Forum Post: Only A Small Part of the 99% Can Speak Here.
Posted 12 years ago on Oct. 31, 2011, 1:31 a.m. EST by Philpux
(643)
from Mountain View, AR
This content is user submitted and not an official statement
My wife and I are big supporters of this. We've watched the live stream. We've sent money. We've sent food. We've tried to get answers to important questions like, "what is the plan for November, what the plan for the cold is, and what is your message?" We want to help, but our concerns are seen as criticism in the live stream chat, and we were both banned from the room by the so called moderators, as were many other people.
Moments ago, this forum removed a post of mine in which we were having a good discussion. The thread had over 190 posts. How can this group represent the 99%, if the 99% can't have a say in the movement?
We are from Arkansas. We are definitely 99%. We represent a large demographic of Americans, and now we feel as though the movement has nothing to do with us. We will not give up. We will not surrender. If we are supposedly represented by this movement, we will have a say.
This is a copy/paste thread that has been discredited. Original poster could not verify any of the details and the thread has been removed 4 times in the last few hours due to concern trolling.
Well, I am still here. I'm not copying now. Can you answer my questions? The "details" that iam99 wants is verification that I donated to the movement. Like, how am I supposed to do that? I hardly see how it is relevant anyway.
You've reposted and rehashed this story 4 times. When challenged to verify ANY DETAIL of your story, you were unable to do so. Therefore your post is likely to be a concern troll attempt. If necessary, I can post a summary of your negative and unhelpful posts.
I have rehashed the story four times, because it is a story about censorship that has been censored three times already. Don't you find that ironic?
I'm not sure why I am responding to you at this point, but I will try again. How would you propose that I "verify" the details of my story? What method should I use to accomplish such a thing? I'm starting to think that you are a troll, whatever that really means. As if any of this is relevant to the conversation.
How does anyone verify anything? Receipts, pix, context, dates, times, etc. Obviously you would remove personally identifying info.
FACTS:
Look, I never heard of a "concern troll" until tonight. Yes I have repeatedly posted my topic. I did it because the thread was removed three times, and it's message was CENSORSHIP! At no time did I "admit" that I did not donate money. I was speaking euphemistically to you, because you could not get past that part of the story. I will NOT verify anything. 1) It's none of your business 2) Whether or not it's true that I donated money is irrelevant to the point I was making. No matter. I will probably be banned from this place soon anyway. Then you guys can all commiserate over your impending victory over capitalism in peace and loving harmony.
Well if you're really not a concern troll then
WOULD yOU pLEASE sTOP cOPYPASTIN yOUR LAME sTORY?
I will if they stop deleting it. If they stop deleting it, then I will be proved wrong.
So when people tell you they don't want to hear what you have to say you just yell louder? Obviously this is not the time or the place for your rant - but you don't get the hint. Therefore you are a troll - whether you mean to be or not.
isn't that what we're doing here in zuccotti?
I think you need to read up on protesting a bit.
I would hardly call it a rant. I find it interesting that a protest movement has such a problem with people protesting. Yelling louder to get people to hear your message is what protesting is. My goal is to help increase the effectiveness of the media associated with this movement. Real media outlets generally listen to their viewers and adjust their methods to reach them. Real media outlets spend big$$ to get these opinions. I am giving my opinion to OWS for free, because I care. It annoys me that, not only will they not listen, they squash the debate as well.
OK fine, then sending SPAM email is protest? No, protest involves JOINING TOGETHER with people to convey a message that is shared. What you're doing is making yourself a nuisance in a community that isn't interested in your negative message. Hence you are a troll.
No Philpux, it's confirmed that you're a troll - you're constantly online!
Go send some spams for dailycaller or whoever is paying you...
Look, the post is still here. My whole argument about censorship has been nullified. If you would stop posting about it, it will disappear. My protest was successful. There is no need to discuss it further. If you keep bringing it up, who is the troll then?
Mods - please Ban hammer yet again
The whole 99% is such BS. The, er, "ideology" (if you can call it that) does not represent a large demographic group in the U.S.. The whole reson this OWS thing is failing is because this web site exposed their lack of, well, anything substantial. Do you want these people - or anyone representing you? All while you sit at home in Arkansas..."do something for me, someone..." Do it yourself.
