Occupy "World" Protests- Decrying Everything "Evil"

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**porkchop806**

At first I was kind interested in what this was about. Till at least for the US, the American Nazi party and the American communist party fully endorsed the movement kinda turned me off. and the whole Rich people need all there money striped from them I don't know about you but I'm fine with the one percent doing there thing (i mean a poor person never cut me a pay check in my life) I just think that things can be done to improve the accessibility of skill training for all people. To raise there standard of life and not hand outs from the government, something tangible that they know with pride they betterd themselves with there own hands.

**Melissia**

porkchop806 wrote:At first I was kind interested in what this was about. Till at least for the US, the American Nazi party and the American communist party fully endorsed the movement kinda turned me off

Why should it matter what douchey nonsensical fringe groups think about the movement?

Certainly it didn't matter what douchey nonsensical fringe groups (And they were legion) liked-- and still like-- the Tea Party movement.

Of course, we may be looking at the wrong problem. Perhaps it's a result of technology, or at least a sizable part because of it, that is causing the joblessness and the concentration of wealth?

http://www.economist.com/blogs/babbage/2011/11/artificial-intelligence

Difference Engine: Luddite legacy
Nov 4th 2011, 16:10 by N.V. | LOS ANGELES

AN APOCRYPHAL tale is told about Henry Ford II showing Walter Reuther, the veteran leader of the United Automobile Workers, around a newly automated car plant. “Walter, how are you going to get those robots to pay your union dues,” gibed the boss of Ford Motor Company. Without skipping a beat, Reuther replied, “Henry, how are you going to get them to buy your cars?”

Whether the exchange was true or not is irrelevant. The point was that any increase in productivity required a corresponding increase in the number of consumers capable of buying the product. The original Henry Ford, committed to raising productivity and lowering prices remorselessly, appreciated this profoundly—and insisted on paying his workers twice the going rate, so they could afford to buy his cars.

For the company, there was an added bonus. By offering an unprecedented $5 a day in 1914, he caused the best tool-makers and machinists in America to flock to Ford. The know-how they brought boosted production efficiency still further and made Ford cars ever more affordable. With its ingenious Model T, Ford became the first car company in the world to bring motoring to the masses.

Economists see this as a classic example of how advancing technology, in the form of automation and innovation, increases productivity. This, in turn, causes prices to fall, demand to rise, more workers to be hired, and the economy to grow. Such thinking has been one of the tenets of economics since the early 1800s, when hosiery and lace-makers in Nottingham—inspired by Ned Ludd, a legendary hero of the English proletariat—smashed the mechanical knitting looms being introduced at the time for fear of losing their jobs.

Some did lose their jobs, of course. But if the Luddite Fallacy (as it has become known in development economics) were true, we would all be out of work by now—as a result of the compounding effects of productivity. While technological progress may cause workers with out-dated skills to become redundant, the past two centuries have shown that the idea that increasing productivity leads axiomatically to widespread unemployment is nonsense.

But here is the question: if the pace of technological progress is accelerating faster than ever, as all the evidence indicates it is, why has unemployment remained so stubbornly high—despite the rebound in business profits to record levels? Two-and-a-half years after the Great Recession officially ended, unemployment has remained above 9% in America. That is only one percentage point better than the country’s joblessness three years ago at the depths of the recession.

The modest 80,000 jobs added to the economy in October were not enough to keep up with population growth, let alone re-employ any of the 12.3m Americans made redundant between 2007 and 2009. Even if job creation were miraculously to nearly triple to the monthly average of 208,000 that is was in 2005, it would still take a dozen years to close the yawning employment gap caused by the recent recession, says Laura D’Andrea Tyson, an economist at University of California, Berkeley, who was chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers during the Clinton administration.

The conventional explanation for America's current plight is that, at an annualised 2.5% for the most recent quarter (compared with an historical average of 3.3%), the economy is simply not expanding fast enough to put all the people who lost their jobs back to work. Consumer demand, say economists like Dr Tyson, is evidently not there for companies to start hiring again. Clearly, too many chastened Americans are continuing to pay off their debts and save for rainy days, rather than splurging on things they may fancy but can easily manage without.

