Rebellion or something.

[Junkenstein]

You misunderstand I think, I meant I have years of evidence supporting the theory that I'm dumb.

Re-reading, I certainly seem to have downplayed the role protest have taken in accelerating change. The self-reinforcing loop is probably on the mark too anyway. I'd guess that my bias towards protests=largely ineffective is being coloured more by personal experience and therefore projecting a negative view towards other protests.

Which is a little un-nerving really, I've usually been quite enthusiastic about people getting out and protesting pretty much anything. I may have moved into the realm of treating it as spectacle rather than an actual socio-political event. That's a disturbing shift I'll need to consider.

[Bruno]

Occupy is a special case insomuch as it didn't have a message to be on-message about. There was an intended message, constructed by Adbusters, which wasn't really as prominent as it should have been, and other messages that it was associated with (like forgiving student loans, support for other kinds of banking reforms, and so on) came out of the protests after they were underway. There was a lot of shit that came out of particular localized version of Occupy that weren't picked up by the rest, in some cases because they were stupid (the one in New Haven I went by almost daily, and there were a lot of things specifically about chemtrails but none about forgiving student loans, because that camp was made up almost entirely of Yale students, who are generally from extremely wealthy families).

Yale students believe in chemtrails?

They believe in supply-side economics, so why not?

Fair enough.

[Doktor Howl]

You misunderstand I think, I meant I have years of evidence supporting the theory that I'm dumb.

Re-reading, I certainly seem to have downplayed the role protest have taken in accelerating change. The self-reinforcing loop is probably on the mark too anyway. I'd guess that my bias towards protests=largely ineffective is being coloured more by personal experience and therefore projecting a negative view towards other protests.

Which is a little un-nerving really, I've usually been quite enthusiastic about people getting out and protesting pretty much anything. I may have moved into the realm of treating it as spectacle rather than an actual socio-political event. That's a disturbing shift I'll need to consider.

I have identified my bias of protests as being ineffective as being inculcated by the media.  During the anti-war protests of 2003-2005 (which were largely ineffective at the time), the media showed pictures of every special interest group involved holding signs pimping out their particular cause, rather than anything to do with the war.  This DID happen, I saw it with my own eyes.  However, they were a minority of the protestors, but were the ONLY ones shown on mass media.

Likewise, the Occupy protestors were shown as crazy homeless people, ridiculous hipsters (this was a problem, but later on) and their "general assemblies", and anarchists (the one shitting on a squadcar comes to mind).  When I went down to see the protests first hand, I saw a bunch of former marines and other veterans, in a campsite so clean and organized as to make any sergeant cry for joy.

[Rococo Modem Basilisk]

Occupy is a special case insomuch as it didn't have a message to be on-message about. There was an intended message, constructed by Adbusters, which wasn't really as prominent as it should have been, and other messages that it was associated with (like forgiving student loans, support for other kinds of banking reforms, and so on) came out of the protests after they were underway. There was a lot of shit that came out of particular localized version of Occupy that weren't picked up by the rest, in some cases because they were stupid (the one in New Haven I went by almost daily, and there were a lot of things specifically about chemtrails but none about forgiving student loans, because that camp was made up almost entirely of Yale students, who are generally from extremely wealthy families).

Yale students believe in chemtrails?

The thing is, Yale isn't a very good school for learning things at. You don't go to Yale to get an education; you go to Yale so that your resume can say that you went to Yale (which, among other things, implies that your parents are wealthy and probably politically powerful, and that you have met a lot of other rich, powerful people socially and probably seen their drunken antics). Yale has high entrance requirements, but doesn't really do due diligence when checking transcripts.

A few years ago, a guy who had dropped out of high school and failed to get a GED managed to get into Yale by faking a high school transcript from a non-existent high school in a foreign country. He proceeded to get straight As in all his classes until his junior year, when someone he had told snitched on him. When asked, some of his professors said that they gave As to all their students (because if you got into Yale, you had to be smart).

Yale is interesting, because a lot of the most intelligent people on earth are there doing the most intelligent and advanced research on earth, and politically and economically barred from teaching undergraduates a damned thing. Meanwhile, the undergraduates have only one thing in common: they can afford Yale tuition. Many of them also have the ego that often goes with extreme wealth, which is why Prescott Bush introduced a secret society whose rituals include jerking off onto a stolen skull in public, and after joining said secret society his son and grandson became president. In other words, the distinction between graduate and undergraduate work there is extreme. Yale graduate students are pretty much universally very smart, and not necessarily extremely wealthy.

In other words, it is not strange that an undergraduate at Yale would believe in chemtrails and spend a whole year skipping classes to camp out in a tent in the middle of New Haven, but it would be extremely strange if a graduate student did so.

[Mesozoic Mister Nigel]

You misunderstand I think, I meant I have years of evidence supporting the theory that I'm dumb.

Re-reading, I certainly seem to have downplayed the role protest have taken in accelerating change. The self-reinforcing loop is probably on the mark too anyway. I'd guess that my bias towards protests=largely ineffective is being coloured more by personal experience and therefore projecting a negative view towards other protests.

Which is a little un-nerving really, I've usually been quite enthusiastic about people getting out and protesting pretty much anything. I may have moved into the realm of treating it as spectacle rather than an actual socio-political event. That's a disturbing shift I'll need to consider.

I have identified my bias of protests as being ineffective as being inculcated by the media.  During the anti-war protests of 2003-2005 (which were largely ineffective at the time), the media showed pictures of every special interest group involved holding signs pimping out their particular cause, rather than anything to do with the war.  This DID happen, I saw it with my own eyes.  However, they were a minority of the protestors, but were the ONLY ones shown on mass media.

