Occupy L.A.'s Civil War Over Weed

Some (morbidly?) fascinating reportage from The Awl.

Link via Katie Baker's Twitter feed. Reason.tv's great piece about Occupy L.A. below:

Comments

[Apatheist]

300 people? Jesus Christ, explain to me again why this is big news.

[Appalachian Australian]

Hey, it's 300 people figuring out central planning doesn't work.

[Capitalism = Central Planning]

Capitalism has become as centralized of planning as communism, as John Robb notes in his blog, as follows:

Capitalism's central planners. PDF

The Network of Global Corporate Control. This is the ETH Zurich paper that is getting lots of interest now.

New Scientist adds some more insight with their coverage.

Central planning is the underlying reason the Soviet Union collapsed so quickly.

We are seeing the same central planning dynamic today, but on a global scale.

NOTE: it's pretty telling that a paper of this importance to modern economics/finance wasn't written by academics in economics/finance. It had to come out of the technical field of complex systems.

http://globalguerrillas.typepa.....artel.html

[John Thacker]

That's the one that thinks that mutual fund companies like Fidelity control corporations through their massive amounts of money from individual investors?

Please.

[John Thacker]

NOTE: it's pretty telling that a paper of this importance to modern economics/finance wasn't written by academics in economics/finance. It had to come out of the technical field of complex systems.

Yes, because it betrays such a lack of understanding of finance that it thinks that mutual fund investors and fund managers actually control companies.

It's as silly as when non-physicists make analogies based on Schrodinger's cat or Heisenberg uncertainty.

[xenia onatopp]

Heisenberg and Schrodinger are pulled over by a cop. The cop says,"Do you know how fast you were going?" Heisenberg says, "No, but I can tell you exactly where we are."Then the cop asks to look in the trunk, and does so. He says, "Did you know that you have a dead cat in here?" Schrodinger says, "Well, now it is!"

Sorry, sometimes I can't help myself.

[rather]

But think if 300 people were to fart in a jar what that would do for energy in this country? And if they could eat at Taco Bell before they let it fly, we could power a car around the moon.

[Jesus Christ]

300? Twelve did the job on the Roman Empire.

[Vandals Huns Goths Visigoths]

*ahem*

[Apatheist]

Don't get me wrong stories like this are hilarious and I don't mind reading them but in general why is the media taking this so seriously? The number of participants is pathetically small. You could get 300 people to show up to protest ANYTHING.

[300 to protest rent control]

Try getting 300 people to protest that.

[Clich? Bandit]

There are easily 10,000 apartment building owners in NY.

[Get 300 to show up]

[Hank]

There are currently 6 people in the "Occupy Louisville (KY)" protest downtown, and that counts toward their movement "spreading to hundreds of cities".

[Apatheist]

Yep maybe two dozen in Houston. With the cold front that blew in this morning it looked even smaller.

[Linus]

explain to me again why this is big news

It isn't, but reason.com has a product to put out and there are no days off, unless you count weekends.

And that's what political blogs are all about, Charlie Brown.

[Appalachian Australian]

No article about Occupy X is complete without a picture of a drummer, but what is that guy drumming on? A tambourine?

[RoboCain]

A doumbek?

[rather]

Really, he should be banging on a number 2 jar with the wide opening. When I lay one in one of those jars, the sound reverbs for a good 5 seconds. And then you still have the fart to huff later. Miracle of glass science that one.

[Paul]

It's like Paris in 1968!

[BakedPenguin]

More like 1792

[Joe M]

"You don't represent us anymore! We're taking over! We're the People's Forum!"

Oh my god, yes! Splitters!

[Michael]

I swear there are moments when I'm convinced that OWS is nothing more than a massive marketing stunt for some Broadway production by Terry Gilliam.

[Skr]

That's funny because I have been thinking is a situationalist piece.

[FlyoverCountry]

Step aside! We are the People's Front of Judea!

[BoscoH]

Unemployed?

Why arnt you practicing your spelling?

[Tman]

If it hasn't been linked yet you guys HAVE to read this letter from Chicago Traders to the Occupy Chicago movement. It's a classic..

