Occupy Portland has developed a tactic to keep a park when the police decide to enforce an eviction
Occupy Portland stumbled on a way to use the tactical superiority of the local police department, and by extension, the fluidity of the crowd, against them.
On December 3rd, we took a park and were driven out of it by riot police; that much made the news. What the media didn’t report is that we re-took the park later that same evening, and the police realized that it would be senseless to attempt to clear it again, so they packed up their military weaponry and left. Occupy Portland has developed a tactic to keep a park when the police decide to enforce an eviction.
The tactical evolution that evolved relies on two military tactics that are thousands of years old — the tactical superiority of light infantry over heavy infantry, and the tactical superiority of the retreat over the advance.
The whole article is worth a read, and nicely summarizes Occupy Portland’s serendipitous tactical breakthrough.
(thanks, Joel)
12 Indicted On Hate Crimes Charges For Hair Cutting Assaults Led By Break-Off Amish Group
I think this is my favorite story of 2011.
quote out of context
Someday the Occupy Wall Street protests will end, and the only question is whether they will go out with a bang or a whimper—or a lot of loud banging followed by whimpers.
American Juggalo, directed by Sean Dunne
American Juggalo is a look at the often mocked and misunderstood subculture of Juggalos, hardcore Insane Clown Posse fans who meet once a year for four days at The Gathering of the Juggalos.
I found this in Andrew’s Stellar links, and was immediately pulled in. Even though it’s twenty three minutes, it’s video for the web that makes that irrelevant. Sad and beautiful. Highly recommended.
Update: There is some nudity, and drug and alcohol use, so be careful at work.
quote out of context
The tension, as I see it, is that if free will is a myth then it’s not clear why we should have an ethical goal of changing people as little as possible.
an interesting subplot to the horror in Norway
Norwegians tend to see “acts of extreme violence … as aberrant events, not symptoms of national decay,” Time Magazine’s William Lee Adams reported last year. Norwegian prison guards undergo two years of training, “don’t carry guns … and call prisoners by their first names and play sports and eat meals with them,” Adams reported.
That approach — and its underlying premise that people who commit crimes are troubled who should be given a second chance and prepared to live again amongst society — can perhaps be credited with Norway’s extremely low prison-recidivism rate — only about 20 percent of those imprisoned in Norway commit a repeat crime that sends them back to prison. Recidivism figures in the United States and the United Kingdom, by contrast, are much higher — 50 to 60 percent.
This in the context of the maximum prison sentence being 21 years in Norway, especially in light of the recent atrocity.
music to be ashamed of
Last.fm publishes a list of most deleted tracks. Their whole playground of projects is pretty interesting.
image with all the context it needs
dear clusterflock
When was the last time you saw someone in a movie, before you knew who they were, and thought, this person will be a star?
Adam Curtis, It Felt Like a Kiss
Sheila suggested I check out documentary filmmaker Adam Curtis’s found footage montage, It Felt Like a Kiss. A collaboration between Curtis and improvised theater company Punchdrunk, I’m not quite sure what the immersive experience would have been like, but I have rounded up the various pieces of it available on YouTube, and if you are interested — you’ll only need to watch a few minutes to know if it’s right for you — you can take a look.
Here is what the Guardian’s Charlie Brooker had to say:
One particular segment, set to River Deep, Mountain High, feels like being repeatedly stung on the mind by a hallucinogenic jellyfish while inhaling huge clouds of history through a pipe. The marriage of Phil Spector’s wall of sound and Curtis’s wall of images is so perfect, so strange and striking, it jangled around my head for hours afterward. And I only saw it in a tiny window on an Apple Mac, in a corner of Curtis’s tape-strewn “lair” at BBC Television Centre. God knows what it’ll be like on a big screen as part of a live-action, funhouse-style experience. It’ll probably kill people.
why are we opposed?
This isn’t remotely shocking, not because they’re Democrats, but because they’re people:
Their study found that the withdrawal of Democratic activists changed the character of the antiwar movement by undermining broad coalitions in the movement and encouraging the formation of smaller, more radical coalitions.
After Obama’s election as president, Democratic participation in antiwar activities plunged, falling from 37 percent in January 2009 to a low of 19 percent in November 2009, Heaney and Rojas say. In contrast, members of third parties became proportionately more prevalent in the movement, rising from 16 percent in January 2009 to a high of 34 percent in November 2009.
