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Occupy Wallstreet

Discussion in 'BBS Hangout: Debate & Discussion' started by Sweet Lou 4 2, Oct 2, 2011.

  1. Dubious

    Dubious Member

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    He never thought of Youtube, could not have dreamed of a worldwide communication system that was not about selling soap. THAT may be the revolution.



    What's funny? They are the future, you are the past.
     
  2. mc mark

    mc mark Member

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    The revolution will be computerized!
     
  3. WNBA

    WNBA Member

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    <iframe src="http://player.vimeo.com/video/31568216" width="400" height="225" frameborder="0" webkitAllowFullScreen allowFullScreen></iframe><p><a href="http://vimeo.com/31568216">We ask a OPD officer why he had his name badge covered....</a> from <a href="http://vimeo.com/blkpxls">BLK PXLS</a> on <a href="http://vimeo.com">Vimeo</a>.</p>​

    "This how to properly engage with police when they do suspicious things. We were riding by on bikes and noticed hes hiding his name and has no badge number. SO we decided to ask him. He did not answer, we asked a ranking officer is that policy? The LT. quickly went about fixing his attitude. This is a common practice among cops at occupy's around the US .That way he/she cannot be named or referenced if he participates in police miss-conduct . Its in most police departments policies that all officers in uniform must show some form of identification. OPD does not wear badges with #'s, how do we hold anyone accountable?"

    http://vimeo.com/31568216

    secret cop.
     
  4. Rashmon

    Rashmon Member

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    There's no way to delay that trouble coming everyday...

    Well, I seen the fires burnin'
    And the local people turnin'
    On the merchants and the shops
    Who used to sell their brooms and mops
    And every other household item
    Watched the mob just turn and bite 'em
    And they say it served 'em right
    Because a few of them are white,
    And it's the same across the nation
    Black and white discrimination
    Yellin' "You can't understand me!"
    'N all that other jazz they hand me
    In the papers and TV and
    All that mass stupidity
    That seems to grow more every day
    Each time you hear some nitwit say
    He wants to go and do you in
    Because the color of your skin
    Just don't appeal to him
    (No matter if it's black or white)
    Because he's out for blood tonight

    You know we got to sit around at home
    And watch this thing begin
    But I bet there won't be many live
    To see it really end
    'Cause the fire in the street
    Ain't like the fire in the heart
    And in the eyes of all these people
    Don't you know that this could start
    On any street in any town
    In any state if any clown
    Decides that now's the time to fight
    For some ideal he thinks is right
    And if a million more agree
    There ain't no Great Society
    As it applies to you and me
    Our country isn't free
    And the law refuses to see
    If all that you can ever be
    Is just a lousy janitor
    Unless your uncle owns a store
    You know that five in every four
    Just won't amount to nothin' more
    Gonna watch the rats go across the floor
    And make up songs about being poor

    Blow your harmonica, son!

    FZ
     
  5. Dubious

    Dubious Member

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  6. rhadamanthus

    rhadamanthus Member

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  7. Hightop

    Hightop Member

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    Krugman: SUCKS

    Should have been fired long ago. He is a hack and a liar.

    But burning down cities is just fine. What a sick individual.
     
  8. Hightop

    Hightop Member

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    OWS protesters have strange ideas about fairness

    The Occupy Wall Street (OWS) movement, obsessed with fairness, has benefitted from the lack of it. The protesters don't think so — but that is because many of them have not thought enough.

    The demonstrators resent disparity. So consider the disparity in coverage of OWS and the Tea Party. A single (still unsubstantiated) allegation that someone in the crowd at a 2010 Tea Party rally in Washington hurled a racial slur at Rep. John Lewis sufficed to prove the entire movement a kissin' cousin of the KKK. But that "Google Wall Street Jews" guy? A lone nut. As for the signs calling for the "death of capitalism" and telling Wall Street bankers to "Jump, you [expletives]" and declaring "capitalism can't be fixed — we need revolution"? Unrepresentative, surely. Ditto the 5:30 Oakland seminar on Marxism 101, and the dude in the Lenin T-shirt, and. . . .

    Don't feel bad if you missed such tidbits on the nightly news. Every movement has its whack jobs, but those on the left get politely overlooked.

    See also: the asymmetry of municipal authorities' approach to free speech. The Richmond Tea Party is justifiably cheesed off that it had to shell out thousands of dollars for permits and whatnot to hold rallies in Kanawha Plaza downtown, while OWS protesters squatted there for more than two weeks free of charge. Tea Party groups elsewhere have reported similar disparate treatment. As the Atlanta Journal-Constitution noted last week, "Tea Party co-founder Julianne Thompson . . . has made a request in writing after being denied permission to hold an event downtown because city officials said there was too much red tape and cost involved." Yet Atlanta's Democratic Mayor Kasim Reed issued an executive order granting special permission to OWS protesters to camp in Woodruff Park until Nov. 7.

    Cops in Albany have refused to enforce a curfew near the capitol. A Tennessee magistrate has been refusing to approve warrants for OWS protesters arrested in Nashville. In Oakland, Mayor Jean Quan actually marched with the protesters a few weeks ago. Safety and sanitation issues eventually led to their eviction; they responded by throwing paint, bottles, M-80s and other items at the cops. The cops responded with force, and an Iraq veteran was seriously injured.

    Reaction among OWS sympathizers was electric, with many denouncing police brutality.

