"The classic madman strategy may or may not be effective - political scientists tend to be skeptical - but it is what you do *before* you strike a deal. You act crazy like you will only accept some outrageous outcome and that you might blow it all up in a fit of pique if you don’t get what you want. But once you have struck the deal, it sticks.
By contrast, Donald Trump is playing the madman strategy *after* he cuts deals with people."
"When I think about Mangione, and Ethel Cain’s #KillMoreCEOs posts, and Caffier’s America’s Most Powerful deck, I can’t help thinking of the work of Stanford historian Walter Scheidel, and his 2017 book The Great Leveler. The volume is a lengthy and in-depth examination of how extreme inequality has been 'resolved' throughout history. Disturbingly, Scheidel found that so far the only thing that has undone such inequality—the only great leveler, so to speak—is violence. Plague, war, or violent revolutions."
As usual, ML Clark goes deeper than me on the Brian Thompson murder.
"The timing of this reversal further reinforced a broadly shared conviction that Big Business now required the threat of violence from random actors to rethink its policies. Nothing less in this economic climate would do the trick."
"The classic madman strategy may or may not be effective - political scientists tend to be skeptical - but it is what you do *before* you strike a deal. You act crazy like you will only accept some outrageous outcome and that you might blow it all up in a fit of pique if you don’t get what you want. But once you have struck the deal, it sticks.
By contrast, Donald Trump is playing the madman strategy *after* he cuts deals with people."
https://benansell.substack.com/p/the-art-of-not-taking-the-deal
The first chapter at least of this book is good, a helpful history of the left's anti-organizational efforts throughout the 20th century.
https://vincentbevins.com/book2/
I have not read Scheidel.
"When I think about Mangione, and Ethel Cain’s #KillMoreCEOs posts, and Caffier’s America’s Most Powerful deck, I can’t help thinking of the work of Stanford historian Walter Scheidel, and his 2017 book The Great Leveler. The volume is a lengthy and in-depth examination of how extreme inequality has been 'resolved' throughout history. Disturbingly, Scheidel found that so far the only thing that has undone such inequality—the only great leveler, so to speak—is violence. Plague, war, or violent revolutions."
https://substack.com/home/post/p-160760973
Protests work, writes Robert Frederick, https://substack.com/home/post/p-160817063
quoting a piece by Zeynip Tufekci from Chapel Hill:
"In the short term, protests can work to the degree that they can scare authorities into changing their behavior."
but it's their long-term inspirational effects that may matter more, something I didn't consider in this piece from 2018.
As usual, ML Clark goes deeper than me on the Brian Thompson murder.
"The timing of this reversal further reinforced a broadly shared conviction that Big Business now required the threat of violence from random actors to rethink its policies. Nothing less in this economic climate would do the trick."
https://substack.com/home/post/p-152851779