thread to be critical/skeptical of occupy wall street

go

oh yay

whiney did you say soemthing dumb in the ows thread or something

whiney hasn't appeared in that thread as far as i can tell,

just figured I'd like to hear some opinions besides rah rah awesome yay

Not exactly criticism, but a question. I have misgivings about the strategy of doing 'mic checks' to disrupt public speaking events by people ows is antagonistic towards. I can see what the tactical goal is: to demonstrate the presence of an opposition and discomfit the comfortable status quo. What I can't see is how this serves the strategic goal of realigning power.

I've seen how this tactic has played out in many past movements. It has the benefit of making people inside the movement feel good and possessed of some manner of power, but it tends to work against bringing new people into the movement. To me it's a sign of ossification and rigidity, not growth.

Tell me why this is wrong, plz. Thx.

whiney you should talk to perpetua he seems to have some of the same misgivings

don't see why this needs a separate thread tbh

just figured I'd like to hear some opinions besides rah rah awesome yay

hmm whiney I think if you read news sources outside of reddit and twitter you might have found something by now

It's not like we're going to actually realign power, you know.

Obama and Karl Rove are never challenged in a meaningful way when they speak. To challenge them verbally at one of their stage-managed live infomercials is necessary.

You know what's gonna "bring new people into the movement" at this point? Getting gored economically, bcz if they're not at least sympathetic at this point, they're nearly unreachable any other way. That's my People Suck point of the day.

The audio will be up by 3:00 pm EST, but there's a illustrative (and to me infuriating) discussion about the more-legitimate arguments to the OWS protests available at http://www.wgbh.org/programs/The-Emily-Rooney-Show-854

Obama and Karl Rove are never challenged in a meaningful way

My point is that the challenge to power represented by a mic check does not fall into the category of "meaningful" and anyone currently outside the movement will view it as meaningless and irritating.

if they're not at least sympathetic at this point, they're nearly unreachable

The specific problem with the mic check tactic is that it dissipates that sympathy and drives away people that could be pulled in. What got the civil rights movement over the hump wasn't growing the number of activists until they were the majority of the country, but growing the number of sympathizers until they were the majority.

i'm not whiney fwiw

well I guess World AIDS Day is as good a time to remember that ACT UP used 'confrontational' tactics on an issue that was, along with the people killed by it, LOATHED and REVILED, and yet they "grew the sympathizers."

i wanted a seperate thread because the #ows ilx faithful are passionate and i dont wanna disrupt or derail them

well my point stands faux-whiney. if you've had trouble finding something critical of OWS, you haven't been looking very hard. even on ilx.

I agree with aimless on the surprise mic checks - they're righteous but won't convert anyone

Reaganism really never had an active 'majority', neither did doing away with bank/finance regulation. We literally haven't got time to recruit 150 million supporters.

alternative?

coup d'etat, obviously

We don't do anything in this country with "most" ppl, bcz Most People Are Fucking Stupid.

ACT UP is a terrible parallel dude

I agree with aimless on the surprise mic checks - they're righteous but won't convert anyone

^^^

they're good for the core supporters morale and pretty much nothing else

because? XP

We don't do anything in this country with "most" ppl, bcz Most People Are Fucking Stupid.

Cuet, but wrong. Most People Are Distracted And Harried And Fed Misinformation. That's why they often make stupid political decisions. Objectively, this is a contingent, not an existential condition.

no, actually most people ARE fucking stupid

like, not continually and 100% of the time, but everyone says and does remarkably stupid things

no, that's about a quarter of the population Aimless is describing. Half are just stupid. xp

because? XP

let's see - AIDS was primarily affecting a minority, one that was not terribly well accepted by mainstream America. otoh, their pleas for sympathy had real profound basis because, y'know, DEAD PEOPLE. ACT UP had specific demands (which OWS does not). ACT UP was not addressing systemic economic issues, they were addressing specific healthcare + PR issues. ACT UP was also much more willing to engage the existing political structure, this was, in fact, their end goal.

etc etc

I agree that most people are fucking stupid.

I amend that to crazy and/or stupid

define stupid

if most people are fucking stupid then either

a) stupid doesn't mean what we think it means

or

b) any political effort to change the social structure is at best some kind of aristocratic power-grab

love you, thread

everyone says and does remarkably stupid things

I agree. But that only applies intermittently. And because it is universal, it can be considered as background noise. Where it gets interesting is studying the predictable features of human stupidity, so you can induce it to suit your own purposes. That is one of the secret levers of power. Those levers are also available to ows, to bring things back on topic.

