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He is right about the 'horns of the dilemma' and non-violence. Another example of these kinds of protests is hunger strikes, employed effectively by British Suffragettes. If you Google this, AI will helpfully tell you the government's response was 'brutal.' I guess letting the poor girls die is the humane thing to do. Oh, wait!
Anyways, in case it is not obvious: 'nonviolence' as a strategy is simply part of using media as a political weapon. It is strange to call such an insurgency the 'weak side.' It is more accurate to call them 'militarily weak, but politically strong.'
The reason a person like this writes an ode to this strategy is because they know at a subconscious level that this particular weapon (sympathetic media) is wielded by their side.
He writes that non-violence, done properly is disruptive and unignorable. It seems to me that these qualities make it categorically similar to violence. Indeed, protesting is kind of like "political-violence," although I am using it here in a very nonstandard way. Gosh, I feel like one of those college kids who redefines words, saying "silence is violence."
Basically, the common sense idea that "violence is very bad, I wouldn't ever EVER do violence ever" is a left-adaptive meme because it means political power (=protesting, media control) wins, and the left has that.
Once we see these dynamics laid bare, why shouldn't someone like me just say, "I will judge actions based on their effects in the zero-sum power war: it matters not if you detonated a bomb and killed people, you are committing an un-ignorable act in the service of a side."
Agreed. Even in modern context without sympathetic media nonviolent protests are absolutely ineffective. Just a few examples, two from conservative and two from leftist side:
March for life/abortion clinics vigils. These were largely ineffective, in fact they led to oppressive laws where praying in a buffer zone around abortion clinics is punishable offense which in fact got some people arrested.
Antiglobalist protests in early 2000s in Seattle and other places. They did not achieve their goals, all the trade deals went as planned and in fact globalist agendas went through just fine. If anything meeting in places like Davos to embark upon Global regulations is even more popular than in the past.
Occupy Wallstreet was complete fiasco, a lot of ink was spent if it was sabotaged possibly by introducing woke as a new topic or what. Nevertheless this movement is dead in the water.
Tea Party and wave of protests for their policy demands died similarly to Occupy.
Counterexample: the Canadian Trucker Protest was completely despised by the media yet managed to totally turn the tide of vaccine passports and lockdowns. China's Zero COVID policy was also overturned by the largest nonviolent protests since Tiananmen 1989 and obviously they didn't have a sympathetic media to draw upon. Or for a protest unrelated to COVID, the Iranian headscarf protests basically reversed the practical enforcement of the "morality codes".
It seems to help when the protests have a very specific and clear goal as opposed to something vague like "fighting inequality"
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It's nearly impossible to judge the effectiveness of any protests or protest movements, not just nonviolent ones. Definitional problems aside, there are too many confounders and backlash effects undermine most gains. Confident judgements on this topic are just an expression of the speaker's priors.
I can imagine a good faith effort to figure this out, but I cannot even imagine that effort succeeding, except in a coarse, probabilistic sense.
Consider the most focused protest you can recall with a successful outcome. On what basis do you determine the protest was incrementally successful? I am going to assume that any evidence brought to bear (polling, Google trends, personal testimony) is plagued by a dozen types of bias.
Beyond that, the democratization of communication technology, efficient toxoplasma distribution systems, and genuine values disagreements mean that any momentary progress towards a given goal will alienate large segments of the population and activate the opposition.
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Abortion clinic protests were actually highly adaptive to their specific circumstances- local authorities that wanted to ban abortion but were prevented from doing so by their superiors. They reduced abortion access quite a bit without bloodshed.
Their success in blue states has been a lot more mixed, but they still kinda worked in mildly reducing abortion access instead of the counterfactual where a bunch of assassins and firebombers go to jail forever.
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What about the counterfactual? Had those protests turned violent, would they have produced results? Have the handful of attacks on abortion clinics or doctors been anymore effective?
Maybe, maybe not. Nevertheless the nonviolent nature of these protest did not win anybody some moral high ground or anything like that, it won them maybe mockery. Even for popular issues like those related to Occupy, it just fizzled out like a fart in outer space.
It also works the other way around such as when violent protests are made successful thanks to media shielding. Prime example are BLM protests/riots, which were turned by establishment into massive success with wave of capitulation from government to corporations to the agenda. Similar example is violent outbursts after some high profile Quran burnings which led to laws banning such burnings under hate speech and other laws. If you want something maybe right-coded, then I'd say that violent yellow vests protests in France were much more successful compared to let's say trucker freedom convoys, which were safely ignored with some of the organizers personally attacked and unpersoned.
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I guess Google AI was also designed by feminists. Very obviously it seems to presuppose that the only humane thing to do in this situation was to accept that the Suffragettes are on the right side of history, yield to them, and then roll over and die.
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This sounds like a very clever argument that casually sweeps away material reality in favour of the world of memes, quite like, gosh indeed, what a stereotypical leftist college kid may deploy.
Non-violence, as you frame it, wielded by the socially powerful may indeed feel like an "I win" card, impossible to oppose with truth or any but the most tailored notion of beauty, and hence like a fundamentally unfair "defect" option in the domain of discourse. This is all very terrible, if you think or can pretend that the domain of discourse is all there is; but those who still have to interact with the physical world may recognise that even though being verbally/morally/metaphorically beaten, pissed on, shot and having the cost of the bullet billed to your relatives may feel every bit as humiliating as having those things done to you literally, only the latter actually leaves you dead and your mother robbed of her last $5. If the price of not accepting moral defeat by an overwhelming moral power is pulling physical defeat back into the Overton window, not everyone may conclude that moral defeat is so bad an option.
I don't understand what you are saying. The sentence structure is too complex. I think what you're saying is people would rather be defeated morally and socially rather than defeated physically. That's true! I wasn't pretending the domain of discourse is all there is! That's why its a big problem of the social powers and military powers seem like they are not on the same side.
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