Category Archives: Operation Orwell

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What if Wonder Woman Were a Disney Princess?

Wonder Woman kicks ass, takes names, brings home the bacon, and fries it up in a pan. And no you can't have any.

Wonder Woman kicks ass, takes names, brings home the bacon, and fries it up in a pan. And no you can't have any.

Now THIS is an avatar of feminine power we can all support. Sure, she may have taken jobs away from the odd dashing prince or fairy godmother, but now they can find new, rewarding careers as ghost writers for her autobiography, fan club presidents, or personal assistants. Win/win/win!

Besides, it’s not like those off-the-shelf Disney Princesses turned out so goddam well.

Hipster Ariel will self-harm if she doesn't get a goddam beer already

Hipster Ariel will self-harm if she doesn't get a goddam beer already

Which brings me to a slight rant, not for the first and surely not for the last time.

Have you been to the GA lately? No? Been to any populist movement of any kind recently? Even a City Council meeting? And seen? These girls? (and they’re always girls, you know?) Who really, really want to make the world, like, a better place, and, huh, oh, just want everyone to FEEL oKAY about it, okay? Okay?

You know?

“In case you hadn’t realized, it has somehow become uncool to sound like you know what you’re talking about? Or believe strongly in what you’re, like, saying? Invisible question marks and parenthetical ‘you know’s and ‘you know what I’m saying’s have been attaching themselves to the ends of our sentences? Even when those sentences aren’t, like, questions? Declarative sentences, so called because they used to, you know, like, declare things to be true, as opposed to other things that are, like, totally… not?” -  Taylor Mali

Yes, our movement is a tentative one. It is conditional. It is not sure it should be out so late on a school night, and it doesn’t want to run into its boss at the GA. “If there ever was a time it would be now,” says Third Eye Blind in their Occupy anthem, and that’s as conditional a statement as was ever shoehorned into a revolutionary theme. Ambivalence is the precondition of all Occupiers, but we needn’t let it paralyze us. Let’s get okay with uncertainty, with backlash.

Kids, girls, poke your heads out of your scarves for a moment, unturtle thyselves, and listen to me:

If everyone feels safe and supported and comfortable about what we are doing then

WE ARE DOING IT WRONG.

Hipster guys for whatever reason don’t seem to insist that everyone feel okay about things, so I’m leaving them out of this rant although I’m sure to rant on them sometime or other, if only for their choice of novelty facial hair. It’s the girls (and yes, only some of them but enough that it’s led me to conclude this is a problem with the hipster worldview per se and not just two or three girls who bug me) who really want to change the world, who realize that to do it you need to step up into a position of action and power and who, once there, turtle themselves into their scarves, stare at their pigeon toes and hold up the GA while everybody gets “okay” with things.

Girls, you’ve got halfway there. Once the spotlight is on you, remind yourself this isn’t a photoshoot for Tumblr. This isn’t an audition for Suicide Girls (think about that name).

This is your chance to change the world, our REAL chance to change the world, and it requires more courage than anything any of us have ever done before. It is okay to fear. There is plenty to fear. But fuck “fierce.” Become fearsome.

Hold your heads high when you facilitate a GA. Shut down the randos; empower the change artists. When you’re stacking, own your power, because the power of the GA flows through you; you are a vessel of democracy at that point. Feel it. Live and breathe it.

And then lay it on an unsuspecting world.

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OccupyVancouver NEW Livestream

Ty. Pi. Cal.

Just as I get the livestream in embeddable form, they change URLs on me for no particular reason. And drop from 133 viewers to 50.

Whatever. Here’s the livestream, and here it is in actual code that you can embed on a WordPress.COM blog.

[ vodpod id=Video.15692226&w=425&h=350&fv= ]

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Occupy Vancouver Thursday October 20 General Assembly

Julian Assange?

Who is that masked man at Occupy Vancouver?

Yes, they screened V for Vendetta at Occupy Vancouver tonight, threatening to rupture the delicate space/irony continuum.

V for Awesome, that's what.

V for Awesome, that's what.

Particularly in this shot:

Watching the Watchers

Watching the Watchers

in which the audience watches the video of the audience watching the video of the announcer showing the video of V. But who watches the watchers of the watchers? The cops, that’s who.

Twitter was abuzz with the news that the Chief is claiming the costs of policing (no arrests yet, not one) are threatening to put the VPD in the red. Conveniently NOT mentioned was this:

and this:

and this:

but don’t write off Twitter entirely, even if the troll/disinfo quotient is suffocating lately. It also contains things like this hilarious little item:

Occupy Tweet TheKRF

Occupy Tweet TheKRF

99% stupid

99% stupid

And this, which made me literally laugh out loud.

