Occupy Wall Street 3: Now What?

ha whoops wrong jpg tho

day 1 of the carnival was rad

also this is my favorite fucking photo ever

http://distilleryimage11.instagram.com/bd9865f87b7411e18bb812313804a181_7.jpg

day 2 of the carnival was rad

also we sorta-saved a house today

http://occupywallst.org/article/occupy-our-homes-dc-wins-stay-foreclosure/

this thing is happening all month

http://www.nowdc.org/

we don't trust the people who put it together for a long list of reasons, mainly a longstanding diff in organizing style (dude doesn't really get the whole "non-hierarchical" thing and has a habit of being the eternal spokesman & shadow leader of every group he's a part of)

but it's bringing a lot of people to town

so we're trying to engage with them

some of them already hate us--the anarchist tent got vandalized (?! lol) by someone writing SHAME ON YOU FOR HIJACKING OUR MOVEMENT. "their movement," presumably, was started by code pink or the afl-cio or their tiedye group of choice.

like, the generational/cultural divide within the movement is what's starting to grate on me the most--old ass motherfuckers with gray ponytails in the cred-boosting olive drab they bought at the vintage store in the 80s telling us we're never going anywhere because we don't sign enough petitions, or because we don't plan our actions as publicity stunts aiming for page 12 of the b section.

we have plenty of problems with their tactics, style, and strategies, but we know enough to have stopped wasting our breath arguing with immovable rocks months ago. they don't seem to have that bit figured out yet, because the hectoring continues.

but look at how petitions have changed things, HOOS

read that as saved a horse, thought 'right on'

http://campusprogress.org/articles/spotted_best_book_on_unaffordable_education_for_lgbt_americans/

My city's mayor on the request to occupy a park this occupy season and his reasons for denying a request in the fall/winter. This is Ithaca, NY btw and the mayor is 25 years old.

"I would very much like to find a way to grant this application," he said. The Occupiers helped avoid a dramatic confrontation by conceding to the city's request, he noted. "We could have had a situation like Oakland in December."

interesting article about the head of my grad program's attempts to get OWSers to archive the movement

http://chronicle.com/blogs/wiredcampus/for-archivists-‘occupy’-movement-presents-new-challenges/35929?sid=pm&utm_source=pm&utm_medium=en

http://www.hstoday.us/blogs/guest-commentaries/blog/the-occupy-movement-rising-anarchy/3a87bb57b44e5779f7d087472df92af2.html

the black bloc boogeyman rides again

The most significant anarchist attack occurred in 1914 when the anarchist group, the Black Hand, murdered Archduke Ferdinand of the Austrian Empire. This attack sparked WWI, causing millions of deaths.

these guys sound dangerous!

you gotta look out for those anarchists, you never know when they'll start the next world war one

i love that shields are consistently cited as evidence of violent behavior

could get into "homeland security today" tho

http://sphotos.xx.fbcdn.net/hphotos-ash3/541780_10150614365110876_505490875_9575747_1168938492_n.jpg

horizontal architecture coop forming

love this

(how does an architecture firm meaningfully coop? idgi but i don't know anything about architecture)

there's a great Lebbeus Woods book from 1992 titled ANARCHITECTURE: Architecture is a Political Act

in theory I guess a horizontal architecture coop would be more of a construction concern since the licensed nature of architecture as a profession is pretty non-horizontal?

haha wow is graeber a dick: http://crookedtimber.org/2012/04/02/seminar-on-debt-the-first-5000-years-reply/

(not gonna/don't wanna touch the actual issues under debate. but just sayin'.)

idg why people are so stunned by that reply?

like, yeah its long as fuck? but am i missing something or

thought this part was pretty interesting

The reason why grand narratives, or metanarratives if you like, have been so broadly rejected in radical theory since the ‘80s is that they close down possibilities rather than open them up, and, of course, tend to imply that political power should be in the hands of some intellectual elite that understands the inevitable direction of history. The problem is that you can’t really think outside some narrative structures. So the result is that those who think they are embracing a postmodern skepticism towards metanarratives, and just looking at contingent particulars, seem to end up reproducing the reigning assumptions of the day (economism, usually) without even noticing they’re doing so. There was a recent special issue of the journal Current Anthropology called “The New Keywords” organized by Lauren Leve, which I contributed to, where we actually tried to demonstrate how exactly that happened in ‘80s and ‘90s anthropology: instead of grand theory we ended up with a series of themes: consumption, identity, agency, flow… and all of them, really, ended up precisely echoing the logic of the market and the emerging neoliberal ideology of the day.

