Ted Cruz picks a fight with Wikipedia, accusing platform of left-wing bias

Cruz sends letter demanding answers from Wikimedia Foundation.

See full article...

 

[graylshaped]

If Ted Cruz accused me of bias against Red Cruz, I would agree with him.

He would be unable to prove it is not a well-founded bias, however. For the record, I wish him no malice. I wish him only irrelevance.



edit: yes, that's a typo, but it kind of fits how he prioritizes things so I'll leave it...

 

[graylshaped]

"Provide any and all documents and communications—including emails, texts, or other digital messages—between any officer, employee, or agent of the Wikimedia Foundation and any officer, employee, or agent of the federal government since January 1, 2020," the letter said.

As Senator Cruz knows well himself, and rigorously ensures compliance for himself, his own office, agents, and employees, as well as that of the current administration, the law requires the federal government itself to maintain all such records, so perhaps he can experience first hand how quickly the FOIA process works.

 

[graylshaped]

I'm not from the US and I can confirm that just like Sky News Australia (Also a Murdoch right wing rag) that this is IMO 100% correct looking outside in.

If you don't like being called unreliable stop spreading patently false misinformation, "news" should be pure fact be it good, bad or ugly and not whatever conspiracy theory the right wing cooked up this week.

Bearing in mind the primary purpose of these organizations consciously sowing disinformation and conspiracy malarkey is not to get people to believe that reality. It is to get them to distrust. Once again, Trump said the quiet part out loud when he told people not to believe what they are seeing and hearing with their own eyes.

Of course, that the Republican assault on education has yielded a pliable cadre who DOES believe the codswollop is extra gravy.

 

[graylshaped]

Question for you: I attend an Episcopal church. My personal theism doesn't rest on God the Father, Yahweh, whoever the hell the Israelis worshipped in old testament times.

Nor on Jesus. Seems like a good dude, but the supernatural bits don't need to be true to learn the lessons Gospel Jesus taught.

I am, however, all in, on the Holy Spirit. That the universe has purpose and meaning, and that we're all here for something.

Is that view incompatible with science?

My observation is that anti-dogmatists tend to be unironically dogmatic.

My higher power, as I understand it, embraces and is embraced by science and logic.

 

[graylshaped]

I will say that I do have at least some concern about Wikipedia "banning" sources completely.

Wikipedia really doesn't give a shit about your concern. Wikipedia is not an experiment in democracy. It is a project to write an encyclopedia. If you have a problem with the content generated by people following their guidelines, don't use the content.

 

[graylshaped]

Has anyone confirmed if he's the Zodiac Killer yet?

He hasn't denied it...

 

[graylshaped]

Good for we Canadian that the Supreme Court of Canada supports human rights unlike your SCOTUS, which is just another organ of Project 2025.

Canadian Exceptionalism. Just as Good and Righteous as that as practiced by many of my own obnoxious fellow US citizens.

 

[graylshaped]

It has been famously said that "reality has a well-known liberal bias."

But it seems we're at the point where liberals have a well-known reality bias.

Which terrifies me. Conservatism even a decade ago prided themselves on their steely-eyed view of objective reality and hard truths, doing the math, being a counterweight to the rose-tinted optimism of liberals.

I'm pretty sure it was just before the last coup we had that W mocked Gore's simple addition and subtraction with respect to the federal budget as "fuzzy math," so it's been a bit more than a decade.

 

[graylshaped]

Yes, yes I can. And I would pay VERY good money to see it.

Does this scratch that itch?

 

[graylshaped]

But to be sure, science and philosophy are very closely related, yes? Philosophers today continue to work in tandem with physicists/cosmologists, mathematicians, psychologists, neuroscientists, and computer scientists.

To a point. There are entire branches of philosophy that assert an unknowable via an unfalsifiable theory and weave reams of cloth from that spurious tapestry. In literary terms, it is what is called "science fiction," but they spin their yarns as ineffable wisdom.

I think we can all name a well-entrenched "religion" with science fiction as part of its "prophet's" oeuvre.

 

[graylshaped]

Lucky. I got washed in the blood of the lamb. You ever try to get lamb blood out of your hair?

Why would you want to wash it out?

