I hope that you all had a great dinner with family & friends where-ever you are.
Occupy Wall Street part duex
Back on Oct 22 I wrote a short piece about the incoherent message of the Occupy Wall Street crowd.
In that piece I said something to the effect, that unless the message was clear and to the point that “Average” americans would loose interest.
Looks like that is exactly what’s happening.
I was chatting with someone yesterday who seemed to thing that the violence that has occurred over the past week toward the OWS crowds in many cities will increase the movement instead of disperse it. His thinking is that “average”americans will take offense at the OWS camps being systematically dismantled by police, and that they will join the OWS crowd in solidarity.
I understand his point but I don’t think he’s correct.
The problem remains the same. The OWS “Movement” still has a very incoherent message.
They haven’t created a simple message that America can actually get behind. This is in part because of the spin created by the media, but mostly it’s because OWS hasn’t done any kind of work at controlling the message that the media is presenting on their behalf.
Scenes of police tear-gassing crowds doesn’t have the same impact on us as a people as it did in the 60s. We’ve seen too much. We’ve had 10 years of war up close and personal. We’ve had scandal and trials about everything from abuses of political power to the treatment of our enemies in prison and what constitutes abuse. (For the record… making a prisoner wear panties on his head isn’t abuse… humiliation maybe, but not abuse.)
We as a people have become numb to riots and violence in general. It doesn’t matter where they happen they always look the same, they always end the same and just aren’t shocking anymore.
Apparently, the Occupy crowd is thinking that police brutality will galvanize public opinion.
They may be right…
The $64,000 question will be which way? Will public opinion swing in sympathy toward the Occupy crowd regardless of their complete lack of platform? Or will public opinion swing towards an attitude of “ABOUT TIME, get those squatters out of the public spaces and make ’em stop hindering folks going about their business”
I think that the fickle beast of public opinion is about to move toward the “Get out of here ya BUMS!” side of Occupy.
Occupy Wall Streets 15 minutes of fame is over.
In my opinion they’ve done nothing but HURT the protest process. For the remainder of this election season, anyone protesting, regardless of their message will be seen as a bunch of directionless irrelevant idiots from Occupy.
Occupy Wall Streets legacy will be that they killed the public protest and by abusing their free speech they silenced us all.
Nice Job!
Is Social Media Bad?
Several weeks ago, After reading of another suicide by an all too young man who had been bullied incessantly I found myself thinking about Social Media.
Social Media inherently is neither good or bad on it’s own.
It’s the WAY that people use it for that cause the problems.
The young man who recently killed himself over being bullied brought home to me a major difference between when I was in school and now.
While I was bullied a bit when I was AT school, When I got home I didn’t have to think about being bullied at all. I was on my own turf. I had a break, and the bullies were far too lazy to walk the three blocks over to my house to bully me in person.
There was a built-in system of checks & balances. I only had to put up with those assholes while I was at school and I could use the afternoon and evening while I was pretending to do my homework to figure out the best way to avoid the bullies for a couple of days.
Bullies being what they are, if you’re out of their sight for a day or so you’re typically forgotten for several weeks. Oh don’t worry, the bullies would always come back around to you again.
I was a redhead when I was younger, I got to deal with taunts about my hair color, “I’d rather be dead than red”, taunts about my sports inability, “You (run, throw, catch) like a girl”, and later “the ever present “Faggot!”.
In my defense, once my legs and arms slowed down in their growth I suddenly became a lot more co-ordinated, and no longer ran, threw, or caught like a girl.
With Social media and the 24 /7 connectedness each of us deals with, we find it harder to retreat.
As an Adult I know I can turn off my cell phone, and I don’t feel compelled to be on Facebook, or Twitter, Tumblr, or any other system that invades my privacy except on my terms.
Our children don’t seem to understand that connectedness is something that they control.
It may be more proper to say our children, being social animals and craving approval simply don’t have the maturity to exercise their right to to retreat by turning off the electronics.
Maybe that’s the real lesson.
We know that parental controls probably won’t work, and we really shouldn’t expect the schools to stop all bullying. I’m firmly against so called “Zero Tolerance” policies.
These policies are unenforceable and in fact often punish the wrong persons. Saying Zero Tolerance to most teenagers is like waving a red flag in front of a bull.
Perhaps we should instead teach that technology, while essentially a good thing does have a down side and that each of us needs to remember ultimately we have control over what we see, hear, and participate in.
Social media isn’t bad, but it is certainly prone to abuse. Dealing with that abuse is as simple as blocking people that are abusive and forbidding anonymous posts.
This isn’t a bad thing. It’s simply exercising your right to limit what you have to put up with.
Penn State Molestation
I have been reading about the disturbing events in a variety of news sources. Today there was an article on one of the CNN sites that caught my attention.
