How Social Media Fuels Social Unrest

The funniest thing about this piece at Wired is that I read it over a week ago in hard copy while out shopping for Christmas presents at Barnes and Noble. I came home that night and logged on looking for it, but the Wired homepage hadn't updated with the January magazine information. It's the holidays, so what the heck? I still thought it strange for a tech-driven magazine to basically make a social media report available in dead-tree media and not online.

In any case, the essay, by Bill Wasik, offers pretty compelling explanation for how social media enable radicals and inflame protests. See "#Riot: Self-Organized, Hyper-Networked Revolts—Coming to a City Near You." This passage was particularly interesting:

In trying to understand how and why crowds go wrong, you can have no better guide than Clifford Stott, senior lecturer in social psychology at the University of Liverpool. Stott has risked his life researching his subject. Specifically, he has spent most of his career—more than 20 years so far—conducting a firsthand study of violence among soccer fans. On one particularly dicey trip to Marseilles in 1998, Stott and a small crowd of Englishmen ran away from a cloud of tear gas only to find themselves facing a gang of 50 French toughs, some of them wielding bottles and driftwood. “If you are on your own,” a philosophical fellow Brit remarked to Stott at that moment, “you’re going to get fucked.” This, in a sense, is the fundamental wisdom at the heart of Stott’s work—though he does couch it in somewhat more respectable language.

To Stott, members of a crowd are never really “on their own.” Based on a set of ideas that he and other social psychologists call ESIM (Elaborated Social Identity Model), Stott believes crowds form what are essentially shared identities, which evolve as the situation changes. We might see a crowd doing something that appears to us to be just mindless violence, but to those in the throng, the actions make perfect sense. With this notion, Stott and his colleagues are trying to rebut an influential line of thinking on crowd violence that stretches from Gustave Le Bon, whose 1895 treatise, The Crowd, launched the field of crowd psychology, up to Philip Zimbardo, the psychologist behind the infamous Stanford Prison Experiment of 1971. To explain group disorder, Zimbardo and other mid-20th-century psychologists blamed a process they called deindividuation, by which a crowd frees its members to carry out their baser impulses. Through anonymity, in Zimbardo’s view, the strictures of society were lifted from crowds, pushing them toward a state of anarchy and thereby toward senseless violence.

By contrast, Stott sees crowds as the opposite of ruleless, and crowd violence as the opposite of senseless: What seems like anarchic behavior is in fact governed by a shared self-conception and thus a shared set of grievances. Stott’s response to the riots has been unpopular with many of his countrymen. Unlike Zimbardo, who would respond—and indeed has responded over the years—to incidents of group misbehavior by speaking darkly of moral breakdown, Stott brings the focus back to the long history of societal slights, usually by police, that primed so many young people to riot in the first place.

Meeting Stott in person, one can see how he’s been able to blend in with soccer fans over the years. He’s a stocky guy, with a likably craggy face and a nose that looks suspiciously like it’s been broken a few times. When asked why the recent riots happened, his answers always come back to poor policing—particularly in Tottenham, where questions over the death of a young man went unaddressed by police for days and where the subsequent protest was met with arbitrary violence. Stott singles out one moment when police seemed to handle a young woman roughly and an image of that mistreatment was tweeted (and BBMed) throughout London’s black community and beyond. It was around then that the identity of the crowd shifted, decisively, to outright combat against the police.

Stott boils down the violent potential of a crowd to two basic factors. The first is what he and other social psychologists call legitimacy—the extent to which the crowd feels that the police and the whole social order still deserve to be obeyed. In combustible situations, the shared identity of a crowd is really about legitimacy, since individuals usually start out with different attitudes toward the police but then are steered toward greater unanimity by what they see and hear. Paul Torrens, a University of Maryland professor who builds 3-D computer models of riots and other crowd events, imbues each agent in his simulations with an initial Legitimacy score on a scale from 0 (total disrespect for police authority) to 1 (absolute deference). Then he allows the agents to influence one another. It’s a crude model, but it’s useful in seeing the importance of a crowd’s initial perception of legitimacy. A crowd where every member has a low L will be predisposed to rebel from the outset; a more varied crowd, by contrast, will take significantly longer to turn ugly, if it ever does.

It’s easy to see how technology can significantly change this starting position. When that tweet or text or BBM blast goes out declaring, as the Enfield message did, that “police can’t stop it,” the eventual crowd will be preselected for a very low L indeed. As Stott puts it, flash-mob-style gatherings are special because they “create the identity of a crowd prior to the event itself,” thereby front-loading what he calls the “complex process of norm construction,” which usually takes a substantial amount of time. He hastens to add that crowd identity can be pre-formed through other means, too, and that such gatherings also have to draw from a huge group of willing (and determined) participants. But the technology allows a group of like-minded people to gather with unprecedented speed and scale. “You’ve only got to write one message,” Stott says, “and it can reach 50, or 500, or even 5,000 people with the touch of a button.” If only a tiny fraction of this quickly multiplying audience gets the message and already has prepared itself for disorder, then disorder is what they are likely to create.

"BBM" is BlackBerry Messenger, the main device that helped set off the rioting in Enfield, near London, earlier this year.

But check the whole piece, at the link.

Nashville Occupy Protesters Fight on Christmas Day

Freakin' animals.

At Frugal Cafe Blog Zone, "Christmas Day Fight Among Occupy Protestors in Nashville, Including Pregnant Woman, Police Called in."

And at Blazing Cat Fur,  "Occupests In Christmas Day Cat Fight."

Why the Left Doesn't Mourn Vaclav Havel's Passing

From Ron Radosh, at PJMedia, "How the Left sees the Life of Vaclav Havel, and why they Do Not Mourn his Passing":

PJ Media readers know why we mourn the passing of Vaclav Havel. On this site, Michael Ledeen beautifully laid out the reasons why the world knows it has lost one of its greatest leaders. Ledeen put it in these words: “he was one of a handful of people who changed the world by fighting totalitarian Communism and then, having defeated it, inspired his people to rejoin the Western world, embrace capitalism, and support democratic dissidents everywhere.”

