![]() | Paulo Francis was a Social sciences and society good articles nominee, but did not meet the good article criteria at the time. There may be suggestions below for improving the article. Once these issues have been addressed, the article can be renominated. Editors may also seek a reassessment of the decision if they believe there was a mistake. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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The page practically slams Paulo Francis all the way and seems to be collected from a very selective variety of sources. I can tell the major author of this page is highly critical of Francis' political alignments (so am I, but the page isn't about my opinions). For instance, is it appropriate to state that Paulo Francis never achieved anything? That his journalism was nothing but cheap slandery? This seems to go against the principle of representing all relevant point of views fairly.
Some people think he's a myth, ahead of his time (as in this article in the newspaper he used to colaborate for, Estadao.
I'm adding the Check Neutrality tag. Betina ( talk) 19:45, 13 July 2009 (UTC)
Why was the Check Neutrality tag ever removed from this article? Consider this passage:
"Eventually he dropped out from Columbia—or perhaps was simply unable to receive a graduate degree because he had already dropped out from his undergraduate studies in Rio, a subject about which he was always less than candid[3]—showing a trait that was to plague him to the end: the inability to perform sustained intellectual work, and a tendency to bank instead on his flashes of wit and borrowed erudition (the use of incessant quotes and bon mots), something that made him prone to "mistakes,[4][5]imprecision, garbled recollections"[6] - a trait of what was to become his personal "method": "the absence of careful research, established facts, precise information [...] becoming eventually - through excessive generalization and lack of patience [...] - downright bigotry".[7]"
And many others from the text are not only non-neutral: the authors were very angry indeed. Paulo Francis was a polemical intellectual, and as such, much has been written derisively of him - picking up the unkindest words of criticism and referencing them as fact, alongside original-research speculation on the author's motives and private thoughts (that pop up every then and again on the article) is hardly encyclopedic. The political subtext of the article, which associates Paulo Francis Left-Wing inclinations with a sincerity that is abandoned as his moved towards the Right-Wing, is also crude and schoolboyish. I'd suggest an almost complete rewrite.
I tried to fix, at least partially, some of the more complicated sections of the article, removing for example the unnecessary and non-encyclopedic titles, and bits like "One of his most infamous smears was when he expressed his desire to have the WP MP-cum-unionist, the Afro-Brazilian Vicentinho, "whipped as a slave"; in another of his obiter dicta, he stated that "the discovery [sic] of the clarinet by Mozart was a greater contribution than anything Africa gave us until today" - which is something more appropriate to a magazine or newspaper article or a blog than an encyclopedia. However, my edit was reverted with no justification, and therefore I bring the subject here so other editors may express their opinions. RafaAzevedo msg 20:40, 30 March 2011 (UTC)
"One of his most infamous smears was when he expressed his desire to have the WP MP-cum-unionist, the Afro-Brazilian Vicentinho, "whipped as a slave"; in another of his obiter dicta, he stated that "the discovery [sic] of the clarinet by Mozart was a greater contribution than anything Africa gave us until today"
Okay: What is said in this quote is that:
1. Paulo Francis wrote in his newspaper column that an Afro-Brazilian MP from the Workers' Party should be "whipped as a slave" 2. The same Francis wrote, again in the same column, that the single (and bogus, BTW) discovery of the clarinet by Mozart outshone all African achievments to human society.
The two quotes were made as examples of his late racism, and they should be deleted if proved false. However, both quotes are plain facts, as shown in the references given (Kucinski's book). Unfortunately, there are many fringe rightists in Brazil who hate to cope with sad facts about their poster-boy. Simple as that Cerme ( talk) 00:25, 31 March 2011 (UTC)
Okay, Cerme has asked me to offer my 2c on both articles where you have both been edit-warring. I'll post my comments on the MST article there, but I will make some general points on your discussion here. First: I understand both of you are editing three articles that are by the nature of their subjects highly charged, politically. At no point should either of you resort to ad-hominem attacks. You don't need to dispute someone's motivations for editing in order to make your point. Wikipedia is built around policies which try to make one's POV irrelevant. So, let's stick to the edits themselves.
On this article: A long time ago I had a lengthy and arduous argument with a user on the Fernando Collor article. We clearly had different viewpoints. One of the ways we tried to deal with them was to separate on the talk page the points under contention. Instead of wholesale edit-warring, I ask that you both put in a little bit more effort and point out here, on the talk page, which particular passages you have issues with. It's a little bit more work, but it's worth it considering one of you has already been blocked for WP:3RR violations. I think that's a good starting point. Once that's done, I'd be more than willing to put in some work on mediating both sides. Both of you are active, long-standing editors (more than 3 years...) and I don't want you getting bogged down over three articles. Shall we give it a try? Just make a list of different passages under contention and your opinion on them and I'll chime in as well.-- Dali-Llama ( talk) 21:16, 31 March 2011 (UTC)
Okay, let's begin to do the homework at Dalilama's prompting:
1. I have been charged with selecting sources that "detract" Francis, which is not the case: Kusinski is a great admirer, who calls Francis a "genius" and puts him in the same intellectual level as Glauber Rocha. I must admit myself to be a big fan also, as Francis offered me the opportunity to develop various intellectual interests. Blind approval isn't the only form of admiration.
What is the relevance of Francis in Brazilian intellectual history?That of a superb essayist and critic and an intriguing fiction writer who becomes one of the most admired figures of the 1960s "New Left" (i.e, not formally connected to the various Left parties) intelligentsia and suddenly in his middle life makes a sharp and ill-explained volte face and turns into a poster-boy of the most conventional conservative views, defending them with all the old language resources directed towards opposite goals. To his late rightist admirers, this is usually treated as a kind of revelation, to be accepted without reflexion - therefore the fact that fans of the late Francis have done next to nothing in order to evaluate criticaly his career - in the process, BTW, consigning his early work to oblivion. His Left admirers, howver, cannot afford the luxury of an uncritical acceptance and must examine his work and deeds more closely - hence my abundance of critical (but in no way libellious) sources.
