RationalWiki:Pissed at us

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===Mensur Omerbashich===
 
===Mensur Omerbashich===
  
[[Mensur Omerbashich|Omerbashich]] is a small-time conspiracy nut with an interest in [[Comet Elenin]]. In July 2011, it seemed like he had just discovered that the internet was talking about him and went on a spree of email writing and complaints to any websites that mentioned him, successfully getting Blogger to remove (albeit temporarily) the main blog post refuting his work. He also added a massive CAPSLOCK rant to the bottom of his website declaring all of his critics as part of a grand conspiracy, including RW. Before you could say [[Streisand Effect]] he had his own RW article of fair length and detail.
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[[Mensur Omerbashich|Omerbashich]] is a small-time conspiracy-loving crank with an interest in [[Comet Elenin]]. It seems that in July 2011 his annoyance with the stuff that the Internet was saying about him reached its peak and he went on a spree of email writing and complaints to any websites that mentioned him, successfully getting Blogger to remove (albeit temporarily) the main blog post refuting his work. Before you could say [[Streisand Effect]] he had his own RW article of fair length and detail. He has a giant CAPSLOCK rant on his website declaring all of his critics a part of a grand conspiracy, including Google, NASA, Cornell University and RW.
  
 
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Revision as of 05:45, 25 July 2011

If you're not pissing someone off, you're doing it wrong.

As RationalWiki grows as a site, it tends to catch the eyes and ears of people whom it criticises. And people don't like being critised, do they? Anyway, here is a list of people who are pissed at us for one reason or another.


Contents

Internet forums

Anglo-Saxon Foundation

Conservative Underground

Islamic Awakening

Islamic Awakening is one of those sites where Muslim extremists, pretending to be moderate Muslims, get together to fantasise about killing people they disagree with. In 2011, they had their own awakening to RW's article on them. One user blew a few irony meters by saying "I ask Allah to grant a miserable life to everyone intentionally involved in mocking the Prophet" in reference to the article, before in the very next sentence stating that "It's very easy to go on a message board and collect random statements to blow them out of proportion or purposely misconstrue them for sensationalism..." So, quote-mining and straw-manning is wrong, unless it's you that's doing the quote-mining and straw-manning. Glad to have that one cleared up.

Top quote
And the guy who created the page is a British faggot ape: User:Baljit - RationalWiki[1]

LessWrong

Less Wrong has an up and down relationship with RW. With a small but notable overlap in userbase and Yudkowsky's one-time insistence that hardcore rationalists can be recruited from sites like RW, it still attracts ire from LW users for one reason on another.

Top quote
Regarding the phase "Note for the clueless (i.e. RationalWiki)" (emphasis added)

Or, rather, whether that's what he meant to express; I don't believe he actually believes nobody other than RationalWiki is clueless. Roughly speaking, I would have taken it to be a subtle way of expressing that RationalWiki is so clueless nobody else deserves the label.[2]

Ludwig von Mises Institute

Members of the forum for the Ludwig von Mises Institute noticed our article about libertarians in January 2011. Considering the von Mises institute promotes the Austrian school of economics, developed by libertarian Ludwig von Mises, they weren't happy.

Top quote
RationalWiki is a product of the Progressive Dawkinsian atheist, who is so immersed in the religion of liberal statism that he is not aware it is a religion. These people are intellectually of little value, simply repeating the tropes they learned in college, but they are representitive of the 'elite' in the United States.h [sic]

Metapedia

Those lovely folk at Metapedia seem to have a problem with us because... well, because we don't seem to hate everybody else. The article on RW may be a mixture of parody and satire, however; it describes RW as a "genetic-egalitarian race-denialist propaganda website", which is fair enough but stating that Richard Dawkins is RW's messiah is a bit of a leap. It is also notable for attemtping to create a "power structure" of RW, based on user rights logs.

Top quote

The website fraudulently portrays itself as being “rational”, and opposed to “pseudoscience”, yet promotes exactly the thing that they claim to oppose: the irrational spiritual pseudosciences of genetic egalitarianism and race denialism. On top of such deceptiveness, Trent Toulouse solicits donations (on the website’s main page) under these false pretenses. That fits within the definition of criminal fraud.[3]

Objectivism Online

In July 2009, RW came to the attention of Objectivism Online, a forum dedicated to Randroids. The thread, The RationalWiki Not so rational, after all, closed shortly after an RW user invited them to discuss criticism on the talk page of the objectivism article.

