The King Leopold thing is fake by the way. Bueno de Mesquita’s account is based on “King Leopold’s Ghost” which is a work of dishonest scholarship. Basically Hoschild used selective quotations and an intense blindness to the context to frame Leopold’s adventure’s in Africa as exploitative when they were really altruistic. For example, the hand-cutting quote “I will have to cut off the hand of every villager to meet my quota” is a cut from a longer passage that says “we have to adjust downward these quotas because the current demands on my unit are unworkable. To actually implement this I will have to cut off the hand of every villager”. Even the policy entrepreneur’s he quotes to make them seem anti-leopold were writing essays with the thesis “The Belgian’s here are under resourced which creates problems, so we need greater Belgian involvement”. Source https://www.theamericanconservative.com/king-hochschilds-hoax/ So I think the importance of political culture and ideology is understated in the opening anecdote.
In general the model does make a good starting position.
The article you cited has a paywall, so I cannot read it for myself, but Reddit says it’s bad, and I’m highly skeptical myself. Wikipedia also doesn’t mention any critique that comes anywhere close to what you describe, not even on the talk page. I also tried to search for such criticism somewhere else, and didn’t find anything. So I’m confidant that this is wrong, and that the way I described Leopold is largely correct.
Those redditors have pretty weak arguments. The first comment is basically “the other academics all agree with the popular claim that Gilley is criticizing, so the popular claim must be true”. The second guy basically states “Gilley correctly argues that Hoschild’s evidence for a population decline is too weak. But if the evidence is bad, Gilley can’t prove there was a genocide. Therefore Gilley is wrong”.
The King Leopold thing is fake by the way. Bueno de Mesquita’s account is based on “King Leopold’s Ghost” which is a work of dishonest scholarship. Basically Hoschild used selective quotations and an intense blindness to the context to frame Leopold’s adventure’s in Africa as exploitative when they were really altruistic. For example, the hand-cutting quote “I will have to cut off the hand of every villager to meet my quota” is a cut from a longer passage that says “we have to adjust downward these quotas because the current demands on my unit are unworkable. To actually implement this I will have to cut off the hand of every villager”. Even the policy entrepreneur’s he quotes to make them seem anti-leopold were writing essays with the thesis “The Belgian’s here are under resourced which creates problems, so we need greater Belgian involvement”. Source https://www.theamericanconservative.com/king-hochschilds-hoax/ So I think the importance of political culture and ideology is understated in the opening anecdote.
In general the model does make a good starting position.
The article you cited has a paywall, so I cannot read it for myself, but Reddit says it’s bad, and I’m highly skeptical myself. Wikipedia also doesn’t mention any critique that comes anywhere close to what you describe, not even on the talk page. I also tried to search for such criticism somewhere else, and didn’t find anything. So I’m confidant that this is wrong, and that the way I described Leopold is largely correct.
Those redditors have pretty weak arguments. The first comment is basically “the other academics all agree with the popular claim that Gilley is criticizing, so the popular claim must be true”. The second guy basically states “Gilley correctly argues that Hoschild’s evidence for a population decline is too weak. But if the evidence is bad, Gilley can’t prove there was a genocide. Therefore Gilley is wrong”.
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