Occupy

[Pope Lecherous]

OCCUPY * MOVEMENT

PRIMARY GOALS: Eliminate Corporate Greed, man!

PRIMARY STRATEGY: Shit in public parks, be obnoxious to nearby businesses, and smell bad.

ORGANIZATIONAL STRUCTURE: None

SPOKESPERSON: Anyone with a megaphone

REASON FOR FAILURE: Gee I wonder.

Almost perfect!  all I'd add would be - OPPONENTS: Militarised global superpower with unlimited resources See above

there ya go

[Roly Poly Oly-Garch]

Zucotti Park just got reoccupied.

Watch them mill around and listen to their horrendous singing/chants via a livestream here:

http://www.ustream.tv/occupyeye

I still believe that occupying a park is kinda missing the point.  It's of course better than sitting on the couch and bitching, but it doesn't seem annoying enough to be really effective.

I totally agree.

I'm currently trying to dissuade Portland Occutards from reoccupying with mixed success.

I met a couple of the "Alpha Camp" folks on MayDay. I got the distinct impression that they were currently "Occupying" the riverfront.*

There were only a few of them, but dollars to donuts if the media had paid *ANY FUCKING ATTENTION* to the demonstrations in front of the Justice Center, you can pretty much bet, they are the folks who would have been interviewed.

*translation: Homeless Junkies/crackheads that hang out by the river

[the last yatto]

There was those types too, I find them spirits without hope, focusing on the now. On night one the class clown of the group some reason found it funny as shit to ask people to lick his asshole, no one ever did it, but his bold questions ironicly turned other shy people into the group, share food, wine, warmth and such instead of just being some shandy town, it felt like we were building something... of course this was last fall and we all learned a lot. Some what we did or didn't like about others of our kind, myself in that huddled masses wanting to be free, I saw back to chanology and how glaroius those fags were... both culture waves seem to hit the shore, but they left things behind. I still have dreams of buying some land building a house and making a church in port townsend.

[ñͤͣ̄ͦ̌̑͗͊͛͂͗ ̸̨̨̣̺̼̣̜͙͈͕̮̊̈́̈͂͛̽͊ͭ̓͆ͅé ̰̓̓́ͯ́́͞]

New York Occupy-ish people doing it right:

http://dumpdimon.com/

[Telarus]

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/dec/29/fbi-coordinated-crackdown-occupy

[Cain]

Hmmm

http://www.nypost.com/p/news/local/manhattan/bombmaking_in_the_village_LoRDqNzP02SDZyfC1pLVXN

The privileged daughter of a prominent city doctor, and her boyfriend — a Harvard grad and Occupy Wall Street activist — have been busted for allegedly having a cache of weapons and a bombmaking explosive in their Greenwich Village apartment.

Morgan Gliedman — who is nine-months pregnant — and her baby daddy, Aaron Greene, 31, also had instructions on making bombs, including a stack of papers with a cover sheet titled, "The Terrorist Encyclopedia,'' sources told The Post yesterday.

People who know Greene say his political views are "extreme," the sources said.

Cops found the stash in the couple's West Ninth Street home Saturday when they went there to look for Gliedman, 27, who was wanted for alleged credit-card theft.

I'm reserving some judgement on this one.

[Cain]

Thomas Franks has a piece on Occupy.  Key sentence:

And dear god why, after only a few months of occupying Zuccotti Park, did Occupiers feel they needed to launch their own journal of academic theory?

OK, here's some more:

Measured in terms of words published per political results, on the other hand, OWS may be the most over-described historical event of all time. Nearly every one of these books makes sweeping claims for the movement's significance, its unprecedented and earth-shattering innovations. Just about everything it does is brilliantly, inventively, mind-blowingly people-empowering.

Occupy itself is pretty much gone. It was evicted from Zuccotti Park about two months after it began—an utterly predictable outcome for which the group seems to have made inadequate preparation. OWS couldn't bring itself to come up with a real set of demands until after it got busted, when it finally agreed on a single item. With the exception of some residual groups here and there populated by the usual activist types, OWS has today pretty much fizzled out. The media storm that once surrounded it has blown off to other quarters.

Pause for a moment and compare this record of accomplishment to that of Occupy's evil twin, the Tea Party movement, and the larger right-wing revival of which it is a part. Well, under the urging of this trumped-up protest movement, the Republican Party proceeded to win a majority in the U.S. House of Representatives; in the state legislatures of the nation it took some six hundred seats from the Democrats; as of this writing it is still purging Republican senators and congressmen deemed insufficiently conservative and has even succeeded in having one of its own named as the GOP's vice-presidential candidate.

