since they can use things like sick/vacation days conveniently timed right
American workers live in such a different world. Not once in my 34 years on earth would it have occurred to me to go on sick leave or spend one of my holidays on strike. Absolutely insane.
And still there’s politicians out there saying things like “I will not ban fracking. I did not as vice president. In fact, I cast the tie-breaking vote to open up more fracking leases”. Playing with people’s lives just to make a buck. Really shows they’re not beholden to the people but to the owning class.
If I have to be completely honest with you, and this is an indictment of their research, it seems heavily dependent on what the protest is for or against.
They consider it non-violent.
This refers to Chenoweth’s research, and I’m somewhat familiar with their work. I think it’s good to clarify what non-violent means to them, as it’s non-obvious. For example, are economic boycotts violence? They harm businesses and keep food of the tables of workers. I don’t think that’s violence, but some people do, and what really matters here is what Chenoweth thinks violence is, and what they mean when they say “nonviolent tactics are more effective”.
At the end of “civil resistance: what everyone needs to know”, Chenoweth lists a number of campaigns which they’ve marked as violent/nonviolent and successful/unsuccessful. Let’s look at them and the tactics employed tonfigure out what exactly Chenoweth is advocating for. Please do not read this as a condemnation of their work, or of the protests that follow. This is just an investigation into what “nonviolence” means to Chenoweth.
Euromaidan: successful, nonviolent. In these protests, protestors threw molotov cocktails and bricks and at the police. I remember seeing a video of an apc getting absolutely melted by 10 or so molotovs cocktails.
The anti-Pinochet campaign: successful, nonviolent. This involved at least one attempt on Pinochet’s life.
Gwangju uprising in South Korea: unsuccessful, nonviolent. Car plowed into police officers, 4 dead.
Anti-Duvalier campaign in Haiti: successful, nonviolent. Destruction of government offices.
To summarize, here’s some means that are included in Chenoweth’s research:
The point here is not that these protests were wrong, they weren’t. The point is that they employed violent tactics in the face of state violence. Self-defense is not violence, and this article completely ignores this context, and heavily and knowingly implies that sitting in a circle and singing kumbaya is the way to beat oppression. It isn’t.
People who deny genocides (either the current ongoing one in Palestine as committed by Israel, or the one carried out by the Germans in WWII) are the lowest of the low. Absolute scum. To see people make excuses for atrocities as the Nakba, Sabra and Shatila, and the Holocaust in real time, as one is happening has been the most disturbing development of our age.
I don’t think downloading things illegally is OK, and I also don’t think spending money on genocide deniers like Irving is ethical. I also don’t think reading Irving will help you in any way, because genocide deniers are pretty much all the same, and there’s not a shred of credence or validity to what they have to say. If you still wish to see genocide denial and defense of people who say stuff like “Erase them, their families, mothers and children. These animals can no longer live”, and the denial of that which is obvious, you’ll find plenty of it available for free in modern day conservative shitrags talking about the ethnic cleansing Israel has been carrying out for 77 years.
I don’t know if it applies to people with adhd, but there is this theory that people with autism have weak central coherence. That is, they have a tough time dealing with broad strokes and assembling context into a comprehensive picture of reality. This manifests in simple things like preferring instructions like “buy one dozen eggs” over “buy some eggs”, to more complicated things like understanding that someone is joking when there’s a thunderstorm out and they say “nice weather”. Oftentimes, people with autism are very detail oriented, and uncomfortable with missing puzzle pieces.
For me, this reveals itself very similarly to what you describe. If I want to center a div, there’s a good chance I’ll be looking up how css works, then at the eBNF form of css, and then probably the Chomsky hierarchy, and then probably set theory bc the formal language theory book I picked up uses it, at which point I’ll probably be lead to learn about Russel’s paradox and so on. It’s debilitating.
I don’t know if you’re autistic (although there is like a 60% comorbidity with adhd), but I do know that folks with autism experience the same thing. I don’t have a solution for you, but you could potentially find tips on dealing with this on forums for autistic people.
So how did the general strike go?