{"id":483628,"date":"2010-03-28T21:09:00","date_gmt":"2010-03-29T01:09:00","guid":{"rendered":"tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5587346.post-6008672515132684872"},"modified":"2010-03-28T21:10:09","modified_gmt":"2010-03-29T01:10:09","slug":"rwandan-genocide-and-the-zani-score","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/483628","title":{"rendered":"Rwandan genocide and the Zani score"},"content":{"rendered":"

I made up the “Zani score<\/a>” as “… a measure of how concerned one should be about nascent entities or organizations. It tries to measure social structures that, 999\/1000 times go nowhere, but 1\/1000 times lead, given chance and circumstance, to very bad things…”<\/p>\n

I imagined it in the context of an industrial society, but I asked a friend who’s an expert on the Rwandan genocide to try to apply the metric to that setting:<\/p>\n

    \n
  1. A belief that the ends justify the means, or, in other words, “extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice”. NOT SURE.<\/li>\n
  2. A sense of grievance and injustice. YES.<\/li>\n
  3. A charismatic leader. NOT REALLY. NO ONE WAS CHARISMATIC, BUT AUTHORITY WAS TOTAL.<\/li>\n
  4. Celebration and admiration of violence. WELL, SINCE 1990. IT WAS SPECTACLE FOR SOME.<\/li>\n
  5. Tribal or ethnic boundaries; a division into the “chosen” and the “other”. YES.<\/li>\n
  6. Anti-intellectual, in particular anti-geek. YES, INTELLECTUALS WERE AMONG THE FIRST KILLED.<\/li>\n
  7. Denial of skepticism. Skeptics are outcast, dissent is forbidden. NOT SURE.<\/li>\n
  8. Welcoming and affirmation of the convert. NONCONFORMITY WAS NEVER ENCOURAGED GENERALLY.<\/li>\n
  9. Membership alone is proof of virtue. IN TERMS OF ETHNICITY.<\/li>\n
  10. Scorn for the weak; denial of pity or sympathy for the other. NOT SURE.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

    The only real conflict to the model was that the leader of the genocide was not particularly charismatic — but since he had total authority that wasn’t much of an obstacle. There are a number of unknowns, but not bad for something that was designed with a very different society in mind.<\/p>\n

    My Google Reader Shared items (feed)<\/a><\/small><\/p>\n

    <\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    I made up the “Zani score” as “… a measure of how concerned one should be about nascent entities or organizations. It tries to measure social structures that, 999\/1000 times go nowhere, but 1\/1000 times lead, given chance and circumstance, to very bad things…” I imagined it in the context of an industrial society, but […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":711,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-483628","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/483628","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/711"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=483628"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/483628\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=483628"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=483628"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=483628"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}