The “3.5% rule”: How a small minority can change the world
bbc.com
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We’ve got this warped idea that a proper protest is when some people gather in some designated area that the authorities allow them to, and they don’t inconvenience anyone. That’s absurd when you consider what a protest is about.
Many people want their protests to be very disruptive but forget they’re not the only ones with grievances.
They’re a lot of people willing to grind society to a halt over any perceived slight, across all ideologies…let us just unleash the craze then.
That's how society works. Except law enforcement filters out the craze below certain thresholds. Past that threshold, disruptive protests becomes referendums on changing norms. A cause with sufficient support to sustain disruptive protest in face of maximum state power corners power into political change to establish new normal where discontentment/disruption is again below threshold of law enforcement. When multple crazes compete, the more disruptive/sustaining one wins out according to local conditions, that's why tribes/interests/policies break down by geography - when some faction of crazies win the disruption game and carve out their own little bubbles. While it's nice to settle things with debate/voting/process, but such system is easily rigged, and ultimately it's the 2nd derivative expression of violence, the source of power. At some point people will chose to fight power with power.
Sometimes they break the law by blocking doors or shoving people (or worse) and get arrested. That's their right too.
Sometimes they break the law and don't get arrested because local law enforcement is sympathetic to their cause. That is a problem. Otherwise, sure, they can protest in ways that inconvenience people.
Regardless of your political views, I would say that yes indeed it is, local law enforcement is too sympathetic to many popular causes. We have witnessed it with BLM burning and looting stores, Pro Palestinian encampments harassing Jews and Churches being burned down.
No one would be complaining if the law was equally enforced, unfortunately it isn't and it very much depends on the local politics. People get upset when they feel like certain groups are granted privileges for breaking the law whilst dissenting voices not so much.
Any man who breaks a law that conscience tells him is unjust and willingly accepts the penalty by staying in jail to arouse the conscience of the community on the injustice of the law is at that moment expressing the very highest respect for the law.
It’s not just an inconvenience and I dislike this type of minimization. Breaking the law isn’t okay - we have laws as a society for reason. There are legal ways to protest and argue for change. Standing on a sidewalk and speaking (within noise limitations) is okay in most jurisdictions, provided you aren’t blocking others from passing through. But taking over shared infrastructure like roads or airports or universities is not okay. No one is entitled to abuse society just because they’re unhappy that their views aren’t heard. At least in the US, there are many other ways to convince others peacefully.
Is your point that since I presumably am pro-choice (correct) since this is a more liberal forum I will disagree with this point? Well I don’t. The same principles apply. Those who want to illegalize abortion or whatever have to follow the same principles.
OK, fine, but you also don't get to decide how other people interpret your actions. You can fuss and bother about how trivial it is to you that someone's commute got delayed by 10 minutes, but if you're pissing off the person you're trying to get your message to, you're still shooting yourself in the foot.
Persuasion is contextual; you don't get to dictate someone else's feelings and you don't get to force them to see things your way.
There’s first of all the point that the sibling comment made (bongodongobob). There’s also the second point of solidarity. Now for those who are too politically liberal to understand that word: it’s about standing together with your fellow person based on some commonality, knowing/trusting that they will also have your back in other contexts. Which could translate to bearing some discomfort because you sympathize with their cause or think that their cause is proximal to your own (see: first they came for X but I didn’t do anything because I’m not X).
This can be seen even in my social democratic country when there is some large strike. Say airport workers. Then the media will immediately be on the prowl, asking leading questions to would-be vacationers about how horrible this strike must be. The more solidaristic ones may choose to bear that burden because they feel that they share a common cause.
>yon't get to dictate someone else's feelings and you don't get to force them to see things your way
No, but you can certainly try to inconvenience them until they take action, whether that means pressuring government to capitulate or crackdown. Disruptive protests tend to already assumes it swayed enough minds to go disruptive, the ultimate goal is not to persuade fence sitters but persuade power.
"Squeaky Wheels Get the Grease" And if they're inconveniencing you, suddenly the thing you care about is making them go away. And what's the best way to make them go away? To make your local politicians do something about them. Often times the demands are easier to capitulate to than to continue suffering the inconveniences that make your constituents upset that people are angry.
If protests go too far, to the point where the general public will cheer for anyone putting the protesters in jail for a decade, the protest is going to be ineffective.
I'm sure that 15 years after the "strike" when they all hit voting age this may become useful information, but the politicians today are probably not thinking that far ahead.
> Said another way, it's not about you.
This seems breathtakingly silly. I'm not saying it is about me.
Maybe other people aren't already doing those things. Maybe some people saw these kids and thought, "You know, those kids are right. I should do something about that."
