Rather than castigating and seeking to overthrow the entire capitalist system — an unachievable outcome that is destined to fail, — the OWS protesters’ challenge will be to devise proposals to reform the current system.
an unachievable outcome that is destined to fail
outcome that is destined to fail
destined to fail
fail
lmao
As anti-war protesters in Washington were being pepper sprayed, an unlikely victim claims he among them.
Patrick Howley, the editor of the Right-wing political magazine, The American Spectator, says he joined the anti-war marchers as they tried to storm the National Air and Space Museum.
He wrote in his publication: ‘As far as anyone knew I was part of this cause — a cause that I had infiltrated the day before in order to mock and undermine in the pages of The American Spectator — and I wasn’t giving up before I had my story.’
And, after teasingly claiming he was the ‘only one who got inside’, the apparent agent provocateur, said he was attacked by a security guard with pepper spray.
He wrote: ‘After sneaking past the guard at the first entrance, I found myself trapped in a small entranceway outside the second interior door behind a muscle-bound Left-wing fanatic and a heavyset guard.
‘The fanatic shoved the guard and the guard shoved back, hard, sending this comrade - and, by domino effect, me - sprawling against the wall.
‘After squeezing myself out from under him, I sprinted toward the door. Then I got hit.
‘Being pepper-sprayed is a singularly agonizing experience - enormously painful, but even worse for a hypochondriac.
‘When the spray begins soaking into your eyeball, swelling your eyelids and rendering them largely inoperable, it's hard not to worry that you might soon have to invest in stronger-prescription glasses.’
Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2047168/Occupy-Wall-Street-protesters-make-love-class-war-sex-drugs-tap.html#ixzz1aVS9xPXV
everything about that story owns
Impper posted:
no, actually i envied that she was not "so pomo..." like me; one part of me thinks she's a fool, and one part of me thinks she did a great thing even if it was stupid as shit
so pomo
Impper posted:
i just said i'm "so pomo..." why do yo uhave to repeat it?
bc admittin your pomo is so pomo
I was getting annoyed at the way Occupy Wall Street was being covered — as if it was insane to gather in a public space and protest. As if it had never happened in America before. Wasn’t the whole point of passive resistance to just be there? To not make any demands? As I tried to come up with a good parallel, I found myself thinking of Bartleby, the Scrivener, Herman Melville’s short story about an office worker, Bartleby, who decides out of nowhere that he doesn’t feel like working anymore, but continues to show up at the office every day. Bartleby’s idleness baffles and then infuriates his boss, who begs Bartleby to give some reason for his behavior. But Bartleby refuses to disclose his interests, and over the course of the story, his needs become so few that he dies of starvation. It’s a bleak, mysterious story, and as I returned to my copy to reread it, I was stilled to rediscover its subtitle: “A Story of Wall Street.”
http://www.themillions.com/2011/10/bartleby%E2%80%99s-occupation-of-wall-street.html
still an interesting article, even though i disagree
babyfinland posted:
Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2047168/Occupy-Wall-Street-protesters-make-love-class-war-sex-drugs-tap.html#ixzz1aVS9xPXV
More than 7,000 miles away from New York, a group of elderly Chinese people were pictured gathering at a park in Zhengzhou, in central China's Henan province, to show their support.
China's state-controlled media has widely reported the growing demonstrations in the U.S.
Banners and slogans said: 'Resolutely supporting the American people’s mighty "Wall Street revolution"' and 'United, proletarians around the world', reported the Wall Street Journal.
An opinion piece last month in China's state-run newspaper 'China Daily' claimed the U.S. media were ignoring the demonstrations because of a 'blackout' imposed by owners.
lol the chinese leadership must be loving this shit, while raking in the dollars.. good job america
drwhat posted:
babyfinland posted:
Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2047168/Occupy-Wall-Street-protesters-make-love-class-war-sex-drugs-tap.html#ixzz1aVS9xPXV
More than 7,000 miles away from New York, a group of elderly Chinese people were pictured gathering at a park in Zhengzhou, in central China's Henan province, to show their support.
China's state-controlled media has widely reported the growing demonstrations in the U.S.
Banners and slogans said: 'Resolutely supporting the American people’s mighty "Wall Street revolution"' and 'United, proletarians around the world', reported the Wall Street Journal.
An opinion piece last month in China's state-run newspaper 'China Daily' claimed the U.S. media were ignoring the demonstrations because of a 'blackout' imposed by owners.
lol the chinese leadership must be loving this shit, while raking in the dollars.. good job america
besides the shit will smell way less bad then
Goethestein posted:
lol there's a dude in D&D complaining that the protests arent centrist enough
If they become centrist, they might have a lot more influence.
There are two common complaints between OWS and the Tea Party, and they are majorly significant ones: TARP and the Federal Reserve.
By combining forces, both groups could argue against these programs (The Federal Reserve Act was signed into law in 1913 by Woodrow Wilson. The Constitution states that payments should only be made in gold and silver.)
