ABIGTESTS
Nomen Nescio
Hello, I'm Skoojal, and this is my user page. Anyone who wants to contact me can do so here: a.qua...@yahoo.com.
I am a wikipedian with an agenda, and I'm happy to tell anyone what that agenda is. Much of it relates to [[Frederick C. Crews|Frederick Crews]]. Starting in early February 2008, I began making a series of modifications to the article on Crews. To begin with, these modifications were minor and uncontroversial, but as I proceeded they became steadily more provocative. This was partly an attempt to find out what it is and is not possible to get away with on wikipedia: just how critical could I be of Crews before someone decided that I had gone too far?
In late February, my edits were reverted by [[User:Shell Kinney|Shell Kinney]], an administrator. This did not surprise me; if anything, I was surprised that it did not happen sooner. It happened shortly after I pointed out in the article that Crews had implied that [[homosexuality]] was a mental illness, so I assume that that was the last straw. Shell Kinney must have thought that I was out to 'get' Crews, which of course I was; no one who wasn't would have done what I did. I complained about Shell Kinney's decision on the talk page, but refrained from re-inserting the material that she had deleted into the article. At that point, I was almost prepared to give up on wikipedia; I thought that I might re-insert some of that material into the article at a later date, but I was in no hurry to do that, and perhaps I would never have bothered.
In early April 2008, another user, [[User:Xxanthippe|Xxanthippe]], re-inserted that material. Apparently she did not take the trouble to fact check it first, since the material she re-inserted included a significant error (eg, that [[Judith Butler]] had used the word 'homophobic' to describe Crews) that I had originally been responsible for inserting. I expected that Xxanthippe's edit would be quickly undone by an administrator and that the article would be reduced back to a stub again but, for whatever reason, this did not happen. So I returned to editing it, correcting the factual mistake about what Butler said about Crews, and making a series of further changes.
In May 2008 I became involved in a conflict about a different issue with an administrator called [[User:Kukini|Kukini]]. This lead to my being blocked for a brief period. One of the first things I did after the block expired, on May 13, 2008, was to place a long post on the talk page of [[User:Cailil|Cailil]], another user I had come into conflict with, to explain my motives, which by that time I had decided it was better to be open and direct about.
[Cailil, you have recently made suggestions about my motives for editing certain articles. I have no comment about my reasons for wanting to make changes to the Foucault article, but I will tell you exactly why I edited the Butler article.
To do this I have to explain a few facts about myself. I am a homosexual. True to the classic Freudian theory about homosexuality, I had a distant and rather cold father and an extremely close, even smothering, mother. I have always assumed that this is part of the reason why I am homosexual, and my reading of the literature about the development of homosexuality has reinforced rather than undermined this view. I therefore have very strong personal reasons for caring about articles related to homosexuality and/or psychoanalysis. That was why I edited the article about Frederick Crews, a man I despise. Reading Crews's book ''Skeptical Engagements'', I discovered that in his article ''Analysis Terminable'' he had, in the course of an attack on psychoanalysis, implied that homosexuality is a mental illness. Crews also implied that, if it were true that parents did something that caused their children to become homosexual, then they should be ashamed of themselves, homosexuality being such a bad thing. Crews's remarks enraged me (such anti-homosexual remarks are of course the sort of thing one expects to read in ''Commentary'' magazine, where that article was first published, since it is well known as an extremely right-wing publication). Reading more of Crews's work, I quickly found something that made me even angrier than his remarks in ''Analysis Terminable'': his suggestion in ''The Memory Wars'' that ''psychoanalysis'' was to blame for homosexuality being labelled a mental illness.
Coming from someone who had himself called homosexuality a mental illness, and who did it when he was a vehement anti-Freudian, that was a shocking act of intellectual dishonesty, and I decided that I had to do something to bring it to public attention, especially since, by harshly criticising Freud for his alleged dishonesties, Crews had in effect suggested that he himself was an exceptionally honest person. That suggestion was revolting, and to me it made Crews fair game for the most aggressive and personal kind of attack. My first attacks on Crews were made on the letters page of the Butterflies and Wheels website. There, using a different pseudonym, Richard R. Warnotck, I had a series of exchanges with Allen Esterson, the author of a book called ''Seductive Mirage'', a well known critic of Freud and psychoanalysis, and an ally and friend of Crews. Esterson defended Crews in several unconvincing ways, only one of which I'll mention here: he declared that only in my mind could Crews's comments possibly be deemed homophobic.
Later, after these exchanges were over, I found out something that I wish I had known at the time: that, during a conference on Freud's role in twentieth century culture, Crews had accused Judith Butler of interpreting one of his comments (an apparently innocuous reference to 'community standards') as homophobic. Each side in that exchange was partly correct. Crews was correct that Butler was calling him homophobic, and Butler was correct to call him that. I cannot speak for Judith Butler, but presumably she has read ''Analysis Terminable'', and perhaps its comments about homosexuality were what made her conclude that Crews was homophobic. Common sense suggests that Crews's 'community standards' remark cannot have been the only reason why Butler made such a damaging suggestion about him. In any case, this exchange was useful to me, because it showed that, contra Esterson, there was at least one other person in the world besides me who might interpret Crews's comments as homophobic, and that the name of that person is Judith Butler.
Deeming it pointless to return to the Butterflies and Wheels site, I decided to use Wikipedia to express my disgust with Crews (try looking at the history of the article on Crews, and the Crews talk page). The version of the article I wrote was deleted by an administrator. It was only then that I decided to make any change to the Butler page. My purpose in mentioning Crews's criticism of Butler there was not to make ''Butler'' look bad - on the contrary, it was to make ''Crews'' look bad and to establish that someone had called him homophobic. Now you may not agree with my behaviour, but motives in all this certainly were not anti-homosexual.]
On May 14, 2008, after I made a change to the article on Crews, Kukini made a minor edit [http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Frederick_C._Crews&diff=prev&oldid=212449449], tidying up what I had done. He did this so quickly that I would guess that he must have been closely monitoring my edits at that time. That he did not stubbify the article, as Shell Kinney did, was noteworthy, and even eyebrow raising, since only the day before I had made it totally clear that I had edited it as a way of attacking Crews. On May 24, 2008 Kukini undid a trivial change that had I made to the article on [[conversion therapy]] on the grounds that it was 'POV pushing' [http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Conversion_therapy&diff=prev&oldid=214721114]. Why he thought that what I did to the article on Crews was not POV pushing, I do not know. On May 25, Cailil suddenly decided that my explanation of my motives did not belong on his talk page and deleted it [http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=User_talk:Cailil&diff=prev&oldid=214736731]). More recently [http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=User_talk:DGG&diff=prev&oldid=214742490], Cailil brought this issue to the attention of a third administrator, [[User:DGG|DGG]], who took no immediate action.