But now that a week or more have passed since Havel’s death, some on the Western Left have decided to let their true feelings about Havel out. Despite having to give some lip service to Havel’s integrity and what he accomplished, these men of the Left quickly get to what they really think: Havel helped destroy the great ideal of Communism as a worthy goal, and for that, he cannot be forgiven.

The most egregious is the article in the British paper The Guardian. The headline to Neil Clark’s article reads, “Another Side of the Story.” Clark immediately ties Havel up with another individual who has just passed way, Christopher Hitchens, whose “consecration” he strongly objects to. For Hitchens was, he writes, “ another ‘progressive’ opponent of the communist regimes of eastern Europe who found favour with Washington’s neocons.”

Clark does not question that Havel was “a brave man” who stood up for his views. That he cannot deny. It is Havel’s views, and his anti-Communism, that he detests. For Havel, he writes, did not help make his country “and the world, a better place.” In particular, denying everything we know about the nature of Stalinism in Eastern Europe — the repression, the bureaucracy, the lack of necessary consumer goods to lead a decent life, the ever pervasive secret police — he faults Havel for the following:

Havel’s anti-communist critique contained little if any acknowledgement of the positive achievements of the regimes of eastern Europe in the fields of employment, welfare provision, education and women’s rights. Or the fact that communism, for all its faults, was still a system which put the economic needs of the majority first.

Surely Mr. Clark must be kidding. Has he not read any of the scores of books revealing the nature of life under what his comrades then called “really existing socialism”? Does he not realize that all these so-called “positive achievements” were there mainly in the minds of the state and Party propaganda apparatus, and that the only people to have them were the Party’s apparatchiks? Does he really believe that communism put the needs of “the majority first”? What accounts, then, for the scores of brave crowds who swept Havel into office, and who openly taunted the regime’s spokesmen as liars and no different than the Nazis who ruled before them?

Clark does not stop with the above. In true Communistpeak, he attacks Havel as “the son of a wealthy entrepreneur,” in other words used by the Maoists of the day, a “capitalist roader.” How dare the son of a bourgeois merchant becomes a national hero? Havel, to Clark, as to the comrades who ruled for decades, had no right to power, since he came from the hated capitalist class.

Continue reading.

Also, from Darleen at Protein Wisdom, "Pining for the fjords Communism." Hammering Whoopi Goldberg's comments on communism, Darleen adds:

The base misanthropy of collectivist advocates is glaringly clear. From communism [international collectivism] to national socialism [national collectivism], these are anti-human systems that declare individuals are not sovereign beings with inherent rights, but units that live at the pleasure of the regime. A regime that decides what needs are to be met and who will be sentenced to fulfilling those needs.

Remember that as Obama and statist Democrats continue their attempts to fundamentally transform America.

Freakin' murderous asshats.

Occupy Wall Street and the Jews

Walter James Casper III has to answer for his ugly endorsement of the hate. Walter James Casper III has endorsed the anti-Semitism of the Occupy movement. Add this on top of his anti-black racist sentiments and the sponsorship of hatred at his blog under "free speech" pretenses, and it's beyond clear the depths of evil this man will go to destroy decent people, Jews and racial minorities especially, because they don't toe the collectivist line.

Here's Jonathan Neumann, at Commmentary:

Defenders and supporters of Occupy Wall Street have tried to downplay the extent of anti-Jewish and anti-Israel hostility, but it was more prevalent than their initial denials suggested or their belated statements of concern conceded.

To begin with, any conspiracy theory that connects a tiny portion (in this case 1 percent) of the population with exploitative banking practices is susceptible to taking on anti-Semitic undertones. This is especially the case when the list of supporters includes the American Nazi Party, Iran’s Ayatollah Khomeini, Louis Farrakhan, white supremacist David Duke, Socialist Party USA, the Council on American-Islamic Relations, Hezbollah, 911Truth.org, International Bolshevik Tendency, and myriad other dubious organizations and individuals. With such comrades in arms, leaders of Occupy Wall Street ought to have been much on guard against anti-Semitic talk.

Nor was the hostility a matter of undertones only. The tone, very early on, was set in part by signs and messages that were overtly anti-Semitic. “Google: (1) Wall St. Jews, (2) Jewish Billionaires, (3) Jews & FedRsrvBank,” read one sign. Another: “Nazi Bankers Wall Street.” The man holding up a sign that read “Hitler’s Bankers,” upon being pressed by passersby to explain himself, replied “Jews control Wall Street.” He was then asked whether the Fox News Channel had asked him to hold up the sign, presumably to make Occupy Wall Street look bad, and he responded, “F— Fox News. That’s bulls—t. F—ing Jew made that up.” Another protester, upon being interrogated by a skeptical elderly passerby sporting a yarmulke, brushed him away saying, “You’re a bum, Jew.”

An Occupier who had traveled from Georgia explained his anti-Jewish animus to a reporter from the New York Post by stating that “Jews are the smartest people in the world,” that “they control the media,” and that nobody is willing to point out this simple truth because “the media doesn’t want to commit suicide by losing the Jewish advertisers.” Still another Occupier expostulated in a widely circulated video: “The smallest group in America controls the money, media, and all other things. The fingerprints belong to the Jewish bankers who control Wall Street. I am against Jews who rob America. They are one percent who control America. President Obama is a Jewish puppet. The entire economy is Jewish. Every federal judge [on] the East Coast is Jewish.”

Occupy Wall Street’s group page on Facebook was littered with images of the title page of Henry Ford’s notorious pamphlet, The International Jew, as well as a picture featuring the phrase Arbeit Macht Frei, lifted from the entrance gate at Auschwitz, with the accompaniment: “We don’t work for bad money.”

