Lemme chime in - if you find someone's work that you once admired now suddenly repugnant - why run off to eBay and fob it off on someone else?  I'd find more conviction in someone who took it out back and burned it.

I had a friend who became Born Again and had to get rid of all her "evil" rock and roll CDs (Poison is evil?).  Did she destroy all this evil?  Nope.  Took them to a pawn shop, made $75.

“I am now going to bombard you with figures. I'm sorry about that, but these numbers need to be tattooed on our minds. Between 1947 and 1979, productivity in the US rose by 119%, while the income of the bottom fifth of the population rose by 122%. But from 1979 to 2009, productivity rose by 80%, while the income of the bottom fifth fell by 4%. In roughly the same period, the income of the top 1% rose by 270%.”

My 2 yen, and that's all I'll be saying on this subject since I'm so adverse to discussing politics over the Internet in these days and times...

   I'm of the impression that Frank Miller just doesn't care what people think of what he's putting up on his blogs.  He has a forum where he can voice his opinions, hard as it is for others to take them.  You have a forum where you can post your responses.  Try thinking of places where expressing that opinion ends up with you being jailed or worse.

   I don't think the United States is there at the present time, unless there's a place or two where the dominant faction is so filled with rage and bigotry (of which, I'm sure there are a few), that they act on these impulses to carry out such actions against someone who rubs them the wrong way.  The Right isn't immune from having its share of extremists, but I haven't seen many cases in this day and age, when the majority are usually taken into custody, put on trial, and sentenced within a reasonable amount of time when they get caught.  I think the Left seems to just let theirs go with a nod and a wink, as though they still live in a day when they could just excuse such behavior as something like youthful exhuberance.

   I don't care what side of the aisle you're on.  When you step beyond blog ranting and holding up a placard across the street from a business or government office stating your grieviance against said people, you get arrested and put in a cell for a time.  It's at times like this when I get reminded just how short of a jump we may have to make before all this stupid rhetoric turns into an ugly, violent civil war...

••

Over the years, Frank has had what I consider a bad habit of referring to editorial policy with which he disagrees as "censorship". This is an odd mistake for someone usually so careful about the precise use of words. But editorial policy is merely that -- editorial policy. Only the Government can censor, and if you find yourself being censored, your options are extremely limited. If the publishing company you're working for, on the other hand, makes a policy statement that leads to the rejection of some story you have submitted, that's all it is -- rejection of a story. You're still free to take that story anywhere else, modify it in any way you please, publish it in in any form. All you are denied is the use of the characters the Publisher owns -- and that's a far cry from censorship.

Which is a roundabout way of saying Frank's protests here are in much the same vein. He does not have the power to suppress the Occupy groups. All he can do is reject, personally, what they stand for -- and complain about it, of course. One of the joys of living in a free country is that we get to complain about whatever we like. (People used to say "At least Mussolini made the trains run on time!" to which the answer, most often, was "No he didn't. He made it illegal to complain when they didn't!")

If you don't like what Frank has to say, feel free to complain about it. He's complaining about what he doesn't like. The Occupy "movement" is complaining about what it doesn't like.

Enjoy!

“The police in their own way are symbols of the problem. All over the country, thousands of armed cops have been deployed to stand around and surveil and even assault the polite crowds of Occupy protesters. This deployment of law-enforcement resources already dwarfs the amount of money and manpower that the government "committed" to fighting crime and corruption during the financial crisis. One OWS protester steps in the wrong place, and she immediately has police roping her off like wayward cattle. But in the skyscrapers above the protests, anything goes.”