Will Beback's passive-aggressive approach, and Cberlet, just plain aggressive Options

[Herschelkrustofsky]

Get a load of this. Note how deftly Will avoids addressing the actual issue at hand.

[Merzbow]

The rewrite I proposed is basically a copyedit for precision and clarity; hopefully it will get approved.

That seems likely, although Alison is going for simple deletion of the paragraph in question.

This debate marks a big change in the way Wikipedia has handled the LaRouche question. Until last summer, SlimVirgin personally OWNed every LaRouche article, and any editor that got in Chip's way was summarily banned without a fig leaf of due process. Will Beback was content to play Igor to her Dr. Frankenstein (with Chip being the monster.) However, for reasons that undoubtably have to do with her own changing fortunes at WP, Slim bowed out (although she made a brief reprise as Sunsplash until we at the Review blew her cover.) Now Will is forced to act alone as Chip's campaign manager.

Things might have gone their way, until Chip made a typically impetuous tactical error of calling an article RfC. Then things got interesting. Editors like Cla68 showed up and noticed, evidently for the first time, that the Chipster has a massive COI problem. I think this may lead to further action by the "community."

There are a couple more admins coming in and saying that there is a COI problem, so I think something will eventually happen. I've suggested on talk that maybe a compromise would be to stick to Chip's published books and articles, and avoid cites to material produced by his employer. ArbCom seems to be punting on making any substantive precedent in the Prem Rawat ArbCom COI case, BTW.

(Merzbow on the Wikipedia talk page)
Given that reliable sources universally take a negative view of LaRouche and his career, this does indeed appear to be the neutral formulation of such.

As some editors pointed out on that talk page some months ago, this is a good example of WP:BIAS. "Reliable sources," which I think is a highly dubious concept when applied uncritically to the press, condemn LaRouche "universally" only if you restrict your view (as Wikipedia typically does) to the publications of the WASP establishment on both sides of the Atlantic. LaRouche gets high marks from Russian, Chinese and Third World publications, which are typically ignored or treated scornfully by WP.

You don't seriously think those publications are reliable sources? Any non-scientific publication from a country without freedom of the press is prima facie garbage, IMHO.

[Herschelkrustofsky]

(Merzbow on the Wikipedia talk page)
Given that reliable sources universally take a negative view of LaRouche and his career, this does indeed appear to be the neutral formulation of such.

As some editors pointed out on that talk page some months ago, this is a good example of WP:BIAS. "Reliable sources," which I think is a highly dubious concept when applied uncritically to the press, condemn LaRouche "universally" only if you restrict your view (as Wikipedia typically does) to the publications of the WASP establishment on both sides of the Atlantic. LaRouche gets high marks from Russian, Chinese and Third World publications, which are typically ignored or treated scornfully by WP.

You don't seriously think those publications are reliable sources? Any non-scientific publication from a country without freedom of the press is prima facie garbage, IMHO.

I wouldn't say that any press is either prima facie garbage, or prima facie reliable, on sensitive BLP issues. I can imagine a debate taking place in Russia or China as to whether anyone should take the American press seriously, when it is owned by cartels like the Rupert Murdoch apparatus, who use it to lend credence to patently false claims like the famous Iraqi WMDs.

The trademark technique of the Chip 'n' King team is the process of divining "hidden meanings" in their quarry's writings. LaRouche is somewhat vulnerable to this sort of thing, because his writing contains many obscure references which may tend to baffle the layman, and Chip 'n' King exploit this to insinuate that every reference to a banker, an aristocratic family, or for that matter, the U.K. or Venice, is an instance of veiled anti-Semitism. Ironically, of course, this really does trivialize anti-Semitism.

I'm not sure it trivializes anti-semitism itself, so much as it trivializes anti-anti-semitism...

Anti-Semitism is a serious matter, about which people are rightfully concerned. But people like Berlet (and he's not the only one) seek to exploit this concern and harness it to other agendas, which does in fact trivialize it. For example, the friends of Meyer Lansky and Mo Dalitz made the claim that people who criticized them for being mobsters were motivated by anti-Semitism. I am interested in the work of Norman Finkelstein, who has criticized the ADL and similar bodies for this sort of thing.