The building of a "community" in Zuccotti Park, for example, is a point of special emphasis. Noam Chomsky's thoughts epitomize the genre when he tells us that "one of the main achievements" of the movement "has been to create communities, real functioning communities of mutual support, democratic interchange," et cetera. The reason this is important, he continues, is because Americans "tend to be very isolated and neighborhoods are broken down, community structures have broken down, people are kind of alone." How building such "communities" helps us to tackle the power of high finance is left unexplained, as is Chomsky's implication that a city of eight million people, engaged in all the complexities of modern life, should learn how humans are supposed to live together by studying an encampment of college students.

Whether or not to have demands, you might recall, was something that Occupy protesters debated hotly among themselves in the days when Occupy actually occupied something. Reading these books a year later, however, that debate seems to have been consensed out of existence. Virtually none of the authors reviewed here will say forthrightly that the failure to generate demands was a tactical mistake. On the contrary: the quasi-official account of the episode (Occupying Wall Street) laughs off demands as a fetish object of literal-minded media types who stupidly crave hierarchy and chains of command. Chris Hedges tells us that demands were something required only by "the elites, and their mouthpieces in the media." Enlightened people, meanwhile, are supposed to know better; demands imply the legitimacy of the adversary, meaning the U.S. government and its friends, the banks. Launching a protest with no formal demands is thought to be a great accomplishment, a gesture of surpassing democratic virtue.

The rhetoric in Zuccotti Park was also, of course, loudly majoritarian. But in practice, to judge by these books, OWS tasted overwhelmingly of one monotonous flavor: academia, with a subtle bouquet of career activism. Protestors are not always identified by occupation in these books, but when they are, they usually turn out to be college students, or recent graduates, or graduate students, or professors. Episodes like the Student Day of Action in November 2011 loom large in the story. Slogans and protest signs gravitate toward such timeless adolescent causes as self-expression and finding yourself ("Seek your own truth," reads a typical protest sign reproduced in one of these books). Occupiers are always said to be "creating a space" for things, a cliché of academia and the foundation world that I grew sick of hearing back in the nineties but that has lost none of its power as a simulation of profundity. And the episode as a whole has become an irresistible magnet for radical academics of the cultural-theory sort; indeed, for them it seems to have been a sort of holy episode, the moment they were waiting for, the putting into practice of their most treasured beliefs.

If you look closely enough at Tea Party culture, you can even find traces of the Occupiers' refusal to make explicit demands. Consider movement inamorata Ayn Rand (a philosopher every bit as prolix as Judith Butler) and her 1957 magnum opus Atlas Shrugged, where "demands" are something that government makes on behalf of its lazy and unproductive constituents. Businessmen, by contrast, deal in contracts; they act only via the supposedly consensual relations of the market. As John Galt, the leader of the book's capital strike, explains in a lengthy speech to the American people Rand clearly loathed: "We have no demands to present to you, no terms to bargain about, no compromise to reach. You have nothing to offer us. We do not need you."

A strike with no demands? Wha-a-a-a? Why not? Because demands would imply the legitimacy of their enemy, the state. Rand's fake-sophisticated term for this is "the sanction of the victim." In the course of actualizing himself, the business tycoon—the "victim," in Rand's distorted worldview—is supposed to learn to withhold his blessing from the society that exploits him via taxes and regulations. Once enlightened, this billionaire is to have nothing to do with the looters and moochers of the liberal world; it is to be adversarial proceedings only.

So how do Rand's downtrodden 1 percent plan to prevail? By building a model community in the shell of the old, exactly as Occupy intended to do. Instead of holding assemblies in the park, however, her persecuted billionaires retreat to an uncharted valley in Colorado where they practice perfect noncoercive capitalism, complete with a homemade gold standard. A high-altitude Singapore, I guess. Then, when America collapses—an eventuality Rand describes in hundreds of pages of quasi-pornographic detail—the tycoons simply step forward to take over.

[LMNO]

Nice summary.  I do recall, however, that the Boston Occupy people did keep saying that they had demands, but no one would report on them.

But for some reason, other than student loan forgiveness, I can't remember what they were.

[Cain]

LOL.

