Can we have a non-meme discussion of this event?

The impression I got was it didn't start out as IDPol, but unfocused rage borne from the fact that we were clearly getting shafted. However the lack of direction, of what they hoped to achieve, left a vacuum. And here is where IDPol shitters subverted the original movement. Essentially if you want them to achieve anything next time they need a list of demands that can focus their energies.

I saw it more as idpol idiots were bussed in to destroy it, pretty much by the end of the first month. It was a very sudden and dramatic shift and I do not blame it on poor leadership.

I wasn't there so you could be right. Is tehre any confirmation they were bused in as part of an agenda? Sounds too smart for the state.

No woman, end of lesson.

Chris Hedges claims to have video of agents coming out of the back of FBI vans dressed as black bloc anarchist. They then went on to instigate violence against police, which prompted a violent crackdown in response.

Chris Hedges also doesn't know what black bloc is.

OWS taught us that people can organize and do cool shit outside of what we're told is the normal methods.

Occupies did a lot around the world and states were surprised and didn't know how to address them. Now, I think occupy as a strategy is old hat so something new has to come about.

...

They weren't violent enough. They honestly thought holding signs qualified as revolutionary action and would do anything.

The idea that the government is bussing in cops dressed as protesters to break windows sounds much more likely that bussing in social studies students. It's just much more in line with their kind of thinking and about as sophisticated as they can get without a full COINTELPRO scale program.

No, really all those IDpol shitters were just normal social studies students, the product of American Academia identifying, analyzing, and proposing solutions for problems int the only way they know how.

Had it done that it would have been the best day of my life

This reminds me of something else that's hard to imagine considering the idpol toxic waste dump it's remembered as now: Surprisingly large numbers of Tea Party Republicans were also attracted to it at first, lured by hostility toward the banks, their bailouts, poor financial regulations, and nascent agitation for a homeowner bailout.

OWS could've been B████crats indoctrinating Trumptards, years before the flaming trashcan was kicked over.

That's exactly the function of idpol: It destroys communication and organization.

Why are anarkids so edgy ?

Why are bootlickers so delusional ?

To be fair, this is how a lot of revolutions start out.

You don't even have to look very far for evidence if you follow who is funding these idiots. It's the elite, naturally.

humanevents.com/2011/10/21/george-soros-funds-occupy-wall-street/

washingtontimes.com/news/2016/aug/16/black-lives-matter-cashes-100-million-liberal-foun/

Americans are very un-theoretical and suck at organizing, but to say they're unfamiliar with protest and activism is to show complete ignorance of american history tbh.

oh child

You know how, in retrospective, we can always tell a moment or event when two different prevailing trends within socialism start to emerge, and how their differences seem minor and remediable at first until the centrifuge of some major conflict, uprising or revolution really brings their contradiction forward and separates them not only by words, but also actions, deeds, alliances, etc?

OWS marks one of these moments of initial divergence, imo. It was an interesting barometer of the popular sympathy for a radical approach to politics, but it also revealed many weaknesses and deficiencies in the Left, and your attitude towards these is what defines which camp you're on today.

For example, you can bury your head in the sand and continue to romanticize its leaderless, horizontalist, "spontaneous" character, or you can be a realist and acknowledge that OWS revealed the necessity of organization, of structure, of cohesion and of leadership, and how, without these, the Left is completely impotent.

It also revealed that Leftist ideas are popular, but leftists aren't. Unless you've spent 2011 isolated in left-wing student echo chambers, you know that the attitude of the general population that surrounded OWS was something in the lines of:

and trust me, this is not because your average Occupier was too "radical" for them. It's because they want these Leftist ideas to be normie-friendly, to be reflected upon and voiced by people who seem serious and dedicated enough to earn their trust, and to have a clear agenda based on them, instead of being presented by people like Ketchup with no clear sense of objective or purpose. And the usual undergrad blather about raising awareness and shifting paradigms won't serve as proper substitutes.

Basically, people are ready to let go of the political language they're accostumed to, and to demand things outside the system of electoral politics and liberal democracy, but they are not ready to let their notions of political capital and credibility go, and they're right in doing so, because a mere half decade after OWS, a number of middle-class students who took part of it are probably starting to learn how to laugh at their own radical past and to sneer at those who still seem serious about its ideals.

So we've learned that we can't think of protest without thinking of organization, we can't organize without sharing common concerns, we can't articulate these concerns without also having demands, we can't figure out these demands without proper theory and we can't do any of that without considering the human material. The undergrad, pink-haired, vegetarian, feminist, Russell Brand-y, "Being a Socialist" constituency can no longer be our semi-official representatives. We need regular, serious people to fill the ranks of Socialism and we need the proper ethic and conduct to make them at least interested in learning some basic theoretical principles.

Your sentiment reminds me of an article I read about the rigidly disciplined and unified nationwide network of local churches and community groups that was responsible for the success of the civil rights movement under MLK, contrasting it against the formless and easily diluted mob that was the Occupy movement. The following article isn't the one I'm thinking of, but it's sort of the same gist:
wagingnonviolence.org/feature/how-to-learn-nonviolent-resistance-as-king-did/

In the very inception of the Left we had systems like this:

And, obviously, the International also worked like that.

The last big protest movement was 50 years ago. You can talk about the labor movement, but schools don't. A disturbing portion of people think Labor day is a military holiday. They might have heard of the "Haymarket Riot" in the context of anarchists and socialists killing police, but nobody's ever heard of Ludlow or Blair Mountain. Americans don't understand the scale of organization during the labor movement, nor the scale and violence of its opposition.

I went to a few camps, mainly Zuccotti Park, Seattle, Portland, and Tacoma. NYC was by far the most organized and had frequent events. There were marches and speeches every single day. There were college professors, students, environmentalists…

However, I get the impression that every other city was like Seattle/Portland: mostly homeless people and 'anarchists' operating in their own cliques who were hostile to outsiders. I tried striking up conversations with several people and no one seemed to have any coherent argument. Many people were the type to say if you're not spending every waking moment at the camp and committing 100% then you didn't belong.

The media latched on to this because it was very easy - within 5 minutes at any camp you were engulfed in foul smells, trash, and schizophrenics. Not everyone is able to quit their job, school and every responsibility to camp in the cold and rain.

Kek, nowhere in that article did they present evidence of George soros or his orgs bring involved with occupy
They just said he donates to "activist" (pro Democrat) groups and then went on about how he loves euro "socialism" (socdem)
They just said he hates America and didn't make an attempt to explain how the walstreet insider loves the people wanting to imprison walstreet insiders

This is also true of most of the developed world, it's not an american particularity by any means.

The same goes for not knowing their own socialist history. Sorry to interrupt your self-loathing, but despite stereotypes about this being chiefly an american trait, historical ignorance is a rule everywhere, particularly when it comes to parts of our history that the powers that be wouldn't like you to know about. And it is way, way more disheartening to see french people displaying ignorance about the Jacobins or germans displaying ignorance about Marx than it is to see americans not knowing much about the Wobblies or Debs.

No platform for liberals
That's all

You're cool.