Gaywallet (they/it)

I’m gay

  • 363 Posts
  • 1.58K Comments
Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: January 28th, 2022

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  • I understand why you might be upset based on how they made a rather sweeping statement about the comments without addressing any content. When they said “a bunch of sanctimonious people with too much appreciation for their own thoughts and a lack of any semblance of basic behaviour” it might strike many as an attack on the user base, but I’m choosing to interpret it through the lens of simply being upset at people who are not nice. I could be wrong, and perhaps @[email protected] can elaborate on exactly who and what they were talking about.

    Regardless, let’s try our best to treat them in good faith. Don’t let your own biases shape how you interpret people or their language. Please try to ask clarifying questions first before jumping to the assumption that they are a right wing troll.












  • That’s just cherrypicking. Yes some people will review bomb. Others will make fake positive reviews to counteract people review bombing a game for being too “woke”.

    In the end the only thing that even could matter is how people in aggregate work - and that’s easy to account for, you just readjust the distribution to be more spread out to get the “true” score of things.

    This video seems more like clickbait than anything. I’m finding it hard to find anything worthwhile to engage with here even from a high level.





  • I’m brought to mind of the concept that any movement must have a peaceful branch for the system to acknowledge and meet demands for change as well as a “violent” branch to drive the opponents to the bargaining table. And within both of those is a need to take care of the community to enable them to continue to protest for change.

    Completely agreed with this concept. I’ve been a big fan of multiple voices advocating for different things. It helps others understand where the center is or where the most agreement is likely to be. You need some people asking for everything in order to push in the direction of change, otherwise the people in charge will think what they have given up is satisfactory (or perhaps even too much).

    I think where these protests will succeed or fail is community coming together to take care of each other, with a safety net so many more people will be able to participate and make their voices heard.

    Yes I think general principles of anarchy apply here in that the more people you can get mobilized around a single issue and the more engagement you can get the more successful it will be. Entirely peaceful protests can drive huge change, but only when the government is a peaceful one who actively wishes to represent the people. The more corrupt and out of touch they get the less they will care about the constituency and the massive prevalence of voter disenfranchisement and a system of corruption which is increasingly run on money in the United States seems to suggest that it falls more closely in that latter bucket.



  • Looking at hundreds of campaigns over the last century, Chenoweth found that nonviolent campaigns are twice as likely to achieve their goals as violent campaigns. And although the exact dynamics will depend on many factors, she has shown it takes around 3.5% of the population actively participating in the protests to ensure serious political change.

    I really wish this was in a proper paper, as I wonder how much selection bias is at play here. How is “achieving their goals” measured? What kind of governments are we talking about? What is “serious political change”? I have a lot of serious doubt that nonviolent protests do much against hostile governments. They are absolutely important, and true research has revealed they are much more effective at mobilizing people who agree with the protestors, but the research also shows that violent protests have a larger affect on folks who do not agree with the protestors because they cause actual harm and more forcibly bring people to the table to negotiate. But what exactly is considered violent is a difficult one to quantify and direct physical violence (injuring and killing others) is much less effective than non-human directed violence which is difficult to quantify and to define. Destruction of property, for example, is often considered a form of non-human directed violence which likely has a larger affect on change than human-directed physical violence because no one is directly injured and it creates a direct economic incentive for change to happen.