#OccupyWallStreet

Careful out there, bud. But do what you do best and elucidate away while you are there…I’m sure, one way or another, you’ll have a captive audience listening to you. :wink:

Your post, short as it is, wouldn’t fit on a billboard.

If they had coherent demands longer than a billboard you’d then accuse them of being flip flopping, muddle-headed wonks.

If they’re only worried about NON-human animals…

No problem. Toss another PETA on the grill.
As for the demonstrators, their “list of demands” is all over the place, but I share their distaste for government mandated bailouts on our tax dollars, for a mess “suits” created and are profiting from. No bailouts, no tax holidays. Give them TRUE free market, in which they either sink or swim with no subisidies, bailouts, special tax breaks, or any other sort of artificial governmental propping up. No “too big to fail”, no gov assistance, sink or swim. Eat or be eaten.

But that brings us back to BBQ PETA.

One other point. As ridiculous as the claims or demands may be, in this country and under free speech, they still have the right ot peaceably assemble. They still have a right to convince others of their cause or entertain them with their goofiness. Any talk about nightsticks and clubs because you don’t like the message (or lack of one) is far more STUPID and repugnant than anything they are saying (or not saying).

How about “whatever sorts of rights and legal protections the Constitution and the laws give to persons only apply to persons of the flesh-and-blood type, and do NOT apply to non-human entities (e.g. robots, corporations, Dick Cheney). Legal protections for such entities must be provided by statutes specific to those kinds of entities.”

Have you cleared your proclamation with the protest’s legal team?

Could you be a little more clear about what your point is? One person on a forum posted a list of unreasonable, probably not-at-all considered demands. A website treated that list like an official release by the leadership, which was either deliberately disingenuous or really stupid; do you have any idea what kinds of crazy shit you can come up with if you treat an organization’s discussion forums as the source of official press releases?

So then some moderator said “stop posting demands to this forum and allowing people to pull that trick; leave the demands to the leadership.”

So? In context it seems like you were suggesting that somehow a moderator saying those particular demands shouldn’t be posted means the leadership is denying the existence of any demands anywhere, and that wouldn’t be fair. But I don’t know what your point is if not that.

What makes you think it was intended to? This is a MB, not a protest march.

No, I wouldn’t. And don’t tell me what I would do if… You don’t know.

P.S.

Specifically, please, huh. When you round up the troops to go picket Planned Parenthoods or whatever the hell, do you go down the line and quiz each member of the group about, specifically please, the mechanisms by which a fetus develops a heartbeat, before they start yelling about whose baby’s heart started beating when, so that they’ll be able to rattle off the science if they accidentally become elected supreme magistrate in the next two hours and it becomes critical that they have all the angles worked out?

Or do you just accept in that case that you all agree about the general notion that bad consequences are resulting from the behavior you’re protesting, that not everybody has to be an expert to have an opinion about right and wrong, and that shorthand and even overly broad rhetoric is going to be an effective way of getting your point across?

Not if you don’t know what your point is in the first place.

If you are just going to spout undigested nonsense, eventually you are going to run into someone who actually thinks about stuff.

So corporate personhood is bad, and you want to outlaw corporations. Have you thought thru the consequences?

ISTM that the fact that you cannot or will not answer even a basic question shows that you have not thought about it at all. You just bought the slogan. And the Brooklyn Bridge.

Regards,
Shodan

Boy, the right-wing apologists sure are out in force on this one.

I’m sure they’re not running scared. It just seems like it.

-Joe

That’s awesome as far as specificity goes, all right.

Of course, since it runs counter to what the Constitution apparently says (at least it runs counter to what the Supreme Court says it says) then that very specific demand can be implemented only by 2/3rds of the Congress and 3/4s of the state legislatures’ concurrence.

So while I absolutely agree that this demand is specific enough, I guess I have jumped to questioning its practicality.

I’m not even sure who you’re talking about. Who did you ask a basic question, and what was it?

There; now you’ve said that. Do you think the people who are calling for the law to be changed are actually not aware that in order to get what they want, the law has to change? Do you think they’re organizing a big protest because they think the law should stay the same?

“End corporate personhood,” would be a death-knell to the entire economic system of this country. “Reverse Roe v. Wade” would not.

So no. The sound-bite from pro-life demands would be an ideal event from my perspective, no matter what the understanding of each participant was about heartbeats. The sound-bite from this event needs much more clarity – which in fairness RTFirefly offered up. Assuming his version is what’s meant, then his proposal suffers from exactly the same deficit mine does: it would need a constitutional amendment to make real.

Not a good analogy at all. It wasn’t too long ago that abortion was illegal in much of the US, so it doesn’t take a whole lot of analysis to know pretty much what that is like.

When was there a time when we had no corporate personhood, and what did the world look like?

What can anyone say to rebut such a thorough analysis of the subject?

Only if by “running scared” you mean either “shaking their heads in dismay” or “laughing their asses off”. If you even know who “they” are here, since the idea of supporting corporate personhood is about as mainstream as you could possibly get, and has been for hundreds of years. Eliminating corporate personhood is a far left, fringe idea. It’s up there with giving civil rights to animals.

So you’re saying that the concept of corporate personhood is too big to fail, then?

I didn’t, Bricker did. It was -

You quoted it. You didn’t answer it, but you quoted it.

What you did say was that it didn’t matter that you, or the protesters, had no idea of the consequences of what you were asking for, just that it was important to communicate that you wanted it. Which is a good thing - it allows us to understand that you really have no clue as to how the world works, or how to fix the very real problems before us. You just want to march and protest and yell.

You have no idea what you want, no idea of what will happen if you get it, and you want it right away. Good luck with that.

Regards,
Shodan

That really doesn’t make sense. Corporate personhood is not a thing, it’s a concept. A concept that it is a significant underpinning of a modern economy. Not just in the US, but anywhere in the industrialized world.

It’s on thing to advocate the overturning of Citizens United, but another thing entirely to call for the elimination of one of the fundamental principles that makes the economy tick.

Ahem.

(op. cit. stark staring decisis, in tres partes omnia Gallia…)

(I’m going as Bricker for the SDMB Halloween Party. But how do you dress up like a lawyer? I only have the one funeral/wedding suit, and, besides, in a suit I look like, you know, “the defendant will rise”. Not the same suit. But still. But I digress…)

The first, it would appear, concerns the interpretation of contracts, and is, so far as our concerns, a trivial matter. It is the second that most directly chaps our collective hide. The 1886 one.

Even if we accept the earlier date, as problematic as that is…just a second. Bricker, if I may borrow your semantic parsing tweezers… that is dated to 1819, which is not even two centuries!

You walk in with a Star of David embossed urn in one hand and a clipboard with a checklist in the other. Then you tell everyone that they should all stop complaining because the paperwork was in order.

-Joe