“Since Democrats are more numerous in the population at large than are members of third parties, the withdrawal of Democrats from the movement in 2009 appears to be a significant explanation for the falling size of antiwar protests,” Heaney said. “Thus, we have identified the kernel of the linkage between Democratic partisanship and the demobilization of the antiwar movement.”
Using statistical analysis, the researchers found that holding anti-Republican attitudes had a significant, positive effect on the likelihood that Democrats attended antiwar rallies. The results also show that Democrats increasingly abandoned the movement over time, perhaps to channel their activism into other causes such as health care reform or simply to decrease their overall level of political involvement.
The precepts in this section—many of them written in a digressive, self-serious style that reads as if Ayn Rand and Deepak Chopra had collaborated on a line of fortune cookies—are never about making money, at least not openly
There is nothing to fear from truth.
When a pack of hyenas takes down a young wildebeest, is this good or bad?
Ask yourself whether you have earned the right to have an opinion.
The pursuit of billions of dollars through aphorisms and “radical transparency.”
(via the browser)
Why do experts get it wrong?
Ravi Mehta, a professor of marketing at Illinois University, and presumably an expert, on why experts so often get analysis wrong:
[His] suspicion is that “feelings of accountability cause experts to focus more on the steps involved in making their judgments, rather than the final decision itself, and ironically this focus leads to memory errors.”
In addition, they found that “consumer experts have a far better developed schema than novices; thus, consistent with prior research on false memories, their more complex schemas increase the likelihood of falsely recalling as associative link from memory.”
(via the browser)
dear (ladies of) clusterflock
Is this man attractive?
Exotic Becomes Erotic
“I think what the genes code for is not sexual orientation but rather a type of personality,” he explains. According to the EBE theory, if your genes make you a traditionally “male” little boy, a lover of sports and sticks, you’ll fit in with other boys, so what will be exotic to you—and, eventually, erotic—are females. On the other hand, if you’re sensitive, flamboyant, performative, you’ll be alienated from other boys, so you’ll gravitate sexually toward your exotic—males.
From an article on Daryl Bem, a professor at Cornell, whose study on precognition will be published this month in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. But you knew I was going to say that.
Update: Huh.
What I’m Watching Now…
The Parking Lot Movie Trailer from The Parking Lot Movie on Vimeo.
I’m watching it right now. It’s brilliant. Watch it. You’re welcome.
Daniel Bell: “a socialist in economics, a liberal in politics and a conservative in culture”
Sociologist Daniel Bell, who coined the term ‘Post-Industrial Society’, has died at 91.
In “The End of Ideology” he contended — nearly three decades before the collapse of Communism — that ideologies that had once driven global politics were losing force and thus providing openings for newer galvanizing beliefs to gain toeholds. In “The Coming of Post-Industrial Society,” he foresaw the global spread of service-based economies as generators of capital and employment, supplanting those dominated by manufacturing or agriculture.
In Mr. Bell’s view, Western capitalism had come to rely on mass consumerism, acquisitiveness and widespread indebtedness, undermining the old Protestant ethic of thrift and modesty that writers like Max Weber and R.H. Tawney had long credited as the reasons for capitalism’s success.
He also predicted the rising importance of science-based industries and of new technical elites. Indeed, in 1967, he predicted something like the Internet, writing: “We will probably see a national information-computer-utility system, with tens of thousands of terminals in homes and offices ‘hooked’ into giant central computers providing library and information services, retail ordering and billing services, and the like.”
Your Friends Aren’t That Happy
A recent study by Stanford University finds that we’re pretty poor judges of our peers’ inner lives and that, in fact, our friends who seem to have their lives together aren’t nearly as happy as they seem:
The paper was based on the doctoral dissertation of psychologist Alexander H. Jordan, now a research fellow at the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth College. Jordan noticed that some of his friends became “upset after reading others’ posts on Facebook,” according to a Stanford press release.
“They felt disappointed with their lives when they logged onto Facebook and browsed the apparently ‘perfect’ lives presented by their peers,” he said. “I wondered whether people might harbor a more general illusion that others’ lives are cheerier than they actually are.”
