Sorting junk to get rid of while a lot of them move out? On the hill? They might as well eat puppies at this point.

They opened up a transfer station on the Hill? Awesome.

Yeah, it's really horrible to be sorting your stuff to trash it. What assholes we are.

Seriously. Give them a freakin' break already. Assinine post.

Fart noise.

@2 Yay Denton! The Home of Happiness!

Nobody claimed that this revolution was going to be tidy.

is this stuff Occupy Seattle got back after SPD kicked them out of the 10th and Union office building they broke into and tried to seize for their indoor headquarters Friday night? Maybe Occupy Seattle should break into Stranger HQ next, since its writers seem to be getting more audacious in not uncritically accepting whatever you do just because your words are so noble. After all, you are either with us or against us, right? 1535 11th. You have a right to camp there.

SCCC just called. They want their office chair back.

At anonotroll: I think your life is a million LOLs.

Believe in the movement or not, it is impossible to sustain the impact and energy of a revolutionary movement by just sitting there for the long haul. You have to be preventing something or blocking something or occupying needed space. Nobody remembers Hoovervilles because of their impact on policy. They're remembered as sad, sad reflections of the time.

And not that it's a bad thing that the Occupy Movement was co-opted by drug addicts and/or the homeless. They probably felt better to belong to something, but it changes the discussion from a political one to a socioeconomic one. I'm not so sure the ultra-rich - particularly those who have benefited from this terrible recession and particularly those who should be the target of this movement - give a fuck about the socioeconomic crisis happening to so many. So what's the point?

That appears to be a photo of someone attempting to clean up that mess. Students have made worse inside the school's restroom.

Your point?

@7: A true sign of maturity. What journalistic integrity you have.

"And not that it's a bad thing that the Occupy Movement was co-opted by drug addicts and/or the homeless."

Yes it is. WE have tolerated your wide eyed juvenile misunderstanding of the way society works long enough. Fuck off and clear out your shanties, or we, the actual 99% will send our law enforcement officers to do it for you.

@18: You comment under the name "suddenlyorcas," and I know more about journalistic integrity than you could fit inside your pea-brain, which is nearly inaccesible due to the thickness of your skull.

@16 I think you'll find the majority of people still think that the skeleton frame of the government is a good start. The appearance of the body that was hung around it rotted. But, many people don't want to throw out the baby with the bath water.

Call it "old fashioned" but the majority of America is afraid of anarchism and don't want a new communistic regime. They'd rather have the current system...except where the government police the rich and protect the poor, instead of the reverse which is currently in play.

Grant,
I agree the OS has flopped. Sustaining it for an extended period would have been an extraordinary task. Either the elements or the institutions via law enforcement would have evicted them.

However, communes have a checkered past::

http://www.newcriterion.com/articles.cfm…

I'm not sure even under the best conditions this one would have lasted.

TO everyone complaining about the trajectory of OS who was interested in the beginning but now just sits back and shakes their head:

You don't really have anyone else to blame but yourself. This is a leaderless movement that can go and could have gone in any number of different directions. If you stayed away because of the things you read in the media, you have allowed spin doctors to form your opinions for you. Maybe you should get firsthand experience and choose to act instead. It is easy to just go along with business as usual because acting takes some bravery and requires risky encounters with the unfamiliar. Have some courage. You don't have to organize with OS if you don't want to, but do something if you're unhappy with the way things are.

I have a feeling that some people's shitty reactions to OS have to do with disappointment. In a lot of ways, I feel disappointed myself. But looking back, I think we have actually had a lot of small successes--having hundreds of people participate in a building occupation IS a success, even if it was evicted shortly after. We hoped we could stay a while, but the most practical and realistic among us knew that the police probably wouldn't let it stand. Do we need more ritzy condos and retail space or do we need more free community space? Come on. Think of what projects YOU could have done in there--it is seriously gigantic.

