Joining the Occupy Wall Street protests has its dangers. You could get pepper-sprayed or end up in handcuffs. Or, as Brooklyn-based journalist Caitlin Curran explains, your boss could see a photo of you holding up a sign at a protest and fire you the next day.

It all started with an article on The Atlantic's web site. Conor Friedersdorf's piece "Occupy Wall Street's Greatest Strength Is Neutering It," echoed what many people are wondering about the movement: what are they fighting for?

Friedersdorf criticized the Occupy movement for rallying against a symbolic, abstract Wall Street—"the average American's idea of Wall Street," rather than against specific people, regulations, or the board at Goldman Sachs, for example. The case against symbolic Wall Street is much weaker than the one against actual Wall Street, Friedersdorf wrote. Occupy supporters shouldn't focus on the impossible debate about whether or not Wall Street is good or evil, but instead should ask concrete questions, like whether regulations should exist for derivatives of mortgaged-backed securities. The Occupy movement has attracted many supporters who blame "Wall Street" for the present state of our economy. But for many people that's a confusing argument. Friedersdorf summed it up:

Figuring out precisely how to feel about Occupy Wall Street or ‘We are the 53 Percent' is difficult for many. Much easier to decide that it's wrong to create a mortgage-backed security filled with loans you know are going to fail so that you can sell it to a client who isn't aware that you sabotaged it by intentionally picking the misleadingly rated loans most likely to be defaulted upon.

[Crikey, another one. I used to listen to The Takeaway when I had a portable with a decent FM antenna. This is disappointing.]