Re: Occupy America On a less serious note, this made me chuckle (relax, it's only for laughs): Spoiler
Re: Occupy America Even if it was fired in an upward arc, the canister has to come down somewhere. Sucks that it happened, but it doesn't necessarily mean the cop did anything wrong and even if he did (whether by negligence/incompetence or malice) it doesn't have anything to do with the protestors' "arguments" one way or the other. A female college student was killed a few years back when she was hit in a vital organ at just the right angle with a non-lethal round after one of the Red Sox World Series wins ('07 I think)....sucks but shit happens. Exchange I had with a friend (nice girl but raging leftie) on Facebook the other day:
Re: Occupy America That's a rather strange argument to make. Cops prepare for what they assumed would be the worst, and despite the protest seeming fairly calm, decided it would be calmer if they shot this guy. When other protestors moved in to check on this guy's status/get him medical attention, they fired a flashbang, I assume because they felt the need to "disperse the crowd". You know, the crowd that gathered because they shot a veteran in the head. See, that'd hold water for me if the cops, upon hitting a guy in the head went "oh shit" and either allowed the protestors to evacuate the guy undisturbed or if they evacuated him themselves. Instead, they fired a flashbang grenade in an attempt to disperse the crowd of people who hadn't yet been shot in the head, which would have left this veteran in critical condition and with ear damage. Despite the second round, protestors did manage to get him to medical attention, where, if I recall correctly, he has resumed breathing on his own.(seriously, can someone find a link to his latest medical condition?) Did she get her beautiful smile through underhanded/illegal/unethical collusion with other people in the dental market and the government? If not, then the comparison doesn't stick. For the most part, OWS people aren't advocating communism. They're looking for fairness, a government that isn't constantly fellating big business, and ethical behavior. Pretty radical ideas, right?
Re: Occupy America The protesters in Occupy Oakland had been warned for two weeks that camping out was illegal. They were warned that if they didn't leave the campsite that it would be forcibly dismantled. The OPD shows up, the protesters engage the OPD with bottles and rocks, and they got their asses handed to them. It sucks that the Iraq Vet got hurt, and OPD has a horrible reputation, but lets not forget that there were 18 different agencies represented in the riot police, and the Po-Po were defending themselves, enforcing the law, which is their job. You have every right to redress your grievances, but when you attack the men with a shield, a helmet, and a big stick, chances are you're gonna catch a beating.
Re: Occupy America She probably inherited her smile from her parents like all of those dastardly rich have if you listen to a lot of these idiots, in which case his loose and purely comedic statement stands. Honestly, I have yet to see a set of statistics that clearly shows a majority of rich people (how ever loosely defined) are good for nothing loafers who get it passed to them from Daddywarbucks. Just because the upper class holds most of the wealth doesn't mean it is all the same set of people from 100 years ago.
Re: Occupy America Nobody is saying anything of the sort, I think that is a misrepresentation of what the more thoughtful elements of OWS are all about. What is being said, however, is that there desperately needs to be a restructuring of the way that things are done, as was eloquently outlined by Aetius early on in this thread: The amount of tax that the top 1% have been paying has been steadily declining over the past 30 years, while real wages have been diminishing for most of us. It's clear to me that trickle-down hasn't really done much in the way of trickling down. That being said, the whole income disparity is merely a symptom; the real problem is encapsulated pretty much perfectly in Aetius' bullet points.
Re: Occupy America If only I had posted that in the College Thread. Oh, wait...ok, ok, not to rehash. I've been thinking a lot about that thread, as well as this one, and what a lot of you have said. There are many good points here, as well as some very angry ones. That's ok, I think anger is justifiable, even if the target of that anger may be misguided at times. Anyway, I think I come down on the college thing as follows: Our grandparents didn't have to 'pay to play.' A high school education got you there, the family, the house, the picket fence. My parents (notably, I'm older than many of you) also didn't HAVE to have a college degree, and in fact my father didn't, but he earned a pretty good living. Now, well, you do have to have a college degree. Unfortunately, it is now 'pay to play' and you don't have the same opportunities to support a family on one income anymore. To be fair, the world has changed, but I guess that's my big problem with sinking so much money into college is that you are paying to play, with fewer opportunities to take the field. It's very unsettling, I just hope OWS raises some awareness that there is something amiss, and hopefully, that we (as Americans) need to pull together in some way to address some significant problems, and try to avoid the ridiculous issues that will surely be thrown at us in the next election to take our eye off the ball, so to speak.
Re: Occupy America Also, did you know that 0.216% of the members on this board wield 100% of the moderating power? #Occupytib
Re: Occupy America I had two friends go to college and graduate "anthropology majors" with no intentions of getting Masters or PhDs. They said they couldn't get jobs because of the economy. I had two at the time and felt little to no pity for them. They are both now working for a non profit organization and living at home. America is fucked because so many kids want to go to liberal arts schools and learn fluff. The days of the philosophy, media studies and all the academic stuff where the only thing you can do is go back and be a professor on it for mental masturbation needs to come to an end.
