Creative Loafing in Atlanta covered an Occupy demonstration in Woodruff Park and recorded this strange incident.
Congressman John Lewis visited the Occupy Atlanta rally at Woodruff Park last night approximately 45 minutes after its planning session, or General Assembly, started. Despite saying he did not want to speak, the civil rights icon was invited to address to the crowd. When the topic of allowing Lewis to speak was presented to the group, “Joe” … held up his arms to “block” Lewis from speaking.
“Joe” said he was against Lewis speaking because the movement is “not about one individual” and that it has been built on the idea of “no hierarchy.” The crowd decided the congressman could speak after the General Assembly, but Lewis had to leave for a previous engagement.
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Just how strange the incident was is not apparent without watching a video of event. The dynamics of Occupy’s democratic process brings up memories of another “mass movement” that took place 45 years ago, which was controlled ironically, from the very top. That movement was the Red Guards.
The Red Guards really consisted of dupes who were enlisted by one faction of the Chinese Communist Party to make war on another faction of the same party. When the Red Guards had finished serving the purpose of their secret masters they were shot down like dogs by the Chinese Army and those leaders who survived were arrested and executed en masse.
There was a little bit of the Red Guard movement about the Occupy movement which the Huffington Post suggested had the tacit support of President Obama. The demonstrations were primarily directed against the rich — like the Wall Street rich — people who were only lately President Obama’s chief financial backers and supporters.
Wink
The transformation from “President Goldman Sachs” to the chief critic of Wall Street is reminiscent of the a power struggle within the Big Tent. Certainly the dismissal of John Lewis by the chanting Atlanta Occupy group recalls the moments when the Chinese Red Guards would put dunce caps on Communist Party veterans.
One of the creepiest things about the Occupy Atlanta video is the manner in which the crowd appears to act as a single organism, repeating word for word, like students in an elementary school literacy class, the sentences intoned by men holding the megaphones. The participants appear to think this behavior is not only entirely natural, but laudable. One wonders whether any of them are aware how much this resembles the eerie scream of the Pod People as shown in the Invasion of the Body Snatchers, and if they were aware, whether they had any residual consciousness outside the group to worry about it.
While it is often argued that people innately desire freedom, history provides plenty of evidence to support the contrary view: that people desire slavery. Many people want nothing more than to surrender their lives to a group of individuals who will tell them what to do; who will remove the uncertainties and anxieties of life; and who will promise them a secure, if subsistence future. That need for ‘security’ is the attraction of the welfare state, which rejects the variability of outcomes inherent in the exercise of freedom for a supposed equality of expectations.
There are at any rate more than enough people who would trade freedoms they do not want for promises that the trains will run on time. If the history of the 20th century is anything at all, it is the saga of those who would create a single order lasting a thousand years in preference to a society of individual disorder with governments lasting only a few years. Like “Joe” said: it’s not about the individual; and even if “Joe” were really called Myron, he might still prefer to be the anonymous “Joe”. The desire to become one of the masses is a very deep psychological urge.
Same old song
Just a drop of water in an endless sea
All we do
Crumbles to the ground though we refuse to seeDust in the wind
All we are is dust in the wind
But where there are slaves — where there are the masses — there is inevitably a slave-owner. Like a necessary dual to the phenomenon of willing slavery there arises the Great Helmsman, the Locomotive of History, the Man of Action. the Duce, the Fuhrer. The uber individual man-god is the historical flip side of historical slavery. Maybe “Joe” will eventually figure that out. But if the Red Guards are any historical guideline, the light bulb will come on a long time too late.
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Pity poor not very well looking John Lewis, who clearly spent the event asking himself: “could we actually be responsible in any way for the presumptive behavior and damage of these skanky hipsters? The anorectic boyos from Soros-funded “cop-watch” shouted down everyone else and only called on men with beards like theirs’, which is the creepiest thing.
The “union” child joshing with the political lesbian chatting with Lewis was astroturf of another persuasion.
I will tell you, in the important-people entourage, there stood the two legislators most responsible for the subprime mortgage crisis in Georgia, thanks to their bills to deregulate lending and create outrageous set-asides in the name of “justice,” around 1998, and look where we are now. The bankers joined hands with the civil rights activists and screwed us all. Thanks, John Lewis; thank you Vincent Fort, you’ve got yours, but why is nobody protesting you? At least I didn’t have to catch a whiff of that dirty-hair/patchouli hackey-sack/sockless-righteous anger stench swirling up around you.
That is the smell of the near future, I’m afraid.
That is one creepy video. This is obviously orchestrated from the top, and i surmise that Barack Hussein Obama is very familiar with the tactics being used to control the “community”. He brags a lot that he’s a “community organizer”… Just what do people think that is??? He studied and excelled at this precise kind of creepy robot methodology to gin up fervor and agitate. Just look at the redshirts strategically peppered throughout the crowd. This is what you see at EVERY Left wing rally. Who prints their supposedly grassroots signs? Who printed up the supposedly grassroots tee shirts? Those signs and those commie tee shirts aren’t just accidental. The retail phrases like “99%” and “Occupy” and “Moveon” are not accidents or happenstance – they are all careful, deliberate branding, orchestrated by other “community organizers” exactly like the cancerous tumor metastasizing in the White House.
Just how radical is Obama? How creepy? Take a look at that video and see with your own eyes what some of us have warned about all along. Obama and his minions in the government, and the public unions and at the universities and in the newsrooms are a cancer on the body politic of America. They don’t just need to be opposed at the ballot box. They are a tumor which requires removing.
The Borg in its infancy? The repetition is a very intriguing technique with religious origins, obviously. But here, anyone in the crowd seems to be able to speak and then is amplified by the surrounding ‘cells’.
That said, they are definitely being manipulated by the man on the stand.
Finally, they are being rather self conscious as many new political organizations are.
“John Lewis is not better than anyone, democracy works!” – This is not democracy IMHO.
Repost of a comment I made at Fred Pruitt’s site.
You can sum up the “manifesto” of the 99%ers in three main statements:
1. I am absolutely entitled to be happy, stress free, anxiety free, perfectly healthy, well-rested, and entertained every waking minute of my life, and if I can’t pay for these things myself (for whatever reasons, including laziness and incompetence on my part) it is the responsibility of everyone else to do so.
2. If anything happens that all of these conditions aren’t met, then it is the primary police, regulatory, and tax-policy responsibility of government – and the primary obligation of taxpayers – to see that they are restored immediately.
3. If these things aren’t restored immediately, then I will use whatever means – electoral or violent – to smash anyone or any business who is better off than I am.
My response to these as follows:
1. There is no right to happiness. Only its pursuit. You are not entitled to a materially excellent, stress free, exciting life. Nobody who has ever lived is entitled to this. When you adopt the attitude that it is ultimately the responsibility not of yourself but of some agency outside of yourself to provide you with material satisfaction and happiness and freedom from anxiety, you void your humanity. The default condition of humans throughout millions of years of history is hungry, stressed, and in need of sleep. Until the past few decades in the Western and Westernized world and with a free market, capitalistic system, this is how most people lived. The capitalist system you all seem to hate also had some of this stress and is far from perfect, but it is the only one that gave people an opportunity (not a guarantee, an OPPORTUNITY) to do something about it. It’s not my fault that your politically correct history teachers imbued with leftist agendas failed to teach you any of this, or that your demagoguing leftist politicians were dishonest about what were historical norms in terms of what to expect out of life.
2. The primary purpose of government is to guarantee civil rights (negative rights, not positive economic ones), be an impartial judge in civil matters, provide equal access to energy and commerce, and then get the hell out of the way and let people sink or soar based upon their native skills, work ethic, and the value of their particular work at whatever the existing level of technology might be. Period. It is NOT to make sure that you have enough money for all the trinkets and outward signs of success and status. Not to free up money that you would have spent on medical care so you can have a new car by taking that medical money from your neighbor who earns more than you do. Not to put in regulations which guarantee your job security and income security at bulletproof levels. We’ve had governments that are like that in the last hundred years or so. Review them and their histories and their human rights legacy and then decide which is best, that way or this one.
3. It’s true that there was much malfeasance on Wall Street. The bad actors should go to jail. But everyone on Wall Street isn’t bad, and Wall Street is only a tiny fraction of the business community. It is insanity to paint all business people with a broad brush as you do and want to crush them with protests and support politicians who promote a ridiculous level of regulation. Smash business and your wealthier neighbors and you will destroy any opportunity for yourself. Everyone can’t have a good paying public sector job with great benefits where you don’t have to work very hard and can retire at 58. And what jobs there are that are like that will not be increasing in number as time goes by, given the obvious failure of the big-government welfare/nanny/hyperregulatory state. Success in the private sector requires that you learn to manage stress. That you purge envy from your life. Learn to multitask. Learn to work within a hierarchy even if you aren’t at the top. Learn that you are valuable to your boss if you need to be told how to do something only once and learn and retain it forever (something you would certainly demand if you were boss). Learn that you may have to move and make other sacrifices in order to be somewhere where your skills are in demand. Learn that you may not get all the material things you want quickly and at once. Learn to be happy with whatever pay rate your neighbors and community have decided your labor or product is worth on a free market . The very fact that you’re in this protest and failing to thrive, and that other young people are doing well and happy with less education and even lower pay than you, is prima facie evidence that you have not learned at least one and possibly several of these necessary things. It’s not the fault of George Bush or businesspeople or devout Christians or Republicans – or Democrats, even. It’s your own deficits, or your own stubbornness.
Beyond these specific things, there are other points I would make.
Your anger and efforts would be better directed at the (largely government) education system. In this you have been ill-served. It is overpriced, staffed primarily with people who aren’t there to be excellent but to get thirty years of guaranteed pay and a pension, who are not at all averse to using the bully pulpit they possess to propagandize instead of teach and conveniently forget to mention aspects of philosophies or historical facts that blow holes in their narrative, and their marketing of their services with respect to ultimate financial expectations has been largely dishonest. If you didn’t fit in exactly to their expectations or were difficult to teach they would put you on Ritalin or some other drugs. That said, nobody forced you to go deeply into debt for an “education” that is more often an indoctrination with no guarantees of a marketable skill.
Likewise, your parents did you no favors. They had you play soccer in leagues that didn’t keep score and gave trophies to all the teams regardless of how good or bad they were, shielding you from the concept of winning and losing, the notion that not everyone has the same skill set, and the idea that actions have consequences. They supported the notion of getting rid of class rank for valedictorian, got rid of physical education and home economics and recess. They filled you with the poisonous notion of outcome egalitarianism, the greatest lie of all.
The minute you were “unhappy” your parents brought you to the doctor and put you on happy pills. They bubble wrapped you so you would never be hurt or suffer consequences for bad actions or words. They insisted you go to college instead of getting a trade because they wanted to impress everyone with how awesome they were as parents as evidenced by sending all their kids to college.
Your media and information industry failed you, getting you to think that supporting Obama in 2008 was a blow against Wall Street by not reporting that Wall Street gave him five times more money than McCain. Protesting Wall Street but not Obama is illogical but understandable if you aren’t aware of his campaign finance connections. (If you know about them and are still protesting Wall Street but not Obama, you’re a hypocrite.)
However, your biggest failure is to yourself. Whatever people or circumstances led you to believe that you deserve to have perfect, stress free happiness and everything you wanted or the government would get it for you, they were wrong, and so are you. Want to be successful and ultimately happy? You’ll need to learn that you will have to sacrifice much in the short term. You’ll be best friends with the concept of delayed gratification. You’ll have to learn to deal with high stress levels, lack of sleep, and lack of material status among peers, not for a few hours or a day or two but for weeks or months or years. You’ll learn to exist not being fully happy for extended times in your life – without happy pills. You’ll learn that there are things in life that make you happy like religion, community, volunteer work, and so many other things that have nothing to do with pay.
