> Sometimes that abuse is relatively easy to identify. In 2019, ArbCom disciplined the two editors most involved in this subject area, instituting a topic ban for their “incivility and inflammatory rhetoric.” But what about the more insidious cases when there are no blatant signs of harassment? Wikipedians told me that these “civil” disputes are much more challenging to resolve because of a key jurisdictional issue: ArbCom has authority to decide on user conduct disputes but is not permitted to rule on article content.
Also Wikipedia's toxic culture often refuses to call a spade a spade, and gives some favored problematic editors a long leash to be uncivil, so long as they learn to avoid a few of the most blatant unacceptable behaviors. IMHO, they need to be more consistent and more final with their bans, because a community with a lot of individuals who've been taught how to obscure their misbehavior and/or expertly push it right up to the line is still a shitty community.
This is a problem with any community, right? Regardless of how open it purports to be, if you don't belong to the trusted circle you are at a disadvantage. And you can only belong to that circle if you were there from the beginning or you spend a lot -- and I mean, a lot -- of time making yourself known so that they accept you. Most people don't have that kind of time.
That is fair, but the problem is that most people do not know that Wikipedia is run by various cliques. Article content does not converge to the "truth". Instead it converges to whatever those who has the most time to waste on Wikipedia believes the truth to be. Take Wikipedia's article on male circumcision. It very much underplays the ethical, moral, and physical issues associated with it because the clique that controls that article see no problem with cutting off unconsenting boys' body parts. People don't know that so when they read that article they think it is "fair" and "objective" which it is not.
> Article content does not converge to the "truth". Instead it converges to whatever those who has the most time to waste on Wikipedia believes the truth to be.
I'm in agreement with you. The worst problem is that people who have not had to deal with edit wars are not aware of how clique-run Wikipedia is. And yes, cliques depend on a bunch of people with way too much free time on their hands.
I'm just saying that I don't know if there is a solution to cliques within communities. Isn't this a widespread problem beyond Wikipedia?
People trust Wikipedia and that is the problem. Those who write articles and engage in battles of attrition over article content are not idealists doing it for the sake of humanity. Instead they are marketeers getting paid to polish celebrities biographical articles, authors peddling books about the joy of circumcision, people paid by governments to carry out psy-ops, etc. The only reason I took the circumcision article as an example is because - for anyone not born in a country where male circumcision is not common practice - it is obvious that it is not written from a "neutral point of view". Other articles have the same issues too. Except for them I don't know anything about the subject so I'll be fooled by Wikipedia's serious tone and many citations into believing that those articles are neutral and factual.
> Those who write articles and engage in battles of attrition over article content are not idealists doing it for the sake of humanity. Instead they are marketeers getting paid to polish celebrities biographical articles, authors peddling books about the joy of circumcision, people paid by governments to carry out psy-ops, etc.
Or obsessive low-level ideologues, who have little else going on in their lives, pushing some agenda. My impression that's the largest group.
Circumcision has a long history because we lacked the medical equipment to resolve phimosis, so everyone had to have it removed earlier. Even today resolving that is much more involved. Of course people don't know this, they're just following their parents religion.
It's a tip of a tongue, but I recall reading somewhere that anarchisistic-run models are prone to corruption in the respect that where the faction with the biggest power can rule it as a de-facto dictator. They suggest that acknowledging the existence of the cliques while turning it into a constitutional-republican model may help alleviate the problem by providing greater oversight or check and balances to their power.
In principle, they should. However, it's been known that ArbCom and the rest lives in thought bubbles which insulate them from getting grasp on what the public opinion might hold against them.
Perhaps this is the silent part that not many people realize, but the one thing is that Jimbo Wales is a believer Ayn Rand's ideas and Wikipedia is founded with heavy inspiration of such an idea. I haven't really read Atlas Shrugged itself but apparently it promotes an idea of epicurean ego-centrism to the detriment of altruism.
This could buttress the argument that Wikipedia's model is flawed from the start because it's DNA is filled with this wrong stuff. The ideology promotes self-centered enjoyment and turn what should be a collegial sanctum with long-term endurance in mind, into a participatory based MMORPG.
No, we banned you for breaking the site guidelines on countless occasions and ignoring repeated requests to stop. We also told you we were banning you and explained why.
