RE: Occupying abandoned "private" property..........

[Yo_Mama]

34. To be honest, at this level of irresponsibility, no

People party in different ways.

You aren't going to answer my question, are you?

As far as seizing public property for the use of a smaller group without consent of the public, I do not support it. I think that this principle would inevitably end up destroying public property rather than putting it to true public use. I'm from the south, and I have seen too many infights in churches over this type of thing to believe that good intentions produce good outcomes, and waaaaay too much infighting and personal dealings in local governments not to immediately suspect that Oakland's government may have orchestrated all this in order to give a sweetheart deal to some property speculator, only to be caught short when the RE bust truly hit and the intended beneficiary lost interest.

You can safely consider me quite cynical about group human behavior, regardless of genuine idealism on the part of most of the participants. Genuine idealism is often exploited by the self-interested or the neurotic who do not understand their own motivations.

I think there are many good public uses to which this property could be put, but the code violations appear to have convinced Oakland's government that they would have to put too much money into the property to justify those uses. Now, if the Oakland government is wrong about that, surely OWS Occupy should go to the government and make their case.

Instead, OWS Oakland (or a faction of it, which is probably a more accurate characterization) decided to go ahead and take it. I cannot believe that they thought they would be permitted to do so, so I am guessing this was a pretext and not the true goal.
Therefore, I do not take the claim that they wanted it as a community/social center seriously.

I may be quite wrong about that. They may just be clueless babes in the woods who do not know that Certificates of Occupancy have a true public safety purpose. I'm guessing that they didn't have an engineering inspection.

As a public spectacle, I find it either a naive exercise in political narcissism or a demonstration of kindergarten anarchism, both of which (IMO) unfortunately obscure the genuine claims upon the public interest that the OWS movement should be making.

That's just my personal reaction. I was very puzzled by yesterday's events and I am trying to make sense of them, and so far everywhere I ask I do not get a good explanation of what OWS was trying to do. Instead, I get double talk and obscurantism, which is the reason I am not able to take this action seriously. In my experience, genuine activists for the public good have their shit together, explain themselves clearly, define their specific goals clearly, and are extremely focused on getting their message out to the public through the media. None of that appears to be happening here.