Occupy "World" Protests- Decrying Everything "Evil"

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**WarOne**

purplefood wrote:
WarOne wrote:
halonachos wrote:Palladium is necessary to know as well.

It that the one that allows you to detect evil?

Only when combined with Helium...

Well where there is Palladium and Helium, there are true neutrons.

**Phanatik**

purplefood wrote:Melissa: 2
Phanatic: 0

Your opinion matters so much to me. Thanks for chiming in.

And apparently, you are not very discerning.

Have a nice day though.

**MrDwhitey**

Whatever people say about you Phanatik, at least you end your posts politely!

**purplefood**

Phanatik wrote:
purplefood wrote:Melissa: 2
Phanatic: 0

Your opinion matters so much to me. Thanks for chiming in.

And apparently, you are not very discerning.

Have a nice day though.

I am very discerning. I drink tea and everything.
Melissa never said CEOs were useless she said she was opposed to them being paid not in accordance to their performance like many other people are.

**Phanatik**

purplefood wrote:
Phanatik wrote:
purplefood wrote:Melissa: 2
Phanatic: 0

Your opinion matters so much to me. Thanks for chiming in.

And apparently, you are not very discerning.

Have a nice day though.

I am very discerning. I drink tea and everything.
Melissa never said CEOs were useless she said she was opposed to them being paid not in accordance to their performance like many other people are.

The "useless CEOs" thing was a red herring.
She believes that people's salaries should be capped based on what other people in the company make, but her own salary shouldn't.

Regards,

**RatBot**

While normally I try to keep my nose out of politics, and haven't read this thread, I simply must chime in on this:

The money manager is particularly angry at New York Senators Chuck Schumer and Kirsten Gillibrand for not coming to their defense, despite Wall Street’s generous campaign contributions: “They need to understand who their constituency is.”

That infuriates me. I'm sorry, mister money manager, I guess since I can't afford to hire a lobbyist and contribute a hundred million dollars to a senator's campaign, your interests are more important than those of the average middle-class person.

feth you, gak head, and burn in hell.

**Melissia**

edited by Manchu

Personal attacks are against Dakka Rule Number One.

**feeder**

WarOne wrote:
halonachos wrote:Palladium is necessary to know as well.

It that the one that allows you to detect evil?

If we had enough Palladium we could manifest some Glitterboys and unleash some Boomgun retribution on those evilly evil Wall Streets like it's 1996!

Seriously though, I like the idea of a personal income cap. Ten million dollars per year sounds about right. It's still a ludicrous figure.

**dogma**

Phanatik wrote:
Well, me being just a blatant troll, lacking in talent.

That's more accurate.

**Cannerus_The_Unbearable**

How has there not been a mod warning in this thread for politeness? Be nice or I'll drag this whole she-bang mercilessly off-topic like a Family Guy cutaway.

That being said, I'm still seeing more "these people are stupid and lazy" and less "here's how to fix the blatantly broken thing." Opinion question: why does anyone need more than aforementioned 10 million per year, and does demanding that make said person a douche? Also of note is that people are defending the riches right to be rich, but again, nothing is making them create jobs. They have disproportionate social power if nothing else.

**dogma**

Phanatik wrote:
Your opinion matters so much to me.

One would assume that, as a man of high and discerning intellect, Phanatik would take into account the opinions presented by others.

Clearly, then, his statement cannot be predicated upon sarcasm of any kind.

**halonachos**

feeder wrote:
WarOne wrote:
halonachos wrote:Palladium is necessary to know as well.

It that the one that allows you to detect evil?

If we had enough Palladium we could manifest some Glitterboys and unleash some Boomgun retribution on those evilly evil Wall Streets like it's 1996!

Seriously though, I like the idea of a personal income cap. Ten million dollars per year sounds about right. It's still a ludicrous figure.

H2 and Pd, removes double bonds not attached to an oxygen molecule.

**Manchu**

This thread is about 75% flamebaiting and flaming.

First and last warning. We can disagree and the world will not end. If you want to discuss this, please keep in mind that it's just one thread on the internet and a lovely autumn (or spring for the Southern Hemispherites) stroll might be a better use of your time.

**whitedragon**

Phanatik wrote:
purplefood wrote:
Phanatik wrote:
purplefood wrote:Melissa: 2
Phanatic: 0

Your opinion matters so much to me. Thanks for chiming in.

And apparently, you are not very discerning.

Have a nice day though.

I am very discerning. I drink tea and everything.
Melissa never said CEOs were useless she said she was opposed to them being paid not in accordance to their performance like many other people are.

