Tag: protests

The Ferguson protest movement: Ripe For The Plucking.

It’s like watching a horror movie, really. Admittedly, one where you’re not really emotionally invested in who lives and who dies, but there’s still that sense of Yeah, don’t go into the cellar.  Yup, you went into the cellar. Fine, let’s get this over with. Here we go:

The next move after expressing anger in the street is often the hard part for new civil rights groups. Do they seek changes in the law? Push to elect sympathetic candidates? Focus on winning over those who aren’t yet on their side? Or pull back from the moment and get radical, pressing for wholesale social change?

In Ferguson, many of the more than a dozen organizations that formed in the tear-gas clouds of August fragmented over the course of the fall. Conflicts flared over organizers who spent much of their time honing their profile on Twitter and attending an endless series of conferences on activism. Members of some new groups grumbled about leaders who seemed more interested in scoring airtime with Don Lemon on CNN or winning donations from wealthy celebrities than about recruiting poor people to their cause.

So… business as usual, then, for Left-protest groups? The next step is where those in the leadership who display the right combination of ambition and bootlicking get to join the establishment (and burnish their fifteen minutes of streetcred for the rest of their lives), while the husks of the movements all get taken over by the blackshirts and used to advocate a permanent, violent Marxist ideology. So it has always been done, and so it will always be done to the Left. Establishment Democrats and the blackshirts are, in fact, pretty good at this entire symbiotic predator/scavenger relationship: and, of course, killing and gutting new Leftist protest groups as they appear are a great way to keep them from doing something truly subversive, like successfully primary Establishment Democrats and win elections.

Which is, by the way, a measure for success that many in the Activist Left hates. Mostly because they just can’t seem to, you know, succeed at it*. Hopefully, they won’t figure out why for a good, long time.

(via @gabrielmalor)

Moe Lane (crosspost)

*I dunno. Go ask Eric Cantor whether the Tea Party movement still has any teeth.  …And while I wrote that out kind of facetiously, the truth of it is that Cantor went from being maybe the next Speaker of the House to an embryonic lobbyist in a single night. That’s the kind of power that Lefty street-level operatives crave. And that’s precisely the kind of power that their masters – word choice deliberate – in the Democratic party so carefully deny them.

#protip: Dear progressives: don’t wear an Obama shirt while burning an American flag.

Although I suppose that it’s an anti-Obama shirt. The problem for that jackass is the media ran with the picture where all you can read is the ‘OPE,’ and it certainly looks like the iconic HOPE picture, so: thanks a lot, moron.

No, seriously. Thanks a lot. I always appreciate it when America-hating fools make my life easier for me.

The inevitable internal conflict of all left-protests in one tweet.

Mostly one picture.

There we have it: a white progressive dude* puts on an ideologically-fraught, hyper-romanticized disguise and attempts to infiltrate a protest – and then use it as cover for said white progressive dude’s rather puerile and sad attempt to get back at Daddy for leaving him and Mommy by going out, and trying to break a piece of the world. The remarkable thing here is that the actual protesters made said pathetic man-child vandal stop. That automatically puts the Ferguson people one up on the antiwar movement, Greenies, animal rights groups, gun control activists, infosocialists, Occupiers, anti-GMO Luddites (sorry, but that’s what they are), and pretty much every other Left-group out there that’s ever been battened upon by the Professional Activist Left.

Won’t last, though. Once the blackshirts find your cause, it’s probably going to end up dying a withered, shriveled-up husk. Which isn’t really my problem, mind you.

Moe Lane

*Well, he’s not a conservative. We clean up after our protests. And he’s not a liberal: they typically …well, that would have been a mean thing to write, so I won’t.

So apparently the Activist Left did one of their patented pointless marches today.

Topic: that weird Apocalypse Climate religion thing. I’m largely indifferent, given that the best way to perpetually marginalize a cause is to let progressives take it over, but I was struck by something in the footage here…

…there was an awful lot of plastics, electronics, and synthetics in that crowd. Don’t those people understand why that stuff’s so cheapr?

Oregonian miners shocked to discover that Oregonian Democrats hate Oregonian mining.

Hey! Elections have consequences, Oregonians:

Hundreds of miners gathered Thursday on the steps of the Oregon Capitol Building to speak out against a plethora of bills that would restrict their livelihood. Through drizzling rain and cloudy skies, these working men and women held simple signs asking for a ‘no’ vote on the bills that would virtually destroy mining in the state of Oregon. One man held a sign that said “You’re taking my job away.”

