Occupy Friday Links

October 28th, 2011  |  Published in Uncategorized  |  1 Comment

At times I am reminded that I do indeed live in a strange foreign land:

Specialite maison: Steak de cheval

But from over here, it seems like life in America got substantially weirder in the past week. A lot of things are happening that I couldn’t have imagined a year ago.

  • Reading assignment of the week: Jo Freeman’s “The Tyranny of Structurelessness”, a timeless classic that’s once again been on my mind in light of recent Occupy Wall Street related craziness.

  • You should be reading Aaron Bady for all your news on this week’s police violence against Occupy Oakland. See this post to find out how you can help some of the folks documenting the occupation.

  • Besides being appalling, the decision of Oakland authorities to call in the riot squad is initially a bit puzzling: like the skits on a rap album, it’s hard to understand how anyone convinced themselves that this was a good idea. But Mayor Jean Quan probably just failed to grasp the new dynamic in which protesters actually win standoffs with the police. At any point in the recent past, Quan could have reasonably assumed that massive police repression of peaceful demonstrations would result in a few days of bad press, followed by the whole problem going away. But now she’s finding that times have changed, and she has only managed to escalate the situation and give the movement its first martyr; as an additional bonus, Mayor Quan has temporarily sidelined the “what are our demands” argument by providing Occupy Oakland with the demand that’s worked so well in other places: ash-shab yurid isqat an-nizam.

  • I mean seriously, did the cops really think they could stop a crowd that contained Boots Riley and MC Hammer? This picture belongs on Awesome People Hanging Out Together.

  • Speaking of Boots, this is an appropriate occupation soundtrack: