Occupy Thanksgiving: Hope, Redemption, and…Unbridled Enthusiasm

Original release November 23, 2011

In a time of 9 percent unemployment, a faltering global economy, toxic levels of political rancor, and the release of Twilight: Breaking Dawn, is there anything left to be thankful for?

Reason offers a message of hope, redemption, and dada.

About 30 seconds. Produced by Meredith Bragg and Nick Gillespie.

For key moments in Thanksgiving history, from the Continental Congress' exhortation not to have fun on such a solemn occasion to the creation of the Ku Klux Klan 2.0 to FDR's creation of "Franksgiving" to Ronald Reagan's weak-willed pardon of a turkey, go here [note: corrected link].

If you enjoyed the video above, check out Reason.tv's 2010 Thanksgiving video:

For more informaton and supporting links, go here. For a contrary take on whether the Pilgrims were proto-socialists, go here.

Approximately 2.30 minutes.

Produced by Meredith Bragg and Nick Gillespie. Voices by Meredith Bragg and Austin Bragg.

Comments

[Anacreon]

Thanks so much for opening a new thread. Perhaps something new every day over this long weekend, so those of us seeking real discussions don't have to sort through 900-post threads mostly made up of name-calling?

[Scrooge! Spoilsport! Party]

Pooper!

[Legitimate property rights]

If you require a State protect your property "rights," it's very likely because your property is illegitimate, and needs the force of naked aggression to take and keep.

[1] WHITE INDIAN EMBRACES LEGITIMATE, NON-STATIST ENFORCED PROPERTY

White Indian embraces property, legitimate property, as human have for hundreds of thousands of years.

What's the difference?

? Legitimate property is the stuff one needs to survive or personally enjoy, honored for hundreds of thousands of years by humans living in Non-State sociopolitical typography.

? Statist-enforced abstract ownership of Earth's resources well beyond what an "owner" can personally use or enjoy.

[2] WHITE INDIAN EMBRACES CAPITALIST'S/LIBERTARIAN'S OSTENSIBLE JUSTIFICATION OF PROPERTY

Libertarians justify property as the things and resources that are necessary to human *survival.* Examples are as follows:

? ...if he must use and transform material natural objects in order to survive, then he has the right to own [property]... ~Murray Rothbard

? [Property] Rights are conditions of existence required by man's nature for his proper survival. ~Ayn Rand

[3] WHITE INDIAN REJECTS BAIT AND SWITCH

The bait-and-switch chicanery that capitalists/libertarians engage in follows:

? BAIT: I need to own some things on earth as property that I need to *survive* (or would enjoy personally.)

? SWITCH: I need government to protect my "right" to own vast amounts of resources, *well beyond* what would ever be needed for a person to survive or enjoy.

[4] WHITE INDIAN ASKS'um HEAP BIG QUESTIONS

? How do the 1% need 40% of the wealth to survive (or personally enjoy?)

? How do the 10% need 85% of the wealth to survive (or personally enjoy?)

[*yawn*]

[anon]

cool story bro

[White Indian...]

... counts coup on intellectually lightweight libertarianism, which has about as much to do with liberty as the capitalist General Mills Total Blueberry Pomegranate cereal has to do with blueberries or pomegranates.

[Don't like it?]

Buy another brand of cereal, you stupid git.

Or pick blueberries and eat them raw. We give a fuck.

[Red Rocks Rockin]

White Primitard couldn't count coup on a crippled deer, much less libertarianism.

[Anonymous Coward]

i like to masturbate i don't see what ur problem is dood

[Freudian Skip]

Why are libertarians so impotent when it comes to a logical retort?

[Res Publika Amerikana]

those of us seeking real discussions...

...don't go to Reason.com

[Legitimate property rights]

When real discussion is offered, you reject it.

[Res Publica Americana]

Try harder.

[Legitimate property rights]

You're just a city-Statist dodging real discussion. Again.

[*yawn*]

[sunny black]

"mostly made up of name-calling?"
shut your pie-hole, commie...

Just kidding...Happy Thanksgiving Anacreon..

[Doncha ferget]

Los Leones de Detroit and them Cowboys.

