General Discussion
In reply to the discussion: Forgive me if I roll my eyes at your precious outrage about torture. [View all]True Blue Door
(2,969 posts)I guess if something irritates you, it's all the same.
What I was doing when you were protesting the WTO (because of sea turtles or whatever the fuck) was organizing for Al Gore's presidential campaign, before I could even vote. Perhaps you were organizing for Nader?
As for the Iraq War, I didn't participate in any street protests because I'm not capable of pacifism, and would have been a liability in a peaceful protest. But while you were participating in the (yes, helpful) ritual of expressing yourself and letting cops attack you, I was spending money and time I didn't have doing woefully amateurish journalism with no help, no resources, and no training, because I simply couldn't stand what was happening - actual, independent research, not reposting shit other people said.
I was tracing out cash flows and lines of authority from public documents, without any encouragement from "traditional" activists, and posting them to discussion forums where people like you yawned because it didn't make them feel like a "rebel" to read a flow chart showing where the money for certain parts of the Iraq War propaganda campaign was flowing. I will never know if my work achieved anything, but at least similar work by others did. Street protests make people feel better about themselves - that's mostly what they're for; my work made me feel worse. But the mere possibility that facts I provided guided at least one useful decision by someone made it worthwhile.
As for Occupy, again, not a pacifist - you don't want me near your protests. But anyway, I was too busy trying to work out how their decentralized near-pure democracy modes could be generalized to large population scales: You know, actually trying to do something with the ideas they were pioneering. Here's the difference between what I was doing and what you were doing: What you were doing ended when the uncoordinated, nebulous mass-movement you cavalierly namedrop dissolved at the first touch of police brutality. Why you're bragging about that is kind of bizarre. I mean, if you're able to do that - get hit by cops and not hit back - why aren't you and all the rest of them still there? Someone wave another issue in your face and distract you for a few minutes until you forgot about Occupy?
Anyway, I'm still studying the lessons that can be learned about democratic systems theory from those protests - not that you give a shit, since intellectualism is "bourgeois," right? Sorry I can't be a part of the trustafarian perpetual protest club.