11 ms·

"We are getting kicked out of our homes." ..and why is that? I want to see how many of these people protesting actually got kicked out of their homes and why.

by rick888 15y ago

"We are getting kicked out of our homes." ..and why is that? I want to see how many of these people protesting actually got kicked out of their homes and why. "We are forced to choose between groceries and rent." Do you have a cell phone? Do you have cable? Where do you live? "We are denied quality medical care." Interesting how this is somehow wall street's problems. Can I blame them for tax increases too? "We are suffering from environmental pollution." lol? "We are working long hours for little pay and no rights, if we are working at all. We are getting nothing while the other 1 percent is getting everything." If you can't find a job..you need to ask yourself why. I lost my job a little over a year ago and then started my own company. Since then, I've had tons of recruiters and other companies emailing me because they want me to work for them. There are still plenty of jobs out there. You just need to bust your ass to get them. Most people aren't willing to put in the work. I saw the start of this entitlement mentality with music and software piracy. Many people from this generation feel it's their "right" to be able to download these things for free. Now they are entitled to a home, a college education, and a job. They want equality, but the problem isn't we aren't all equal. I work 12 hours a day. As a result, I have more money in the bank than someone that works part-time. Why should I be limited or penalized for this? "So far, it's pick-your-own cause, with grievances ranging from bank bail-outs to animal testing, and yet what most of the mainstream media seems to have missed is the fact that the occupation itself is its own demand" This is why I find the entire "occupation" to be a joke. Every left-wing asshole with a grievance against big business is out there protesting.

hvs 15y ago
I'm not sure if it was the same way in the 60's and 70's, but every protest I saw in Chicago since 2003 always attracted a fair share of professional protestors. Your "Free Tibet"ers, environmentalists, and various others always seemed to show up for Iraq War protests and immigration protests. It's easy to ignore protesters when they are obviously doing it as lifestyle choice rather than out of honest indignation.
- _delirium 15y ago
  There's not much you can do about such people showing up, though, unless you have a very organized, centrally run protest with a gatekeeper for who's allowed to show up. People who have their pet issues will show up and attempt to use the platform if participation is open. I guess you'd just need enough new people to swamp the 'regulars'. (These kinds of things are, incidentally, why Lenin-style communists argue for agitation to be tightly organized by a vanguard party, which keeps things on message and makes sure protests and other actions maximize tactical and strategic effectiveness, rather than becoming an incoherent free-for-all. But Leninist organization isn't too in favor on the contemporary left.)
deleted 15y ago
[deleted]
exit 15y ago
to whoever responded with: "But anyways. Like most of us, I am also very fortunate to be in tech, and have a passion for programming. But I do not pretend that my good fortune some how means I work or harder or am smarter than other people in our society.", but then deleted their comment: you really should repost it. it captures my feelings too and i wanted to thank you for putting them into words. again and again, i encounter people in my circles of well-employed colleagues who do not realize how lucky they are to have interests coinciding with aptitudes coinciding with particular economic demands in their productive years. and it makes them sickeningly self congratulatory.
- rick888 15y ago
  "But I do not pretend that my good fortune some how means I work or harder or am smarter than other people in our society" What a defeatist attitude. I do work harder and smarter than other people in our society. My work and success reflects this. "and it makes them sickeningly self congratulatory." It's sickening that you would equate having a good job with mostly luck. Winning the lottery is pure luck. I chose to get involved in the tech industry. If I would have been in any other time, I would have chosen a different industry and most likely been successful. Less than 1% of it has to do with luck. If I would have just sat here and done nothing, my career wouldn't have fallen into my lap and my skill set wouldn't have suddenly appeared. Anybody can be successful.
  - scarmig 15y ago
    Just like those workers who saw that housing was booming in 2004 and decided to join that industry, eh? Of course, tech bubbles never exist, so that's an imperfect analogy.
  - _delirium 15y ago
    You must be an odd person if you have equal aptitudes and passion for a huge range of things, and can choose them based solely on current economic demand. Few to no people I know in tech are like that, though. I'd be into hacker culture if the field was full of shit jobs; the way some people live and breathe music and can't imagine doing anything else, others can't imagine not doing something that involves hacking technology. It's just sugar on top that there's all this money floating around in the field too. I mean, I got hooked on computers when I was 6 or 7, from Logo. I'm pretty sure I didn't get hooked due to my great foresight and economic responsibility. It was just interesting. Other people get hooked on other things, whether it's math or music. I'm fortunate that my thing pays well, but I don't think that makes me better than them. Makes my life easier, sure, but for exogenous reasons. I don't think it's uncorrelated with merit, but I do think the correlation is very inconsistent. I know brilliant mathematicians with much poorer incomes, for example (pure math doesn't pay well... despite its long-term usefulness, it's hard to capture the value / monetize it).
zavulon 15y ago
I could not upvote you enough. It's sickening what is happening in this country. I was born in Soviet Union, and the resemblence grows more and more every day. All the protesters are lacking is a charismatic leader who will promise to punish the evil bourgeouis and distribute their wealth to the poor. What happened to entrepreneurship. What happened to taking control of your life. What happened to working hard and making things happen. These protests make me very sad, and go against every principle this country was founded on.
- _delirium 15y ago
  > These protests make me very sad, and go against every principle this country was founded on. Given how enthusiastic the American founding fathers were for the French Revolution, which had a definite socialist and anti-elite flavor (not merely anti-monarchism), I'm not sure how true that is. Opinions varied, but many were of the view that a free society needs reasonable equality and can't coexist with large concentrations of economic resources. Thomas Jefferson hoped (futilely) to achieve it by avoiding industrialization, remaining a nation of yeoman farmers and thereby avoiding what he saw as the ills of British industrial capitalism, with its predominance of wage labor, large factories, etc. (he didn't like either the industrialists or their trade-unionist counterparts). That, combined with robust public education. Thomas Paine was a proto-socialist, traveling after the American Revolution to France to help with the revolution there, where his Rights Of Man: Part The Second was one of the first comprehensive proposals for what can now be seen as social democracy, with a progressive income tax and inheritance tax used to fund a social safety net. The existence and independence of corporations was also a pretty active area of controversy until the 1850s or so. Before then, many of the founding generation were of the view that corporations were limited-time constructs under supervision of the state (which held visitation and dissolution rights), not fully independent entities, and were skeptical of corporations with a "life of their own", seen as a European pathology (the Dutch East India Company, etc.).
- michaelchisari 15y ago
  To use a Marxist term, what we're seeing here is a Social Democratic consciousness, not a push for centralized Communism. If you asked the protestors whether they wanted Russia in 1917 or Sweden in 2011, what do you really think they'd pick? In other words, I think you're overreacting.
scarmig 15y ago
All the damn protestors' fault, eh? Here's a question: Why was unemployment so much lower five years ago than now? Did people just get really lazy? Every right wing asshole with a grievance against attacks on privilege is out there mocking these protests. Somehow they simultaneously deny that environmental pollution, restricted access to healthcare, and involuntary unemployment exist. But systemic issues do exist.
- hugh3 15y ago
  I don't know anyone who is denying that the economy sucks. The reason we make fun of these people is that they're protesting against the fact that the economy sucks. This is much like protesting against the weather. Nobody has a magic "make the economy work again" switch that they just need to be persuaded to flip. They're silly because their world view is flawed in many ways. It's not just their ideology which is wacko, but their ontology. One of the chief problems which afflicts the left is their tendency to believe that "good intentions lead to good outcomes", which has the flipside "bad outcomes are caused by bad intentions". They therefore assume that since we're currently having bad outcomes they must have been cauesd by somebody's bad intentions, so they choose a scapegoat [I wrote spacegoat the first time, which is a much better mental image] and blame it until they're blue in the face. I feel sorry for all the workers on Wall Street who have been chosen as the scapegoat this time.
  - srdev 15y ago
    For my part, I feel that while financial institutions were complicit, one only has to look at the savings rate of the average US household pre-2008 to realize that there were systematic problems. Its not just Wall Street tycoons that failed -- people at every level did.
  - scarmig 15y ago
    You misread what the protest is about. It's not that the economy sucks. It's that institutions of power exist that are doing their damnedest to maintain their position of power. This has led to bad outcomes in this particular historical moment.
  - 15y ago
danssig 15y ago
What we should do is gather up every single person in the protest and every single person who wishes they were but can't and send them over to Scandanavia/France/etc. Then they can participate in the kind of system they actually want and all that will be left in the US is people like you. My mouth literally waters imagining what would happen when all the "hippies" and "losers" were gone and no one was left but self proclaimed "hard workers" and the mega rich. Listening to people like you try to rationalize the fact that, despite all your "hard work", your wealth was staying flat or decreasing (in relative terms if not literal) while the top 1% continued to capture more and more of all the created wealth would be pure bliss. And I'm sure all the "99%", who would be enjoying systems with much healthier distributions of wealth would be enjoying the show as much as I was.
jstedfast 15y ago
My feelings exactly. Left-wingers got us into this mess in the first place by demanding that banks give out subprime loans to people who would never pay them back and Clinton promised these banks that the US Government would bail them out in return. Now that same liberal left got bitten by their own ideology and who do they blame? The banks and Republicans, of course! Republicans bailed out the banks (because they were obligated to by Clinton) and the "greedy" banks loaned money to people who couldn't afford to pay them back! If the liberal left used their brains for once they'd see that they caused these problems themselves. They have no one else to blame but themselves. Instead, they blame everyone else for their problems. It should be blatantly clear that the liberal left do not believe in taking personal responsibility nor do they believe in free will. For if they believed in those things, then it's not the banks they'd be blaming at all. The banks didn't put guns to people's heads to take out loans that they couldn't afford to pay back. The banks didn't just wake up one day and decide to start giving out subprime loans. No, they were pressured into doing it by the liberal left's own greed. They made their bed, now they can lay in it. They better not come begging me for handouts. All they ever did for me was force my taxes to go up and try to drag me down with them. No thanks.

