User:TheTimesAreAChanging - Misplaced Pages

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NB: I hope you don't find the opinions I express here (or have been known to express in talk page discussions) too off-putting. While this hasn't always been the case, I take my responsibility to edit in a neutral manner seriously, and believe I do a better job of it than many of my opponents.

" had tortured a number of its own members to death in Japan. (One, for instance, was a young woman. They had buried her alive under the floorboards of the rooms in which the gang lived. Her crime had been to ask one of the comrades to pass her a paper handkerchief. The leader of the group, Fusako Shigenobu had seen this as proof that she was 'too bourgeois', for which she deserved to die. The murdered woman was pregnant at the time.)"-From Jillian Becker's 1984 classic The PLO: The Rise and Fall of the Palestine Liberation Organization, pg. 129. If I were still reading as many neo-reactionary blogs as I used to, I would probably include the caption "Leftism in a nutshell." From the fanaticism with which the Khmer Rouge set out to kill (after the most extravagant tortures) every Cambodian guilty of thinking insufficiently virtuous thoughts (or of wearing glasses—which could indicate intelligence—or having received a Western education, like the French-educated intellectual leaders of the Khmer Rouge themselves) in a massacre with few parallels in recorded history, to the censorious campus Left that threatens violence to block a feminist speaker due to her "transphobic" belief that a biological male cannot draw on the same reservoir of experience as an individual that has been female for their entire life, examples such as the above may merely be caricatures, but revealing caricatures nevertheless.

Hello, and welcome to my userpage. My name is Jake Murrin. I am an extreme introvert from Lombard, Illinois, whose primary interests are reading books and editing Misplaced Pages. (I wish there was more to me than that, but sadly, I live a rather unremarkable life.) As "TheTimesAreAChanging," I am best known for my work on Dreamcast and other articles about Sega gaming consoles, as well as articles on the modern history of the Middle East. Creating this account in October 2010 but not accomplishing much until 2012, I frequently indulged in absurdly over-the-top edit warring and POV-pushing (which I considered necessary at the time), but mellowed a bit and have been making more serious contributions since January 2014 (if not slightly earlier). In addition to being one of the major contributors to the GAs and FA listed under "Fast Facts," I reviewed Resident Evil (2002 video game) for GA.

Fast Facts

This user is from Illinois.

This user lives in or hails from Chicagoland.

This user is left-handed.

This user considers himself self-educated.

31Y

This Wikipedian was born on 01 November 1993 and is 31 years, 2 months, and 3 days old.

13,000+

This user has made more than 13,000 contributions to Misplaced Pages.

This user helped promote Sega Saturn to featured article status.

This user helped promote Dreamcast to good article status.

This user helped promote Sonic R to good article status.

This user helped promote Sonic Lost World to good article status.

This user helped promote Super Monkey Ball (video game) to good article status.

My love for Sega is rooted in a natural sympathy for the underdog, as well as the inimitable charm and appeal of Sega games.

Politically, I've evolved from a radical Leftist fooled by Chomsky into thinking that the Khmer Rouge were framed for the after-effects of U.S. bombing (a conclusion anyone would reach if they knew absolutely nothing about Cambodia and Chomsky were their only source of information on the matter), to a neo-neocon in the vein of Hitchens (and then an actual neo-con), to an Objectivist/libertarian, then a neo-reactionary, and, finally, I've recently been converted 99% of the way to Progressivism by the likes of Scott Alexander (cf. Deirdre McCloskey's "How the West (and the Rest) Got Rich"). (Of course, there is still that remaining 1%...) (David Frum's admonition "Just generally, whenever anybody praises an arrangement from the past, it's a smart idea to ask: 'If this system was so great, why did people abandon it?'"—albeit in reference to Ron Paul's nostalgia for pre-Civil War bimetalism—is something far too few of the radicals on the "alt-right" seriously grapple with, instead suggesting that all change is due to a vast Leftist conspiracy.)