You’ll learn to deal with all of this with dignity and a sense of humor, not pouty aggrieved entitlement.
Or you’ll fail utterly and cosmically deserve to fail, regardless of what happens to Wall Street.
Occupying Wall Street isn’t the solution.
“He said he would be chief and so we knew him,
But he failed us and so we slew him.”
Early notes on political science from the shield man party.
I doubt that Occupy Wallstreet is a spontaneous grass roots movement. More likely, it is the left’s attempt to emulate the Tea Party. The unions appear to be a common denominator. It will be interesting to see what kind of momentum they’re able to develop and if the President will be able to claim a populist mandate from their eventual numbers.
“Joe” Who?
Uncle Joe is who.
“he was idolized by the majority of the people until his death.”
…-
“Welcome to the Stalin Project!
From 1924-1953, Joseph Stalin ruled the largest country in the world with an iron fist. He attempted to twist and contort the USSR into a modern communist country using the most brutal methods. He was able to industrialize a rural country in a short amount of time and he held off the Nazi onslaught during World War II. However, the price for this “progress” was immense. He surrounded himself with amoral yes-men who created one of the most criminalized penal systems in history. Over ten million were killed and many more had their lives destroyed by the system. His brilliance was that through the combination of fear and propaganda, he was idolized by the majority of the people until his death.”
http://www.stalinproject.com/index.php
…-
“Study links bribery with collectivism”
“Bribery is viewed as morally wrong across cultures, but the question remains why some places are more prone to corruption than others.
According to research by Pankaj Aggarwal and Nina Mazar, two professors at the University of Toronto, part of the answer seems to be the level of collective feeling in a society.
The team discovered that people in more collectivist cultures – in which individuals see themselves as interdependent and as part of a larger society – are more likely to offer bribes than people from more individualistic cultures.
Aggarwal and Mazar suggest that people in collectivist societies may feel less individually responsible for their actions, and therefore less guilty about offering a bribe.”
http://cnews.canoe.ca/CNEWS/World/2011/10/08/18799991.html
Mike Check
Orwell wrote this script.
For over twenty years now the Chinese regime have been working to insinuate themselves into power in America. They were behind the Obama tied New Party and the Acorn SEIU apparatus and the Maurice Strong “Green Agenda” and the cash for nuclear secrets with Green Al Gore as bag man. The difference between Soviet and Maoist Communist technique is analogous to the divide between Sunni and Shi’a Islam. Fascinating on an academic level but less important if the man with the microphone decides you need a bullet behind the ear. As for the chanting cult followers, they are the same lost souls who would follow Jim Jones to Guyana.
After “A Thousand Flowers” comes the “Rectification Campaign.” How many died?
The call and response is a Control Method. It is used to occupy people so they can’t think and act independently and have to listen. It is used by kindergarten teachers. Adults stay quiet and listen and then respond in a thoughtful orderly manner. If needed a trusted person could repeat the message to those around them. There is no valid reason, given that control of the “The Mike” is the power, to make people shout in unison.
It is my understanding that the call/response thing was a means of amplifying the message in the absence of loudspeakers. If true, it strikes me as a clever idea, however creepy it appears in execution.
Occupied!!! Occupation!!!
(To be sure, that sort of rhetoric has been working really well for the Palestinians over these past 63 odd years….that they just can’t seem to get enough of it….)
Actually, it seems like the current administration is one big occupational hazard:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/solyndra-obama-and-rahm-emanuel-pushed-to-spotlight-energy-company/2011/10/07/gIQACDqSTL_story.html
File under: Slogan’s Heroes!
Double post, apologies.
As I watched that video I had a picture of hundreds of 3rd grade teachers all across America asking; “Where are my students”?
Thousands of villages looking for their lost idiots.
“It is my understanding that the call/response thing was a means of amplifying the message in the absence of loudspeakers.”
True. I have heard the same justification.
“If true, it strikes me as a clever idea, however creepy it appears in execution.”
Even more clever: bring in some loudspeakers. But that would mean less power and control over the audience.
Wretchard: I have often meditated on the ancient Egyptian tomb paintings. Pharoah and his consort are twice the size of the nobles. They tower over the servants.
Not much has changed really.
How does a people so jealous of its freedom give it up so easily?
Hobbes and Carlyle would give one answer. Jefferson and Locke would say just the opposite. Nietszche went mad trying to understand the paradox. Or perhaps it kept him sane far longer than the syphillis otherwise would have allowed…
And a paradox it is. It forces us to chose — to exercise our free will.
God exists. He is a tough SOB.
The people are like the Anti-globalization protesters. They do not want freedom from a higher power, which is what the Tea Party is about.
Rather, they want a higher, higher power that can make the higher power – whatever it is – Goldman Sachs, Wal-Mart, Nash-Kelvinator, Acme Construction, Fred’s Screen Door Repair – do what they want. They are not against capitalism; they’re against other people’s successful capitalism. They don’t want less crony capitalism but more of it – they want a piece of the action. Have the Feds give the company I want to work for a few trillion$ and make them hire me. Dammit, Solyndra needs to hire more people with Phd’s in Wymen’s Studies!
And those are just the more coherent positions.
We don’t have anything to fear from these guys but fear itself. They are people who can cross thread bowling balls.
The only “entity” capable of doing what they desire would be a government so vast, so controlling that it would fall apart at once without itself even realizing it.
It is my understanding that the call/response thing was a means of amplifying the message in the absence of loudspeakers. If true, it strikes me as a clever idea, however creepy it appears in execution.
This may be true but it does not necessarily negate what BFTP and others have called a control method.
I was at the anti-Obamacare Tea Party rally in D.C. in March 2010. There were probably about 30,000 people present. There was a schedule of events. Early in the day they had a few GOP Congresspeople (Michele Bachmann, IIRC, and Mike Pence) and citizens who have gained visibility via previous Tea Party events (Tito the Builder) speak to the crowd. For this portion of the schedule there was a podium w mic and loudspeakers.
After the speeches, everyone dispersed & went to their own Congress members’ offices. Somewhere around mid-afternoon a bunch of Tea Partiers (including me) were back outside the Capitol. This was nowhere near the 30,000 from before but it was still several thousand (like 3,000-5,000 at least … I have video of the crowd at the end of the day [4PM] and it is still very, very substantial).
There were one or two people with bullhorns at the mid/late afternoon assemblies. You couldn’t hear them perfectly from everywhere in the crowd, but it wasn’t impossible to hear them, either. At least three times, we dis-assembled from a particular location, walked (or dashed, in one instance) to another location on another side of the Capitol, and then reassembled there.
Somehow we Tea Partiers were able to do all this successfully with no loudspeakers and no creepy “chant back at me every word I say” from whoever happened to have a bullhorn. People just got word to one another the way one normally does — you turn to the guy or gal next to you, etc etc.
BTW, if one is concerned about a message getting lost upon a large crowd due to limited audio capabilities, a general rule of thumb is to TALK LESS. Whatever message you want disseminated, keep it short & sweet.
That’s why what is going on in the video plays really, really odd … if the *sole* purpose of the chant-back was merely communication. There are more effective ways to do that kind of thing. Ways that do not involve what comes across (because it is, IMO) a control method.
********
FWIW, *ANY* kind of chant-back where one is “obligated” to do so is creepy to me. And I do not participate. Even in church. Every now & then the pastor will get it in mind to do one of those “Every time I say X, you say Y” exercises during his sermon, i.e. stuff that is not part of the regular liturgy. I understand what’s going on (pastor wants to spur memorization via repetition), but I find that type of exercise awkward and largely phony. Something inside me gets a little ticked off, too (“You’re not Pavlov, and I’m not one of your dogs!”), and then this spirit of rebellion? independence? kicks in, I put my curmudgeon hat on and sit there like a stone in the pew while nearly everyone else *does* do the chant-back. (Point of observation being, most people do just go along, and this includes Christians, if the one doing the calling is their pastor.)
I am non-conformist by nature and pretty much always have been. If I see “the crowd” zigging, I will zag, because, well, just because. I realize this separating-from-the-pack instinct would not serve me well if I were a zebra in a herd being chased by lions, but as a homo sapien I find it’s a pretty good anti-cult early warning system. Or something. All I know is that it has prevented me from taking a number of missteps in my life & has made me naturally suspicious of people who, as it later turned out, richly deserved the label of suspect.
I’m wondering if BC has a higher-than-average ratio of natural curmudgeons?
It’s always a good occasion when one gets to quote Monty Python:
Brian: You don’t need to follow me! You don’t need to follow anyone! You’re all individuals!
Crowd (en masse): We’re all individuals.
Lone Guy in Crowd: Ummm … I’m not.
The weird, creepy dyke chatting away tells you the whole story. The degenerators have a new tool. Obama *thinks* he has a left-wing counterforce to the Tea Party, but these people are very young and while not stupid in the IQ test way don’t have anything like the organizational abilities middle-aged Tea Party people have, if only from things like running their adult lives and families.
The left is very nostalgic for the 60′s, when getting students out in the street actually accomplished something. But that was a long time ago. The last real shot they had at a mass movement was 1974, when they elected the “Watergate babies” congress that gave South Vietnam to the communists. Since then it’s been all about controlling the institutions, the courts, the educational system, the regulatory system, and the issuance of cash and benefits. But the institutions have lost credibility and the cash is gone.
The left can’t rule, but they can’t be overthrown either. But how does that resolve itself?
Entropy lives.
Bogie,
You wonder if BC has “a higher-than-average ratio of natural curmudgeons?”
On a forum with people like Subotai, No Mo Uro, Morton Doodslag and yourself, you have to ask this question? You gotta be kidding me!
I thought being a curmudgeon was a prerequisite for posting here…
The people of “The [little] Redbook” joyfully join OWS.
18. Thrasymachus The weird, creepy dyke chatting away tells you the whole story
I resemble the dyke part of that remark, but not the weird creepy part. There is not 100% correlation between same-sex attraction and liberal politics. Tammy Bruce is a lesbian conservative who often fills in on the Laura Ingram show. Armed gays don’t get bashed, it turns out. And some of us like to keep more of what we earn.
Mac-
You say “curmudgeon” like it’s a bad thing!
Narcissistic Personality Disorder is a coin with two sides.
The one side that is most commonly thought of is the overbearing self-centered individual that is pathologically incapable of connecting with their fellow human beings. These people are the “users” of others, since in their world, other people are just objects to be manipulated.
But there is another aspect to NPD and that is the individual that has either a very weak or non-existent sense of self. This later group finds a sense of self by attaching themselves to a movement/cause or by becoming devotees of some guru or charismatic leader. The need in this later group to acquire a sense of self, and the need that the movement that they are attached to be one of “cosmic” importance, can be so strong that they will go into a fantasy world if that is what it takes to preserve their fragile sense of self. Individuals in this state are beyond reason.
These two sides of NPD always find each other, one attracted to the other like moths to a flame, the one driven to use others, the other with an unquenchable need to be used. It is a deadly combination.
This is the fringe element that couldn’t wrangle an invitation to the “coffee party” meetings.
I’m not terribly worried, however, since the folks I’ve seen on the clips holding unintelligible signs, delivering a garbled message, to a stoned soul picnic crowd of people who collectively look like the last persons on earth who want anything to do with developing their own “occupation” of any sort.
In fact, avoiding an actual occupation by turning on, dropping out and tuning to “what’s the frequency, kenneth”…is the sub rosa point of this Bohemian Rhapsody.
Jon Lewis did the astro-turf in the park, the Congressional Black Caucus is trying to gin up the afro-turf and this molto bizzaro collection of acid-turf losers is not going to win over any of the sane independents. In fact, this pulls off the mask of the Lone Ranger President just a little more.
