Eruditorum Press

We’re not on the blockchain, but we are blocked by Gareth Roberts

Fuller Statement on my Wikipedia Banning

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EDIT 11/11: I asked the arbitration committee why the bit of policy that says “”if individuals have identified themselves without redacting or having it oversighted, such information can be used for discussions of conflict of interest (COI) in appropriate forums” does not apply in this case.

The response was that “I don’t think that what the Guardian described as an “angry blog post” is what the community had in mind as an ‘appropriate forum’.”

It’s official: the arbitration committee does not consider my blog an appropriate place to discuss conflicts of interest.

Original post below:

I’d do a Saturday Waffling about the Day of the Doctor trailer, but I’ve seen it and there’s not all that much to say. Still, feel free to discuss it in comments. Meanwhile, I’ve got a dead horse to beat.

Back on Wednesday, in an interstitial post, I mentioned that I’d been permabanned from Wikipedia and made some appropriately dark mutterings about this. But since the issue has continued to be contentious on Wikipedia I wanted to make a more detailed response, if only because the arbitration committee persists in making the suggestion that I haven’t “answered their questions.” (This, in practice, is much like the political tactic of declaring that one’s opponent has to answer questions, in that the questions are never stated and the answers are never acknowledged.) Indeed, the committee is currently misrepresenting what I’ve said and done in a variety of ways, and so it seems worthwhile to turn the spotlight on this body again and look at what passes for decision making on Wikipedia.

Let’s start with the basic facts. In my post entitled “Wikipedia Goes All-In on Transphobia,” which is, at the time of writing, my fourth most-read post on the blog and is thus linked on the sidebar, I revealed that an editor who was accusing people of conflicts of interest over the discussion on what the appropriate name for the article about Chelsea Manning should be on the basis that they knew trans people, and who engaged in disturbing and stalkerish behavior towards several editors was, in fact, an employee of the US Military. I did so by revealing their name and workplace.

Since Wikipedia is currently removing all links to that post (which was used as the main source for a Guardian article on the subject, incidentally, and which Brad Patrick, the former legal representative for Wikipedia, praised and shared), I won’t mention the editor by name here, just because, well, I want the people still arguing about this on Wikipedia to have the ability to link to what I’m saying here in order to dispel some of what can charitably be called the misrepresentations of what I’ve done. Regardless, yeah, I doxed a dude.

Shortly after the post went up I received the following e-mail from a member of the arbitration committee.

Please contact the Arbitration Committee to explain why you have posted personal, non-public information about another contributor on your personal blog. This blog post has direct ramifications on the project, and may put you in gross violation of the project’s norms and policies.

…

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The sacred mountain of the Sarns is being engulfed.  Turlough tries to persuade Timanov and the faithful to flee.

“Leave us alone,” says Timanov, “We wish to die with our settlement.”

You have to wonder if some of the others are truly eager to die needlessly, or whether they are just still under the spell of Timanov’s authority.  This is a man who has condemned people to burn many times.

A silver figure walks into the room.

“Logar!” cries Timanov, thinking he is seeing his god.

“On your feet!” shouts the figure.  He is offended by bended knees, yet he is hectoring in his command.  He removes his helmet.  It is Amyand, ‘leader’ of the unbelievers, wearing a heat-proof suit.  (The Sarn religion is a ‘cargo cult’, but we’ll complain about that – and everything that goes with it – some other time.)

“A deception,” says Timanov quietly, a bitter laugh in his voice, “Another deception.  And from a heretic.”

Amyand holds out his hand.  There is a way out.

“You will never understand, Amyand,” says Timanov quietly, “Logar is everywhere.  He cares for the faithful.”

But perhaps it’s Timanov who doesn’t understand.  After all, why expect a pantheistic god to walk in through a doorway?

Here is the split in the belief.  God is everywhere; God is a king on a throne.  God is love; God is power.  God cares; God is to be feared.  God is a comfort; God demands obedience on pain of death.

Timanov’s oligarchy has rationalised itself along this split.  Religion is the expression of, and protest against, a world that hurts us.  That’s why, ironically enough, it can be so useful to the people who run the world that hurts us.

Stripped of his power, Timanov will subject himself to burning – his old punishment for doubt – as a reward for faith.  This Logar’s care.  At least Timanov is not a hypocrite.…

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Rose is exploring the space station, waiting for the end of the world.  Suddenly she encounters a young woman with blue skin, wearing overalls and hard at work.

Rose asks if she’s allowed to be where she is.  Her automatic response to officialdom of any kind is to question her own status.  For all her confidence, she’s a girl who lives on an estate and worked in a shop.

