It’s a classic peasant mentality: going into fits of groveling and bowing whenever the master’s carriage rides by, then fuming against the Turks in Crimea or the Jews in the Pale or whoever after spending fifteen hard hours in the fields. You know you’re a peasant when you worship the very people who are right now, this minute, conning you and taking your shit. Whatever the master does, you’re on board. When you get frisky, he sticks a big cross in the middle of your village, and you spend the rest of your life praying to it with big googly eyes. Or he puts out newspapers full of innuendo about this or that faraway group and you immediately salute and rush off to join the hate squad. A good peasant is loyal, simpleminded, and full of misdirected anger. And that’s what we’ve got now, a lot of misdirected anger searching around for a non-target to mis-punish…
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WereBear
Yes, I’m afraid that’s so. It’s passive/aggressive at its most unthinking.
Zoogz
Beck’s still a blind squirrel, trying to find the wright ACORN to chew on.
vishnu schizt
Much like the subplots in two of the finest pieces of literature, in the form of cinema, in the past forty years, I’m speaking of course of "Slap Shot" and "Gladiator". Giving the people what they want, in the form of an enemy to hate and a cause to support is a (if not the) classic form of social engineering. Now that the right has lost a bit of its grip on killing brown people. It must find another Goldberg. Of course, the fact that no one has any idea what Goldberg really is makes little difference. They just want the opportunity to hate something, and cheer for their team. GO RICHIE, KICK MY ASS!!! Is the sign I’d carry.
gbear
TBogg has a great picture at his site celebrating this fabulous spring morning.
It’ll be interesting to see what the "misdirected anger searching around for a non-target to mis-punish" leads to today. Hopefully no one will get hurt and the peasants can return to their regular circlejerk tomorrow.
Brick Oven Bill
Taibbi’s paper is out of touch with reality. His assumption is that Beck’s ‘peasants’, from ‘villages’, are ‘mostly lower-income people’, who have been ‘trained’.
‘Lower income’ I understand to be correlated in Taibbi’s mind with ‘low cognitive ability’, which is acceptable to consider as a metric when considering Beck’s audience. Perhaps we should start testing school children for IQ again, oh wait, never mind.
But his pre-conceived notions are wrong. The people I have met are primarily small businessmen, contractors, military, and technician-types. Their biggest concern seems to be honoring the principles of the Constitution, which in my view is the biggest barrier to the aims of those parts of the Left which want to control people’s lives.
If Taibbi were smarter, he would have left out that part about peasants about bowing to their masters. This indicates a poor sense of situational awareness. Taibbi is the son of an NBC reporter.
srv
I’ll just stick to sheeple, rather than writing a couple paragraphs about the glaringly obvious reality.
Queue the people always loathe the word and how much it grates their peasant sensibilities.
Fencedude
@Brick Oven Bill:
You know, I hear you owe someone 10 bucks.
jenniebee
Just checked the meetups for Richmond, 39 people are committed to attend the Tea Party here. My favorite decline message:
I don’t know where to start with that one.
someguy
@ Brick Oven Bill
Wouldn’t it just be easier for you to say, "morans and their moranic supersititions"? It would save you some typing and take a little stress of your brain, so you wouldn’t have to work hard to fabricate up all that fancy sounding shit.
Awesom0
Their biggest concern seems to be honoring the principles of the Constitution…
Can’t…stop…laughing…long…enough…to…write…snarky…takedown…of…moron…..
jake 4 that 1
We have always been at war with the Money Grubbing Negro Immigrant Gay Commie Chinese Jewish Polish Islamists.
srv
"The surest way to corrupt a youth is to instruct him to hold in higher esteem those who think alike than those who think differently."