Do you really like paying rent? Do you really like your job that much? Do you like having to shell out for food and water and warmth? Things haven't always been this way and they don't have to be this way forever. Do something about it, don't let them scare and pacify you into complacency. No significant social movement has ever been perfect. Change is messy. Things only look so cinematic in the history books and Spielberg films. Things are not going to get any better through voting with your money or your ballot. This system is completely fucked and is collapsing.

There is going to be a west coast port shutdown on Mon, December 12. I think most if not all major port cities are set to participate in some way. There will be a rally at Westlake at 1pm, then a march to the port. There will be two rallies near the port at 3 PM and 6 PM at the Spokane Street fishing area, just to the east of the Spokane St. Bridge, near the intersection of SW Spokane St & SW Manning St, under the West Seattle bridge. The 125 bus goes there from downtown and from West Seattle; get off at Chelan Ave SW and SW Spokane St. and walk east along the Alki bike path. Come to the Spokane St. fishing area anytime after 3PM and Occupy Seattle members will meet
you there to show you where to find the port picket lines.

• No union-busting! Solidarity with immigrant port truckers battling Goldman Sachs in LA.
• We support the Longview, WA, Longshoremen in their struggle against multinational
grain exporter EGT.
• Against police repression and evictions of occupations. Occupy everything!
• Against austerity! They say cut back, we say fight back.
• For more information: www.westcoastportshutdown.org or call (206) 424 - 4547.

@24 The flawed logic is that the government is also "someone else." and, if you're not going to pay a company, you're going to pay the government. Things have ALWAYS been that way. There has always been a tax man.

@24: Thanks for that. Yes, the occupy movement seems to be floundering at the moment but I believe we are looking at the end of the beginning, not the end. The Civil Rights Movement had its ebbs and flows too, and plenty of detractors who claimed to believe in what they were doing but "if only they used different strategies, weren't so confrontational, didn't polarize by doing sit-ins, etc." They didn't call them concern-trolls at the time but MLK certainly wrote about them. They were, and are, cowards, just like those who sneer and snark.

Contextually, what are we even supposed to be looking at here in this picture? Are we supposed to be upset about a guy sorting refuse?

Or should we just assume that a post providing zero contextual reference for a photograph is simply Grant spit-balling from the journalistic sidelines?

@25 -- There has *always* been a tax man? Really? Really? There always has to be a tax man? Really? Lack of historical knowledge, lack of imagination.

West Coast Port Shutdown info video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OGqncu3wl…

@24
I understand your frustration and appreciate the accomplishments you and Occupy Seattle have made, and I'll be there on December 12, but I take issue with your comment that nothing can be accomplished at the ballot box, and that so few of you are registered to vote. I keep hearing about taxing the rich, not the 99%, yet an initiative, I-1098 that would have taxed people making over $250,000 was on the ballot. It wouldn't have cost the 99% a thing, and yet it was voted down. So where were you and the rest of Occupy Seattle? Did you vote? Our budget problems would be a fraction of what they are now if that initiative had passed. Occupying can bring the message to the forefront, but if you want change, you are going to need laws to make those changes. You can't just go to Olympia and yell at our legislators and expect immediate change. To make those changes, you need to register to vote good people in to office. And believe it or not, there are a lot of people in the legislature who have our interests at heart, along with the duds.

@30 Saying Really over and over again is not an argument. Really? REALLY?

@24 and 30, if Occupy gave a fuck about the union struggle in Longview it would respect the union's request that they knock off this bullshit about a west coast port shutdown. But unions are run by democratic elections, so I guess the ILWU rank and file's votes don't mean a goddam thing to Occupy.
http://www.ilwu13.com/occupy-protests-ca…

I think I liked it better when the Stranger was lecturing for pie-in-the-sky dreams resulting from Occupy, which I'm assuming they probably know are near impossibilities because of the current structural realities of how Occupy operates.

Demanding uniform actionable specifics from decentralized collections of people making decisions by vote composed of whoever happens to be present on that particular day, and which also has no real organizational hierarchy to efficiently delegate the policy writing or public relations work you demand of it? How in the hell... YOU LIVE IN A HIGHLY SPECIALIZED SOCIETY AND YOU'RE PISSED OFF AT THE PLEBEIANS, YOUNG FOLKS, AND INDIGENT FOR NOT BEING ON YOUR ENLIGHTENED LEVEL?

