I wasn’t aware of the connection but it makes perfect sense that the most self-cancelling group/publication of the last 25 years was the feeble spark that set Occupy (the most ineffectual large-scale movement in the last 100 years) in motion.
The only culture AdBusters jam is their own.
I imagine motives varied with the individual, but free food, people not treating them like lepers, and a chance to tell their story to people actively listening and the media would probably factor into the appeal.
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Here in Rochester, it wasn’t as confrontational as I read in a lot of the national accounts when the crack downs started.
There were two major arrest sprees where the administration tried to clear out a sparsely utilized park we occupied. With the high crime rate here, this was a really poor utilization of police.
The mayor at the time was a man of practical bent, so he negotiated a “truce”, designating what part of the park could be occupied.
The community was pretty supportive so it was kind of like camping with better amenities ( At least I haven’t had free pizza/chinese/BBQ delivered to my tent flap before) and most of the protesters who did regular shifts stuck it through the winter. But not being paid career politicians, eventually you have to get on with your life and attendance started petering off during the next spring/summer.
Being fairly apolitical prior to this, it was an educational, eye opening time for me. I enjoyed talking with occupiers, spectators, even the cops about current social/civic/economic issues.
This video sums up my response to your posts.
Ah, I wish I’d seen that before I posted that youtube link. Its cool. The Vietnam war escalated under LBJ drastically, but the US was involved (on a small scale) as far back as Eisenhower.
I covered the occupy movement for one of the print pubs here in DFW. I spent a lot of time talking to them, attending meetings etc. My observation – primarily of the movement around here.
The people involved early on were a wide variety. There were a lot of educated, employed, business owners, etc. There were also a lot of hippies and anarchistic types.
Anyone could speak up. They invited everyone to participate, including the Tea party. The tea party responded by showing up at one end of the park and yelling insults and while the occupiers were distracted another group would show up and dump trash around the camp and take photos of it. Some of the occupy Dallas people have video of them doing it.
The idea was to get everyone who was dissatisfied with the way things were going together, and come up with a plan on how to fix the things they agreed on. Not a bad idea, but that lead to the whole “they don’t know/can’t agree what they are protesting thing”.
The police in Dallas, when they let homeless people out of jail would send them to the occupy camp. Pretty soon there were a significant group of homeless there. Then they would bust them for alcohol.
The reasonable people who started the thing off were pretty quickly pushed aside by the black helicopter/tin foil hat types. Most of them that I got to know when it started gave up in disgust and moved on. Last time I checked the facebook page it was mostly anti-Obama stuff right off of either Fox News or Prison Planet.
They accomplished a few things, but nothing too significant. If they had found some way to keep the really crazy ones out, it might have worked. But the crazy people had more time and energy.
I think this might be as simplistic and misdirecting as blaming the failure on organized labor and “socialist types.” However many loons each encampment attracted, the core failure was the majority of the group(s) - who made the inexplicable decision to be utterly passive, have no spokesmen or leaders, state no clear aims or goals, and let… what… a very large body of total inactivity carry their “message.”
As pointed out above, even the celebrated “passive” revolutionaries had deep-laid planning and very clear-cut goals. I don’t intend this as a baseless slam, but the Occupy crowd were idiots - dismissing everything but their own self-referential viewpoint, including the lessons of the last fifty successful social revolutions, many of whom were hated, feared and oppressed a hell of a lot more than the Occupiers.
They were kids playing war and thought that meant bringing a deck of cards.
No problem. If I could’ve I’d have deleted my post but I couldn’t. I was trying to make a joke with a serious side by referring to Clarke, but when I reread it I realize it came across as vastly more insulting than intended.
Anyway, we’re off-topic so I’ll just say for now we agree to disagree.
That’s not what I witnessed. They weren’t utterly passive, they often elected spokesmen when dealing with the media, with the government etc. They voted on and stated clear aims and goals, on the community level as well as what they would propose/support when it came time to meet up on a national level.
Also not what I witnessed. The problem is that the initial occupy events were more along the lines of a very public planning meeting to bring together as many people as possible to formulate clear cut goals. there were very intelligent people involved, and it was an interesting experiment that failed.
Far from dismissing everything but their own self-referential viewpoint, they were welcoming of EVERY viewpoint and lesson. That was part of the problem.
And you would be hard pressed to find a group that met with a more organized and dedicated oppression. The police response, despite being filmed, was brutal, and it was more organized and effective than response during the 60s’. The police have learned a thing or two since the 60’s.
Respectfully, if you think the police response to the privileged white kids of the Occupy was remotely as brutal, dedicated, or “oppressive” as the police response to black activists in the 1960s then you’re delusional.
White skin privilege is a real thing and the only people who don’t recognize this are fools or racists.
Hell, if Martin Luther King’s foot soldiers had behaved or dressed like the bitter white losers of the Occupy movement they’d have been slaughtered.
There’s a reason everyone knows about Kent State while mentions of Jackson State(which was vastly worse) sends people scurrying to google or wikipedia.
Not all the protesters of occupy were white, were kids, or privileged. There were people from all walks of life and ages. and yes, many of them were brutally beaten and gassed in large numbers.
For the most part, the occupiers I saw were pretty well behaved. Not particularly losers, Or bitter. (although there were some of each) I’m not saying there is no white skin privilege. It didn’t play much of a role here though.
Respectfully, saying the Occupiers weren’t all white is like complaining the Tea Partiers weren’t all-white.