– Friedrich Nietzsche
You know, I had to take philosophy and read Nietzsche, and never saw that quote until yesterday.
ksmiami
Okay – so I tried to look at some of those tea party people and I don’t think they are a cross section of normal Americans and small businessmen concerned with the constitution. In fact, they remind me of the same people who were angry when segregation ended – on the wrong side of history doomed to shame and irrelevance and well – slightly doughy. They are the rubes and whereas the DFH protests at least have an element of irreverant fashion and poetry, the tea baggers are in desperate need of a make over. Where were these people recruited from? The studio audience for Biggest Loser????
Zifnab
@srv:
"Sheeple" gets kicked around a lot by anyone wanting to mock a group of three or more. It’s worth spelling out exactly how ridiculous someone looks when he’s protesting tax cuts for himself a tax hikes on the guy that’s been robbing from him for the better part of his life.
It’s not just watching lemmings dive over a cliff. It’s more like rabbits jumping into the soup pot. It’s a level of ignorant craziness that needs a little definition.
Brick Oven Bill
Fencedude. Ninerdave did not take me up on that bet, but he had suggested that the proceeds go to a charity. So tonight, after our glorious Tea Party, I shall find the right waitress to whom the Obama charity donation shall be presented.
passerby
@Brick Oven Bill:
I agree, but I think his mistake was using the term "lower-income". Peasants aren’t necessarily low-income. For a variety of reasons they’re just more gullible and easily guided because they’ve abdicated their ability to think for themselves.
In the end, it’s their behavior that classifies them as peasants, not their economic status.
The Grand Panjandrum
Apsaras linked to that Taibbi piece in a previous thread. The part you quote is the take away from the piece. The cognitive dissonance of the teabaggers is staggering. Not only is it misdirected anger but what is it exactly they want? Can they narrow it down? But as others have pointed out in previous threads and elsewhere in the blogosphere the butchered rump of the GOP now shows its utter lack of original thinking. Like a bunch of petulant teenagers they are just throwing a "hissy fit" and it really is tiresome. Should we just send them to their rooms and let them think about the damage so-called conservatism has brought upon the country?
A Ghost To Most
So, Body Oven Bill, after your "glorious Tea Party" today, what exactly are you going to drink to get the taste of sweaty "Tea-sticle" out of your mouth?
scav
Oh this is a grand day. The French Navy just captured some pirates! Allez les frogs!
GSD
What do Osama Bin Laden and Glenn Beck have in common?
Besides both of them being religious extremists hoping for America to collapse from within?
-GSD
jenniebee
Fully-Literate BOB:
kay
"I do note that on February 4th, the date of the proposed wager, Rasmussen’s ‘Presidential Index’ was +18 and it is now +2. I said on February 4th:
"Deval Patrick’s approval ratings dropped 20% between February and March, after the election. Disapproval ratings rose 22%. There is a difference between campaigning and governing."
Yeah, except he said Obama under 50% approval rating, on April 15th, according to Gallup.
There is a difference between admitting you were dead wrong and what Bill wrote.
Not that I expected an honest concession. I didn’t.
Dennis-SGMM
The teabaggers seem to believe that, although the Constitution was written in the eighteenth century, it didn’t come into effect until 2009.
Ricky Bobby
I agree that Taibbi’s mistake was equating "peasants" with low income, but you have to admit that the historical precident is there and it’s correct.
The Right has their own ways of "controlling people’s lives" it just happens to be stuff that you agree with.
/pot, kettle
Ash Can
@jenniebee: I just spotted a little tidbit on the GOS that makes this gem even better:
Grateful Dead have oval office meeting with Obama; David Axelrod a Deadhead.
Jon H
A friend of mine is doing a product demo at a hotel adjacent to the cincinnati teabaggers event, which he calls "Cincinnati Teabaggers Pride Parade". He reported the following on Facebook:
"zOMG there’s a teabagger with a "stop the ZOG" sign. Will try to get a pic."
