This is cool:
This is one dog whose bark is definitely worse than his bite.
Loukanikos, a stray who lives on the streets of Athens, Greece, has become an unlikely celebrity… for his dedication to anti-government protests.
The clearly opinionated mutt has been pictured on the front line of protests, dodging tear gas and barking at riot police, for the last three years.
Quite a contrast between the United States and Greece, isn’t it? Here our manly men arm themselves to the teeth and act like stormtroopers, invading your home and shooting your dog while you sleep. Half the time they’ve charged into the wrong damned home.
There- they just ignore the damned dog.
Think about that the next time you hear some wingnut babbling about the freedom agenda.
Yutsano
I for one welcome our future canine overlords.
Cain
Yay, mutt.. So after three years, he still hasn’t gotten a home? fuck that shit..
AAA Bonds
Riot gear is designed to scare the shit out of people so they can be more efficiently oppressed. This dog’s reaction is the same as our own.
Stray dogs on the street know ALL about the conditions that the European and American middle class are just now beginning to accept as their lot in life.
The difference is that dogs know to bark, and know to bite. If we don’t learn, we’ll be tearing each others’ guts out in no time.
Just Some Fuckhead
Clowns, all of ’em. This is John Wayne Gacy’s America.
Mike Goetz
Wow, this post did not go where I thought it was going.
I just want to point out how superb the name “Loukanikos” is. Best dog name on the planet.
BGinCHI
Prediction:
On MTP this Sunday David Gregory will breathlessly ask the dog if it’s running for President of the IMF.
cleek
i prefer to think of Somalia, and what it would be like filled with Freedom Lovers.
gbbalto
Loukanikos means “sausage” per the BBC, that also calls him a stray. But note the collar with a bunch of tags.
Lawnguylander
Not one more dime from me to the North Shore Animal League until American dogs are out there in the street barking at cops.
amk
But 2nd amendment, 2nd amendment. Obama is gonna take our guns.
Amurika is fucked up country full of sissies.
Mike Goetz
Bachmann/Loukanikos ’12, FTW!
One is constantly shitting on the carpet, the other is Loukanikos.
MikeJ
While we’re talking about working people getting screwed, any of the front pagers know enough about the pension fight and upcoming public sector strike?
bjacques
Cripes, John, I wondered if you’d ever notice Sausage the Dawg. He’s more or less adopted by the people around the square, and took over the job from Kanellos (Cinnamon), who died recently.
Mike Goetz
I knew Loukanikos had to be Greek for something cool; I never dreamed it would be as awesome as “sausage”.
alienprayer
S0calist Greece makes a point of vaccinating stray cats and dogs, then releasing them back into communities – That’s why he has a collar. The locals feed them scraps, so the animals stay healthy and friendly, and stake out little territories for themselves.
Forgot about the moderation, whoops.
JGabriel
Commie bitch.
.
Mike Goetz
The knowledge being dropped here on stray Athenian dogs is staggering.
comrade scott's agenda of rage
What’s there to think about? *We* all know it’s hypocritical babble. *We* all know that 27% of the country will always be that way. The problem is getting the approximate 20-30% of the country to do what you suggest.
AAA Bonds
Man, I bet these austerity cuts are the only way to restore Greece economic stability – after all, it’s the same model Western-Europe-and-American-controlled “international” financial institutions used to gut Latin America.
Forced “business-friendly” policies, combined with slashing the public sector and adding taxes to the lowest income bracket. That’s the ticket! It’s the American way, by gum, err, I mean, it’s a highly successful plan for guaranteeing prosperity!
Look at how well that’s worked out for our hemispheric neighbors! I turn my ear southward and all I can hear is the faint, non-stop cheering: “Thank you, IMF! Thank you, World Bank!”
gogol's wife
Mike Goetz #16, Yes, it’s amazing, isn’t it? Never underestimate BJ.
Maude
The violence in Athens is escalating. The people of Greece didn’t take the financial sector down, why should they pay the price?
Meanwhile, one of our military leaders wants to keep a commando group in Iraq. I can’t tell you how glad McCain isn’t prez.
Culture of Truth
Due to the new austerity the kibble ration has been cut in half.
For dogs too.
Poopyman
Googled pictures of “Loukanikos”? He’s like the Zelig of Greek protests.
Poopyman
@Maude:
Clearly they could get the economy under control if they’d stop literally throwing money away on tear gas. (Made in USA, no doubt.)
Sasha
Terrific!
Culture of Truth
Loukanikos 2012: BITE ME
AAA Bonds
@Maude:
Amen.
