New York metero contains 15 million people. There are probably more people there having appendectomies today than “protesting”.
From this comment thread.
My thoughts on “occupy” below the fold.
I liked reading Lex’s thoughts when the Occupy movement started in Chicago. The people seemed intelligent. Unfortunately it took just a couple of weeks for the entire movement to get co-opted by leftists and other agitators and now “Occupy” has officially jumped the shark. They are now disrupting traffic, creating unsanitary conditions, trashing parks, destroying private property and acting basically like a bunch of idiots. I was done with them a while ago, but I am thinking that most normal adults now are looking at these people and hoping they all just go home and take a bath at this point.
I believe that the arctic cold, unsanitary conditions and flu season will wipe “Occupy” out in the northern climates pretty soon, and we will only see “Occupy” in the West and South. Sorry San Diego and Miami.
It was a good idea, ruined by the same old claptrap idology of the left. When you have guys like Ayers giving lectures to the Occupiers, you know what is going to happen.
I’m content to see them continue to alienate the majority of the voters. I remember 1968 quite well.
why was it a good idea?protesting against a perceived injustice whilst having a limited understanding of justice is indeed protesting for injustice.
In a similar vein, I saw an article over the weekend that had an estimate of the number of ‘Occupiers’ by city across the country and was struck by the fact that more people attended the Illinois Class 6 high school football district championship game a few blocks down the street from me last Saturday than were at all of the Occupations combined that day.
I really want to get over to one of their general assemblies in Chicago and see what kind of impression I get this time.
The good guys should have flooded the zone with smiles, hand-shakes, conversation, accurate descriptions of what is going on around here, and free market teach-ins.
We might have successfully coopted much of it. The kids were up for grabs.
Too bad. It was a lost opportunity.
I remember some years ago going to a 2nd Amendment rally with 8-10,000 people – not even mentioned on our news media.
But get 10-20 on a street corner with their cause célèbre and it is on the front page.
Michael I too remember 1968. Unfortunately Occupy will be forgotten by the time the election rolls around.
My guess is that Occupy will mutate, evolve, regroup, reconceotualize. Having to go indoors for the Winter may be necessary skull session they need to take things to a new and more effective stage. We may be seeing the end of an initial phase, but only a phase. I suspect Occupy or its offshoots will be around for a long time.
I couldn’t see how continuing it helped Bloomberg.
Michael – my sporadic memory does recall a political cartoon during the 1968 election – Nixon and Agnew are strolling with demonstrators tossing what-not at them and both are smiling, counting the voters.
Robert – I am not so sure. I don’t believe these demonstrations, apparently funded by the unions, will wane – some people are making a big miscalculation on what the public sentiment is (certainly not me ;-) )
I don’t believe these will be isolated but continue sporadically.
Just read that the Treasury Dept estimated the cost to the taxpayers of bailing out GM was $23 Billion.
No wonder the unions like Obama.
Lexington Green – You seem to be assuming that the fix wasn’t in from the very beginning. Go look at adbusters and tell me the fix wasn’t in from the very inception of OWS. We would have had to do more than just show up to flood the zone. We’d also have to take over the organizing of it, the role that adbusters played.
Gavin – there is a lot of injustice in the way the US is currently being run. Sarah Palin is one of the only (the only?) politicians to address this. Lex has done a post or two on the subject. It is part of what Occupy was about, when it started. Now, I have absolutely no clue what these idiots are doing out there besides causing trouble and getting sick.
Bill Brandt – “But get 10-20 on a street corner with their cause célèbre and it is on the front page.” This is certainly part of why it is getting media coverage. Ann Althouse also put forth what I think is a valid theory – that this is going on right down the street from most of the major media hubs in New York. It is easy to dispatch a camera crew there.
TML, whatever Adbusters wanted to do, I met a bunch of the people and know for a fact that many of them were young, naive, poorly informed and educable. These garherings occurred in open public places and literally anyone could have walked in. I saw it myself. The people who got it started were one group, the mob of people who initially showed up were a mixed bag. The response, or rather non-response, from conservatives or libertarians or the TEA Party was a missed opportunity. The big problem is that the American Right wants to be in favor of economic liberty liberty and has a hard time understanding that corrupt, rent seeking crony capitalists are political enemies, and are Mr. Obama’s biggest supporters. Not every private business is a good guy.
Twice in the last month I’ve bicycled downtown to take the pulse of the local OWS group. Lex Green’s “what an opportunity” expresses part of what swirled in my mind. I pondered showing up with a white board, tripod stand, markers, and offering some free market classes on the very subjects I expected (and my visits confirmed) were high on OWS concerns. Maybe I’d find an audience of folks bored from just milling around.