At Occupy Los Angeles, one sign explained, in remarkable detail: the “[The] satanic cult called the Illuminati…represents Masonic and Jewish bankers who finagled a monopoly over government credit….Thus the people who control our purse strings are conspiring against us.” (It went on to claim how this nefarious force funded the first two world wars and is planning a third.) Another sign read “Humanity vs. the Rothschlds” [sic] as a speaker further advanced this classic trope: “How many people know that the wars, in WWII, both sides, were funded by the Rothschilds? Those are the bankers. So banking and war is [sic] very intertwined.”

To highlight such talk is to invite one predictable retort: One cannot hold an entire movement responsible for the excesses of outliers. But, despite the assertions of its advocates, Occupy Wall Street was not in fact a movement. Its ranks never numbered more than a modest few hundred people in Manhattan—which made its anti-Semitic cohort statistically significant. Its lack of structure, moreover, and near inability to repudiate sentiments by its participants meant that even a fringe was no less part of the whole.

And Neumann illustrates how the widespread anti-Zionism at Occupy Wall Street showcases the ruthless anti-Jewish eliminationism of the global left's Israel extermination industry:

And what of anti-Zionism? Naturally, given the resonance of the word occupy in association with controversial Israeli policies toward the West Bank and Gaza, the protests were a word-association game waiting to happen. On a random visit to Zuccotti Park in October, three signs were observed by this writer that related to American foreign policy, two of which pertained specifically to Israel. One read: “Obama stop giving bunker buster bombs to an extremist Israeli regime. Stop being Israel’s hit-man. AIPAC will still dump you in 2012.” The second: “USA and Israel are criminal psychopathic nations, an axis of evil, mass murderers, financial predators if not stopped no one has a future! Hands off Iran.” A small table exhibiting books for purchase was dominated almost exclusively by Marxist and Communist literature. Among the offerings, the one seeming anomaly was a book on Boycott Divestment Sanctions (BDS), an organization that seeks to isolate Israel on all fronts.

But the BDS book was no aberration; the policies and input of that organization seem to have been welcomed by Occupy Wall Street. On October 13, BDS issued a statement entitled “Occupy Wall Street, Not Palestine,” expressing solidarity with Occupy Wall Street and hailing the objectives of the two as analogous. After all, “Palestinians, too, are part of the 99% around the world that suffer at the hands of the 1% whose greed and ruthless quest for hegemony have led to unspeakable suffering and endless war.” A month later, Adalah-NY, an organization that campaigns in New York for the boycott of Israel, relayed a message of support for the protests from the Palestinian Arab chapter of BDS and led a question-and-answer session at Occupy Wall Street on the ‘‘growing movement for BDS against Israel until it complies with international law.’’

Last summer mass domestic protests overtook Israel—protests that attracted hundreds of thousands rather than the scant crew down by Wall Street. When an organizer of those protests came to speak in Zuccotti Park, a member of the Occupy Wall Street outreach working group, Andy Pollack, decried the appearance of “Zionist racists.”

An anti-Israel group, If Americans Knew, sustaining the conspiratorial notion of an America-Israel corporate nexus, distributed fliers headlined “Occupy Wall Street…not Palestine!” and noted that “while people are losing jobs, homes, and hope, politicians—dominated by powerful special interests—are sending more of our tax money to Israel than to any other country on earth.”

On October 28, Zuccotti Park hosted “Kaffiyeh Day at Occupy Wall Street”—the kaffiyeh being the Arab headdress associated most famously with Yasir Arafat—and protesters waved Palestinian flags and chanted “Free Free Palestine” and “Long live Palestine! Occupy Wall Street.”

Nor was this sort of thing confined to New York. At Occupy Oakland, anti-Zionist commentators were fixated on the allegation that the tear gas used by the police to break up their encampment was manufactured by the same American company that makes tear gas for the Israel Defense Forces. The left-wing Jewish poet Amirah Mizrahi wrote, “i was palestine in oakland,” and Max Blumenthal, an anti-Zionist blogger, insisted that, far from being a distraction from the essential economic concerns of the Occupy protests, the Arab-Israel issue had now become more difficult to avoid, as the protesters were being confronted with the very same weapons used against Palestinian Arabs.

No, it's not confined to New York at all.

And it is in fact a movement, and the radical extremists are working to leverage Occupy into a long-term program against the establishment. President Obama and Leader Nancy Pelosi endorsed Occupy. Today's Democrat Party is infiltrated with neo-communists who wouldn't flinch at the sight of Israel going up in flames  amid a Middle East holocaust to rival the interwar years. This is the program of the radical left.

Neumann goes on with further examples, citing the organizing magizine Adbusters, which is known for its virulent anti-Semitism:

And are the two—anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism—so easily divided? To begin with, the protests were originally a response to a call issued by the virulently anti-Zionist magazine Adbusters, a publication most noted for a short 2004 article entitled, “Why Won’t Anyone Say They Are Jewish?” Speculating that the U.S. invasion of Iraq was carried out to serve the interests of Israel, the essay explored the close affinity of Jewish neoconservatives for the Jewish state and emphasized the Jewish identity of several prominent neoconservatives within and without the Bush administration. In so doing, was Adbusters being anti-Zionist or was it being anti-Semitic?