Now, going into particulars:
2.Since the career of Francis is defined in terms of his intellectual history, I do not see why not to describe it in the terms of his intellectual development, instead of simply offering a dry chronological titling (which would be, by the way, inconsistent with his chronological age: Francis "early period" ended in his mid-thirties, his "middle period" extending into his late fifties). If this is an interpretation, so be it, for without it the article would amount to something like: "Francis, Paulo (1930-1996): Brazilian essayist, journalist and novelist".
3. I see that the episode around Francis smearing the MP-cum-tradeunionist (which means simply MP & tradeunionist: in Port. that would go as "o parlamentar-sindicalista") Vicentinho with racist fumes was suppresed. Yes, blind acceptance has this dead end, as one must suppress (Stalin-like, BTW) anything that does not makes the admired one the sum of all human perfections and genius.... Not only is the episode a fact, but it had nothing of an accident: it was only one of a spree of racist and ethnocentric rants directed, in both spoken and written form, toward Amerindians ("not even fit to be slaves" - another suppressed episode), Arabs, people from the Brazilian Northeast - in short, all who were not "Western Whites" such as he wrote in praise of Fernando Collor ("Strong, comely and Western White"). Say what you like, these were an important part of his late intellectual life and of his conservative views as he saw them. Whan I call such views "infamous" (dictionary.com definition: "of ill repute, with a bad reputation") I'm only echoing present-day common sense, something admited implicity by the editor who suppressed these...infamous declarations, who were one of the chief varieties of a Francis speciality: his obiter dicta (i.e. his remarks "by the side").
4.That Francis' fatal heart attack was somehow triggered by his plight as defendant in a libel suit, is Kusinski's view and also quite probable, if only on a post hoc ego prompter hoc basis, but I make no bones about that.
I rest my case Cerme ( talk) 23:02, 1 April 2011 (UTC)
1. To call a racist outburst racist is not an "opinion" it's fact: we have a fact - that Francis expressed, in print, the desire to have an African-Brazilian congressmen flogged (or better, expressed a desire to personally flog him) as a slave. A consequence ensued: the statement raised a scandal at the time - that is, was generally seem as infamous (again, the meaning of "infamous" is clear: something that has a bad reputation)and that is also a fact.
Its also a fact that this particular outburst was not directed solely at a particular individual: it expressed Francis' general convictions at the time about the lack of culture and achievments of the whole entity generally known as "black race" (as expressed in the comparision between Mozart and Africa). Such convictions are generally seem as racist, and that's not my particular "opinion", it was simply the objective commonsense view expressed at the time- as well as today. I could, by the way, quote sources among Francis' late admirers saying this multitude of opinions disparaging and vilfying non-Europeans and non-Whites were simply ironies directed against "politically correct" stereotypes, but in this case I will have to mention the fact that many of Francis targets, including the congressman Vicentinho, didn't take such "antics" lightly and had him sued for racist libel, something that was left undecided by courts at his death. If these are opinions, they are not simply mine or anyone else's: it's a whole climate of opinion. And a generally held opinion is as much of a reality as a rock or a tree.
2.I don't remember expressing the opinion, in the article at least (as opposed to the discussion) that Francis' earlier work was more noteworthy than his later one: that is actually a question of personal taste. What I remarked is that the objective existence of his Far Left phase (to which belong the bulk of his written corpus, the totality of his non-posthumous fiction and of his theater criticism as well as most of his essays) is as much a fact as his conservative phase. In fact, I have abstained from mentioning others' opinions that simply say that the incoherence of Francis political shift made the whole of his work useless and bound to eventually go down the drain of oblivion, an extreme view I find personally most unfair - however, I admit that, all things considered, it's an understanable one Cerme ( talk) 23:01, 5 April 2011 (UTC)
My exchange of opinions in the preceding section is currently becoming bogged because I'm facing an ideological commonplace still current amid the Brazilian middle and upper-class: the inability to accept the racist character of much of their ideology, something that puts me in the obligation of proving the obvious. But then, patience, and here we go:
1 Even to "compare" Mozart's achievements to African cultural achievments in general is comparing two non-commensurate qualities, something akin to say that bananas taste "better" than apples - unless one assumes thare exists something as an hierarchy of cultures. Perhaps I should even decline to make a list of African cultural achievments, basing on the fact that drawing such a list would be to consider lack of knowledge in the field legitimate, but, however, I would like to point, e.g., that all of Modern art as we know it wouldn't be possible were it not for the influence exerted by African art on Picasso's painting; that a Nigerian writer like Wole Soyinka is long in the list of Nobel Prize Winners (something no Brazilian writer has so far attained), etc., etc.
2. Paulo Francis loved jazz, so he cannot have been a racist...Wow! C'mon, please, this is like the proverbial line of the antisemite saying that "some of my best friends are Jews". Let's keep it simple: Francis countless times argued for the overall cultural inferiority of Blacks, although he conceded that "Negroes [and I believe he was not above using the infamous term crioulos, which in Port. is similar to nig***] sing and dance a lot, and should confine themselves to it", something like that (that's is in his quarrel with Caio Tulio Costa). But then that's the problem about Brazilian commonsense ideology, who refuses to admit that the writer Monteiro Lobato was a racist - even when he argued for a "final solution" through massive sterilization to the negro problem - because one of his children's books characters was a sympathetic (and entirely submissive) female black cook. Well, perhaps a Black editor could know better, but I'm doing what I can.
