Occupy Wall Street 3: Now What?

best of luck dude

meanwhile, my hometown occupy has been given notice to leave this morning

I can't watch streams, what's goin on?

spending freeze btw

http://cityroom.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/01/17/occupy-wall-st-faces-its-own-economic-realities/

"in what observers are comparing to Frogger and Red Rover"

http://www.theatlanticwire.com/national/2012/01/arrests-and-standoff-occupy-congress-turn-tense/47511/

what a fucking day

based on personal history, i know it was hoos that threw a smoke bomb at the white house

highlights

homies out front
https://p.twimg.com/AjYDDE9CEAEAswk.jpg

for the direct action of the day we split into 3 zones for the 3 buildings of congress, color-coded & matched to flags that led the groups: red flag, black flag, blue flag. i (predictably) rode with black flag for livetweeting, but it turned out to be the quietest of the three. red flag, home to a certain Issa--among the richest in congress, 90% of whose campaign contributions don't even come from his district, and also the guy who's trying to kick occupy dc off of federal land--wound up seeing the most action. this was outside.
https://p.twimg.com/AjZCug4CAAEDvjq.jpg

all 3 flags reconvened for the mass march. i was livetweeting & got this reply

@amorrissey
Aaron Morrissey
whatever, let us know when Fugazi gets there. MT @hoosteen: #blackflag now reuniting at the Capitol bldg. #occupycongress #j17
7 hours ago via Twitter for Mac

left for the march that would hit the 3 centers of power. got to the supreme court. it's illegal to hold political signs on the steps of the supreme court (iKNOWright?), and typically it gets you arrested--but the metro PD aren't big fans of mass arrests, sooo
http://a4.sphotos.ak.fbcdn.net/hphotos-ak-ash4/396500_324622100911186_100000901965251_1004922_1493147475_n.jpg

left SC for the white house, and passed the newseum on the way. the newseum has a giant 1st amendment faux-carved-into-stone. we stopped the march to mic check the whole thing, guided by a dozen bouncing laser pointers from the crowd:
https://p.twimg.com/AjZqCvBCQAAcfjc.jpg

"NDAA, we say no way!"
https://p.twimg.com/AjZx9UDCMAE2pB9.jpg

^^ a couple minutes after this some idiot (provocateur? too easy to blame all the stupid shit on fantasy provocateurs) threw a smoke bomb onto the lawn. there were about 30 seconds of panic as people at the gate thought we were being gassed--masks & hoods & goggles went up everywhere before we realized what was going on. predictably, this was all anybody heard about on fox news.

its impossible to have any real perspective on the day's events right now--in the next day or so we'll have a better sense of how it played, i imagine. suffice it to say i'm fucking exhausted, and that this kinda felt like a sneak peek at the G8 in chicago in may.

oh also, the prettiest girl in the world made me a shirt that says "talk radical to me, baby," and i am possibly in love

yay

make sure Issa lets you testify next week

haha

"I'm told that as of this morning, we’re approaching 200 tents in McPherson Square," said BIG HOOS, a 25-year-old McPherson Square protester who has been at the camp since its twelfth day. "The south lawn of McPherson, where we have our general assembly, stays empty by design so that we can have our meetings there. But the rest of the park is filling to the brim ... We do expect that a large number of folks coming for this action are going to be staying with us for the long haul." The city's other encampment, at Freedom Plaza, is also adding members, he said. Last week, Occupy D.C.'s S______ ______ told us each park has a capacity of 500 people.

