The density of these offices in downtown Seattle is super high and it's also an area that has a lot of crime so this implementation makes sense. Probably low ROI in other areas like your neighborhood that don't fit this profile.
109 karma · joined December 17, 2022
The 1848 revolutions you talk about occurred in different ways, but a way to generally characterize them is that they were all democratic with the aim of removing the old monarchical structures (regardless of the actual participants). This aligns with Toqueville’s claim that revolution stems from social division (which liberalism eliminates) and not other forms of inequality. The same is true of the Paris Commune; the third republic was initially dominated by monarchists and the Paris Commune as government was organized as a rival to the national government in Versailles/Bordeaux.
The American Civil war is another example that supports Tocqueville. The social stratification of slavery led to war but not the extreme inequality of the 1920s. Neither has the inequality of the present.
Tocqueville’s observation of the connection between social class and revolution also explain why the 20th century movements in Europe played out the way they did. Communist revolution occurred in Russia but not Germany. The fascist movements in liberal Germany and Italy took power without bloody revolution but the movement in Spain was tied to monarchists and thus there was civil war.
His main point is that liberalism provides off-ramps from violent revolution because people have other ways of wielding political power. In societies with strict social classes, the classes without political power have much greater incentives to fight. I imagine you wouldn’t disagree with this claim.
He also argues that there are great incentives against revolution in societies when people possess things they could lose in a revolution (his main example is property). I think an example of this is May 68's failure to bring political change due to the Communist Party's nonviolent stance/cooperation with the Gaullists. We can debate back and forth why they took an antirevolutionary position but consensus seems to be that they at least did not want to surrender what political power they had won through elections.
He also makes other predictions about how equality in social conditions causes people to be more individualistic and less communal, but at the same time less unique. Again, I think we can witness this first hand in America. Maybe he's wrong about other claims, but I wouldn't say this essay is wrong based on the title alone, since the actual essay reads spot on.
The CDL issue with the IA has been litigated multiple times on this forum by now, and the consensus seems to be that publishers weren't going to do anything about CDL until the IA started freely distributing digital copies in the early stages of the Covid pandemic. As someone who reads, I strongly support what the IA is doing, but as someone who produces content, I also want some way of controlling its usage. I wish the author would take a more nuanced approach to this topic rather than misconstruing reality to make the other side seem unreasonable.