Why the tea parties don't matter

[bovil]

The "Tea Party" movement is a symbolic failure.

The original tea partiers engaged in criminal acts and risked arrest and imprisonment to destroy product from a company being propped up by unfair reduced taxes by the government, at the expense of what, at the time, amounted to "small business:" the domestic importers of tea who competed with the East India Company.

The current teabaggers are buying tea and throwing it around. That's it. When the DC teabag crew showed up with a truckload of tea bags (yes, I'm serious) to dump in Lafayette Square (because dumping in the Potomac is illegal, can't do that, after all) they were informed that they didn't have the correct permits to dump their load.

So they took it away. They're a bunch of pussies. "Civil disobedience" and "protest" are just words to them. They'll always cave in to authority rather than take a risk for their alleged principles. Samuel Adams would have dumped the tea right then and there.

If they wanted a real symbolic connection with the original Boston Tea Party they would be stealing Chrysler and GM cars and trucks from distribution centers and dumping them in the drink.

But they're not.

Pussies.

Comments

[chuckles48.livejournal.com]

Ummm, no. I did a body count whilst circumnavigating the crowd.

And you're getting your numbers _where_?

[bovil.livejournal.com]

You walked around through a milling crowd and counted ~2,500 unique people. Wow. That's serious skill there. Or are you being literal, and counted ~2,500 people while walking around the outside?

[chuckles48.livejournal.com]

No, I used the same methodology PD uses. Take a representational slice of the crowd, count bodies in that area, multiply by how many slices there are.

Which is why I gave a ballpark estimate.

You can also use the area/density method, which is a variation of what I did.