It’d be great if Americans took that point of view, wouldn’t it?
I mean, we should have seen riots on Wall Street in 2008, if this were a sane country. A few smashed windows and some burned-out, fully-insured BMWs would have meant we were going easy on ’em.
But since the 1980s, we’ve become pretty used to locking ourselves in the bathroom and cutting our arms whenever any rich, connected crook demolishes our economy, so I doubt we’ll manage that kind of action anytime soon.
Leave it to a Greek dog to pursue the interests of the American middle class, I guess. He’s certainly doing more than they did: “who the fuck are you?” the dog asks. “why the fuck are you in my square? who told you that you were in charge here? I’m starving, do you have any food for me? No? Then fuck off.”
Elizabelle
There was a great online collection of photos of Greek street dogs within the past 3 months — wish I could remember where I found it.
Anybody remember?
LowProfileinGA
@JGabriel
Look again. ;-)
Linda Featheringill
JGabriel #15
:-)
PeakVT
When I see photos like that, of masses of riot police at the ready, I always wonder what is going on in the mind of the people in uniform. I suppose it’s pretty banal, but I have a hard time imagining it.
Also, too, are the police in Greece taking pay cuts, or have they been exempted in an effort to buy them off, like Walker tried to do in WI?
jibeaux
My dog prefers to fight the menaces of bicycles and mailmen. He could be sort of in the canine anti-government reserve reserve reserves. Maybe.
Maude
In NJ it was considered a victory for Christie that he got the legislature to cut public workers benefits. What did they do wrong? Nothing.
The Repubs are into this attitude on a massive scale. The deficit lies are to have all of us who aren’t them scrape the bottom of the barrel and thank the baby jeebus for what we got.
I am watching to see what the Obama admin does with the oil speculators. If there’s a way to crimp them, good.
The Repubs are fighting all of Dodd Frank and want Wall Street to be happy.
I’ve had enough of the Repubs.
Culture of Truth
LaGarde was named head of the IMF, and said she will speak with the other dog of international finance, DSK.
Han's Solo
Breaking: As of now John Quincy Adams was a founding father.
http://thinkprogress.org/politics/2011/06/28/256227/john-q-adams-wiki-editing/
Reality impaired Republicans…
But back to the topic at hand; we need to train more dogs to behave like this dog. Sookie, a former Balloon Juice standout featured on the 2011 BJ calendar, has been taking lessons on just that.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wk-OvevXZz0
stuckinred
AAA Bonds
You talk a lot about what we “should” be doing. Why fuck around on this blog if you are such a baader-meinhof motherfucker?
Poopyman
Elizabelle:
Here’s one.
(Do I get sent to moderation for a link to a site with “anarch1st” in the URL? I TinyURLed it this time.)
El Tiburon
I suspect Michele Malkin will print the dog’s home address while insinuating that the dog actually belongs to George Soros and eats grilled caviar.
Origuy
I’m hungry now. The Greek Festival was a couple of weeks ago and there’s nowhere else around here to get loukanikos.
Martin
Well, the 2nd amendment issue is why there’s no popular uprising – it’s also why US military intervention is so odd.
For protests, firearms are overkill, just as nukes are in most military situations. The problem is that once you have easy access to either – everyone else gets freaked out that you might use them and responds accordingly. If we had European-style uprisings here, the police would have to respond on the assumption that the protesters were armed and what we’d get would look less like Europe and more like Palestine. The public seems to be aware of this (based on how previous uprisings have gone – LA, etc.), and not wanting that reaction, is hesitant to start any action.
The guns themselves remove some freedom to act because of a well established cycle of how groups respond to unknown threats. If the unknown threat is potentially large, than you escalate in anticipation of that threat arriving, even if there was no intention by the opposition to use it. This is the cold war in a nutshell.
Villago Delenda Est
So, apparently, the Party is never, ever wrong. So the drones go and start retconning Wikipedia pages to reflect whatever reality Palin or Bachmann is spouting about today.
kd bart
How long until he’s a front page blogger at FDL? He’s probably been more effective.
Martin
Christ, they have their own Wikipedia to transcribe the gospel, why are they fucking around with everyone elses?
