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State Crimes Against Democracy

State Crimes Against Democracy (edit | talk | history | protect | delete | links | watch | logs | views) – (View log · Stats)

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WP:FRINGE, not notable subject. Searches come up with nothing. ThePlatypusofDoom (Talk) 14:59, 19 May 2016 (UTC)

Delete - seems to fail WP:GNG and WP:RS. WegianWarrior (talk) 15:02, 19 May 2016 (UTC)

Note: This debate has been included in the list of Crime-related deletion discussions. Sir Joseph 15:10, 19 May 2016 (UTC)

Note: This debate has been included in the list of Law-related deletion discussions. Sir Joseph 15:10, 19 May 2016 (UTC)

• Weak keep. Although I do not feel qualified to comment on what threshold for notability such concepts in the social "sciences" must meet, there are over one hundred Google scholar references that discuss this concept. Many of these are independent of the subject, published in the peer-reviewed American Behavioral Scientist, a journal with a reasonably high impact factor. They seem to me to be secondary sources that are independent of the original author, that are reliable under the rather high standards even of WP:SCHOLARSHIP. But as I said, I am not really qualified to assess these sources in a deeper way, other than to indicate their existence, and apparent reliability under our usual sourcing guidelines. Sławomir Biały (talk) 16:02, 19 May 2016 (UTC)

Yes, a certain issue of American Behavioral Scientist gets a lot of attention on 9-11 Truther and Conspiracy websites. Looks like Lance deHaven-Smith, Matthew T. Witt, Laurie Manwell, etc. are accredited academics who also happen to hold conspiracy beliefs. - LuckyLouie (talk) 16:55, 19 May 2016 (UTC)

Delete Looks like a several cups of speculation, with a side of synthesis all flavored with the barest sprinkling of RSs. Gordon Ramsey would not be pleased. MjolnirPants Tell me all about it. 16:03, 19 May 2016 (UTC)

• Delete Quite a bit of WP:SYNTHESIS used to make a fringe theory/term coined by Lance deHaven-Smith sound like it has mainstream traction. For example, the first sentence defining the term is sourced to Lance deHaven-Smith and Laurie Manwell, a 911 Truth advocate, but presented as the opinion of unspecified "scholars". Then a bunch of reliable sources that assert "crimes have been committed by government officials in the past" is used to bolster their theory. The pre-TNT version has many more examples of the synthetic argument being made by the article. If I had time, I would check all the non-fringe/non-deHaven-Smith sources to see that they actually discuss the topic as presented. - LuckyLouie (talk) 16:04, 19 May 2016 (UTC)

I've taken a look at some of them, and I can't find any non-fringe sources (I consider deHaven-Smith to be fringe, given his proclivities) that are well-cited and not used to support synth statements. MjolnirPants Tell me all about it. 16:16, 19 May 2016 (UTC)

• Delete It's a COATRACK for the promotion of Fringe Theories. The sources also appear to be overwhelmingly FRINGE and thus fail RS. -Ad Orientem (talk) 17:02, 19 May 2016 (UTC)

• Delete. The TLDR is that when you take out the articles authored by people with a potential COI (see sidebar discussion below), "state crimes against democracy" doesn't meet notability criteria, no matter which notability guideline you're looking at.

When I eliminated the names of people who contributed to deHaven-Smith, Witt, et al.'s books, I was left with 4, presumably independent sources in peer-reviewed journals that discussed SCAD and only two were solidly in-depth (Manwell 2010 and Kee & Forrer 2012). The other 2 were Catlaw (2013) and Love (2013). Otherwise there were some articles with reference lists that cited papers with SCAD in the title and a few passing mentions, but nothing else had enough coverage to use as a source in the article. On google scholar without the COIs, at most there's 1 additional book that could be a potential independent reliable source, but I haven't looked into it because I didn't think it would make or break the decision anyway. Also there are zero mentions of "state crimes against democracy" in mainstream news sources.

FWIW, I didn't get the impression that other scholars considered deHaven-Smith & Co.'s positions to be fringe or conspiracy theory. They seem to be well respected, even by academics who disagree with them. They do have an online fan club of conspiracy theorists who misrepresent their statements though and deHaven-Smith seems to feed into it. —PermStrump(talk) 02:07, 20 May 2016 (UTC)

• delete fails GNG and even if folks find the few independent sources with substantial discussion to push this over the bar, it still would need to be TNTed to have a real WP article. Jytdog (talk) 13:05, 20 May 2016 (UTC)

• Keep -- a useful article about an actual term. It's a real thing in the world, a term of art that's used. So keep it and make the article the best possible. It's not "fringe" and it's not wrong for Misplaced Pages to have this article. This is a canvassed vote, as well, being alerted on a certain noticeboard with encouragement to delete it here. SageRad (talk) 14:10, 22 May 2016 (UTC)

