On November 04 2011 00:57 0neder wrote: The occupy movement is foolish. The larger government gets, the more collusion there will be with the private sector....so you want more government and 'occupation'? Sad...
Yet easily a top 3 demand would be to remove money from politics The assumption that more government means more cronyism is misconceived it assumes we will always have cronyism no matter what and there is nothing we can do to minimize it. And with that kind of attitude why bother with government participation at all why not just have dictators probably just as likely to serve the public interest as business.
People payed plenty of attention to the tea party, and it wasn't publicly disruptive.
Just saying "take money out of politics" isn't going to do anything...just ask Brazil. They've banned lobbying and government corruption is rampant. If you really want to eliminate special interests from the government, you need to take away the incentive. That means smaller government with less regulatory power. Regulations protect the rich, not the other way around, because the rich are the ones who write the regulations.
He's defending corporations because they fulfill people's needs. That's great, good thing they're not protesting against corporations per se. They're protesting against a system they believe is dysfunctional. Apparently, for mr. Bill Whittle, they should just be greatful that they have it good and not that they could and should have it better. The graphs that have been presented in this thread strongly disproves his point that growth is evening out, it's only evened out for the bottom 80 or so % of people.
Protestors are doing a very noble cause, standing up for what they believed in. And I applaud them, however the change that they insist will NEVER come to reality. Our monetary system is on it's last leg; no financial reform will save us from the coming currency crisis.
For far too long we've taken for granted the priviledge and extravagant of our world's reserve currency. The debt that we've incurred will never be paid back. We will continue to borrow and inflate our monetary supplies until the inevtiable happens.
All Occupy Wall Street will do is create anger, unnecessary riots, and panic among people. No one group is truly resonsible for this disaster. Those who played a major role in decision making, no longer serve their terms.
On November 04 2011 00:59 semantics wrote: If you don't inconvenience people no one pays attention to a peaceful protest=p
On November 04 2011 00:57 0neder wrote: The occupy movement is foolish. The larger government gets, the more collusion there will be with the private sector....so you want more government and 'occupation'? Sad...
Yet easily a top 3 demand would be to remove money from politics The assumption that more government means more cronyism is misconceived it assumes we will always have cronyism no matter what and there is nothing we can do to minimize it. And with that kind of attitude why bother with government participation at all why not just have dictators probably just as likely to serve the public interest as business.
People payed plenty of attention to the tea party, and it wasn't publicly disruptive.
Just saying "take money out of politics" isn't going to do anything...just ask Brazil. They've banned lobbying and government corruption is rampant. If you really want to eliminate special interests from the government, you need to take away the incentive. That means smaller government with less regulatory power. Regulations protect the rich, not the other way around, because the rich are the ones who write the regulations.
tea party has best buddies contract with Cable fox news network! And if fox picks it up the rest of the channels will pick it up becuase fox has the most viewers. If you reduce government you need strong labor laws and unions to back them up else to say regulations protect is rich is to ignore history. Again how many well known poisons and drugs were sold in the US before the FDA plenty, every cure all was usually just an opiate or form of cocaine to which after the civil war the dangers of were clear to the public but without regulation forcing companies to put such items on their labels they sold it always. Do you know that x-rays was sold as a cure for baldness (ironically if anything it would create baldness due to radiation burns). With regulation the triangle shirtwaist factory fire wouldn't have occurred because then business couldn't lack women inside the building until their shift is over. Again just becuase Brazil's try at removing corruption failed doesn't mean there is no way to minimize corruption, that is defeatist. To say government only protects large business is a fallacy, somehow the people who say regulation kills jobs also say that it protects large business having both sides of the coin, which can be true for a select few business mostly dealing with small start ups and safety regulations but to imply that it's all is wrong. Brazil's corruption afaik is far more overt anyways not the same as the US in which the people in office are rich and thus side with the rich on issues, the idea of removing money from elections and lobbying is to create a populist government not one based on who spends more gets office. http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2011/oct/17/occupy-wall-street/occupy-wall-street-protesters-sign-says-94-percent/
From now on it is officially more important to have the confidence of "markets" than the confidence of people in their once democratically elected government.
