I don't think you understand what he's saying. There's no disagreement that people with liberal beliefs and/or an understanding of math have long advocated looking at the way the wealthy are taxed, and not always as part of a response to inequality. That's a long distance from where that issue is today, which is as an actually negotiable political stance as opposed to an issue that had total Democratic surrender written all over it before it even came up. OWS wasn't the only factor in that transition, but it was at least as influential as the Tea Party movement was in advancing the agenda of total submission to the wealthy as a means of salvation (I'm paraphrasing), and all that without being sockpuppeted by special interests or establishment liberals to any significant degree.Originally Posted by Queeg
I'm pretty sure they have been both consistent and coherent, actually. If there is one position associated with OWS, it's "tax the rich". That is certainly one way of reducing income inequality. It is also a very specific, practical, and realizable goal. You can debate the wisdom of the position but I don't think you can really argue that they haven't made that position clear.
And since there arms are interlocked they do this in what fashion. How do they seperate them? Do they force them to release their arms?
Torture. You keep calling this torture. Bull shit. Yes. I call Bull Shit.
Idiot. So when do the cops cross the line. When they doslocate some ones shoulders, or break a wrist. How much leveerage can they use before they are toturing the guy.You grab them and wrestle them apart. You don't fucking stomp on them or twist joints out of shape in order to do so. They're nonviolently resisting, not punching and kicking the cops, two cops are stronger than two guys trying to keep their arms linked.
When they are deliberately trying to use pain to force someone to comply. Basically the simple definition of torture: The action or practice of inflicting severe pain on someone as a punishment or in order to force them to do or say something. (dictionary.com)
Police around the world manage to deal with protestors without using stress positions and without deliberately hurting the protestor after the protestor has already submitted. I'm not sure why the LAPD shouldn't be held to the same standard.
Again, no one is claiming that OWS invented the concept of taxing the rich more in order to reduce inequality. That would be stupid, and would lead to a potentially inexhaustible sequence of references to mentions of the idea historically such as whatever Queeg keeps flinging off Google which no one is clicking on except out of morbid curiosity. Hey, here's a link that explains that up is up, down is down, and tomorrow the sun will rise.
Of course, "no one" is a set that specifically excludes our persistent community of known internet idiots. At any rate, here's the thing.
From the beginning, OWS has been criticized by people with an ideological predisposition against it as unfocused or not delivering a message in a manner they found sufficiently professional. That doesn't mean there's no room for legitimate discussions of the topic, which is an important one and plenty of normal people who are able to set aside reflexive team cheers in political debate are doing it all the time. But that means you have to be careful to distinguish your points from concern trolling/smear jobs of that nature if you want to have a conversation about it with people that aren't GOP hacks in their fantasy porno persona.
That's right, known internet idiots. We all know you want to fix Boehner's cable. AT ANY RATE.
So when you frame your question as a positive criticism premised around pointing out obvious things as if they supported a deeper point about the ineffectiveness/lack of clarity/etc of OWS, expect to get an equal and opposite reaction. That goes hand in hand with the "What Next" criticism, which has also been extensively debated in public and out loud by people directly affiliated with the movement on a variety of levels, such as they are, along with lots of commenters external to the movement but not directly hostile to it.
By its very nature, a true grassroots movement does not lend itself to straightforward soundbites, but I'll give you the Cliff's Notes: Mostly, not going to go back to occupying Zucotti Park style. Something else is being planned, likely around the idea of occupying spaces but in more targeted, narrowly focused ways. This is in response to the police-led government response, which is designed to attach disproportionate consequences to any sort of long-term occupation. Message received!
Now, it's entirely possible that the movement is not durable, and that's wishful thinking. That's ok, it's still the best thing to come out of American popular movements in decades. Someday, in the unlikely event that the bulk of the American middle and lower classes break out of the toxic combination of reflexive conservatism and a self-esteem crisis that drives them to degrade others instead of looking for answers from the ones that conned them into living that way, well, maybe the country can have a talk about it without having safety valves for asshole diversionary tactics for the conversation. Unlikely, given the resilience of those beliefs across peoples and nations in human hierarchies, but there's nothing wrong with that as an aspirational idea.