The young woman in overalls looks awkward.

“You have to give us permission to talk,” she says, nervously aware of the irony.

Rose is dumbfounded.  She realises that this woman looks upon her – Rose – as a high status person, someone before whom she must be humble.

“Er…” she says, embarassed, “you… have… permission?”  She inflects it as a question.  ‘Is that the right form of words that I’m using?’  There is embarassment in her voice, and a faint look of nausea on her face.  It makes me love her.

“Thank you,” says the woman, who’s name turns out to be Raffalo, “And, no, you’re not in the way. Guests are allowed anywhere.”

Rafallo turns out to be a plumber.  She addresses Rose respectfully as “Miss”.  Rose probably feels like a teacher.

“They still have plumbers?” says Rose, stating it to herself as much as asking a question.  Five billion years in the future and there are still grease monkeys in boiler suits, running around backstage, making sure the swells have plenty of hot water.

“I hope so,” says Rafallo, “else I’m out of a job.”

Just like Rose is out of a job now that, between the Autons and the Doctor, the shop where she worked got blown up.  Rose knows what unemployment means.

Rose says goodbye and, as she leaves, Rafallo thanks her “for the permission”.  

Rose has met one of the people in the background.  The people who make everything work.  One of the people the Doctor has never had much to do with until now.  But Rose would, because she was one of those people herself, until recently.  Now she’s travelling.  Rafallo will not be as lucky, despite being Rose’s mirror image.  Because the universe is shitty and unfair.  Still.  Rafallo is about to die because of the profiteering scheme of a rich, sociopathic bit of skin who also happens to be the last human being alive… if we allow that she’s still human at all (and that Rafallo somehow isn’t).

It’s a shame that Cassandra is the show’s first explicitly transgender character.  And it’s also a shame that we, the people of the universe, are depicted as still ridden by class in the year 5 Billion.  As Slavoj Žižek said:

Think about the strangeness of today’s situation. Thirty, forty years ago, we were still debating about what the future will be: communist, fascist, capitalist, whatever. Today, nobody even debates these issues. We all silently accept global capitalism is here to stay. On the other hand, we are obsessed with cosmic catastrophes: the whole life on earth disintegrating, because of some virus, because of an asteroid hitting the earth, and so on.

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Outside the Government: Something Borrowed

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It’s March 5th, 2008. Duffy is at number one with “Mercy.” H Two O, OneRepublic, Basshunter, and David Jordan also chart, along with several more… notable artists. In news, former Thai Prime Minister and owner of Manchester City Thaskin Shinawatra returns to Thailand to face corruption charges. Prince Harry returns from a deployment in Afghanistan due to his location being leaked by the press. The Presidential Primaries rumble on in the US, with Hillary Clinton winning the Rhode Island, Ohio, and Texas primaries, but Obama winning Vermont and the Texas caucuses, which results in him getting more delegates overall out of that state. John McCain, meanwhile, officially secures the Republican nomination.

While on television, it’s the pleasantly idiosyncratic Something Borrowed. It’s possible, looking at the dramatic improvement Torchwood undergoes in its last two seasons (yes, really), to suggest that Torchwood is simply not very good at done-in-one episodes, and that its natural format is the miniseries. Certainly it’s true, as we’ll get around to seeing, that the series undergoes a profound transformation and improvement with its third season. And it’s true that the first and second seasons are pocked with mediocre and occasionally dreadful episodes. But this is not in and of itself a refutation of its format. 
I bring all of this up because Something Borrowed is the last time Torchwood attempts a fairly light-hearted episode; indeed, a broadly comedic one. As it happens, it’s also the best episode of the season to date, and a credible contender for the best episode of the season outright. And so it represents a vanishing glimpse of another sort of Torchwood. The problem with the eventual miniseries format is that it is bombastically big. And while this can be terribly effective, it’s easy to forget that in the first two seasons Torchwood was at its best with small stories.
Because this is what appeals so much about Something Borrowed. It is, in the end, just a story about Gwen and Rhys getting married. It’s a human story. Something goes terribly wrong on their wedding day, and Gwen is determined to find a way to make it work because she refuses to let Torchwood interfere with this one. The result is that one of Torchwood’s absolute strongest points – the Gwen/Rhys relationship – is in the foreground. (Notably, this is what made Meat, the most recent more-or-less functional episode of Torchwood, work as well) And so we get the sort of thing Torchwood is good at – ordinary human moments juxtaposed with strange, eccentric spaces. 
There’s a line of critique about this episode that declares that Gwen is mad to carry on with her wedding. Which she very plainly is, and yet it’s an entirely human madness. Gwen is hardly the first person to become a bit monomaniacal on her wedding day. (And her initial justification is so perfectly accurate: “do you have any idea how much a wedding costs?” Because yes, that is exactly what it is like.) And more to the point, there’s a clear motivation, particularly in the wake of Rhys finding out about Torchwood.
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“Be not a cancer on the earth”: The Mark of Gideon

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“‘Oh, I wish it could stay like this forever!’ ‘So do I.'”