Re: Occupy America I bet your friends probably paid excessively for their education too. I feel for people just getting into the work force but there HAS to be some level of self awareness regarding your own future. If you're chasing a bullshit degree or using college as a place to hang out for 4-5 years and you aren't paying attention to whats ahead then you have no one to blame but yourself. When I was being "sold" on college in the late 90's early 2000's it was close to a guarantee that if you graduated with a business degree you would find employment rather easily somewhere. You might be Asst Manager at a Staples but you'd be employed. For the expense of college today if parents are in the decision making picture they need to be brutally fucking honest about little Johnny wanting to study Art History, especially if he's going to rack up a $100k+ tab. It's a real question of how and how long it'll take to pay off that sum. Maher 's comparison of a college education to a mortgage for a house you don't live in is dead on. Huge investment you hope you can make a little on or at least break even with.
Re: Occupy America And those companies are full of shit. Take the engineering example - I work for an engineering firm, and know many friends, relatives and neighbors who are engineers. The engineering field has been shrinking for years now, leading to a glut of trained and experienced engineers. There are a shitload of "skilled American" engineers out there. There have ALWAYS been more communications majors, psychology majors, etc., because those majors are easy, and you can skate through undergrad and come out with a degree. The fact is that plenty of skilled people are coming out of school and having great difficulty finding jobs, because there are few to be had.
Re: Occupy America There are far too few people graduating from college these days with the knowledge that you don't always get to do what you want; you have to do what needs to be done. I think this mentality is a holdover from the days of the boom, when everyone was comfortable enough to say that being merely financially secure wasn't adequate - emotional fulfillment had to be there as well. That's all fine and dandy, but most of us no longer have that choice. If someone else doesn't, reality will step in to tell them that they can either be emotionally satisfied - or put food on the table. The sooner this happens, the sooner I believe we can start to move forward and make progress.
Re: Occupy America I graduated from college with a psychology major and a finance minor. They only reason I didn't double major is that conflicting required courses between the Arts and Sciences school and the business school would have had me in college for another year. From the minute I switched from Pre-Med to Psychology when I was a sophomore, I had a business career in mind. I just wanted to go about it from a more unique way which I thought would leave me well-rounded and desireable. I wrote my psych papers on behavioral finance and consumer behavior instead of regurgitating the DSM-IV like other less-inspired psych kids I went to school with. I had every intention of getting a job in finance or related fields using a marriage of the two and could talk about it at length. Guess what? Employers didn't give a shit. By the time I graduated in 2008, the job market had narrowed and people were throwing my resume away as soon as they saw "Psych Major" and looking at kids with Finance, Econ, Com Sci, etc... My friends that graduated in 2007, even as marketing or communications majors had 3-4 offers to sift through. The next year, similar students were lucky to have one. The game has changed and I think the days of bs liberal arts majors getting competitive business jobs are over. Like I said in a previous thread, of the 4 very successful financial professionals I know (investment fund owner, former trader who retired at 32 and has a smaller consulting firm now, Private Equity MD, and a portfolio manager) only the latter had a traditional finance or econ major. The other 3, history, english, and my favorite, philosophy, and he got a job at a major investment bank right out of school. And none of those guys went to prestigious or Ivy league schools. The playing field is just different. Unfortunately, it will take another 5 years before people realize this and we see majors and fields of study adjust to meet it.
Re: Occupy America That, right there. I remember being in junior high (so...Grade 8 or 9), and having one of our Social Studies classes canceled so that we could have an orientation for high school as well as an aptitude test to know our strengths academically. I was one of the oddballs, in that I scored high in both English AND Math. And I already knew then, at the age of 15, that the decisions I made about high school courses and what I chose to study in university would matter GREATLY. My best subjects were Art and English. To this day, I have far more artistic talent and writing ability than I have any kind of math talent. And engineering is certainly not my life's passion. BUT I fucking studied it anyway, because I knew I would never be unemployed and I would always earn a decent living. If I knew this kind of shit at 15, what the hell are all the anthropology majors thinking? Another point that no one (I think) has addressed: You must move where the work is. Gone are the days of the white picket fence home that you live in for 40 years. My dad and his compatriots make KILLER salaries. They put Nett and Fawkes to shame. Why? Because they always moved with the work. That means doing what carrymehome is doing and living in Buttfuck, Ft. MacMurry for part of your life. It means disrupting the kids' school schedules and constantly packing and readjusting to a new area. But fuck it...my dad was never unemployed, and he made a fantastic career for himself. I have cousins who think they can live in Small Town Ontario and do the same thing. Sorry, no you can't.
Re: Occupy America Can you post some videos of those rocks and bottles being thrown? How about videos of rocks and bottles lying on the ground (like you see in videos of protests from the middle east where dudes are running forwards to grab rocks that fell short so they can throw them again)?
