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510 results for “anecdata”
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Niggle: it's not research, but it could be interesting #anecdata. Just don't read too much into it.
I've said a few times that all Fedi posts containing polls that say "boost for better sample" (or "research" here, similar) should be required to have one of the response options be "DEWEY DEFEATS TRUMAN".
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I have a new theory based on #anecdata:
In the long term, #corporateIT decides against the best product or technology.
Anecdata points:
- #OS2
- #NovellNetWare
- #LotusNotes
- #XML (this may be a tad controversial) -
For #CircuitPython2026, I've distilled my 2025 #CircuitPython wish list (https://fosstodon.org/@anecdata/113773025044962141) to one item:
• asyncio support for sockets
(it can be done for TCP currently, though I don't think it's CPython-compatible, I'm not sure it's complete, and it hardfaults https://gist.github.com/anecdata/89b4458fd7c0c01c7fc0a9ff4be5b4e6)
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@chiffchaff @mrchristian @davidgerard It's worrying Claude persuaded Richard Dawkins it's "conscious"; he has fallen for the "empathy lizard" (*) system prompting. Also known as "rogerians" from Jay Reynold's short sci-fi story "Trial Sample" at the Internet Archive. Private anecdata from a laid-off Meta worker suggests the chatbots are being prompted to emit this output for "engagement". (*) A creature which lacks true understanding yet presents the illusion of empathy. #wooconcepts
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Which individual activity reduces a person's carbon footprint more?
Boost if you want to turn a shitpost into anecdata.
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@HayiWena And do you have any source I can track down about crashes involving middle schoolers that aren't in the police collision traffic report data? I could really use that! I'll take anecdata if that's all you have. @footsteps #SafeRoutesNow #KidsDeserveIt #CrashNotAccident
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Here's a bit of nonsense for a Monday evening: a summary of my Very Scientific Study about what people call Dandelion Seed Heads.
Thanks to everyone who decided that talking to a random person on the internet about what they call dandelions was a worthwhile thing to do (or if not actually worthwhile at least a tolerable momentary distraction from the world).
The anecdata is here...
https://things.uk/@eclectech/112467417521156802#dandelion #dandelionClock #dandelionFluffs #dandelionPuffs #dandelionBalls
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Nobody should look back on 2020 with anything but a mix of relief that it’s over and dread about what we watched. And yet Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump keeps asking voters if they’re better off now than they were four years ago.
So I had to go look up my receipts from back then. Here is what they reveal about where things in my life stood on Oct. 25, 2020 versus today:
- The nation and the world were in the grip of the deadliest pandemic in more than a century, and those of us hunkered down at and near home could only hope that vaccines would arrive and work. Today marks a week since my latest covid booster; four years ago, I did not expect to keep getting vaxxed every year, but I don’t mind that brief annual investment in helping to ensure that a case of covid feels no worse than a mild cold.
- I did not leave my house at all that day four years ago, per my Google Maps timeline, and had last ventured out for a work event in March of 2020. Today began with me landing at Dulles International Airport on a red-eye from Los Angeles that in turn followed a flight from Maui, where I’d been covering Qualcomm’s Snapdragon Summit (with that company covering my airfare and lodging).
- My interactions with people beyond family members on that Sunday in 2020 consisted of a Zoom appearance before a friend’s college journalism class in the early afternoon, followed by the Sunday Dungeons & Dragons game via Zoom with friends that had become the only way I would see many of those guys until 2021. This Friday began in a crowded LAX.
- The Vanguard S&P 500 Index fund that represents my primary investment vehicle closed at $320.02 a share on the previous business day back then. Today it’s at $536.30.
- My income though that point of 2020 was about 20% below my income so far this year–and the previous three months of 2020 had been especially brutal, with my income over that span barely over half what I made in the most recent three months (which still falls below my most profitable period of freelancing, around a decade ago).
- My own recollection and Bureau of Labor Statistics data show that some groceries–for example, milk and eggs–were cheaper back then.
- After three years of seeing the Trump administration luxuriate in lies, corruption, bigotry, incompetence and cruelty, my optimism about my country was fraying like the worn American flag hanging from our front porch (pictured above as it looked in July of 2020). Four years later, the Biden-Harris administration has disappointed me on occasion but has not had me cringing about the state of the union; more often, this White House has surprised me with its progress in such areas as building out infrastructure and greening our economy.
Looking over all of this anecdata, none of it makes me pine for four years ago.
But in this election, none of that should even matter. Beyond Trump’s open fondness for fascism, weird Hitler admiration, unhinged incoherence onstage, and relentless lying–traits notably absent in Democratic nominee Kamala Harris–he instigated the Jan. 6 insurrection because he could not accept getting fired by the American people in a free and fair election. Attempted murder of democracy is among the most serious crimes an American president can commmit, and Trump’s guilt there should alone rank him as the worst president in American history and disqualify him from any return to that office.
https://robpegoraro.com/2024/10/25/four-years-ago/
#BidenHarris #Covid #election #fourYearsAgo #inflation #JoeBiden #KamalaHarris #pandemic #Trump2024 #TrumpAdministration
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3.5% — A Small Number With Huge Implications
Kelley and I have recently returned from 10 days in London, one of the most genuinely multi-cultural cities I’ve spent time in. We had many deep and interesting conversations, one of which I’ll touch on further down. (And others I might discuss in more detail in a future post.) Most of those we spoke with—friends, family, colleagues, strangers, whether in politics, arts, sciences, religion, nonprofits and/or social justice organisations—are as distressed as we are about what is happening in this country and their own, and its implications for the rest of the world. Several of our conversations revolved around the findings about change and civil disobedience that I detail in this post—which I had just begun drafting before I left Seattle and so was top-of-mind.
The findings discussed below are the work of Erica Chenoweth and Maria Stephan.1
3.5% of a population can force real and lasting change
Nonviolent civil resistance, or unarmed civil struggle, can and does force real change in the behaviour of government, or, if the government cannot change, then its collapse. Stop and think about that a moment, please: not slight change, or meaningless promises but real change or the fall of government. According to Erica Chenoweth and Maria J. Stephan in their book, Why Civil Resistance Works: The Strategic Logic of Nonviolent Conflict (Columbia University Press, 2012), once around 3.5% of a nations’s population2 has begun active and sustained participation in nonviolent civil resistance, success becomes increasingly likely with time—to the point where in a country like the US we can go so far as to say inevitable.
Don’t take my word for it. Here’s the BBC talking about how this has worked internationally.
Nonviolent protests are twice as likely to succeed as armed conflicts – and those engaging a threshold of 3.5% of the population have never failed to bring about change.
In 1986, millions of Filipinos took to the streets of Manila in peaceful protest and prayer in the People Power movement. The Marcos regime folded on the fourth day.
In 2003, the people of Georgia ousted Eduard Shevardnadze through the bloodless Rose Revolution, in which protestors stormed the parliament building holding the flowers in their hands. While in 2019, the presidents of Sudan and Algeria both announced they would step aside after decades in office, thanks to peaceful campaigns of resistance.
— BBC
Here’s Chenoweth herself discussing her work. Watch it; it’s only 12 minutes. Pay attention. She speaks to 150 years of data; if you doubt the numbers I use here, go argue with her: she has the receipts. Moreover, though she was speaking 13 years ago, her central thesis is sharply relevant to us here in the US (and, as I discovered, the UK) today more than ever.
What this means for the US today
3.5%. A small percentage—but in terms of the US population, big absolute numbers. Per the U.S. Census Bureau, as of July 1, 2025 the population of the USA was 341,784,857. 3.5% would be 11,970,000. Essentially 12 million people.
If 12 million Americans engaged in nonviolent protest/civil disobedience, the current administration would either change significantly or collapse.
12 million. Are there 12 million Americans willing to commit to protest? I think there are. I think that since late 2016 an increasing number of ordinary people are becoming aware, unhappy, and organised. These organisations are many and varied. Some are very small and unconnected to anything else—blocks of houses where families have learnt to look out for neighbours during floods and wildfires, government shut-downs, or sudden DOGE-mandated layoffs. Other organisations at the congregation or neighbourhood or city level are loosely networked. Then there are nodes of specialised groups—food banks, whistle-makers, observers, trainers in nonviolent response—who are starting to coordinate. And then there are cities and states who are becoming rapidly radicalised because of governmental overreach, callousness, and murder: Minneapolis/St Paul and Minnesota; Los Angeles and California; Chicago and Illinois.
Just as important, though often less reported, are the smaller communities in more rural areas where voters are as likely to be registered as Republicans or Independents as Democrats. See, for example, reporting on Wilder, Idaho, population 1,725, where 72% of the county it sits in voted for Trump in 2024: 400 citizens or legal residents, including children, were zip-tied and detained, 105 were held on immigration charges, and 75 were deported. You can risk a bet that in the mid-terms, that county voting percentage is going to look rather different. If you want more on smaller communities and their less-reported tribulations at the hands of immigration and border control agents, see, for example, this NYT article (gift link).
There’s no way to know for certain how many of us there are, but my guess is more, and very possibly a great many more, than 12 million.
But can those 12 million commit to the extent required—and what is the extent required? Can that commitment be sustained—and how long would that be? Can those 12 million coordinate—and to what extent should their actions be concentrated or decentralised?
I haven’t read the book, so I don’t know the finer details, but bearing in mind, always, that we are talking about nonviolent behaviour in support of a clearly articulated goal, two things I feel sure of:
- In terms of mass protest, the more people that gather on the street—and are seen to gather—the more others will join. There is safety in numbers. (I’ve talked about this before.) In the bluntest of terms, the more ordinary Americans that participate, the greater the odds are of the enforcement agencies (ICE, FBI, National Guard, police) becoming unwilling to gas, shoot, or beat protestors: their kids, their parents, and their friends might be in the crowd. This, according to Chenoweth, is what has happened in other times and places.
- Coordinated protests must happen in towns, small cities, and big cities, in communities both red and blue. More than one of those protests must, on the same day, be huge—record-breakingly huge.
- The protests must show not only determination but commitment to kindness and building community rather than to hate and division. Hate does not help. (I’ll return to hate in a bit.)
What do I base all this on? Thinking about US movements for change during my lifetime, looking at the numbers, and considering the results both obvious and subtle.
Precedent in the US
All these numbers are available via a variety of sources. Wikipedia has an aggregation page with enough links to get you started. Please note that while some of these protests were met with violence, whether from over-zealous law enforcement or from hateful counter-protesters, the overwhelming majority remained steadfastly nonviolent in the face of provocation. Also, while it’s important to acknowledge the risk of violence, it’s equally important to remember that, according to Chenoweth’s data, the greater the percentage of a community’s population that’s marching, the less likely it is that local law enforcement or National Guard will be willing to use violent tactics against a crowd of those who may be their relatives, friends, or neighbours.
In terms of single-day actions in the US in my lifetime, some examples:
- Earth Day (1970): On April 22, more than 20 million Americans (10% of the population at the time) took part in teach-ins, clean-ups, and rallies in more than 10,000 towns and campuses. Huge, huge numbers, but a single-day decentralised event. It was not a protest; the focus was not on marching with the goal of regime change but on raising the environmental consciousness of those in power and agitating for legislative action. Earth Day led to the creation of the Environmental Protection Agency and absolutely raised the bar on environmental action in this country, an effect that lasted 55 years—until the actions of the current administration, which has effectively destroyed the Clean Air Act and other safeguards.
- Women’s March (2017): On January 21, 3.3 – 4.6 million Americans (1-1.3% of the population at the time), the majority of them women, marched in over 50 states as counter-programming to Trump’s inauguration. There were over 750,000 in Los Angeles and 500,000 in DC. Those huge numbers buoyed the participants; judging by anedotal accounts, I believe the Women’s March laid the foundations for much of today’s local organising, whether focused on neighbourhood-scale actions or forming wider networks.
- No Kings (2025): On June 14, about 5 million Americans (1.4% of the population) marched in over 2,000 locations in protest and counter-programming of Trump’s Flag Day military parade. On October 18 there was another coordinated protest, this time estimated at between 5 – 7 million Americans (1.4 – 2.0% of the population). This may be the nation’s largest biggest single-day protest. But it was not concentrated in select cities—it consisted mainly of smaller gatherings in many locations. Even so, I believe it consolidated much of the networking and experience of the Women’s March and, again, strengthened the commitment to change and the ability to coordinate action.
In terms of more sustained protest:
- George Floyd/Black Lives Matter (2020): Over the three months after George Floyd’s murder, polls3 suggest 15 – 26 million Americans (4.5 – 6% of the population) joined at least one racial justice demonstration, with the single-highest day turnout on June 6 of perhaps 500,000—though not all in one place. That lack of massive numbers in any single time and place, and (perhaps—I’m happy to be corrected on this) specific actionable demands may be why outcomes are less obvious. Nonetheless, I believe these protests and organised networks helped make the No Kings actions possible. I also believe it had an impact on more localised change—in terms of city and county police regulations and response.
Much more recently, the spate of ICE Out protests resulting largely from the killings in Minneapolis/St Paul of two US citizen observers, Renée Good and Alex Pretti, by Customs and Border Protection agents, are more difficult to quantify. For one, it’s difficult to find reliable numbers (though they seem to have been lower than most protesters hoped). And for another, while there seem to have been some results—the ICE presence in Minneapolis/St Paul and some other cities is being reduced; there will be an investigation into the death of Pretti but not Good—there is no commitment to agents removing masks or wearing ID, or obtaining judicial warrants before breaking into people’s homes and hauling them away with no due process. Democrats in the Senate have (temporarily, if past experience is any guide) found some spine—but at best these results are minor and, at worst, misleading.
What does all this mean?
That we have most of the groundwork already done: the conditions exist for a nation-changing protest. But. We need more, and bigger. With longer planning and very clear demands. Imagine beginning with a single-day nationwide General Strike, school closings, and people on the street in huge numbers—more than 12 million, with, say, 1.5 million in DC, at least half a million in each of the ten largest cities, and tens or hundreds of thousands in smaller cities and towns across the country—followed by two weeks of massive and peaceful demonstrations and/or vigils and/or withdrawal of services or money. And/or perhaps more specific and regionally focused actions.
Is this possible? Yes. Many unions are ready. Many congregations of many creeds are ready. Many administrations at city, county, and state level are ready. Many local and regional law enforcement agencies are reevaluating their cooperation with federal enforcers. Community organisers are ready. There are more and more people out there who have recent experience of protest, demonstration, and vigil. They are connected, formally and informally. Ordinary Americans are more than ready; once we see it begin, we will join. There are easily 12 million of us.
Negativity bias—stats and stories
I promised to touch on those interesting conversations we had in London, and this is where it gets even more hopeful. To understand why let’s first consider something I’ve talked about often: negativity bias.4 People pay more attention to the negative than the positive. It’s an evolutionary trait: humans are prey animals; in survival terms it’s more cost-effective to focus on a sound that could be a predator than on a laugh. As a result we are more attuned to and tend to overweight the importance of the negative than the positive. We can look to the evidence of our own everyday experience; anyone with even a passing familiarity with social media understands that bad news spreads faster and further than good news. Negative disinformation moves even faster. Countless studies back this up: all over the world, ‘If it bleeds, it leads.’
This is important. I want you to understand and believe it: in the context of information and/or news (whether gossip, anecdata, mainstream media, social media, tabloids, podcasts, newsletters or government announcements), negativity bias can lead to a distorted perception of reality. This distortion can be extreme—normally reasonable people can have a seriously skewed understanding of the world around them. There are reams of data to back this up but rather than hammering at you with tables and statistics and links, let me tell you a story.
I used to teach women’s self-defence for a living; my students were women and girls (and a handful of men) of all ages, abilities, colours, creeds, and socio-economic backgrounds. Around the second session, when I started showing women how to apply the strikes I taught in the first session—how to seriously hurt their attacker—they baulked. Why? Because, they said, fighting back would just make it worse, make their would-be rapist (rape and sexual torture is what most women fear) angry and more like to hurt them. Everything they knew about the world told them that fighting back would do no good: all you had to do was read the newspaper, watch the news, listen to the radio to learn that (this was before the internet).
I would sit them down, and ask: What do you think the odds are of a woman fighting off a rapist? Someone might venture, Five percent? No, I’d say: if the attacker is unarmed, data show that 72% of the time if a woman fights back she will avoid rape; if she fights back against an attacker armed with a knife, her chances are 58%; against a gun, 51%. Even if a would-be rapist is armed with a gun and the woman he has targeted is unarmed, if she fights back the odds of her avoiding rape are greater than even. (The odds of her being less badly hurt are also better if she fights back than if she doesn’t.)
