{"id":11951,"date":"2011-11-06T15:01:42","date_gmt":"2011-11-06T19:01:42","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=11951"},"modified":"2012-07-11T09:29:19","modified_gmt":"2012-07-11T14:29:19","slug":"qotd-the-occupy-movement","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2011\/11\/06\/qotd-the-occupy-movement\/","title":{"rendered":"QotD: The Occupy movement"},"content":{"rendered":"<blockquote>\n<p>There are lessons in this history for the leftist protester. The Occupy movement is bristling with changes it wants made (I\u2019m told we\u2019re not supposed to call them \u201cdemands\u201d); these changes won\u2019t, and shouldn\u2019t, happen outside the ballot box. The goal of protest in a liberal-democratic society must therefore be to advance one\u2019s pet issue further ahead on the agenda of the sympathetic, for when they do attain power, and to weaken the morale of moderates on the other side. One must locate specific injustices rather than nebulous cosmic ones, confronting them and defying their perpetrators directly. Deeds will accomplish more than any amount of eloquence. And it should not be necessary to claim to be a majority (let alone a majority of 99-to-one); one individual suffices, where he has a true claim to our attention.<\/p>\n<p>It\u2019s not really clear, anyway, how an \u201cOccupation\u201d that is meeting no serious resistance from authorities anywhere is supposed to elicit sympathy. The main effect of the movement so far seems to have been an elaborate proof-by-demonstration that Canadian municipalities are incredibly respectful of political protest and fawningly deferential to the Charter of Rights. So . . . hooray?<\/p>\n<p>Colby Cosh, <a href=\"http:\/\/www2.macleans.ca\/2011\/11\/06\/want-political-change-talk-to-a-farmer\/\" target=\"_blank\">&#8220;Want political change? Talk to a farmer&#8221;, <em>Maclean&#8217;s<\/em><\/a>, 2011-11-06<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>There are lessons in this history for the leftist protester. The Occupy movement is bristling with changes it wants made (I\u2019m told we\u2019re not supposed to call them \u201cdemands\u201d); these changes won\u2019t, and shouldn\u2019t, happen outside the ballot box. The goal of protest in a liberal-democratic society must therefore be to advance one\u2019s pet issue [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[6,28,53,41],"tags":[212,186,835,720],"class_list":["post-11951","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-cancon","category-media","category-politics","category-quotations","tag-freedomofassembly","tag-freedomofspeech","tag-occupymovement","tag-protest"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-36L","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11951","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=11951"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11951\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":15968,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11951\/revisions\/15968"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=11951"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=11951"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=11951"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}