> Reading it all here and especially watching the panel I was reminded of a
> bunch of gray Eyeores occupying Eyeore's Gloomy Place: Rather Boggy and Sad,
> munching on thistles and muttering, "Oh me. Oh my. The rest of the animals
> in the Forest, they have no brain at all. Only gray fluff blown into their
> heads by mistake."
I was enjoying reading your posts about consensus, and about negative and positive freedom etc.. And then you go and write something obnoxious like this!
Can we drop the pretense that some of us are in the movement and others carping from the sidelines? The panel was not Jacobin vs. OWS but an airing of debates that are very much part of it.
Occupy Sydney threw a 'family day' on Saturday and I went down with my wife, daughter and mother-in-law. There were a good few hundred people there and I took the opportunity to talk to friends who were heavily involved. There's been a lot of open disagreement about the GA procedures imported from OWS, and that night there was a proposal on the GA agenda to adopt some form of majoritarian decision-making.
The next day, without any prompting from me someone brought up the Murray Bookchin stuff on consensus and the Clamshell Alliance. They had got it from Lenin's Tomb (http://leninology.blogspot.com/2011/10/on-consensus.html) - and I presume Richard got it from Doug's link up the top of this thread. Funny how these things happen.
(In the meantime, by the way, Occupy Sydney got kicked out. The Sydney GA was preoccupied with deciding how to respond to a couple of arrests - the debate on consensus never happened. Then at 5am on Sunday morning 200 riot police stormed the camp while most were asleep, arrested 40 people or so and cleared Martin Place.)
Mike