I Totally Support the Occupy Movement...Follow

No, ThiefX is varus's retarded cousin.

Saw the movement down here in San Diego and I saw that the protesters were from all different walks of the world. But I did have one problem with a couple of protesters where I got the impression that they were using the OWS to avoid their responsibilities.

I know we're not supposed to compare Occupy Wallstreet with the Tea Party, but there are lots of good comparisons to be made.

I've been impressed with the grassroots movements of both.

I wonder if, like the Tea Party, the Occupy Wallstreet deal will also coalesce into it's own political party or an off-shoot of the dems (if so, it has a stupid name). I think it's past time to shake up our 2-party system.

But doesn't that make the message (and certainly the messengers) a bit dishonest? How much weight should we put on a group of people complaining about wall street and bank bailouts, when they are by far the least (negatively) impacted by those things in the first place? How can you complain about "our money" being used to bail out wall street, when you haven't paid taxes (and that's ignoring the whole "TARP money to banks paid back in full with interest bit)?

While I can accept that there are some legitimate complaints to be made (from many directions), the main face of the Occupy movement seems to be young people with minimal work/life experience, basically showing up to demand a free ride and pretending that somehow the fact that other people's tax dollars were spent in ways that they don't like gives them the justification to make said demand. Meanwhile, most of the people who actually work and pay taxes seem to understand the issue better and aren't jumping into the Occupy bandwagon.


On an amusing side note, when I first read that (especially the bolded section), it reminded me of the Hippy movement and how most of the communes failed. What happened in many cases was that about 10-20% of those in the communes actually wanted them to succeed and realized that hard work was involved. Real hard work. Like digging irrigation ditches, planting crops, building and repairing homes, etc. The other 80-90% wanted to live in a "free society" in which everyone shared everything. And they came up with all sorts of justification as to how their work making crafts, and singing songs, and thinking/talking about how wonderful their society could/should be, was just as valuable to the commune as any other work. Meanwhile, they "shared" the food at the table, and the water from the dug and maintained well, and thought everything was wonderful and perfect.

What inevitably happened was that the folks who were actually working in productive ways either took control of the commune and imposed some rules to make sure everyone was pulling their weight, or, failing that, left in disgust. Which resulted in communes that either became as authoritarian (or moreso) than the world they'd left or which collapsed due to the simple fact that you can only support so many people selling flowers and songs on the side of the road.

Not sure what reminded me of that, but it did. I suspect that many of those young kids at those protests are like the people in the communes who thought a perfect society was one in which everything was "free". But someone has to work and pay for those things, right? I don't think many of them really understand that. That's the impression I get from this movement. As you said, an abdication of responsibility. And I while I'm sure there's a small number of people who want to take a more responsible approach, they, like the hard workers in the commune are inevitably outnumbered by those who leap upon such movements thinking it'll be a free ride.


The abdicators may not be the "core", but they are the majority.

That is a pretty bold statement. I have been well off, just getting by, underemployed underemployed. I will tell you a few things about "Our Money". One time in my life I was unemployed, I paid no income taxes and had no costs. This was about 3 years ago. I have paid taxes since I was 14 nearly 2 decades of taxes with 1 year of that time not paying any.

I have reaped minimally, Ive never been on welfare, Ive never taken EI, Ive never used a non repayed form of government assistance.

You know what I ******* about while I was unemployed, the fact that when it was my turn sit on the bench my Government denied me getting money even with the 10's of thousands a year I help put into these various programs, I got nothing back. Maybe it is because I moved back in with family who knows the point is I have put up my part, and got nothing back for it.

I can totally see why people would be pissed off if they paid and paid and paid, now have no work, and the Govt instead gives money to banks and corporations.

While I do agree there are a lot of freeloaders and people who just float along, they are far from the majority, they are as much a minority as the extremely wealthy. The majority are people like you and I who clock in and out everyday watching 20-30% of our pay get taken by various government agencies.

Personally I am tired of supporting freeloaders, but I am more pissed at governments around the world dropping billions into huge companies. That is the peoples money, not some fat cat who already has a healthy 100 mil at his disposal.

FTFY. Remember, Dems are people too and they still comprise a good 25% of the population. So "people" is a pretty poor over generalization, especially considering a lot of left-moderates who don't identify as Dem but rather identify as independent also don't agree with your statement.

In the same way the conservative pundits are trying to cast the group as some kind of anarcho-anti-Corp mass causing trouble. This is why I called it an inkblot. There is massive leeway to see meaning in chaos, even more than human cognition is preprogrammed to. It's very interesting in that sense.

At the risk of repeating myself, the last mid term election was a massive statement about how much the voting public (people) don't agree with the very policies of wealth distribution we're talking about. They overwhelmingly rejected the arguments to end the Bush tax cuts (even just on the rich). And the voters spoke loud and clear about overspending by our government and on the health care bill.

I think it's quite reasonable to say that "the people" have clearly expressed their disagreement with the idea of redistribution of wealth. And as I stated in my last post, there was no garbling of that message. It was not hidden behind some kind of vaguely stated set of protest signs. It was front and center.

Edited, Oct 17th 2011 3:56pm by gbaji

And those people were in the majority? I've seen the pictures of the crowds Joph. We all have. On every station. You can't tell me that more than a minority (probably a small minority) of those people have ever held more than part time jobs while attending school. There are a hell of a lot of young faces in those crowds.



Yup. Are you looking at the same crowds I am?



Get back to me when by saying that most of these people are young student age people, I'm actually misrepresenting them. But I'm not, am I?

Are you?

Are these all high school students?

That was from the first page of image results. Thanks for proving my point for me, though.

Which isn't to say that youth doesn't make up a percentage of the protests and probably makes up a majority of the tent dwellers (hard to live in a tent when you have kids at home) but do they make up a majority of the protesters at large or a majority of the movement? You'll have to do better than pointing at some select photos of youth acting goofy (and thus photo-worthy) to make that point.


Getting back to you right now!

It's so nice to know that since I'm not having any luck on the job hunt that I've regressed back to a teenager (ugh) and moved in with my parents.

Yeah not protesting about the richest 1% taking more and more and more and more has sure produced a lot of jobs... yep. That's why the unemployment rate in the US is... what?