Those stats were from a 1985 study, Ask Any Woman: A London Inquiry into Rape and Sexual Assault, Ruth E. Hall (Bristol: Falling Wall Press, 1985). While writing Always (published 2007), I went to the Department of Justice website to check their statistics: the numbers held up. Looking at what info I can find now (and the internet has got so bad that it’s difficult to find clear answers) it seems that women’s odds have not got worse.
So why do women believe fighting back is useless? Because the media tells them so. Media, mainstream and social, reports completed rapes (the bloodier and more brutal the better) far more often than attempted rapes. While in real life women have an almost 3:1 chance of beating off a would-be rapist, the media publicises 13 completed rapes for every attempted but uncompleted rape. (Why? Because bad news garners clicks. Bad news sells ads.) When it comes to gender violence, media negativity bias is 39:1. That is a seriously skewed version of reality. That’s what we’re up against; that’s why it’s easy to read bad news and believe the world is irretrievably broken.
Saving the best for last
Right now there is a lot of bad news to notice. In the US we are hit daily with everything from the disassembly of public health and the cancellation of research programmes to federal agents executing citizens in the streets. In the UK we talked to people in positions of formal and informal responsibility at the national, community, or diocesan level who are worried by the signs of hatred visibly rising in their spheres of interest—racist graffiti, street violence, social media attacks.
Again and again we brought up this notion of 3.5% and change. It excited everyone—it is exciting. But then one woman Kelley was talking to suddenly stopped and said (I’m paraphrasing a second-hand report) “Oh! All that hatred out there, that feels so overwhelming, like there’s nothing we can do because the whole world hates us… What if it’s only 3.5% who are full of hate, and not the whole world?”
When Kelley told me this later that night I said, Yes! And, oh, I wish I’d been part of that conversation! Because I would have pointed out that when you factor in the cognitive bias towards the negative, it’s probable that the level of real hatred, the kind of hatred that leads to burning synagogues, spitting on immigrants, attacking transfolk—or to marching in the street to counter-protest nonviolent marches for change, calling your representative to vote for dehumanising legislation against transgirls in sports, or directly funding hate groups—is not just small but tiny. Think about it. Think about the numbers of people who show up for anti-abortion vigils or White Power marches or transphobic campaigns; try to remember how many homophobes showed up at the last Pride event: minuscule, comparatively speaking. Insignificant when weighed against those of us who protest hatred and cruelty.
If it takes only 3.5% of a population to change the direction of a nation; if the hatred we feel is out there isn’t quite as widespread as we think; and if you factor in the negativity bias at a ratio of 39:1, well, even if the bias was wrong by an order of magnitude, it’s still a heartening answer. Change is possible. More possible than we might think.
I don’t know what will force the growing dissent against the current administration’s agenda into full flower but I have no doubt it’s coming. And when it does I have no doubt it will succeed. There are so very many more of us than them.
- Many thanks to Mary Brandt whose Wellnessrounds.org post brought Chenoweth to my attention and helped crystallise what I’d been fumbling towards for a while. ↩︎
- I’ll be using ‘population’ and ‘Americans’ interchangeably to refer to those who live in this country, whether they’re citizens or not. ↩︎
- Lowest estimate from Pew, highest from Kaiser Family Foundation. These are self-reported numbers rather than estimates from photos and professional crowd counters. ↩︎
- I usually talk about it in terms of Misery Lit, and the perception that High Art has to be depressing. ↩︎
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3.5% — A Small Number With Huge Implications
Kelley and I have recently returned from 10 days in London, one of the most genuinely multi-cultural cities I’ve spent time in. We had many deep and interesting conversations, one of which I’ll touch on further down. (And others I might discuss in more detail in a future post.) Most of those we spoke with—friends, family, colleagues, strangers, whether in politics, arts, sciences, religion, nonprofits and/or social justice organisations—are as distressed as we are about what is happening in this country and their own, and its implications for the rest of the world. Several of our conversations revolved around the findings about change and civil disobedience that I detail in this post—which I had just begun drafting before I left Seattle and so was top-of-mind.
The findings discussed below are the work of Erica Chenoweth and Maria Stephan.1
3.5% of a population can force real and lasting change
Nonviolent civil resistance, or unarmed civil struggle, can and does force real change in the behaviour of government, or, if the government cannot change, then its collapse. Stop and think about that a moment, please: not slight change, or meaningless promises but real change or the fall of government. According to Erica Chenoweth and Maria J. Stephan in their book, Why Civil Resistance Works: The Strategic Logic of Nonviolent Conflict (Columbia University Press, 2012), once around 3.5% of a nations’s population2 has begun active and sustained participation in nonviolent civil resistance, success becomes increasingly likely with time.
Don’t take my word for it. Here’s the BBC talking about how this has worked internationally.
Nonviolent protests are twice as likely to succeed as armed conflicts – and those engaging a threshold of 3.5% of the population have never failed to bring about change. [Note: given revised data—see footnote 1 below—it would be more accurate to say ‘very rarely failed to bring about change.]
In 1986, millions of Filipinos took to the streets of Manila in peaceful protest and prayer in the People Power movement. The Marcos regime folded on the fourth day.
In 2003, the people of Georgia ousted Eduard Shevardnadze through the bloodless Rose Revolution, in which protestors stormed the parliament building holding the flowers in their hands. While in 2019, the presidents of Sudan and Algeria both announced they would step aside after decades in office, thanks to peaceful campaigns of resistance.
— BBC
Here’s Chenoweth herself discussing her work. Watch it; it’s only 12 minutes. Pay attention. She speaks to 150 years of data; if you doubt the numbers I use here, go argue with her: she has the receipts. Moreover, though she was speaking 13 years ago, her central thesis is sharply relevant to us here in the US (and, as I discovered, the UK) today more than ever.
What this means for the US today
3.5%. A small percentage—but in terms of the US population, big absolute numbers. Per the U.S. Census Bureau, as of July 1, 2025 the population of the USA was 341,784,857. 3.5% would be 11,970,000. Essentially 12 million people.
If 12 million Americans engaged in active and sustained nonviolent protest/civil disobedience, the current administration would very likely either change significantly or collapse.
12 million. Are there 12 million Americans willing to commit to protest? I think there are. I think that since late 2016 an increasing number of ordinary people are becoming aware, unhappy, and organised. These organisations are many and varied. Some are very small and unconnected to anything else—blocks of houses where families have learnt to look out for neighbours during floods and wildfires, government shut-downs, or sudden DOGE-mandated layoffs. Other organisations at the congregation or neighbourhood or city level are loosely networked. Then there are nodes of specialised groups—food banks, whistle-makers, observers, trainers in nonviolent response—who are starting to coordinate. And then there are cities and states who are becoming rapidly radicalised because of governmental overreach, callousness, and murder: Minneapolis/St Paul and Minnesota; Los Angeles and California; Chicago and Illinois.
Just as important, though often less reported, are the smaller communities in more rural areas where voters are as likely to be registered as Republicans or Independents as Democrats. See, for example, reporting on Wilder, Idaho, population 1,725, where 72% of the county it sits in voted for Trump in 2024: 400 citizens or legal residents, including children, were zip-tied and detained, 105 were held on immigration charges, and 75 were deported. You can risk a bet that in the mid-terms, that county voting percentage is going to look rather different. If you want more on smaller communities and their less-reported tribulations at the hands of immigration and border control agents, see, for example, this NYT article (gift link).
There’s no way to know for certain how many of us there are, but my guess is more, and very possibly a great many more, than 12 million.
But can those 12 million commit to the extent required—and what is the extent required? Can that commitment be sustained—and for how long should that be? Can those 12 million coordinate—and to what extent should their actions be concentrated or decentralised?
I haven’t read the book, so I don’t know the finer details, but bearing in mind, always, that we are talking about nonviolent behaviour in support of a clearly articulated goal, two things I feel sure of:
- In terms of mass protest, the more people that gather on the street—and are seen to gather—the more others will join. There is safety in numbers. (I’ve talked about this before.) In the bluntest of terms, the more ordinary Americans that participate, the greater the odds are of the enforcement agencies (ICE, FBI, National Guard, police) becoming unwilling to gas, shoot, or beat protestors: their kids, their parents, and their friends might be in the crowd. This, according to Chenoweth, is what has happened in other times and places.
- Coordinated protests must happen in towns, small cities, and big cities, in communities both red and blue. More than one of those protests must, on the same day, be huge—record-breakingly huge.
- The protests must show not only determination but commitment to kindness and building community rather than to hate and division. Hate does not help. (I’ll return to hate in a bit.)
What do I base all this on? Thinking about US movements for change during my lifetime, looking at the numbers, and considering the results both obvious and subtle.
Precedent in the US
All these numbers are available via a variety of sources. Wikipedia has an aggregation page with enough links to get you started. Please note that while some of these protests were met with violence, whether from over-zealous law enforcement or from hateful counter-protesters, the overwhelming majority remained steadfastly nonviolent in the face of provocation. Also, while it’s important to acknowledge the risk of violence, it’s equally important to remember that, according to Chenoweth’s data, the greater the percentage of a community’s population that’s marching, the less likely it is that local law enforcement or National Guard will be willing to use violent tactics against a crowd of those who may be their relatives, friends, or neighbours.
In terms of single-day actions in the US in my lifetime, some examples:
- Earth Day (1970): On April 22, more than 20 million Americans (10% of the population at the time) took part in teach-ins, clean-ups, and rallies in more than 10,000 towns and campuses. Huge, huge numbers, but a single-day decentralised event. It was not a protest; the focus was not on marching with the goal of regime change but on raising the environmental consciousness of those in power and agitating for legislative action. Earth Day led to the creation of the Environmental Protection Agency and absolutely raised the bar on environmental action in this country, an effect that lasted 55 years—until the actions of the current administration, which has effectively destroyed the Clean Air Act and other safeguards.
- Women’s March (2017): On January 21, 3.3 – 4.6 million Americans (1-1.3% of the population at the time), the majority of them women, marched in over 50 states as counter-programming to Trump’s inauguration. There were over 750,000 in Los Angeles and 500,000 in DC. Those huge numbers buoyed the participants; judging by anedotal accounts, I believe the Women’s March laid the foundations for much of today’s local organising, whether focused on neighbourhood-scale actions or forming wider networks.
- No Kings (2025): On June 14, about 5 million Americans (1.4% of the population) marched in over 2,000 locations in protest and counter-programming of Trump’s Flag Day military parade. On October 18 there was another coordinated protest, this time estimated at between 5 – 7 million Americans (1.4 – 2.0% of the population). This may be the nation’s largest biggest single-day protest. But it was not concentrated in select cities—it consisted mainly of smaller gatherings in many locations. Even so, I believe it consolidated much of the networking and experience of the Women’s March and, again, strengthened the commitment to change and the ability to coordinate action.
In terms of more sustained protest:
- George Floyd/Black Lives Matter (2020): Over the three months after George Floyd’s murder, polls3 suggest 15 – 26 million Americans (4.5 – 6% of the population) joined at least one racial justice demonstration, with the single-highest day turnout on June 6 of perhaps 500,000—though not all in one place. That lack of massive numbers in any single time and place, and (perhaps—I’m happy to be corrected on this) specific actionable demands may be why outcomes are less obvious. Nonetheless, I believe these protests and organised networks helped make the No Kings actions possible. I also believe it had an impact on more localised change—in terms of city and county police regulations and response.
Much more recently, the spate of ICE Out protests resulting largely from the killings in Minneapolis/St Paul of two US citizen observers, Renée Good and Alex Pretti, by Customs and Border Protection agents, are more difficult to quantify. For one, it’s difficult to find reliable numbers (though they seem to have been lower than most protesters hoped). And for another, while there seem to have been some results—the ICE presence in Minneapolis/St Paul and some other cities is being reduced; there will be an investigation into the death of Pretti but not Good—there is no commitment to agents removing masks or wearing ID, or obtaining judicial warrants before breaking into people’s homes and hauling them away with no due process. Democrats in the Senate have (temporarily, if past experience is any guide) found some spine—but at best these results are minor and, at worst, misleading.
What does all this mean?
That we have most of the groundwork already done: the conditions exist for a nation-changing protest. But. We need more, and bigger. With longer planning and very clear demands. And a great deal of very unglamourous behind the scenes organisation. Imagine beginning with a single-day nationwide General Strike, school closings, and people on the street in huge numbers—more than 12 million, with, say, 1.5 million in DC, at least half a million in each of the ten largest cities, and tens or hundreds of thousands in smaller cities and towns across the country—followed by two weeks of massive and peaceful demonstrations and/or vigils and/or withdrawal of services or money. And/or perhaps more specific and regionally focused actions.
Is this possible? Yes. Many unions are ready. Many congregations of many creeds are ready. Many administrations at city, county, and state level are ready. Many local and regional law enforcement agencies are reevaluating their cooperation with federal enforcers. Community organisers are ready. There are more and more people out there who have recent experience of protest, demonstration, and vigil. They are connected, formally and informally. Ordinary Americans are more than ready; once we see it begin, we will join. There are easily 12 million of us.
Negativity bias—stats and stories
I promised to touch on those interesting conversations we had in London, and this is where it gets even more hopeful. To understand why let’s first consider something I’ve talked about often: negativity bias.4 People pay more attention to the negative than the positive. It’s an evolutionary trait: humans are prey animals; in survival terms it’s more cost-effective to focus on a sound that could be a predator than on a laugh. As a result we are more attuned to and tend to overweight the importance of the negative than the positive. We can look to the evidence of our own everyday experience; anyone with even a passing familiarity with social media understands that bad news spreads faster and further than good news. Negative disinformation moves even faster. Countless studies back this up: all over the world, ‘If it bleeds, it leads.’
This is important. I want you to understand and believe it: in the context of information and/or news (whether gossip, anecdata, mainstream media, social media, tabloids, podcasts, newsletters or government announcements), negativity bias can lead to a distorted perception of reality. This distortion can be extreme—normally reasonable people can have a seriously skewed understanding of the world around them. There are reams of data to back this up but rather than hammering at you with tables and statistics and links, let me tell you a story.
I used to teach women’s self-defence for a living; my students were women and girls (and a handful of men) of all ages, abilities, colours, creeds, and socio-economic backgrounds. Around the second session, when I started showing women how to apply the strikes I taught in the first session—how to seriously hurt their attacker—they baulked. Why? Because, they said, fighting back would just make it worse, make their would-be rapist (rape and sexual torture is what most women fear) angry and more like to hurt them. Everything they knew about the world told them that fighting back would do no good: all you had to do was read the newspaper, watch the news, listen to the radio to learn that (this was before the internet).
I would sit them down, and ask: What do you think the odds are of a woman fighting off a rapist? Someone might venture, Five percent? No, I’d say: if the attacker is unarmed, data show that 72% of the time if a woman fights back she will avoid rape; if she fights back against an attacker armed with a knife, her chances are 58%; against a gun, 51%. Even if a would-be rapist is armed with a gun and the woman he has targeted is unarmed, if she fights back the odds of her avoiding rape are greater than even. (The odds of her being less badly hurt are also better if she fights back than if she doesn’t.)
Those stats were from a 1985 study, Ask Any Woman: A London Inquiry into Rape and Sexual Assault, Ruth E. Hall (Bristol: Falling Wall Press, 1985). While writing Always (published 2007), I went to the Department of Justice website to check their statistics: the numbers held up. Looking at what info I can find now (and the internet has got so bad that it’s difficult to find clear answers) it seems that women’s odds have not got worse.
So why do women believe fighting back is useless? Because the media tells them so. Media, mainstream and social, reports completed rapes (the bloodier and more brutal the better) far more often than attempted rapes. While in real life women have an almost 3:1 chance of beating off a would-be rapist, the media publicises 13 completed rapes for every attempted but uncompleted rape. (Why? Because bad news garners clicks. Bad news sells ads.) When it comes to gender violence, media negativity bias is 39:1. That is a seriously skewed version of reality. That’s what we’re up against; that’s why it’s easy to read bad news and believe the world is irretrievably broken.
Saving the best for last
Right now there is a lot of bad news to notice. In the US we are hit daily with everything from the disassembly of public health and the cancellation of research programmes to federal agents executing citizens in the streets. In the UK we talked to people in positions of formal and informal responsibility at the national, community, or diocesan level who are worried by the signs of hatred visibly rising in their spheres of interest—racist graffiti, street violence, social media attacks.
