Here is a quote from the COVID-19 lab leak theory article[1] as an example of how Wikipedia's NPOV policy is implemented. I'll let it speak for itself.
"The lab leak theory is informed by racist undercurrents, and has resulted in anti-Chinese sentiment. [...] While the proposed scenarios are theoretically subject to evidence-based investigation, it is not clear than any can can be sufficiently falsified to placate lab leak supporters, and they are fed by pseudoscientific and conspiratorial thinking."
I haven't really followed the lab leak theory but it's so frustrating when claims of "racist undercurrents" or "dog whistling" are made without substantial evidence. Those terms are just used to halt constructive dialogue and make unsubstantiated accusations. And they are often an instance of the following logical fallacy: "Racists support X, therefore supporting X is racist."
Those terms were frequently used to shut down discussion when the Quebec government made the decision to prohibit certain public employees from displaying religious symbols a few years ago.
That something fundamentally wrong with that article. There's two separate "lab leak" theories, one that the virus was genetically engineered, and the other theory is that it came from bats, but was accidentally leaked from the lab.
The article merges the theories together, and then uses scientist's support of natural origin to dismiss both. Having it come from a wild bat doesn't suddenly rule out the lab that was doing research on wild bats.
"The lab leak theory is informed by racist undercurrents"
The language used here is indicative. Few native English speakers would ever deploy a racist undercurrent when a perfectly decent overtone exists to do the job properly. An undercurrent is covert and an overtone is overt. The allegations are largely overt.
It turns out that most large Chinese cities are home to labs that study coronaviruses and virus outbreaks occur rurally ... anyway the article is now obviously bollocks, through over editing.
You do get to view the complete history of this article. You can watch it churn, revision by revision. There must be a paper in there or two - just on the revision history of a WP article.
You could write a book about how egregiously stupid that is.
And on such an important topic! It's horrifying that grown adults take this bullshit at face value.
Like - we know for a fact, thanks to many leaks, that scientists believed lableak was possible and even likely, that they were pressured from "on high" to say otherwise.
We know for a fact that scientists and others who talked about the lableak theory - at all - had their posts delete, suppressed, "fact-checked", restricted, and were even banned or shadow-banned.
So for that to be said with a straight face - it's vomitous. It's about as daft as calling Corbyn an anti-semite, or calling protestors who want a Gaza ceasefire 'violent extremists' and 'Hamas supporters'. Media's gonna media, I guess.
Why can't Wikipedia be consequent and implement the same policy on "The Tuskegee Study of Untreated Syphilis in the Negro Male" and similar cases, if you criticize it then you are supporting racist undercurrents, while the proposed scenarios are theoretically subject to evidence-based investigation, it is not clear than any can can be sufficiently falsified to placate supporters of this far-fledged theory, and they are fed by pseudoscientific and conspiratorial thinking. /s
That's a really good way to handle it. I don't know where the brain worms are from exactly, but I've seen people who don't otherwise have rocks for brains going full-on "All the scientists are wrong, I'm just asking questions, leaked from a Chinese lab!" about this specific conspiracy theory. I get there's a nationalism aspect, but that's no excuse to throw your brain out the window.
Edit: It is weird that on a pretty technical forum there are a bunch of people here who don't know anything about virology disagreeing with the overwhelming scientific consensus in the field, based on overtly conspiratorial thinking (e.g. "Look at the connections, this can't be a coincidence, this man leaked the truth and they silenced him" etc etc). You don't get to scientific consensus on something through a conspiracy. I wonder what the people replying with conspiracy theories think about climate change.
The biggest problem with Wikipedia is that it ignores a lot of factual scientific publications that wiki-editors are unable to comprehend and then blindly trusts "notable" sources published in junky paper articles while those papers regularly caught outright lying in their articles.
Putting aside the political portion, this seems like it could potentially lead to Wiki being "behind the times" at the least and stifling advancements at the extreme. The telescope was once fringe, and rightly so. Imagine reading that some guy had been able to see something in the sky that you can't see, you gotta trust him bro.
Modern medical practice was a fringe view two hundred years ago.
My point is if you hide the fringe then you either get left behind or prevent others from moving forward.
> My point is if you hide the fringe then you either get left behind or prevent others from moving forward.
