful information, but now any discussion turns into a religious difference, and the escape is of course "who has the truest source". people don't necessarily understand the content, they just defer the validity to an official third party, so basically we're back to zero.. but we're all debating everything now.
and it makes me think that locally, we chatting, was never meant to exchange rigorous information, but mostly to share opinions lightly, more emotional than rigorous and scientific
It's kind of a shit show.
Where we all have a different definition of "mainstream media".
It doesnt really matter if the whole world has access to the same information if the whole world trusts completely different sources.
For better or worse we trust those sources exclusively because of tribal affinity.
I doubt many people in the US could be persuaded to trust Global Times over the New York Times even if you could prove it had a better prediction track record. Wrong tribe.
What does this mean?
Ok, to clarify:
> > And not even getting into billions poured into American colleges by the same people.
Which American colleges, by what people, and what does "being political" mean? Maybe I'm very ignorant of the USA, are these just known things to Americans?
It seems today that he was just wrong and used to make "dubious" clinical trials.
> As of 2025, 46 of Raoult's research publications have been retracted, and at least another 218 of his publications have received an expression of concern from their publishers, due to questions related to ethics approval for his studies.
Many people listened because he wasn't some youtuber doing his research, he was the head of the "Infectious and Tropical Emergent Diseases Research Unit" ad the Faculty of Medicine of Marseille.
I've watched one of his interviews where he stated that people survived in his unit with hydroxychloroquine and that he had numbers to prove it.
When you look at his credentials, and my.braincells.count(), it was hard to identify it as misinformation.
But even without being knowledgeable about statistics, there were a lot of very serious people giving very good arguments against his results. You just had to see them. And seeing all the Facebook doctors lunatics instantly side with Raoult and defend him tooth and nail should definitely raise some red flags...
I would think that posting any particular person would descend in to a pointless argument over whether those claims are merited. Do you have some better reason to want a particular name?
I don't disagree that weird bullshit occasionally happens on Wikipedia, but I have noticed that as soon as light is cast on it, it usually evaporates and a return to factual normality is established.
> It is widely considered to be one of the first written constitutions of mankind.
Now go to the page on constitutions in history[2] and see how far down the list that one is.
Now go back to the Constitution of Medina (itself an example of misinformation, since it should be charter or even more precisely, treaty, but those protecting the page have meddled with the title too) and look at the reference it uses[3] and what it says to get a feel for the kind of "reference" that is being used there, and then try and update said Wikipedia page by removing the parts about its being the first.
The talk pages of both show that invested groups have been trying to force their views, and they've done it quite successfully.
Let us all know how you get on with that, and then I'll point you to the next example, and the next example…
Some other notable things to check are co-founder Larry Sanger's 9 theses[4], and the news that broke yesterday about a PR firm doing "Wikilaundering"[5].
That's just the tip of the iceberg.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constitution_of_Medina
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constitution#History_and_devel...
[3] https://journalijcar.org/issues/first-written-constitution-w...
[4] https://larrysanger.org/nine-theses/#1-end-decision-making-b...
[5] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/jan/16/pr-firm-p...
So, next example?
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:Log&page=... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Dispute_resolution_n... [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Constitution_of_Medina/Ar... [4] https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Constitution_of_M... [5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Constitution/Archive_1#Fi...?
Why is this "consensus not to include the claim" relevant when the claim was already included?
Why did it have to go to dispute at all?
> So, next example?
Please.
>> those protecting the page have meddled with the title too
> Why is this "consensus not to include the claim" relevant when the claim was already included? Because anyone can dispute anything. But saying it's some kind of agenda by a group of admins is incorrect.
> Why did it have to go to dispute at all? Because someone disputed it. Though, really, it may not have been necessary in this case. You may also refer to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Guy_Macon/One_against_man...
Or, you can put it down to an honest mistake or difference of opinion. That really is the oldest written constitution in the world, or it’s got a valid claim to be, and those people don’t want to add any respectability to their pet project.
Tough choice. The phrases “die on that hill” and “never interrupt your opponent when they’re making a mistake” come to mind. Do continue.
This must be one of the more bizarre conspiracy theories I've heard.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Constitution_of_Medina/Ar...
Explain it. Lay it out.
It does not persist today; I removed it. It occured once, 10 years ago, and again, a few months ago.
Regardless:
- The page is still titled "Constitution…" when the opening paragraph contains "The name "Constitution of Medina" is misleading as the text did not establish a state." Make that make sense.
- "and the first "Constitution"" is still in the page
It persists.
Now, what I might consider bad faith is:
- being unwilling to answer simple, straightforward questions, which is apt, considering Socrates was an Athenian
- having such an interest in the page that you claim you made edits
- not checking properly and thus thinking this only happened twice, and wasn't part of attritional arguments, rollbacks, edits and counter-edits
Wikipedia must be alright if one does not wish to see a problem.
https://digitalcommons.chapman.edu/history_news_articles/151... https://slate.com/technology/2023/04/how-wikipedia-covers-th...
It depends on its nature.
Have you ever tried changing something on Wikipedia regarding politics (which now includes several health issues) or religion?
Edit: also, I did write "I would think that posting any particular person would descend in to a pointless argument over whether those claims are merited." and yet you're suggesting I get into that argument. I quite clearly don't want to because it's pointless, and we had years of it anyway.
Please do.
Most recently hijacked by the Qatar dictatorship: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/jan/16/pr-firm-p...
News, influencers, Wikipedia, almost all information we consume nowadays is intentional. And not even getting into billions poured into American colleges by the same people.