The very young and very brilliant Woojin Lim wrote a silly article titled 'the success condition for protest' some four years ago. The fact is, protests are about self-assertion. They should occur even if bound to fail. Little kids realize this very quickly. Make a big fuss about not being allowed to stay up to watch 'the Exorcist' and Mum will decide not to try to make you eat your spinach. I suppose Woojin was made to eat his spinach though when he pleaded to be allowed to stay up late to finish reading the Posterior Analytic in the original Greek, his Tiger Mommy threatened to confiscate his collection of books on algebraic topology.
One type of argument for the justification of protest activities
is just as shit as every other. Protest should be independent of any fucking justification whatsoever. It is a different matter that you sullenly acquiesce in what is inevitable. What is important is that you established a 'threat point'. If you could go so berserk about the demand that you stop shitting on the boss's desk, just think what you would do if he demanded you do some actual work.
has appealed to pragmatic considerations.
They dictate when to concede. But protest itself is thymotic and about self-assertion.
Guided by the principle ‘the means should prefigure the end,’ defenders of what I call ‘the success condition for protests’ have argued that protests—and particular forms of it—are permissible only by virtue of their success in bringing forth practical results in line with their movement’s objectives, be it social change or enhanced cooperation.
That isn't protest. It is being a boring arsehole. Nothing is permissible by virtue of success. It is so only if it is actually permitted by whatever authority one claims to recognize or whatever principle one claims guides one's actions. But this is merely a manner of speaking. There is no fixed 'extension' to the term. However, if the matter is justiciable, then there may be a 'bright-line' demarcation of what is and isn't permissible.
The condition holds that morally justified protests have a good enough chance of successfully achieving its ends,
But 'ends' may be strategically conceived or, in any case, unknowable because of Knightian Uncertainty. Thus 'achieving ends' may mean anything whatsoever. My flatulence is a protest against Neo-Liberalism. Sadly, the true end towards which I was working was shitting myself. This lost me my job. This weakened 'Neo-Liberalism' because I dropped out of the Labour Force thus reducing the 'surplus value' Capitalism can extract.
thus rendering the risks they impose, all other things equal, morally acceptable.
Sadly, since 'ends' or even 'identity' are intensional or epistemic in nature, even if everything else is ceteris paribus, they are not so themselves. You can't do comparative statics or Cost Benefit analysis.
Since certain forms of resistance should be undertaken if and only if they are considered successful in achieving their desired set of objectives,
'considered' and 'desired' and 'successful' are all 'intensional' and epistemic. They don't obey Liebniz's law of identity. The sentence given above is 'anything goes'. It can be equally persuasively affirmed or denied in any context.
in converse, protest activities that are considered ineffective or counterproductive to the movement on the whole should not be pursued at all.
unless they may possibly provoke an even more counterproductive backlash. Your nutters may so incense the nutters on the other side that they go too far and thus scare the straights.
On this note, some have even argued that all protests are pointless.
But protesting can, itself, be fun. Also, there's always a chance you meet a hot chick who hates her father and fucks you so as to get back at him.
In this article, I will examine this success condition and ask whether particular forms of protests—for instance, those that are violent, covert, evasive, or offensive, and perhaps “counterproductive”—should be reconsidered, if not avoided simpliciter.
Disavow them by all means- more particularly if there is a video of your identical twin brother (who was stolen from the maternity ward by the Doctor who also brainwashed your Mum into denying she'd had twins) bashing in the skull of Nancy Pelosi.
Effective Nonviolence
is like effective not bashing in the skulls of frail elderly women. You can get a PhD in this from Harvard by spending a lot of money.
This question concerning effectiveness lies at the heart of “Why Civil Resistance Works:
It doesn't. On the other hand, if a large number of people habitually commit a particular crime and the Police stop enforcing the relevant law, we could say 'Crime works'. But we would wrong. What has stopped working is the enforcement of the Law.
The Strategic Logic of Nonviolent Conflict” by Erica Chenoweth and Maria Stephan—two political scientists who aspire to figure out whether campaigns of nonviolent resistance are more effective drivers of change than their violent counterparts.
Their methodology was fatally flawed. What matters is 'threat point'. It is fundamentally counterfactual and can't be observed in any way. All that historians can do is quote eye-witness accounts by decision makers and draw conclusions from that. But those conclusions were unreliable. De Gaulle initially fled when faced by student protests. But did this have to do with his distrust of his own army commanders? Who can tell?
