12.5% of the planets have 71% of the mass.. Occupy Jupiter..

[Fumesucker]

The thoughts of a 17 year old on the Occupy movement..




http://zombieland-nowbrainfree.blogspot.com/2011/11/young-people-these-days.html

Occupy Wall Street is entering its fifth week of resistance, and the press has had its fun. I know there were Communists there, but it feels like Fox News missed the end of the Cold War. How did we ever come to dub protest class warfare? What makes students feel free to hold a publically-announced meeting solely to ridicule the protesters, at the decided exclusion of liberals? These are lessons from Political Maneuvering 101—check out Nixon’s campaign against Jerry Voorhis—but we can’t keep relying on ideological rhetoric to make our decisions for us. Communists aren’t just the old enemy of Capitalism; they’re the classic sign of deteriorating economies. That feels infinitely more interesting than the observation that hippies attend protests. But it’s not just the media that likes to overreact. Look at our own school; with mention of a dedicated anti-liberal Conservative Club, we should be concerned about how the dialogue of politics is playing out. I checked out the protests with friends last weekend expecting to find it an interesting case of ineffective resistance, but found my presumption to be way off the mark. So we have to be open conversationalists, and here’s where we’ll start.

Let’s take this seriously. Students like us are at an age where we can’t help but demonize as soon as we can criticize. So we have to drop any preconceived notions we might have about the potheads in Zucotti Park (the same potheads enforce a stricter drug and alcohol policy than Taft). Paul Gilding, an Australian environmentalist and author, would say that the decline of the economy is the result of pressing up against the limits of economic expansion. According to Gilding, we are entering a “Great Disruption” where ruthless economic growth has coupled with a weakening democratic process in such a manner that is unsustainable and self-destructive. And as the fuse on Wall Street burns, where do the protesters stand? They don’t provide a solution, and they aren’t unified under one concrete political platform. Gilding calls Occupy Wall Street the child that says what nobody wants to admit: “the emperor has no clothes. The system is broken.”

American media theorist and columnist Douglas Rushkoff points out that this could be the new format for protest, “picking up on the sustainable protest village of the movement’s Egyptian counterparts.” When we went down to the park, the things that impressed me most were the library, the discussion groups, and the “human megaphone.” Like any good protester, an Occupier is vocal, but what’s being taken to the streets isn’t a revolution or a political agenda. It’s a discussion. Protesters are replacing a political platform with an open forum. But we’ve always had political platforms at our protests, right? It’s just how things are done, like with the Tea Party.

The Tea Party comparison is actually pretty weak, because Tea Partiers are campaigners, as opposed to proponents of dialogue. The populace isn’t represented by the Tea Party, which is a partisan organization subsidized by the Koch Brothers, etc. Occupy has marched a force of fifteen thousand students, teachers, union members, and unemployed common men and women on more than one occasion. Fortunately, they aren’t a campaign, because at a time where ideological partisanship is clogging decision-making on every level of government, we really need discussion, not demagoguery. Occupy Wall Street actually manages the kind of discourse that we need to institute in the place of.

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Read the rest of the piece at the link..

[RockaFowler]

1. They keep trying to belittle it

I've seen this on many people's Facebook pages, I can't believe people are so blind and stupid

[Fumesucker]

2. I don't read it that way at all...

:shrug:

[RockaFowler]

4. The people who put this on their Facebook page

Are mocking the OWS movement. My statement was more of an indictment of them :)

[Uben]

3. YEah, always suppressing the little guys......

....remember, they took "planet status" away from the smallest planet, Pluto. Poor fellow. I think Jupiter is owned by Bank of America.

[Cirque du So-What]

5. Distribution of mass in our solar system

is more equitable than distribution of wealth in this country. Let's take on the 1% before taking on Jupiter.

[Fumesucker]

6. It's a joke, son, a joke..

[Cirque du So-What]

7. Yes, I recognize it as such

although I apologize if my reply was not taken as such. Dry humor often doesn't translate well with the written word.