Thing is OWS incorporates MANY things like this. Since I am an Environmental Science major one of my main focuses in my protesting is the environmental part. Its both about equality and waking humanity up to the fact that we have screwed up both our world and each other.

Looks at thread....what have I done!

This is really bad. This happened over the weekend and late last week in Melbourne and then Sydney.

Sydney:

http://resources1.news.com.au/images...upy-sydney.jpg

...who's in the wrong here, exactly? :P

Don't assume police automatically did everything, they are almost certainly likely to get attacked when attempting to resolve a situation like this without confrontation from their side.

News time. Wish it could have been on a brighter note today. :(












Oakland Police Critically Injure Iraq War Vet During Occupy March

New York Becoming a Police State? Occupy Wall Street Meets the "Ring of Steel" at Liberty Square | Occupy Wall Street | AlterNet

Inside the Shocking Police Crackdown on Occupy Oakland: Tear Gas Used, 85 Arrested | | AlterNet

I guess there are a few bits of good news out there. :)

New York Cops Defy Order to Arrest Hundreds of

I can't wait to see how certain people try to spin that as not the rioters' fault :P

Two points:

1) Police can incite riots just as equally as protestors can incite riots. Just sayin'... To toss the protestors under the bus without including the human factor in the (in modern times, extremely militant) riot police is wrong, IMO. You saw the other video of them tossing the M84 into the crowd trying to help up the fallen person. Are you honestly saying the cops are guilt free in this situation?

2) And the protestors weren't "rioters" before the cops stepped in. These protests were peaceful, and everyone knew that if they wanted their First Amendment right to petition the government for redress of grievance to be addressed, they would have to remain peaceful (like Thom Hartmann said, the only permit we need to protest is our very own Constitution and First Amendment). Trust me, I've been following these movements a lot more closely than you probably are. That is, unless your only beef with them is the music or tent cities, in which case I would tell you that free speech isn't always visually or audibly pleasing to everyone. :)

That is, unless you somehow consider "nonviolent civil disobedience" to be wrong or violent in some way? Or justification for police violence? Do you believe nonviolent civil disobedience is a legitimate form of protest? Were Thoreau and Gandhi wrong about the justification of nonviolent civil disobedience? I remember you went to a protest a few weeks ago about the teaching to religion in public schools, would you have still been in the protests if the group took a nonviolent civil disobedience approach similar to the Occupy Movements? How would you feel if your demonstration was raided?

Remember this post...by you:

Sorry, being from the United States I have to correct you there. The only 'riot' was what is commonly known as a police riot, attacking generally peaceful people who had nothing to do with a few small groups of primarily anarchists and communists who had turned up solely to cause a fight and had no connection to the actual protests. ;)

And before you come back at me with "but the Occupiers are anarchists and communists!" Well, nice try, but not so fast...

Now no offense, but I'm going to answer you in the same way you responded to Isard in that same thread:

The only reason you have this double-standard against the Occupy Protestors compared to protests you take part in is because you somehow got the idea (probably from the corporate media) that they are working against your own best interests. If you took the moment to step back and think it over, you'd realize that they aren't, and the majority of demands are things you and your European neighbors already have!!

That's all I really could say about all of that. I need to clear my head for a while, this whole Oakland thing (and the reaction it has garnered by some on this forum) has gotten me a bit enraged at the moment.

I'd find it hard to know unless I saw it myself :S

Tsyal, you're right - it's something similar. A few communists/anarchists who are not the main group, who like to incite violence. That happened in both cases :P

Now you're getting it.:)

Another point I'd like to bring up again is that the media flocks to crazies in a group, especially media with an agenda, and the Occupy Movement is a perfect example. The group is very diverse, people of all ages, colors, religions (or lack of), sexualities, etc., coming together over a common goal. But that doesn't stop those in the media from finding an extreme radical and using them to create a stereotype (or in the case of Evan Coyne Maloney, creating the image of radicals himself).

Never did. I just posted the news. :P
My gripe is that The Occupy movement in both Melbourne and Sydney resulted in violence and forced eviction. A protest movement shouldn't have to end in that. As far as I'm concerned it could of been more civil..

I really can't say who's in the wrong, but I do know that blacks sitting with whites on the buses were considered "In the wrong" at the time by southerners. So it can be extremely biased at times. Was tearing up a street acceptable compared to what the 99ers claim the 1ers do?