That's it Cerme ( talk) 14:35, 6 April 2011 (UTC)
The cuts done in the article were so extensive that even info on Francis' pro-American view about Brazilian cultural heritage being that of the USA was deleted. What I propose to do is simply to restore the article to its original form and change its wording a little bit: for instance in the place of "infamous" remark, I will put "controversial", or "scandalous", in order to leave no doubts whatsoever about the objectivity of the editor. With this, plus a few more changes in vocabulary, I think we shall have the relevant info restored. Since I will not have time for that in the next few days, that will allow other editors to make additional comments & suggestions Cerme ( talk) 12:30, 8 April 2011 (UTC)
As no additional suggestions were offered, I restored the article to its ancient form, with a more non-controversial wording of the sections' titles, and some additional info in support of some points. I look foward to discussing further editing Cerme ( talk) 15:10, 15 April 2011 (UTC)
As is to be seem at the head of the talk page, the article received peer-review after a request, and it was suggested that the first paragraph, being a lead, should contain a summary of the article as a whole, which of course would have no references, which should be offered in the following paragraphs Cerme ( talk) 16:22, 3 May 2011 (UTC)
What the summary contain is the following, IMHO:
1. Paulo Francis was regarded as a journalist with high stilistic skills; 2. He performed a political shift in his middle life; 3. That rendered him a controversial personality, who during and after his lifetime offered opportunity to in various polemics between him and his peers, and/or between hios admirers and adversaries.
I would like to know what is "opinion" in these statements; to me, they are simply public knowledge Cerme ( talk) 16:35, 3 May 2011 (UTC)
It's difficult to discuss with people who don't realize what an encyclopedia is, exacly; every presentation of a life, an historical event,etc. is, by its own nature, biased. What Wikipedia requires is not an absence of opinions (and to portray, viz., the late Paulo Francis as a serious intellectual, and not as someone fond of producing libel in behalf of various interests, is an opinion also), but that the opinions presented are those backed by known authorities in the field and in the public sources available - therefore, new research is banned. If "opinions" were banned as unencyclopaedic , I wonder what would happen with the famous Encyclopaedia Britannica ed. where the article on Freud was written by his friend Ernest Jones, as the biography of Lenin was written by Trotsky. I admit I may have a very poor opinion on the late Francis' politics, but then I have the authorities on "my" side, as apparently no one, even his friends, has seem fit to describe his later pieces of libel as some kind of high Literature or Political Science - at least in the sources available. However, if someone appears with other sources, I would argue for including them in the text alongside the other sources; what I cannot admit as serious is the exclusion of sources whose "flaw" is only that they oppose attempts at whitewashing someone's biography Cerme ( talk) 17:40, 3 May 2011 (UTC)
The previously lead ran thus:
"Although initially a sympathizer of left-wing ideologies, describing himself as a trotskyist,[Paulo Francis] late in his life, after living for years in the USA, he performed a sharp political shift, advocating and supporting a more right-wing and liberalist stance, pro- capitalist"
I have revised it, for the following reasons:
1. He was not a sympathizer of "Left-wing ideologies": he was a sympathizer of a particular variety of Left politics, and opposed himself to Stalinism as the ideology of the CP-based intelligentisia of his time.
2. That he lived in the US when he performed his political shift is immaterial: many others made a similar shift living elsewhere.
3. The remainder of the phrase would be okay, if we were describing the intellectual trajetory of a scholar and/or political thinker. Francis wasn't any of these: he was simply a jornalist (albeit a well-informed one) and his early leftism was as intellectually patchy as his late conservatism.
That's enough, for a start Cerme ( talk) 15:06, 4 May 2011 (UTC)
In revising the part about Francis early life, I have tried to explain, with the help of RS, (1) his early upbringing; (2)his professional choices leading from promising actor/director to paper critic; (3)His role in a process of Americanization of cultural life in Brazil; (4)His anti-academic stance;and his consequent carelessness. I have left particular examples to the footnotes, as what interested me was not to show what he knew or didn't know about Ancient History or the History of the Pacific War (he was no scholar in neither field), but his general modus operandi Cerme ( talk) 17:46, 4 May 2011 (UTC)
In this second part, I intended mostly to describe the intellectual influences that shaped Francis mature career, such as (a) The Trotskyst movement, therefore the mention to members of the Braz. Left Opposition; (b) The Brazilian contemporary cultural movement, therefore the mentions to Senhor magazine and Bea Feitler; (c) The Cold War and Francis' position as a Trotskyist, which stranged him from the pro-Soviet or pro-Chinese Left of the time and attracted him to the US. I mentioned Francis connection to John Mowinckel , the cultural attaché of the US embassy in Brazil between 1967 and 1969, because he was mentioned by Isabel Lustosa as a friend to various Brazilian intellectuals and also because he was obviously engaged in the Cold War cultural front (he was former OSS, and therefore, mostly probably CIA) and must have been, for good or evil,a fascinating personality, well worthy of subsequent research - and a Wiki entry of his own Cerme ( talk) 17:20, 5 May 2011 (UTC)
In discussing the reasons for Francis' political shift, I have decided to underline the intellectual causes envolved, therefore giving preference to Kucinski's and Lustosa's explanations - although I had, for the sake of intellectual honesty, to acknowledge the existence of explanations that see the whole thing as simply a case of selling-out. Be as it is, all views I could find that had a reliable source behind them are presented Cerme ( talk) 16:45, 7 May 2011 (UTC)
I also reduced examples of Francis' racist smears to the barest, most representative minimum-not least because of the necessity not to have such statements given much opportunity to propagate from the WP site Cerme ( talk) 18:37, 8 May 2011 (UTC)
In describing Francis' last year, I think it would be important to show how resistence to him hardened in his last year of life, as well as the fact that he was eventually lost support from his Establishment connections - one can hardly say that his last episode was unexpectedly Cerme ( talk) 14:02, 9 May 2011 (UTC)
This article needs images, copy editing and a longer lead that adequately summarizes the content. The refs also don't seem to conform to standard formats. Please withdraw the nomination unless you can make these changes in the coming week. Otherwise it will be failed for now. Lemurbaby ( talk) 00:29, 22 June 2011 (UTC)
The article needs to be reviewed by a native English speaker. Also,there have been heated discussions about its relevance - since it refers to a personality who is virtually unknown outside Brazil - as well as to various issues related to the political bias inevitable in a biography of someone who took various (and mutually contradictory)partisan stances throughout his live. It would be better if the editor who will do the copy-editing were to some extent familiar with Brazilian History and politics Cerme ( talk) 01:02, 7 July 2011 (UTC)
Francis offered as a reason for his political shift...