DougJ
“Slap Shot” is probably the best sports movie ever made. They filmed some of it a few miles from where I grew up. People were very excited about the Paul Newman sightings.
eyeball
It’s a decent enough analogy as far as it goes. But Beck is really more like a house slave warning the field slaves about how bad it will be when the Northern armies come to free them. Strip away the tears, the snake oil, the dry-drunk posturing, the know-nothing-ism, and you have a studio puppet whose role is to convince the plebes they’re better off with a master who tosses them some cornbread on sundays than a messy revolution that yanks them out of bondage and servitude for good.
jenniebee
@The Grand Panjandrum:
Not only is it misdirected anger but what is it exactly they want? Can they narrow it down?
Where’s my burrito?
DougJ
I see what you’re getting at, but I think you’re wrong. I know plenty of these types myself and many of them — not all — are the “bow to the master” type, where “the master” equals Republican public officials, owners of local sports franchises, many business moguls, and so on.
HitlerWorshippingPuppyKicker
@srv:
Wow, there goes a whole generation of blog owners.
JGabriel
Quick question: I hear the teabaggers are complaining about "taxation without representation". Does this mean they’ll agree to seat Franken and Murphy forthwith?
.
Comrade Kevin
"You’ve got to remember that these are just simple farmers. These are people of the land. The common clay of the new West. You know… morons. "
MikeJ
Atrios reports the teabaggers in DC didn’t have permits to dump teabags, so they dumped them in the 12th floor conference room of the Competitive Enterprise Institute.
Why didn’t the Brits think of that?
Mattski
"slap Shot" is 30 minutes of the greatest sports scenes in a movie evah surrounded by another 1 1/2 hours of the most suck plot evah. And i fricken love that movie.
passerby
@eyeball:
Studio puppet, nailed it. Most of the talking heads on TV are studio puppets. The term "rabble rouser" seems interchangeable here. So much theater.
JGabriel
@jake 4 that 1:
Apparently, we’re now calling them the advocates of: Unconstitutional, Anti-Christ, Socialism, Federal Deficit Spending Programs.
.
Mike
Is there anyone who isn’t making fun of the teabaggers? The current banner headline on Marketwatch, hardly a left-wing site: "Obama: Tea-baggers all wet."
The Moar You Know
@passerby: Anyone who gives waitstaff a decent tip is alright in my book.
Don’t listen to the haters, BOB. You stay just the way you are.
Cat Lady
@DougJ:
I got you beat. My best friend since junior high school’s brother played McCracken. He still does some acting, and goes to Slap Shot reunions, where people line up to get his autograph on random stuff. He got the part because he played hockey in HS. He learned to ride a horse and got a part in Heaven’s Gate. That movie did not help his career.
Dennis-SGMM
@MikeJ:
They should have dumped them in the Men’s Room. That way they could have indulged in the wingers’ other pastimes.
JGabriel
Hep me, I’ve been modereratered!
.
Brick Oven Bill
The reason I believe that Glenn Beck is on to something is that the women at these events are largely attractive, and clean. This is a good sign for any political movement. As I have previously mentioned, these women are better looking than those I once witnessed at an Indigo Girls concert. Here would be my ratings for ladies of child-bearing age at the various events:
Indigo Girls: 6
Beck Events: 8
The standard deviation among the Indigo Girls women was much higher. There were some blazing hot ones and many ‘others’. Beck’s women are more homogenized. But the Beck women are cleaner, for the most part. They are definitely not peasants, which can be synonymous with ‘unwashed’.
passerby
@The Moar You Know:
Huh? Did you just lump me in with the haters? Wha’d I say?
Napoleon
@DougJ:
God, I love that movie. A couple years ago I saw an article where one of the "Hanson Brothers" runs a hockey camp for kids.
JK
Thank God for Matt Taibbi
Glenn Beck is a slimy, sleazy neanderthal and Glenn Reynolds is a flaming douchebag
Cris
More like thank god for Brick Oven Bill
A Ghost To Most
If hatin’ BOB is wrong, I don’t wanna be right
LV-426
@DougJ:
I agree. They don’t call them ‘masters’ they cal them ‘job creators’. They don’t bow but they do affect a respectful pose.
