jj4211 @ jj4211 @lemmy.world

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2 yr. ago

I don't personally know, but as far as I could tell, people in the USA were largely ok with the Vietnam war, until they started to draft people to send to Vietnam who never wanted to be in a military.

I wouldn't think of it as somehow absolving people in the region from wanting to make this stuff happen, but without the resources and support from outside, they might be a bit more restrained by necessity/unable to inflict quite the scale of disasters.

Like how North Korea would have probably started some shit but they can't because they don't have anyone willing to boost their military capability to the requisite level. Meanwhile every player in the middle east has some bigger country happy to pump up their military resources while simultaneously tending to distance themselves from the result because a proxy war is safer than direct conflict.

Sometimes it feels like people are worse to people that almost agree with them than they are to people who are completely at odds with them.

I think before airplane people would have said the same of Leslie Nielson. I'm going to reserve judgement for now.

While it might be thoughtful, it's based on like 3 events. It's crazy to even bother mention the 3.5% threshold with such a trivial sample size.

If a protest of a billion people happens, then it cannot be ignored by the media.

I know, it was hyperbole, but the point is that if 12 million people are on the street, it's not that the 12 million people need to get people's attention, they are indicative that the people already have that perspective and are showing it in the streets.

A small protest has a goal of getting attention on a problem that people may lack awareness. A multi-million person protest isn't about a need to raise awareness anymore, it's about showing the awareness and commitment that is already there. For whatever volume of people actively protest, you can be sure there's a singnificant multiple of that number of people who agree with the protestors but didn't take it to the streets for one reason or another.

Well I meant the more rhetorical "pushing", but yes, some of the activity of the claimed non-violence seems a bit violent.

I would say that I doubt you can have millions of people protest and manage to be completely non-violent. Some folks will take it to violence in the name of the cause, some will opportunisticly do it under the cover of the movement, and finally some might "false flag" to try to discredit the movement.

There are way more DGUs than there are not.

I think this is a pretty gigantic citation needed here. I couldn't find anything supporting this assertion but plenty of material showing the opposite.

…the perp taking his own life.

Well, technically, that is someone with a firearm I suppose...

On the one hand, most of those incidents cited were in the face of a regime that also didn't want to care. Just hard to ignore circumstances if 3.5% of your people are out on the streets and likely most of the people off the streets agree with them.

On the other hand, they base this on very few instances, so it's hardly a statistical slam dunk, it's vaguely supportive of some concepts, but anyone taking note of specific numbers is really overextending the research beyond what it can possibly say.

I think it's not "3.5% of people want an outcome" but "protests of significant magnitude to have 3.5% actively on the streets pushing" correlate with a very very large population that agrees, but not enough to be out on the streets.

So even if 40 million people want single payer, there are not 12 million in the streets.

But again, this is based on a scant handful of "movements", so it's pretty useless on specifics. Most I can see as a takeaway is perhaps that a violent movement may be too high stakes for people and a largely non-violent movement can attract more people and more people usually matter more than more violence.

Based on the article "no non-violent movement that has involved more than 3.5% of a population has ever failed" has the caveat of "we only look at 3 of them, and those 3 worked".

So their overall sample size is small, and the 3.5% sample size is just 3. Further, those 3 had no idea someone in the vague future would retroactively measure their participation to declare it a rock solid threshold.

I think the broader takeaway is that number of people seems to matter more than degree of violence, and violence seems to alienate people that might have otherwise participated.

can’t even do video playback on VLC.

I remember back in the day when I downloaded the first divx file my K6-400 couldn't smoothly play... I had been so used to thinking of that as a powerhouse coming from my Pentium 60, which was the first one I ran Linux on.

Way way too much stock is placed in that study.

For one, their total sample size was only 323 events, only 3 of which met the "3.5%" level. So the statement that change is inevitable based on only 3 instances is really crazy.

Further, none of those three instances had participants thinking that 3.5% was some sort of goal, it was a correlation. So now you have a lot of protestors treating 3.5% as a goal rather than some organic emergent property of the broader movement. Even if there was something inevitable about having a 3.5% participation rate when no one is aware of that metric, simply knowing of the metric can change a lot.

Of course, that was well below the claimed "magical" 3.5% level.

The cited scenarios were rarely democratic in nature.

Of course, in all the scenarios cited, there was no one telling them "get to 3.5% and things will happen", so with everyone saying "if we get to 3.5%, things will happen", that could itself break the "rule", as a sort of self-denying prophecy.

Further, it happens to hit the magical "3.5%" number everyone was throwing around.

Maybe it's correct and others will vouch for it, analysize, but an estimate that's significantly higher than an already decently high number that bridges the apparent gap to the 3.5% number almost exactly seems too conveniently on point, like someone wanted to stretch the numbers as little as possible while still hitting the designated number.

My understanding is that the train system and automotive sector are kind of opposite.

For automotive, the government does the roads and private industry does the vehicles.

Conversely, the rails are largely private industry excluding Amtrak, and Amtrak is mostly responsible for the trains with their government granted monopoly on passenger rail.

It's part of what really limits passenger rail, the companies that own the rail mostly want to rail from places like ports, and negligible value for rail between population centers. Also Amtrak has to suck it up if a rail is busy (wasnt supposed to be the case, but cargo operators were allowed to make trains too long to fit on bypass spurs so they can't get out of the way like they were legally required to).

One thing left unclear is how the determination is made about emergency versus non emergency.

If it's a separate number, ok, seems clear cut enough.

If it's human always answers and if it's some bullshit they just click a button to punt to AI instead of just hanging up, ok.

If they are saying the AI answers and does the triage and hands off immediately to a human when "emergency detected", then I could see how that promise could fail.

To be fair, that article was overall pretty plainly stating that the protests were overwhelmingly more well attended. Yes they had one line that raised the possibility of weather as a factor, but I think anyone but Trump could see the facts as presented in the story telling the real story.

Also went out of their way to characterize the protests as peaceful and the only politicians under violent threat were Democrats, despite the magnitude of protests.