What lies beneath is a little more revealed.
Cooper Union brought to a capitalist edifice near you.
”But where there are slaves — where there are the masses — there is inevitably a slave-owner. Like a necessary dual to the phenomenon of willing slavery there arises the Great Helmsman, the Locomotive of History, the Man of Action. the Duce, the Fuhrer.”
Thomas Sowell: ”The preemptive class is undoubtedly sincere. People are never more sincere than when they assume their own superiority. Nor are they ever more ruthless. …”
That echoing the speaker, even down to a single word sometimes, was the damndest thing I’ve ever seen; if that isn’t it in a nutshell, I don’t know what is. And the waving of the fingers!!??? They’re like the zombies in the famous Apple commercial.
Watching this “OWS” movement I can’t stop thinking, “so THIS is their fall offensive????” Obviously Obama and his henchmen were going to cook something up to try and counter his falling numbers – but THIS? This is so pathetic, and guaranteed to antagonize everyone but the far left!!! But you can see why it was cooked up when you see Jonathan Chait writing about how the country needed some far left protests so that Voters could see that Obama was really in the middle. That’s their thinking, apparently – also, they’re thinking that they won’t be fingered as being behind it, just as they think they won’t be fingered for Gunwalker and Solyndra.
To think that this kind of thing is what average Americans will gravitate to and identify with – only someone who lives in a fantasy world could think that!
bogie wheel @ 16,
I enjoyed reading your description of me. It was spot on.
The left has two contradictory needs. The fiercely need to misunderstand the tea party, and ensure that their followers misunderstand the tea party, and they fiercely need to copy and emulate it. Put those two goals together and you get this.
This will blow up in their faces. America has many, many antibodies that recognize this bacterial invasion. Watch for a 10 point poll meltdown in the next week or two.
Since one of the Wall St. occupiers relieved himself on a police car, one “notoriously rowdy” conservative blog is calling it the Bowel Movement.
I suspected that it is astroturfing, but not from Obama. Obama has failed to deliver to certain powers what was expected of him. My guess is labor unions, and the focus on crowd control and repetition might be due to the realization that their useful idiots tend to be, well, idiots. They’re shaping up.
“I have often meditated on the ancient Egyptian tomb paintings. Pharoah and his consort are twice the size of the nobles. They tower over the servants.”
Why not take it literally? Perhaps they were Grigori or watcher angels, of which Goliath the giant was a descendant. The gods were ETs.
What bizarre behavior. Supposedly they do the call and response thing because they have no audio-visual equipment, but this time the leader who shall be called a leader had megaphone. So there was no need to do the call and response thing while he was speaking. They did it anyway; it took the aspect of a bizarre ritual. I guess they felt better doing it.
The overwhelming and obvious consensus was to let John Lewis speak, but they failed to figure it out in time. This does not give one a warm fuzzy regarding their skills at democracy!
A woman got up to speak and she was positioned right beside the non-leader leader guy holding the megaphone. But she was not given use of the megaphone. All people are equal, but that does not mean anyone gets to use the megaphone! Maybe she did have the requisite megaphone training?
The call and response behavior appears in a Cordwainer Smith story as sort of a court ceremony (in the book Norstrilia, the followers of the revolutionary underground demigod and generally good guy E’Telikeli). Story written in the 1970s, and Smith used many classic Chinese and Russian sources for his characters.
So I presume there is a real historical basis for this, but don’t know any more about it. Only that seeing it is weird and creepy as hell.
That’s a ridiculous excuse. The speaker had a megaphone, and the crowd wasn’t that big. They were demonstrating their absolute collective solidarity. Don’t get distracted by the people trying to soften the strangeness. It is exactly what it looks like – or what else was the subject of the debate as to whether Lewis should speak? This isn’t some technical adaptation to circumstance, this is pure communist nonsense.
There is in man (dykes too) a seed of desperation. We are seeing the fruit of that seed in this video. This desperation creates the need of an immoral man who has no strong ties to family to seek the comfort of the mass movement. Such a movement can be controlled with the slightest effort by suggestion once it has congealed.
All we can hope for now is the lack of real desperation in these people. They sit with their iPods, iPhones and laptops posting like out of control automatons on social networks. Kind of reminds me of a flock of blue footed boobies at the nesting rocks calling to the crowd in a endless feedback loop.
Well I really don’t get it. I read most of the comments before viewing the video and was surprised when I went back and looked at it that the crowd is mostly white, mostly middle aged, lots of union folks, but really not very animated. this is not the 19 year old smelly hippies of Boston or NY. And what gives with the muslim prayer beads the leader is wearing around his left wrist? The whole thing just doesn’t make sense to me. But then I never understood why so many people followed Stalin. Oh sure, for the nomenklatura there were perks like apartments, cars, dachas, access to foreign currency and GUM department store, but the people in this crowd don’t look like nomenklatura. I really felt like they were more like Hollywood extras, there because it was a job and they were getting paid.
A little off topic here, but…
Is it just me, or does the picture of Obama, that Wretchard posted, look like a caricature of Alfred E. Neuman?
KRB
Josh@33: …seeing it is weird and creepy as hell.
Weird and creepy as hell. (sorry)
How ineffably depressing to ponder the possibility of a grass roots rebellion against the criminal behavior of Wall St, only to watch it turn into an embarrassing caricature (there’s that word again – I think there’s an essay there) of grounded critique driven by principled anger. No contrived narrative or cute choreographed spontaneity required.
…..
Hey Judy, let’s go down to The Square and put on a demonstration!
Sure Mickey, and while we’re at it, let tie in what’s left of the liberated hipster crowd with a legit gripe and watch it vanish into thin air.
…..
No, Virginia, we’re not *all* that stupid.
(Caveat: didn’t watch the whole video – no patience for this sort of thing – I may have missed F’s legit point about the composition of the crowd. 1 of 4 and that’s too many for this video.)
The demonstrations were primarily directed against the rich — like the Wall Street rich — people who were only lately President Obama’s chief financial backers and supporters.
We might remember that the master demagogue Stalin could turn on a dime and demolish his former supporters. Might our Chief Community Organizer be turning, and preparing foot soldiers for the next direction?
This Atlanta example may be just step one in a series of conditioning exercises, giving their well-prepared cadres (those with bullhorns, and their supporters spaced throughout the mob) some field experience, and the sheep in the crowd an indication of how to behave under this form of command and control.
By the third or fourth meeting of the series, the bullhorners will have incrementally tightened the control and conditioned the mob for other coordinated actions. Reinforcements can be supplied by squads of public ‘service’ union members for crucial engagements, for instance in opposing tea party gatherings.
Remember that Obama is sending low-key but positive signals to this ‘movement’. By the time of the 2012 elections, it may ripen into something with its own Richter scale. Next summer may be a long hot one.
I watched about a minute of that video last night on another site. That was all I could take. I just forced myself to watch the whole thing and it made my skin crawl. Wretchard’s comparison to the Red Guards is sadly appropriate.
I wonder if people standing around the edges of the crowd began chanting, “STOP YOUR CHANTING! STOP YOUR CHANTING!” Could that have broken the spell?
This video is already going viral. The internet is an advantage we have that the Red Guard’s victims didn’t. I hope it’s enough.
“I thought being a curmudgeon was a prerequisite for posting here…”
I might be wrong but I think that Nome de’ Club is available. Get it quick before it goes Yahoo and you need a number.
Curmudgeon2, curmudgeon3, curmudgeon721, etc.
Oh, Mildred. Our new neighbors are here; Mr. and Mrs. Pod.
Forty of Eric Holder’s assault rifles made it across the border and into the home arsenal of Jose Antonio Torres Marrufo, a feared cartel leader in Ciudad Juarez.
Eric Holder repeatedly lies under oath for the same psychological reason Gary Hart engaged in Monkey Business with Donna Rice and dared reporters to do something about it. At one point he found he could get away with it, and now he’s pushing the boundaries to see how far he can take it. Besides, he knows the Libstream Media has got his six.
F #36:
“The whole thing just doesn’t make sense to me.”
It can’t make sense. It does not have to.
These are Rebels Without A Clue.
Cornell West was first call/response leader of this installment that I am aware of.
The audio alone that I heard was creepy enough.
Remember the children’s beautiful voices singing The Ones praises in unison during the campaign?
It’s a Catholic mass.
Some have suggested that Obama was the Antichrist. I knew that wasn’t the case because Obama wasn’t competent enough.
BUT, the rise of Obama demonstrated that the people who invested so much into him WANTED an Antichrist. Not that they would understand what an antichrist was, but when he does arrive on the scene (I believe pretty soon), they will leap to support him as well.
Those idiots in the “Occupy” movement will be eager followers of whoever it turns out to be.
doesn’t the left always accuse the right of being an echo chamber? isn’t the required greeting on Rush Limbaugh’s show “megadittos”?
well, here we have the left acting like a bunch of megadildoes.
(can I say that on tv?)
to which we on the non-left can perhaps quote that prophet, philosopher, and commentator on public events Gomer Pile: surprize, surprize.
–
b @ 46: It’s a Catholic mass.
Reminds me of the swearing-in ceremony in Animal House:
leader: “I, (state your name)”
recruits: “I, state your name”
leader: “Do solemnly swear … with liberty and fraternity for all”
recruits: “Amen”
Animal House guys were smarter than these libtards.
The brain trust: Tavis Smiley, Cornell West, Keith Olbermann
Cornel West “This Is Not Just A National Movement! This Is An International Movement!”
It’s a Catholic mass.
Not really.
I thought about just this comparison when I wrote comment #16 above. I’m Presbyterian but I grew up Catholic and spent about the first 20-22 years of my life going to Catholic Mass every week. So believe me, I know what a Catholic Mass looks like, and I know by comparison what a mainline Protestant service looks like.
The Catholic liturgy (at least the post-Vatican II version that I grew up with) is heavily structured around a call/response format. But with rare exceptions, the congregation does not repeat word for word what the priest (or lector) says. The congregation has different lines.
One could argue that that’s a superficial difference, but I think it points to what the real difference is: the priest-lector and the congregation each have “roles” they are reading (or reciting from memory) in the service, and these roles remain fixed week after week, year after year. The congregation is not following the priest-lector. Both parties are following a liturgical script. There is a big, huge difference.
The congregation is not getting culted into following a personality in a Catholic Mass. There is no room for anyone’s personality to be imposed upon anyone else in this format. That includes even a very colorful and charismatic priest-lector.
Sure, yes, the recitation can be dry as bones, and after you’ve done it for a couple decades it can be done mindlessly, half-awake, mind aimlessly wandering, recited while filling out one’s tax forms, etc. And this is the great drawback of the format of the Catholic Mass. It doesn’t require you to engage, either mentally *or* emotionally. (one can, but one does not have to)
And that latter factor is also what sets the Mass apart from cult/control programming. Emotional engagement is required in cult functions, after the mind’s normal reasoning faculties are disengaged (via the repetition). The cult cannot capture without deep emotional response.
I left the Catholic church in my 20s and nobody chased me down, locked me in a room & starved me, shunned me into withering isolation, denounced me, or in any other fashion harassed me, not even to the smallest degree. And I did not crumble psychologically, emotionally, or spiritually, or suffer withdrawal symptoms, when I left. Try leaving a cult & getting the same treatment. Try renouncing leftism to one’s lefty friends and escaping shun-, harassment-, denunciation-, withdrawal-free, for pete’s sake.
The Red Guard analogy strikes me as quite accurate: somebody behind the scenes manipulating young people to become a violent FACTION and it is all occurring within one “party.”