What about the protester at Occupy LA who said, “I think that the Zionist Jews who are running these big banks and our federal reserve, which is not run by the federal government, I think they need to be run out of this country”? Was she being anti-Zionist or anti-Semitic? Or the Kaffiyeh Day participant at Occupy Wall Street who shouted ‘‘Occupy Yahudi!’’ and ‘‘Yahudi are kafirs!’’ (‘‘Occupy Jews!’’ and ‘‘Jews are infidels!’’) and whom the group refused to silence? Was he being anti-Zionist or anti-Semitic? Or a protester at Occupy Oakland who, reacting to a speech from a Palestinian Arab youth crying “down with Israel,” turned to his fellow attendee and commented: “F—ing Jews.” How about the aforementioned protester from Georgia at Occupy Wall Street who explained that “the reason the Arabs hate us” is because of “the Jews”? Or the founder of Occupy D.C., Kevin Zeese, who has a history of lamenting the power of the “Israel lobby” in the United States?

These do not begin to exhaust the extent or foulness of the sentiments toward Jews and Israel that emanated from the Occupy protests—sentiments so extreme as to compel even Michael Lerner, editor of the left-wing magazine Tikkun, to share his ‘‘distress at the hatred toward Israel and/or toward Jews’’ on display in Oakland.

Continue reading.

Neumann explains how Jewish social justice activists became central organizers in Zuccotti Park --- and thus gave cover to those attacking the movement for its rampant anti-Semitism.

PREVIOUSLY: "Manifesto: Occupy for the Revolution."

Also, "Continuing Lies by Cowardly Hate-Blogger W. James Casper in Left's Demonic Workplace Intimidation Campaign," and "Deranged Stalker Walter James Casper III Fires Up the Criminal Hate-Blogging for the Holidays."

The Basis of Left and Right, Part 4

The series continues at Power Line, "THE BASIS OF LEFT AND RIGHT, PART 4: MORAL REASONING (OR KANT VS. ARISTOTLE AGAIN)":

Here we come close to affirming the practical notion that the left and right need each other as a counterweight or completing factor. But on closer look their positions are asymmetrical: the postulates of liberalism will always make it the initiating force in political life, while conservatism will always be its cautionary handmaiden. While liberals are congenitally discontent with the pace and extent of reform, they always have a general sense of what should come next, best expressed in Samuel Gompers’ famous one-word policy: “More.” More reform, more legislation, more equality. Conservatives, by contrast, do not have a clear or uniform outline of the good society; instead, conservatives have serious divisions among themselves about what the good society should be. It is not simply a matter of opposing “less” to the liberals’ “more.” Conservatives have deep theoretical differences over the relationship of liberty and virtue, and while liberalism has a similar theoretical argument (between “communitarians” and individualists), it is not as pronounced and politically relevant as the split on the right. I’ll add here that the theoretical and practical tensions within conservatism are a source of the movement’s strength; conservatism’s infighting leads to a certain amount of self-renewal that is largely missing in liberalism.

Well, there's certainly some self-renewal in the left's practical politics in the post-Cold War age. Communism as a goal is pushed more aggressively than ever, among people who had normally been the institutional foundation of what previously was the mainstream liberalism of John F. Kennedy and others. That is, to the extent that the left is seeking a revival of the animating revolutionary ideologies of the early twentieth century, there appears certainly a renewal. Indeed, it's the resurrection of the most murderous ideological developments in the history of mankind. And now there's the added malevolence of the left's accommodation to fascism with its support for millenarian Islamist fanaticism and the shift of historic anti-Semitism from the right to the left of the spectrum in the manifestation of the "new anti-Semitism." These are developments that Hayward might want to address in his continuing iterations of the series.

My previous entries in the series are here.

The Basis of Left and Right, Part 3

The next installment from Steven Hayward, at Power Line, "THE BASIS OF LEFT AND RIGHT, PART 3: EQUALITY":

The Marxist-inspired radical who sees property as the ultimate illegitimate convention to be swept away need not concern us here. Of more interest and relevance is the moderate liberal who argues two related and compelling points: first, from a view harmonious with conservatism’s bias for social stability, large inequalities in wealth, or a static distribution of wealth, undermine society’s social cohesion. As a consequence, second, unequal wealth distribution should be measured by its utility to all classes (Rawls’ argument). Both of these concepts elude convincing and unequivocal empirical demonstration, let alone obvious policy responses. But one can observe the least amount of friction between left and right when policy choices regarding opportunity are on the table.

This leads inevitably to an important corollary of the right-left split over the nature of equality, concerning the efficacy of government itself, not only on direct distributional questions, but also on subsidiary matters regarding the “playing field” of opportunity. Liberals believe in using government—through regulatory and ameliorative means—to correct market failures, which liberals perceive as occurring on a wide scale. Conservatives are much more prone to wariness about government failure, often going so far as to attribute political intervention as the final cause of all market failures—often with good reason: the role of multiple government mistakes in bringing about the housing bubble and subsequent crash is hard to minimize. The arguments about the nature and reasons for both government failure and market failure are serious and extensive, but suffice it here to note that the extreme libertarian position ironically shares in common the same utopian expectation as Marxism: the belief in the possibility of the withering away of the state.

Again, it's a great discussion. My problem is that the idea of the "modern liberal" is a concoction of progressives to hide their statist, inherently totalitarian, ideological convictions. High-brow theory can explain all these minute nuances of theory and ideology, but in practice the deceit of left-wing politics always ends with the destruction of human agency and individual liberty. The left is the cancer of modern societies.

Occupy Wall Street: A Movement Custom-Designed to Make Democrat-Socialists Look Like a Bunch of Freaks

See Noemie Emery, at Weekly Standard, "Occupational Therapy":

"God, I love ’em,” wrote Eugene Robinson in the Washington Post not long after the glorious dawning of Occupy Wall Street, saying that the protests “arise at just the right moment and are aimed at just the right target” to grow into something quite big. Apparently, the stench from McPherson Square (the Washington, D.C., equivalent of Zuccotti Park in Manhattan) had not yet wafted the two blocks north to the Post building, for he was back a week later to praise it again, along with his stablemate E.J. Dionne and many other liberals who read into the Occupy movement numerous virtues that never existed, while wholly ignoring the vices that are only too real. And why would these clean, polite, well-mannered people, for whom an overdue library book would most likely seem like a major infraction, embrace a collection of ne’er-do-wells who are causing a public-health crisis in the midst of their city? Because they and the rest of the left are desperate for any kind of jolt to jump-start their party, which has been in a coma since the air seeped out of Obamamania sometime in 2009.