First he creates a utopian image of well-being and prosperity in the united states, ignoring what has been a dismal reality of growing poverty and desperation for many people over many years. And he does this all the while citing the 'asymptote,' as if this mysterious mathematical phenomenon were an astrological sign hailing the end of empires worldwide. Repent, ye weak-willed lazy consumers, your end is nigh!
His proposed solution is to conjure up for millions of americans a peaceful spot of land in the woods where they can live out some sort of american settler nostalgia. Another flight of fancy that blatantly ignores the reality of many attempts at food justice by low income people.
In his mind, unless your 'hard work' takes the form of his quasi-imperialist pipe-dream it doesn't count. So much for the thousands of protestors slogging away through midnight meetings and camping out in the bitter cold while striving to find solutions to inclusive organizing and a better tomorrow.
All of this, on top of his sycophantic attitude towards corporations that provide "endless" supplies of energy and are all too happy to "kill for us" (!), among other tasks we are too lazy to do ourselves. Amazingly, just after he has chastised the occupy movement for not doing enough themselves (he ignores that protestors have successful formed and maintained a massive national movement campaigning for social, economic, and political justice, on their own) he encourages them to rely more on corporate generosity.
He should probably take his own advice and spend 1% of his year on the ground with the occupy movement so he can view them as they are and not through the distorted lens of his biased perspective on reality.
On November 04 2011 01:30 AZN)Boy wrote: Protestors are doing a very noble cause, standing up for what they believed in. And I applaud them, however the change that they insist will NEVER come to reality. Our monetary system is on it's last leg; no financial reform will save us from the coming currency crisis.
For far too long we've taken for granted the priviledge and extravagant of our world's reserve currency. The debt that we've incurred will never be paid back. We will continue to borrow and inflate our monetary supplies until the inevtiable happens.
All Occupy Wall Street will do is create anger, unnecessary riots, and panic among people. No one group is truly resonsible for this disaster. Those who played a major role in decision making, no longer serve their terms.
OK Nero, grab your fiddle.
To quote James Baldwin: ' I know that what I'm asking is impossible. But in our time, as in every time, the impossible is least that one can demand—and one is, after all, emboldened by the spectacle of human history in general, and American Negro history in particular, for it testifies to nothing less than the perpetual achievement of the impossible.'
On November 04 2011 00:59 semantics wrote: If you don't inconvenience people no one pays attention to a peaceful protest=p
On November 04 2011 00:57 0neder wrote: The occupy movement is foolish. The larger government gets, the more collusion there will be with the private sector....so you want more government and 'occupation'? Sad...
Yet easily a top 3 demand would be to remove money from politics The assumption that more government means more cronyism is misconceived it assumes we will always have cronyism no matter what and there is nothing we can do to minimize it. And with that kind of attitude why bother with government participation at all why not just have dictators probably just as likely to serve the public interest as business.
People payed plenty of attention to the tea party, and it wasn't publicly disruptive.
Just saying "take money out of politics" isn't going to do anything...just ask Brazil. They've banned lobbying and government corruption is rampant. If you really want to eliminate special interests from the government, you need to take away the incentive. That means smaller government with less regulatory power. Regulations protect the rich, not the other way around, because the rich are the ones who write the regulations.
Tea Party ended up being usurped and taken over by right wing politicians and news organizations. What the Tea Party is today is a much smaller faction of what it used to be 2 years ago.
As for lobbyists in government, they aren't inherently corrupt, or even mostly corrupt. When a community gets a group together to contact their congressman and send 1 or 2 people on their behalf, that is a lobby. There are plenty of lobbyists who do little more than bring information to issues without doing anything to "bribe" the congressman.
However, if campaign funding were turned into a public expense and commercial airtime was distributed via FCC regulation, that would have real effects on reform.