I can't even tell if this is just a form of slacker projection, or if it's just part and parcel of Seattle's passive aggressive social mores.

Of all the different kinds of occupations going on in places all around the globe, this is the one that should have this kind vitriolic scrutiny directed towards it on a regular basis?

Personally, I'm just still amazed no violent actions have been able to successfully pass a general assembly, but nooooooo... It's all THESE GUYS DON'T SEPARATE RECYCLING THE WAY THEY'RE SUPPOSED TO! wtf

My Christmas wish is for the Stranger to please hire someone with a political science, or maybe a history background. Pretty please with sugar on top.

Basic political analysis: Three demands that by this point should be glaringly self-evident, if by nothing more than through the sheer collective actions of the decentralized group of crazy fucks unfortunately called 'the Occupy Movement':

1. Camping on public property is protected by the 1st Amendment to the Constitution.
2. Interfering with commerce is not a crime.
3. Enough with the police overkill already.

Boom. Riddle of the sphinx solved!

For the record, I like the Stranger, I think overall it's been a great Seattle institution that I've been reading it for over a decade. I know some of you have been writing for a while, and there's been some great mind-sexing literary times, but I just know you guys can do better.

Poor bastard. Completely unaware that the dread Killer Cardboard Box of Broadway has snuck up on him.

I think occupy movements should focus on campaigning and protesting and demonstrating for local tax and bureaucracy changes they think are archaic and nonsensical in these modern, stressful times. I completely agree with comments above, though I don't want to advocate in an aggressive manner: protests, movements for change depend on people realizing it's time to take a stance and change things. because *everyone* is tired, busy, and working to keep their home and food on the table, it's difficult to imagine giving more of yourself to a movement that has its ebbs and flows but seems to be ebbing. it's okay if occupy dies, but the quest for change cannot and should not. so if you're and educated economist, lawyer, etc with a passion for change, help your local movement. be the change you wish to see. stop sitting on the fence and bitching when things go ways you don't like (teensy bit of aggression). rally; even though you're tired, bitter, depressed. just fucking start and you'll be surprised how good it feels to pursue a passion, a dream, a change. martin luther king jr had a dream, so did ghandi. don't you?

Is this Greenlake?

@39 There's a lot more going on. Check out http://occupyseattle.org/blog/2011-11-29…

@24

"Do you really like paying rent? Do you really like your job that much? Do you like having to shell out for food and water and warmth?"

so you're saying nobody should work because nobody should have to pay for anything? who are you thinking will grow the food, build the shelters/hydro-electric plants and create your ipads? you're right, things haven't always been this way.

for thousands of years man lived in caves and mostly died horrible deaths just trying to stay alive for another day. but i guess if that's your idea of utopia you could go occupy a patch of dirt in montana.

Everyone knows that the SCCC campus was so idyllic prior to the occupation .......

@25: Since you are just pretending to understand anything about human history let me say that taxation is a relatively recent phenomena. Even then it was a mere sliver of the overall world population that had any taxes until the last century. Not exactly "ALWAYS" is it? You should look up the word "reification" sometime.

@42: "so you're saying nobody should work because nobody should have to pay for anything? who are you thinking will grow the food, build the shelters/hydro-electric plants and create your ipads? you're right, things haven't always been this way."

The person @24 never said no one should work. You constructed a straw man argument, thus you failed by making an invalid point.

"for thousands of years man lived in caves and mostly died horrible deaths just trying to stay alive for another day. but i guess if that's your idea of utopia you could go occupy a patch of dirt in montana."

This follows from your previous invalid point, therefore your entire argument has collapsed. But I might point out that the "Cave vs Capitalism" dichotomy is a false one.

Try again.

@44

and it's idyllic now during the occupation?

@45

omg, you said i constructed a straw man argument (that's never been used before) and so my point is invalid - SHOCKER!!!

try refuting my comments with logical arguments versus just spewing what comes up every few slog posts. oh, and you must be a nazi. troll.