“Our study therefore concludes that nonviolent civil resistance works, both in terms of achieving campaigns’ strategic objectives
Gandhi's objective was vast ethnic cleansing involving millions of Hindus, Sikhs and Muslims- right?
and in terms of promoting the long-term well-being of the societies in which the campaigns have been waged,”
India became a place where minorities weren't safe. Also it stopped being able to feed or defend itself. On the other hand, you could have an Italian lady running the country on the grounds that her hubby had ruled the country because his Mummy had ruled the country because her Daddy had ruled the country. What a wonderfully democratic outcome!
they write. “Violent insurgency, on the other hand, has a dismal record on both counts.”
Very true. The American Revolution was a dismal failure. On the other hand, the non-violence of the Lenape led to their ruling their own country.
Chenoweth and Stephan present a number of statistical findings from the research and analysis of 323 campaigns, both violent and nonviolent, which occurred around the world between 1900 and 2006.
Their thesis was wholly discredited when their optimism re. the Arab Spring and non-violent movements in Iran and Palestine (!) was shown to be utterly misplaced. The plain fact is, they didn't understand the countries they wrote about.
After analyzing nearly 160 variables related to success criteria—number of participants, international sanctions, backfiring and loyalty shifts, etc.—they found that nonviolent action has a success rate of 57 percent (cf. 25 percent by violence), and a failure rate of only 20 percent (whereas violence fails over 60 percent of the time).
By contrast, not having any fucking campaign but just bribing or persuading politicians succeeds one hundred and fourteen percent of the time. Consider my refusal to campaign for the legalization of farting. The plain fact is nobody arrests me even though I fart all the time. By contrast, if I had launched either a non-violent or a violent campaign, I probably would have faced at least a Civil Suit filed by my posh cousins in Hampstead. This is because they want to counter my theory that Gayatri mantra should only be recited while farting vigorously. Bizarrely, they claim the Hindu Religion requires no such thing.
To be coded a “success” the campaign must have met its stated objective within a reasonable period of time (two years), and have had a discernible impact on the outcome.
Like Brexit, which was non-violent. But that was because there was a referendum.
If the campaign did not meet its objectives or did not obtain significant concessions, the campaign was coded a “failure.”
Sadly, the campaign to abolish death is coded a failure.
Strategic nonviolent action, Chenoweth and Stephan claims, at times enhanced the campaign’s domestic and international legitimacy, attracting more broad-based participation and sympathy.
This is why Dalai Lama is ruling in Tibet and Aung San Suu Kyi is running Burma.
The involvement of greater numbers of participants in resistance campaigns led to a number of factors that positively contributed to a movement’s success in creating desired change,
e.g. Trade Unions forcing Employers to close down their factories and run the fuck away
including the appearance of openness to negotiation and bargaining, a larger social network, and allegiance shifts within security forces.
e.g. the Army telling the General to fuck off because it has sworn allegiance to the local tart.
Building off of this work, other researchers have found that impact of public opinion on changing policy is substantial: the mobilization of sympathetic bystanders to perceive the status quo as illegitimate successfully instigated social change processes.
Why stop there? Why not have yet more researchers discover the impact of people on people? Moreover, when people walk or crawl, they are displaying mobility. This can successfully instigate processes of social change- e.g. people walking from one place to another place.
Although Chenoweth and Stephan both acknowledge that “there is no blueprint for success,” tactical considerations of effectiveness bear significant weight on whether violent or nonviolent actions should be undertaken.
Tactical considerations are equally significant in deciding when and where to defecate. Hopefully Chenoweth and Stephan will focus on this in their next book.
By no means do the authors call for a blanket of nonviolence, or nothing but nonviolence.
Sadly, they do call for more and more useless idiots calling for stupid shit.
But all things considered, since nonviolent civil resistance is more successful in securing its desired political aims, Chenoweth and Stephan suggest that nonviolent forms of resistance should be preferred, given the circumstances, strategically, over less effective and possibly counterproductive, violent forms of resistance.
Nonviolent forms of resistance just means either bribing people or making a nuisance of yourself. Both may produce a bigger backlash.
Murky Metrics
While an excellent, well-researched book, Chenoweth and Stephan acknowledge that it is difficult to categorize campaigns in the binary designation of “violent” or “nonviolent” given that many strategic campaigns have elements from both approaches. Some of the civil resistance movements that they classify as nonviolent—for instance, the anti-apartheid struggle in South Africa and the First Palestinian Intifada against the Israeli occupation—often in fact involved violent flanks.
