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[RedKing]

He probably was referring to the disparity in wealth, and all.

Right, I get that. But in trying to think as an average Joe listening to this...it's meaningless. You have to explain what's unjust and how justice is going to be applied. At worst, it sounds like a euphemism for redistribution of wealth, which gets you conveniently tagged as a "socialist" and your arguments dismissed right out of the gate.

I know this is difficult because things have to be boiled down into soundbites and simplistic comparisons to have much traction in a mass media environment, and these are complicated issues that deserve long and considered debate. But you can't just boil it down to a catchphrase that is meaningless to most of your intended audience.

Look, if I were asked to sum up why I'm protesting I'd say something along the lines of "My CEO tanked the company, got fired, and had a golden parachute worth five times what I'll make in my lifetime." It's short, it's easy to understand, and it plays to a basic sense of unfairness and disparity that is at the heart of the matter. It's inherently counter to the Protestant work ethic that is supposed to be intertwined with the American concept of capitalism. It's something that is liable to strike people as wrong regardless of their political leanings. Once you get them going "Yeah, that's not right" THEN you have an opening to get them interested in learning more.


@Japa: Bengal?

[klingon13524]

Hitler. Just thinking about Hitler.

[Vester]

New People's Army?

Transhumanist communists. My God.

It's the new People's Army, dear, not the Army of New People.

Although that would be pretty frightening.

[RedKing]

New People's Army?

Transhumanist communists. My God.

It's the new People's Army, dear, not the Army of New People.

Kind of like the Judean People's Front and the People's Front of Judea? 

[ToonyMan]

I am in such low spirits this morning.  There's nothing to say right now.  Maybe I'll get better as the 'day' goes on.

[Rose]

You don't get T-shirts with pockets.

And you don't get regular shirts with cool slogans on them.

[Vester]

You don't get T-shirts with pockets.

And you don't get regular shirts with cool slogans on them.

And that's a shame.

EDIT: wait a minute, what kind of pockets are we talking about here?

[SalmonGod]

they want to be so inclusive and so big-tent that they dilute any message they have down to useless fractal noise.

I think this is simplifying the matter in an unfriendly fashion.  I can think of more sympathetic explanations off the top of my head, 10 minutes after dragging myself out of a scarce 4 hours of sleep.

First, I think the left tends to give lots of thought and importance to how issues fit together.  They tend to think more about underlying principles and social theory behind a problem, and how they are the same ones responsible for a wide range of other problems.  For instance, there is a feminist and lgbt presence at almost every far-left leaning protest, and they're not there strictly because of the issues at hand.  They're there because they recognize how that relates to their own cause, via common motivations rooted in prejudiced/patriarchal attitudes.

Second, because these protests are typically targeted at a specific group of people, and those people are responsible for a wide variety of problems.  Think about any W8 or WTO assembly, where there is always a huge protest in response to their presence.  Those people are responsible for a LOT of problems on an international level.  I would think that having representation present for each and every one of them would only strengthen the message that "these are bad people who cause a lot of problems", but then I tend to think very, very differently from the majority of people...

I'm not going to disagree with you about it being a problem.  I just don't like to see it written off as the participants being naive or unprofessional.

[Mindmaker]

First day of university was scary. Oh, I really suck at taking notes.
Well at least I bught the specialist literature early.

To all of my fellow students:
What is your way of memorizing literary content.
Making notes? Reading it very carefully? Reading it several times?
Problem is it will be part of an exam in early december and I'll be learning a lot of other stuff in between.

I'm just worried.

[kaijyuu]

I'm good at absorbing information so I usually just read it once unless it's a difficult subject.

[Rose]

You don't get T-shirts with pockets.

And you don't get regular shirts with cool slogans on them.

And that's a shame.

EDIT: wait a minute, what kind of pockets are we talking about here?

all my shirts have a breast pocket, which is smallish, and a pair if side pockets that can each hold a mass-market paperback, or a desktop hard-drive.

[RedKing]

You're right on both counts. But my point is that there's often a tremendous disconnect between people who have this sort of high academic understanding of the problem, and the general audience they're trying to reach. Yes, there's a general solidarity of minority groups and human rights issues, such that a Palestinian activist and a Colombian human rights monitor and someone trying to support GLBT rights in Uganda all have commong ground, and they might all even have relevance at the Occupy Wall Street rally in a broad sense of "fighting imbalance in power structures".

The problem is that the average American sitting at home trying to make sense of what these protests are all about:

1. Are not versed in a host of social, economic and human rights issues. Unlike many of the organizers and participants.
2. Do not see the interconnectedness of these issues if they are aware of them.
3. Are not left with a clear, concise message.

If you ask a Tea Partier what their rallies are all about, you'll get boilerplate rhetoric about "defending liberty" and "taking back the country", etc. But when boiled down, they have two main demands: reduce government spending, and cut taxes. Simple, concise, easy to understand (even if the two together are a recipe for disaster at the current time).

If you ask an Occupier (I don't know what the in-group term for themselves is yet) what the rallies are all about, you'll get "Oh, it's about a lot of things," followed by a laundry list of what that individual's main complaints are. Yes, it's a much more honest and grassroots response. It's also going to lose most people as soon as you say "a lot of things". KISS principle. Pick one or two main themes, find a concise, catchy way to express it, and repeat the hell out of that meme. The "rent is too damn high!" guy caught on because what he was saying was easy to express and rang true, even if it was just symptomatic of a larger problem.