@SageRad: Posting notices to a noticeboard is not canvassing. There is no function on WP which prevents pro-fringe users from reading or participating at the FTN, nor can one interpret posting there to be targeted, as pro-fringe editors regularly do participate there. MjolnirPants Tell me all about it. 15:10, 22 May 2016 (UTC)

Yeah, sure. That board is publicly visible but the following is generally expected to vote to delete this article. I hope many non-McCarthyist editors will respond here in addition to those who see it as their mission to declare and root out all content that collides with their ideological agenda. SageRad (talk) 23:55, 22 May 2016 (UTC)

There is a lot of usage of this term in peer-reviewed literature, like this, and it's a reified term as well as many other sociological terms about which Misplaced Pages has articles that nobody questions. It's mainly because it has something to do with non-mainstream thinking about conspiracy that some people here would label it "FRINGE" and therefore a sort of "thought crime" to entertain an article about the term. Well, i think that's ideological and not right according to the ideals of Misplaced Pages. Misplaced Pages is explicitly not a mainstream ideology adhering website. It is not a tool for propaganda. It is to present articles about all topics that merit an article, and this is one of them. Why did someone just hack away 80 or 90% of the article and then put it up for deletion? Because there are no good sources about this topic? Doesn't seem so. SageRad (talk) 00:01, 23 May 2016 (UTC)

• Delete per OP. 142.105.159.60 (talk) 21:03, 22 May 2016 (UTC)
• Delete as well explained by LuckyLouie. Bishonen | talk 22:21, 22 May 2016 (UTC).

Note: This debate has been included in the list of Social science-related deletion discussions. —PermStrump(talk) 23:37, 22 May 2016 (UTC)

Note: This debate has been included in the list of Politics-related deletion discussions. —PermStrump(talk) 23:39, 22 May 2016 (UTC)

• Delete as mere promotion of an neologism that has not caught on. By his own account, Lance deHaven-Smith coined the term in his 2006 article "State Crimes Against Democracy." (DeHaven-Smith, Lance. "When Political Crimes Are Inside Jobs: Detecting State Crimes against Democracy." Administrative Theory & Praxis 28, no. 3 (2006): 330-55. http://www.jstor.org/stable/25610803.) His coinage has had a decade to catch on, and it has gotten little traction despite the fact that the conspiracy theories deHaven-Smith peddles are very popular. Check out deHaven-Smith's website "What are some examples of SCADs in recent U.S. history? : the assassinations of John Kennedy, Robert Kennedy, and Martin Luther King; the attempted assassinations of George Wallace and Ronald Reagan; the election breakdowns in 2000 and 2004; the numerous defense failures on 9-11-2001; the anthrax mailings in October 2001" There's more, but you get the drift. 9/11 conspiracy theory. JFK assassination conspiracy theory. Anthrax mailing conspiracy theory. Good grief. Original deHaven-Smits 2006 article defines a SCAD as :"concerted actions or inactions by public officials that are intended to weaken or subvert popular control of their government." Note also that this page was started by an SPA in 2014, and has seen little in the way of expansion or incoming links in the years since. This seems to parallel the lack of resonance in the world at large, at least in my searches. The hits on the term in a books google search are a mix of conspiracy theory books, books about conspiracy theories, and a book by deHaven-Smith. If DeHaven-Smith's original article, or his book Conspiracy Theory in America were a Misplaced Pages article, we would delete it as mere WP:COATRACK, he piles one example after another with little to connect them, an dvirtually nothing in the way of evidence that these events were in fact conspiracies. Conspiracy Theory In America did garner a positive review on the website: Citizens for Truth About the Kennedy Assassination , but was ignored by the political press and scholarly world. Delete as per WP:BROCHURE.E.M.Gregory (talk) 01:38, 23 May 2016 (UTC)

• Keep With 80 peer reviewed articles by at least 17 academics, the burden of proof is on those who claim that this topic is either "fringe" and/or not notable. If there are issues with any particular statements or references, they should be dealt with as individual items, and discussed on the article's talk page. And what was the hurry about TNT before delete discussion? Somebody attempted to restore the original version, but that was reverted because they also deleted the AfD tag. JerryRussell (talk) 03:42, 23 May 2016 (UTC)

Now I see it was LuckyLouie who failed in his attempt to restore the article. But he's voting to delete it. The original article had 32 references, half were nuked even after LuckyLouie's attempt to restore the article. If you look at the page access stats, there were 250 views on the day the AfD appeared, and all those visitors saw the nuked version of the article. NO wonder most didn't stick around to vote in favor. This combination of nuke-and-pave followed by AfD followed by edit warring strikes me as seriously lacking integrity. JerryRussell (talk) 05:30, 23 May 2016 (UTC)

