It's weird to imagine that there were people who were once shocked at the Challenger Explosion, or cried at JFK's assassination. If anything, Trump dodging a bullet a month provides reassurance: even the orange cheeto himself gets to partake.
'it is extremely important for the show that i get breast implants. temporarily of course.'
wish i could monetize that side of mine too
I could see this making any kind of analysis of outcomes from arbitrary cohort extremely complex. This is outside my area of expertise and I'm definitely not a scientist (though I use it constantly). Perhaps I'm looking at this from the wrong perspective? It just seems that for any cohort the amount of variance would be so high that if you were to draw a conclusion from data it could already be wrong.
These would be two distinct yet connected sorts of data. The qualitative and the quantitative. One can disprove or question theories defined by the other, which is one reason why social sciences are in a permanent state of revision. Another reason is because your understanding of society is contingent on the very questions and framing devices you utilize.
Let's say you are investigating the birth of a city from an economic standpoint. Meaning that you wish to know what sort of trade or productive activity jumpstarted those first few cycles of capital accumulation. In the Americas you have cities like Rio de Janeiro which are so new that the documentation goes back to when there were only a few hundred families in the urban center + surrounding hinterland. So you have both the potential to realize patterns and variance, or the quantitative and the qualitative sides of your analysis.
You can look at specific families, what they did for a living, how they did well for themselves, what happened to their estates, what economic role mothers and fathers played, etc. And you can look at all families at once to find patterns. The quantitative analysis might help you make blanket statements such as 'the first and most primary form of capital accumulation for Rio de Janeiro was slavery, specifically the enslavement of native groups as part of allied wars and enslavement campaigns'. But if you go on to make another blanket statement such as, say, 'social mores in the wealthier sectors of colonial society followed a rigid patriarchical structure', then you'll find numerous examples of families where sometimes 3 full generations were outright led by the mothers and wives rather than the fathers and husbands. Sometimes because they appear to just be better at it than the men, sometimes because there were no men.
I'm framing it like this because that's how it works. We write our sociological narratives, and then someone else re-frames things a little differently and comes up with new and interesting inputs. It's not often that we completely disprove old, well supported theories. Rather, we end up refining them as scholars argue forever to the smallest detail.
I think a good point can probably be made here about not mixing different pairs of socks. One thing is talking about class or category, and acknowledge that there's some tendencies here and there. Another is individuals, and individuals are up to their personal history. So the real punchline here is neither (which does not prevent me from having a certain... experience with taxi drivers in particular).
almost the same material conditions can still include the guy who works in a supermarket for a living and the guy who became a taxi driver for a living
That series of tweets seem completely delusional. Jill Stein has no leverage to speak of, the Democrats will not be punished for carrying out a genocide, and will never compromise on their pro genocide principles. What victory does this person even want? To 'prove to americans that the Dems will throw them under the bus'? That's been the Democratic party platform for at least 30 years now.
Let's say there's a palestinian american who, somehow, does not yet know that the Democrats wants them dead. What are they gonna do after Jill Stein uses her great and incredible leverage and the Dems tell her to fuck off? Write Jill Stein in? Lmao.
Jill Stein has about as much leverage on the Democrats as liberal arab-israelis have on Netanyahu's government.
In addition, the US wasn’t even really trying to statebuild. That was their bullshit cover story.
Definitely true. Even so, the interesting thing about the situation is that what little state-building the Americans did in Afghanistan was in itself disruptive of tribal society. And sowed the seeds for Afghanistan's rapid collapse thereafter.
For an example, imagine a mountain valley shared by a number of tribes. They use the valley in different ways at different times of the year. Informal agreements define ownership of said valley, even if in theory it belongs to a given group. Except now there's a judge in Kabul and he's made a ruling. The new Afghan state must enforce property rights. Whichever group does not own the deed to the valley suddenly finds itself fighting for its livelihood, probably against the people they had working agreements with. Multiply that times a million and that is how the taliban went from deeply unpopular in Afghanistan to the only option to oppose a careless government.
There is an important difference between the US's campaigns in the middle east and Russia's invasion of Ukraine. And that is the kind of societies and terrain we are talking about.
The United States invaded, sought to occupy, and also fundamentally change tribal societies where things like justice were issued on a grassroots basis (moreso in Afghanistan than Iraq).
Ukraine meanwhile is a post industrial society where social cohesion depends on the State. Simply put, Afghans can self mobilize for government and resistance. Ukrainians - like most people today - can only self mobilize as far as calling the local police force.
If the Ukrainian State collapses, it will have no basis by which to mount an armed resistance (even more so given how said resistance would occur in the open steppe or in cities that Russia re-built from the ground up). While it was easy for the Americans to collapse the Iraqi or Afghan states, convincing everyone to accept the american occupation governments was something else entirely.
Edit: this is why even early in the war a lot of people in Europe started talking about arming a resistance in Ukraine. It would have to be like the French Resistance in WW2. Something that relied on foreign state power for organization, direction, recruiting, and supplies. As opposed to, say, the northern vietnam army which benefitted from chinese supplies and soviet (later chinese) instructors, but which was self organized at the grassroots.
stalin would have personally led a gang war so big that cascadia would be a country and vaush thinks the old man would have been a staffer
ask him which country hosts the most refugees from Ukraine