So what if the occupiers have no idea what they want, and no plans for getting it? “Liberals need a tea party, damn it,” writes Jonah Goldberg, and thus “have embraced the movement in principle with the understanding that they’ll worry about the details later, if at all.” For similar reasons, labor and assorted left-wing organizations are also circling, hoping to connect to the “99 percent” the occupiers say they are speaking for. They hope to repeat the success of the civil rights and the Tea Party movements. But there are reasons this may not work out.
The problem with Occupy is that it involves occupation, which gets it off to a very bad start. The Tea Party asked people to show up for a few hours on weekends, march, listen to speeches, perhaps call upon members of Congress, pick up their trash, and go home. Occupy by contrast asks people to leave their homes (should they have them) and live in a tent in a park for an indefinite period, for goals that are hard to explain.

What kind of people move into a tent for an indefinite period? Those without strong connections to professions or to other people, without obligations, routines, and responsibilities; without children or clients or jobs. This self-selects against the 90 percent of the population that is productive and grounded, that supports itself and works hard, not to mention the part of the population that votes. Even before the camps were heavily infiltrated by homeless and/or criminal elements, the composition was tilted to those on the fringes, frequently by choice as well as necessity, which made it more like a cultural event such as Woodstock than like the Depression-age Hoovervilles, which were peopled largely by those who once had middle-class standing and were then down on their luck....

The civil rights and Tea Party movements addressed specific concerns—a cosmic injustice, and fiscal policies believed to be ruinous—that had means of redress through political remedies, which they pursued by legal, nonviolent means. The Occupy forces by and large have problems that do not admit of political solutions. The civil rights and Tea Party movements sprang from the middle of middle America; Occupy Wall Street from the fringe. Its happy embrace of a “communal”—and rag-tag and dirty—lifestyle was bound to alienate that much larger part of society that likes soap and water; clean clothes, sheets, and towels; indoor plumbing and sleeping in beds. The people who claimed to speak for the 99 percent who aren’t rich managed to repel the 98 percent who want order and cleanliness.

Emery mentions New York Magazine's John Heilemann, who published a piece about those holding out for a resurgence of Occupy in the spring and summer. Turns out there's some planning to occupy the national party conventions: "Yes, tent cities teeming with lice, rape charges, and piles of excrement (200 pounds of it in Santa Cruz, California) are just the thing to rally swing voters."

Yep, that's exactly the movement that James Walter "Occupy" Casper III endorsed with his exhortation: "Occupy wherever you are." Freakin' scumbag.

Criminal Hatesac3's even more stupid than the doltish union idiot at the video. Man, Cavuto reams her a new one. That's gotta hurt.

Winning!

The Basis of Left and Right, Part 2

Steven Hayward's series continues, at Power Line, "THE BASIS OF LEFT AND RIGHT, PART 2: (HUMAN) NATURE, CONVENTION, AND LIBERTY":

The left-right divide begins to become more comprehensible when differing understandings of individual liberty and its political postulates are probed further. The starting point of liberalism offered here (individuals should be free to pursue their self-chosen purposes) leads liberals to challenge conventions that constrain individual autonomy—to “question authority” in the popular graffiti. The logical consequence of the imperative to expand the domain of individual autonomy naturally compels liberalism to be reformist, to embrace progress as the essential process to accomplish reform, and to employ reason to guide the progressive reform process. Above all, the imperative of individual autonomy necessarily places the principle of equality at the center of liberal thought. Conventional social structures that maintain artificial or arbitrary inequalities between individuals attract the most ire from reform liberalism, because such inequalities constrain or reduce the sum total of individual self-fulfillment across society. These four postulates of liberalism find their apotheosis in the impressively argued synthesis of John Rawls.

I wrote previously on the series here. It's going to take a bit more development to resolve some of the tensions I discussed there, although by mentioning equality Hayward is getting closer to the true nature of today's left.

Walter James 'Occupy' Casper Continues Campaign of Lies: Childishly Whines About 'McCarthyism' While Endorsing Anarchists and Anti-Semitic Communists

My criminal stalker Walter James "Occupy" Casper III, a.k.a. "Hatesac3", continues to harass me and this blog with comments --- on top of his recent cyber threats to my family --- despite being banned long ago. This post is to record some key evidence in Walter James "Occupy" Casper's continuing campaign to undermine the foundations of the country with a clandestine Marxist program of communist subterfuge.

To put it plainly, "Hatesac3" can't stand the fact that today's Democrat Party is a socialist party with a large number of members in government who have allied with --- and provided aid and comfort to --- real live communists in furtherance of an ideological agenda that continues to shift this country away from its founding as a classically liberal democracy.

After a long rambling post of incoherent denials about the fundamental anarcho-communism and anti-Semitism riddled throughout the Occupy movement, "Hatesac3" dumps out this groaner of pathetic smear-mongering:

A political science professor who is alleging there are communists in the House and Senate? Communists?!? Somebody call Joe McCarthy...