/deadstare

 

[graylshaped]

I don't see anywhere that we said religion is wrong, only that dogmatic belief in things that cannot be proven or disproven is incompatible with science.

edit: missing word

Religion typically involves some element of mysticism, but can apply to any system of doctrine and beliefs, which CAN be consistent with science.

Not to be pedantic, of course. I make no pretense to my belief system being anything other than a personal guideline to living more productively with both myself and society,. Do I have to evangelize for it to be a religion? Evangelizing and evangelizers bore the snot out of me.

 

[graylshaped]

This is absolutely not true, though, at least for the Catholics. You're not looking for the word "true" or "inerrant" to describe things. Most all denominations are going to say the bible is true and inerrant, including the Catholic Church itself. The word you're looking for is "literal." Just because you don't believe a text is figurative or metaphorical doesn't mean that you think it is false.

That is something that is primarily the domain of the fundamentalist evangelicals. This is why you have Catholic schools that teach evolution and the big bang, and evangelical ones that have those fun books where humans and dinosaurs lived together. It is also why evangelicals tend to eschew higher education, whereas Catholics do not.

The fundamentalists are certainly leading the spearhead of wanting the country to be a theocracy. But there are people from most all other denominations that are drawn to this thinking in disturbingly large numbers. I doubt most of them would be happy when it isn't their form of Christianity that is in charge.

It would be silly to believe the real power players here have any personal interest in the spiritual aspect at all, outside of its use to manipulate others.

 

[graylshaped]

Oh get out of here with that. It does aim to be neutral. Look at the process documents. It's largely a consensus towards mean truth. That's the whole idea.

I'll say it again: being objective and developing strong points of view are completely compatible. Objectivity and neutrality are different things.

 

[graylshaped]

There are some power players that petty clearly do have a personal interest in the spiritual aspects. I have no reason to think that Biden hasn't been honest about being Catholic. But he also isn't constantly trying to leverage his own religion.

Where I think you have to worry is when people wrap themselves in their religion or flag. Someone like Trump or Falwell.

Trump’s religion is Trumpism.

 

[graylshaped]

Um. Ouch. There's a pretty good chance that it is, just that no-one has actually tried too hard. And also the fact that experiments involving ethics could quickly become, um, rather unethical.

Any system of ethics should at least be amenable to analysis by mathematical tools, without indulging in social experimentation. That's not science, sure. But it's way better than philosophy. If biologists can successfully use maths to analyse survival strategies, surely ethics can be nailed down by something other than the opinion of the loudest chest-thumper.

Consider: Science can investigate the trolley problem. Can Science solve the trolley problem?

 

[graylshaped]

Tut tut. It's entirely possible, even likely that [iff the story has any basis in reality] that those followers or rather their leaders had a really bad sense of direction. Apparently they went south-east when their goal was north-east? Sure, can happen to anyone.

"Wandering in the desert" could well be family lore for those cousins who lived out near Barstow for so long ...

 

[graylshaped]

I wasn't referring to banning users/editors, but to what I thought was a claim that Wikipedia would ban anyone from citing a specific source completely. Based on what others have said, this isn't the case - sources are indeed flagged but citing them constructively (e.g. critically or illustratively, without asserting that the source is truthful) isn't outright banned. Hence I stand corrected - if they rank a source as questionable but still let you cite it constructively, then what I said doesn't really apply.

Illustration: There's a difference between mentioning in a Controversy section that Fox News reported X (citation), which was refuted by Y (citation), and saying Fox News reported X thus it's undisputably true. I was under the impression that Wikipedia would simply not allow you to cite Fox News at all, even in that kind of context.

When it comes to banning individual users, I'd only feel concerned if there was concerted effort to ban entire topics or viewpoints themselves from Wikipedia - I think we could all agree that "we'll ban you from editing/ban you completely if you even think of asserting viewpoint X even with credible sources" would be a huge problem - that'd be much closer to totalitarian control. (Yes, I acknowledge Wiki is a private platform, but we also need to acknowledge its inherent trustworthiness - we can definitely agree that Wikipedia does have a responsibility to handle that trust with care.)

Pro Tip: When retracting, you say "I was wrong." Repeating your example doesn't hide that you knee-jerked and repeated inaccurate assumptions.

This shit is too important to waste time playing what-if games with hypothetical edge cases hidden behind "I think we could all agree" ways of implying your original point held water.

 

[graylshaped]

The trolley problem probably is a bad choice of examples.