Anyone who has tried to deal with Wikipedia on any remotely controversial topic knows this is true (from the article):
> Clearly, a small group of Wikipedia editors seems to be trying to exhaust the other side until they no longer have the time or energy to fight.
This is what gets me. I really like Wikipedia. It's probably my single most visited website ever. But in the end, what stays there is whatever a group of editors with too much time on their hands is willing to spend seemingly limitless time and energy to fight for. It can be exhausting to try to correct something if you don't have limitless time or don't "know" the right people, which makes Wikipedia way less open than it pretends to be.
Then again, I wouldn't be able to edit an article on the Encyclopedia Britannica...
>This is what gets me. I really like Wikipedia. It's probably my single most visited website ever.
Me too.
>But in the end, what stays there is whatever a group of editors with too much time on their hands is willing to spend seemingly limitless time and energy to fight for.
> Clearly, a small group of Wikipedia editors seems to be trying to exhaust the other side until they no longer have the time or energy to fight.
DoS?
> Sealioning (also sea-lioning and sea lioning) is a type of trolling or harassment that consists of pursuing people with relentless requests for evidence, often tangential or previously addressed, while maintaining a pretense of civility and sincerity ("I'm just trying to have a debate"), and feigning ignorance of the subject matter.[1][2][3][4] It may take the form of "incessant, bad-faith invitations to engage in debate",[5] and has been likened to a denial-of-service attack targeted at human beings.[6]
This example gets to a fundamental reality in group decision making: some issues for some people are too important to them for them to accept the group deciding against them. That can be perfectly legitimate - for example a minority shareholder should not accept a majority owner giving a dividend only to the minority; or a subset of a population should not accept a political process that strips them of rights.
Depending on how a decision system is set up and supported and what the people are willing to do, the outcomes can be very different. Some possible outcomes are deadlock (where no decisions can be made), disintegration (e.g. where people unilaterally act and group decision making ends), exception (where rules are suspended and some other process makes the decision this time) or violence (which could be state power enforcing a decision but also can be assassination etc).
It sounds like ArbCom is a managed form of exception to the usual consensus decision making. I hope its effective.
The interesting part for me is how do other encyclopedias deal with this. It's not mentioned in the paper itself (https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/25785648.2023.2...) but I'm sure this is not the only case and the paper volumes we used to buy decades ago dealt with similar issues, just much less visibility into the process.
I actually can't find any good writeups about similar issues in the past, yet I'm sure various encyclopedias in Europe had a very different view on some details. There must've been internal editor conflicts too. With Wikipedia, we can just observe that in real time.
As far as I'm am aware most traditional encyclopedias rely on experts for such things, backstopped by traditional corporate governance. So basically the corporate owners pick experts based on their own motives and those experts set the direction and fine tuning of articles.
Really the only group decision making happening is small committees (who can be overriden by executives) and the board of directors.
I've met librarians and researchers before. Those people have some serious opinions. It's extremely unlikely that none of the encyclopedia editors cared. There were surely some doing this as their 9-5, but I bet this was a small fraction.
I don’t mean that none of them cared. Bit of a tongue-in-cheek comment about how the intensity can ramp up when the compensation is zero. On one hand, payment motivates people. On the other hand, when you hire volunteers you have selected for people who find pushing their specific view of the Holocaust to be its own reward. This is not likely to make the situation easier to resolve.
Croatian Wikipedia was used to deliberately and succesfully instill nationalist and neo-fascist points of view onto the users of the page, young people in Croatia. The really odd thing is that literally 4 Wikipedias were started in the Serbo-Croatian language: the Serbo-Croatian Wikipedia, the Serbian Wikipedia, the Croatian Wikipedia, and the Bosnian Wikipedia. The Croatian one is often the most biased one.
—
I often read the English and the German Wikipedias. I found that I can edit the English Wikipedia and my changes are accepted, my changes on the German Wikipedia however are rejected.
The English Wikipedia is up-to-date. In topics such as computers or science or popular culture, it is very accurate. The German Wikipedia feels to me like stuck in 2006. Many pages don’t have any of the recent developments, and the information is very outdated.
If I read history, English and German Wikipedias present completely different articles, where the German one tends to be better and unbiased. Only in these topics (history and the like) the easy editability of the English Wikipedia makes it a target and victim of misinformation and bias.
> The German Wikipedia feels to me like stuck in 2006. Many pages don’t have any of the recent developments, and the information is very outdated.
