Ht; the Blaze;
I’ve seen this before, in films taken in the 1930s.
The communists are doing a careful little dance. They know they can’t accomplish anything without government cooperation (and that so far requires some cooperation from the voting public) unless they get violent. If they get violent all on their own, they lose. They’re primed and ready however, just waiting for the spark. Piven knows all this, wants very much to be that spark, but she knows she can’t provide it without bringing trouble on herself. “Top Down, Bottom up, Inside Out” is all very well and it’s worked several times, but it requires our cooperation. Remember that. The Inside Out part is where we are so fed up with the chaos that we’re begging for “something” to be done.
These poor kids. This is all they’ve ever known. They’ve been taught this gibberish all through public school and university. All they need right now is for someone acting ostensibly on behalf of the teaparty or some such to start cracking heads. Then they’ll get their days of rage.
“These poor kids. This is all they’ve ever known. They’ve been taught this gibberish all through public school and university.”
Several months ago, it occurred to me that the farmers didn’t need the Tennessee Valley Authority. Even granting that electrical companies wouldn’t send power lines to all those farmers (which in and of itself might not even be true!), I couldn’t help but wonder: what other ways could farmers have obtained electricity? Very likely, whatever method was developed–whether it be sending wires to farms, or making small power plants, or perhaps even developing quiet, efficient generators for each house–it would have been more efficient than using taxpayer’s money to build a dam and drape wire across the countryside.
But we never got a chance to see that solution, because Government stepped in and “helped”.
It was a bizarre realization, because up to that point, I believed what I was taught in school: that Only Government Could Help. No one ever presented the possibility that there were other ways to satisfy that need!
And to this day, I wonder what other beliefs I hold, planted there by the School System, that are in dire need of questioning….
Just throwing this out there, but there are a lot of people out there at that rally, and I don’t see any kind of microphone/bullhorn/whatever for the speakers to make themselves heard (there is a youtube of Cornel West out there doing the same thing). Just a thought, but maybe they are doing this so that the protesters out on the farther reaches can hear the words, if not the voices, of the featured people?
Newsmax has a piece on these people: http://www.newsmax.com/DougWead/Protesters-Bank-Bailouts-Wall/2011/10/03/id/413113
…And how interesting it is that a too-powerful government (and the desire to manipulate it) is precisely why the .gov/corp entanglement is there in the first place. These kids think it’s bad now? They really need to talk to people who grew up in the old Soviet bloc. If corps run the gov or the other way around, it’s bad either way.
Wasn’t it that ol’ lefty Ayn Rand who called for a separation of business and state akin to the separation between church and state?
(Also — why is it Piven & Simmons are supposedly avatars of light for sayin’ taxes are askew and need to be realigned, but when Herman Cain suggests a 9% flat tax on persons and businesses right across the board with no weaseling out from under, he’s a Bad Man? I don’t get it).
The protesters have made a big mistake. They think the system for handling protesters cannot handle several thousand of them at once in any given location. They are wrong. While the protesters are using methods common since the 1930s, or 1960’s at least, the police have used the intervening decades to refine their responses to mob actions.
When 700+ protesters where either allowed to enter, or misdirected toward, the traffic lanes of the Brooklyn Bridge, then held in place by a mere orange plastic fence, then put aboard buses and whisked to jail, it should have been a lesson to the leaders that they were being out-strategerized. And not even by a President from Texas, but by a statist liberal mayor.
These protests will get lots of publicity, and go nowhere.
Alpheus hit on something profound, and it is very, very important that we all give it serious and prolonged thought. For one thing, the government sees a new technology or service, gets out in front of it to control it, and then claims that we can’t get along without the government running it. But that’s just the tip of the iceberg. So many aspects of our lives have been so deeply effected by government meddling that none of us, no one, can imagine what might have been under a free market. Transportation including the highway system and aviation, agriculture, education, energy– we truly have no idea because no one person, and no thousand people, can imagine what might have evolved over the last 100 years with millions of people putting their minds and their resources into the problems.
“(Also — why is it Piven & Simmons are supposedly avatars of light for sayin’ taxes are askew and need to be realigned, but when Herman Cain suggests a 9% flat tax on persons and businesses right across the board with no weaseling out from under, he’s a Bad Man? I don’t get it).”
Roberta; it’s simple. They’re communists. They’re not interested in reason or even in solutions. In their own words, they’re not interested in fixing things. They’re interested in revolution.
I can clarify that further; they’re interested in destruction. In light of that you can easily predict their otherwise seemingly discombobulated assertions and behavior. What you aren’t getting in your comment is that you’re dealing with plain old fashioned evil. Once you accept that it becomes easy to understand. If we stop trying to make sense of their assertions and look at the goals as defined by their actions, all becomes clear.
That’s where they always get us– we don’t want to believe, we often refuse to believe, that they’d be so evil, having such primative and dark motivations. That always works in their favor. “Pleased to meet you. Hope you guess my name (after I’ve got you where I want you)”
Roberta; Further evidence is that the communists can talk all day about what they’re against, but they rarely even try to say what they’re for. Even then what they’re for is always nebulous gibberish.