Joe McCarthy investigated communists in government. McCarthy was right. He may have gone overboard, but the facts show that real communists had infiltrated the United States government. They were directed by Moscow and they were causing real damage to national security. Again, not all those accused by McCarthy were deemed national security threats, but when progressives throw out the "McCarthyism" card they're deceptively and malignantly casting a smokescreen in front of their support for Marxist-Leninist ideologies and goals. This is sinister. And that is why Walter James "Occupy" Casper continues his attempts hide behind the "McCarthyism" smear while working underground to destroy his political enemies through multifarious smear jobs, campaigns of workplace harassment and threats to freedom of speech, as well as cyber threats to the families of his enemies. Jonah Goldberg speaks truth to "McCarthyism":

Senator Joe McCarthy was a lout, generally speaking. But he was on the right side of history and, in a broad sense, of morality as well. If, in some sort of parallel-universe exercise, the same number of (now proven) Soviet-Communist spies, collaborators, sympathizers, and the like were somehow switched to Nazis, and McCarthy went after them with the same vehemence as he went after Reds, Joe McCarthy might well have universities and foundations named after him today. Just imagine if a ring of Nazi party members were found to be working in Hollywood, never mind the State Department, taking money from Berlin to advance the Nazi cause. Does anyone really think "McCarthyism" would still be denounced as an unmitigated evil, often put at the front of the parade of horribles alongside Hitlerism and Stalinism?

Now, I'm sure many people are rolling their eyes at this point. "It's not the same thing!" say those who believe that the lost jobs of a few Hollywood writers and the loyalty oaths reluctantly offered by some unjustly accused union officials are the American equivalent of concentration camps. Maybe, maybe not. The argument over which was worse, Communism or Nazism, will never be settled. Nor should we expect it to be. But even if you firmly believe that Nazism was more evil than Communism, as even Robert Conquest does, you must concede that Communism was evil enough. If the sight of an American Communist screenwriter being forced to take the Fifth Amendment before Congress and have his "career ruined" still fills you with blinding rage, it's indeed curious why the forced slaughter of millions by Stalin seems like a trivial event to you. After all, there were plenty of men and women invoking their "rights" as their heels left lines in the dirt on the way to the gulag. Needless to say, their careers were ruined too. And if the American Communists had had their way, much the same thing would have happened here as well. But, yeah, Roy Cohn's the devil.

Regardless, wherever you come down on McCarthyism, Communism, and the rest is a matter of opinion. What is a matter of fact — unmitigated, irrefutable, undeniable fact — is that there were hundreds of Communists working for Moscow, directly or indirectly, in the United States during the Roosevelt and Truman administrations. The Rosenbergs were guilty and got what they deserved. Alger Hiss too. Victor Perlo, Judith Coplon, Morton Sobell, William Perl, Alfred Sarant, Joel Barr, and Harry Gold were all either pawns or lackeys of a foreign and evil foe. We know the Hollywood Ten were all Communists, but what else they were we can't know for sure, because they believed taking the Fifth was more important than protecting the country (and if you think it's unfair to cavalierly call people who devotedly followed the Moscow line for all their adult lives "Communists," I sure hope you don't ever call, say, President Bush a "fascist" on the basis of no evidence at all). The American Communist Party (CP-USA) was in fact a Soviet franchise.

In other words, you are free to describe McCarthyism as a witchhunt if and only if you are willing to concede that actual witches existed in our midst. The evidence — from declassified Venona transcripts, Soviet archives, memoirs, etc. — is still mounting, but what we have so far is plenty in itself. In 1996, Nicholas Von Hoffman wrote an essay for the Washington Post that caused no small amount of hysteria on the American Left, which has been milking its myths and denial for decades. McCarthyism was the product of the "paranoid style" in American politics. There were no witches — only zealots and brown-shirted bullies. The playwright Lillian Hellman declared: "The McCarthy group — a loose term for all the boys, lobbyists, congressmen, State Department bureaucrats, CIA operators — chose the anti-Red scare with perhaps more cynicism than Hitler picked anti-Semitism."

Yet, as Hoffman reluctantly conceded, these assessments were in turn lies, myths, and carefully constructed distortions. The reality was that "in a global sense McCarthy was on to something. McCarthy may have exaggerated the scope of the problem but not by much…

In other words, Walter James "Occupy" Casper III is ready to attack his enemies as "McCarthyites" while malignantly turning his eyes from the horrors of tens of millions killed in the name of the very ideology he's pushing.

And I've covered this ground before --- and repeatedly faced down all the denials by "Hatesac3" and his henchmen --- but here's David Horowitz on Representative Barbara Lee, "An Enemy Within":

REPRESENTATIVE BARBARA LEE, Democrat of Berkeley, was the only member of Congress who refused to defend her country under attack. The Los Angeles Times calls Barbara Lee a "liberal" and compares her to "anti-war" dissenters of the past, most notably Jeanette Rankin who cast the lone vote in the U.S. Congress against America’s entry into the Second World War and said after Pearl Harbor, "As a woman I can’t go to war, and I refuse to send anyone else." We are at war again, and it’s time to call things by their right names.

Barbara Lee is not an anti-war activist, she is an anti-American communist who supports America’s enemies and has actively collaborated with them in their war against America.

Continue at the link. And see Joseph Farah, "The truth about Barbara Lee."

Rep. Lee is just one of roughly nearly 100 members of the Democrat Party in Congress who are in fact communists in all but name. There's no need to keep going, since it's long ago been shown that Walter James "Occupy" Casper stands against all that is decent and good in America. I've chronicled his progressive hatred time and again. He's a stalking coward and an ideological snake. He has publicly endorsed the Occupy movement murderers, rapists, and anti-Semites. This is fact. And this is what Occupy is about. And I will continue to expose his deception because this is what today's left does. It's evil incarnate and people of decency have to expose these freaks to the light of truth.

Previously:

* "Comrade Repsac3: Racist Commissar of State Security, People's Commissariat for Internet Affairs?"

* "W. James Casper is a Coward, a Fraud, and a Liar."

* "Manifesto: Occupy for the Revolution."

Also, at Zilla of the Resistance, "Stand Against Evil - Never Let it Win."

Newt Gingrich 'Mic Checked' at University of Iowa

These people are the biggest freakin' losers.

