London riots

[Gob]

Fully agree Sean, send in the army. Give these thugs over to the brave men and women who have been fighting FOR our country so that they can meet out justice to them.

[The Hen]

Bugger Sean. I am sending protective thoughts your family's way. (For whatever that is worth in any case .... )

[Sean]

Thanks Hen. I've been in contact this evening and police are advising everybody there to stay away from the city centre, shopping centres and police stations and to stay in their homes if possible after dark. Of course my mum would be living just around the corner from Stechford CID (second largest police station in Brum) which thankfully has not been targeted as yet... not much worth looting there. My sister has likened it to "living in downtown fucking Baghdad!" and says that the whole situation is very surreal.

[liberty]

It is easy for me to talk it is not my county. But I am not opposed to using the army if the need is great enough that the situation could be called an insurrection. But something that should be understood and accepted before the army is employed is that people will die. Soldiers are not police; they have a different mind set especially battle hardened soldiers. I would not uses them unless I had to and then I would arm them with enough force to do the job; you don’t want to frustrate these guys.

[Liberty1]

Is the UK actually waking up to their reality of unlimited benefits? Such as endless unemployment.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/artic ... ouths.html

I am sure that is what many of the young rioters, black and white, who have burned and looted in England through the past few shocking nights think today.

It was fun. It made life interesting. It got people to notice them. As a girl looter told a BBC reporter, it showed ‘the rich’ and the police that ‘we can do what we like’

If you live a normal life of absolute futility, which we can assume most of this week’s rioters do, excitement of any kind is welcome. The people who wrecked swathes of property, burned vehicles and terrorised communities have no moral compass to make them susceptible to guilt or shame.

Most have no jobs to go to or exams they might pass. They know no family role models, for most live in homes in which the father is unemployed, or from which he has decamped.

They are illiterate and innumerate, beyond maybe some dexterity with computer games and BlackBerries.

They are essentially wild beasts. I use that phrase advisedly, because it seems appropriate to young people bereft of the discipline that might make them employable; of the conscience that distinguishes between right and wrong.

They respond only to instinctive animal impulses — to eat and drink, have sex, seize or destroy the accessible property of others.
Their behaviour on the streets resembled that of the polar bear which attacked a Norwegian tourist camp last week. They were doing what came naturally and, unlike the bear, no one even shot them for it.

A former London police chief spoke a few years ago about the ‘feral children’ on his patch — another way of describing the same reality.
The depressing truth is that at the bottom of our society is a layer of young people with no skills, education, values or aspirations. They do not have what most of us would call ‘lives’: they simply exist.
Nobody has ever dared suggest to them that they need feel any allegiance to anything, least of all Britain or their community. They do not watch royal weddings or notice Test matches or take pride in being Londoners or Scousers or Brummies.
Not only do they know nothing of Britain’s past, they care nothing for its present.
They have their being only in video games and street-fights, casual drug use and crime, sometimes petty, sometimes serious.
The notions of doing a nine-to-five job, marrying and sticking with a wife and kids, taking up DIY or learning to read properly, are beyond their imaginations.

Last week, I met a charity worker who is trying to help a teenage girl in East London to get a life for herself. There is a difficulty, however: ‘Her mother wants her to go on the game.’ My friend explained: ‘It’s the money, you know.’
An underclass has existed throughout history, which once endured appalling privation. Its spasmodic outbreaks of violence, especially in the early 19th century, frightened the ruling classes.
Its frustrations and passions were kept at bay by force and draconian legal sanctions, foremost among them capital punishment and transportation to the colonies.
Today, those at the bottom of society behave no better than their forebears, but the welfare state has relieved them from hunger and real want.
When social surveys speak of ‘deprivation’ and ‘poverty’, this is entirely relative. Meanwhile, sanctions for wrongdoing have largely vanished.
When Work and Pensions Secretary Iain Duncan Smith recently urged employers to take on more British workers and fewer migrants, he was greeted with a hoarse laugh.

