Occupy Wall Street 3: Now What?

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

interesting read re currency dominance: http://web.mit.edu/krugman/www/seignor.html

just catching up on this thread, and that egregious/hilarious hstoday.com post (?!!? at that whole site)

unless there is more than one Ian Oxnevad about, this is him:

http://twitter.com/ianoxnevad
http://www.chabotstrategies.com/recent-articles.html

amazing that such bad writers can get paid telling other people about the world

UC Davis report on the pepper-spray incident is up: http://reynosoreport.ucdavis.edu/reynoso-report.pdf

Anonymous statements by police officers at the end are interesting.

uc davis was forced to release a report to maintain safety

so here's a kind of back-patting thing i wrote

http://eyesopen99.wordpress.com/2012/04/12/what-have-we-accomplished/

i'm broken and looking for hope, sue me

occ chicago & staff at a mental health clinic have occupied & barricaded demanding to talk to rahm

http://www.ustream.tv/channel/tangello

I didn't hear about these doings in Montreal:

http://occupywallst.org/article/montreal-students-occupy-banks-12-hour-protest-mar/

Made it to the park for the last 10 mins or so of the GA, then floated between a few breakout groups (kinda like a lol cop).

i used to hang out with the cops during the slow parts of the GAs and field questions. (by "questions" i mean "why don't you guys have a platform".) gradually our relationship with the PD decayed, which can't all have been on me.

btw hoos the bolshy history dork in me (i.e., most of me) was excited to find the link to "dual power" behind the "building the new world in the shell of the old" bit at the end of your article; i did not know dual power was an anarchist Thing as the last i'd heard of it was feb-oct 1917 but i think the slow, patient success of the russian soviets as parallel and eventually undeniable political institutions is a really important lesson. anyway the article is a v solid Previously On; i hope it cheered people up.

ty

i was pleasantly surprised to see it get pretty widely shared by friends on fb & twitter

and yeah i mean "build the new world in the shell of the old" has been a wobbly/anarcho-syndicalist slogan for a while, i think adopting "dual power" as the name for the strategy as used by anarchos has been a relatively recent development

really gets to the heart of the way i feel about this stuff though. i argue with a lotta anarcho-minded friends about it; you can't just say "smash the state" and refuse to engage with actually existing politics. it's like chess--you can't just say "pawn takes king," try to overturn the table, and pretend like that means you win. you have to play the game. you have to do the slow, boring, important work of organizing and building counterinstitutions that can meet people's needs. i'm not interested in smashing the state. i want to supercede it.

http://farm8.staticflickr.com/7260/6913618532_860371f276.jpg
http://farm6.staticflickr.com/5160/6909583572_53f5850fff.jpg

A friend in NYC took these.

i like that second one especially

never gonna be able to send him an email unless we see the rest of wallst.isover5.1.12@ what?

ha

naw that's the dude's tag, his name is sliza

NYPD begins arresting Wall St sidewalk sleepers

http://nymag.com/daily/intel/2012/04/nypd-decides-ows-sidewalk-sleepovers-are-illegal.html

metro pd officers are arresting our sidewalk sleepers while saying, on livestream, that they know the arrests are unlawful

then they're coming back and donating food and sleeping bags

in which paul volcker makes a suggestion, and i lol

http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0412/75200.html

ha

arrests, nastiness at Federal Hall last night:

"They're whiny fucking bitches!" shouted a man who also said he lived in 37 Wall Street. "Oh boo hoo, we want money, we want cars, we want government handouts. It's fucking bullshit!" Two white-shirted NYPD officials who appeared to be in charge most of the evening, Deputy Chief McNamara and Inspector O'Connell, attempted to calm the residents down.

When we asked for the two residents' names, Inspector O'Connell blocked us. "We know what you do," he said. "You're done here. They're not gonna give you their names." We replied that we had to at least ask. "Get the fuck back."

Later, O'Connell told us that he was trying to prevent "a riot." "You wanna incite them? You want these two groups throwing bottles at each other?" When we attempted again to speak to the man, he swore at us and said his name was, "Fuck You. Want me to spell it for you?"

http://gothamist.com/2012/04/17/video_ten_arrested_as_ows_tests_pro.php#photo-1