The "useless CEOs" thing was a red herring.
She believes that people's salaries should be capped based on what other people in the company make, but her own salary shouldn't.

Regards,

Man, you twist and bend those words any farther back and the internet is going to break.

**Crablezworth**

Cannerus_The_Unbearable wrote:Opinion question: why does anyone need more than aforementioned 10 million per year, and does demanding that make said person a douche? Also of note is that people are defending the riches right to be rich, but again, nothing is making them create jobs. They have disproportionate social power if nothing else.

The most money I've ever made for a days work (roughly 10 hours) was around $2400... from the perspective of pure causality I "earned" it but that doesn't make it "right" or even sane. That’s capitalism in a nutshell, causality posing as morality. Just because you can, doesn’t mean you should.

As much as I enjoy having money and being a good ole’ consumer it has always struck me as entirely absurd that I would have had to work 6 weeks at a minimum wage job to earn the same amount of money I made in one day.

**dogma**

**Monster Rain**

Gee whiz, dogma.

You jumped right on it, didn't you?

**dogma**

It was a good bandwagon.

**WarOne**

Do you think this thread has derailed sufficiently to close it now? Pretty sure the debate had ended about halfway through this page.

**Frazzled**

Manchu wrote:First and last warning. We can disagree and the world will not end.

See now, if it was Friday you wouldn't be saying that, now would you.

**Phanatik**

Gotta say it now, because tomorrow will be too la...

**Melissia**

A new look on the Occupy Whatever movement:

http://www.economist.com/blogs/democracyinamerica/2011/10/occupy-wall-street-3

OCCUPY WALL STREET is not only a mass protest movement intended to draw attention to economic injustice and political corruption. It seeks to embody and thereby to demonstrate the feasibility of certain ideals of participatory democracy. This is, to my mind, what makes OWS so interesting, and so unlike a tea-party protest. OWS is not simply a group of like-minded people gathered together to make a point with a show of collective force, though it is that. The difference is that it has developed into an ongoing micro-society with a micro-government that directly exemplifies a principled alternative to the prevailing American order. The complaint that OWS has failed to produce a coherent list of demands seems to me to miss much of the point of the encampment in Zuccotti Park. The demand is a society more like the little one OWS protestors have mocked up in the park. The mode of governance is the message.

And what is the message of the "General Assembly", the governing body of the original financial-district occupation? According its website:
New York City General Assemblies are an open, participatory and horizontally organized process through which we are building the capacity to constitute ourselves in public as autonomous collective forces within and against the constant crises of our times.
Got that? If this sounds a bit academic, that's because it is. Whether you're having trouble parsing this or not, this piece by Dan Berrett on the academic roots of OWS's governing ideology is incredibly helpful.

Mr Berrett focuses on the influence of David Graeber, "an ethnographer, anarchist, and reader in anthropology at the University of London's Goldsmiths campus." Mr Graeber was impressed by the people of Betafo, in Madagascar, who ruled themselves through a process of "consensus decision-making" demonstrating the left-anarchist ideal of "democracy without government". Mr Graeber applied what he learned in his ethnographic work in some of the left-wing anti-globalisation protests of the 1990s, and has now brought his experience to bear on Wall Street, laying the groundwork for OWS's experiment in participatory democracy. As Mr Berrett reports:
Soon after the magazine Adbusters published an appeal to set up a "peaceful barricade" on Wall Street, Mr. Graeber spent six weeks in New York helping to plan the demonstrations before an initial march by protesters on September 17, which culminated in the occupation.”

Spontaneous order can take a bit of planning. But it seems Mr Graeber's planning has born fruit:
“The defining aspect of Occupy Wall Street, its emphasis on direct action and leaderless, consensus-based decision-making, is most clearly embodied by its General Assembly, in which participants in the protest make group decisions both large and small, like adopting principles of solidarity and deciding how best to stay warm at night.
This intensive and egalitarian process is important both procedurally and substantively, Mr. Graeber says. "One of the things that revolutionaries have learned over the course of the 20th century is that the idea of the ends justifying the means is deeply problematic," he says. "You can't create a just society through violence, or freedom through a tight revolutionary cadre. You can't establish a big state and hope it will go away. The means and ends have to be the same."
When 2,000 people make a decision jointly, it is an example of direct action, or direct democracy, Mr. Graeber says. "It makes you feel different to go to a meeting where your opinions are really respected." Or, as an editorial in the protest's house publication, Occupied Wall Street Journal, put it, "This occupation is first about participation."
It is hard to deny the romance of this, and part of me would like to camp out in Zuccotti Park and pitch in. But I wouldn't expect it to last. Not only is is it hard to see how this worthwhile little experiment in leaderless, consensus-based decision-making is a realistic means to the end of a whole society governed by leaderless, consensus-based decision-making, it's hard see why this is a desirable end.

