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A rather subtle thought just occurred to me that explains why artistic pursuits so often correlate with use of weapons of the weak.
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It's because WotW are often only capable of destruction, so if you don't pair them with a creative pursuit, they'll rot your soul. So many instinctively do so. By contrast weapons of the powerful often are just the destructive aspect of technology that also has a creative side.
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For eg. airplanes can both help civilians travel (creative use), and be used as fighter planes to kill people (destructive use). By contrast, the technology of organizing a protest really cannot create good policy. It can only block bad policy.
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Organizing a protest can of course lead to good policy. The Civil Rights Movement, non-violent revolutions, etc. are all examples of laws changing for the better because there was a movement right?
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The protest movements didn't create the good policy. Individuals did, usually in-power types. The sequence seems to be: protests or other WotW create pressure on the bad policies by spotlighting them, then some adjacent party uses more powerful means to actually drive change
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While someone has to actually write the policy, sometimes that's just the falling action in causality after a mass movement made it possible. Marx wrote a theory that led to mass movements that led to Lenin dictating exact policy. Are you talking causality or something else?
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I think this theory is basically wrong. The actual causal path peaks with the creative insight, which has no real correlation. It can happen long before or long after. The movement just creates a window of opportunity for the option to be exercised if it exists or is created.
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Like doing a protest demanding anti-gravity doesn’t automatically create anti-gravity tech. It’s a mistake to think policy formulation is any less of an act of inspired invention. That’s how you get bad non-policy proposals like GND or UBI. They’re stubs pretending to be code.
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Essentially, I think we're talking in too broad of terms to really have a clear analysis. The revolutions of 1848 (proto Marxist) that led to reforms could be said to be caused by economic, power structural, ideological, etc.