Science can't solve the problem of determining how to ethically do human experiments on children. Using the scientific method, it is trivially easy to design a perfectly valid experiment that violates our ethical guidelines on human experimentation. The constraints on human experimentation come from outside the scientific method.

Philosophy and ethics are where we look to come up with the guidelines for human experimentation. This is not a field with an objective truth, the way we have with particle physics. There is often no objective right answer to these questions.

No, I chose it intentionally to make the point you are making.

 

[graylshaped]

*citation needed

Antecedent needed.

 

[graylshaped]

... The bad actors are on the verge of kicking off a hot civil war as it is. We don't need it to become a crusade on top of that.

Howard Johnson's right!

 

[graylshaped]

That sounds like a punchline.

Can chatGPT do "here's a punchline, what's the joke"?

Blazing Saddles. Town hall scene.

edit: which is the "authentic frontier gibberish" scene, but that line was in reference to Gabby Johnson, played by to his everlasting fame by Jack Starrett. Howard Johnson was played by John Hillerman, best known as Higgins, opposite Magnum. I enjoyed his work on the short-lived Ellery Queen series, also.

 

[graylshaped]

I'm not in the head of @graylshaped

Tis a dank and murky wood, indeed, so add that to your gratitude list for the day, should you be of the ilk that produce such

so I can't speak to what in the discussion prompted the reference, but I'm fairly certain he's quoting the town hall discussion from Blazing Saddles. I was going to post a clip, but the only ones I could find were from other parts of the scene...

Two highly fungible tokens to you, my friend. Spot on the mark. I saw your response after making my own.

 

[graylshaped]

I see you don't want to talk about Wikipedia whitewashing pedophiles then.

You’re doing a fine job of flogging that one.

 

[graylshaped]

Yes, you are talking about that. And studiously ignoring the elephant in the room.

The elephant isn't the only thing I'll be ignoring now.

Wrong forum, wrong story, wrong approach.

 

[graylshaped]

I have a dead horse. There are other dead horses in the world, but this one is mine, and I am going to flog it.

And I will flog it in the morning, and I will flog it in the evening, all over this land.

I am going to flog it well, and someday someone will tell me how well I flog my dead horse.

 

[graylshaped]

I didn't say anything about religious claims about events that they say happened, just about whether any god(s) or afterlife exist or don't exist. Events in the past can potentially be proven to have happened or not happened. I'm not sure what you mean in your second paragraph, since I didn't reduce anything down to any particular "monomyth" at all. There are afterlives mentioned in many religions, so that doesn't reduce what I was talking about to a "monomyth" either.

Edit: Also, saying that there is a low confidence value to a god's existence and so we're going to say there's no evidence that god exists is not the same as saying that god absolutely doesn't exist, which is what Fatesrider said. I don't see anything wrong with saying anything that equates to "we have no evidence that any god or afterlife exists."

“Saying ‘There is no God’ asserts facts not in evidence” is a valid point of view, as would be asserting there is one.

Just don’t ask me to think better of someone for passionately defending either position.

 

[graylshaped]

Fallacious premise. No, "god" is not a falsifiable hypothesis.
The existence of such an entity - omnipotent, omniscient, utterly undetectable in any way shape or form - is still an extraordinary claim.

My understanding of "god" does not entail an entity. I don't make any claims whatsoever regarding such qualities, or even, really, any qualities at all.

So... what else ya got?

 

[graylshaped]

Well, if you don't define "god" as the dictionary definition of an entity that, well, doesn't leave much room for debate.

If your idea of religion is the belief in an impersonal field or set of circumstances rather than as anything with agency then no, I got nothing further. I freely admit that gravity is a thing. If what you posit is ether, then produce proof or be dismissed.

If your belief is in some undetectable prime mover with agency then I call that an extraordinary claim for which evidence of some sort needs to be produced or the claim must be dismissed in much the same manner as anyone sane should dismiss theories about the tooth fairy without at the very least an evidence bag containing very small pliers and a dash of faerie dust, or at least the Onlyfans page adress of said entity.

The idea that science can not immediately dismiss an extraordinary claim has always been fallacious. Objectively, the idea of a sky wizard is a delusion and should be discussed as exactly that.

Do you demand the respect of credibility be extended to someone thinking that Transformers are real when they go down the street lambasting all the spying cars?

