“Nearly doubling to 100 co-sponsors” doesn’t mean shit. Talk to me when it’s 60 senators and 220 representatives.
We have the most profoundly impotent democratic “leadership” who are completely comfortable with our slide into fascism, even though it’ll almost certainly mean the end of their positions of power.
This is parroted a lot by commentators online but I’m increasingly convinced it isn’t true. I think showing pity or understanding for these kind of braindead bigots actually encourages the rare braindead bigot reading social media to hold on longer. I’m old enough to remember these statements made in 2016, pleading to gently convert conservatives into liberals. Instead we see a continual ratcheting of bigotry and hate against the left, because it appears not compassionate, but weak.
I think that if instead people went online and saw universal derision and scorn for these people, they would quietly revise their worldview. As it is, it seems like each MAGA voter needs to experience consequences personally before they revise their stance. Folks need to remember that conservative media is telling these “low-information voters” that minorities and “liberals” desperately want to destroy them. So when we say “oh no, come on over!” it seems like a trap, or like we are disingenuous.
You also need to consider that social media is so ideologically fractured by algorithm and media preference, you need to go out of your way to find a dissenting viewpoint. Basically all political punditry is performative at this point, with zero minds being swayed by logical arguments.
This is why I’ve stopped feeling or expressing remorse for any MAGA folks who suffer under the regime.
Thanks for the reply! I think I understand your arguments pretty well now, Thanks for the clarification.
On the subject of “Free as in Freedom” - I don’t agree that a site is ‘not free’ if non-anonymous user membership is a requirement for adding content. Primarily because all sorts of bad actors would abuse that privilege. But that’s not the main thrust of your argument so let’s set that aside.
Your main concern, about the Wikimedia foundation “doing very little,” and concerns about fairness, doesn’t seem to hold much weight from my perspective. The entire point of the wiki project is to leverage subject matter experts from the public rather than curated work from in-house people. Not only is a comprehensive and current encyclopedia of Wikipedia’s scale impractical to produce in-house, it’s also far less valuable. The Wikimedia foundation solicits funds for additional wiki projects, site hosting, and community events. Hosting a site in the top 10 traffic list is horrifically expensive, and worth the expense. Spending their time, effort, and funding on ancillary efforts around that goal is fine with me, Even in a hypothetical situation where only 10% of the solicited funds went to site hosting and 90% went to activism around using the site, I think I’d still be fine with it, given the altruistic nature of the project.
Donations to contributors would corrupt the entire process. Contributors would have an incentive to produce content that would financially reward them. We already have plenty of sites on the internet that do that, with all of the issues with bias that come with it. We don’t need more news sites, or lemmys, or substacks. We need a free place to compile information that is driven purely by the quest for truth, not money. Punditry for profit can go anywhere else. Indeed, recently the co-founder of wikipedia recently had their admin rights pulled for falsely accusing someone of the thing you’re wishing you could do, which tells me that they take the idea of direct contributor remuneration very seriously.
Lastly, I’m very aware of the corruption with 501c nonprofits. Frankly, your comments across this post have been full of veiled accusations of corruption. If it was that apparent, you’d be posting links with factual evidence of mismanagement, instead of vague hand-waving about freedom, IP, financial mismanagement or the abuse of volunteers. This is the kind of FUD that would get you banned from editing on Wikipedia, to be honest.
Edit: From your own source you linked elsewhere, the CTO has a very detailed rebuttal to the idea that the Wikimedia foundation is squandering those dollars:
I agree that those big banner ads were eyesores, and the pleas for money are off-putting. But that’s marketing, not politics.
Free as in beer? It can be free, but as Heinlein said: “There’s no such thing as a free lunch.”
The whole point of Wikipedia is that the “IP” is freely given, for the benefit of all. Keep in mind wikipedia editors are challenged to remain purely factual, so the idea that anything stated there could possibly belong to someone doesn’t exactly make sense. You can own the rights to a process, or a song, or own the right to produce something, but the composition of an object, the technology driving an innovation, or the background of music theory are facts, and statements around them are part of public discourse.
In the sense that media is present on Wikipedia, I believe I’ve never seen a commercially-licenced piece of media on the site. That’s why all the pictures of celebrities are weird public snaps.
Is the editing and content creation process messy? Sometimes corrupted? Yes. That’s humanity for you. We fuck things up. It’s up to all of us to keep us honest and continue to improve. Things can be irredeemable or fully captured by commercial interest, sure - that’s a Reddit situation and it can be abandoned. Wikipedia isn’t that, and it’s old enough to have proven it won’t be captured in that way.
I think maybe you’re confused on how nonprofits work? Plenty of nonprofits have paid employees who are working there expressly for money. Sometimes lots of money. Because living under a capitalist system involves trading your time for labor. How else would the site be maintained and kept running? Wikipedia is the 10th-most visited website on the entire internet. That it would run at all on the labor of less than 100 people is fucking incredible and something to be thrilled about! In comparison, Reddit makes the world much worse than Wikipedia and it runs on ~2,000 employees. So I would say that the Wikimedia foundation is definitely not just like reddit.
What other stuff? Blocking anonymous proxies is okay with me given the volume of bullshit posted by anonymous people everywhere else. Non-anonymised posting on a website wholly dedicated to facts and not opinions seems like a good thing.
Its a long, long border, mostly undefended in the west. A lot of infrastructure undefended, and a very brittle supply chain when it comes to civilian logistics and power. A handful of fighter jets would be a nightmare for rail lines and oil depots.