Well wroten, Stacy.

It’s just a party, a rave-up.  And the sense of entitlement evidently extends to the bodies of other partygoers.

I saw something somewhere to the effect that they even harassed an elderly woman in a wheelchair, and wouldn’t allow her to leave. Death would be too good for these scum suckers. This OWS crowd are the kinds of people I would love to accidentally overhear somebody planning their murders, just so I could have the sadistic pleasure of not saying jack shit about it.

This ain’t the 90’s Rip Van Winkle. Did you just wake up? 

Being compassionate to thugs supports thuggery. 

I am so tired of that crap.  AFAIK, the only “community organizing” Obama did for any length of time or as his main focus wasn’t what people assume:  he was an attorney for ACORN.  He wasn’t out there carrying petitions in the ‘hood, Homey.  He wasn’t driving people to demonstrations or meetings.  He wasn’t signing up members.

ALL the jerk did was file suits and motions for the group, which then as now was frequently in legal trouble, since their entire purpose was corrupt from the beginning.

“Community Organizer”?  Meh.

Not true, Adj.  Read Stanley Kurtz’s Radical-In-Chief.

I disagree.

The way I see it, the zombies will have to eat SOMEBODY first.

Wrong you are, Numbnuts.  We’ll have plenty of compassion for their nexts of kin.

eat shit and die

Is there any way we can get an id on the guy  if the name Matthew  Patterson  is actully real.

They are reporting some things, but they are trying to play it off as outsiders, like he homeless, or recently paroled prisoners looking for freebies and a party. In other words, its not the protesters, just people taking advantage of them. If something happened at a Tea Party and I blamed it on the same culprits, then I would be painted as a person who hated the homeless or who unfairly persecuted paroled criminals who just need a break. Its amazing to me who these damn people can even stand to look at themselves in the mirror.

Which is why I call it the Donner Party.

As of yet neither has this Donner Party (killed someone for dinner) but they have started to “consume” each other.

The fellow who particularly relished the pectoral muscles?

thousands of individuals in SEIU shirts… gotcha.

Don’t need to be wearing SEIU shirts to be collectivists. These folks don’t deny it. They rather more resemble the Borg than the sixties protesters, but even a hive has a queen.

Don’t see it, how so?

knappy, Communism was and is an economic system long before anyone tried to run a country with it.

Oh, now we should look deeper, that this is all the result of a small groups or individuals. No one bothered to do that with the Tea Party. Of course, the Tea Party would not have countenanced any of this behavior in their midst. Of course, the Tea Party as a whole would have been blamed, at least for not stopping it. And you probably wouldn’t be here telling us to not look at it “collectively”.

I don’t see how defining ones enemies negatively is collectivist, while we might find some commonality with some of the things they are against we have nothing in common with their solutions to any of them.

 We are against the bank bailouts because of the moral and economic damages of socialising risk while privatizing profit. They object because rich folks got the money instead of them.

They don’t want to change the government in order to attain their goals they want the current power structure to confiscate wealth redistribute it and then leave them alone to enjoy their gains, until it’s time to do it all over again. The inherent flaws of this scheme appear to exceed their comprehension skills. They seem to believe that increasing the government intervention can give them what other’s earn without interfering in their personal lives. We know better and believe that less government is the path individual freedom and prosperity.

Tens of thousands is probably the upper limit even if one counts all the campers and the reinforcements who show up for particular excursions off camp. No doubt our definitions of “the collective” and “collectivism” vary a good deal however I submit that each camp is “run” as a collective and if all the camps were merged into one big camp they would attempt to run it as they do the smaller ones. In the video you posted the part were they tell the driver who had a child in the car and just wanted to proceed on with his journey, they tell him that he has no power is very revealing. Their belief that their mere presence abrogated his right to drive on the roads his tax dollars pay for but took away his power to do so just because they say so. My take from that is that they not only don’t understand what power is, in that if he chose to exercise it, he did indeed have the power to proceed on his way despite the “moral power” they think their decision to block the road gave them. To my mind they are so convinced of their “collective” power that they believe once they have reached consensus on what their rights and privileges are the rest of us are part of the collective it’s just that we are rebelling against it. Or perhaps we’re just Kulaks.