They a) think all protesting is the same as doing something, when actually only specific protesting does something, and b) aren't learning something real that would help them become better at really helping with this issue one day.
Protest is not always about immediately having your demands met. It's nearly always part of a longer game. And if you're a 16 year old who has no financial leverage, no job to strike from, no company to make different decisions with, and who won't be able to vote for another 2 years, raising an issue with the people that can doesn't seem like such a bad idea.
Besides, these protests got younger generations' voices into mainstream TV and newspapers. That's more than "appropriate" protest ever did.
I'm talking about "strikes" that were 7-year-olds. Junior schools were striking.
> That's more than "appropriate" protest ever did.
I don't care about appropriate; just about effectiveness.
It adds pressure for those in charge to capitulate and stop the protests. I don't know why this is so hard for people to understand.
Edit: I can't reply to the comment below this for some reason, but ok they send the police to break up protests against Walmart. Which looks absolutely terrible. "Our mayor sides with Walmart over the people." That adds to the narrative and is paradoxically possible a net positive for the protestors.
Seriously, what's the difference here? They're doing illegal protests same as like when women illegally protested. If you want to punish some students harshly, you should also support jailing Rosa Parks, no?
I’m sure there are reasons. But the ones I can think of (tele-support, tele-morale?), well I don’t buy them.
You're really making a contribution with this comment. /s
The right to protest ends once it interferes with others' freedoms.
Oh shit! Is it? Can I finally arrest tourists for walking slowly in my city? They bother me way more than the occasional protest does (less than once a month, while tourists are in my way every day I go outside)!
I’ll have a double of whatever a person demonstrating this lack of compassion is protesting.
* Wife in labor, need to get to the hospital. Stuck in traffic for hours. Mom and/or baby die. * Job interview, been unemployed for 8 months, late, stuck in traffic for hours. No job. * Ambulance trying to rush a patient in critical condition to hospital. Stuck in traffic. Dead. * Trying to pick kid up from daycare. Hours late, huge fee, kicked out of daycare, possibly lose job.
I can keep going.
Let us assume for a second that all the above scenarios are people who are neutral to the cause of the protest. Now they hate the cause of the protest, along with all of the people who felt second-order effects from the "inconvenienced" people.
"Inconveniencing people" is such an arrogant, selfish, self-centered way to view a protest that can have lasting consequences. Accepting that at collateral damage is, frankly, bullshit.
I can’t help you if you get enraged by hypothetical scenarios.
> "I'm gonna try to get through," Scott said. "My daughter needs me. She's got four little ones there and I'm supposed to be helping take care of them while she's working."
> "Our poor Uber driver," said Brianna & Brienne, two passengers visiting from out of town.
I have not and I will not complain about people complaining about real inconveniences when they happen to be at the wrong place at the wrong time through no fault of their own.
And all of this doesn’t change the fact that protests should not be discouraged or be made unlawful (although apparently according to that state trooper it already is) considering that protesters have quite important things that they are protesting themselves, according to their own thinking. From that link (one of the “poor Uber driver” girls):
> "Yes it's an inconvenience," Brienne added. "But it's also inconvenient to be inconvenient to a human being in Gaza right now."
I have an issue with collateral damage in the name of a cause. I meant what I said, it is arrogant to decide "my protest is more important than ANYTHING you could be doing right now, because I said so"
It's just fucked up. Protest your face off, don't stop everyone else from getting on with their day.
People go for violence after the peaceful discussions have failed or aren't possible (I see terrorist orgs in that same boat, there's no middle ground to discuss in the first place). And if these people didn't have the power to move the needle through standard negociation, they'll rarely have more power in a violent fight so they're usually bound to fail from the beginning.
It's all the more true in regimes where the target of the protest has the mean to physically crush the whole population.
I haven't read the full article but my impression halfway thru was that it wasn't just a bit about _nonviolent_ protest (which I wouldn't say is the same as _peaceful_ protest), but rather that is the whole premise of the article.
Some people, e.g., Gandhi and MLK Jr, did not go for violence after peaceful negotiations failed, while others at the same time _believed_ such negotiations had failed. But just because someone feels hopeless and believes such negotiations have failed doesn't mean they actually have.
People kept supporting him because hope was still there, and his death gave way to riots that just couldn't be ignored, giving the smallest glimpse of what would keep going if rapid change wasn't enacted.
I'm not versed enough in India's history to comment.
I hypothesize because they were talking about nonviolence and people assumed by that they wanted peace and I think these leaders wanted love. I recently have been thinking a lot that there's almost a war between love and peace, where people who want love want to work together to resolve conflict and people who want peace want to get rid of conflict, often by working against each other.
