Larry Sanger: Wikipedia's QAnon Cultist Co-Founder

[Giraffe Stapler]

[You can start here —

Rescher, Methodological Pragmatism
The Blackwell Dictionary of Western Philosophy
Author(s): Nicholas Bunnin, Jiyuan Yu
Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell, Year: 2009
ISBN: 9781405191128,1405191120
http://download.library1.org/main/22500 ... 009%29.pdf

Sorry, man, I don't trust books. They're full of misinformation. Plus, I heard that Caligula guy had sex with a horse. There's a play called Equinox about it. A couple of my friends saw it because that guy from Harry Potter was in it. He gets his dick out on stage, they said. They saw Harry Potter's dick! I don't think they should be teaching children about Harry Potter if he's showing his dick all the time.

[Vigilant]

IF Sanger is indeed a "Qanon cultist" then I will pay little heed to Sanger's statements. But I need to see good quality EVIDENCE for the "Qanon cultist" claim. And that evidence hasn't been forthcoming. Insofar as I have observed we're just seeing evidence-free anti-Sanger POV-pushing.

Present appropriate evidence and I'll become anti-Sanger too. I'm waiting.

Do your own research, man!

[L.R. Lee]

Would you, @Tarantino, please cite the basis for asserting that "52 percent of Larry's 39 thousand followers think Q is right"? That sounds like a demanding analysis to perform.

Also, I didn't claim that Larry was a Qanon cultist you doofus. Posts were split from another thread (not by me) and put in a newly titled thread.

The first post of this thread "Larry Sanger: Wikipedia's QAnon Cultist Co-Founder", from Mar 03, 2020, shows you to be the author, Tarantino. Am I to understand that evil conehead spies are falsely attributing threads to you?

[Vigilant]

The first post of this thread "Larry Sanger: Wikipedia's QAnon Cultist Co-Founder", from Mar 03, 2020, shows you to be the author, Tarantino. Am I to understand that evil conehead spies are falsely attributing threads to you?

Oh Crow,

Did the local Greyhound bus station close on Thanksgiving and you can't find another glory hole nearby where you can pick up extra holiday cash?

[L.R. Lee]

L. R., do you disagree with the assertion that Sanger is a “conspiracy theorist” or are you taking solely issue with the assertion that he is a “QAnon cultist”? Just curious.

"Disagree"? I am only asking for evidence to support the claim of “QAnon cultist”. That would be "disagree" in the sense that the positive claimant bears the burden of proof. And I observe that the positive claimants are having trouble presenting their claimed evidence.

If you, FelinaLavandula, want to claim that "Sanger is a 'conspiracy theorist' " then please do so. I hope that you have better skill with evidence than the claimants for “QAnon cultist”.

[Vigilant]

"Disagree"? I am only asking for evidence to support the claim of “QAnon cultist”. That would be "disagree" in the sense that the positive claimant bears the burden of proof. And I observe that the positive claimants are having trouble presenting their claimed evidence.

If you, FelinaLavandula, want to claim that "Sanger is a 'conspiracy theorist' " then please do so. I hope that you have better skill with evidence than the claimants for “QAnon cultist”.

You're so cute when you stomp your tiny foot like that.



"Look at me! Look at me!"

[FelinaLavandula]

I thought: “Oh, I’ll just take a quick look at his tweets and pick out something silly he said to get back on topic.”
But all his tweets are silly! How does one choose!

[The Garbage Scow]

Well this has become a mighty Sealioning indeed.

[DanMurphy]

What Larry really thinks is between him and the rabid squirrels in his brain.

But he says and writes all the things one would expect from a swivel-eyed loon. And we are what we pretend to be.

[Ming]

Well this has become a mighty Sealioning indeed.

It reminds Ming more of the case in QB VII. Does anyone have a half-penny we could send Mr. Sanger?

[L.R. Lee]

You're so cute when you stomp your tiny foot like that.

"Look at me! Look at me!"

I'm getting good laughs from watching persons interested in Wikipedia respond
petulantly to challenges to provide EVIDENCE to support their claims.

Honk-honk, Vigilant

[Giraffe Stapler]

I am 100% certain that no one here is cares what you think about Larry Sanger and QAnon. If you think Sanger isn't a QAnon believer, that's fine, no one cares. If you think that he is a QAnon believer, that's also fine and no cares. I don't know why you think that anyone would want to spend any time trying to argue with you about this.

Do you actually have something to say here or are you just playing The Devil's Advocate?

[FelinaLavandula]

Larry’s posting about how we need an “encyclosphere”. Cool.

[DanMurphy]

Larry’s posting about how we need an “encyclosphere”. Cool.