Top quote
Don't waste your time with it. The entire page is a poorly-written smear-job.

Ron Paul Forums

In a thread titled And you thought liberalpedia was bad from April 2009, several Ron Paul fans expressed dismay and resentment at RW's admitted left-of-centre political stance and info on Ron Paul.

Top quote
If it computers were cheaper, I'd have thrown my computer out the window in anger. It is so stupid and full rash generalizations, non sequiturs, and idiotic assumptions about the marketplace. "RationalWiki" is about as rational as the average communist.

SCEPCOP

Rationalwiki was criticised in a thread at the SCEPCOP forum started by Winston Wu himself.[4]

Top quote
Did Bigfoot piss in their proverbial Cheerios? LOL.[5]

Individuals

Karajou

Referred to by the CP Monitor blog as Conservapedia's "resident swabbie", Karajou holds the distinction of being the Conservapedian most obsessed with RW. Forget User:Conservative's "red telephone" messages, or Andrew Schlafly personally coining the term "Hot. Science. RationalWiki", Karajou has taken it off-wiki and to his own blog and various leaked email comments where he has been shown to fantasise about suing the site and holds delusions that the entire site is responsible for DDoS attacks against Conservapedia (as if anyone who edits RW has the technical knowledge to pull that one off...). His paranoia knows no bounds.

Top quote
It's called RationalWiki. A place called a "trash heap" by one, and "inhabited by thugs" by another. They're on record as using "cyber-terror tactics" in an effort to remove Conservapedia from the internet; they're the ones who employ DDoS attacks, major and minor vandalism, links to porn and worse...and all because they were thrown out of Conservapedia when they couldn't get their way.[6]

Seán Manchester

Seán Manchester is a vampire-hunting Bishop - seriously. But rather than being one of the cool kind from the movies that don a pair of sunglasses and go on a kick-ass killing spree against the legions of the Undead, Manchester confines himself to blog ravings. After one RW user began writing an article on him, he decided to take action by decrying it all as falsehoods, taking up most of his blogging time around Janurary 2010. The quote below comes from one of his posts in Janurary, summing up his opinion of the site.

Top quote
Deconverting folk from Christianity clearly appears to be a mission close to their heart. For them a Christian is someone who "must handle snakes, hate homosexuals, go door-to-door like the Jehovah's Witnesses and Mormons, roll-in-the sawdust, babble-in-tongues, rock back and forth with your eyes rolled back in your head, eschew card playing, eschew dancing, eschew Demon Rum, campaign for the prohibition of alcohol and other drugs, send the man on the TV your money, flog your children (and stone them if they object), make anti-Semitic remarks (ala Pat Robertson and Billy Graham), burn CDs (in the literal sense involving fire, not the sense of recording CDs) which spew Satanic messages (that you were explicitly looking for) when you play them backwards, watch for black helicopters, look for commies under every bed, preach that the UN is going to invade America, join a militia, take Harry Potter books out of schools, believe that your beliefs must be the law for everyone (because 'we' have to 'get right' with God), and believe that the existence of a single non-Christian anywhere in the world means that you're being oppressed."

Notedscholar, of Science and Math Defeated

Notedscholar wasn't too happy about our article on Science and Math Defeated, as indicated by his blog post during January 2009.

Top quote
Look at this. Apparently thinking they haven’t been discredited enough, the unorganized hate fest oxymoronically called Rational Wiki have put up a hit job on me. As you can see, it’s not gaining any steam. There are apparently a record number of gutless users who “vote” for my blog, but no one is willing to reveal themselves. Not surprising.

The moral of the story is: if you can’t take the heat, set up your own closed Internet society. In fact, take a page from Orwell and call it rational. [7]

Denyse O'Leary

Denyse O'Leary is a journalist and proponent of non-materialist neuroscience. She discovered our article on such, which was highly critical of her, Mario Beauregard, and Michael Egnor. Obviously, she responded by making specific points about the science behind non-materialist neuroscience and didn't just attack RW for mixing up the order of authors of her book and not mentioning that others have written about the topic too. Wait, no.

Top quote
Trent: You are an embodiment of just what is wrong with your tradition.

You make your site LOOK LIKE Wikipedia, but now you claim that it is not, after all, an encyclopedia.

No, it isn’t. It is a rubbish dump of detraction.

I have given you the names of many more people to detract - every one of whom is certainly a more thoughtful and creative person than you could ever hope to be.

Thus your dump will grow. And if you seek your monument, look around you.

