Comment by DanielBMarkham | Hacker News Reader

Comment by DanielBMarkham | Hacker News Reader

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Nice rant. He manages to sound curmudgeonly without getting too political.

We live in a very interesting time. Photography has now been around for over 150 years. Sound movies are close to 100. Videos of average Joe and his family are coming up on 40 or 50 years.

What does that mean? It means that instead of just hearing stories from dad and gradnpop, we have pretty immediate access to several generations -- and we can hear them in their own words, when they were young. Not some kind of age-filtered reminiscence.

And guess what? All of them felt like they were the first to discover sex, or drugs, or protesting, or making a world a better place, or empowering the common man -- the list of commonalities goes on and on. Each one whined about how terrible things were when they came of age, each one had crazy ideas that were based a lot more in emotion than reality, and each one managed somehow to grow up and make their way anyway.

I think it's pretty cool, but it also kind of has to suck to be in your 20s, 'cause a lot of it has all been done before. So when I look at the Occupy folks, I think it's awesome, even though I have no idea what they want aside from some kind of fuzzy vision of a Utopian world that's probably impossible. That's fine with me -- the hippies didn't really make much sense either, but they were mostly some really nice folks.

I wonder if each generation will now feel an obligation to "out do" the previous ones, now that they can see and hear the previous ones protest. And I wonder how the older folks will react. Will it all be "get off my lawn!" like this guy? Or will they just smile and pat the 20-somethings on the head (which is probably a more enraging reaction, really)

200 years from now we'll be able to "talk" to a dozen generations. This experiment will just keep getting neater and neater.

even though I have no idea what they want aside from some kind of fuzzy vision of a Utopian world that's probably impossible.

Basic infrastructure investment (high speed rail, broadband, healthcare, education) as economic stimulus, paying down deficits by raising the taxes on the wealthiest, a reintroduction of Glass-Steagall and other investment/banking regulations, a scaling back of militarism and empire, a crackdown on corruption and collusion between corporations and government (ie, hiring agribusiness ceo's to head government watchdog agencies), and a broadening of the debate.

I realize that the media has not done a great job of making these demands known. These are not my demands (I'd choose something considerably more sweeping and radical), but I have a hard time considering them utopian or fuzzy. In fact, they're all so immediately doable, some countries have been at it for half a century.

So, I get a little defensive when I hear that the Occupy movement is all pie-in-the-sky. It's actually a movement based almost entirely on low hanging fruit.

eeeh the problem is it's way to chaotic. I've head people of the generation who have gone out to the protests say it's about all kinds of things including "fair wages AROUND THE WORLD" for instance which to me means everyone in north america takes a hilarious pay cut 0_o so yeah, it's hard to see this huge group shouting so many different things, some a bit crazy and assign them any one sensical view point.

Sure, some of them want more sane things like banking reform. And so do I. And I can empathize with that. But the group is larger than just that, and crazyier. So I get what the author means when he says he doesn't know what they want other than some utopic thing, because as a whole, it's pretty schizophrenic and nonsensical and impractical.

There are too many people out there for too many reasons for it to be a clear and coherant movement. Which is it's strength and weakness. With no clear solid one true path/plan it can continue to draw people from all over the place and amass a much larger group of protesters than otherwise might be possible, which is good in so much as more people is more attention getting, but it's bad in that there is no clear voice or opinion. It means something different to everyone. So it's going to be hard to accomplish too much.

Since you mentioned it, I think the underlying theme of the OWS movement is the rampant amount of pandering to special interest and lobbying groups due to campaign contributions and other quid pro quo shenanigans. Sure there's other random groups trying to throw in there two cents, but this is the main quibble.

Is this really that hard to understand?

I think the underlying theme of the OWS movement is the rampant amount of pandering to special interest and lobbying groups due to campaign contributions and other quid pro quo shenanigans

Ironically, this also happens to be the underlying theme of the Tea Party movement.

Or rather, that's what you get if you ask a sufficiently clever member of either movement to strip down their movement into the most universally-popular motherhood statement they can think of.

That's what the Tea Party says, but the things they back as a whole are, oddly enough, pretty much in line for what corporate lobbyists want. Interesting coincidence, that.

"Separation of church and corporation" is one way I've heard that expressed.

"Separation of corporation and state" is more like it.

Succinct, unburdened, and who really could disagree (aside from corporations and the media appendages who love them).

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