America’s two-tiered justice system – specifically, the way political and financial elites are now vested with virtually absolute immunity from the rule of law even when they are caught committing egregious crimes, while ordinary Americans are subjected to the world’s largest and one of its harshest and most merciless penal states even for trivial offenses. As a result, law has been completely perverted from what it was intended to be – the guarantor of an equal playing field which would legitimize outcome inequalities – into its precise antithesis: a weapon used by the most powerful to protect their ill-gotten gains, strengthen their unearned prerogatives, and ensure ever-expanding opportunity inequality.
On November 03 2011 05:34 Amaroq64 wrote: Every person must think to some degree to perform labor. Before you can identify/assemble/discover/move/define/assess, you must think. An arm and a hammer are both tools that the thinking mind uses for its own ends. True, you must perform physical actions in reality in order to create value, but the more thought you put into the process, the more value you can create.
I think your definition of thinking and using the mind is very broad and frankly I don't think the inclusion of muscle-memory is relevant to anything in this context. Even more so, you are rambling quite a bit without any logical cornerstones in your rant towards Semantics. If you are objectivist, then for gods sake provide reason for trusting your assumptions. What I read from you so far is very subjective.
That's why i discount any extreme absolutist views, they aren't built on reality...
On November 03 2011 22:48 ShadowWolf wrote: Re: previous posts: I refuse to discuss Austrian Economics and/or Objectivism. It has literally 0 to do with OWS and it's just off-topic stuff. Sorry.
My extreme absolutist views are built on reality. And have everything to do with OWS.
Sorry.
Dogmatic skepticism was originally a (retarded) counter to dogmatic absolutism based on religious faith. The skepticists never thought to question whether there can be absolutes based on facts instead of faith. Instead, in order to reject faith, they rejected absolutes, and effectively rejected any possibility of objective truth.
Without objective truth, without absolutes, anything is possible. An apple can be an apple today and a unicorn tomorrow. The sun might rise today and refuse to rise tomorrow. Freedom might be good for humans one day and slavery good for humans the next day. Or some freedom might be good for humans, but only if tempered by some enslavement (controls). When absolutes are out the window, anything goes, and you can ignore the nature and requirements of human life when asserting your ideal social systems. You can inch us away from a free society toward a statism by saying "Freedom is well and good, but we need some (more and more) controls." Either freedom is or isn't good for human beings. Which is it? There is no middle ground.
When you have a true and fully consistent, reality-grounded and oriented worldview (Objectivism), and/or a true and consistent, reality-grounded economic view (Austrian economics), it has everything to do with everything important that happens in the world. Including OWS.
I mentioned before that to the extent that the protesters are only protesting the bailouts, I agree with them. The government should not be bailing out anyone. It's just another example of the horrible things that happen when the market is not free. But I highly doubt that most of them are well educated enough for that to be their only concern. I'm sure they're lumping in legitimate businessmen with the evil cronies without even realizing it, and I'm sure they're pushing for more welfare statism. In their ignorance, they're fighting for everything that is causing their problems (statism) in the first place and attacking everything that could save them (the free market).
Another problem I have with them is the form that their protest took. An "Occupation", ignoring every individual right, including property rights, and replacing them with their "right" to occupy and protest on other peoples' property. They don't think that occupying other peoples' property is a violation of anyone's rights, and then scream about how their rights are being violated when a police officer attempts to remove them from property that isn't theirs. It's obviously just a bunch of leftists who want to see how much they can get away with. How far they can go in their attempt to overturn the concept of property rights before someone stops them.
Someone wanted me to prove myself to demonstrate that I'm not being subjective. I like to be as clear as possible, so here goes. I'll explain myself.
I've noticed that the Austrians and other explicit and implicit free-marketeers in this thread have done an excellent job providing the facts to prove that the free market works. IE, that Capitalism is practical. They probably believe that if only they can explain their view logically enough, the enemies of the free market will see the error of their ways. But they're wrong. They're projecting their own rational and self-honest personalities onto these other people and thinking they're better than they really are. Socialists, communists, and other types of statists will never give a damn about how well the free market works, because they view it as evil. At best, a necessary evil required to build up an infrastructure that their ideal (statist) society can use to survive. At worst, an unnecessary evil. But what's constant between them is the belief that the free market is evil.
