Gorbachev wanted to gradually deconstruct the communist state to avoid all of the problems that the people suffered by the sudden collapse because nothing had been put in place. Gorbachev wanted a symbolic removal of the wall by reducing travel restrictions, eventually the wall would have been demolished. My thoughts are that if Gorbachev had been allowed to continue with a gradual political change the power vacume that resulted in the sudden collapse would not have happened and Russia would be a completely different country today.
It is an article of faith among some people, notably those with minority and/or wackadoodle ideas, that there’s an organized, paid effort to discredit them on Internet websites and forums.
Spend any time on sites discussing alternative medicine or topics like vaccination and GMOs, and you’ll run into posters vehemently insisting that their opponents are paid shills for the Corporate Evil (it would be lovely if (for instance) Big Pharma paid me big bucks to scour the Internet each day for herbalists and homeopaths to squash like bugs, but alas that paycheck is still elusive).
Wikipedia has taken heat for its generally pro-science stance, causing loons to denounce it and set up alternative information sources that will not impede the flow of crazy.
Don’t we need a nice, centrist cite from RationalWiki or Michael Lind to show us the extreme far-right bias of anyone else?
Regards,
Shodan
Thanks Obama !!!
This is from a parody site, but it’s really funny one.
http://harddawn.com/facebook-friends-hate-you-for-obama/
"Are your Facebook posts not getting enough likes because Obama fears Independent Brilliance?"
"If you get flagged anonymously or if your links simply generate zero interest among your so-called “friends” online, it could even be Obama himself who is behind it. Your brilliance is a direct threat to his dictatorship.
For many, this is a very disturbing image… Our Commander in Chief hunched over his desk in the Oval Office, banging his fists at your most enlightening Facebook posts, pulling his hair out as he reads your incredibly devastating comments, shocked to tears by your amazing videos… And clicking over ever so harshly to flag and flag you again, sending those stunning insights to Facebook purgatory, to the very bottom of everyone’s newsfeeds, to be forever lost and forgotten in the dustbin of political correctness!"
Well, that sure as Hell ain’t loony, at least not at any time since 1980.
That certainly explains such high priority business desires as Obamacare, the passage of the Sarbanes-Oxley act, the developing movement to grant recognition of human rights to the LGBT community, the growing awareness and acknowledgement of Anthropogenic Global Warming, etc. along with the defeat of the Parti Accion Nacional in Mexico, the self-destruction of Venezuela, and similar phenomena.
No cite, obviously, but I am always amazed at how objective Wikipedia is. I don’t look at the talk pages much but whatever fights there are over how to address disputed issues tend to be pretty apolitical, as far as I can tell.
The Amazon blurb for that book says:
The United States is more vulnerable today than ever before-including during the Great Depression and the Civil War-because the pillars of democracy that once supported a booming middle class have been corrupted, and without them, America teeters on the verge of the next Great Crash.
(My emphasis.)
Anybody who seriously thinks that we’re more vulnerable now than during the Civil War is anti-vax-humans-had-dinosaur-pets-crystal-vortex loony.
You posted that because you’re paid off by Merck, Mobil and Monsanto. :mad:
Well, I dunno who wrote that blurb, but I’m midway through the book and it don’t say that yet.
This is what I was going to mention. There is quite a lot of evidence of Wikipedia actually stopping these sorts of concerted efforts, especially in high-trafficked articles on highly contentious subjects. Things that look POV tend to get noticed.
The way to slip something in is to make it completely innocuous and seemingly true, and include a citation that is not easy to get access to. Not that I would ever do such a thing…
Of course, it could also happen like this. Never attribute to malice . . .
3M?
LIke BigT said, I also have to point at a good example of how Wikipedia dealt with the attempted edits to remove the qualification of Irreducible complexity as being pseudo-scientific and not a theory either, just an argument.
The history entry does show that the fight is ongoing as just this April someone tried to change it to make it a “science” last week, it is back to the non neutral edit.
As recent polls show, creationism is strong even on the left side in the USA, but a majority in the right wing remain creationists.
On many other scientific areas I can say that many right wingers do not like Wikipedia.