Likewise, the Occupy protestors were shown as crazy homeless people, ridiculous hipsters (this was a problem, but later on) and their "general assemblies", and anarchists (the one shitting on a squadcar comes to mind).  When I went down to see the protests first hand, I saw a bunch of former marines and other veterans, in a campsite so clean and organized as to make any sergeant cry for joy.

The media, or rather the corporations that own the media, have a deeply vested interest in portraying protests as disorganized, ineffective, and laughable. So when they're forced to cover protesting at all (which they almost never do unless the protests have so much hype that they can't simply ignore them, which they started doing in the early 90's) they always downplay the protests and try to make the protesters look as stupid and awful and as much like people you would never associate with as possible.

[Mesozoic Mister Nigel]

You misunderstand I think, I meant I have years of evidence supporting the theory that I'm dumb.

Re-reading, I certainly seem to have downplayed the role protest have taken in accelerating change. The self-reinforcing loop is probably on the mark too anyway. I'd guess that my bias towards protests=largely ineffective is being coloured more by personal experience and therefore projecting a negative view towards other protests.

Which is a little un-nerving really, I've usually been quite enthusiastic about people getting out and protesting pretty much anything. I may have moved into the realm of treating it as spectacle rather than an actual socio-political event. That's a disturbing shift I'll need to consider.

Ah, well... glad I could help, and glad to see you being a biped, as usual.

[Chelagoras The Boulder]

I remember when the Occupy Protest came out i was very excited at the prospect of bankers being taken to task for their role in the financial meltdown. When my sister(very socially conservative) found out about this we got into a huge debate about whether they were "right" to protest. There was some stuff about how they shouldn't go after the bankers and whether the police were right in their handling of the protest(her husband was working as a cop at the time) but what really infuriated me was that she made it sound like because maybe some of the protests hadn't followed  the exact procedure for protest permits and whatnot, that made what the cops did okay, and that made the issue they were trying to redress irrelevant.
So if we're talking about the effectiveness of protests, I think that this is one area where what someone said about protesting the system procedure as opposed to X issue could be applied. I can see it pretty damn hard to get anything done when someone can declare you a bunch of radicalized homeless people just because you didn't check the right box on your protest permit.

[Left]

As far as protest not at least causing some change?
In '92 I was out in a marching-around sort of way.
And the police deliberately beat up a bunch of LGBTIQ people outside the Astrodome where the RNC was being held.
ANYway...
The police beating up gay people was bad press for Bush and *may* have helped Clinton win.
...And then he threw us under the bus like a typical Dem...
ANYway...
...But gay rights have come a long way in 21 years, and it was in part due to...well, people like me, willing to act a fool in public.

But in this case...you're trying to get people to question the entire system, which is a bit more of a stretch than gay rights. 
It NEEDS to be questioned, reformed, remade...because it ain't working.

Occupy got the discussion going, at least, though I had more hopes for it than that.

[Rococo Modem Basilisk]

Something interesting and related I saw on G+:

Shava Nerad originally shared:
The Bank Anarchy Overlay
Wall Street makes their own laws

Wall Street as a voluntary association is now, paradoxically, more successfully anarchistic than Occupy Wall Street, creating its own environment of domestic and treaty law in which to operate unimpeded.

There is an entire body of financial law like this in the US, which meshes with international treaties and standards to give financial multinationals their own operating environment that -- especially in "hard times" (and who helps make and define those?) -- national governments and central banks can't or won't rein in.

Note how this legislation was passed despite objections by Treasury.

I have said before: capitalism sees growth as its biological directive, and greed as sex, so of course, without good manners or reining in by long perspectives of culture, "greed is good," and any capitalist will have difficulty gainsaying it without major cultural backup.

But capitalism, because of this "biological directive," sees law and regulation as damage, and routes around them.

They are not unique in this sort of trap, where the public must put checks and oversight on a system. DHS and law enforcement are stuck in a cycle of dependence on slack investigative clauses (PATRIOT, CALEA, CFAA...) that often violate civil liberties and encourage corrupt and sloppy investigative work (and swift promotions to those willing to "red bait" and grand stand). Older and/or more ethical/principled officers must grit their teeth and use these possibly unconstitutional methods or be in violation of current law/policy, and abandon their agencies to the "Young Turks" who give not a damn about the history or constitutionality of the system they operate under, only bad guys and/or advancement.

Bush's diplomatic corps -- many of them, conservative or not -- were in a similar situation,, grinding teeth for eight years while sometimes secretly apologizing to their counterparts.

But DHS/LE got no relief from the Obama administration, and now whistleblowers are emerging from DHS, which -- trust me -- is a very bad precedent and a sign of tragic pathology.

Finance, on the other hand, has drifted so far from any charter of operating as a public good, it hardly can operate in its own enlightened self interest by its own vaunted principles anymore. With an abstract machine running at the speed of supercomputers on trust-reliant protocols and antiquated accounting and metrics, the financial system is just waiting for the next set of social engineers to exploit it, game it, and bring it down. It is critically, laughably vulnerable to "hackers" after short term gains, and the international system can't rely on producing excess to cover exploits -- that is the real underpinnings of every financial crisis of the last three or so decades.

http://dealbook.nytimes.com/2013/05/23/banks-lobbyists-help-in-drafting-financial-bills/

H/t Sen +Bernie Sanders