Thread on Larry and the encyclosphere.

I have no idea why anyone would think he's Qurious.

[FelinaLavandula]

I’m not personally convinced that he’s a “QAnon cultist”, but he does seem to dabble in “just asking questions” about QAnon. I also think that “QAnon cultist” is essentially being used as a synonym for “right-wing conspiracy theorist” here, and you’d be hard-pressed to argue that he’s not a right-wing conspiracy theorist…

Thread on Larry and the encyclosphere.

Lol!!

[Midsize Jake]

The first post of this thread "Larry Sanger: Wikipedia's QAnon Cultist Co-Founder", from Mar 03, 2020, shows you to be the author, Tarantino. Am I to understand that evil conehead spies are falsely attributing threads to you?

That was me actually, changing the thread title after-the-fact — not Mr. Tarantino, who generally avoids using his mod rights to change thread titles unless it's really obvious that it has to be done.

The fact is, we've had issues with the title of this thread all along. At first it was about "Encyclosphere," but then that started to peter out, and when Dr. Sanger started getting really screwy on Twitter (thereby embarrassing those of us who had supported his "co-founder" claim over the years), we changed to to "Larry Sanger has jumped the shark." I personally didn't like that title though, because I felt it suggested the opposite of what I thought was actually happening: Sanger was either becoming a conspiracy cultist, or he was deliberately trying to exploit right-wing conspiratorialism to draw more attention to himself, "get back in the game," and most likely try to score a lucrative book deal with a right-wing publisher. I suspected the latter, but the thread wasn't about that, it was about the what the tweets actually implied, and whatever he was doing, he did appear to be successfully drawing more attention to himself. So, that's when I changed it to the current title.

As for QAnon specifically, Mr. Lavandula is correct in the post immediately above this one. When I renamed the thread, QAnon was fully in the ascendant as far as loony right-wing conspiracies were concerned, to the point of being representative of practically all of them. That's no longer the case, so now I'd be OK with renaming the thread to something more generic.

That said, IMO we have no interest in whitewashing Sanger's recent Twitter activity. He may be an embarrassment to us, but he's an even bigger embarrassment to Wikipedia, and we think it's important that people know about it — especially with most of the Google results about him being much older, before he went nuts, and thereby giving people a false sense of who he is now.

[FelinaLavandula]

As for QAnon specifically, Mr. Lavandula is correct in the post immediately above this one. When I renamed the thread, QAnon was fully in the ascendant as far as loony right-wing conspiracies were concerned, to the point of being representative of practically all of them. That's no longer the case, so now I'd be OK with renaming the thread to something more generic.

That’s Mz. Lavandula to you!
That said, I think “conspiracy theorist” would not really circumvent this kind of tweet-dodging. Oh well, let the crumbs fall where they may.

[iii]

That said, IMO we have no interest in whitewashing Sanger's recent Twitter activity. He may be an embarrassment to us, but he's an even bigger embarrassment to Wikipedia, and we think it's important that people know about it — especially with most of the Google results about him being much older, before he went nuts, and thereby giving people a false sense of who he is now.

Y'all think the guy went nuts, but I contend he was this slimy all along. Look at the projects Sanger takes on: they all end up directly attacking expertise while almost cynically declaiming a desire to include experts as long as they don't get too big for their britches. Sanger isn't a cultist: he is an equal-opportunity empty skull (of the sort who is so open-minded that his brain fell out). And he is perhaps the most arrogant person involved in Wikipedia circles. Say what you will about Wales, but there are instances of him being self-effacing and admitting to his lack of ability when it comes to knowledge production or internet grifting. Some of this is sob-story bullshit, but Sanger is consistent in his self-aggrandizement. According to him, he has never made any wrong turns. It's the rest of the world that is the issue. Oh, he'll sealion with the best of them. "If anyone finds anything wrong with what I'm saying, please let me know." But just try pointing it out to him and he will press the block button.

If you read Sanger's dissertation-qua-defense of Thomas Reid (a Scottish philosopher who is remembered as a critic David Hume and a favorite of the anti-empiricist Christians who have set up camp in certain philosophy departments funded by the Templeton Foundation), you can see this coming. He's all about believing that his own understanding of the world is all that matters and that anyone who questions that is fundamentally unable to justify their critique. The job of every other person with whom he interacts is to convince him he's wrong. He has never learned anything from anyone else.

