User:Rand0
TL;DR: No matter how crazy you believe I am, I believe I'm at least 4.7 times crazier than you do. Also, be nice or be ignored.
[edit] NOTE: Be Nice Or Be Ignored
My name is Rando Calrissian. It is a reference to Lando Calrissian, not to Ayn Rand and her very hypocritical cronies. On an allegedly unrelated note, I am saddened by the increasing rate by which America is becoming a police state.
I like to spend a bit of time de-orphaning orphaned pages. I also occasionally add categories to pages, which I'd like to do more often. For these reasons and ohters, I'm considering joining RationalWiki:Wikify project, but I have yet to commit.
I am a part of RationalWiki:Mathematics project, which I am (hopefully part of, rather than solely) reviving. Please feel free to join me! (Note: I am not an expert on math in the slightest. I just really like it.) As of Sept 17, 2014- hey isn't that the third anniversary of something?- I'm actually taking it seriously now. I am also part of RationalWiki:Project Social Justice and RationalWiki:Project Citation Found.
[edit] Articles I have created
- Alan Dershowitz
- Darrell Huff, as part of RationalWiki:Mathematics project
- Police state
- Drones
- Anna Rosmus
- Jessica Ahlquist
- Michael Hastings
- Intersectionality
- Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant
- Free trade
- Samuel P. Huntington
- White guilt
[edit] Articles I am going to create once I feel like it
- Madagascar
The Economist, the periodicalSomeone else got there first.Norman FinkelsteinThis bloke beat me to it.- Self-hating Jew
- COINTELPRO
- Geoffrey R. Stone
Whistleblowernever mind- American Council of Trustees and Alumni
- Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreeement
- Trans-Pacific Partnership
- The War on Whistleblowers
[edit] Also...
[edit] My favorite wikis
- Wikipedia
- SourceWatch
- RationalWiki
- Bulbapedia cuz nostalgia
- the wiki for for the On-Line Encyclopedia of Integer Sequences
- Encyclopedia Dramatica is funny sometimes
- WikiWikiWeb for being the pioneer and inventing the technology
- WIKILEAKS counts, right?
- The Archive Team
[edit] My thoughts on conservapedia
It's hilarious. I sometimes visit just to laugh at the morons who edit it. I am not at RW to worry about or 'expose' CP. I am here to focus on the mass media and the other liars who are, for one reason or another, accepted by society at-large. Although I guess a fair chunk of my contributions have been about truth-tellers who are hated by one group or a government or society-at-large.
[edit] My thoughts on RationalWiki
It needs less cowbell! A lot less! Also, we have an anglophone bias and de facto condition for membership, which is very unfortunate. Otherwise, ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥!
RW editors are so great and do an excellent job keeping RW true to its mission because they understand a) nuance, b) the power of nuance, c) the limits of nuance d) that the world is complex, e) that some stuff just isn't complex, and, most importantly of all, f) that they do not know everything, which is far more than can be said of the CP crowd, I'm sure.
We are a diverse group of people from all walks of life, multiple political perspectives, various 'spiritual' beliefs(within which, I include none at all), all races, ages, classes, genders, sexual orientations, ability statuses, ethnicities, etc. This makes us baller! We do have that anglophone-centric problem, however.
My favorite article on RW is over here. This one is pretty good too. And this bad boy was rather informative as well. I am nominating this one for a brainstar. For a good time, click here.
It was after reading the article on Peter Hitchens, and specifically the thought process of his that includes the belief that women should not have the right to an abortion that I finally understood why being pro-choice is important. (No, I'm not saying that P. Hitchens or those who think like him should have been aborted; I'm saying that opposition to abortion is often part of a broader desire to control womankind).
I tend to disagree with the general tone of RationalWiki on fracking. It seems we generally say that the harms of fracking are a myth or exaggerated or the jusry is still out. I think that fracking really is very threatening; for me the jury is still out on whether it puts people at greater risk of developing cancer and whether is causes earthquakes. I lean towards it doing neither, but whether correlation does or does not causation with the fracking wells in Los Angeles county being right beside the origins of the 2014 earthquakes is neither here nor there- it's probably very bad that there are fracking wells by the fault lines because earhtquakes happen anyways, if you catch my drift.
