Quotulatiousness

November 6, 2011

Redefining “anarchism” to mean “statism”

Filed under: Government, Liberty, Media, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 12:41

Mark Steyn in the Orange County Register:

I don’t “stand with the 99%,” and certainly not downwind of them. But I’m all for their “occupation” continuing on its merry way. It usefully clarifies the stakes. At first glance, an alliance of anarchists and government might appear to be somewhat paradoxical. But the formal convergence in Oakland makes explicit the movement’s aims: They’re anarchists for statism, wild free-spirited youth demanding more and more total government control of every aspect of life — just so long as it respects the fundamental human right to sloth. What’s happening in Oakland is a logical exercise in class solidarity: the government class enthusiastically backing the breakdown of civil order is making common cause with the leisured varsity class, the thuggish union class and the criminal class in order to stick it to what’s left of the beleaguered productive class. It’s a grand alliance of all those societal interests that wish to enjoy in perpetuity a lifestyle they are not willing to earn. Only the criminal class is reasonably upfront about this. The rest — the lifetime legislators, the unions defending lavish and unsustainable benefits, the “scholars” whiling away a somnolent half-decade at Complacency U — are obliged to dress it up a little with some hooey about “social justice” and whatnot.

[. . .]

America is seizing up before our eyes: The decrepit airports, the underwater property market, the education racket, the hyper-regulated business environment. Yet, curiously, the best example of this sclerosis is the alleged “revolutionary” movement itself. It’s the voice of youth, yet everything about it is cobwebbed. It’s more like an open-mike karaoke night of a revolution than the real thing. I don’t mean just the placards with the same old portable quotes by Lenin et al, but also, say, the photograph in Forbes of Rachel, a 20-year-old “unemployed cosmetologist” with remarkably uncosmetological complexion, dressed in pink hair and nose ring as if it’s London, 1977, and she’s killing time at Camden Lock before the Pistols gig. Except that that’s three-and-a-half decades ago, so it would be like the Sex Pistols dressing like the Andrews Sisters. Are America’s revolting youth so totally pathetically moribund they can’t even invent their own hideous fashion statements? [. . .]

At heart, Oakland’s occupiers and worthless political class want more of the same fix that has made America the Brokest Nation in History: They expect to live as beneficiaries of a prosperous Western society without making any contribution to the productivity necessary to sustain it. This is the “idealism” that the media are happy to sentimentalize, and that enough poseurs among the corporate executives are happy to indulge — at least until the window smashing starts. To “occupy” Oakland or anywhere else, you have to have something to put in there. Yet the most striking feature of OWS is its hollowness. And in a strange way the emptiness of its threats may be a more telling indictment of a fin de civilization West than a more coherent protest movement could ever have mounted.

November 1, 2011

QotD: The unnatural prolongation of adolescence

Filed under: Quotations, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 00:03

OWS: Lawless, selfish, disrespectful, and mean. They are overgrown children, in other words — not adults in any real sense of the word. It is an oddity about modern Americans that always strikes me: many seem so . . . unformed. I’ve seen pictures of my grandfather and grandmother when they were in their early 20’s (married and with 2 kids already, and another on the way) and they seemed like fully-formed adults already. They looked like adults; they dressed like adults; they behaved as adults. Yet now I see people at 30, 40, 50 years old who seem little more than self-obsessed adolescents — smug, directionless, angry but inchoate, lavishly educated but not particularly intelligent, entitled without being industrious or deserving. They even groom and dress like children: slovenly, unwashed, unbarbered, sneakers, t-shirts, sweatpants, looking like unmade beds. I look at the OWS protests and I see a crowd of ill-behaved, unsupervised toddlers, but no adults willing (or perhaps able) to call them to order. My grandparents had much more difficult lives in any way you can measure than these spoiled brats, and yet they were better people — and happier people, on the whole.

“Monty”, “DOOM: I like that Doom Doom Pow”, Ace of Spades H.Q., 2011-10-31

October 25, 2011

“For strong personalities, the hyper-egalitarian mantras of anarchism act as a smokescreen for authoritarianism”

Filed under: Government, Liberty, Politics — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 09:42

Jonathan Kay discusses the contradictions of Julian Assange and his dictatorial control of WikiLeaks and uses the Occupy Wall Street “anarchists” to explain why anarchy usually turns into dictatorship:

In a fascinating report filed last Thursday, New York Magazine’s Alex Klein found that the protesters had splintered on the question of music. Many of the Occupiers, apparently, have been passing their time with daily 10-hour drum sessions. The tom toms help keep up morale, apparently. But they also anger those protesters who are trying to sleep, and have disrupted classes at a local high school.

