Tensions Between Archivists and 'Occupy' Protesters Over Preserving the Movement 153
An anonymous reader writes "At one point an NYU librarian literally got into a shouting match with a protester at an Occupy protest, trying to make the case for why a digital record should be kept of photos, videos, audio recordings, posters, and other materials, so future scholars and activists can recount what happened. Academics are taking unusual steps to preserve the protesters' stuff, including 'distributing postcards promoting archiving at protests, developing automated systems to download photos posted online, and asking participants to vote on which images are most important for the historic record.'"
The anonymity they deserve...? (Score:2, Interesting)
Maybe the protesters were right.
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20 years from now the Amercan Fooie Adenoid Hinkel will use the archives to round-up "subversives" like the occupy people. Good thing nobody thought to preserve the Tea Party stuff, otherwise my butt would be in trouble.
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The Tea party does not give a shit about republicans.
They want small government, constitutional, conservatives.
Of course the lefties in the group will call small government "anarchy" and constitutional "weird idea people" and conservative "Clinging to God and Guns out of fear".
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They want small government, constitutional, conservatives.
Except for the ones that want government controlled marriage, government controlled internet, government controlled drugs, etc. etc. etc. And don't forget: Keep government out of my Medicare!
I'd be all for it, except that all they want is for everyone else to be free to do what they approve of.
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Then you are looking at people who do not believe in the constitution.
I do not want a non constitutional president.
The US constitution expressly forbid much of what the federal government is today doing. Has been doing for decades.
The problem is the stupid fucking judges that gave the US complete control over everything under the guise of the commerce clause.
Every one of those judges should be dug up from their graves and be defiled before the nation.
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The problem there is "conservatives". "True Conservatives", "Real Conservatives", whatever you can call yourself to get the last "Conservative" thrown out. I'm almost surprised that a "Floating Point Conservative" hasn't come down the pike.
Not that the loser minds so much in the long run. He gets thrown out, gets bitter and cynical, waits and goes into lobbying. More money there anyway, gets to hob knob with the same kind of people and instead of begging for money he gets to be the one dangling the carrot.
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It is good to be a conservative.
The problem comes when conservatives or liberals are given powers to control your life.
Fix the problem and quit hating people because they do not believe what you do.
The problem is that the federal government has extended their powers to your bedroom.
Who gives a fuck what they think as long as they can not do shit about it.
Gay marriage. Would never had been a problem had the government stayed out of marriage in the first place.
Had marriage stayed as something between two peop
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FTFA
lol. Just lol.
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Preserve the movement? (Score:1, Funny)
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That's right, coward, hide behind your keyboard and slander these working class people who are trying to make our country a better place to live. And whoever modded that garbage up, well, funny it ain't.
Golly! (Score:5, Funny)
I thought people were afraid of being recognized by police using the archives.
Turns out they're arguing over whether to call themselves the Judean People's Front or the People's Front of Judea.
Re:Golly! (Score:4, Insightful)
"Ok. Aside from our iPhones, iPads, Androids, YouTube, high-speed wireless to watch YouTube, light, cheap aluminum for our tent poles and backpacks, MRI machines for our broken noses, and worldwide jet travel that supplied how to cook mutter paneer and sushi on the same Sterno..."
"And the Sterno!"
""And the Sterno. Aside from that, what has capitalism done for us?"
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Wait a minute, you don't cook sushi! Well, except for the rice, I guess. And the tea. And the nice warm jug of sake.
Yay for Sterno!
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You don't cook all sushi. But you do cook some of it. And no, I don't mean the rice. Expand your horizons, try some eel sushi.
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Whether something is sushi is orthogonal to whether the topping on the rice is cooked. The term describes the rice. (Hence, sashimi is not sushi.) The great majority of fish sushi is not cooked. Vegetable sushi varies. Egg (tamago) and eel (unagi) are generally cooked.
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And I prefer cold sake, you insensitive clod. It's generally better quality and better tasting.
Re:Golly! (Score:4, Insightful)
"Brought peace!" [demon.co.uk]
...wait. Shit.
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Wow, the tea partiers are out in force today and even have mod points to mod up that garbage you wrote. Yes, I know you were joking (Monty Python reference, good job there), but apparently the mods took you not only seriously, but thought you were insightful.
The Occupy movement isn't a movement against capitalism, it's a movement against unbridled greed and sociopathy. It's against CEOs making millions per year to run their companies into the ground and then get bailed out by the government while they lay o
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Why should they be afraid of being recognized?
