Michaeldsuarez wrote:GethN7 wrote:
Michael, I'm going to see things from your perspective here for a second, tell me if I'm wrong.
Fiala1 is an incompetent who runs a Neo-Nazi Wikipedia ripoff that dispenses hate and accuses others of prejudicing against his own views, even though those very views are largely prejudicial and hateful themselves, and you feel his is blind to the irony of his own hatreds and thus seeing his wiki eradicated would be a victory against the hatred he spews, correct?
If so, from a moral standpoint, I can't disagree.
When I said "decisive victory", I mean that getting them off Orain would be a death blow rather than a temporary set-back for them due to how poor their technical skills are. Whenever Brandt cost ED its web host or domain, it always recovered due to our skills and resources; the same can't be said of Rightpedia. I don't believe that Rightpedia could recover from losing Orain support. I was speaking of "victory" in terms of effectiveness and impact / consequence; I wasn't speaking of "moral victories".
GethN7 wrote:However, now I want to play devil's advocate:
I see Encyclopedia Dramatica as being quite amusing and have often read it for personal entertainment on multiple occasions. However, it's mission is largely to point and laugh at internet drama and say horrible things about those who have made themselves infamous on the internet, freely admitting entertaining lies will be kept in place of boring truths, and that people who troll others for amusement are venerated, and that pissing people off in the name of "the lulz" is the highest goal you can aspire to.
Further, it has suffered frequent technical issues, very few hold any knowledge of the nuts and bolts of how ED works in the background (the "security through obfuscation" complaint you levied against Orain seems to apply equally here), most of the staff are technically incompetent to do more than operate a ban button (very few seem to have technical expertise to fix any issues that befall ED), and ED has suffered massive downtime, DDoS attacks, and has otherwise functioned with degraded functionality at times, sometimes days on end.
By that standard, I would say ED is also a hate site, encouraging the angering of people who make asses of themselves for amusement, most of it's staff make Fiala1 look like a genius, and the permanent fall of ED would also be a net positive for the internet, if were were to apply your own arguments to ED.
Frankly, you're a fool if you believe that Fiala1 is more skilled or knowledge than ED's administration.
Edit:
@GethN7: Did you know that your friend Sasha / Alex / -maelstr0m was an ED editor (actually two ED editors):
https://web.archive.org/web/20090218002628/http://encyclopediadramatica.com/User:Tanja
https://web.archive.org/web/20101124041307/http://encyclopediadramatica.com/User:AnonymissMadchen
She's also banned from Wikipedia.
As documented at ED, she has a large history of crazy and lying, yet
you were her chief enabler at RationalWiki, even
unblocking her in January 2014, and a member of several of her websites and groups.
No, that was news to me. In fact, I recently read the article ED produced on her activities (some of this I did not know, at least what I could verify), and since she has a bearing on this thread, I want to clarify something.
Sasha/Tanja (whatever you prefer) is not, in my opinion, an intrinsically horrible human being on her own, like the biblical King Ahab, she is quite capable of reason, intelligence, and decency when she can rein in her own rashness and hubris and associates with respectable company, and I was her friend not only because I try to be nice to everyone, but because I felt she had useful talents regarding MediaWiki that could be applied for nobler goals, and wanted to hopefully convince her to abandon her less respectful pursuits and do what I try to do: be a benefit to society with whatever skills one possesses.
So I tried to get her interested in helping Orain sometime after leaving RationalWiki together, as I felt her skills could be an asset to the project. Unfortunately, she dragged a bunch of idiotic drama with her, a massive paranoia complex, and had some truly horrible company that inspired more foolish actions that lead to Dusti getting pissed off at her for reasons I cannot fault him for.
I too informed her even my willingness to show her leniency was wearing thin, and much like you've seen Abd do with Nathan Larson, I was trying to be her conscience, or as stated earlier in this thread about Orain, the Jiminy Cricket to her Pinocchio.
To my regret, much like how Ahab did horrible things under the influence of Queen Jezebel, so Sasha did horrible things despite my attempts to persuade her otherwise due to the influences she was surrounded by (she was friend with an individual named Dondrekhan who frankly I found a toxic troublemaker who was leading her down some truly terrible roads in life), and while I'm not rejoicing in her recent exposure on ED, I really don't feel sympathy for her plight, as I tried to warn her.
I wrote a blog post going into more detail here:
http://gethn7.blogspot.com/2015/03/i-tr ... y-did.html
To address your other points, I was a rookie at MediaWiki for the longest time myself, so I'm not going to be too hard on Fiala1 in the technical skill department, as I'm still a rookie in many ways and have a lot to learn, though I concede your remarks have some truth to them. However, my point about how hollow the complaint about how security through obfuscation seems when applied to ED's transparency in that regard still stands.
As for victory over Rightpedia, I may be biased, but I doubt any major impact will be felt by the internet at large if they go down. It will allow you and others on ED to laugh at their downfall, and I'm sure a few others here would love to watch their views be silenced due to their moral offensiveness, but, speaking for myself here, I just see them as having their own little echo chamber to have their say in being harmless in and of itself, and I'm willing to live and let live so long as they commit no offense other than having offensive sociopolitical views, so aside from pleasing yourself, your fellow EDiots and a few people here, what cause is truly served by taking down a splinter from a much larger tree (Metapedia), and what benefit does the internet at large get in the long run?