@30, 45...uh, how so? If I remember correctly, it's "render unto Caesar what is Caesar's", which is sort of a little bit ago.

Nu?

@47: Yes, I said you constructed a straw man argument because, uh, you did. And yes, (Ha!) it has been used before, many times in fact. Construction (and critiques) of logical arguments is a foundation of human thought. So no, I'm not very original there.

@48: I said relatively recent (a few thousand years), and only a sliver of the population (those who were subjects of various empires such as Rome) so I stand by what I said.

Please give an example of an untaxed population. I'm intrigued.

G. Gus, thanks for posting the link to the ILWU article. That was actually depressing - Unions and OWS should be working toward the same goals. And instead, the longshoremen wimp out and say this:

"The ILWU Coast Committee cautioned its members that if a similar situation develops on Dec. 12, longshoremen should stand by in a safe area and await a decision by employers to call for an arbitrator. "

Seriously, stevodores? You're gonna clutch your pearls and wait in your "safe area" because of the scary, scary protestors?

@50

still no logical responses to my QUESTIONS @42. if you had read, you'd see i posed questions about @24's comments. yet, you want to pull out the straw man response. good for you for avoiding answering my questions. i guess it's easier to do that than actually think of rational responses. try again.

@51: Anyone not working within an imperial structure where money existed, which was most people until a hundred or so years ago.

Check out David Graeber's "Debt: The 5,000 Years" to get the whole story.

@53: Oh, you are cracking me up. How do you respond logically to invalid arguments? You can't, that's why they are invalid. They don't work. Therefore there is nothing to respond to.

bhowie...I see you're as dumb as the one who bdurreti (though I kind of think you're the same person).

Name a handful of cultures that did not have slaves, did not have taxes, were not theocracies (and, therefore had tithes that acted as taxes), and also made significant advances in society (be it culture, law, engineering, or science) beyond how to do your laundry in the rivers. I honestly can't really think of any. Egypt = slaves. Rome = taxes. China = taxes and slaves. India = taxes. Middle East = Theocracy.

No, I'm really trying hard to think of a society which has actually gone beyond your basic hunting/killing society that hasn't had any of the three limitations I put forth.

@55

no, you crack ME up. you can't answer my questions because you don't have a logical response. for someone who wants to gain support for his beliefs you have severely limited tools of persuasion. try again.

@55

my questions were:

"so you're saying nobody should work because nobody should have to pay for anything? who are you thinking will grow the food, build the shelters/hydro-electric plants and create your ipads?"

i'm asking, not arguing, is what @24 saying is that we shouldn't work? because that's what i'm inferring from:

"Do you really like paying rent? Do you really like your job that much? Do you like having to shell out for food and water and warmth?"

now, if you have a logical argument or answer to my comment, i'd love to hear it.

@56: Your subjective notion of "significant advances in society" was not a part of the criteria before. Fail.

@60: Working is different from having a job. You are basing your questions on a false assumption that @24 is saying no one should work. Thus a straw man. Once again, there is no argument to logically respond to.

@30 people were paying taxes in Ur. Not all taxes are forced either, taxes have been self-levied by groups for the common good since the dawn of collective living. Even animals pay taxes in a way. In both wolf and wild dog packs only the alpha female bears pups. All social groups pay something for their security. Oh, and yes I like my job and no, I don't mind paying rent, and I like buying and cooking good food. I also like supporting charitable institutions and volunteering to help those less fortunate than myself.

@61 Well, I assume Occupy Seattle doesn't want us all to revert back to cavemen times. So, an advancing society IS one of the criteria that we need to use in validating other systems. Did this society advance past its tribal stages? If yes, look deeper. If no, move along. You can't just name some tribal culture from Buttfuck Deepest Africa a good model to base your new society on if they haven't even gotten past hunting and gathering, because I sure as hell don't enjoy either of those things.

The SEC is doing the job Occupy purports to do.

S.E.C. everywhere!

#15

I was looking at homes in Kent on Zillow.

There are some that are heading towards $65,000.

