When Occupy gets its own cable news network, we can open that discussion.
It doesn’t take great insight to point out something so self-evidently incoherent. I hate to deprive you of the pleasure of working through it yourself. But I will carry on.
These are weasel words par excellence. The author doesn’t even take responsibility for this argument. Instead, he asserts that somehow it must be an inescapable conclusion of a reasonable person and not the opinion of a self-interested hack. This doesn’t insult your intelligence?
The author has not exactly gone to great lengths to convince us first that such mischaracterization even exists. The best he does is this:
He may feel very passionately that this myth has somehow been debunked. But lots of adverbs and an assertion of objectivity do not make it so. Nothing has been “completely and utterly debunked,” and there certainly have been no “objective” assessments of any kind.
But we do have some facts. The movement is small: more people pack themselves into the AMC on 42nd street over the course of a weekend than have been in Liberty Park for the past month. The movement is not all spoiled white kids, but the incidence of such people is a lot higher here than in the general population. I live in Manhattan, teach at NYU, and work part time in the financial district. I can walk a few blocks and see it with my own eyes. Some of my students have been occupiers.
But this isn’t even the worst part of the argument.
This is a really extraordinary claim. This movement, such as it is, puts out a torrent of information about itself constantly. It takes about 30 minutes of effort and the internet to learn a huge amount about OWS. There is simply no cost at all. Yet somehow this fool claims that the entire monolithic mainstream media just can’t be bothered. Somehow it can be bothered to do the minimum level of information-gathering to run the usual daily bullshit human interest stories. It certainly bestirred itself to cover, in exhausting detail, how an “organic democratic process” worked in Egypt. Plenty of journalists were on the ground in Cairo, which presumably is farther away from anywhere in the US than NYC. The author presumes somehow that this movement different insofar as the usual things that motivate the media just fail to apply. He relies on the head-nodding of the flock to accept it without even the slightest whiff of analysis. He must think we’re really stupid.
Plenty of talking heads have suggested that OWS find leaders, etc, because that actually works. Organization and structure kept the Tea Party electorally effective and in the news for years. If anything, the media just wants to keep the story alive, and that means keeping people in Liberty Park, not ignoring them. OWS is getting so boring in the US that now, all the big protest news is from Europe, where the protesters’ actual political beliefs have almost nothing in common with their counterparts in the US. Either way, the author is a sneaky weasel-worder, he fails to motivate monolithic action by the mainstream media, and for the love of God, he’s a real estate and finance consultant. Shouldn’t he be up against the wall?
Clearly, the author of the piece has a viewpoint, clearly, so do you. Nothing wrong with that, save perhaps the quibble that your claim to an objective viewpoint is no more valid than his. He claims the OWS is misrepresented by the media as a bunch of bongo-banging misfits. You claim that his objective analysis is flawed because they really are a bunch of etc.
For instance, this objective observation:
I can entirely understand how you can know someone is white by casual observation, but how do you know that they are “spoiled”? And where do you derive the data than enables you to make a comparison to the general population?
True the Tea Party did a meravelous job of organizing. Seems as though in a matter of days they had leaders like Dick Armey, tour buses, professional event organizers, web sites, press releases, conventions. Boy, for a nascent grass-roots movement, they sure gathered up some money in a big ass hurry, didn’t they? Just goes to show you what good ol’ American self-reliance can do, huh? Huh?
I can quite agree that his viewpoint is biased, but you seem to be eager to imply that he is lying, which is a bridge too far. Your criticism is no more empirical than his analysis, and there’s nothing wrong with that, so long as you don’t try to pretend otherwise.
You touch on an interesting question, in passing. You offer to bolster your authority by pointing out that some of your students are OWS. How many students you got in the Tea Party? And what is the ratio of spoiled white kids to just plain old kids?
My own observations are an aside. They are not necessary to my argument. I personally think he’s wrong that the OWS movement has been mischaracterized, but that’s not even what makes this a bad piece.
This is a bad piece because he presumes the motivation for the media without proof and then uses it to explain the media’s behavior. This motivation, that somehow the entire mainstream media can’t be bothered to understand OWS, makes no sense. Even if we believe that the media has somehow mischaracterized the movement, I cannot believe that somehow the entire institution has willfully refused to spend 30 minutes on twitter learning anything about the movement because the media routinely invests a huge amount of time investigating much stupider shit than this. There seems to be no good explanation for this. Like I said, I think the media’s incentive is not to ignore the story or be frightened by the movement but to keep it in the news.