There is a good deal of truth in that. But it misses a crucial change that economists are loth to accept, though technologists have been concerned about it for several years. This is the disturbing thought that, sluggish business cycles aside, America's current employment woes stem from a precipitous and permanent change caused by not too little technological progress, but too much. The evidence is irrefutable that computerised automation, networks and artificial intelligence (AI)—including machine-learning, language-translation, and speech- and pattern-recognition software—are beginning to render many jobs simply obsolete.

This is unlike the job destruction and creation that has taken place continuously since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, as machines gradually replaced the muscle-power of human labourers and horses. Today, automation is having an impact not just on routine work, but on cognitive and even creative tasks as well. A tipping point seems to have been reached, at which AI-based automation threatens to supplant the brain-power of large swathes of middle-income employees.

That makes a huge, disruptive difference. Not only is AI software much cheaper than mechanical automation to install and operate, there is a far greater incentive to adopt it—given the significantly higher cost of knowledge workers compared with their blue-collar brothers and sisters in the workshop, on the production line, at the check-out and in the field.

In many ways, the white-collar employees who man the cubicles of business today share the plight of agricultural workers a century ago. In 1900, nearly half of the adult population worked on the land. Thanks to tractors, combine harvesters, crop-picking machines and other forms of mechanisation, agriculture now accounts for little more than 2% of the working population.

Displaced agricultural workers then, though, could migrate from fields to factories and earn higher wages in the process. What is in store for the Dilberts of today? Media theorist Douglas Rushkoff (“Program or Be Programmed” and “Life Inc”) would argue "nothing in particular." Put bluntly, few new white-collar jobs, as people know them, are going to be created to replace those now being lost—despite the hopes many place in technology, innovation and better education.

The argument against the Luddite Fallacy rests on two assumptions: one is that machines are tools used by workers to increase their productivity; the other is that the majority of workers are capable of becoming machine operators. What happens when these assumptions cease to apply—when machines are smart enough to become workers? In other words, when capital becomes labour. At that point, the Luddite Fallacy looks rather less fallacious.

This is what Jeremy Rifkin, a social critic, was driving at in his book, “The End of Work”, published in 1995. Though not the first to do so, Mr Rifkin argued prophetically that society was entering a new phase—one in which fewer and fewer workers would be needed to produce all the goods and services consumed. “In the years ahead,” he wrote, “more sophisticated software technologies are going to bring civilisation ever closer to a near-workerless world.”

The process has clearly begun. And it is not just white-collar knowledge workers and middle managers who are being automated out of existence. As data-analytics, business-intelligence and decision-making software do a better and cheaper job, even professionals are not immune to the job-destruction trend now underway. Pattern-recognition technologies are making numerous highly paid skills redundant.

Radiologists, who can earn over $300,000 a year in America, after 13 years of college education and internship, are among the first to feel the heat. It is not just that the task of scanning tumour slides and X-ray pictures is being outsourced to Indian laboratories, where the job is done for a tenth of the cost. The real threat is that the latest automated pattern-recognition software can do much of the work for less than a hundredth of it.

Lawyers are in a similar boat now that smart algorithms can search case law, evaluate the issues at hand and summarise the results. Machines have already shown they can perform legal discovery for a fraction of the cost of human professionals—and do so with far greater thoroughness than lawyers and paralegals usually manage.

In 2009, Martin Ford, a software entrepreneur from Silicon Valley, noted in “The Lights in the Tunnel” that new occupations created by technology—web coders, mobile-phone salesmen, wind-turbine technicians and so on—represent a tiny fraction of employment. And while it is true that technology creates jobs, history shows that it can vaporise them pretty quickly, too. “The IT jobs that are now being off-shored and automated are brand new jobs that were largely created in the tech boom of the 1990s,” says Mr Ford.

In his analysis, Mr Ford noted how technology and innovation improve productivity exponentially, while human consumption increases in a more linear fashion. In his view, Luddism was, indeed, a fallacy when productivity improvements were still on the relatively flat, or slowly rising, part of the exponential curve. But after two centuries of technological improvements, productivity has "turned the corner" and is now moving rapidly up the more vertical part of the exponential curve. One implication is that productivity gains are now outstripping consumption by a large margin.

Another implication is that technology is no longer creating new jobs at a rate that replaces old ones made obsolete elsewhere in the economy. All told, Mr Ford has identified over 50m jobs in America—nearly 40% of all employment—which, to a greater or lesser extent, could be performed by a piece of software running on a computer. Within a decade, many of them are likely to vanish. “The bar which technology needs to hurdle in order to displace many of us in the workplace,” the author notes, “is much lower than we really imagine.”

