Knicks · OT: London riots. (page 2)
I've been watching the screens for 3 straight hours now. There's no protest. No message. No placards. No demands for change. Just youths who have safety in numbers against the police and are using it to break the law. Old people being forced from their homes. Buildings torched. Stores looted for free stuff cuz they think they'll get away with it.
Anyone who thinks this is some kind of cry for help is wrong. It started that way 3 days ago but that went by the by 2.23.5 days ago. This is simple animal violence. Do as much damage as possible.
I'll be out on the street policing tomorrow and I guarantee I won't hear a single legitimate protest on my shift. It's a simple lack of morality degenerating into lawlessness through mob mentality. Don't imagine for a second this is "breaking the shackles" or something.
Anyone still think there's a message of protest to this?
writes: The common feeling in Hackney Central is that our community has been hurt and damaged by causeless violence. We spoke to looters trying to get home, the only explanation they gave for their behaviour was that they had no money today. It is sad to think that these people are thinking of only the next moment, and the moment they have created is a nightmare. As we watch them now moving on in small pockets, we hope that our community will unite together this morning to react against these riots.
firefly wrote:The guy youre chatting to sounds on the money. But that's not what disenfranchised youth is. Kids who are too fuckin lazy to go to school or get a job or start a life? And now what? They blame it on the Man for not giving them opportunities?! That's bull. There's plenty of opportunity in London, and to ignore all you can be cuz you won't get off your ass and do something is not disenfranchised. The kids on the street of London do have something to complain about. It's a total and utter lack of moral compass. This anything goes, blame the Man attitude is what makes these guys think it's ok to act like they are.I've been watching the screens for 3 straight hours now. There's no protest. No message. No placards. No demands for change. Just youths who have safety in numbers against the police and are using it to break the law. Old people being forced from their homes. Buildings torched. Stores looted for free stuff cuz they think they'll get away with it.
Anyone who thinks this is some kind of cry for help is wrong. It started that way 3 days ago but that went by the by 2.23.5 days ago. This is simple animal violence. Do as much damage as possible.
I'll be out on the street policing tomorrow and I guarantee I won't hear a single legitimate protest on my shift. It's a simple lack of morality degenerating into lawlessness through mob mentality. Don't imagine for a second this is "breaking the shackles" or something.
i want to add a comment here but know that I am also not as informed as I should be.
a couple of things keep swishing back and forth in the mind: over past decade or so money has accumulated at the top in a way that it has not over a longer stretch of time, and the way in which that it has occurred and the out-right grab for power that has accompanied it is also unprecedented for a long while. Inequality combined with forces behind economy begets jobs begets frustration begets... No doubt there is no way to lump all those involved with looting with others just frustrated with general outlook, but I wouldn't necessarily separate the underlying causes.
Anyway, be careful out there, don't be left with a cigarette in one hand and your cell with the other when a bat is necessary.
Keep up the details and good luck. thanks.
loweyecue wrote:firefly wrote:Sorry but there is no message to what these people are doing. It's plain and simple opportunistic violence, robbery, arson and anarchy. Kids are on the street doing it for fun. Just fun. Noone is saying there's a disenfranchised point to any of this. It's kids with cellphones, twitter and FB thinking they are now in charge.Lord Of The Flies.
Not trying to argue with you but this is what I was reading. Of course I have no firsthand knowledge, even the news agencies here don't seem to be covering it very well:
ChrisC wrote:Have just finished watching BBC Newsnight. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/programmes/ne... (They have not yet upgraded the site so wait til tomorrow). Try this instead: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/By all accounts it is getting worse as I write with fires and youths running wild all over the place, not just in London.
None of this should come as a surprise. if you play the economy only for a very small group in a nation, sooner or later the disenfranchised young start to believe that there is nothing for them to look forward to. What have they to look forward to if there is little or no prospect of their being able to emulate what they see every day on screen? Particularly a steady job and the chance of a home and a family.
Again, watch ANY young person today and they live in another world, constantly sending or receiving text messages on their phones and when not, listening to their iPod. In my youth, we had many in our local communities that had made a great success of themselves and were clearly visible in each and EVERY community. Today, our High Streets are all the same and all those "Shopkeepers" have been assimilated into a "Tesco" or a "Boots". Yes some are franchises; but by far the majority can see no clear, well defined future for themselves nor for anyone surrounding them.
We need a comprehensive program of new business creation right down at the grass roots to inspire them to get up and try to make something of themselves. We need to rebuild our communities; create an economy that gives everyone, all every level, the chance to better themselves.
But who wants to listen?
I think this is good stuff but it should be ammended to include two things:
(1) it is August and the 21s and under are off f rom school
(2) this economy sucks donkey dong
(2a)they aren't being productive
(2b)there are no jobs
(2c)the austerity measures of social programming addressing urban youth unemployment/employment gaps
How ironic that the entire political upper crust is on holiday.
I don't know about y'all, but I got into some crazy shit at that age. But never anything like that because I had opportunities then. Fuck, I moved to Libya in my mid-20s to get a decent job because of how shit the economy is. That's what I had to do to get a chance. What about if you're 14-21? That is the shit-end of the stick
Thanks Martin, I'll be smoking Eastwood style, no hands necessary. I'll be going on duty later today, hope there's more rebuilding then destroying.