I am sure it’s the world’s fault if the world doesn’t think you are any Christopher Wren.

Mensur Omerbashich

Omerbashich is a small-time conspiracy-loving crank with an interest in Comet Elenin. It seems that in July 2011 his annoyance with the stuff that the Internet was saying about him reached its peak and he went on a spree of email writing and complaints to any websites that mentioned him, successfully getting Blogger to remove (albeit temporarily) the main blog post refuting his work. Before you could say Streisand Effect he had his own RW article of fair length and detail. He has a giant CAPSLOCK rant on his website declaring all of his critics a part of a grand conspiracy, including Google, NASA, Cornell University and RW.

Top quote
GOOGLE'S RATING SYSTEM ALSO LOVES ANOTHER LOONY WHO FELT PRIMEVAL URGE (CALL TO ARMS) NAMED TRENT TOULOUSE, A MASONIC-LOOKING OBESE STUDENT (PSYCHOLOGY -- COO COO) FROM HAMILTON CANADA, WHO OWNS A WEBSITE CALLED "RATIONAL WIKI" (OXYMORON). AT FIRST GLANCE HE HAS A HUGE...[8]

Eliezer Yudkowsky

Manufacturers

Dynamiclear

Dynamiclear are unusual in that they actually came to RW to discuss things on the talk page of their article and were actually reasonable in their requests. Initially an email was sent accusing the site of slander and in the pocket of Dynamiclear's competitors (could all members of RW involved in the cold sore business please raise your hand?) but it wasn't long until a user appeared to discuss more specific criticisms with the article's principle authors. Undoubtedly, the extra attention lavished on the article because of this improved it considerably.

Top quote
Hi People, by the overall tone of the Dynamiclear page it seems you still think our product is not genuine so I would like to make you an offer: If anyone of you has cold sores or herpes we would love to provide you with a sample of Dynamiclear. You can see first hand the results it offers. This offer will be available for a limited time and to only a few members. So let me know if you really want to find out if Dynamiclear actually works.[9]

H2Om

In September 2010, RationalWiki was graced by the visit of Lex Lang, founder of "H2Om:Water with Intention". Lex wasn't exactly thrilled that RW described his product as an overpriced example of water woo, and tried to whitewash the article several times. Owing to the Streisand effect, this only attracted the attention of other editors and led to increased scrutiny and the expansion of the article.

Top quote
as I said...There is a difference between a skeptic and a hater. I am skeptical of people who believe they know what is possible and what is not. This belief leads to dogmatism, and to the dismissal of ideas and evidence that do not fit in. Genuine skepticism involves an attitude of open-minded enquiry into what we do not understand, and this is the approach I try to follow. I've already taken too much time trying to share details of this business and its positive nature. It costs less than regular bottled water, it has an inspiring nature to it, it motivates people to have positive thoughts while providing clean spring water to drink.[10]

Legal threats

William Dembski

In November 2009, cdesign proponentist William Dembski posted in his blog Uncommon Descent that RW's article The Search for a Search - Measuring the Information Cost of Higher Level Search constituted copyright infringement. Though RW server owner Trent willingly provided contact information, Dembski never followed through.

Top (only) quote
RationalWiki is reprinting large portions of an article I did with Robert Marks that far exceeds anything permissible under “fair use” copyright protections. I was getting ready to contact my attorney about having them remove our article from their website (go here — I’ve saved this page in case it changes as a consequence of this post), but couldn’t find any contact information on the site.

Question: Who is running this site and how to contact them?

Ramanand Jhingade

Footnotes

  1. http://forums.islamicawakening.com/f38/we-have-our-own-wiki-48911/index2.html
  2. http://lesswrong.com/lw/4g/eliezer_yudkowsky_facts/
  3. Metapedia's "article" on RW
  4. http://www.debunkingskeptics.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=320
  5. http://www.debunkingskeptics.com/forum/viewtopic.php?p=2818&sid=1580f9eaa47cf7e1bbc6f2f4044090e0#p2818
  6. http://karajou.blogspot.com/2011/03/coward-part-2.html
  7. http://sciencedefeated.wordpress.com/2009/01/19/losers-at-rationalwiki-want-a-piece-of-my-pageviews/
  8. Omberbashich's website (archived by WebCite)
  9. http://rationalwiki.org/w/index.php?title=Talk:Dynamiclear&diff=prev&oldid=644244
  10. http://rationalwiki.org/w/index.php?title=Talk:H2Om&diff=prev&oldid=650437
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