Pretty sure referring to one's political opponents as either stupid or crazy is unlikely to convert many of them.

depends how stupid / crazy they are

"stupid" = "behaves in a manner directly and blatantly against his/her own self interest, and/or disagrees with me"

Surely any deomocratic leftist alternative to the problems of capitalism has to based on the idea that most people aren't stupid, otherwise what's the point? Might as well stick with self-interested technocrats.

'Ignorant of a lot of issues for a variety of reasons' isn't the same thing as inherently stupid. If people are stupid the left is fucked.

There are plenty of stupid leftists

BINGO and BINGO xp

are they also farting y/n

everybody farts

sometimes

they just...they just got out and farted

they mostly fart at night

mostly

most people are very short-termist thinkers, you cd argue that's "stupidity" at a stretch but this whole "we the vanguard must save the dumb masses from themselves" is never gonna fly as a program to rally behind. more likely that existing social/political forces serve to exacerbate short-termism and obfuscation. to protest capitalism ought to be to demand less alienation, not more benevolent dictators.

Wait. we aren't suppose to be against the technocrats, are we?

why not? I hate techno

would vote for an italodiscocrat tho

benevolent dictator sounds pretty good to me. i need more structure in my life.

i think misanthropy's a perfectly valid response to the fuckedness of everything too, but misanthropy doesn't need to worry about tactics

At the present levels of complexity in society, there's going to be a reliance on expertise, for sure. What matters are the rules that we all play under, and making sure they promote the goals we largely agree on. Creating a huge wealth imbalance isn't a goal I'm siging up for, personally.

read the fine print

1. Fuck you (from Francis Scott Key and everybody at the Battle of Baltimore.
2. Cakewalks not only twice as corny as spangles, but also maybe tied up with minstrel shows in an uncomfortable way?

finally some high-profile celebrities willing to speak out

http://www.nydailynews.com/gossip/adam-carolla-blames-occupy-wall-street-protests-culture-entitlement-article-1.985880

http://assets.nydailynews.com/polopoly_fs/1.985874.1322850351!/img/httpImage/image.jpg_gen/derivatives/landscape_485/image.jpg

http://thumbnails.hulu.com/19/815/101177_512x288_generated__2xt+PpWGqk6WhIiNv+PUgQ.jpg

http://i.imgur.com/Ga9U9.jpg

rich people telling poor people they don't deserve shit is always funny

xp: was there an article in twitter or something?

so what was the point of whiney denying he was dealwithit? has he finally gotten to the point where even he's embarrassed about being who he is?

sonned by ilx's only sub-jon-via-chi poster

the evasive dodging continues

man, don't talk about jon like that.

My main problem with OWS has been the "traditional politics is broken so lets not engage with it at all" mentality. I mean, as broken as it is, there are still old-fashionied activist and lobbying groups out there getting shit done and getting legislation passed, and it just seems kind of lazy for a bunch of early-20-somethings who have never even tried that route to completely blow it off (I recognize that this doesn't describe everyone in the movement). I mean I'm all for all the direct action and new thinking, I just think that stuff should be couple with traditional political activism as well. Most great movements have included a variety of tactics and almost all have included political lobbying/letter-writing/bill-proposing/vote-out-getting etc.

Also I think the more you insist that politics no longer serves the people, the more true it becomes, because you're basically just encouraging everyone to give up on it. If your goal is "revolution" I suppose this is what you want. To the extent that that's anyone's goal, I haven't seen any real blueprints of what such a revolution would look like. I hear a lot of what the revolution would oppose, but not much of what a new system would look like.

invisible subway sandwich

So I'm not saying "don't camp out in public parks" or "don't mic check people" or whatever, because I think at least that stuff is injecting fresh energy into activism. I'm just saying take some of the more articulate campers and get them to board a bus to washington in support of some legislation, and do voter reg drives, and that sort of thing.

that's true to an extent but it's also undeniable the way that OWS has shaped media narratives and has amplified its message across the country in ways that traditional methods of lobbying/voter reg drives wouldn't have

Right but my whole point is do that stuff AND voter reg drives.