Still weighing the idea. I found the locals concerned about gov’t transfer of wealth, but utterly naive about what drove that transfer. Eg: the complicated string of events from gov’t mandated home loans, the loan market headaches, the taxpayer funded bailouts. not just the last of which involved prison sentence level corruption. At a far more basic level, I found: people who thought of business as boss rather than servant; people who would use the word “poor” and not realize the puzzles attached to America’s “poor” being the 1% for the world; people who looked at someone working for a low wage and insist that person deserved more-regardless of that person’s life choices which resulted in their being able to command no more than an entry level job. All fertile ground for solid teaching. Next question was whether position bias would make it impossible for the intended audience to even contemplate much less accomplish a paradigm shift. After all, folks, that’s what we’re discussing, a Kuhnian revolution. My initial, limited sampling of just one locale suggests a tough task.
On the other hand, what are the alternatives? How do we avoid the calamity that DeToqueville predicted, where the USA fails because democracy enables the masses to attempt voting wealth into existence?
I now see OWS as in their Communist Agitator BootCamp phase. They are training thier soldiers, and selecting some officers. Martial music (drum beat), drugs, violence, hate, agitprop, groupthink … etc.
Mark Levin has been calling them BrownShirts.
Based on living conditions, you would have to be very dedicated (brainwashed) to their cause to stick around for more than a few days.
The new problem:
The BootCamp phase is ending.
On the Right, you have a Libertarian storyline that appeals to the winner, the lucky, or those that aspire to become such. Pushed to its extreme, this storyline provides cover for economic predation that extracts rather than improves, often through the use of the coercive power. Outrage caused by such predation has triggered counter-action that takes down both extractive predator and improving innovator indiscriminately.
On the Left, you have a Liberal storyline that appeals to the loser, the luckless, or those that fear becoming such. Pushed to its extreme, this storyline provides cover for economic predation that extracts rather than improves, often through the use of coercive power. Outrage caused by such predation has triggered counter-action that takes down both extractive predator and improving innovator indiscriminately.
If you lay out the specifics of both storylines side by side and present them to the American people as choice A and choice B, the American people always choose C, all of the above. Denying the existence of C, as both extreme Libertarian and Liberal do in their fevered frantic search for eschatological purity, leads to the violent see-sawing from one extreme of the spectrum to the other we’ve seen since 2006. The electorate keeps digging through the manure pile in the dogged (if unrealistic) hope that there must be a pony in their somewhere. Meanwhile, nothing gets done about the one storyline subplot that elite America has a unanimous consensus on: at all costs, the extractive trough must be filled.
The winning storyline will protect the aspirations of the winner or the lucky while assuaging the fear of the loser or the luckless. It will find a golden mean that strikes a happy balance between the ambitions of the striving few while buying off anxieties of the just getting by many.
Good luck with that.
The occupier movement is a media puff job whose underlying purpose has always been to organize a street level group of activists who will show up as directed to protest and disrupt future conservative political events, as they have already done in a couple of instances.
This coming election cycle, 2012 and beyond, will be the focus of increasingly disruptive and violent clashes by this group, and its sympathizers in the unions and colleges, especially if the tea party candidates and ideas seem to be gaining strength.
People keep talking about the 60’s, but it’s the street warfare of the 20’s and 30’s here and in Europe that we are heading for as this leftist “strike force” targets anyone who threatens the progressive agenda.
As a footnote, be prepared for the media cover-up of these vandals’ excesses to continue, and become even more grotesque if there are open clashes with attendees at tea party rallies. Violence will ALWAYS be the tea party’s fault, and this bunch will always be the “peaceful protesters” who were attacked by tea party thugs.
Some insight on the NYC OWS crowd:
http://www.theblaze.com/stories/jon-stewart-reveals-segregation-class-warfare-in-the-occupy-movement/
Enjoy. :-)
Bee quips that the upper class elites have a library and expreso machines, while the “downwardly mobile” have their drum circles. According to some of the west-enders, those living in the east-end are making decisions without consulting everyone in the park.
“So let me get this straight,” Bee says to one of the protesters. “You’ve been here eight weeks and you already have a ghetto?” The dialogue is classic.
Sounds like a Lord of the Flies moment…
Nothing, and I mean nothing was more annoying than the drum circles at the Wisconsin “protests”. I don’t know how those people could stand it. It was making me nuts. So loud and utterly ridiculous.