Their sense of entitlement astounds, I’ve heard them say in previous videos that they have a right to “civil disobedience” and it’s fascistic to arrest them for it. They also believe that they have the right to invade private property to express their demands. That seems to be based on their belief that private property only means personal possessions.

PGlenn,

There are several different useful definitions of collectivism, but the one that runs both ways here is the assumption that because a group is defined by one characteristic, its members necessarily share other characteristics.

The only characteristic shared by all participants in Occupy is that they’re all participating in Occupy. In every other respect, they differ. 

Some are run-of-the-mill Democrats who think they’re participating in a “reform” movement.

Some are organized labor rank-and-file who’ve been drummed out to try to co-opt the thing for the Democratic Party.

Some are anarchists, some are statists.

Some are non-anarchist libertarians, some are Stalinists, some are in between those two statist extremes.

Some may be smelly hippies (I saw some hippies at Occupy St. Louis, but they weren’t particularly smelly).

Some obviously are savages, most of them probably aren’t.

Personally, I think it’s both too early and too late to call Occupy a “movement” at all. Half of it is a clusterfuck that has yet to organize around anything in particular, and the other half is a Democratic Party astroturf operation, and that half-and-half division probably isn’t nearly granular enough to capture the reality.

Replace “Stalinist” with “Falangist,” “Democratic” with “Republican,” and remove the organized labor component, and you’ve got the Tea Party circa mid-2009.

“Collectivism basically means collective ownership by all the people of the ‘collective’ of all means of production, with that system controlled by a central authority (e.g., the state).”

No, it doesn’t. Communism (of which there are both anarchist and statist varieties) is a political extension of collectivism, which is itself epistemological.

Are you sure you’re not John McEnroe? He has a bad habit of saying that I’m saying things I didn’t say, too.

It’s now been about half a century since Flemming v. Nestor. You might want to read it. Social Security is not an “investment” which entitles one to ownership an account balance, nor is it an “insurance policy” in which premiums give one a right to “benefits.” It’s just a welfare program that happens to be — but doesn’t have to be — linked to a particular tax.

People “pay into” the Department of Agriculture their entire lives, too, but that doesn’t mean they’re entitled to a farm.

knappster, sorry, you’re flat wrong here. Collectivism is not epistemoligically rooted. Where did you come up with that? I encourage you to consult how the term has been used over the years in the relevant disciplines, but in the meantime simply look up the definition in a dictionary.  

Collectivist and conformist are not synonyms.

Actually, the two terms are about as far apart as what you want the Occupy groups to be and what they really are . . .

Thanks for the candor. So, back to the “collectivist” part . . .

Calling OWS types “dirty hippies,” etc. might be construed as being a reaction based in ideological conformity, but I don’t get how you read it as “collectivist.” Please enlighten.  

Just viewed the occupy the consulate video. Now it’s OK for the Egyptians to “occupy our consulates”. While this appears to be the lobby of a building in which the Israel is only a part, meaning the lobby isn’t technically the property of a sovereign Nation, I suspect that nuance will escape radicals overseas. That the Boston PD felt the need to explain and apologise to the Donner Partiers for forcing them to cut short their “occupation” of someone Else’s property is truly despicable. While they would claim that they’re only trying to keep the peace, protecting property is the most important job of law enforcement. The actions of many of the police departments enabling lawlessness because the violations are in furtherance Radical-Liberal politics should compromise the viability of continued federal funding these cities receive.

” this IS what democracy looks like, which is why he was so passionate that the United States be a Republic. ”

Excellent point.   Makes for a pretty snappy comeback at debate time.

Thanks for the link!

I feel much better.

If thugs are camped out by the polling stations, I imagine that we 53%-ers will just have to bring our heat.

For one Eric Holder doesn’t have anyone protecting polling stations and Justice comes into the picture only after the crimes against voting occurs. I can see these folks attempting to interfere with voting though to what purpose I don’t know. General mayhem? I doubt they’d do it to help the SDs for that matter I’m not sure most of them are for voting at all.

