This past Thursday, the Occupy movement held its so-called day of action, during which protesters clashed with police. In a related story, this past week Kossacks blogged about Occupy, during which they clashed with the forces of reason, logic, and history.
As usual, each headline is preceded by the blogger's name or pseudonym. DKWIR will return in two weeks. Happy Thanksgiving!
RabidNation: Occupy is rolling back Reagan's legacy
...Politically, this is probably the beginning of the long, slow, and possibly painful unraveling of Post-Reaganism...The “Occupy” campers, like the fading Tea Partiers before them, are symptoms, not causes...Life as cog, life as consumer has left broad swaths of the populace insecure, unfulfilled, and more than a little bit resentful. Plainly put, people are beginning to move from being repressed and depressed to being outright pissed...
Hunter: Occupy is like the Boy Scouts
...Hey, remember back when Republicans started showing up to health care town halls and outside Obama public events armed with rifles and the like, not to intimidate or threaten anyone but as a form of "political speech"? Yeah, camping is much worse. That was free speech with guns; this is free speech with camping. So you can see why they have to crack down. With police in riot gear, no less...
thereisnospoon: Future conservatives will co-opt Occupy...
...Just as Glenn Beck's venomous followers comically attempt to adopt the mantle of Martin Luther King, Jr., so too will some right-wing blowhard 30-40 years from now claim to embody the spirit of the heroes of Zuccotti Park in the service of whatever reactionary force they happen to be extolling a generation hence...
Troubadour: ...or use it to justify dictatorship
...With the evolution of Occupy Wall Street, the threat that made George W. Bush reticent to go for full-blown dictatorship is now out of the bag: People are actively resisting and disrupting the money and power structure that underlies the Republican Party and, sadly, major portions of [the Democratic] party...We are resisting this state of affairs with increasing sophistication, volume, and success...But all of what we do is dependent on a few, fragile liberties and lines of communication that a sufficiently ruthless, shameless, and desperate regime could easily shatter...
...Without liberal control of the government, the street is nothing more than a convenient place to round up and dispose of dissent...[I]f America becomes one giant police kettle, there will be no external recourse. I for one would rather avoid the detour into Pinochet-land...
Hunter: Conservative history is dumbed down and made up
...Conservatives have an odd relationship with intellectualism. By "odd" I mean overtly hostile, mostly, but they also take stabs at intellectual endeavors themselves...Because they inherently distrust people with too much knowledge, however, the conservative version is to learn a little and then make the rest up. History is told with an eye for ideological storytelling, but the details of actual history are unimportant, and boring. DNA exists, and evolution exists to a limited extent, but then comes the part that's too hard to understand so it all gets crossed out and replaced with "and then God did some magic that completely ignored all the rest of it because he got bored"...
diomedes77: The free market is poisonous
...Conservatives and right-wing libertarians (propertarians) want their capitalism straight up, no mixer, no ice. Progressives and liberals want to add soda, pour it on the rocks, and drink a lot of water afterwards. But they still get drunk, just like righties, and their livers are still rotten.
No matter what we do to capitalism, no matter how we filter it or mix it with soda or pour it on the rocks, it's never going to be anything more than an infernal machine to create economic apartheid and destroy the planet...