by rick888 15y ago

hvs 15y ago

I'm not sure if it was the same way in the 60's and 70's, but every protest I saw in Chicago since 2003 always attracted a fair share of professional protestors. Your "Free Tibet"ers, environmentalists, and various others always seemed to show up for Iraq War protests and immigration protests. It's easy to ignore protesters when they are obviously doing it as lifestyle choice rather than out of honest indignation.

_delirium 15y ago
There's not much you can do about such people showing up, though, unless you have a very organized, centrally run protest with a gatekeeper for who's allowed to show up. People who have their pet issues will show up and attempt to use the platform if participation is open. I guess you'd just need enough new people to swamp the 'regulars'. (These kinds of things are, incidentally, why Lenin-style communists argue for agitation to be tightly organized by a vanguard party, which keeps things on message and makes sure protests and other actions maximize tactical and strategic effectiveness, rather than becoming an incoherent free-for-all. But Leninist organization isn't too in favor on the contemporary left.)

deleted 15y ago

[deleted]

exit 15y ago

to whoever responded with: "But anyways. Like most of us, I am also very fortunate to be in tech, and have a passion for programming. But I do not pretend that my good fortune some how means I work or harder or am smarter than other people in our society.", but then deleted their comment: you really should repost it. it captures my feelings too and i wanted to thank you for putting them into words. again and again, i encounter people in my circles of well-employed colleagues who do not realize how lucky they are to have interests coinciding with aptitudes coinciding with particular economic demands in their productive years. and it makes them sickeningly self congratulatory.

rick888 15y ago
"But I do not pretend that my good fortune some how means I work or harder or am smarter than other people in our society" What a defeatist attitude. I do work harder and smarter than other people in our society. My work and success reflects this. "and it makes them sickeningly self congratulatory." It's sickening that you would equate having a good job with mostly luck. Winning the lottery is pure luck. I chose to get involved in the tech industry. If I would have been in any other time, I would have chosen a different industry and most likely been successful. Less than 1% of it has to do with luck. If I would have just sat here and done nothing, my career wouldn't have fallen into my lap and my skill set wouldn't have suddenly appeared. Anybody can be successful.
- scarmig 15y ago
  Just like those workers who saw that housing was booming in 2004 and decided to join that industry, eh? Of course, tech bubbles never exist, so that's an imperfect analogy.
- _delirium 15y ago
  You must be an odd person if you have equal aptitudes and passion for a huge range of things, and can choose them based solely on current economic demand. Few to no people I know in tech are like that, though. I'd be into hacker culture if the field was full of shit jobs; the way some people live and breathe music and can't imagine doing anything else, others can't imagine not doing something that involves hacking technology. It's just sugar on top that there's all this money floating around in the field too. I mean, I got hooked on computers when I was 6 or 7, from Logo. I'm pretty sure I didn't get hooked due to my great foresight and economic responsibility. It was just interesting. Other people get hooked on other things, whether it's math or music. I'm fortunate that my thing pays well, but I don't think that makes me better than them. Makes my life easier, sure, but for exogenous reasons. I don't think it's uncorrelated with merit, but I do think the correlation is very inconsistent. I know brilliant mathematicians with much poorer incomes, for example (pure math doesn't pay well... despite its long-term usefulness, it's hard to capture the value / monetize it).

zavulon 15y ago

I could not upvote you enough. It's sickening what is happening in this country. I was born in Soviet Union, and the resemblence grows more and more every day. All the protesters are lacking is a charismatic leader who will promise to punish the evil bourgeouis and distribute their wealth to the poor. What happened to entrepreneurship. What happened to taking control of your life. What happened to working hard and making things happen. These protests make me very sad, and go against every principle this country was founded on.