Apparently, new laws are being called for in Pennsylvania that would deal with how and when sexual abuse is reported.
This raises a couple of questions for me.
Do we really need another law that says abuse should be reported?
We already have laws on the books that deal with this kind of thing, the failure here was that the police didn’t get called immediately.
Why aren’t the rules of common sense enough? Screw telling your boss you saw another boss fucking a boy in the locker room showers, walk to the nearest phone and dial 911 tell the operator you need the cops and at least two ambulances. (One for the child, and then other for the remains of the molester) then leave the phone off the hook so that 911 can record the soundtrack as a cautionary tale for other molesters.
No matter how strongly a law is written if it’s not enforced or enforceable then you’re wasting your time. In fact, you may be giving a scumbag lawyer yet another opportunity to 1) Get a perpetrator off on a technicality because an overly complex law wasn’t followed to the letter. 2) Allow someone with a grudge, or who was overly zealous to destroy some poor schmuck because they were seen naked where a child might have seen them. (There was a case like that in Huntington Beach, CA)
Odious and complicated laws seem to get us in more trouble than they prevent. I think we should let common sense prevail.
A section of the article really caught my attention.
Outside of the legal concerns, many question why McQueary did not stop what he allegedly saw happening in the showers in 2002.
“How does McQueary, a 28-year-old grad student, look in the showers of a facility and see a grown man raping a 10-year-old child and not instinctively grab a baseball bat and not protect this child? How does he live with himself?” asked Richard Hermann, legal analyst and criminal defense attorney.
Why didn’t McQueary instinctively grab a baseball bat?
REALLY?
Ok Let me explain it to you.
This is what comes from telling Men over and over again that they’re too violent, and testosterone poisoned.
This is what happens when you create law after law that protect, and allow criminals to sue and WIN cases against their victims.
This is what happens when you tell a Man he can’t defend himself, his family, or others because he’s supposed to be like a little schoolboy and go tell the authorities.
This is what happens when you create a culture where it is preferable to abdicate the responsibilities associated with being a Man because getting involved and taking a stand is simply too expensive financially, emotionally, and professionally.
I’d wager, that if McQueary had stepped into that shower, and said “Remove your dick from that boys ass” carrying a baseball bat, that the fine Attorney Richard Hermann would have been demanding McQuearys’ prosecution for threatening a superior with bodily harm in front of a child!
SO people… which do you want?
Pussy men who don’t take action?
OR
Men who take action, even though they might sometimes get it wrong? Are you willing to accept and PROTECT Men that take action, even though they might screw up?
You can’t have it both ways!
I’ll take the Men that take action ANY TIME, how about you?
Here’s another chilling fact. Even IF we as a society decide that we really want Men again it’s going to be 20 years at minimum. Because there are too few Men who remember the old rules, the old ways, and fewer still that are in any kind of position to teach those ways.
McQueary may have been a coward, he may have been in deep shock, he may have been simply confused about what to do, mixed signals from the society at large can do that. He will live with his conscience and the vile image of a 10 year old being raped while he did nothing for the rest of his life, and that may be punishment enough.
However, according to the Grand Jury findings McQueary wasn’t the ONLY man to witness improper events happening in that shower. Other maintenance / cleaning staff were aware of other events and they also did nothing.
To me the inaction of these men speaks volumes about how Men in general have been villainized and castrated in our society.
I’m proud to be one of the old fucks, I’ve still got a set of low hanging hairy ones.
I’d have been in that shower in two long strides and when I was done… well the man who was fucking the 10 year old wouldn’t be using his dick for anything except pissing ever again.
Sometimes you do what you know in your heart is RIGHT and you accept the consequences even when you’re punished for doing the right thing.
It’s thin comfort but you can sleep at night… As a Man.
Will Kim Kardashian go down in flames? We can only hope…
Another train wreck.
On the plus side at least she’s not a train wreck because of drugs, alcohol, grand theft, or petty theft. She’s managed to demonstrate why the “Sanctity of Marriage” crowd has been sniffing a little too much incense in their weekly prayer meetings.
72 days in a “Committed” relationship is almost but not quite as long as some gay friends long term relationships.
I suppose that I should say thanks. You know, under that old line “The Enemy of my Enemy is my friend”. She has done a great job of weakening the “Marriage is Sacred” argument across the nation.
Clearly marriage is about material things. Goods, land, money, fame, and of course being able to legally & morally play with someone else’s genitalia, if only for a short time.
On the Down side, every fucking place you look there is Kim Kardashian!
She’s right up there with Brittney, Lindsay, Charlie, Michael, Chris & well you know the list….
Time for all of them to take their wrecks and exit the public stage.
I’m tossing my cookies right along with Christopher Titus in his comedy show “Neverlution”
Please make it stop, raaallllfffff!