I am quite capable of taking care of myself. I not asking anyone to do anything for me. I was simply asking to be allowed to speak. Now that my post about censorship has been allowed to stand, I believe I have little to say on the matter. If we can just do something about that sore spot on the screen in the LiveStreams called chat, we will be a lot better off. Now that reasonable debate is seemingly allowed on this forum, I can get to work defending the movement, instead of fighting censorship.
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Sometimes we cannot tell if our post went throught. They do not show up on the forum. I think your system has a problem keeping track of all the posts across multiple servers (?).
Could be. Losing a certain post three times inside an hour though, is fishy. It seems to be better now. Maybe they are getting the message. We can't have any reasonable debate, if opposing viewpoints are not allowed. I can answer a lot of these opposing views, if people are allowed to have them. I refuse to try, though, until the censorship problem is fixed. Now perhaps I can get to work helping to answer some of these tough questions that people have. Not all opposing viewpoints are simply trolls.
Who has the power to remove a post and why would they do it?
It's the forum moderators. I guess they do it for the same reason any power structure uses censorship, to crush dissent. Personally though, I don't see constructive criticism as dissent.
Then they need to build a trash pile, where they put inappropriate material without deleting it. Then those of us who have replied can still see the posts to which we replied. Some posts are inappropriate and should be moved aside. I really like the way popular material moves to the top. But, they also need a place to put good ideas that have been discussed and found to be useful so they do not fall to the bottom of a very long list. There is a great deal of useful material being gathered which needs to be saved and used to build solutions.
Agreed.
The people running this don't really want 99% to have a say, only those who agree. I think there is a 1% running OWS, 1% running the banks and 98% of us a fucked by both sides.
Lol. Could be.
Donate to Obama's campaign fund!
What would be the point in that?
Philpux - next time you are considering making a donation, please give to a local food bank. Most of the OWSer are well off. They don't need to be fed - others however are not so fortunate.
I just watched Ccbendoregon ban like three people in 10 minutes on GlobalRevolution chat. I don't understand why those people were banned. If you have 12 moderators banning 30 people an hour for 24 hours, you have banned 8,640 people. If you do that for 30 days, you have banned 259,200 people. Many of those would have been bots, trolls, and douchebags anyway, but if only 20% were banned for no good reason, then you have lost 52,000 supporters. What is the sense in this arbitrary exclusion? Let the people talk, please. The room is slow anyway. Maybe they are running out of people to ban?
Don't forget about friends of those supporters. People who participate here have friends. I personally run an unrelated forum with a few thousand weekly readers in South Florida, and I've been posting a running commentary of my impressions about the movement, including quotes from this site and links to posts. Deleting things from this site doesn't necessarily purge criticism from the Internet like the moderators seem to be hoping. It can lead to the opposite: people forming impressions based on the censorship, when they haven't even taken any time to investigate the movement on their own. This site is very tedious and un-focused and it isn't easy to interact with, so a lot of my friends are forming their opinions based on my second-hand accounts. Every time the moderators delete something that I post here, a few thousand people might end up reading my opinions about the implications of that censorship. And even people who don't run other forums have Facebook accounts and Twitter accounts, and friends who they talk to in person. Censored posts could have more of an impression on outsiders than any of the non-censored posts here, since most of what happens here just gets buried and forgotten, but people talk about the censorship.
And it really is censorship, not ordinary anti-spam and anti-troll moderation. When you delete a post from a reasonable person that's critical of the movement because of its content, that's censorship.
Exactly! Thank goodness. Someone gets it. That is all I have been trying to say, but apparently, they don't want to hear it. They need to hear it, because this is a propaganda war. Acting as they are is similar to opening a new retail business, and then showing malice to anyone who walks in the door with a question. Doomed to failure.
I just read the rules for the forum. I don't think this kind of post is off topic, but I'm not sure. I'm not really sure what the topic is actually. The rules for the forum seem to be as arbitrary as the movement itself. What is going on here?