In their recent book, “Race Against the Machine”, Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology agree with Mr Ford's analysis—namely, that the jobs lost since the Great Recession are unlikely to return. They agree, too, that the brunt of the shake-out will be borne by middle-income knowledge workers, including those in the retail, legal and information industries. But the authors' perspective is from an ivory tower rather than from the hands-on world of creating start-ups in Silicon Valley. Their proposals for reform, while spot on in principle, expect rather a lot from the political system and other vested interests.

Unlike Mr Ford, Dr Brynjolfsson and Dr McAfee are more sanguine about the impact smart technology is having on the job market. As they see it, those threatened the most by technology should learn to work with machines, rather than against them. Do that, they suggest, and the shake-out among knowledge workers becomes less of a threat and more of an opportunity.

As an example, they point to the way Amazon and eBay have spurred over 600,000 people to earn their livings by dreaming up products for a world-wide customer base. Likewise, Apple’s App Store and Google’s Android Marketplace have made it easy for those with ideas for doing things with phones to distribute their products globally. Such activities may not create a new wave of billion-dollar businesses, but they can put food on the table for many a family and pay the rent, and perhaps even the college fees.

In the end, the Luddites may still be wrong. But the nature of what constitutes work today—the notion of a full-time job—will have to change dramatically. The things that make people human—the ability to imagine, feel, learn, create, adapt, improvise, have intuition, act spontaneously—are the comparative advantages they have over machines. They are also the skills that machines, no matter how smart, have had the greatest difficulty replicating.

Marina Gorbis of the Institute for the Future, an independent think-tank in Palo Alto, California, believes that, while machines will replace people in any number of tasks, “they will amplify us, enabling us to do things we never dreamed of doing before.” If that new “human-machine partnership” gives people the dignity of work, as well as some means for financial reward, all the better. But for sure, the world is going to be a different place.

**porkchop806**

You have a point Melissia I'll have to give it a deeper look I try to see everything equal as I can. Like with the tea party things i don't like but things i love as with anything,before making a full conclusion I need more research.
Because its the open mind that's the fullest in the end right?

**Phanatik**

Melissia wrote:
porkchop806 wrote:At first I was kind interested in what this was about. Till at least for the US, the American Nazi party and the American communist party fully endorsed the movement kinda turned me off
Why should it matter what douchey nonsensical fringe groups think about the movement?

Certainly it didn't matter what douchey nonsensical fringe groups (And they were legion) liked-- and still like-- the Tea Party movement.

ex·trap·o·late /ɪkˈstræpəˌleɪt/ Show Spelled [ik-strap-uh-leyt] Show IPA verb,-lat·ed,-lat·ing.verb (used with object) 1. to infer(an unknown) from something that is known; conjecture.
http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/extrapolate

I think it's safe to say that communists and socialists are not going to support the Tea Party, for a reason.
If they do support someone, it's for a reason.

Anyone capable of putting their trousers on for themselves should be able to figure out what those reasons are.

Regards,

**porkchop806**

All valid Points. and that's what I wanna know is the reasons behind why they endorse what they do. And I can think of a few reasons but the if there correct its futile. America has never been a socialist or communist nation and it never will be, personal freedom is too deeply engrained into our culture

**Melissia**

Phanatik's points aren't valid. He's just trolling and doing everything he can to call anyone who disagrees with him a communist. He's done this time and time again, it's best to just ignore him.

That fringe groups support an activity doesn't mean anything. They're fringe groups-- by definition, not representative of the majority, not even a sizable minority. They're not even like the Islamist organizations in the Arab Spring movement, at least those had more public support, and they tried to remake themselves into a more progressive movement than they were in the past.

Saying "nazis support it so it's bad" is just a step away from Godwin's Law.

**sebster**

biccat wrote:Well, your first sentence is simply incorrect. The United States has operated under 20% of GDP (see table 1 about halfway down the page, particularly 2000 and 2001), and somehow remains a developed country.

Okay, I'll modify my statement to 'near or over 20% of GDP'. Thanks for bringing some information to the table, see how the conversation can move forward when you do.

Second, I note that you've excluded health and welfare spending from your list of 'essentials.' I think we could agree that Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid are not 'essential' government programs.