[rubato]

Based on very limited, although recent, experience I would say that the average hard-working Londoner is Italian or Eastern European.

yrs,
rubato

[Gob]

I have just heard that Col. Gaddafi has issued a statement saying that he recognises the rioters in London as the UK's legimate government.

[dales]

These are the TRUE Londoners.



Descendants from the same who raised their middle finger to the Luftwaffe during the blitz.

[Gob]

Agreed 100%

[Liberty1]

Me too. Time to stand up and put the spoiled kiddies in their place. Let's see that "stiff upper lip" once more!

[Gob]

It's so easy to label these kids as scum, violent and a hopeless cause. We need to bring people like this into the political arena, to ask them what they need, and not in a patronising way.


http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree ... n-response

I find it hard to believe that someone with enough firing neurones to be able to type, wrote that.

[Liberty1]

I find it hard to believe that someone with enough firing neurones to be able to type, wrote that.

Agreed, spoilt I'd call them.

[Sean]

It looks like American sports are really catching on in England. According to the news, sales of baseball bats have gone up by 5,000% over the past few days...

[loCAtek]

Baghdad, ha!

[Scooter]

[

It's so easy to label these kids as scum, violent and a hopeless cause. We need to bring people like this into the political arena, to ask them what they need, and not in a patronising way.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree ... n-response

I find it hard to believe that someone with enough firing neurones to be able to type, wrote that.

David Cameron said something very much like it five years ago in his "hoodie speech".

[rubato]

Are the rioters using social media to spread the violence from community to community?

If so, this is very interesting.

Until now I had seen social media as either used for either benign or beneficial purposes.

Flash mobs were mostly beneficial public performances. As were the groups who organised the cleanup from the riots. Social media were used to organise the demonstrations in Iran, Tunisia, Egypt, Syria Libya &c which are mostly beneficial or neutral (depending on your point of view).

I had not thought that the group who would want to riot, destroy, and loot were sufficiently self-aware to be able to do this (apart from ideologically driven groups). If so, then this is truly something new under the sun.

yrs,
rubato

[oldr_n_wsr]

This reminds of the summer of 1977 when the electricity went out in NY City. I was working for the beer distributor in Bedford Styvesant (think south bronx only worse) at the time.
We immediately brought down the garage doors (thankfully they were manual not electric) and sat outside the distributor (with shotguns) selling what ice we had before it melted.

The local scum went on a looting spree first stealing trucks then backing up those trucks through the gates of the stores on Broadway, loading whatever they could get their hands on then firebombing the empty stores. These were stores that were for the most part, locally owned and many did not re-open. We were not bothered nor was the Korean produce store next to us where the owners were also sitting outside with shotguns.

[Gob]

David Cameron said something very much like it five years ago in his "hoodie speech".

The infamous "hug a hoodie" speech. He's never going to live that one down.

We were not bothered nor was the Korean produce store next to us where the owners were also sitting outside with shotguns.

Neat!

[dgs49]

At least some people in England "get it."

From the London Daily Telegraph:

"It is the result of a major cultural shift that took place in the 1960s and 1970s and the long-term decline in conservative values and institutions that had underpinned British society since the late 19th century. This process was marked by a collapse in the belief in marriage, a retreat of the police from the streets, a move away from tough penalties for property crime, the rise of moral relativism and rampant consumerism, the diminution of stigma as a restraint on bad behavior and the entrenchment of welfare dependency."

Note the elimination of the stigma on bastardy. Consider some the words of the Supremes' hit, "Love Child."

The guilt of "having no name," and so forth.

Social stigma serves a purpose, and it is also counterproductive for the Government to compensate people for behavior that attacks to social constructs of the society - i.e., giving additional money to families when there is no father in the household.

The phenomenon was understood and explained several decades ago, and "we" continue with the policies that promote the proliferation of the "underclass."

[Scooter]

And I guess reporters from the Daily Telegraph were out in force checking the birth certificates of the rioters to know that they were all children of unmarried parents...