The Greatest Generation was horney. Really horney. Once they got that Hitler fella sorted, they went home and literally fucked Baby Boomers into existence.

Eh, it’s a fun meme, but the whole thing was Palps playing both sides. Even Dooku was just a patsy in the end.

Now, Mon Mothma did go on to setup the New Republic in both canon and Legends. Neither version really worked out. Say what you will about Saw Gerrera, but he did recognize that the Republic wouldn’t have fallen if it governed well in the first place, and going back to that was a mistake.

I read a bit of the book. There’s some framing around it by the authors and popular press that I don’t think quite matches up with the data. In the end, it is true that movements that are predominantly nonviolent tend to win more often, but there is often a violent element that plays a role.

(Apologies for any mistakes in my transcription from the book.)

To quote it:

Our central contention is that nonviolent campaigns have a participation advantage over violent insurgencies, which is an important factor in determining campaign outcomes. The moral, physical, informational, and commitment barriers to participation are much lower for nonviolent resistance than for violent insurgency. Higher levels of participation contribute to a number of mechanisms necessary for success, including enhanced resilience, higher probabilities of tactical innovation, expanded civic disruption (thereby raising the costs to the regime of maintaining the status quo), and loyalty shifts involving the opponent’s erstwhile supporters, including members of security forces.

Which sounds like nonviolent campaigns win, right? Reading on shows it’s not quite that simple.

It is appropriate here to briefly define the terms to which we will consistently refer in this book. First, we should distinguish violent and nonviolent tactics. As noted earlier, there are some difficulties with labeling one campaign as violent and another as nonviolent. In many cases, both nonviolent and violent campaigns exist simultaneously among competing groups. Often those who employ violence in mass movements are members of fringe groups who are acting independently, or in defiance of, the central leadership; or they are agents provocateurs used by the adversary to provoke the unarmed resistance to adopt violence (Zunes 1994). Alternative, often some groups use both nonviolent and violent methods of resistance over the course of their existence, as with the ANC in South Africa. Characterizing a campaign as violent or non-violent simplifies a complex constellation of resistance methods.

It is nevertheless possible to characterize a campaign as principally nonviolent based on the primacy of nonviolent resistance methods and the nature of the participation in that form of resistance.

Later in the chapter:

As one might expect, there are several good reasons why social scientists have avoided comparing the dynamics and outcomes of nonviolent and violent campaigns, including their relative effectiveness. First, the separation of campaigns into violent and nonviolent for analytical purposes is problematic. Few campaigns, historically, have been purely violent or nonviolent, and many resistance movements, particularly protracted ones, have had violent and nonviolent periods.

Classifying any given movement as strictly nonviolent would not have worked. The data is too messy for that.

Even the definition of success is tricky:

Success and failure are also complex outcomes, about which much has been written (Baldwin 2000). For our study, to be considered a “success” a campaign had to meet two conditions: the full achievement of its stated goals (regime change, antioccupation, or succession) within a year of the peak of activities and a discernible effect on the outcome, such that the outcome was a direct result of the campaign’s activities (Pape 1997). The second qualification is important because in some cases the desired outcome occurred mainly because of other conditions. The Greek resistance against the Nazi occupation, for example, is not coded as a full success even though the Nazis ultimately withdrew from Greece. Although effective in many respects, the Greek resistance alone cannot be credited with the ultimate outcome of the end of Nazi influence over Greek resistance alone cannot be credited with the ultimate outcome of the end of Nazi influence over Greece since the Nazi withdrawal was the result of the Allied victory rather than solely Greek resistance.

In fact, they classify basically all resistance (nonviolent or violent) to the Nazi regime as a failure. There are a few exceptions, such as the Rosenstrasse Protest. However, the Nazis fell predominantly due to the actions of the armies of other nation states, not the local resistance groups (though they certainly played a role in helping, such as funneling intelligence to the Allies).

The current situation will tend to sweep away a lot of institutions. The Republican Party almost certainly won’t survive Trump, and there’s a chance Democrats won’t either. Even if they do, it’s not like they could hold on to being a singularly dominant party forever. Not when there are so many people voting for them only to make sure Republicans don’t take power.

They’ll have to adapt to that situation or perish. New political parties can spring up quickly. We’re not used to that in the US, but it’s happened here before, and happens around the world all the time.

Yup, black cats in bright sunlight bring out brown tones. People usually don’t realize it unless they have had a black cat.

Then let me come from a different angle: we don’t need Democrats. Not as a group, anyway. I’m fine with individual members, like AOC, but the party as a whole hasn’t been on our side. That won’t change.

Instead, we should be looking to build solidarity with unions and community. If Democrats exist at all at that point, they’ll be forced to deal with a very different political reality.

Edit: fixed some wording.

What happened in the last six months that makes you think Democrats will do shit if they get power back? Or even the last decade?

The conclusions are more nuanced than the headlines. Her data shows that violent and non-violent methods often work in tandem. It tends to be different factions of the same movement using different methods, and they tend not to like each other. The more violent faction says the peaceful faction is naive, while the peaceful faction finds violent methods unconscionable.

More people will tend to join the peaceful faction, perhaps because it’s easier to join the side that isn’t asking morally gray things of them. However, the violent side plays a more direct role in undermining the system of oppression.

Just so we’re all aware, GPS jammers will invite the interest of the FCC. Now, protests aren’t about being well-behaved, but just know that there’s an entirely different federal agency being brought in.

Extra funny because a lot of stuff comes in from the ports of LA and San Fransisco.

Make it income tax rather than sales tax, and I’m in. I live in a state that sends more to the federal government than we get back, so this would likely be a lower overall tax amount for me.

Pixel 6 is the minimum that can load up GrapheneOS. Those are like $130 on eBay.

Pixel 8/9 does have some CPU features that help separate memory, which can be useful for keeping apps from creeping on memory they shouldn’t.

This is the sort of nuts and bolts of protesting that Americans are learning the hard and fast way.

Since you’re posting this all over the thread, I’ll also have to repeat the information that gyro/accelerometers are not capable of doing that. Small measurement errors stack up and throw it completely off.

Gyro/accelerometer data isn’t accurate enough to do that. Small errors in the data add up and will quickly drift away from the actual location. You can use it for video game controllers, but not tracking over large distances. Edit: there’s a reason the best VR tracking often uses external methods, not controllers alone.

But most phones have GPS and that’s where the real problem is.

Don’t worry about it, they’re in a chaotic era right now.

For raw computation, yes. Most programs aren’t raw computation. They run in and out of memory a lot, or are tapping their feet while waiting 2ms for the SSD to get back to them. When we do have raw computation, it tends to be passed off to a C library, anyway, or else something that runs on a GPU.

We’re not going to significantly reduce datacenter energy use just by rewriting everything in C.

You know, Constitutional scholars joke about third amendment violations. It’s not a ridiculous possibility that they have a sudden influx of cases soon.

They’re interrelated. Europeans destroyed their culture, which makes them worried about revenge if minorities have enough political power to do it.

Edit: missed a word

Have had one for over a decade and I’m further to the left than ever.