Terrorising Coffee Drinkers for the Greater Good
It’s really about sensing and knowing that a system is no longer right or just or fair and no longer [being] willing to be an exploited member of that system… Occupy Wall Street is now having, and will continue to have, a profound impact on the status quo.
Alexander Penley, Occupier. Quoted in the Guardian, October 2011.
According to police, the men were part of a larger pack of 25 people who tried to use eight-foot-long galvanised metal pipes to break the windows of the coffee shop. Terrified patrons hid under the tables, scared that glass would fall in on them… Penley, 41, was arrested and charged with assault and inciting a riot after Saturday’s incident.
Alexander Penley, smashing stuff for kicks – sorry, for “social justice.” Metro, April 2012.
Update:
As so often, the mismatch of rhetoric and behaviour is almost funny. Prior to smashing windows and hitting police officers with 8 foot long steel pipes, the Occupiers had gathered at an anarchist book fair, where leaflets and workshops promised a softer, fairer, fluffier world. (“Indigenous solidarity event with Native Resistance Network.” “Equal rights for all species.” “Children welcome!”) In this temple of warrior poets and ostentatious empathy, the “activist and educator” Cindy Milstein cooed over Occupy’s “direct democracy and cooperation”: “This compelling and quirky, beautiful and at times messy experimentation has cracked open a window on history, affording us a rare chance to grow these uprisings into the new landscape of a caring, ecological, and egalitarian society.” Occupy, says Milstein, is all about “facilitating a conversation in hopes of better strategizing toward increasingly expansive forms of freedom.” Its participants, we learn, are “non-hierarchical and anti-oppression.”
See, it’s all fluff and twinkles. It’s just that some of the twinklers like to wear masks and balaclavas – the universal symbol of friendliness and caring - while trying to shatter glass onto Starbucks customers.
Yes, it’s almost funny. But then you wonder what kind of mind doesn’t register the dissonance. And then you realise that the minds in question are probably like this one here and the minds of these caring, egalitarian people. Our purveyors of radical compassion are, it seems, much too entranced by a cartoon version of the world – and a cartoon version of themselves – to notice their own dishonesty and fundamental contradictions. Behold our betters, the titans of tomorrow.
Via Brain-Terminal.
Yes, I’m going to take lessons in fairness and justice from dicks like this.
Well, quite. Though one might see some semblance of justice if Mr Penley and his radical comrades were handcuffed and left in a room with the owners, staff and customers of the coffee shop in question. Twenty minutes should do it.
Occupy’s five point plan to bring down capitalism:
1. Smash windows.
2. Piss people off.
3. Run away.
4. …er…
5. Utopia!
This isn’t violence. Violence is showing advertisements for stuff on TV. This is “non-violent direct action”.
#OccuFail really is down to the dregs. Can’t we just start punching them now?
Since they have not accomplished anything, it must have been snatched away from them by the way of exploitation. Poor things, whatever ‘it’ is. Coffee?
“Can’t we just start punching them now?”
Like so many of their cheerleaders, these poseurs are counting on their victims – people drinking coffee, running businesses, trying to get to work, etc – not repaying them in kind.
Which tells you quite a lot about who they are.
“Can’t we just start punching them now?” If you have to ask it is far too late. Take a club and get them now.
If you screw with New York long enough, eventually New York will screw you. With a baseball bat.
Laurie Penny will be on this any minute now. Right?
I think Occupy has sprung up BECAUSE people have been held back “reciprocating”…
You’ll notice noone has tried another “protest” at the LPE http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2005/feb/17/activists.climatechange
Its participants, we learn, are “non-hierarchical and anti-oppression.”
Nailed it as usual, David. But at least they’re giving us plenty of chances to juxtapose…
‘Equal rights for all species!’
‘All pigs must die!’
So it’s equality for all species except the police and anyone else who gets in their way.
Oh Dear, how sad…
http://www.kernelmag.com/editors-blog/1868/laurie-penny-johann-haris-final-victim/
… Twenty minutes should do it.
Where I live, Anchorage, Alaska, everyone owns at least one gun. Twenty seconds would be 18 too many.
Which could be why our version of this social pathology is Occupy Square Root of Zero.
AC1,
Although Laurie does have a tendency to fabricate and embellish, often to the point of absurdity, that may not hinder her rise to stardom. After all, she doesn’t so much argue as attitudinise. In her writing, facts and logic are at best peripheral and usually absent altogether. What she sells is a posture, a dogma, a hackneyed shtick.
It’s just that some of the twinklers like to wear masks and balaclavas – the universal symbol of friendliness and caring – while trying to shatter glass onto Starbucks customers.
Inspector Gadget on Alfie Meadows…
“The prosecution claim that Meadows was wearing a balaclava and combat jacket, that he was at the front of the student lines outside Parliament BEFORE any containment went on and that he was involved in hurling heavy metal railings at police officers. They showed CCTV from the police helicopter to prove this. Meadows defence was that yes, he did those things, but he was wearing the balaclava to protect himself from state reprisals, and that he used the metal railings to defend other students from police attack.”
http://inspectorgadget.wordpress.com/2012/04/17/alfie-meadows-verdict-due-today/
To paraphrase Brando from The Wild One.
‘What are you emotional about, Laurie?”
“What have you got?”
Stupidity on that level is it’s own punishment. The universe loves to torture the idiots among us.
“beautiful and at times messy experimentation has cracked open a window on history”
Haw! Too funny.
“The lawyer busted in an anarchist window-busting incident at an East Village Starbucks has a string of arrests in his past, a police source said Monday… Penley, who lives on the upper West Side, was charged 20 years ago with a entering a restricted area at a military facility in Boise, Idaho. He also has arrests for… burglary, trespassing and vandalism in California and for failure to show up in court on a resisting arrest charge in Oregon.”
http://www.nydailynews.com/news/crime/attorney-busted-anarchist-attack-starbucks-frequently-wrong-side-law-source-article-1.1062457
As Andrew Breitbart said, ‘Behave yourself.’
“Oh, I’m sorry, did I interrupt your train of thought? Go ahead… Oh, you were done? Well, allow me to retort…”
— Pulp Fiction
Hm. A burglar, a vandal and a thug with neck tattoos and a bullring through his nose. We must let them guide us to a higher moral plane.
Life imitating parody
http://www.thedailymash.co.uk/news/society/drunks-trash-mcdonalds-over-lack-of-healthy-options-201204175134/
And the lawyer hasn’t been disbarred yet?
The rhetoric and aesthetics of the Occupistas conceals what they really are. They present as rebels protesting the establishment, but consider: they are demonstrating in favor of the ruling party, they commit violence freely without state reprisal but anyone who fights back is subject to arrest, and they have no goal beyond terrorizing and demoralizing opponents.
They are Brownshirts. This is fascism.