…And there are going to be consequences to handing over control of the Oregon legislature to a political party that hates mining.  If I seem unforgiving about this, I am.  It’s well past time that people understood this: the Democratic party that once saw use or beauty in a mine or a dam is now DEAD.  It was murdered by a bunch of unemployable crypto-Marxists in the 1960s, and their descendents aren’t about to give up power any time soon.

I know that it’s weird to hear this from a Republican, but my dad was a railroad union man, so I feel personally comfortable saying it: vote your freaking class interests, you… people.

Moe Lane

Via

 

#rsrh Scenes from the Crass Muddle in Lower Broadway*.

I can’t tell for the life of me how Aaron Gell of the New York Observer was appalled by the level of sophistication, awareness, and/or revolutionary consciousness being shown by those goofy kids up there protesting Wall Street:

“What are you doing here?” we asked.

“Oh, we’re just here, like, you know, protesting what’s going on,” she replied.

“Cool, what specifically?” we asked.

“Everything going on, I mean. Take your pick!”

Her name was Jenna. We secretly hoped she was from Portland.

I mean, you can read it equally easily as being an appalled These kids are making a mockery of our country’s desperate need to put everybody on Wall Street into a giant wicker man and set it on fire in order to appease the incomprehensible Money Demons** or an amused appalled Wow, so this is what it’s like to think “these damn dirty hippies need to go find a real job.  Either way works for me, and while I wouldn’t wish the mindset of the former interpretation on my worst enemy I also have zero sympathy for anybody who embraces such a strange and frankly self-destructive worldview on their own***.  So, really, win for me either way.

Via Hot Air Headlines, which found the same quote hilarious.

Moe Lane

Continue reading #rsrh Scenes from the Crass Muddle in Lower Broadway*.

This is the way WI protests end.

This is the way WI protests end.
This is the way WI protests end.
This is the way WI protests end.

(Via Instapundit) Not with a bang, but with a bunch of self-indulgent whining as the adults in the room get on with the state of Wisconsin’s business.

Hmm. Doesn’t really scan.

Moe Lane

PS: The entire Wisconsin protest thing would have been a lot more impressive in the old days, before we saw what groups like the Tea Party could do AND SUSTAIN.

#rsrh Our odd June House recess.

Odd in that it – like the May recess, come to think about it – came and went without a plethora of stories about how citizens flooded* town halls across the land to ritually burn the Republicans at the stake over Paul Ryan’s Medicare/budget reform plan.  Which is actually quite surprising, given that we were more or less promised Armageddon along those lines.  Almost as surprising as the lack of stories of Democrats capitalizing on their supposed killer political advantage by holding their own town halls.  Instead, we got… nothing much, really.  Dribs and drabs, but nothing special.

Then again, I lie: this is not surprising.  The Organized Left’s greatest problem is that it has everything that it needs for a populist movement except for actual people; and they’re constitutionally incapable of spawning protests that are organic, self-organizing, self-sufficient, and capable of growth.  And every time that they get distracted enough that protesting slips from from the top of their to-do list, it shows.

Moe Lane

*For a given value of ‘flooded.’  By Tea Party standards even the Easter ‘protests’ were more like a slow-draining sink.

#rsrh I am not thrilled with this.

Yeah, sure, from their plumage they’re apparently Code Pinkers, which is a group that I avoid comparing to pond scum mostly because pond scum doesn’t deserve the comparison, but since when do cops get to put hands on the throats of people who aren’t, you know, attacking them or anything?

I mean, seriously. You take a swing at a cop, the cop smacks you to the ground, that’s how it works. No beef there. But was this really proper procedure? – I ask mostly because I might feel like dancing at the Jefferson Memorial some day, and the last time I checked there are supposed to be some pretty hefty Constitutional protections in place to allow me to do it.

I think that the US Park Police needs to review/update its training procedures.

Moe Lane

PS: To reiterate… to hell with Code Pink. I hope that they win their court case, get a buck in damages, and have to pay their own court costs.

SF throws a protest and everybody comes.

Good God but this hurts my head:

If you can’t watch that video, it’s of the San Francisco protest against Obama… which had freaking everybody. And I mean everybody: they had the full protest spectrum out*. You haven’t lived until you’ve heard conservatives chant “Hey hey ho ho: Barbara Boxer’s got to go.” At least, I think that’s what they were chanting.

Fausta also links to Zombie, who has more pictures of the protest. The very, very surreal protest.

Moe Lane Continue reading SF throws a protest and everybody comes.