Occupy Wall Street Protests

I don't know if any of you have been following the protests in NYC lately, but a bunch of people have been taking to the streets and protesting the recent economy, the leaders of our nation, and just the general shit state of everything right now. The part of this that has made it a big ordeal is the dumb NYC police and how they've been handling the stuff. I'm not going to post the police brutality videos here because it even made me flinch what they did to these people who haven't done jack squat yet;' but it amazes me how this lot of unorganized people hasn't violently fought back yet. I feel if it keeps up, it may get out of hand and turn into the situations that gripped London recently..

What do you think?

http://www.youtube.com/view_play_list?p=2F2ECCAE06273EF3

 

Yeah, the completely is a bad idea, but you need some happy medium between USSR and India, where you get nothing from the government unless you're wealthy.

Kyoji makes a good point too, most protesters don't understand what they're protesting about and even some of the organisers see only what they want to see.

Economically, the blame for this lies with corporations and consumers. The government's only vice has been kicking the can down the road. The capitalist system is at its core a highly efficient mechanism that rewards those who do useful work almost of its own accord. However, it's a little short-sighted given that research with no short-term but potentially significant long-term benefits doesn't appeal to many companies. Fortunately, we have universities for this.

The real problem is that capitalism is driven by people. People are idiots. They buy things they don't need, take out loans they can't afford, and fail to insure things they can't afford to lose, because it seems like a good idea at the time. Plus advertising agencies are pretty good at manipulating people to think it's a good idea.

So when too many people have run up debts they can't ever pay back, the whole system starts to fail. And then the government is busy with stimulus packages, lowering interest rates, and printing money, so these people can continue spending money they don't have for just a little longer.

 

Yes, clearly these people are uninformed and have no idea what they are protesting against.



Also a good post on reddit.

http://www.reddit.com/r/occupywalls...ows_the_us_vs_international_media_xpost_from/

 

Unfortunately most of these people are sheep, they may have good intentions but they lack the actual knowledge of the situation. That being said, the mass of sheep is sometimes the best method to attain attention to a subject.

As long as one or two people can stand out from the crowd and represent the correct information / issue, the cause is just.

 

Bold statement, can you even prove that? I've seen tons of videos of people who are well articulated, educated (many college students), and even older people who clearly know what they stand for and what the situation is. Here's another fantastic video,



And don't you have your own EU situation.

 

I wasn't referring to this event specifically, I was generalising. (I could have worded it better, granted). Although fair enough there are people out there that know exactly what they are talking about, many of the other people are usually just following someone else's influence. I will refer back to Kyoji's statement where he called out the show Bullshit and getting people to sign a false petition.

The catch is finding the correctly informed people. Those are the more valuable participants because they have a full understanding, or at least as close as possible.

The theory of knowledge (tripartite definition) is;

P is true (That it exists and is proven)
A believes that P (That the individual is willing to act upon this belief)
A can justify P (The individual can recite the facts to prove claim)

If the person cannot fulfil this requirement to a high degree, then their argument is flawed. The majority would loose validity at this point due to lack of insight into the specific topic. Those that can backup their claims are the ones that tend to make a difference. (Thus why I said most are sheep)

In response to what is happening in the UK, i.e - London riots, its pretty similar in principle.

 

I know what you meant, but you're not the only one using generalizations for a specific event that has no evidence to support the sheep stereotype. I don't even know why it was brought up. It has no bearing on what is going on with these protests and goes to show how informed some people are. This is a thread on the Occupy Wall Street protests, not protestor psychology. If you want to discuss that make a thread for it.

And if you don't have facts don't make a statement, because you don't have an argument.

 

Great points by everybody..
But what I was mainly hitting at was the denial of the free speech that these people have been given by the police and all that..
In the USA, as long as you're not violently hurting people or destroying property, you can do this. The police are taking this way out of control.

Great videos there Doc.

I do forsee that if that police keep this up that the protests will turn into riots, with more and more people joining the crowds. And with more people you get more opinions, and with more opinions comes the ones who believe in force and fighting back.

It's not a dispute of whether our country is in economic trouble; because we are. But the habits of the people only go so far. Things like the new credit and banking laws? Good. Things like bailouts for companies who can't manage their finances. Bad.

And that last statement: I don't care if it does eliminate a mass amount of jobs, the companies will be in the same boat again if they don't clean up their acts. Old begets new and so on, maybe if people would take a hit to their pride and get a crappy ass job int he meantime to hold over until they find something, we'd be okay.

I know several people who were either fired or laid off a career job and refuse to work a retail, or something considered "college kids" work in the meantime. But I diverge from the main topic here so..

 

My grievances,

Bank of America needs to stop illegally foreclosing homes on people. And people need to stop banking with them.

Also corporations are not people and shouldn't be treated as such. When money became speech this country began to decline. That's why the 99% need to become the 100%.

 

Kyoji, 46.2 million people in the United States are in poverty. That's fucking pathetic. It's not a matter of jealousy and not everyone wants a million dollars, they just want a proper life. Back in the day you could have a job out of high school, buy a house, a car, get married before you were 20 and have kids. Now you need a college education that puts you in debt your paying off most of your adult life and people can barely make ends meet, with that education, if they can get a job. People have to work 2-3 jobs. Let's not even talk about healthcare. With this economy people can't even live. That's a problem.

 

What arguments? People are idiots? Well I'll just put you in that category and call it a day.

 

I'd put anyone in that category who has over 1000 posts to a video game community forum(yes myself included!)

 

Why are people claiming that the people at these rallies are idiots like its something new? Welcome to the MASSES. General masses are never informed. Go to any political rally and ask ANYTHING besides who the current president is and I guarantee the majority won't know. Ask them how to solve the problem and you will have 1 maybe two people with legitimate responses and neither of them will be the ones leading the protests.

As for the communism remarks? wow. No one wants your upper middle class suburban white money, they just want to stop getting fucked in the ass by a brick held by an economy that is dependent on a bunch of greedy assholes with fake money and scams unlimited.

 

Too high to be realistic, but there are a lot (hundreds of millions at least). It's just not the majority.

I haven't really read up on these protests, but I'm not sure exactly what they're asking for. You can't chuck out Wall Street and expect any real problems to be solved. I'm not really able to take a message away from it because not much of anything coherent has come through any coverage, this thread included... maybe I'll go look for more detailed articles when I have the chance.

 

https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/index.html

I can't be arsed summing up the total % for the whole world but US had a 15.1% in 2010 (I'm sure that's gone up a hell of a lot this year), so if you consider other countries along side, the 74% population of world poverty is actually realistic. After having a quick look through countries there are a huge number that top at least 40%.

That's pretty worrying.

 

That's really not a useful site for getting poverty readings. According to that, only 5% of China's population live in poverty at most, making it one of the most wealthy countries in the world.

This is based on the UN statistics which seem a little more believable. Take particular note of countries with high populations: the US, Mexico, Brazil, UK, Germany, France, Russia, Turkey, Nigeria, Pakistan, particularly India and China, Indonesia, Japan and the Philippines.



This is a fairly pessimistic statistic of population earning less than $2 a day. Even by this metric, the average looks to be closer to 40% and it's definitely not over 60%.