When in the course of Wikipedia events, critics were upset at the grift and undue influence of Wales, so the outcast Sanger was taken to be a missed-opportunity improvement over Wales and his obvious lack of credentials. But writing a PhD dissertation that justifies yourself as the right arbitrator of all that is correct and true is, I would argue, somewhat worse than being a washed-up grifter-wannabe. The model Larry wants is that everyone comes to some venue he controls completely and fights with each other until he (and he alone) gets to decide how to handle the situation. The free-for-all of Wikipedia was Sanger's initial idea, but this was only to the extent that he thought he could set up a system whereby he would rub his hands together and then declare what was the right way to do things was and excommunicate anyone who disagreed. When it became clear that would not happen, he was out. The fact that he had no power at his own invention is exactly why he left so soon. Now he is just desperately trying to continue on with his vision and has been failing spectacularly each time. First he took that tack that the problem was expertise being denigrated. But really, he just wanted to choose who would get to do what. Citizendium had him choosing charlatans and cranks as experts which tanked the endeavor. Then Everipedia had him arguing, however briefly, that blockchain would somehow make it all better. Encyclosphere is a desperate rehash of the accept-all-comers approach now with old fashioned RSS technology! Each new incarnation of his idea of creating a monarchial internet compendium suffers from the same issues over and over -- namely that Larry Sanger thinks that only Larry Sanger knows what's best for the world and the rest of y'all can go fuck yourself.

Except for the vaunted NPOV concept which is a canard par excellence, his Wikipedia legacy is just to be someone who accidentally happened upon a way to create a top-ten crowdsourced website and has been spiteful of that discovery ever since.

[FelinaLavandula]

Y'all think the guy went nuts, but I contend he was this slimy all along.

Fully agree.

[Randy from Boise]

Y'all think the guy went nuts, but I contend he was this slimy all along.

[ <snip!> -- Smiley ]

[Mason]

The model Larry wants is that everyone comes to some venue he controls completely and fights with each other until he (and he alone) gets to decide how to handle the situation.

Your whole post was bang-on, but this observation in particular really nails it.

[Smiley]

If you read Sanger's dissertation-qua-defense of Thomas Reid (a Scottish philosopher who is remembered as a critic David Hume and a favorite of the anti-empiricist Christians who have set up camp in certain philosophy departments funded by the Templeton Foundation), you can see this coming.

A blogworthy post there, iii.

I might add that Reid was a backwards-ass buffoon whose contribution to philosophy seems to consist of a bunch of half-baked brainfarts that the Buddhists and Jains would have torn to shreds two thouand years beforehand.

[Vigilant]

The model Larry wants is that everyone comes to some venue he controls completely and fights with each other until he (and he alone) gets to decide how to handle the situation.

Your whole post was bang-on, but this observation in particular really nails it.

And I think Jimbo was the very same in the early days of wikipedia.

[Giraffe Stapler]

Looking in on Larry Sanger's Twitter feed, I see that he has gone a step further than usual.

Let's be very clear here.

If someone really goes through the difficulty and trouble, *as an adult*, to make a credible transition from male to female, or from female to male, that person has a mental problem. The encouragement of this mental problem does no one favors.

I want to make it clear that this is one tweet in a series of tweets about teaching children about gender, but that is a complete thought that the context does not change. Larry Sanger believes that transpeople have a mental illness.

Editing to add archive and archive. Sometimes Sanger deletes things like this.

[Mason]

To be fair, Larry might not be transphobic per se, he might just consider anyone who goes through difficulty and trouble for any goal to be mentally ill since his worldview is that people should just give him piles of cash just for the hell of it, and any kind of effort or work is something only lesser people do.

[Midsize Jake]

To be even fairer, a person who goes through all the difficulty and trouble, *as an adult*, to build a series of terrible websites that produce little more than conflict, embarrassment, and incipient psychological trauma for everyone involved, probably has an even bigger mental problem.

[Smiley]

Not like you lavishly munificent libertarians, eh Larry?

[Mason]

Is he posting this to StartThis because Twitter has started to enforce noun-verb agreement?

[Ming]

Is he posting this to StartThis because Twitter has started to enforce noun-verb agreement?

[Vigilant]

His twitter is an insane melange of outrage over furries, transgender people and racism.

It's pretty funny to behold.

And, of course, begging for money.

[Smiley]

For posterity, one of Larry's best ever tweets:

[Smiley]

Larry fires up that famous brain of his, and turns his penetrating gaze towards the world of anime:




















NIce work, Larry!

[Smiley]

You've still got time to vote...



https://twitter.com/Oshii_Ch/status/1469015651931074560

[Vigilant]

The results are in.

It's child porn by a mile.



The general sentiment is that he probably can't get it up enough for penetrative sex.

[Smiley]

Well, there you have it. The people have spoken. No arguing wth democracy.

