"That workers who attended college would be attracted to nonprofessional jobs at REI, Starbucks and Amazon is not entirely surprising...."

"The companies appeal to affluent and well-educated consumers. And they offer solid wages and benefits for their industries — even, for that matter, compared with some other industries that employ the college-educated. More than three years after he earned a political science degree from Siena College in 2017, Brian Murray was making about $14 an hour as a youth counselor at a group home for middle-school-age children. He quit in late 2020 and was hired a few months later at a Starbucks in the Buffalo area, where his wage increased to $15.50 an hour. 'The starting wage was higher than anything I’d ever made,' said Mr. Murray, who has helped organize Starbucks workers in the city.... [T]he gap between the expectations of college graduates and their employability has led to years of political ferment. A study of participants in the Occupy Wall Street movement, which highlighted income inequality and grew out of the 2011 occupation of Zuccotti Park in Manhattan, found that more than three-quarters were college graduates, versus about 30 percent of adults at the time...."

From "The Revolt of the College-Educated Working Class/Since the Great Recession, the college-educated have taken more frontline jobs at companies like Starbucks and Amazon. Now they’re helping to unionize them" (NYT).

"An 'insurrection,' as the dictionary will tell you, is a violent uprising against a government or other established authority."

"Unlike the violent riots that swept the country in the summer of 2020—riots that caused some $2 billion in property damage and claimed more than 20 lives—the January 6 protest at the Capitol lasted a few hours, caused minimal damage, and the only person directly killed was an unarmed female Trump supporter who was shot by a Capitol Hill Police officer. It was, as Tucker Carlson said shortly after the event, a political protest that 'got out of hand.'" 

Writes Roger Kimball in "The January 6 Insurrection Hoax" (Real Clear Politics). 

When I see "uprising," I think of this:

Sometimes people want to be thought of as insurrectionists. Sometimes the political protesters that got out of hand want the bigger concept to apply to them. They use it to brag about the scope and significance of what they accomplished. 

It goes both ways, this spin. But it's funny to me to see leftists using "insurrection" against the protesters they hate when they — some of them — used the same notion to vaunt their 2011 takeover of the Wisconsin Capitol.

And don't forget Occupy Wall Street. 

Am I failing to distinguish "insurrection" and "uprising"? I've dabbled in researching the difference if any. I think the 2 words mean the same thing, though "insurrection" might have somewhat more of a connotation of armed rebellion. I don't think any of the things discussed above were armed rebellion. So I'd just use the word "uprising" and use it consistently to refer to the takeover of the Wisconsin Capitol and the takeover of the U.S. Capitol. If you don't want to use that word for both things, just don't use it for either. Or be exposed as a propagandist.

A sign for Occupy Inauguration — taped to a lamp post on the UW campus.

The image of Trump looks like he's saying "fuck." The event

Somebody saw fit to edit the sign:



I've looked at the Facebook page for the event. It says:

Donald Trump and the reactionary core of the Republican Party are coming to power in 2017 on a platform of racism, sexism, xenophobia, and pro-corporate policies....

The Democratic Party has proven they are incapable of stopping Trump. It is time to build a new party for the 99% based on the united power of all exploited and oppressed people, on movements for social and economic justice, on the belief that we CAN do better than this corrupt and rotten system!

"The people complaining about 'false balance' usually seem confident in having discovered the truth of things for themselves, despite the media's supposed incompetence."

"They're quite sure of whom to vote for and why. Their complaints are really about the impact that 'false balance' coverage might have on other, lesser humans, with weaker minds than theirs. Which is not just snobbish, but laughably snobbish. So, shut up."

From "Stop Whining About 'False Balance'/Everyone wants to blame reporters for the rise of Donald Trump. How about the media consumer?" by Matt Taibbi.

Via John Althouse Cohen.

ADDED: It's a variation on the old "free speech for me, but not for thee" — not about speaking but receiving speech. It's fine for me and the people I put in the elite group to hear everything, but what reaches the masses must be filtered through the elite, because the common people lack the capacity to tell good speech from bad and to arrive at the truth through the power of their own mind.