Maybe this is a reason.
http://www.theverge.com/2012/3/23/2896525/new-surveillance-system-compare-your-face-against-36-million-others-in-one-second#
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Of course if they were to win it becomes less of a problem. If Wall Street is broken up and it contents distributed to main street. If corporate control of politics is eliminated. If US society were adjusted so that the rich have less power over the poor. If the US military industrial complex was broken up.
So being identified doesn't really matter.
Of course if none of it changes and the slack jawed drooling idiots who don't want to end the exploitation but rather chase the dream of becoming the exploit
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Re:Golly! (Score:4, Insightful)
Splitters!
There is already enough material (Score:3)
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Re:There is already enough material (Score:5, Informative)
Technically, you're correct. However, the coverage the protests received from Big Media are also copyrighted to Big Media, which puts it outside the financial range of individuals who want to use that coverage without paying for very expensive per-item licensing fees.
For example, I'm personally aware that the University of Kentucky archives contacted CBS to get a 6 minute video clip of their basketball team in action from 1998 to include within a larger documentary about UK's sports history. CBS said it would cost about $10,000 for that one clip. The story's the same for other copyrighted history like the 1979 Who tragedy in Cincinnati, Martin Luther King's "I Have a Dream" speech, and countless other historical events.
The NYU archivists know this, and it's why they can't count on Big Media - they have to do it themselves.
First non-assholey post! (Score:1)
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What's worse, they have mod points. Look at the next comment down, lists of things a tiny, teeny, eensy minority of Occupiers are accused of, and the AC is modded "informative".
Did Murdoch buy slashdot, or did they sell mod points to Koch Industries? WTF, sometimes comments piss me off but today the moderations are worse than the trolls.
Yes, Let's Record All the Rapes and Assaults (Score:2, Informative)
Yes, let's record everything about the Occupy movement [verumserum.com] so the future can judge it:
Arson
Occupy Fort Collins – Member arrested, $10 million in damage
Occupy Portland - Member arrested for throwing Molotov Cocktail
Occupy Seattle – Suspicious fire at Bank of America 2.7 miles from camp
Occupy Portland – Three men arrested with homemade grenades
Assault/Threats
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I'm just sayin'.
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True, but look at the numbers and it's easy to see that they are, in fact, misleading. "Occupier takes a bathroom break in the street". ONE lone asshole in a huge crowd. You want lawbreaking? Look at Kentucky after a god damned basketball game. [go.com]
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And that's just what the police did. What about the protesters?
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Hide ya kids! Hide ya wife! And hide ya husband 'cause they're rapin' everybody out here!
(Seriously, is this the best you can do?)
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Seriously, is this the best you can do?
No, he can mod himself up with his sock puppet account.
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Yes, let's record everything about the Occupy movement [verumserum.com] so the future can judge it:
Sedition
Sedition is among your list of terrible crimes? How can someone claim to "love America" and yet believe that even the suggestion of revolution or even publicly advocating change in government is somehow criminal and immoral?
Occupy Burlington – Man kills himself with handgun Occupy Salt Lake City – Man found dead with syringe in his tent Occupy Vancouver – Young woman dies of cocaine and heroine overdose Occupy OKC – Young man with history of drug abuse found dead
As for this, I would argue that these people would have killed themselves regardless of the Occupy Movement. It's really reaching to be blaming a movement for someone else's suicide.
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Occupy Toronto – Foot sniffer arrested
Seriously?
Occupy OKC – Young man with history of drug abuse found dead
Seriously?
Occupy Oakland – Yelling and nonsense at Burger King
As someone said, considering the number of people that gathered, and how long it lasted this list is not surprising or even high crime rate. I am pretty sure most of these things happen at music festivals( example [independent.co.uk] ), or gun shows (search for gun show accidents provides a nice list) or sport events. Parent's post just gives data, which is not same as information. So instead of infor
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Wikipedia definition of Agent Provacateur
and raise you one Wikipedia definition of jackass [wikipedia.org].
Tons of ephmemeria (Score:5, Informative)
Organizing that stuff is hard work. Work continues getting 1960s protest info cataloged. Stanford had a group trying to organize Martin Luther King's stuff. That took years. Then they got the archives of the Black Panther Party, and are now grinding through that. The archives of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) are at Kent State.
Much of the plder stuff is too variable for fast scanning. Somebody has to put posters, handouts, and brochures through a flatbed, slowly. The fast book scanners need more structure.
