Mini Biography
Information on the famous author (de-nom-de-guerre'd): http://gnosis.cx/ (sometimes called "David Mertz, Ph.D." and variants on that).
To talk to me, either go to the user talk page, or feel free to email me If you want to drop any bombs on me, you can apparently get the telemetry data. You probably need an extra click or two change to satellite imagery. If you do, you can see my car in the driveway, and my house quite easily. Is this fact creepy? (actually, if you trust google, you will target some neighbors on my block rather than me; but still...) Update: from Oct '06 until whenever, you'll have to send the bombs to west Los Angeles; I'm sure Google can tell you the address). This editor suffers fools poorly, and just is not able to assume good faith when it is self-evidently absent. |
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Things I wish I wrote (and some I did)
From the Call me Ishmael department
- So I am for the moment going to say that I'm not sure of his/her gender, and am going to refer to Lulu as a girl, since its a girl's name. If he is a man and wants to be known as a man, change his name to something like Paul or something. (A secret admirer)
- Just as the dominated classes' ideological structures determine their future political, economic, and moral situations; my own view of my position to my boss determines my relation to my boss. These thoughts in the sailor went round and round like hamsters strung out on dex. (Kathy Acker, Empire of the Senseless)
- B: Is that a female impersonator?
A: Of what?
(Andy Warhol, The Philosophy of Andy Warhol; from A to B and back again)
- For the record, I am not User:58.160.223.124 and would welcome whatever processes can be employed to prove this. My current IP address is 192.168.1.3. User:58.160.223.124 is a friend and collegue of mine, however, who is new to Wikipedia.(username redacted)
On human relations
- Do not treat bad-faith engagement as if it were in good-faith solely to preserve a superficial cordiality. It is not OK to lie outright, nor to fixatedly cling to your own ignorance; Or in the language of South Park: You have the right to call shennanigans (bullshit).
- If I seem shortsighted to you, it is only because I have stood on the backs of midgets. (also a .signature of mine, but "stolen" from some dimly remembered source)
Talking 'bout a revolution
Two related slogans seem apropos the recent style usage kerfuffle that I was (unfortunately, but unavoidably) drawn into by myrmecine minds:
- Humanity will not be happy until the day when the last aristocrat has been hung with the guts of the last priest. (18th century radical priest, Jean Meslier)
- Humanity will not be happy until the day when the last bureaucrat has been hung with the guts of the last capitalist. (Situationist slogan written on wall in the Sorbonne rectorate in May 1968)
The curse of Wikipedia
- If once a man indulges himself in murder, very soon he comes to think little of robbing; and from robbing he comes next to drinking and Sabbath-breaking, and from that to incivility and procrastination. (Thomas de Quincey)
The structure of Law
- Anarchism is founded on the observation that since few men are wise enough to rule themselves, even fewer are wise enough to rule others. (Edward Abbey)
- Democracy must be imposed with an iron fist. (Your humble editor)
"Intellectual property"
- Keeping medicines from the bloodstreams of the sick; food from the bellies of the hungry; books from the hands of the uneducated; technology from the underdeveloped; and putting advocates of freedom in prisons. Intellectual property is to the 21st century what the slave trade was to the 16th. (yours truly, as an email .signature; quoted around the 'net)
- The specter of free information is haunting the `Net! All the powers of IP- and crypto-tyranny have entered into an unholy alliance...ideas have nothing to lose but their chains. Unite against "intellectual property" and anti-privacy regimes! (ditto, though I may have borrowed just a little in writing it ☺)
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Released into public domain | ![]() |
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I agree to release my text and image contributions, unless otherwise stated, into the public domain. Please be aware that other contributors might not do the same, so if you want to use my contributions under public domain terms, please check the multi-licensing guide. |
Pages started/to start
Pages that are meant as temporary/draft versions, talk pages, or pages that are purely administrative, excluded from the list below. I am tempted to list those articles where I have made "substantial" improvements. But it is such a fine line between substantial and merely worthwhile improvements that I think you will just need to look at my contribution history if you really care.
How much?
Hey, my pro-Satan day (November 15, 2005):
Total edits 4758 Image uploads 20 (16 cur, 4 old) Distinct pages edited 666 Edits/page (avg) 7.14 Deleted edits 32 (browse) First edit 2004-07-12 03:17:27
More recently (June 18, 2006):
Total edits 11003 Image uploads 61 (37 cur, 24 old) Distinct pages edited 1537 Edits/page (avg) 7.16 Deleted edits 605 (browse)
And again (July 13, 2008):
Total edits 16,360
Another year (July 19, 2009):
Total edits 19,582
Deletionist? Inclusionist? Nope...
There are a number of categories and/or lists of "<Type of person> in <profession>" that have stuck in my craw lately. For example, Category:LGBT philosophers, List of gay, lesbian, or bisexual academics and List of born-again Christian laypeople, List of Jewish historians. The problem with these groupings is that they almost inevitably violate WP:V and WP:NOR; but underlying that is that putting people in those groupings is almost always a kind of "feel good" self-affirmation by editors who share the category membership. I do not believe that categories/lists like this will ever reach encyclopedic quality, since the judgments involved are always too fuzzy, subjective, contextual, and politicized. In the opposite direction Category:Terrorists is equally bad.
Therefore, I would characterize my attitude towards page deletion as Occamist. I really don't often believe in the substantial existence of categories. In other words, I am a nominalist. Concretely, it tends to mean: put the facts in the subject articles themselves, not in weak aggregations of like things.
Successfully nominated for deletion
- Category:Secular Jewish philosophers
- Category:Political correctness
- Category:Controversial books -- not identitarian, just vacuous since all theses intend to "raise controversy"
Failed nominations for deletion
Lulu's Favorite Words
Administravia
Those categories that are true of me...