Ultimately they’re OK with both because the politics justify it.
It’s so obvious that as formal religion has weakened that informal religion has taken over. It’s not a bible, it’s a screen, you have faith, you think what it tells you, there are priests, you can wear the wrong thing, you do what makes you accepted in your tribe. If you didn’t see it during covid, then you extra double have a religion.
All these people that mock religion - and have no idea they have their own is almost entertaining if it wasn’t so destructive. It’s wired into humans, we know it is, and then pretend it isn’t to our detriment.
There is an important difference between "leading edge" and "fringe", in this context.
Most useful stuff comes from the leading edge. Occasionally from the fringe, but the SNR there is terrible. Either way though, by the time you want it written up in an encyclopedia it's been sorted out if it's useful for something.
If you just write up everything, you'll be drowning in half-baked ideas and crackpot theories, the net damage to the value of the place far outweighs any positives.
TLDR; Wikipedia's definition of "Neutral Point of View" evolved from
"Providing different, attributable points of view, diverse sources, and prohibition of pejorative labels"
to
"statements of fact, sourcing hierarchy, and acceptance of pejorative labels."
This transition was propelled by early victories in the "anti-fringe" camp, driving away members of the "pro-fringe" camp.
This has less to do with NPOV itself and more with the need for increasingly reliable references (meaning references that are unlikely to outright make stuff up, regardless of the identifiable views they portray). If "fringe" references are a lot more likely to be actively misleading than "mainstream" ones, it stands to reason that these references will be edited out, and the fringe views that are associated with them will be less represented as a result. This also plays out in the domain of politics, where political sides with poorer quality references (loosely speaking, anything other than boring centrist politics) are less represented too.
Sounds good, until you try to find an anti-war media source that isn't labeled 'fringe'. Both liberal and conservative US media sources love war, and profit from it. Alternate views don't get a look in, not in politics, and not in media. The most graphic recent example of this might be the population's 65% support for a ceasefire in Gaza - completely unrepresented in media and the executive.
Pro-war media, corporate media, whether "liberal" or "conservative" both look rabid and bloodthirsty to the rest of the world. The NYT and WaPo, Fox ABC CNN CBS, even NPR have cheer-lead us into expensive atrocity after expensive atrocity.
Wikipedia have enabled them and censored dissenting views, openly, even clapping themselves on the back for it. They've red- and black-listed every anti-war outlet. "The last good place on the internet" my arse.
Do you even read NYT, WaPo, and CNN? They have all been very good at showing things from the Palestinian side and how much people in Gaza are suffering.
It's absolutely unhinged to put them in the same category as Fox News.
Do you consider The Intercept pro-war? Also, while most editors naturally reach for anglophone sources first, it's not as if sources in other languages are automatically rejected, even if every US media source is bloodthirsty. Unfortunately, it's not as if the project can get its own reporters on the ground, nor does it really want to.
I'm skeptical of mainstream media's reporting on wars, and I've actually found a lot of facts exposed on Wikipedia that might've been covered up as "treasonous" because they don't support the US's side. More so than in other English sources.
The English Wikipedia might (or might not) have achieved this but certainly the Croatian and Polish were caught to be heavily influenced by right wing extremists, the Hungarian was not yet because no one gives a damn.
But my recipe of adding anything to Wikipedia still stands, I adopted it from an article added by Hungarian nationalists: while you must source things, the quality of the source is not checked. So take an obscure book, obviously not in English and claim your fact comes from it. No one will try to dig up a small run German book decades or even hundreds of years old to verify. Or will be able to.
The thing is, the people Wikipedia successfully did drive out are actual experts -- or rather they never came. The no credentials are accepted policy makes sure the experts stay away in droves. Imagine someone putting in decades of work to gain expertise in a field being told they need to argue with a neckbeard with too much time on their hands. No thanks.
> The no credentials are accepted policy makes sure the experts stay away in droves. Imagine someone putting in decades of work to gain expertise in a field being told they need to argue with a neckbeard with too much time on their hands. No thanks.
It's the unalterable division of labor. Scientists are experts, science journalists are clueless. You'll never get the first group to take up the job of the second group because they have way better, more interesting, more important things to do. Same with Wikipedia, even if experts were sought out, they wouldn't want to edit it.