The free-marketeers can prove the practicality of Capitalism until they're blue in the face, but that will never stop the opponents of the free market from fighting for what they believe is right, the truth be damned.
So I'm here to provide the philosophical and ethical justification for the free market. To give the other free marketeers "intellectual ammunition", if you will. It has been long ago demonstrated that the free market works. So the front that this intellectual war must be fought on is whether the free market is right or wrong. I'll be arguing that the free market is morally right, and that any person or system that opposes it is wrong. Including the Occupiers, to the extent that they are fighting for socialism. As long as the Left maintains the moral high ground, America will be doomed.
The most fundamental issues underlying the fight between the free market and statism are questions of the mind and of morality. Is reason or feelings supreme? Is self-interest of self-sacrifice good?
The answer to the first question determines the answer to the second. And the answer to the first and second determine everything else a person comes to believe.
Every living creature has some method and tool of survival. An animal has teeth and hunts. Humans have conceptual conciousness, and they think and produce. So if you want to live, you must use your tool of survival. You must think. This is a fact that can be demonstrated by observing any and every living human. Even the ones who don't think or produce are surviving off of someone else's thought and productivity.
If you're on a desert island, how should you behave? If you want to live, you should of course think and produce. These are requirements of human life. But what ultimate goal should your efforts be directed toward? Promoting your own life, or sacrificing it for something else? Obviously, you want to think and produce for your own life. Taking this as morally good results in a moral code geared to life. Taking on a morality of sacrifice results in you working for your own destruction.
Now, if it's morally right for an individual on a desert island, it's still morally right for an individual in the midst of a society. An individual's life still has certain requirements, a human still has certain tools that he must use to survive. Only now, there's a bunch of other people who should also be working for their own lives as well. The question of social systems is the answers of of ethics applied to this situation.
If it's right for every individual to pursue their own life, what kind of social system should we construct in order to achieve this. The answer is Capitalism. When the founding fathers came up with the inalienable individual rights, they weren't just arbitrarily defining a set of rights. They were identifying conditions of human survival that must be protected when humans are living together in a society. The right to life is obvious. Everyone should own their own life and not be anybody else's slave. The right to liberty is the right to be free from coercion. To be free to act on your own judgment. If you are not free to act on what you know about reality, then your life is impaired to the extent you are being forced to act against your better judgment. The right to property is the right to keep what you produce and use it however you wish. If you are not allowed to keep what you work for, you are a slave. The right to the pursuit of happiness, is the right to set long-ranged goals and pursue them. And also simply the right to pursue your own self-interest. If you are not allowed to pursue your own interest, long or short term, you can only act for your own destruction.
Capitalism is the only morally righteous social system, because it is the one that protects these rights. These rights extend from requirements of human life, necessitated by the context of a society, and they are right because acting in one's self-interest is right.
If you grasp this, you can grasp why there is such fierce opposition to the free market today, regardless of how much proof there is that it works. The most widely accepted moral code in the world is self-sacrifice, which is fundamentally opposed to the very foundation of the free market. Every thing about Capitalism protects, promotes, and rewards self-interest, in the form of profits. This goes against everything that a selfless person believes is morally right.
A morality of self-interest logically necessitates individual rights and the free market. To understand why statists of all types oppose the free market in favor of their various kinds of statism (socialism, communism, fascism), you should understand how their morality of self-sacrifice logically necessitates systems like these.
There's no rational justification for self-sacrifice on a desert island. So right off the bat, it's an irrational, self-destructive morality. It revolves around things other than the individual, always giving him rules and regulations stating the things that are bigger than himself that he must sacrifice himself to. Maybe it's a God, maybe it's the "greater good" of a society. It doesn't matter much.