Also, if that many people really are protesting, you can pretty safely extrapolate, that the support for the cause if at a much higher percentage.
Sometimes a minority can enforce their will, but there are probably more negative examples than positive ones where that did happen.
The 1st amendment absolutely protects your right to protest in the US. But practically you do have to be in the right courtroom for that to be meaningful.
This is why we need more general strikes.
I was friends with some cops back them and I heard that plenty of police forces were reducing their staffing in response to the protests
So I suppose there needs to be some rule of law or a red line the people you are fighting back against won’t cross.
I live in venezuela, we've had millions of people on the streets multiple times and we still get screwed over every single time. The dictatorship endures
If the US government and police had the overly abusing powers and trickery they have today back during the protests against Jim Crow and Civil Rights, Voting Rights for minorities (and women) NONE of that would have happened no matter how many people threw themselves on the fire in sacrifice.
Just look at how some states shutdown campus protests this year as easily as forbidding any sitting or eating and police happily arrested people using chairs.
What do you think is going to happen in those states when people have to sit down or eat in line while waiting to vote in November?
Look how hard it is for unions to exist anymore in the USA
China rewrites its history and reality right down to its own maps, no protest will ever overcome that, not this century, not next given even better technology to control its people. Same for North Korea and Iran.
What about Hong Kong?
Protesting to me has always felt like you are forcing things to happen, but the same bureaucracy that controls the decisions at the very top is still there.
Could 12 million Americans (3.5%) who are selfless and self-aware change the entire country around them? I would love a study on something like this, even if it is for a relatively small city/country.
"There can be only one permanent revolution — a moral one: the regeneration of the inner man.
How is this revolution to take place? Nobody knows how it will take place in humanity, but every man feels it clearly in himself. And yet in our world everybody thinks of changing humanity, and nobody thinks of changing himself."
https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/leo-tolstoy-on-anarc...
Seems like 3.5% could also be a pretty good estimate of how many voters or less make all the decisions when it comes to less-publicized local elections.
How about 12 million who are selfish and unempathetic when it comes to very many of their fellow Americans?
https://www.directactioneverywhere.com/dxe-in-the-news/cheno... (2021)
My instinct is that surely nearly every violent campaign is preceded by an unsuccessful non-violent one, i.e. the low hanging fruit of change is always picked by the non-violent movement before people turn to violence. Thus the problems which violent campaigns attempt to solve are by definition more difficult, and success less likely.
What horseshit.
I think it's an interesting topic. You probably want to read the original research if you want to get better insight. Naturally with all things human it's not an exact science. Also should we look at the population of China or the population of Hong Kong? Presumably if 10% of the population of China was protesting there's some chance of a political change.
For another, these numbers ("3.5% of the whole population", "53% of the time compared to 26% for the violent protests") all seems incredibly precise for something as messy as real world protests. Estimating participation, estimating population, estimating "peak engagement - so many components of this are judgement calls at best. And that is before even attempting to engage with cultural and temporal factors. To make such a bold and outlandish claim based on such shaky data feels fraught.
The problem is that protesters are often delusional and don't understand complex problems. The civil rights protests were very carefully and accurately led by MLK and this very careful narrative to educate white people was indeed successful.
But the obvious hint is at the student protests about Palestine. That's one of the bad protests. First, it targets only Israel without laying any blame or responsibility on the Hamas (which started this specific conflict and is still holding civilian hostages). This also targets the entire country instead of the current leadership, which again is a bad target. The result of these protests is obvious from miles away:
* The Israeli right gains power and becomes more aggressive - they use the protests to show how everyone hates Israel and there's no point in trying to satisfy the "antisemites" and the idiots.
* Trump gains power - Biden can't control these people... He will make matters worse for the Palestinians.
* Hamas is emboldened - they are the reason Palestinians don't have a state (which Israel offered twice to two separate Palestinian leaders).
* Putin and Iran are emboldened by the weakness of the West.
I understand why people are protesting. They want to help and have good intentions, they are also deeply misinformed (e.g. the UN just updated its casualty statistics which were VERY wrong and are probably still pretty far off). Also the Israeli government is indeed terrible, but Hamas is even worse. Uninformed protesters like this are making things worse for the moderate Palestinians and Israelis.
The reason students are asking their schools to divest from Israel but not from Hamas is because no western schools are funding Hamas or corporations that sell weapons to Hamas. You want protest camps set up to demand schools keep not doing that?
> the UN just updated its casualty statistics
I just looked them up (https://www.ochaopt.org/). 34,904+ killed, 70,000 homes destroyed, and 1.7 million people displaced in Gaza. I agree Hamas is probably worse than the Israeli government in some sort of doctrinal or deontological sense, but in terms of actual atrocities committed, it is not even close at this point.