“The Mark of Gideon” is not one of the original Star Trek‘s finest hours. But you expected this. It has the makings of a great example of the show’s newfound direction, but it ultimately ends up proving the show is just drifting at this point, painfully obviously out of steam.

It tries though, it really, truly does. For an episode very clearly produced solely so the show didn’t have to build any new sets, “The Mark of Gideon” does the self-evidently correct story to make with that brief: Having a crewmember be mysteriously transported an eerily empty starship. It’s a novel concept, though it would be perhaps more novel if the show hadn’t pulled similar tricks in both “The Tholian Web” and “The Doomsday Machine”. So novel in fact it’s done again in the similarly resource-challenged second season of Star Trek: The Next Generation (albeit to a much more effective extent) and one of the most frequently overlooked virtues of the first two seasons of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine was it’s ability to knock out world-class science fiction on a weekly basis while consistently only using one set.

This time though it’s Kirk who, ostensibly on a diplomatic mission to a notoriously reclusive and xenophobic civilization, beams down only to find himself apparently where he started, on the transporter pad of the Enterprise. Only now it seems like he’s the only one on the ship. To make matters worse, he has a mysterious bruise on his arm and nine minutes of his life, the period of time between when he beamed down and beamed back up again, are a blank to him. Soon though he realises he’s not alone when he meets a mysterious woman named Odona who claims to have been abducted from her home planet. Although she doesn’t remember much about it, she says it was extremely claustrophobic, and that thousands upon thousands of faces were constantly staring at her from every direction. Meanwhile, we keep cutting to scenes on the very much populated Enterprise as Spock, McCoy, Scotty and Uhura try to determine why Kirk has disappeared into thin air and trying to navigate diplomacy talks between Starfleet Command and Gideon, the latter who are clearly hiding and withholding information.

This part of the episode is actually brilliant. There is a palpable sense of mystery surrounding the proceedings, keeping us constantly wondering about whether or not Kirk has been transported to another dimension or perhaps into his ship’s own past…or perhaps its future. It slowly builds tension and unease over the course of a full half-hour up until the moment Kirk and Odona look out of the portholes and suddenly see the stars transform into thousands of faces staring back at them, a scene which is genuinely unsettling to the point of actually being disturbing. Furthermore, just like the subtle Forteanism of “The Tholian Web”, the Fairy Myth overtones in “Wink of an Eye” and the supernatural horror of “That Which Survives”, the first half of “The Mark of Gideon” is yet another example of Star Trek shifting its approach to science fiction from the pulp and Golden Age tradition to the more fantastic trappings that come to define the genre from here on out, and indeed that the franchise is capable of making this kind of shift at all and living on after Apollo 11.…

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Early morning in Britain.

Shop-window dummies twitch, stand up and smash their way out into the high street.  They stalk past the shop logos and brand names and adverts.  Price tags dangle from their fashionable clothes.

Their hands are not like human hands.  They’re not organs of manipulation, to be used for work.  They flip open to reveal weapons.

The dummies encounter shoppers, or people waiting for the bus to work.  They gun them down.  People fall and die next to the shop fronts.

The dummies are plastic effigies of people.  Products, manufactured things, fashioned in the human image.  They alienate the human image from humans.  They were made in a factory, on a production line, by workers.  Sold to shops.  They are hostile commodities, made for a capitalist concern; made by people working for a wage, yet out of human control, invested with a life of their own, confronting people as an external, dominating, fierce, blank, gothic, inhuman power. 

The alienation of the worker in his product means not only that his labour becomes an object, an external existence, but that it exists outside him, independently, as something alien to him, and that it becomes a power on its own confronting him. It means that the life which he has conferred on the object confronts him as something hostile and alien.

– Karl Marx, Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844

By the way Karl, the people who made these dummies were women.  The dummies, by contrast, are all male.  The dummies are all white too, because that’s what the default, ‘vanilla’ human is to capitalist culture: male and white.  Several of the women we see working in Auto Plastics are not white.

Talk about alienation.…

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“Freedom at last!” says Kimus.  Because he’s flying in an air car.

“You’re not free yet,” the Doctor reminds him.