I don't like the article on "creep shaming," largely because anybody can hurl a mean word like "creep" at someone, and someone who has had a mean word hurled at them has the right to complain about it. Also, I feel as though the term "creep" itself is drastically overused because some folks simply use it to describe people that merely don't gel with them or even for people who happen to be passionate about things that the term-users are not themselves also passionate about. That said, I can easily believe the general gist of the article, and that is that sexists use the term "creep-shaming" to defend sexual harassment and that they incorrectly believe that those who oppose sexual harassment are somehow comparable to slut-shamers, though I think that term gets over-applied too (by apologists for porn-culture).
I sometimes feel that our articles can be very biased against conservatives who simply espouse a policy opinion contrary to the preferences of the article's editors. For example, a conservative or libertarian might call for a return to the gold standard (which I happen to disagree with, though I like it as the cornerstone of the long-gone Bretton Woods system, which most libertarians probably oppose), and then they might also support ending the federal reserve (I have my problems with the Federal Reserve, but I also would oppose that policy- for now), and then they might also really like the idea of legalizing gambling (which I mostly oppose too), and then on that basis alone, the article's editors treat this person as a total nutcase. This is ridiculous in my opinion, and it can be used to overshadow good contributions to society that this person made or is making, all because the article's editors have non-mission disagreements with this person (in other words, the articles' subjects don't espouse bullshit or authoritarianism). One of the people who have been treated this way is the anti-war libertarian Adam Kokesh (okay, so he denies climate change and likes anarcho-capitalism; ever heard of the inverse stopped clock?). Another, it saddens me to say, is Edward Snowden, to some extent. We even do it to the almighty Glenn Greenwald even though he is a not-so-closeted progressive (there was a particular statement he made about the mainstream media hating on Occupy being owed to the fact that television journalists tend to be upper-class in which he mentioned in passing that he was a progressive). Furthermore, Stefan Molyneux may be a Men's Rights reactionary, and we must report on that in detail, but that doesn't mean our article can't contain information on the content of his anti-war documentary (which is more anti-war work than I have ever done), which would be very much on mission as well. But Rand0, you could go ahead and add information about what the anti-war documentary had to offer yourself! Yes, I can, and I probably will once I actually effing watch it. But my point is that we can do a better job of balancing the good, the bad, and the ugly when we are writing articles about people who simply espouse bad perspectives.
The inverse of this, of course, is when we are too nice to people by balancing the good, the bad, and the ugly. One example of this is Henry Kissinger, a war criminal. That he committed horrible atrocities, prolonged the war on Indochina by years, was a driving force in Operation Condor, etc. should be the focus of our article. Thawing tensions with China and promoting the SALT treaties should get the same kind of passing mention that we currently give to Molyneux's anti-war credentials.
Also, I appreciate User:Thescaryworker intentionally writing articles on mathematical and scientific subjects in such a way as to make the concepts accessible to all. I believe his doing so was very much on mission, for if you are a reader of RW, you may wish to understand better the concepts we discuss or the claims made by good scientists and asshole pseudoscientists/liars in general and don't have a science math background. That's why I, for one, expanded the standard deviation article to explain the concept in plainer English and provide the formula in a form more suitable to the layman. Unfortunately, all of the articles Thescaryworker started (except standard deviation[1] and Fun:Calculus) were deleted. We should bring them back, methinks. Here is a list of his deleted contribs, and here is a list of his non-deleted contribs. C'mon ya'll.
[edit] My thoughts on Liberapedia
In parts, it reads like Conservapedia,[2] but more editorialized.[3] I should mention that it has a great article on the NSA, and short as it may be, it's still considerably longer than our NSA article; bear this in mind, as it's part of our mission to provide information on authoritarianism.
[edit] My thoughts on...
[edit] Definitely overlapping magisteria
- Secularism: Great!
- The New Atheism: A bunch of douches (Daniel Dennett OK).