Re: Occupy America On Monday 24 October, on a current affairs program on national radio (Triple J's Hack, for those playing at home), there was a discussion held regarding the Occupy Melbourne movement and some of the concepts underpinning the global protests*. There was one of the protesters who had been evicted from the site (and, I think, arrested) and a representative from the city council. They got into a rather heated exchange with the council rep asking the protester to quantify what he meant by "excessive greed"; referencing the collective ambiguity of what was going on. This is an exact transcription of part of the conversation: Council Rep: You can't say someone is excessively greedy if you can't define what you mean by greed. Protester: Well I think everyone can see that the big bankers are excessively greedy. I think you're very much in the minority there if you think that they're not. Look all around the world, look at the huge inequalities, look at how they were bailed out, look how the rest of the 99% are treated around the world. That's all we're saying. Presenter: [Interjects to get things back on track. Asks the council rep for his view on the bank bailouts.] CR: Well, I'm just waiting for him to say what's reasonable [referencing a question asked previously as to what would be a reasonable return on equity for profit]. Presenter: [Interjects that it's apparent that the protester isn't going to despite being asked a number of times.] Protester: What would be reasonable is if bank employees earned the same as their CEOs. That would be reasonable. Let's fight for a world like that, of genuine equality. CR: Hang on a sec,... everyone gets exactly the same salary regardless of the job they're doing? Everybody? Presenter: Is that what you're advocating [name]? CR: That would certainly be a lot better than what we have now, yeah. That's something... I would love to advocate for that. I'm not saying that that is indicative of the broad stance of the 99%, but just the fact that that mentality is seriously out there is massively fucking concerning to me. And I don't mean me, personally. I mean for the whole of society. The gravity of things wrong with "same pay regardless of work" should be obvious to anyone who stops and thinks for half a second. *If you want to hear it, go to <a class="postlink" href="http://www.triplej.net.au/hack" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;">www.triplej.net.au/hack</a> and get the podcast. The actual exchange is around 22 minutes in.
Re: Occupy America In Australia, you consider that alarming. In America, we let people who think like that run for President.
Re: Occupy America I don't mean to attack you directly, Disgustipated, this is more of a broad condemnation, but this to me is everything that is wrong with the FoxNews/Conservative response to this ..."movement," for lack of a better word. Come on, really? It's disingenuous and purposely obtuse. Look, I don't think anyone in his/her right mind can say that we don't have a problem of some kind, that the facts show without any ambiguity, the distribution of wealth is at a level of inequality that we haven't seen since the Great Depression. Regardless of whether you think it's good or bad or how you want to spin its origins, it's a provable fact. Now, we have a fairly large group of people standing up and saying, "hey, I'm pissed off about this." Like any large group of people, many (most, more likely) are idiots with no ability to even understand, much less express what it is that they're angry about, exactly, and even less of an ability to propose solutions. This is more an example of the realities of humanity than anything else - there isn't a higher percentage of eloquent and intelligent people on the other side of the issue, either. But rather than acknowledging the issues raised by people who aren't idiots, conservatives and the media in general and many of you in particular have chosen to pretend that the entire group is defined by a few morons who you can point to and laugh, thereby avoiding any intelligent discourse about the inequalities and the disenfranchisement of a large and extremely diverse swath of the population. It's so much easier to pretend there aren't any facts to support the basic argument that we've reached a point of rich getting richer and poor getting poorer that isn't sustainable in a civilized society, and it's time to address it with a reasonable mind and a seriousness that is willing to ignore the nonsense and the drum beating unwashed hippies who want to be rebellious. There are real people involved here, people who want to have a serious conversation, and they're being purposefully ignored in favor of finding clowns that allow the right to act smug and dismissive. This is stupid and it's dangerous, and frankly I find it insulting and it makes me want to dismiss anyone taking that path. If you won't stop pretending that you don't understand what people are upset about, how can we have an intelligent conversation? And honestly, if you're being serious and you really don't have any idea why people are upset and standing up in anger, I'm afraid I've got to call you an idiot. I'm happy to have a discussion with a person who disagrees with me, but if you're seriously going to tell me that you can't see the results of turning the free market into a hunting license, or understand the difference between "of course you're entitled to make a profit and earn in accordance with the richness of your ideas and commensurate with your level of responsibility, etc," and the need for some form of regulation and control, you're just as ridiculous as the hippie who wants to be paid as much as the CEO. Look, Greed with a capital G has been the driving force behind the collapse of every single system of society we've ever come up with as a species. People are inclined to try to take something for nothing, and to get away with whatever their cleverness will allow them to take. It's how we're wired. So just because the core of capitalism might be a good idea, it doesn't mean it's going to work if we just let it loose and apply it to everything from our elementary schools and universities to social welfare programs and the arts and every other damned thing, and if we leave it completely unregulated, people who can will take more than is reasonable to sustain the whole of the society. And then the people will rise up and start making a mess, which is what we're seeing now.
Re: Occupy America Aren't you at teacher of some sort? I am curious as to what you think is wrong with our education system and what you think might be done. I have always thought our piss poor education system put a lot of people at a disadvantage in the real world. It seems like we have a combination in this country of apathy in parents and in teachers in general.