I was teaching in China shortly after the end of the Cultural Revolution and many disaffected former Red Guards explained to me what had happened in China. It was the case of one communist group pitting young people against another communist group–all within the same communist party. The constant low-level violence went on for years until, as one former Red Guard told me, he looked up into the sky and saw airplanes dropping leaflets. The leaflets were from the People’s Liberation Army and told the Red Guards to disband or they would be killed. So the Red Guards quit their harassment of professors, intellectuals, teachers, etc., and went back to school.
When I asked the Red Guards–seemingly quite intelligent, educated people–why they did what they did, they all had the same answer. They didn’t really know, but everybody else was doing it, so they did it too.
What’s particularly odd is that the movement states it will start protests here in Canada on October15th. But why?, I ask. Canada’s unemployment rate is only 7.1; there are no banking problems, no mortgage problems, housing construction rates are normal, and we have universal health care coverage. So whatever aim the movement has, it certainly has nothing to do with poverty, income inequality, or health care. The insight that it is, in contrast, some sort of internal leftist warfare, like the Red Guard movement, is an accurate one.
This is not astroturf.
This is a sickly cell that was easily taken over by an undead virus.
Morons unwittingly produce comedy gold!
When someone like me stands up and shouts: ‘We are all silly buggers!’
Crowd shouts: ‘We are all silly buggers!’
Me: ‘Mary had a little lamb!’
Crowd: ‘Mary had a little lamb!’
Me: ‘Its fleece was white as snow!’
Crowd: ‘Its fleece was white as snow!’
Me: ‘We are the white, brainwashed dandruff of society!’
Crowd: ‘We are the white, brainwashed dandruff of society!’
Idiot in red hat: ‘We demand free head and shoulders shampoo!’
crowd: ‘We demand free head and shoulders shampoo!’
Idiot: ‘head and shoulders formula with a zinc-based active ingredient calms the itchiness, helping to leave your scalp more comfortable and your hair looking great!’
crowd: ‘head and shoulders formula with a zinc-based active ingredient calms the itchiness, helping to leave your scalp more comfortable and your hair looking great!’
Idiot with megaphone: ‘Head and shoulders is not on the agenda!’
Crowd: ‘Head and shoulders is not on the agenda!’
And so on. The prospect for Downfall-type parodies of this video appear to be endless. Who are the people in that crowd and how much taxpayer money did it take to make them so stupid?
Despite significant differences in format, the Atlanta video reminds me of the feeling of a scene from Warren Beatty’s long-ago movie “Reds”. Specifically, the First Communist Internationale, which the movie set in a sumptuous ballrooom filled with activists talking past each other in different languages.
Back to the video — Who elected the Master of Ceremonies? Who voted for the sacred “Agenda” which they must follow? Democracy, or merely the outward trappings of democracy? And didn’t you love the guy with the t-shirt proudly proclaiming “Union Thug”?
Still, those lefties in Atlanta managed to send a very important message — and to a repeatedly “democratically-elected” far-left Democrat, no less: You Cannot Count on Us. No wonder Stalin had to have hundreds of thousands of solid Communist Party members shot.
The ironies seem endless. A predominantly white crowd of activists in Atlanta inviting, then deciding not to give the floor, to John Lewis. People who would most probably denounce religion acting, without the slightest awareness of the absurdity, like a cult. A movement which proclaims itself to be working for the restoration of the democratic process behaving like extras from some cheap remake of “Triumph of the Will”; in t-shirts without the Hugo Boss uniforms.
Yet all these ironies are completely lost on the participants. They can’t see themselves as they appear to others. That perspective is forbidden by an internal programming. But there’s more. If you look closely at the video, there are other things which are “invisible” but yet in plain sight. Specifically these are individuals who by tacit consent are acknowledged their importance. You can see them plainly in the dynamics of the crowd. They whisper confidences to each other, stand confidently; they know what this is all about. These secret authorities are seen yet not seen. By secret and invisible badges, some comrades are known to be more more comradely than others and their outward “equality” fools no one.
In an mass assembly of complete equals, one-upsmanship is actually the name of the game. Joe is playing it. For even if it is not apparent, there is a hierarchy within protest groups driven by some kind of points system you carry around with you, the legend you create. And there is nothing an activist in a sea of equals desires more than to be in a position of leadership. To be listened to when he speaks; and above all to be noticed by the whisperers. If Joe is not already a leader, he will be.
Thus they are drawn into a game which is the very opposite of their supposed aspirations. Every “mass movement” of this type which attains power becomes the very antithesis of itself. It becomes a group waiting for the Mothership, with ten thousand eyes expectantly watching a vacant throne. Sooner or later, someone bold will stride up to claim the seat, but he won’t be the Emissary from the Ones; just the biggest, baddest grifter in that whole assemblage.
But perhaps this is inevitable. As Henry David Thoreau once put it, “the mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.” And the people in the video are not nothing if not desperate to believe. There is nothing many would like more than to lay down the burden of freedom, the difficulty of thinking for themselves and to simply follow the man of vision.
And the people in the video are not nothing if not desperate to believe. There is nothing many would like more than to lay down the burden of freedom, the difficulty of thinking for themselves and to simply follow the man of vision.
but this is what we are, this is who we are, and maybe it’s a good thing. if we were all trying to be alphas, we’d also be trying to rip each others’ throats out. you’d like to see each of these try to think for themselves? well, they have, and this is what they came up with, best they could do, and I don’t doubt it. some will outgrow it with age, that’s in our societal DNA, I think, many human cultures respect the wisdom of age and benefit thereby, so if a lot of this crowd is young, well, at least they get an extra half an excuse.
and if some are old but trying to still act young, well again, if that’s their wisdom, then leave them to it.
–
on another matter, more or less, I wanted to post a very interesting article from IEEE Spectrum magazine, perhaps some here have seen, on “Re-Engineering Afghanistan”, in particular their electrical generation and grid.
http://spectrum.ieee.org/energy/the-smarter-grid/reengineering-afghanistan
It’s the sad (but perhaps not unexpected) story of idiotic wastes of tens of billions of dollars, with only a few references to much smaller but apparently more successful efforts elsewhere.
The common element, perhaps, is the failure of rationality, and the sad spectacle of the scale on which rationality can and does fail.
“we will continue with the agenda”
Well, that was succinctly put. I wonder if the communists will allow that little scene get around the black community because that was a major ‘diss’ to the senator. John Lewis’s supporters will not likely soon forget this episode. It may be democracy to the spellbound chorus in the park but is the making of a mob and mob rule to African Americans who are not used to the mores of majority rules, especially in Atlanta.
And you got to love the Union Thug guy on the ad hoc stage. They know who they are. Good to see they are wearing colors. If they get what they are agitating for they will find themselves in a shooting war. It would be best for all parties know what side they are on. Nobody likes a skulking terrorist.
These people living lives of quiet desperation are being given one more chance to catch the fashion bus. Like Lawrence O’Donnell’s savaging of “unauthentic” Herman Cain, there is a hierarchy that is exemplified in the communist teacher’s labor union that exalts the early adapters of street protests. The civil rights marchers and the Chicago and Berkley street protesters. If you weren’t there than you are nobody. Who’d want to miss out on that given a second chance?
And I’m wondering how much longer this “movement” continues to be known as “Occupy Wall Street” or if it gets a new name somewhere down the road.
Say, the “New October Revolution” (or “New October” for short)?
I wanted to make a snap judgement on the film clip, so I only watched the first 30 seconds or so. What struck me about it was the similarities to a kindergarten class, with all the people sitting cross-legged on the ground, obediently repeating back everything said by the “authority” at the front.
Wretchard wrote that people desire slavery, but I don’t think that’s a perfect description for their yearning; I think what people want is childhood. As W noted, they want to be cared for from the cradle to the grave by some wise and benevolent entity – by Big Brother I suppose.
Our current crop of ignorant, infantile American 18-40 year olds are perfectly poised to fall for the false promises of authoritarianism. Scary.
Without speaking of the metaphysical and speaking only of the purely practical there is nothing quite like destroying the notion of a relationship between the individual and the Cosmos (or God if you wish) as a preparatory step to establishing an authoritarianism on earth.
It is a question of psychology. A completely cynical authoritarian can do no better to create an existential despair the better to substitute his earthly, ersatz heaven. While the natives worship the old gods, they may suffer, but they do not despair. Marx called all other religions besides the one he would invent “the opiate of the people”. Now if you are going to sell a rival product, it only makes sense to destroy the competition first.
Take away man’s metaphysical system and many will wander about like ants, “under a sky swept of stars” — as Camus put it — looking for someone, something to give them meaning. And that’s where the demagogue comes in.
That could be Jim Jones, or Xenu or whoever you like. The name changes but the product is the same. The best place for a cult leader to go trawling is always among the lost and lonely. If he builds it, they will come. They’ll fight to get into prison. The last scam on earth to go out of business will be cults. It was the great genius of Lenin to take the elements of mystery, eschatology and martyrdom and cast it into the only world-religion ever invented in the Western world: Marxism-Leninism.
It was so successful that the idea at once gave rise to a whole plethora of heresies, including the Fascist and National Socialist heresies, with whom Marxism-Leninism fought a religious war in the 1940s, the most the destructive war of belief in world history.
Sometime I think that purely for reasons of public safety we should encourage people to believe in Moses, Jesus or the Buddha simply because if you are going to believe something anyway, better the Buddha or Jesus than some frigging bearded German intellectual or bald Russian conspirator or moonfaced Chinese mass murderer. Augustine said, “my heart will never rest until it rests in thee”, and if this is true I will head for the church before I will head for ACORN.
“While the natives worship the old gods, they may suffer, but they do not despair.”
Reminds me of how I feel about health care. If I were to become sick and die in a free world then it is God’s will. If I become sick and die in a government controlled world then I die at the hands of the state and therefore die a slave to dictators. The facts may remain the same but there is some solace to having a free will and exercising it.
How much does one of those fancy megaphones with the mike on a coil-wire cost?
I can’t make out the brand of the unit used by the gray-haired red-shirted weasel, but a little research shows a range from a low end of about $50 to almost $200.00 for megaphones that can address a large crowd.
It is clear this guy was trained, equipped, and given an assignment to LEAD in this situation. Odd that, because he has the look of a diffident academic, more apt to back-stabbing than bold self-assertion. Maybe it’s un-generous to judge, but here’s some guy presuming to lead hundreds of others to shout at the rest of us how we should re-make the world to satisfy Them… He reminds me of the leftist student radicals I knew in college in the 1970′s, who were desperate to be seen as leaders of SOMETHING, ANYTHING, while being personally devoid of any “people skills,” charm, or detectable ethics. What they lacked in those areas were covered by rote memorization of the “talking points” of any number of radical groups. If you could parrot the words and concepts convincingly, you would win assignments from the shadowy figures operating at the higher levels in the “movement.”
There is nothing inherent in this guy’s behavior or “persona” that suggests he has the charisma to have simply charmed the people around him into accepting his leadership as thoroughly as it seems he has. Somebody had to contact the TV news teams and let them know the particulars. Which also means that there were particulars planned some time in advance.
Organization.
Expenses.
Funding.
So, the idea that this was in ANY WAY spontaneous is ABSURD. You can see there are plants in the crowd confirming, mimicking, reiterating elements from the “leader”… the costs of printing and distributing signs, posters, agendas, maps, schedules, etc, are NOT TRIVIAL. Then there is Feeding, Sleeping arrangements, porta-potties, walkie-talkies, security. PERMITS (Surely they were required to secure permits for these activities!) I’ve been involved in plenty of NON-political gatherings of thousands of people, and I can tell you, to do even a LOUSY job of organizing such things is a monumental chunk of work and expense. Someone is investing in these activities, in a BIG WAY. Probably on the order of half a million USD for each city, depending on different durations, scales and weather…
Nobody attending the Tea Party rallies — even those in which people drove themselves hundreds of miles at their own expense and paid their own housing and food — NONE of those argue that the events were completely spontaneous. Someone took care of permits, garbage cans, toilets, etc.
