Comic Strips

Here, I opened the book (research paper) for you. and look! violence was involved in the successful outcomes!

especially in light of the enduring violent insurgencies occurring in some of the same countries—begs systematic investigation.

In many cases, both nonviolent and violent campaigns exist simultaneously among different competing groups.

you can't isolate the non-violent campaigns from the violent campaigns in such an analysis, they're part of the same environment.

I'll also note that the research paper doesnt clearly identify how they generated their numbers. the underlying dataset they used is enitrely absent. so we can't make any inferences on how well they actually isolated and calculated their values.

in short: doesnt show its work.

Sure, and where does diversity of tactics rank?

It's rarely one or the other, eg. Suffragettes demonstrations were made much more threatening by the bombing campaigns that were happening in parallel, Gandhi was made much more threatening by the HSRA campaigns, MLK wouldn't have achieved jack without urban uprisings and the black panthers turning up the pressure in the background, etc.

Looking at their chart near the top, it appears as if violence scores higher in most categories except for "non-violence security force defections" which eclipses every other datapoint by 20x-40x which probably realllly skews the average in favor of non-violence.

We’re rapidly heading towards an inflection point where no amount of town halls, lawsuits, etc will fully halt the wave of destruction. So while these resistance campaigns are needed and should continue, how long are they going to work within the part of the timeline where democracy and all of the mechanisms have been fully eroded, reversed, and proven to be placebos?

I still find the meme funny, even if this is all far more nuanced. Some examples:

• A lot of cities are rejecting and shutting down Flock cameras, but in some cases the cameras quietly returned after the uproar died down. They simply waited for people to forget. At what point does it become justifiable to either cover all of the lenses or destroy them altogether?
• Similar with data centers. The billionaires are going to keep pushing them through, and in one case I saw recently, a town’s leadership even overturned votes against data centers, which was a clear-as-day example of democratic erosion. What good is democracy if it can be arbitrarily overridden? At which point is it justifiable to try and destroy a datacenter’s functionality in order to preserve life, especially when future generations are at stake?

I think eventually we’re going to need a combination of both, but it needs to be lead with structure and intelligence. Billionaires are going to continue to erode and ignore democracy, while a bunch of city officials will continue to fold to the almighty buck, similar to how AIPAC has turned tons of politicians into useless genocidal drones. We’re going to be pushed into a corner where we can either fight back with everything we have access to, or we can keep pulling on levers they’ve systematically destroyed in order to nullify our democratic power. It could be 5, 10, 20 years from now. We don’t know when but authoritarianism—especially now in such unknown times—makes it inevitable.

The TL;DR here is that we need to clearly define what counts as violence. Destroying Flock cameras and hindering data centers is in the same bucket and it’s self-defense, but it’s not violence in the sense that we think about it. If someone automatically thinks that “violence” means “overthrowing the government,” they’re willfully (or maybe not; probably a good time to educate and share knowledge with fellow working class folks) ignorant to a whole bunch of smaller, more focused acts.