JerryRussell: If you read my !vote above and the sidebar below, you'll see I was initially supportive until I explored those sources more in depth and found that all but 4-5 of them had contributed to a book on the topic together. Of the 4-5 independent sources, only 2 were in depth coverage. —PermStrump(talk) 05:50, 23 May 2016 (UTC)

Sidebar

It seems like it would be useful to at least try to reach consensus on how to categorize the topic (not the TNT'ed content). Because if we're evaluating it with WP:NFRINGE guidelines, we'd have to explore if the ~80 peer-reviewed articles on the topic are all "in-universe" in order to assess notability. If we decide the topic is legitimate perspective in the political science field, or even that it's an "alternative theoretical formulation" then I guess WP:GNG would be the applicable guideline? On the other hand, maybe the topic boils down to just being a phrase some professor coined and we should think of it as a WP:NEOLOGISM. I don't know what my opinion is yet (and WP:NEO just occurred to me, so now I have to brush up on that), but I do worry we're being too quick to assume that the topic is FRINGE. —PermStrump(talk) 19:58, 19 May 2016 (UTC)

Feeling about the same. There are a couple ways to go with this. Since "State Crimes Against Democracy" appears to be a term in limited use by a small group of "involved" academics, the article might better be renamed ]. Or it could be a bio of Lance deHaven-Smith. In both cases, we'd need to find truly independent sources that objectively describe these views, e.g. so we can write a neutral article that's not coatracking and soapboxing. - LuckyLouie (talk) 20:40, 19 May 2016 (UTC)

Oh wait... There's a book? My gut reaction to learning that is that the article is likely an WP:ADMASQ for the book and also happens to be WP:FRINGEBAIT (that should be a thing). And I would bet that the majority of people who buy the book (outside of his students) are conspiracy theorists, so the more provocative statements he makes online are probably catering to his audience and that's why it sounds so different from what he's actually published in peer-reviewed journals. Anyway, I guess we should add WP:NBOOK and WP:ACADEMIC to the list of options for how to evaluate this. I'm not sure what to make of the fact that there's zero coverage of the topic in the mainstream media, but there were more academic articles in peer-reviewed journals than I originally expected. Let's say this was an article about the book, what does that say about its notability? —PermStrump(talk) 20:57, 19 May 2016 (UTC)

Re: a possible book article - it is a bit confusing, but it seems there are two books hawking this term: State Crimes Against Democracy (Political Forensics in Public Affairs) by Matthew Witt (with Lance DeHaven-Smith listed as "contributor"), and Conspiracy Theory in America by Lance DeHaven-Smith (containing a substantial acknowledgement to Matthew Witt). Like I said, the topic is forwarded within small group of "involved" academics. - LuckyLouie (talk) 21:58, 19 May 2016 (UTC)

State Crimes Against Democracy: Political Forensics in Public Affairs by Alexander Kouzmin, Matthew T. Witt, and Andrew Kakabadse lists 17 contributors (including deHaven-Smith and the 3 listed as authors), so maybe that list will make it easier to tease out which of the 80ish peer-reviewed articles are actually independent. I think we can assume anything written by at least these people has a potential COI: Alkadry MG, Burke J, deHaven-Smith L, Dixon J, Hinson C, Jensen C, Johannesson J, Kakabadse A, Kakabadse NK, Kouzmin A, Kuku-Siemons DS, Mouraviev N, Pappas NV, Siemons H, Simnjanovsk R, Spehr S, Witt M. And their works shouldn't count separately towards the notability of the concept or book. I wonder if we'll find anything truly independent, even if it's to criticize SCADs. The suspense! —PermStrump(talk) 22:39, 19 May 2016 (UTC)

WP:COI makes a distinction between biography and other types of articles. Writing about yourself is automatically a serious conflict, but writing about subject matter within an editor's field of expertise is not necessarily COI. The idea that contributing to a collected academic volume creates a COI among a big group of authors seems silly to me.JerryRussell (talk) 05:20, 23 May 2016 (UTC)

User:JerryRussell pardon the ping; not sure you are watching this page. Yes, "COI" is being used incorrectly above; what I believe is meant is WP:INDY. as in WP:Golden rule. Jytdog (talk) 05:31, 23 May 2016 (UTC)

References

1. Catlaw (2013), "Reconsidering Fabricating the People", Public Administration Quarterly, 37 (4): 614
2. Love (2013), "A Society of Control", Public Administration Quarterly, 37 (4): 576

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