User:Clarknova/old

Clarknova is the self-assigned moniker of a long-time Internet addict. His life since 1997 has been almost entirely devoted to IRC and voracious online reading, which he preforms in the abbreviated, Brownian style typical of those with severe ADD. Though he's been staring into monitors since the age of 12, he can still screen-read without glasses. He spends roughly 36 hours a week in front of an Athlon-based personal computer.

Clarknova graduated from a small college on the U.S. eastern coast in 1997 with a BA in History and English Creative Writing. He minored in Biology. He has worked as a whitewater raft guide, a cable lineman, a dish washer, a warehouse and factory serf, a flooring slave, a laboratory servant, a technical support drone, and an art critic. He is engaged to be married in approximately 2007.

Clarknova had voting rights in the last board of trustees election because he had over 400 total edits. Elections in the future will require Wikimedia memberships, which require dollar donations, which will ensure a caste system. At least he can mutter plaintively about how he remembers democracy.

Comrade Martyr Nova

Interests

 * The theories and biographies of
 * Nicola Tesla
 * Wilhelm Reich
 * Terence McKenna
 * Making music by way of
 * Hand Drumming
 * The Violin
 * The Jew's Harp
 * Throat singing
 * Psychohistory
 * Photography
 * Environmental Science
 * Literature
 * International politics
 * Syncretic Hermeticism
 * Shamanism
 * Gardening

Clarknova was born in Washington D.C. in the mid seventies, and lived in a Maryland suburb until his 22nd year. He doesn't know what to think of his childhood, and so, like most adults, tries not to. He currently resides in Iowa.

Preamble
The wikimedia Neutral Point of View policy is designed to perpetuate a useful fiction: the myth of objectivity. It at once rests on this false premise, and declaims it.

The NPOV policy announces:

Where we might want to state opinions, we convert that opinion into a fact by attributing the opinion to someone.

it says shortly thereafter:

determining how some artist or work has been received publicly or critically might require research; but that reception, unlike the idiosyncratic opinion of the Wikipedia article writer, is an opinion that really matters.

i.e. Wikipedia writers don't matter. You don't matter. That's a point of view.

There are other ways an article can be biased within the the terms of NPOV. Here are three examples:


 * When enumerating contrary opinions put the one you like best at the end of the list. Just as a trial attorney gains advantage over her opponent by being the last to deliver closing arguments, so can the Wiki writer lend more credence to a certain point by discussing it last. No overt expression of the view is necessary.  This is an appeal to the reader's sense of narrative structure.


 * Ghetto debate to another page. This divorces a minority opinion from the subject matter itself. Fleshing out the new article makes it appear that all all viewpoints receive due consideration but the compartmentalization itself is disenfranchisement.


 * Write only on topics that interest you. Sheer volume of text can make a subject seem more important.

Encyclopedia writing has its origins in the European Enlightenment, and was a political act aimed at undermining theocracy. We can use historical authority to argue decorously about whether this was good or bad on the pages of wikipedia, but the very act of contributing in its classical, objectivist style is an affirmation that it was positive.

I certainly think so.

As a contributor my biases are expressed in the ways enumerated above. Most regular contributors are guilty of at least two of these.

So, to be fair:

The Declaration
Ideologically my philosophy is libertarian socialist, or anarchist, but with a strong democratic bent. I am anti-capitalist and anti-industrialist to the point of being a Luddite, but in my more optimistic moments I have hope that a highly-decentralized, post industrial economy will save us from self destruction. I'm a big fan of the Soviet model prior to Krasnyi Oktyabr.

I believe that if human beings must live under the nation state model of political organization then the state has a responsibility to provide services like health care, non-coercive education, environmental monitoring and policing, and responsible regulation of economies. I believe this is best archived by direct elections to all offices in all branches of government, by the abolition of political parties, the diminishing of class distinction, and by the revocation of human rights from chartered corporations.

I believe that the nation state model of political organization is horsehockey.

I believe that the citizens of a nation should have equal rights to the mineral resources of that nation. I believe in land ownership reform in light of that land's life as a system, not in its relationship to a Mercator projection. That land itself be held in common, but that indigenous claim to land be considered sacrosanct. That land use rights be granted each citizen, and withheld from corporations without public refferendum.

I believe in a uniform tax percentage rate on personal and corporate profit.

I believe in a high standard of worker's rights. Minimum wage should be tied to the local cost of living. Workers should have the right to organize and petition without fear of repercussion. Any demonstrably systemic violation of human and worker's rights should result in the revocation of that corporation's charter, and that the business's assets should be handed over to a democratically elected employee's council.

I believe that corporate exeutives that violate the public trust should be hung from trees.

I believe in the abolition of class distinctions in criminal prosecutions. There should be no special correctional structure for “white collar” crime. Equal right to council also means economic right.

I believe that age requirements for political offices should be abolished.

I believe that no naturally-occurring, unrefined substance or organism should be illegal to posses or be propagated by an individual, unless that organism or mineral poses a serious hazard to ecology.

I believe that local horticultural economy should be encouraged, concurrent with the progressive dismantling of industrial-scale agriculture. I believe in open emigration and immigration, provided that all people within the borders of the state be granted an equal standard of political and social suffrage. I believe in Free Trade with the stipulation that  workers of other nations we trade with be granted the same rights our own are afforded.

Postscript
I believe that the Wikipedia NPOV guidelines should remain essentially unchanged, but that it should be acknowledged that they exist for psychological reasons, and are a stylistic convention, not a higher principle. The NPOV is an opinion in itself. It is also an opinion of itself. It should be renamed.

All of these beliefs color my actions as a human being, and my contributions to the Wiki. They're there if you look hard enough.

Wikipedia Links

 * Preferred links