Please read the thread. I've already stated this; "You could indeed cut the social portions right out of the budget, both welfare and medicaid, and you'd slash government spending by 45%, and reduce government to just 13% of the total economy"

It's cutting all that that gets you back to the round about position of 10% I already stated.

Looking at the above link, we see that defense, non-defense discretionary, and the all-important 'other' category only make up 8.5% of GDP.

And if government spending was just 8.5% of the economy, or a lowly, lowly, $1.2 trillion dollars, it'd certainly be immune to corruption because no-one would ever bother trying to manipulate that.

But again, you're addressing an argument that I didn't make.

You said this;
"The right, on the other hand, wants less regulation, less government involvement and wants the governmenet to stop creating the incentives by which corporations spend money on politicians. Personally, I like the right-wing idea of reducing the power of government because it reduces the incentives that corporations have in spending money and they will willingly stop."

I have tried to point out to you that you could government in half and you'd still have incentive to manipulate the process. You responded with this;
"Actually, it could be avoided in a modern economy. Because government does not have to be a significant economic actor."

You now seem to have accepted that in theory government could be slashed back to 10% of GDP, which is very obviously a significant economic actor. At which point it becomes obvious that cutting the size of government alone will not remove the incentive to corrupt the political process.

The only sensible conclusion is to accept while reducing the scope of government might have, it cannot be considered a solution to the problem. Offering it only functions as a dodge by people who don't want to seriously consider meaningful reform to government to prevent moneyed interests from holding undue levels of interest.

No, you're missing the point. I'm saying that government shouldn't be making such decisions in the first place.

If you reduce the incentive to do X then you reduce the propensity of people to do X.

And if you reduce it to $1 trillion a year, it's still a very big incentive. It remains the kind of incentive that you just can't ignore, leaving you with only final conclusion - you need regulations to control how much money can be put into government.

The rest of your post is full of conjecture, but if you really want to engage in pedantry I'll be happy to respond to the rest of it.

No, it wasn't. It's a shame you decided it was too hard to answer the questions I was asking. I am genuinely curious to found out if you genuinely believe the answer to consumer protection really is 'buyer beware' or if there is a place out there for government safety regulations for products released to the public market. I am genuinely curious as to how you think this smaller government would land on issues like abortion, and gun control.

Automatically Appended Next Post:

biccat wrote:I have already provided examples in this thread, for example aircraft regulation, which results in Sebster thinking I want people on airplanes to die.

No, I merely think you have ludicrously fanciful ideas about the motivations and governance skills of the whole of the private sector.

Arguing against regulation doesn't work with people who believe in the infallability of government regulation.

I don't believe government regulation is infallible. You almost certainly know this, and are just trying to mischaracterise me in order to feel better about your own position. But just in case you are actually attempting honest debate and that just an inexplicable misreading of my position...

I don't believe government is perfect, and I certainly don't believe it is the solution to all our problems. But to take that position, and conclude as you seem to have, that the private sector alone will solve all our problems, is utterly ridiculous. There are considerable problems with both, and as such, the only sensible solution is to measure the strengths of one against the other. For instance, we shouldn't pretend we can regulate our way to complete consumer safety, but nor should we just pull back and pretend that the corporate sector alone will provide an anedquate level of protection, purely to avoid losing market share.

Automatically Appended Next Post:

biccat wrote:Even if you pass a constitutional amendment banning spending money in politics, there will be a lot of money spent to repeal the amendment. If you pass a law prohibiting corporations from influencing elections, then you'll get individuals to lobby to repeal that law.

Except that such situations exist in democracies around the world. It seriously isn't that hard to look around and see what works in the rest of the world.

Or they're ideologically driven to regulate some issue.

Like the FBI being expanded to prevent kidnapping across state lines, and bank robbers moving across state lines to evade pursuit. Damn those meddling politicians.

Automatically Appended Next Post:

Phanatik wrote:Whereas you are the definition of objective thought?

I'm not. The crap you're peddling stands as self-evident.

Your statements reek of a bloated opinion of your own self-righteous beliefs and the delusion that only you and the people you parrot are right. Anyone else is "ugly?"

No, not anyone else. Just you. For accusing a man of aiding the Nazis, because as a 14 year old boy he hid from those Nazis, and in doing so had to go along with his uncle collecting property from other Nazis.

I have to substantiate that someone else is of a certain value? Is that your point? That's all you got?