Again and again we brought up this notion of 3.5% and change. It excited everyone—it is exciting. But then one woman Kelley was talking to suddenly stopped and said (I’m paraphrasing a second-hand report) “Oh! All that hatred out there, that feels so overwhelming, like there’s nothing we can do because the whole world hates us… What if it’s only 3.5% who are full of hate, and not the whole world?”
When Kelley told me this later that night I said, Yes! And, oh, I wish I’d been part of that conversation! Because I would have pointed out that when you factor in the cognitive bias towards the negative, it’s probable that the level of real hatred, the kind of hatred that leads to burning synagogues, spitting on immigrants, attacking transfolk—or to marching in the street to counter-protest nonviolent marches for change, calling your representative to vote for dehumanising legislation against transgirls in sports, or directly funding hate groups—is not just small but tiny. Think about it. Think about the numbers of people who show up for anti-abortion vigils or White Power marches or transphobic campaigns; try to remember how many homophobes showed up at the last Pride event: minuscule, comparatively speaking. Insignificant when weighed against those of us who protest hatred and cruelty.
If it takes only 3.5% of a population to change the direction of a nation; if the hatred we feel is out there isn’t quite as widespread as we think; and if you factor in the negativity bias at a ratio of 39:1, well, even if the bias was wrong by an order of magnitude, it’s still a heartening answer. Change is possible. More possible than we might think.
I don’t know what will force the growing dissent against the current administration’s agenda into full flower but I have no doubt it’s coming. And when it does I have no doubt it will succeed. There are so very many more of us than them.
- Many thanks to Mary Brandt whose Wellnessrounds.org post brought Chenoweth to my attention and helped crystallise what I’d been fumbling towards for a while. Those who want to follow the evolution of Chenoweth’s thinking might want to download this PDF. (Thanks Jennifer!) ↩︎
- I’ll be using ‘population’ and ‘Americans’ interchangeably to refer to those who live in this country, whether they’re citizens or not. ↩︎
- Lowest estimate from Pew, highest from Kaiser Family Foundation. These are self-reported numbers rather than estimates from photos and professional crowd counters. ↩︎
- I usually talk about it in terms of Misery Lit, and the perception that High Art has to be depressing. ↩︎
-
3.5% — A Small Number With Huge Implications
Kelley and I have recently returned from 10 days in London, one of the most genuinely multi-cultural cities I’ve spent time in. We had many deep and interesting conversations, one of which I’ll touch on further down. (And others I might discuss in more detail in a future post.) Most of those we spoke with—friends, family, colleagues, strangers, whether in politics, arts, sciences, religion, nonprofits and/or social justice organisations—are as distressed as we are about what is happening in this country and their own, and its implications for the rest of the world. Several of our conversations revolved around the findings about change and civil disobedience that I detail in this post—which I had just begun drafting before I left Seattle and so was top-of-mind.
The findings discussed below are the work of Erica Chenoweth and Maria Stephan.1
3.5% of a population can force real and lasting change
Nonviolent civil resistance, or unarmed civil struggle, can and does force real change in the behaviour of government, or, if the government cannot change, then its collapse. Stop and think about that a moment, please: not slight change, or meaningless promises but real change or the fall of government. According to Erica Chenoweth and Maria J. Stephan in their book, Why Civil Resistance Works: The Strategic Logic of Nonviolent Conflict (Columbia University Press, 2012), once around 3.5% of a nations’s population2 has begun active and sustained participation in nonviolent civil resistance, success becomes increasingly likely with time.
Don’t take my word for it. Here’s the BBC talking about how this has worked internationally.
Nonviolent protests are twice as likely to succeed as armed conflicts – and those engaging a threshold of 3.5% of the population have never failed to bring about change. [Note: given revised data—see footnote 1 below—it would be more accurate to say ‘very rarely failed to bring about change.]
In 1986, millions of Filipinos took to the streets of Manila in peaceful protest and prayer in the People Power movement. The Marcos regime folded on the fourth day.
In 2003, the people of Georgia ousted Eduard Shevardnadze through the bloodless Rose Revolution, in which protestors stormed the parliament building holding the flowers in their hands. While in 2019, the presidents of Sudan and Algeria both announced they would step aside after decades in office, thanks to peaceful campaigns of resistance.
— BBC
Here’s Chenoweth herself discussing her work. Watch it; it’s only 12 minutes. Pay attention. She speaks to 150 years of data; if you doubt the numbers I use here, go argue with her: she has the receipts. Moreover, though she was speaking 13 years ago, her central thesis is sharply relevant to us here in the US (and, as I discovered, the UK) today more than ever.
What this means for the US today
3.5%. A small percentage—but in terms of the US population, big absolute numbers. Per the U.S. Census Bureau, as of July 1, 2025 the population of the USA was 341,784,857. 3.5% would be 11,970,000. Essentially 12 million people.
If 12 million Americans engaged in active and sustained nonviolent protest/civil disobedience, the current administration would very likely either change significantly or collapse.
12 million. Are there 12 million Americans willing to commit to protest? I think there are. I think that since late 2016 an increasing number of ordinary people are becoming aware, unhappy, and organised. These organisations are many and varied. Some are very small and unconnected to anything else—blocks of houses where families have learnt to look out for neighbours during floods and wildfires, government shut-downs, or sudden DOGE-mandated layoffs. Other organisations at the congregation or neighbourhood or city level are loosely networked. Then there are nodes of specialised groups—food banks, whistle-makers, observers, trainers in nonviolent response—who are starting to coordinate. And then there are cities and states who are becoming rapidly radicalised because of governmental overreach, callousness, and murder: Minneapolis/St Paul and Minnesota; Los Angeles and California; Chicago and Illinois.
Just as important, though often less reported, are the smaller communities in more rural areas where voters are as likely to be registered as Republicans or Independents as Democrats. See, for example, reporting on Wilder, Idaho, population 1,725, where 72% of the county it sits in voted for Trump in 2024: 400 citizens or legal residents, including children, were zip-tied and detained, 105 were held on immigration charges, and 75 were deported. You can risk a bet that in the mid-terms, that county voting percentage is going to look rather different. If you want more on smaller communities and their less-reported tribulations at the hands of immigration and border control agents, see, for example, this NYT article (gift link).
There’s no way to know for certain how many of us there are, but my guess is more, and very possibly a great many more, than 12 million.
But can those 12 million commit to the extent required—and what is the extent required? Can that commitment be sustained—and for how long should that be? Can those 12 million coordinate—and to what extent should their actions be concentrated or decentralised?
I haven’t read the book, so I don’t know the finer details, but bearing in mind, always, that we are talking about nonviolent behaviour in support of a clearly articulated goal, two things I feel sure of:
- In terms of mass protest, the more people that gather on the street—and are seen to gather—the more others will join. There is safety in numbers. (I’ve talked about this before.) In the bluntest of terms, the more ordinary Americans that participate, the greater the odds are of the enforcement agencies (ICE, FBI, National Guard, police) becoming unwilling to gas, shoot, or beat protestors: their kids, their parents, and their friends might be in the crowd. This, according to Chenoweth, is what has happened in other times and places.
- Coordinated protests must happen in towns, small cities, and big cities, in communities both red and blue. More than one of those protests must, on the same day, be huge—record-breakingly huge.
- The protests must show not only determination but commitment to kindness and building community rather than to hate and division. Hate does not help. (I’ll return to hate in a bit.)
What do I base all this on? Thinking about US movements for change during my lifetime, looking at the numbers, and considering the results both obvious and subtle.
Precedent in the US
All these numbers are available via a variety of sources. Wikipedia has an aggregation page with enough links to get you started. Please note that while some of these protests were met with violence, whether from over-zealous law enforcement or from hateful counter-protesters, the overwhelming majority remained steadfastly nonviolent in the face of provocation. Also, while it’s important to acknowledge the risk of violence, it’s equally important to remember that, according to Chenoweth’s data, the greater the percentage of a community’s population that’s marching, the less likely it is that local law enforcement or National Guard will be willing to use violent tactics against a crowd of those who may be their relatives, friends, or neighbours.
In terms of single-day actions in the US in my lifetime, some examples:
- Earth Day (1970): On April 22, more than 20 million Americans (10% of the population at the time) took part in teach-ins, clean-ups, and rallies in more than 10,000 towns and campuses. Huge, huge numbers, but a single-day decentralised event. It was not a protest; the focus was not on marching with the goal of regime change but on raising the environmental consciousness of those in power and agitating for legislative action. Earth Day led to the creation of the Environmental Protection Agency and absolutely raised the bar on environmental action in this country, an effect that lasted 55 years—until the actions of the current administration, which has effectively destroyed the Clean Air Act and other safeguards.
- Women’s March (2017): On January 21, 3.3 – 4.6 million Americans (1-1.3% of the population at the time), the majority of them women, marched in over 50 states as counter-programming to Trump’s inauguration. There were over 750,000 in Los Angeles and 500,000 in DC. Those huge numbers buoyed the participants; judging by anedotal accounts, I believe the Women’s March laid the foundations for much of today’s local organising, whether focused on neighbourhood-scale actions or forming wider networks.
- No Kings (2025): On June 14, about 5 million Americans (1.4% of the population) marched in over 2,000 locations in protest and counter-programming of Trump’s Flag Day military parade. On October 18 there was another coordinated protest, this time estimated at between 5 – 7 million Americans (1.4 – 2.0% of the population). This may be the nation’s largest biggest single-day protest. But it was not concentrated in select cities—it consisted mainly of smaller gatherings in many locations. Even so, I believe it consolidated much of the networking and experience of the Women’s March and, again, strengthened the commitment to change and the ability to coordinate action.
In terms of more sustained protest:
- George Floyd/Black Lives Matter (2020): Over the three months after George Floyd’s murder, polls3 suggest 15 – 26 million Americans (4.5 – 6% of the population) joined at least one racial justice demonstration, with the single-highest day turnout on June 6 of perhaps 500,000—though not all in one place. That lack of massive numbers in any single time and place, and (perhaps—I’m happy to be corrected on this) specific actionable demands may be why outcomes are less obvious. Nonetheless, I believe these protests and organised networks helped make the No Kings actions possible. I also believe it had an impact on more localised change—in terms of city and county police regulations and response.
Much more recently, the spate of ICE Out protests resulting largely from the killings in Minneapolis/St Paul of two US citizen observers, Renée Good and Alex Pretti, by Customs and Border Protection agents, are more difficult to quantify. For one, it’s difficult to find reliable numbers (though they seem to have been lower than most protesters hoped). And for another, while there seem to have been some results—the ICE presence in Minneapolis/St Paul and some other cities is being reduced; there will be an investigation into the death of Pretti but not Good—there is no commitment to agents removing masks or wearing ID, or obtaining judicial warrants before breaking into people’s homes and hauling them away with no due process. Democrats in the Senate have (temporarily, if past experience is any guide) found some spine—but at best these results are minor and, at worst, misleading.
What does all this mean?
That we have most of the groundwork already done: the conditions exist for a nation-changing protest. But. We need more, and bigger. With longer planning and very clear demands. And a great deal of very unglamourous behind the scenes organisation. Imagine beginning with a single-day nationwide General Strike, school closings, and people on the street in huge numbers—more than 12 million, with, say, 1.5 million in DC, at least half a million in each of the ten largest cities, and tens or hundreds of thousands in smaller cities and towns across the country—followed by two weeks of massive and peaceful demonstrations and/or vigils and/or withdrawal of services or money. And/or perhaps more specific and regionally focused actions.
Is this possible? Yes. Many unions are ready. Many congregations of many creeds are ready. Many administrations at city, county, and state level are ready. Many local and regional law enforcement agencies are reevaluating their cooperation with federal enforcers. Community organisers are ready. There are more and more people out there who have recent experience of protest, demonstration, and vigil. They are connected, formally and informally. Ordinary Americans are more than ready; once we see it begin, we will join. There are easily 12 million of us.
Negativity bias—stats and stories
I promised to touch on those interesting conversations we had in London, and this is where it gets even more hopeful. To understand why let’s first consider something I’ve talked about often: negativity bias.4 People pay more attention to the negative than the positive. It’s an evolutionary trait: humans are prey animals; in survival terms it’s more cost-effective to focus on a sound that could be a predator than on a laugh. As a result we are more attuned to and tend to overweight the importance of the negative than the positive. We can look to the evidence of our own everyday experience; anyone with even a passing familiarity with social media understands that bad news spreads faster and further than good news. Negative disinformation moves even faster. Countless studies back this up: all over the world, ‘If it bleeds, it leads.’
This is important. I want you to understand and believe it: in the context of information and/or news (whether gossip, anecdata, mainstream media, social media, tabloids, podcasts, newsletters or government announcements), negativity bias can lead to a distorted perception of reality. This distortion can be extreme—normally reasonable people can have a seriously skewed understanding of the world around them. There are reams of data to back this up but rather than hammering at you with tables and statistics and links, let me tell you a story.
I used to teach women’s self-defence for a living; my students were women and girls (and a handful of men) of all ages, abilities, colours, creeds, and socio-economic backgrounds. Around the second session, when I started showing women how to apply the strikes I taught in the first session—how to seriously hurt their attacker—they baulked. Why? Because, they said, fighting back would just make it worse, make their would-be rapist (rape and sexual torture is what most women fear) angry and more like to hurt them. Everything they knew about the world told them that fighting back would do no good: all you had to do was read the newspaper, watch the news, listen to the radio to learn that (this was before the internet).
I would sit them down, and ask: What do you think the odds are of a woman fighting off a rapist? Someone might venture, Five percent? No, I’d say: if the attacker is unarmed, data show that 72% of the time if a woman fights back she will avoid rape; if she fights back against an attacker armed with a knife, her chances are 58%; against a gun, 51%. Even if a would-be rapist is armed with a gun and the woman he has targeted is unarmed, if she fights back the odds of her avoiding rape are greater than even. (The odds of her being less badly hurt are also better if she fights back than if she doesn’t.)
Those stats were from a 1985 study, Ask Any Woman: A London Inquiry into Rape and Sexual Assault, Ruth E. Hall (Bristol: Falling Wall Press, 1985). While writing Always (published 2007), I went to the Department of Justice website to check their statistics: the numbers held up. Looking at what info I can find now (and the internet has got so bad that it’s difficult to find clear answers) it seems that women’s odds have not got worse.
So why do women believe fighting back is useless? Because the media tells them so. Media, mainstream and social, reports completed rapes (the bloodier and more brutal the better) far more often than attempted rapes. While in real life women have an almost 3:1 chance of beating off a would-be rapist, the media publicises 13 completed rapes for every attempted but uncompleted rape. (Why? Because bad news garners clicks. Bad news sells ads.) When it comes to gender violence, media negativity bias is 39:1. That is a seriously skewed version of reality. That’s what we’re up against; that’s why it’s easy to read bad news and believe the world is irretrievably broken.
Saving the best for last
Right now there is a lot of bad news to notice. In the US we are hit daily with everything from the disassembly of public health and the cancellation of research programmes to federal agents executing citizens in the streets. In the UK we talked to people in positions of formal and informal responsibility at the national, community, or diocesan level who are worried by the signs of hatred visibly rising in their spheres of interest—racist graffiti, street violence, social media attacks.
Again and again we brought up this notion of 3.5% and change. It excited everyone—it is exciting. But then one woman Kelley was talking to suddenly stopped and said (I’m paraphrasing a second-hand report) “Oh! All that hatred out there, that feels so overwhelming, like there’s nothing we can do because the whole world hates us… What if it’s only 3.5% who are full of hate, and not the whole world?”
When Kelley told me this later that night I said, Yes! And, oh, I wish I’d been part of that conversation! Because I would have pointed out that when you factor in the cognitive bias towards the negative, it’s probable that the level of real hatred, the kind of hatred that leads to burning synagogues, spitting on immigrants, attacking transfolk—or to marching in the street to counter-protest nonviolent marches for change, calling your representative to vote for dehumanising legislation against transgirls in sports, or directly funding hate groups—is not just small but tiny. Think about it. Think about the numbers of people who show up for anti-abortion vigils or White Power marches or transphobic campaigns; try to remember how many homophobes showed up at the last Pride event: minuscule, comparatively speaking. Insignificant when weighed against those of us who protest hatred and cruelty.
If it takes only 3.5% of a population to change the direction of a nation; if the hatred we feel is out there isn’t quite as widespread as we think; and if you factor in the negativity bias at a ratio of 39:1, well, even if the bias was wrong by an order of magnitude, it’s still a heartening answer. Change is possible. More possible than we might think.
I don’t know what will force the growing dissent against the current administration’s agenda into full flower but I have no doubt it’s coming. And when it does I have no doubt it will succeed. There are so very many more of us than them.