HOOS stopped short of promising all those people would join in resisting any police effort to evict the protesters. But he said, quite diplomatically, "I know we will have people who are prepared to peacefully defend our space."

still feel v strange abt this kind of thing

also massive lolz

http://24.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_lxz8f7EXjf1qg5xw5o1_500.jpg

when i tweeted abt this response was "shit! we've GOTTA stop putting our secrets in that truck!"

oh here's a nicer shot of the 1st amendment mic check from the front of the march, nb laser pointer

http://d3j5vwomefv46c.cloudfront.net/photos/full/498118687.jpg?Expires=1326872587&Key-Pair-Id=APKAIYVGSUJFNRFZBBTA&Signature=FvBX3ymFWZ5DJbhLagDOy0ikfKTfY57nq7e26UbTtBibwrRrpKskBwpDerWXw3G6s4xRcsLyZ-00KQatMNQZ3e7RUYV1TKMvij7rnta38m7iCy1scZAAZPy1n2wTXC0EOWABfx1cJIcsknpbjjWpeDDM3fWYayMHz1t6wbKPsKU_

haaa my homegirl made this

https://p.twimg.com/AjYdAptCIAAIN54.jpg

not rly sure i get why the military is above the goblet-swillers there, but

and church should be replaced in that hierarchy by entertainment media/advertising at this point

hoos your homegirl is a fan of gerd arntz!!

http://www.gerdarntz.org/content/gerd-arntz

You're leading an interesting and exciting life HOOS

You're leading an interesting and exciting life HOOS

4real

hoos your homegirl is a fan of gerd arntz!!

http://www.gerdarntz.org/content/gerd-arntz

― TracerHandVEVO (Tracer Hand), Wednesday, January 18, 2012 11:42 AM (3 hours ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

fwhoah

awesome

oh i posted this in wdyll so forgive me for the repost but <333333

http://i44.tinypic.com/2duxh79.jpg

some idiot (provocateur? too easy to blame all the stupid shit on fantasy provocateurs) threw a smoke bomb onto the lawn.

eyewitnesses saying they saw a whiteshirt cop throw the smokebomb. can neither confirm nor deny.

my favorite chant of the day was in spanish, borrowed from south america, had a nice rhythm to it that had us all dancing down the street

a
anti
anticapitalista

oh and A.N.S.W.E.R. showed up and we all booed

we didn't "all" boo

just lots of us are not big fans of a buncha stalinists posing as a grassroots network

haven't actually watched this but friends are posting it on FB so

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0QptAVWbm9c&feature=youtu.be

just lots of us are not big fans of a buncha stalinists posing as a grassroots network

<3 yeah fuck the RCP

nice to read yer updates, good luck

OWS greeting Obama at Apollo Theater 6pm tomorrow, but doubt I will be able to get near the place after work.

btw who are The World Can't Wait, and are they doing anything worthwhile?

KEEP ON KEEPIN' ON

who are The World Can't Wait, and are they doing anything worthwhile?

― Dr Morbois de Bologne (Dr Morbius), Wednesday, January 18, 2012 9:53 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

mainly RCP, though they've got some other support--they were formed after the '04 election and their founding charter said that their goal was to 'eject bush and cheney from office in disgrace' because 'the world can't wait for '08'

i kinda wanna start "Occupy Wall Street 4: Last Camp Standing," but there aren't nearly enough messages in this thread, which is depressingly telling

it'll get press again come convention season

so where is the donations link?

i kinda wanna start "Occupy Wall Street 4: Last Camp Standing," but there aren't nearly enough messages in this thread, which is depressingly telling

in truth i haven't been following occupyLA too closely since their encampment got raided (like, i'm not even sure where they've been organizing), and i'm pretty bummed at myself for that. i do think you're doing awesome work hoos and you are strongly advised to kiu w/ both actions and updates

ty guys

heating up in SF

http://www.salon.com/2012/01/21/occupy_san_francisco_gets_down_to_business/singleton/

yeah they got mad real last night

logisitics people for j17 reporting we served 8000 plates of food on tuesday

@timcraigpost
Undercover Video shot by GOP staffers shows #occupydc protesters admitting they camp and get along with National Park Service
1 minute ago via Twitter for BlackBerry® Favorite Retweet Reply

lmao what the fuck is going on in this hearing

nm - it sounds like they're trying to enforce some kind of semantic distinction between "protesting" and "camping," but the subtext of it also reads like they're being critical of yall for being civil to the park police (THE HORRORS etc)

civil servants engage in civil behavior with civilians shocker

lmao what the fuck is going on in this hearing

― scream blahula scream (govern yourself accordingly), Tuesday, January 24, 2012 4:19 PM (1 hour ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

we were all holding our breath waiting for something really damning, and then we realized "wait...'the park service does a good job' is the best you've got?"