Soo.... (Score:1)
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Wow, the Kochsuckers are out in force today. Which bank do you work for, son?
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Isn't it all the information public now? (Score:3, Insightful)
The Occupy events were held on public property where there's no reasonable expectation of privacy. They uploaded information about the events to public websites. They handed out materials to the general public. There was far too much media coverage. Why should they get ANY say in what's retained in a permanent record? They already made it themselves.
data collection (Score:3)
As someone who's tried to locate data before, I wish them all the luck in the world.
I know this is the internet, so UFOs carry aliens, we never actually landed on the moon, and I'll be trolled for saying this...But, we've never had the modern day's archival abilities before. I'm glad to hear someone's attempting to put it to good use.
Why Ask Them To Vote On What To Archive? (Score:1)
Just a quick observation - why even bother asking what to archive and what to discard?
If there is any real interest in maintaining a true historic record then by all means archive everything - including not just the wonder photo-op stuff but also the pooping-on-cop-cars stuff as well. Asking people to vote on how they want to be remembered by future generations will only wind up preserving images that the "protestors" find self-serving and paint a picture of complete harmony. That is, assuming that this w
Re:Why Ask Them To Vote On What To Archive? (Score:5, Insightful)
I have to call bullshit here... but I'm not saying that as a defense of the current movement, but rather I'm objecting to your idealization of the 60's. All too many baby boomers seem to have a fuzzy, romanticized version of what happened in the 60's.
There was no shortage of bad actors mixed in with more idealistic folks then, just as is the case today. We have, with varying degrees of success, already sugar coated a lot of 60's history. All of the negative aspects you point out in the current movement have analogous issues in the 60's movement.
Of course, there were a lot of good things that happened as a result of the counterculture movements of the 60's. If we pretend there were no such negative aspects to these movements, and then use this optimistic but false dream of the past to condemn modern movements via a flawed comparison to an idealized version of the 60s that never actually existed... then it seems we have missed the entire point of these counterculture movements.
The difference is they knew what they wanted (Score:2, Insightful)
By and large, the big civil rights movements and protests, like those in the 60s, had defined goals and real, reasonable demands.
Like, say, the civil rights movement of Dr. King. They could clearly articulate their grievance: Blacks are treated differently than whites because of the colour of their skin. They also could say what they wanted: Equal protection under the law.
Same shit with Vietnam war protests. They wanted the war to stop. Some may not have had good reasons for it (though most did) but they co
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I have to call bullshit here... but I'm not saying that as a defense of the current movement, but rather I'm objecting to your idealization of the 60's. All too many baby boomers seem to have a fuzzy, romanticized version of what happened in the 60's.
There was no shortage of bad actors mixed in with more idealistic folks then, just as is the case today. We have, with varying degrees of success, already sugar coated a lot of 60's history. All of the negative aspects you point out in the current movement have analogous issues in the 60's movement.
Of course, there were a lot of good things that happened as a result of the counterculture movements of the 60's. If we pretend there were no such negative aspects to these movements, and then use this optimistic but false dream of the past to condemn modern movements via a flawed comparison to an idealized version of the 60s that never actually existed... then it seems we have missed the entire point of these counterculture movements.
I have to call bullshit here... but I'm not saying that as a defense of the current movement, but rather I'm objecting to your idealization of the 60's. All too many baby boomers seem to have a fuzzy, romanticized version of what happened in the 60's.
There was no shortage of bad actors mixed in with more idealistic folks then, just as is the case today. We have, with varying degrees of success, already sugar coated a lot of 60's history. All of the negative aspects you point out in the current movement have analogous issues in the 60's movement.
Of course, there were a lot of good things that happened as a result of the counterculture movements of the 60's. If we pretend there were no such negative aspects to these movements, and then use this optimistic but false dream of the past to condemn modern movements via a flawed comparison to an idealized version of the 60s that never actually existed... then it seems we have missed the entire point of these counterculture movements.
For the most part the 60s movements were abysmal failures which resulted in the decline of America starting in the 1970s with the destruction of the nuclear family, the destruction of the single parent income, etc. Now you have to work harder to get less than you got in the 1960s.
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For the most part the 60s movements were abysmal failures which resulted in the decline of America starting in the 1970s with the destruction of the nuclear family, the destruction of the single parent income, etc.
Utter bullshit. The antiwar movement stopped the Vietnam War. The ecology movement got the EPA instituted, and if you were alive then and lived near any factory you know how bad the environment was. The civil rights movement was similarly successful.
