Talk:Earl Silverman

Silverman having hit his wife

User:Mr Keegz, your point about it not specifically mentioning 'the 90s' is well-taken. It was inferred to be so from a 2013 article mentioning the timeframe as 'twenty years ago.' Regarding the abuse edit, Earl later in the article calls it 'acting defensively.' Also it doesn't use the term 'beat' as you contend, but that's a minor issue. Also regarding your edit using 'He told the Alberta Report...,' the National Post article I linked above objectively stated the event occured, so I don't see a reason it should be in that form. LΞVIXIUS💬 23:16, 8 April 2021 (UTC)

He describes what he did in his own words, and it's not self-defense. NPOV does not mean we are under an obligation to say that him beating his wife was in self-defense just because he wanted to characterize it as such, especially when what he describes is not self-defense; he's not the one who fled the house in fear of his life. And that's a key element of his story he left out after 1991, cuz there were services for male victims back then, even batterers, as was mentioned in the article; when he says there were no services for him, he means ones that wouldn't tell him he was wrong to batter his wife.

Like, that website hosting the PDF of the Report article, it actually has a lot of Earl's legal docs he uploaded, including the business plan for the shelter, and the court's responses to him. It makes it really clear that shelters and services for men already existed, and a huge reason Earl was denied funding in 2006 was because he refused to work with any other organizations in the DV community in Canada, even the ones who sheltered and provided services to men, because Earl said having to work with those people would be misandry. He also makes it very clear the purpose of the "shelter" is a place for men to go to cool off so they don't beat their wives, like a divorced/divorcing mens' club. So, if we really wanna get into fixing all the falsehoods in the article, we can. Correcting the wiki to include the fact he admitted to beating his wife, in an article already cited by the wiki, that was really the least I could do with regard to verifying these wikis.

And like, if you find something relevant in that National Post article, go ahead and make a new sentence and include that info, and cite the post article. Don't go to other sentences which cite information from different articles and butcher them so you can attribute those statements to the article you want. Especially don't do that when the guy we're quoting has changed his story significantly in the 20+ years between those articles being published. I mean, his quotes from the National Post are cited just two sentences later; keep the citations of what he said to the Report with eachother, and the Post quotes with the post quotes, maybe? — Mr Keegz (talk) 02:07, 9 April 2021 (UTC)

Firstly, if he said it was self defence, we would add to the article that he said it was self-defence, or, as I propose, changing the entire sentence to something along the lines of 'which he says ultimately caused him to hit her back in defense.' Secondly, the article talks about the Pastoral Institute to explain the dire situation for men in Calgary, pointing all the waits and lack of spaces and whatnot, and not to talk about 'the fact that there was services.' You're reading it with a heavy POV, mate.

Can you cite your statements in in paragraph 2? Even if taken as true, I don't see why they matter here. Regarding the 3rd para, it's called referencing multiple articles in different parts of a para. If the national post article states as a matter of fact that he fled an abusive wife (So does the Huffpost article cited somewhere in the article), and the alberta report interview quotes him saying as such, then for encyclopedic purposes it can be reliably inferred that it happened. My point is: The phrase 'He told the Alberta Repost..." is vestigial and leaves a statement up for questions when we have better sources already. I don't see what's wrong with citing multiple articles to back a single sentence, it's very common practice. I'm gonna make a new good faith edit, feel free to put it here if you have issues with it. I'm actively avoiding PW:WAR. LΞVIXIUS💬 17:14, 9 April 2021 (UTC)

Buddy, you can't say you're "actively avoiding an edit war" when you just made another edit without discussing it, on the topic we are specifically disagreeing about right here. I'm reverting it; the point of discussing this on the talk page is to discuss the edit. Editing something you just disagreed with me on without us discussing it at all is actively starting an edit war. That's why I told you to bring it here. This is extremely rude.