At Washington Wire, " Occupy Protesters Interrupt Gingrich":

IOWA CITY, Iowa–Before beginning a campaign event in a packed lecture hall at the University of Iowa, Newt Gingrich was interrupted by Occupy Wall Street protesters.

“Mic check!” a protester yelled, a phrase used by the movement to begin a chant. Mr. Gingrich didn’t appear to catch on at first. “What’s wrong?” he said.

Also at Fox News, "Newt Gets 'Occupied' at the University of Iowa."

'The Protester' is Time's Person of the Year

Well, at least they didn't give it to Obambi. Oh, I forgot. They did that already.

At Time, "The Protester." (Via Fausta, The Hill, and Memeorandum.)

Also, at Washington Post, "Why Steve Jobs isn’t Time’s Person of the Year."

And Daily Caller, "TIME’s ‘Person of the Year’ selection about as annoying as you’d expect."

PHOTO CREDIT: El Marco, "Zuccotti Utopia: Portraits of The New Revolutionaries."

The Basis of Left and Right

At Power Line, "NEW POWER LINE SERIES: THE BASIS OF LEFT AND RIGHT, PART 1":

The divisions between left and right are fundamental and unbridgeable. A frequent trope of political rhetoric is that everyone agrees about the ends; we merely disagree about the means. Although this is often true at the level of a discrete policy issue (for example, how to broaden access to health care), it is wrong at the deeper level of what might be called the “tectonic plates” that drive the individual political battles. Reducing left-right differences to disagreements only over means has a numbing effect on clear thinking, and is an obstacle to grappling with some of the larger problems that now need reform that goes far beyond the business-as-usual tinkering around the edges, such as entitlement spending. Liberals tend to believe in old-fashioned leveling egalitarianism; conservatives do not. (Much more on this point in due course.) Rather than evade or gloss over fundamental differences, highlighting them is the vital pre-condition to finding any middle ground for possible compromise.

That's one hefty essay, and I'm looking forward to the next installment in the series ---although the main problem right now is that "liberalism" really isn't a left-wing ideology. It's an invention of American progressives to mask their socialist ideological foundations. This guy gets closer to the real American left, but also continues to call them "liberals" when they are not. See "Utopian Folly: Liberalism’s Philosophical Problem."

VIDEO: West Coast Port Shutdown

More Occupy freaks to enliven your day.

Oakland at the video:

And a nice roundup from Long Beach at LAist, "Police Declared Occupy The Ports Unlawful Assembly, 2 Arrests Made." And at Los Angeles Times, "Occupy protests shut down 2 Portland terminals, spread to Seattle." And more for the Los Angeles Times here.

And ICYMI, Michelle has an epic post, "Your guide to D12: Occupiers return to ports for West Coast shutdown; Updated."

West Coast Port Shutdown Planned for Today

I wrote about this a couple of weeks ago: "New Direction for Occupy Wall Street?" Here's the latest from Occupy Oakland, "MONDAY PORT BLOCKADE: last minute info." And from Occupy Long Beach, "Occupy the Ports."

And while the San Francisco Chronicle has this, "Opposition grows to Occupy's port shutdown plan," the Occupy Oakland organizers are pushing back, "Longshore Workers Being Told to Not Cross the Picket Line." My hunch is that regular hard-hats want to stay on the job but the militants inside the union and out want confrontation with the 1 percent. That said, here's this from a self-described New Left radical at Firedoglake, "#Occupy Oakland: WTFWMD":

This morning’s SF Chronicle has the requisite Occupy concern-troll stories spread throughout several sections, including a lead story headlined “Opposition growing to shutdown of Port.” In addition to interviews with union members and truckers who are conflicted about supporting the shutdown, the story says that “some activists” have concluded that a port blockade is “too extreme” and so strongly disagree with confrontational tactics that they now call themselves “99 Percenters” instead of “Occupiers.” Various groups affiliated with Occupy Oakland have been holding trainings on diversity of tactics and non-violence strategies in anticipation of tomorrow’s events. On several Facebook forums there are very heated discussions involving rumors of peacekeepers who may be planning to “kettle” any comrades who do not comport themselves in whatever they deem to be an acceptable fashion.

As I read this, as always, I think: What the Fuck Would Mario Do?

Check that link. This lady's a freakin' communist. Sheesh. (Also at Lonely Conservative and Memeorandum.)

RELATED: From The Other McCain, "ACORN Returns as ‘Occupy’."

New York University to Offer Classes on Occupy Wall Street

Pamela has the report: "NEW YORK UNIVERSITY (NYU) TO ADD COURSE ON #OWS NEXT SEMESTER."

The world is upside-down. Anarchists, communists, drug-addicts, murderers and rapists. And our institutions of higher learning think this is great material for academic coursework at an elite East Coast university. This is depraved. See Scared Monkeys, for example: "OWS Protesters at Zuccotti Park Put Up Women-only Tent to Stop the Sexual Assaults."

Oh, and don't forget. These people are basically Nazi progressives as well: "Documenting Anti-Semitism at Adbusters, Leading Backer of 'Occupy Wall Street'."

MORE HERE: "Manifesto: Occupy for the Revolution."

Documenting Anti-Semitism at Adbusters, Leading Backer of 'Occupy Wall Street'

From Michael Moynihan, at Tablet, "Busted" (via Memeorandum).

Shoot, finding anti-Semitism at Adbusters is like taking candy from a baby. Checking Moynihan's references gives you an idea, for example, 9/11 truther Kathleen Christison "Elliott Abrams, Dual Loyalist and Neocon Extraordinaire." And she's a fan of rabid anti-Semite Gilad Atzmon. See Kathleen Christison, "Gilad Atzmon on Jewish Identity Politics: Calling Out the Tribalists," at the hardline communist website Counterpunch and cross-posted to Aztmon's blog.

