Wow. The whole BMW slave labour thing has caused quite a stir on the Wikipedia discussion board. Click here to read the whole thing, at least before it disappears into the archive. And thanks, Dick Umbrage, for your eloquence.

Posted by B. W. Ventril in Rants

 

This entry was posted on Thursday, April 21st, 2005 at 12:36 pm and is filed under Rants. You can follow any responses to this entry through the comments RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

8 Responses to “Discussion of Ratzinger, BMW and Dachau”

  1. minty says:
    Indeed. I bow down before the eloquence of Dick Umbrage. I’m not worthy!

    April 21st, 2005 at 1:09 pm
  2. holagatita says:
    Dude, I think someone took down the Dachau mention in the BMW entry!

    April 21st, 2005 at 1:48 pm
  3. B. W. Ventril says:
    Fuck, it’s like Holocaust denier whack-a-mole. I give up. I mean, look what the Benedict XVI discussion has come down to:

    Some things are problematic in your previous post, Bwventril:

    1) This measuring the Pope with harder standards. Might be true today, but back than he was only a lad

    2) You say that “he guarded a plant that used slave labour, which is morally problematic”. If you see it that way, you should also understand why I think this presentation of fact can be misleading.

    But is it really morally problematic,
    given the fact that he didn’t chose to guard the plant, he was put there (both into guarding something at all, and into guarding this particular place

    did his guarding really make life worse for the slave labourers (from what I have heard he was in a flak squad. That is anti-aircraft defense (Flak is FLugAbwehrKanone, that’s the canon used) so one could argue he was defending the slave labourers as well.

    but the text sounds like he was somehow involved in the “slave labour thing”, which he wasn’t (again he was not a KZ guard)

    Str1977 18:11, 21 Apr 2005 (UTC)

    April 21st, 2005 at 2:44 pm
  4. minty says:
    Wow. I am in some serious awe of this whole Wikipedia experience and the time it must take to attempt to maintain control of it. Are there certain people who are in charge, and who enforce the rules?

    The whole Benedict XVI discussion over there has been entirely fascinating, though.

    April 21st, 2005 at 4:09 pm
  5. lukakapookie says:
    It appears the wiki-row has been noticed by the Guardian:
    http://blogs.guardian.co.uk/news/archives/world_news/2005/04/21/still_mentioning_the_war.html

    (Sorry, I don’t know how to use the xhtml tags)

    April 21st, 2005 at 7:36 pm
  6. Adam says:
    Just to be clear: I am not the asswich fucktard you’re arguing with on Wikipedia. Keep fighting the good fight.

    April 21st, 2005 at 10:28 pm
  7. B. W. Ventril says:
    Duly noted. And thanks.

    April 22nd, 2005 at 8:56 am
  8. defyinggwb says:
    OK, the absurdity of Wikipedia is it appears that anyone can insert anything into the text of an entry, and for at least a few seconds–until someone else edits out the entry–the entry stands.

    So, just to see how it works, I briefly changed the second-to-last sentence of the military service section to read “He and another strapping young man began to walk the 120 km (75 miles) home but got a lift to Traunstein in a milk truck.”

    Gone already, but briefly, just briefly, I provided the pope and his buddy with an adjective.

    Besides appreciating the potential to wreak havoc this way, I also LOVE the way that Wikipedia calls into question the whole idea of an authoritative text. My only qualm–and it’s a big one: how many people who use Wikipedia ever think to question the veracity of what they’re reading.

    I’m just sayin’

    April 23rd, 2005 at 2:34 pm