Occupy has fully jumped the shark.  It is now an expert shark jumper.  It charges fees for people to see it's shark jumping prowess.

http://pando.com/2014/02/07/occupy-wall-street-leader-now-works-for-google-wants-to-crowdfund-a-private-militia/

Over the last few days, Tunney has been causing a Twitter outrage tsunami after she took full control of the main Occupy Wall Street (OWS) Twitter account, claimed to be the founder of OWS and then proceeded to tweet out stream of ridiculous anarcho-corporatist garbage. She railed against welfare, described the government as "just another corporation," argued poverty was not a political problem but "an engineering problem" and told politicians to "get out of the way." She also debunked what she thought was a misconception: people thought OWS activists were protesting against concentrated corporate power, and that, she claims, is simply not true.

This just happened to coincide with her landing a job at Google, of course.

But actually Tunney's claim that she founded Occupy is by far the least interesting part of the story. Buzzfeed's Gray missed a much weirder and sinister development: Tunney — a Google employee — has been pushing a crazy crusade to fund a paid mercenary protester army to fight against Wall Street — all via KickStarter.

No joke, grrrrls and bros! Tunney wants to crowdsource a private army revolution!

Tunney's call to arms was seconded by Micah White, former editor of AdBusters who now runs a boutique social movement consulting business. White describes his business as a "social change consulting firm founded by the American creator of the Occupy Wall Street meme"  which "serves a hand-picked international clientele of social revolutionaries and movements."

Damn.  No wonder the Soviet Union turned out like shit.  Lenin simply didn't have the advice of a social movement consulting business.  That's where it all went wrong.

[Junkenstein]

What the actual fuck. So much dumb.

[LMNO]

I was expecting corporate absorption, but this is ridiculous.

[Salty]

 

Ahhahahahhaha. Oh, now that is just magical.

[East Coast Hustle]

This....this is just....man, I don't even. 

[Salty]

Oh god I laughed so many times reading that, it's perfect, PERFECT.

[Cain]

I'm as baffled as the rest of you guys.

I mean, I had certain expectations about the likely outcome of Occupy, but they were certainly nothing like this. 

I have to admit, I wasn't entirely sure what Justine meant by a "non-violent militia".  I mean, I know what a militia is, and I know what non-violence is, but I was unsure how you'd go about combining the two without underming the vital elements of one or the other.  So, like any person with a functioning brain stem, I decided to punch the words into Google and try and see if I could perhaps get some examples of this, or at least find out if the idea had some sort of heritage, history or meaning I was unaware of.

Fortunately, I found this War Nerd article, so I didn't have to bother with all that.

My first reaction was like everyone else's: "nonviolent militia"? That makes as much sense as non-alcoholic vodka. But once you realize what Tunney  means by "nonviolent," her plan starts to seem less ridiculous and more grimly familiar. What Tunney means, essentially, is a substitute, a sacrificial victim who'll absorb cop violence that might otherwise be inflicted on more valuable persons, such as... oh, Justine Tunney, for example.

This is a very old  military strategy: using expendable, low-value troops to absorb enemy fire. The term used for these doomed pawns is "cannon fodder." So it wasn't so surprising to see Justine Tunney herself using that term in an email exchange Yasha quotes:
   

"I'm not going to ask people to be cannon fodder against the NYPD without giving something in return"

Yep, I thought, that's all she meant by "nonviolent": someone to absorb violence rather than dish it out. Once you realize that, I'm sorry to say that Tunney's idea slots right into the cold, hard mainstream of military history.

But sending low-value people to die has another benefit: It gets rid of troublesome elements, just as David solved the Uriah problem. Stalin's "penal battalions" were a classic example: a half-million Soviet citizens who were designated unreliable and shunted to suicide squads, often without even being issued any offensive weapon (Yasha Levine's grandfather, who survived a head wound that should have killed him, is one of the few Shtrafniki to survive the war).

These Penal units were given suicide missions like clearing minefields by running through them. They weren't supposed to kill the enemy; their job was to die, and in dying, clog the Germans' guns, use up their ammunition and detonate their mines so that the second and third waves, made up of more valuable Soviet citizens, had a chance.

Tunney's only mistake was forgetting America's deep reverence for euphemism. If she'd recruited her cannon fodder quietly, hiding their desperation and greed, audiences would think they were real people, people of value. Now that Tunney, with typical Libertarian tact, has blurted their real motive and purpose, the footage of their maimed bodies wouldn't move anyone.