..."a (supposed) trip to the American Midwest, "the industrial center of the country" where he allegedly had seen "nothing to equal it, in the way of progress and workers' welfare".
I have added the "supposed" for the fact that I suspect the trip to be bogus, as Francis never mentioned it before his shift. But he could have been to the Midwest innumerable times, given the fact that one of his regular duties as foreign correspondent was to cover American primaries and presidential elections. But then, could a Brazilian journalist who had already toured contemporary Japan & Western Europe see the 1970s American Midwest and be flabbergasted by it? Wasn't the American Midwest of the 1970s already the Rust Belt? Cerme ( talk) 17:09, 13 July 2011 (UTC)
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Reviewer: Wugapodes ( talk · contribs) 01:36, 16 August 2015 (UTC)
Will review.
Wugapodes (
talk)
01:36, 16 August 2015 (UTC)
GA review – see WP:WIAGA for criteria
It doesn't seem that there were any major changes since the last [[../GA3|GA nom]] ( diff), particularly with regards to the prose. The entire article seems to lack an encyclopedic tone seeming more like a narrative in structure and in style. I feel like there is both unneccesary and possibly undue diversion into his political opinions. I mean, he is notable for his writing, right? I mean, the lead lists him as "a Brazilian journalist, political pundit, novelist and critic." Yet the article overwhelmingly focuses on the intimate details of his political philosophy with only minor mention of his journalism and criticism work and the discussion of his fiction writing was so thick that I could barely read or understand it. As stated in the previous review, selected works are inherently non-neutral and a form of cherry-picking. I think this article is in severe need of a peer review and copy edit, as well as a massive trim to its prose size.
Second Opinion I think this article is a very long way from satisfying criteria 1, 3, and 4, however I'm wary of a quick fail because I don't have particularly concrete suggestions on how to improve it. I'm going to see if another editor would be willing to give the article a look over and what their opinion would be. Wugapodes ( talk) 02:30, 16 August 2015 (UTC)
Not listed I agree with BlueMoonset and so am closing this as not listed. Wugapodes ( talk) 19:00, 27 August 2015 (UTC)
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Reviewer: MPJ-DK ( talk · contribs) 12:52, 27 March 2016 (UTC)
I will be picking up the review of this one - both for the Wiki Cup and the GA cup as well. I will be making my review comments over the next couple of days.
I am not impressed with what I'm seeing - this is the fifth time it is nominated, the only action taken by the nominator between GA4 failing on August 27, 2015 and renominating it was pluralizing the word article and before that the main edit prior to nominating it for the fourth time was to remove the tags at the top of the page but not addressing the issues. Now to be fair I will review the entire article but I am putting it on hold right now - it's not a GA article as it stands, there are a ton of issues unresolved from more or less every previous GA article that needs to be addressed.
I am going to Assume Good Faith on this and actually provide my feedback on this and allow 7 days for issues to be addressed. In all honesty, the tags that were removed in March still apply, but I am not just going to slap them back on and fail it - but I will reapply them if the GA fails. Fair warning, I am not going to rewrite the article for you - if it was just a sentence or two I'd probably offer an alternative but for this one I will provide a list of issues that need to be addressed and can help with wording for individual fixes if you ask
I like to get this checked out first, I have found issues using this that has led to quick fails so it's important this passes muster.
"Rejecting what he saw as the portrayal "of the ruling Bourgeoisie as an evil caricature", he chose to offer "the people" the opportunity "to know more about its masters",[54] by describing life among the happy few in 1960s–1970s Rio ("the elite of the charming parochialism of Rio de Janeiro [fashionable boroughs], their parties and sensual pleasures"[55])—a project reminiscent of James Joyce and Scott Fitzgerald. By the same token, he associated his embrace of modernist stylish conventions (juxtaposition, non-linear narration) – or, in his own words, the deliberate refusal of earlier formal stylistics[56] – to the necessity of portraying an emerging urban Brazil."
Joyce does not describe the life of the elites, it is quite the contrary, the object of his whole work is the life of the middle-class dubliners, who often deal with lack of money, opportunities and expectations of change in their lifes. Dubliners is all about that. In Portrait of the Artist and Ulysses we find the exact kind of people, Stephen Dedalus is a poor schoolteacher, Leopold Bloom is a middle-class advertising agent, Molly Bloom is a middle-class singer. There are clear passages in which Dedalus and Bloom worries about money. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 187.104.5.93 ( talk) 13:16, 24 November 2016 (UTC)
Start with "Such ideas" in the beginning of a paragraph is confusing - I can only take it that it's a reference to the previous paragraph and his "neoliberal commitment"? If so I am not sure how neoliberal transitions into bigotry and the fact that it's presented as if that's a natural progression?