But the Tea Party never tried to convince anyone that the gatherings were wholly spontaneous…
“…better the Buddha or Jesus than some frigging bearded German intellectual or bald Russian conspirator or moonfaced Chinese mass murderer.”
These socialist rulers that you speak of were mass murderers if they were anything. In the rewriting of history the Left has successfully rehabilitated the reputations of these killers and to the students of the cult of teachers the history is lost, abutted up to WWII as it were. The Democratic Party used to have a strong and vocal contingent of anti-communists even through the stormy days of Senator McCarthy. But what isn’t taught is that aside from his zealous techniques, by and large Senator McCarthy was correct as the Venona transcripts so aptly reveal. So we now have a vocal contingent of Democrats that are openly anti-capitalistic and the Democratic Party has little choice than to sponsor the monster that they so patiently spawned. There will be more than a few Democrats appalled by this. You got to be a true believer to go along with this or have nothing to lose.
For my own part, I have been a lifelong learner and have been terrorized by communist teachers for the last two decades or more. I have taken two major classes this year, one of them on Linux servers and I have yet to pass a semester without being lectured and cajoled to support communism, if not just the Democratic Party. In the Linux class, one of the teachers professed up front that he was a flaming liberal. He was a nice enough guy though and being a middle aged white male knew his boundaries. An administrator however came in and addressed the class and exhorted us to vote for Democrats or the class would be shut down. That was last spring. The Photoshop teacher that I have now is a dowdy old woman, nice enough but has on at least one occasion gone off on an anti-George Bush tirade. That was within the last month. If the world were to devolve into total chaos and murder then I know who I would want to take with me into the fires of hell. There are a few good teachers but not so many that god can’t sort them out.
If there is any validity to guilt by association then unionistas are genocidal mass murderers and should be treated as such. This isn’t about some philosophical argument, this is about life and death and the union thugs, a group to whom the teachers belong, have made it clear who they think is going to be doing the dying here.
Fiddler said…
“There is nothing inherent in this guy’s behavior or “persona” that suggests he has the charisma to have simply charmed the people around him into accepting his leadership as thoroughly as it seems he has.”
Indeed.
Watching Jim Jones mesmerize is like a return to normalcy.
It would be worthwhile to stalk the guy with video cameras to reveal that which is impossible to imagine, much less understand, namely who IS this guy, and how could such a creature possibly remain above room temperature for so long?
F @ 36: what “union” members? The professional activist wearing the electrician’s shirt, the “union thug” wearer?
Nope. There aren’t very many real unions in Atlanta, and the people who show up in union clothes at these events are, in fact, paid professional activists. — including the middle-aged lady ones. Some of them do belong to unions, but they’re not real workers sweating work calls — they’re hanging out at politicians offices, getting paid by the national to feign union presence in political arenas.
I used to have to pay dues to pathetic trolls like these. Look at their hands, or just ask them for their vitaes. It’s all show.
And ditto John Lewis, who jumped the shark many, many protests ago. He went from being someone with credibility to someone who chose poorly, and eventually participated in an astonishingly hateful election campaign that included equating his white constituents with segregationists.
After I watched him in close contact for the hundredth time or so, equating this that or the other thing with Selma Bridge (it would have been Bank of America if they had let him speak, despite the way they shovel my money into his causes), I couldn’t take him seriously anymore, because he wasn’t taking himself seriously, or history seriously, or the social compact seriously. You make the racket, you lie in it.
And what a surprise, that a lefty demo would be taken over by a bunch of hysterical, preening, bearded, power-hungry and probably quite sexist boys, with one power-dyke admitted to the entourage.
These boys want to be Abbie Hoffman or Tom Hayden; the excited “legal observers” want to be William Kunstler; John Lewis can’t think of anything to be anymore. It’s not so much arrested development as fashion, or full-blown ethical ocd. I think many of these people are disturbed, or mentally ill.
Pity the poor cops, having to babysit these tools while being called names by them.
I need to go off-topic here for a moment. Several of Wretchard’s recent screeds pertain to discussions of the lack of reasoning and/or logic of the Left. They made me think of a short story I read years ago in college. The author was Russian and of the time period of the 18th or 19th century. I don’t remember whether it was from a volume of short stories or a stand alone. The story is about a man’s last days and concerns itself mostly with his thoughts about the events of his life and his reflections on them. Can any BC Russian leaning literati help me out with the title and author? Thanks in advance.
I will add my comment to many others expressed here. The video has to be near the poster child that defines creepy. After watching I had a moment when I felt like the subject of the painting by Edvard Munch called “The Scream.” Is this the “rent a voter mob” that Obama is counting on to re-elect him? There was a commentary a few days ago that Obama was ignoring his large donors and bundlers to spend his time with his “virtual” base since they were decisive in getting him elected. These consisted of college aged kids and the smaller but rabid donators as well as blacks voting for the first time ever.
The video was more like a movie scene from “Village of the Damned” with the “kids” controlling the adults. Although the crowd did include some of the Birkenstock babies (now quite long in the tooth), the majority looked college aged. I too am puzzled by the ethnic makeup of the crowd especially since it took place in Atlanta. Weird.
“I am non-conformist by nature and pretty much always have been.”
Eagles don’t flock.
“The professional activist wearing the electrician’s shirt, the “union thug” wearer?”
I had to go back to the tape to see the actual writing on the back of the unionistas shirt. Get this -
Teamsters
Helping
Unions
Grow.
There’s your Union Thug. Local 728. He was obviously considered muscle. I thought that was pretty to the point for a communist. Everything they do and say is based on the big lie. The saying is kind of like Pride, Integrity, and Guts. The Teamsters are perfect operators for a fascist movement. They can be paid to travel anywhere in the continental United States by virtue of the trucking lines. They are known to be the toughest though the equally corrupt International Longshore and Warehousemans Union certainly has its own reputation of thuggery to defend. This is the early formation of Teh Won’s Army. TWA
Wretchard:
While I am not in the least discounting the phychological aspects of all this, is it possible something more basic, like economic self-interest, is also at work? Granted everything you said about people wanting to lay down the burden of freedom, perhaps we should also remember enlightened self-interest. Many of these protestors are college students, who would like nothing better than to have the evil bankers write down or forgive their loans, or have the government bail them out. Others are union activists who no doubt want the government gravy trains to keep running, if not on time.
Today there was an article at Pajamas Media, (in the breaking news section) which tells us close to have of all American households get help from the government of one kind or another. This cannot last much longer, you know it and I know it; but it may help explain the protests today and why, despite the dismal economy, I believe Obama will be reelected next year.
“The problem with socialism is that sooner or later you run out of other people’s money” – Margaret Thatcher. For a lot of people, however, as long as later is after their own lifetimes they do not care.
W: “While it is often argued that people innately desire freedom, history provides plenty of evidence to support the contrary view: that people desire slavery. Many people want nothing more than to surrender their lives to a group of individuals who will tell them what to do; who will remove the uncertainties and anxieties of life; and who will promise them a secure, if subsistence future.”
“The right to freedom being the gift of God Almighty, it is not in the power of man to alienate this gift and voluntarily become a slave.” Samuel Adams
http://history.hanover.edu/texts/adamss.html
Wretchard is referring to the “new Marxist man” locked into an identical insect-like (or Borg-like, or cog-like, or molecule-like) equality with other insects where they are dominated by a small group of other men – the men of government – who it turns out are the only men possessing real freedom of action. Samuel Adams speaks about the original man – the one made in the image of God – a free man constrained under the relatively mild force of natural law wielded by a government which is less free in comparison to the free men – a government bound by natural law to secure the equal rights of men to life, liberty and fruit of labor in pursuit of happiness. There are two human natures from which to choose – one human nature created by Big Brother (the great mass of men enslaved to a small group of government men possessing superior rights) – one human nature created by God (the small group of men in government bound to securing the equal rights of the great mass of free men).
“As for Marxism, one thinks of an analogy with another physical theory. This is the kinetic theory of gases, according to which a gas is the aggregate of molecules that come into collision, with the result of each collision determined by the laws of mechanics. A very great number of molecules transform the statistical laws of their collision into the general laws of the physics of gases. [Marx:]“The only form of social contact of the producers of goods in capitalist society is exchange” (just as for gas molecules the only form of interaction is collision). The interaction of a great number of producers engenders that “social production” which, in its turn, determines their political, legal and religious notions, and the “social, political and spiritual processes of life in general.” It is evident that such a conception makes sense only on the assumption that separate “molecules” (producers) are identical… Understanding socialism as one of the manifestations of the allure of death explains its hostility toward individuality, its desire to destroy those forces which support and strengthen human personality: religion, culture, family, individual property. It is consistent with the tendency to reduce man to the level of a cog in the state mechanism, as well as with the attempt to prove that man exists only as a manifestation of non-individual features, such as production or class interest.” Igor Shafarevich
http://www.robertlstephens.com/essays/shafarevich/001SocialistPhenomenon.html
“The individual is only a cell… power is collective. The individual only has power in so far that he ceases to be an individual… If he can make complete utter submission; if he can escape from his identity; if he can merge himself in the Party so that he is the Party, then he is all powerful and immortal… Can you not understand that the death of the individual is not death; the Party is immortal… You are imagining that there is something called human nature which will be outraged by what we do, and will turn against us; but we create human nature.” George Orwell – 1984
28. mariner
bogie wheel @ 16,
I am non-conformist by nature and pretty much always have been. If I see “the crowd” zigging, I will zag, because, well, just because.
“I enjoyed reading your description of me. It was spot on.”
Moi aussie. It has caused me to miss out on some opportunities, but with 20-20 hindsight, not very much.
But it kept me out of some real trouble as well!
Having this penchant AND being somewhat of a curmudgeon, now, that can bring some very bad trouble.
I don’t have the same problem in church as Bogie, but that all depends upon knowing the pastor’s intentions and that takes some initial prior exposure to his sermons and in personal conversations; but I still see his point.
Lest we forget: GWB’s spontaneous use of a bullhorn at Ground Zero– very different type of interaction between Bush and the FDNY:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x7OCgMPX2mE
Obama does weird things. This, now, and that chorus of small children singing of his yet unkown praises:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=so-ggvEyvmk
“Obama’s gonna change it, we’er gonna change the world…”
doesn’t feel like Obama is simply changing it – it feels more like he is bringing to the fore the absolute worst parts of what the human animal is capable of.
I wish I could replace the sounds of this video onto the parts where Orchs are being fashioned out of pure evil – straight out of the ground.
————-
Break-Break: Some of the First Person Shooter video games allow the participants on line to “suit up” as it were in either “our” guys in the sand bos, or as the bad guys they are fighting. Some military Moms who lost their sons to the Zombies in the Middle East took grat umbrage that “anyone” would sell such a game (However, I believe the company is based in the UK, so that was probably part of the game’s appeal). Some of the Moms were successful at getting the military Exchange Stores to promise not to sell the game on base.
However (to make a long story short), many of these FPS games feature or are dedicated to Zombies versus normal humans. I would bet that many of these protesters would opt for the Zombie army before they would, for one second, suit up as G.I. Joe.
The Red Guard analogy is very accurate. Open source investigation indicates;
The Obama Administration was in touch with and attempted to guide the insurruction against Mubarak via the National Security Coucil”s “Counter Terrorism Advisor.” (Actually a young woman with that title who’s only claim to fame is an intimate connection with various leftist NGOs in Latin America and the Middle East.) She operated via a “journalist” in Lebanon, who made the actual contacts.
The recent demonstrations in Israel (essentially the same agenda as the “Occupy” crowd) were coordinated by a former Clinton administration NSC member.
