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I’m mulling a (nother) longer post on the question of demands and clarity of mission as it applies to activist movements, but in the meantime, check this out:
“We affirm the philosophical or religious ideal of nonviolence as the foundation of our purpose, the presupposition of our belief, and the manner of our action.
“Nonviolence, as it grows from the Judeo-Christian tradition, seeks a social order of justice permeated by love. Integration of human endeavor represents the crucial first step towards such a society.
“Through nonviolence, courage displaces fear. Love transcends hate. Acceptance dissipates prejudice; hope ends despair. Faith reconciles doubt. Peace dominates war. Mutual regards cancel enmity. Justice for all overthrows injustice. The redemptive community supersedes immoral social systems.
“By appealing to conscience and standing on the moral nature of human existence, nonviolence nurtures the atmosphere in which reconciliation and justice become actual possibilities.
“Although each local group in this movement must diligently work out the clear meaning of this statement of purpose, each act or phase of our corporate effort must reflect a genuine spirit of love and good-will.”
Weak, no?
Other than a commitment to “nonviolence,” which is itself more than a little fuzzy as a strategy, it’s completely vacuous. “A social order of justice permeated by love.” What the hell does that mean? That “the redemptive community supersedes immoral social systems.” Well, okay, but how? “By appealing to conscience and standing on the moral nature of human existence.” Seriously?
And then, of course, the last paragraph is a total punt. “Each local group in this movement must diligently work out the clear meaning of this purpose.” Come on.
Movements need demands. Movements need clear and specific goals. Otherwise they’ll never amount to anything.
The ongoing saga of Twitter’s seeming censorship of activist trending topics got new datapoint in the wake of the arrest of a hundred Occupy Boston demonstrators late last night — the phrase “Occupy Boston” trended globally for a while this morning, while #OccupyBoston, with three times the total traffic, did not.
What’s curious about this is the fact that unlike the failed TTs I’ve discussed in the past, the trendlines for Occupy Boston and #OccupyBoston were quite similar before last night’s surge. In fact, the two terms rose almost exactly in sync yesterday until #OccupyBoston shot up as the arrests began after midnight. Now, #OccupyBoston had seen more traffic in previous days, but those raw numbers were tiny, and I don’t think they explain the failure of the tag to trend. Rather, I think the after-midnight spike holds the answer.
Why did #OccupyBoston spike so heavily as the arrests took place? Because of intensive, concerted efforts by OWS supporters to get the word out. And as I’ve noted before, Twitter (and it’s algorithm genies) hate intensive, concerted efforts — they don’t want anyone gaming their system but them.
But while #OccupyBoston was getting tweeted and retweeted by that (admittedly large and growing) core group, Occupy Boston was being tweeted and retweeted by a much broader and more diverse crowd — the kind of people who aren’t up on the latest hashtags. Those folks — journalists, local Bostonians, curious onlookers from all over the world — gave Occupy Boston a breadth of traffic that #OccupyBoston lacked, and the oomph to put it onto the trending topics list on a global basis.
I should make it clear that all this is an educated guess on my part, rather than established fact. Twitter doesn’t release much info about their algorithms. But I shook some Twitter folks out of the woodwork last year when this came up around #Wikileaks, and everything I’ve said here jibes with what I learned from them (and my own investigations) back then.
A hundred members of Occupy Boston were arrested in the early hours of Tuesday morning after police tried and failed to get them to give up a satellite encampment across the street from their main Dewey Square occupation. Multiple reports from the scene suggest that the cops used excessive force in the course of making the arrests.
Meanwhile New York mayor Mike Bloomberg made his most conciliatory statement to date on Occupy Wall Street yesterday, saying that he would make no move against the demonstrators in Liberty Plaza “as long as they obey the laws.” Bloomberg, who had previously declined to answer questions about whether he would allow the camp to continue indefinitely, said yesterday that “the weather” could well be the determining factor in how long the occupation goes on.
What these two disparate developments — a raid in Boston, an olive branch in NYC — have in common is a recognition that shutting down major OWS protests is not a practical option for local police right now. Whether Bloomberg or Boston mayor Tom Menino would like to end the protests or not, they each recognize that right now any such attempt would prove disastrous. OWS is just too big, and too popular, to shut down completely.
So instead of a full frontal assault, what we’re seeing in both New York and Boston is an attempt at containment. In NYC, that’s taken the form of mass arrests at street demonstrations. In Boston last night it took the form of pushback against expansion.
Expect to see more of this kind of pushback, in these cities and nationally. And expect to see heightened tension around it as the OWS movement grows in numbers and the spaces already occupied become ever more cramped.
Students launched an occupation of the gardens outside the offices of the president of Scotland’s University of St. Andrews early this morning, protesting skyrocketing tuition fees.
Scottish tuition rates aren’t just high, they’re also bizarrely structured. Scotland’s universities are free for Scottish students, and free for European Union residents under EU rules that say that member state universities can’t charge more for other EU nationals than they do for locals.
But the rest of Britain isn’t subject to those rules, weirdly, so English, Welsh, and Northern Irish students, falling between the “free for Glaswegians” category and the “free for Latvians” categories, are charged high fees.
At St. Andrews those fees amount to £9,000 a year, which is $14,000 in American money. According to the organizers of today’s protest, that makes the university the most expensive in all of Europe — for those students who pay anything at all.
The high fees for “RUK” (rest of UK) students in Scotland were introduced this summer in reaction to massive fee hikes in English universities. The Scottish government defended the move as an effort to keep Scotland’s universities from being swamped with “fee refugees” from the rest of Britain.
The occupiers intend to stay for 36 hours, symbolizing the full four-year £36,000 fee. They have a Twitter account and a website if you want to learn more.
Last week a campus walkout in support of Occupy Wall Street, originally called for New York City, mushroomed in a matter of days to include dozens of campuses across the country. The Wednesday actions drew numbers ranging from hundreds to — on at least five campuses — single students, starting from scratch and organizing on their own.
And this week they’re doing it again.
After a frenzy of discussion and several straw polls on Facebook, the folks at Occupy Colleges have announced this Thursday, October 13, as their next day of action. They’re presenting this as a day of protest rather than a walkout, and they say they already have forty campuses on board. (They’ve also produced a handy-dandy guide to mounting an action.)
More to come…
studentactivism.net 
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