- Many thanks to Mary Brandt whose Wellnessrounds.org post brought Chenoweth to my attention and helped crystallise what I’d been fumbling towards for a while. Those who want to follow the evolution of Chenoweth’s thinking might want to download this PDF. (Thanks Jennifer!) ↩︎
- I’ll be using ‘population’ and ‘Americans’ interchangeably to refer to those who live in this country, whether they’re citizens or not. ↩︎
- Lowest estimate from Pew, highest from Kaiser Family Foundation. These are self-reported numbers rather than estimates from photos and professional crowd counters. ↩︎
- I usually talk about it in terms of Misery Lit, and the perception that High Art has to be depressing. ↩︎
-
3.5% — A Small Number With Huge Implications
Kelley and I have recently returned from 10 days in London, one of the most genuinely multi-cultural cities I’ve spent time in. We had many deep and interesting conversations, one of which I’ll touch on further down. (And others I might discuss in more detail in a future post.) Most of those we spoke with—friends, family, colleagues, strangers, whether in politics, arts, sciences, religion, nonprofits and/or social justice organisations—are as distressed as we are about what is happening in this country and their own, and its implications for the rest of the world. Several of our conversations revolved around the findings about change and civil disobedience that I detail in this post—which I had just begun drafting before I left Seattle and so was top-of-mind.
The findings discussed below are the work of Erica Chenoweth and Maria Stephan.1
3.5% of a population can force real and lasting change
Nonviolent civil resistance, or unarmed civil struggle, can and does force real change in the behaviour of government, or, if the government cannot change, then its collapse. Stop and think about that a moment, please: not slight change, or meaningless promises but real change or the fall of government. According to Erica Chenoweth and Maria J. Stephan in their book, Why Civil Resistance Works: The Strategic Logic of Nonviolent Conflict (Columbia University Press, 2012), once around 3.5% of a nations’s population2 has begun active and sustained participation in nonviolent civil resistance, success becomes increasingly likely with time—to the point where in a country like the US we can go so far as to say inevitable.
Don’t take my word for it. Here’s the BBC talking about how this has worked internationally.
Nonviolent protests are twice as likely to succeed as armed conflicts – and those engaging a threshold of 3.5% of the population have never failed to bring about change.
In 1986, millions of Filipinos took to the streets of Manila in peaceful protest and prayer in the People Power movement. The Marcos regime folded on the fourth day.
In 2003, the people of Georgia ousted Eduard Shevardnadze through the bloodless Rose Revolution, in which protestors stormed the parliament building holding the flowers in their hands. While in 2019, the presidents of Sudan and Algeria both announced they would step aside after decades in office, thanks to peaceful campaigns of resistance.
— BBC
Here’s Chenoweth herself discussing her work. Watch it; it’s only 12 minutes. Pay attention. She speaks to 150 years of data; if you doubt the numbers I use here, go argue with her: she has the receipts. Moreover, though she was speaking 13 years ago, her central thesis is sharply relevant to us here in the US (and, as I discovered, the UK) today more than ever.
What this means for the US today
3.5%. A small percentage—but in terms of the US population, big absolute numbers. Per the U.S. Census Bureau, as of July 1, 2025 the population of the USA was 341,784,857. 3.5% would be 11,970,000. Essentially 12 million people.
If 12 million Americans engaged in nonviolent protest/civil disobedience, the current administration would either change significantly or collapse.
12 million. Are there 12 million Americans willing to commit to protest? I think there are. I think that since late 2016 an increasing number of ordinary people are becoming aware, unhappy, and organised. These organisations are many and varied. Some are very small and unconnected to anything else—blocks of houses where families have learnt to look out for neighbours during floods and wildfires, government shut-downs, or sudden DOGE-mandated layoffs. Other organisations at the congregation or neighbourhood or city level are loosely networked. Then there are nodes of specialised groups—food banks, whistle-makers, observers, trainers in nonviolent response—who are starting to coordinate. And then there are cities and states who are becoming rapidly radicalised because of governmental overreach, callousness, and murder: Minneapolis/St Paul and Minnesota; Los Angeles and California; Chicago and Illinois.
Just as important, though often less reported, are the smaller communities in more rural areas where voters are as likely to be registered as Republicans or Independents as Democrats. See, for example, reporting on Wilder, Idaho, population 1,725, where 72% of the county it sits in voted for Trump in 2024: 400 citizens or legal residents, including children, were zip-tied and detained, 105 were held on immigration charges, and 75 were deported. You can risk a bet that in the mid-terms, that county voting percentage is going to look rather different. If you want more on smaller communities and their less-reported tribulations at the hands of immigration and border control agents, see, for example, this NYT article (gift link).
There’s no way to know for certain how many of us there are, but my guess is more, and very possibly a great many more, than 12 million.
But can those 12 million commit to the extent required—and what is the extent required? Can that commitment be sustained—and how long would that be? Can those 12 million coordinate—and to what extent should their actions be concentrated or decentralised?
I haven’t read the book, so I don’t know the finer details, but bearing in mind, always, that we are talking about nonviolent behaviour in support of a clearly articulated goal, two things I feel sure of:
- In terms of mass protest, the more people that gather on the street—and are seen to gather—the more others will join. There is safety in numbers. (I’ve talked about this before.) In the bluntest of terms, the more ordinary Americans that participate, the greater the odds are of the enforcement agencies (ICE, FBI, National Guard, police) becoming unwilling to gas, shoot, or beat protestors: their kids, their parents, and their friends might be in the crowd. This, according to Chenoweth, is what has happened in other times and places.
- Coordinated protests must happen in towns, small cities, and big cities, in communities both red and blue. More than one of those protests must, on the same day, be huge—record-breakingly huge.
- The protests must show not only determination but commitment to kindness and building community rather than to hate and division. Hate does not help. (I’ll return to hate in a bit.)
What do I base all this on? Thinking about US movements for change during my lifetime, looking at the numbers, and considering the results both obvious and subtle.
Precedent in the US
All these numbers are available via a variety of sources. Wikipedia has an aggregation page with enough links to get you started. Please note that while some of these protests were met with violence, whether from over-zealous law enforcement or from hateful counter-protesters, the overwhelming majority remained steadfastly nonviolent in the face of provocation. Also, while it’s important to acknowledge the risk of violence, it’s equally important to remember that, according to Chenoweth’s data, the greater the percentage of a community’s population that’s marching, the less likely it is that local law enforcement or National Guard will be willing to use violent tactics against a crowd of those who may be their relatives, friends, or neighbours.
In terms of single-day actions in the US in my lifetime, some examples:
- Earth Day (1970): On April 22, more than 20 million Americans (10% of the population at the time) took part in teach-ins, clean-ups, and rallies in more than 10,000 towns and campuses. Huge, huge numbers, but a single-day decentralised event. It was not a protest; the focus was not on marching with the goal of regime change but on raising the environmental consciousness of those in power and agitating for legislative action. Earth Day led to the creation of the Environmental Protection Agency and absolutely raised the bar on environmental action in this country, an effect that lasted 55 years—until the actions of the current administration, which has effectively destroyed the Clean Air Act and other safeguards.
- Women’s March (2017): On January 21, 3.3 – 4.6 million Americans (1-1.3% of the population at the time), the majority of them women, marched in over 50 states as counter-programming to Trump’s inauguration. There were over 750,000 in Los Angeles and 500,000 in DC. Those huge numbers buoyed the participants; judging by anedotal accounts, I believe the Women’s March laid the foundations for much of today’s local organising, whether focused on neighbourhood-scale actions or forming wider networks.
- No Kings (2025): On June 14, about 5 million Americans (1.4% of the population) marched in over 2,000 locations in protest and counter-programming of Trump’s Flag Day military parade. On October 18 there was another coordinated protest, this time estimated at between 5 – 7 million Americans (1.4 – 2.0% of the population). This may be the nation’s largest biggest single-day protest. But it was not concentrated in select cities—it consisted mainly of smaller gatherings in many locations. Even so, I believe it consolidated much of the networking and experience of the Women’s March and, again, strengthened the commitment to change and the ability to coordinate action.
In terms of more sustained protest:
- George Floyd/Black Lives Matter (2020): Over the three months after George Floyd’s murder, polls3 suggest 15 – 26 million Americans (4.5 – 6% of the population) joined at least one racial justice demonstration, with the single-highest day turnout on June 6 of perhaps 500,000—though not all in one place. That lack of massive numbers in any single time and place, and (perhaps—I’m happy to be corrected on this) specific actionable demands may be why outcomes are less obvious. Nonetheless, I believe these protests and organised networks helped make the No Kings actions possible. I also believe it had an impact on more localised change—in terms of city and county police regulations and response.
Much more recently, the spate of ICE Out protests resulting largely from the killings in Minneapolis/St Paul of two US citizen observers, Renée Good and Alex Pretti, by Customs and Border Protection agents, are more difficult to quantify. For one, it’s difficult to find reliable numbers (though they seem to have been lower than most protesters hoped). And for another, while there seem to have been some results—the ICE presence in Minneapolis/St Paul and some other cities is being reduced; there will be an investigation into the death of Pretti but not Good—there is no commitment to agents removing masks or wearing ID, or obtaining judicial warrants before breaking into people’s homes and hauling them away with no due process. Democrats in the Senate have (temporarily, if past experience is any guide) found some spine—but at best these results are minor and, at worst, misleading.
What does all this mean?
That we have most of the groundwork already done: the conditions exist for a nation-changing protest. But. We need more, and bigger. With longer planning and very clear demands. Imagine beginning with a single-day nationwide General Strike, school closings, and people on the street in huge numbers—more than 12 million, with, say, 1.5 million in DC, at least half a million in each of the ten largest cities, and tens or hundreds of thousands in smaller cities and towns across the country—followed by two weeks of massive and peaceful demonstrations and/or vigils and/or withdrawal of services or money. And/or perhaps more specific and regionally focused actions.
Is this possible? Yes. Many unions are ready. Many congregations of many creeds are ready. Many administrations at city, county, and state level are ready. Many local and regional law enforcement agencies are reevaluating their cooperation with federal enforcers. Community organisers are ready. There are more and more people out there who have recent experience of protest, demonstration, and vigil. They are connected, formally and informally. Ordinary Americans are more than ready; once we see it begin, we will join. There are easily 12 million of us.
Negativity bias—stats and stories
I promised to touch on those interesting conversations we had in London, and this is where it gets even more hopeful. To understand why let’s first consider something I’ve talked about often: negativity bias.4 People pay more attention to the negative than the positive. It’s an evolutionary trait: humans are prey animals; in survival terms it’s more cost-effective to focus on a sound that could be a predator than on a laugh. As a result we are more attuned to and tend to overweight the importance of the negative than the positive. We can look to the evidence of our own everyday experience; anyone with even a passing familiarity with social media understands that bad news spreads faster and further than good news. Negative disinformation moves even faster. Countless studies back this up: all over the world, ‘If it bleeds, it leads.’
This is important. I want you to understand and believe it: in the context of information and/or news (whether gossip, anecdata, mainstream media, social media, tabloids, podcasts, newsletters or government announcements), negativity bias can lead to a distorted perception of reality. This distortion can be extreme—normally reasonable people can have a seriously skewed understanding of the world around them. There are reams of data to back this up but rather than hammering at you with tables and statistics and links, let me tell you a story.
I used to teach women’s self-defence for a living; my students were women and girls (and a handful of men) of all ages, abilities, colours, creeds, and socio-economic backgrounds. Around the second session, when I started showing women how to apply the strikes I taught in the first session—how to seriously hurt their attacker—they baulked. Why? Because, they said, fighting back would just make it worse, make their would-be rapist (rape and sexual torture is what most women fear) angry and more like to hurt them. Everything they knew about the world told them that fighting back would do no good: all you had to do was read the newspaper, watch the news, listen to the radio to learn that (this was before the internet).
I would sit them down, and ask: What do you think the odds are of a woman fighting off a rapist? Someone might venture, Five percent? No, I’d say: if the attacker is unarmed, data show that 72% of the time if a woman fights back she will avoid rape; if she fights back against an attacker armed with a knife, her chances are 58%; against a gun, 51%. Even if a would-be rapist is armed with a gun and the woman he has targeted is unarmed, if she fights back the odds of her avoiding rape are greater than even. (The odds of her being less badly hurt are also better if she fights back than if she doesn’t.)
Those stats were from a 1985 study, Ask Any Woman: A London Inquiry into Rape and Sexual Assault, Ruth E. Hall (Bristol: Falling Wall Press, 1985). While writing Always (published 2007), I went to the Department of Justice website to check their statistics: the numbers held up. Looking at what info I can find now (and the internet has got so bad that it’s difficult to find clear answers) it seems that women’s odds have not got worse.
So why do women believe fighting back is useless? Because the media tells them so. Media, mainstream and social, reports completed rapes (the bloodier and more brutal the better) far more often than attempted rapes. While in real life women have an almost 3:1 chance of beating off a would-be rapist, the media publicises 13 completed rapes for every attempted but uncompleted rape. (Why? Because bad news garners clicks. Bad news sells ads.) When it comes to gender violence, media negativity bias is 39:1. That is a seriously skewed version of reality. That’s what we’re up against; that’s why it’s easy to read bad news and believe the world is irretrievably broken.
Saving the best for last
Right now there is a lot of bad news to notice. In the US we are hit daily with everything from the disassembly of public health and the cancellation of research programmes to federal agents executing citizens in the streets. In the UK we talked to people in positions of formal and informal responsibility at the national, community, or diocesan level who are worried by the signs of hatred visibly rising in their spheres of interest—racist graffiti, street violence, social media attacks.
Again and again we brought up this notion of 3.5% and change. It excited everyone—it is exciting. But then one woman Kelley was talking to suddenly stopped and said (I’m paraphrasing a second-hand report) “Oh! All that hatred out there, that feels so overwhelming, like there’s nothing we can do because the whole world hates us… What if it’s only 3.5% who are full of hate, and not the whole world?”
When Kelley told me this later that night I said, Yes! And, oh, I wish I’d been part of that conversation! Because I would have pointed out that when you factor in the cognitive bias towards the negative, it’s probable that the level of real hatred, the kind of hatred that leads to burning synagogues, spitting on immigrants, attacking transfolk—or to marching in the street to counter-protest nonviolent marches for change, calling your representative to vote for dehumanising legislation against transgirls in sports, or directly funding hate groups—is not just small but tiny. Think about it. Think about the numbers of people who show up for anti-abortion vigils or White Power marches or transphobic campaigns; try to remember how many homophobes showed up at the last Pride event: minuscule, comparatively speaking. Insignificant when weighed against those of us who protest hatred and cruelty.
If it takes only 3.5% of a population to change the direction of a nation; if the hatred we feel is out there isn’t quite as widespread as we think; and if you factor in the negativity bias at a ratio of 39:1, well, even if the bias was wrong by an order of magnitude, it’s still a heartening answer. Change is possible. More possible than we might think.
I don’t know what will force the growing dissent against the current administration’s agenda into full flower but I have no doubt it’s coming. And when it does I have no doubt it will succeed. There are so very many more of us than them.
- Many thanks to Mary Brandt whose Wellnessrounds.org post brought Chenoweth to my attention and helped crystallise what I’d been fumbling towards for a while. ↩︎
- I’ll be using ‘population’ and ‘Americans’ interchangeably to refer to those who live in this country, whether they’re citizens or not. ↩︎
- Lowest estimate from Pew, highest from Kaiser Family Foundation. These are self-reported numbers rather than estimates from photos and professional crowd counters. ↩︎
- I usually talk about it in terms of Misery Lit, and the perception that High Art has to be depressing. ↩︎
-
3.5% — A Small Number With Huge Implications
Kelley and I have recently returned from 10 days in London, one of the most genuinely multi-cultural cities I’ve spent time in. We had many deep and interesting conversations, one of which I’ll touch on further down. (And others I might discuss in more detail in a future post.) Most of those we spoke with—friends, family, colleagues, strangers, whether in politics, arts, sciences, religion, nonprofits and/or social justice organisations—are as distressed as we are about what is happening in this country and their own, and its implications for the rest of the world. Several of our conversations revolved around the findings about change and civil disobedience that I detail in this post—which I had just begun drafting before I left Seattle and so was top-of-mind.
The findings discussed below are the work of Erica Chenoweth and Maria Stephan.1
3.5% of a population can force real and lasting change
Nonviolent civil resistance, or unarmed civil struggle, can and does force real change in the behaviour of government, or, if the government cannot change, then its collapse. Stop and think about that a moment, please: not slight change, or meaningless promises but real change or the fall of government. According to Erica Chenoweth and Maria J. Stephan in their book, Why Civil Resistance Works: The Strategic Logic of Nonviolent Conflict (Columbia University Press, 2012), once around 3.5% of a nations’s population2 has begun active and sustained participation in nonviolent civil resistance, success becomes increasingly likely with time—to the point where in a country like the US we can go so far as to say inevitable.