By extension, the above would suggest that the impetus and organization for the “Occupy” movement is financed and controlled via leftist NGOs and Communist Unions, acting on the initiative of the White House NSC. The relevant NGOs are those created or abetted by George Soros and Theresa Heinz-Kerry. That would be The Tides Foundation, The Ford Foundation, and others.
The “Occupy” phenomenon has no other reason for existance except to advance the agenda and consolidation of power of the Left as represented in the Wihite House. All this discussion about principles and political philosophy is blather.
This is intimidation pure and simple, they don’t intend to lose. It won’t be over untll…
For a decade prior to 2009, I resided in two very different neighborhoods. One was a dowager-version of a 1970′s professors’ subdivision after most of the professors had sold to landlords or lower-level bureaucrats working for the State of Florida. It faced the problem of rent houses being occupied by excessive numbers of rowdy students, which situation was expressly illegal according to city codes. The resident-owners formed a neighborhood association to address the problem but never could muster the courage to demand that the city enforce its laws. The association withered away.
The other neighborhood was along a river 20 miles from the city and was inhabited by salts of the earth: rednecks, country folk, prison guards, ex-cons. One night a small gang of outsiders tried to burglarize the store at the fish camp. Within a few minutes four neighbors with 12 gauges had the dead man’s drop on them. The only organizational technique was “Bobby, get down to the store with yer gun.”
The putzes in the video are more organizationally dysfunctional than the idiots in my first neighborhood. They are nothing to worry about, given the existence of people like those in my second neighborhood.
67. Ganymede
Possibly you are thinking of ‘The Death of Ivan Ilyich’ by Leo Tolstoy
“1. Avoid distinguishing marks. Look like a citizen as much as possible. This means no tattoos, even on parts of your body not visible to the public, accidents happen. If you get arrested or hospitalized you don’t want anything that will counter or reveal your ID. Have a good explanation and possibly medical records to explain burns, scars, and discolorations.
2. Avoid faddish clothing.
3. Avoid beards, and extreme hair cuts/styles. look clean shaven.
4. Keep your shoes shined in the countries that wear Western business style.
5. When ever possible wear a tie or what the businessmen of the area wear.
6. Law enforcement officers for the most part are lazy, they’ll target those who don’t look like “citizens” who wear the uniform of the “non-conformists” and the criminal underclass first. Also people don’t register the business type in their mind as much as those that trigger their subconscious “possible threat” reaction.”
7. Thus if you have to, you can walk down a street with a brief case, an umbrella, and coat carried over your arm, with a very good chance that you will not be stopped and have your pistol, grenades, knife, and other nasty stuff found.”
I’ve always thought if you have to appear like a non conformists you probably aren’t one. You’ve just joined a different tribe.
#76 – Yes, that’s the one!! Thank you SO much! A very chilling tale but still relevant to many of Wretchard’s discussions.
How to avoid raising any more of these Zombies:
How to get your kid to be a fanatic reader
By James Patterson, Special to CNN
(NY Times rejected it as “too much of an advocacy piece” !
Here’s a simple but powerful truth that many parents and schools don’t act on: The more kids read, the better readers they become.
The best way to get kids reading more is to give them books that they’ll gobble up — and that will make them ask for another. Yes, it’s that simple. 1 + 1 = 2. Kids say the No. 1 reason they don’t read more is that they can’t find books they like. Freedom of choice is a key to getting them motivated and excited. Vampire sagas, comics, manga, books of sports statistics — terrific! — as long as kids are reading. Should they read on e-tablets? Sure, why not? How about rereading a book? Definitely. And don’t tell them a book is too hard or too easy. “Great Expectations”? Absolutely. “Finnegans Wake”? Well, maybe not. And remember, books can be borrowed free at libraries.
Where to find books your kids will gobble up.
ReadKiddoRead.com, GuysRead.com, and Oprah.com’s Kids Reading List are excellent resources, and they’re simpler to use than an iPhone. The American Library Association and the Young Adult Library Services Association have recommendations for terrific books, easily found by searching “ALA reading lists.” DropEverythingandRead.com has a “Favorite D.E.A.R. Books” tab on its home page.
Boys should be made to feel all squishy inside about reading graphic novels, comics, pop-ups, joke books, and general-information tomes — especially the last. GuysRead.com has categories such as “Robots,” “How to Build Stuff,” “Outer Space, but with Aliens,” and “At Least One Explosion.” It’s a wonderful site for finding books that will turn boys on to reading.
Teachers and school administrators might want to consider this: in many schools, there’s a tendency not to reward boys for reading books like “Guinness World Records” or “Sports Illustrated Almanac” or “The Rolling Stone Illustrated History of Rock and Roll.” Too often, boy-appealing books are disproportionately overlooked on recommended reading lists.
Big mistake. Tragic mistake. Avoidable mistake.
79. Doug
Ditto: I learned to read of the Donald Duck comics of the 1950′s.
What a bunch of silly pathetic morons. Sqatters. They make a great case for inertia. I notice that those who participate in Tea Party assemblies actually have a life to return to. They are getting lots of media time, and as long as the media portrays it vaguely, and with the same energy it gins up for its agenda (fox included) it will continue to look all grass roots and stuff. Like hoovervilles!
Irony is usually pretty ironic, so if John Lewis is getting a huge hint that the gig may be up, he or the rest of us might be inclined to try and focus with precision on- what gig? what up? why would it be “up”?
The red chinese triple purge offers the best explanation, and also the best prediction of what would eventually happen next, or at least after a while once any significant gains (from this SquatSheidt) were made by democrat party down the line as that applies to next years election. John Lewis can at least see that as an organizing principle and a goal, but he is definitely not part of the future as far as the new order is concerned, and is isolated as some sort of object of derision, inferring that he is a part of the establishment collaboration between government (democrat party) and “Wall Street”.
This apparently, is the thanks he gets, despite being a made man on the so called “civil right” end of things, in that he was part of a radical process that was supposed to have purged the Bull Conner types from democrat party, and supposedly re-birthed them in everymans’ everything back in his day.
The false premise (on which Lewis based his carrier) is that affirmative action is or was supposed to be a means of overcoming any barriers to advancement (not to mention the welfare state) when in fact the two combined were nothing more than a spoils system by democrat party to delude blacks and guilted whites into thinking that they were magnanimous and that the prosperity of the country could be absorbed into their sphere of control.
When Herman Cain talks of brainwashing and what he is doing to undermine it and turn the tide on it’s more or less monolithic track record, what we see here is democrat party airing some dirty, in fact filthy laundry.
It’s difficult to call it racism per se, because I would define racism as advancing one race at the expense of another. But that is the very term democrat party in general, and Barak 0bama in particular use to shut off discussion. So 0bama is going to usurp this thing (whatever it is, or is spun and fed into) for one purpose only, his own. (Yo ()bam a, I don’t think this is helping you get votes sucka)
The only net benefit here that is possible is the degree to which it helps ()bam a get reelected and provide some equilibrium to his sorry state right now. That’s how desperate his administration is. And he is more than ok with John Lewis being told that he can sit in the back of the bus when he is in fact being thrown under it. By the very group he’s ‘winking’ at. Moron.
I think the protestors are using the notion of opposing the “1%” of rich and powerful people as a flag of convenience. Supposedly, there are opposed to Wall Street, but when the “Occupy” protestors attempted to storm the Air and Space Museum in Washington DC, their actual target comes into view.
It appears they want to obliterate America’s memory of itself.
I think the protestors are seeking to attack symbolic targets in order to provoke outrage, and then claim to be the “victims” if their opponents become as violent as they are. I’m not quite sure what the puppet masters are trying to accomplish, but I suspect they are trying to cause a repeat of the Spanish Civil War, this time with the “Fascists” defeated.
I am late to the field, being that this is Sunday, when both Church and the 49er’s play. I note that “new” praise music has similar aspects of the call and response.
As a good Belmont Club member, i will worship in the opposite spirit. In an intellectual church, i am charismatic. If they try to force me to be charismatic, either I internally argue with the simplistic theology of a praise chorus, (it isn’t useful to say “God you is good” forty seven times), or practice active listening to God. It satisfies the need to be still and listen, usually lacking in most Protestant churches. Some of my best poems are written during “praise time”.
Next week is Catholic,(wife is Catholic, we both go to both churches, and have for 40 years) so i have the chance to observe the hierarchical boys at play. Apparently they are changing some words in their call and response.
I read an analysis that Obama’s speeches were designed to hypnotize, in a similar way to Hitler’s. We are susceptible to such control methods, although knowing they are being practiced should reduce their effectiveness. Turning sermons into poems forces you to try to understand what is really being said, and makes mind control harder.
This is what makes Belmont Club so dangerous. Our leader the cat, helps us think.
The early 50′s Donald Duck comics were classics, both in art and story.
What a
What a
bunch of
bunch of
morons
morons
If you’ve been a part of the American motorcycle culture, you’ve probably heard of the One Percenters. They are the bad boys, the sexy “Wild Ones” who stalk the land tearing it all up on their insane quest for freedom.
The One Percenters live a life filled with tattooes, guns, loud music, fast women, and getting into trouble way too much.
No suffocating, confining ‘burbs for them, they take to the open road.
I wonder what is the tattoo ratio between the Occupiers and the Tea Party. I wonder if the original One Percenters aren’t puzzled as hell, because the new One Percenters are pencil-pushing dip-dunks on Wall Street, and chances are the 99%’ers in this crowd might make a run on you in the tattoo art category.
Can’t a rebel get a break?
#67 Ganymede
“The video was more like a movie scene from “Village of the Damned” with the “kids” controlling the adults. “
Soon to become “Children of the Corn”.
http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/curmudgeon
pinched
“: a crusty, ill-tempered, and usually old man ”
Wretcherd, how about a Curmudgeon of the month award? Let Teresita play too, so long as she can show her hair and teeth are falling out and her dildo is shrinking.
I think that’s (this?) is my forth. So I’m going to study my mind control techniques;
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=adp61fE21Nk&feature=related
This guy is a hoot! Not sure if he is the ultimate con man of just the worlds greatest comedian.
“Radiate Who You Are!”
Obama said he was the only thing standing between the peasants with pitchforks and the wealthy bankers. He didn’t mention the peasants were his paid allies. Now he’s decided to unleash them on the bankers. [Gales of riotous laughter.] I’m sure the bankers he betrayed are typical white people. Couldn’t happen to a nicer bunch.
Lewis didn’t have half the humiliation he deserves. His shtick about how all white people are racists who shout [racial epithet deleted] at him was tired 40 years ago.
87. stoicheion Wretcherd, how about a Curmudgeon of the month award? Let Teresita play too, so long as she can show her hair and teeth are falling out and her dildo is shrinking.
Curmudgeon?
I’ve always been a Pat Buchanan lesbian, paleo-conservative rather than neo-conservative. Fortress America. No overseas empire. A belt of Army bases across the land border with Mexico, each one five miles apart, with live-fire exercises every night and ceaseless patrols with night-vision goggles looking for trespassers from the south. A No Fly List that automatically excludes people from Muslim countries unless they have a damn good reason for coming here, like a UN ambassador maybe. Tougher sanctions for US employers who ignore the No Work List. A crash program to harden the US from EMP attack. No more welfare for any country, and especially those that export arms or revolution, like Israel or Pakistan. No more turning things upside-down, so our allies are our enemies, and our enemies someone to literally bow down to.
Howzat?
RE. #12. stoicheion
“Thousands of villages looking for their lost idiots”.
Don’t worry. Humankind’s capacity to generate them seems unlimited.
89. TeresitaNo more welfare for any country, and especially those that export arms or revolution, like Israel
Are you a buchananite anti – jooooooooooooo [like victor]?
