Misquoting my arse. Mao didn't need to hold a gun if he could control those with it. The currently crumbling pax Americana wasn't held by just capital and group action. You think Xi would be fine if the people in his country controlling the guns decided they want someone else?
I didn't just talk about the stick though. When you promote the idea that all cops are bastards, and make sure people who will police the way you want don't go into policing, you'll get bastards. Doesn't matter if your community votes DSA, Green or Communist.
If you don't have people that align with your ideology in areas that matter or aren't incentivised to you won't get the changes you desire.
How will you get change when the people who want the changes refuse to work or have their people in the organizations that they want change? And even disincentivize it.
Barring the use of force it's the functional elites, not the hoi polloi (that manage to have time for protests and such) that drive change.
You can tell from the biography of pretty much every activist or philosopher you know.
As for Linux, it takes people; individuals on the inside to drive change too. As anyone who follows development there will know. If the people that matter don't write or don't accept the code you desire, it's never going to be in-tree.
I am a little confused about what is happening now. What Mao did was wrong. Holding the gun or being in charge of those who do is a distinction without a difference. Law by violence is wrong. Whether it is Xi, Mao, or the mob, it's wrong. The same holds true for America's rise to power. My argument is normative; it is not a historical narrative.
Just because he did it "effectively" (by a measure of effectiveness I would take issue with) doesn't make it less wrong. If you want to stop the lion's share of crime, just imprison every young person aged 16–26 and release them on their 27th birthday. Effective beyond belief, crime will decrease in a way never before seen. It is still really wrong. Effectiveness is not a substitute for morality.
Asking people to join the police, as it is currently constituted, is asking people to go against their morality. It is that simple. It doesn't matter if you believe a police system can exist in its current form "done right", or if you think it needs restructuring, or if you think it doesn't need to exist. Right now it sucks, and a 10% increase in cops with some subtlety in their actions isn't fixing it.
People are in a big dialogue right now about how using social media is ruining people... what do you think going against your basic moral precepts will do to someone? You are not providing a clear avenue for change but still asking for a lot out of folks and wondering why they won't take part.
Regarding Linux development, having some hierarchy is not a negation of group action. Furthermore, analogizing a maintainer being pissy about a Rust PR and the police force killing people might as well be the platonic ideal of a false equivalence.
(The canonical and contemporaneous translation is (I _think_ from Edgar Snow): "Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun.")
To change things you have to hold power, analyzing and critiquing make no change while the internal culture and incentives don't change.
There's no false equivalence. The sort of change you want almost always requires a change of control. i.e people inside .
If you think you're above being inside, it's not any morality nonsense. It's a lack of desire to effect change. Like in Ukraine, the guns won't shoot themselves.
I didn't just talk about the stick though. When you promote the idea that all cops are bastards, and make sure people who will police the way you want don't go into policing, you'll get bastards. Doesn't matter if your community votes DSA, Green or Communist.
If you don't have people that align with your ideology in areas that matter or aren't incentivised to you won't get the changes you desire.
How will you get change when the people who want the changes refuse to work or have their people in the organizations that they want change? And even disincentivize it.
Barring the use of force it's the functional elites, not the hoi polloi (that manage to have time for protests and such) that drive change.
You can tell from the biography of pretty much every activist or philosopher you know.
As for Linux, it takes people; individuals on the inside to drive change too. As anyone who follows development there will know. If the people that matter don't write or don't accept the code you desire, it's never going to be in-tree.