What destroyed the nuclear family was the fact t
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For the most part the 60s movements were abysmal failures which resulted in the decline of America starting in the 1970s with the destruction of the nuclear family, the destruction of the single parent income, etc.
Utter bullshit. The antiwar movement stopped the Vietnam War. The ecology movement got the EPA instituted, and if you were alive then and lived near any factory you know how bad the environment was. The civil rights movement was similarly successful.
What destroyed the nuclear family was the fact that STDs were no longer fatal thanks to antibiotics, birth control was cheap and effective unlike before in the world's history, and they legalized abortion. Hell, in the '70s women would walk up to me and ask "wanna fuck?"
The women's movement did indeed allow corporations to screw us normal working class stiffs over, but having to pay for the war, coupled with the Arab Oil Embargo of 1974 caused the inflation that had more to do with women joining the workforce in droves than the women's movement did. Wages stagnated (helped by Nixon's wage/price controls) while prices skyrocketed. You can't blame any of the '60s movements on that. Greedy rich people were the cause.
If you were alive during that period, you clearly weren't paying attention.
The Vietnam war was stopped? Yeah and how many wars have there been since that?
The 60s movement caused the war on drugs and the creation of for profit prisons. Where were the freedom fighters of the 60s when Nixon started the war on drugs and when mandatory minimum sentences were institutionalized?
The EPA? How effective is the EPA? They are minimally effective. The 60s radicals of the left served to legitimize the anti-communists of the right. It allowed for the FBI to bring about COINTELPRO. It is best to
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The Vietnam war was stopped? Yeah and how many wars have there been since that?
The protests were against that particular war and against the draft. And we weren't in any more wars until Bush Sr. almost a quarter century later, and the last soldier to be drafted went to Vietnam.
The 60s movement caused the war on drugs
No, they've been fighting a "war on drugs" since the thirties. It's just that the Vietnam war introduced thousands of draftees to pot, who came home and introduced it to friends and family. The
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I don't know what you mean by "bringing the war to American soil." The last time there was war on American soil was the Civil War, discounting Pearl harbor and 911.
Well, I suppose there's the "War" on Drugs and "War" on Terrorism. Both are against our own citizens, and are waged on American soil.
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Those aren't war, though. The "war on" bullshit is just that -- meaningless rhetoric.
Callout: (Score:2)
its simple (Score:2)
That article ignored the point (Score:3)
trolls (Score:2)
Or we could just forget the whole thing happened. (Score:2)
Re:Achievement (Score:5, Insightful)
Perhaps none that we can see today, but I can imagine why there's such a push to archive absolutely everything that happened with these protests.
Maybe I'm being a bit too hopeful, but some time decades in the future, perhaps these protests will be seen as 'what got the ball rolling' to vast, sweeping changes.
You never know what the future holds, but I for one hope that these protest started something bigger than they could ever have imagined. It just takes a while for that snowball to grow at first.
And IF those protests were indeed the start of eventual mass changes... would it not be beneficial to have documented as much as we can on them?
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Yes, that was called the "Tea Party" (Score:3, Insightful)
but some time decades in the future, perhaps these protests will be seen as 'what got the ball rolling' to vast, sweeping changes.
What you are thinking of there is called the "Tea Party".
The funny thing is that mostly the two groups had the same complaints (the Tea Party dislikes big banks just as much as Occupy folk). Only instead of camping illegally The Tea Party stayed outside for just a few days each month to show people they existed, and then went back inside - to occupy the only thing that REALLY ca
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Personally I lean more towards blaming government for enabling Wall Street to get where it is today with bailouts and the Fed (I'm probably more inline with the standard tea party ideals than what some of the occupy people were saying).
To me, occupy was more of a media stunt to grab ratings rather than a history changing m
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And the Tea Party likely does want less government. For other people. They will happily keep what they use and probably ask for more, but discard what "the others" use. The OWS people, for all their asininity, are just asking for the government to do what they said they would do, IE, regulate stuff.
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Yup, they did. They gave us Eric Cantor and all the uncompromising, "our way or the highway" Republicans who refuse to negotiate
Re:Yes, that was called the "Tea Party" (Score:4, Insightful)
I've been hearing people bitch about "negotiating" and compromise for decades. Turns out, their version of compromise is when you agree with them.
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In a word, yes.
The Dems/Progressive/Libs camp have been whining about compromise ever since 1994.
Of course when they regained the majority, all that sentiment went out the window and they just shoved things down everyone's throat.