Even if they didn't, they imposed a cost. If that rose too high relative to the Benefit, policy was changed. Sadly, this meant things could turn to shit much more quickly.
In their criteria, a movement is violent if it rests primarily on armed insurrection.
This may not be violent if the other side runs the fuck away. A bloodless revolution can occur if an armed group scares the shit out of the current regime. Was the recent Taliban takeover of Afghanistan, or the recent collapse of Hasina's regime in Bangladesh, violent or non-violent? In the former case, there was very little fighting. Government troops were happy to surrender to anyone who would give them safe conduct and maybe a bit of food. In the latter case, the Army commander said the soldiers might not obey shoot to kill orders. Hasina had just 45 minutes to pack and get on a plane.
“Characterizing a campaign as violent or nonviolent simplifies a complex constellation of resistance methods,” they write.
Some political movements consider that only violent means are legitimate in their own gaining power. This was the anti-Browder thesis of various Communist parties. The moment they said, 'well will participate in elections, and take office if we win', they were on a slippery slope to becoming non-violent. This is because instead of settling internal disputes through bloody purges, rivals within the party might rely on their popularity with the voters. There were some purely non-violent movements. But they could not hold power because this would mean condoning the coercive methods used by men in uniform
It is difficult to fully explore the implications of each of the 160 variables on social change despite efforts of operationalisation.
by a pair of ignorant cretins
Provided the large number of moving variables, including the shifting global landscape of dissent and authoritarian adaptations, causation is difficult to establish through empirical observation.
It is easy enough for ordinary people witnessing these events.
After revisiting her study in 2017, Chenoweth notes that the success rates of nonviolent campaigns have declined by a staggering rate since 2010.
The alternative is to admit that nothing had changed. Her book was stupid.
The project of detailing all the relevant, collectively exhaustive outcome-mechanisms is itself a task that is very hard, if not impossible.
It is unnecessary.
In the social sciences literature at large, how to measure the effectiveness of protests and social movements is unclear,
Nope. You look at how long it lasted and what proportion of the population was involved. Don't forget the desired effect may not be to change policy but to disavow it. 'Not in my name' just means that I'll pay taxes to kill innocent Muslims, I just won't say that I like killing Muslims.
especially provided that all protesters’ notions of “perceived effectiveness” are not the same.
They differ for the same person over the space of a couple of drinks at the bar.
To add, public attitudes and perceptions of a protest’s success may radically change as time passes.
You think the protest was great coz you got laid. Then you find out you have the clap. You now think the protest sucked ass big time. Also, it turns out the hot chick was actually a dude. My mistake for thinking the placards read 'Grannies against Trump' rather than 'Trannies against Trump'
The question regarding the nature of “success,” and the identification of all the important influences and dynamics which factor into this buzzword, remain fuzzy at best.
More particularly if you are getting a smelly discharge from various orifices.
Chenoweth herself admits that even when civil resistance campaigns “fail” on her criteria in the short run, they have often led to longer-term reforms and changes that brought about democratization compared with violent campaigns.
Which is why it is important to protest against both Death and Taxes. The Grim Reaper should just , very kindly, take a fucking hint already, dude.
Even if the metric of effectiveness
there can be no metric because there are no sets and thus no topology which might conceivably be metrizable.
were straightforward, there are many more factors to account for than merely “effectiveness” when deciding what forms of protests to engage in.
more particularly if the hot chicks at the protest are likely to be elderly Trannies.
Beyond Effectiveness
In a short interview with the Oxford Political Review, Candice Delmas
not all useless academics are women. Still...
shared her thoughts on what considerations, possibly, lies beyond the effectiveness criterion. “There is need to question our ubiquitous and perennial calls for civility and nonviolence, which have been predicated on the idea that
your colleagues or students are serial killers who use the N-word and the C-word and Bob Woodward as a spittoon.
anything else is counterproductive,” she said.
It would be counterproductive for this lady to try to do something useful. She is simply too stupid. She would end up trying to bite off her own head.
In her most recent book, “A Duty to Resist: When Disobedience Should Be Uncivil,”
e.g. calling Mum a Lezza ho-bag and telling her to fuck the fuck off if she suggests we study something useful at Collidge.