Ayn Rand spelled out the motivations in exquisite detail long ago, using the light bulb over the head– the flash of inspiration and innovation, as the example of what the enemy is targeting. In short it is hatred of Man’s mind, inspired by two things;
1. Envy.
2. Ignorance of how things work. They look at the successful, not knowing the first thing about how it happened, and paranoia sets in to fill the vacuum. Fear. Fear leads to anger, anger to hatred, and hatred to….suffering.
And again; our so-called education system is complicit in the ignorance department.
These kids on the street are just being used (as is always the case with socialist movements). I wonder how they’re going to react once they realize what’s being done to them, if they ever get the chance.
Lyle,
Since you live in a fairly rural area, think back to when you were growing up… Didn’t you know people who didn’t have indoor plumbing? No electric? No telephone service? Or was Idaho so progressive that everyone had those things?
Glenn Reynolds has a good line, why haven’t the Occupy Wall Street idiots not presented their “demands” to President Goldman Sachs in the White House.
“Didn’t you know people who didn’t have indoor plumbing? No electric? No telephone service? Or was Idaho so progressive that everyone had those things?”
I, for one, grew up in a city, and so I didn’t know anyone who didn’t have these things. My wife, though, remembers the community phone in her little town, when she was growing up: any person in one of several houses could pick up a ringing phone, or pick up a phone and listen in onto the conversation.
Last I checked, most of those people who lived under such conditions are doing fine and dandy!
When my children grow up, my daughter may very well be talking about how her family had only one cell phone, and it wasn’t even a “smart” phone! And her family had only one car! And no television! Admittedly, these aren’t necessities–but then, we’ve accepted so many things as “necessities”, when in reality they are just amenities that *might* make life more pleasant.
Ultimately, if something is a good idea, people will eventually buy it–that’s why so many people own cars today, and computers, and even smart phones. And yet, you could also find, if you look hard enough, people living without indoor plumbing–and some of these people will undoubtedly be as happy as a clam!
Yes, it would be wonderful if we could all have the latest in technology. But I can wait until I can afford it. In the meantime, I’ll try to be happy with what I have.
(And no, I’m not a Luddite–I don’t believe technology is evil. But I don’t believe it’s the be-all and end-all of happiness, either. It’s up to us to determine how to be happy, and having water pumped into our house isn’t going to guarantee it, any more than anything else we might try. And when we’re left to our own devices, it’s *amazing* what we can come up with!)
I don’t need ubu or anyone else to tell me to think, as if I’m going off half cocked and not thinking. ubu; think, will you? Don’t you think we can come up with great solutions to the problems of life without being pushed around and maligned by statists who are jealous of our enthusiasm, creativity and ingenuity? How’s that for a loaded question? You should like it.
Of course I knew people without certain amenities. The first house I lived in had no indoor toilet. We took baths in the kitchen, using a metal tub filled with hot water from the stove. Our neighbors had a hand pump outside the kitchen window, and an outhouse. Most homes had septic tanks, but there were some open sewers. We were perfectly capable of dealing with life, and capable of getting rid of the open sewers without some hair-sprayed, pale-faced dipshit with a manicure in the state capitol. We had neighbors who looked out for one another, rather than looking to the power of the state as we’re all trained to do now. Our town consisted of many first-generation immigrants, who were proud to be Americans in the sense that America was the land of the free and home of the brave. They were proud to have their own homes, which many of them built with their own hands without the “benefit” of codes and inspectors.
I remember talking with a World War One vet (our neighbor) too. How many of y’all can say that? He’d had an eye socket shot out by a German, but he took care of himself and was always polite.
‘Course once the welfare families started moving in the place went to hell, but most of those hand-built houses are still in use. They had to be brought up to code for the welfare families though, after which the properties were misused, abused, and trashed. Before, when the original owners lived in them, they had tidy gardens, painted fences and flower beds, and the old folks would leave candy out for us paper carriers.
ubu is making my point, though as always it’s through innuendo as leftists don’t know how to speak directly. Government gets itself out in front of technology that someone else created, takes hold of it, slows its progress, locks it up with artificially imposed standards, restrictions and requirements, and then claims credit for “providing” it. Sorry Kid; you have the whole world backwards. Government interference in the market does little but hinder, pester, molest, and stagnate. Worse yet it violates basic property rights and then, as ubu was doing, it uses the violations (claims of “providing” things) to justify new and expanded violations.
As an aside; one of the little neighbor kids (and they were often sent out with no pants or diapers as a means of saving on diaper washing) once fell into the open sewer, after which he proclaimed, “Glad there weren’t no frogs in it.” I met those “kids” many years later and they were doing quite well for themselves. They had learned to cope from a young age.
Coping skills are not encouraged anymore. Rage against productivity and freedom is encouraged, hence the OP.
Lyle,
If you ever get bored, you should go read about the history of water and electric in Los Angeles. (The LADWP has some of it on their website.) The city started out trying to employ free market/Libertarian solutions to the problem back in the 1800s but it didn’t work out. It’s amusing to read about it plus there is that great movie “Chinatown” that covers a portion of it.
Anyway, we now have a purely socialist water and power company. It’s owned by the customers (no private stockholders) and exists solely to provide water and power without making a profit.