[PantsFan]

Today is also dbcooper day.

[Southerner]

Well, at least they got some seasoning for their Thanksgiving. (Pepper spray is made from the same peppers used to make hot sauce.)

[Homer]

MMMmmm....incapacitating!

[anon]

Essentially.

[Megyn Kelly]

The school lunch program classifies pepper spray as a condiment.

[PapayaSF]

I think it's a vegetable now.

[dunphy]

i can haz scoville yunitts?

[MB]

That's pizza.

and ketchup.

[Aresen]

I hate the ritual of "pardoning" the turkey.

I wish the POTUS - whoever that may be - would just whack it one year.

[AlmightyJB]

Dude. You hate turkeys almost as much as Reason hates cops.

[Aresen]

If you have ever run into a tom turkey, you would know that they are stupid, aggressive, nasty birds. If there ever was a creature that deserved to be eaten, it's a turkey.

TBS, I like turkeys just fine decapitated, eviscerated, stuffed, seasoned and roasted at 350 F for 20 minutes/pound.

[kw6]

I guess it depends who the turkey is.

[AlmightyJB]

So the solution for obesity in this country is the elimination of property rights. I'm surprised that hasn't been used already.

[O'Bama]

We are trying. Moochelle tells me we will all be healthier if only we can share everything. ...by force.

[Bucky]

that, and school dinners...

[Big Complainer]

I turned on my TV to watch commercials featuring cheap cell phone plans and wide-screen TVs and Black Friday updates and my viewing experience was periodically interrupted by stupid football games! What's up with that?

[Aresen]

Don't worry.

They only spend 15 seconds on the game for every 5 minutes of commercials.

[Poet Laureate sloopyinca]

Silly goose, Logo TV is another channel up.

[Big Complainer]

I was watching the rugby championships a few weeks ago (NZ beat the Frogs) and those retards never have commercial breaks! What's up with that? I was like, Dudes! How will I know which large-screen TV or cell-phone plan or kick-ass American truck to buy if you keep showing the friggin' game?!

[Sevo]

And how will you take a leak?

[Poet Laureate sloopyinca]

Very comfortably, thank you very much.

[AlmightyJB]

Ouch...my balls!

[dr dre beats headphones]

Dr dre beats headphones is a Top High Quality And Authentic Monster Beats headphones online E-shop. We supply thousands of high-quality beats by dr dre studio black.

[dr dre beats headphones]

Dr dre beats headphones is a Top High Quality And Authentic Monster Beats headphones online E-shop. We supply thousands of high-quality beats by dr dre studio black.

[A Secret Band of Robbers]

Let's all go around say one thing we're thankful for.

[Poet Laureate sloopyinca]

My children.

[EDG reppin' LBC]

Family (sometimes...).

[O'Bama]

Your money and Chink credit.

[Francisco d Anconia]

My monocle.

[Freudian Skip]

you don't have one, but such lack mirrors your other fantasies

[Bucky]

soap...
and my family...

[Sevo]

Sloopy, vermin shit is obviously desperate for attention to try a sleazy tactic like this. What's next? Waving the flag to get applause?
Let the desperation build; we can hope vermin shit will choke to death on its contradictions.

[Libertarianism is choking...]

...on it's own contradictions.

The self-styled ?ber-competitors can't even compete in the world of marketing ideas.

Not that they have any integrated and logical ideas. Are we anti-state or mini-Statists today?

[Libertard Marketing Mistake #1]

Call everybody we hate a Statist, except that damn Non-Statist white indian who comes out against against city-Statism (civilization) which libertarians advocate.

[Don't like it?]

Don't be a statist.

[Sevo]

LMM#1,
You're making the mistake of presuming that vermin shit is rational. Vermin shit is shit; thought is not one of its attributes, and attempting to offer rational argument to vermin shit is a waste of time.
Simply ignore vermin shit.

[Joey Demeelo]

That actually looks like it might jsut work.

http://www.surf-privacy.at.tc

[Warren]

I like Turkey Girl's retro look, but she isn't up to the high standards set by Pillow and Lobster.