And again, the fact that Occupy Wall Street gets the epic whitewash from MSM outlets is pretty astonishing. But it's an upside-down world, so you gotta keep fighting these criminal asshats. See my earlier essay, "Manifesto: Occupy for the Revolution."

What's So Awful About the 1%?

From Bradley Schiller, at Los Angeles Times:

Occupy Wall Street has said it's the 99% of 'us' against the 1% of 'them.' But many of 'them' started out like 'us' and have brought us great innovations that we embrace.

The class war is on. It's the 99% of "us" versus the 1% of "them."

In the rhetoric of this war, we are fighting the 1% because they possess most of the nation's wealth, bankroll their handpicked political candidates, control the banks and get million-dollar paychecks and billion-dollar bailouts; yet they don't pay enough taxes or invest their wealth in creating American jobs. They're the "millionaires and billionaires" President Obama has called out as needing to pony up more for progressive reforms of our healthcare, banking, tax and political systems. They are the enemy of "us" — the 99% who toil at low-wage jobs, hold underwater mortgages, face foreclosures, suffer recurrent and protracted job layoffs and plant closings, and yet pay our fair share of taxes.

But there's a flaw in this strategy. The Occupy Wall Street movement envisions the 1% as a monolithic cadre of entrenched billionaires who have a firm and self-serving grip on all the levers of the economy. But a closer look at that elite group reveals how untrue that perspective is.

Forbes magazine compiles a list of the richest 400 Americans every year. To get on that list, you must have at least $1 billion of wealth. They are the creme de la creme of the 1% — indeed, the top 0.0000013% (!) of Americans. So who are these dastardly people?

The late Steve Jobs was in that elite club this year. In his earlier days, Jobs would have been camped out with the OWS crowd, probably passing around a joint. Should we count him as one of "us" or one of "them"? (And you can't use your iPhone or iPad to vote "them.")

Then there's 27-year old Mark [Zuckerberg] (No. 14 on the Forbes list), whose Facebook innovation enables the OWS movement to communicate so easily. He and five other Facebook entrepreneurs just joined the Forbes 400 this year.

We'd also quickly recognize among "them" Sergey Brin, Larry Page and Eric Schmidt, who became billionaires developing Google. And, as they are sipping a latte to keep warm, the OWS campers should also reflect on whether Howard Schultz, Starbucks' founder and No. 330 on the Forbes list, is with "us" or "them."

Not every member of the Forbes 400 is a high-tech folk hero. There is a lot of inherited wealth on that list too (the Mars, Walton, Cargill and Ford dynasties). But 70% of the Forbes elite are self-made billionaires. Those entrepreneurial successes include not just the names behind Facebook, Google, Apple and Starbucks but also EBay (Meg Whitman, Pierre Omidyar), Yahoo (Jerry Yang), Nike (Phil Knight), AOL (Steve Case), Amazon (Jeff Bezos), Subway sandwiches (Peter Buck, Fred DeLuca), "Star Wars" (George Lucas) and even Beanie Babies (Ty Warner). Does anyone doubt that these members of the reviled 1% have enriched the country in significant ways?

Even more to the point is that all of these club-400 elites were once just like "us." Jobs worked on the first Apple computer in a garage on a shoestring budget. He had vision, not wealth, to propel him to fame and fortune. Oprah Winfrey (No. 139) rose from poverty to TV queen through determination, hard work and a couple of lucky breaks. Even Warren Buffett, No. 2 on the Forbes list, started out looking very much like just another hardworking middle-class kid with good Midwestern values.

I checked out the Forbes 400 earlier and was thinking pretty much the same thing, especially since a bunch of those on the list are Democrats.

New Direction for Occupy Wall Street?

Check yesterday's Los Angeles Times, "Eviction pushes Occupy protesters in new directions."

Lots of folks are talking about how Occupy's causing a long-term shift towards reducing income inequality in American politics. I'm a bit skeptical about that. I expect mostly more violent agitation from the more radical Occupy mobs. Mentioned at the Times, for example, are plans for "national and regional coordinated actions" like "a Dec. 12 shutdown of West Coast ports."

I saw something on this the other day, and Occupy Oakland has this, "Support Grows For Occupy Movement’s Coordinated West Coast Shut Down On December 12th."

“We’re shutting down these ports because of the union busting and attacks on the working class by the 1%: the firing of Port truckers organizing at SSA terminals in LA; the attempt to rupture ILWU union jurisdiction in Longview, WA by EGT. EGT includes Bunge LTD, a company which reported 2.5 billion dollars in profit last year and has economically devastated poor people in Argentina and Brazil. SSA is responsible for inhumane working conditions and gross exploitation of port truckers and is owned by Goldman Sachs. EGT and Goldman Sachs is Wallstreet on the Waterfront” stated Barucha Peller of the West Coast Port Blockade Assembly of Occupy Oakland.

“We are also striking back against the nationally’ coordinated attack on the Occupy movement. In response to the police violence and camp evictions against the Occupy movement- This is our coordinated response against the 1%. On December 12th we will show are collective power through pinpointed economic blockade of the 1%.”

Sounds pretty militant, and no doubt some of these folks are dead serious, given the scale of unrest during the recent Oakland port shutdown. Anyway, more on this from Lee Stranahan, at Big Government, "Occupy Leader Says Union ‘Opposition’ to Planned 12/12 West Coast Port Shutdown Is ‘Just a Game’."

Tea Party vs. Occupy

Via American Glob:

Protesters Leave Behind 30 Tons of Debris at Occupy L.A.

Dirtbags.

And from Glenn Reynolds, "Remember how the Tea Party protesters left things neater than they found them? Which group is more likely to have a positive vision for America’s future?"

At Los Angeles Times, "Occupy L.A.: 30 tons of debris left behind at City Hall tent city."

Plus, "Occupy L.A.: Protesters march downtown past LAPD headquarters."