Kimus observes that he’s “free to think”, yet doesn’t seem to be doing so.

They chat about how Kimus’ world works.  It has mines that function by themselves.

“What happens when they run out?” asks the Doctor.

“The Captain announces a new Golden Age of Prosperity and they just fill up again.”

Kimus notices a certain reserve in the Doctor’s manner.

“You don’t think that’s… well… wrong?  Do you?”

“It’s an economic miracle,” says the Doctor, “of course it’s wrong.”

What actually happens, of course, is planetary piracy.  Or, to give it another name, imperialism.  Kimus’ planet (“Zanak” as Romana or Mula would helpfully remind us) materialises around other planets and then mines them down to a tiny, crushed pulp, killing anyone who happens to live on them in the process.

Real imperialism is considerably more complex than this… but the basic picture is essentially right.

Much as the people might stagily cry “hooray!” for the Captain whenever he announces another Golden Age of Prosperity, they are not the ones he serves.  Their tyranny is one which gives them fine clothes and jewels to kick around the street, but that’s a by-product.  The crushed planets are fed into a system to keep an ancient queen alive.  Stuck forever at a moment of near-deathly stasis, her need for energy is nevertheless immense… and growing.  The energy flows in from the crushed planets to the ravenous centre of the system.  And the hunger at the centre only grows.  The more it gets, the more it needs.  The real dividends always fall.  The crisis looms, and the only way to fend it off is to extend further and further, to accumulate more and more and more.  And with every extension, the hunger grows.…

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Dangerous, Mysterious, Hyperscientific (The Last War in Albion Part 17: The Stars My Degradation, The Stars My Destination)

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This is the final of Chapter Three of The Last War in Albion, covering Alan Moore’s work for Sounds Magazine (Roscoe Moscow and The Stars My Degradation) and his comic strip Maxwell the Magic Cat. An omnibus of the entire chapter, sans images, is available in ebook form from Amazon, Amazon UK, and Smashwords. It is equivalently priced at all stores because Amazon turns out to have rules about selling things cheaper anywhere but there, so I had to give in and just price it at $2.99. Sorry about that. In any case, your support of this project helps make it possible, so if you are enjoying it, please consider buying a copy. You may also enjoy my newly released history of Wonder Woman, A Golden Thread. Chapter Four will begin next week.

PREVIOUSLY IN THE LAST WAR IN ALBION: Alan Moore’s first strip for Sounds, Roscoe Moscow, ended after a little more than a year, and was replaced with The Stars My Degradation, a science fiction parody strip…

“The Stars My Destination is, after all, the perfect cyberpunk novel: it contains such cheerfully protocyber elements as multinational corporate intrigue; a dangerous, mysterious, hyperscientific McGuffin (PyrE); an amoral hero; a supercool thief-woman…” – Neil Gaiman


To continue to come up with inventive page layouts and subversive cat gags week in and week out is one thing. To labour excessively on a reasonably humorous sci-fi parody strip in order to cover up inadequate artistic skills is another. 
Figure 130: The Stars My Destination was
first serialized in four issues of Galaxy in 1956
In this regard there’s something strangely apropos in Moore’s choice of parody subjects in The Stars My Degradation. The title – indeed the entire opening rhyme – is a parody of Alfred Bester’s 1956 novel The Stars My Destination, originally titled Tiger! Tiger!. Bester is very much a science fiction fan’s science fiction writer – one who enjoys rather more renown within science fiction fandom than without. To name The Stars My Destination as one’s favorite science fiction novel is not in the least bit controversial – it’s widely and repeatedly cited as one of the best. But it is not a particularly famous book outside of science fiction circles. Unlike writers such as Isaac Asimov, Robert Heinlein, and Arthur C. Clarke, whose work became influential and widely known outside the sci-fi community, Bester remains at once obscure but terribly well-respected: Samuel Delany, William Gibson, and Michael Moorcock have all identified it as their favorite science fiction novel.
Figure 131: Gully Foyle is my name
Terra is my nation
Deep space is my dwelling place
The stars my destination
(Howard Chaykin, 1979)
On one level, The Stars My Destination is a fairly straightforward pulp-style novel. It was serialized over four issues of Galaxy, and features the sort of episodic content familiar to such material. What elevates it is the character arc of its protagonist, Gully Foyle.
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The Post Wikipedia Doesn’t Want You To See

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Due to my revelation in this post that the Wikipedia user Cla68, who has been arguing that transgender people are too biased to edit the article on Chelsea Manning, is in fact a member of the US Military and thus has clear biases of his own, the Arbitration Committee of the English language Wikipedia has removed my administrator privileges and banned me indefinitely, forbidding any appeal of the ban for a year.

