drwhat posted:
aerdil posted:
theres sorta this weird implicit thought that liberals seem to have that violence is just bubbling right under the surface in OWS or any other protest and they gotta keep repeating the mantra no violence no violence no violence its a little creepy and revolting tbh



violence *is* bubbling under the surface in any protest. to make a nonironic post for a second- for all the people who show up to a protest who aren't college maoist club members who show up at everything, it's an inherently tension-filled situation, an open defiance of the imposed structure- you're generally staring directly in the faces of hundreds of fully suited up police officers who would love nothing better than for you to go the fuck home or for them to be able to send you the fuck home

this whole feeling is reflected and re-amplified once protests become large enough to actually potentially threaten the safety, even only theoretically, of the individual police officer... they're looking for the first slip-up or aggressive action so they can stomp it out, and there's a bunch of angry kids who are looking for that so they can fight it

i mean this is all pretty immediately obvious

the problem imo is that the really megaboring professional protestors show up all the fucking time with some happy bongos and white person dreadlocks and say in the same voice every fucking time, PEACE FUL PRO TEST PEACE FUL PRO TEST. it's the same shit all the time. TELL ME WHAT DEMOCRACY LOOKS LIKE. THIS IS WHAT DEMOCRACY LOOKS LIKE! it's so fucking stupid. there's no message anymore, just a lot of people yelling about how they're peaceful and no violence and this is democracy. every time there is any opportunity to organize for any reason.

it's cool that OWS even happened, considering this constant antimessage, antipassion self-suppression. of course there should be, has to be violence, inescapably in the clash of anything against the structures of power. perpetrated in one direction or another. it isn't noble or meaningful or impactful to get led away in some handcuffs and kept in a cell or truck for a few hours and then released to cry about it on tv.

if real impact is happening, either you or they are going to get injured. the cliche of Gandhi is misleading, I very much think the Indian civil disobedience movement would have gotten nowhere if the penalties for their disobedience were less than being shot, flogged, or long-term imprisonment. something real was being risked, lives were, inarguably, on the line.

so i don't think it's creepy or revolting, i just think it's myopic and repressive. for the non-violence people who show up at every fucking protest I wonder if they ask themselves, at what point is it serious enough that you quit chanting that? when do you finally shut up and quit being there to have fun? serious change is not fun. not in the fucking least.

143 people were arrested in boston on monday. 700 people in new york a week before. 20 in seattle last night. meanwhile on those nights, internet revolutionary cosplayer, in his room like a jail cell only in that he urinates within its confines, haughtily complains that they're having too much fun and not doing anything

lungfish posted:
Goethestein posted:

lungfish posted:
OWS has ultimately done little but make most people hate the left in a more disgusted and visceral manner than they already did.

facts disagree


Maybe I haven't been paying well enough attention. What facts? My Twitter feed has otherwise-liberals turning downright conservative.

A poll by Time released Thursday, which asked participants’ opinions on President Barack Obama’s job performance, the impact of the tea party and views of “Occupy Wall Street,” contains a startling revelation that the national press hasn’t quite pieced together yet: the “Occupy Wall Street” protesters have a higher approval rating than President Obama.

The poll’s figures show that President Obama has an approval rating of just 44 percent, with 50 percent disapproving and six percent not sure. That stands in contrast to the 54 percent who say their opinion of “Occupy Wall Street” is either “very favorable” (25 percent) or “somewhat favorable” (29 percent).

Comparatively, the tea party, which has essentially become the Republican Party’s attempt at a populist movement, only has a 27 percent approval rating, with just eight percent being “very favorable” and 19 percent being “somewhat favorable.”

lungfish posted:

Goethestein posted:

lungfish posted:
OWS has ultimately done little but make most people hate the left in a more disgusted and visceral manner than they already did.

facts disagree

Maybe I haven't been paying well enough attention. What facts? My Twitter feed has otherwise-liberals turning downright conservative.

oh, well that settles it!

lungfish posted:
OWS has ultimately done little but make most people hate the left in a more disgusted and visceral manner than they already did.

i don't think limbaugh and whoever else's characterization of liberals as greedy/lazy hippies is anything different from what they've always said. are they really changing anyone's mind on the issue

*joins mysticw0lf's wolfpack + peacefully prowls the streets*

Goethestein posted:
general impression? some hippies, some crackpots. mostly 18-30 years old, some outliers. getting bigger daily. everybody was friendly.

