Category Archives: actvist example

God Hates Flags

The infamous westboro baptist church visited San Francisco. WBC’s hate-promoting signs were answered by multiple signs of randomness, nonsensical yelling, and even a unicorn. A portable stereo blared Lady GaGa, while press and people passing by ignored the WBC signs and took pictures and videos of the more entertaining signs. I was also there and turned [...]
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Miami’s Community Avengers

Have No Fear the Community Avengers are Here! As the right wing mob mobilizes to shut down democratic debate on health care reform; as Van Jones is forced from the White House through distortions of the truth and plays on racial and political fears; as the recession deepens – the masked marauders known as the Community [...]
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Gihan Perera: Internal Efficacy

Gihan Perera: Grounding our Inner Leadership Spirit & Sustainability Profile “In so much of my political work, the benchmark of that was external. It was intellectual, and I mentally related it to my impact on objective conditions. However, so much of what I felt about my larger purpose was so non-related to those benchmarks. What was important [...]
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There is no “win”

Ok, I am kinda lovin’ Jay Smooth right now. Success means that we move further towards the ideals. Victories are only evidence that progress is possible, and that we are moving further towards those ideals. So measuring success is acknowledging the victories along the way, and realizing there is no end.
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The power of the symbolic win (do-over)

apparently I added the wrong video the last time I tried to do this, so let me try again. Mainly for Jay and Duncombe. I think at the core, one of the things he’s talking about, is if all that work getting Obama elected actually mattered…
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Utah Student Wrecks Federal Land Auction

This guy is great. He saw an opportunity and jumped on it, disrupting a corrupt auction, costing major corporations money, and drawing attention to an issue that easily could have been buried under the mountain of year-end top 10 lists and countless other examples of Bush Administration corruption. What started out as a spur of the [...]
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George Bush discusses what’s effective

Not effective: Simply drawing attention to yourself. Yelling at him at a political rally.  Flipping him off. Effective: throwing a shoe at him and the press asking questions. Conclusions: The more unusual things one does that stray from U.S. norms and culture that cause the press to ask questions, the more effective you will be.  Who said [...]
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Candy Raver Russian Revolutionaries

Not everyone has much faith in art-activism, but you can’t please ‘em all. Do symbolic protests accomplish anything more than raising morale for the protesters? If not is it enough to simply raise morale? Or do actions like this War prank create temporary autonomous zones and manifest, albeit briefly, the type of reality the [...]
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Bill Ayers on Fresh Air

Bill Ayers on Fresh Air with Terry Gross This is an except from the end of the interview that I thought was relevant to the questions we’re asking in How to Win. Gross: Do you think some of the tactics that you took on were in some part this youthful expression of anger, something that only a [...]
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Marketing Lessons from Obama’s Campaign – BusinessWeek

In recent weeks, I’ve ended up more than once amid marketing executives discussing, with apparent seriousness, what the purveyors of ordinary products can learn from the campaign that sold America on Barack Obama. To which my response is, well, they can learn lots. As long as they, too, sell something that makes people cry when [...]
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