I'm curious to see what you folks think about the Occupy Wall Street protest(s) going on for the past week or so. I must admit that I'm ecstatic to see that the left hasn't forgotten how to protest.

Well, it's a better cause for a protest than "boo hoo we lost an ice hockey match please pity us".

I still think protestors should be shot at sight, though. [/FGR Sentence]

Do you not ever see a cause for protest? Hopefully no protestors will be shot this time around. We do have a long history of doing just that.

I hear that American news hasn't been covering any of this. Reasons why?

American news hasn't "covered" anything in a very long time. There probably wouldn't be any coverage if it wasn't for the arrests. However, to answer your question, I would suspect that news corporations have a vested interest in preventing the public from hearing/viewing anti-corporate propaganda, but maybe that's just a conspiracy theorist occupying my brain.

Sorry, don't know how to play this video :(
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zgr3DiqWYCI

RingMaster481, why do you hate freedom and liberty?????

I heard about this and wasn't sure what it was about because details are scarce and was going to make a thread

The whole blocking of coverage/ corportation "conspiracy" makes sense though

I think it's adorable that the Occupy Wall St. website calls on all the "good" cops to rat out the bad ones. Sorry to break it to you guys, but the 1% of truly despicable police officers wouldn't be able to get away with anything if it weren't for the implicit support of the other 99%.

It comes with the job. The Stanford prison experiment proved it. You put on that uniform, you put yourself in a position of unassailable lordship over other people, and you become a terrible ****ing human being. We make ourselves feel safer by saying they're heroes, doing highly-skilled and dangerous work to protect us... but it's bull****. It's all bull****. If any of it were true the job would have to pay a ****ton more than it does. The reality is that they're borderline-unemployable mongoloids who spend their days doing a liveried and questionably more dangerous version of unskilled manual labor, the work of high school drop-outs. The reality is they aren't in the business of protecting us, they're in the business of protecting themselves. As long as they stay alive and get paid, they don't give a **** what happens to the rest of us. Period.

You want to overthrow the state and install a dictatorship? Offer the police a pay raise. It's yours.

(Edit: You think I'm joking? The Praetorian Guard once put the Roman Empire up for auction. Horrible cops are not a new thing.)

I'm expecting Carlos Miller's "Photography is Not a Crime" blog to cover more of these instances, assuming the protest(s) continue.

When I look back to high school and think of all of the criminal justice majors I used to know, they were are abusive, cruel bullies and I didn't understand how any of those people who had terrible problems with the law would ever get a position in a police department. Now I'm starting to get it.

Really.

When the real **** goes down, know where the cops are? They're headed for the hills. They're not going to protect you. They don't even like you. They're only looking out for themselves and the people they care about.

Look at New Orleans during Hurricane Katrina. Most of the police went AWOL - they even stole their police cruisers to do it (I say stole, of course, because they'd have no problem arresting the rest of us if we used our company cars to go on an unauthorized road trip.) Out of the rest, some of them were out to do guilt-free looting, some of them were out to do guilt-free murdering, and a few of them were actual heroes who were trying to rescue people. ...Until their corporate masters ordered them to guard Wal-Mart instead of saving lives, anyway.

This is why they're busting skulls over being recorded. It's not to protect us, it's not to maintain a police force where the officers aren't constantly afraid of prosecution. They know the government will never hold them accountable for anything they do, ever. They're battering journalists because they don't want their names and faces to be associated with the crimes they commit for the sake of their own convenience. They're terrified of us and what we will do to them. The US is actually at the point where organized criminals like the Hell's Angels are doing the job the police won't do, and threatening to kill violent cops and corrupt DAs. How sad.

The Stanford Prison Experiment showed that giving someone control over other people and then not holding them accountable and responsible would cause them to become a terrible ****ing human being.

-Though there is a question of whether that accountable and responsible thing is satisfyingly exercised. But that's a different topic.

[QUOTE=Jon C]blah blah the world is screwed up blah blah[/QUOTE]

Really? This is TOTALLY news to me. LOL

I did forget about the Praetorian Guard thing. Thanks for bringing it up. 1500 years later, it is a hilarious bit of history.

There was a lot about this on facebook... people complaining that the media weren't covering the protests. I'm kind of surprised by this MSNBC item.