- The term "brights": No. Just no.
- Theism: Not particularly bad so long as we're not talking about literalist theism (and literalism is a new-ish phenomenon).
- Christianity, Judaism, and Islam: All pretty similar, despite what their practitioners insist.
- Mormonism: Not the devil folks insist it is; a Christian sect, despite whatever certain other Christians may claim.
- Science: Marvelous, stupendous, rewarding, necessary, wonderful, of the utmost importance.
- Romanticism: We need more of it.
[edit] Bigotry
- The term "white trash": I would appreciate if you didn't say this around me, pretty please with a cherry on top.
- Homophobes: Go away!
- Islamophobes: Read a damn history book!
- Sexism: How the fuck is this shit still around?
[edit] Narcissists
- George Bush Jr: War criminal; secretly not an idiot.
- Barack Obama: War criminal; all-around douchey kinda guy.
- Hillary Clinton: War criminal; NOT a feminist.
- Tony Blair: War criminal; not convincing anyone (anymore).
- Stephen Harper: Wants to change his title to dictator. Nuff said.
- Binyamin Netanyahu: War criminal; megalomaniac; models himself after Putin.
- Hamas: Cowards; megalomaniacs.
- Sarah Palin: Unintentional comedy.
- Michelle Bachmann: Wasted talent.
- Rush Limbaugh: Booooooooring.
- Glenn Beck: Neo-Neo-Nazi.
- Alex Jones: The butt of the butts of all jokes.
- George Galloway: Was correct about Iraq. So were a lot of people.
- Jerry Falwell: Hitch was right- if he had been given an enema, he could have fit in a match box (hence the phrase "holy shit").
- Osama bin Laden: Smellier than Falwell's innards; complete sexual pervert (in a bad way).
- Fred Phelps: Business man; see entry for Rush Limbaugh.
- Steve Jobs: Bully; never grew up (in a bad way); ARROGANT; undeserving of the awe and prestige (although that could be said for this whole list).
- Donald Trump: LOL! LOL again! LOL a third time!
[edit] Cults
- The Republican party/conservative sphere: No sense of personal responsibility; doesn't take much hunting to find bigotry here.
- The Democratic party/liberal sphere: No sense of moral nor intellectual consistency- it's not even clear what they're about.
- Stalin/Mao/Castro apologists/denialists: Scary as fuck.
[edit] Politics
- Israel/Palestine: Down for a one-state or two-state or no-state solution in the future, but two-state right now.
- Capitalism: Exploitative.
- Socialism: Okay, but do it quietly.
- Feminism: I can't see any argument against it, any whatsoever.
- Drugs: Legalize them.
- Gun control: Doesn't bother me, but I think it should apply to the military too (as in every military) and be very strictly enforced for "law enforcement."
- Urban police departments: Organized gangs, despite the presence of a few good eggs.
[edit] Venues for mischief
- United States: Land of contradictions.
- Earth: Planet of contradictions.
- The Solar System: Apparently no intelligent life.
- Big bang: Meh, I don't reject the theory but I don't 100% accept it (prolly in the 70% range).
[edit] My Userboxen ranch
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[edit] Links
- A great political economic article on academic freedom
- The people who want to fool you know how your brain works. You should too.
- Isaac Asimov gives a nice lesson on scientific reasoning
- Why we all ought to prioritize critical thinking above feeling comfortable.
- Joel KLEIN is a fucking douche and Time magazine is a rag
- Joel STEIN is a fucking douche and Time magazine is a rag
[edit] Videos
- How statistics is abused to fool juries (Youtube/NSA warning)
- Omar Holmon performs "I am Nerd" (Youtube/NSA warning)
- Jaron Lanier on Alan Turing's mistreatment, imprisonment, plight, and death (Youtube/NSA warning)
[edit] Assnotes
- ↑ Wait, I thought the point was to write them in an accessible way. Why did the article still require adding layman's editting?
- ↑ I grant, this may be intended as a joke
- ↑ I grant, this is definitely intended as Democratic party-loyalism
