Misplaced Pages

This is an old revision of this page, as edited by Nishidani (talk | contribs) at 09:53, 10 July 2007. The present address (URL) is a permanent link to this revision, which may differ significantly from the current revision.

Nishidani,

I know this may seem rude, but I think you should make a personal page containing your introduction as it seems a certain editor named Hermeneus considers your account a sock puppet created by me to bolster my argument with him on the Nihonjinron article's discussion page.--Jh.daniell 01:24, 28 May 2006 (GMT+9:00-Tokyo)

Dekimasu et al. Re Robin Gill:-

I myself was worried that the article might seem like hype. I'm far more comfortable with the dead! I generated this in order to provide background for the Gill citations in the bibliography of the Nihonjinron article. I have taken the information from Gill's website, and from reading 7 books, some two thousand odd pages. Though he frequently alludes to his life in these books, the allusions are scattered all over the place, and it has taken a lot of time to draw them in. He doesn't even have an adequate curriculum posted on his own site, since he appears too busy to trouble himself about one. If the curriculum is fine, the problem remains of summing up what he is doing, without promoting him. One could just leave a bibliography, of course, but that is not informative, since it is hard to gather from the titles exactly what he is doing, which strikes me as important.

I have adjusted the text, but would ask Dekimasu or others for further precise indications on how to present the material. Biographical articles on contemporary authors vary from excessive, if carefully hidden hype (the most notorious example I know off is the wiki article on Ayn Rand, which is several pages of promotion for the institutions associated with her philosophy), to moderate synopses of works (Le Carré) to simple bibliographies after the CV (Donald Keene and Roy Andrew Miller). I suspect that part of the problem is that Gill, unlike many, is an unknown quantity for academics, save for a handful of specialists, so that merely mentioning him looks like hype. Some way round the impasse must be found, preferably with help from you guys out there, because it would be silly to wait round for an obituary to write up the fact that he is the most productive translator of Japanese haiku in the history of Western studies on Japan, as far as I, who have never met him, am aware.Nishidani 08:14, 26 June 2007 (UTC)

Munich massacre

Hi! Regarding this edit to Munich massacre, do you have a published source supporting that striking analogy? I have no problem with the text being in there, as long as it can be sourced per Misplaced Pages:Verifiability. Please do cite your source, as otherwise the analogy will almost certainly be removed. Thanks! -- Jonel (Speak to me) 01:52, 10 July 2007 (UTC)

Dear Jonel.

The verifiability of the factual content is in the links in the passage I posted, which will send the reader to the relevant facts. (2) The analogy is precise, in that the Munich Massacre consisted of the elimination by terrorist groups of athletes at a prestigious international competition, precisely what occurred with the Posada Carriles downing of the Cuban airline. In the text, nothing that is subjective is asserted, but only factual correlations, and therefore it cannot with any editorial justification be eliminated simply because it happens to be an analogy. I could overcome your objection by simply removing the word ‘analogy’, and rewriting, in perfect accord with the rules again, that the Munich massacre’s terrorist assault on athletes is only superceded by the Cubana airline downing. Would the slight word change alter anything? No. I might add that the quotation from Simon Reeves preceding it is sourced, but demonstrably untrue. The Lod Airport Massacre of May that year was far more violent, and costly to Jewish lives. In the relevant Cubana Flight 455 article, that massacre is defined as ‘what was then the most deadly terrorist attack in the Western hemisphere.’

(3) A large part of this article lacks ‘publishing sources’ for each ‘fact’. There is much irrelevant information (that murdered athletes had children is not pertinent, to note but one example, and it is not sourced). I would suggest that if you wish to blue-pencil, go to these numerous passages first, before challenging the ‘analogy’, which you agree is striking. If I wished to annoy or damage contributions by others, I could apply wikipedia verifiability criteria to the article strictly and wipe half of it out. I do not do so because were those criteria applied with relentless mechanical efficiency, no article would ever be written. It is facile for individuals to erase, quite difficult to write consensually. I prefer the latter approach.

(4) Look at the Qibya Massacre article, where numerous unsourced and tendentious assertions bury the historically verifiable record, and which is a disgrace to careful neutral historical writing in what it carefully omits. Since it deals with Arabs, the whole episode can be fiddled down to a minor ‘incident’, though one could find many better scholars within Israel who take it, like Reeves does Munich, as a defining moment in modern terrorism and Arab-Israeli relations (5) To remove an analogy which, you yourself say, repeating my words, is ‘striking’ cannot but strike a neutral observer as aleatory, or make many wonder whether it is not an invasive and unscrupulous use of editorial niggling censoring details in order to maintain the semblance of ‘singularity’ which Reeves’s tendentious opinion has underlined.