> You also almost double your odds of success by not using violence.
Admittedly having not read the 400-page study, I don't think that's a causation that is necessarily supported by the correlation. It would be extremely surprising if the prior of "how likely is this movement to succeed" were not a determining factor in whether a movement tends to use violence, with the a priori less-promising movements being more likely to take violent action.
C.F. the difference between me demanding you give me an apple or your car.
> Admittedly having not read the 400-page study […]
It is not a 400-page study: it is a 400-page book that goes over the research available at the time and summarizes it. The book leans slightly academic, but it's a fairly easy read.
A movement's success is (partly?) determined by its size and how much of the general population gets on board with the original (presumably) small group that started it.
The/A thesis of the author is that people are turned off by the use of violence/force and are less likely to agree with, and/or get involved in, movements that use violence.
So if a movement wants to grow the 'coalition' of people that will help and/or join them, that growth is best achieved by eschewing violence as much as possible.
If you're movement is going to 100% cause a reaction of violence with the opposition regardless if you're violent or not, then there is zero reason for your movement not to use violence themselves. Simply put, you'd be rounded up and exterminated simply for existing.
> If you're movement is going to 100% cause a reaction of violence with the opposition regardless if you're violent or not, then there is zero reason for your movement not to use violence themselves. Simply put, you'd be rounded up and exterminated simply for existing.
The book covers such scenarios: where you are non-violent but the Powers That Be are violent towards your movement.
I can't show up at the grocery store with a pick-up truck full of lettuce and say, "This is Dole lettuce, just put this on the Dole pile and give me the money".
Grocery stores have distribution trains from trusted vendors, with QC and regulatory oversight to defend them against the liability they are subject to if they sell a harmful product.
> Aviation rules are written by blood, you either follow them or you add a few more lines with your own blood.
Please, what fool subjects their own blood to the absence of regulation? If you've got blood on your hands, much better for it to be a customer that has already paid you.
Given the prevalence of slavery within the first 1800 years of Christianity's existence, I don't think we can credit it with a value system that has sympathy for the fundamental humanity of the enslaved. More credit goes to the Enlightenment.
> I don't think we can credit it with a value system that has sympathy for the fundamental humanity of the enslaved.
We can because there is a difference between introducing a new moral grammar into the world and what people do with it. The claim is not that Christians as people were any more moral or less power hungry than people tend to be, it's that from that point on in world history, they had to be hypocrites, precisely because something had metaphysically changed.
The Enlightenment doesn't stand in contradiction to this, it's the culmination of it, which was most visible in particular among the American abolitionists. Who more than anyone else staked their claims on Christian (and Enlightenment) grounds.
And as a practical point when it comes to today's issues. Pay attention to what the post-Christian secular America looks like. Because unlike the British humanists who thought equality was just common sense, you're going to be in for a wild ride, which Nietzsche did tell us.
But the slaves were told that there was an afterlife, and that they had a better chance of going there than rich people. That must have been nice to hear for them.
Yup. Which was why some (probably Nietzsche, but AFAICR several people before him too) called Christianity "a religion for slaves": It's very very useful for elites throughout the ages, from Roman patricians to current techbroligarks, to fob the plebs off with "Your reward will come in the afterlife!"... So they don't make a ruckus about getting any reward for their toil in the present. Or, as Marx (no, not Groucho) put it: "Religion is an opium for the masses"; means the same thing.
While I agree that the question of "are we jailing this person for their political opinions" gets into skeevy areas, if we refuse to enforce laws just because elections and politics are involved we might as well not have any laws that involve elections and politics (and I don't think "lawlessness starts at the top" is a recipe for a healthy society).
On the other hand, lots of people buying audio gear new DO take the second-hand market into account, and will spend more on the initial purchase if they think the product will retain its value.
It doesn't have to be advertising; if policies were enacted to either restrict supply (by making it more difficult to produce in favor of some perceived public good) or to raise the price by reducing (currently significant) subsidies or imposing taxes on the supply chain, that might make your fridge less likely to contain those things.
Policy and advertising both work at the margins; if something affects consumer choices such that they swing 10% to or away from a sector, that has a huge impact on the sector. Can you imagine no changes that would convince you to eat 10% more or less meat?
I am allergic to legumes (the only viable source of vegetarian protein really), as are many others... so fuck you for trying to outlaw my main source of nutrition.
To be clear: I'm not trying to outlaw anything, just demonstrate to the parent how they could be subject to the lobbying/regulation/consumption feedback loop without being susceptible to advertising. I'm sorry if that offended you.
Which meat alternatives can you eat? Most of the current options are heavily processed, small-scale and heavily tied to brands, all of which raise the price. Once we see the commodification and white-labeling that we see in the rest of the grocery supply chain, I'd expect the prices to come down. As an aside: TVP looks to be about $0.04/gram of protein, which is about half the price of a gram of protein in ground beef.
Because the current administration has an overriding focus on self-aggrandizement and the struggle against persecution by hidden forces. All communications and outputs of the administration must pay lip service to said focus, no matter how unprofessional or off-topic such virtue signaling may be.
I find there area few things the budgets and spreadsheets help with from a personal finance perspective:
- Values vs reality: A $3000 candle budget is fine, but if you're spending $10/work-day on candles it might be easier to see when that accumulates and you can compare it against your longer-term aspirational goals. This is especially true for less tangible expenses like subscriptions where it can be difficult to see "I'm spending $3000/year on candles I never burn" from ground level.
- Planning and decision-making: It's easier to make good life decisions (e.g. "should I take $job" or "can I buy $house") if you have an accurate accounting of your life expenses.
Yeah, before we picked up YNAB more than a decade ago we never had issues with $3k of candles disappearing in the budget, but we still struggled to save money.
When we started using YNAB and entering our spending into it, it was like a hockey-stick diagram on our household net worth.
And this isn't even double-entry accounting (which I've adopted for my own personal spending). One thing I'll say is that the way we use YNAB seems different from most other people: we hand-enter every transaction, we don't import it afterwards from the bank. Then we reconcile what we thought we spent vs. what the bank says we spent.
In this way we have to be a bit more intentional about what we're spending money on since there's not some kind of big monthly exercise to make the numbers line up and then a "we'll try to be better next month". Instead it's more like an envelope system where we are tracking budget categories as the month goes by.
I used to use YNAB and I think this was its whole point: you allocate money in different envelopes (budgets) and as the month goes by, you enter your transactions and see how your envelopes deplete.
I didn't actually do this that much, I was much more interested in where my money was going over longer periods (say a year). It was nice enough, but I dropped it a few years ago when they had big price increase and became more expensive than it was worth to me.
Yeah, I'll probably switch to Actual at some point in the next couple of years as a result of the price change. The YNAB team at least continues to strive to make improvements to the core app so they seem to be actually putting the money to use, but the improvements are not in directions I need. And the improvement I do need, to make their web site faster for 10 years of budget, seems perenially on the back burner.
Admittedly having not read the 400-page study, I don't think that's a causation that is necessarily supported by the correlation. It would be extremely surprising if the prior of "how likely is this movement to succeed" were not a determining factor in whether a movement tends to use violence, with the a priori less-promising movements being more likely to take violent action.
C.F. the difference between me demanding you give me an apple or your car.
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