[AlmightyJB]

I am thankful for hot women in the porn industry. I love you all. Keep up the great work.

[Res Publica Americana]

Genuine amateur porn, maybe. The way 95% of women are used up (in every possible sense) in most porn is just off-putting.

[Legitimate property rights]

Women get treated in this culture exactly like Mother Earth. Used up, in every possible sense.

[*yawn*]

[Res Publica Americana]

Yeah, because saarlac-like vaginas are a great analogy for deforestation and shit!

[Legitimate property rights]

The Greeks thought so, with their mythology of the Rape of Demeter, the goddess of grain and agriculture, with the plow being the phallic instrument of raping the soil.

[neoteny]

But the soil is enjoying it, deep down.

[Legitimate property rights]

Mesopotamia was once covered in cedar forests. Now there's the barren iraqi desert.

you probably prefer that

[neoteny]

All dry land was once one piece, Pangea.

You probably would have preferred that.

[Legitimate property rights]

Mine is a preference for a Non-State society sans the horrors visited upon mother earth and her children by brutally aggressive city-Statism.

[neoteny]

Yep, the true reactionary, the Romantic dreamer of past glories -- which never existed.

[Legitimate property rights]

Non-State society existed for 2 million years, up until a couple hundred years ago in North America.

Oh right, libertarians are as batshit crazy about empirical evidence as young earth creationists.

[neoteny]

Non-State society existed for 2 million years, up until a couple hundred years ago in North America.

Prove it.

The Americas were settled around 14,000 years ago, so the 2 million years is bullshit.

80% of the North American large mammal species disappeared within 1000 years of the arrival of humans in the Americas... so the Non-State societies raped Mother Earth and her children quite effectively, too.

Homo sapiens sapiens is at most 400,000 years old, so the 2 million years is bullshit.

But keep coming with the tales... it is quite entertaining to shoot them like so many fishes in a barrel.

[Legitimate property rights]

Seems like you're the fish.

? Yeah, I said 2 million years, dipshit. Read much?

Food sharing has for some time been considered an integral part of earliest human society (e.g. Washburn and DeVore, 1961). Jane Goodall (1971) and Richard Leakey (1978), among others, have concluded that it was the key element in establishing our uniquely Homo development at least as early as 2 million years ago. This emphasis, carried forward since the early '70s by Linton, Zihlman, Tanner, and Isaac, has become ascendant. One of the telling arguments in favor of the cooperation thesis, as against that of generalized violence and male domination, involves a diminishing, during early evolution, of the difference in size and strength between males and females. Sexual dimorphism, as it is called, was originally very pronounced, including such features as prominent canines or "fighting teeth" in males and much smaller canines for the female. The disappearance of large male canines strongly suggests that the female of the species exercised a selection for sociable, sharing males. Most apes today have significantly longer and larger canines, male to female, in the absence of this female choice capacity (Zihlman 1981, Tanner 1981).

~John Zerzan
Future Primitive
http://primitivism.com/future-primitive.htm

? About the other bullshit city-Statists like you love to parrot:

Were the megafauna wiped out by climate change? Or by rapacious, brutal bands of overhunting human foragers? Both sides have their evidence, of course.

Nor is this merely an academic argument without reprecussion for the present. The "overkill" theory is routinely cited by some groups as if it were already a proven fact, and used as evidence that humans are an inherently destructive species. So we needn't worry ourselves with the environmental destruction we wreak. We can't help it. It's our nature.

As you might expect, the truth lies somewhere between overkill and overchill.

The Holocene Extinction
by Jason Godesky | 13 July 2005
http://rewild.info/anthropik/2.....index.html

[neoteny]

Are you aiming to get some gullibility award? Citing other primitivist Romantics as 'proof'?

So the disappearance of the North-American megafauna wasn't the doing of humans, but all other environmental changes in the last 10,000 years were? If you can believe that, I have gamboling fields to sell you...

female of the species exercised a selection for sociable, sharing males

Yeah, sharing with the female and her offsprings, but not with everybody else.