the guy right behind the douchleman from south carolina was clearly the person who'd shot it, he couldn't resist grinning behind a fist like HEEHEE WE GOT YOUUUU except they actually didn't

also eleanor holmes norton rules

some friends of mine wrote this

http://blog.sfgate.com/nov05election/2012/01/24/mic-check-occupy-wall-street-offers-a-rebuttal-to-state-of-the-union/

i feel like the 24 hour news cycle has just completely swallowed this up. i don't mean to suggest that it isn't still going on or still potent to some degree, but it seems really noticeable how quickly anything passes out of the news cycle and is thus deemed irrelevant, a judgment all too many are willing to concede.

also can someone explain the point of the guy fawkes masks aside from generalized "rebellion" affect?

i mean even though they are trolls the fact that "zzzz"/"so bored with this" rhetoric is like a thing in comments to articles on OWS is really telling. it's only "old news" or "zzzz" in relation to the ADD cable news cycle. i doubt that a few months after anti-vietnam war protests blew up people, even those opposed, would have greeted it in such a cynical way.

this really really really bothers me because it affects me as much as anyone.

x-post

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/V_for_Vendetta

it seems really noticeable how quickly anything passes out of the news cycle and is thus deemed irrelevant, a judgment all too many are willing to concede.

― flesh, the devil, and a wolf (wolf) (amateurist), Wednesday, January 25, 2012 8:23 AM (20 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

you'll get no argument from me

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/V_for_Vendetta

right, i'm not going to watch that movie, and nobody else seems to like it, so why do those masks turn up everywhere?

an anarchist revolutionary dressed in a Guy Fawkes mask, begins an elaborate, violent, and intentionally theatrical campaign to murder his former captors, bring down the government, and convince the people to rule themselves.

ugh seriously? embarrassing that people would wear those much less that it would be the "face" of OWS. you might as well give up.

can someone explain the point of the guy fawkes masks aside from generalized "rebellion" affect?

― flesh, the devil, and a wolf (wolf) (amateurist), Wednesday, January 25, 2012 8:23 AM (21 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

yah the movie and then

Also in 2006, the mask began to appear in a popular 4Chan meme called Epic Fail Guy. According to Housh, the suggestion to use the Fawkes mask as protest gear was almost immediate. But some Anons weren’t convinced that the Fawkes mask was right, so they made a short list of alternatives: a Batman mask, classic masquerade masks, a few others.

“Then we called comics and costume shops, all over the world,” Housh says, checking availability and price, and the V mask won out: “It’s available, it’s cheap, and it’s in every city.” (The actual Fawkes had “nothing to do with it, for us,” Housh says.)

Thousands of people in various cities subsequently participated in a day of anti-Scientology street demonstrations, plenty of them wearing the mask. “Videos and images and photographs circulated almost immediately,” says Gabriella Coleman, the incoming Wolfe Chair in Scientific and Technological Literacy at McGill University and author of the forthcoming Coding Freedom: The Ethics and Aesthetics of Hacking. “It was just so powerful.” And it cemented Anonymous as, paradoxically, a recognizable phenomenon.

http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/design/2011/12/guy_fawkes_mask_how_anonymous_hacker_group_created_a_powerful_visual_brand.html

and now...

http://publicintelligence.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/10/anonymous-global-protest-8.jpg

http://publicintelligence.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/10/anonymous-global-protest-9.jpg

http://publicintelligence.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/10/anonymous-global-protest-19.jpg

http://publicintelligence.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/10/anonymous-global-protest-12.jpg

http://publicintelligence.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/10/anonymous-global-protest-23.jpg

though that said if you can't hear the assonance between an anarchist revolutionary dressed in a Guy Fawkes mask begins a theatrical campaign to ... bring down the government, and convince the people to rule themselves. and the lots and lots of people running around in these stupid masks lately, i don't really know what to tell you