If you really believe that, then we shouldn't be having elections at all. In this election, the elite are seeing — more starkly than in any election I can think of in my lifetime — that the people are receiving information and thinking about it in a different way, not taking direction, and the elite shrink from the disgusting opinions of the people who were decent enough when they were doing the bidding of the elite. But now, thinking on their own, the electorate belongs in the Basket of Deplorables.

That's what makes the "Les Deplorables" image so powerful:



It's a revolution. To switch to a different French Revolution play:

Down with all of the ruling class!
Throw all the generals out on their ass!
Why do they have the gold?
Why do they have the power? Why, why, why, why?
Why do they have the friends at the top?
Why do they have the jobs at the top?

The Judy Collins version of that — "Marat/Sade" — gives me chills. Here's a video matching the song to images of the Occupy movement:



AND: I clicked on the embedded "Marat/Sade" video and the ad that came up was for Maserati!

"The frustration of the people built up to cause this. It’s really no different than the Occupy Movement or a sit-in at a college."

Said B.J. Soper, 39 — who lives near the taken-over federal wildlife refuge —quoted in a WaPo article titled "In Oregon, frustration over federal land rights has been building for years."

“What people in Western states are dealing with is the destruction of their way of life,” said Soper, a father of four who was once a professional rodeo rider. “When frustration builds up, people lash out.... True wealth comes from the land. If they can’t feed their cows, there’s not going to be beef in the supermarket,” he said. “People are no longer [able] to make a living.” Federal agencies, he said, "are taking food out of people’s mouths."

"When I first saw it, I was kind of creeped out because it was just a random person on the street with a scary mask. I don't like clowns."

Said one young woman about the man dressed as a clown who's been seen walking around Carroll University in Waukesha, Wisconsin. People want the police to do something, but the police know the clown to be a developmentally disabled teenage boy who, they say, is "just doing this to see people's reaction," which is, of course, not a crime.

ADDED: Laws against wearing masks are not unheard of. This came up in the context of Guy Fawkes masks in the Occupy Wall Street protests of 2012:

[A]ccording to the New York Penal Law 240.35(4), it is illegal to congregate in public with two or more people while each wearing a mask or any face covering which disguises your identity. The law has existed since 1845, when tenant farmers, in response to a lowering of wheat prices, dressed up as “Indians” and covered their faces with masks in order to attack the police anonymously. There are exceptions for masquerades and other entertainment events that are deemed appropriate by the city (such as Halloween).

Scott Walker is so proud of his enemies he takes credit for enemies that are not even his.

WaPo's Fact Checker gives Walker 4 Pinocchios for whatever claim he made to inspiring the Occupy movement he made when he said: "The Occupy Movement didn’t start in Washington, didn’t start in Wall Street, it started in my capitol" and "The [budget] hearing would soon claim a more ignominious place in history — as the moment that gave birth to the ‘Occupy’ movement."

"Jon Stewart’s expiration date: Why liberalism needs to outgrow the snark."

Headline of a Salon article that ends: "If liberals want to see more of the kind of direct action that’s characterized the Occupy Wall Street and #blacklivesmatter movements — if they really want to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable — they’re going to have to embrace a political vision that has grown beyond the idiosyncratic limitations of Jon Stewart."

Not noticing the whole "Person of the Year" business.

I loathe Time Magazine's "Person of the Year" annual nonsense. Nevertheless, I'd always given it some thought as it approaches. Who will be Time's "Person of the Year"? I'd believed it was an irresistible question, best to confront, endure, and get past in preparation for the announcement. Then there's the announcement, and you briefly note and critique it and move on.

This morning — I don't know, something about waking up at 4 a.m. — it occurred to me to check who's considered to be in the running this year, and I was surprised to see the announcement had come a couple days ago.  I realized I'd seen pictures of the cover, but the image had not registered at a "Person of the Year" cover:



Who did the ebola fighters nudge out? The first runner-up seems to be "Ferguson Protesters, The Activists":

Protest is a performance that can make the unseen visible. In this angry epic, thousands found a role.... A black President who so often seems reluctant to talk about race was forced into the fray.... This outcry was better focused than Occupy, bigger than the one that followed the Trayvon Martin case.... But to many, it was hard to square the anger with the Molotov cocktails whistling through the night....