Like anyone attempting any kind of market analysis, to establish a market is operating effectively you have to establish that the price paid for a good is roughly equal to it's value. In response to Melissia's point in the early stages of this thread, you asked her if CEO's had no value. I replied that of course they have value, but it's very hard to reconcile that value with the sudden increase in CEO salaries in the last two decades. We are left with one of three possible conclusions - CEO's have become ten times more skilled in the last ten years (the market has responded quickly to account for the vast array of skills CEOs now have compared to their predecessors), they are now overpaid (there is some market failure leading to overpayment), or they were previously underpaid (a market failure existed but has now been corrected).

There is no writing out there arguing CEOs have suddenly and dramatically increased in skill since 1991. There is a great deal of writing . And I have read a couple of pieces that CEOs were undervalue, due to squeemishness over paying so much. A combination of points 2 and 3 seem most likely, leading to a need to acknowledge the market for valuing CEOs is not perfect.

Other answers are likely possible. I suspect you won't give one. Either you won't post again in this thread, or you'll quote one small piece of my answer and halfass a response to that. I suspect this is because fundamentally, you're a lazy person, who can't be bothered to actually think about the world, and find it much easier to cheer on one side of politics, and boo the other.

Automatically Appended Next Post:

Phanatik wrote:The fundamental problem is that some people think that it's possible to legislate/regulate equality of outcomes in a randomized world.

The world isn't random. No-one is arguing for equality of outcomes.

As such, your post was contentless. Do better.

Automatically Appended Next Post:

Phanatik wrote:If they do support someone, it's for a reason.

Anyone capable of putting their trousers on for themselves should be able to figure out what those reasons are.

Because they're all part of the evil football team, embracing evil in all it's forms, and entirely opposed to the good football team, that you happen to cheer for?

**BrassScorpion**

Call of Duty: Veterans Join the 99 Percent

http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/call_of_duty_veterans_join_the_99_percent_20111102/
http://www.democracynow.org/blog/2011/11/2/call_of_duty_veterans_join_the_99_percent

Posted on Nov 2, 2011

(photo: Iraq War veteran Scott Olsen, 24, lies bleeding in Oakland, Calif., after being struck by a projectile apparently fired by police.)

By Amy Goodman

11-11-11 is not a variant of Herman Cain’s much-touted 9-9-9 tax plan, but rather the date of this year’s Veterans Day. This is especially relevant, as the U.S. has now entered its second decade of war in Afghanistan, the longest war in the nation’s history. U.S. veterans of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars are appearing more and more on the front lines—the front lines of the Occupy Wall Street protests, that is.

Video from the Occupy Oakland march on Tuesday, Oct. 25, looks and sounds like a war zone. The sound of gunfire is nearly constant in the video. Tear-gas projectiles were being fired into the crowd when the cry of “Medic!” rang out. Civilians raced toward a fallen protester lying on his back on the pavement, mere steps from a throng of black-clad police in full riot gear, pointing guns as the civilians attempted to administer first aid.

The fallen protester was Scott Olsen, a 24-year-old former U.S. Marine who had served two tours of duty in Iraq. The publicly available video shows Olsen standing calmly alongside a Navy veteran holding an upraised Veterans for Peace flag. Olsen was wearing a desert camouflage jacket and sun hat, and his Iraq Veterans Against the War (IVAW) T-shirt. He was hit in the head by a police projectile, most likely a tear-gas canister, suffering a fractured skull. As the small group of people gathered around him to help, a police officer lobbed a flashbang grenade directly into the huddle, and it exploded.

Four or five people lifted Olsen and raced with him away from the police line. At the hospital, he was put into an induced coma to relieve brain swelling. He is now conscious but unable to speak. He communicates using a notepad.

I interviewed one of Olsen’s friends, Aaron Hinde, also an Iraq War veteran. He was at Occupy San Francisco when he started getting a series of frenzied tweets about a vet down in Oakland. Hinde raced to the hospital to see his friend. He later told me a little about him: “Scott came to San Francisco about three months ago from Wisconsin, where he actually participated in the holding of the State Capitol over there. Scott’s probably one of the warmest, kindest guys I know. He’s just one of those people who always has a smile on his face and never has anything negative to say. ... And he believed in the Occupy movement, because it’s very obvious what’s happening in this country, especially to us veterans. We’ve had our eyes opened by serving and going to war overseas. So, there’s a small contingency of us out here, and we’re all very motivated and dedicated.”