Because ultimately power doesn't make concessions just because it gets mic checked.

if anything 'blueprints for a new system' are one of the clearest things within the movement - decentralized concensus-based governing. you can argue about the feasibility and limits but the model is there and pretty well-defined.

i'm not whiney fwiw

― dealwithit.gif, Thursday, December 1, 2011 8:01 PM

HAHA COMIC SANS AMIRITE is p much Community fan internet 101, and at this point worse than OMG BACON OM NOM NOM

― one pug (dealwithit.gif), Friday, December 16, 2011 4:33 PM

decentralized concensus-based governing

uh if anything it's show just how dysfunctional this model can be, especially on a macro scale. like, this is a framework that works for small groups of people. it totally breaks down for larger ones.

shown

insisting on that framework completely fucked OccupySF, for example

(well among other things)

I guess I still find "de-centralized consensus-based governing" a little vague. The fact that it works on a small scale to make relatively simple decisions in an artificial situation (where the necessities of life are mostly coming from outside) for a short period of time is not exactly what I'd call the blueprint of a revolution.

I also think you have to look at ows outside of 'normal politics' - I participate in ows stuff I also participate in knocking on door politics and I don't think there needs to be explicit overlap. people who volunteer or the democratic party have to accept a certain cynicism w/r/t the political process and 'the game' and ows is about changing our overall worldview and is a fight against that aforementioned cynicism that you otherwise accept.

have they started talking about bribing congressmen with yachts yet? that really needs to be the goal right there.

u care about flags and anthems

hurting you should look up and read stuff by david graeber

I don't believe that consensus decision making can replace our national-level institutions but I believe it's something that could have potential for local level politics

btw this is pretty interesting/awesome:
http://www.portlandoccupier.org/2011/12/15/occupy-portland-outsmarts-police-creating-blueprint-for-other-occupations/

(although it's more on the "how to protest" tip than the "how to govern/organize society" tip)

just had an hourlong discussion/argument with a friend about occupy, which pretty much ruined the get together because she started raising her voice and pointing a lot, despite the fact that i was being exceedingly conciliatory and calm, perhaps overly so.

her main objections were that there was no coherent message that she could discern (despite my efforts) and also the general argument that things are worse elsewhere in the world. i tried and failed to correct that but was consistently interrupted by her.

so, so frustrating, because her heart's in the right place in general and yet she seems to be spending most of her "activist" time in opposing occupy.

i kept going back to the civil rights movement in the US, both as an example of something that was clearly worth doing despite things being "worse" elsewhere in the world (as will always be the case) and also by saying that for an apples to apples argument, we'd be comparing occupy to, say, Dec 1955 - Mar 1956. both movements were at the infancy stage, despite decades of background work. to complain that 3 months into occupy there's not a clear endpoint is just ludicrous and naive (though i didn't say that)

While we're at it, what is the coherent message behind the Democratic party?

One thing I do definitely try to say to doubters is "at least these guys are innovating -- why don't you give them a chance and see what they come up with." I mean a lot of people who later became big in politics cut their teeth in SDS, the civil rights movement, vietnam war protesting, etc., often having no idea what they were doing in the beginning. This sort of activism is very fertile for developing a more sophisticated understanding of organizing, and for developing new tactics. There are good Emma Goldman quotes about this sort of thing that I will try to find.

OWS also good at keeping our jobless state on the hot plate for the voting season

The 99% discussion should be good for the democratic party. Yet Newt Gingrich wants to make things much better for the 1% and worse for the 99% (throwing fuel into the fire, hurting our economy) and somehow he has the most support. I don't think Americans are smart enough to revolutionize our government even if it was as simple as voting yes to revolution on a ballot. The amount of problems in our system in staggering and with the way our system is set up it's practically futile to even try to stab at the root of these problems. /pessimism

What I'd say to OWS doubters - watch the Big Picture with Thom Hartman (and if I had some specific youtube links that would help too).

I would avoid trying to have an OWS discussion with any friends or family that vote republican because they are too far gone and you might as well avoid blood and tears so to keep things civil

I guess the fundamental problem I don't know whether OWS can solve is this: on one hand, yeah, they're right. Any revolutionary movement that uses hierarchy and coercion is likely to set up a new unjust system to replace the old one. But revolutionary movements that are free of hierarchy and coercion don't tend to be as good at displacing entrenched power. Or at least I can't think of an example of such a movement that has displaced entrenched power. An alternative is to just set up small-scale mini-societies that operate outside of/in spite of entrenched power. Of course this has been done many times before, with all kinds of communes and commune-like structures, with varying degrees of success. I don't know enough about OWS or the history of communes to know how the principles of the current movement might differ from those.

Anyway, my overarching take on the whole thing is that I don't really feel like I'm at a place in my life where I can really "join" the movement right now, but I'd like to see where it goes and I don't want to detract from it. And people who only talk about why it can't work based solely on what they see on the news are depressing and frustrating and kind of a waste of time.

And people who only talk about why it can't work based solely on what they see on the news are depressing and frustrating and kind of a waste of time.
And people who only talk about why it can't work based solely on what they see on the news are depressing and frustrating and kind of a waste of time.
And people who only talk about why it can't work based solely on what they see on the news are depressing and frustrating and kind of a waste of time.

absolutely

http://a7.sphotos.ak.fbcdn.net/hphotos-ak-snc7/390788_338374726188045_108038612554992_1352391_671758301_n.jpg

"FOLKS IN THIRD-WORLD COUNTRIES ARE EVEN POORER, SO POOR PEOPLE IN AMERICA SHOULD BE GRATEFUL AND SHUT UP!!"

this, almost verbatim, was the argument my friend was making last night, repeatedly, with righteous anger. i couldn't believe it. at one point about 10 minutes into her rant she finally paused to take a breath, and she asked "what do you think? do you agree?". i can't really think of another time in my life where my jaw was actually hanging down, open, involuntarily. i couldn't believe all the shit that had just come out of her mouth. i think i answered "i'm sorry, but that's the saddest thing i've heard anyone say in the last several years" or something.

awwkaaaaaard

leftycartoons.com

Won't someone please think of the 3rd world children!

I do often wonder why protesters don't "wear neckties like civil rights marchers 50 years ago" - any ideas?

the worst argument is SEE THOSE LEFTIES INCITE VIOLENCE AND RIOTS. y'know even though its even a small minority that gets arrested and that the violence seems to always begin when police show up in riot gear and escalating needlessly.

then again, these are probably the same people who said "Kent State protesters provoked the National Guard into shooting!"

hey HOOS, come up to NY and get some facetime w/ models

http://www.salon.com/2011/12/18/the_return_of_the_radical_chic_evening/singleton/

Penn Badgley, an actor on the hit series “Gossip Girl,” has a face too mathematically perfect to be truly interesting,

negging

At the present levels of complexity in society, there's going to be a reliance on expertise, for sure. What matters are the rules that we all play under, and making sure they promote the goals we largely agree on. Creating a huge wealth imbalance isn't a goal I'm siging up for, personally.

― Aimless, Thursday, December 1, 2011 4:11 PM (2 weeks ago) Bookmark Permalink

Skipping 42 messages at this point... Click here if you want to load them all.

lol @ "tumblr whites"

― upper mississippi 2: still shakin, Thursday, December 1, 2011 7:01 PM (2 weeks ago) Bookmark Permalink

who can i blame for this

He bounds onto the stage, grabs the microphone and yells “mic check!”

every time i've seen this happen its kind of hilarious

also as somebody neck-deep in this stuff i would like to say hurting's take is the most reasonable one i've read from an """"outsider"""" in a minute

we're the last major-city camp on the eastern seaboard (i'm not counting occupy buffalo, hope friends there will forgive me), and we're approaching our 3 month anniversary.

in the last month we've become more about intracamp politics/issues than that which brought us together to begin with, and that's been frustrating to see; with 200 tents and twice as many people living in a damn park it only makes sense that it would take on all the internal politics of a small town once it got settled.

fights, usually a sidecar to substance abuse among the homeless who've brought their prior issues into the community, have become alarmingly common. tensions are high, and at a time when we're being challenged by weather while trying to have some of our most important existential discussions to date.

a lot of us are trying to start conversations about "2.0," the question of what happens when there are no more tents at the square. there's a faction (as i suspect there's been at every major encampment) that, on discussion of post-occupation tactics, raises the question "post-occupation? how can you TALK like that? what about the people in this camp with no other place to live? where's the place for THEM in your occupy 2.0?"

this position seems to presuppose that camp will continue indefinitely unless we voluntarily tear it down, which strikes me as short-sighted. I also have the luxury of not living at and dealing with the camp 24/7, and i completely understand how someone who made the choice to do that might come to see the continuation of the camp itself as the most important aspect. the camp, though, has always been intended as a means--and i think that to treat it as an end in itself is dangerous in more ways than one.

not really sure what i'm getting at here--maybe the inherent danger of myopia in a community like the one we've brought together, and the consequences of allowing it to remain porous when that openness results in the introduction of elements we're not fully prepared to deal with.

oh and on the question of GAs as local decision-making mechanisms this was kinda heartening in its way--and only 84 fucking years after sacco and vanzetti too

http://www.thenation.com/signupad/165240?destination=article/165240/thank-you-anarchists