So... raise a Mazel Tov cocktail to the ebola fighters. How can that choice possibly cause complaint? The runner up who's an actual person — an individual — would have required too much of the patient, pedantic explanation that "Person of the Year" is not an endorsement.



Keep going with the uplift... and maybe I can finally actually, fully, and completely not notice Time's "Person of the Year."

The violent imagery deployed against Scott Walker by Debbie Wasserman Shultz is gendered — it's domestic violence.

When Wasserman Shultz says "Scott Walker has given women the back of his hand" and "What Republican tea party extremists like Scott Walker are doing is they are grabbing us by the hair and pulling us back," she evokes domestic violence. Grabbing a woman by the hair and pulling is the classic image of a caveman capturing his sex partner by force. Sociology professor Lisa Wade wrote a piece on the subject (cross-posted at Ms. Magazine):

[T]he caveman-club-’er-over-the-head-and-drag-her-by-the-hair narrative is pure mythology. The mythology, nonetheless, affirms the idea that men are naturally coercive and violent by suggesting that our most natural and socially-uncorrupted male selves will engage in this sort of behavior.  Rape, that is.

If we think of it that way — the feminist way — Wasserman Schultz can be accused of subtly purveying a rape metaphor.

Here's a vivid drawing by R. Crumb showing grabbing and pulling a woman's hair to control and subordinate her during sex: "Big healthy girl enjoys deep penetration from the rear."

Some of the most lurid stories of violence against women extract the dragged-by-the-hair detail for the headline: "Brutal attacker forced woman's head down Burger King toilet before dragging her outside by her hair with the threat: 'You're going to die today'" and "Man dragged ex by hair, tried to run her over, police say." From the Occupy Wall Street blogging at FireDogLake: "Cop Dragging A Woman By Her Hair?" ("Cops especially like the opportunity offered by long-haired females (view above video) to drag such females by the hair across the pavement to be zip-cuffed.") 

Attacking and controlling a woman by using her long hair — the shining emblem of her femininity repurposed as a hand grip — strikes a deep chord. It is a chord I believe Wasserman Shultz meant to strike. She wanted to reach through our conscious, critical mind and stir that most powerful emotion, fear.

To give the back of his hand is a more puzzling expression. I'm seeing it internet-defined as merely an insult, connected to the phrase "back-handed compliment." I think that's confusing "back-handed" with "left-handed." According to the (unlinkable) OED, the figurative meaning of "back-handed" is "indirect, like a back-handed sword-cut." Dickens wrote "Having given her this back-handed reminder" (in "Our Mutual Friend"). But what's a back-handed sword-cut? I think you can picture that easily. And the first meaning of "back-handed" is "With the back of the hand" as in "A back-handed slap across the face." And, indeed, "back-hand" is a verb, and it means "To hit... with the back of the hand." So I think to give the back of one's hand is the way you'd punch if you began with your fist across your chest.

"While many of the creators of the internet bemoan how low their creature has fallen, their anger is misdirected."

"The fault is not with that amorphous entity but, first of all, with the absence of robust technology policy on the left – a policy that can counter the pro-innovation, pro-disruption, pro-privatisation agenda of Silicon Valley."

In its absence, all these emerging political communities will operate with their wings clipped. Whether the next Occupy Wall Street would be able to occupy anything in a truly smart city remains to be seen: most likely, they would be out-censored and out-droned....

Algorithmic regulation, whatever its immediate benefits, will give us a political regime where technology corporations and government bureaucrats call all the shots.

Occupy Madison soldiers on in its project of building a village of "tiny houses" for the homeless.

Isthmus reports on the group's acquisition of an old auto shop as its site and the "unwelcome surprises" of discovering an oil disposal tank buried there and "toxic mold in the leaking roof." Were these really surprises found after the purchase? Wouldn't anyone expect an oil disposal tank on the premises of a 30-year-old auto repair shop?

All of the repairs and renovations are likely to cost around $100,000. A new roof and renovated bathrooms will likely be the biggest ticket items.

"We implore you to stress that we need money," joked Allen Barkoff. "I think a lot of people assume that because we now own property, money isn't an issue."

