User talk:Gun Shy

this is from User_talk:Ed Poor, placed here to head off the usual intervention of ego-driven admin types who interfere with critical communication, and administrators who enforce conflicting rules about whether users are allowed to delete discussion from their own talk pages.Gun Shy

To Ed's credit, he replied to a surly approach by stating that he welcomed the comments. Gun Shy 19:31, 13 Apr 2004 (UTC)

military power

I agree to what you said on your home page: our military's definitely better than it was, say, 30 years ago, or even 10 years ago (do the countries of Somalia and Vietnam bring anything to mind)? I may be opposed to the Iraq War in general, but there's no denying that the military handled itself very well after being thrust into the situation. ugen64 22:10, Apr 5, 2004 (UTC)

That is an easy conclusion to reach for a person who has not seen what is happening in the war. As long as the cameras don't show where US soldiers point their guns and who falls down when the bullet strikes, it is easy to conclude that hundreds of Iraqi deaths in early April were all the result of US troops killing insurgents. Yeh, right. And all people who have gripes with Wikipedia's fledgling administrative process that is based on name calling and character assassination are "trolls." Phsheww! US troops rolled into Bahgdad because of a breif moment in history when US forces have an edge in weapons guidance systems - primarily the M1A1's ability to fire at moving targets, using computer guided sites on the run, but also a temporary advantage in air superiority that allowed victory in open field combat. The general tactic employed is to return fire when fired upon, with soldiers instructed that whomever resists them belongs to one of several generalized categories - usually Saddam loyalists, outside agitators. It was militarily affective on the battle field, but when the US took its guns to town the tables turned. People don't appreciate seeing families murdered because a emotionally scarred young man chose their roof as a good place to launch a rocket propelled grenade.

The truth is the resistance is fueled by a growing number of people whose family members were killed by US forces often for no reason but being in the wrong place at the wrong time. What makes Wikipedias current administrative style so repugnant and dangerous is that it teaches the same rules of engagement taught by US commanders - take advantage of temporary technological advantages to solidify outmoded understandings of human behavior. When opposition qualifies as unlawful by improvised battle field rules, attack everything associated with the now-unlawful contributor. Well understood aspects of human behavior have no place in occupied Iraq, nor in occupied Wikipedia. No, these battles are between good and evil, trolls and infinitely righteous admins. Discussion of psychological faults in the system, and introduction of improved rules of engagement is treated as collaboration with the enemy in both cases. We have documented numerous cases of problem-solving dialogue being deleted by leaders of this site, which we will present in other less hostile outlets.

Yeh, I have some admiration for the recent mechanical technological gains of the US military, having seen it more up close and personal than many. And I know exactly how thin is that military advantage - how emerging P4 and G5 technology can be applied to create improvised high-tech weapons even as the government blathers coverup for its "go ahead, hit me" strategy on Sept. 11. The US uses US civilians the same way it uses its troops in Iraq -- it intentionally places them in the line of fire for the purpose of identifying the source of opposition, then follows with a "kill 'em all, let God sort 'em out" response. And the same is how the worst, most active admins work here - they participate in editorial processes, introducing often contradictory requirements (cite sources/don't cite sources, use this format/don't use this format) until an unwelcome group member is provoked to some adminstrative infraction, at which point the admins pick up their guns and begin a character assassination.

I have witnessed the criminal behavior of military personnel, which makes it so much more easy to recognize the abusive aspects of Wikipedia administration. In the same way US military leaders deny rampant off-base crime by troops, and cover up as "fog of war" on-battlefield atrocities, dominant Wikipedia admins use a "go tell it somewhere else" response that prevents most administrators from acknowledging even the substance of this concern before they go on a rampage of character assassination. i.e. - "your anonymous", "you have no reputation here hence no credibility, there is another place to write these comments so you are trolling if you post here", "you did something offensive to me two months ago so I will never trust you again", "Complainant A is really complainant B" (aka "just pockets of resistance"), etc.

And that is what wikipedia is about. As altruistic contributers are hooked by ego-manipulation into conflicts that reveal their personal proclivities, a futures trader maintains back-room access to identify contributors through technical means not available to the community as a whole and provides that information to is ultra-conservative allies for use when the insurgency inevitably comes home to roost in the United States.

While the usual knee jerk reaction of admins, Ed Poor included, is to marginalize critical analysis as "complaining" we bother to repeat these messages because eventually more mild-mannered adminstrators and future administrators may recognize the substance of the problem and help us in turnng things toward a kinder, more respectful human community. Gun Shy 17:49, 13 Apr 2004 (UTC)

Thank you in advance, Ed, (based on your track record) for refusing to listen to what others have to say and for developing a hateful response that confirms our data-supported analysis that we bother to spend time compiling. And thanks to the usual gang of minions who race to delete comments from talk pages before somebody reads them and genuine dialogue has an opportunity to emerge. Gun Shy

To Ed's credit, he replied to a surly approach by stating that he welcomed the comments. Gun Shy 19:31, 13 Apr 2004 (UTC)