There are a lot of English Wikipedia pages like that, too. Sometimes it's pretty blatant, like super-comprehensive list of something that just stops in 2013 or something.
So far we have Wikipedia admitting Croatia and Poland and if they were to look I am sure they would find interesting things in Hungary as well as I pointed out.
There is a stronger political discussion at country levels between Israel and Poland regarding this topic. It is easy searchable, you can find articles like this [1]. The author doesn't seem to study the topic in all extent.
I suggest to read the paper which sets a more scientific ground to Wikipedia issues that other anecdotes. Beyond this specific topic, I don't know of topics which enable a level of discussion of this caliber.
Based on the editors involved and the subject matter, this is a re-run of one of Wikipedia's most famous scandals: the Eastern European Mailing List (EEML).[0]
The EEML was a group of Eastern European editors who set up a secret mailing list to coordinate their activities in their never-ending nationalist edit wars, primarily (but not only) against Russian editors.
Secretly coordinating over a back channel is a real no-no in Wikipedia culture, because it allows a group of editors to completely subvert the rules. For example, one of Wikipedia's bright red lines is that no editor may revert the same page more than three times in 24 hours.[1] If you have a secret mailing list with all your like-minded editors, you can always just send out a request for someone else to revert on your behalf. That's exactly what the EEML did.
Two things made the EEML special. First, they had an admin in their ranks (Piotrus, who is also a party to this latest Arbcom case about Polish-Jewish history), who was actively scheming with them to sideline and ban their enemies. That gave them significantly more power than a random group of editors would have had.
Second, their entire mailing list was published by Wikileaks. Yes, Wikileaks, not Wikipedia. The speculation is that there was a mole in the EEML, who eventually passed their correspondence to Wikileaks. You can read a sample of the messages from the EEML here: [2].
There was a big argument over whether Arbcom should even consider the evidence from Wikileaks, or whether that would violate the privacy of the EEML editors. But Arbcom did end up taking the emails into account, because how could it not? The emails were pretty spectacular, showing all sorts of underhanded scheming: things like, "You, you and you will push editor X's buttons, and when he responds, I'll report him for incivility."
The EEML editors mostly got off the hook with a slap on the wrist. You would think they would have gotten permanently banned, but somehow, they weren't. Several of them have remained extremely active in Eastern European nationalist edit wars, and are in fact now parties to this new case.
This latest case centers around the history of antisemitism in Poland, and particularly around the involvement of Polish collaborators in the Holocaust. One of the biggest flashpoints was an article about a supposed concentration camp for non-Jewish Poles.[3] The camp never existed. It's an urban legend, invented in order to claim that non-Jewish Poles were equal victims as Polish Jews. But there was a big fight between Polish nationalist and Israeli editors over the article. Ah, Wikipedia, what a miserable place.
I've long suspected bias in Wikipedia's articles about Eastern Europe and specifically its history during World War 2. This helps explain why (maybe not the entirety of it, but some).
It's mind-boggling that they coordinated behind the scenes with an admin to get other people banned/censored by using underhanded tactics. It's doubly surprising that this admin wasn't even banned!
There was alot of horrific things that went on in those "in-between-empire" countries, that got steam rolled regularly, reappeared half digested during defeats and either imitated there old masters, hoping to keep independent by mimicry or in re-aligning with new empires, imagining those who suffered the wrath of other empires, to be more sympathetic.
Those trying to transcend nationalism and imperialism of course were there mortal enemies, as they subverted the endeavor for freedom and independence. Im pretty certain some dreamed aloud about becoming the muscovites instead of the muscovites.
The bandera activities on polish jews come to mind
and the sovjet union punished them severely, after hitler fed them into the churning war. There was a corner house (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corner_House_(Riga)) in every occupied city, and a room with swiss-cheese walls in ever one of those houses.
The empire is the worst thing to ever happen, a certain source of misery, a crack all wounded nation states would yearn for, willing to trample another million into the dust. It by now has infected the us at the core and is slowly eroding its values away. It has put up a good fight though, allowing for example other cultures, languages, ideas and countries to flourish relatively free in its influence sphere.
And there are still competing traditional empires, yearning for the g(l)ory days, of mercantilism and neverending sunsets or worse still revenge, for imagined slights received aeons ago.