ThatLeftTurnInABQ
@Martin #41:
That’s just Authoritarianism 101. Freedom isn’t just being able to create your own reality. Heck, anybody can do that; hippies even. True Freedom consists in being able to create your own reality and also having the power to destroy other people’s realities and substitute your own in their place.
jl
Why do they even want John Quincy Adams to be Founding Father? I say let them. JQ Adams was one of the founders of the ‘American System’ and would be another Founding Father (were he actually one), along with Thomas Paine, who would NOT be turning over in his grave at a federal government active in the domestic economy:
” During his term, Adams worked on developing the American System, consisting of a high tariff to support internal improvements such as road-building, and a national bank to encourage productive enterprise and form a national currency. In his first annual message to Congress, Adams presented an ambitious program for modernization that included roads, canals, a national university, an astronomical observatory, and other initiatives. ”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Quincy_Adams
WTF, the US still does not have a public ‘national university’.
The text is from Wikipedia, so usual warnings apply, but its description of JQ Adams’ policies are exactly the same as I learned in HS (from the guy who was mostly known as the wrestling coach, and was kind of goofy, but he steered me right on Paul Revere, so I will go with him on JQ Adams too).
I say, let’s give Bachmann this one.
As for founding father business. Adams was, like 8 or 9 years old in 1776, and in Harvard during the Constitutional Convention, and in between mostly in Europe with his dad and paling around with Jefferson, in between getting a snooty Yurrpean education at high calss Yrrupean colleges, which latter earned him resentment and mistrust from the Jacksonians.
Yeah, I say let’s give Bachmann this one.
jimbob
I went to YouTube and started watching Greek riot videos and that fucking dog makes an appearance in 90% of them. Amazing.
AAA Bonds
@stuckinred
You don’t know me or what I do, so this statement is a little funny to me, but I can’t blame you for that, since I’m not about to offer more identifying information than I’ve already left lying around here.
All I can tell you is that opportunities for resistance abound, and you too should do what you can to gin up the mob. Here, I jam a lever into the center-left, and I work it, because I can do that and other things at the same time.
Chris
It really is. European protestors have ten times more balls than ours do, I’d have to say. Don’t get me started on the Arabs and Iranians.
jl
That dog is another vindication of Greek food, some how or other.
Which reminds me, I haven’t had one of those Greek sausages in a long long time.
Thanks, you ‘damn dog’. Keep up the good work.
stuckinred
AAA Bonds
I’ve seen that shit in action dawg, buncha dumbasses getting sacrificed for some cause doesn’t do shit for me.
sukabi
@ JustSomeFuckHead and Michelle Bachmann approves…
Elizabelle
Thanks, Poopyman.
I’m guessing the link might have come off Andrew Sullivan’s blog (he’s a dog lover) but no time to search just now.
Go protest dog!!
AAA Bonds
@stuckinred
I also find it telling that you equate an angry populace attacking financial edifices and hucking rocks at riot police with the RAF, who were accused of killing over thirty people in preplanned attacks. Sort of an “all Palestinians are Hamas” deal going on there.
It’s exactly that sort of mentality – the kneejerk fear of public resistance as somehow “terrorist” – that keeps liberals defanged and at the mercy of the wealthy, who are quite happy to use brutal, deadly terror to preserve their power.
Culture of Truth
So they can claim the founding fathers worked hard opposing slavery, and would have succeded, too if weren’t for all those Africans forcing it on them!
nancydarling
Not a dead ringer, but Loukanikos looks an awful lot like my Mijo. Mijo spends his energy harassing ground hogs,trying to catch squirrels, chasing deer back up the hill, and trying to join the mule’s fraternity but I’m sure he would have my back in any sort of demonstration.
Joel
And look how effectively you bring change. Congratulations!
AAA Bonds
@stuckinred
Oh, I agree that the media, particularly in America, has largely defeated public protest through its own insecurities – it’s not “cool” to protest, it’s so “outdated”, it’s “not serious”. No reporting, no story, nothing much gets mentioned in the press until someone burns a car or breaks a window. (Which only encourages that behavior, of course.)
Protests don’t sell papers anymore, and there’s piddling few people buying papers, and they’re the sort of people who shiver in their loafers at the thought of the rabble. (This is much less true in places like Greece with strong left-wing parties who have their own press organs.)
Plus, entertaining the idea that people have legitimate grievances against the government or big companies marks the press itself as “unserious”, that is, unlikely to be showered with the favors needed to keep “journalism” up and running for another few months.
That said, I’d much rather see people sacrificing themselves for a genuine cause and little recognition than abandoning the concept of cause, and denying and suffocating their own, fully deserved, fully legit anger, as you see here in the States.
Pragmatically, the latter is equivalent to praying the gay away. Doesn’t help, does harm, and you actually get farther away from satisfaction.