And that's with a quarter acre of property.

So, you can get a house now with a $300 mortgage.

Suddenly talking about the Homeless or Occupying public property, when say 6 people, each contributing $50 a month, can own a quarter acre of land and a home.

And with depopulation, this is just the beginning.

#32

Even the slowest reader knew that if I-1098 were passed it wouldn't be long before a Gregoire and her clutching Democrats would have expanded it down to everyone...which was the real goal.

Occupants, Republicans and others who speak for the poor, should always speak for tax cuts on income, sales and business because that helps the Retailution...the circulation of money into the bottom rung that will revivify this nation.

@65

Winning college football games is fun and all, but they're doing it with a bigger budget than any of the other conferences.

64: In summary;
You said, "There have ALWAYS been taxes."
I said, "No, there haven't."

That's all. You later added the criteria of "advancement of society." I'm not saying if that is right or wrong, just that you altered what "there always have been taxes" meant.

Whether or not "advancement of society" is good, and what even defines "advancement" is another conversation--one I am willing to have another time. That wasn't my point here, however.

#70

Case in point...is our life now "better" than that of the Plains Indians of pre-Manifest Destiny?

bhowie, I think you're making a pretty embarrassing misapplication of Graeber's thesis. The book is titled "Debt", and that is what it is about, with particular attention to the exchange of goods and the development of hard currency. It is only tangentially about taxes; his argument is aimed primarily at common assumptions in contemporary theories of trade.

Graeber's main idea, of course, is that debt preceded hard currency. It should take only a moment's consideration to realize that taxation came long before coinage as well.

From the advent of agriculture through the middle ages, taxes were paid in grain, and I'm sure they're still paid that way somewhere today.

Before agriculture, there were mandatory payments to the local moral and/or physical authorities: tributes to chiefs, religious "offerings", appeasment "gifts" to stronger nearby settlements, and so on. One can argue that these were not "taxes" in the contemporary sense, but it's a pretty flimsy bit of semantics.

There is no way of knowing, of course, whether or not mandatory sociopolitical transfers of material wealth have been a fact of human society "forever," but all available evidence suggests that they were collected deep into prehistory.

@73: I didn't say what I was talking about had to do with Graeber's main thesis, but he did point out that coinage was created for the sake of taxation.

Moreover, you are stretching the meaning of the word taxes which certainly IS flimsy semantics. If a community pools its resources, for example, that is not taxation.

Bunch of fucking gas bags on this thread.

Rotten666 always has a positive, insightful contribution to make, like "Derp derp derp" his retort du jour.
The rest of you gas bags should follow his example.

@70 Yeah, and you keep changing your terms. You went from century to several thousand years. Pick a time frame and stick with it. Any society of any era worth modeling after had taxes or slaves or both.

@78 Well lets be honest. The entire thread is based on a pic of a dude sorting garbage, and has devolved into a bunch of armchair academics arguing over semantics (about the history of taxes, no less). They argue, yet they mostly seem to agree with each other. Ergo, "fucking gasbags".

I will be careful to spell out all my posts in detail for now on, your majesty.

@75, tax goes back to the Pharaohs, i.e., back as far as civilization. More importantly, every MODERN society, i.e., widely successful with a large middle class and a modern standard of living, has had a tax structure very similar to ours, barring a few details like rates, VAT vs. sales tax, etc.

If the aim of Occupy is to overthrow all of that with a new communitarian, moneyless ideal, then you desperately need to fuck off as soon as possible. Sorting through the soggy detritus of someone else's civilization in the drizzling rain may be your idea of a good way to life but 99% of the population of the earth disagrees with you on that point.

Fnarf is correct, of course, except for one minor detail: It's more like 99.999%.

@82: If you had any ability to follow an argument you would see that I said nothing of the sort. I did not speak of overthrowing anything. You need to bump up your reading comprehension skills.

Oh, but I'm sure the "99% of the population of the Earth" thanks you for speaking for them. I don't have the audacity.

@85: Where did I say I have a viable alternative to governments and corporations? You and Fnarf are drawing false inferences.

