Talk:Peter Gelderloos

Out of Date
This article is severely out of date. Peter Gelderloos is going to be speaking in Boston, Massachusetts tomorrow (May 25, 2010) at encuentro 5. See The State & Non-Violence. -- Christopher C. Parker t c 21:00, 24 May 2010 (UTC)

Substantial removal of content.
I don't understand why you want to remove so much of this article. It is quite possible that the SOA Watch bio was written by Gelderloos himself, so let's presume that's not independent. It is cited for unexceptional biographical details, which seems appropriate given WP:ABOUTSELF. Indybay is cited for further info on the Anti-Capitalist Convergence for the S29 Anti-War protests, which are otherwise poorly documented. While these aren't great sources, I don't see reason to doubt them, nor is the content they are cited to support seem remarkable. It merely gives the reader some sense of who this person is, which seems valuable enough to keep.

Most of what you deleted was based on reliable, independent local news (Daily News-Record, WHSV, Hburg News). I don't understand at all why you would want to remove this content. Daask (talk) 15:50, 23 June 2018 (UTC)
 * Indybay is a patently unreliable source. If you think its claims are important to cover, it shouldn't be hard to find a reliable, secondary source that does so. And I'm not sure what version you're reading because most of what I deleted was sourced to garbage and indeed the version that I restored kept the WHSV, Daily News-Record and Washington Times sources, even though those only address Gelderloos in brief. We're an encyclopedia—we shouldn't be citing low-grade Internet sources. If you want to cite Gelderloos's own site as uncontroversial content clearly written by him, it shouldn't overpower the rest of the article because the emphasis should be on what secondary sources have reported.  czar  15:55, 23 June 2018 (UTC)

More about influence of writing?
The article as it stands is entirely about PG's activism, but I (perhaps quite a few others?) know him primarily from his critical writing - works like "How Nonviolence Protects the State" (2007), which (I think - a while since I read it!) broadly makes the same argument as Andreas Malm's "How to blow up a pipeline: Learning to Fight in a World on Fire" (2021) - but a decade and a half earlier. I've recently read Malm and found myself thinking "Hang on, I read something like this years ago... now who was it by... ah yes... Peter Gelderloos!". I'm just a casually interested reader: I don't know enough to know how significant/influential PG's books etc have been, but it would be good to have some discussion of this, please, if anyone else feels "qualified" enough. 82.71.0.229 (talk) 08:25, 8 August 2021 (UTC)
 * We're currently lacking reliable, secondary sources that discuss his influence/significance, if you have any to recommend. czar  20:13, 8 August 2021 (UTC)


 * I did a quick search on Google Books and found his ideas (primarily about violence versus non-violence) discussed (sometimes favorably, sometimes less so) in the following books, all of which appear to be reliable secondary sources. However, as I said above, I'm not remotely "expert" in this area: I came here trying to answer this very question ("Was Gelderloos an *influential* advocate of violence versus nonviolence?"). It needs the attention of someone like one of the scholarly editors/authors of these books to assess the wider significance/influence of his ideas. Anyway, here they are for future reference and for anyone else who might care to pick this up (thank you kindly!). 82.71.0.229 (talk) 08:30, 9 August 2021 (UTC)


 * Understanding Peace: A Comprehensive Introduction, by Michael Allen Fox, Taylor & Francis, 2013


 * Languages of the Unheard: Why Militant Protest is Good for Democracy, by Stephen D'Arcy, Zed Books, 2014


 * Anarchism and Animal Liberation: Essays on Complementary Elements of Total Liberation, McFarland, 2015.


 * Contemporary Icons of Nonviolence by Anna Hamling (ed), Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2019


 * Nonviolent Struggle: Theories, Strategies, and Dynamics by Sharon Erickson Nepstad, Oxford University Press, 2015.


 * Anarchism Today by Randall Amster, ABC-Clio, 2012