The Moar You Know
@passerby: Shit I clicked on the wrong name! I was gunning for Brick Oven Bill.
How embarassing.
Dennis-SGMM
BOB reminds me of an anecdote about Florida State Seminoles’ football coach Bill Peterson. The day before an important game a reporter asked Peterson if he thought it would rain on game day. "What do you think I am?" Peterson replied, "A geologist?"
aimai
I think the next thing for the left to do is really to start trying to interfere with the deadly vicious circle that Fox News, the Oligarchs and the GOP have set up–or the Iron triangle or whatever other image you want to use. Its the real reason why they are so petrified of unions. Unions used to be one of the few places that people could get health care, insurance and *education* about the world. Go as far aback as the ILGWU, or the cigar rollers, or any of the early Jewish labor organizations. The distinguishing feature was that they offered their workers useable in formation. The cigar workers were, famously, among the best educated workers because they used to pay one of their number to read to them while they rolled the cigars.
When I look at the people showing up for this tea bagging thing, or read the kos diary today about the pathetic hysterics who showed up to a ny congressman’s constituent day sobbing that they don’t want the stimulus money but they do want more government spending on roads (!) I’m filled with disgust. But also with pity. We’ve abandoned these people to Fox news and Glenn Beck. Shit has rushed in to fill the vaccuum left as they lose their jobs, their health care, their sanity.
I’d recommend that the Dems start a *huge* listening/we’ll help tour of the hardest hit most conservative areas. Republican reps won’t show up because they are obligated to insist that the government can’t help people with their real problems. Democrats need to start pubicly stepping up their help for the neediest conservatives and peeling them off.
I know its going to sound like a joke but I’d be willing to offer (electives) in both gun safety and religion courses in public school, along with dance and art instruction and foreign language. Then throw money at the schools *with the aid* of the former NRA hysterics. Cut, cut, cut away at the various linked constituencies.
aimai
LV-426
That would probably describe peasants during the middle ages but it’s not a textbook definition. I’m a peasant and I showered this morning so take that.
There’s a difference between ‘dismissive’ and ‘correct’.
Col. Klink
You forgot the ‘clownshoes’ tag.
passerby
@The Moar You Know:
No need to feel embarrassment Moar. It’s one of the pluses of anonymity. Now, in person we’d all be well practiced in slunking off all red-faced and owned. : )
eemom
as I have SO been trying to think of the right analogy for Palin and Bachmann, this from the Taibbi piece is a godsend:
" . . . pinhead Midwestern congresswoman Michelle Bachmann, a woman who is looking more and more like George Foreman to Sarah Palin’s Joe Frazier in the Heavyweight Championship of Stupid. Down goes Frazier! Down goes Frazier!"
MikeJ
Nothing stops schools from offering those now. My HS had a firing range where students were taught with .22s.
The Other Steve
We should teach children how to field strip an AK-47 like they do in Russia.
Buck
Amen. He has made many of my days more tolerable.
JenJen
Cold and rainy, but I took a look-see downtown today, and have to say, good turnout here in Cincinnati, Ohio; I’d say 3,000 people. Everyone is white, and for the most part, over 50. Lots of "Don’t Tread On Me" flags. Thought it was a tax protest, not a war supply blockade, but who knows?
I watched while a local news reporter asked the protesters what they were, you know, protesting. One woman with a "Read My Lipstick" sign said, "I just want my government to know that I don’t like this!!" Very clear. Next came an older male in period costume, who told the reporter that Obama needs to keep his hands off our guns. A third male was carrying Gov. Rick Perry’s pretty-close-to-secession statement on his big-ass sign. Maybe he’d be happier in Texas rather than a blue state?