You've got Rousseauian Romantic rot on your brain; the "noble savage" myth. You and your ilk glorifies technological & societal underdevelopment as the apogee of human existence... unfortunately for you and your crypto-Luddite primitivist buddies, the bones of those Non-Statist societies got consigned to history's dustbin.

[Washburn DeVore Goodall Leakey]

All those scientists cited above have you confused? Frustrated?

Then take a page from the young-earth creationists! That'll work.

[neoteny]

Name-dropping primitivist Romantics got you fooled; the obvious deficiency of Non-State societies makes you sad.

But keep dreaming, maybe that'll cheer you up...

[Washburn DeVore Goodall Leakey]

Citing scholarly references isn't "name-dropping."

Except to young-earth creationist level intellects.

[neoteny]

You weren't citing scholarly references; you were citing primitivist Romantics who were citing scholarly references.

You were just name-dropping.

[Red Rocks Rockin]

All those scientists cited above have you confused? Frustrated?

Why would anyone be frustrated when you cite homo habilis as the ideal society?

[kw6]

The ox is slow, but the Earth is patient.

[neoteny]

The Sun is bright, but Chinese fortune-cookie sayings are deep.

[anon]

Are you kidding me? A vagina is the one thing in the world you can't wear out.

[neoteny]

That, and WI's mouth.

[Legitimate property rights]

your name is an accurate description of libertarian philosophy

[neoteny]

Are you this stupid by yourself, or do you get help?

I withdraw the question; obviously you were nurtured on the postmodernist tit.

[Freudian Skip]

You've psychologically projected your infantile oral fixation twice now.

[neoteny]

Now I'm confident that your posts are made by a computerized bullshit-generator.

[Freudian Skip]

You're still psychologically projecting, but at least you're off the oral fixation now.

Are we making progress?

[neoteny]

psychologically projecting

This is redundant redundant (what other projecting exist than psychological?), but your OCD still manifests itself.

Referring to 'progress' from a neo-primitivist is vacuous, to say the least...

[neoteny recapitulates neoteny]

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychological_projection

Thomsen, A. Psychological projection and the election: A simple class experiment. Journal of Psychology, 1941, 11, 115-117.

Problem? Oh, you haven't published? Oh, just schmartypant liberals do that? LOL

[neoteny]

Like you've published anything...

If you're laughing so much, why are those tears rolling down on your face? 😉

[Sevo]

neoteny,
Feeding vermin leads to vermin shit on the premises, such as you've seen.
No food leads to less vermin shit, and the vermin shit in question is *not* open to reason; its supposed claims have be debunked many times.
This vermin shit posts for attention, nothing more.

[anon]

But dude... gamboling... etc.

[neoteny]

You're right, Sevo, but I had an empty Saturday evening, the thread was practically dead, wanted to identify the spoors a bit better... and I like to yank their chains every now & then. 🙂

[Bucky]

i'm not quite sure...should i thankful that Uncle Joe is sitting at the imaginary table or that it is an imaginary Thanksgiving table that he is sitting at?

[charles allen]

my roomate's mother-in-law makes $77 hourly on the laptop. She has been without work for 6 months but last month her income was $8972 just working on the laptop for a few hours. Read about it here saasurl.us/14

[charles allen]

my roomate's mother-in-law makes $77 hourly on the laptop. She has been without work for 6 months but last month her income was $8972 just working on the laptop for a few hours. Read about it here qikr.co/eegvq

[charles allen]

my roomate's mother-in-law makes $77 hourly on the laptop. She has been without work for 6 months but last month her income was $8972 just working on the laptop for a few hours. Read about it here NuttyRichdotcom

[lol]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v.....r_embedded

[first]

bananas

[spam]

On the eve of "Cyber Monday," online retailers reported an even stronger start to the holiday shopping season than brick-and-mortar stores.

Research firm comScore reported on Sunday that e-commerce spending jumped 26 percent on Black Friday, the day after Thanksgiving, compared with the same day a year ago. ComScore reported $816 million in online sales for the day, up from $648 million.

The 26 percent growth rate for online sales compares with a 7 percent retail sales increase reported for Black Friday by ShopperTrak, which gathers data from individual stores and shopping malls. At $11.4 billion, the brick-and-mortar sales total still dwarfs the online total.