Don’t take my word for it. Here’s the BBC talking about how this has worked internationally.
Nonviolent protests are twice as likely to succeed as armed conflicts – and those engaging a threshold of 3.5% of the population have never failed to bring about change.
In 1986, millions of Filipinos took to the streets of Manila in peaceful protest and prayer in the People Power movement. The Marcos regime folded on the fourth day.
In 2003, the people of Georgia ousted Eduard Shevardnadze through the bloodless Rose Revolution, in which protestors stormed the parliament building holding the flowers in their hands. While in 2019, the presidents of Sudan and Algeria both announced they would step aside after decades in office, thanks to peaceful campaigns of resistance.
— BBC
Here’s Chenoweth herself discussing her work. Watch it; it’s only 12 minutes. Pay attention. She speaks to 150 years of data; if you doubt the numbers I use here, go argue with her: she has the receipts. Moreover, though she was speaking 13 years ago, her central thesis is sharply relevant to us here in the US (and, as I discovered, the UK) today more than ever.
What this means for the US today
3.5%. A small percentage—but in terms of the US population, big absolute numbers. Per the U.S. Census Bureau, as of July 1, 2025 the population of the USA was 341,784,857. 3.5% would be 11,970,000. Essentially 12 million people.
If 12 million Americans engaged in nonviolent protest/civil disobedience, the current administration would either change significantly or collapse.
12 million. Are there 12 million Americans willing to commit to protest? I think there are. I think that since late 2016 an increasing number of ordinary people are becoming aware, unhappy, and organised. These organisations are many and varied. Some are very small and unconnected to anything else—blocks of houses where families have learnt to look out for neighbours during floods and wildfires, government shut-downs, or sudden DOGE-mandated layoffs. Other organisations at the congregation or neighbourhood or city level are loosely networked. Then there are nodes of specialised groups—food banks, whistle-makers, observers, trainers in nonviolent response—who are starting to coordinate. And then there are cities and states who are becoming rapidly radicalised because of governmental overreach, callousness, and murder: Minneapolis/St Paul and Minnesota; Los Angeles and California; Chicago and Illinois.
Just as important, though often less reported, are the smaller communities in more rural areas where voters are as likely to be registered as Republicans or Independents as Democrats. See, for example, reporting on Wilder, Idaho, population 1,725, where 72% of the county it sits in voted for Trump in 2024: 400 citizens or legal residents, including children, were zip-tied and detained, 105 were held on immigration charges, and 75 were deported. You can risk a bet that in the mid-terms, that county voting percentage is going to look rather different. If you want more on smaller communities and their less-reported tribulations at the hands of immigration and border control agents, see, for example, this NYT article (gift link).
There’s no way to know for certain how many of us there are, but my guess is more, and very possibly a great many more, than 12 million.
But can those 12 million commit to the extent required—and what is the extent required? Can that commitment be sustained—and how long would that be? Can those 12 million coordinate—and to what extent should their actions be concentrated or decentralised?
I haven’t read the book, so I don’t know the finer details, but bearing in mind, always, that we are talking about nonviolent behaviour in support of a clearly articulated goal, two things I feel sure of:
- In terms of mass protest, the more people that gather on the street—and are seen to gather—the more others will join. There is safety in numbers. (I’ve talked about this before.) In the bluntest of terms, the more ordinary Americans that participate, the greater the odds are of the enforcement agencies (ICE, FBI, National Guard, police) becoming unwilling to gas, shoot, or beat protestors: their kids, their parents, and their friends might be in the crowd. This, according to Chenoweth, is what has happened in other times and places.
- Coordinated protests must happen in towns, small cities, and big cities, in communities both red and blue. More than one of those protests must, on the same day, be huge—record-breakingly huge.
- The protests must show not only determination but commitment to kindness and building community rather than to hate and division. Hate does not help. (I’ll return to hate in a bit.)
What do I base all this on? Thinking about US movements for change during my lifetime, looking at the numbers, and considering the results both obvious and subtle.
Precedent in the US
All these numbers are available via a variety of sources. Wikipedia has an aggregation page with enough links to get you started. Please note that while some of these protests were met with violence, whether from over-zealous law enforcement or from hateful counter-protesters, the overwhelming majority remained steadfastly nonviolent in the face of provocation. Also, while it’s important to acknowledge the risk of violence, it’s equally important to remember that, according to Chenoweth’s data, the greater the percentage of a community’s population that’s marching, the less likely it is that local law enforcement or National Guard will be willing to use violent tactics against a crowd of those who may be their relatives, friends, or neighbours.
In terms of single-day actions in the US in my lifetime, some examples:
- Earth Day (1970): On April 22, more than 20 million Americans (10% of the population at the time) took part in teach-ins, clean-ups, and rallies in more than 10,000 towns and campuses. Huge, huge numbers, but a single-day decentralised event. It was not a protest; the focus was not on marching with the goal of regime change but on raising the environmental consciousness of those in power and agitating for legislative action. Earth Day led to the creation of the Environmental Protection Agency and absolutely raised the bar on environmental action in this country, an effect that lasted 55 years—until the actions of the current administration, which has effectively destroyed the Clean Air Act and other safeguards.
- Women’s March (2017): On January 21, 3.3 – 4.6 million Americans (1-1.3% of the population at the time), the majority of them women, marched in over 50 states as counter-programming to Trump’s inauguration. There were over 750,000 in Los Angeles and 500,000 in DC. Those huge numbers buoyed the participants; judging by anedotal accounts, I believe the Women’s March laid the foundations for much of today’s local organising, whether focused on neighbourhood-scale actions or forming wider networks.
- No Kings (2025): On June 14, about 5 million Americans (1.4% of the population) marched in over 2,000 locations in protest and counter-programming of Trump’s Flag Day military parade. On October 18 there was another coordinated protest, this time estimated at between 5 – 7 million Americans (1.4 – 2.0% of the population). This may be the nation’s largest biggest single-day protest. But it was not concentrated in select cities—it consisted mainly of smaller gatherings in many locations. Even so, I believe it consolidated much of the networking and experience of the Women’s March and, again, strengthened the commitment to change and the ability to coordinate action.
In terms of more sustained protest:
- George Floyd/Black Lives Matter (2020): Over the three months after George Floyd’s murder, polls3 suggest 15 – 26 million Americans (4.5 – 6% of the population) joined at least one racial justice demonstration, with the single-highest day turnout on June 6 of perhaps 500,000—though not all in one place. That lack of massive numbers in any single time and place, and (perhaps—I’m happy to be corrected on this) specific actionable demands may be why outcomes are less obvious. Nonetheless, I believe these protests and organised networks helped make the No Kings actions possible. I also believe it had an impact on more localised change—in terms of city and county police regulations and response.
Much more recently, the spate of ICE Out protests resulting largely from the killings in Minneapolis/St Paul of two US citizen observers, Renée Good and Alex Pretti, by Customs and Border Protection agents, are more difficult to quantify. For one, it’s difficult to find reliable numbers (though they seem to have been lower than most protesters hoped). And for another, while there seem to have been some results—the ICE presence in Minneapolis/St Paul and some other cities is being reduced; there will be an investigation into the death of Pretti but not Good—there is no commitment to agents removing masks or wearing ID, or obtaining judicial warrants before breaking into people’s homes and hauling them away with no due process. Democrats in the Senate have (temporarily, if past experience is any guide) found some spine—but at best these results are minor and, at worst, misleading.
What does all this mean?
That we have most of the groundwork already done: the conditions exist for a nation-changing protest. But. We need more, and bigger. With longer planning and very clear demands. Imagine beginning with a single-day nationwide General Strike, school closings, and people on the street in huge numbers—more than 12 million, with, say, 1.5 million in DC, at least half a million in each of the ten largest cities, and tens or hundreds of thousands in smaller cities and towns across the country—followed by two weeks of massive and peaceful demonstrations and/or vigils and/or withdrawal of services or money. And/or perhaps more specific and regionally focused actions.
Is this possible? Yes. Many unions are ready. Many congregations of many creeds are ready. Many administrations at city, county, and state level are ready. Many local and regional law enforcement agencies are reevaluating their cooperation with federal enforcers. Community organisers are ready. There are more and more people out there who have recent experience of protest, demonstration, and vigil. They are connected, formally and informally. Ordinary Americans are more than ready; once we see it begin, we will join. There are easily 12 million of us.
Negativity bias—stats and stories
I promised to touch on those interesting conversations we had in London, and this is where it gets even more hopeful. To understand why let’s first consider something I’ve talked about often: negativity bias.4 People pay more attention to the negative than the positive. It’s an evolutionary trait: humans are prey animals; in survival terms it’s more cost-effective to focus on a sound that could be a predator than on a laugh. As a result we are more attuned to and tend to overweight the importance of the negative than the positive. We can look to the evidence of our own everyday experience; anyone with even a passing familiarity with social media understands that bad news spreads faster and further than good news. Negative disinformation moves even faster. Countless studies back this up: all over the world, ‘If it bleeds, it leads.’
This is important. I want you to understand and believe it: in the context of information and/or news (whether gossip, anecdata, mainstream media, social media, tabloids, podcasts, newsletters or government announcements), negativity bias can lead to a distorted perception of reality. This distortion can be extreme—normally reasonable people can have a seriously skewed understanding of the world around them. There are reams of data to back this up but rather than hammering at you with tables and statistics and links, let me tell you a story.
I used to teach women’s self-defence for a living; my students were women and girls (and a handful of men) of all ages, abilities, colours, creeds, and socio-economic backgrounds. Around the second session, when I started showing women how to apply the strikes I taught in the first session—how to seriously hurt their attacker—they baulked. Why? Because, they said, fighting back would just make it worse, make their would-be rapist (rape and sexual torture is what most women fear) angry and more like to hurt them. Everything they knew about the world told them that fighting back would do no good: all you had to do was read the newspaper, watch the news, listen to the radio to learn that (this was before the internet).
I would sit them down, and ask: What do you think the odds are of a woman fighting off a rapist? Someone might venture, Five percent? No, I’d say: if the attacker is unarmed, data show that 72% of the time if a woman fights back she will avoid rape; if she fights back against an attacker armed with a knife, her chances are 58%; against a gun, 51%. Even if a would-be rapist is armed with a gun and the woman he has targeted is unarmed, if she fights back the odds of her avoiding rape are greater than even. (The odds of her being less badly hurt are also better if she fights back than if she doesn’t.)
Those stats were from a 1985 study, Ask Any Woman: A London Inquiry into Rape and Sexual Assault, Ruth E. Hall (Bristol: Falling Wall Press, 1985). While writing Always (published 2007), I went to the Department of Justice website to check their statistics: the numbers held up. Looking at what info I can find now (and the internet has got so bad that it’s difficult to find clear answers) it seems that women’s odds have not got worse.
So why do women believe fighting back is useless? Because the media tells them so. Media, mainstream and social, reports completed rapes (the bloodier and more brutal the better) far more often than attempted rapes. While in real life women have an almost 3:1 chance of beating off a would-be rapist, the media publicises 13 completed rapes for every attempted but uncompleted rape. (Why? Because bad news garners clicks. Bad news sells ads.) When it comes to gender violence, media negativity bias is 39:1. That is a seriously skewed version of reality. That’s what we’re up against; that’s why it’s easy to read bad news and believe the world is irretrievably broken.
Saving the best for last
Right now there is a lot of bad news to notice. In the US we are hit daily with everything from the disassembly of public health and the cancellation of research programmes to federal agents executing citizens in the streets. In the UK we talked to people in positions of formal and informal responsibility at the national, community, or diocesan level who are worried by the signs of hatred visibly rising in their spheres of interest—racist graffiti, street violence, social media attacks.
Again and again we brought up this notion of 3.5% and change. It excited everyone—it is exciting. But then one woman Kelley was talking to suddenly stopped and said (I’m paraphrasing a second-hand report) “Oh! All that hatred out there, that feels so overwhelming, like there’s nothing we can do because the whole world hates us… What if it’s only 3.5% who are full of hate, and not the whole world?”
When Kelley told me this later that night I said, Yes! And, oh, I wish I’d been part of that conversation! Because I would have pointed out that when you factor in the cognitive bias towards the negative, it’s probable that the level of real hatred, the kind of hatred that leads to burning synagogues, spitting on immigrants, attacking transfolk—or to marching in the street to counter-protest nonviolent marches for change, calling your representative to vote for dehumanising legislation against transgirls in sports, or directly funding hate groups—is not just small but tiny. Think about it. Think about the numbers of people who show up for anti-abortion vigils or White Power marches or transphobic campaigns; try to remember how many homophobes showed up at the last Pride event: minuscule, comparatively speaking. Insignificant when weighed against those of us who protest hatred and cruelty.
If it takes only 3.5% of a population to change the direction of a nation; if the hatred we feel is out there isn’t quite as widespread as we think; and if you factor in the negativity bias at a ratio of 39:1, well, even if the bias was wrong by an order of magnitude, it’s still a heartening answer. Change is possible. More possible than we might think.
I don’t know what will force the growing dissent against the current administration’s agenda into full flower but I have no doubt it’s coming. And when it does I have no doubt it will succeed. There are so very many more of us than them.
- Many thanks to Mary Brandt whose Wellnessrounds.org post brought Chenoweth to my attention and helped crystallise what I’d been fumbling towards for a while. ↩︎
- I’ll be using ‘population’ and ‘Americans’ interchangeably to refer to those who live in this country, whether they’re citizens or not. ↩︎
- Lowest estimate from Pew, highest from Kaiser Family Foundation. These are self-reported numbers rather than estimates from photos and professional crowd counters. ↩︎
- I usually talk about it in terms of Misery Lit, and the perception that High Art has to be depressing. ↩︎
-
Amn’t I glad we use “amn’t” in Ireland
From ‘An Irish Childhood in England: 1951’ by Eavan Boland (full poem on my Tumblr):
let the world I knew become the space
between the words that I had by heart
and all the other speech that always was
becoming the language of the country that
I came to in nineteen fifty-one:
barely-gelled, a freckled six-year-old,
overdressed and sick on the plane,
when all of England to an Irish child
was nothing more than what you’d lost and how:
was the teacher in the London convent who,
when I produced “I amn’t” in the classroom
turned and said—“You’re not in Ireland now.”I grew up in Ireland using expressions and grammatical constructions that I took to be normal English, only to discover years later that what counts as normal in language usage can be highly dependent on geography and dialect. I amn’t sure when I realised it, but amn’t is an example of this.
Standardized English has an array of forms of the verb be for various persons and tenses with a negative particle (n’t) affixed: isn’t, wasn’t, aren’t, weren’t. But there’s a curious gap. In the tag question I’m next, ___ I?, the usual form is the unsystematic am I not or the irregular aren’t I (irregular because we don’t say *I are). Why not amn’t?
Amn’t I talking to you? (Anne Emery, Death at Christy Burke’s, 2011)
Amn’t I after telling you that, said Donal. (Sean O’Casey, Inishfallen, Fare Thee Well, 1949)
Amn’t /’æmənt/, though centuries old, is not part of standardized English. But it is common in Ireland, used especially in colloquial speech though not limited to informal registers. It’s also used in Scotland (alongside amnae and other variants) and parts of England – the OED says the north, and west midlands – and occasionally elsewhere, such as Wales.
How amn’t came to be so geographically limited is not fully clear. Another variant, an’t, probably supplanted it in general usage because speakers wanted to avoid sounding /n/ immediately after /m/; see Michael Quinion and Robert Beard for brief commentary on this. David Crystal says it was therefore:
a natural development to simplify the consonant cluster. The final /t/ made it more likely that the simplification would go to /ant/ rather than /amt/, and this is what we find in 18th century texts, where it appears as an’t.
An’t, also spelt a’n’t, is the “phonetically natural and the philologically logical shortening”, writes Eric Partridge in Usage and Abusage. It too fell from favour, but not before morphing in two significant ways. It gave rise to ain’t, which has its own lively history, and it also began being spelt aren’t (by “orthographic analogy”, in Crystal’s phrase), which is pronounced the same as an’t in non-rhotic accents.
This explains aren’t I, which would otherwise seem a grammatical anomaly. Indeed, Gabe Doyle notes that its irregularity “earns the ire of the accountants” of English. But it has steadily gained acceptability in major English-speaking regions. Irish and Scottish dialects are the exception in retaining and favouring its ancestor, amn’t I.