So once you're living with other people, if self-sacrifice is right, then you should serve them. But what if you don't want to? Don't you have a right to your own life? Don't you have inalienable rights? No, you don't. Not if you started with a morality of self-sacrifice, you don't. You still have the same requirements of life, since you're the same kind of being no matter which morality you choose. But you have no moral right to have those conditions protected, under a selfless morality. The only rights in this kind of a society are the rights that the Left likes to throw around. The right to an education, the right to food, the right to wages, the right to retirement, etc. Who provides these rights? Everyone who is capable of it. Who receives them? Everyone who is incapable. From those according to ability, to those according to need.
Since sacrifice for the greater good (which is, everyone other than yourself) is morally right, there's nothing wrong whatsoever with the government forcing you to make those sacrifices. Tada! Statism.
What does all this have to do with the Occupiers? Everything. To the extent that they're protesting the free market, they're acting on their selfless moralities and attacking everything that embodies self-interest. They aren't so innocent that all they want is the successful peoples' money. They can't stand that other people are more successful than them, so rather than lift themselves up, they want to bring every successful person down to their level. They hate success and they want it destroyed.
Don't believe me? Yes, it's too monstrous to believe. But here is an example of it right here.
I mentioned before that to the extent that the protesters are only protesting the bailouts, I agree with them. The government should not be bailing out anyone. It's just another example of the horrible things that happen when the market is not free. But I highly doubt that most of them are well educated enough for that to be their only concern. I'm sure they're lumping in legitimate businessmen with the evil cronies without even realizing it, and I'm sure they're pushing for more welfare statism. In their ignorance, they're fighting for everything that is causing their problems (statism) in the first place and attacking everything that could save them (the free market).
That's right dam those homogeneous protesters for lumping people together in nice neat groups...
Another problem I have with them is the form that their protest took. An "Occupation", ignoring every individual right, including property rights, and replacing them with their "right" to occupy and protest on other peoples' property. They don't think that occupying other peoples' property is a violation of anyone's rights, and then scream about how their rights are being violated when a police officer attempts to remove them from property that isn't theirs. It's obviously just a bunch of leftists who want to see how much they can get away with. How far they can go in their attempt to overturn the concept of property rights before someone stops them.
I'm not going to argue on how a free market should be ran it's clear to me that it would be like trying to convince the pope that there is no god, irregardless of if the argument has merit or not it will be dismissed meaning there is no argument as the pope wont argue only preach, you "argue" as if you are objective yet you demand things to be absolute based on theorycrafting not history. FYI the fact you label the occupy movement in the US all as left liberal socialist that worships marxism proves how little you know about individual occupy movements which aren't all compeltely connected to each other, there are plenty of libertarians that are there for similar reasons they just conflict on how we should solve the issue.
If you're on a desert island, how should you behave? If you want to live, you should of course think and produce. These are requirements of human life. But what ultimate goal should your efforts be directed toward? Promoting your own life, or sacrificing it for something else? Obviously, you want to think and produce for your own life. Taking this as morally good results in a moral code geared to life. Taking on a morality of sacrifice results in you working for your own destruction.
Your thought experiment demonstrates your own morality, not some objective truth.
As you should know, since you are someone who claims to believe in objective truth, objective truth is in the order of 'Gravity is a force of attraction acting between two (or more) objects and its strength is determined in part by the relative masses of those objects.' The claim that morality is objective is an authoritarian attempt to impose certain logical perspectives that bias one party or point of view over others.
Establishing moral relatively was, however, never the main point of your argument, as you make clear. Your intent was rather to open moral grounds for supporting free market capitalism.
Considering the reality of truly free market, totally unfettered capitalism, I don't think you can, or should, make any moral claim for its superiority. Free market capitalism, in perhaps the purest form ever seen on this earth, uses every manner of trickery and deceit to make a profit: the period immediately following the industrial revolution in England is a testament to the utter disaster that is complete deregulation. History is full of examples of rampant human rights abuse, which is perhaps an anachronistic term to use when speaking historically, caused by unregulated capitalistic interests.
You make other half-baked arguments, but of everything else you said I was most concerned by this:
If you are not allowed to pursue your own interest, long or short term, you can only act for your own destruction.
