Down with the evil everythings, or something.

There is more to say about the trend of these events, but this is a good start:



These "Occupy Wall St" things are dragging out and starting to propagate, but it eludes me, and any thoughtful commentators I've seen, what precisely these people want.

Some visitors here get the superficial impression that I'm a big booster of capitalism, corporations etc. This is superficially true, as I am a fan of progress, and innovation is best fostered in a competitive environment. Profits are a good and necessary part of doing business, and making money makes your life better, or at least you have less pressing things to worry about than if you'll eat this week or how to replace your or your children's worn out clothes.

Greed however is still greed, and I must concur that it should be classed as a sin, or in a secular world, a character flaw. I have a serious problem with companies which are "Too Big to Fail", and avoiding that sort of thing is why monopoly and anti-trust laws were created and enforced.

So, if this was some sort of grassroots campaign to restore some balance in banking and corporate law I could get behind that. However, it seems to be an incoherent hodge-podge of disaffected "progressives" and anarchists out to disrupt and occupy other peoples' property. This sort of disregard for private property I have a serious problem with, especially when it seems to be for no useful reason.

Action without purpose is chaos, and there is enough of that in the universe with out us adding to it. Civilization, especially technological civilization, is about resisting entropy, not encouraging it. The TEA Party had an agenda: too much government means too many taxes, therefore they want less bureaucracy and smaller government. This is coherent, and despite the obsession of lefty media and individuals of accentuating the kooks at the margins of this inherently conservative movement it has had political success.

The same lefties are falling over themselves to praise the "Occupation" (at least when Israel's not doing it) but I can't see this going anywhere, except geographically. The Democrats in the US are now looking to see if they can do some sort of TEA Party thing with these rallies, but they already got their dream candidate in office for four disappointing years. I don't know what they could mould out of this to replace that bid for Hope and Change, but if it's even possible it would be a political Frankenstein.

That makes me think about the whole Keystone XL pipeline imbroglio, so perhaps (no promises) I'll look at that next time.