@outfrost On what specifically? (The claim on E.P. I retract because that is based on a verbal exchange with a Wikimedia employee and is thus hear-say.)
"[A]bout 80% of Israeli soldiers who completed MDMA-assisted psychotherapy for PTSD experienced a significant reduction in symptoms [...] MDMA itself is not the treatment but a therapeutic catalyst, believed to create a temporary "window of opportunity" that allows patients to engage with traumatic memories [...]"
Your example is misguided. Volunteers for DWB are embedded in DWB's legal and organisational structure; receive a salary and get reimbursed for some costs. Nothing like that applies to Wikipedia editors. They are not part of the legal and organizational structure of WMF, don't get a salary, and only occasionally may get reimbursed for some of their costs. Given the differences, I presume your comparison is more or less common WMF propaganda strategy.
WMF is fine, its technical infrastructure is set up, enough money is in the bank. The yearly hosting costs of all language versions e.g. are below the combined salary of all staff concentrating on fundraising.
WMF staff is well paid with a large overhead. And, for the exception of server maintenance, more or less not needed. WMF is a means to provide people you know with nice jobs, regardless of their expertise or the relevance of the job posting (Evan Prodromou has been a notorious example).
So, let privileged WMF staff unionize. But don't advertise that goal by pointing to the (so-called) virtues of Wikipedia and unpaid volunteer editors with their countless man-hours. WMF exploits their work like large tech companies do when they use the editors' work (without a fee, due to the license) for their in-house training of their AI, their search engines, or their automated content monitoring syste4ms. If you want to end exploitation, unionizing the privileged WMF employees is the last place where to start. Begin with reimbursing or paying the editors of Wikipedia.
Exploitation it is. Unionizing the WMF staff only sugarcoats that pervasive and foundational trait. But it ads to the many reasons why to stay firmly away from Wikipedia or Wikimedia.
It is nonsense to confuse Wikimedia employees and Wikipedia volunteer editors. Wikipedia editors have always been exploited. But it has been their decision to work for free with the exception of an honorary barnstar now and then. Wikimedia Foundation on the other hand is a classical middle man. It doesn't create any content but provides access to it. It earns its money by raising donations for the creation of buggy software and the provision of access to the content it did not produce. The employees of Wikimedia may unionize or not but that shouldn't shield them from the fact they every one of them has a paid job because he exploits Wikipedia volunteers working for free. That "Wiki Workers United" starts with praising Wikipedia (to which they have contributed nothing) and use that as justification for their campaign to unionize only shows how ingrained this exploitative attitude is in Wikimedia and its employees. Honestly, I don't have any sympathies for people exploiting others and then, when the times get tough, try to secure their cushy privileges by unionizing.
P.S.: Trump doesn't want to save the world (be it with or without violence). He is no Russel Eigenblick. His goal, rather, is to remake the world in his ghostly images, simply because he cannot understand—and feels uncomfortable because of that—why both can even be different.
Which is, by the way, why Trump doesn't "admire" strongmen (Putin, Erdoğan, Xi), nor changes sides when balances of power shift. He is drawn to strongmen because they share his inability to not mold the world according to their specific ghosts. He doesn't "admire" them, he feels at home with them.
This state of mind in which you are so utterly out of your mind that you don't and can't see your own derangement; in which you are untouchable in your weirdness which, in turn, enforces your sense of timeless strength and control. ("True Detectives", SE1, plays on that theme.)
I never quite understood this state of mind, although I sensed its mythological allure, as if from afar. Only now did I recognize this "old, weird America", could pin it down, and find it embodied in a Laura Loomer, and, as her drooling uncle in spirit, in a Donald Trump.
Both have no qualms with redeeming the world if they have to, and both won't give a thought about the violence that comes with that. Because it's not "their" violence but the violence inherent in the "events" they only bring about. It's not their fault.
To call them Christian Jihadists would be a misnomer, but the level of derangement is comparable to the Jihadists. And this needs attention. These people are not rational, not reasonable, they live outside of time, and, in a sense, bring a demonic world to this one. ("Buffy The Vampire Slayer" plays on that.)
They are deeply irrational, unbothered by everything, even untouched by the material wealth they happen to accumulate. They act as if they live in a bubble of paranoia, and what makes them dangerous is their ability to successfully bend the world to correspond to their psychotic dream world. (Which is why children like Steve Bannon, Glenn Beck, Pamela Geller, Tucker Carlson, Megyn Kelly, the Breitbart yokels, but also Bill Maher and others, don't understand them and think they can ride them like little ponies.)
And then you watch how a Loomer or a Trump, unfazed by the discrepancies between their deranged sense of the world and the world we live in, simply keep going in remolding the latter to their psychotic dream world.
They do experience cognitive dissonance, but on a non-verbal, proto-linguistic level. So they don't verbalize or reflect but simply move aimlessly and, sometimes nonchalantly, sometimes brutish, push around people and circumstances until all fit their sense of paranoid stasis.
They don't feel much in that situation (if they can feel at all). They themselves would never see themselves as ruthless, cruel, or violent. They don't see why everybody makes a fuss. They don't feel, they just slide into manifesting a world they at the same time suffer from and have privileged access to. They are the high priests of the demons who possess them.
This is not the sphere of rational deliberation, of negotiation of conflicting interests and points of view. This is making the world part of the demonic sphere only they have access to. These people don't act rationally.
And they have no qualms using the powers at hand to bend the world to the resemblance and the liking of these ghosts. The "old, weird America" is a world whose timelessness consists in the "out-of-time-liness" of the abusive bond of perpetrator and victim. With its specific and typical language, its imagery, its specific rituals to convey meaning, purpose, peculiarity. You shouldn't vote such people into office or lend them political power. Not just because of what they will do. But because you will never understand what they do and why.
It's not that these 410 don't pose a serious risk; and it is not that many if not the majority of Muslims in Germany have anti-Semitic attitudes and reject "Western values". But freedom of religion and freedom of expression are guaranteed in Germany's Basic Law. To ostracize Muslim neighbors in the wake of the recent Islamist attack in Berlin is to betray the values of the polity and the articles of the Basic Law.
There obviously is, as part of the specific German history, the problem that on the one hand the right to exercise one's religion is guaranteed in the Basic Law, and that on the other hand a Islam that is anti-Semitic has no place in German society.
But that problem should not be mixed up with the other one that Islam is part of Germany, that the majority of Muslims are German citizens, and that ostracizing neighbors of Muslim creed means undoing the foundations of the German polity and nation.
So would all the bullshitters who now bawl that "We will not be intimidated!" or "We are more than they (the Islamists)!" please just shut up? You are pushing Muslim neighbors out of society, and you demand expressions of fealty that isn't yours to ask and theirs to provide. Gee!
"[Max Naumann's] theory was that antisemitism is a reaction. Germans were not born hating Jews. They were reacting to things Jews did. [...] Take away the provocation and the hatred goes with it."
"[Max Naumann's] real lesson has nothing to do with Nazis. When you have an explanation for why you are safe, you do not give it up. Usually someone takes it from you."
Who dares to enter a hospital when s/he cannot be sure to be treated safely or be able to work there without harassment? I guess the Pali supporters are proud of themselves.