87. stoicheion
”Wretcherd, how about a Curmudgeon of the month award? Let Teresita play too, so long as she can show her hair and teeth are falling out and her dildo is shrinking.”
Sir, to me that comment is out of bounds and, even worse, not funny.
JAPeters – “By extension, the above would suggest that the impetus and organization for the “Occupy” movement is financed and controlled via leftist NGOs and Communist Unions, acting on the initiative of the White House NSC.”
We have a shadow government that is run like the CIA using distributed networking. These tactics were precisely the tactics used to counter the communists who invented it during the cold war. Read Inside the Company. There is a gathering storm and the shifting of polemics inside our own country is becoming so great that eventually a great battle for ideological control will ensue. Either that or we will be consumed by communists and crony capitalists. The world of Philip Agee is on the ascendancy and the world as we know it is turning inside out and upside down. The generation that “lost” America are looking forward to having a comfortable retirement, job well done.
Ridgerunner – “The putzes in the video are more organizationally dysfunctional than the idiots in my first neighborhood. They are nothing to worry about…”
These people vote. They influence their idiot friends to vote. Girlies attract men who will do whatever they tell them to for the promise of sex because our schools enforce a hierarchical whordedom, therefore they will vote for the causes that the girls with the hairy armpits tell them to. They will also get sympathy from the grey haired hippy type as well. Zombie armies do not need to organize they only need to exist.
“Howzat?”
I like it.
91. f47 Are you a buchananite anti – jooooooooooooo [like victor]?
I am against borrowing money from China and giving it away in military aid to the fourth largest arms exporter in the world, and the strongest power in the Levant. This is because I view debt as the ultimate form of taxation without representation. Our children and grandchildren will pay for the fun we have today.
On the other hand, selling bunker buster bombs to the regional superpower in the Middle-east is perfectly okay. Kudos to Obama, even if he is trying to get Ed Koch off his back.
My position results in constant accusations from the person who posts here as “Pork Rinds from Allah” that I am anti-Semitic. Well, Semites include the Arabs too. And so he specifically accuses me of hating Jews. I hate no one. John Boanerges said, “If a man say, I love God, and hateth his brother, he is a liar: for he that loveth not his brother whom he hath seen, how can he love God whom he hath not seen?”
“It was the great genius of Lenin to take the elements of mystery, eschatology and martyrdom and cast it into the only world-religion ever invented in the Western world: Marxism-Leninism.”
Don’t you think you could take that thread at least back to the Greek atomists, which Storm-Rider kind of gets at in #70? They may have been the earliest dust-in-the-wind boys.
The point about the chanting is not the chanting itself but what one is chanting to/for. Such rituals provide a legitimate means of accessing a different level of awareness, and if the awareness is of Truth it is helpful. The obvious fact is that Moses, Jesus, and Buddha conveyed Truth, and the atomists and Marx and these fools convey the opposite.
The chanting done by Catholics and Jews – and some of it IS chanting – is bedrock, part of the foundation of what makes us better human beings. It stems directly from Jesus and Moses and the magisterium that has passed that associated truths down through the ages. This video is yet another case of the devil aping God.
And these cult members are the least of our worries in that regard. The really dangerous infections are those so successfully disseminated by not just the socialists (the economic nihilists) but also by the abortion industry and the “gay rights” advocates.
These are bullets aimed straight at the heart of religious freedom, the Judeo-Christian church, and the family. (Without the family we are powerless against the state – Chesterton).
T/94—
I keep having this idea of attaching those bunker busters to a drone and dropping the whole thing onto an Iranian nuke site, a whole fleet of ‘em: Voila!!! unmanned kamikaze, no worries about getting back, pilot protection, etc.
I’ve got a feeling somebody already thought of that.
94. Teresita
i have no problem with NO foreign aid – i have a problem singling out the only democracy in middle east.
btw if israel got back only a fraction, credit for inventiveness what it provides to the free world in terms of high tech, medical research …
“Howzat?
Well, Teresita, one would have expected nothing less…
http://www.humanevents.com/article.php?id=26606
98. Barry Meislin
thank you for proving my point. when you say that your a buchanenite
and who disingenuously says ‘i’m not anti-Semitic’ i just hate jooos …. and quotes scripture to prove how eeeeevil joos are ….
“I keep having this idea of attaching those bunker busters to a drone”
The Predator and the Reaper have payloads of around 450lbs. The penetrator munitions are in the 2000-5000lb range. Send in the drones to clean up the anti-air defenses after the wild-weasel mission is over.
“i have no problem with NO foreign aid – i have a problem singling out the only democracy in middle east.”
I must throw down with the shutting off the aid. I am not for shutting off Israel but giving money to Israel for their defense then giving money to Egypt because we gave money to Israel is BS. Let us buy legitimate arms from Israel. What is this; “we’ll give you money only if you spend it at our store” crap. Our dealings with Israel is the lynch pin of our wastrel methods. We give money to Afghanistan and Pakistan who uses it to attack us in Afghanistan. Total BS. As Teresita points out, we borrow money that we don’t have to give it away. The excuse to waste this money is because we give it to Israel therefore it is only fair that we give greater amounts in aggregate to Israel’s enemies. This is a sickness plain and simple. And if people can’t be for “cops” but realize there are boundaries, that balance must be struck, they too are sick. Typical liberal trope– “If you are for law enforcement you must therefore be for taxing the rich, borrowing money from China, and multi-trillion dollar pensions for anybody who worked a day for the government.” The balance must be, pull your head out and realize that there are no infinite boundaries to friendship anymore than there are infinite boundaries to our treasuries. We are placing down markers on both sides of a bad bet and the house always win. Israel is our friend not our charge. And, frankly, if Israel is a religious state, then tithing them may well be a breach of the constitution.
israel is NOT a religious state it is intended to be a safe haven for the jewish people – there are 1.5 million arab citizens of all and no faith.
Liberals want to tax the rich and give to their poor friends. Conservatives want to tax everybody and give it to their “special” friends. Same end result. Half of the nation gets to pay for the personal projects of the other half. Israel deserves our backing morally and militarily if it comes to that. They don’t deserve to earn our taxes.
“israel is NOT a religious state” Well I guess that clears that up. It kind of sucks that the Nazi’s are gone and the UN set up a safe haven in the middle of a Islamofascist Caliph. Now the UN has changed their mind and through the multi-culti inclusion of kingdoms and dictatorships is now vociferously against the Jewish state. That is why I support Israel. But if Israel is not a religious state, then exactly why is it if you are not for borrowing money from China and giving it to Israel that you are an anti-Semite? Isn’t that having it both ways?
102. Annoy Mouse
Israel deserves are backing morally and militarily if it comes to that. They don’t
ask for
our taxes.
Agreed.
when will we stop subsidizing our sworn enemies – u know the ‘religion of peas [tm]‘ ?
ask wictor “what’s in our best interest, turkey?”
100) A M,
“The Predator and the Reaper have payloads of around 450lbs. The penetrator munitions are in the 2000-5000lb range.”
Just have 5-10 of the drones gripping the bunker buster by the husks.
I’m glad the issue of foreign aid came up in this thread. I just watched vid of armored vans running down peaceful protesters in Egypt a minute ago, and America’s foreign aid should be on everyone’s minds.
Which is why Herman Cain’s forthrightness on the matter of clarifying who are our friends are is so prescient. Right now Americans are debating the utility of government wealth transfers to constituencies inside their own republic. The debate about governmental transfers of tax-payers’ monies to constituencies outside their republic is certain to follow.
To the degree the State Department can lay claim to taxpayers’ dues and transfer them abroad, the denizens of foggy bottom should take care to send those dues only to America’s true friends. Both to send a signal to our enemies and to reward nations that adopt American-style constitutional governance and free markets.
Sadly for the Transnational Left, only democratic nation states can claim a democratic mandate from their peoples, and thus, only these nations can apply for the doles that accompany being our tried and true friend.
Westphalian orders reassert themselves, and it’s another stick in the eye of the party of Al Gore, Marc Rich, the post modern political “sciences,” and the academic Left!
W: “… people innately desire freedom, history provides plenty of evidence to support the contrary view: that people desire slavery.”
It is unfair to categorize people as such. Almost all people want is security and stability, a comfort zone that we all know how to operate. It is too hard to struggle against THEY/THEM, esp. as an individual. The least resistance route people took usually ended up in a semi-slavery state, but that’s not to say people DESIRE slavery.
Very few made a name for themselves, when picked by FATE to make a stand
About seventy posts ago, I ventured a guess that OWS was a seeding effort by labor unions to create a liberal version of the Tea Party. Have done some research since then and would like to cancel that thought; the same fundamental movement that spawned the original Tea Party (Taxed Enough Already) still exists, long after it morphed in practice into CPAC 2, with the Only Real Republicans.
Upon reflection, I can’t see a reason for organized labor to upset the applecart at this moment – Obama’s new jobs bill is a bunch of union giveaways. At the core of the protests seems to be the unholy alliance of Big Money, Government, and Industry and the result of a lower standard of living for those of us not so aligned. The unions are newcomers and seem intent on co-opting the movement for their own agenda, while staying firmly within the Democratic Party and otherwise maintaining status quo. The OWS originators and/or their supporters are warning against that, and saying in effect that the one giving you money might have a knife behind his back.
Fascinating stuff, this gatekeeping effort, and in that context this group’s actions make sense to me. I don’t know who they are, but I’m pretty sure of who they aren’t.
Steveaz – “To the degree the State Department can lay claim to taxpayers’ dues and transfer them abroad, the denizens of foggy bottom should take care to send those dues only to America’s true friends. Both to send a signal to our enemies and to reward nations that adopt American-style constitutional governance and free markets.”
I guess my point is if freedom and democracy is its own rewards then bribing our so called friends to adapt policies in their own self interest is a losing proposition as long as A) we are broke, and B) nations like China, Russia, Iran, Venezuela, Frawnce, et al, can in the aggregate outspend us to counter our international largesse. Freedom should be its own inducement, instead, in the whole our spendthrift policies always seem to backfire and benefit tyrants. Kim Sung Il is doing none the worst for our efforts. We underwrite the military of every democratic nation just by being so the payola to Germany, Japan, and South Korea is a joke, not to mention the fact that our commie state department undoes everything our intentions hope for. We are a nation divided against itself once again and unless we can become the shining beacon of communism on the hill that the Democratic Party desires or a nation of the free men that our founders envisioned there will be no way to have a coherent policy that is capable of seeing its interest put forth. Literally the Left hand undoes the actions of the Right hand. It is political masturbation abroad that should best be kept at home until the fight against good and evil is decided. There is nothing we can do for the world when we have lost our own souls. The US Attorney General has shipped arms to drug cartels for god’s sake. An evil force is occupying our own nation and we are worrying about other people’s business. Shmeesh.
A M @ 93
As a student in the 60′s I was well acquainted with the interpersonal dynamic you’re referring to. One hairy little lady gave me a Chairman Mao pin for my efforts. The reason I believe reaction to the Occupy Everywhere happenings is overblown is that the demonstrators are creating more anti-Obama votes than pro-. The average guy has to be motivated to go vote, and these antics do a lot of motivatin’ on the anti- side.
Mad Fiddler
Kiss up and kick down, par for the course among bureaucratic apparachiks. As Wretchard said, many people want no responsibility, they just want someone to tell them what to do and take care of them. But that doesn’t mean they don’t still want to boss others around. The petty tyrants who infect every organization where people don’t take responsibility for themselves.
We could tolerate the perpetual children a whole lot better if their very existence didn’t inevitably spawn the petty tyrants and enable the not-so-petty ones.
102. Annoy Mouse But if Israel is not a religious state, then exactly why is it if you are not for borrowing money from China and giving it to Israel that you are an anti-Semite? Isn’t that having it both ways?