I honestly do not know how to overcome it, but it certainly seems, that people who experience empires in there daily lifes, suppressed by hierarchies into miserable servitude with no actual control & freedom, are more susceptible to projecting there pride upon these expansionists behemoths.
Is all this past any justification for the atrocities of russia against ukraine today? No. Never was. Never will be.
> The empire is the worst thing to ever happen, a certain source of misery, a crack all wounded nation states would yearn for, willing to trample another million into the dust. It by now has infected the us at the core
I think the Guatemalans, Chileans, Indonesians, Vietnamese, Iraqis, Libyans, etc. could tell you that the US has been an empire for quite a long time...
The article that Grabowski[1] wrote seems extremely heavy-handed and reeks of having an axe to grind. I am no fan of Wikipedia or their incessant edit wars, bad information and bickering, but Prof. Grabowski does not seem tempered in his criticism (going as far as calling out specific editors, which seems unprofessional to say the least).
Looking into his sources is also a bit dubious, occasionally providing conclusions as being prima facia obvious, which (at least to me) is hard to swallow given an ultra-charged topic of discourse like the Holocaust. As an example, the "Jew with a Coin" Polish statuette caricature mentioned in the article is certainly offensive and insensitive, but calling it blanket anti-Semitisim needs some evidentiary work (whereas Grabowski considers it an obvious implication).
The "Jew with a Coin" is antisemitic. The coin is used in this case to symbolise greed which antisemites here automatically assign to all Jews. (I know, I am a Pole)
I'm not sure even Grabowski agrees, here's what he first says about it:
> Anthropologist Erica Lehrer wrote about this phenomenon in Kazimierz (a center of Jewish life in Kraków) in her 2013 book Jewish Poland Revisited, uncovering that some Poles collect these odd pieces of art as good luck charms and may not consciously attribute sinister meaning to them.
Maybe Wikipedia editors are whitewashing antisemitism, but he should really find more clear cut cases.
No conflict here. You can own a piece of art that is racist or antisemitic without being racist or antisemitic.
Also, in certain parts of Poland antisemitism is so pervasive that it is basically part of local folklore. So you try to go read children's book and there will be a Jew in it trying to steal kids money... and nobody thinks twice about it just like nobody questions stories about a fat guy wearing red suit flying around dropping presents.
So the way antisemitism here works is pretty much the same way it always did. The same way Nazis used.
People assign certain qualities to Jews. They repeat the same ad nauseam in jokes, in caricature, etc. Rather than treat Jews individually, antisemites tend to treat them in a way that dehumanises them -- which is a move that makes further antisemitism easier. You see, dehumanising is about disconnecting your empathy, about not seeing "them" as individuals but as a class of people that you can assign to qualities you hate.
Also there is a reason Nazis hated Jews so much. The whole goal was to find a way to be able to make people do things by finding a common enemy that will be easy to vilify. And Jews were already pretty common (everywhere in Europe), easy (no own government) target and already with pretty poor sentiment. No, Nazis did not invent antisemitism.
The funny thing about all this is that historically Jews were prevented here from many trades and, out of necessity, they took up certain professions connected with finances because they just couldn't do much else. Because of this Poles formed this connection between Jews and money and greed while completely forgetting that it was the governments at the time that caused this.
> Because of this Poles formed this connection between Jews and money and greed while completely forgetting that it was the governments at the time that caused this.
I don’t think they’ve forgotten. In much of Europe rulers that issued crippling taxes or engaged in ruinous financial schemes are not remembered fondly.
Hm, yeah, all of a sudden I think I'm more on Grabowski's side. This is extremely weasel-worded: "Opinions about the motif vary; some cultural studies scholars believe it promotes Polish–Jewish dialogue or view it as harmless folklore or nostalgia, while others believe it is an antisemitic and offensive stereotype."
Maybe you can argue the trinkets aren't in themselves anti-Semitic, but I completely agree with you that they're 100% undeniably rooted in anti-Semitic tropes. I mean even the word "nostalgia" there is weird. Nostalgia for what?
My polish grandmother has it as a painting in her house (a jew counting coins). She bought it few years ago. She says the jew brings good luck. She is absolutely not racist nor antisemitic.
She might not be, but the notion of "the jew brings good luck" is absolutely anti-semetic and dehumanizing (associating Jews with money and reducing the people to a notion).
Well it's hard to not associate Jews with money in Europe, especially eastern one, where for cultural and religious reasons the minority was heavily involved in trade and banking since middle age.