I mean to me it's wrong to say you can only protest at certain times, in certain places. To me that destroys the purpose of protesting. Protesting is supposed to be obnocious because it's supposed make people change something.

Now I don't know what the protesters were doing, but I like what Malcom X says: that you protest peacefully until they lay a hand on you; as soon as they do that, all reasons for peace are off.

Right HHM let's clear this up: You seemed to focus on that quote from the article:

Now, I realise that you wouldn't have the full knowledge of what has been going on with the occupy movements in Australia because you aren't down here and haven't talked with protesters or seen weeks of media footage. So you wouldn't know the full story or what had happened in context of the eviction.

For Melbourne

https://indymedia.org.au/2011/10/23/...idiot%E2%80%9D

This is the same with Sydney:

The police wouldn't allow protestors to access the public toilets from 10pm to 5am. What do you expect people to do?

http://www.indymedia.org.au/2011/10/...s-to-criticism

Just how cool would it have been if everyone left the place in time? Those 400 police would have had just stood there, worthless. :P

Marine Scott Olsen Will Undergo Brain Surgery, And OccupyMARINES Are Making Demands

http://a3.sphotos.ak.fbcdn.net/hphot...92883586_n.jpg

Well, that's mostly because I was trying to squeeze that entire post into 10k characters. Since your new post(s) are even longer, I'm not even to try that, so hopefully that'll break up the problem. (Of course that means that this response will take up at least 2, possibly 3 actual posts.) EDIT: it is also 1:30am, so sorry if this post is hard to read or anything like that.

Isn't value, almost by definition, the (maximum) price people will pay for things? Eggs don't have any intrinsic value, after all, only value in the context of goals. Aliens might "value" eggs negatively, because they are, e.g. poisonous.

Some resources, like peoples' time and instaneous power generation, are, AFAIK, heavily affected by demand; the value is not so much in posessing the resource, but in posessing the resouce right now.

Actually, Milo's behavious has very little to do with the crash, and if, for some reason, the value of eggs plummeted, he would be fine, because his wealth is not in eggs; his wealth is in US dollars. The crash happened because the big investment banks had their wealth in things like investment indicies and the shares of other corporations, which as mentioned earleir, have no intrinsic value.

Imagine if Apple were not an electronics manufacturer, but an investment bank. What could conceivably happen upon Jobs' death is that shareholders lose confidence in Apple, and so their share price drops. However, if other companies have shares in Apple, and use them as assets, the value of that company drops. This means that their share price also drops, and...

I would disagree that capitalism causes scarcity and say that scarcity is the default; capital and resources are required to move resources around. (What a lovely catch-22.)

Opportunity cost can hardly be called a "cost," in the actual financial sense. It costs the AF 5 cents per egg, but they don't "lose" 2 cents because they could have theorectically bought directly from the farmer for 3.

Yes, the brand itself has value. That value is only as fictiotious as the value gold has over, say, platinum. For instance, in the 17th century, the Spanish were off counquering South America, and they found a group of islanders who decorated themselves with a unknown, silverly metal. It wasn't a particularly nice status symbol, nor was it rare on the island. The Spanish hadn't any idea what to do with it, so they mined for gold and then sailed off again. Neither gold nor platinum has any "real" value; they are both completely useless unless you happen to manufacture electronics.

Simple: see above. It is the belief of most people that ecology does not have value, or it has negligible value.

...Pretty much nothing, unless they produce something we trade. Sorry.

As mentioned, this is a disadvantage of captalism: nobody planned it out, and so businesses basically treat any stragy alloewd by law as a valid tactic, which includes artificial scarcity and planned obsolscence.

(Since I don't believe in an intrinsic value in the gold standard, I am unsure how fiat currency is actually less "backed" than gold. They both rest on the same consensual value.)

Who's paying for it? :D I'm serious actually: distrubuting grain does, itself, take resources.


That's technically commodification of IP, which isn't the same. If A2 was bland, but broke another box office record through sheer inertia, it wouldn't make a difference to the value of the IP.

This is a wonderful idea.

This, however, is not, because it removes the main incentive to make a profit. It may also rely on people spending their money wisely, which is a silly assumption to make.

What incentive is there for the artist to create "good" art, as opposed to anything?


It's also vastly impractical to actually implement. It probably also won't make a difference. Humans are irrational like that.

PR itself has value, in that good PR increases profits.

If you remind me, I'll write a thread about it tommorow.