Re: A bit of Southern history.

Let's look at an entity like Disney. We know Disney has been pretty heavy-handed about people using their cartoon images at will. I think they even came down hard on a daycare. But to Disney's defense, they're protecting their brand.

Same with any major corporation like Coke or whomever.

Now let's throw in an example like the Confederate battle flag. Look, I know it's not a corporation like the others, but the idea is still the same. In its first original form, the Confederate battle flag didn't symbolize anything racist. But it became hijacked by racists, KKK, neo Nazis in America, etc. The brand was abused and misrepresented. You can take a seemingly innocent symbol and turn it into something with a poor reputation, like the Nazis did to the swastika.

So back to the Tea Party. I believe it started out with altruistic intentions, and the people who founded it probably hold to those. But too many buffoons jumped on the wagon, and the brand became tainted in the eyes of other Americans. And, IMO, none of those founders have done enough to distance themselves from them.

So maybe 99 percent of the Tea Party followers aren't like those buffoons? Who knows. In the eyes of the rest of America, it doesn't matter. The brand has been tainted and that's their perception.

camcgee®

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Those are not mutually exclusive

May 6, 2015, 12:43 PM

In Marxism, the last stage of the historical dialectic is communism, where there is common ownership of property by the proletariat/ working class and everyone is equal. At that stage in history, there is no need for a state, and you've actually got anarchy. However, the actual states that we call "communist" have never reached the communist stage of the dialectic, as they've always gotten stuck in the "dictatorship of the proletariat" which is the stage of the dialectic between capitalism and communism when the proletariat begins to transfer the ownership of property.

At any rate, most anarchists are also Marxists, and all Marxists are, in the end, anarchists. But Marxism is largely about how anarchism will be achieved, while anarchism is about describing the working class utopia.

By "occupying" public spaces, setting up alternative social arrangements, and treating the authority to remove them from those spaces as oppressive, the OWS folks were literally being radical. I mean, if you ask them, they'd tell you they're radical. To them, the American project is fundamentally oppressive. The Tea Party groups would tell you they wanted to go back to the Constitution, and that they wanted to restore the historical ideals of America. Even those who thought/ think the current government is illegitimate do so on the basis of what they think of as constitutionalism or founderism. It isn't really insignificant that OWS occupied while Tea Partiers lawfully protested or showed up to town hall meetings.

And the reference to The Newsroom just reminds me how idiotic that show was.

Message was edited by: camcgee®

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A bit of Southern history.

Like many movements

Exactly,

What were the founding beliefs of the Tea Party?

Reduction in debt, spending, government waste, etc.

What are the racial positions of the Tea Party?***

Whoa, whoa, whoa... easy.

:) You're right. Let me approach this more honestly.

Think of it like branding or marketing

The media did more to smear the tea party brand

Yep. How dare they show all those confederate flags

What'd they find, like three of them across the country?

Here in VA, they fly at every TP rally.

You GO to Tea Party rallies?***

They come to my historic town.

I would argue that 1% of a cause being

I'm no Palin fan, but why do you say she's a closet racist?***

Because of the things she has said.

no thanks***

What were the noble ideas of OWS?

You just have to roll your eyes at stuff like this

OWS was a bunch of communists, not anarchists.

Those are not mutually exclusive

I think you missed the point about the Newsroom.

Um, no

Lol.

I've got to ask....

Re: I've got to ask....

lol at the daily beast***

Re: A bit of Southern history.

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