And now, your nightly Slideshow. Only sixteen pix here, rather than the say 130 from last time.

Second night of rain, and the crowd is bigger than it was earlier in the week, though of course not as big as the weekend. Even more tents: I think I saw a VPD estimate of 150, although I think that’s really high. There are certainly twice as many as Sunday, so a hundred or so scattered around the grounds, even creeping towards Robson along the East side of the Art Gallery. My friend and I were hoping to find the tent mobilizing mouse had donated, but it looked to be occupied, so she went home and I went to Blends to get some work done, and now it’s 6:22 am and I’m still working on posts, but at least I got my actual real paid done! That’s important for smacking down all the “get a job you filthy hippie!!1!!” trolls, and there are, did I mention, a LOT of them about.

I tried liveblogging the General Assembly (PDF link to the Occupy Guide from NYC!), to show you how your direct democracy sausage gets made, but it was ever so slightly disastrous. For one thing, not to be sexist, but there are a lot of women who seem to want to speak but contrive to avoid being heard. When not even the willing Human Mic participants can hear what you’re saying, either speak up or give up.

Here’s an unedited transcript. And yeah, it’s pretty ugly. Oh, at some point someone from one of the committees said that if anyone were taking notes, they’d like it if they were run by the committee. Well, I guess they must be very disappointed in me, that’s all I can say.

Oh, and I can’t spell Tsleil-Waututh when I’m trying to type quickly.

Continue reading →

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Fran Lebowitz on the OccupyEverywhere movement

I'm all for the separation of Corp and State. You?

I'm all for the separation of Corp and State. You?

A hundred years ago, anything worth saying had already been said by Oscar Wilde and/or George Bernard Shaw. Today anything worth saying has already been said by George Carlin and/or Fran Lebowitz. We’ve already reviewed what George presciently said about Occupy Wall Street, so now let’s take a trip in the TARDIS back to the July, 1997 issue of Vanity Fair and see what the Sage of Manhattan had to say about Occupy Wall Street and its offspring.

Do you agree with Calvin Coolidge that “the chief business of the American people is business?”

I think that in the current climate Calvin Coolidge might be regarded as almost a Beatnik, since it seems widely accepted that the only business of the American people is business — and that the appropriate model for all human endeavor is the business model. People contstantly say things like “If I ran my business the way they run the public school system, I’d be out of business in three weeks.” People seem to have the idea that these things are similar in some way. If they ran the public school system the way you run your business, people would be even less educated than they are now, because the purpose of business is to earn a profit. This is not the purpose of education. Additionally, it is not hard to imagine down-sizing in this context — grades four through nine being regarded as middle management and hence eliminated. It is equally easy to envision at some imminent point in time that during the State of the Union address, when the camera pans above the head of the president, instead of the great seal of the United States of America we will see the Nike symbol. Direct corporate sponsorship of the federal government.

People accept this sort of thing in every way now. People accept a level of commercialization of every single aspect of life that is shocking to someone of my age. you pay nine dollars to go to the movies and they show you commericals for 20 minutes. Not ony commercials for other movies — which they get you to call trailers or previews, like, “How lucky for you. For your nine dollars we’re throwing in 75 previews”  – but also commercials for products like Coca-Cola. When they started showing these — which wasn’t that long ago, although everyone now seems unable to remember a time when this did not occur —  people in New York used to boo them, but now they don’t. They expect to pay to see commercials. It takes two seconds, it seems, to get people used to this kind of thing. I, on the other hand, still can’t get used to paying for television. A television bill. It’s astonishing. And even more astonishing is that other people regard this as a technological advance, whereas to me it seems this is technology going backward. I feel that if at first television had been cable TV — this enormous, clunky, cumbersome, labor-intensive, expensive system —  and then some genius figured out broadcast television, people would have said, “Can you imagine? They don’t have to dig up the streets anymore. They don’t need the big wires. You can move your tv around. It doesn’t have to be attached to your wall. And it’s free. It goes through the air. It’s a miracle of modern technology — of course, there’ll have to be commercials.

The 99%

The 99%

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GPOY: OccupyEverywhere Edition

Power to the People

Power to the People

Ever have one of those days where you’re all, I GAVE Peace a chance and ten years later we’re still in Afghanistan? No? Just me then?

OccupyVancouver

OccupyOttawa

OccupyToronto

OccupyVictoria

OccupyEverywhere

October 15.

Expect us.