Firstly, as long as you understand only absolutes you will be simply incapable of seeing where and how the pursuit of self-interest is possible under non-capitalist economic systems. And as an immediate second point, I think your own thoughts lack serious reflection since the pursuit of self-interest, when pushed to the absolute in its own direction, is the emergence of conflicting self-interests which eventually subjugate one another eventually resulting in a quasi- or completely totalitarian system.
(1) Respectfully, the question 'is self-interest or self-sacrifice the good?' is loaded and a false dichotomy. We can quite easily answer 'both' and do so consistently.
(2) You can't just say 'that which is right on a desert island is that which is right in all contexts' without some serious further argumentation, that prove the following two things: (a) The relevant unit of moral evaluation is the action. This is because you are evaluating actions to be good or bad on a self-interest/self-sacrifice axis. That which is good, in your view, is that which is self-interested. An action is self-interested not due to its intention, but due to the content of the action; you can act in your self-interest without meaning to act in your self-interest, and I suspect you'd say that's a good action. However, the majority view in the history of philosophy has been that intention is the relevant unit of evaluation, at least partially to avoid problems with moral luck. We condemn the guy as bad who shoots at somebody and misses. (b) That context is irrelevant to the moral value of actions. To take the standard example, lying to your girlfriend because you've been sleeping around in order to continue sleeping around is generally considered to be an ethically dubious action. Lying to a murderer about the location of a person they want to kill is, unless you're Kant, not an ethically dubious action. The same thing is done - you lie - but they, at least intuitively, have different moral values. As a result, we can't just grant (a) and (b) with no further argumentation and premise the rest of our argument on that. They're highly contentious, and background conditions that are necessary for your argument to function.
(3) You've made an inference from the above to the guarantees of the American constitution - life, liberty, property (I'm amused you didn't mention happiness...) - and suggested that this was a necessary link: these things can be guaranteed if and only if Randian capitalism. Maybe this is true if we want to justify these three things as the only three valuable things deontologically, but that again is not something we can take as given.
So there is a movement in Vancouver called Occupy Vancouver that is a complete joke. I was posting about how it was a fucking terrible idea weeks ago, but nevertheless they have chosen to go ahead with it. I personally know a couple of the semi-organizer type people, and they are privileged, most certainly from families in the top 10%, unemployed, and always take advantage of any opportunity they can to smoke weed on wreck beach (the local nude beach where all the hippies go because the cops leave the area alone).
Backdrop: The initial Occupy meeting had thousands of people show up, with a sprinkling of smart people with well-thought out ideas. However, those smart people long vacated the premises after seeing the list of demands that was being concocted by these crazies, and all that is left is about 100 or 150 of the "core" protesters.
It has been fucking hilarious to watch from the sidelines. The articles which have come out in the last 2 days (thats right, just in the last 2 days), not only show how reviled these idiots are, but has shown just how pathetic the Occupy Canada movements are. The comments that have been most upvoted by readers are largely hilarious.
Just so everyone knows, these articles were published in The Globe and Mail, Canada's largest national newspaper, which has a reputation for being center-left. The comments wouldn't be so nice in the National Post...
Not only has the parade had to be rerouted, but it is a huge charity event. The usual location they use to receive, organize, and distribute charitable donations for the needy has had to be changed as well.
The top rated comments:
1. Occupy Wall Street has a point to their message. Occupy Vancouver is nothing but the same old fringe groups you see smoking weed and/or waving signs at the Art Gallery on a regular basis. The problem is they won't go home and are still in the midst of their public tantrum. If you want a real laugh go and look at the 'demands' on their website.
2. Ironic. Most of those Occupy folks are going to need the food bank, no?
3. Get a job you hippies
4. So now some of the LOSERS of our society are ruining a part of Christmas for little Canadian kids.
5. They are ruining Christmas!!!!
6. Hippies ruining it for everyone.
7. Would someone PLEASE think of the children?????!!!!!!!!
The Occupy Vancouver protest has gotten in the way of Santa Claus.
The annual Santa parade in downtown Vancouver, which raises money for food banks, has been forced to change its route this year because of the continuing Occupy protest outside the city art gallery.