No. I want protests to have the Israeli flag too. Acknowledge Israel has the right to exist. Also not rip out posters for the hostages that are held by Hamas to keep the war going.
What do you hope to achieve by divesting from Israel?
Make Jews feel persecuted. Mission accomplished. Make Hamas feel that pressure is being put on Israel. Again, success. This is blaming an entire country instead of the people responsible for the occupation and settlements. There are ways to target those. E.g. banning products from the settlements, or banning instituted from the settlements. These are things many Israelis can get behind.
> I just looked them up
They updated the ratio of civilians. Turns out the majority of those are adult male combatants. Not Women and Children like Hamas claimed and was parroted by the media.
As of yesterday, the UN is reporting that 60% of deaths are women, children, and the elderly. So even if you want to pretend that all adult men in Gaza are combatants, your minimization is verging on genocide denial. (And the total figures are "not including more than 10,000 reported missing or under the rubble" so the death stats are almost certainly low.)
https://www.ochaopt.org/content/hostilities-gaza-strip-and-i...
> The UN now claims that in total 24,686 people were confirmed killed,
The correct statement is that “The UN now claims that 24,686 people who have been confirmed killed and fully identified. There are over 10,000 confirmed victims who are confirmed dead, but not yet fully identified, and then there are around 10,000 more missing and presumed dead under the rubble, in undiscovered mass graves, etc. Bringing the total number of dead closer to 50,000.
This site is willfully misleading, and is actively lying by only counting identified victims and claiming that is the total number of victims.
https://www.npr.org/2024/05/15/1251265727/un-gaza-death-toll...
> The U.N. says Gaza's Health Ministry has been able to fully identify 24,686 deaths out of more than 35,000 people the ministry says have been killed in the Gaza Strip.
> U.N. spokesperson Farhan Haq says Gaza's Health Ministry is still working to fully identify 10,000 or more deaths. Based on the identities confirmed so far, though, the U.N. now says about 52% of those killed have been women and children.
> Haq, who is the deputy spokesperson for the U.N. secretary-general, was asked in a briefing Monday about media reports, one of which was shared by Israel's foreign minister, that said the U.N. had halved the number of women and children it had been saying were killed in Gaza.
> "It's not quite the case," Haq said. "The overall number of fatalities that has been tallied by the Ministry of Health in Gaza, which is our counterpart on dealing with the death tolls, that number remains unchanged," he said, reiterating the figure stands at more than 35,000.
https://www.npr.org/2024/05/15/1251265727/un-gaza-death-toll...
To summaries, they lowered the number because now they are only using confirmed dead and fully identified, whereas previously they included confirmed dead and not yet fully identified. So out of all the confirmed deaths, only about 70% (not half, as you claimed) has been fully identified. The UN is now using that 70% figure.
If you want to get to half, you will have to include presumed but not confirmed deaths (missing, under rubble, in undiscovered mass graves, etc.) this number is believed to be another 10,000, bringing the total number of dead or presumed dead to 45,000. About 55% of confirmed or presumed deaths have been fully identified. The UN is now using that 55% figure.
Then where did the false numbers come from?
They just made them up. Typically, when statistics are proven wrong you go back to the numbers and then check if other numbers have been completely false. Or maybe a different source of numbers was more correct. Maybe the source for the false numbers is still lying.
The problem is that people use the brand "UN" which is generally a respected brand. Unfortunately, on the ground in Gaza it means Palestinians who are often connected to the Hamas directly. That means a lot of the information that the UN broadcasts to the world as fact is corrupted by Hamas.
To be clear, I'm not saying there aren't many civilian casualties. I'm not saying this is anything less than tragic. I am saying that these casualties are far lower due to a conscious effort by the IDF to reduce these numbers. I'm also saying that Hamas has made a significant effort to increase civilian casualties (especially children) e.g. by using children as couriers between their tunnels and preventing civilians from leaving siege areas (e.g. firing on refugees).
It takes time to identify dead bodies, especially in an active warzone where it is not unheard of that whole families are dead, and double so when large powerful munitions are used. And as the health care system collapses, it gets harder and harder to identify quickly, so you can expect the latter number to grow.
[1] https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flat_Earth_Society?wprov=sfti1
You don’t get a carte blanche against whatever you don’t like based on your standard-issue Internet Misanthropy.
As Einstein said(?) only two things are infinite and he's only sure about one of them.
Maybe stupid isn't the right word. Gullible, subject to being influenced, herd mentality- donno. Intelligent, rational, people with critical thinking skills seems like a very rare phenomena indeed.