> while you must source things, the quality of the source is not checked. So take an obscure book, obviously not in English and claim your fact comes from it
Agreed, this is a problem esp. on smaller Wikipedias.
> The no credentials are accepted policy makes sure the experts stay away in droves.
Perhaps partially true, but without this policy there would be basically no Wikipedia. There are projects requiring credentials like Citizendium where experts don't have to fear being bothered by neckbeards, but they're basically dead.
Lots of people are for silencing others making sure they can’t be heard, taking away a platform, because they never think they’ll find themselves on that side of it. But they will.
[and i get downvoted because even though mine is one of a diverse number of opinions, and my history as a good participant of this community mean nothing: opinion is the type of diversity that some people can't allow, here and on wikipedia]
English (language not kingdom) Wikipedia has become a party organ* for whatever they call themselves, those people who took over and ruined philosophy, history, sociology, linguistics, anthropology, et al departments of universities (get rid of dead white males and anything they ever wrote!) to allow only deconstructive, post modernist, existentialist, nihilist, anti-western, socialist, personal truth and lived experience; the same people who are now battering down the gates of science and technology (remember Shut Down Tech day?) because believing there is "the right answer" to a problem is itself problematic, an expression of white privilege. Math should allow many answers depending on the student's truth and lived experience. And they shouldn't have to turn in their work "on time", that oppressive white western male notion. The same people that are marching in the streets to say that mass murder and terrorism are morally justifiable expressions of yearning for a brighter future, alongside a brighter future for women in Islam, just don't be too specific about what you mean, said the Walrus.
Wikipedia btw raises tons of money, they are rolling in cash. Why do they keep begging you for more with interstitials? Because they have a number of woke "diversity", "equity", and "inclusion" projects they are dumping your money into. It has nothing to do with making wikipedia better.
*party organ as in: The Nation, volume 180, number 9, page 173: “Modern armed forces cannot be built without heavy industry,” the People’s Daily, the central organ of the Chinese Communist Party, has remarked pointedly.
They do have far too much money. Donate to the Internet Archive instead. You'll even be helping Wikipedia content because the archive holds readable copies of millions of print books and an absolutely enormous and unparalleled microfilm library (literally multiple shipping containers full of microfilm they scanned) that can be cited and used to verify and crosscheck Wikipedia articles.
How long have you been so passionate about Wikipedia and their funding. Also, how much cash is "rolling in cash" by your estimation? Sounds like you think they have too much? Should we limit how much cash one can roll in - is that something you think you might be in to?
> the author "classif[ied] editors into the Anti-Fringe camp (AF) and the Pro-Fringe camp (PF)". The AF camp is described as "editors who were anti-conspiracy theories, anti-pseudoscience, and liberal", whereas the PF camp consists of "Editors who were more supportive of conspiracy theories, pseudoscience, and conservatism."
It's interesting to see Wikipedia publication so readily admit that, rightly or wrongly, its "Neutral Point of View" considers [American] conservatism a "fringe" (implicitly, counterfactual) belief.
The "politics" section further down touches on this, but doesn't actually deny it. Like I said, interesting, since it's something that I've seen conservatives whine about, but I assumed Wikipedia's official position was the "NPOV" meant politically neutral.
There are two mistakes in your response here.
1) "the author" is an academic who is being quoted by a writer for the Wikipedia newsletter. No "Wikipedia publication" is admitting or endorsing that definition. In fact the newsletter piece discusses several issues they have with the definition.
2) A classification system that combines multiple attributes to define a group is not a claim that all the attributes that define one group are equivalent to each other. It's a measure of correlation.
This is discussed in the "Fringe and politics" section, and not from the Wikipedia writers:
> As readers might have noticed above, the author includes political coordinates in his conception of "fringe" ("more supportive of conspiracy theories, pseudoscience, and conservatism") and "anti-fringe" ("anti-conspiracy theories, anti-pseudoscience, and liberal"). This is introduced rather casually in the paper without much justification...
I don't want to quote the whole thing, but its worth a read.
It's unfortunate, but probably defensible. That is, if the correlation is high, then the correlation is high, and I'd rather observe and act on that than ignore it.