The parade usually passes right by the gallery, where the grounds are used for a Christmas Square, offering family entertainment and a drop-off spot for food bank donations.
Parade officials say the route is being changed to avoid the art gallery altogether, and the Christmas Square will be moved to another location.
The parade and Christmas Square, sponsored by Rogers and Coast Capital Savings, are one of the largest food and fundraising events for the Greater Vancouver Food Bank Society, collecting $96,000 and more than 28,000 kilograms of food since 2004.
Vancouver city council debated a motion to remove the Occupy camp Tuesday night, but decided to leave the protest in place for now.
This article is about one of the protesters who overdosed on heroin at the protests! Given that now 1% of the protesters have OD'd on heroin, I've got a new slogan for them: "1% of the protesters have 90% of the overdoses. Occupy Vancouver General Hospital!"
The top rated comments:
1. If he were part of the 1% he could have afforded quality junk. No wonder he is upset.
2. Now the working Canadians have to fork out another 5 to 10 k to treat this junkie, so that he can "occupy" again to demand that social services and welfare be increased, and drugs be legalized......funny ehh??
3. Overdosed by 9:20 ......sounds like he's very serious about the cause
4. The reason it's news worthy is that this guy symbolizes for the useless scumbags occupying public property and demanding more handouts from people who actually work. The more media attention they get, the more obvious it becomes that these worthless degenerates are victims of being lazy and immature and nothing else.
5. What, the Occulosers are just a bunch of drug-addled layabouts?! Colour me shocked.
6. Since these protesters have a list of demands (see their website), maybe those of us who can't cut out of work and pitch a tent at the Art Gallery could demand a few things. For starters, I DEMAND that the pathetic loser who almost OD's on heroin be made to pay any and all medical expenses directly from his own pocket. Why should ordinary Canadians who pay into healthcare have too see any amount skimmed off to pay for his illegal activity? Sound fair?
7. Occupy my veins. Occupy my brain. Yeah - sounds about right.
A quick response saved the life of a young man at Occupy Vancouver who overdosed on a narcotic, Vancouver city fire chief John McKearney says.
A man between the age of 25 and 30 went into full cardiac arrest at 9:20 am Thursday, he said in an interview moments after the man was taken to St. Paul’s Hospital.
“It was very serious,” he said, adding that the man was now breathing and expected to be okay.
Fire chief McKearney attributed the favourable outcome to the quick response.
The man received first aid and then was helped by city firemen who were near the protest site on the plaza outside Vancouver Art Gallery.
Mr. McKearney said it was not immediately clear what drug was in the man’s system but the speculation is that it was heroin, he said.
A visibly shaken man who administered first aid to the overdose victim was at the first aid tent at Occupy Vancouver. But he declined to be interviewed.
"I've just been through a traumatic experience and I don't want to talk about it," he said. He declined to give his name.
Cameron Bode, a member of the Occupy Vancouver media committee, said the young man received better care for his overdose than he likely would have received if Occupy Vancouver was not there.
"We have on-site medical staff who responded to his distress within seconds. Then fire and ambulance people came in," he said.
"We had a conscious person taken away," Mr. Bode said.
"If not for the Occupation, there would have not been the timely attention that he received," he said.
Mr. Bode did not speak directly with those involved in responding to the incident. Based on conversation with others, he speculated that the man who overdosed may have been a drug addict with mental health issues.
Drugs are as common at Occupy Vancouver as in any other community in Vancouver, Mr. Bode said.
The media comittee has a policy of no drugs, no alcohol and no smoking but the general assembly has not endorsed a non-drug use policy, he said.
I do wonder what people think of other occupy movements that aren't in the US, in the US the reasons for it is quite clear what we want to do about it is much murker, esp canada which i thought was doing pretty well for the recession i mean we are the 99% doesn't quite work in canada. I mean i visit about once a week down to occupy oakland or occupy SF, i usually bring some food to donate and just observe how things go for awhile before heading home, what i observe is that people are opening a dialogue about what people feel is not working in our current government and ways to solve the issues, along with the usual professional protesters etc what people think as hippies beating on bongos. I still support those people being there, because i can't be there all day, it doesn't make the movement not representative of my feeling at least not yet.