We are Wall Street. It's our job to make money. Whether it's a commodity, stock, bond, or some hypothetical piece of fake paper, it doesn't matter. We would trade baseball cards if it were profitable. I didn't hear America complaining when the market was roaring to 14,000 and everyone's 401k doubled every 3 years. Just like gambling, its not a problem until you lose. I've never heard of anyone going to Gamblers Anonymous because they won too much in Vegas.

Well now the market crapped out, & even though it has come back somewhat, the government and the average Joes are still looking for a scapegoat. God knows there has to be one for everything. Well, here we are.

Go ahead and continue to take us down, but you're only going to hurt yourselves. What's going to happen when we can't find jobs on the Street anymore? Guess what: We're going to take yours. We get up at 5am & work until 10pm or later. We're used to not getting up to pee when we have a position. We don't take an hour or more for a lunch break. We don't demand a union. We don't retire at 50 with a pension. We eat what we kill, and when the only thing left to eat is on your dinner plates, we'll eat that.

For years teachers and other unionized labor have had us fooled. We were too busy working to notice. Do you really think that we are incapable of teaching 3rd graders and doing landscaping? We're going to take your cushy jobs with tenure and 4 months off a year and whine just like you that we are so-o-o-o underpaid for building the youth of America. Say goodbye to your overtime, and double time and a half. I'll be hitting grounders to the high school baseball team for $5k extra a summer, thank you very much.

So now that we're going to be making $85k a year without upside, Joe Mainstreet is going to have his revenge, right? Wrong! Guess what: we're going to stop buying the new 80k car, we aren't going to leave the 35 percent tip at our business dinners anymore. No more free rides on our backs. We're going to landscape our own back yards, wash our cars with a garden hose in our driveways. Our money was your money. You spent it. When our money dries up, so does yours.

The difference is, you lived off of it, we rejoiced in it. The Obama administration and the Democratic National Committee might get their way and knock us off the top of the pyramid, but it's really going to hurt like hell for them when our fat a**es land directly on the middle class of America and knock them to the bottom.

We aren't dinosaurs. We are smarter and more vicious than that, and we are going to survive. The question is, now that Obama & his administration are making Joe Mainstreet our food supply?will he? and will they?"

http://dailycaller.com/2011/10.....y-chicago/

[Clich? Bandit]

If you read to the bottom of the link you will see a link to theblaze and a letter about shooting cops. Now, if you read the whole letter i will say that it looks like a libertarian wrote it, but the reaction on theblaze is why I no longer think Glen Beck can be a libertarian.

[Let them eat cake...]

...always smooths feathers.

[Zeb]

That's pretty good. But it took me a minute to realize that $85k was his example of a low salary.

[#]

wasnt he reffering to teacher's salaries?

[cynical]

I think they were saying they would steal union jobs.

[mr simple]

Why is it that the only people in these videos that speak clearly and have a coherent message lean libertarian? I think the socialists are bogarting the good weed.

[Paul]

Twinkled their fingers in agreement? I ask again, if the OWSers would adopt the 50s Jazz club finger-snapping, my respect for them would go up.

[RoboCain]

Like beatniks?

[Paul]

Exactly. That would be badass.

[kinnath]

Come see the violence inherent in the system............

[WTF]

Oh, king, eh? Very nice. And how'd you get that, then? By exploiting the workers! By hanging on to outdated imperialist dogma which perpetuates the economic and social differences in our society!

[Skr]

There you go bringing class into it again.

[albo]

There's some lovely filth down here!

[Paul]

Those who were in favor of the code of conduct were accused of wanting to purge outsiders and create a two-caste structure within the camp. Those who opposed the code were, indirectly, called selfish and short-sighted.

So those who opposed the code were, in effect, the libertarian wing of the OWS movement.

[RoboCain]

I wouldn't say that not wanting a code so they can still get high makes them libertarian.

[Paul]

But they were accused of being selfish and shortsighted. Libertarians QED.