hoos: because he's just a total dick, if you read what he's replying to and what they actually said. where he's not just going in knives out for ppl that disagree he's puffing himself up something serious. & he's playing the victim card hardcore like every criticism is just an ad-hominem attack because his ideas are too dangerous or w/e when its pretty clear that's not what's going on. The whole mess is worth it however because the response to him contains the awesome line: "I also believe that for purposes of analysis one ought to separate the person from the work. Worse people have written better books. Worse people have written better books."

oops, bad c&p job there from me. should simply read: "I also believe that for purposes of analysis one ought to separate the person from the work. Worse people have written better books."

where he's not just going in knives out for ppl that disagree he's puffing himself up something serious. & he's playing the victim card hardcore like every criticism is just an ad-hominem attack because his ideas are too dangerous or w/e when its pretty clear that's not what's going o

i mean it seems to me he's saying "hey if you guys are gonna go for the low blow of calling the quality of my scholarship into question for a single factual error i don't see why i shouldn't return the favor for your total misunderstandings & misrepresentations of my arguments"

he hardly suggests his ideas are "too dangerous," he's illustrating that when adherents to a worldview see it attacked from the outside they'll often attack the messenger rather than addressing the argument at all because the orthodoxy is so established that contradictory ideas are seen to be ~unworthy~ of argument.

If you're a scholar, and you have a factual error, you should feel shitty about it and apologize. And if your copyeditors screwed up and not you (which seems only partially true in this case) then you should still feel shitty about it and apologize, and not expect everyone to know that you're awesome and some hack at the publisher is to blame because you wouldn't do that. and if someone points out that factual error, then that's legit. and if you're responding to some other dude who said sweet f/a about said factual error then you shouldn't drag the whole controversy (which is your problem, because your book got it wrong) into that debate too. and if the pieces yr responding to go out of their way to say all the things they like and agree with before they get into the room for debate, then its basically psychotic to accuse their authors of trying to discredit you.

i'm not even sure what "worldview" he thinks his critics are adherents of and defending against, b/c that's not what the pieces he's responding to were like at all! That's sort of the point. If someone comes at you and you go HAM, then that's one thing. But if you come in for some positive, collegial disagreement, which is to be expected if you are an academic and you write a book and people talk about it, and you paint a picture where you're a persecuted whatever, then that's totally unhinged.

"when adherents to a worldview see it attacked from the outside they'll often attack the messenger rather than addressing the argument at all because the orthodoxy is so established that contradictory ideas are seen to be ~unworthy~ of argument." is a very nice true thing in principle. but that has absolutely nothing to do with what graeber's responding to!

If you're a scholar, and you have a factual error, you should feel shitty about it and apologize.

what do you think the entire opening was

"i fucked up. i'm gonna fix it."

i mean yeah i guess he goes ham and all

the comments on this are actually pretty great too

sterling otm, he just comes across insufferably, not even in terms of how he responds to criticism but how he responds to praise too

no yeah i'm walking myself back for sure here, yall otm

Farrell also starts by attacking my scholarship (in his case using a particularly obnoxious rhetorical strategy of citing my own words about the importance of careful scholarship against me.)

so obnoxious

yeah I like graeber but he does fall into the pretty standard chomskyian 'everything's gotta be a conspiracy' trap when he talks about world affairs

this btw

https://lh5.googleusercontent.com/-wnYHPHs8_6A/T38jtAQUGTI/AAAAAAAAAQ4/rDAQ7CUs6JU/s490/2012-04-06

why is darth vader mopping

yeah idgi

idgi either tbh

this is part of the "lolzy" promo materials including such gems as "one does not simply influence a congressman"

i feel like you dont want to place yourselves on the same side as darth vader

otm

there's also this which i at least prefer to the vader version

http://i44.tinypic.com/1z3bac4.jpg

oh damn that's huge huh

"if you liked star wars, you'll love peaceful protest"

lol

http://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2012/04/no-silicon-valley-did-not-and-does-not-partake-of-the-anarchist-utopian-nature-why-did-you-imagine-it-did.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+BradDelongsSemi-dailyJournal+%28Brad+DeLong%27s+Semi-Daily+Journal%29

wonder if he's related to tynan

xp ha i've actually seen that wolff lecture, i am as scholarly as david graeber

(on this one point in his enormous book)

(that is admittedly still a pretty lazy oversight)

it's not the point it's how he's reacting to it. the twitter feed where he says 'oops, my bad, that's prob wrong' vs. the way he does in the response post

academic is petulant face-saver

"It's not the crime, it's the cover-up."

People's Assembly/Spring Awakening in Central Park this Saturday afternoon:

http://www.nycga.net/events/event/spring-awakening-2012-occupy-new-york-city-peoples-assembly/

rad