Greg Stolze

Don Moynihan @donmoyn.bsky.social [ View ] Jul 03, 2024 at 17:56 UTC

Constitution: People involved in insurrections should not be President. Roberts court:...hmm, no, I don't see it. Constitution:.... Roberts court: but the president should have immunity for crimes

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Greg Stolze @gregstolze.bsky.social [ View ] Jul 03, 2024 at 16:26 UTC

Dunno why this is in my mind. Just something about people who kept pushing an extreme agenda, and not getting punished, and pushing, and not getting punished, and kept pushing. Something about that. 12/12

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Greg Stolze @gregstolze.bsky.social [ View ] Jul 03, 2024 at 16:25 UTC

So, as we say “Nothing can change, we’re doomed, we’re on rails, the end is foretold,” remember that some tipping points are unseen and that our gloom may be as unfounded as the optimism of the Chinese Democracy movement. 11/x

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Greg Stolze @gregstolze.bsky.social [ View ] Jul 03, 2024 at 16:24 UTC

Once a threshold — a tipping point invisible to the democracy movement — was passed, taking the hit to international prestige, enduring the domestic outrage, all that became necessary to preserve power. 10/x

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Greg Stolze @gregstolze.bsky.social [ View ] Jul 03, 2024 at 16:23 UTC

The movement, paying attention only to the Party, had every reason to think that nothing had changed, that the authorities would continue to say “You stop now! Don’t make me impotently say stop again!” But the Party was evaluating not only the movement, but many other factors.

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Greg Stolze @gregstolze.bsky.social [ View ] Jul 03, 2024 at 16:21 UTC

Well, because in their personally observed, lived experience, the Party backed down 100% OF THE TIME. Because of all the factors mentioned, the Party calculus was that destroying the democracy movement wasn’t worth the costs.

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Greg Stolze @gregstolze.bsky.social [ View ] Jul 03, 2024 at 16:20 UTC

But that’s exactly what happened. Everyone got the result that no one wanted. Why? Because the movement over-reached, went too far, and made it so that the power structure had to destroy them to maintain itself. A tragic story. But why did they believe the Party would back down? 7/x

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Greg Stolze @gregstolze.bsky.social [ View ] Jul 03, 2024 at 16:19 UTC

No one in the movement wanted to get murdered. No one in the government wanted to murder a bunch of promising kids. No one in the broader Chinese population wanted to see the PLA gun down Chinese citizens. None of China’s trading partners wanted to see a human rights atrocity. 6/x

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Greg Stolze @gregstolze.bsky.social [ View ] Jul 03, 2024 at 16:18 UTC

She pointed out that the movement was not a bunch of angry peasants: It was mostly the children of privilege, educated youths with prominent parents in the Party. The future of China, more or less. Their equivalent of our Ivy League.

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Greg Stolze @gregstolze.bsky.social [ View ] Jul 03, 2024 at 16:17 UTC

But what *I* think about is my old co-worker, a Chinese sociologist who had actually been part of the democracy movement demolished at Tiananmen Square. I edited one of her papers on the subject. 4/x

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Greg Stolze @gregstolze.bsky.social [ View ] Jul 03, 2024 at 16:16 UTC

Or they point out that after we, the worldly cynics, scoffed at the UN project to drastically reduce global policy, the UN went on to… exceed their own goals ahead of schedule. 3/x

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Greg Stolze @gregstolze.bsky.social [ View ] Jul 03, 2024 at 16:15 UTC

Now, our optimist friends like to point to things like this www.oerproject.com/OER-Material... and argue that war, while awful and still pursued cruelly in places like Gaza, Syria, Haiti and so forth, is less deadly in this century.
2/x

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Greg Stolze @gregstolze.bsky.social [ View ] Jul 03, 2024 at 16:14 UTC

OK, I’d like to talk to all the doomers out there in the audience who think nothing can get better, and—being by nature a pretty gloomy gus myself—I’m going to do this in our own language. 1/x

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