_delirium 15y ago
> These protests make me very sad, and go against every principle this country was founded on. Given how enthusiastic the American founding fathers were for the French Revolution, which had a definite socialist and anti-elite flavor (not merely anti-monarchism), I'm not sure how true that is. Opinions varied, but many were of the view that a free society needs reasonable equality and can't coexist with large concentrations of economic resources. Thomas Jefferson hoped (futilely) to achieve it by avoiding industrialization, remaining a nation of yeoman farmers and thereby avoiding what he saw as the ills of British industrial capitalism, with its predominance of wage labor, large factories, etc. (he didn't like either the industrialists or their trade-unionist counterparts). That, combined with robust public education. Thomas Paine was a proto-socialist, traveling after the American Revolution to France to help with the revolution there, where his Rights Of Man: Part The Second was one of the first comprehensive proposals for what can now be seen as social democracy, with a progressive income tax and inheritance tax used to fund a social safety net. The existence and independence of corporations was also a pretty active area of controversy until the 1850s or so. Before then, many of the founding generation were of the view that corporations were limited-time constructs under supervision of the state (which held visitation and dissolution rights), not fully independent entities, and were skeptical of corporations with a "life of their own", seen as a European pathology (the Dutch East India Company, etc.).
michaelchisari 15y ago
To use a Marxist term, what we're seeing here is a Social Democratic consciousness, not a push for centralized Communism. If you asked the protestors whether they wanted Russia in 1917 or Sweden in 2011, what do you really think they'd pick? In other words, I think you're overreacting.

scarmig 15y ago

All the damn protestors' fault, eh? Here's a question: Why was unemployment so much lower five years ago than now? Did people just get really lazy? Every right wing asshole with a grievance against attacks on privilege is out there mocking these protests. Somehow they simultaneously deny that environmental pollution, restricted access to healthcare, and involuntary unemployment exist. But systemic issues do exist.

hugh3 15y ago
I don't know anyone who is denying that the economy sucks. The reason we make fun of these people is that they're protesting against the fact that the economy sucks. This is much like protesting against the weather. Nobody has a magic "make the economy work again" switch that they just need to be persuaded to flip. They're silly because their world view is flawed in many ways. It's not just their ideology which is wacko, but their ontology. One of the chief problems which afflicts the left is their tendency to believe that "good intentions lead to good outcomes", which has the flipside "bad outcomes are caused by bad intentions". They therefore assume that since we're currently having bad outcomes they must have been cauesd by somebody's bad intentions, so they choose a scapegoat [I wrote spacegoat the first time, which is a much better mental image] and blame it until they're blue in the face. I feel sorry for all the workers on Wall Street who have been chosen as the scapegoat this time.
- srdev 15y ago
  For my part, I feel that while financial institutions were complicit, one only has to look at the savings rate of the average US household pre-2008 to realize that there were systematic problems. Its not just Wall Street tycoons that failed -- people at every level did.
- scarmig 15y ago
  You misread what the protest is about. It's not that the economy sucks. It's that institutions of power exist that are doing their damnedest to maintain their position of power. This has led to bad outcomes in this particular historical moment.
- 15y ago

danssig 15y ago

What we should do is gather up every single person in the protest and every single person who wishes they were but can't and send them over to Scandanavia/France/etc. Then they can participate in the kind of system they actually want and all that will be left in the US is people like you. My mouth literally waters imagining what would happen when all the "hippies" and "losers" were gone and no one was left but self proclaimed "hard workers" and the mega rich. Listening to people like you try to rationalize the fact that, despite all your "hard work", your wealth was staying flat or decreasing (in relative terms if not literal) while the top 1% continued to capture more and more of all the created wealth would be pure bliss. And I'm sure all the "99%", who would be enjoying systems with much healthier distributions of wealth would be enjoying the show as much as I was.

jstedfast 15y ago

My feelings exactly. Left-wingers got us into this mess in the first place by demanding that banks give out subprime loans to people who would never pay them back and Clinton promised these banks that the US Government would bail them out in return. Now that same liberal left got bitten by their own ideology and who do they blame? The banks and Republicans, of course! Republicans bailed out the banks (because they were obligated to by Clinton) and the "greedy" banks loaned money to people who couldn't afford to pay them back! If the liberal left used their brains for once they'd see that they caused these problems themselves. They have no one else to blame but themselves. Instead, they blame everyone else for their problems. It should be blatantly clear that the liberal left do not believe in taking personal responsibility nor do they believe in free will. For if they believed in those things, then it's not the banks they'd be blaming at all. The banks didn't put guns to people's heads to take out loans that they couldn't afford to pay back. The banks didn't just wake up one day and decide to start giving out subprime loans. No, they were pressured into doing it by the liberal left's own greed. They made their bed, now they can lay in it. They better not come begging me for handouts. All they ever did for me was force my taxes to go up and try to drag me down with them. No thanks.