#OccupyWallStreet – Principles for Success

Just this morning, a crackdown of sorts transpired on the #OccupyOakland movement. The Associated Press wrote:

Under cover of darkness early Tuesday, hundreds of police swept into Oakland's Occupy Wall Street protest, firing tear gas and beanbag rounds before clearing out an encampment of demonstrators. In less than an hour, the 2-week-old, miniature makeshift city was in ruins. (Source)

Personally, I am greatly mortified to hear this news, word of clandestine police raids conjuring disturbing visions of V for Vendetta-esque police-states. That said, it is even more disturbing to read some of the comments on the link in question, indicating that those affected by the gratuitous lies that the media propagates tire of the movement and maintain a deeply flawed misconception of the movement.

That said, in order to preserve solidarity and hope in vein of police intervention and a false sense of jadedness and cynicism towards the movement, several things must be acknowledged by protestors.

1. Protestors must not break the law confrontationally. By vandalizing private property, throwing around ethnic slurs and trespassing, we come off to the media as sensationalistic hippies without a worthy cause. We know that we are not that and thus, we must act professionally to hold credibility.
2. Protestors must not react violently to police presence. Like in the last rule, our credibility is at stake here. A single riot would put a massive dent in the movement. 1% of the 99% can easily ruin the image of the movement for all involved.
3. Protestors must uphold the ideals of nonviolent civil disobedience. As a “populist” movement, there are few historical precedents to #OccupyWallStreet. Thus, we must learn from the most successful: Gandhi and King.
4. Protestors must persist and not be dissuaded by threats of police intervention or popular disapproval. As a movement characterized by mass civil disobedience, we must stand together in solidarity to act as a force for positive social change imprinted forever into the collective consciousness of our world. We must believe in ourselves and that our actions are valuable.

Naomi Klein wrote that the #OccupyWallStreet movement was the single most important thing happening in the world right now. Let’s give the movement the love and care it deserves.

SOPA and The Great Internet Blackouts

When it was brought to the attention of the Reddit community in mid-November, SOPA, the Stop Online Piracy Act, drew immense criticism from all sectors of the internet, which might be the understatement of the year. A mass online movement to protest the bill was born, and legions of people contacted their Senators and Representatives to urge them to vote down the bill. SOPA will be discussed before Congress when it returns from its Winter Recess come the end of January.

In essence, the bill attempts to address the problem of media piracy by giving corporations more power to seek legal action against web sites they accuse of copyright infringement. Such legal actions might include blacklisting sites that link to shared copyrighted content, starving sites off the necessary advertising money they need to survive, imprisoning content-sharers for up to five years, barring search engines from displaying certain links and erecting a DNS firewall around the United States preventing access to copyrighted content in servers located in other countries.

Reflecting the “smart-mob” nature of the web, internet users revolted against the multitude of corporations that supported the bill. Domain name company GoDaddy, which voiced its support of the bill in December, faced a mass exodus of users as people boycotted the service. The company lost 37,000 users as a result of the boycott and saw its web ranking plunge when megasites Reddit and Wikipedia migrated off their namespaces.

On December 13^th, Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales proposed a Wikipedia “blackout” in protest of the bill, temporarily taking the site offline to send a penetrating message to legislators and the internet community. He addressed editors, “Do not underestimate our power - in my opinion, they are terrified of a public uprising about this, and we are uniquely positioned to start that”. As of January, Google, Facebook, Reddit and Twitter have put consideration into joining Wikipedia in its symbolic strike. Reddit confirmed a blackout on January 18^th and other sites have started discussion in coordinating blackouts.

SOPA puts the United States in peril as President Obama will likely alienate the media industry if he signs the bill into law, and conversely, alienate tech and internet startups. The mainstream media has skirted the issue notably while the tech industry has loudly and radically protested the measure. Time will tell whether this controversial measure will be the boon to innovation its creators espouse it to be.

Occupy Wall Street – Police Brutality

If you haven’t been living under a rock, you may be aware that Wall Street has fallen under mass protests against corporate corruption and an imbalance of power. Anonymous has covered the protests extensively, calling them out as a beacon of social justice in an increasingly bleak world. Check out the below video, its the 60s of the 2010s.

From the above post, this is what Anonymous believes.

• Engaging in direct and transparent participatory democracy; (always has been Anon’s strong suit)
• Exercising personal and collective responsibility; (Varies amongst the members of the collective, many do not act accountably for their actions) 
• Recognizing individuals’ inherent privilege and the influence it has on all interactions; (The voice of the internet generation)
• Empowering one another against all forms of oppression; (What the world needs)
• Redefining how labor is valued; (Humans are not assets) 
• The sanctity of individual privacy; (Needs work, Anonymous, as a hacker collective, needs to solidly define ethical uses of hacking and protecting data)
• The belief that education is human right; (Protip: Government Education isn’t reliably funded)
• Endeavoring to practice and support wide application of open source. (What about piracy? That’s an issue that should be discussed from all sides. Interesting topic given the GeoHotz case and the Great Playstation Network Outage of 2011)

Incredible stuff is happening here, stay tuned.

Anger is the Motivator

I am angry.

I am angry because Proposition 8 was passed. Passed out of ignorance. The votes were fueled by people who had no exposure to gay society. People who had no idea of how it is like to be gay, people who have no gay friends nor family members. I am angry because of that.

But anger is good.

Anger motivates us to do positive actions that will benefit the world. It drives us to reflect upon ourselves and others. Thus, anger serves as the catalyst for all meaningful movements in history.

We are angry. 

Gay-sympathizers, gays, straights, lesbians, questioners and bisexuals: unite in hope. Anger led us to come out and be vocal, asking provocative questions to break long held unfair taboos. Anger will again move us to unite in a movement.

