Talk:Authoritarianism

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Recent revert

In this edit @Generalrelative reverted a change I made to remove unsourced content. Could you please identify where the content is sourced int he referenced article? The discussion you link does not address this topic, and is on another wikipedia talk page. Text removed:

The far-right in the United States is composed of various Neo-fascist, Neo-Nazi, White nationalist, and White supremacist organizations and networks who have been known to refer to an "acceleration" of racial conflict through violent means such as assassinations, murders, terrorist attacks, and societal collapse, in order to achieve the building of a White ethnostate.

The cited article does not have any discussion of the composition of the far right. In fact, the topic of the article is about a specific neo-fascist network, and doesn't discuss the far-right or authoritarianism in any substantive manner. Supporting quotes which establish this content are needed here, as this looks like a cut and dried case of bad sourcing. TheMissingMuse (talk) 16:24, 12 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]

I think you meant to link to my edit rather than yours? As you'll see, I was reverting a rather massive removal which included stuff that was undoubtedly well supported. But in the case of this specific passage it appears I restored content which went beyond the cited source. So thanks for alerting me to the issue. In any case, it was quite easy to find a high-quality source for this material. Cheers, Generalrelative (talk) 21:27, 12 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Not sure what you mean by "undoubtedly well supported". The content removed was not supported by the sources. If there are actual sources, then they should be added. We don't keep unsourced content on the hopes that someone sometime might find a source that supports it. TheMissingMuse (talk) 22:32, 12 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]

I think you're confused. Look again at my revert. Generalrelative (talk) 22:51, 12 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]

If you think the content was supported by the citations, you are free to quote the sources. I've read them, and the sources did not support the content they were attached to. TheMissingMuse (talk) 22:58, 12 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Your blanking included a direct quote. I won't be engaging with this nonsense any further. Generalrelative (talk) 23:08, 12 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Yes, a direct quote from a self published site - as was noted in the edit message. See section below for further discussion. TheMissingMuse (talk) 23:14, 12 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Sigh. Okay, one last reply:

The Public Eye is a peer-reviewed quarterly magazine published by Political Research Associates.

[1] That wasn't even remotely difficult for me to find. Generalrelative (talk) 23:25, 12 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Peer reviewed articles are fine. That's not what was removed. This link is the source that was removed. If you would like to make a case that that page can be used as a reliable source I'm all ears. If this is a citation that you really want to preserve in this article, I'm happy to widen the conversation to a broader audience. TheMissingMuse (talk) 23:35, 12 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Use of Public Eye

The legacy website http://www.publiceye.org is used throughout the article citing this source. This is a self published page, and generally not a reliable secondary source. I will be removing this source from the article. If anyone has any specific issues with this course of action, please feel free to raise them here. TheMissingMuse (talk) 23:09, 12 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Public Eye's current webpage is here, and it does not appear to be self-published. It describes itself as "a peer-reviewed quarterly magazine published by Political Research Associates." See e.g. its submission guidelines. You may object to it as politically biased, but your claim that it is self-published is easily shown to be false. Generalrelative (talk) 23:21, 12 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]

I was referring not to the journal, but the cited source: [2] which has no author, and is not a published in a peer-reviewed venue. Citing articles which are published in the journal is fine. Citing moribund links from an unmaintained site with no authorship is not. TheMissingMuse (talk) 23:32, 12 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]

As no one has yet advocated for preserving the source, I will be moving forward with the removal of [3] from the article in the coming days. If anyone thinks we should preserve that source, please share your perspective. TheMissingMuse (talk) 15:39, 13 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Compatibility with human rights

Is authoritarianism a human right abuse?, or can it be compatible with human rights? 2806:108E:18:8603:A060:27DC:9CEA:F3D (talk) 00:59, 13 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]

If you have reliable high quality secondary sources that address the topic, feel free to update the article accordingly. TheMissingMuse (talk) 15:41, 13 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Removal of examples section and tables of authoritarian states

I have now removed the “current” and “historical” tables of examples of authoritarian states. This change was suggested and gained consensus earlier this year (Talk:Authoritarianism/Archive 2#Examples section), with the rationale that the list is hard to maintain at any reasonably neutral point of view and is hard to support properly as much more than original research or synthesis.

It seems sensible that some select examples should be pulled out to be discussed in prose. For anyone looking to reference these tables, I leave the last revision with the tables here. (Note, immediately prior to my wholesale removal, FCBWanderer removed multiple states in this change, in case anyone sees that prior version as more complete.) — HTGS (talk) 01:45, 26 July 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Theoretical quality and compatibility

The article is halfway between a dictionary entry on "authoritarian states", listing the different meanings of the term, and a symptoms category from a positivist perspective. I suggest we split this article into a main article with the different definitions of "authoritarian state" (symptom bundle categories) and the different determinations known as "authoritarian" for a state (descriptive categories). Each definition/determination should have an article of its own:

Moreover, the quality of the cited material is very low. Anti-communist propaganda produced by western liberal think tanks and newspapers such as The Economist are presented more prominently than actual academic research on the matter. For instance, Cuba, China, Vietnam and North Korea are presented very low in the Economist's "democracy index" whereas the western countries and their zone of influence are presented very high in the same scale. If we make a scale of countries by political control by western capitalists, we coincidentally find the same scores. Such scales produced by the liberal ideological apparatus should not be taken as reliable sources.

However, the cited academic material is also theoretically weak. In particular, "Information Politics and Propaganda in Authoritarian Societies" is a very bad never cited recent article by Bryn Rosenfeld and Jeremy Wallace. The authors make no difference between propaganda ('poverty in Mexico causes migration to the US'), agitation ('let's build a wall'), campaign ('vote on me to build a wall'), publicity ('we built the most wonderful wall'), advertisement ('buy the wall souvenir') and the like. They also cite multiple papers that use different definitions/determinations of "authoritarian states" and mixes their results. I suggest we rank the cited material in theoretical quality (Do they explain what makes a state authoritarian? Do they include only results from articles with the same notion of authoritarian states?) and group the acceptable material in groups of compatible sources. Each group of material should become a different article with a different name: "Authoritarian state (xxx)", "Authoritarian state (xxx)"...

Finally, if we want to have an article about "Authoritarian heads of government" (that is, Heads of government of authoritarian states), we should create one. However, we should avoid any characterisation of the personality of heads of government here because we are likely to be describing actual people we personally despise. If we want an article about a type of state, we should focus on that and avoid describing people. In particular, I would inform in the article title that this article is about states, not people, by renaming the article to "Authoritarian state". This would reduce the propensity of enthusiastic editors to introduce opinionated statements about mental properties of people into the body of the article. Daniel Couto Vale (talk) 22:21, 13 November 2024 (UTC)[reply]