Delmas challenges Chenoweth and Stephan, arguing that the empirical argument for the superior effectiveness of nonviolent resistance and civil disobedience in the context of large social movements does not at face value establish the ineffectiveness or counterproductivity of uncivil forms of disobedience.
The superior effectiveness of scratching your arse with your hand does not, at face value, establish the ineffectiveness or counterproductivity of using your toes to do it.
In some cases, Delmas argues that recent protests in Hong Kong have been popular and remarkably effective due to tactics of uncivil disobedience.
That shite failed miserably. How fucking stupid does a Professor have to be not to see the outcome was inevitable?
In other cases, violent groups often work to strengthen the bargaining position of their nonviolent counterparts while protecting more moderate nonviolent activists from repression (a concept known as the “positive radical flank effect”).
Sadly, the violent group may later kill the non-violent counterpart. As for 'moderate nonviolent activists' either they give you money or you beat them till they do.
Delmas takes a further step. “More generally, effectiveness may not be measured solely in terms of contribution to a mass civil resistance campaign,” she writes. “Individual actions may be socially beneficial (“effective”) whether or not they lead to reform.”
Indeed, they may be socially beneficial whether or not they occur. In particular, actions involving fellating flying unicorns may cause rainbows to stream out of their arses.
For example, the Lavender Panthers’ organized use of self-defensive violence to fight violence in San Francisco in the 1970s can be justified,
because self-defence is justified
for it can directly frustrate injustice and benefit people in dire need through ways that are not available to nonviolent, civil disobedients.
Similarly, chopping off your dick can directly frustrate injustice- e.g. the fact that you don't have to sit down to pee whereas trillions of disabled Lesbians of Colour do. This strategy is not available to non-violent civil disobedients coz they got no dicks or balls but are simply a vast and vacuous vagina.
Uncivil protests can be just as “effective” in other ways besides contributing to the objects of select social movements. Incivility draws attention to injustice.
So does shitting into your cupped hands and flinging your faeces at members of the clergy while shouting 'Fuck the Police!'
Apt Anger
is like apt shitting. There's a place and a time where nothing else will do.
Even if we grant, for the sake of argument, that a movement’s (uncivil) tactics are strategically ineffective, there may nonetheless be intrinsic, non-instrumental reasons to engage in those sorts of protests.
Or to engage in the relevant actions without bothering to protest anything whatsoever.
Uncivil disobedience, however prudentially irrational or counterproductive, might still be the best way for the activist to express one’s well-grounded disrespect and even contempt for a broken, unjust society that does not care about one’s life, well-being, and equal standing.
How shit do you have to be if the best thing you can do does not involve doing or studying anything useful or worthwhile? Still, it is a fact that Society is very cruel for caring nothing about my marvellous farts even though most of them protest vociferously against this utterly reprehensible lack of interest on the part of Society and Humanity at large.
There is intrinsic worth, immeasurable by social scientific tools, that comes with expressing and affirming one’s agency and dignity in the face of threats and denial thereof.
Only if there is intrinsic worth in my farting.
In “The Aptness of Anger,” Amia Srinivasan develops an account of “affective injustice,” that is, when victims of injustice must withhold expressing their apt feelings and emotions because of other prudential considerations (i.e. outcomes and effectiveness).
Daddy has to repress his instinct to say 'that's hideous! Our daughter is deeply deeply disturbed!' when shown the drawings his little Princess had made.
Alas, forcing agents to shut up adds an affective injustice that compounds the initial arms of oppression.
Very true. People don't mind being beaten and sodomized. What get's their goat is being told to shut up about it by tele-marketeers. At least, they describe themselves as tele-marketeers who need to know your Bank Password and pin number and sort code for some mysterious reason. They get very angry when I say, my password is... just one sec...I remember I changed it when I was being raped by your mother... what was it?...Donkey-fucker? No. That was her pet name for you.'
“The counterproductivity of one’s anger is often seen as dispositive reason not to get angry, whatever the circumstances,” Srinivasan writes.
It is never seen in that way. People may say some such thing to you but getting angry is like farting. It occurs whether or not it is counter-productive. Srinivasan is as stupid as shit. Nothing regarding a non-justiciable issue can be 'dispositive'.
A long thread of literature dating back from Seneca to Martha Nussbaum
why not say 'from Shakespeare to Farty McFartypants'?
pits anger against sanity and civility.