David Ben-Gurion and Golda Meir were outright atheists. In 1991 we ended up paying Israel $13 billion to resettle their Russian immigrants in return for them NOT helping us hunt for Scuds in Iraq, which would have shattered the coalition, and forced us to throw Saddam out of Kuwait without the couple three Saudi F-15s and handful of Qatari platoons along for the ride. Nice work if you can get it. Pock-ee-ston has adopted the same business model.
Teresita@89: Howzat?
I like it too.
That and Tina Trent’s “anorectic boyos.”
Withering disdain, at its finest.
Ridgerunner – “The reason I believe reaction to the Occupy Everywhere happenings is overblown is that the demonstrators are creating more anti-Obama votes than pro-.”
I think you’re right. The problem I have is that the young and the restless crowd the administration is radicalizing is the one that will turn to violence, the one that the MSM will focus news coverage on 24/7, and the spineless Republicans will try to appeal to them to show that they are not just a bunch of monied country club stiffs in checked pants. They will bend their will to them just like they bent their will to illegal aliens that have taken over our nation and gutted and trashed our laws and legal system. We are now a country based on giving favors to foreigners, radicals or whoever represents the greatest threat and no longer a nation that represents the bulk of its citizens. I think in no small part that is what concerns the Tea Party and why they are criticized left and right.
What the punks in the park are saying is; “look, we are the only people organized enough to come together and protest. You need to listen to us because we are the ones that are important and if you don’t do what we say there is going to be some unpleasantness.” What I have advocated all along, and it would require somebody who was capable of organizing such a thing, is that you need to get 10 million Tea Partiers to show up with such overwhelming numbers that the opposition realizes that they they cannot compete. It will probably never happen. You couldn’t get that many people together who had a life to live. That is why the losers get the attention they do.
Here here, Teresita.
My comments are growing long so gotta go but one more –
Liberals say they are just as American as anybody. That they sympathize with communist Cuba, Venezuela, et al, is beside the point. They hate America’s past, its institutions and its traditions. What makes them a better American than you, in their mind, is that they are willing to overthrow the established order be it Wall Street, the military industrial complex, or the constitution which was after all, written by old racist white men. They think that America is evil; therefore destroying it is more patriotic than preserving it. Where were you during the protests? Did you do your part?
It would be very funny if the tea party co-opted the Wall Street protest. I’d like to see some Tea Party guys there with signs like: No bail-outs for the big banks. Let them go bankrupt. or, No more government money for special interests. or Obama: pledge not to take any more dirty money from Wall Street.
My Tea Party group did this once when a union group of paid protesters were counter demonstrating against a rally we were having for our preferred candidate for governor of NY. When the Tea Party guys joined the other demonstrators it completely befuddled them. They didn’t know whether to welcome us or bash us and thus draw discredit on themselves. It was a high point of cognitive dissonance.
…in return for them NOT helping us hunt for Scuds in Iraq, which would have shattered the coalition, and forced us to throw Saddam out of Kuwait without the couple three Saudi F-15s and handful of Qatari platoons along for the ride.
So are you saying that Israel should have sat on its hands (as the Bush I administration demanded they do—and which Israel did, while Iraqi scuds were landing on its citizens)?
Or are you saying that Israel should have rejected the Bush I administration’s demands and tried to prevent those Iraqi from being launched—which they almost did do (Israeli pilots being in their cockpits ready for takeoff).
Please—I know it’s hard—but a little coherence goes a long way. Please.
Agreed, AM,
We shouldn’t have to ‘bribe’ people to do what’s right.
The homily, “You catch more bees with honey than with vinegar.” always bothered me for that reason. Who wants to spare sparse honey to catch hives of stinging bees in the first place? But, homily it is…because it is true. And aid-quantities, like trade volumes, do indicate relative levels of comity between nations.
Still, the issue of foreign aid does catch the thinking citizen in a catch-22 duzn’t it. If we aren’t busy ‘sugarin” our friends ‘cuz they did right, then we’re actively ‘sugarin” our enemies in order to get them to do right. I, for one, want off of this spinning carnival ride.
Maybe we should quit the ‘aid-racket’ altogether, bottle up our international charity in World-Bank lending and the free-trade campaigns, and say we’re done being sugar-daddy to the world. Foggy Bottom’d scream bloody murder (the ‘partment derives much of its prestige from its ability to ‘sugar’ this or that overseas constituency), but if that’s the worst of it, so what? ‘Nuff said.
I mean that, it is not a rogue, unserious suggestion.
Some will accuse us of “isolationism,” even while private investment in, and trade with, friendly foreign countries grows naturally out of our frugality…But we’ll have slain the “aid-monster.”
One more sign to be used by Tea Party guys infiltrating the Occupy Wall Street protests: “Everyone pays their fair share, and no one rides for free.” This meant to indicate that even if you get more from the rich, everyone should have some skin in the game. (see comment 116).
Gordon @ 92 taking exception to Stoicheion @ 87:
“Sir, to me that comment is out of bounds and, even worse, not funny.”
Well said, Gordon! #87 was a very disappointing comment from Stoicheion. If it was intended to be jocular, it completely missed the mark. If it was not intended to be jocular, then — Stoicheion, you should be ashamed of yourself.
The lady in question certainly can (and does) take care of herself. But the rest of us should not stand by idly. “First they came for Teresita, but I was silent because I was not Teresita.”
Gordon and Kin,
I’ve a feeling that Sto knows he misspoke.
Speaking as one of Stoicheion’s regular readers, I expect he’ll pop up with better manners in future threads at BC.
We’ve all blurted things in print that we regret later. I think Sto’ll take some time to refine his approach, and that we’ll see him back at BC better than before.
Shades of Habu
Israel’s enemies are America’s enemies. We should build nuke plants and mine coal and drill for oil so as to free ourselves from the corrupting influence of Israel’s enemies. Any tools we give Israel, ie Bunker Busters, will be targeted where they belong.
“It was the great genius of Lenin to take the elements of mystery, eschatology and martyrdom and cast it into the only world-religion ever invented in the Western world: Marxism-Leninism.
It was so successful that the idea at once gave rise to a whole plethora of heresies, including the Fascist and National Socialist heresies, with whom Marxism-Leninism fought a religious war in the 1940s, the most the destructive war of belief in world history.”
Oh Man! That is some good stuff right there.
It’s incisiveness alone is first-rate, but it has the added benefit of being phrased in such a way to cause the average lefty to fly into a sputtering rage.
Thank you for that…
117. Barry Meislin: So are you saying that Israel should have sat on its hands (as the Bush I administration demanded they do—and which Israel did, while Iraqi scuds were landing on its citizens)?
Naw, they should have been helping us find the Scuds, to hell with the coalition. The coalition was a whitewash anyway. Did we really need the French tank division, or the token forces from the Philippines? The UK and the Poles would have been with us come hell or high water.
But most of our BC regulars were here for the 2006 Israeli-Lebanon War, and we saw how effective the IDF was in finding Scuds then….NOT.
PLEASE NOTE THE BLOGGER KNOWN AS MS T, TERESITA IS CUTTING YOUR POSTS AND PASTING THEM IN THE BLOG “ELEPHANT BAR”
Teresita said…
117. Barry Meislin: So are you saying that ****** should have sat on its hands (as the Bush I administration demanded they do—and which ****** did, while Iraqi scuds were landing on its citizens)?
She has a history of anti-israel, anti-zionism and anti judaism posts and then cries foul when you say she’s anti-semitic.
Naw, they should have been helping us find the Scuds, to hell with the coalition.
Indeed. Of course. For sure, if you say so….
(And I can see it now all so clearly: Darlin’ Pat foaming at the mouth declaring, “Those goshdarn Zionists are sabotaging—with the blessings of the Amen corner—President Geoge H. W. Bush’s carefully crafted coalition!!! We’re trying to help those f#$%ers out; but no, they HAVE TO sabotage us. All we’re asking them is to STAY OUT OF IT for a change. While we’re busting our asses trying to find those Scuds. Just STAY OUT of it. Not too complicated one would think. But NO, they can’t even do that….” etc., etc. Darlin’ Pat doing what he does so well…)
So sure, Teresita, if you say so.
File under: Damned if you do; damned if you don’t… (Just how we likes it!)
But most of our BC regulars were here for the 2006 Israeli-Lebanon War, and we saw how effective the IDF was in finding Scuds then….NOT.
Gloating again, are we? (Along with “most of our BC regulars”?…)
Well, with some justification, no doubt…. And perhaps one may be assuaged that at least some one was having a good time during those grim summer days….
(But “Scuds”, Teresita? You never cease to amaze…. Though might it have something to do with the fact—even if one keeps, somehow, forgetting—that you’re a “friend of God”?
http://pajamasmedia.com/richardfernandez/comment/177144/ )
Still, there were some successes, given the sheer quantities of ordnance and where it was deployed:
http://tinyurl.com/6c9mo95
http://tinyurl.com/6dk7ayu
along with the Zelzal that was shot down by the IDF over Beirut and other stuff that, no doubt, remains undivulged.
File under: Scorn-matic
I recall Parris Island in the summer of the 70′s, The D. I. and the close combat instructors would yell, “MOTIVATE ME!” The recruits would yell back loudly and in unison, “KILL, KILL, KILL!”
It felt so good and so right to be one of the soon to be Marines, yelling together under the gaze of the man we would all gladly die for. That is what distrubs me about these assholes today it’s nonsense yelling tomorrow it will be kill, kill, kill.
Here’s an eerie one from these automatons-the crowd in “call and response” mode repeating the phrase-”You can have sex with animals.”
Here’s the video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=My_cNzQGS8E&feature=player_embedded
A very strange dynamic. The repeated chanting is only partially explainable by the lack of a good PA system. It is about control for the organizers, and for the crowd a willing submission to the collective mind of the group. The strange part, which I have never understood about Lefties, is that most “collectivists” feel a pathological need to inflict their blathering on everybody else, because their viewpoint is unique, valuable, and must be heard RIGHT NOW.
The guy who first “blocks” the Congressman from speaking… I wanted to yell “STFU you pompous bastage, no one cares!”
Scuds in 2006 campaign? That’s news to me.
It’s a fact: liquid propellant rockets are almost impossible to see during the launch phase — particularly if they use storable propellants like Aerozine 50 and dinitrogen tetroxide. It has an almost invisible flame. ( c.f. Gemini launches http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wmM8fwIoK9s )
Even the V-2/A-4 ( burning 150 proof grain alcohol and LOX ) was so flameless that the RAF NEVER spotted even one launch. This, in spite of directing entire squadrons to the correct areas!
This is the reason that Bush 41 was able to chill out the Israelis. Nothing they could provide was as effective as what the USAF and RAF were already doing — and we were using more aircraft on SCUD hunts than Israel could possibly provide.
The SCUD hunt campaign directly lead to the THAAD project. Hunting down TELs with aircraft did not work.
The OWS mob went to the Upper East Side earlier today. Alleging that their targets were the evil corporate billionaires, they singled out just two.
Rupert Murdoch, and David Koch (of the Koch brothers).
Wretchard, I think you’ve nailed it. The Red Guard vibe was strong with them. And that “human megaphone” business was like something out of The Onion (so was the pencil-necked weenie leading them in the chants). Also noteworthy is that Zuccotti Park, the Wall St. park where they’re ensconced, is owned by a big corporation with close ties to Hussein Obama. Which is why they’re not asking the cops to kick the bums out.
The misguided bums: railing against “Wall Street,” and all unawares that the Wall Streeters were A) mostly Democrats, and B) among Hussein Obama’s biggest donors. Crony capitalists, the dirty alliance between Big Government and Big Money — that’s who they Should be yelling at.
Hussein Obama and his minions and masters: how do we get to them? how fight them? they own the megaphone.