EDIT: wow, that slow-motion of the pepper spray incident is impressive.



Officer walks up to protesters from out of nowhere, sprays in a woman's face, sneaks away!

As for media coverage of the occupation

Sorry, don't know how to play this video :(
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f17oa7zSR-I

Along these lines. Something I found a while back that you guys might find interesting.

http://pastebin.com/VVD4PMFf

unfortunately your probably spot on. in california if you get more than 20 people in the same area over immigration issues its a "protest" and gets wall to wall coverage. this is involving thousands of people from what ive heard and yet... nothing. i may not agree entirely with what they are protesting over, but this should still be getting large amounts of news coverage. but no... nothing. seriously google "occupy wall st" and most of the results are from blogs or kind of side line news forums. (with a few exceptions of course)

I live in NYC, and I haven't even heard about this protest until now.

The interviewer in the RT video raises the most interesting point of all (that people seem to only care about the arrests, which were expected by most participants, & that no one seems to care about the purpose of the protests).

I was gonna say they have nothing 'bout this on the Finnews either but that's really hard to beat.

Cue "I work at Wall Street and I haven't seen anything"

They should occupy the whitehouse, not wallstreet. That's where our real economic woes are coming from, silly liberals.

I'm a member of the Occupy Wall Street protest and this is the first I've heard about it.

It's not all that surprising. MSNBC is probably the closest thing we have in the U.S. to a liberal mainstream news source.

Also, time is running out on Gorbachev.

...& Putin on the Ritz.

OK. That one made me laugh.

I have to say, I'm not exactly sure about the purpose of their protests. If they are worried about the political clout wall street has in Washington (I generally think that is a worrisome thing) then maybe they should be protesting at the Capitol? The "1%" they are protesting can make all the campaign contributions they want, it's still the "99%" who elect these sad sacks.

I'd be interested to see JLee's thoughts regarding Jon`C's posts.

Why? You've already seen his "thoughts." He can't react worse to these posts than his wildly histrionic reactions to the slightest criticisms of police policies, the justice system, individual officers, or even the manufacturer of their weapons.

I also live in NYC and I have been to the protest and have heard about it.

This has gotten more coverage than people are claiming. A photo series is on the main page of Yahoo! News, the arrests were pretty widely covered, etc.

I've never really had any interaction personally with police. However, the one time I was outside a Tim Hortons when me and two others with me heard gunshots ring out next door, scared the **** out of us, this is a small suburban setting. A police officer was driving through the parking lot and we told him what we had just heard and he was like "Ok, I'll check it out" and then drove off in the other direction. Guess he didn't check it out or something.

Me too.

[QUOTE=Jon C]Why? You've already seen his "thoughts." He can't react worse to these posts than his wildly histrionic reactions to the slightest criticisms of police policies, the justice system, individual officers, or even the manufacturer of their weapons.[/QUOTE]

But it's histrionics that give this forum momentum!

What Al said, pretty much. I worded my post the way I did because, yes, I have a pretty good idea how he would respond, and mostly wanted to metaphorically lean back with a bag of popcorn as you went and claimed that just about everyone in law enforcement are selfish bums. (Note: to clarify, I agree with the observation made by studies about people given power and whatnot, though not the resulting severe pessimism.)

Just burn down wall street already.

Such a violent thought. I love it.

Honestly, I found this whole protest pretty laughable and hilarious

Then again, i'm sure 99% of the people there don't actually have any idea what actually played into the crisis and why the economy is in the ****ter (gee, lets turn a blind eye to the toxic banking environment created by the federal government since the 1970s and lets just blame bankers, not that they aren't partially to blame). And I can say that with some certainty, because if they did, they wouldn't be "occupying wall street".

<3

I love the ******** to the left of the other ********, very indicative of the cause and the blue-collar stero-type. Way to aim for mediocrity.

It really is almost scary the way corporations are taking over. Not that they haven't been doing this for years, as people tend to forget. I do not like the fact that most people are poor in caparison, but what are you gunna do? Oh yeah, protest i almost forgot. Thats america live in it, live with it ( and shut the **** up for good measure so the rest of us who are all miserable and quiet can die in peace.)

On the other hand id like to see what they all would do if they were the ones making a gross amount of income. Im sure then it would be cool.

It's manhattan. Trucks make deliveries.