So, the leaders of the Occupy Wall Street “general assembly” — a sort of self-appointed protester executive body — decreed that drumming shall be limited to two hours a day. The general assembly has also imposed a 50% tax on the donations that drummers earn from passersby.

“They’re imposing a structure on the natural flow of music,” complained one drumming protester. “We’re like, ‘What’s going on here?’ They’re like the banks we’re protesting,” said another.

And that’s not all. The general assembly is also ordering protesters to clean up their camp sites in advance of a local community board inspection. In some cases, they’re taking down tents and sending people away, so that new protesters can set up shop. Fist-fights have ensued. But Lauren Digion, a leader of Occupy Wall Street’s “sanitation working group” isn’t phased. “Someone needs to give orders” she told Klein, after barking commands about who could use the communal sleeping bags and who couldn’t. “There’s no sense of order in this f–king place.”

And that’s anarchism in a nutshell for you. It’s all drum circles and “natural flow” and “consensus” — until the time comes to actually get something done; at which point the self-appointed dictators start emerging naturally from amidst the protesters, like mushrooms after a week of rainstorms. For strong personalities, the hyper-egalitarian mantras of anarchism act as a smokescreen for authoritarianism.

October 20, 2011

Brendan O’Neill: Occupy movement is the death rattle of the old Left

Filed under: Economics, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 08:46

For a self-described man of the left, Brendan O’Neill is not afraid to critique leftist movements:

In the increasingly whiffy camp outside St Paul’s Cathedral, amid placards declaring ‘The End is Nigh’, apparently a new kind of politics is being born. Young women talk about ‘politics starting again’. The media cheerleaders of the Occupy movement claim it represents ‘a substantive change not just to the nature of modern politics, but to the way in which it is done, demanded and delivered’. From New York to Madrid to Tokyo, the inhabitants of the so-called tent cities proudly declare themselves ‘citizens of a new world’.

Is all this occupying really the start of something new? No. And not only because on the rare occasion when the protesters issue a coherent demand they end up echoing ideas we’ve heard a thousand times before. (Their call for tougher independent regulation of the financial industry was pilfered from the Financial Times.) More fundamentally, their globally contagious protest represents the death agony of something old rather than the birth pang of something new. What we’re witnessing is the demise of the progressive left, but — and here is the Occupy movement’s twist — that demise is dolled up as something good, something positive, where instead of addressing the vacuum at the heart of modern left-wing thinking, the occupiers make a virtue out of it.

Around the world, the occupiers are adapting to the decayed state of radical left-wing thinking, moulding themselves around the organisational and political disarray of the left. All the negative things about the left today — the lack of big ideas, the dearth of daring leaders, the withering of organisational structures — are repackaged as positives. Leaderlessness is transformed into a virtue, the enabler of a fairer, more consensual form of politics. The absence of overarching ideology is sexed up as ‘liberation from dogma’. Even the thoughtlessness of the Occupy movement, both in terms of its lack of deep thinking and the way it has spread across the globe in a fairly thoughtless, meme-like fashion, is turned into a good thing: this is ‘unthought’, declares one observer, where creeds emerge ‘without much articulation of why they’re necessary, [almost] as reflexes’.

October 19, 2011

Questioning the “income inequality” argument

Filed under: Economics, Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 09:19

James Pethokoukis doesn’t find the income inequality talk particularly convincing, and has a few reasons why:

Sorry, the story just doesn’t hold together. According to left-wing think tanks, columnist and bloggers — and, of course, the Occupy Wall Street radicals — the top 1 percent have been exploiting the 99 percent for decades. The rich have been getting richer at the expense of the middle class and poor.

Really? Just think for a second: If inequality had really exploded during the past 30 to 40 years, why did American politics simultaneously move rightward toward a greater embrace of free-market capitalism? Shouldn’t just the opposite have happened as beleaguered workers united and demanded a vastly expanded social safety net and sharply higher taxes on the rich? What happened to presidents Mondale, Dukakis, Gore, and Kerry? Even Barack Obama ran for president as a market friendly, third-way technocrat.

Nope, the story doesn’t hold together because the financial facts don’t support it. And here’s why:

[. . .]