It's only unfortunate in that it legitimizes groupthink. Varying degress of conservatism with a small C should ideally be allowed and encouraged, the same as varying degrees of novelty-seeking vs risk-aversion (value freedom vs value safety), tolerance for confrontation or debate, logic vs emotion, etc, etc.
> Robert Francis Kennedy Jr. (born January 17, 1954), also known by his initials as RFK Jr. and the nickname Bobby, is an American environmental lawyer and writer who promotes anti-vaccine misinformation and public health conspiracy theories.
That's the #1 most important thing to be known about him, Wikipedia? Compare to the opening paragraph on Stalin:
> Joseph Vissarionovich Stalin was a Soviet revolutionary and politician who was the leader of the Soviet Union from 1924 until his death in 1953. He held power as General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (1922–1952) and Chairman of the Council of Ministers of the Soviet Union (1941–1953). Initially governing the country as part of a collective leadership, he consolidated power to become a dictator by the 1930s. Ideologically adhering to the Leninist interpretation of Marxism, he formalised these ideas as Marxism–Leninism, while his own policies are called Stalinism.
Or Mao:
> Mao Zedong was a Chinese politician, Marxist theorist, military strategist, poet, and revolutionary who was the founder of the People's Republic of China (PRC). He led the country from its establishment in 1949 until his death in 1976, while also serving as the chairman of the Chinese Communist Party during that time. His theories, military strategies and policies are known as Maoism.
Yeah, it's a complete mystery why two of the most important* leaders of the 20th century have more well-written intros than some self-aggrandizing dildo who's into Covid-19 conspiracies and other misinformation nonsense.
[+] [-] letmevoteplease|2 years ago|reply
"The lab leak theory is informed by racist undercurrents, and has resulted in anti-Chinese sentiment. [...] While the proposed scenarios are theoretically subject to evidence-based investigation, it is not clear than any can can be sufficiently falsified to placate lab leak supporters, and they are fed by pseudoscientific and conspiratorial thinking."
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COVID-19_lab_leak_theory
[+] [-] olalonde|2 years ago|reply
Those terms were frequently used to shut down discussion when the Quebec government made the decision to prohibit certain public employees from displaying religious symbols a few years ago.
[+] [-] calibas|2 years ago|reply
The article merges the theories together, and then uses scientist's support of natural origin to dismiss both. Having it come from a wild bat doesn't suddenly rule out the lab that was doing research on wild bats.
[+] [-] gerdesj|2 years ago|reply
The language used here is indicative. Few native English speakers would ever deploy a racist undercurrent when a perfectly decent overtone exists to do the job properly. An undercurrent is covert and an overtone is overt. The allegations are largely overt.
It turns out that most large Chinese cities are home to labs that study coronaviruses and virus outbreaks occur rurally ... anyway the article is now obviously bollocks, through over editing.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COVID-19_lab_leak_theory - click on View History, hit the 500 entry link and you will only go back to February this year!
You do get to view the complete history of this article. You can watch it churn, revision by revision. There must be a paper in there or two - just on the revision history of a WP article.
Start here: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=COVID-19_lab_leak...
[+] [-] hot_gril|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mandmandam|2 years ago|reply
And on such an important topic! It's horrifying that grown adults take this bullshit at face value.
Like - we know for a fact, thanks to many leaks, that scientists believed lableak was possible and even likely, that they were pressured from "on high" to say otherwise.
We know for a fact that scientists and others who talked about the lableak theory - at all - had their posts delete, suppressed, "fact-checked", restricted, and were even banned or shadow-banned.
So for that to be said with a straight face - it's vomitous. It's about as daft as calling Corbyn an anti-semite, or calling protestors who want a Gaza ceasefire 'violent extremists' and 'Hamas supporters'. Media's gonna media, I guess.
[+] [-] hot_gril|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] type0|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lucubratory|2 years ago|reply
Edit: It is weird that on a pretty technical forum there are a bunch of people here who don't know anything about virology disagreeing with the overwhelming scientific consensus in the field, based on overtly conspiratorial thinking (e.g. "Look at the connections, this can't be a coincidence, this man leaked the truth and they silenced him" etc etc). You don't get to scientific consensus on something through a conspiracy. I wonder what the people replying with conspiracy theories think about climate change.