[Michael]

CNN: What OWS clearly needs is a vanguard party!

http://edition.cnn.com/2011/10.....index.html

[rsi]

Did you click on this link in that the story: Another view: Occupy beta tests a new way of living (http://www.cnn.com/2011/10/25/opinion/rushkoff-occupy-prototype/index.html)

"Most of us do not have the courage, stamina or fortitude to work as hard as these people are working, anyway. (Yes, they work hard."

[Paul]

Breaking away to have a cigarette, Kat told me that she absolutely believed a code of conduct should be passed but was certain that the issue would not even reach the General Assembly for some time. "We're having too many growing pains right now," Kat said, and exhaled smoke and tossed her hair to the side.

What brand of cigarette is Kat smoking? And would AdBusters approve?

[mikey]

I know this chick! But it can't be her - she hasn't aged a bit in over 40 years (has it been that long?). It's 1967 again.

[T]

These people are going to solve the problems of a nation of 300 million and they can't even get 300 people organized. Good fucking luck, chumbuckets. You'll need it.

[Get 300 to show up...]

...to protest rent control.

Go on.

Can't?

Now, say what you just said about yourself.

[Tonio]

Because landlords realize that lobbying is a much more effective way to achieve their goals than is a street protest.

[califronian]

My favorite part:

"There is a wing of the Occupy LA that sees their encampment as a radical new mode of living; one that not only rejects income inequality, but any sort of action that enables one group to represses any other."

These two ideals are wholly incompatible of course.

[Paul]

ear. Then it was announced that there would be two minutes of drumming. The loud thumping gave way to spastic dancing and eventually some primal bellowing.

I love it when 10,000 liberals occupy the same space with no political opposition to check their crazy.

[Paul]

I liked the footnote at the end:

[...] they have not been able to attract the participation of more mainstream elements at, least not in Los Angeles. There is, for example, no regular presence of labor unions, left-leaning non profits, or any of other hierarchical group.

That's because those folks are the 1%. And in that regard, I'm 100% behind the OWS movement.

[CoyoteBlue]

These are the Hoovervilles of our time - Obamavilles. They'll probably end like the Bonus Army when Obama orders the cavalry to ride through them.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bonus_Army

[Apatheist]

Except from the link, they had 43,000 people, not 300.

[albo]

Even the least druggy, most coherent and reasonable-sounding protesters at any of these rallies still can't express exactly what they want to happen with these protests other than to express their incoherent anger.

[Robert]

That's not as bad a strategy as you might think. They all agree to want to change the channel, but not to what program should be on. Sometimes that's the best consensus you can get. If you dislike the status quo, you never know, if you can get enough people behind change as a thing in itself, the change you wind up getting might be to something better. If you never try, you'll never find out.

[Robert]

Of course the most likely changes are encapsulated by the observ'n of regression to the mean. And if the starting position isn't an outlier, that means practically nothing.

[Zeb]

OK, a few hundred activisty types camp out in a park in CA. And someone is surprised that there is pot smoking going on?

[Paul]

I'm more surprised that the activists were even debating a no-drugs policy. The free speech/free-love movement this isn't.

[cynical]

Nope, this movement's about "free" as in beer, not "free" as in speech.

[Fist of Etiquette]

One man, standing at the center of the swirling and increasingly unruly crowd, yelled into a megaphone, "You don't represent us anymore! We're taking over! We're the People's Forum!"

The goddamn hippies suffer their own goddamn hippies? Maybe Occupy Whatever has some value, after all.

[Robert]

I guess you've never heard of the Pacifica Foundation and their radio stations. It's like that about once every 15 years, and in a minor way more often than that.

[Ken Shultz]

I actually sympathize with these people's right to protest...

...right up until I hear them talk. Nobody said you had to like people to stand up for their rights. So, I'll stand up for their right to protest--I just wish they weren't so hellbent on depriving me of my rights as an entrepreneur.

The more these people talk, the less the rest of America is gonna like 'em.

P.S. Somebody should tell some of those guys to get a job.

[Karen Session]

we can chase our freedom.

[AlmightyJB]

I'm just glad we here have the "privilege" to "read" and "discuss" such issues, because evidently in LA they don't have libraries, the internet, or freedom of speech.