5. Set all the numbers aside for a moment. If you’ve lived through the past four decades, does it really seem like America is no better off today? It doesn’t to Jason Furman, the deputy director of Obama’s National Economic Council. Here is Furman back in 2006: “Remember when even upper-middle class families worried about staying on a long distance call for too long? When flying was an expensive luxury? When only a minority of the population had central air conditioning, dishwashers, and color televisions? When no one had DVD players, iPods, or digital cameras? And when most Americans owned a car that broke down frequently, guzzled fuel, spewed foul smelling pollution, and didn’t have any of the now virtually standard items like air conditioning or tape/CD players?”

No doubt the past few years have been terrible. But the past few decades have been pretty good—for everybody.

October 16, 2011

The argument for value-added taxes

Filed under: Cancon, Economics, Government — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 10:37

In an article about the Canadian copy-cat protests, Mike Moffatt addresses some of the demands to increase taxes on the wealthy and explains why value-added taxes (like the much-hated Harmonized Sales Tax) are more efficient:

The Occupy Canada protests which began Saturday took place in over a dozen cities with mostly modest turnouts. They also lacked a cohesive goal or message, as their critics in the media are fond of pointing out. The protests did, however, address a number of important societal issues, such as the growing gap between the rich and the poor. As has been acknowledged by both Bank of Canada governor Mark Carney and Finance Minister Jim Flaherty, rising income inequality in Canada is a real and legitimate concern.

Over the last 30 years, the income gap between the top 1 per cent (or more accurately, the top 0.1 per cent) and the rest of us has increased substantially. Furthermore, this inequality is growing faster in Canada than it is in most other countries, including the United States. The Conference Board of Canada has reported that Canada has fallen to 12th out of 17 countries in its peer group when it comes to income inequal-ity. Between 1980 and 2005, before tax earnings increased by 16 per cent for the top 20 per cent, but fell by over 20 per cent for the bottom 20 per cent. The Occupy Canada protests are the product of a rising tide only lifting a few boats.

[. . .]

So how do we reduce inequality? The obvious place to start would be to borrow solutions from countries where after-tax income inequality is relatively low. Three countries that consistently score well on income inequality measures are Denmark, Finland and Sweden. These three Nordic countries share very similar tax structures, featuring moderate-to-low marginal corporate tax rates, moderate-to-high income tax rates and very high value added sales tax rates (VATs, similar to Ontario’s HST). The average VAT in these three countries is 25 per cent, a rate nearly twice that of the average Canadian federal GST plus provincial sales tax or HST. A onepercentage-point increase in the HST alone would raise $5 billion to $6 billion per year for the federal government, so increases by a few percentage points could adequately fund programs designed to reduce inequality. No country on Earth has been able to find a way to fund the kind of social programs and redistribution needed for “reasonable” levels of inequality without VAT rates significantly higher than Ontario’s HST.

Why are high sales taxes needed to fund social programs rather than higher corporate taxes or higher income taxes? Put simply, VATs are the hardest taxes to avoid paying. Higher income taxes reduce labour effort by the taxed. Higher corporate tax rates reduce investment. Canada’s corporate income tax rate was, not so long ago, twice what it is today. Adjusted for the inflation and the size of the economy, however, the higher corporate tax rates brought in similar levels of revenue then as they do now. There are some ways to avoid the HST, of course, but these are far more limited than they are for other taxes. The HST, as with all VATs, is a cash cow that provides governments with the necessary resources to tackle important societal issues.

October 15, 2011

It’s not as stirring a rallying cry to say that the 99% earn 80% of the income

Filed under: Economics, Government, Politics — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 12:32

Lorne Gunter can, if he holds his mouth right, kind of agree with the “Occupy Wall Street” protesters, but he says they do themselves no favours by mixing in fake “facts”:

The protesters’ main point also is obscured by all the lefty, social justice, union-financed trash they have heaped on it. The Occupy movement has proclaimed itself in favour of animal rights, a guaranteed living wage, free health care and education, and an end to the “poisoning” of the food supply.

Nor can the protesters help repeating a lot of class-warfare myths, such the “fact” that 1% of the population controls almost all of the wealth. According to Internal Revenue Service statistics in the United States, the “99 per centers” — as OWS types like to call themselves — earn about 80% of all income and control over two-thirds of the personal wealth (both percentages are slightly higher in Canada), while the “one per centers” earn about 20% of income and control about 32% of wealth.

It’s true that the top 1% of earners are taking a greater share of the pie than at any time since the 1950s, when reliable family income figures first became available. But it is also true that even the bottom 20% of earners are better off than they were then — not as much better off than the top 1%, but better off than they were in the mid-20th century.

