This article is on my to-read list and I am a great fan of Mr. Devereaux's work. But I also feel like promoting non-violence outside the context of western democracies is misleading and potentially dangerous. Maybe he addresses it somewhere in the article but I have yet to read it so forgive me if he does.
But how does he explain the failure of peaceful revolutions in Belarus or China?
My understanding of social dynamics is that being peaceful only works as long as it gains you more supporters than you lose by government action against the movement. Some governments give in but if not, at some point, the scale tips and violence or surrender are your only options.
In Belarus, I knew they were fucked as soon as I heard that police support the protests by putting down their guns and joining the protesters.
They gave up their ability to use violence and therefore became as irrelevant as the other protesters. They should have kept their guns. They should have tried to use their openly armed protest to incite other armed people to also join. At some point, the potential violence would materialize but hopefully at that point, enough of the armed people would be on the side of the protest.
Maybe the dictator would give up if he saw the situation spiraling out of control (and hopefully be executed as punishment anyway).
Maybe the dictator would try to flee and get caught and executed ("gunned down"). Maybe his bunker would get overrun.
Maybe someone close to him would try to get favor from the protesters and kill him.
But all of those potential outcomes were closed off if people opposing him didn't have enough guns.
> feel like promoting non-violence outside the context of western democracies is misleading and potentially dangerous
The article discusses "efforts, in a sense, directed against the state itself, both violent approaches (what we might call ‘terroristic insurgency’) and non-violent approaches (protest)" (Id.).
> Maybe he addresses it somewhere in the article but I have yet to read it
"The ‘center of gravity’ – the locus of the most important strategic objective – for most insurgencies thus often becomes the political support that sustains a government, be that a body of key supporters in non-democratic regimes or the voters in democratic ones. That body of key voters or supporters, of course, is often not even located in the theater of operations at all: the Taliban ultimately won their insurgency in Afghanistan because they persuaded American voters that the war was no longer worth the cost, leading to the election of leaders promising to pull the plug on the war" (Id.).
> how does he explain the failure of peaceful revolutions in Belarus or China?
"All that said, there are very obviously regimes in the world that have rendered themselves more-or-less immune to non-violent protest. This isn’t really the place to talk about the broader concept of ‘coup proofing’ and how authoritarian regimes secure internal security, repression and legitimacy in detail. But a certain kind of regime operates effectively as a society-within-a-society, with an armed subset of the population as insiders who receive benefits in status and wealth from the regime in return for their willingness to do violence to maintain it. Such regimes are generally all too willing to gun down thousands or tens of thousands of protestors to maintain power.
The late Assad regime in Syria stands as a clear example of this, as evidently does the current regime in Iran. Such regimes are not immune to an ‘attack on will,’ but they have substantially insulated themselves from it and resistance to these regimes, if it continues, often metastasizes into insurgency or protracted war (as with the above example of Syria) because the pressure has nowhere else to go" (Id.).
Thanks, looking forward to reading the full article myself.
Hopefully there's more about how these regimes have failed in the past and how to make them fail in the future. Because AFAICT at that point, violence is the only possibility apart from waiting for the dictator to die from natural causes and the system to disassemble itself as potential successors fight each other.
His is a very idealistic take which weirdly omits that every major example of non-violent protest working to topple a regime involved some foreign super power spending trillions of dollars to wage very much violent wars for the purpose. The insight that he's missing in so many words is that you need to crack the door open just enough for a foreign (super)power to want to come barging in for some reason. Non-violent protests might work as good optics for this, but good optics don't launch rockets on the enemy.
> there are very obviously regimes in the world that have rendered themselves more-or-less immune to non-violent protest.
This sounds like a cop-out to the original blanket statement, or at least this is how I interpret it from your earlier quote. Regimes copy methodologies from others wherever possible and learn from failure to coup-proof themselves faster than the population can keep up. This is why most authoritarian regimes have endured for so long despite many being otherwise failed states, and almost always need some sort of external covert or military intervention to tip the scales.
It's like saying that you can hit the target every time by just meditating. And having a professional take the shot for you.
> insight that he's missing in so many words is that you need to crack the door open just enough for a foreign (super)power to want to come barging in for some reason
No foreign superpower barged into the Civil Rights or the Indian independence movement. Not directly. (If we’re counting hypothetical foreign involvement that’s a geopolitical constant.)
> sounds like a cop-out to the original blanket statement
And no excerpt from an article will do a full reading justice. The article makes no blanket statements, its entire thesis is armed insurgency and protest are strategic twins.
