Occupy Wall StreetFollow

Or when they stay within those parameters. Nothing like listening to people lament that it's easier to build Coca-Cola factories in China, what with its government dictatorship and lack of safety/environment/business regulations. Oh, if only we could be more like China!...

You don't?

Got kids?...I'd like to borrow them.

I don't follow. Are you saying you wish this country was more like China? Or just that our government was a dictatorship like China's?

TBH high school sports did more to instill a work ethic in me than any childhood job.

Jobs taught me:

1) Septic systems stink in so many ways
2) You don't want to be 45 and working in fast food
3) You can get paid more for watching a couple of kids watch TV and changing some diapers then for any "real" job.
4) If you shift the mower into high you can make it buck
5) You water the soil not the leaves
6) Anyone who orders 60 tacos from the drive-through at Jack-in-the-Box deserves serious punishment.

TL:DR I learned I didn't want to drop out of school; which really wasn't happening anyway.

Edited, Oct 12th 2011 11:28am by someproteinguy

No more than people with the opposite opinion. What's your point?

No, taking responsibility is going out and getting a job to pay for your exorbitant student loan debt instead of complaining about having to pay it back while sh:tting on a cop car.

Good, Yogi. Personal responsibility in action. You can be taught.

Except that it is. I want to keep what I earn, the protesters want to take what I earn. Natural Rights, baby. Keep your hands out of my pockets and I won't leave a razor blade in there.

The fact that some responsible people protest in parks does not automatically make the act of protesting in the park responsible. It's not about what they're doing, but why, how, and with what purpose. As you say, it's an acceptable legal practice to try to reform legislation.

So... What legislation are they trying to reform? Absent a specific agenda or even consistent principles at work, it's just a bunch of people complaining about random stuff they don't like without a clue what they'd do differently much less a plan for accomplishing anything.




But they're not in the park to try to "improve our financial system". They're in the park complaining about the current system. There really is a difference. You can't just protest "against" something (or shouldn't anyway). Things don't exist in a vacuum. In politics it's not about having something or having nothing. It's having something, or having something else. If you cannot frame your protest in the form of what the "something else" is you'd rather have than the something you are protesting against, then at best you're just wasting your time and at worst, you're being used as a tool for someone else's agenda.


I'll give the Occupy folks some respect as soon as they tell me what they are "for" instead of just what they are "against". Causes often try to form people together based on what they're against simply because it's easier. You can always get lots of people who don't like something. But it's a lot harder to get lots of people who agree on a solution/alternative. That's how you can have communists and libertarians standing in the same crowd yelling about the banks. You can bet that they don't agree on much else though.



Why is this funny? Despite massive attempts by the left leaning media to make both groups out to be the same, there are dramatic differences between them:

1. The average Tea Partier is something like 10-15 years older.

2. The average Tea Partier is a responsible productive member of society and understands a hell of a lot more about how the world works (sorta because they've lived more of it).

3. The Tea Party has clearly defined for/against positions. Against "big government". For individual liberty and responsibility. They are for the free market in absence of the government intervening constantly. This alone is a huge difference. They have a fully formed "cause". The Occupy people don't.

4. When instigators shows up at a Tea Party protest, the people in the crowd call the police over and have them removed and cheer/thank the cops for removing this person who doesn't represent them from their midst. When the same thing happens during an Occupy protest, the "peaceful" crowd cheers on the instigator and jeers the cops.


I could probably list more differences if I wanted to. The point is that there is nothing wrong about supporting one group while opposing the other. They are generally diametrically opposed in terms of positions *and* very very different in terms of methodology, degree to which they have well defined goals, and the actual peacefulness of their protests.

Edited, Oct 12th 2011 12:49pm by gbaji

There's a whole middle range between a "bunch of people" and "none of them". I'm quite sure that some of them have very specific agendas. However, a "bunch of people" there don't and are thus either wasting their time *or* being used for someone else's agenda (didn't I already say this?)

Ah. "A bunch". Well, you sure would know about parroting things for someone else's agenda

Because "big government" isn't just about the dollars, or the number of people. It's about the expanding scope of the government (usually federal) into new areas. Thus, universal health care is an example of big government. Funding our military is *not* an example of big government. I'm sure I've explained this to you many times in the past. Perhaps you should pay attention one of these times?

Also, you kinda left out the part about opposition to government intervening in the free market. Obviously, the government should be directly involved in managing our nations military. It should not be so directly involved in managing our markets.



You're conflating "religious" and "conservative". The two positions share some commonalities, but are not strictly identical. The conservative position on abortion is that it should be determined at the state level, and not the federal level (that's consistent, right?). Thus, the conservative position is about how the law is determined and applied, and not necessarily about the result (kinda like not having a problem with Mass choosing to employ Romney care but having a big problem with the same thing applied nationwide).

The religious view is specific to the issue itself. They oppose abortion. Those positions happen to align because in our current legal state, religious people can't fight to overturn current abortion laws unless conservatives can first overrule Roe v. Wade and return the power to make those decisions to the states. That's how the two are aligned. They're also aligned in more broad terms because the current left happens to be increasingly secular and anti-religious (specifically anti-Christian).

If the liberals of today were instead fighting to expand government in ways that benefited existing religious institutions, you can bet that we'd have a "religious left" and conservatives would be opposing them. It's a mistake to assume that conservative and religious are synonymous, or that all conservatives hold the same specific set of issue position as all religious people. There are a whole hell of a lot of pro-choice Republican voters (like me!) out there.




Taking out the spoiler tag. Um... Michelle Bachmann? There are a whole hell of a lot of religious conservatives who do practice exactly what they preach. I'm not sure what you thought you were trying to prove here.


Oh. But just to be clear, the conservative position on abortion is that there is a balance of individual rights. That of the woman over her own body, and that of the unborn child to live. We recognize that this is an incredibly complex and difficult issue and that we should not therefore just declare one solution by fiat from the highest point of the law and think that we've ended it. Clearly, Roe v. Wade did not end the debate, but it did make it harder for us to explore different solutions on a state by state basis and allow the people to decide on their own what laws they feel the most comfortable with.

The conservative position on Roe v. Wade is a whole topic by itself. But I think the point here is that there is a consistent set of positions with a consistent set of principle pushing them. The Tea Party platform is *not* about abortion. It's not about prayer in school. It's almost exclusively about government imposing greater control over our markets and our economic lives. The left tends to attack members of the Tea Party on other positions they may hold that aren't part of the Tea Party platform. I can only assume because they can't effectively attack the common positions Tea Partiers hold.



It's a hell of a lot better defined. If there's any confusion about what they stand for, it's because of every liberal pundit in the country desperately attempting to paint the Tea Party as being about anything and everything *except* what they are actually about. Conflating of multiple positions which are not common to the Tea Party is how that's done. The contrast to the Occupiers, is that if you ask 10 random members what they think the movement is about, the only common thing is not liking banks and rich people. That might be a start, but it's hardly a cohesive set of positions on any issue.


When they get some common positions, then they get a bit more respect.