Mario Savio, Harvey Milk and Gandhi used their anger to move people and unite to make efforts towards liberation. Once again, we need a leader. A leader who possesses the fiery passion to instill in each of us the motivation to live out our beliefs.

The passing of Proposition 8 was not a win for the Defense of Marriage, it was a lost. For it instilled in us the anger to create positive change. That change will come with our combined efforts. We will combat the ignorance that has plagued Evangelical communities. With the education of the ignorant, more and more people can sympathize with gays. The frightening lack of knowledge in far too many communities was what passed Proposition 8.

So I ask of you to get angry. Fight back against ignorance with dialogue. As such will enlighten those who willfully shut away sympathy out of fear and insecurity.

Join the Impact

http://jointheimpact.com/2009/01/doma-protest-signature-drive-411/

Please kindly consider this protest if you haven't yet attended one.

Why Proposition Eight is Immoral

Proposition Eight aroused the strongest emotions on both sides of the issue than any other California proposition in recent history. It set a world record for amounts of donations. The same-sex marriage banning proposition passed in California to the great disappointment of many San Franciscans. In the days following the election, widespread protests flooded the states, with 50,000,000-member Facebook groups protesting its passing sprouting up in a single afternoon. The result of the proposition disappointed many, but strengthened the desire to repeal it for many more.

I myself strongly oppose the ban on Same-Sex marriage for the same reasons that many others do. All throughout history, laws and propositions have been passed that guarantee rights to citizens, the passing of proposition eight marked the first time that human rights were taken away from citizens. Being a left-leaning Libertarian, economic and social freedom are what I base my political views upon. With the recall of rights from citizens, the prohibition of discrimination is compromised. It is the only action that takes away freedom of choice in legal arrangements for people of differing sexual preferences. This in itself is discrimination, as it denies certain human rights to citizens on basis of sexual orientation. Says Libertarian Philosopher Ayn Rand: It is improper for the law to interfere with a relationship between consenting adults.

However, before any judgment on the “protection of marriage” is made, the very nature of marriage must be brought into question. Here, marriage will be defined as the social ritual of the unity of two (or more, but that's another issue) individuals. Still, the definition of marriage has been redefined multiple times throughout history: polygamy has been legalized once by the Mormon church in the nineteenth century, and prior to 1967, efforts to prohibit interracial marriage were attempted.

Most of the support of Proposition 8 is based on the question of morality and ethics, with many citing their religious heritage as proof of its immorality. While the morality of same-sex marriage has been questioned, the immorality of it hasn't. According to John Stuart Mill's utilitarian. ethical theory that “The moral worth of an action is determined by its outcome and that what is moral is what makes the most individuals happier.” many social conservatives are displeased with same-sex marriage, its prohibition leads to the stronger unhappiness of the entire LGBT community. As the prohibition of same-sex marriage makes more people unhappy than if it were allowed, its prohibition will be unethical as it makes more people unhappy.

I will end with a note from philosopher Thomas Hobbes. That the government may take away the rights of the citizens only when it offers a protection in exchange. The government may take away the right to kill from the citizens, but at the same time, they give the citizens protection from murder. Unlike the kind of recall of rights Hobbes is talking about, the passing of proposition eight takes away essential and fundamental rights from citizens and gives no protections in return. Such a law is immoral.

Intellectual Warfare

This I am sure, will be an controversial blog post. Here I hope to prove that most traditional forms of protest are ineffective in doing their purpose, which is to make change. By traditional, I mean picketing and chanting like at the 1989 Seattle protests. I also hope to propose a much more effective alternative to protest

Traditional protest usually lacks the Three Forms of Persuasion. Which are pathos, ethos and logos. Pathos can be defined as the use of emotional appeal to persuade. Take for example, distributing photographs of skinned puppies to get people to boycott fur coats. Ethos can be defined as flaunting one's authority to scare someone into believing something. Such as the Surgeon General's warning printed on cigarette boxes. Logos is the use of logic and argument to persuade someone.

Returning to my dead puppies example, while pathos will be effective in gathering people to join your cause, it will fail to get unethical corporations to change their ways on the matter. Also, appealing to people's emotions will not always work. People may not feel affected by pathos and will continue to do unethical things. In away, appealing to people's emotions has much in common with McDonald's commercials. The ads feed off people's desire to be "healthy" and "organic and natural" to get people to do things that are bad for them. In the same way, distributing pamphlets feeds off people's hope to be "ethical" and "fair" to get people to do something that might be good.

Ethos is the use of authority to get someone to do something. Earlier I made my example with the Surgeon General's warning on cigarette boxes, which can also be used in traditional protest. While people of authority are usually seen at protests, rarely do they use that authority to persuade their opponents to change.

Logos, the "one shot, one kill" method of persuasion, is not seen in traditional protest. For the most part, picket signs and chants just give information to opponents that tell them that there are people that don't like them. Also, the statements are not supported by fact; thus, they are not arguments (which should form the basis of any persuasive attack). A much more effective alternative to traditional protest is what I call "Intellectual Warfare", which makes liberal use of all three methods of persuasion.

Pathos and ethos, while largely ineffective in causing the opponent to change, is very efficient when it comes to recruiting others to join your cause. The dead doggy pictures can be given to others to get them to support you. Important and authoritative people can write articles and editorials to express their views using Logos. However, using logic and argument will be the only way to confront your opponent and try to get them to change. Arguments must be arranged with your opponent so leaders of movements can spar to finally persuade someone to change their view on using puppies in fur coats or to stop the Iraq War. Take for example, leaders who spearhead the Anti-Iraq-War movement should call up the Bush administration and confront them to get them to end the Iraq War.

As traditional protest is ineffective in initiating change, only with intellectual warfare can people accomplish what protest fails to do. No more offensive or disrupting rants, just effective persuasion.