well listen here buddy, ive got a twitter-list full of really old and angry occupy boston people, soooooooooooooooooooo

Goethestein posted:
general impression? some hippies, some crackpots. mostly 18-30 years old, some outliers. getting bigger daily. everybody was friendly.

yeah theres occupy seattle people on the UW campus and its like oh the legalize marijuana people swapped thier signs up

Impper posted:
there was a one woman protest in front of my building today. she held a sign that said HUMAN RIGHTS IN TIBET

sounds better than the one woman protest in front of the planned parent hood building here

"The Fantastic Success of Occupy Wall Street"


The Occupy Wall Street movement - for now it is a movement - is the most important political happening in the United States since the uprisings in 1968, whose direct descendant or continuation it is.

Why it started in the United States when it did - and not three days, three months, three years earlier or later - we'll never know for sure. The conditions were there: acutely increasing economic pain not only for the truly poverty-stricken but for an ever-growing segment of the working poor (otherwise known as the "middle class"); incredible exaggeration (exploitation, greed) of the wealthiest 1% of the U.S. population ("Wall Street"); the example of angry upsurges around the world (the "Arab spring," the Spanish indignados, the Chilean students, the Wisconsin trade unions, and a long list of others). It doesn't really matter what the spark was that ignited the fire. It started.

In Stage one - the first few days - the movement was a handful of audacious, mostly young, persons who were trying to demonstrate. The press ignored them totally. Then some stupid police captains thought that a bit of brutality would end the demonstrations. They were caught on film and the film went viral on YouTube.

That brought us to Stage two - publicity. The press could no longer ignore the demonstrators entirely. So the press tried condescension. What did these foolish, ignorant youth (and a few elderly women) know about the economy? Did they have any positive program? Were they "disciplined"? The demonstrations, we were told, would soon fizzle. What the press and the powers that be didn't count on (they never seem to learn) is that the theme of the protest resonated widely and quickly caught on. In city after city, similar "occupations" began. Unemployed 50-year-olds started to join in. So did celebrities. So did trade-unions, including none less than the president of the AFL-CIO. The press outside the United States now began to follow the events. Asked what they wanted, the demonstrators replied "justice." This began to seem like a meaningful answer to more and more people.

This brought us to Stage three - legitimacy. Academics of a certain repute began to suggest that the attack on "Wall Street" had some justification. All of a sudden, the main voice of centrist respectability, The New York Times, ran an editorial on October 8 in which they said that the protestors did indeed have "a clear message and specific policy prescriptions" and that the movement was "more than a youth uprising." The Times went on: "Extreme inequality is the hallmark of a dysfunctional economy, dominated by a financial sector that is driven as much by speculation, gouging and government backing as by productive investment." Strong language for the Times. And then the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee started circulating a petition asking party supporters to declare "I stand with the Occupy Wall Street protests."

The movement had become respectable. And with respectability came danger - Stage four. A major protest movement that has caught on usually faces two major threats. One is the organization of a significant right-wing counterdemonstration in the streets. Eric Cantor, the hardline (and quite astute) Republican congressional leader, has already called for that in effect. These counterdemonstrations can be quite ferocious. The Occupy Wall Street movement needs to be prepared for this and think through how it intends to handle or contain it.

But the second and bigger threat comes from the very success of the movement. As it attracts more support, it increases the diversity of views among the active protestors. The problem here is, as it always is, how to avoid the Scylla of being a tight cult that would lose because it is too narrowly based, and the Charybdis of no longer having a political coherence because it is too broad. There is no simple formula of how to manage avoiding going to either extreme. It is difficult.

As to the future, it could be that the movement goes from strength to strength. It might be able to do two things: force short-term restructuring of what the government will actually do to minimize the pain that people are obviously feeling acutely; and bring about long-term transformation of how large segments of the American population think about the realities of the structural crisis of capitalism and the major geopolitical transformations that are occurring because we are now living in a multipolar world.

Even if the Occupy Wall Street movement were to begin to peter out because of exhaustion or repression, it has already succeeded and will leave a lasting legacy, just as the uprisings of 1968 did. The United States will have changed, and in a positive direction. As the saying goes, "Rome wasn't built in a day." A new and better world-system, a new and better United States, is a task that requires repeated effort by repeated generations. But another world is indeed possible (albeit not inevitable). And we can make a difference. Occupy Wall Street is making a difference, a big difference.