Because the participatory democracy of OWS is an ideological endeavour, it can avoid the hard problem of liberal society: the ineradicable diversity of moral belief and the impossibility of consensus. Consensus-based communes composed of individuals who opt in specifically because they already agree with the commune's founding values can work precisely because the people who would make consensus impossible—people with very different opinions and values—stay away. But not only does the OWS experiment skirt the problem of pluralism through self-selection, the ideological homogeneity of self-selection may make deliberation tend toward extremism, as Cass Sunstein's important work on deliberation and group polarisation shows. He writes: "When like-minded people are participating in 'iterated polarization games'—when they meet regularly, without sustained exposure to competing views—extreme movements are all the more likely."

Even given a climate of ideological similarity, this mode of communal egalitarian living doesn't tend to scale up well beyond a few hundred people, and requires intense and often invasive surveillance and monitoring to minimise free-riding, as well as heavy communal pressure to maintain the kind of conformity of belief necessary to maintain ongoing consensus. This is not, to my mind, a beautiful dream. Anyway, insofar as people are serious about it, egalitarian participatory democracy points in the direction of radical decentralisation and hyper-local control. The immense scope and diversity of the American territory and population, as well as the vast scale of the American state and the number and complexity of its activities, are fundamentally incompatible with the kind of society now being performed by the romantics in Zuccotti Park.

Moreover, direct deliberative democracy by its very nature puts effective power disproportionately in the hands of extroverted, energetic, and charismatic individuals with a knack for persuasion. The opinions of introverts and those of us who need a good deal of time to mull things over tend not to be fully included into the decision-making process. So these people (most of us, I think) must go along, their views systematically underrepresented until the rule of the pushy yammerers becomes too intolerable and they leave. Exit is more powerful than voice if voice is not your strong suit.

There is a great deal wrong with American governance, and not only within government. I think that the concentrated management and diffuse ownership of public corporations has left a relatively small numbers of corporate managers with insufficiently checked control over trillions of other people's property. And I think that the relatively unchecked power of government to make or break fortunes has made it more or less inevitable that corporations would in time end up writing their own regulations to their own advantage. Occupy Wall Street is a great boon to the extent that it helps draw attention and build effective opposition to the unjust mechanisms of upward redistribution and to the many flaws in our political economy responsible for the disproportionate influence of the wealthy and powerful over the rules that profoundly affect us all. However, insofar as OWS is meant to persuade Americans to adopt a wholly different and better way to live with one another, it is bound to fail. Even if consensus-based, leaderless participatory democracy could work on a grand scale, Americans aren't interested. And face it: sooner or later, Brookfield Properties is going to get it's park back. So for those deeply committed to realising a lasting community governed by the ideals of OWS, let me recommend a seastead.

Fairly sure I don't like this idea.

**WarOne**

.Anyway, insofar as people are serious about it, egalitarian participatory democracy points in the direction of radical decentralisation and hyper-local control. The immense scope and diversity of the American territory and population, as well as the vast scale of the American state and the number and complexity of its activities, are fundamentally incompatible with the kind of society now being performed by the romantics in Zuccotti Park.

This here is what I think is the most interesting bit, aside from the idea of decentralizing the control of money from the rich and powerful.

Point one- this is the extreme version of what Republicans want; taking power away from the Federal government and investing it in smaller units of power (the states and counties). Republican pundits are confused/saddened/scoffing at the protesters. I wonder what a Republican would say if you told them the Occupy Wall Street group is practicing a decentralized form of government akin to what Republicans are asking our Federal government to do.

There is a great deal wrong with American governance, and not only within government. I think that the concentrated management and diffuse ownership of public corporations has left a relatively small numbers of corporate managers with insufficiently checked control over trillions of other people's property. And I think that the relatively unchecked power of government to make or break fortunes has made it more or less inevitable that corporations would in time end up writing their own regulations to their own advantage. Occupy Wall Street is a great boon to the extent that it helps draw attention and build effective opposition to the unjust mechanisms of upward redistribution and to the many flaws in our political economy responsible for the disproportionate influence of the wealthy and powerful over the rules that profoundly affect us all.

The last part about spreading out the responsibility in handling America's money, we'd need to change the fundamental education of lots of Americans to make that happen. We have market managers and rich people for a reason; they know how to handle/accumulate money. Putting monetary policy in the hands of the less experienced would probably see no difference in the way money trickles up to those in power, or at worst causes the money to be lost or spent irresponsibly.

