On Sun, 05 Aug 2007 11:32:07 -0400 Marc Riddell michaeldavid86@comcast.net wrote:
on 8/2/07 7:19 PM, Armed Blowfish at diodontida.armata@googlemail.com
wrote:
Excellent point, AB. I was thinking in terms of 1-1 dialogue. But, you are right, in the larger scale of a public forum, the hatemongers must be met head on, and with a group voice that is loud and clear. Victims do feel very much alone; we, by our voice and our embrace, can assure them they are not.
Thank you for this.
Marc
The analogy is fine, and one which I agree with. If someone has been stalked many times over, it does have a lot of symptoms that are similar to being raped many times over. The feeling of helplessness, of nobody understanding, of feeling like you are responsible, of not even feeling the power to be able to make a complaint. Indeed, many kinds of crime engender many of the same kinds of symptoms - people who are bullied and beaten up many times by a school bully, people who are robbed multiple times, gays who kept getting beaten up and harassed for being gay, asians or people from a minority racial group who just accept that they are going to be racially abused, the list goes on. It is different to rape as well, because obviously they don't have the same physical symptoms (there are physical symptoms of course, but they differ significantly). There are also many psychological symptoms that differ greatly. But you are right that the most painful and hence most important part of being raped on multiple occasions, which is shared by repeat victims of many types of crime, is that it is repeated. Many rape victims, after they have been raped x amounts of times by different people (or in some cases all by the same person) don't even bother to complain about it anymore. They don't try to tell anyone, and hide it, lie to themselves that it didn't happen, and so forth. This is the ultimate tragedy of this kind of problem, and this happens with all of them. Ultimately, it can lead to suicidal feelings, and this is the same for all of them.
Ultimately, to get out of this vicious circle the best possible way is to get justice for what has happened. You don't necessarily need for every single person who abused you to go to jail, but you do need to have something serious that you can refer to that proves that you won, that sends a message out to every other one that comes after you that you aren't an easy victim, that you can win, that you can succeed.
For me personally, this happened thanks to a person called Bonnie, who amongst other things wrote a web site about it at http://www.toxicpink.net/ You can see my name on there, and this e-mail address. This made a big difference to my coping with cyber stalking.
Now, the problem with what you are saying isn't your analogy. If we were dealing with actual cyber stalking, the kind that I dealt with, and that many others have dealt with, then I am sure that not many people would have an issue with it. The problem is that we are not dealing with real cyber stalking.
The person who produced the information was an investigative journalist who specialised in the Lockerbie bombing and was covering the recent major news that the Lockerbie bombing case was being re-opened because of an MI5 agent that had deliberately changed the course of events, something that Colonel Qaddafi himself was on record recently admitting. The question that is being asked in the mass media now is who was that MI5 agent?
The over-riding issue has nothing to do with Wikipedia. This was not a critic of Wikipedia, this was an investigative journalist who was interested in the Lockerbie bombing, who had never previously (or since) written anything about Wikipedia. He looked through the research provided by Wikipedia Review and concluded that the MI5 agent responsible may have been *****, the person who was a former assistant of ABC journalist Pierre Salinger, who at the time was suspected of being an MI5 agent. Furthermore, he was able to conclude from looking through Wikipedia Review evidence that she had used Wikipedia to further this perversion of truth.
The issue was that MI5 was changing truth. This is the issue that was being discussed.
Now, I am sure that nobody likes it when they are being researched by the major media, and they find it rather bothering, especially as it may eventually lead to criminal charges. They probably feel harassed and upset about it.
But suggesting that this is akin to cyber stalking, when no personal details were released, and when Wikipedia Review redacted all of the names (at least prior to the names being revealed by the major media). Is that akin to cyber stalking?
To compare the two is ridiculous, and it is very irresponsible and insulting to anyone who has ever been through something like that. To suggest that Wikipedia Review are stalkers in general, when a number of them have been victims of serious stalking, myself included, is very hurtful. Wikipedia Review has never engaged in stalking, and indeed never will.
If SlimVirgin alleges that Wikipedia Review has ever said a single thing about her that is true, then it has always been said that all that she needs to do is to prove that it is false and they will remove the untrue information. As far as Wikipedia Review are aware, everything that they've ever said about her is true. If not, it was most certainly not deliberately false. It was an attempt to reveal true information about it.
This is a topic of utmost importance to Wikipedia, because there is evidence that facts have been altered on Wikipedia.
The fact that this evidence was oversighted from Wikipedia is disgusting in itself. The fact that Jimbo Wales has lied that it was oversighted for privacy reasons is disgusting quite frankly. None of the edits that were oversighted contain any private information whatsoever. They merely indicate that SlimVirgin had never, at any stage, edited with a genuine purpose to help Wikipedia. From the very beginning, she edited with an obvious agenda, both in terms of changing things from truth to untruth, and in terms of her manipulating people to her ends. SlimVirgin did not inadvertedly reveal her true name - she inadvertedly revealed her agenda.
Why did Jayjg bother to oversight it when it had already been quoted on Wikipedia Review, if the concern was her privacy? People can simply go to Wikipedia Review and read it. The only reason to oversight it was so that when we get to this inevitable news story (which will undoubtedly get much bigger from this point on) then they have plausible deniability, because we can't prove that those edits were SlimVirgin's first edits. We can prove that she made the changes, but Wikipedia can argue that she didn't do it from the very beginning. If she'd done it from the very beginning, then it'd be evidence that she was a secret agent, someone with an agenda from the very start.
So Jayjg, restore those edits. Show to people that there was private information. Did SlimVirgin inadvertedly reveal her full name, address and phone number? No, she didn't. All that she revealed was an agenda.
Using this as "evidence" of stalking is disgusting. To go further and to refer to Wikipedia Review as being the same as rapists, and to refer to ME as effectively a rapist is disgusting. I am extremely offended at that.
If you want to know what really happened, go and have a look at our blog:
http://blog.wikipediareview.com/
I would like please for people to cease referring to Wikipedia Review as stalkers. You can feel free to refer to us as mad, crazy, loonie, conspiracy theorists, nutjobs, banned users or anything like that, but not stalkers. It's not on.
Adrian