Political terrorism is a deeply ineffective strategy with a high human cost.
Abrahms 2006: in a dataset of 42 terrorist groups, terrorism was rarely successful (7%, 3/42) or partly successful (17%, 7/42); it is more successful against military targets than civilian and with limited goals than maximalist or other goals: mitpressjournals.org/doi/abs/10.116…
Fortna 2015: relative to civil wars led by nonterrorist rebel groups, terrorist rebel groups were 15x less likely to achieve victory and 2x less likely to reach an agreement with the government: cambridge.org/core/journals/…
It is difficult to estimate the economic cost of terorrism in particular; the overall cost of fighting violence is about 13% of world GDP, and about 15% of that is spent in fighting internal and external conflicts (such as the Syrian Civil war): economicsandpeace.org/wp-content/upl…
• • •
Missing some Tweet in this thread? You can try to
force a refresh
my takeaway is that most forms of persuasion are effective.
please gimme more neat/strong studies or contrary studies if you know of them!
watching news changes beliefs
Martin & Yurukoglu 2017: data from channel number randomization suggests that Fox News shifts voting patterns rightward: Without Fox News, .46% fewer people would've voted Republican in 2000, 3.59% in 2004, and 6.35% in 2008:
long talks change beliefs
Broockman 2016: deep canvassing (a ~10 minute convo encouraging person to consider a trans person's perspective) increased tolerance of trans people and support for a gender nondiscrimination law; effects persisted after 3 months nytimes.com/2016/04/10/mag…
Hoping to put out a blogpost on the "point" of socialist theory soon, as a starting point for a theory series. I hold that all socialist theory writing attempts either to answers (some of) these questions or rejects (some of) these questions:
1: Justification: Why is socialism preferable to capitalism?
2: Transition: How do we get from capitalism to socialism?
3: Institutions: What social-political structures / relationships (or lack thereof) should organize economic, political, and social activity in socialism?
These are large topics, and I think they cover virtually all "socialist theory" writing. Does any theory you've read seem to fall outside these three?
I vibe with Rosen 2000's suggestion that Marx rejected contemporary, doctrinal morality (➡why he wrote of materialism "shattering" morality) but accepted moral values (➡why he wrote of capitalist "embezzlement" and communism enabling human flourishing): scholar.harvard.edu/michaelrosen/p…
interesting suggestion from Wolff and Leopold 2021: Marx goes beyond "theoretical necessity" in critiquing morality (and refusing to use it as a justifier) in order to distinguish himself from contemporary reformist socialists and bourgeois do-gooders: plato.stanford.edu/entries/marx/
linking the two ideas is Cohen 1983: Marx clearly implies a non-relativistic justice in his frequent use of "robbery" to describe capitalization, and elsewhere suggests relativistic justice is moonshine: Then, Marx clearly thinks that capitalist exploitation is unjust:
here's how tankie twitter is spending their moment in the sun:
- simping for Stalin
- saying true socialists have to be Stalinists
- denying Stalin's (now extremely well-documented) mass killings as capitalist propaganda
while we're here: Stalin killed millions, according to the USSR's security services' own documents: