OCCUPY SANDBOX

xp
yeah, i'm old. check back with me in about 20 years iatee and tell me what you accomplished with ows and how you feel baout it then. as soon as ows starts to look like boys pursuing fun and games through lawbreaking, you've lost and you may as well pull up stakes and go live at home with your parents.

keep up the great job you're doing, hoos. thx. i appreciate how you insert your good sense into your actions.

xxp- hoos just admit once and for all that this is nothing but a matter of yr personal vendetta against the 16Y

One of my uncles was a Brown Beret when he was my age, and my mom (visiting this week) told me that he's been calling her excitedly all the time "living vicariously through your posts on Facebook." Said Uncle has always been one of my heroes, and it basically made my heart blow up to hear this.

getting - and keeping - media attention is difficult and old ppl progressives on the internet (including basically everyone on ilx except morbs) were pretty cynical about early OWS methods and the people involved. I'm not gonna defend every single way people go about this and I don't think I need to (tho blocking traffic is an inherent good regardless).

posts very much in character

I like this new crankier iatee.

iatee, clue me in when you have some kids that you have to pick up and I'll stop by and tie your shoelaces in a knot.

thanks guys I'm taking notes for the GA: "make sure the revolution inconveniences nobody, ever"

I must assume you were distracted and not paying attention. Luckily, we wrote it all down for you.

thanks I will help you open up ms word later

blocking traffic is an inherent good?

really?

remember who you're talking to

I just usually think of things like "people not getting killed" or "people getting fed" or "people having a job" as being inherent goods, was not aware of the dastardly evil that is moving from one place to another on a public thoroughfare.

again, remember who you're talking to

http://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/images/rudy4.jpg

wtf iatee, get outta your bubble. Inconveniencing struggling single parents who happen to depend on cars will not help your media image.

you heard em hoos, let the struggling single parents through

take the Metro, have fewer kids.

sarcasm won't help your image either xp

sarcasm is an inherent good regardless

^ posts very much in character

I tend to think of it more as a service

Morbs I agree with u but telling that to someone who already lives in the wrong (car-dependent) place with two kids and an underwater mortgage is not exactly a selling point.

sell the extra kid to Newt Gingrich, he'll find a job for him

not if he's brown-skinned.

ha

Morbs I agree with u but telling that to someone who already lives in the wrong (car-dependent) place with two kids and an underwater mortgage is not exactly a selling point.

do you honestly think this is a good description of the average person in a car on k-street

no, bur it is a good description of the several irl people I have seen alienated from protest movements b/c of poorly-conceived tactics like randomly blocking public traffic.

not that I agree w/ those people writing off a whole movement based on isolated tactics or whatever, but based on my experience blocking traffic (in specific) seems to be very alienating to friends of mine who don't share my radical views.

breaking windows, that's a bit more of a tossup. people go either way.

that's interesting.

break my window and I'll run you over with my V8 engine SUV.

ON MY WAY TO PICK UP MY KIDS ABLOO ABLOO ABLOO

a broad cross-section ofc people utilize the k st. corridor on the daily. i mean, there are bad people who work there doing awful things to america, but it's not the lexis parade of sneering powerlords that you're imagining iateedawg.

Though for the record I spent a Friday afternoon rush hour noting cars & there was a preposterously high number of Jaguars & Beamers.

Every time I see this thread, I think of my cats

unless all of the Bimmers you saw were 5 Series, I'd guess a good number of them were an income bracket below all of the Jags you saw

Lots of people who ride into DC work for non-profits and government agencies and even like, construction jobs and shit. Some people start work at 6 in the morning and get off at 2. Disrupting traffic is really lame.

― rusty flathead screwdriver, Wednesday, December 7, 2011 12:40 PM (1 hour ago) Bookmark Permalink

you're concern-trolling for people you don't even know based on no evidence. either way, americans feeling righteously entitled to smoothly flowing car traffic as a basic right* is going to face some serious challenges in the future from all kinds of fronts and is basically untenable.

(and of course this ALWAYS depends on what is the cause of the not-smoothly-flowing traffic. police checkpoint: legitimate. protesting: not legitimate.)

xp oh do tell us more, k-street expert and capn-save-a-single-parent.

americans feeling righteously entitled to smoothly flowing car traffic as a basic right*

this is just such a bizarre and wrongheaded statement

I'm concern-trolling for myself and the people I ride the bus with, dickwad.

OMG WORKING PEOPLE DON'T WANT TO GET HASSLED BY THEIR BOSSES FOR BEING LATE? THE NERVE! etc

this is just such a bizarre and wrongheaded statement

^^^

I hate cars. I don't drive to work. I take the bus - which uses city streets. Streets have long existed as the central organizing principle of urban space since well before cars were invented. people living/working in cities should absolutely feel entitled to using streets to get from one place to another, regardless of what vehicles are being used. I am a hardcore fan of public space, they are there for everybody to use, and they are funded by everybody for a reason.

poor working people get screwed no matter what. protesting in visible public places is too important a tactic to give up because it "causes" traffic. minimizing problems for the powerless along the way is important, but reaching out with real goals/vision-for-the-future-type-stuff for us and the less-fortunate-than-we-are is more important than worrying about inconveniencing and omigod alienating some people. they were either asking to be alienated in the first place or you aren't doing a good enough job reaching out in other ways.

xp not talking about "streets as public thoroughfare," talking about "i was 15 minutes late and my boss was an asshole about it."

how dare OWS make me late to the job i hate so i can live paycheck to paycheck

they were either asking to be alienated in the first place

might wanna think about how successful this kind of rhetoric is in attempting to build a broad-based movement

and I'm not arguing against protesting in public spaces - that is also what they are for! - I was irritated by iatee saying that blocking traffic IN AND OF ITSELF is a good thing. it's not.

I think it's pretty obvious that Occupy is past the point where overly combative/rhetoric tactics are going to win them any support

ugh i'm getting into an armchair argument i have no business being in and afaict HOOS does an awesome job of it day in and day out. what can i say, i'm in a people-suck Dr-Morbius type of mood, or a people suck Dr Morbius type of mood, whatever.

xpost oh yeah i don't think blocking traffic is inherently good at all.

that's what ppl were objecting to/mocking, it kind of had nothing to do with OWS

I hate cars. I don't drive to work. I take the bus - which uses city streets. Streets have long existed as the central organizing principle of urban space since well before cars were invented. people living/working in cities should absolutely feel entitled to using streets to get from one place to another, regardless of what vehicles are being used. I am a hardcore fan of public space, they are there for everybody to use, and they are funded by everybody for a reason.

I'm 'not gonna get into this' but the distribution of public space in a place like DC in the past 100 years has shifted radically towards 'cars and parking merit 80% of a street's width. it is, very much, a zero-sum game and one that isn't unrelated to OWS stuff as much of the country simply has no appropriate space to 'occupy' because most places don't have shared streets or very visible/centralized public spaces. that's one reason why it's much more feasible to protest in a european city and ps, they block traffic there too it just doesn't put the whole country into crisis mode.