Even today despite global jews being less than 0.2% of world population are 20% of Forbes 200 richest, e.g. 5 of the 10 richest americans are jews.
> My polish grandmother has it as a painting in her house (a jew counting coins). She bought it few years ago. She says the jew brings good luck. She is absolutely not racist nor antisemitic.
> Even today despite global jews being less than 0.2% of world population are 20% of Forbes 200 richest, e.g. 5 of the 10 richest americans are jews.
While I don't know your grandmother, your representation of yourself reads very antisemitic to non-Polish audiences. You may want to take a minute of introspection as to what shared cultural influences led to your grandmother's art choices and your insistence that antisemitic stereotypes are valid. There might be a connection there. That said, you probably wouldn't want me painting all Poles as insensitive oblivious racists.
There's a difference in statistics which don't say anything about causality - like the mentioned involvement in banking due to religious/cultural restrictions, and the association going the other way - this is a Jewish figurine with money, therefore it's lucky. That's the whole issue with antisemitism, racism, etc. It's like the historical connection of black people being banned from public pools -vs- associating being black with not being a good swimmer.
It's actually pretty easy to not do associations the other way... just need to be aware and care. It's easier for us now than for previous generations to be aware at least, but being open-minded in general always helped.
Just because a stereotype has a historical basis doesn't make it not racist. In the Americas black people were slaves for hundreds of years, but if I carry around a little statue of an African slave because that's what I still associate with black people, that's definitely racist and dehumanizing.
The sin of usery prevented Catholics from banking leaving a void filled by people who didn’t follow Christ.
Think about how much we decry banks today. Now place yourself in the 14C. Jesus drove out the moneychangers 4 daYs before his crucification, hmm today. The “greatest story ever told” informs people. Moneychangers are bad, moneychangers are Jewish therefore Jews are bad.
This is completely bonkers. Usury isn't condemned because Christ threw the money changers out. Usury is condemned because it is exploitative and because it is theft[0]. IIRC, Jewish bankers weren't even the worst offenders in, say, Renaissance Europe; there were Christian bankers who charged higher interest.
One difference, though, is that while Catholics are forbidden from offering usurious loans to anyone, Jews are only forbidden from doing so to other Jews. It is permissible to offer such loans to non-Jews[1].
This is a very touchy area indeed, and I think that especially for those people who are not on the "in" about the topic, I would suggest approaching any article about it with reservation and suspend judgement. To do otherwise is to risk committing an injustice through false accusations. Slander and libel are very difficult to retract once spread.
One very common equivocation that occurs involves the word "collaboration". The Slate article is one of the few I've seen that actually touches on it. The prewar Polish government of the Second Republic, which went into exile in London and lasted until the end of the Cold War as the Polish government-in-exile (its last president, Ryszard Kaczorowski, died in the 2010 air disaster in Smolensk), never collaborated with the Nazis or the Soviets. They were the first to report to the Allies what was happening in Poland under Nazi occupation (reports which were dismissed). This absence of state collaboration marks a major difference between the Polish state and many other European states who did, in fact, collaborate.
That's one meaning of "collaboration". When we use phrases like "the Poles collaborated", we are invoking an organized, corporate entity ("the Poles"), but since the Polish state is that organized, corporate entity, it is a false statement. "The Poles" did not collaborate. This is not subject to debate.
The other meaning of "collaboration" concerns individuals. Were there individuals who collaborated? Even without knowing the facts, the banal presumption is generally that in any war, especially one involving an occupied country with tens of millions of citizens living under brutal occupation, and occupied by two savage occupiers, no less, you are bound to find some collaborators, both willing and unwilling (for example, at gun point; note also that the Nazis were exceptionally brutal in Poland even with those who were merely associated with people who aided Jews, like children; see the Ulma family for an example[0]). I don't know of anybody who denies that some Poles collaborated with the Nazis.
We must not equivocate the two meanings of "collaboration". There is a discernible tendency on the part of some, either out of ignorance or malice, to conflate the two and attribute to "the Poles" some kind of quasi-constitutional antisemitic racism. (A recent example, ambassador Israel Katz, quoting Yitzhak Shamir, made the stupid and racist remark that the Poles "suckle anti-Semitism with their mothers’ milk". Perhaps a case of racist projection? Perhaps it was Katz and Shamir who suckled Polonophobic bigotry with mother's milk? Can you picture what would happen if the roles were reversed?)
