Yeah… Of all the antigovernment people to latch onto it’s vaguely unfortunate that we landed on fawks. Like, I do get that it’s a pop culture reference more than an actual historical reference, but still.
There was legitimate persecution of Catholics in England at the time, so it doesn’t least have a veneer of fighting tyranny, but he didn’t even actually succeed.

Shoulda gone for Louis Lingg. A bit more modern, and had the awesome criminal defense that “it’s his right to fill his house with dynamite”.

I’d actually say it’s significantly more political than most. It’s a philosophy about the nature of political and economic power.

It’s hard to get more political than a political philosophy. About the only way is to find one whose proponents are particularly debate-y and prone to infighting, and fond of byzantine governing arrangements to avoid entrenched or coercive positions of power.

Anarchism is typically focused on opposition to coercive or involuntary ruling arrangements. It’s beenpoliticized as being in favor of chaos by people on the powerful end of said arrangements.
Because they’re against hierarchy, anarchist social arrangements typically require much more political involvement than others.

Anarchism is literally a political philosophy. It’s profoundly political.

No, it’s terror. It’s just that that isn’t always the negative we’ve tended to think it is.

Typically we’ve been citizens in a country on the “power” side of the dynamic, so using terror like that meant using it on us, and so we learned that it’s bad.

This time we’re on the other side of the power dynamic, so it’s seemingly… Good.

The bad thing being good creates cognitive dissonance.

He does, but it can also be things like reputation damage or “the fascists stopped paying for my song because they thought it was gay”.

I disagree on this specific one. It’s not an incredibly esoteric concept and is part of every legal dispute involving ownership of anything. It’s legalese for “they don’t own it, I own it”.

I entirely agree with your main point.

Aside from that, the concept of “superior ownership” isn’t something made up any time recently. It’s the notion that there are different types of ownership and some of them take priority over others.
For example, if I have a watch, A steals the watch from me and sells it to you, and then B steals the watch from you, you, me and B all have a claim to it.
B possesses the watch so you need to prove they stole it to show you have a superior claim to ownership. You can show that you bought the watch fair and square from A, which means it looks like your claim is valid, but because it was stolen from me in the first place I have the best claim.

It’s not a rich person making up a new legal principle, it’s a rich person trying to use their money and lawyers to buy an outcome because they don’t like one of the parties.

That one also has the aspect of avoiding a deliberate insult. Desecrate the corpse and you risk turning it into a Thing™ that people might rally around.
killing him does that too, but people rally a little less around a relatively restrained killing of a valid military target and unremarkable handling of the body.

The worst person in the world, while living, looses all consideration for how they’re treated. At that point, it’s not about what they deserve as much as it’s about living up to our own standards for how we compose ourselves.

We don’t feed evil people to rabid hogs not because they don’t deserve it, but because we respect ourselves more than that.
Likewise, everyone deserves a baseline level of dignity in death because that’s a standard we hold ourselves to.
It’s not for them.

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/foundation/f/f6/Wikimedia_Foundation_2024_Audited_Financial_Statements.pdf

Their hosting is a couple million a year, and they have $80 million in cash, not $250.
Their cash flow from donations after expenses is about $6 million.
They absolutely cannot keep running for 400 years without further funding.
If nothing else, people are needed to run the servers and actually manage the basic operations of the foundation.

They’re definitely not in a dire financial situation, but they’re not centuries of hands off operation by any means.

NAS. Most things sit in downloads indefinitely, and I’ll randomly decide the folder is gross and unmanageable and put things into appropriate folders. Usually Documents gets the most sub-categories, with various significant life docs sorted by category and year. Pictures gets random art I made in a folder, pictures, memes and funny shit, etc also get their own folders.

Media downloads go straight to the NAS where they’re organized by Format/Category/Series/Name. As in Video/Movies/John wick/John wick 1. TV gets a season level in there.

you can’t refute my main point that…

This is the part where you’re dense as fuck. As I said from the get go, I wasn’t trying to do that, you absolute insecure buffoon.
Go back and re-read the first comment, and try not being insecure and combative. I was literally, as you say, correcting a typo (Although then using that typo in math makes me feel like it was a misunderstanding of the numbers and not a typo).

You can keep ranting about irrelevant details and then agreeing with my original conclusion.

“Wikipedia has a half billion cash and is evil for asking for more” is really different from “Wikipedia isn’t in as bad a situation as you might think, and donation isn’t as crucial as they might lead you to believe”.
Your first comment is grossly misleading. I don’t really give a shit about your conclusion, since I’m ambivalent about donating. See also: the paragraphs I quoted from your second article I liked.

Maybe, just maybe, it’s like I’ve been saying and you refuse to accept: I’m not trying to “gotcha” you, I just actually cared about accurate numbers. If you actually care about accurate numbers for drawing conclusions, like a person who goes and reads financial audits might, then perhaps they aren’t “irrelevant details”. Or, as I like to call them: A $320 million dollar error.

You’re the one who can’t accept that someone saying “hey, their financials are by no means weak but they don’t have decades of cash saved up” isn’t a disagreement with your main point.

Then you went off on insane ad hominem tangents and refused to believe that maybe someone isn’t attacking you.

given that I’ve roundly quashed all of your efforts here

You really haven’t. If you’ll recall: “what the fuck are you even talking about”? Insecure gibberish isn’t the masterful debate strategy you think it is. You aren’t coming across as cleverly as you seem to think you are.

You’re a surprisingly dense person. You’ve managed to mistake a news article for a financial audit, misread a number of comments, misinterpret numbers, think that the phrase “article I agree with” means I don’t agree with it, and somehow take “hey, your number’s wrong” to mean “your numbers are wrong, your conclusion is wrong, and everything you say is wrong”.