Sincerely,
safety valve
PS: torture (n.): The action or practice of inflicting severe pain on someone as a punishment or in order to force them to do or say something.
It's a term that can be easily misused but is generally useful when describing the abuse of authority in a physical sense. Like terrorism, it's it's most often misused to describe acts against members of a dominant group and most often applicable to the experience of marginalized groups. Thanks for another pointless side adventure to fucking candy land of I wish my backwards frozen in amber leftovers of a mindset had a useful thing to say.
Since I wouldn't do this I won't ask you to but I am curious how many protests of this nature end up with the police telling everyone to leave and then nothing happening. The police have a job to do, the occupiers have a "job" to do. Their jobs do not mesh, somebody is going to get hurt. Are all oilice forces violent when this happens? Is there a police force that somehow manages to dispurse a crowd that does not want to be dispursed without some kind of physical confrontation.
What do you think the protestors expected? That the cops would just ignore them? No one has answered that question. Jeffd talks about some guy who states a 3-1 ration will do it. Apparently law enforcement ignores the guy because none of them follow his advice. Maybe there is a reason?
I wish my backwards frozen in amber leftovers of a mindset had a useful thing to say.
Most eloquent thing you have ever written.
Well, we can all thank God that Queeg here has taught us that the OWS people DIDN'T invent taxing the rich. I think we all learned a valuable lesson today. So all you people who were totally saying they did? You can stop now.
Please don't drive tonight.
Lizard King addressed what I was getting at, Queeg, but just to clarify: I worded my question deliberately. I said "how many people do you remember," not "how many stories can you find on the internet?". I have google too, genius.
Point being that Occupy did not invent these ideas, and nobody is claiming they did. They did bring them to the forefront of our national conversation by sleeping in parks, however.
Yeah, there's a reason. There are plenty of ways to engage nonviolent protestors other than violence, but historically authority figures have a tough time justifying any of them because they understand the fragility of their position is being exposed and that induces panicky responses based around terrorizing people into submission.
What the protestors "expected" is irrelevant. That they likely have pitifully low expectations of the government representatives designated to serve and protect them is not a poor reflection on the protestors, but a summary of how the rubric of law and justice is easily abused by those in power. The people know it, the leaders know it, the police know it, and you want everyone to just man up to being abused for relatively inconsequential, largely victimless acts of civil disobedience. Well, fuck that, and I hope someday you get to give yourself that little pep talk about what you should have expected when somebody fucks your shit up for speaking your mind in a manner they find inconvenient. Maybe they can fix the typos in your signed confession.
First post you've made that doesn't look like it came from an 8 year old with mittens on.
I find it interesting you've decided OWS' goals are to "tax the rich," and from there are happy to PSH them away ("duh, we already KNEW that"). If only we could tax the rich, everything would be okay.
Of course, this is a ridiculous conclusion to reach from even the most cursory attention paid to anyone occupying. There's a reason they camped out near Wall Street, and just in case it wasn't evident to some people, they even put "Wall Street" in their name. Taxing the rich is a good thing, and will help alleviate some problems we seem to have trouble overcoming immediately, but there are issues our democracy is facing that will require rethinking the way our economic system functions and our approach to financial crises in the future. These are listed in severe detail elsewhere, I'll trust you're able to find them without the aid of witless OWS defenders.
You know that and I know that, but that is the typical dumb guy point of view; that the OWS people are "Protesting the rich".
Sometimes it's just better to pat them on the head and walk away.
That's fine, but if I'd told you a year ago that people were going to try to change the political discourse in ways that prompt a possibility for coherent legislation by camping out in cities across America with varying degrees of success, we would have both had a good laugh and adjusted our monocles to get a better look at what respectable pundits were saying was going to happen next.
And everyone involved would have been dead wrong.
It's like that moment when you hear some shit on the radio and you realize you've become that guy who hates music that isn't for them. It's not as directly correlated to age, but losing your sense of political agency as something that can be meaningfully reclaimed is something that we all have trouble addressing. That belief requires a certain naivete, willful or youthful, and it's a trade-off like all others.
You need to distinguish between your glib one-liners and the things you actually believe, because at the moment they are indistinguishable.
Yeah, I don't think I've ever seen a homeless Asian person before. Well, I've seen an old Asian woman who goes around downtown Vancouver trash bins to pick out pop bottles and cans to return them for recycling for 5 cents each.
