But its topical! We have the bizarre and deeply stupid ruling from the EU re the "right to vanish". But wikipedia has a quasi "right to vanish" too. People use it to sweep their embarrassing past under the carpet. Which brings me to:
Wikipedia:Requests for adminship/Thegoodlocust.
Ho ho.
Update:
(User rename log); 07:40:16 . . Nihonjoe (talk | contribs) renamed user Thegoodlocust (2640 edits) to Vanished user oerjio4kdm3 (courtesy vanishing)
(Move log); 07:40:16 . . Nihonjoe (talk | contribs) moved page User talk:Thegoodlocust to User talk:Vanished user oerjio4kdm3 without leaving a redirect (Automatically moved page while renaming the user "Thegoodlocust" to "Vanished user oerjio4kdm3")
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I'm surprised how tolerant people there seem to be of TGL 's attitude. Though I suppose if the admins simply assumed everyone who believes they're God's gift to Wikipedia was congenitally incapable of learning better, they'd be cutting their pool of candidates by some appreciable fraction.
He want's to be an admin but he doesn't know that Wikipedia keeps histories of every page??
[To be fair, the desire was in the past tense -W]
Prior to the 70s one of the beauties of the US was that it is large, lots of states and jurisdictions, lots of distance. This allowed people before that time to move on, reinvent themselves, and to start over fresh.
The story of U.S.Grant was that he was a poor storekeeper. He went bankrupt, and started over several times before essentially stumbled into the US army where he found his niche and made history.
Yes, there are a many people who used that same opportunity to start over fresh to perpetrate fraud or violence. But even then some did go straight and become productive citizens.
That ability to start over was one of the pillars of our national optimism. Unfortunately, beginning in the 50s, the opportunity to start fresh disappeared. Your identity, and every little thing you have done, now follows you. Previous generations could move on and keep trying knowing that the minor sins of earlier days could be left behind when you moved.
Now the worse thing you have ever done is a Google search away, and you will never live it down.
[Are we talking TGL (who is anon, so it doesn't apply) or the Google case? The absurdity of that one is that the original sources weren't taken down, but this foolish burden was put on google. I see what you mean about starting over, but this is a different world; and none of the cases presented so far has seemed worthy -W]