[. . .]

But the biggest problem with the OWS movement is what they want to do about the problems they see. Because they view most corporate activity as bad and most government programs as good, the Occupiers have convinced themselves the only way to a fairer society lies through bigger government, more public spending and much higher taxes, all of which would only make our economic problems worse, while alleviating none of the disparity protesters believe is so corrosive to democracy.

Conrad Black on “Occupy Wall Street” and its targets

Filed under: Economics, Government, Media, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 11:50

Conrad Black looks at the “Occupy Wall Street” movement:

The Wall Street protesters denounce government bail-outs, the political and economic short-shrifting of students and young workers, the high cost of post-secondary education, various forms of discrimination, U.S. foreign policy, union-busting, outsourcing, the oil industry, media misinformation and (more generally) capitalism and globalization.

Of course, this is a pretty hackneyed scatter-gun indictment by people who haven’t really thought it through, but their anger and frustration are largely justified nonetheless: In the past decade, many prominent financial houses joined in the process of issuing consolidated debt obligations (CDOs), consisting of unfathomable patchworks of mortgages on packages of residential real estate, unsupported by any real base of invested equity in the underlying assets by their ostensible owners, and covered by diaphanous fig-leaves of default insurance. These instruments were made deceptively presentable by certifications from the main rating agencies that they were investment-grade, as if issued by serous entities and secured by unquestionable assets.

[. . .]

As for the Wall Street protesters, their largely justified complaints can’t be addressed by the wild methods they suggest. (A proposed list of demands posted at OccupyWallSt.org includes “free college education,” “bring the fossil fuel economy to an end” and “Immediate across the board debt forgiveness for all.”) The prestige of the U.S. financial leadership, the country’s political class and its economic academics and financial media have all collapsed at once and together, like a soufflé. Except for the military and the pure sciences, the country’s elites have been utterly discredited, and no one believes anything they say. Even if they wanted to, they could not impose on Americans the sort of radical anti-capitalist reforms the protestors urge.

October 11, 2011

What the “Occupy #LOCATION” folks should really be protesting

Filed under: Economics, Liberty, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 12:09

Caroline Baum puts her finger on the real looming crisis that the folks out in all the various Occupy Wall Street/Bay Street/Seattle/Edmonton gatherings should really be agitating about:

Oh, sure, some protesters have posted lists of pie-in-the-sky demands. (The occupywallst.org website insists there is no official list of demands.) One of these includes a $20 minimum wage regardless of employment, tariffs on all imports, trillions of dollars in new spending on alternative energy and infrastructure, and debt forgiveness — all debt “on the entire planet.”

In other words, lots of benefits and no consideration of the cost. You’d think one of these kids — and that’s how they come across — would have taken an economics course along the way. Where do they think the government gets the money for its largesse? Imposing usurious taxes on the top 1 percent of earners won’t yield enough money to provide for the other 99 percent. (One of the protesters’ slogans is, “We are the 99 percent that will no longer tolerate the greed and corruption of the 1 percent.”)

It’s not as if young adults couldn’t find good targets for their anger. If these protesters are looking for something to get exercised about, they might want to wander into Chris McHugh’s Monetary Economics class at Tufts University in Medford, Massachusetts, and learn about “generational economics,” the idea that government is going to stick the younger generation with the bill for supporting the retiring baby boomers. McHugh asked his students to identify grass-roots youth groups that are agitating about this, but all they found were a couple of minor groups that tended to be Tea Party and Ron Paul spinoffs.

Talk about haves and have-nots. The debt burden that the younger generation is staring at almost guarantees it will have a reduced standard of living. After all, if more dollars are directed at keeping Granny alive until age 102, that means fewer dollars for productivity-enhancing investments.

This idea clearly hasn’t resonated with today’s youth.

Maybe that’s because the numbers — tens of trillions of dollars in unfunded Social Security liabilities, for example — are hard to fathom. It’s much easier to vent their anger at bank bailouts and preferential treatment for corporate interests, much of which is justified. They seem to be ignoring Capitol Hill, where the rules are made by our bought-and-paid-for government.

October 9, 2011

ReasonTV: Remy’s Occupy Wall Street Protest Song

Filed under: Economics, Humour, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 11:52

October 7, 2011

“The entire Occupy Wall Street movement needs a ‘[citation needed]’ footnote”

Filed under: Liberty, Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 08:32

Robert David Graham does some independent reporting of the “Occupy Wall Street” protests and finds the mainstream media is being remarkably superficial:

It’s the quality of the coverage, not the amount that’s the problem. It’s been on the nightly news every night for the past week, but there has been little “serious” reporting.