Despite its vintage, its logic, and its convenience, not everyone likes amn’t. It’s dismissed as “ugly” by Eric Partridge and as “substandard” by Bryan Garner in his Dictionary of Modern American Usage. Patricia O’Conner and Stewart Kellerman describe amn’t I as “clunky” in Origins of the Specious.
Garner is wrong, and the other pronouncements are subjective or prejudicial. Amn’t is not part of standardized English, but it is thoroughly normal in Irish English. There’s nothing intrinsically unsound or deficient about it unless you revere prestige. It’s often called awkward, but it doesn’t feel awkward if you grow up with it. Even aesthetically, amn’t has unique appeal.
Amn’t I with you? Amn’t I your girl? (James Joyce, Ulysses, 1922)
Ye don’t want me, don’t ye? And amn’t I as good as the best of them? Amn’t I? (Patrick MacGill, The Rat-pit, 1915)
So how is amn’t used? Commonly in questions: straightforward interrogative (Joyce, above), tag (MacGill), and rhetorical (see post title). These are the structures typically noted by lexicographers: Robert Burchfield’s revision of Fowler says it’s “used as part of the tag question amn’t I?”, while Terence Dolan’s Dictionary of Hiberno-English associates it with “negative first-person questions”.
Neither Burchfield nor Dolan mentions other uses, but amn’t is also used, for example, in declarative statements of the form I amn’t. Though even Irish people, in my experience, usually say I’m not in such cases, some of them also say I amn’t.
I amn’t sure I should go on at all or if you’d like a line or two from your bad old penny. (Joseph O’Connor, Ghost Light, 2010)
And you, my poor changling, have to go to Birmingham next week, and I, poor divil, amn’t well enough to go out to far-away places for even solitary walks. (J.M. Synge, Letters to Molly, 1971)
A bit odder is the double negative question amn’t I not, which I’ve come across in both tags (I’m not drunk neither, amn’t I not) and more centrally (amn’t I not turble [terrible] altogether). A straw poll I held on Twitter suggests, unsurprisingly, that it’s a good deal rarer than other uses of amn’t, but several people still confirm using it.
My Twitter query also showed that amn’t occurs in more than just tag questions in Scotland, disproving a claim I’d encountered earlier. It prompted lots of anecdata and discussion on the word’s contemporary use in Ireland and elsewhere, and is available on Wakelet for interested readers.
If I amn’t mistaken, the pinch is here. (Athenian Gazette, May 1691)
Oh, Peader, but amn’t I Dublin born and bred? (Katie Flynn, Strawberry Fields, 1994)
Amn’t may grow in frequency and stature or it might, like ain’t, remain quite stigmatised in formal English. At the moment it’s undoubtedly a minority usage, with just four hits in the vast COHA corpus, five in COCA, and one in the BNC. Even GloWbE, with its 1.9 billion words from informal sources, offers a mere 31 hits.
Last year I retweeted a comment from @Ann_imal, a US speaker who said she had “started saying ‘amn’t I’ instead of ‘aren’t I,’ and no one (except AutoCorrect) has questioned me”. A search on Twitter suggests she’s not alone: amn’t has modest but undeniable currency in Englishes and idiolects around the world.
Social attitudes are decisive. Language Hat has noted that children acquiring language sometimes use amn’t – it is, after all, an intuitive construction – only to lose it along the way; a search on Google Books returns similar reports. LH used the word himself, and says, “I don’t remember when or why I stopped. The pressures of ‘proper English’ are insidious.”
In a neat inversion of the usual pattern, a commenter at Language Log recalls using aren’t I as a child and being corrected to amn’t I. More of this kind of parental guidance, or at least less proscriptive regulation in the other direction, may help amn’t gain more of a foothold outside Ireland and Scotland.
Not that I’ve anything against aren’t I, or ain’t for that matter. But if anyone felt they wanted to adopt amn’t and got past the social barrier, they would likely find it a handy, pleasing contraction. And that counts for a lot these days, amirite amn’t I right?
https://twitter.com/StanCarey/status/822016562953682945
*
Today, by the way, is (US) National Grammar Day, which by semantic sorcery I’m interpreting as International Grammar Day to highlight a characteristic feature of grammar in Ireland. The Sentence first archives have lots more Irish English grammar and vocabulary.
Updates:
Eavan Boland has also written about this episode in prose, in her book Object Lessons (1995):
“Language is fossil poetry,” says Emerson, and it may well be. But it also home truth. Whatever the inventions and distortions of my imaginings, my tongue, the sounds it made in my mouth, betrayed me. I was no English Alice. I was an Irish child in England. […]
The inevitable happened. One day my tongue betrayed me out of dream and counterfeit into cold truth. I was in the cloakroom in school in the middle of the afternoon. A winter darkness was already gathering through one of the stubborn fogs of the time. A teacher was marshaling children here and there, dividing those who were taking buses from those who were being collected. “I amn’t taking the bus,” I said. I was six or seven then, still within earshot of another way of speaking. But the English do not use that particular construction. It is an older usage. If they contract the verb and the negative, they say, “I’m not.”
Without knowing, I had used that thing for which the English reserve a visceral dislike: their language, loaded and aimed by the old enemy. The teacher whirled around. She corrected my grammar; her face set, her tone cold. “You’re not in Ireland now” was what she said.
At her blog The Other Side of Sixty, Corkonian wisewebwoman says: “you wouldn’t believe the shellacking I took for brazenly using ‘amn’t’ when I moved to Canada. Laughter, disbelief and mockery ensued.”
I like a good coincidence. While editing this post I listened to the Mogwai song ‘Wizard Motor‘ on repeat, unaware, before a tweet from Helen McClory, that Mogwai also have a song called ‘Moses? I Amn’t’:
#amnt #contractions #dialects #eavanBoland #grammar #hibernoEnglish #ireland #irishBooks #irishEnglish #irishEnglishGrammar #irishLiterature #lexicography #linguistics #morphology #nationalGrammarDay #negation #poetry #prescriptivism #sociolinguistics #standardizedEnglish #usage #words #writing
-
Amn’t I glad we use “amn’t” in Ireland
From ‘An Irish Childhood in England: 1951’ by Eavan Boland (full poem on my Tumblr):
let the world I knew become the space
between the words that I had by heart
and all the other speech that always was
becoming the language of the country that
I came to in nineteen fifty-one:
barely-gelled, a freckled six-year-old,
overdressed and sick on the plane,
when all of England to an Irish child
was nothing more than what you’d lost and how:
was the teacher in the London convent who,
when I produced “I amn’t” in the classroom
turned and said—“You’re not in Ireland now.”I grew up in Ireland using expressions and grammatical constructions that I took to be normal English, only to discover years later that what counts as normal in language usage can be highly dependent on geography and dialect. I amn’t sure when I realised it, but amn’t is an example of this.
Standardized English has an array of forms of the verb be for various persons and tenses with a negative particle (n’t) affixed: isn’t, wasn’t, aren’t, weren’t. But there’s a curious gap. In the tag question I’m next, ___ I?, the usual form is the unsystematic am I not or the irregular aren’t I (irregular because we don’t say *I are). Why not amn’t?
Amn’t I talking to you? (Anne Emery, Death at Christy Burke’s, 2011)
Amn’t I after telling you that, said Donal. (Sean O’Casey, Inishfallen, Fare Thee Well, 1949)
Amn’t /’æmənt/, though centuries old, is not part of standardized English. But it is common in Ireland, used especially in colloquial speech though not limited to informal registers. It’s also used in Scotland (alongside amnae and other variants) and parts of England – the OED says the north, and west midlands – and occasionally elsewhere, such as Wales.
How amn’t came to be so geographically limited is not fully clear. Another variant, an’t, probably supplanted it in general usage because speakers wanted to avoid sounding /n/ immediately after /m/; see Michael Quinion and Robert Beard for brief commentary on this. David Crystal says it was therefore:
a natural development to simplify the consonant cluster. The final /t/ made it more likely that the simplification would go to /ant/ rather than /amt/, and this is what we find in 18th century texts, where it appears as an’t.
An’t, also spelt a’n’t, is the “phonetically natural and the philologically logical shortening”, writes Eric Partridge in Usage and Abusage. It too fell from favour, but not before morphing in two significant ways. It gave rise to ain’t, which has its own lively history, and it also began being spelt aren’t (by “orthographic analogy”, in Crystal’s phrase), which is pronounced the same as an’t in non-rhotic accents.
This explains aren’t I, which would otherwise seem a grammatical anomaly. Indeed, Gabe Doyle notes that its irregularity “earns the ire of the accountants” of English. But it has steadily gained acceptability in major English-speaking regions. Irish and Scottish dialects are the exception in retaining and favouring its ancestor, amn’t I.
Despite its vintage, its logic, and its convenience, not everyone likes amn’t. It’s dismissed as “ugly” by Eric Partridge and as “substandard” by Bryan Garner in his Dictionary of Modern American Usage. Patricia O’Conner and Stewart Kellerman describe amn’t I as “clunky” in Origins of the Specious.
Garner is wrong, and the other pronouncements are subjective or prejudicial. Amn’t is not part of standardized English, but it is thoroughly normal in Irish English. There’s nothing intrinsically unsound or deficient about it unless you revere prestige. It’s often called awkward, but it doesn’t feel awkward if you grow up with it. Even aesthetically, amn’t has unique appeal.
Amn’t I with you? Amn’t I your girl? (James Joyce, Ulysses, 1922)
Ye don’t want me, don’t ye? And amn’t I as good as the best of them? Amn’t I? (Patrick MacGill, The Rat-pit, 1915)
So how is amn’t used? Commonly in questions: straightforward interrogative (Joyce, above), tag (MacGill), and rhetorical (see post title). These are the structures typically noted by lexicographers: Robert Burchfield’s revision of Fowler says it’s “used as part of the tag question amn’t I?”, while Terence Dolan’s Dictionary of Hiberno-English associates it with “negative first-person questions”.
Neither Burchfield nor Dolan mentions other uses, but amn’t is also used, for example, in declarative statements of the form I amn’t. Though even Irish people, in my experience, usually say I’m not in such cases, some of them also say I amn’t.
I amn’t sure I should go on at all or if you’d like a line or two from your bad old penny. (Joseph O’Connor, Ghost Light, 2010)
And you, my poor changling, have to go to Birmingham next week, and I, poor divil, amn’t well enough to go out to far-away places for even solitary walks. (J.M. Synge, Letters to Molly, 1971)
A bit odder is the double negative question amn’t I not, which I’ve come across in both tags (I’m not drunk neither, amn’t I not) and more centrally (amn’t I not turble [terrible] altogether). A straw poll I held on Twitter suggests, unsurprisingly, that it’s a good deal rarer than other uses of amn’t, but several people still confirm using it.
My Twitter query also showed that amn’t occurs in more than just tag questions in Scotland, disproving a claim I’d encountered earlier. It prompted lots of anecdata and discussion on the word’s contemporary use in Ireland and elsewhere, and is available on Wakelet for interested readers.
If I amn’t mistaken, the pinch is here. (Athenian Gazette, May 1691)
Oh, Peader, but amn’t I Dublin born and bred? (Katie Flynn, Strawberry Fields, 1994)
Amn’t may grow in frequency and stature or it might, like ain’t, remain quite stigmatised in formal English. At the moment it’s undoubtedly a minority usage, with just four hits in the vast COHA corpus, five in COCA, and one in the BNC. Even GloWbE, with its 1.9 billion words from informal sources, offers a mere 31 hits.
Last year I retweeted a comment from @Ann_imal, a US speaker who said she had “started saying ‘amn’t I’ instead of ‘aren’t I,’ and no one (except AutoCorrect) has questioned me”. A search on Twitter suggests she’s not alone: amn’t has modest but undeniable currency in Englishes and idiolects around the world.
Social attitudes are decisive. Language Hat has noted that children acquiring language sometimes use amn’t – it is, after all, an intuitive construction – only to lose it along the way; a search on Google Books returns similar reports. LH used the word himself, and says, “I don’t remember when or why I stopped. The pressures of ‘proper English’ are insidious.”
In a neat inversion of the usual pattern, a commenter at Language Log recalls using aren’t I as a child and being corrected to amn’t I. More of this kind of parental guidance, or at least less proscriptive regulation in the other direction, may help amn’t gain more of a foothold outside Ireland and Scotland.
Not that I’ve anything against aren’t I, or ain’t for that matter. But if anyone felt they wanted to adopt amn’t and got past the social barrier, they would likely find it a handy, pleasing contraction. And that counts for a lot these days, amirite amn’t I right?
https://twitter.com/StanCarey/status/822016562953682945
*
Today, by the way, is (US) National Grammar Day, which by semantic sorcery I’m interpreting as International Grammar Day to highlight a characteristic feature of grammar in Ireland. The Sentence first archives have lots more Irish English grammar and vocabulary.
Updates:
Eavan Boland has also written about this episode in prose, in her book Object Lessons (1995):
“Language is fossil poetry,” says Emerson, and it may well be. But it also home truth. Whatever the inventions and distortions of my imaginings, my tongue, the sounds it made in my mouth, betrayed me. I was no English Alice. I was an Irish child in England. […]
The inevitable happened. One day my tongue betrayed me out of dream and counterfeit into cold truth. I was in the cloakroom in school in the middle of the afternoon. A winter darkness was already gathering through one of the stubborn fogs of the time. A teacher was marshaling children here and there, dividing those who were taking buses from those who were being collected. “I amn’t taking the bus,” I said. I was six or seven then, still within earshot of another way of speaking. But the English do not use that particular construction. It is an older usage. If they contract the verb and the negative, they say, “I’m not.”
Without knowing, I had used that thing for which the English reserve a visceral dislike: their language, loaded and aimed by the old enemy. The teacher whirled around. She corrected my grammar; her face set, her tone cold. “You’re not in Ireland now” was what she said.
At her blog The Other Side of Sixty, Corkonian wisewebwoman says: “you wouldn’t believe the shellacking I took for brazenly using ‘amn’t’ when I moved to Canada. Laughter, disbelief and mockery ensued.”
I like a good coincidence. While editing this post I listened to the Mogwai song ‘Wizard Motor‘ on repeat, unaware, before a tweet from Helen McClory, that Mogwai also have a song called ‘Moses? I Amn’t’:
#amnt #contractions #dialects #eavanBoland #grammar #hibernoEnglish #ireland #irishBooks #irishEnglish #irishEnglishGrammar #irishLiterature #lexicography #linguistics #morphology #nationalGrammarDay #negation #poetry #prescriptivism #sociolinguistics #standardizedEnglish #usage #words #writing
-
Amn’t I glad we use “amn’t” in Ireland
From ‘An Irish Childhood in England: 1951’ by Eavan Boland (full poem on my Tumblr):
let the world I knew become the space
between the words that I had by heart
and all the other speech that always was
becoming the language of the country that
I came to in nineteen fifty-one:
barely-gelled, a freckled six-year-old,
overdressed and sick on the plane,
when all of England to an Irish child
was nothing more than what you’d lost and how:
was the teacher in the London convent who,
when I produced “I amn’t” in the classroom
turned and said—“You’re not in Ireland now.”I grew up in Ireland using expressions and grammatical constructions that I took to be normal English, only to discover years later that what counts as normal in language usage can be highly dependent on geography and dialect. I amn’t sure when I realised it, but amn’t is an example of this.
Standardized English has an array of forms of the verb be for various persons and tenses with a negative particle (n’t) affixed: isn’t, wasn’t, aren’t, weren’t. But there’s a curious gap. In the tag question I’m next, ___ I?, the usual form is the unsystematic am I not or the irregular aren’t I (irregular because we don’t say *I are). Why not amn’t?
Amn’t I talking to you? (Anne Emery, Death at Christy Burke’s, 2011)
Amn’t I after telling you that, said Donal. (Sean O’Casey, Inishfallen, Fare Thee Well, 1949)
Amn’t /’æmənt/, though centuries old, is not part of standardized English. But it is common in Ireland, used especially in colloquial speech though not limited to informal registers. It’s also used in Scotland (alongside amnae and other variants) and parts of England – the OED says the north, and west midlands – and occasionally elsewhere, such as Wales.
How amn’t came to be so geographically limited is not fully clear. Another variant, an’t, probably supplanted it in general usage because speakers wanted to avoid sounding /n/ immediately after /m/; see Michael Quinion and Robert Beard for brief commentary on this. David Crystal says it was therefore:
a natural development to simplify the consonant cluster. The final /t/ made it more likely that the simplification would go to /ant/ rather than /amt/, and this is what we find in 18th century texts, where it appears as an’t.