You have to start small and focused. The Tea Party didn't start off with its current Cloudcuckoolander demands. It started off as being about fiscal responsibility and balancing the budget. Sound, reasonable, and something that could get bipartisan support. It was only after that that they began extending their agenda to cutting government itself, cutting education, being anti-gay, anti-immigrant, etc.

If the Occupy Wall Street wants to succeed, they need to focus on things that the 99% can get behind without needing a course in PoliSci 101 to understand. Personally, I think CEO compensation is a good issue for that. It's hard for anybody to argue that it's fair to pay millions to a CEO who fucks up bigtime and gets fired, because it doesn't jive with what happens to everyone else that gets fired. They may still tell themselves that successful CEOs deserve obscene amounts of money, because that's what they've been told capitalism is all about. But at least they're acknowledging that there's a serious problem with the current system. From there, you can segue into related issues like banking reform, corporate tax loopholes, offshoring, etc.

You can't try to sell people on all the problems all at once, because it's simply too much to process.

[quinnr]

So there's this really cool project in my area called 'TeenLine' where teenagers volunteer and it's a hotline for other teens to call and have a confidential place to talk about their issues, ect. However, they only do training once a year (I just missed it last year), and it's three weeks long of three days a week, from 6PM to 9PM. With a test and interview at the end.
Which is all fine. (Getting all my homework done will suck though!)

Except my Irish Step Dancing classes are from 7PM-8:15PM, so I'll have to miss them for three weeks. The tuition is not small for them, and I do like my dancing...to make it worse I missed last weeks class as well due to some blah, so I'll miss a month straight of dance class. I'm hoping if I e-mail the teachers there is another location the school is on different days, or perhaps they'd allow me to go to one of the beginner classes for the month or something, but I don't know. Bleh.

[Mindmaker]

I'm good at absorbing information so I usually just read it once unless it's a difficult subject.

Yeah, I think I'll try this approach at first. Thanks.

[Aqizzar]

I've always had an ambiguous conception of things like Autism and social disorders.  The cynic in the back of my mind always wants to say it's over-analyzing differences of personality, and that anyone can do anything socially if they exercise enough willpower and try at it.  The rational side of my mind, the one I try to listen to, knows that the brain is an organ like any other organ, and it has many involuntary functions and room for fundamental differences in performance; when your seat of consciousness wants to think something or act a certain way, there's only so much you can do about it from within your brain.

I've never been sure on where I place myself in regards to these things, not least because I don't really know anything about Autism and such.  Maybe even more than that, I think self-diagnosis, especially of psychological and mental conditions, is ridiculous and powerfully uncool.  And some of it is just plain old pride - I don't want to be told that there's something my brain just "can't" do, and I certainly don't want to hear that from myself.


I am now on Day 2 of being a work-from-home telemarketer, and I feel like I'm going to have a stroke.  I've always been a somewhat reclusive person, but I never felt like I had a fundamental problem with talking to people.  Certainly I don't think I lack for empathy or understanding of other people's reactions.  It's more about myself, that I am terribly socially-conscious, especially about attracting attention to myself.  I was worse as a child, and maybe some of it is lingering gradeschool scars or something, I don't know.  But cold-calling people from my home is rapidly killing me.

The more I think about it, the more clear the causes become.  I don't have a problem in itself with being the center of attention, as long as I'm prepared for it.  I can give speeches, even do stand-up comedy (if not improvise).  The similarity in all those is that my "audience", whether a stage or classroom or family dinner, is made of people who want to hear from me.  They're sitting there, maybe patiently, maybe disinterestedly, but they know they have to listen to me if they don't already like me.  I'm in a position of power over the audience, because they came to me (or it's their fault for being there if they didn't want to be).  I could be a cashier or a car salesman or a goddamn rockstar (if I had the wherewithal), because I'm still the one in charge of the human interaction.

Telemarketing, or going door to door like my last failed job, is different.  I'm contacting people who don't want to hear from me.  I'm butting into their business to ask if I can butt further into their business.  And I fucking hate it.  Rationally, it shouldn't be a problem.  I can do the math and realize that getting fifty rejections for every one acceptance is perfectly normal, especially when most of my calls just go to answering machines.  I can think about the potential rewards, and how this is the first job in six months to even let me in the door (precisely because they don't have to pay me if I suck at it).  I can think about the fact that I am leaving absolutely no lasting impression on any of the people I'm calling; nobody remembers telemarketers, and I'm not even being annoying, and it's not like I'll meet anyone I call.  (I'm also conscious of how my voice sounds over the phone, but there's nothing to be done about that.)

But I've spent the last half hour pacing around the room and staring out the window, emailing my boss, and writing this post.  Because just picking up the phone puts a lump in my throat; I go on autopilot once I start talking, and it's actually a huge relief when someone answers, no matter how indifferent or annoyed they sound.  But I can't shake it.  There's a part of my brain generating this intense irrational fear of continuing, that I have no conscious control over.  Being at home doesn't help either; instead of making me comfortable or something, it just means there's no one around to tell me to quit wasting time.  I'd function better if I was trapped in business-casual with nothing to do but work.

So I'm sitting here stewing in the fear-chemicals my limbic system is pumping like it's trying to put out a fire, hating myself for not having the willpower to pick up a goddamn phone, hating myself for wanting to continue this knowing I don't even get paid if I don't set any appointments.  I can't stop thinking that I'm wasting my time, because even if I have any talent for this, my attitude is certainly going to jynx it, not least because I can't get myself to work more than an hour at a time.  I'm sick of giving up, I hate giving up, and my conscious mind doesn't want to give up.  But every fiber in my being that I don't have any control over sure as fuck wants to give up and hide from the phone, and it's really really hard to do anything but listen.