At one point a group of protesters asked me to come onto the square and join them. "No thanks, just having my lunch and watching." One of them said "Enjoy your lunch, lib!" I laughed and said, "Thank you! It’s Chicken!!"
Honestly these things are nothing but Sarah Palin rallies, six months after the fact. And for anecdotal comparison, when Senator Obama gave his acceptance speech at the Democratic National Convention, 8,000 of us showed up on Fountain Square to watch it on the big screen.
The Moar You Know
@aimai: Interesting you should mention union education.
I have an amazing set of books – Wonders Of The World – from the 1930s. Leather covers, probably the most exquisite tooling on the covers of these books I’ve ever seen. And they were written and published by a rather large union – I can’t recall which one right now.
It’s always puzzled me what they were for. They look WAY too expensive to have been intended for private ownership by a working guy, particularly in the middle of the Great Depression. They are egalitarian enough in content that I don’t see them aimed at a rich person. Perhaps they were intended for a union library or school.
EDIT: As to the rest of your post, you are dead-on right. There is a bit of truth to the charge that Democrats are elitists. The good news for us is that Republicans are even more so. There are a lot of people that need to be reached out to. We shouldn’t allow Glenn Back to be the one that does that outreach.
LD50
Fascinating. The school where my wife teaches has a massive infrastructure in place to PREVENT kids from bringing guns to school.
(And BoB? I don’t want to hear your asinine take on this. STFU.)
passerby
@MikeJ:
And to expand on this point, I’d like to suggest that a course in banking and credit be made a mandatory part of HS curriculum.
An ignorant populace is a controllable populace. How many are beginning to understand that we have been owned and manipulated by the banks (and their henchmen–the government and the media) for all this time. The outrage of the TeaParty participants, though misdirected, is just now, in 2009, making its way into the mainstream. Shit. This highway robbery has been going on for decades.
Banks are receiving taxpayer bailout money and then will turn around and loan it back to us with interest–screwed coming and going. We’re on the Plantation and as Taibbi pointed out:
…"when the excesses of business interests and their political proteges in Washington leave the regular guy broke and screwed, the response is always for the lower and middle classes to split down the middle and find reasons to get pissed off not at their greedy bosses but at each other."
We have a common enemy and the powers that be need us fightin amongst ourselves lest we ban together and give them all death by pitchfork.
WereBear
I gotta say, I run across articles about the average age of Fox viewings being 71, and now the Teabag Partiers are over fifty, and I send daily prayers to The Noodleliness that it’s simply a consequence of when and where these old folks were young, not an inevitable byproduct of aging.
aimai
My point, Mike, is that the Democrats could get out in front–waaay in front–of lots of petty little issues like this and simply steal it away from some proportion of the remaining republican base. Why should the NRA be able to raise money fanning fears of a gun grab the dems (to my sorrow!) don’t have the nerve to make? Instead offer in school gun clubs *with dues* for interested families. A) it defuses the accusations that the government is out to take the guns. B) it takes money from the NRA because its more convenient to pay it to the school for instruction and you don’t need to pay your dues for "protection." Same with "religious education" as long as its ecumenical. Frankly, I think no one would take those classes but hey, offer them anyway. It just cuts off one more talking point. And while you are at it smuggle in advanced funding for music and the arts.
As for the Union thing–we actually (still) belong to the Workman’s Circle which was originally a huge union/self help association for a largely jewish working population distributed among anarchists, socialists, and communists. The workman’s circle dues paid for a visiting doctor, lecture series, housing, life insurance, and a cemetery and a children’s summer camp (which is still going). It was the only way poor workers could aspire to any kind of insurance or health care or any hope of getting their kids out of the city for the summer.
aimai
The Moar You Know
@WereBear: It is, don’t worry. I’m now into my forties and have become far more liberal then I was in my twenties.