An’t, also spelt a’n’t, is the “phonetically natural and the philologically logical shortening”, writes Eric Partridge in Usage and Abusage. It too fell from favour, but not before morphing in two significant ways. It gave rise to ain’t, which has its own lively history, and it also began being spelt aren’t (by “orthographic analogy”, in Crystal’s phrase), which is pronounced the same as an’t in non-rhotic accents.
This explains aren’t I, which would otherwise seem a grammatical anomaly. Indeed, Gabe Doyle notes that its irregularity “earns the ire of the accountants” of English. But it has steadily gained acceptability in major English-speaking regions. Irish and Scottish dialects are the exception in retaining and favouring its ancestor, amn’t I.
Despite its vintage, its logic, and its convenience, not everyone likes amn’t. It’s dismissed as “ugly” by Eric Partridge and as “substandard” by Bryan Garner in his Dictionary of Modern American Usage. Patricia O’Conner and Stewart Kellerman describe amn’t I as “clunky” in Origins of the Specious.
Garner is wrong, and the other pronouncements are subjective or prejudicial. Amn’t is not part of standardized English, but it is thoroughly normal in Irish English. There’s nothing intrinsically unsound or deficient about it unless you revere prestige. It’s often called awkward, but it doesn’t feel awkward if you grow up with it. Even aesthetically, amn’t has unique appeal.
Amn’t I with you? Amn’t I your girl? (James Joyce, Ulysses, 1922)
Ye don’t want me, don’t ye? And amn’t I as good as the best of them? Amn’t I? (Patrick MacGill, The Rat-pit, 1915)
So how is amn’t used? Commonly in questions: straightforward interrogative (Joyce, above), tag (MacGill), and rhetorical (see post title). These are the structures typically noted by lexicographers: Robert Burchfield’s revision of Fowler says it’s “used as part of the tag question amn’t I?”, while Terence Dolan’s Dictionary of Hiberno-English associates it with “negative first-person questions”.
Neither Burchfield nor Dolan mentions other uses, but amn’t is also used, for example, in declarative statements of the form I amn’t. Though even Irish people, in my experience, usually say I’m not in such cases, some of them also say I amn’t.
I amn’t sure I should go on at all or if you’d like a line or two from your bad old penny. (Joseph O’Connor, Ghost Light, 2010)
And you, my poor changling, have to go to Birmingham next week, and I, poor divil, amn’t well enough to go out to far-away places for even solitary walks. (J.M. Synge, Letters to Molly, 1971)
A bit odder is the double negative question amn’t I not, which I’ve come across in both tags (I’m not drunk neither, amn’t I not) and more centrally (amn’t I not turble [terrible] altogether). A straw poll I held on Twitter suggests, unsurprisingly, that it’s a good deal rarer than other uses of amn’t, but several people still confirm using it.
My Twitter query also showed that amn’t occurs in more than just tag questions in Scotland, disproving a claim I’d encountered earlier. It prompted lots of anecdata and discussion on the word’s contemporary use in Ireland and elsewhere, and is available on Wakelet for interested readers.
If I amn’t mistaken, the pinch is here. (Athenian Gazette, May 1691)
Oh, Peader, but amn’t I Dublin born and bred? (Katie Flynn, Strawberry Fields, 1994)
Amn’t may grow in frequency and stature or it might, like ain’t, remain quite stigmatised in formal English. At the moment it’s undoubtedly a minority usage, with just four hits in the vast COHA corpus, five in COCA, and one in the BNC. Even GloWbE, with its 1.9 billion words from informal sources, offers a mere 31 hits.
Last year I retweeted a comment from @Ann_imal, a US speaker who said she had “started saying ‘amn’t I’ instead of ‘aren’t I,’ and no one (except AutoCorrect) has questioned me”. A search on Twitter suggests she’s not alone: amn’t has modest but undeniable currency in Englishes and idiolects around the world.
Social attitudes are decisive. Language Hat has noted that children acquiring language sometimes use amn’t – it is, after all, an intuitive construction – only to lose it along the way; a search on Google Books returns similar reports. LH used the word himself, and says, “I don’t remember when or why I stopped. The pressures of ‘proper English’ are insidious.”
In a neat inversion of the usual pattern, a commenter at Language Log recalls using aren’t I as a child and being corrected to amn’t I. More of this kind of parental guidance, or at least less proscriptive regulation in the other direction, may help amn’t gain more of a foothold outside Ireland and Scotland.
Not that I’ve anything against aren’t I, or ain’t for that matter. But if anyone felt they wanted to adopt amn’t and got past the social barrier, they would likely find it a handy, pleasing contraction. And that counts for a lot these days, amirite amn’t I right?
https://twitter.com/StanCarey/status/822016562953682945
*
Today, by the way, is (US) National Grammar Day, which by semantic sorcery I’m interpreting as International Grammar Day to highlight a characteristic feature of grammar in Ireland. The Sentence first archives have lots more Irish English grammar and vocabulary.
Updates:
Eavan Boland has also written about this episode in prose, in her book Object Lessons (1995):
“Language is fossil poetry,” says Emerson, and it may well be. But it also home truth. Whatever the inventions and distortions of my imaginings, my tongue, the sounds it made in my mouth, betrayed me. I was no English Alice. I was an Irish child in England. […]
The inevitable happened. One day my tongue betrayed me out of dream and counterfeit into cold truth. I was in the cloakroom in school in the middle of the afternoon. A winter darkness was already gathering through one of the stubborn fogs of the time. A teacher was marshaling children here and there, dividing those who were taking buses from those who were being collected. “I amn’t taking the bus,” I said. I was six or seven then, still within earshot of another way of speaking. But the English do not use that particular construction. It is an older usage. If they contract the verb and the negative, they say, “I’m not.”
Without knowing, I had used that thing for which the English reserve a visceral dislike: their language, loaded and aimed by the old enemy. The teacher whirled around. She corrected my grammar; her face set, her tone cold. “You’re not in Ireland now” was what she said.
At her blog The Other Side of Sixty, Corkonian wisewebwoman says: “you wouldn’t believe the shellacking I took for brazenly using ‘amn’t’ when I moved to Canada. Laughter, disbelief and mockery ensued.”
I like a good coincidence. While editing this post I listened to the Mogwai song ‘Wizard Motor‘ on repeat, unaware, before a tweet from Helen McClory, that Mogwai also have a song called ‘Moses? I Amn’t’:
#amnt #contractions #dialects #eavanBoland #grammar #hibernoEnglish #ireland #irishBooks #irishEnglish #irishEnglishGrammar #irishLiterature #lexicography #linguistics #morphology #nationalGrammarDay #negation #poetry #prescriptivism #sociolinguistics #standardizedEnglish #usage #words #writing
-
Amn’t I glad we use “amn’t” in Ireland
From ‘An Irish Childhood in England: 1951’ by Eavan Boland (full poem on my Tumblr):
let the world I knew become the space
between the words that I had by heart
and all the other speech that always was
becoming the language of the country that
I came to in nineteen fifty-one:
barely-gelled, a freckled six-year-old,
overdressed and sick on the plane,
when all of England to an Irish child
was nothing more than what you’d lost and how:
was the teacher in the London convent who,
when I produced “I amn’t” in the classroom
turned and said—“You’re not in Ireland now.”I grew up in Ireland using expressions and grammatical constructions that I took to be normal English, only to discover years later that what counts as normal in language usage can be highly dependent on geography and dialect. I amn’t sure when I realised it, but amn’t is an example of this.
Standardized English has an array of forms of the verb be for various persons and tenses with a negative particle (n’t) affixed: isn’t, wasn’t, aren’t, weren’t. But there’s a curious gap. In the tag question I’m next, ___ I?, the usual form is the unsystematic am I not or the irregular aren’t I (irregular because we don’t say *I are). Why not amn’t?
Amn’t I talking to you? (Anne Emery, Death at Christy Burke’s, 2011)
Amn’t I after telling you that, said Donal. (Sean O’Casey, Inishfallen, Fare Thee Well, 1949)
Amn’t /’æmənt/, though centuries old, is not part of standardized English. But it is common in Ireland, used especially in colloquial speech though not limited to informal registers. It’s also used in Scotland (alongside amnae and other variants) and parts of England – the OED says the north, and west midlands – and occasionally elsewhere, such as Wales.
How amn’t came to be so geographically limited is not fully clear. Another variant, an’t, probably supplanted it in general usage because speakers wanted to avoid sounding /n/ immediately after /m/; see Michael Quinion and Robert Beard for brief commentary on this. David Crystal says it was therefore:
a natural development to simplify the consonant cluster. The final /t/ made it more likely that the simplification would go to /ant/ rather than /amt/, and this is what we find in 18th century texts, where it appears as an’t.
An’t, also spelt a’n’t, is the “phonetically natural and the philologically logical shortening”, writes Eric Partridge in Usage and Abusage. It too fell from favour, but not before morphing in two significant ways. It gave rise to ain’t, which has its own lively history, and it also began being spelt aren’t (by “orthographic analogy”, in Crystal’s phrase), which is pronounced the same as an’t in non-rhotic accents.
This explains aren’t I, which would otherwise seem a grammatical anomaly. Indeed, Gabe Doyle notes that its irregularity “earns the ire of the accountants” of English. But it has steadily gained acceptability in major English-speaking regions. Irish and Scottish dialects are the exception in retaining and favouring its ancestor, amn’t I.
Despite its vintage, its logic, and its convenience, not everyone likes amn’t. It’s dismissed as “ugly” by Eric Partridge and as “substandard” by Bryan Garner in his Dictionary of Modern American Usage. Patricia O’Conner and Stewart Kellerman describe amn’t I as “clunky” in Origins of the Specious.
Garner is wrong, and the other pronouncements are subjective or prejudicial. Amn’t is not part of standardized English, but it is thoroughly normal in Irish English. There’s nothing intrinsically unsound or deficient about it unless you revere prestige. It’s often called awkward, but it doesn’t feel awkward if you grow up with it. Even aesthetically, amn’t has unique appeal.
Amn’t I with you? Amn’t I your girl? (James Joyce, Ulysses, 1922)
Ye don’t want me, don’t ye? And amn’t I as good as the best of them? Amn’t I? (Patrick MacGill, The Rat-pit, 1915)
So how is amn’t used? Commonly in questions: straightforward interrogative (Joyce, above), tag (MacGill), and rhetorical (see post title). These are the structures typically noted by lexicographers: Robert Burchfield’s revision of Fowler says it’s “used as part of the tag question amn’t I?”, while Terence Dolan’s Dictionary of Hiberno-English associates it with “negative first-person questions”.
Neither Burchfield nor Dolan mentions other uses, but amn’t is also used, for example, in declarative statements of the form I amn’t. Though even Irish people, in my experience, usually say I’m not in such cases, some of them also say I amn’t.
I amn’t sure I should go on at all or if you’d like a line or two from your bad old penny. (Joseph O’Connor, Ghost Light, 2010)
And you, my poor changling, have to go to Birmingham next week, and I, poor divil, amn’t well enough to go out to far-away places for even solitary walks. (J.M. Synge, Letters to Molly, 1971)
A bit odder is the double negative question amn’t I not, which I’ve come across in both tags (I’m not drunk neither, amn’t I not) and more centrally (amn’t I not turble [terrible] altogether). A straw poll I held on Twitter suggests, unsurprisingly, that it’s a good deal rarer than other uses of amn’t, but several people still confirm using it.
My Twitter query also showed that amn’t occurs in more than just tag questions in Scotland, disproving a claim I’d encountered earlier. It prompted lots of anecdata and discussion on the word’s contemporary use in Ireland and elsewhere, and is available on Wakelet for interested readers.
If I amn’t mistaken, the pinch is here. (Athenian Gazette, May 1691)
Oh, Peader, but amn’t I Dublin born and bred? (Katie Flynn, Strawberry Fields, 1994)
Amn’t may grow in frequency and stature or it might, like ain’t, remain quite stigmatised in formal English. At the moment it’s undoubtedly a minority usage, with just four hits in the vast COHA corpus, five in COCA, and one in the BNC. Even GloWbE, with its 1.9 billion words from informal sources, offers a mere 31 hits.
Last year I retweeted a comment from @Ann_imal, a US speaker who said she had “started saying ‘amn’t I’ instead of ‘aren’t I,’ and no one (except AutoCorrect) has questioned me”. A search on Twitter suggests she’s not alone: amn’t has modest but undeniable currency in Englishes and idiolects around the world.
Social attitudes are decisive. Language Hat has noted that children acquiring language sometimes use amn’t – it is, after all, an intuitive construction – only to lose it along the way; a search on Google Books returns similar reports. LH used the word himself, and says, “I don’t remember when or why I stopped. The pressures of ‘proper English’ are insidious.”
In a neat inversion of the usual pattern, a commenter at Language Log recalls using aren’t I as a child and being corrected to amn’t I. More of this kind of parental guidance, or at least less proscriptive regulation in the other direction, may help amn’t gain more of a foothold outside Ireland and Scotland.
Not that I’ve anything against aren’t I, or ain’t for that matter. But if anyone felt they wanted to adopt amn’t and got past the social barrier, they would likely find it a handy, pleasing contraction. And that counts for a lot these days, amirite amn’t I right?
https://twitter.com/StanCarey/status/822016562953682945
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Today, by the way, is (US) National Grammar Day, which by semantic sorcery I’m interpreting as International Grammar Day to highlight a characteristic feature of grammar in Ireland. The Sentence first archives have lots more Irish English grammar and vocabulary.
Updates:
Eavan Boland has also written about this episode in prose, in her book Object Lessons (1995):
“Language is fossil poetry,” says Emerson, and it may well be. But it also home truth. Whatever the inventions and distortions of my imaginings, my tongue, the sounds it made in my mouth, betrayed me. I was no English Alice. I was an Irish child in England. […]
The inevitable happened. One day my tongue betrayed me out of dream and counterfeit into cold truth. I was in the cloakroom in school in the middle of the afternoon. A winter darkness was already gathering through one of the stubborn fogs of the time. A teacher was marshaling children here and there, dividing those who were taking buses from those who were being collected. “I amn’t taking the bus,” I said. I was six or seven then, still within earshot of another way of speaking. But the English do not use that particular construction. It is an older usage. If they contract the verb and the negative, they say, “I’m not.”
Without knowing, I had used that thing for which the English reserve a visceral dislike: their language, loaded and aimed by the old enemy. The teacher whirled around. She corrected my grammar; her face set, her tone cold. “You’re not in Ireland now” was what she said.
At her blog The Other Side of Sixty, Corkonian wisewebwoman says: “you wouldn’t believe the shellacking I took for brazenly using ‘amn’t’ when I moved to Canada. Laughter, disbelief and mockery ensued.”
I like a good coincidence. While editing this post I listened to the Mogwai song ‘Wizard Motor‘ on repeat, unaware, before a tweet from Helen McClory, that Mogwai also have a song called ‘Moses? I Amn’t’:
#amnt #contractions #dialects #eavanBoland #grammar #hibernoEnglish #ireland #irishBooks #irishEnglish #irishEnglishGrammar #irishLiterature #lexicography #linguistics #morphology #nationalGrammarDay #negation #poetry #prescriptivism #sociolinguistics #standardizedEnglish #usage #words #writing
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Amn’t I glad we use “amn’t” in Ireland
From ‘An Irish Childhood in England: 1951’ by Eavan Boland (full poem on my Tumblr):
let the world I knew become the space
between the words that I had by heart
and all the other speech that always was
becoming the language of the country that
I came to in nineteen fifty-one:
barely-gelled, a freckled six-year-old,
overdressed and sick on the plane,
when all of England to an Irish child
was nothing more than what you’d lost and how:
was the teacher in the London convent who,
when I produced “I amn’t” in the classroom
turned and said—“You’re not in Ireland now.”I grew up in Ireland using expressions and grammatical constructions that I took to be normal English, only to discover years later that what counts as normal in language usage can be highly dependent on geography and dialect. I amn’t sure when I realised it, but amn’t is an example of this.
Standardized English has an array of forms of the verb be for various persons and tenses with a negative particle (n’t) affixed: isn’t, wasn’t, aren’t, weren’t. But there’s a curious gap. In the tag question I’m next, ___ I?, the usual form is the unsystematic am I not or the irregular aren’t I (irregular because we don’t say *I are). Why not amn’t?