As discussed in the post, Cla68 has, prior to this, been open about his participation on Wikipedia, freely giving quotes to the media and engaging in discussion on Wikipedia about those quotes. It’s only now that he’s begin editing with an obvious conflict of interest that he has suddenly developed a desire to keep his identity a secret. My “revelation,” in other words, is nothing of the sort. Indeed, it’s difficult to see how this decision comports with Wikpiedia policy, which declares that “Posting another editor’s personal information is harassment, unless that person had voluntarily posted his or her own information, or links to such information, on Wikipedia.” Which, again, Cla68 has done.  Since my post, in fact, Cla68 has posted on Wikipediocracy, a Wikipedia criticism site on which he’s a forum moderator, confirming his employer. Furthermore, I’ve made no mention of his identity on Wikipedia, nor have I linked to that blog post from there. I revealed his identity in my capacity as a z-list blogger, not as a Wikipedia editor.

My reasoning for outing Cla68 was and is simple: it’s in the public interest. The sixth largest website in the world is sanctioning trans allies and Chelsea Manning supporters for being “too involved” to work on the Chelsea Manning article, but is giving a pass to members of the US Military, who apparently have no conflict of interest. This is straightforwardly something that deserves to be talked about.

This shockingly harsh sanction – the harshest the committee ever hands down – takes on an unnerving tone when one considers that the bulk of that blog post consisted of criticism of the Arbitration Committee’s decision to punish editors complaining about transphobic behavior on Wikipedia more harshly than they punish transphobic behavior itself. It is difficult, if not impossible, to see this move as anything other than petty retaliation.

Particularly entertaining is that I’ve been banned for attempting to disinfect with sunlight with regards to Chelsea Manning. Not only does this sanction look petty, it looks particularly ridiculous when applied on the topic of someone who is in jail for her commitment to transparency. I’m actually taken aback by the comedy of it. The Arbitration Committee censures its critics for leaking things in the public interest. Over the Chelsea Manning article.

It is not the ban in particular that bothers me. I rarely edit Wikipedia anyway, have not used administrator powers in ages (though they were quite nice for finding well-written articles on fiction that got spuriously deleted on “notability” grounds). I knew there was a risk in criticizing the Arbitration Committee, and I took it because the consequence – banning – wasn’t one that personally mattered to me much at all.
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In an opulent throne room, the Doctor and Romana are being entertained by Zargo and Camilla, two of the Three Who Rule.  Plates are loaded with meat.  Glasses are filled with dark red wine.  The Lords are draped in fine fabrics and smeared in make-up to mask their strangely pallid faces.

“Well, you certainly do very well for yourselves here,” observes the Doctor.

“We struggle to retain some remnants of civilisation,” says Zargo, who evidently considers himself civilised.

“Well, you do better than the peasants,” remarks the Doctor.  He and Romana have recently been in a peasant hovel, where the half-starved, over-worked, rag-clad people reacted in terror at their aristocratic confidence.

“The peasants are simple folk,” observes Camilla drily, “Richer fare would only distress them.”

“Quite right,” says the Doctor.  (His pronunciation makes it sound more like ‘Quite trite.‘)  “Probably give them indigestion,” he continues, “There’s nothing worse than a peasant with indigestion. Makes them quite rebellious. I hear you’ve been having trouble that way.”

“There are always a few ungrateful ones who do not appreciate all that we do for them,” agrees Camilla, without a trace of irony.

“And what do you do for them, apart from saving them from gluttony?” asks Romana, with more than a trace of irony.

The Lords claim to “protect” their people; they are unspecific about how, or from what.  It turns out that they protect their people from “the Wasting”.  But the Lords – a gang of literal vampires – are the Wasting.  They are what sucks all opportunity for progress out of the system, making their world (in Romana’s phrase) “a society that evolves backwards”.  All wealth, all that is farmed and harvested, is appropriated by them from the people who farm and harvest it.  The lifeblood of society flows upwards to them where they consume it, wear it, sit comfortably upon it.  They store the literal blood of the peasants in their giant fuel tanks, like the stolen surplus that it is. 

There was nothing progressive about Roman aquaducts (the water went to the fountains of the rich) or pyramids (they were the tombs of kings, stuffed with the wealth they wanted to take with them), or any of the other monuments that ruling classes throughout history have built to themselves.  Such rulers have always claimed to be protecting the people they leech off.  But every last ruling class in history has been a great vampire, feeding upon a wasting disease of which they are themselves the primary symptom.…

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