This should not be necessary, but I observe right wing blogs blissfully unaware of what has been going on, so, a list:
- Astroturf: Large protests consist mostly of students sent in by their professors, and employees sent in by their employers. The routine day to day organizing is by people employed by government unions and ngos, who theoretically are not paid to protest, but are somehow at the protest day after day while their employer continues to pay them. Both the government unions, and the ngos, receive their money from the government. Ngo employment, despite the name Non Governmental Organization, is listed as government employment in the job ads. The people at the camps however, are only about half or a third astroturf – if you don’t count free food, free laundry service, free camping gear and a free campsite as payment. If you count that as payment, they are all astroturf.
- Confrontation Theater: Fake conflicts are staged with the collaboration of authorities, so that they can appear to be a formidable force. Thus, for example, when they “blockaded†Oakland port, what shut down the port was not that it was blockaded, but that the people who normally work in the port had been sent away by the city government to blockade it. In another infamous Oakland example, the protestors were removed from the park with great drama and thousands of police, only to be immediately re-admitted. Similarly with the fake occupation of London. The tents are just there for show. Only a handful of protestors remain at night. The cleaning staff could just clean up the mess and throw the tents in the trash, if they chose to do so. Note that when these guys attempted to occupy important symbols of capitalism, businesses had no difficulty removing occupiers with a handful of security guys and very little drama. They also had no difficulty making sure that if any protestors got hurt in the process, they got hurt off camera. Similarly, observe that it takes only a handful of rentacops to remove these guys, but it somehow takes thousands of police
- Vandalism and Assault:In the Oakland protest as they marched down the street they did not only attack Whole Foods, but numerous businesses. If it was not occupied by defenders, they attacked
- Cowardice: They attempted to blockade Americans for Prosperity, while the police displayed curious lack of interest. Americans for Prosperity sallied forth to lift the blockade. In the ensuing dust up, OWS seriously injured only an old lady, while Americans for Prosperity injured only healthy young males. If any young males on the Americans for Prosperity side got hurt, they were manly enough not to make a fuss about the matter. See also target selection above in the Oakland march.
- Social dysfunction. Their camps stink of filth, and are unsafe. When the boy scouts camp, it works. When the Tea Party holds a protest, they leave behind no mess. You can tell the occupiers are subhuman by the odor.
- Snobbery: A major issue with occupiers is unemployment and under employment, as one might expect of those attracted by free food and free place to crash. Those of them that are not employed in the virtue industry are only interested in virtue employment, which is to say, high status employment. Joe the Puppeteer does not want to paid by people who want to watch puppets. He wants to be paid by the state. Joe the Plumber makes good money, but is low status. Joe the Puppeteer is, alas, temporarily between grants, but holds the qualification “Master of Fine Arts”, which not only makes him high status, and not only makes him too high status to do plumbing, but also makes him too high status to attempt entertain paying customers with his puppets.
If I had a blog, I would link to this.
You should add effeminacy to their list of sins.
I get that feeling, but cannot point to any very concrete evidence. The drug dealers, the “internal security” force, and the Muslims look masculine enough. Can you point to some evidence?
Well, they won’t work. Man was made to work (Gen 2:15). They are fundamentally anarchists. Man was made to impose order in his various spheres of influence (Gen 1:28).
Demographically, the men there are all dead-ends because they choose to be that way.
Masculinity, as I’m sure you’ll agree, is based on much more than appearances. The guys I know that spend the most time trying to look the part have the hardest time getting their act together and tend to be high-emotion/high-drama. OWS is a pretty high-emotion/high-drama movement; the males in it are all acting out their feelings and turning off their intellects.
“Down-twinkles” and “Up-twinkles.” Not even the dweebiest nerds I went to school with back in the Dark Ages (BC – Before Cable) would have come up with and/or agreed to shit like that.
Having anarchist sympathies (not left-anarchist sympathies; I have no love for the martyred murderer Durrurti) I wince every time I hear the word “anarchist” applied to the tie-dyed battalions of the OWS. There’s nothing even remotely anarchist about their program. The model for the “black bloc” (so often loudly, if ambigously, deplored by the OWS mouthpieces, so quietly useful for provided the threat behind the high-minded rhetoric.) is certainly not Lysander Spooner – it’s the Red Guards and the Maoist Cultural Revolution. In the sixties Maoism was the hip totalitarism among the idealistic youth of that day, not Stalinism. The Cultural Revolution was vast repression carried out as a rebellion. This is not hypocrisy or false labeling on Mao’s part; if you accept the Maoist world view then repression is a revolutionary act. (If rebelliion turned against Mao then it could only be counter-revolution and reaction) Mao was perfectly sincere when he said that the people have a right to rebel – but you must remember that by definition only Maoists are the people. A true revolutionary makes his own definitions and imposes them on reality, a process usually producing rivers of blood.
And so the spectacle of anarchists defying authority and asserting their right to rebel — a rebellion which is, to us, on behalf of what could only be unending and unlimited tyranny. The casual way in which even many conservatives dismiss OWS as a pack of confused childish hippies is frustrating to me. The OWS is in reality an extremely sinister development, and could become a very real threat. They certainly are not harmless idealists.
You will recall that when the black bloc is present, the police are absent – telling us that the same authority commands both.
As you say, the black bloc is exactly as anti authoritarian as the red guards were.
[…] decadent clashing in confusion and darkness with the marginally more competent and serious. The Occupy movement prefigures the future conflict, which is why I have more hope in rentacops and mercenaries, than in the regular […]