Of course, I support the Federal Reserve and the highly successful and profitable TARP act. But I must acknowledge what would be best for OWS.
lungfish posted:Goethestein posted:
lol there's a dude in D&D complaining that the protests arent centrist enoughIf they become centrist, they might have a lot more influence.
There are two common complaints between OWS and the Tea Party, and they are majorly significant ones: TARP and the Federal Reserve.
By combining forces, both groups could argue against these programs (The Federal Reserve Act was signed into law in 1913 by Woodrow Wilson. The Constitution states that payments should only be made in gold and silver.)
Of course, I support the Federal Reserve and the highly successful and profitable TARP act. But I must acknowledge what would be best for OWS.
Combining Tea Party and OWS complaints isn't really "centrist"
But, to draw on the old cliché, the enemy of my enemy is not necessarily my friend. Just because liberals are frustrated with Wall Street does not mean that we should automatically find common cause with a group of people who are protesting Wall Street. Indeed, one of the first obligations of liberalism is skepticism—of governments, of arguments, and of movements.And so it is important to look at what Occupy Wall Street actually believes and then to ask two, related questions: Is their rhetoric liberal, or at least a close cousin of liberalism? And is this movement helpful to the achievement of liberal aims?
This task is made especially difficult by the fact that there is no single leader who is speaking for the crowds, no book of demands that has been put forward by the movement. Like all such gatherings, it undoubtedly includes a broad range of views. But the volume of interviews, speeches, and online declarations associated with the protests does make it possible to arrive at some broad generalizations about what Occupy Wall Street stands for. And these, in turn, suggest a few reasons for liberals to be nervous about the movement.
One of the core differences between liberals and radicals is that liberals are capitalists. They believe in a capitalism that is democratically regulated—that seeks to level an unfair economic playing field so that all citizens have the freedom to make what they want of their lives. But these are not the principles we are hearing from the protesters. Instead, we are hearing calls for the upending of capitalism entirely.American capitalism may be flawed, but it is not, as Slavoj Zizek implied in a speech to the protesters, the equivalent of Chinese suppression. “ 2011, the Chinese government prohibited on TV and films and in novels all stories that contain alternate reality or time travel,” Zizek declared. “This is a good sign for China. It means that people still dream about alternatives, so you have to prohibit this dream. Here, we don’t think of prohibition. Because the ruling system has even oppressed our capacity to dream. Look at the movies that we see all the time. It’s easy to imagine the end of the world. An asteroid destroying all life and so on. But you cannot imagine the end of capitalism.”This is not a statement of liberal values; moreover, it is a statement that should be deeply offensive to liberals, who do not in any way seek the end of capitalism.
Zizek is not alone. His statement is typical of the anti-capitalist, almost utopian arguments that one hears coming from these protesters. A recent debate about whether to allow Congressman John Lewis, a civil rights icon, to speak to Occupy Atlanta was captured on video and ended up on YouTube. As Lewis looked on, arguments on both sides were bandied about. “The point of this general assembly is to kick-start a democratic process in which no singular human being is inherently more valuable than any other human being,” argued one protester. Ultimately, because no “consensus” could be reached, Lewis was turned away. Yes, like the Zizek speech, this was just one data point. But surely it was an indication that liberal skepticism about this movement is not unwarranted.
And it is just not the protesters’ apparent allergy to capitalism and suspicion of normal democratic politics that should raise concerns. It is also their temperament. The protests have made a big deal of the fact that they arrive at their decisions through a deliberative process. But all their talk of “general assemblies” and “communiqués” and “consensus” has an air of group-think about it that is, or should be, troubling to liberals. “We speak as one,” Occupy Wall Street stated in its first communiqué, from September 19. “All of our decisions, from our choices to march on Wall Street to our decision to camp at One Liberty Plaza were decided through a consensus process by the group, for the group.” The air of group-think is only heightened by a technique called the “human microphone” that has become something of a signature for the protesters. When someone speaks, he or she pauses every few words and the crowd repeats what the person has just said in unison.The idea was apparently logistical—to project speeches across a wide area—but the effect when captured on video is genuinely creepy.
These are not just substantive complaints. They also beg the strategic question of whether the protesters will help or hurt the cause of liberalism. After all, even if the protesters are not liberals themselves, isn’t it possible that they could play a constructive role in forcing Americans to pay attention to important issues such as inequality and crony capitalism? Perhaps. But we are hard-pressed to believe that most Americans will look at these protests, with their extreme anti-capitalist rhetoric, and conclude that the fate of the Dodd-Frank legislation—currently the best liberal hope for improving democratically regulated capitalism—is more crucial than they had previously thought.
In the face of the current challenge from Tea Party conservatism, it is more important than ever that liberals make a compelling case for our vision of America. But we will not make this case stronger by allying with a movement that is out of sync with our values. And so, on the question of how liberals should feel about Occupy Wall Street, count us as deeply skeptical.
Edited by redfiesta ()