Advertisement
As I was covering one of the Occupy Wall Street rallies in Times Square on Oct. 15, I saw Sgt. Shamar Thomas become deeply upset. Police on horseback had moved in on protesters, only to be stopped by a horse that went down on its knees. Other officers had picked up metal barricades, squeezing the frightened crowd against steam pipes. Sgt. Thomas was wearing his desert camouflage, his chest covered with medals from his combat tour in Iraq. He shouted at the police, denouncing their violent treatment of the protesters. Thomas later wrote of the incident: “There is an obvious problem in the country and PEACEFUL PEOPLE should be allowed to PROTEST without Brutality. I was involved in a RIOT in Rutbah, Iraq 2004 and we did NOT treat the Iraqi citizens like they are treating the unarmed civilians in our OWN Country.”

A group calling itself Veterans of the 99 Percent has formed and, with the New York City Chapter of IVAW, set Wednesday as the day to march to Liberty Plaza to formally join and support the movement. Their announcement read: “ ‘Veterans of the 99 Percent’ hope to draw attention to the ways veterans have been impacted by the economic and social issues raised by Occupy Wall Street. They hope to help make veterans’ and service members’ participation in this movement more visible and deliberate.”

When I stopped by Occupy Louisville in Kentucky last weekend, the first two people I met there were veterans. One of them, Gary James Johnson, told me: “I served in Iraq for about a year and a half. I joined the military because I thought it was my obligation to help protect this country. ... And right here, right now, this is another way I can help.”

Pundits predict the cold weather will crush the Occupy movement. Ask any veteran of Afghanistan and Iraq about surviving outdoors in extreme weather. And consider the sign at Liberty Plaza, held by yet another veteran: “2nd time I’ve fought for my country. 1st time I’ve known my enemy.”

Denis Moynihan contributed research to this column.

Amy Goodman is the host of “Democracy Now!,” a daily international TV/radio news hour airing on more than 900 stations in North America. She is the author of “Breaking the Sound Barrier,” recently released in paperback and now a New York Times best-seller.

© 2011 Amy Goodman

**halonachos**

Personnel, including reserve forces, are prohibited from wearing military uniforms at political campaign or election events. Attendance at rallies, meetings and conventions as a spectator and not in uniform is allowed.

When acting in their official capacity, service members may not engage in activities that associate the Navy with any partisan political campaign or election, candidate, cause, or issue.

Military members should not answer politically-charged questions from media except to say "To answer the question would violate DoD's policy to avoid associating the service with a particular political cause."

If I see a guy in uniform protesting then he's not following the DoD's official guide to how their personnel should represent themselves and the Service as a whole, if they can't follow that simple rule then they shouldn't be in the Service.

**Ahtman**

halonachos wrote:If I see a guy in uniform protesting then he's not following the DoD's official guide to how their personnel should represent themselves and the Service as a whole, if they can't follow that simple rule then they shouldn't be in the Service.

Indeed, wouldn't want to embarrass the DoD. They should deny that they ever even were in the service if they are going to protest, especially if it in some way relates to the trouble servicemen and women are dealing with. I'm sure the DoD will handle this in their own way. No need to shine a light on them. How rude.

**Da Boss**

@halonachos: He wasn't in uniform, he was wearing a camo jacket. And he's not in service, he's a veteran- a former marine.
Did you read the piece or just the headline?

**halonachos**

Protest, but uniform is sacred
STARS AND STRIPES
Letters to the Editor, November 4, 2011
This is not in regard to any particular story but just in general. Ever since the Occupy Wall Street protests started, I’ve read a lot of stories and seen photos of individuals who are reported to be veterans attending these protests in the uniform of their former service. The most irritating thing to me is these people who say they are veterans show up wearing their uniforms grossly out of regulation. The photograph on Stars and Stripes’ Nov. 4 front page for its Mideast and Europe editions shows a former sailor in his uniform — wearing earrings. To me, I feel that is completely disrespectful to the uniform.

I’m not sure about the uniform regulations of other services but the Army clearly outlines when retired servicemembers, separated servicemembers, and even civilians can wear Army uniforms. This is under Chapter 30 of AR 670-1. Paragraph 1-10 in AR 670-1 also clearly outlines when wear of the Army uniform is “required or prohibited.”