By “serious” reporting, I mean such things as contacting the park’s owners asking for an official statement. The protesters are occupying Zuccotti Park, owned by the same company (Brookfield Office Properties NYSE:BPO) that owns the adjacent skyscraper. An obvious step would be to contact them asking for a statemen, but I could find no journalists that had yet done so. Well, if “journalists” aren’t going to do this, I can do this myself. I sent an email to their VP of Communications. I got a response, which I posted to my blog. When I posted it, I also Googled the sentences from the official statement, and found no results. I was indeed the first one “reporting” on this. Since then, others have mentioned the official statement, probably by picking it up from the #OccupyWallStreet Twitter hashtag that links to my blog.

[. . .]

In many ways, the press treats this protest the way they treated the Tea Party, completely distorting the story. Journalists ignored the mainstream of the Tea Party and instead focused on the fringe. Instead of showing the hundreds of signs calling for smaller government, reporters instead focused on the one sign showing Obama as Hitler. In the end, this reporting became self-fulfilling. The Republican fringe disaffected with the establishment were convinced by this reporting, believing that they, too, should join the Tea Party, thus derailing it.

[. . .]

In that way, it’s like the Internet. When the Internet appeared on the scene 20 years ago, it wasn’t like anything that predated it. Yes, you could define it in terms of the old, as a digital library, as an electronic form of mail, or as a communications network, but none of these descriptions captures the essence of what the Internet really is.

In particular, there is the problem with the “filter bubble”. While the Internet can expand a person’s universe, it gives people the power to shrink it. People create a “filter bubble” around themselves, using tools of the Internet to pass only those things they agree with. For example, Google watches what people search for, profiling them, and sorts the results for that individual. They see their own small universe reflected back, rather than the big universe.

[. . .]

I get the impression that the entire Occupy Wall Street movement needs a “[citation needed]” footnote. Wikipedia uses this technique to allow anybody to challenge an unsupported assertion. Anybody can insert this footnote, expressing to the reader that (as yet) the assertion isn’t supported. Anybody else can find supporting evidence, and replace the [citation needed] to a footnote pointing to a reliable source. If no citation can be found, the assertion is eventually deleted.

October 3, 2011

Occupy Wall Street activists fail to persuade

Filed under: Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 13:12

Brendan O’Neill says that the “teenage moralism” of the protesters makes him “ashamed to be Left-wing”:

Occupy Wall Street, the gathering of angry actors, graphic designers and various other hipsters in the financial districts of New York City, might just be the most degenerate Left-wing movement of recent times. Its weird demands, plastered across tongue-in-cheek placards and on super-cool, self-pressed t- shirts, capture the descent of the modern Left into the cesspool of victimology, conspiracy-mongering and disdain for mass society and its allegedly dumb inhabitants. Far from representing anything that I, a Leftie, would recognise as progressive and humane, this gaggle of rich kids spouts little more than snobbery and fear, seemingly incapable of deciding whom they loathe the most: greedy fat bankers or the dumb fat public.

Occupy Wall Street claims to be a mass workers’ movement, but it’s nothing of the sort. It is in fact a tiny, self-selected group of self-righteous, mostly middle-class activists who have failed to win over large sections of the American public to their “cause” — which isn’t surprising when you consider that on the rare occasion that these trendy banker-bashers talk about the American public, they do so with a metaphorical peg on their snouts. An article on the Occupy Wall Street website claims “the working class in this country has been brainwashed by MSM, Fox News and the Right-wing propaganda machine”. It says everyday Americans, being stupid, do not understand what socialism is, because “they have been emotionally brainwashed against it”. And so it falls to the cool, fashionable, oh-so-enlightened activists of Occupy Wall Street to help “de-programme people against the brainwashing they’ve experienced”. That is, the oiks must be re-educated by the hipsters. The little people must have their minds cleaned out by their moral and fashion superiors. Occupy Wall Street mashes together the outlook of Kim Jong-Il with the politics of Susan Sarandon, giving rise to a weirdly hippyish yet authoritarian gathering of slackers-cum-elitists.