Amn’t I talking to you? (Anne Emery, Death at Christy Burke’s, 2011)
Amn’t I after telling you that, said Donal. (Sean O’Casey, Inishfallen, Fare Thee Well, 1949)
Amn’t /’æmənt/, though centuries old, is not part of standardized English. But it is common in Ireland, used especially in colloquial speech though not limited to informal registers. It’s also used in Scotland (alongside amnae and other variants) and parts of England – the OED says the north, and west midlands – and occasionally elsewhere, such as Wales.
How amn’t came to be so geographically limited is not fully clear. Another variant, an’t, probably supplanted it in general usage because speakers wanted to avoid sounding /n/ immediately after /m/; see Michael Quinion and Robert Beard for brief commentary on this. David Crystal says it was therefore:
a natural development to simplify the consonant cluster. The final /t/ made it more likely that the simplification would go to /ant/ rather than /amt/, and this is what we find in 18th century texts, where it appears as an’t.
An’t, also spelt a’n’t, is the “phonetically natural and the philologically logical shortening”, writes Eric Partridge in Usage and Abusage. It too fell from favour, but not before morphing in two significant ways. It gave rise to ain’t, which has its own lively history, and it also began being spelt aren’t (by “orthographic analogy”, in Crystal’s phrase), which is pronounced the same as an’t in non-rhotic accents.
This explains aren’t I, which would otherwise seem a grammatical anomaly. Indeed, Gabe Doyle notes that its irregularity “earns the ire of the accountants” of English. But it has steadily gained acceptability in major English-speaking regions. Irish and Scottish dialects are the exception in retaining and favouring its ancestor, amn’t I.
Despite its vintage, its logic, and its convenience, not everyone likes amn’t. It’s dismissed as “ugly” by Eric Partridge and as “substandard” by Bryan Garner in his Dictionary of Modern American Usage. Patricia O’Conner and Stewart Kellerman describe amn’t I as “clunky” in Origins of the Specious.
Garner is wrong, and the other pronouncements are subjective or prejudicial. Amn’t is not part of standardized English, but it is thoroughly normal in Irish English. There’s nothing intrinsically unsound or deficient about it unless you revere prestige. It’s often called awkward, but it doesn’t feel awkward if you grow up with it. Even aesthetically, amn’t has unique appeal.
Amn’t I with you? Amn’t I your girl? (James Joyce, Ulysses, 1922)
Ye don’t want me, don’t ye? And amn’t I as good as the best of them? Amn’t I? (Patrick MacGill, The Rat-pit, 1915)
So how is amn’t used? Commonly in questions: straightforward interrogative (Joyce, above), tag (MacGill), and rhetorical (see post title). These are the structures typically noted by lexicographers: Robert Burchfield’s revision of Fowler says it’s “used as part of the tag question amn’t I?”, while Terence Dolan’s Dictionary of Hiberno-English associates it with “negative first-person questions”.
Neither Burchfield nor Dolan mentions other uses, but amn’t is also used, for example, in declarative statements of the form I amn’t. Though even Irish people, in my experience, usually say I’m not in such cases, some of them also say I amn’t.
I amn’t sure I should go on at all or if you’d like a line or two from your bad old penny. (Joseph O’Connor, Ghost Light, 2010)
And you, my poor changling, have to go to Birmingham next week, and I, poor divil, amn’t well enough to go out to far-away places for even solitary walks. (J.M. Synge, Letters to Molly, 1971)
A bit odder is the double negative question amn’t I not, which I’ve come across in both tags (I’m not drunk neither, amn’t I not) and more centrally (amn’t I not turble [terrible] altogether). A straw poll I held on Twitter suggests, unsurprisingly, that it’s a good deal rarer than other uses of amn’t, but several people still confirm using it.
My Twitter query also showed that amn’t occurs in more than just tag questions in Scotland, disproving a claim I’d encountered earlier. It prompted lots of anecdata and discussion on the word’s contemporary use in Ireland and elsewhere, and is available on Wakelet for interested readers.
If I amn’t mistaken, the pinch is here. (Athenian Gazette, May 1691)
Oh, Peader, but amn’t I Dublin born and bred? (Katie Flynn, Strawberry Fields, 1994)
Amn’t may grow in frequency and stature or it might, like ain’t, remain quite stigmatised in formal English. At the moment it’s undoubtedly a minority usage, with just four hits in the vast COHA corpus, five in COCA, and one in the BNC. Even GloWbE, with its 1.9 billion words from informal sources, offers a mere 31 hits.
Last year I retweeted a comment from @Ann_imal, a US speaker who said she had “started saying ‘amn’t I’ instead of ‘aren’t I,’ and no one (except AutoCorrect) has questioned me”. A search on Twitter suggests she’s not alone: amn’t has modest but undeniable currency in Englishes and idiolects around the world.
Social attitudes are decisive. Language Hat has noted that children acquiring language sometimes use amn’t – it is, after all, an intuitive construction – only to lose it along the way; a search on Google Books returns similar reports. LH used the word himself, and says, “I don’t remember when or why I stopped. The pressures of ‘proper English’ are insidious.”
In a neat inversion of the usual pattern, a commenter at Language Log recalls using aren’t I as a child and being corrected to amn’t I. More of this kind of parental guidance, or at least less proscriptive regulation in the other direction, may help amn’t gain more of a foothold outside Ireland and Scotland.
Not that I’ve anything against aren’t I, or ain’t for that matter. But if anyone felt they wanted to adopt amn’t and got past the social barrier, they would likely find it a handy, pleasing contraction. And that counts for a lot these days, amirite amn’t I right?
https://twitter.com/StanCarey/status/822016562953682945
*
Today, by the way, is (US) National Grammar Day, which by semantic sorcery I’m interpreting as International Grammar Day to highlight a characteristic feature of grammar in Ireland. The Sentence first archives have lots more Irish English grammar and vocabulary.
Updates:
Eavan Boland has also written about this episode in prose, in her book Object Lessons (1995):
“Language is fossil poetry,” says Emerson, and it may well be. But it also home truth. Whatever the inventions and distortions of my imaginings, my tongue, the sounds it made in my mouth, betrayed me. I was no English Alice. I was an Irish child in England. […]
The inevitable happened. One day my tongue betrayed me out of dream and counterfeit into cold truth. I was in the cloakroom in school in the middle of the afternoon. A winter darkness was already gathering through one of the stubborn fogs of the time. A teacher was marshaling children here and there, dividing those who were taking buses from those who were being collected. “I amn’t taking the bus,” I said. I was six or seven then, still within earshot of another way of speaking. But the English do not use that particular construction. It is an older usage. If they contract the verb and the negative, they say, “I’m not.”
Without knowing, I had used that thing for which the English reserve a visceral dislike: their language, loaded and aimed by the old enemy. The teacher whirled around. She corrected my grammar; her face set, her tone cold. “You’re not in Ireland now” was what she said.
At her blog The Other Side of Sixty, Corkonian wisewebwoman says: “you wouldn’t believe the shellacking I took for brazenly using ‘amn’t’ when I moved to Canada. Laughter, disbelief and mockery ensued.”
I like a good coincidence. While editing this post I listened to the Mogwai song ‘Wizard Motor‘ on repeat, unaware, before a tweet from Helen McClory, that Mogwai also have a song called ‘Moses? I Amn’t’:
#amnt #contractions #dialects #eavanBoland #grammar #hibernoEnglish #ireland #irishBooks #irishEnglish #irishEnglishGrammar #irishLiterature #lexicography #linguistics #morphology #nationalGrammarDay #negation #poetry #prescriptivism #sociolinguistics #standardizedEnglish #usage #words #writing
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Anecdotal evidence of Talarico's popularity here in DFW: Loads of Talarico yard signs in once deeply red neighborhoods
Talarico leads both Cornyn, Paxton in new poll of Texas’ U.S. Senate race 🌊
The Austin Democrat, who won his party’s nomination in March, led Cornyn and Paxton by margins of 3 and 5 percentage points, respectively. Both results were within the survey’s margin of error.
https://www.texastribune.org/2026/04/28/texas-us-senate-poll-talarico-cornyn-paxton-2026-midterms/
#BirenBomb #Talarico #BlueWave #Texas #SenateRace #USPol #DFW
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Buccan in Palm Beach freshens menu with pork chop and ricotta gnocchi https://www.diningandcooking.com/2614933/buccan-in-palm-beach-freshens-menu-with-pork-chop-and-ricotta-gnocchi/ #AnecdotalEvidence #Buccan #ClayConley #culinary #CulinaryTraditions #DurocPorkChop #Italia #Italian #ItalianCulinary #ItalianCulinaryTraditions #italiano #italy #JamesBeardAward
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𝑪𝒖𝒓𝒊𝒐𝒔𝒊𝒅𝒂𝒅𝒆𝒔
En las guerras de finales del siglo XIX y principios del XX, especialmente en el ejército británico, circulaba algo que muchos soldados conocían bien: la famosa “píldora número 9”.
Sonaba casi a remedio milagroso.
En los campamentos y trincheras se hablaba de ella como una pastilla que los médicos daban para todo.
Dolor de estómago, malestar, cansancio… muchos pensaban que era una especie de solución rápida para cualquier problema.Pero la realidad era bastante menos misteriosa.
Los médicos militares llevaban cajas con medicamentos numerados para poder repartirlos rápido en el campo de batalla.
Era una forma sencilla de organizar las pastillas sin tener que explicar demasiado en medio del caos.Y la número 9 tenía un efecto muy concreto.
Era un laxante bastante potente.
Muchos soldados pedían medicinas esperando conseguir unos días fuera del frente, quizá un traslado al hospital o al menos un descanso.
Los médicos sabían que muchas veces no se trataba de una enfermedad grave, sino simplemente de agotamiento o de alguien que quería escapar un tiempo de las trincheras.Así que cuando sospechaban que el problema no era serio, a veces entregaban la famosa píldora.
El resultado no era precisamente un descanso.
El soldado no salía del frente… pero pasaba unas horas bastante incómodas.
Con la alimentación limitada, el estrés y las malas condiciones sanitarias de los campamentos, el efecto era rápido y nada agradable.Por eso la “Number 9 pill” terminó convirtiéndose en una especie de broma amarga entre los soldados del ejército británico.
Incluso apareció en canciones militares y en el humor de los cuarteles.No era un medicamento especial ni secreto.
Solo un laxante fuerte que los médicos usaban como solución rápida cuando no había una enfermedad real que tratar.En un entorno tan duro como la guerra, hasta una simple pastilla podía convertirse en parte del lenguaje cotidiano del frente.
Y también en una pequeña advertencia: si pedías medicina sin necesitarla… quizá acabarías recibiendo la número 9.
▣▣▣▣▣▣▣▣▣▣▣▣▣▣▣▣▣▣
#historia #curiosidadeshistoricas #historiadelamedicina #historiamilitar #curiosidades #historiadelaguerra #anecdotashistoricas
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Anecdotally, as a trainer, I do get more doodles with behavior issues than other breeds. But I don’t believe the problem is the cross breeding or the poodle part—it’s that buyers want doodles and breeders are cranking them out as fast as they can. Too many breeders are focusing on looks instead of temperament, and fast turnaround of litters—so they’re not selling mentally healthy puppies. And because the doodles are so popular, they are over-represented in the gen pop. When I was young, it was golden retrievers, and they had the highest numbers of reported bites.
#dogs #DogTraining
https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2026/mar/19/crossbreed-dogs-cockapoo-cavapoo-labradoodle-behavioural-problems-study-research -
:comics_dc_superman: Me acaba de pasar una de esas tonterías que seguramente solo te hacen gracia si estás en el momento… pero mi hermana y yo hemos acabado llorando de risa.
Suena el teléfono.
Raro, porque yo casi nunca recibo llamadas y menos a estas horas. Contesto…Y de repente escucho un grito que casi me deja sorda:
¡¡¡LUUUUIS!!!
Sin pensarlo ni medio segundo, y supongo que porque estoy viendo la serie estos días, le respondo a pleno pulmón:
¡¡¡S–MALL–VILLE!!!
Tal cual. Como en la intro de la serie.
Silencio raro al otro lado… y luego un hombre claramente muy, muy ebrio, hablando a trompicones. Apenas se le entendía. Le digo que se ha equivocado de número y cuelgo.
Dos segundos después… vuelve a llamar.
Otra vez:
¡¡¡LUIS!!!Y yo, ya entre risas:
—Que aquí no hay ningún Luis, hombre…El pobre empieza a contarme algo entre palabras sueltas donde solo entendí Logroño, este número y Luis. Luego me pregunta muy serio:
—¿Dónde llamo?
Y yo:
—Barcelona.Silencio.
—Ah… vale.
Y cuelga.
Mi hermana estaba conmigo y las dos hemos terminado llorando de la risa, porque claro… lo de S–MALL–VILLE fue una de esas estupideces automáticas que solo entiende tu propio cerebro en ese momento.
Hay chorradas que solo te hacen gracia a ti…
pero oye, benditas sean. 😄:comics_dc_superman: :comics_dc_superman:
#anecdota #cosasdelavida #llamadasraras #momentosabsurdos #reir #smallville #humor #vidacotidiana #historiasreales
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:comics_dc_superman: Me acaba de pasar una de esas tonterías que seguramente solo te hacen gracia si estás en el momento… pero mi hermana y yo hemos acabado llorando de risa.
Suena el teléfono.
Raro, porque yo casi nunca recibo llamadas y menos a estas horas. Contesto…Y de repente escucho un grito que casi me deja sorda:
¡¡¡LUUUUIS!!!
Sin pensarlo ni medio segundo, y supongo que porque estoy viendo la serie estos días, le respondo a pleno pulmón:
¡¡¡S–MALL–VILLE!!!
Tal cual. Como en la intro de la serie.
Silencio raro al otro lado… y luego un hombre claramente muy, muy ebrio, hablando a trompicones. Apenas se le entendía. Le digo que se ha equivocado de número y cuelgo.
Dos segundos después… vuelve a llamar.
Otra vez:
¡¡¡LUIS!!!Y yo, ya entre risas:
—Que aquí no hay ningún Luis, hombre…El pobre empieza a contarme algo entre palabras sueltas donde solo entendí Logroño, este número y Luis. Luego me pregunta muy serio:
—¿Dónde llamo?
Y yo:
—Barcelona.Silencio.
—Ah… vale.
Y cuelga.
Mi hermana estaba conmigo y las dos hemos terminado llorando de la risa, porque claro… lo de S–MALL–VILLE fue una de esas estupideces automáticas que solo entiende tu propio cerebro en ese momento.
Hay chorradas que solo te hacen gracia a ti…
pero oye, benditas sean. 😄:comics_dc_superman: :comics_dc_superman:
#anecdota #cosasdelavida #llamadasraras #momentosabsurdos #reir #smallville #humor #vidacotidiana #historiasreales
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Dejé de trabajar en ese lugar en 2009. En retrospectiva, puedo decir que ese jefe era todo un cretino.
https://www.maikciveira.com/2009/05/hay-que-darles-mierda-muchacho.html?m=1
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Anecdotally on mastodon, and based on very rudimentary analytics from Tinylytics, Germany 🇩🇪 seems the most receptive to fighting back on #AIdoomerism.
What's going on over there in Deutschland? Why are y'all ahead of the curb?
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Anecdotally among people I know & through rumblings on social media, I'm starting think that Citizens Advice Bureaus are having a real capacity problems, as people are waiting to speak to advisors for weeks (in some cases months) & seem to be getting a poor (partial) response when the contact CABs are about specific support.
My guess is that the CABs are being hit be rising demand & more complexity in the support required?
If so, a worrying development for the vulnerable.
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Anecdotally, I encounter this fairly regularly too — mostly, but not exclusively, from the right, and usually from the politically unengaged.
As described here, Reform are only interested in the Welsh elections next May to shore up resources for their national party rather than legislating responsibly for Wales and Welsh people — but I think it a valid concern that our very democracy may be on the ballot too.
#Wales #WelshPol #WelshPolitics #Senedd #Cymru
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/sep/10/senedd-welsh-parliament-abolish
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🎯 ■ Usa durante un año el aceite que encontró en su piso: lo que descubre al final da la vuelta a España ■ Hace un llamamiento final para que esto no le ocurra a nadie más.
https://www.huffingtonpost.es/virales/usano-aceite-encontro-piso-descubre-final-da-vuelta-espana.html?int=MASTODON_WORLD#virales #instagram #hermanos #tiktok #cocinar #aceite #piso #anecdota
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Anecdotal observation apropo of nothing...
During our recent hour rowing on the Serpentine, we were (I think) the only row boat amongst a busy lake of pedalos. But one of my photos from 2009 show that back then it was maybe nearer half-and-half.
Has leisure rowing fallen out of fashion?