Your idea of right and wrong, truth and fiction, is based upon a Caucasian, American, middle-class upbringing and shaped by a reverence for authority, a fear of having less than your neighbors and a terror of being taken advantage of. It’s a very narrow world-view, life is not a zero-sum game.

For God’s sake, open your mind to what may be disagreeable to it. There is another 90% of the world out there you miss. Like that post.

Arf

As a number of sympathizers and organizers have said, in public, they need the police to hurt someone to keep this going. The exact phrase in one case, which I posted on, was “another Kent State.”

They need the violence to keep this crap rolling in the media, and will provoke or invent it if they have to. The one person who’s been seriously injured so far has been milked like you wouldn’t believe. Look at their websites.

Watch Oakland tomorrow. Oakland has been selected by the organizers as the major focal point.

And there haven’t been any reports of violence in Portland from what I’ve seen.

Do you suppose that the difference between areas with violence and without is how violent the police get first? Realizing it’s a chicken-and-egg sort of thing, I rather suspect so. Cops figure violence is their strong suit, and they instigate it.

Maybe not, but something is driving the peaceful nature of these demonstrations.

Arf

Arf

The US would have been far, far more effective in Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan if they would have been aware of their issues and language.

However, re the Occupiers. Your attitude is typical, no effort to understand those folks, simply deriding them because you disagree. And that’s sad, because they have a message with which you don’t have to agree but still a message.

Y’know, during the American Revolution, 1/3 of the people were in favor of independence, 1/3 didn’t care one way or the other, and 1/3 were in favor of staying a colony. It’s not difficult to tell where you would have been and how you would have regarded those ragtag revolutionaries, scruffy uniforms, lousy marchers, shooting from behind trees, spoiled, ungrateful wretches who crap wherever it suits them.

Arf

This is a bunch of spoiled brats lying on the floor kicking their feet and squalling because they aren’t getting the goodies they were promised.

When the weather gets rough, most of them will go home.

These are the people everybody is pointing to and saying are the future of the country.

Exactly my point. For myself, I am not to hopeful. At All.

Iraq. Whipped again, by third-world warriors. The US is afraid to go anywhere except at gunpoint. Their biggest weapon, the power of ideas, hatred of foreigners and resentment of another Crusade, a Christian President attacking the infidels.

Afghanistan. Beginning to see a pattern? Your $2 billion bombers being useless? Ideas again, fighting American imperialism. And they want it more.

And now, following the American tradition of never learning from history, you are underestimating the power another set of concepts, those of justice, equality and fairness.

You have the police, the military and ultimately a losing hand. But keep sneering, it’s all you will have in the end.