Now, underneath his equivocation is the matter of scale (how widespread was the collaboration) and the question of Polish antisemitism as such.
With respect to the first, the research can be tendentious or sloppy, involving hastily drawn conclusions unsupported by the evidence. An example is Jan T. Gross' "Neighbors". Some Poles do seem to resist any suggestion that collaboration occurred in Poland, however, I would not overstate this, and much of this comes from a place of fear of exaggeration, of dishonest research, and of the exploitation of this tragedy for political ends (the so-called "Holocaust industry", to borrow Norman Finkelstein's phrase) or the use of such facts to downplay the suffering Poles endured under both Nazi and Soviet occupation, including the later communist occupation, which have not been fully digested or researched (the Soviet-installed postwar communist government was especially keen to suppress anything negative about the Soviets, like the Katyn massacre).
With respect to the second, the accusation of deep-seated Polish antisemitism, this is an extremely unfair accusation. Antisemitism is an animus based on racial antipathy. That is the variety that we see in Nazi Germany. In Poland, early 20th century anti-Jewish sentiment mostly revolved around economic resentments and questions around patriotism and loyalty to the Polish state. While there were certainly assimilated Jews who were Polish patriots, the ambivalence among many living in Poland during a period of high national tension led to the European "Jewish Question", which in Poland was not racial in nature. Zionism was also in the air. Recall also that Poland, for centuries the Paradisus Judaeorum, had just been reconstituted after having been partitioned by three empires 123 years earlier, had just fought a war with a Soviet empire with ambitions to spread west, and was facing the threat of a re-militarizing Germany. Having Jewish ancestry was not at the root of Polish-Jewish tensions.
But what is also problematic is a tacit double standard. Be honest with yourself for a moment. Is it worse to be an antisemite or a Polonophobe? Which group is it worse to hate? You might be embarrassed to admit your own biases out loud. Are we to presume that holding bigoted attitudes toward others is something Jews have never done and never do? No cases of Jewish mothers telling their children not to play with the goyim? Untrue that Jews were vastly over-represented in some of the, shall we say, less flattering organs of the Soviet civil bureaucracy, including the cheka, and the NKVD? What are we to conclude here? That "the Jews" were murderous thugs? That "the Jews" are Soviet collaborators?
Level heads must prevail. Time is needed. Until then, I read such claims with a grain of salt.
There isn't an acceptable kind of anti-semitism that's rooted in economic anxiety to contrast to an unacceptable kind rooted in racial animus. There's just anti-semitism. The two supposed flavors morph into each other situationally.
The grain of salt I'd take is with any argument that has as one of its premises that some forms of anti-semitism are acceptable, or somehow offset by some kind of treatment of "goyim".
This is exactly what people say when they want to re-write the truth to fit their ends. It may be hard to find out what the truth really is, it may even be impossible to get it 100% right, but there is an actual truth of what happened. Denying that gives power to liars.
In terms of cold hard quantifiable facts -- "X happened" -- yes.
But history isn't made of facts. History is made up of interpreting facts to form larger coherent narratives that mean things. It's saying "X happened because Y". It means assigning motivation and goals in the behavior of people and organizations -- all of which is ultimately subjective. It means making judgment calls about which events can be explained as inevitable given historical forces, versus which were essentially random. History isn't about the what, it's about the why.
And no, there is no "actual truth" there. There is hopefully a gradually forming consensus, which then sometimes gets overturned decades later in a paradigm shift, then overturned again.
I don't want to rewrite anything, but at the end of the day history isn't a mathematical formula whose properties can be definitely verified.
History is written by winners, its rewritten and reinterpreted by their descendants and most things cannot be trusted besides some very simple and widely documented "cold facts".
> People looked at the same thing and saw different things.
However, the dress was an actual dress, which had an actual color. Sometimes it's hard to see what the truth is, but just because people look at the same thing and see different things, doesn't mean all of those things are equally valid.
> This is exactly what people say when they want to re-write the truth to fit their ends.
The person you are talking to may partake in a pro-fascist ideology, but they probably do not identify as pro-fascist. Empatheticly, the person looks at the world and said "if there was truth then..." and realized that the consequences for truth are never there. In a world where it's true that, for example, Trump tried to sway the Georgian election official, then why aren't there consequences?
