- The blind dissing the blind.
- Socialism, Capitalism, Distributism.
- Cut federal budget by 2/3?
- Buttoned-down radicals
- The other anti-Mormon bigotry.
… This is the funniest part to me: that leaders of a nation incapable of constructing a coherent consensus about reality can accuse its youth of not having a clear program. If the OWS movement stands for anything, it’s a dire protest against the country’s leaders’ lack of a clear program …
Language is failing us, of course. When speaking of “recession,” one is forced into using the twisted, tweaked, gamed categories of economists whose mission is to make their elected bosses look good in spite of anything reality says. I prefer the term contraction, because a.) that is what is really going on, and b.) the economists haven’t got their mendacious mitts around it yet. Contraction means there is not going to be more, only less, and it implies that a reality-based society would make some attempt to acknowledge and manage having less – possibly by doing more.
… The banking frauds of the past twenty years were a conspiracy between government and banks to provide the illusion that an economy based on happy motoring, suburban land development, continual war, and entertainment-on-demand could go on indefinitely ….
(James Howard Kunstler, Occupy Everything)
Socialism: No one owns anything.
Capitalism: A few own everything.
Distributism: Everyone owns enough, and a some own even more.
(Proposed bumper sticker) That’s a tough sell, though, for those who look at a graph like this and conclude that 99% of the population became crazy lazy suddenly around 1979.
I thought Paul Ryan was pretty bold. Hah! Piker! (If image doesn’t display inline, try clicking it. Or go the the Independent Institute MyGovCost.org)
The Occupy Wall Street movement may look radical, but its members’ ideas are less radical than those you might hear at your average Rotary Club … [S]ince the left no longer believes in the nationalization of industry, these “radicals” really have no systemic reforms to fall back on.
…
Don’t be fooled by the clichés of protest movements past. The most radical people today are the ones that look the most boring. It’s not about declaring war on some nefarious elite. It’s about changing behavior from top to bottom. Let’s occupy ourselves.
(David Brooks) Brooks makes the legitimate point that we have problems, not just one problem of a greedy 1%, and that OWS (so far?) fails to address most of them.
William McGurn makes the point that politically-involved Mormons have worse problems than some cornpone Southern Baptist megapastor calling them a “cult.”
Tipsy Teetotaler ن 