Occupy Heros, Police Heros

I can't find any.

Some of the individual cops deserve a little slack.  Much like soldiers, they are paid to take orders, and on the line of intense confrontation they are paid to obey commands (Gas 'em!)  instantly and without question. Their personal beliefs about humanity, reasonable exercise of police powers, and Constitutional protections are officially deemed irrelevant.

Still, the video of the cops Macing citizens at UC Davis yesterday afternoon suggests the political masters still lack a way of eliminating officers who simply enjoy exercising raw power. (If, in fact, the community and campus overlords even care about such things.)  Insofar as the two videos reflect what actually happened, we're seeing a dog licking his balls because he can and because his masters applaud, toss him a Milk Bone, and shield him from unpleasant consequences.

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Since the first Occupiers hit the streets I've been looking for a reason to murmur approving words.

Sorry Biffie. I can't do it despite a congenital urge to cheer anyone who annoys authoritarians.

The problem is your confusion. A vague discontent with the  way things are is a perfectly good reason to yell and scream for a while -- just long enough for you to get it out of your system before you get a haircut, shower, and go back to work. Everyone is entitled to an occasional  spasm of street theatre and a good cathartic rant about how life ain't never gave you no breaks.

Your problem is that you expect to be taken seriously without giving  thought-enabled persons reason to do so. In other words, what do you want? Or even, who is your enemy? Your chants that your foe is the "power structure" and you want "fairness" prove your movement is an exercise in loud, unwashed, idiocy, more an excuse to raise Hell and get on teevee than anything else.

There is power structure. Any society of three or more humans needs one. Fairness may be the ultimate moral achievement of a society, but it is not the natural order and not yours or mine by some divine right. It is the result of rational thought processes heavily concentrated on keeping the power structure honest.

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You called your virgin invasion of the streets and parks "Occupy Wall  Street." That may have been enough, as an intellectual matter, to dismiss you out of hand.

You wouldn't know what to do with the financial system if we handed you the keys, largely because your anger -- real or feigned -- blinds you to the partial truth Wall Street apologists are fond of spouting. Markets do provide liquidity, and liquidity is crucial. Without the means of changing your mind about an investment by buying or selling, no one would invest, meaning Steve Jobs would have spent his life farting around in his garage.

Markets do create vast hordes of capital, the kind of capital necessary to, for instance, create systems which make it possible for you to fulfill your deepest desire. That is, without huge capital availability no one could support the network teevee camera. Then you would have have no place to wave your sign. Then the world would ignore you. Then you would have to run around wearing a frownie face. You would be sad.


But take heart. A real enemy does exist, and his name is Fraud, so I have a suggestion. Go find a copy of "Atlas Shrugged." (It's a book. You know, with pages and like that.) Find the passages which explain fraud as simply the intellectual and emotional equivalent of theft.  That is, there is no moral distinction to be made between a thug stealing a little kid's lunch money and a broker peddling a CDO rated AAA when he knows it has no more intrinsic value than the turd you deposited behind the tree in Zucchini Park.

That just might lead you to other books explaining how economic and political systems (1) are designed to work (2) actually work and (c) might be made to work better.

I know that kind of regimen isn't as much fun as sitting around a kum-bye- yah campfire, but it is sort of what people do when they yearn to be taken seriously.