Even Plato's sticking the boot in, which has gotta sting.



The person running NYT's twitter probably laughed themselves into a state of hypoxia.

Poor Larry.

[Giraffe Stapler]

It is unfortunate for Larry Sanger that he happens to look like the popular conception of a pedophile. That is mostly just genetics and not something he has much control over. Of course It doesn't help that he frequently seems to find indications of pedophilia where reasonable people wouldn't.

I have seen nothing to suggest that Larry Sanger is a pedophile, but it is clearly something he thinks about a lot. A. Lot.

[Anroth]

It is unfortunate for Larry Sanger that he happens to look like the popular conception of a pedophile. That is mostly just genetics and not something he has much control over.

Na he has plenty of control. Contacts and go the full Bruce Willis would help for a start.

[iii]

It is unfortunate for Larry Sanger that he happens to look like the popular conception of a pedophile. That is mostly just genetics and not something he has much control over.

Not sure about the "mostly" genetics thing. There are such things as stylists and plenty of people with those... um... genetics don't look that way. Consider Sir Patrick.

[Vigilant]

[Vigilant]

He's on a tear today about how being asked to wear a mask is 'how they control you'.

What a maroon.


Also, someone doesn't understand 'exponential growth' or 'trailing indicators'.
https://twitter.com/lsanger/status/1472936268665401348

[FelinaLavandula]

Just complete density. Totally solid head.

[Vigilant]

Fascist supporter now

edit: Sanger retweeted Andy Ngo's post above.
Andy Ngo is an absolute piece of shit.

Larry's gone fully around the bend.

[Smiley]

Was it ever a secret?

He's openly taking orders from a "Grand Wizard":

This week in Larryland:

Hmm...

[Midsize Jake]

This isn't fascism-related, but he seems to be on some sort of Twitter crusade now to promote the purchase and use of Network Attached Storage (NAS) devices. Presumably this is because of his apparent antipathy towards cloud-storage services, which is (also presumably) a follow-on from his newly-found distrust of "Big Tech" in general.

I'm guessing he thinks the market leaders in cloud storage (Amazon, Apple, Microsoft & Google) can't be trusted to not hand over secret right-wing (and/or conspiracy-theory-related) communications to the US Government, right? I suppose that's somewhat fair though, since they definitely can't be trusted not to hand over secret left-wing communications...

I own a NAS myself, and I still use it, sometimes even for non-storage-related things. But even if I upgrade to the latest/greatest thing with NVMe SSD's and 10GB wired Ethernet and max out everything, that's still only 25% of the throughput you can get with the latest Thunderbolt 3/4 plug-in external drives (on which everything pretty much happens instantaneously), and probably a little bit slower than an even-cheaper USB 3.2 gen.1.1 drive too. I'll also be paying about 2-3 times as much for the privilege. And for web developers, it's much easier and cheaper to run a Linux VM on your laptop than to set up a web server on a NAS, not to mention much closer to what you'll be implementing stuff on in the real world. I realize there are 40GB and 100GB ethernet routers & switches hitting the market now, some of which you can actually buy already... but I suspect Larry is in for some disappointment on this score.

[FelinaLavandula]

Fascist supporter now

edit: Sanger retweeted Andy Ngo's post above.
Andy Ngo is an absolute piece of shit.

Larry's gone fully around the bend.

Hard to imagine a grift more transparent than this, really…

[Giraffe Stapler]

... but I suspect Larry is in for some disappointment on this score.

I am not a regular reader of Larry Sanger's tweets, but I have seen enough to know that he will not be disappointed. He is right and if you try to tell him why he may be wrong he will block you. Sanger doesn't know much about tech and doesn't seem to know that he doesn't know much. And he's happy to tell other people how be just like him.

[Zoloft]

Yeah, early on I messaged him on Twitter asking him why he's engaging with conspiracy theorists - and he blocked me without explanation. Of course, I can still read his tweets by just logging out. *sigh*

[Vigilant]

His ego is just as delicate as Jimmy's.
Any criticism, any at all, and he's devastated.

The only way either of these divas can operate is if they are receiving constant praise and attention.

Very Trump-like, both of them.

[Giraffe Stapler]

Larry Sanger seems to have discovered the "Muslim grooming gangs" which have long been a popular bogeyman of British racists (see Rotherham child sexual exploitation scandal (T-H-L)). He is retweeting videos by Tommy Robinson (activist) (T-H-L). Among other things, Robinson has a ban from Twitter, so that probably won't end well.

[Vigilant]

When can we expect Larry to discover that Dungeons and Dragons leads to Satanism and baby eating?