There is no question about when, where and how anyone is allowed to wear the Army uniform — and it is likely the same for other services.

However, for Army veterans who were honorably discharged, they can only wear the Army uniform to ceremonial occasions, parades on national or state holidays, or other patriotic parades in which any U.S. military unit is part of. “Wear of the Army uniform at any other time, for any reason other than the purpose stated above, is prohibited.”

Bottom line, if you are a veteran taking part in any protests, that is your constitutional right; however, if you want to wear your uniform I suggest you take a gander at your service’s uniform regulation. Just because you are no longer in does not mean you can discredit your former service or uniform.

Staff Sgt. Kelly Calder
Fort Meade, Md.

**Da Boss**

Still confused as to how a camo jacket counts as uniform.

**Ahtman**

Weak defense. 10 points from Slitherine.

**halonachos**

Firstly the man was in uniform. If you watch the videos you see him in a camo jacket, but not any camo jacket. Its his uniform with his last name "Olsen" on it. In fact in the picture in one of the previous posts you can see the "OL" from his name on the left hand side.

Secondly it appears he may be alright for wearing the uniform because many reports are saying that he was dishonorably discharged for cocaine/crack use. Whether its true or not I don't know but it seems to be the consensus.

Also the guy standing next to him is also clearly in Navy uniform which is against regulations.

Thirdly they disobeyed an order from law enforcement to clear the area. They disobeyed it and law enforcement reacted as they should. Just because you are in the military does not mean you are above the law, especially if you were kicked out with a dishonorable discharge.

**biccat**

Well, since the MODs apparently don't care about the personal insults and attacks going on in this thread, I'm going to bow out.

But I did find this comment particularly hilarious:

sebster wrote:Because they're all part of the evil football team, embracing evil in all it's forms, and entirely opposed to the good football team, that you happen to cheer for?

It's amazing that you can recognize this in others but apparently not in yourself.

**Phanatik**

sebster wrote:The world isn't random. No-one is arguing for equality of outcomes.

By random I meant chaotic.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chaos_theory#Distinguishing_random_from_chaotic_data

And yes, the liberal/progressive agenda is all about equality of outcomes. You apparently don't know what you support.

Do better.

**Melissia**

Phanatik wrote:And yes, the liberal/progressive agenda is all about equality of outcomes.

No it isn't.

It's about equality of opportunity; that those whom are dedicated, skilled, and/or talented will rise up to match their skill and talent-- if all other things are equal.

**sebster**

biccat wrote:Well, since the MODs apparently don't care about the personal insults and attacks going on in this thread, I'm going to bow out.

It's disappointing that you drop out of another argument claiming that I'm being mean, just when we'd managed to get past your stalling and finally got the argument moving forward.

But I did find this comment particularly hilarious:

sebster wrote:Because they're all part of the evil football team, embracing evil in all it's forms, and entirely opposed to the good football team, that you happen to cheer for?

It's amazing that you can recognize this in others but apparently not in yourself.

You really need to pay more attention to my political arguments if you're going to try and comment on them.

I am not a liberal. That I see massive problems in the current Republican party, caused by unhealthy developments in the greater conservative movement, does not mean I am part of the other side.

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Phanatik wrote:
sebster wrote:The world isn't random. No-one is arguing for equality of outcomes.

By random I meant chaotic.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chaos_theory#Distinguishing_random_from_chaotic_data

And yes, the liberal/progressive agenda is all about equality of outcomes. You apparently don't know what you support.

You apparently think I'm a liberal. Likely because I'm not on your team, so you just assume I must be hardline committed to the other team.

Meanwhile, you're making a chronic mistake in thinking the greater liberal movement is clearly defined in its politics, so that someone could declare that it seeks equality of outcomes. It just makes no fething sense to describe an anti-war activist, or an anti-gun activist, or a pro-choice activist, or a feminist, or a guy who just thinks the minimum wage should be a bit higher as beholden to a more extreme version of collectivism than that which Marx argued for. It would only sense if you honestly believed that all those people were part of a great hive mind, all endlessly seeking the same set of goals.

**dogma**

halonachos wrote:
Secondly it appears he may be alright for wearing the uniform because many reports are saying that he was dishonorably discharged for cocaine/crack use. Whether its true or not I don't know but it seems to be the consensus.