I wrote assets, because I was talking about total assets

Except, you didn’t. And neither did the article I said was inaccurate where you plainly pulled that number from.
Maybe go actually read the second article you shared, which doesn’t get their cash or assets wrong or make grossly inaccurate assertions about their financial status.

Also, congrats on actually running with “bold of you to assume I can read”.

You’re confusing cash with assets. $80 million is nowhere near $400 million cash.

dozens of accurate numbers from two articles, one of those many numbers in one of those articles you have picked out to focus on

Except $300 million cash isn’t in the article I said was a good article.

“Dozens” of good numbers don’t really matter when the one you use to make your point isn’t one of them.
They don’t have $400 million dollars cash, so they can’t run for 40 years just on cash on hand. Which is the entire thing I was talking about.

I sort of assumed that basic literacy meant you could understand that a question doesn’t have to end in a question mark. For example: I’m curious what you think I’m making up.
Note how that doesn’t end in a question mark, but is clearly a request for information.
And, for pedantic ness: “what the fuck are you talking about?”

What “mistakes” are you correcting? I’m referencing their financial audit. Where do you think those news articles you’re not understanding get their numbers?

You can’t just pick a number off a page, say “yeah, that one’s big, it’s how much cash they have”, then round up and add $100 million dollars and wave it off as a typo. At best, it’s a typo compounding a gross misunderstanding of the financials.

So again, what “mistakes” are you correcting? You keep saying you’re correcting some mistakes, but … You’re not. You haven’t actually done anything other than share some bad data and be offended someone would point that out.

From your source: "After a decade of professional fund-raising, it has now amassed $400 million of cash as of March”.

From you: “they have at least 400 million in reserves now”.

Their financial audit, that I linked to, shows that they have nowhere near that much cash. They don’t even have that much total assets if you count their endowment, real estate, and computer hardware.

The entire reason for my comment was that I read that number, thought “wow, that number seems preposterous”, and looked up their financial report which shows that indeed, it’s a totally bogus number detached from reality.

You seem deeply upset that someone might not just accept your opinion at face value, and it seems to be making you respond like an asshole instead of “not responding because you don’t care”, or actually giving some sort of response.

Har har har.

I’m honestly curious what point you think I’m responding to that you didn’t make.
You did actually use grossly inaccurate financial data when the tax documents were publicly available.

What are you even talking about?

Check engine light? That’s fine, if it goes wrong it’s just him. The high beams are dangerous, inconsiderate and just a dick move, but also something that could be done by mistake.

Flagrantly violating traffic control signs is dangerous to him, anyone in his vehicle, other drivers, and random passerbys. That’s a pretty big no-no, and worth reporting in the harshest terms on its own.

Would you have wanted previous riders to have reported that behavior before you got in the car? If you knew they were going to drive like that would you still have picked them as a driver?
If not, why would you let someone else be in the same situation you would take steps to avoid?

Looking at the profiles for the executives, you definitely get the feeling that they’re either the sort that prioritizes “my work put good into the world and you don’t need to squint to see it” over cash, so “yeah, that lets me live” is sufficient, or their seemingly going for a high score for number of “oh, nice!” organizations they can put on their CV, and the total compensation from them all is probably more than competitive.

first article that popped up with reliable numbera

Except…the numbers weren’t reliable. Where did they get $400 million in cash from? That’s just not a thing.

$100 million is purely cash on hand, it doesn’t take into account any otger WMF assets.

It’s $80 million cash, $274M counting all assets, like it says in the audit and my comment.

unsurprisingly, the WMF reports that WMF are spending their money responsibly and are barely managing to sustain themselves

Are you saying that their financial audit is fraudulent? “Wikipedia is committing tax fraud” is a pretty hot take, not gonna lie.
Their financial report also doesn’t claim they’re barely scraping by, so I’m not sure where you’re getting that.

Wikipedia has plenty of money, they spend it irresponsibly

That’s a different argument which you seemingly haven’t actually argued. “They make enough money, here’s some incorrect financial claims to justify it” is very different from “I don’t think they spend money wisely, and need to change what they spend on”.

it’s nice that you’re excited about Wikipedia, and it can be a useful resource, but these are not contentious facts.

I never actually made a statement for or against donation, I only pointed out that your information was incorrect. “$400 million cash” is a very different situation than “$80 million cash”.
I’m gonna disagree very strongly that these are “not contentious facts”, because they’re not correct in the slightest. Being off by $320 million dollars strongly undercuts the credibility of an argument.

Honestly, I’m confused about why you seem so angry at Wikipedia.

Yes, I am ageist about facts. What a weird thing to take issue with. The financial state of an organization two years ago doesn’t have as much bearing on if they should get donations as the current financial statement does.
Does this financial statement from 2006 feel just as relevant and make you want to donate to them?

That article is at least accurate in how it describes their financial situation. It’s also kind of amusing that the author concludes that donation is reasonable:

So, bottom line: Should someone with financial means donate when they see Wikipedia’s banner ads running in December? It depends. In my view, people who volunteer a lot of time improving Wikipedia’s content have already made their “gift” and should feel no obligation. For everyone else, the calculus is personal. One volunteer suggested donating to smaller but allied organizations like OpenStreetMap, which provides map data that is used for Wikipedia pages. Other contributors said that even if Wikipedia is only indirectly supported by the WMF, the WMF is still the best-positioned organization to advance free knowledge overall by virtue of its scale and connections.

Clearly, Wikipedians are right to engage in vigorous discussion about how donations are solicited from visitors and to oversee how those funds are actually spent. For me, there’s also the small matter of the external environment. In recent years, Wikipedia has been attacked by authoritarian regimes and powerful billionaires—people who do not necessarily benefit from the free flow of neutral information. If $3 helps hold them off, then that’s coffee money well spent.