The author makes a causal argument: the media mischaracterizes the movement because it refuses to learn about OWS and at the same time, is scared of OWS. It seems quite unlikely that these two propositions can both be true at the same time. The author assumes without proof that the mischaracterization is true. He presumes a motive for the media that is completely at odds with observed behavior. Even if the mischaracterization were true, the argument still falls apart because the causal explanation is incoherent.
None of these things is dependent on my personal observations. Those just add some color and an alternative viewpoint.
I can’t ever really know if someone is spoiled. But I think you can make really good guesses about people by talking to them. Perhaps the entire world is more spoiled than I think it is. Mine is not a scientific claim, and I think it more than meets the standards of an everyday inference.
I don’t believe the Tea Party myths any more than I believe OWS. Both feed from the same populist trough, and both represent a far narrower band of interests than they would like the rest of the world to believe. 99%, my foot.
There’s nothing wrong with bias. The guy writes for HuffPo. I expect and want bias. The problem is that his causal argument is illogical, whether or not you accept the truth of the premise that he tries to explain.
Bolstering my authority? Good grief. Think about it as explaining my point of view.
To my knowledge, I have no students affiliated with the Tea Party. This is NYU. I do have several students who did not fit into their small, Tea Party towns and are very happy to be in New York. At least one of them is gay and took an enormous amount of shit for it growing up.
I have my suspicions about spoilage, but i will get back to you after I grade and return their midterms next week.
Completely false. All structural change is through revolution and coup d’etat, not elections.
If I’m getting the your arguments correct, you think OWS is a flash in the pan because it hasn’t influenced an election.
My rebuttal is that there hasn’t been an election in the interim, so this point is asinine.
The other part of it seems to be that you think the Tea Party rallies were very large several months after they started being organized and that the turnout in OWS is small.
My rebuttal was that there just hasn’t been that much time since the OWS protests have started, and it would be more fair to compare to the Tea Party rallies at a similar stage in their development. And indeed, the initial Tea Party rallies were rather small. And, do you seriously not remember how camera angles and such were manipulated to make them appear better attended than they actually were? Heck, this still goes on with Tea Party rallies.
You could just as easily say that democracy in the US was doomed to failure in 1795 because the UK had a stable functioning government for hundreds of years, while the colonies were a bunch of yokels who had only experienced it for a few years.
As I recall, there were indeed several people who made this claim. The argument is ridiculous because the a definitive comparison cannot actually be made until more time has passed.
After we had a revolution here, we completely restructured national government through lawful electoral means, setting up a system where it will always be easier (and almost always safer) for discontented factions to get what they want that way than any other.
You really think there’s ever going to be another revolution here?
The system has been corrupted to help the few over the masses of people. There are ways to change things inside the system, but the powerful have taken them over. We have little recourse in polite politics.
A revolution like France may not happen ,but the discontent with what our country is becoming is real. The occupations are a message. The repubs are not only not listening but berating the messengers. It may not be wise.
Well leaving aside MSNBC, there’s that network Al Gore started, the one Keith Olbermann’s on, or did that disappear already?
Jon Stewart Rips Into GOP Hypocrisy on 99%ers
As per usual, Jon gets it in one.
Ten years ago I would have said it was unthinkable and anyone who thought otherwise was a nutjob. Now I am not so sure. I can imagine some states going bankrupt, perhaps in the Southwest or California, serving as the catalyst.
Same story with the EU: I can envision two or more countries walking and reinstalling their own currencies so as to control their own liquidity and money policy. And I’m not the only one, either. You can see exactly what the market thinks by getting a quote on the Euro Break-up Index from World Spread (traded on the LSE): http://www.worldspreads.com/en/Spread-Betting-with-Us/spread-betting-offers/euro-break-up.aspx. Bid and ask are still between 1 and 2 years but I think that is high…
Nice user name/post combo.
The TPers got coopted and neutered almost instantly to serve as another tool in conventional politics. Not sure why anyone would brag about that. I guess that’s the best one can hope for in the current system. Otherwise protests are only good for picking up the opposite sex (you’ll impress her if you get tazed, bro).
Looks like Occupy Oakland is taking the lead on the press. ________ Wall Street what?
Nothing like a vet with a fractured skull to trump a kitchen strike.