Friday links! Compromise or I’ll murder us all edition

By Dan Brooks in Friday Links 1 Comment
Would this man do something merely to aggrandize himself?

Would this man do something merely to aggrandize himself?

Come on, America: let’s stop all this fighting and fussing. Let’s put aside the disagreements, the system we developed to arbitrate our national will through representatives and votes, and compromise by giving me what I want. When you disagree, you have to compromise eventually. That’s what mature people do. We should definitely compromise in this case, because otherwise I’m going to destroy us all. Our factories will lie ruined atop our schools. Our children will earn pennies a day performing on the internet for the Chinese. The Koch brothers will divide our corpses between them to burn for fuel. Today is Friday, and everything is going to be fine, provided you just compromise. If you don’t, I’m going to murder everybody.

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Wall Street still occupied

By Dan Brooks in Class Warfare 10 Comments

If the gap between rich and poor seemed like it was widening a bit more slowly this morning, it was probably because Occupy Wall Street is still going on. Exactly how it goes on remains a matter of conjecture, although certain non-televised journalists are beginning to pierce the veil. Michael Greenberg’s longish tour of Zuccotti Park in the New York Review of Books provides us with a slightly less vague picture of the movement than what we’ve gotten so far, including their use of “the people’s microphone.” Because city ordinances prohibit the use of amplification devices, public speakers at the OWS demonstration have their words repeated by the crowd. It’s a big ol’ objective correlative for a protest that has coalesced out of Twitter, Anonymous and maybe a few emails from the insufferable Adbusters, and now has to grapple with the problem of propagating a message when no one has been designated to speak first.

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What does a protest do?

By Dan Brooks in Public Discourse 5 Comments

Demonstrators at last week's Occupy Wall Street protests object to the Euro, the Reddit logo, semiological uncertainty and running out of cardboard.

The protestors who camped out on the streets of New York’s financial district as part of Occupy Wall Street did not disrupt much. Mostly, they blended in with the other people camping on the streets of New York as part of the ongoing Don’t Have a Place to Live demonstration, which also is probably related to Wall Street. That’s what OWS is upset about, kind of. The ostensibly leaderless group convened in order to show that they will “no longer tolerate the greed and corruption of the 1%.” They did it by going down to Zuccotti Park and tolerating it in person, shortly before they decamped to tolerate it from a distance in Union Square and also before they got rounded up in plastic netting and pepper sprayed.

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