via Crooked Timber and bunch of other places, Quinn Norton’s amazing piece on the good and the bad of Occupy.
I am still trying to make sense of Occupy. I do know that for me, it did expose a shrill hypocrisy among many in the US who give lip service to freedom but who chortled with glee while riot cops bashed young people’s heads because members of occupy dared disrupt the precious social order by using their freedom of assembly. Does freedom mean merely the freedom to earn and buy? But not, I guess, the freedom to band together if I don’t agree with you, or if you represent a class of urban young people I don’t like, or whatever. In that case, shut up, be invisible, and Obey. That struck me as sad throughout, and it still strikes me as sad and as a fundamental inability to understand that liberty entails the obligation to make space for people and ideas you do not like.