    Yet a survey by Democratic pollster Douglas Schoen of OWS protesters in Zucotti Park showed 31 percent "would support violence to advance their agenda." That figure is incorrect; it is closer to 100 percent. Never mind the occasional guillotine poster, this week's rioting in Oakland, or the sometime enthusiasm for mass-murdering Bolsheviks. OWS demands more government redistribution of wealth — a process entirely dependent on the use of force. (Just ask actor Wesley Snipes, currently doing a three-year stretch in the federal pen for tax evasion.)

    Then there is the hatred of capitalism ("DEATH TO CAPITALISM"; "CAPITALISM DOESN'T WORK"; etc.). The alternative to a free market is, of course, an unfree one, requiring that somebody make sure people do not go around exchanging goods and services through mutual consent. How do you stop consensual activity? Take a wild guess.

    All of this makes it abundantly clear that OWS prefers forced equality over liberty. Many people do. But the OWS protesters seem singularly obtuse about what this entails. As J.R. Lucas observed some years ago, equality has more than one dimension, and efforts to tame economic inequalities can produce bureaucratic empires that crystallize "an inequality of power . . . more dangerous than the inequality of wealth to which objection was originally made."

    Granted, political inequality may not greatly disturb the consciences of OWS protesters, who in some locations have adopted a "revolutionary progressive stack," which "encourages women and traditionally marginalized groups [to] speak before men, especially white men." Lining up speakers by race and gender might not seem fair on an individual level. But for much of the radical left, individuals are irrelevant: The class struggle is all that matters, and the only way to end domination by one class is, apparently, to impose domination by a different one. Vladimir I. Somebody-or-other called that the dictatorship of the proletariat, if memory serves.

    But then, serious thought about fairness is meager among OWS protesters — whose top concern, based on a textual analysis of the 99 Percent blog, is student debt. Repaying loans can be hard, and this evidently makes the obligation unfair in the eyes of many demonstrators. But loans are made because borrowers promise to pay the money back. If borrowers break their promises, the loans will dry up, which would not be fair to future would-be borrowers. The keeping of promises is a basic moral duty — and a self-imposed one to boot. But it can seem unfair, if you have the moral philosophy of a 4-year-old.

    The OWS focus on money and economics only exposes the poverty of its quasi-Marxist critique. Equality has more than one dimension. William Niskanen, who died last week, once invited us to consider two young men: "One . . . is healthy and handsome, spends his days on the beach, has his pick of young women companions, and makes $10,000 a year. Another . . . is confined to a wheelchair, has congenital body odor, has never had an intimate relationship, and, with no other life, makes $100,000 a year as an expert computer programmer. In this case, who is worse off? Who should redistribute what to whom and how?"

    The OWS "progressive stack," redistributing the right to speak, already has provided a partial answer. For a fuller one, look up Kurt Vonnegut's short story "Harrison Bergeron." It is supposed to be satire. Turns out it was prophecy.
     
  9. DonnyMost

    DonnyMost Member
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    Kruggers with another home run. Inequity is spiraling out of control. What's shovelselect ranting about now?
     
  10. Dubious

    Dubious Member

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    If you let the editors of the NY Times know it's you Topper and how you feel, they probably will let him go.
     
  11. mc mark

    mc mark Member

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    thanks for the opinion piece shovelface!
     
  12. rimrocker

    rimrocker Member

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    Interesting graph. The gains at the top have come from the majority of American workers.

    [​IMG]
     
  13. Don FakeFan

    Don FakeFan Member

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    I don't know how he gets those women, but that handsome man has to live in a garbage can located on the beach to survive on $10000 a year. The guy will have no house, no wife, not even a wheelchair in his whole life.

    Hmm, he will also have to redistribute his $$$ to the wheelchair guys and wall street guys who are making more than $10,000,000 a year.

    that's fair.
     
  14. Dubious

    Dubious Member

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    Redistribution of wealth is a red herring.

    It's the redistribution of political power that is at issue; back to the interest of the people, away from the interest of corporate profit.

    excuse me one second please.....

    AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!!!!

    no, I'm just listening to Chickenfoot
     
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  15. Raven

    Raven Member

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  16. tallanvor

    tallanvor Member

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    <object width="640" height="441" classid="clsid:D27CDB6E-AE6D-11cf-96B8-444553540000" id="ep"><param name="allowfullscreen" value="true" /><param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always" /><param name="movie" value="http://i.cdn.turner.com/v5cache/TBS/cvp/teamcoco_drupal_embed.swf?context=teamcoco_embed_offsite&videoId=19701" /><param name="bgcolor" value="#000000" /><embed src="http://i.cdn.turner.com/v5cache/TBS/cvp/teamcoco_drupal_embed.swf?context=teamcoco_embed_offsite&videoId=19701" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" bgcolor="#000000" allowfullscreen="true" allowscriptaccess="always" width="640" height="441"></embed></object>
     
  17. Commodore

    Commodore Member

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    <iframe width="640" height="360" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/HcgcZrymkbE" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe>

    Wasn't this from last week's episode of The Walking Dead?
     
  18. Northside Storm

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    this is akin to saying the alternative to a nice day at the beach is getting shot in the face.

    For those who know about externalities, information asymmetry, moral hazard, skill distribution, and other assorted corrected free market failures (implemented in every nation state including America), this is false on so many levels.
     
  19. The Real Shady

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    When are they going to bring this block party to Houston? Not really into the cause, but it looks like a good time with a lot of chicks.
     
  20. basso

    basso Member
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    the good news is i'm not dead yet
    the bad news is i still got a coupla days.
     

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