I was about to send a lot of "here's the next step" work Emails and suddenly realized that it's Saturday. Perils of working from home (and being a non-observant cultural Jew for the specifically Saturday part).
=> More informations about this toot | View the thread
At any rate I have to get back to work. I understand why people like this theory: it's an easy "numbers go up" theory. But i don't know of any successful movement that took this correlative description as a goal and then succeeded.
/fin
=> More informations about this toot | View the thread
If communications make it easy to turn people out, they also make it easy to turn counter-people out.
The US Iraq War protests involved, by some measure, 5% of the US population making some public demonstration against the war. They also involved 20% of the population making some demonstration for the war.
=> More informations about this toot | View the thread
Does that mean that the chain of causation could go the other way? No it doesn't. According to this theory, if the basic mechanism of the state is still supporting the elites they will crush whatever popular movement is there.
Contemporary communications are really good at getting a large % of the population into the streets for a couple of days. Will that work by itself? No.
=> More informations about this toot | View the thread
In this view, in some sense revolutions are always waiting to happen and a certain kind of state failure causes them -- not merely immiserating the population, but the system changing so that elites can no longer be supported by it.
Imagine that this theory is correct. Wow you'd see 3.5% of the pop in the streets just before each big social turnover.
=> More informations about this toot | View the thread
I'm not even sure where to start with the 3.5% one. I could read the publications in question and go over them bit by bit but I have far too much to do, and I suspect that "3.5%" is about to die as a belief anyway.
There is an entire contemporary social science theory about revolutions that is not from hopeful leftists who may be experts in economics (Marx, etc.) It says that revolutions happen when the essential structure supporting the state fails.
=> More informations about this toot | View the thread
I was surprised and then dismayed to find out that "if you mobilize 3.5% of the population, you win" and "nonviolent movements are more successful than violent ones" are from the same Chenoweth research. I had thought that these two beliefs were independent bad beliefs afflicting contemporary social movements, but they're connected.
The "nonviolent movements" claim is from data misclassification. "3.5%" is from confusing correlation with causation.
=> More informations about this toot | View the thread
Criticisms of Extinction Rebellion aren't new -- I've written poetry that contains it. "Who are the eight skilled organizers": well at least one of them is in jail in the UK. May they emerge wiser and not believing in this BS or telling anyone else to believe it.
https://mastodon.social/@richpuchalsky/112156522281776648
=> More informations about this toot | View the thread
The excuses for why it doesn't work are incoherent, too. People saying that maybe 3.5% only works for "maximalist" movements that want regime change or independence -- but Hong Kong got a full third of the population into the streets for that and it failed. I really don't like stories about numeric thresholds that we just have to hit, as if what state opponents do in response doesn't matter.
=> More informations about this toot | View the thread
OMG the bogus 3.5% mobilization number is from the same place as the "nonviolence works" study!
Now that people are starting to figure out that 3.5% has been hit plenty of times and nothing happened, they've started adding stuff about how it has to be sustained.
https://www.directactioneverywhere.com/dxe-in-the-news/chenoweth-blog
=> More informations about this toot | View the thread
=> More informations about this toot | View the thread
Since I'm on something like my 10th #data #archive question:
=> More informations about this toot | View the thread
At any rate I don't think that this is a case of people being distracted by unimportant things and not paying attention to a more important thing. People have no direct control over this, the Democrats have no intention of resisting anything, asking them to is a bad use of people's energy, and the office itself has been a clown show.
=> More informations about this toot | View the thread
There was Scott Pruitt, of course. Resigned while under 14 investigations.
And then there's Andrew Wheeler. I vaguely remember him coming up through EPA before he came back later and managed to unite a whole lot of scientific and medical groups, the editors of leading journals, and a bipartisan group of past EPA administrators against one of his proposals.
=> More informations about this toot | View the thread
When I was in a student environmental group we decided to bring in Rita Lavelle for a talk after she got out of prison. Maybe we paid her $50 or something like that? I think she was having trouble scraping money together at the time.
She was convicted again later.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rita_Lavelle
=> More informations about this toot | View the thread
This post starts with "while you were looking at other shiny objects" as if people should care who is confirmed as head of the EPA. It's going to be really difficult for a new contender to break through the record of past administrators and set a new low. Corrupt EPA administrators are a tradition going back to Anne Gorsuch Burford, the 4th one and the mother of the SC justice.
https://mstdn.social/@GottaLaff/113913801990002447
=> More informations about this toot | View the thread
One of the general #climate politics sources that I read:
https://www.phenomenalworld.org/analysis/polycrisis-2025/
ETA: It's written from an international perspective, so it doesn't have the usual dullard pretense that the US is a great country and a world leader.
=> More informations about this toot | View the thread
=> More informations about this toot | View the thread
One of the problems that I've never solved as I got old was how to tactfully and kindly tell people that they were incompetent at something that they wanted to do and needed a lot more practice before telling anyone how to do it.
=> More informations about this toot | View the thread
US scientists -- Canada wants you (as do many other countries). With all of the problems that Canada has, it's still better to work from there than to serve the US empire as it declines.
https://immigration.ca/fast-track-high-demand-occupations/
=> More informations about this toot | View the thread
=> This profile without reblog | Go to richpuchalsky@mastodon.social account This content has been proxied by September (3851b).Proxy Information
text/gemini