![]() | Paulo Francis was a Social sciences and society good articles nominee, but did not meet the good article criteria at the time. There may be suggestions below for improving the article. Once these issues have been addressed, the article can be renominated. Editors may also seek a reassessment of the decision if they believe there was a mistake. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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![]() | This article is rated C-class on Wikipedia's
content assessment scale. It is of interest to the following WikiProjects: | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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The page practically slams Paulo Francis all the way and seems to be collected from a very selective variety of sources. I can tell the major author of this page is highly critical of Francis' political alignments (so am I, but the page isn't about my opinions). For instance, is it appropriate to state that Paulo Francis never achieved anything? That his journalism was nothing but cheap slandery? This seems to go against the principle of representing all relevant point of views fairly.
Some people think he's a myth, ahead of his time (as in this article in the newspaper he used to colaborate for, Estadao.
I'm adding the Check Neutrality tag. Betina ( talk) 19:45, 13 July 2009 (UTC)
Why was the Check Neutrality tag ever removed from this article? Consider this passage:
"Eventually he dropped out from Columbia—or perhaps was simply unable to receive a graduate degree because he had already dropped out from his undergraduate studies in Rio, a subject about which he was always less than candid[3]—showing a trait that was to plague him to the end: the inability to perform sustained intellectual work, and a tendency to bank instead on his flashes of wit and borrowed erudition (the use of incessant quotes and bon mots), something that made him prone to "mistakes,[4][5]imprecision, garbled recollections"[6] - a trait of what was to become his personal "method": "the absence of careful research, established facts, precise information [...] becoming eventually - through excessive generalization and lack of patience [...] - downright bigotry".[7]"
And many others from the text are not only non-neutral: the authors were very angry indeed. Paulo Francis was a polemical intellectual, and as such, much has been written derisively of him - picking up the unkindest words of criticism and referencing them as fact, alongside original-research speculation on the author's motives and private thoughts (that pop up every then and again on the article) is hardly encyclopedic. The political subtext of the article, which associates Paulo Francis Left-Wing inclinations with a sincerity that is abandoned as his moved towards the Right-Wing, is also crude and schoolboyish. I'd suggest an almost complete rewrite.
I tried to fix, at least partially, some of the more complicated sections of the article, removing for example the unnecessary and non-encyclopedic titles, and bits like "One of his most infamous smears was when he expressed his desire to have the WP MP-cum-unionist, the Afro-Brazilian Vicentinho, "whipped as a slave"; in another of his obiter dicta, he stated that "the discovery [sic] of the clarinet by Mozart was a greater contribution than anything Africa gave us until today" - which is something more appropriate to a magazine or newspaper article or a blog than an encyclopedia. However, my edit was reverted with no justification, and therefore I bring the subject here so other editors may express their opinions. RafaAzevedo msg 20:40, 30 March 2011 (UTC)
"One of his most infamous smears was when he expressed his desire to have the WP MP-cum-unionist, the Afro-Brazilian Vicentinho, "whipped as a slave"; in another of his obiter dicta, he stated that "the discovery [sic] of the clarinet by Mozart was a greater contribution than anything Africa gave us until today"
Okay: What is said in this quote is that:
1. Paulo Francis wrote in his newspaper column that an Afro-Brazilian MP from the Workers' Party should be "whipped as a slave" 2. The same Francis wrote, again in the same column, that the single (and bogus, BTW) discovery of the clarinet by Mozart outshone all African achievments to human society.
The two quotes were made as examples of his late racism, and they should be deleted if proved false. However, both quotes are plain facts, as shown in the references given (Kucinski's book). Unfortunately, there are many fringe rightists in Brazil who hate to cope with sad facts about their poster-boy. Simple as that Cerme ( talk) 00:25, 31 March 2011 (UTC)
Okay, Cerme has asked me to offer my 2c on both articles where you have both been edit-warring. I'll post my comments on the MST article there, but I will make some general points on your discussion here. First: I understand both of you are editing three articles that are by the nature of their subjects highly charged, politically. At no point should either of you resort to ad-hominem attacks. You don't need to dispute someone's motivations for editing in order to make your point. Wikipedia is built around policies which try to make one's POV irrelevant. So, let's stick to the edits themselves.
On this article: A long time ago I had a lengthy and arduous argument with a user on the Fernando Collor article. We clearly had different viewpoints. One of the ways we tried to deal with them was to separate on the talk page the points under contention. Instead of wholesale edit-warring, I ask that you both put in a little bit more effort and point out here, on the talk page, which particular passages you have issues with. It's a little bit more work, but it's worth it considering one of you has already been blocked for WP:3RR violations. I think that's a good starting point. Once that's done, I'd be more than willing to put in some work on mediating both sides. Both of you are active, long-standing editors (more than 3 years...) and I don't want you getting bogged down over three articles. Shall we give it a try? Just make a list of different passages under contention and your opinion on them and I'll chime in as well.-- Dali-Llama ( talk) 21:16, 31 March 2011 (UTC)
Okay, let's begin to do the homework at Dalilama's prompting:
1. I have been charged with selecting sources that "detract" Francis, which is not the case: Kusinski is a great admirer, who calls Francis a "genius" and puts him in the same intellectual level as Glauber Rocha. I must admit myself to be a big fan also, as Francis offered me the opportunity to develop various intellectual interests. Blind approval isn't the only form of admiration.
What is the relevance of Francis in Brazilian intellectual history?That of a superb essayist and critic and an intriguing fiction writer who becomes one of the most admired figures of the 1960s "New Left" (i.e, not formally connected to the various Left parties) intelligentsia and suddenly in his middle life makes a sharp and ill-explained volte face and turns into a poster-boy of the most conventional conservative views, defending them with all the old language resources directed towards opposite goals. To his late rightist admirers, this is usually treated as a kind of revelation, to be accepted without reflexion - therefore the fact that fans of the late Francis have done next to nothing in order to evaluate criticaly his career - in the process, BTW, consigning his early work to oblivion. His Left admirers, howver, cannot afford the luxury of an uncritical acceptance and must examine his work and deeds more closely - hence my abundance of critical (but in no way libellious) sources.