“Democracy passes into despotism.”  –Plato

At the risk of hyperbole once the dogs have gone rabid there’s nothing to save them. As for the leftist education industry being solely to blame not sure I’m buying.

Um excuse me? Not sure what “The Right preaches Down With Capitalism?” had to do with my comment. 

“The Left knows no shame and the Right knows no compassion.”

Um… really?  The Right knows no compassion?

I’m so freaking sick of hearing this pile of flaming bull crap.  Did you know that per capita, people give more to charity in flyover country than in the blue states, even though people in flyover country have lower income levels.  That’s not proof of compassion?

The Right believes that charity is a duty of the individual, not of the government.  We not only believe it, we’re willing to put our money where our mouths are and actually give our own to help others.  That’s not compassionate?

It’s not “compassionate” to demand the government take money from the “haves” in order to give to the less fortunate.  Nope… that’s SELFISHNESS.  Put your hand in your own pocket and take out some cash if you care so damn much for the poor…

As for the kids who’ve been duped, it’s true enough they’re regurgitating what they’ve been taught in the public schools, but they probably also heard much of the same stuff from their parents, too.  It’s also true that the government and the schools have been telling kids for decades that getting a college degree increases their earning potential.  So?  But who told them all college degrees hold the same intrinsic value?  Is a degree in engineering as valuable or more valuable as one from Harvard law?  Is a degree in women’s studies or underwater basket weaving as valuable as one in mathematics?  Should it be?  

What prevented these kids or their parents from asking some questions about what the cost/benefit ratio is for an expensive college degree?  What prevented these kids from getting a job to help defray the costs of their higher education?  What prevented these kids from putting off college a few years while they earned enough money to pay off some of their education before they even started it?  And what prevented them from getting degrees in useful fields where positions can’t be filled because there are no qualified candidates?

Nothing prevented any of that, except a lack of imagination and personal responsibility for the outcome of their own choices.

I don’t lack compassion for saying that, that’s just the cold, hard reality.  There are plenty of things you can do without a college degree, but the piece of parchment has become, for some, the be-all and end-all.  It’s the magic ticket to a high-paying job, regardless of the value of the course of study.  And now they’re throwing a tantrum when it doesn’t pan out.  Bloggers like Glenn Reynolds have been writing about the higher education bubble for years.  I had college professors in the early 80s who were incredulous as to how students were supposed to pay for college, given how expensive it was then… and I was attending a third-tier state college at the time.  It’s not like people haven’t seen the trend that college was pricing itself out of the market, just like housing was in many metro areas.  The answer is the consumer didn’t have to consume, but government — in both cases — lent a “helping” hand so that people could buy beyond their means.  And now the bill’s come due.

That’s not my fault or the fault of anyone who’s managed to live within their means. 

Let the colleges who foisted worthless degrees and huge debt on these kids eat the bad debt.

If someone were to train a pit bull to attack people, how would you handle the matter.  The “kids” you refer to strike me as grown adults, at least chronologically.  Did you watch the video?  Nary a one was acting with any semblance of consideration for anyone other their compatriots.  When the old ladies were knocked down, were there OWS protesters urging their peers to stand back and allow the old ladies to get up?  If so, I must have missed them.  Where was the compassion there?  The kids have become the “anarchists” (I use quotes, because none of the actual anarchists I know advocate all-government-all-the-time).  Yes, we should rightfully blame their teachers and professors for turning them into rabid animals.  But, at this point, that transformation has happened.  If we are to show any compassion, it is for those who would be their victims going forward.  And the best way to do that is to put the movement down.

It’s been painful to watch even a quieter, more mellow set of Occupiers, in San Francisco.

They somehow think that a government that enforces “fairness”, defined in a shallow and adolescent fashion, won’t interfere with their lives.

If the definition of non-interference is sex and drugs, I suppose it might work out – but that’s because those remain the cheapest and easiest distractions available. When you want other liberties, though?

Not so much.

Poor kids. The very worst thing that could happen is that they get what they so long for.

KENT STATE TIMES TEN THOUSAND PLEASE

FIFY

If it ever came down to where that were to actually happen so would most other people. We haven’t had any full scale riots yet, but  if and when it happens, and the police have to restore order using deadly force, just who is going to object?