Regardless, every report I've seen has called him a veteran, which means he can basically do whatever he wants with is uniform.

halonachos wrote:
Thirdly they disobeyed an order from law enforcement to clear the area. They disobeyed it and law enforcement reacted as they should. Just because you are in the military does not mean you are above the law, especially if you were kicked out with a dishonorable discharge.

The dishonorable is completely irrelevant. If you're going to hide behind a defense of "They broke the law." then there is no qualifier of "especially".

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sebster wrote: It would only sense if you honestly believed that all those people were part of a great hive mind, all endlessly seeking the same set of goals.

Tragically, this seems to be about par for the course for the people on this board who have chosen their sides.

**sebster**

dogma wrote:Tragically, this seems to be about par for the course for the people on this board who have chosen their sides.

With guys like phanatik it becomes clear that politics don't even matter, what matter is us vs them, and scoring points for your side. It might as well Mets vs Yankees, or Catholics vs Protestants.

**BrassScorpion**

Saw these terrific protest signs tonight:

https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=10150381296873221&set=a.10150376164728221.370783.86586603220&type=1&theater

**Melissia**

And what's wrong with objecting to the many rights (often without the legal responsibilities) of corporations?

Our founding fathers objected to them to be sure, isn't that something that both left and right wingers care about?

**halonachos**

Oh silly protestors.

Oh and I hate these guys here.

If you note he said that his parents made the money, yet he's so pompous and set in that he decided that he wants his parents to pay more because he's never had to work for a living nor made it in the world on his own. These people sicken me because they want to give away money they did not make and I hope their parents make them part of the "99%" by removing all of their support.

And last but not least some people need to stop complaining and realize how relatively good they have it.

**Ahtman**

If you note he said that his parents made the money

Actually it says 'family', not parents. That could include his grandparents, siblings, and of course, himself.

**dogma**

halonachos wrote:
And last but not least some people need to stop complaining and realize how relatively good they have it.

Is that an inclusive statement?

**sebster**

Melissia wrote:And what's wrong with objecting to the many rights (often without the legal responsibilities) of corporations?

Our founding fathers objected to them to be sure, isn't that something that both left and right wingers care about?

Not really, because people generally fail to understand what is meant by corporations being considered people. Outside of very particular (and admittedly very ridiculous) situations like campaign funding, the concept of corporations as people is basically a legal convenience.

halonachos wrote:If you note he said that his parents made the money, yet he's so pompous and set in that he decided that he wants his parents to pay more because he's never had to work for a living nor made it in the world on his own. These people sicken me because they want to give away money they did not make and I hope their parents make them part of the "99%" by removing all of their support.

Are you honestly suggesting that if a person inherits money, they become incapable of assessing the morality of income distribution?

And last but not least some people need to stop complaining and realize how relatively good they have it.

There is some case to be made that people shouldn't overstate their own issues, and pretend they are among the most oppressed in the world while they live in developed countries. But that doesn't mean there aren't legitimate grievances.

**Scrabb**

halonachos wrote:
These people sicken me because they want to give away money they did not make and I hope their parents make them part of the "99%" by removing all of their support.

People wanting to give their own money away because they have more than they think they need thrill me. People who seem to need someone else to take it from them and go "hey I'm so cool and awesome look at me" don't garner a lot of respect from me.

halonachos wrote:And last but not least some people need to stop complaining and realize how relatively good they have it.

Americans didn't get where they are today by realizing "how relatively good they have it." A lot of what the occupiers have to say is insane. Some of it makes a ton of sense. If we can try to fix the problems that are real and ignore the crazies we can get a net gain of good out of this movement.

**Bromsy**

dogma wrote:

Regardless, every report I've seen has called him a veteran, which means he can basically do whatever he wants with is uniform.

False. There are all kinds of rules about when/where and how a veteran and/or retiree can wear the uniform.

http://usmilitary.about.com/od/theorderlyroom/a/uniformwearmc.htm

However, if it was simply his jacket with his name tape, that is not a uniform per se. You have to display insignia of some kind for it to be a uniform

**Melissia**

sebster wrote:Not really, because people generally fail to understand what is meant by corporations being considered people. Outside of very particular (and admittedly very ridiculous) situations like campaign funding, the concept of corporations as people is basically a legal convenience.

I was being sarcastic anyway.

But I really do support removing the rights of corporations to donate to political campaigns... too bad it'll never happen.