I hope you don't think the current political and financial system is somehow synonymous with democracy, so that if you change it in any fundamental way it's not democracy any more.
Or that you think the current system is even a good example of democracy. If you do, then you really don't understand what OWS is about.
Observation: the right to protest is a part of our democracy.
Thanks for reading.
Wasn't the "I'm old" rule formulated in this very thread?
So...either "protests don't work" or you have a sincere belief that the OWS things are actual think tanks where people are looking for the real answers instead of...you know...protests...Hence my conviction that folks who sincerely want change aren't likely to find it, at least not in any lasting and meaningful way, inside a tent pitched in a park.
It's good to have convictions, but let's not cling to them at the expense of reason or in the face of evidence. I've already mentioned the Civil Rights Movement, but we can cast back to women's rights to vote, the abolishment of slavery, the overturning of abolition, and any other of countless strides forward the country has taken over its two+ centuries and see that, when it comes to the big changes, legislative action tends to be the very end of the tail of the kite. Yes, if you want to increase the marginal rate on top earners by 3%, by all means beseech your congressman and hope for the best. If you want a reworking of the way our financial system is regulated, of the way government aids some industries to the detriment of others, if you want any of the myriad changes the OWS crowd has, at various times, advocated, you may need to raise the consciousness of the nation a bit before floating those bills. As others have said, the movement has already started that process.
My impression is that the govern of USA is scared of the OWS, and want to deal extraordinay force and violence to make it stop. The OWS is a movement that really want to make changes, and not cosmetic changes or chair exchanges. Part of it is understandable, If you are old, you don't want the world to change. Then the OWS position is understandable, if the world don't work, you want to get it fixed. Too bad fear is a more viral sentiment than hope.
It somewhat to how the christian where fight by the roman empire.
OWS must be stoped, with extreme prejudice, or else, It could contagion other people with hope for a better world.
Spoiler: another image of seniortor violence
I'm going to ignore your personal insult and refer you to the policy paper that jeffd posted earlier. Also, I can tell you that pulling two people apart doesn't require dislocating shoulders and breaking wrists, it just requires at least one person per each person you're separating because your two arms are stronger than one arm from each person. They aren't fighting back, just making it difficult for you to arrest them, and you can just pry their arms apart in the exact same way you'd pull a child away from something they were clinging to in a temper tantrum, and you don't cause serious (or really any) harm there.
Your views on police brutality are abhorrent and unrealistic. I suggest that you watch some footage of old civil rights protests where they were non-violently resisting, and see if you feel the same way when the police kick the living shit out of them. Then rethink your position on this.
Please show me where this happened in LA. Also you clearly have never tried to pull people apart in this type of situation. That's all I have to say on the matter and that is from someone that was there the whole night and pretty much saw everything.
The sub-discussion began with Dan Lawrence's linking to an account of the use of pain and apparent over-escalation there.
Veracity of the post may obviously be discussed but the sort of generally "excessive" and excessively pain-and-compliance oriented policing fits within the earlier discussion of how policing political dissent has changed, disquietingly.
Good to have a record, all the same. Enough of them get spread across the internet and people might start getting upset.
Although I will admit it's going to take a lot longer than I hoped it would ... the comments on that video make me sad and angry.
Because it's easier to just hurt people than it is to do it properly.
Not just that. The article I linked just above puts it in the context of the Seattle WTO unrest and its impact on protest policing. Part of it is that if you apply politer, more tolerant, more labour-intensive methods, there's the possibility that the protesters will get out of hand and make you look incompetent and ridiculous, and get you fired.
It's a complicated question but that's important I think.
I think I'm too naive on this issue but I like to think that the police have actual training on how to deal with these situations so it SHOULDN'T get out of hand in the first place. But maybe that's fantasy land...
Don't get me wrong, I think a soft approach was better than what they changed to, but if you read the thesis glossed in the Atlantic article it's pretty compelling.
I'm not sure what you're asking of me. I can certainly point to all sorts of times in LA where pulling two people apart didn't involve dislocating or breaking joints. Did you misinterpret my statement to be reversed?
(Also, christ, this thread has too many deleted posts; we're up to two ghost pages now.)
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