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The OWS movement is certainly pretty confused and vague when it comes to demands. It would be a mistake, IMO, to use this to dismiss the reasons why people hav
by potatolicious 15y ago
The OWS movement is certainly pretty confused and vague when it comes to demands.
It would be a mistake, IMO, to use this to dismiss the reasons why people have chosen this time to protest.
If you look at the people and signs at a #Occupy protest, you will find a familiar theme: income disparity and unemployment. People are running scared in an economy where social mobility has been utterly destroyed, unemployment runs at an all-time high, and the gap between rich and poor continues to widen unabated.
Some people have chosen to blame corporations, some people pin it on banks, some are angry at the government. In the end though, the theme is the same. OWS protesters clearly have no clue how to fix it, but they are correct that something is fundamentally broken, and it would be a mistake to sweep this all away because the protesters can't put together a solid fix.
There are, of course, also the piggy-back causes. Environmentalists, educational reformers, health care reformers, and all manners of all side-issue protesters are out in force at the #occupy protests, and that really does hurt the main message.
- greyman 15y agoWhy is something fundamentally broken?
- forensic 15y agoBecause democracy and equality is fundamentally superior to feudalism, therefore any system that is on an unstoppable slide toward feudalism is fundamentally broken.
- JoshTriplett 15y agoI agree with your assessment of why the protesters protest, and that they don't have a clue how to "fix" things. I disagree with your claim that this indicates anything "fundamentally broken", other than the mindset of the protesters in thinking someone else should step in and make their lives better in all the individual ways they consider their personal situations undesirable. Edit: Clearly people disagree. I'd appreciate some responses to go with the downvotes; I'd enjoy some discussion, rather than silencing.
- nknight 15y agoI have two very simple questions for you: 1) Do you believe it right that the financial sector was, and is still being, bailed out? 2) If not, how do you describe the system producing that result, if not "fundamentally broken"?
- mseebach 15y ago1) No 2) Because bail-outs aren't a fundamental property of "the system".
- nknight 15y agoThey are a result of the system. I find it hard to believe that a not-fundamentally-broken system would produce that result. What non-fundamental properties of the system do you think should change to halt now, and prevent in the future, bailouts and related actions (e.g. corporate subsidies)?
- euccastro 15y agoBail-outs are a symptom of plutocracy, which is very much the fundamental nature of the American system (amongst many others).
- JoshTriplett 15y ago1) No. I also don't consider said bailouts the root cause of anything except one more instance of wasteful spending. 2) "Too busy fighting over local minima/maxima to ever escape them and make core changes, but as a result at least mostly harmless except as a drag force on productivity." We could argue all day about core changes that might fix the system, but we'll never agree on precisely which core changes to make, so they'll never happen. And that still probably works better than the case where the wrong core changes occur. (And a meta-level comment about search heuristics comes about as close to a political comment as I'd like to get.)