On November 04 2011 01:30 AZN)Boy wrote: Protestors are doing a very noble cause, standing up for what they believed in. And I applaud them, however the change that they insist will NEVER come to reality. Our monetary system is on it's last leg; no financial reform will save us from the coming currency crisis.
For far too long we've taken for granted the priviledge and extravagant of our world's reserve currency. The debt that we've incurred will never be paid back. We will continue to borrow and inflate our monetary supplies until the inevtiable happens.
All Occupy Wall Street will do is create anger, unnecessary riots, and panic among people. No one group is truly resonsible for this disaster. Those who played a major role in decision making, no longer serve their terms.
the funny part is you are wrong, it is entirely plausible to repay our debt if we could have a true bipartisan deal that did an actual good portion of spending cuts and tax increases.. which would in turn make our monetary system just fine
increase taxes on the rich, major slashes to useless defense budget spending and we are practically there...
Your news is dated, semantics. MF Global went bankrupt before he could negotiate a severance package. The reason why the deal fell through is because of fraud on a whole different scale, estimated 600 million missing from brokerage account. It remains to be seen if that is true and whether or not anyone will be prosecuted.
What this isn't a hard game to play http://markets.financialcontent.com/stocks/news/read/19540600/Hewlett ForceRecrawl: 0 Did he earn his money? how about all the people who participated in the housing bubble fraud and profited from it's collapse the idea that not every rich person worked hard for their money but cheated to get it isn't that out there esp post 2008 You say the deal fell though by why did he get such a deal to begin with why isn't he being prosecuted, how horrible do you have to be do get prosecuted?
On November 04 2011 07:03 semantics wrote: What this isn't a hard game to play http://markets.financialcontent.com/stocks/news/read/19540600/Hewlett ForceRecrawl: 0 Did he earn his money? how about all the people who participated in the housing bubble fraud and profited from it's collapse the idea that not every rich person worked hard for their money but cheated to get it isn't that out there esp post 2008 You say the deal fell though by why did he get such a deal to begin with why isn't he being prosecuted, how horrible do you have to be do get prosecuted?
Why do you care if that guy "earned his money" or not? The shareholders have legal remedies for if they think he was overpaid, because ultimately it is the shareholders which are paying this guy.
Are we putting everyone who makes a huge amount of money on a stake? What if his services in that 11 month period made the company far, far more money than he was paid...
The problem with this movement is all the people who aren't focusing on the corruption issue, but stupidly get distracted by big numbers and jealousy. There are grounds for a legitimate movement, but you seem to have missed it.
On November 04 2011 07:03 semantics wrote: What this isn't a hard game to play http://markets.financialcontent.com/stocks/news/read/19540600/Hewlett ForceRecrawl: 0 Did he earn his money? how about all the people who participated in the housing bubble fraud and profited from it's collapse the idea that not every rich person worked hard for their money but cheated to get it isn't that out there esp post 2008 You say the deal fell though by why did he get such a deal to begin with why isn't he being prosecuted, how horrible do you have to be do get prosecuted?
Why do you care if that guy "earned his money" or not? The shareholders have legal remedies for if they think he was overpaid, because ultimately it is the shareholders which are paying this guy.
Are we putting everyone who makes a huge amount of money on a stake? What if his services in that 11 month period made the company far, far more money than he was paid...
The problem with this movement is all the people who aren't focusing on the corruption issue, but stupidly get distracted by big numbers and jealousy. There are grounds for a legitimate movement, but you seem to have missed it.
Well not everyone who benefits from big money's influence on our legal system directly influenced the legal system it's just a point of illustration and he did not do hp good it's why he was let go and yet he can claw money out of it in 11 months for not making anything or really doing something revolutionary he made 16.8 mil in cash and 18 mil in stock options and you don't think that's fucked up when the avg salary for a worker at hp is somewhere between 40-90k a year depending how high up you are
EPT