What did they pay for this place? Here's the article on the purchase of the property. They paid $110,000, with a loan, and one member said:

"There's a couple days of scrub-down before we move anything there.... It's grimy. It's been an auto repair shop for the past 30 years."

What's in the "grime" of 30 years of auto repairs, is it really something you can just "scrub down," and why is this a good environment for homeless people?

Back at the first link, we see that the group is refraining from asking for volunteers to help with the clean up because "the mold and other things... could be hazardous to people." How are amateurs supposed to make a site like that habitable? Are the repairs and renovations really only around $100,000? Do they have insurance to cover the harms that might beset those who work there?

I was going to say that it's interesting to see this well-meaning group needing to face the kind of reality actual businesses face, but the article ends with one board member saying:  "The work we have to do is not that overwhelming... There's some fund raising challenges ahead."

A shantytown in Madison, Wisconsin.

"The first 'tiny home' constructed for Madison's homeless was officially occupied earlier this week — the first of what OMBuild, a nonprofit organization that grew out of Occupy Madison — hopes will eventually be a 'village; of little houses for the formerly homeless."

City ordinances require the house — parked on the street — to be moved every 48 hours.

OMBuild is waiting for a qualified nonprofit group, like a church, to step forward and obtain a newly created zoning permit that will allow a little house to be placed permanently on private property. Long-term, OMBuild would like to own property on which a “village” of little houses could be developed....

This is supposedly modeled on something that's going on in Washington and Oregon, including "Right to Dream Too" "a 'rest area' located on private property in downtown Portland, fenced with a ring of recycled doors morphed into a mural art project."

"Just morph out from there," I say and Meade says, "I knew you would say that." We get each other's allusions, which in this case was "Start with homosexual behavior and just morph out from there. Bestiality, sleeping around with this woman and that woman and that woman and those men."

What's morphing in your world today? "Morph,"  the verb, goes back to 1982, according to the (unlinkable) OED, as a reference to the computer animation process, and the extended use, referring to change "as if by morphing" only appeared in the early 90s. I first heard the word "morph" when that then-amazing video "Cry" came out in 1985.

Back to the topic of fencing in a possibly unsightly shantytown, the top-linked article quotes a [former] Madison city council member, Brenda Konkel, who toured places like Right to Dream Too. She said: “Fences are important — it gives the community a sense of security and personal responsibility — and that gives people the right to govern what goes on there.”

Is the fence to cater to the feelings of those who are fenced in or those who want them fenced in? You know there's a question you're supposed to ask:

Before I built a wall I'd ask to know
What I was walling in or walling out,
And to whom I was like to give offence.
Something there is that doesn't love a wall,
That wants it down.'....

"A group of Occupy Wall Street activists has bought almost $15m of Americans' personal debt over the last year as part of the Rolling Jubilee project..."

The debt was purchased for $400,000.

Andrew Ross, a member of Strike Debt and professor of social and cultural analysis at New York University... said the group had received letters from people whose debt they had lifted thanking them for the service. But the real victory was in spreading knowledge of the nature of the debt industry, he said.

"Very few people know how cheaply their debts have been bought by collectors. It changes the psychology of the debtor, knowing this. So when you get called up by the debt collector, and you're being asked to pay the full amount of your debt, you now know that the debt collector has bought your debt very, very cheaply. As cheaply as we bought it. And that gives you moral ammunition to have a different conversation with the debt collector."

The Democrats dream candidate to oppose Scott Walker next year.

Here's a long, long article in the Wisconsin State Journal. I'll just do a short excerpt:

a multimillionaire... who could self-finance....

From the comments:

I can easily see why the Huffington Post deemed her the "democrat version of Mitt Romney". I can't wait to find out how much she makes from dividends per year. I wonder how many tax havens she has? It will be interesting to see how the dems treat her, we all know she would be crucified if she were a republican. Heck, in her professional life she's driven by profit but since she has a 'D' next to her name she'll be thought of as brilliant, if she were a republican she would be evil.

Let the hypocrisy begin!!

And:

So let me get this straight, the Dems are thinking about shamelessly and hypocritically putter up as a candidate someone who:

1) is a 1%-er

2) comes from the Private Sector

3) relied on nepotism to succeed.