[+] [-] type0|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pard68|2 years ago|reply
Modern medical practice was a fringe view two hundred years ago.
My point is if you hide the fringe then you either get left behind or prevent others from moving forward.
[+] [-] helen___keller|2 years ago|reply
I think this is really only an “issue” when it comes to politics and culture wars
[+] [-] SV_BubbleTime|2 years ago|reply
Ultimately they’re OK with both because the politics justify it.
It’s so obvious that as formal religion has weakened that informal religion has taken over. It’s not a bible, it’s a screen, you have faith, you think what it tells you, there are priests, you can wear the wrong thing, you do what makes you accepted in your tribe. If you didn’t see it during covid, then you extra double have a religion.
All these people that mock religion - and have no idea they have their own is almost entertaining if it wasn’t so destructive. It’s wired into humans, we know it is, and then pretend it isn’t to our detriment.
[+] [-] ska|2 years ago|reply
Most useful stuff comes from the leading edge. Occasionally from the fringe, but the SNR there is terrible. Either way though, by the time you want it written up in an encyclopedia it's been sorted out if it's useful for something.
If you just write up everything, you'll be drowning in half-baked ideas and crackpot theories, the net damage to the value of the place far outweighs any positives.
[+] [-] cxr|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jowea|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nateglims|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pictureofabear|2 years ago|reply
to
"statements of fact, sourcing hierarchy, and acceptance of pejorative labels."
This transition was propelled by early victories in the "anti-fringe" camp, driving away members of the "pro-fringe" camp.
[+] [-] zozbot234|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jrmg|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] MichaelZuo|2 years ago|reply
What's the rationale for the 'anti-fringe' camp to intentionally lower Wikipedia's credibility?
And why would Jimmy Wales et al. accept that?
[+] [-] mandmandam|2 years ago|reply
Pro-war media, corporate media, whether "liberal" or "conservative" both look rabid and bloodthirsty to the rest of the world. The NYT and WaPo, Fox ABC CNN CBS, even NPR have cheer-lead us into expensive atrocity after expensive atrocity.
Wikipedia have enabled them and censored dissenting views, openly, even clapping themselves on the back for it. They've red- and black-listed every anti-war outlet. "The last good place on the internet" my arse.
[+] [-] 0xDEF|2 years ago|reply
It's absolutely unhinged to put them in the same category as Fox News.
[+] [-] Alpha3031|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hot_gril|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] NoGravitas|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] _ugfj|2 years ago|reply
But my recipe of adding anything to Wikipedia still stands, I adopted it from an article added by Hungarian nationalists: while you must source things, the quality of the source is not checked. So take an obscure book, obviously not in English and claim your fact comes from it. No one will try to dig up a small run German book decades or even hundreds of years old to verify. Or will be able to.
The thing is, the people Wikipedia successfully did drive out are actual experts -- or rather they never came. The no credentials are accepted policy makes sure the experts stay away in droves. Imagine someone putting in decades of work to gain expertise in a field being told they need to argue with a neckbeard with too much time on their hands. No thanks.
[+] [-] concinds|2 years ago|reply
It's the unalterable division of labor. Scientists are experts, science journalists are clueless. You'll never get the first group to take up the job of the second group because they have way better, more interesting, more important things to do. Same with Wikipedia, even if experts were sought out, they wouldn't want to edit it.
[+] [-] The_Colonel|2 years ago|reply
Agreed, this is a problem esp. on smaller Wikipedias.
> The no credentials are accepted policy makes sure the experts stay away in droves.
Perhaps partially true, but without this policy there would be basically no Wikipedia. There are projects requiring credentials like Citizendium where experts don't have to fear being bothered by neckbeards, but they're basically dead.
[+] [-] _kulang|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] SV_BubbleTime|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] fsckboy|2 years ago|reply
English (language not kingdom) Wikipedia has become a party organ* for whatever they call themselves, those people who took over and ruined philosophy, history, sociology, linguistics, anthropology, et al departments of universities (get rid of dead white males and anything they ever wrote!) to allow only deconstructive, post modernist, existentialist, nihilist, anti-western, socialist, personal truth and lived experience; the same people who are now battering down the gates of science and technology (remember Shut Down Tech day?) because believing there is "the right answer" to a problem is itself problematic, an expression of white privilege. Math should allow many answers depending on the student's truth and lived experience. And they shouldn't have to turn in their work "on time", that oppressive white western male notion. The same people that are marching in the streets to say that mass murder and terrorism are morally justifiable expressions of yearning for a brighter future, alongside a brighter future for women in Islam, just don't be too specific about what you mean, said the Walrus.