> learn from failure to coup-proof themselves faster than the population can keep up
Institutional memory is longer than individual memory. What drove this point home for me was an article about how the police on London can predict whether a protest will turn violent and that they know how to corral people depending on which outcome they want.
But for now, institutions still at least rely on individuals to retain the experience/memories/skills and individuals have their own agency and can leave the organization or die.
Hitler was so bad that anybody is willing to publicly talk about killing him, there are movies glorifying it, people talk about going back in time and killing baby Hitler. He was so bad that the very strong taboo against killing does not work on him.
So, when _exactly_ did it become OK to kill him? Think about it.
What cumulative sum of his actions between 1889 and 1945 tipped the balance?
Now, do those same rules apply to current dictators or people in the process of becoming dictators even if the taboo is still strong there?
Are you comparing Iran to Hitler?! That does not make sense whatsoever.
If you mean 'At some point, you have to step in and make the change by force. Like we did with Hitler'.
I will say: Yes, at some point it is justified to step in. But, there must be a realistic chance that you will make things better, and low chance that you will make things much, much worse. International consensus would be highly desirable, as well.
In case of Iran: How sure are you that you can make a positive change in Iran by bombing only? If you kill (directly or indirectly, e.g. starvation/ruined water supplies) much more Iranians than Iranians killed themselves (like we did with Saddam), are you really helping?
I don't think there is a will (and maybe not even a capability) for boots on the ground. So, you are just hoping that the new regime would be a better one. Not many positive historical examples there.
Last, but not least: There are serious escalation dangers. What if China/Russia provided Iran with targeting data and/or missiles (not that Iran does not have their own) and Iran hit/sunk a carrier and some destroyers? Are you now in war with China/Russia? At what moment do you cross that line? Will you retreat with the tail between you legs, like from Afghanistan? Or will Israel decide to toss a nuke or two?
The idealism of helping the poor protesters is a noble one, but the road to hell is paved by good intentions.
Don't say sadly. Don't further the indoctrination that violence is bad.
It is a tool, it cannot be good or bad. States are the most prolific users of violence (even more when you also count potential/threatened, not yet materialized). Anyone who wants to claim that violence is bad has to oppose the existence of states.
Violence is risky, dangerous, unpredictable, costly, etc. But those are practical and legal, not moral, concerns.
Violence is also necessary, as you say, against governments or other actors which cannot be deterred, stopped or punished using other means.
Violence is also most effective when it's certain and overwhelming/indefensible. If we lived in a world where dictators and their flying monkeys get regularly shot or droned to death, we wouldn't have dictators. Not because they'd all end up dead but because nobody would dare try becoming or supporting one.
This is why we have to publicly support _proportional_ punishment of dictators and their supporters, both now and after they've been removed from power. Good people have to use the same tools as bad ones (after all, they are just tools, not good or bad).
> Don't say sadly...It is a tool, it cannot be good or bad
It's not just a tool, it's also a human action. An action that exacts consequences on its victim and its wielder. Necessary and regrettable aren't exclusive.
On the contrary, target is a neutral word, justifying the violence against a target is exactly as difficult as it should be - based on the circumstances instead of emotions.
Victim already implies wrongdoing so it makes justifying just violence harder than it should be.
For the record, i often use target instead of victim when talking about harassment, bullying, rape, etc. because it also doesn't imply surrender to the aggressor or lack of agency.
Some tools are definitely better than others. Also some tools are not "the right tool" for the job.
Fundamentally though I'm not sure I agree with you. Violence is often an emotional reaction. When violence is used as a tool it is usually (always?) used by bad people.
If it helps you reconcile my worldview, I absolutely oppose the existence of states.
Keep in mind this needs to be judged separately in the legal, practical and moral dimension. For example a state might determine that a person _legally_ deserves to spend 10 years in prison. But the same state will attack you in turn if you abduct that person and hold them for 10 years in similar conditions to prison because _practically_, it weakens the state's monopoly on violence, even if _morally_ that action can be justified (i.e. because if a punishment is just there is no moral reason why it should matter who carries it out).
> often ... usually (always?)
I think the crux lies in how we quantify this. If you live in a western democracy, almost all of the violence you come into contact with or hear about is in fact used by bad individuals (thiefs, gang members, drunks, etc.) or the mentally ill. But even then you have the right (moral and usually legal) to defend yourself.
If you live in other places, that violence might more often be used be institutions (such as states or religions) and might not be materialized (it is potential/threatened/implied). E.g. what happens to a muslim woman who refuses to cover her face - the violence usually never happens because she knows it would and therefore doesn't break the rule. It is still violence used to achieve a goal though and she has the same (moral but usually not legal) right to defend herself - even if any practical defense is beyond her ability to do so because the aggressors are too numerous and dispersed.