Now, going into particulars:
2.Since the career of Francis is defined in terms of his intellectual history, I do not see why not to describe it in the terms of his intellectual development, instead of simply offering a dry chronological titling (which would be, by the way, inconsistent with his chronological age: Francis "early period" ended in his mid-thirties, his "middle period" extending into his late fifties). If this is an interpretation, so be it, for without it the article would amount to something like: "Francis, Paulo (1930-1996): Brazilian essayist, journalist and novelist".
3. I see that the episode around Francis smearing the MP-cum-tradeunionist (which means simply MP & tradeunionist: in Port. that would go as "o parlamentar-sindicalista") Vicentinho with racist fumes was suppresed. Yes, blind acceptance has this dead end, as one must suppress (Stalin-like, BTW) anything that does not makes the admired one the sum of all human perfections and genius.... Not only is the episode a fact, but it had nothing of an accident: it was only one of a spree of racist and ethnocentric rants directed, in both spoken and written form, toward Amerindians ("not even fit to be slaves" - another suppressed episode), Arabs, people from the Brazilian Northeast - in short, all who were not "Western Whites" such as he wrote in praise of Fernando Collor ("Strong, comely and Western White"). Say what you like, these were an important part of his late intellectual life and of his conservative views as he saw them. Whan I call such views "infamous" (dictionary.com definition: "of ill repute, with a bad reputation") I'm only echoing present-day common sense, something admited implicity by the editor who suppressed these...infamous declarations, who were one of the chief varieties of a Francis speciality: his obiter dicta (i.e. his remarks "by the side").
4.That Francis' fatal heart attack was somehow triggered by his plight as defendant in a libel suit, is Kusinski's view and also quite probable, if only on a post hoc ego prompter hoc basis, but I make no bones about that.
I rest my case Cerme ( talk) 23:02, 1 April 2011 (UTC)
1. To call a racist outburst racist is not an "opinion" it's fact: we have a fact - that Francis expressed, in print, the desire to have an African-Brazilian congressmen flogged (or better, expressed a desire to personally flog him) as a slave. A consequence ensued: the statement raised a scandal at the time - that is, was generally seem as infamous (again, the meaning of "infamous" is clear: something that has a bad reputation)and that is also a fact.
Its also a fact that this particular outburst was not directed solely at a particular individual: it expressed Francis' general convictions at the time about the lack of culture and achievments of the whole entity generally known as "black race" (as expressed in the comparision between Mozart and Africa). Such convictions are generally seem as racist, and that's not my particular "opinion", it was simply the objective commonsense view expressed at the time- as well as today. I could, by the way, quote sources among Francis' late admirers saying this multitude of opinions disparaging and vilfying non-Europeans and non-Whites were simply ironies directed against "politically correct" stereotypes, but in this case I will have to mention the fact that many of Francis targets, including the congressman Vicentinho, didn't take such "antics" lightly and had him sued for racist libel, something that was left undecided by courts at his death. If these are opinions, they are not simply mine or anyone else's: it's a whole climate of opinion. And a generally held opinion is as much of a reality as a rock or a tree.
2.I don't remember expressing the opinion, in the article at least (as opposed to the discussion) that Francis' earlier work was more noteworthy than his later one: that is actually a question of personal taste. What I remarked is that the objective existence of his Far Left phase (to which belong the bulk of his written corpus, the totality of his non-posthumous fiction and of his theater criticism as well as most of his essays) is as much a fact as his conservative phase. In fact, I have abstained from mentioning others' opinions that simply say that the incoherence of Francis political shift made the whole of his work useless and bound to eventually go down the drain of oblivion, an extreme view I find personally most unfair - however, I admit that, all things considered, it's an understanable one Cerme ( talk) 23:01, 5 April 2011 (UTC)
My exchange of opinions in the preceding section is currently becoming bogged because I'm facing an ideological commonplace still current amid the Brazilian middle and upper-class: the inability to accept the racist character of much of their ideology, something that puts me in the obligation of proving the obvious. But then, patience, and here we go:
1 Even to "compare" Mozart's achievements to African cultural achievments in general is comparing two non-commensurate qualities, something akin to say that bananas taste "better" than apples - unless one assumes thare exists something as an hierarchy of cultures. Perhaps I should even decline to make a list of African cultural achievments, basing on the fact that drawing such a list would be to consider lack of knowledge in the field legitimate, but, however, I would like to point, e.g., that all of Modern art as we know it wouldn't be possible were it not for the influence exerted by African art on Picasso's painting; that a Nigerian writer like Wole Soyinka is long in the list of Nobel Prize Winners (something no Brazilian writer has so far attained), etc., etc.
2. Paulo Francis loved jazz, so he cannot have been a racist...Wow! C'mon, please, this is like the proverbial line of the antisemite saying that "some of my best friends are Jews". Let's keep it simple: Francis countless times argued for the overall cultural inferiority of Blacks, although he conceded that "Negroes [and I believe he was not above using the infamous term crioulos, which in Port. is similar to nig***] sing and dance a lot, and should confine themselves to it", something like that (that's is in his quarrel with Caio Tulio Costa). But then that's the problem about Brazilian commonsense ideology, who refuses to admit that the writer Monteiro Lobato was a racist - even when he argued for a "final solution" through massive sterilization to the negro problem - because one of his children's books characters was a sympathetic (and entirely submissive) female black cook. Well, perhaps a Black editor could know better, but I'm doing what I can.