Some thoughts from Indian country:
Then there is the matter of decolonization. The question is: the decolonization of what, of whom? How can decolonization be a part of the process if the occupiers are occupying occupied land?
Don't get me started. I'm Choctaw.
Is it slow here tonight or what? The other forum is slow as well.
Make your voices heard, thats why im still here, its hard to figure out what the real deal is.
We are trying to be heard. We will keep at it. I think the whole thing may be a big episode of Punk'd. lol
What exactly happened? I lost a few good posts of mine due to hamfistedness on the part of one of the mods, even though it was probably simple error rather than active censorship of my views (the guy I was talking to was commenting on my sexual orientation and supposed nights with my mother rather than actually engaging in a discussion). I figure when they cleaned up his posts mine got removed along with them by accident. Perhaps that was what happened to you?
This forum is pretty basic, there may not be a way to remove an offender's posts from a thread, or doing so may require a level of expertise that the one who handled the issue did not have. So the entire thread or comment mini-thread was dumped instead of individual posts.
Mods, in the future, replace offending posts with an appropriate placeholder, something like, [[ This comment violated forum rules and was removed ]]
So basically, if you want to get rid of a thread, you simply violate the rules on that thread. Brilliant. ty, though.
I've seen it time and time again on more advanced forums, someone who doesn't like a thread (or just someone bored) will try to start a flame war so the thread will get locked or deleted, or the mods will do a mass dump of all posts after the flamebait because they're trying to moderate 200 threads and don't have time to pick out the three posts in 100 that aren't flames or more flamebait. Sucks, but we're all human. The sooner machines can comprehend the meaning of typed words and perform thread moderation in real time, the better.
I think that is a lame excuse. If that is the case, then the mods are acting more as editors than mods. I believe you, though.
Apparently that is possible even to the level of individual posts. For a while a week or so back you'd see an occasional message within a thread saying that a post had been deleted for offensive content (or something to that effect).
Dang, I did it again. lol See above response.
That's really weird....
Four times in 24 hours? They removed a thread that had over 190 comments. I don't know what happened. Ironically, we were having a discussion about censorship.
I guess it's a 99% thing that I wouldn't understand. Wait...
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I will not shut up. I don't care if that person is the president. Someone who claims to speak for me will listen to my concerns. Period.
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That is exactly what I am trying to say. If you want to represent most of the citizens of the country, you will have to answer a lot of questions. It's tough, but that is the way it is. I am with the program, but the program is not with me. All I am trying to say is that the OWS media has a tough job, but they need to do it. They cannot simply run away from tough questions by censoring them.
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I can assure you that I am thinking of the movement. The bodies on the street are very important, but the online media is ultimately the public face of it. I want it to work in a productive way. Yes we do have to answer those tough questions. This is a movement for greater democracy. Democracy is hard, but I think it is worth it.
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This movement is many different things to many different people. One thing that stands out to me is greater access to our political process by regular citizens, by way of removing the advantages that corporations have to effect it. That, to me, implies greater democracy in our political process.
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The censorship problem seems to have gotten a lot better.
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No, if I see something I don't like, I may be in the doghouse again. This post has been allowed to stay, which renders the censorship argument mute.
Quit spamming the same shit everywhere. There will be no other warning.
Thx you mods. I am starting to think the guy really is clueless, but he's still annoying.
Criticism = spam. Nice.
Posting the same piece incessantly = spam
Do you not find irony in deleting a story about censorship? It's not like I posted the story over and over just to sell some idea. The story was deleted, so it was like I had never posted it in the first place.
I remember your original post. That post was not "spam" and it should not have been deleted. If you really did donate money and then you got censored for posting constructive criticism then that's extremely disturbing.
I think reasonable people should be allowed to speak whether they donated or not. I never expected greater access because I helped. The donations were anonymous anyway. I am just disturbed by a protest movement for greater democracy that claims to represent me, yet won't hear me, or let me be heard.
What I mean is that your concerns are especially valid if you really have been a supporter of the movement and you really did donate money to them. I'm as skeptical as anybody else of somebody on the Internet who claims to have donated to the movement. But assuming that you did, this is just sad.