I would argue that billions of people live in countries where violence is used against them every day because it is a threat which for example stops them from freely accessing information.
In that regard you're right that it is usually used by bad people. But it says nothing about its morality. The way I see it, violence being used by bad people is a stable equilibrium but it can be used by good people during a transition to a different stable state. It is usually not used by good people in a prolonged because materialized violence tends to reduce the number of people on both sides and cannot be sustained forever.
I don't believe that punishment can be just, and ergo I don't see a moral axis on which to judge violent actions for this purpose. I might concede the use of threatened violence as a means of control, but I don't see any pragmatic way to accomplish this without at least occasional actual punishment so it's a bit non sequiter.
It's likely our views are divergent enough that we wont come to a consensus on this, but I appreciate the nuanced discourse!
I've encountered such opinions before but never cared to engage with them since they seem utterly alien to me. Can you give me a summary of your opinions or links to some materials?
There are multiple goals to a punishment - e.g.:
- Deterrence
- Protection of others / prevention of re-offense
- Removal of aggressor from community to minimize further trauma for the victim by having to interact with him
- Restitution
- Retribution
- Vindication
- Removing any gains from the offense from the aggressor
- Further disadvantaging of the aggressor to make up for `expected_gains * probability_of_getting_caught`
- Further disadvantaging of the aggressor to put negative evolutionary pressure on such behavior
- Separation of the aggressor from others to prevent him from normalizing / spreading his behavior
These few are just off the top of my head, not all apply to all offenses, and not everyone will agree all of these are desired by their favorite society. But how do you achieve any, let along most, of them without punishment?
The problem is that it is routinely misused (especially by those who have overwhelming power), and the cases where it is really needed are really, really, really rare.
Even in cases when it appears that the use of violence is justified, the long term consequences (e.g. on culture and mentality, and hence ultimately on normal daily life) are usually such that it would have been better to avoid it in the first place.
At the moment you regularly shoot/drone the dictators, the one deciding who is dictator warranting such violence is the most scary dictator of all.
This talk about good/bad people is such naive childish ploy, are we adults here or what?
And that's why it's important to establish publicly known and accepted rules about this. Nobody suggests one person deciding this, usually people who imagine this situation have some issues of their own.
But the threat of absolutely any citizen having a decent chance of successfully killing a dictator would probably lead to democratization of power - individuals would not be attracted to having so much power they would likely become targets and we'd hopefully see more effort towards establishing more direct means of decision making.
> This talk about good/bad people is such naive childish ploy, are we adults here or what?
No need for insults, it's a simplification. It's obviously a spectrum. But broadly speaking, people who regularly intentionally harm others for their gain or pleasure (or see nothing wrong with doing it or support those who do) are considered bad. People who go out of their way to help others are good. The rest is neutral. Most people are neutral - don't see injustice or wrongdoing as their problem until it directly negatively affects them.
And obviously, there are people who do both a lot of good and a lot of bad. I consider those bad because more often than not, they only do the good things to gain support or compensate so they can get away with the bad things.
That's my personal opinion and experience. Other people could for example argue for simply summing up the good and the bad and the total would neatly categorize them. Intent also matters and that's even more complex but usually unprovable from the outside.
Why would you want to, unless you live in a domain of indoctrination ("echo chamber") that pacifism is good and anything else is bad?
I always find it useful to ask "why", whenever someone tells me their beliefs. Children do it and adults sometimes tend to find it annoying because they realize they cannot justify their beliefs but being children, they are easy to dismiss. Harder to dismiss an honest question from an adult.
“If we lived in a world where dictators and their flying monkeys get regularly shot or droned to death, we wouldn't have dictators”
While I agree with the sentiment, the groups who support dictators (oligarchs, religious extremists) would decide to also use violence. So both dictators and the leaders on the side of the people would be murdered and society would be destabilized.
We need reliable anonymous communication as yet another source of friction (drink!) which the state needs to overcome to subjugate the people. And that's why so many states, even western democracies, are trying to oppose it now using children or terrorists as an excuse. The authoritarians and wannabe-dictators (most of whom will never achieve their goal or even publicly state it) are already in government positions, always have been.
There are two upsides:
- There are more normal (good or neutral) people than there are authoritarians (bad people - who want to exercise unjustified control over other people's lives). If the leadership attributes are evenly distributed, then they need to kill more of us than we need to kill of them.
- I don't think people should need to be led. It's a symptom of submissivity many have been taught since childhood ("do what I say and don't talk back") and to some extent is it probably natural but hopefully it can be reduced through better upbringing. Teach your children to question everything and to guess people's incentives and motives. What we need need is enough independent thinkers who are able to communicate and self-organize.