September 19, 2011

The “Day of Rage” turns into a damp squib

Filed under: Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 08:38

Apparently it wasn’t the start of the anti-capitalist revolution after all:

September 17 was supposed to be the Day of Rage, the starting point of an anti-capitalist revolution that (in theory) was going to sweep the country coast-to-coast. As I noted yesterday, “The plan is to protest in state capitals and major cities across the nation, but the focus of the revolution will be in New York, where a hoped-for 20,000 anti-capitalists will ‘occupy’ Wall Street.”

I dutifully sent my operatives out to cover what were to be three of the largest Day of Rage protests — in New York, San Francisco, and Los Angeles — so humanity would have a full record of this pivotal moment in history.

Really, I should have learned my lesson by now: The bigger the build-up to a protest, and the more grandiose the promises, the louder the sound of the bellyflop onto the dustbin of irrelevancy.

In other words: “Day of Rage” was a massive FAIL.

Lots of sad photos at the link. Even the fringy-est of fringe movements were represented. As one of the photo captions says, “Down in L.A., there were so few authentic protesters, that the LaRoucheites comprised a significant proportion of the attendees.”

July 2, 2011

“I remained somehow reluctant to conclude that the Communist Party of China would flat-out lie”

Filed under: China, History, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 10:10

A tale of naivete about the Peoples’ Republic of China through the eyes of an American sympathizer:

The first time I tried to go to China was in 1967, the year after I graduated from college. My father was a radical leftist professor who admired Mao Zedong. And that influence, along with the Vietnam War protests — a movement in which I was not only a participant but an activist — led me to look at socialist China with very high hopes.

I was living in Hong Kong and wrote a letter to Beijing. A few months later I received a charming reply on two sheets of paper that looked like they had been labored over for days by a Red Guard with little English and a faulty typewriter. The letter explained that the Chinese people had nothing against me, but that I was from a predatory imperialist country and could not visit the People’s Republic. Before I left Hong Kong I bought four volumes of “The Selected Works of Mao Zedong,” and, rather grandiosely, ripped the covers off of them so that I might carry them safely back to the imperialist US.

In May, 1973, however, I got another chance. A year earlier, in April 1972, the Chinese ping-pong team had visited the US to break a twenty-three year freeze in diplomatic relations, and I had served as an interpreter. I made a good impression on Chinese officials on that US tour, in part because I led four of the six American interpreters in a boycott of the teams’ meeting with President Richard Nixon at the White House. (Nixon had ordered the bombing of Haiphong just the day before; to me, small talk in the Rose Garden just didn’t seem right.)

H/T to Tim Harford for the link.

June 21, 2011

The Athens protests as a theatre for projection

Filed under: Economics, Europe, Government, Greece, Media — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 09:45

Whatever may really be behind the protests, reporters are having a wonderful time using it as a blank canvas to project their own notions:

Some seriously overblown claims are being made about the anti-government, anti-EU, anti-IMF protests in Athens. ‘Syntagma Square has become the frontline of the battle against European austerity’, said one giddy British reporter, referring to the square where for the past three weeks Greek citizens, calling themselves ‘indignados’, have been protesting against the IMF/EU demand for further austerity measures before Greece can receive more aid. In truth, the most striking thing about the protests is their incoherence, even their childishness. Far from being the frontline of any kind of solid movement, the Syntagma camp-in is a confused, depoliticised, borderline petulant response to the economic crisis.

Some European journalists and activists have become so enamoured by the physicality of the protests that they seem not to have noticed the gaping political hole at the heart of them. BBC reporters, who normally spend most of their time in stuffy, smokeless offices, have written with undisguised glee of their sweaty experiences in Athens, where the ‘teargas hits us without warning’ and ‘we crush together, shoulder to shoulder’. A Guardian reporter describes being ‘jammed up against the railings’ in a ‘raucous’ atmosphere that is like ‘an open-air concert’. Hacks more used to writing about Vince Cable’s latest pronouncement on business law have leapt upon the opportunity to get stuck into a seemingly more thrilling economic story, in the process presenting the Syntagma stand-off as way more profound than it actually is.

Likewise, many amongst the European left are busily projecting their aspirations on to Athens. This is the ‘start of the European workers’ fightback’, they claim, describing the protests as the ‘beginning’ of an uprising against austerity that they knew would come. It is a feeling of profound disarray and disconnection amongst European left groups, their sensitivity to the political stasis that has largely greeted the economic crisis, which leads them to make excitable claims about Greece. Motivated by a determination to avoid having hard debates at home about the crisis, far less try to come up with any strategies for resolving it, they content themselves instead with celebrating the rowdy ‘indignation’ of Greek protesters and imagining that it represents the first stirrings of the return of traditional class politics.

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