A bug that WIRED discovered in True the Vote’s VoteAlert app revealed user information—and an election worker who wrote about carrying out an illegal voter-suppression scheme.
The TL;DR version is that all participation in a society is, at its core, volitional. Even in the most ruthless dictatorship, the police, the dictatorship’s judges, the executioners, and all of them, are still just people waking up in the morning with their families, walking out the door, and deciding how they’re going to handle the situations they’re faced with. There’s no such thing as “the system,” truly. There are just a ton of people interacting, with a bunch of habits they’ve developed for what patterns they’re going to adhere to. What they see, and in particular what they see from any “enemies” they’re faced with, is going to impact their allegiances and what reactions they think are appropriate to the situations they’re faced with.
Some of the most repressive regimes have crumbled, at the end, because the police simply saw which way the wind was blowing and refused to fire on the strikers. Some of the most determined and justified violent revolutions have turned around to become even more repressive than the injustice they were overthrowing.
The details are important, and broad generalizations will always break down sometimes. It’s hard to say what approach is better in all situations. But, if you’re going to make a single general rule, peaceful is better. Certainly in a situation like now, where we still have a mostly civil society, with most of the trappings of the rule of law and stable institutions are mostly intact, peaceful is better.
I’ve been having a surge of anxiety and anger about this election. I really hope I can see things your way… Right now, it doesn’t feel that peace is an option. It doesn’t seem like we’ll get the choice.
That isn’t true. It’s surprising.
https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2019/02/why-nonviolent-resistance-beats-violent-force-in-effecting-social-political-change/
The TL;DR version is that all participation in a society is, at its core, volitional. Even in the most ruthless dictatorship, the police, the dictatorship’s judges, the executioners, and all of them, are still just people waking up in the morning with their families, walking out the door, and deciding how they’re going to handle the situations they’re faced with. There’s no such thing as “the system,” truly. There are just a ton of people interacting, with a bunch of habits they’ve developed for what patterns they’re going to adhere to. What they see, and in particular what they see from any “enemies” they’re faced with, is going to impact their allegiances and what reactions they think are appropriate to the situations they’re faced with.
Some of the most repressive regimes have crumbled, at the end, because the police simply saw which way the wind was blowing and refused to fire on the strikers. Some of the most determined and justified violent revolutions have turned around to become even more repressive than the injustice they were overthrowing.
The details are important, and broad generalizations will always break down sometimes. It’s hard to say what approach is better in all situations. But, if you’re going to make a single general rule, peaceful is better. Certainly in a situation like now, where we still have a mostly civil society, with most of the trappings of the rule of law and stable institutions are mostly intact, peaceful is better.
I like your worldview.
I’ve been having a surge of anxiety and anger about this election. I really hope I can see things your way… Right now, it doesn’t feel that peace is an option. It doesn’t seem like we’ll get the choice.