Using violence against someone is the ultimate authoritarian act, so for one side this is business as usual while for the other this is the epitome of hypocrisy.
Your mention of anonymity reminds me of assasination politics [0], which is an idea I found enticing in the past. However I've since come to the opinion that such a system is neither optimal nor necessary, though I believe a similar outcome may be inevitable as we continue along the arc of the democratization of power through technical proliferation.
Only in single-step moral systems (one which judges actions as moral or immoral solely based on those actions in the moment and not what preceded them).
I have a multi-step moral system. Basically any unjustified intentional harm to a person justified proportional retaliation. Unjustified means it is not harm which is being caused as punishment to a previous offense. And proportional means that it shouldn't be too weak, neither too strong. IMO the optimum is causing something like 1.5-3x more suffering/"disadvantagement". However, it is important to signal to both the original aggressor and any potential witnesses why this is being done so that one is not mistaken for an original aggressor himself.
I am also a fan of judging others by their own moral principles. Basically, if someone thinks it is OK to, for example, limit my freedom or harm me (for various reasons or in various circumstances), I apply the same rules to him and it is therefore OK for me to limit his freedom or harm him (for similar reasons or in similar circumstances).
Either system leads to similar outcomes. (The first allows stronger response to offense, the second allows only mirroring).
Thanks for the link, it looks very interesting but it goes into my to-read list for today.
That's a good way to think about it but unfortunately, human language is so imprecise that IMO many people will leave with the conclusion that "sadly" means "using violence makes me sad and implicitly is therefore bad".
Ideally we'd live in a society where laws are a complete and consistent description of a valid (also complete and consistent) moral system. That's not the reality.
(If it's possible at all because morality operates on reality while legality operated on provability - a subset of reality which can be proven to a neutral third party.)
I suspect this kind of nuance is lost on the sort of people who think having qualms about the use of violence is the same thing as pretending to be saintly pacifists.
Because advocating things which are moral/ethical but illegal is often against the TOS :(
We need laws which are explicitly based on moral principles. Barring that, we should at least have laws which treat sufficiently large platforms as utilities and forbid them from performing censorship without due process.
You think we should give people being moderated on a forum due process? How would we ever run forums if every contentious and necessary moderation action could lead to a 5k-50k legal bill.
Last I heard, putting a glock on a quadcopter was creating an "illegal weapon system" or similar fancy sounding BS but I wonder what the accusation would be for a paintball gun on a drone?
On the list of "laws you don't want to screw with", National Firearms Act violations are high on my list. Regardless of whether something is or isn't a violation, I'm certainly not interested in paying expensive lawyers to argue they're not.
Their unaffordability is only the last straw that will hopefully break the camel's back and create a counter-force.
Normal people generally don't dream to be ultra rich, they just want to enjoy life (and have enough money to do so). But a small percentage is obsessed with money and they obviously invest much more energy into gaining it.
This dynamic means that people don't get paid according to how much value they produce but according to how good they are at negotiating and at maneuvering themselves into positions of power from which they 1) take a bigger cut than they deserve according to real value produced 2) further entrench themselves.
Salary negotiations are a perfect example of divide and conquer - the employer has more information, more runway, more experience negotiating, etc. And on top they negotiate with each employee one by one. Imagine a reverse situation in which the people doing the real positive-sum work sit together on one side of the negotiation table and ask their new assistant (so called "manager") how much he wants to be paid.
But the real issue is ownership. People who don't do any work get paid (if not in money directly, then by being able to sell the company). And they get to pass this "ownership" onto their children who contributed nothing at all.
I am convinced a lot of these runaway feedback loops would be destroyed if ownership of a company was by law distributed among employees according to the amount of time and skill level they worked there.
I like that idea, and I agree. a 10x spread of $ between skill levels, and otherwise by hours of effort and years of tenure. Yes the flight attendant who's worked there for 30 years should have more ownership (and more influence) than an executive who started last month.
I have an idea I've been batting around: mandatory 1% annual tax on public corporations that is expected to be paid in their own stock, and either held in a sovereign wealth fund, or distributed equally to all citizens. This simultaneously dilutes the wealth of the majority owners hold, boosts public savings (tax advantage to holding rather than selling), and makes ordinary people automatically invested in their nation's economy.
> if ownership of a company was by law distributed among employees according to the amount of time and skill level they worked there.
Those are so hard to quantify that I think you'd really have better luck instituting UBI. Both in terms of encoding it into law and getting voter support.
I also want to say, as a market socialist who owns stock, owning stock in your own company is the least diverse investment you can make, except maybe buying a house and then living in it.