I lean toward the hazy theory of Mark Ames: we will see this resistance from American workers, in a terrible, less-effective “lone wolf” style, as individuals return to their former workplaces with automatic weapons and lists of targets. That shit’s been popular since Reagan smashed labor – coincidence?
jl
@52 Culture of Truth
Thanks, I vaguely remember it now. Has something to do with liberals and minorities being the real bigots, some way or other. I still forget how the reasoning is supposed to go.
So many hallucinatory wingnut memes been flying around that I can’t keep them all in my head at once.
Linda Featheringill
stuckinred # 48
Dead is dead, no more and no less.
mafisto
@gbbalto #8: I thought the same, but additional research revealed that the blue tags mean that the dog has been sterilized and vaccinated. I guess stray dogs are accepted in Greece?
Linda Featheringill
Bonds # 45
I don’t want to send people out to get their heads bashed in unless I am really, really sure that it would do a significant amount of good.
And while peaceful demonstrations can be effective for drawing attention to an issue or demonstrating popular support for one side of an issue, you can get into the territory of diminished returns very quickly.
Remember: Make noise, not war. :-)
chopper
@AAA Bonds:
but once you figure out a way to get those cheeto stains out, watch out world -the revolution will be well fucking nigh!
JWL
Updated Lyrics:
“I dreamed I saw Joe Hill last night
Barking like a dog…”
Martin
Liberals denied blacks the freedom to choose a life of slavery by banning it. Big government oppressing the masses!
chopper
@Linda Feathergill:
this. i’ve been in some crazy demonstrations for an american. i know what tear gas tastes like. but these things don’t really have the effect they used to, and it should be worth it before we start asking people to get their skulls cracked over shit.
The Snarxist Formerly Known as Kryptik
@AAA Bonds #55:
Yep. Sadly, proper protest and demonstrations, like so many things, have been dead and buried due to the chidings of the media as well as the rise and entrenchment of “Very Serious Persons”. Unfortunately, way too many accept it as the way it SHOULD be, not an aberration that should be corrected.
Unfortunately, I have long since given up hope that this will be corrected. When proven losers like ‘supply-side economics’ not only continue to thrive, but dominate all other theories to the point of exclusion, when the GOP can go all in ham-handed with hyper-partisan monolithic stonewalling, and successfully use it to paint DEMS as the intractable evil partisans, when we’re actually seeing severe abortion restrictions starting to become the MODERATE position because we actually have states that are fucking prosecuting miscarriages?
Yeah, we’re fucked with no lifeline back.
Linda Featheringill
JWL #61
“I dreamed I saw Joe Hill last night
Barking like a dog…”
What a lovely thought!
Woof!
comrade scott's agenda of rage
This is why I’m glad me and the missus never reproduced and will hopefully be gone before the planet reverts to some Mad Max-esque society.
Keith G
@AAA Bonds
Your cutting analogy is apt.
I wonder what it would take for Americans to use public protest on a massive scale. Probably quite a lot as the Right is pretty good at using tribalism as a wedge.
Han's Solo
comrade scott’s agenda of rage @ 66 – I share the sentiment.
My only concern is who will take care of my numerous dogs? Then I see this brave Greek dog and my spirits lift.
stuckinred
Meanwhile in Kabul at what looks like Bunker’s Bunker in Saigon:
The security official told the BBC: “We think there are six suicide attackers who got inside the hotel.”
“We are fighting a very organised group of suicide attackers.”
kdaug
Ditto. One of my most-oft repeated phrases to my family is “There are reasons we ain’t got kids”. I can say the first three words to my sisters now and the eyes start rollin’.
(I come from Xian Conservative stock, reckon it just didn’t take with me.)
Got 5 nieces and nephews, though. It’s gonna get rough for them.
stuckinred
kdaug
same here, no way I was bringin children into the world. I love em but I’m glad I’m not responsible for any specific one of them.
artem1s
obviously Ms. Bachman is also ignorant of JQA’s lifelong fight against slavery. Can’t imagine she’d be so hip on him if she knew about how he robbed the owners of the Amistad of their property.
kd bart
I believe Michelle Bachmann is confusing John Quincy Adams with Johnny Tremaine.
Martin
Suicide fighters are no way to win a war. Devastating, sure, but also desperate.
Elsewhere:
Probably this place.
Linda Featheringill
Martin #76
Cool!
dadanarchist
The Greek protestors are shrill. Really, really shrill.
Andre
There are actually a few different “Greek riot dogs”. The most famous is Cannellos, who died in 2008, but who is the dog in most pictures attributed to Louikanikos except for the most recent round of protests.
Know Your Meme has a bunch of pictures and a bit of background.