Larry Sanger (@lsanger)

Wikipedia's ex-founder here. Four consequential policy discussions are happening on Wikipedia right now. Three of them would empower mainstream media to control what the encyclopedia says, and more importantly, what it doesn't say. A thread. 🧵 👇

There are three reasons. First, woke progressives (“intersectional activists”) constantly thirst for confirmation of their moral superiority, which they typically get by defending whoever (they're told) is victimized, and by signaling their superiority both to the victimizers and to all who do not signal hard enough. Virtue signaling is socially powerful and explains a lot of what wokesters say and do. The second reason is that there is only one victimizer that matters: Western civilization (and its defenders). So, if a group—like Muslims, trans people, illegal aliens, etc.—is plausibly victimized by the West, they become the victims. Then they are helped, their causes promoted, and any harm that comes to them becomes the cause du jour. The third reason is that the only victims that matter are those that, by being defended, can help destroy Western civilization, or whatever parts of it stand in the way of a socialist, egalitarian (“woke”) utopia. Muslims can weaken Western civilization by increasing crime (including rape gangs), creating ghettos, and threatening terrorism and Sharia Law. Think several European cities with large unassimilated Muslim populations. The trans movement can be used as a blunt weapon to indoctrinate children into the joys of LGBTQ and as a way to divide Christian denominations. Illegal aliens can be used to defend violent gangs, drive up housing costs, and generally increase alienation in society. Thus we have sanctuary cities. Conservatives notice what's going on, complain about it, and thereby can be identified with the "victimizers." They do unforgiveable things like opposing the spread of Islam, say that trans women aren't women, and complain about needless, avoidable violence by known illegal immigrant criminals. So the left then secures its wonderful tasty moral superiority by defending the "victims" against the complaints of conservatives. As to LGBT people (or women) victimized by Muslims in Muslim societies, leftists haven't been told this, so they don't believe they are. Or, if they can't avoid the facts, they believe this is a legitimate cultural difference. Not only are the moral relativists, their commitment to moral relativism becomes central to their moral self-concept when they reflect that their purpose is to defend victims as “historically marginalized groups” and to fight the historical oppressors. Any suggestion that it's a serious problem is the bigoted and offensive imposition of the great oppressor, Western civilization, which is the source of all the worst problems in the world. Any violence and other crime on the side of the victims is thus recast (in the twisted progressive mind) as legitimate acts of war, essentially; for the progressive to acknowledge a problem would be treasonous. This is why the hatred of Israelis became so pronounced after October 7. I have no doubt that some LGBT progressives are uncomfortable with their “strange bedfellows,” but allies are allies. In fact, the self-disinterested ability to accept them as allies in the bigger fight is surely another source of that tasty sense of moral superiority.

Well, that’s that—I’ve been blocked by Wikipedia “indefinitely” for unstated reasons, by the “consensus” of a mob. There was no due process, no prosecutor, no dispassionate judge, no jury, no interpretation of law. All my judges were self-selected and hated me. 🤣