This is fine if you think, as the Stoics did, that it is a result of a defective belief. We know better. Emotions are Darwinian algorithms of the mind.
The opposing twin of the counterproductivity critique, long rooted in the tradition of Black and feminist political thought,
i.e. whining about White dicks.
in contrast, challenges the empirical presupposition that ‘anger is at best a weapon for self-harm.’
In Sanskrit there is a saying 'anger is a small pleasure'.
Srinivasan quotes the powerful words of Audrey Lorde, “anger expressed and translated into action in the service of our vision and our future is a liberating and strengthening act of clarification.”
Farting expressed and translated into action- e.g. shitting into your cupped hands and flinging your faeces at members of the Clergy while shouting 'Death to the Police!'- is a liberating and strengthening act iff you are a fucking chimpanzee.
Getting angry is a means of affectively “appreciating” and “marking” the injustice in the world.
Just like farting.
Hence, the metrics of effectiveness and aptness can be pulled apart.
Nope. There are no such metrics to start off with.
There is more to the justification of anger and uncivil protests than its mere effects.
Indeed. Anger and uncivil protests may cause flying unicorns to shit out rainbows composed entirely of tiny leprechauns.
Anger, however unproductive, might still be a fitting emotional response to the unjust world as it is.
In the view of a turd. Sure.
By condemning anger, Srinivasan concludes, “we neglect, as we have always neglected, those who were never allowed to be angry, the slaves and women who have the power of neither the state nor the sword.”
Some slaves and some women had the power of the State and the Sword. Most men didn't. Still, it is true that we neglect, as we have always neglected, those who were never allowed to turn into pussy-cats. Do you think Uncle Tom, sitting in his cabin, was permitted by Simon Legree to turn into a cat? I tell you, Legree would whip him mercilessly if he so much as made a miaow miaow noise. As for women- did Queen Victoria turn into a cat? No! Disraeli and Gladstone forcibly restrained her from so doing. This is the reason that it is apt for injured and oppressed peeps- e.g. those who lack a penis and have to sit down to pee- to make miaow miaow noises even if they personally have no inclination to turn into a pussy cat and chase after mice.
Marching Forward
rather than backward across the Irish Sea
The success condition for protests places a constraint on every protester’s actions.
Only in the sense that the becoming a cat condition for slaves and women places a constraint on peeps who have to sit down to pee and who feel that baby is totes enslaving them.
Provided empirical backing, this qualifier could limit the realm of justifiable protests to only peaceful, public, nonviolent, respectful, and civil forms of resistance.
No. A success condition is a feasibility constraint exogenous to the underlying 'realm'.
On the other hand, by solely relying on this bendable, oft-oversimplified threshold of effectiveness, we fail to adequately capture the complexity of movements, the diverse standpoints of victims and activists, and the apt affective states involved.
But no one can adequately capture anything. One may as well say 'by solely relying on our arsehole to defecate we fail to adequately capture the complexity of our bowel movements and the diverse standpoints of the activists upon whose heads we would like to shit.'.
Perhaps this calls for more interdisciplinary work
If this is work, what is wanking?
to bridge empirical and non-empirical work on political protests and forms of civil and uncivil disobedience.
I suppose the kid is being sarcastic.
For, when interviewed about the role of analytical political philosophy in face of the social sciences,
that role is to examine normative questions while 'bracketing' empirical issues. The problem is that genuine schizophrenics are better at it than those who traffic in the warmed-up sick of the Seventies.
Delmas explained, “its role is to contest the common sense in society
lunatics do this better
and in scholarship,
It is common knowledge that non-STEM scholarship is worthless shit.
changing the outlook and what to look for, how to understand success and failure, violence and nonviolence, and so forth.”
The problem here is that either what is 'political' involves what is 'endoxa'- conventional wisdom- for the polis or else it is elitist, Straussian, and deals in 'Noble lies' or utterly ignoble paranoid drivel- i.e. screaming hysterically because of the horrendous epistemic self-abuse you have suffered, just because Mum & Dad sent you to a Liberal Arts College rather than enrolling you in the ISIS training program at a young age.
She added, with a laugh: “the empirical question is not our job?”
Her job is stupidity. What is utterly scandalous is that she is White. This is a terrible affront to trillions of disabled Lesbians of colour. She should at least paint some black stripes on herself. If Kamala becomes POTUS, her first executive action must be to ensure this outcome.
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