The entire premise that you can't disprove the existence of god, therefore science can say nothing about it is very early - and lamentably internationally successful - agitprop pushed by intelligent design creationists in a desperate attempt to keep the sky wizard concept from getting the boot out of academic and governmental institutions.

I am amused you dance through such hoops while filtering everything you say through a Christian-flavored filter.

You had it right to start with: the dictionary definition of what you want to label “god” is not part of my understanding of the higher purpose of my life as I understand it. Then you felt compelled to toss out out all kinds of strawmen to shoot at, and spoil your whole argument. Your concept of my concept is irrelevant: that you demand it fit it into how you want things to be perceived is illuminating.

One of the things people miss is that the Christian “God” (I capitalized it so you can see the difference) if you take that alleged entity at its purported word, doesn’t care what you call it or what you think of it. I am that I am. It cares about not fucking around with other people, treating them poorly, or taking their stuff. It cares about you keeping your own house in order. Candidly, it is projection even to assume “care” is involved. It sounds like good advice to me.

All the rest of that biblical claptrap is just different men projecting their control fantasies, in the same way your entire post history is your explicit and implicit criticism of how you think other people should think.

 

[graylshaped]

Ooof. “I Am That I Am” is so old-old-testament that it has really absolutely nothing to do with Christianity, at all. AIUI it predates יהוה by a lot. (No, not that Lot.)

These days Jesus has very little to do with Christianity.

 

[graylshaped]

Words have meaning. If what you're thinking about is something which might as well be described in a formula of field equations then that is not something you can wedge into any understood definition of "deity".

So please, skip the "I'm more mystic than thou" rhetoric, grayl, and kindly clarify. You want to describe a "There's something out there" as some form of spiritual belief and demand this is respected without any logic or evidence to support such an extraordinary claim.
And get defensive and rude when called out on it, to boot.



And that rose, no matter by what it's name and attributes, is still an extraordinary claim which can, by the scientific framework, be dismissed without evidence the same way we can dismiss Gandalf, Vampires, the tooth fairy and santa claus. Not because of a belief but because that's just self-evident reality. Absence of Evidence is in fact Evidence of Absence when we're discussing Russel's Teapot. Such absence simply isn't proof - but it doesn't need to be for a summary dismissal, because the claimant is the one on whom that burden lies.



We live in one observable reality. Most of it can be measured. Yes, grayl, I certainly criticize the dictionary-definition delusional who take for granted that Santa Claus In The Sky or the Boltzman Brain is reality rather than assume that pending any evidence to the contrary that hypothesis can be summarily dismissed as nonsense. Because people who make such assumptions have based their entire understanding of the world on a manifest fallacy.

So kindly spare me the stale intelligent design agitprop around how observable reality makes me the bad guy in such an argument where I claim that instant dismissal of the non-observable is in fact quite complicit with the framework of scientific rigor. If you have a problem with that argument, then kindly address that criticism to whoever codified logic.

My relationship, such that I have one, with my higher authority--such that there is one--is my business. Your demands have been appropriately filed.

Also:

Insofar as I may be heard by anything, which may or may not care what I say, I ask, if it matters, that you be forgiven for anything you may have done or failed to do which requires forgiveness. Conversely, if not forgiveness but something else may be required to insure any possible benefit for which you may be eligible after the destruction of your body, I ask that this, whatever it may be, be granted or withheld, as the case may be, in such a manner as to insure your receiving said benefit. I ask this in my capacity as your self-appointed intermediary between yourself and that which may not be yourself, but which may have an interest in the matter of your receiving as much as it is possible for you to receive of this thing, and which may in some way be influenced by this ceremony.

Amen.

 

[graylshaped]

And that right there? Appeals on my behalf to a hypothetical fantasy are about as patronizingly and condescendingly offensive as advocating gay conversion therapy to homosexuals would be.
So congratulations on making my stomach churn.

That’s some self-righteous shit right there. Are you really trying to equate someone having a belief system that you don’t understand, with gay conversion therapy?

Wow. Pretty thin skin for someone so convinced he has the Answer.

You can chill. That was a very slightly adjusted version of Zelazny’s agnostics prayer, which I’m a little surprised you did not recognize. Any karmic investment I might make would be more in line with simply hoping you find what you need. No more, no less.

Also amusing to think I would offer you patronage.