Your unilateral edit served to undercut the fact that he hit his wife, by inventing something which the source does not say. He did not say that he hit his wife to defend from an oncoming attack, he said he lost control and hit her back. That's not self-defense, that's hitting your wife because you lost control. "When you defend yourself they call it abuse." is not a statement of fact, it is a characterization. He states just a paragraph later that he is a batterer. Because he was convicted of battery. The Pastoral Institute is the batterers program, the person said the problem is men don't seek help before they abuse their wives, that's why that program is for men who had battered women. They had services available for men before they beat their wives. (Do you see the problem with telling all those men who need to reach out for help that there isn't any? He kept telling people that for decades. Right up until he died.)

And you're butchering someone else's sentence, start of the biography section, by citing a contradictory account he gave the month before his death, published as his obituary, rather than biographical sources. The account he gave in 2013 contradicts the account given in 1991 in multiple ways, including by saying he fled his wife in 1993. That edit just obscures and jumbles the writing—it's in the middle of the sentence!—and it's not appropriate for a biographical section. You do not establish biographical details by citing multiple different publications of his obituary, all of which included those post interview bits. Citations are supposed to be of specific verifiable facts, we don't need to split up his 1991 account of beating his wife with other citations, like, that just obscures things.

Wrt the second paragraph, those pdfs were on his blog, but I'd just write it up if I were going to put it here, under a new section of talk. He was convicted of domestic violence around 88; a lot else is missing from wikipedia article, and it really whitewashes the guy. And again, I told you to bring it to the talk page to try to discuss the edit in good faith, but you've honestly been incredibly rude. Can you please actually make an effort to discuss things, in good faith? —Mr Keegz (talk) 01:42, 10 April 2021 (UTC)

Obviously multi-accounting Buddy-guy-bro who knows nothing of self-defense ("there has to be an active punch being thrown for it to be self defense" - congrats, you just undermined most of self-defense cases, amazing) argues in "good faith" by asserting his own position with no cited evidence. Splendid. Also you seem to know a whole lot more than is in the sources, or in the article post your edits; see "the only publicly funded services available for men were for anger management" etc. You argue from the bias that abuse *has* to flow one way. 2A01:113F:615:7700:18CB:C520:C9B9:ADE7 (talk) 12:32, 14 April 2021 (UTC)

If a woman was abused for years by her male SO, and eventually after being mocked for trying to seek help, stopped holding back the defensive violence part of her had wanted to act upon for years, would you be accurate and honest to frame her taking action as "beating her husband", or would you want to frame it as "defended herself". If your answer is different for that scenario than this one, you're a disgusting sexist, and have no business trying to dishonestly control the narrative on this page around your particular hatred.

That would be a case of domestic battering. Taking vengeance for something that has been going on for years is not self defense. For it to be a justified case of self defense, it has to be the response to an immediate threat.

This article is clearly not written from an unbiased perspective.

I don't know how to flag this kind of thing but come on, people. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 35.2.80.15 (talk) 16:55, 19 April 2022 (UTC)

Were you going to cite specific examples so that people could actually make the necessary fixes? — Preceding unsigned comment added by 2601:58B:4280:1180:75D6:1F7E:3CCE:C9B (talk) 20:27, 9 June 2022 (UTC)

Explain??? -- Python Drink (talk) 22:30, 11 August 2022 (UTC)

No the original commenter, but I am concerned about the line "But, in contrast to the hundreds of millions of dollars the Canadian government provides to women's shelters, this one-time $1,000 grant was a mere pittance" -- which seems to be unnecessary editorializing. The amount of funding given is relevant, but how appropriate that funding is is not something for an encyclopedia. It also doesn't make sense to me to compare the funding for 1 individual shelter to the total government funding for all women's shelters. BippityBoppity101 (talk) 16:41, 18 September 2022 (UTC)

@BippityBoppity101: I searched through the article and I found no such content. Maybe it was in a previous revision? But regardless, I'm gonna assume that was a quotation from Silverman? If so, what then is the problem? -- Python Drink (talk) 21:14, 18 September 2022 (UTC)

It seems to have been removed in the September 18th revision by Drmies but it was not a quotation (or at least there was no indication in the text if it was). BippityBoppity101 (talk) 20:21, 30 September 2022 (UTC)