Despite being an editor, I don't actually recommend that you take the vast majority of Misplaced Pages articles on politics or history remotely seriously. I'm not sure I'd even be here if I didn't think it necessary to minimize the harm Misplaced Pages can do. My brief experience editing on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict convinced me that Misplaced Pages's anti-Israel bias is pervasive and probably insurmountable. You're certainly not going to learn the true history of the Reagan administration's Latin America policy from Misplaced Pages. (Yes, including Guatemala!) (For a biting analysis of why four more years of the Carter administration would have accidentally—or "accidentally" if you're on the "alt-right"—delivered all of Central America to Communist autocrats, see Jeane Kirkpatrick's exceptionally wise and still deeply relevant "Dictatorships and Double Standards." For Leftist academics rewriting history in real time, see Misplaced Pages articles such as List of authoritarian regimes supported by the United States.) I'm sure Moldbug would say that Misplaced Pages is merely the voice of "the Cathedral," and he might be right (though I have always been as allergic to Moldbug as I am to Chomsky, even when I closely identified with the neo-reactionaries). It may be worth noting, however, that some Misplaced Pages articles are more truthful than others: For example, 1954 Guatemalan coup d'état obscures the truth entirely, but 1953 Iranian coup d'état barely even tries to conceal the fact that Mossadegh was an authoritarian dictator whose ruinous policies had brought Iran to the brink of disaster.

To my everlasting relief, the "Trumpslide" proves that most Americans still have enough sense not to care about the hateful lies peddled by depraved intellectuals—let alone Misplaced Pages's endless litany of absurdities. (It probably won't be enough to save the country, but one can dream.)

Awards:

		The Video Game Barnstar
		For your incredible research and editing at Sega Saturn, which I am sure will reach FA status soon. Indrian (talk) 18:11, 4 June 2014 (UTC)

		The Sega Task Force Barnstar
		For your absolutely awesome work at Sega Saturn, one of the task force's most important articles.
		_{this WikiAward was given to TheTimesAreAChanging by Red Phoenix on 01:44, 5 June 2014 (UTC)}

"TTAAC's Greatest Hits" include:

Debunking the standard narrative that the Sega Saturn was originally designed around a single SH-1 CPU prior to Sony's famous January 1994 PlayStation tech demo (see also "Proof that the Saturn was always designed around the SH-2 and vice-versa," and note that Indrian—who I have admired since 2012, when I first became aware of his work exposing the innumerable propaganda hoaxes of the infamous Jagged85—persuasively argues that Sega doubled down on the Saturn's 2D proficiency by adding the VDP2 and some additional RAM to the system);
Exposing numerous examples of Hamas propaganda during the 2014 Israel-Gaza war (see, e.g., government salaries, causes—although the question of when Hamas started firing is purely academic since even extreme Hamas apologist Nishidani's own sources openly admit Hamas was no longer enforcing the ceasefire on other groups—targets, power plant, shields, Nishidani can't do math);
After sufficient nudging from Guccisamsclub—a Leftie that not infrequently gets the better of our exchanges—concluding that estimates of 500,000-650,000 deaths during the 1979-1980 famine in Cambodia are highly exaggerated (for other instances where Gucci has corrected me, see here and here, though there are more);
Questioning the veracity of Jerry Robinson's claims regarding the creation of the Joker, which have been widely repeated despite the contrary testimony of undisputed co-creators Bob Kane and Bill Finger;
Revisiting Sega Genesis sales figures (plus Saturn and Dreamcast, and with acknowledgement to the true experts at NeoGAF);
Refuting allegations that the CIA helped the Iraqi Ba'th Party seize power for the first time in February 1963 (see also here and here; note that I am the lead author of Iraq–United States relations and sister page CIA activities in Iraq covering the period 1958 to 1975);
And discrediting the Iranian "Grand Bargain" panacea supposedly neglected by the George W. Bush administration (see also this analysis of the Iranian conspiracy theory that President Carter gave Saddam a "green-light" to invade Iran).
Of lesser interest: Sorting out arcane discrepancies regarding Sega's financial losses during the fiscal years 1998 to 2000 (the figures in the second link are extremely valuable for quantifying the dramatic collapse in Saturn sales outside Japan following the U.S. launch of the Nintendo 64 in late 1996); nailing down Saturn launch titles.
I have also uncovered my fair share of fake quotes (e.g., /, , ) and sockpuppets (e.g., , , , ). And one more hoax debunked for good measure.

Fun Facts About The History of Sega:

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