That's it Cerme ( talk) 14:35, 6 April 2011 (UTC)
The cuts done in the article were so extensive that even info on Francis' pro-American view about Brazilian cultural heritage being that of the USA was deleted. What I propose to do is simply to restore the article to its original form and change its wording a little bit: for instance in the place of "infamous" remark, I will put "controversial", or "scandalous", in order to leave no doubts whatsoever about the objectivity of the editor. With this, plus a few more changes in vocabulary, I think we shall have the relevant info restored. Since I will not have time for that in the next few days, that will allow other editors to make additional comments & suggestions Cerme ( talk) 12:30, 8 April 2011 (UTC)
As no additional suggestions were offered, I restored the article to its ancient form, with a more non-controversial wording of the sections' titles, and some additional info in support of some points. I look foward to discussing further editing Cerme ( talk) 15:10, 15 April 2011 (UTC)
As is to be seem at the head of the talk page, the article received peer-review after a request, and it was suggested that the first paragraph, being a lead, should contain a summary of the article as a whole, which of course would have no references, which should be offered in the following paragraphs Cerme ( talk) 16:22, 3 May 2011 (UTC)
What the summary contain is the following, IMHO:
1. Paulo Francis was regarded as a journalist with high stilistic skills; 2. He performed a political shift in his middle life; 3. That rendered him a controversial personality, who during and after his lifetime offered opportunity to in various polemics between him and his peers, and/or between hios admirers and adversaries.
I would like to know what is "opinion" in these statements; to me, they are simply public knowledge Cerme ( talk) 16:35, 3 May 2011 (UTC)
It's difficult to discuss with people who don't realize what an encyclopedia is, exacly; every presentation of a life, an historical event,etc. is, by its own nature, biased. What Wikipedia requires is not an absence of opinions (and to portray, viz., the late Paulo Francis as a serious intellectual, and not as someone fond of producing libel in behalf of various interests, is an opinion also), but that the opinions presented are those backed by known authorities in the field and in the public sources available - therefore, new research is banned. If "opinions" were banned as unencyclopaedic , I wonder what would happen with the famous Encyclopaedia Britannica ed. where the article on Freud was written by his friend Ernest Jones, as the biography of Lenin was written by Trotsky. I admit I may have a very poor opinion on the late Francis' politics, but then I have the authorities on "my" side, as apparently no one, even his friends, has seem fit to describe his later pieces of libel as some kind of high Literature or Political Science - at least in the sources available. However, if someone appears with other sources, I would argue for including them in the text alongside the other sources; what I cannot admit as serious is the exclusion of sources whose "flaw" is only that they oppose attempts at whitewashing someone's biography Cerme ( talk) 17:40, 3 May 2011 (UTC)
The previously lead ran thus:
"Although initially a sympathizer of left-wing ideologies, describing himself as a trotskyist,[Paulo Francis] late in his life, after living for years in the USA, he performed a sharp political shift, advocating and supporting a more right-wing and liberalist stance, pro- capitalist"
I have revised it, for the following reasons:
1. He was not a sympathizer of "Left-wing ideologies": he was a sympathizer of a particular variety of Left politics, and opposed himself to Stalinism as the ideology of the CP-based intelligentisia of his time.
2. That he lived in the US when he performed his political shift is immaterial: many others made a similar shift living elsewhere.
3. The remainder of the phrase would be okay, if we were describing the intellectual trajetory of a scholar and/or political thinker. Francis wasn't any of these: he was simply a jornalist (albeit a well-informed one) and his early leftism was as intellectually patchy as his late conservatism.
That's enough, for a start Cerme ( talk) 15:06, 4 May 2011 (UTC)
In revising the part about Francis early life, I have tried to explain, with the help of RS, (1) his early upbringing; (2)his professional choices leading from promising actor/director to paper critic; (3)His role in a process of Americanization of cultural life in Brazil; (4)His anti-academic stance;and his consequent carelessness. I have left particular examples to the footnotes, as what interested me was not to show what he knew or didn't know about Ancient History or the History of the Pacific War (he was no scholar in neither field), but his general modus operandi Cerme ( talk) 17:46, 4 May 2011 (UTC)
In this second part, I intended mostly to describe the intellectual influences that shaped Francis mature career, such as (a) The Trotskyst movement, therefore the mention to members of the Braz. Left Opposition; (b) The Brazilian contemporary cultural movement, therefore the mentions to Senhor magazine and Bea Feitler; (c) The Cold War and Francis' position as a Trotskyist, which stranged him from the pro-Soviet or pro-Chinese Left of the time and attracted him to the US. I mentioned Francis connection to John Mowinckel , the cultural attaché of the US embassy in Brazil between 1967 and 1969, because he was mentioned by Isabel Lustosa as a friend to various Brazilian intellectuals and also because he was obviously engaged in the Cold War cultural front (he was former OSS, and therefore, mostly probably CIA) and must have been, for good or evil,a fascinating personality, well worthy of subsequent research - and a Wiki entry of his own Cerme ( talk) 17:20, 5 May 2011 (UTC)
In discussing the reasons for Francis' political shift, I have decided to underline the intellectual causes envolved, therefore giving preference to Kucinski's and Lustosa's explanations - although I had, for the sake of intellectual honesty, to acknowledge the existence of explanations that see the whole thing as simply a case of selling-out. Be as it is, all views I could find that had a reliable source behind them are presented Cerme ( talk) 16:45, 7 May 2011 (UTC)
I also reduced examples of Francis' racist smears to the barest, most representative minimum-not least because of the necessity not to have such statements given much opportunity to propagate from the WP site Cerme ( talk) 18:37, 8 May 2011 (UTC)
In describing Francis' last year, I think it would be important to show how resistence to him hardened in his last year of life, as well as the fact that he was eventually lost support from his Establishment connections - one can hardly say that his last episode was unexpectedly Cerme ( talk) 14:02, 9 May 2011 (UTC)
This article needs images, copy editing and a longer lead that adequately summarizes the content. The refs also don't seem to conform to standard formats. Please withdraw the nomination unless you can make these changes in the coming week. Otherwise it will be failed for now. Lemurbaby ( talk) 00:29, 22 June 2011 (UTC)
The article needs to be reviewed by a native English speaker. Also,there have been heated discussions about its relevance - since it refers to a personality who is virtually unknown outside Brazil - as well as to various issues related to the political bias inevitable in a biography of someone who took various (and mutually contradictory)partisan stances throughout his live. It would be better if the editor who will do the copy-editing were to some extent familiar with Brazilian History and politics Cerme ( talk) 01:02, 7 July 2011 (UTC)
Francis offered as a reason for his political shift...