aimai
My point, Mike, is that the Democrats could get out in front—waaay in front—of lots of petty little issues like this and simply steal it away from some proportion of the remaining republican base. Why should the NRA be able to raise money fanning fears of a gun grab the dems (to my sorrow!) don’t have the nerve to make? Instead offer in school gun clubs with dues for interested families. A) it defuses the accusations that the government is out to take the guns. B) it takes money from the NRA because its more convenient to pay it to the school for instruction and you don’t need to pay your dues for "protection." Same with "religious education" as long as its ecumenical. Frankly, I think no one would take those classes but hey, offer them anyway. It just cuts off one more talking point. And while you are at it smuggle in advanced funding for music and the arts.
As for the Union thing—we actually (still) belong to the Workman’s Circle which was originally a huge union/self help association for a largely jewish working population distributed among anarchists, so**zelists, and communists. The workman’s circle dues paid for a visiting doctor, lecture series, housing, life insurance, and a cemetery and a children’s summer camp (which is still going). It was the only way poor workers could aspire to any kind of insurance or health care or any hope of getting their kids out of the city for the summer.
LV-426
@passerby:
DING!
Leo Strauss would be so proud of his disciples.
Elie
So let me see — if you are a teabagger, you approved when the government under Bush, ran up a trillion dollar deficit, got us into at least one unnecessary war and let the financial sector crash the US economy because of no oversight. But YOU don’t want to pay for that. Someone must pay, of course, but not YOU —
What else could they be saying? Completely irresponsible — we will let the recession deepen (against paying for the stimulus), we will let all the financial institutions crash, and I dont care whether we are ok cause we will pay less taxes. Am I getting that right?
MikeJ
The pics from these hissy fits are darling. One guy has a sign wanting the fairness doctrine (ooga booga!) to apply to the media. Which I guess he thinks talk radio isn’t part of.
http://twitpic.com/3co5u
Oh, and the guy calling for the death by hanging of "traitors in congress", like Clinton. Yes, yes, I know.
http://twitpic.com/3coww
DougJ
@Cat Lady
What makes that movie great is that Paul Newman knows how to play a loser. That’s something a lot of the young hotshots of today lack. I mean, when you look at, say, John Cusack all you can think is “that guy’s pretty smart and writes at HuffPost all the time”, no matter what how low-down the character he’s playing is.
Playing a loser is one of the most important things a male actor can learn how to do. It’s why I think Kevin Costner isn’t bad and why I think Hugh Grant may be a genius.
passerby
@LV-426:
Was it Rachel Maddow or Barack Obama who recently pointed out that there was a reason why it was against the law to teach a slave to read and write. I honestly don’t remember but at the time I heard them say it, I was astounded to hear in spoken.
Joshua Norton
I think that’s a great line. Whenever I hear wingnutz ranting I always think of how Churchill described the Hun. "They’re either at your feet or at your throat". Fits them perfectly. Kissing the ass of their leaders and raging against anyone who isn’t.
JenJen
@MikeJ: I enjoyed one of the comments that accompanied that "Hang ‘Em High!" photo. It read, "But I thought teabaggers preferred ’em to hang low?"
:-)
Honestly, carrying a sign that urges the hanging of elected Congressional members is not OK. I imagine the Malkinites will try to say that people with those kinds of signs were carried by liberal agent provocateurs, right? Just watch.
passerby
Looks like I’m going to have to rent Slap Shot.
Napoleon
@passerby:
I am reading one of Steven Pinker’s books (for those of you that do not know he is an intelligence/mind scientist of some type at Harvard). It is called something like How The Mind Works. I just got to a part where in a totally non-political discussion (not that any of his books are the least bit political) he mentions a study of someone on a bunch of differant societies, where the heavier a caste system in the society, the less likely they would have anything approaching the empirical system to things we have (ie, no scholarly history but instead rely on myths, etc, etc). The book was written in the mid-late 90s so it couldn’t even be interpreted as some back door critic of what we have seen in the last 9 years.
