In abstentsia lucii, tenebrae vinctumn.

— In the absence of light, darkness prevails.


About me...
An honorable member of the Order of MG West and the lost cause it has become.
PC-0 I am politically incorrect. Hence, I will use common sense and speak plainly rather than trip all over myself trying to be inoffensive.
This user's Agenda on Wikipedia is to STOP users who have an agenda on Wikipedia!

Template:User language Template:User language

Welcome

Hello, my name is Thomas (Tomtom to my friends, et al) Fuller. I was Tombombadil until the network I was on was comprised from the inside. I am a 43 year old male living in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, United States.

I served in the United States Army.

I have a Rat terrier

Where I was stationed

Fort Leonard Wood, Fort Huachuca, Fort Bragg, Hunter Army Airfield, Yongsan Army Garrison, Camp Jackson, Fort Jackson, Fort Hood, in that order.

Countries I've visited

Mexico, England, Germany, Netherlands, Ireland, El Salvador, Honduras, Egypt, Grenada, South Korea, Japan, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Iraq, Israel.

Interests

This section was unabashed stolen from Ford, and taken almost verbatim from his user page, without consultation.

Generalist in world studies, particular interest in history, geography, language and symbols, and the nature and practice of dominion. Proponent of transcendent rationalism, and its corollary, stewardship.

Leading frustrations

This section was also unabashedly stolen from Ford, and taken verbatim from his user page, without consultation. ‘I’ below refers to Ford, not to Tomtom9041.

Administrator abuse. — This frustration trumps all others. There is little if any point in editing here when self-important editors with special powers violate written policies that are meant to govern the use of these special powers. Perhaps worse than that is that such abuse receives from the community. This is incredibly shortsighted; those who cheer abuse when it happens to those they do not like have no defense when they are the victims of abuse themselves.

Biased edits. — I agree with the sentiments of some that calling a thing by its proper name is important — dictatorship, rule, oppression, murder. That is much of the point of the above pages, particularly Earth as it is. I am happy to deal in controversy elsewhere; but Wikipedia, with its open format, is not the place. We have all agreed to produce something that is dry and factual; we should do only that. Of course, this bias is most frustrating when it involves calling a thing what it is not, and is accompanied by accusations that a neutral position is biased.

"Historically, the claim of consensus has been the first refuge of scoundrels; it is a way to avoid debate by claiming that the matter is already settled."

“Settled” matters. — Policies which are subject to change are taken as divine fiat; agreements reached between a handful of editors at some indeterminate time in the past are taken as constitutional law. While I am called upon to justify my editing practices, other editors are allowed to resist any change with reference to a discussion with a few or even one other editor a year or two in the past as the last word on any given issue. And such “settled” or “established” policies are held to trump even the policy of neutrality.

Adulation of “superiors”. — Religious figures, royalty and nobility, and other holdovers of pre-modern times are subjects that some editors are clearly incapable of treating . Styles and titles that are assumed by self-important individuals, or disingenuously “granted” them by their supporters, or bestowed by presumptuous governments, are perhaps matters of fact that can be noted; but they cannot be used if the encyclopedia is to remain neutral. John Paul II and Tenzin Gyatso are not “holy”, Elizabeth Windsor is not “majestic”, and those who insist that to call them so is not an endorsement of these claims are dupes. Naturally, there is a lingering fascination with the pre-modern culture of nobility, and there is no shortage of fanboys here who treat the persistence of the nobility as a terrific game; but between such neo-romantics, fame-addled celebrity worshippers, and the pious devotees of religions and patriotisms of various kinds, the encyclopedia is a testament to inequality, where the egalitarian idea is treated as unacceptable bias.

Page ownership. — Some rather-important pages are treated like personal property by single editors. The most significant instance of this I have seen involved an editor who resisted any change not of its own doing on conservative grounds (id est, “this wording has stood the test of time”), and then summarily substituted a radically-different version while we were still discussing a new version that I had placed on the talk page for consideration.

Gratifying vanity or commercial interest of subjects. — While self-identification is worth taking into account, when self-identification becomes self-promotion we are not in any way obligated to follow suit. If we do so, we abandon the policies of neutrality and common usage and actually engage in advertising. This includes the practice of writing brand names in all caps, which companies support because it calls attention to their brands. This also includes the non-standard and utterly-ridiculous practice of considering the definite article as part of the name of something to the extent that it should be included in an article’s title and capitalized in the middle of a sentence. All the arguments for this practice would likewise support silliness like “graduated from the presitigious The George Washington University”, and will lead to this eventually, if they have not already.

Various things I believe

World's biggest user box

This user is a member of the Association of Wikipedians Who Dislike Making Broad Judgements About the Worthiness of a General Category of Article, and Who Are In Favor of the Deletion of Some Particularly Bad Articles, but That Doesn't Mean They are Deletionist
AWWDMBJAWGCAWAIFDSPBATDMTD
AWWDMBJAWGCAWAIFDSPBATDMTD

The motto of the AWWDMBJAWGCAWAIFDSPBATDMTD is Est omnino difficile iudicare inclusionis meritum cuiusdam rei in encyclopædia cum ratio sciendi quid populi referat incerta sit, sed nihilominus aliquid encyclopædiam dedecet, which translates to "it is generally difficult to judge the worthiness of a particular topic for inclusion in an encyclopedia considering that there is no certain way to know what interests people, but some topics nevertheless are not fit for an encyclopedia." This motto reflects the desire of these Wikipedians to be reluctant, but not entirely unwilling, to remove articles from Wikipedia.

Tomtom9041

Communist state imitations

I was born in 1963, and remember that the Soviet Union and Communist China were once, and some would say still are, "the" Evil empires of the world. I remember seeing the Berlin Wall on TV. The cold war fascinates me, what if we still had the Soviet Union, what would the world be like today? Would Soviet citizens be allowed on the Internet? Would they write blogs? I like how they were always trying to copy the west. Here is a table with a list of examples:

Western world Eastern bloc
Encyclopædia Britannica Great Soviet Encyclopedia (1926)
Olympic Games Spartakiad (1928)
B-29 Superfortress Tupolev Tu-4 (1940s)
Vickers VC-10 Ilyushin Il-62 (1963)
Concorde Tupolev Tu-144 (1968)
Boeing 707 Model 120 Shanghai Y-10 (1970s)
Space Shuttle program Shuttle Buran (1976)
XB-70 Valkyrie Sukhoi T-4
2001: A Space Odyssey Solaris (movie) (See Solaris (movie)#Solaris and 2001)
Western movie Ostern (1957)
European Economic Community Comecon (1949)
Nobel Peace Prize Stalin Peace Prize (1949)
NATO Warsaw Pact (1955)
Fat Man Joe 1 (1949)
BBC World Service Radio Moscow World Service (1980s)
James Bond Stirlitz
IBM System/360 ES EVM (1968)
IBM PC ES PEVM (1980s)
PDP DVK
Unix MOS (operating system) (1980s)
PDP-11/40 SM-4 (1970s)
PDP-11/34+ SM-1420

WikiLicense

I agree to multi-license all my contributions, with the exception of my user pages, as described below:

Just fine.
Multi-licensed with the Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike License versions 1.0 and 2.0
I agree to multi-license my contributions under the GFDL and the Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike license version 1.0 and version 2.0. Please be aware that other contributors might not do the same, so if you want to use my contributions under the Creative Commons terms, please check the CC dual-license and Multi-licensing guides.