Are people that selfish, hypocritical, and willfully ignorant that they will really sacrifice their beliefs to serve their own self-interests?

And:

Run Brett Run

That refers to this.

By the way, whatever happened to the "Occupy" movement? Maybe it's taking a break out there somewhere with the Coffee Party.

"Treating OWS as 'potential criminal and terrorist threat' was exactly the right thing to do."

"No one knew whether these protests were going to stay peaceful or not. OWS certainly wanted it to turn into a phenomenon of national civil unrest. Why the FBI wasn't supposed to treat it as if it had the potential to go that way is beyond me."

Writes one Metafilter commenter, who gets 3 "favorite" votes from the community and — 8 minutes later — this response:

Treating OWS the Tea Party movement as "potential criminal and terrorist threat" was exactly the right thing to do. No one knew whether these protests were going to stay peaceful or not. OWS The Koch Bros. certainly wanted it to turn into a phenomenon of national civil unrest. Why the FBI wasn't supposed to treat it as if it had the potential to go that way is beyond me.

FTFY

The response now has 33 "favorite" votes.

"FBI Investigated 'Occupy' As Possible 'Terrorism' Threat..."

According to documents obtained by a FOIA request by the Partnership for Civil Justice Fund.

We are the 99%/You are the 47%.

Yesterday was: 1. The 1-year anniversary of the Occupy Wall Street protest movement, where the chant was "We are the 99%," and 2. The day we got the video of Mitt Romney talking to his affluent donors and saying "There are 47% who are with [Obama], who are dependent upon government, who believe that they are victims, who believe the government has a responsibility to care for them, who believe that they are entitled to health care, to food, to housing, to you name it. These are people who pay no income tax."

The percentages are different, but the us/them attitude is similar. It's a way of speaking politically: There are X% of us and Y% of them, and the recognizing the comparative size of the 2 groups tells us what our politics should be.

The people within group X and group Y aren't all alike, but the speaker is choosing to portray them as alike, because it's a step in an argument about what supposedly needs to be done. The claim of representing 99% is especially ludicrous, but the effort is to focus anger on the evil 1%, who elicit no sympathy at all. But it doesn't make sense for other people near the top not to worry that the greedy mob — the takers — are coming after them... which is why the 99% can't possibly be the 99%, because the top end of the 99% can see that it too is under attack, and they won't want the bottom end of the 99% speaking for them.

That's the flaw in the 99% chant: There's no credible threat that all 99% will vote together. Some of those Occupy protesters dreamed of revolution, but we've still got a democracy, and the only serious question is how many of the 99% will vote for the Democratic Party's candidates. The Democratic Party used a modified version of what the protesters were saying. That's what Elizabeth Warren articulated in her famous "underlying social contract... take a hunk of that and pay forward" rant. Obama was trying to make the same move when he inelegantly said "You didn't build that" — the 4 words the Republicans built their whole convention around.

Romney supporters can hardly complain when Obama supporters seize upon his 47% quote and use it any which way they can.



It's the most knuckle-bustin', gut-wrenchin', brain-scramblin', butt-bruisin', lip-splittin' brawl of all time.

"Hundreds of protesters took to the streets of Manhattan's financial district early Monday to mark the 1-year anniversary of the Occupy Wall Street movement..."

"... choking traffic and crowding the area around the New York Stock Exchange but being met at most turns by walls of police who stopped them from occupying anything."

It's not so cute this time around, but it was at first, last time, to some people. Remember?

"Ayende Alcala, an activist with Occupy Charlotte, said the group organized the protest not with any singular agenda..."

"... but to give people a space to come together and be heard."

"No matter what your issue is, we want to let them know we stand together," he said. "We want to have a united front to start off this Democratic National Convention."

"Behind those doors, the story is going to be the 'poli-tricks' as usual," Alcala added. "It's the art of getting elected, of pointing the finger back and forth. We want to say there's another story and that's the people on the street still suffering."

Nobody in the protest expressed much hope in the political process. Said Alcala: "It's a two-faced one-party system. They have different colors and different names, but at the end of the day, they all answer to the same Wall Street corporations that dominate the system."

Organized... not with any singular agenda... Which is kind of disorganized.