Respectfully, you claimed they faced worse than the protesters of the 60s.
With all due respect, that is complete bullshit and borders on being grossly insulting.
No, they weren’t treated remotely as badly particularly when one factors in their own actions.
No, it isn’t.
No, I did not
It wouldn’t, if I had said it, and I didn’t.
Their own actions weren’t particularly bad. And they were treated very badly, often as bad or worse. I’m not sure how to score it or compare it but the violence directed at the occupiers on a large scale nationwide by law enforcement was severe, and most often against completely peaceful protesters.
Saying that these people were also brutalized does not minimize the suffering of people who came before them. Neither group deserved what happened to them.
Why, both groups were overwhelmingly white.
You certainly implied that in the below statement.
To everyone with a functioning brain it’s rather obvious you insisted the spoiled white chumps of the Occupy movement faced far worse opposition than the black activists of the 60s even though everyone who is not racist, stupid or both they faced far less.
Piece of advice. When you’re going to insist that you never insisted the bitter white losers of the Occupy movement weren’t treated worse than the black activists of the 60s you shouldn’t make such a statement.
It completely contradicts your claim.
The privileged white morons of Occupy Oakland threw molotov cocktails at police officers.
Did any of Martin Luther followers in Selma do that?
Do you consider throwing molotov cocktails at people “not particularly bad”?
Again, only morons or racists claim that the bitter white losers of the Occupy movement were treated as bad or worse by the police than the black activists of the 60s.
I’d recommend you stop pissing all over the graves of the victims of Jackson state or the bodies hauled from the rivers of Mississippi.
It reflects rather poorly on you.
Not nearly to the same degree. Occupy is/was a much more diverse movement.
No, that’s not what it says.
I said nothing of the sort and this isn’t the pit. most of the people I met in the occupy movement when I was covering it were not spoiled. Most of were working people of all races and ages who simply wanted to change things. They did it badl.
It does not. Often does not mean overall, nor does it mean always. it means often.
There were some people, mostly anarchist, who committed violent acts. there were people in the civil rights movement that did the same. That does not paint King in Selma with the same brush as the more violent protestors of that era. We could go back and forth all day with that and it would mean nothing.
Or people who know what they are talking about.
I’m not pissing on anyone’s grave. I’m just relaying what I observed.
You seem to have a pre-formed opinion about who the people in occupy were and what happened. I don’t know where you came to that conclusion, but I got my opinion of them by spending months interviewing, researching actually going to occupy camps and watching hundreds of hours of live video feeds from all over the country.
I think it reflects poorly on you to slander a group of people you don’t know. I have not done that.
I got to know a lot of these people. Many of them were smart, some of them were idiots, There were good points to the movement, and major failings. I take a realistic view of it, which is what I was paid to do.
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War? You were in drama when you were in school, weren’t you AB?
Have no issue with your statement on other groups being more grieviously oppressed, but you should really denote the rest of your statements as “My opinion”, and an erroneous ones at that.
Most Occupiers I spent time with were actually not hung up on " their own self referential veiwpoint", but were more concerned about events happening around them, not to them.
Nor were we overly young. I’m 50 and work as a software engineer. Where do I fit into your nice tidy dismissal?At my encampment, I’d say the breakdown went 20%college kids, 20 % poor/homeless and the rest older, steady employment/retired people.
As experienced by someone who was actually there, and not picking through news items for a pre-formed narrative that fit my world view. So yeah, you’d have nailed it in one if you’d just left it at,“Baseless slam”.
Thanks for the insights, bdgr. I had hopes for OWS and was sad to see them fail. Whatever mistakes they may have made, it sounds like concerted anti-OWS actions by vested interests was a big part of the problem.
I’m not writing from ignorance - of either Occupy, occupiers… or… wait for it… the much larger context of social protest and the history of its tactics and strategy. I have absolutely no doubt that the majority of occupiers were sincere and well-intended; that most of them were reasonably intelligent and educated into college levels; or that the problems they chose to address are real. We good on that?
What I, and most of the other disappointed types who have posted here, have a problem with is that these intelligent, motivated and sincere folks, who had a genuine and menacing enemy, took to the battlefield with the plan of… sitting around passively until something changed. A tactic that has never worked in the history of human conflict and historically results in the annihilation of the sitters. They had the examples of the last 100 years of social conflict to study and learn from, and chose not to - willfully chose not to, because “leaders are for the 1%” or some horseshit.
I think very little of things like the G8 protesters because they are pissing upwind and wouldn’t accomplish anything if they had tanks and tactical nukes. Occupy was the right time and right place for a mass uprising, and with the sort of leadership, planning and tactical intelligence of any successful movement in recent history could have truly changed our world. But no… they took the moment, and the opportunity, and in true anal-introspective passive tech-weenie style… completely pissed it away.
And yes, I do characterize it as a war; one they let the media define and then dismiss. And I am unsurprised to learn that the self-referential primate groomers from the AdBusters world were at the genesis of it all.
See, I don’t see them as sitting around passively. Maybe in some locations they did. But that was not what I observed. Not here, and not in the place I had contact with (both other journalists, and occupiers in other states).
Now if you mean passively in the since that they were unwilling to use violence–that was a given in most places. But they were quite active.
I’m hoping Pikey Pete will chime in here. He was covering it for one of the wires (IIRC) and actually went native and camped out on site with them (He’s younger, healthier and crazier than I am.). He has some interesting stories to tell. I sent him a facebook PM.