Gian Fulgoni, comScore chairman, said in a statement that e-commerce enjoyed a banner day, despite some analysts' predictions that early store openings on Black Friday could hurt online sales.

"With brick-and-mortar retail also reporting strong gains on Black Friday, it's clear that the heavy promotional activity had a positive impact on both channels," Fulgoni said.

Thanksgiving is also a big day for online sales, and comScore reported an 18 percent increase this year compared with a year ago, with $479 million in sales.

Online sales also have been strong throughout November. Online sales through Saturday rose 15 percent compared with the same period a year ago, according to comScore, which is based on Reston, Va. Through the first 25 days of the month, online sales have totaled $12.74 billion.

ComScore said 50 million Americans visited online retail sites on Black Friday, up 35 percent from a year ago. Each of the top five retail sites reported double-digit gains in visitors, in percentage terms, led by top retail site Amazon. Walmart ranked second, followed by Best Buy, Target and Apple.

Next up is Cyber Monday, when many online retailers run promotions for the first business day of the week following Thanksgiving. Cyber Monday sales topped $1 billion last year, making it the heaviest day of online spending ever. ComScore's Fulgoni expects another record will be set this year.

ComScore reported online sales for Black Friday two days after another researcher, IBM Corp.'s Coremetrics unit, reported a smaller online spending gain for Black Friday. Coremetrics reported a 20 percent increase, compared with comScore's 26 percent

[Sevo]

Well, I do find that interesting.
But don't you think it would be a good idea to credit the source? I doubt seriously that you wrote that, just copied and pasted it from the originator.

[skylin]

Occupy should bear in mind that the attention it is getting is the result of news media owned by Wall Street and the main reason for the world wide news is from a few protesters being pepper sprayed by renegade police probably being paid by Wall Street. The whole situation says to me: POLITICAL MANIPULATION.http://bit.ly/s2dzGl

[skylin]

Occupy should bear in mind that the attention it is getting is the result of news media owned by Wall Street and the main reason for the world wide news is from a few protesters being pepper sprayed by renegade police probably being paid by Wall Street. The whole situation says to me: POLITICAL MANIPULATION.

[Aimeng]

Online sales also have been strong throughout November. Online Silver jewelry through Saturday rose 15 percent compared with the same period a year ago, according to comScore, which is based on Reston, Va. Through the first 25 days of the month, online sales have totaled $12.74 billion.

ComScore said 50 million Americans visited online retail sites on Black Friday, up 35 percent from a year ago. Each of the top five retail sites reported double-digit gains in visitors, in percentage terms, led by top retail site Amazon. Walmart ranked second, followed by Best Buy, Target and Apple.

[Aimeng]

Sterling Silver Jewelry

[Tem]

Research firm comScore reported on Sunday that e-commerce spending jumped 26 percent on Black Friday, the day after Thanksgiving, compared with the same day a year ago. ComScore reported $816 million in online sales for the day, up from $648 million.

The 26 percent growth rate for online sales compares with a 7 percent retail sales increase reported for Black Friday by ShopperTrak, which gathers data from individual stores and shopping malls. At $11.4 billion, the brick-and-mortar sales total still dwarfs the online total.

Gian Fulgoni, comScore chairman, said in a statement that e-commerce enjoyed a banner day, despite some analysts' predictions that early store openings on Black Friday could hurt online sales.

"With brick-and-mortar retail also reporting strong gains on Black Friday, it's clear that the heavy promotional activity had a positive impact on both channels," Fulgoni said.

Thanksgiving is also a big day for online sales, and comScore reported an 18 percent increase this year compared with a year ago, with $479 million in sales.

[Nike Mr Cartoon]

Interest thing

[Nike Air Forces]

Gian Fulgoni, comScore chairman, said in a statement that e-commerce enjoyed a banner day, despite some analysts' predictions that early store openings on Black Friday could hurt online sales.

What's the meaning?

[Designer Bags Online]

With brick-and-mortar retail also reporting strong gains on Black Friday, it's clear that the heavy promotional activity had a positive impact on both channels