Nonviolence

This seems like an unfair burden to place on Stanford or any other institution of higher learning. We can attribute as much blame to Stanford for Messrs Brin and Page as we can to Wharton for President Trump's actions.

And what about positive actions? Forward secrecy would not be possible without Diffie-Hellman key exchange. Both Diffie and Hellman hail from Stanford. Not to mention Ralph Merkle (of Merkle trees), Alan Kay, Paul Klipsch (of the speaker) and Barbara Liskov among others. Should the school get the credit for their achievements?

And it turns out killing and punching people is sometimes the worst option of to play the long game. This is why nation states often twist themselves in bretzels to manufacture consent so they can go elsewhere and punch and kill people over there. If you don't have that consent, you will lose the popular support and that can mean that even if you won the battle, you lose the war.

Many people fail to consider second order effects. Offensive violent actions to address violent threat may seem like the natural solution, but a second order effect is often that it runs a wedge between the general population and those willing to use violence, shrinking the support. Another second order effect is that the other side will also use more violence and then the whole thing spirals into open weaponized conflict. A thing you should only provoke if you have the numbers, support and means to actually win it. So don't just scratch where it itches, think about the side effects and what psth it leads you down.

Non-violent opposition hinges on the fact thst many of the second order effects are positive. The non-violent side has usually more sympathies within the population, non-violent opposition can be really easy to get into, it could be as simple as a mail man strategically losing a letter, a sysadmin accidentally leaving a api exposed, a wine-mom building networks with others to keep open tabs on the neighbourhood, a peint shop not forgetting who printed a certain flyer when the state authorities show up and so on. Wherever you are, there is probably a way to resist. And if there are enough people normal operations of the regime become hard to sustain.

I have a feeling you probably should have put a bunch of caveats for both like "if you're willing to wait a few generations for your aims to be met".

When talking about both the American civil war, one side had engaged in violence for antiquity and had the force of the state which came to state that violence was the expected behavior. This violent behavior was very profitable, and the people profiting from this realize they were in a weak position so they started propagandizing was what they were doing was "in the name of god", "is good for the common man", etc. It moves the conversation from one looking at the violence of slavery to "Why do you hate god and country".

Simply put the US civil war was a temporary increase of violence that preceded the war with slavery and followed the war in neo-slavery.

This study (and the one about 3% of the population being sufficient to enact a change) comes up constantly when you hang around leftists, and I've been known to quote it myself when I was younger, but it always felt too good to be true and uncomfortably aligned with liberal sensibilities.