LV-426
@Napoleon:
You would think that but you’d be wrong. The date it was published is a fact and facts don’t matter when ideaology is involved. The DHS report about right wing extremists was commissioned when Bush was president yet the right still blamed it all on Obama.
Jon H
@DougJ: "Playing a loser is one of the most important things a male actor can learn how to do."
The problem is that William H. Macy has those roles locked down, with Steve Buscemi picking up the leftovers.
Sister Machine Gun of Mild Harmony
The reason I believe that Glenn Beck is on to something is that the women at these events are largely attractive, and clean.
Psst.. BOB! Your spoof is showing!
passerby
@Napoleon:
My sister, who is a big fan of intelligence/mind theories (she’d probably be familiar with Pinker), sent me a fascinating book: Mistakes Were Made (But Not By Me): How We Justify Foolish Beliefs, Bad Decisions, and Hurtful Acts.
A quote:
"Self-justification not only minimizes our mistakes and bad decisions; it is also the reason that everyone can see a hypocrite in action except the hypocrite…Aldous Huxley was right when he said, "There is probably no such thing as a conscious hypocrite." "
And isn’t this what is being accomplished by mass media. Baldfaced lies from Faux News which mis-direct the gullible. In the last days of his presidency, Bush’s henchmen lauched a full court press with goal of spinning his legacy. Myth making.
passerby
@Jon H:
Agree. To see William H. Macy in his most loser role ever, watch The Cooler. I think it was in the special features section of the DVD that Macy said he was hesitant to play yet another loser. I’m glad he did. Alex Baldwin rocks in his role as old school casino owner. Rent it today.
[Edit: Awaiting moderation? What for?]
Joshua Norton
From what I’ve seen, "attractive" means having one or both of their front teeth. "Clean" means wearing their best size 48 K-Mart goin’ to meetin’ dress.
Hawt!
Charity
You know, all these over-50 "socialist" hating folk…
If I threatened to take away their Social Security or their Medicaid, they’d freak the fuck out. Wouldn’t I be saving them from socialist programs?
Polish the Guillotines
@DougJ:
That and Bad News Bears. And no, I’m not talking about the Billy Bob version, and no, I’m not kidding.
Tony J
It is a great film. If you wear glasses, it’s even better.
Topicwise, the Teabaggers are doing a great job of showing that the GOP as it stands has no future. Too old, too stupid, and too weighed down by the crazies it relies upon for votes.
Put it this way. How many of these ‘grassroots’ protests actually attracted anyone to join in? Any footage of passers by stopping what they’re doing and taking part?
They have become culturally ‘smelly’. And they’ll stay that way until they die.
Polish the Guillotines
@passerby: Here’s a taste. Hockey explained.
El Cid
It’s a classic observation, even a Marxist argument (Marx called the peasantry a "sack of potatoes"), to portray peasants as entirely obedient dupes. They certainly tend not to be proletarian revolutionaries.*
But actually, if you study peasant actions around the world, many of them engage in all kinds of quite clever resistance to survive, including surviving the exploitation of their own oppressors in large landholders, oligopsonist buyers, or repressive governments.
Evo Morales of Bolivia, for example, was propelled to a successful run to Bolivia’s presidency by peasant & worker led protests against another internationally-backed idiot scheme to privatize water.
(Although I should add that Mao Tse-Tung was seen as a truly revolutionary thinker by other, Soviet and Lenin-influenced Marxists for believing he could make a revolution out of China’s gigantic peasant population. He was right, by the way. Yet China to this day still has a majority peasant population, about 700 million last I heard.)
SLKRR
@Joshua Norton:
And "largely" means, well…"large."
Ninerdave
@Brick Oven Bill:
Yeah it was to go to charity. I suggested in a previous thread Walter Reed.
Here
mandarama, Eager Minion
Loooove Slap Shot.
"Fuckin’ machine took my quarter!"