When Warriors Quarrel

Now, three years after the movement’s cultural and political apex, things have gotten a bit complicated for OWS activists.
Snork.

Someone call the Judean People’s Front.

I almost wish they were still going.
They were a concentrated source of unintended comedy.

David, off topic but does this count as a classic Guardian sentence…?
“With establishment figures showing up at festivals, the idea of popular music as a form of psychic resistance to entrenched inequality becomes ever more distant.”
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/sep/18/burning-man-glastonbury-david-cameron-establishment-psychic-resistance

< Guardian voice > “Pop festivals should be more leftwing and only leftwing people should be allowed in.” < /Guardian voice >

‘With establishment figures showing up at festivals, the idea of popular music as a form of psychic resistance to entrenched inequality becomes ever more distant’.
The ‘establishment figures’ have been on stage performing at these gigs for quite a while now.

“Pop festivals should be more leftwing and only leftwing people should be allowed in.”
Calling Eric Cartman…

I’m stuck home with a bug while reading through Scottish election results and finally got around to reading through that one.
Oh, Dear . . . .

The attendance at this year’s Burning Man festival of libertarian Republican policy wonk Grover Norquist has caused some controversy over the past few weeks. There have also been grumbles about members of the Silicon Valley elite heading out to the Nevada desert and setting up their own VIP enclaves at the festival. Names include Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook and “a slew of khaki-wearing venture capitalists”. . . . .
. . . In this climate of stultifying top-down sameness and a lack of confidence from below, festivals still hold out the promise of something more edgy, more left-field. At their best, festivals epitomise that popular modernist trend of offering people the chance to create and inhabit alternate futures in the here and now, however momentarily. These potentialities still exist at Glastonbury and other festivals, even if only as an echo. This is why people are still drawn to them. They’re seeking out that spirit of radical experimentation, of trying out new ways of living in the world. As one participant at this year’s Burning Man put it: “This is a great experiment in self-actualisation.”

Actually, ah, No. Not even close. To borrow from physics, that’s not even wrong.
Generally speaking, those who started BM have long since moved on to other things. When I first heard of BM, well over a decade ago, the uniform assessment noted that the decline was well in progress, with a summary being, basically, Y’know, it just hasn’t been the same since they banned the drive-by shooting range.
Apropos of the Occupy twits twittering tweetly, BM is undergoing yet another round of lawsuits.
And in turn . . .

But why do we get so upset when the rich go glamping at Glastonbury, or when David Cameron visits the Salford Lads Club to claim the Smiths as his favourite band? When Cameron named the Jam’s Eton Rifles as one his favourite songs, . . . .

Well, actually, no we don’t get upset. We continue to note that random personal preferences remain random personal preferences.

. . . “celebrity culture” is held up as one model of the “good life”, while the cultural elite display open bigotry and hatred of the contemporary working class (“chavs”). . . .

. . . and there is the hiccup.
cc is held up—i.e., let’s see if anyone falls for this one—as one model . . .
In short, under no circumstance is cc established as the model, and as has been established across centuries of hipsters being asses, and adults being the inevitable leadership, all that we are seeing with the “celebrity” hatred of “chavs” is mere peons that have gotten some cash at the moment expressing their hatred of mere peons who don’t have the same cash, at the moment.
Patricians, by contrast—and this is all patricians, from the working class master plumber patrician to the upper class mandarin patrician— Just Don’t Care.

http://hotair.com/archives/2014/09/18/political-affiliation-of-man-who-firebombed-black-congressmans-office-wont-surprise-you/

In reponse to ‘I ate a tomato’…
Where was the tomato grown, how was it picked, was the farmer paid a fair price by the supermarket, were pesticides used etc etc etc ????
as i said, everyting is political but by your flippant, juvenile comments, i don’t expect you to ‘get’ it
Must be a wonderful festival. Can’t see any reason why people might want to get away from attitudes like this!

Hmmm. Mildly OT question for the peanut gallery and for David:
Any commentary on the Scottish referendum?
I was only having a general scan of the headlines going into the vote, and thus couldn’t state which way I would have voted had I been in the position to vote—and certainly would have been rather more steeped in all the issues if I had.
At the same time though, my definite interest comes from the background of very ingrained Cape Breton Islanders—as I recall one cousin’s comments, while we apparently left in the 1700s or so, on the occasions when at least one uncle of mine who grew up in the 20th century would go ballistic, he would automatically start screaming in Scots Gaelic before remembering to switch over to English . . .
I’m looking at all the home rule promises—Oh, Please, “”Devo Max””, double quotes deliberate, is merely a construct worthy of Laurie Penny or so, complete with accent—, and I’m noting assorted variables where all the interesting variations I’m reading about can apply, and noting Oooooooohhhhhhh . . this is going to be FUN iiinnnnnnteresting . . . . . . . .