Tag: occupy

Street Art Watch: we have met the enemy, and it is… pulling out a checkbook?

This is not an easy piece to summarize fully – the bare bones is that it’s about Banksy, an anonymous street artist struggling to reconcile the paradox that good art about people not being able to make it in this world often allows the artist to make it in this world* – but the conclusion is of interest in its own right:

…the language of resistance — of the vanguard on the streets leading the way — is the language of the elite. Banky’s adolescent messages reflect the adolescence of his audience. His audience likes the images they believe he paints of them:  as childlike idealists fighting against villains, but how do they fight? All they do is scramble from museum piece to museum piece, hoping to see it before guards or rival street artists arrive. It is a game for children, like those in Banky’s art, a treasure hunt for the idle rich.

The old game between workers, artists, and institutions is over, and the institutions have won. Continue reading Street Art Watch: we have met the enemy, and it is… pulling out a checkbook?

#rsrh #ows So, how did that sonic cannon thing work out?

Apparently last night/early this morning the Chicago cops sent out a Long Range Acoustic Device, or LRAD, to disperse the rioters… excuse me, the ‘peaceful protesters*’.  If you’ve never seen one of these before, well, that probably means that you’re more used to activism on the Tea Party model.  Oddly enough, the police rarely if ever need to use crowd-suppression devices on crowds that end their protests by cleaning up all their loose trash and depositing it in the nearest public waste receptacle.

Think about that, ye Occupiers.  Also: the hygienic and social advantages of soap and deodorant.

Moe Lane Continue reading #rsrh #ows So, how did that sonic cannon thing work out?

#rsrh QotD, It’s About Time The Occupation Movement Died, Frankly edition.

Walter Russell Mead, writing the epitaph of the Occupiers:

To some degree, [the Occupy movement] was killed by its “friends.” The tiny left wing groups that exist in the country jumped all over the movement; between them and the deranged and occasionally dangerous homeless people and other rootless wanderers drawn to the movement’s increasingly disorderly campsites, OWS looked and sounded less and less like anything the 99 percent want anything to do with. At the same time, the movement largely failed to connect with the African American and Hispanic churchgoers who would have to be the base for any serious grass roots urban political mobilization. The trade unions picked up the movement briefly but dropped it like a hot brick as they found the brand less and less attractive.

It is as if the Tea Party had been taken over by the Aryan Brotherhood and delusional vagrants while failing to connect with either evangelical Christians or respectable libertarians. The MSM at one point was visibly hungering and thirsting for exactly that fate of marginalization to happen to the Tea Party, and the MSM did its klutzy best to tar the Tea Party with that kind of Mad Hatter extremism. The Tea Partiers by and large (not always or cleanly) escaped the fatal embrace of the nutters and the ranters on their side of the spectrum; OWS was occupied by its own fringe, and so died.

Continue reading #rsrh QotD, It’s About Time The Occupation Movement Died, Frankly edition.

#rsrh Glenn Reynolds offers a syllabus for classes on the Occupiers.

And it is subtly, entertainingly vicious, too.  I don’t quite feel comfortable excerpting any single one of them, so let me give you some of the suggested course titles:

  • The Higher Education Bubble and Debt Slavery Throughout History. This one is particularly subversive, since it’s aimed at the universities themselves (Glenn is a law professor at the University of Tennessee).
  • Bourgeois vs. Non-Bourgeois Revolutions: A Comparison and Contrast. This one would get the most broad-spectrum screaming.
  • The Fragility of Public Health.  Now this one was just mean.  Depressingly accurate, but mean.

So – ahem – read the whole thing.  You might as well, because there’s not a chance in Perdition that anything like these classes will be taught in our current academic atmosphere.  At least, not in Establishment academia…

(H/T: Hot Air Headlines)

Moe Lane

#rsrh Have we found an #occupy movement *too* stupid…

…to be allowed to auto-Darwinate?  You make the call:

Saturday marks the two-month anniversary for the Occupy Fairbanks movement. Instead of the police crackdowns seen elsewhere around the country, the Interior Alaska protesters are contending with punishing cold and local grumbling about the legality of warm-up tents.

Brent Baccala, a 41-year-old self-described preacher and software designer from Maryland, continued his vigil at Veterans Memorial Park sporting a donated Northern Outfitters blue suit and matching boots Friday. He slept in the nearby tent as overnight temperature dropped to minus 36, Thursday, three degrees cooler than the record low for that date, set in 1969.

(Via @SonnyBunch) Minus 36.  As I understand it, winter in Fairbanks, Alaska lasts seven months.  I gather that the local Occupiers are somehow impressed with a mental group hallucination that thinks that screaming about imaginary corporate conspiracies is a viable way to spend one’s life, but I’m more curious about whether this qualifies for what the local equivalent is to a 72-hour psychological observation. Continue reading #rsrh Have we found an #occupy movement *too* stupid…

Occupy Charlotte burns the American flag.

Yeah, I know: “Occupy WHO?” Still, there are people out there who take the dirty hippie wannabees seriously, so every so often there needs to be a refresher post. In this case, the aforementioned dirty hippie wannabees managed to illegally* burn an American flag and got arrested for it. With the Occupiers screaming epithets about fascists all the while.

Mind you, the geniuses were apparently doing the burning in the middle of their own squatters’ encampment. Which suggests that ‘fascist’ is semantically equivalent to ‘not willing to let dirty hippie wannabes auto-darwinate** themselves and their ilk;’ and before you renounce the ‘fascist’ label hereby, consider that permitting these idiots to immolate themselves would result in a very nasty cleanup job for some poor sanitation workers. To say nothing of the paperwork.

(Via Power Line, via Instapundit)

Moe Lane (crosspost)

Continue reading Occupy Charlotte burns the American flag.

ILWU backpeddling from job-killing Occupy attack on West Coast?

Background (H/T: Instapundit) next Monday there is supposed to be an organized shutdown of the West Coast’s port facilities by the Occupy movement – if you’re wondering why the heck they’re going after port facilities, it’s because the Occupy movement has a lot of anti-globalization sorts in it these days, and those people hate free trade with a passion that normal people reserve for rapists – and supposedly said shutdown would be supported by the private sector unions that would be immediately affected by it.  Most important one? The International Longshore & Warehouse Union (ILWU).  The Occupiers are expecting the ILWU’s support in their shutdown.

Witness the solidarity! Continue reading ILWU backpeddling from job-killing Occupy attack on West Coast?

#rsrh Boston sets midnight deadline for Occupy Boston.

Yesterday a Bostonian court decided that the Occupiers’ occupation was not in fact protected by the First Amendment; today Boston mayor Thomas Menino lowered the boom.  The Occupiers have until midnight to disperse their illegal encampment, or the city of Boston will do the dispersal for them.  It’s yet to be determined whether they’re going to go quietly; although that may be more to do with the Occupiers’ inability to actually do anything useful with their time than anything else.

Which is probably why Democrats across the land have decided to gut the Occupy movement.  You simply can’t get these people to accomplish anything.  They apparently can’t even elect progressive candidates to Congress; at least, they’re showing no signs of moving in that direction (unlike, say, the Tea Party).