So yes, when the Dems are out of power they are all about talking compromise. When they are in power, they don't give a shit about it.
Santorum Tea Party? Absurd! (Score:2)
You don't know anything about the Tea Party obviously. Being opposed to large government most Tea Party activists dislike both Santorum and Romney, but Romney would still be preferred between the two (Ron Paul of course being far better but face it, he's not the candidate).
You continue to incorrectly view the Tea Party as religious, when it was not founded on a religious basis and the goals of the tea party are in no way religious. They are simply to reduce spending and reduce the size of government. Whi
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But now he's running for President. And before him there was Bachmann, who hadn't a clue in her head.
No they weren't. They certainly weren't for sane fiscal issues, preferring to scream about taxes in a way that was only useful to the richest and advocating only tax cuts whi
That is not the core Tea Party goal. (Score:2)
What you are missing is that while SOME Tea Party members are indeed religious, not all of them are. That's the price of REAL diversity, not all of them share the same opinions on everything.
The core of the Tea Party however is very simple - reduce spending, reduce the size of government. That is all they are working towards. People have different motivations for doing so but that is the shared goal.
It doesn't matter what positions "tend to" have, what matters is what they DO!
You are thinking of Occupy (Score:2)
The KKK marched with Occupy, not with the Tea Party.
All of the other things you mentioned are fringe outliers, not core to the Tea Party - otherwise for Occupy you'd have to count people firing guns at the white house (not even extreme elements at a tea party have ever fired a gun) or the rapists.
I don't really count them against Occupy, but you have to if you insist on including all fringe elements of any movement.
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I think in the long run historians will see the Occupy movement as the last (unfortunately unsuccessful) attempt to create a grassroots movement to resist the changes being brought to our society by the amalgamation of big business and the governments they support. It was flashy, it got some newsbites when protestors got stomped on by bullying police, but nothing much was accomplished and media preferred to show the Occupy members as potentially violent troublemakers. The average person saw them not as disa
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"In the future they wont even be a foot note, just a bunch of spoiled brats with no goals or directions running around creating havoc and tearing stuff up."
sounds like our current government.
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True, but the administration is doing it at a much larger scale, and will be part of future history books.
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Can there ever be a better illustration of how Slashdot is populated by moron leftists than the fact that any comment even mildly critical of the OWS "movement" is modded into oblivion?
OWS served as an illustration to tens of millions of America children of what not to do and how not to behave. I drove by the Austin OWS camp. My son looked at it and without any prompting said, "we read about these people in school today. They look as dumb as they sounded."
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Re:Lol (Score:4, Interesting)
You're trolling, but there is truth to the point that many of the people at the protests didn't even know why they were there. Literally, when asked on camera, they couldn't give an answer. They just wanted to be part of an anti-authority movement. It ended up becoming another generic anti-capitalism movement, like what the Iraq War protests became after a few days. A certain element was defecating on police cars, committing sexual assault, and littering parks with tons of garbage.
It's so much easier to blend into a crowd and yell with them at the top of your lungs to make yourself feel better about a general anger you have toward society. It's so much harder to actually effect change by contacting politicians, convincing the public, studying the law, and generally having an impact on the legislative process so that something actually comes out of any of it.
It's one of the reasons I'm irritated by anyone with a bullhorn, even when they say things I would normally agree with. It comes off like a pushy way for them to vent. They're aware of the image of themselves as a protestor with a bullhorn, and they get hooked on that image. Then it's over, and they go back to the office job they were trying to get away from in the first place.
Actually change something--then I'll be impressed!
Re:Lol (Score:5, Insightful)
You're trolling, but there is truth to the point that many of the people at the protests didn't even know why they were there.
Does that make their concerns any less valid?
It's so much harder to actually effect change by contacting politicians, convincing the public, studying the law, and generally having an impact on the legislative process so that something actually comes out of any of it.
Exactly. Especially when you don't even know exactly why you're so pissed off at society. Maybe you don't realize it's because you didn't like that cop's thuggish attitude the other day when he pulled you over for "weaving across lanes" and then pressured you into a drug search. Maybe subconsciously your mind is still pissed off from when the TSA hassled you at the airport. Maybe those taxes, and the 10x as many hidden taxes disguised as fees, charges, and a hundred other words are really fucking dragging you down. Maybe you don't appreciate the child services people harassing your neighbors because the dad got put in jail for possessing three marijuana plants.