Well, I won't be donating anymore until it appears that they are getting their act together. I support the movement, but only if they plan to be effective.
lf7yyy
Huh? Are you trying to get this post deleted by posting nonsense. It will probably work. lol
I think I will try out the other forum, and see if it is better. http://www.occupyr.com/
You know, I've been watching how these posts have been coming with a periodicity. There are moderators on this board I'm sure. But, I've said some of the most offensive things and have been working very hard to bait as many right wingers to my posts as possible and not one thing has been edited.
I wonder if you, or some of the other posters of this message, are working in some fashion to discredit the board. You all seem to use similar verbages and all have the same level of writing skills.
If you are trying such a devious tactic, I applaud you. I also loathe you.
If, on the other hand, you have been edited, then I apologize for any offense my remarks may have caused you.
I can assure you that I am not a troll. I know that internet assurances are lame, but... The problem that I see is not just in here. GlobalRevolution booted my 86yo grandmother for asking how the OWS was like the TEA party. Do you know how hard I worked just to get her to look at it? That is so lame. She is important because she votes her arse off. I'm not trying to discredit the room, I am trying to help. If a movement is to have wide credibility, it cannot run from criticism.
no. the person that posted this is the owner of occupyr.com the guy likes to post inflammatory stuff here and on his own forum. i have a project in place as well but i am very up front about it. but then i use my real name too.
Its because this website is a soros front yeah I said it.. Not the movement it self but this website and some people behind the scenes of this movement.
idk Maybe Soros, but who cares? I don't think that is the problem, anyway. I just think that OWS is either unable to, or simply refuses to answer questions directly. Maybe if we just keep asking. I'm afraid people are going to stop asking. That would be a shame. What if the whole thing is just an episode of Punk'd?
Look soros and obama knew they were about to get a protest they knew it was coming so they got some of their people to call for occupy wallstreet. In hopes to co opt it that is why you see them smack down any real solutions the people behind the scenes want you confuse. But it back fire that is why you see more bad press about OWS. If they can't co opt it they will try to kill it. That's what they try to do with the tea party but they failed because they have a message and the rep have to obey by it. The rep hate the tea party because its messing up their plans. Instead of the tea party getting co opt the tea party co opt the rep party. A large amount of the tea party supporters want our troops home and they are ron paul supporters. Two things the republicans hate. What I suggest OWS do is stand behind an issue that cuts left or right and will help the 99% and thats END THE FED. People left and right wants it to end thats a good start.
That's weird. I did not type "Lawl."
Dood! You mentioned "he who shall not be named" at OWS. Gasp! I won't speak his name, but his initials are Ron Lawl! I'm not actually an RP supporter, but I do find his exclusion intriguing. The hammering of dissent by OWS in it's media outlets does give one pause. I think they are afraid that actual ideas might co-opt the movement. It makes me kind of wonder who "they" are. I'm not generally paranoid, but why would a grass roots protest movement squash perfectly legitimate dialogue.
Yes the 1 percent which is the fed and soros and koch among others but they are the big three. If you check the funding of this movement you will see moveon.org and soros which are big democratic operatives. Now on the right they have koch. The tea party grew from the grass roots and koch came in to try to co opt it. Like soros and moveon.org is trying to do to OWS. Most tea party support are alex jones listeners thats why they knew how to combat the co opt. That is also the reason why OWS.org do not want you to post alex jones info here. Because of him and people spreading his info OWS has not been co opted. And ron paul is being censored because he explain why we are in the mess we are in and he is the only candidate thats really for the people left or right. I know you do not follow him and thats fine I would ask you to look up some video of his interviews on youtube you will learn a lot trust me.
I've read a lot about he who shall not be named. A lot sounds good, but some of it is too much for me. I wonder if this movement has not already been co-opted.
but this is why i tried to network with other forum owners. thats cool. they can stay attached at the hip.
this movement started c0-opted. go sit on the global revolution live stream chat and tell me there is no leader of this decentralize movement?
I hear you I say just keep looking at him he trys to explain his ways but you have to really follow him to understand. I say to anyone do not vote for anyone left or right who has a history of selling out the people and have big money financing their campaigns. Also look out if the main stream media is for that person. That will tell you they can't be trusted.