Are there any significant occupations ongoing?
Have their plans for the political conventions been announced?
Apparently they’re planning something for May Day.
They’re occupied with something else.
Does that me they’re pre-occupied?
Wow that’s Tuesday. I hadn’t heard… must not be on their mailing list.
Don’t the Communists usually do something on May Day too?
May Day is celebrated as International Workers’ Day in 80 countries (but not this one, we had to put our “Labor Day” in September for some reason), so, yeah.
I predict a lot of well-meaning earnest people will come out and march, and then a small contingent of violent dickheads will spoil it for everyone.
Again.
Because we were afraid of the communist association with May Day, and needed something else to preempt it.
Certainly what I would expect, been a pattern going back to Bad Old Days. But it seems to me that this last set of Occupy protests bent the paradigm a bit, the attention whoring shit disturbers were much less in evidence. And I think I may know why.
The first Occupy gatherings were more or less spontaneous, propagated by Twitter, Inyer Facebook, so on. Not through the “traditional” lefty conduits, which had two beneficial effects. First off, it reached people who do not pay attention to standard political activity, who are not advised through political outlets, left or right. As a result, the asshole fringe was just as uninformed and clueless as the rest of us.
Second, it allows a more non-political discussion. As it happens, most of these problems, if not all, are the result of rightish ideology. That’s a true fact, you could look it up. But by eschewing “agenda” and ideology, Occupy got to concentrate on publicizing the problems, without necessarily offering a solution, or offering the solution.
Progressivism is, to one degree or another, a matter of faith. We believe that reasonable and well meaning people, given the facts, will come to very similar conclusions as we have, since we are reasonable and well meaning people. Of course, its taking a lot longer than we thought…
But, if we can simply lay out the problem of too much money in too few hands, the solution to that problem is bound to be somewhat progressive. In our outreach, we may not need to assert our solutions in order to get people activated and relevant. We don’t need an agenda. We simply need to state the problems clearly, and let non-political people go through the reasoning processes so that they arrive where we are already sitting, waiting.
Progress by stealth. People are suspicious of agenda, as well they might be. Occupy activities were relentlessly mocked for lacking a clear and stated agenda, but maybe they are on to something, there.
Bear in mind that no violent dickheads spoiled the first OWS occupation, except those wearing blue uniforms.
I deliberately did not exclude members of the police force from the category of “violent dickheads”. I haven’t forgotten Ian Tomlinson.
I expect what the Occupiers are doing, but that sounds all kinds of assholish.
The weird thing is that May Day was chosen to honor the Haymarket Riot, which happened here in the USA in 1886, in Chicago. But we’re one of the countries that doesn’t make a big deal about it.
:rolleyes: Like the Great American Boycott was assholish?
If you go to the occupier’s website (at least in Seattle), it’s not too unclear that they’re mostly lead by Socialists.
There is absolutely nothing significant about this “movement”. They’ve accomplished nothing, and they aren’t going to accomplish anything.
The only thing less significant than being talked about is not being talked about. You’re talking about them. But they ain’t talking about you. Oscar Wilde said a similar thing about squash, but seems never to have mentioned broccoli.
Would you say the same thing about the Tea Party? Because the Occupy movement is everything that the Tea Party claims to be.
No it isn’t. The Tea Party, for good or ill, is a political force to be reckoned with. They have organization, and more importantly, money. They’ve parlayed that into actually electing candidates to pursue their agenda.
Meanwhile, the Occupy folks have managed to…camp in parks. They have no organization, no money, and no influence with anybody that matters.
As someone that’s attended a general assembly and talked to various people at the Occupy protests, this is precisely the difference between the two protests. I would say no candidate requiring independent funding would support such a movement, but I suppose Elizabeth Warren did so indirectly. The issue seems clear: corporate advertisers would not benefit from an Occupy candidate and would not support the exposure of reasonable arguments by them to a general public. Unless one holds that all mainstream views are encapsulated by the range of broadcast media in the US and a lack of favourable hearings to Occupy is a conspiracy theory.
That said, Occupy has at least seeped through into the public conscious, with resignations over their right to protest from Giles Fraser for instance.