Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2019/10/12/someone-at-the-nra-has-been-qu.html
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Not soon. Gone already. No new stories after Weds. They can’t build the guillotines fast enough.
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NRA has become the Nationalist Russian Alliance
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Why are they (the NRA) still allowed to have non-profit status, when they are very clearly a terrorist organization? This kind of crap just adds to the mounting pile of evidence that they are trying to change history and weaken our society.
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I know we’re all shocked, simply shocked, to find an anti-Semite inside an organisation that was taken over in 1977 by a racist murderer, that tried to put out a graphic novel that looked like undead Julius Streicher had edited it, and is now revealed to be in thrall to Vladimir Putin.
[sarcasm, of course. Lately, even our resident ammosexuals have been less keen than they were before to portray the NRA as valiant defenders of the Second Amendment]
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The edit to the Holocaust Denial page was a minor grammar correction. And while the article details some significant, politically motivated edits to certain pages related to the NRA. You can’t really assume that just because some one visited the article for Holocaust Denial then they must be an anti-Semite. If merely reading up on those subjects was evidence of hate, then I’d be worse than Hitler.
Putting it in the headline is misleading. And even the original article’s choice to lead with that particular edit is intended to give an impression that the information simply can’t back up.
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People take the time to edit and improve topics they’re passionate about. If it were someone doing a single grammatical correction on an article about Hitler or the Nazi party, it would be a non-story. This was someone from a right-wing organisation that’s indulged in anti-Semitism in the past reading a long article on Holocaust denial very carefully, making two grammatical corrections deep into it. You’re free to give the NRA editor the benefit of the doubt, though. I’m not.
[amusingly enough, the same IP makes a grammatical edit to the page about the Russian ruble the previous month in 2010. Ah, the multifarious passions of the NRA…]
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It’s not about the benefit of the doubt. It’s about what the information can demonstrate. And a single, minor, grammatical edit tells you nothing about who or motivation. And while yeah, people generally do serious edits and additions to article they’re passionate about. Minor corrections like this don’t fall into that category. I’ve made minor corrections like that to pages I just ended up on due to bored Wiki browsing. And it’s the only sort of edit I’ve ever made to Wikipedia. Even if we assume a certain passion for the subject, this doesn’t tell us anything about why they’re passionate about it. For all that info tells us whoever made that edit could have been checking the page to make sure it was accurate and unaltered by white supremacists. They might have been planning to add info about Nazi alliances with Greys from Alpha Centari. We don’t know.
I’m well aware that the NRA is full of assholes and bigots. But it isn’t a minor grammar correction on a particular wiki page that’s taught me that.
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The linked article is A Brief History of NRA Employees Editing Wikipedia for Fun and Possibly Profit.
It mentions a lot of the self-servingly corrupt and the trivial.
Anybody thinking of framing their history of interference as “a single typo edit” could also be unintentionally misleading people about what happened.
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I’ve read the article. And that was not my complaint about it.
The edit to the Holocaust page was a single minor edit. And hey look here’s me describing the rest of them:
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Concern trolling lite is still concern trolling.
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All that, plus don’t underestimate how much typos and grammatical errors can affect the credibility of an article! Or any written communication, really; these sorts of errors are one of indicators you can use to help judge if an email is some sort of scam.
So I’d say a “minor grammatical edit” has pretty high value for a misinformation campaign.
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I wonder what happened in 2010?
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Heck if I know… but the Dem’s '06 to '10 $$$ rise could tell us something. Perhaps more Pink Tu-tu Democrats got into office along the way?
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@Ryuthrowsstuff is right: if someone is fixing typos on a Wikipedia page, all it tells you is they’ve read the page.
You might well assume that when NRA personnel read about holocaust denial, they like what they read. But this doesn’t happen to prove that; and you can’t make it probative just by clapping back at anyone who says so. Fortunately there is already a mountain of evidence against the NRA, so we don’t need that QAnon logic to make the case.
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The problem isn’t a matter of mere ‘correctness’; it’s the off-putting tone and delivery that overshadows any valid point being made.
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