A rational person would say that means it either must not be true, or that whoever is in power determines the "truth."
The third correct alternative idea is so onerous that it is nearly impossible to confront, (1) that there is a truth, (2) that there is a powerful entity trying to deny it, and (3) that there is a personal responsibility to resist or fight it lest you be forced to submit to it.
GP says "History is written by winners." GP Doesn't understand that they are a participant in the game of winners and losers and has already accepted submission to those more powerful as a forgone conclusion.
So the idea of truth is muddied by the consequences of that truth and the personal responsibility to uphold truth. The person you are responding to isn't evil, they just have not fully explored the consequences of their belief system.
How exactly do you know what is True when you don't know what you don't know?
Most people operate under a subjective interpretation of Truth.
For example, take the statement:
"China wants accountability for US operating biological weapon facilities in Ukraine."
Objectively it's either True or False. Either US had bioweapon facilities in Ukraine or Not.
So is it True? If you ask a Chinese person it is. If you Ask an American, it hasn't even crossed their mind. Americans don't even contemplate that this is a sticking point in Chinese/American relations. This information has simply not been told to them. And even if was, and not censored, most would dismiss it as misinformation.
So Chinese people and Americans people operate in a world with opposing interpretation of a factual event.
There might be objective truth. But people live in a world of subjective interpretation of it.
This whole idea we're dealing with now about the
alternative facts and post-factuality is pretty
familiar to the 1920s. It’s a vision that's very
similar to the central premise of the fascist vision.
It's important because if you don't have the facts,
you don't have the rule of law. If you don't have the
rule of law, you can't have democracy.
Sociologists say that a belief in truth is what makes
trust in authority possible. Without trust, without
respect for journalists or doctors or politicians, a
society can’t hang together. Nobody trusts anyone,
which leaves society open to resentment and propaganda,
and of course to demagogues.
If a community or country can't hold together
horizontally by way of an idea of factuality, then
someone comes along vertically with a huge myth, and
that person wins.
> But people live in a world of subjective interpretation of it.
Everyone's subjective truth is not equal. What are the consequences of that? What are the consequences of believing your subjective truth is more authoritative than someone who has spent more time understanding a problem than you or a consensus of such people?
What you've described, via subjective truth, is the core ideology of might makes right. If you equate the truths, you are saying that the subjective truths are equal, therefore who can shout the loudest is who can spread their truth. If you believe in objective truth, then it is a clear conclusion that not everyone's subjective truth is equal and you must figure out ways to determine which truths are lower quality.
> How exactly do you know what is True when you don't know what you don't know?
Contradictions are the one thing we can be confident means something is wrong, so truth can be explored through contradictions. Entities that frequently contradict themselves are bad faith, and that creates a strong indication that their truth is probably not the truth.
To abandon facts is to abandon freedom. If nothing is true, then no one can criticize power, because there is no basis upon which to do so. If nothing is true, then all is spectacle. The biggest wallet pays for the most blinding lights. -- Timothy Snyder, Yale professor of history.
There is truth - sometimes we just don't know what it is. But that means we can talk about the truth of A claiming X because of (...) and B claiming Y because of (...). (this is basically what every real research paper is - claims and their justifications, not "truth") There's nothing good about the defeatism and saying "well, we'll never know, just ignore it".
1. There is no such thing as a final analysis completely free of bias.
2. There is no such thing as facts.
It's related to the old "social constructionism" example, where "reality is a social construct" can either mean that our perception of reality is influenced by society or that there is no such thing as objective reality therefore quantum woo ayurveda ESP dowsing astral projection Raelian spaceships in the Medway.
If you mean "in matters of opinion, there is no such thing as truth" I'd be with you, but clearly some things — such as the proposition that there is no such thing as truth in general — are incorrect.
And in this specific case, it's true that many Poles engaged in antisemitic behavior and in some cases took advantage of Nazi policy to settle old scores.
So this claim that "there is no such thing as truth" sounds very suspicious in this context.
Also Wikipedia's toxic culture often refuses to call a spade a spade, and gives some favored problematic editors a long leash to be uncivil, so long as they learn to avoid a few of the most blatant unacceptable behaviors. IMHO, they need to be more consistent and more final with their bans, because a community with a lot of individuals who've been taught how to obscure their misbehavior and/or expertly push it right up to the line is still a shitty community.