And if it's based on time at the company, do I keep the stock when I leave? Am I punished by losing stock if I'm fired? How much of the company is owned by former employees? A lot? None?
If I only own stock while I work there, and I can't sell it, then it's not worth much. It's just a profit-sharing bonus with extra steps.
It's hard to quantify perfectly but we already quantify it imperfectly during salary negotiations. Don't make perfect an enemy of good. We could get a better system _today_ overnight if we just took everyone's salary and used it as weight/skill for distributing ownership per unit of time. We could further improve it by renegotiating on equal footing.
I am not against UBI as a safety net system so that everyone has enough to survive. But instituting UBI before restructuring the ownership system would be actively harmful because, again, we need enough straws to break the camel's back so that people take the time and energy to understand the root causes and oppose them. (Because people's reaction is not linearly proportional to inequality - there's nothing (acceptance/indifference) for a long time, opposition forms only when it's sufficiently bad.)
One large underlying cause of inequality is that we have 2 different reward systems:
a) Fixed money per unit of work (usually per unit of time or per item produced).
b) Ownership which gives full control of the owned structure and therefore the ability to capture the full value produced by it. (Minus money to pay workers but money per person does not scale, ownership per person does.)
These map pretty cleanly to the worker vs owner divide. And this distinction is what we need to erase to erase the class divide.
> do I keep the stock when I leave
Yes, that's the point and this is where it would be better than current co-op systems. Every person's economic input into a collaborative effort is the weight used to divide their ownership. So if you stop working there, you keep your part but it keeps getting smaller relative to the rest as more people keep putting in their work or money.
Money (investment) is a valid economic input and should weight towards ownership. How much? We could use median salary of the country, median salary of the company, or my favorite - divide the investor's total net worth by the number of hours he did worked - this would somewhat erase the advantage rich people would have upon transitioning to this system.
> Am I punished by losing stock if I'm fired?
Interesting question - I don't think so, if you used to contribute positively, you should keep the reward, but you might need to be penalized if you caused harm to the company proportionally to the harm.
> How much of the company is owned by former employees?
That would increase over time up to a plateau as they got old and died. (Ownership should not be heritable.)
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Regarding diversifying investment - you can do that by either working for many different companies or by using your money to invest into other companies.
Thinking about this as buying and selling shares is IMHO misleading - it's more like re-weighting a distribution. Adding an economic input reduces everyone else's share slightly but since that input (hopefully) leads to more revenue, they will be better off (if they don't think so, they (as owners) can vote against taking the investment).
I am not an economist and I still feel like I am scratching the surface of how the economy works so maybe there are loopholes or degeneracies in this system. I'd like to find them and fix them. And I should probably write a proper blog post about this with diagrams since some of this should be easier to convey with images. What I am proposing is similar to some economic systems (mutualism is one of the closest) but I haven't seen this exact thing around weighted ownership.
Crazy idea: when companies change their product, they have to change the name.
Do you ever feel like the same food item doesn't taste the same it did 10 years ago? Maybe it's your memory being faulty or maybe the company got new management which decided to cut costs while keeping prices, extract the differential value from customer inertia and move on when the product stops being profitable.
Android is the same. Certain freedoms were a part of the offering - a part of the brand name. They no longer are. Not only should lose their trademark[0], they should be legally forced to change the name.
[0]: The purpose of which is to identify genuine product from counterfeits - in this case, the counterfeit just happens to be by the same company which released the original product.
Don't be ridiculous, AI will create robots that do all the work and the only use for humans will be as amusement for the rich who own everything. Probably not sarcasm, I don't even know.
But how does he explain the failure of peaceful revolutions in Belarus or China?
My understanding of social dynamics is that being peaceful only works as long as it gains you more supporters than you lose by government action against the movement. Some governments give in but if not, at some point, the scale tips and violence or surrender are your only options.
In Belarus, I knew they were fucked as soon as I heard that police support the protests by putting down their guns and joining the protesters.
They gave up their ability to use violence and therefore became as irrelevant as the other protesters. They should have kept their guns. They should have tried to use their openly armed protest to incite other armed people to also join. At some point, the potential violence would materialize but hopefully at that point, enough of the armed people would be on the side of the protest.
Maybe the dictator would give up if he saw the situation spiraling out of control (and hopefully be executed as punishment anyway).
Maybe the dictator would try to flee and get caught and executed ("gunned down"). Maybe his bunker would get overrun.
Maybe someone close to him would try to get favor from the protesters and kill him.
But all of those potential outcomes were closed off if people opposing him didn't have enough guns.
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