Something else I appreciated:
“You know, and this point of view, you probably came into contact with through the work of people like Gene Sharp, who was, you know, kind of the main theorist of nonviolent resistance.
But then someone said he got revealed now that Gene Sharp, someone did a book, that Gene Sharp was revealed as a neoliberal apologist.
Well, it isn’t a book. But what has happened is that the researchers that took up his sort of project of let’s establish that this was the goal, really. Let’s establish that nonviolent resistance is the primary way in which successful social movements are successful.
A person named Erika Chenoweth and her and their colleague Maria Stevan wrote a book called Why Civil Resistance Works in 2011. But as a sociologist of street rebellion named Ben Case has shown, they really are working with a very poor data set because they fail to disambiguate between things like armed violent resistance from a violent militant like Gorilla Flank and unarmed violent resistance as in rioting within a protest movement where there are marches or there are protests or there are various gatherings that might involve stuff that we’re seeing in LA recently, right? Like people throwing stones at cop cars and setting waymos on fire and shit like that.
And so the problem with with Chenoweth’s book is that it convinced a whole bunch of people that if you are trying to smash the windows of cop cars that you’re actually doing a form of violent resistance that will not work. But actually, according to the classification of their data set, smashing the windows of police cars are within the nonviolent category because they’re not armed, right? So there’s a big confusion about the actual data.
You’d probably enjoy the full podcast, cuz that’s basically the overarching theme of not just the episode but the whole series.