jj4211

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.

At least conservative media at least tried to declare we have no reason to support Ukraine.

Of course the Klan also flies the US flag.

Culturally in the rural south, a lot goes into convincing as many people as possible that the civil war had little to do with racism and instead it was about the elite northerners vaguely bossing the poor southerners around.

As a consequence, they get that flag flown by a fair number of oblivious people that either worship some idealized vision of the antebellum south or just in general people saying "being a rebel is cool".

Like Dukes of Hazard fans largely treated it as a symbol of generic righteous rebellion rather than referring to the core principles of the conflict that created the flag.

Yeah, my education growing up featured pro-confederacy curriculum pretty hard. It sums up as "The union didn't ban slavery at all until midway into the war, and even then only for rebelling states to scare the union border states into staying with the union to keep their slaves".

Of course, they had to really gloss over the various declarations of secession, some of the legislative moves of the period, and the Lincoln-Douglas debates. But in exchange there was just so much support from the daughters/sons of the confederacy... Sure they could point out how much the Union was slow-walking change, but it was absurd that we were taught that slavery was at most a footnote as to why the war kicked off.