In addition to noting this Facebook effect, the paper also suggested that the tendency to underestimate other people’s woes explains why humans seek out tragedy in entertainment.
Grace and I have been having an ongoing conversation about this very issue. Being young and newly married in the age of social networks, our peers’ projections of their ideal selves can be a pretty daunting example to live up to (marriage always looks so polished and perfect in a status update). I always had an inkling that it was mostly bullshit, but it’s nice to have the science to back it up.
quote out of context
Cross-culturally we also find that monogamous societies consume more alcohol than polygynous societies in the preindustrial world.
from the comments
We tried to communicate with their tribe, but in a society where advancement is the only currency, we found ourselves unable to cope with the increasingly stressful demands of staying au courant. After a few months in the presence of the Hipsters, they had acclimated to us, allowing us into their most sacred rituals involving the brewing of limited runs of alcoholic spirits that they would then trade with one another for tapes and other trinkets. Many of the hipsters would spend their days recording sounds out in nature, and these sounds would then be played back during the communal gatherings at night. They smoked a lot of weed in those days, and xochinanácatl was present at nearly every gathering as they searched for ascendancy and yet still seemed to value the grounded world. The writings from this period are difficult to track as written communication became more dependent upon communicating less in general, with many of the speakers for the culture becoming bound by fear that their words wouldn’t be taken properly, speaking either with deception (for laughter) or sincerity (with great trepidation.)
They seemed to us in those days to be a people without vision, and without vision a people perish.
“dude, it’s changing colors”
(there is a bit of NSFW language)
found on The Toilet Book, a Tumblr dedicated to… toilets
Beautiful Inside My Head Forever
Damien Hirst, Sotheby’s, how it’s done, Saatchi, old money, new money, Jeff Koons, art vs the stock market, Andy Warhol, the royal family of Qatar, Korea, Taiwan, mainland China, Oedipus, and more:
The goal of making the primary works more expensive may benefit Mr Hirst’s personal income in the short-term, but it makes no sense from the perspective of his market. Part of the reason that art costs more than wallpaper is the expectation that it might appreciate in value. Flooding the market with new work is like debasing the coinage, a strategy used from Nero to the Weimar Republic with disastrous consequences. If Mr Hirst were managing a quoted company, he would be unable to enrich himself at the expense of his investors in quite the same way. But Mr Hirst is an artist and, in Western countries, artists are valued as rule-breaking rogues.
(via marginal revolution)
Conservatism and Counterrevolution
Corey Robin’s essay on conservatism (pdf):
While conservatism is an ideology of reaction — originally against the French Revolution, more recently against the liberation movements of the sixties and seventies — the nature and dynamics of that reaction have not been well understood. Far from yielding a knee-jerk and unreflexive defense of an unchanging old regime or a staid but thoughtful traditionalism, the reactionary imperative presses conservatism in two rather different directions: first, to a critique and reconfiguration of the old regime; second, to an absorption of the ideas and tactics of the very revolution or reform it opposes. What conservatism seeks to accomplish through that reconfiguration of the old and absorption of the new is to make privilege popular, to transform a tottering old regime into a dynamic, ideologically coherent movement of the masses. A new old regime, one could say, that brings the energy and dynamism of the street to the antique inequalities of a dilapidated estate.
(via marginal revolution)
quote out of context
The world is, in fact, a much better place than the optimists allow: and that is why pessimism is needed.
Media Cyborgs
A must read for media junkies:
It’s not just people with, you know, gun-legs; it’s anybody who uses a cell phone or wears contact lenses. It’s anybody who brings a tool really close in order to augment some capability.
Aren’t there people who have brought media that close? Aren’t there people who manipulate it, in all its forms, as naturally as another person might make a phone call, or speak, or breathe?
When you think of someone like Kanye West or Lady Gaga, you can’t think only of their brains and bodies. Lady Gaga in a simple dress on a tiny stage in a no-name club in Des Moines is—simply put—not Lady Gaga. Kanye West in jeans at a Starbucks is not Kanye West.
To understand people like that—and, increasingly, to understand people like us (eep!)—you’ve got to look instead at the sum of their brains, their bodies, the media they create, and the media created by others about them. All together, it constitutes a sort of fuzzy cloud that’s much, much bigger than a person.
