“When I have neither pleasure nor pain and have been breathing for a while the lukewarm insipid air of these so called good and tolerable days, I feel so bad in my childish soul that I smash my moldering lyre of thanksgiving in the face of the slumbering god of contentment and would rather feel the very devil burn in me than this warmth of a well-heated room. A wild longing for strong emotions and sensations seethes in me, a rage against this toneless, flat, normal and sterile life. I have a mad impulse to smash something, a warehouse, perhaps, or a cathedral, or myself, to commit outrages, to pull off the wigs of a few revered idols…”

Uh. LOL.

Maybe you could try asking them instead of making shit up?

You get a big social movement like Occupy. You are a young angry radical and you need to show you have fire in you to your peers – violence is the most accessible way to affirm yourself especially when you don’t have the social skills or the education to prevent someone from talking for you.

You are genuinely pissed off by the consensual approach of the socially privileged elite who steers the movement. You can’t stand the privileged wankers who represent the alternative by promoting way of life only accessible to privileged whites.
So when it comes to show this anger you don’t do it against wall street – downtown – because you would get smashed by the cops in a matter of seconds. After all the trader who work there is a known enemy, you think you’ll get him when the movement is radicalized enough. Now what matters is to set things ablaze and see who stays on your side.

So you turn back against the “traitors” in your own ranks (they’re talking about you and me) – the ones who are the benefactors of the system: the tech yupies who change mobile phone every time a new once comes up but shop organic to do their part to save the world, those who serve them, the fashion victims and their hyper-socialized tribes, the day traders and their relaxed demeanor, the Victorian house owner who believes in gardening, the art galleries who are at the forefront of any neighborhood gentrification. All that class of people who are comfortably agreeing with your movement but who will never question their lifestyle and its relationships with their immediate environment.
And one day, you are in the heart of the district that symbolizes that betrayal to “your” movement.
The next thing you know, you are part of a mob of people like you and you smash everything you can. You are smashing the symbol. And the symbol doesn’t take in account if the car you torch has minimum insurance and 24 months of payment still due, you don’t know if the store you take down does any profit. You are far away from being aware of these kind of realities. It’s you against “them”.

I’m not defending these guys here – I just want you to know where they come from. They are genuinely part of Occupy, they think they are the avant-garde of the movement, they are not manipulated. They are not representative of Occupy, they are a radical fringe of Occupy. You’ll see more of them as occupy losses steam and as the radical fringe splits up in a spiral of violence.

His argument seems to be that these people were in no way associated with OccupySF/Oakland because by definition Occupy people (like himself!) are all angels, engaged in saving the world & also in educating “moribund” and “apathetic” Mission groups.

It has become our duty to run for our lives.