..."a (supposed) trip to the American Midwest, "the industrial center of the country" where he allegedly had seen "nothing to equal it, in the way of progress and workers' welfare".
I have added the "supposed" for the fact that I suspect the trip to be bogus, as Francis never mentioned it before his shift. But he could have been to the Midwest innumerable times, given the fact that one of his regular duties as foreign correspondent was to cover American primaries and presidential elections. But then, could a Brazilian journalist who had already toured contemporary Japan & Western Europe see the 1970s American Midwest and be flabbergasted by it? Wasn't the American Midwest of the 1970s already the Rust Belt? Cerme ( talk) 17:09, 13 July 2011 (UTC)
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Reviewer: Wugapodes ( talk · contribs) 01:36, 16 August 2015 (UTC)
Will review.
Wugapodes (
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01:36, 16 August 2015 (UTC)
GA review – see WP:WIAGA for criteria
It doesn't seem that there were any major changes since the last [[../GA3|GA nom]] ( diff), particularly with regards to the prose. The entire article seems to lack an encyclopedic tone seeming more like a narrative in structure and in style. I feel like there is both unneccesary and possibly undue diversion into his political opinions. I mean, he is notable for his writing, right? I mean, the lead lists him as "a Brazilian journalist, political pundit, novelist and critic." Yet the article overwhelmingly focuses on the intimate details of his political philosophy with only minor mention of his journalism and criticism work and the discussion of his fiction writing was so thick that I could barely read or understand it. As stated in the previous review, selected works are inherently non-neutral and a form of cherry-picking. I think this article is in severe need of a peer review and copy edit, as well as a massive trim to its prose size.
Second Opinion I think this article is a very long way from satisfying criteria 1, 3, and 4, however I'm wary of a quick fail because I don't have particularly concrete suggestions on how to improve it. I'm going to see if another editor would be willing to give the article a look over and what their opinion would be. Wugapodes ( talk) 02:30, 16 August 2015 (UTC)
Not listed I agree with BlueMoonset and so am closing this as not listed. Wugapodes ( talk) 19:00, 27 August 2015 (UTC)
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Reviewer: MPJ-DK ( talk · contribs) 12:52, 27 March 2016 (UTC)
I will be picking up the review of this one - both for the Wiki Cup and the GA cup as well. I will be making my review comments over the next couple of days.
I am not impressed with what I'm seeing - this is the fifth time it is nominated, the only action taken by the nominator between GA4 failing on August 27, 2015 and renominating it was pluralizing the word article and before that the main edit prior to nominating it for the fourth time was to remove the tags at the top of the page but not addressing the issues. Now to be fair I will review the entire article but I am putting it on hold right now - it's not a GA article as it stands, there are a ton of issues unresolved from more or less every previous GA article that needs to be addressed.
I am going to Assume Good Faith on this and actually provide my feedback on this and allow 7 days for issues to be addressed. In all honesty, the tags that were removed in March still apply, but I am not just going to slap them back on and fail it - but I will reapply them if the GA fails. Fair warning, I am not going to rewrite the article for you - if it was just a sentence or two I'd probably offer an alternative but for this one I will provide a list of issues that need to be addressed and can help with wording for individual fixes if you ask
I like to get this checked out first, I have found issues using this that has led to quick fails so it's important this passes muster.
"Rejecting what he saw as the portrayal "of the ruling Bourgeoisie as an evil caricature", he chose to offer "the people" the opportunity "to know more about its masters",[54] by describing life among the happy few in 1960s–1970s Rio ("the elite of the charming parochialism of Rio de Janeiro [fashionable boroughs], their parties and sensual pleasures"[55])—a project reminiscent of James Joyce and Scott Fitzgerald. By the same token, he associated his embrace of modernist stylish conventions (juxtaposition, non-linear narration) – or, in his own words, the deliberate refusal of earlier formal stylistics[56] – to the necessity of portraying an emerging urban Brazil."
Joyce does not describe the life of the elites, it is quite the contrary, the object of his whole work is the life of the middle-class dubliners, who often deal with lack of money, opportunities and expectations of change in their lifes. Dubliners is all about that. In Portrait of the Artist and Ulysses we find the exact kind of people, Stephen Dedalus is a poor schoolteacher, Leopold Bloom is a middle-class advertising agent, Molly Bloom is a middle-class singer. There are clear passages in which Dedalus and Bloom worries about money. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 187.104.5.93 ( talk) 13:16, 24 November 2016 (UTC)
Start with "Such ideas" in the beginning of a paragraph is confusing - I can only take it that it's a reference to the previous paragraph and his "neoliberal commitment"? If so I am not sure how neoliberal transitions into bigotry and the fact that it's presented as if that's a natural progression?