This is not my personal original research, the "other" cofounder of wikipedia (along with The Outlaw Jimmy Wales) says the same https://nypost.com/2021/07/16/wikipedia-co-founder-says-site...
Wikipedia btw raises tons of money, they are rolling in cash. Why do they keep begging you for more with interstitials? Because they have a number of woke "diversity", "equity", and "inclusion" projects they are dumping your money into. It has nothing to do with making wikipedia better.
*party organ as in: The Nation, volume 180, number 9, page 173: “Modern armed forces cannot be built without heavy industry,” the People’s Daily, the central organ of the Chinese Communist Party, has remarked pointedly.
[+] [-] malchow|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Bayart|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] adhesive_wombat|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] LastTrain|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] LordDragonfang|2 years ago|reply
It's interesting to see Wikipedia publication so readily admit that, rightly or wrongly, its "Neutral Point of View" considers [American] conservatism a "fringe" (implicitly, counterfactual) belief.
The "politics" section further down touches on this, but doesn't actually deny it. Like I said, interesting, since it's something that I've seen conservatives whine about, but I assumed Wikipedia's official position was the "NPOV" meant politically neutral.
[+] [-] lazyasciiart|2 years ago|reply
2) A classification system that combines multiple attributes to define a group is not a claim that all the attributes that define one group are equivalent to each other. It's a measure of correlation.
[+] [-] brucethemoose2|2 years ago|reply
> As readers might have noticed above, the author includes political coordinates in his conception of "fringe" ("more supportive of conspiracy theories, pseudoscience, and conservatism") and "anti-fringe" ("anti-conspiracy theories, anti-pseudoscience, and liberal"). This is introduced rather casually in the paper without much justification...
I don't want to quote the whole thing, but its worth a read.
[+] [-] f5e4|2 years ago|reply
This article briefly addresses this inclusion of the political-leaning in the definition of fringe later on.
[+] [-] chpatrick|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Brian_K_White|2 years ago|reply
It's only unfortunate in that it legitimizes groupthink. Varying degress of conservatism with a small C should ideally be allowed and encouraged, the same as varying degrees of novelty-seeking vs risk-aversion (value freedom vs value safety), tolerance for confrontation or debate, logic vs emotion, etc, etc.
[+] [-] explaininjs|2 years ago|reply
> Robert Francis Kennedy Jr. (born January 17, 1954), also known by his initials as RFK Jr. and the nickname Bobby, is an American environmental lawyer and writer who promotes anti-vaccine misinformation and public health conspiracy theories.
That's the #1 most important thing to be known about him, Wikipedia? Compare to the opening paragraph on Stalin:
> Joseph Vissarionovich Stalin was a Soviet revolutionary and politician who was the leader of the Soviet Union from 1924 until his death in 1953. He held power as General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (1922–1952) and Chairman of the Council of Ministers of the Soviet Union (1941–1953). Initially governing the country as part of a collective leadership, he consolidated power to become a dictator by the 1930s. Ideologically adhering to the Leninist interpretation of Marxism, he formalised these ideas as Marxism–Leninism, while his own policies are called Stalinism.
Or Mao:
> Mao Zedong was a Chinese politician, Marxist theorist, military strategist, poet, and revolutionary who was the founder of the People's Republic of China (PRC). He led the country from its establishment in 1949 until his death in 1976, while also serving as the chairman of the Chinese Communist Party during that time. His theories, military strategies and policies are known as Maoism.
[+] [-] The_Colonel|2 years ago|reply
Well, yeah. What else makes him important?
Contrast that with Stalin, a long-standing leader of a superpower, with immense influence on the course of the 20th century.
[+] [-] nateglims|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] slater|2 years ago|reply
Truly, a most vexing situation.
* i'm obviously not agreeing with their politics