**murdog**

I wouldn't worry Mel. To me that is a cleverly-worded scare article. He praises the movement to open the piece. Indeed half the article is supportive of OWS. But in the second-last paragraph, his opinion of the the protesters as 'pushy yammerers' slips out. If you go back over the rest of the article, you see that he has chosen to focus on one prominent organizer, with a dirty word like 'anarchist' attached to his resume (much like how corporate media will show only one incoherent protester, instead of the multitude down there who are speaking eloquently). As if Grabner is running the show! As if anyone in there is under the illusion you could run a superpower military with a nuclear arsenal by consensus! Because Grabner has certain views, that means that that is where we are going to end up? What are the opinions, views and backgrounds of dozens of other organizers?

But this article is even more clever. Where is it that he thinks this movement would take us? He manages to use some of the worst of the current system, namely 'invasive surveillance to minimise free-riding' as a brush with which to paint this movement. The national-security state provides for invasive surveillance already, and isn't free-riding sorta what this is all about? He's talking about communal living and ideological similarity, as if this movement doesn't already cut across all kind of lines and divisions. WarOne already pointed to that. As if the people in the encampment really want to be camping there! Like they all want to live in hippie communes!

Another dose of praise and support in the closing paragraph, twisted in with a threat, some mocking, and a prediction of failure (which is standard stuff). Seems to me like a tragic ironic point of view. He's trying to get you to agree with him at the start so that you agree with him at the end.

To me, this article exudes fear. The movement is only beginning to gather strength and hasn't even begun to effect concrete changes!

**Phanatik**

murdog wrote:The movement is only beginning to gather strength and hasn't even begun to effect concrete changes!

The only changes this movement can affect is to the concrete on Wall Street.

http://www.humanevents.com/article.php?id=46981

Best,

**biccat**

Phanatik wrote:The only changes this movement can affect is to the concrete on Wall Street.

http://www.humanevents.com/article.php?id=46981

Hehehe.

In related news, the "Occupy Baltimore" group also wants to keep police out of their area.

The pamphlet says that members of the protest group who believe they are victims or who suspect sexual abuse "are encouraged to immediately report the incident to the Security Committee," which will investigate and "supply the abuser with counseling resources."
...
The directive also says, in part, "Though we do not encourage the involvement of the police in our community, the survivor has every right, and the support of Occupy Baltimore, to report the abuse to the appropriate authorities."

Dang cops, you stay out of our protest! If someone gets raped, we'll provide appropriate counseling.

One wonders what Former Sen.* Biden has to say about this.

* Senator is a more impressive position than VP. I'm not disrespecting Mr. Biden, I'm disrespecting the office of VP. It's a very important and utterly powerless post.

**daedalus**

Phanatik wrote:
http://www.humanevents.com/article.php?id=46981

Eew. Link may contain Ann Coulter.

You could have at least offered a warning.

**Phanatik**

daedalus wrote:
Phanatik wrote:
http://www.humanevents.com/article.php?id=46981

Eew. Link may contain Ann Coulter.

You could have at least offered a warning.

Sorry about that.
I considered including a warning, but with Halloween coming up I thought everyone would like an early fright.

I like her books though.

Best,

**Crablezworth**

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V8WQM-KVFwE

**murdog**

Thanks for the link Phanatik. Not very compelling, however. More of the same 'ol same 'ol. Instead of communism, she manages to throw Hitler and the Holocaust in there! She manages a whole article where her only real critique of the movement is that they didn't stop their march at a certain billionaires house, which has her concluding that that billionaire is helping OWS. No sources or references. The rest of the article is filled with raging against Democrats, whom the movement has not particularly endorsed (in fact alot of this has to do with the sobering realization that Obama is more same 'ol same 'ol). Mockery, belittlement, and insults; "brain-dead zombies... playing bocce ball and getting stoned" is how she characterizes the "pea brained" protesters. She save the most blatant misrepresetations until the end:

"they have no interest in actual malfeasance by actual Wall Street bankers. They're too busy denouncing Fox News... [some] think stuff should be free and America is the moral equivalent of al-Qaida". Where is she getting this stuff? She says you must choose between "Wall Street looters and protesters defecating in the street, throwing rocks at police and chanting 'F—k the USA,'". Why are you believing it?

It's the same format as the last one: get you to agree at the start (who can argue against a list of Democratic incompetence?) so that you agree with her at the end (where she presents you with a non-choice).

Thanks again.