BTW, @80, Let me break it down:
A few thousand years=the emergence of money and taxation in a few civilizations.
A hundred (or at most, two hundred) years= the proliferation of money and taxation across the globe.

As a side note, morally speaking, slavery is not a model we should live by.

awesome photo. very moving.

hey occupiers, you are fucking up because you are turning people against you. politics right? play a better game.

We smell your Fear.

Remember the Stamp Act!

This will end with blood if you try to suppress it.

Neither 100% pure capitalism, or communism works. Unrestricted capitalism would allow corporations to do whatever they wanted, at the expense of humankind, the environment, the world, and the greater good. (slavery is an example of putting profits over the common good.) Communism doesn't work either because most people won't do hard work only to get just the basics of life for the sake of the common good. (That's too much like slavery too.) People will scheme, and connive to get more.

Some important jobs require more skill, work, liability, etc, and thus pay more. A doctor makes more than a janitor, because doctors require a skill set and knowledge way beyond sweeping and mopping. We need the promise of a bigger payout to motivate people to do the hard work of things like getting though medical school.

We have a society that needs people to both contribute with work, (I like my job just fine, thank you very much.) and pay taxes. Infrastructure doesn't build itself. It needs money to buy the equipment, materials, pay workers. People are motivated to work by pay, but each job also helps enable society to keep humming along.

Some things shouldn't be for-profit enterprises. Police, fire departments, and education are examples of vital socialist services that profit should take a backseat to helping forward our society. Healthcare should be on that list too.

Wall Street executives really do provide vital services to the economy, and they take personal risks doing it. They need to be regulated so that they don't risk severely damaging society in the process. A corporation that is too big to fail, is too big, but corporations do provide jobs, and services, so we need them too.

We need government to manage vital services, and regulate the for profit world so that it doesn't overtake complete control of society at the expense of the common good. Government isn't, and shouldn't be run as a for profit business, (Although it should always work to become more efficient and keep up with the times.) but it can't run on good intentions. It needs taxes.

It's a economic balancing act, and no society in history has ever been, nor will ever be, perfect.

@ bhowie
It's a ways up in the thread so I thought I would re-post your pompous and condescending comment.

"Since you are just pretending to understand anything about human history let me say that taxation is a relatively recent phenomena. Even then it was a mere sliver of the overall world population that had any taxes until the last century. Not exactly "ALWAYS" is it? You should look up the word "reification" sometime."

Who's pretending here? Any of the empires mentioned by TheMisanthrope would definitely qualify as more than a mere sliver of the overall world. Let's go with Rome. If your empire completely encircles the Mediterranean you are not a mere sliver of the population. If your empire predates Christ your are not recent or even relatively recent. In the academic world they call that ancient history, not relatively recent history. If you are attempting to include the entire span of Homo sapiens life on the planet you are talking about between 450,000 and 200,000 years ago, and yes sir you are correct we as humans lived tax free for about 442,000 years (give or take a a few thousand) we also spent a fair amount of those 442,000 not having anything that could be taxed and no reason to tax it i.e. no actual society other than loosely formed tribes running around flinging shit at each other. We've moved on from that and nothing worth having is free. Although with you throwing words like "fail", "try again", and even "reification" around, clearly you have not moved on from flinging shit. Remember the beginning of "2001: A Space Odyssey" The primitive man that got clubbed to death? Probably your ancestor.

I had to look reification up. apparently it describes OWS/Seattle

Reification (fallacy),- treating an abstraction as if it were a real thing

Thank you, Rob in Baltimore.

Anyone care what Tony Perkins has to say about Occupy?

http://tinyurl.com/827xjjp

Goes to Cnn dot com, for whatever that's worth.

@75

Fine, go off to your corner and pretend that prior to [unspecified date] there was no such thing as mandatory transfer of material wealth from members of a society to its government. And as long as you stay in your corner, you can pretend that's not a reasonable definition of taxation.

Feel free to pretend that there was no such thing as government at all, even. Or that all transfers of material wealth were voluntary "pooling".

Just stay in your corner when you do all that, OK?