Maybe it's all that and more. Not all of us are fucking scholars enough to understand exactly why we're pissed. Doesn't mean the anger isn't real, and doesn't mean it's just going to magically go away if we wish hard enough. If the same tyranny and oppressive bullshit remains in place, then the anger will continue to build, until it can't build any more. It's that simple. You don't want to be there when it explodes.
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What concerns? They didn't know why they were there!
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They didn't know why they were there!
Right. But does that mean they were there for no reason?
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I'm a joke? You're a moron who thinks his conscious mind represents everything his mind is capable of.
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Could we please have JUST ONE DISCUSSION on slashdot that doesn't devolve into potheads clamoring for their sacred weed?
As soon as it's legalized, sure. You can have as many discussions as you like without us potheads clamoring for our sacred weed.
We get it, you are addicted to drugs and have to get high to escape your mundane or painful reality. Great. Stop talking about it. Nobody else cares.
You're a moron
Exactly. (Score:2)
Thanks for chiming in bro. Your story is exactly what I was talking about. Ask the Occupy protestors why they're there, and you get a hundred different reasons. That does not equal no reason. There's far too many goddamn good reasons today to even keep track; pick one.
One more thing (Score:2)
Forgot to say this in my last reply: if you read this, don't give up man. Big changes are coming, and we have wild times ahead. The old corrupt system will be swept away and replaced with a new, freer one. Things will get worse in the interim, but it's coming. Don't do anything dumb or violent. We need every good and able man on board for the times ahead. Just lay low.....stock up....be prepared. Make friends. Smoke some good pot and chill as much as possible. Keep an eye on the news, and laugh at the comic
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"Jusitification" is for morons. Were the peasants in France "jusitified" when they executed thousands of aristocrats via guillotine? Doesn't matter--it happened regardless. When a gang of revoking youth identifies you as "one of them" and throws you up against the wall with the others, all the "justifications" and "explanations" and "reasoning" in the world won't save you.
How do you expect a population that has been lied to for literally their entire lives to consciously know all the wrong things the govern
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It's so much harder to actually effect change by contacting politicians, convincing the public, studying the law, and generally having an impact on the legislative process so that something actually comes out of any of it.
Except that nothing would come of that either. You can't change an inherently corrupt system by playing within the rules it has established and currently controls.
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Preserving and defending the right to peaceably assemble, all by itself is a good enough justification for doing it from time to time. I bet a lot of protestors initially who initially had no, or no good reason, to protest eventually found one when the cops teargassed them or otherwis
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Look man, they were the 0.0001%. They were trying to get in another 98.9999% in order to gain legitimacy, but most of those either had jobs or were out trying to find a job. It's no wonder tried to get everybody in on the non-action.
Meta-post about social tensions evident on posts (Score:5, Insightful)
Most are unaware of it, but the social tension evidenced in this conversation comes from changing living conditions. The world is full. Further economic growth is neither possible nor desirable.
A growing economic pie allowed large disparity in income. A shrinking economic pie directs people's attention back to large income disparities.
Most OWS and Tea Party (they may distrust and fear each other, but they have more in common than either will admit) real grassroots sympathizers & supporters know there's something going on that they don't like, but they're not sure what to do about it. Last year a wave of popular revolutions swept the Arab world, driven by the same feeling. Liberals and Conservatives use different words to describe seemingly different things, but the origin of their discontent comes from the end of growth. This impending paradigm shift is at the origin of the social conflict played out on this page.
It is foolish of people to focus on redistributing wealth, scapegoat, bicker, or wage war, when the entire edifice is in peril. Yet it is in our nature to behave so in the face of a bottleneck predicament. Know Thyself [jayhanson.us]
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"The world is full."
Carrying capacity is a function of technology and lifestyle (which are in turn functions of imagination and ethics):
http://www.juliansimon.com/writings/Ultimate_Resource/ [juliansimon.com]
The carrying capacity of the local solar system with known or easily forseeable technology is probably on the order of quadrillions of humans living in many millions of Earth's worth of space habitats.
See, to complement "Know Thyself", see also "A Newer Way Of Thinking":
http://www.anwot.org/ [anwot.org]
The big issue is we are trying
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Note that I agree with everything the GP poster said, but his comments do have an inkling of truth. We are experiencing an economic change in the United States, and may have been experiencing it for 20 years -- masked only by the 90s stock boom and real-estate bubbles. The change is characterized by lower-than-expected growth, and a difference in the way that growth has been distributed. Much of the growth is occurring overseas, and while Americans are profiting off of it, the profits aren't being equally d