SC and Martin you guys make good points, especially about cuts in funding to youth projects. There is a legitimate beef to be fought for here. What's sad is that these rooters don't care about that cause. They are destroying their own communities just because they can.
What saddens me is that it's like the youth of today was told "you can do whatever you want to so what do you want to do?" and they just wanted to destroy stuff. It's inexcusable and I refuse to correlate it to any real cause. being bored is not an excise for behaviour like this.
texts: On the train out of Waterloo I can see loads of people with brushes, gloves and dustpans heading to join the cleanup: London at its best.
I am a school teacher in south London and I am saddened and appalled by the level of violence being committed by my brothers, young black men. They need to find a voice, a leader, a moral compass. Parents and grandparents may have suffered, but today they have and will have opportunities.
Clapham resident Sean Fitzpatrick tells BBC News he was at the end of Lavender Hill when the unrest started last night. He says residents came out of their homes to see a crowd of youths gathered outside Lavender Hill Police Station.
He says he can understand police were stretched by violence in south London "they were literally outnumbered by 300, 400 kids at least".
"What happened last night was lawless thuggery," he says. He points to a looted a charity shop: "That's low".
Home Affairs Correspondent Danny Shaw tells BBC 5 live the Independent Police Complaints Commission says the investigation into Mark Duggan's death is "going to be complex". He also says reports that a gun found at the crime scene was a replica are not correct. It was a working firearm.
blogs about the reasons for the violence: "Everyone wants to be rich and famous, without wanting to work hard to reach those otherwise acceptable ambitions. So I think the prime motivators behind the looting are greed and jealousy, rather than sorrow and anger. Basic human failings that have been around forever. Not contemporary political gripes but certainly contemporary social malaise."
Not that it matters really. The rioting is scary and I really hope everyone is safe.
An English friend of mine was visiting family in England when this all broke loose. He said that it was a crazy feeling and that he had never before seen so many police out in the city. He is in Uxbridge - no violence right where he was.
The Age of Outrage
By ROGER COHEN
Published: August 13, 2011
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/14/opinio...
AUGUST was once a time for dreaming, wandering the empty streets of this city, reading silly-season newspaper stories after a leisurely lunch washed down with Sancerre, gazing at squares where fountains plashed and the pregnant or the old chatted on benches at dusk. Then something happened.
The world speeded up. Stress levels soared. Idle moments evaporated. Egos expanded. Devices became hand-held. Money outpaced politics. Rage surged. As Leonard Cohen put it: “The poor stay poor. The rich get rich. That’s how it goes. Everybody knows.”
Except that everybody is at a loss. When David Cameron rushes back from Tuscany (a k a Chiantishire) to riot-ravaged London, and Nicolas Sarkozy hustles home from the Riviera to a Paris debt crisis, and the summer vacation void vanishes in Europe (once so long the Germans coined a word for “free-time angst”), all bets are off.
August aborted this year. It morphed into the serious season. The beach lost out to the barricades. A time of outrage is upon us.
The fury in British cities follows huge social protests this year in Greece, where violence also flared, and in Spain, where tens of thousands have camped out from Madrid to Barcelona. Other nations, including Portugal, have seen a diffuse anger rooted in a shared conviction: things can’t go on like this. This European malaise is no stranger to a United States of high unemployment, economic bafflement, ideological radicalization and political pettiness.
Numbers tell part of the story. Youth unemployment in the 27-nation European Union stands at just over 20 percent, ranging as high as 45.7 percent in Spain. In Britain youth unemployment has risen from 14 percent in the first quarter of 2008 to 20 percent. About one in every five young Europeans and young Americans is wondering how to get any sort of working life on track. Britain’s NEETS (not in education, employment or training) meet U.S. boomerang kids in the anxiety of waiting.
The anxiety grows when governments are slashing benefits and pushing back retirement ages in an attempt to deal with spiraling deficits. A working gerontocracy hardly helps the young. Brits from Tottenham to Teesside have watched the most patrician cabinet since Macmillan cutting everything from libraries to youth counseling services. Theirs is a “No Future” revolt.
A feeling has grown in Western societies that uncontrollable forces are at work shrinking possibility. History has never seen a global power shift as radical as the current one that managed to be peaceful.
The united Europe of today is built on the ashes of successive empires — from the Roman to the British — that ended in one form or other of violent convulsion. Now the American quasi-imperium, and more generally the dominion of the West, is ending, not rapidly but steadily.
Growth, jobs, expansion, excitement — and, yes, possibility — lie in the great non-Western arc from China through India to South Africa and Brazil. Go South! Go East! That’s the dictum of the age but not always practicable in Peckham or Peoria. The world has been turned upside-down. What we are witnessing is how shaken Western societies are by such inversion.
As new powers emerge, globalization has altered the relationship between capital and labor in the former’s favor. Many more cheap workers have become available outside the West as technology has eliminated distance. Returns on capital have proved higher relative to wages. That’s the story of the post-cold-war period. The gap between rich and poor has become a gulf.
The only people who walked away unscathed from the great financial binge that preceded this mess were its main architects and greatest beneficiaries: bankers, financiers and hedge-fund honchos.
This, too, is fueling a time of outrage that has left Western politicians chasing shadows.
Perhaps the society dealing best with these dilemmas is Germany. It has invested in a highly educated work force. It has matched workers’ skills to jobs. It has continued to make precision machinery others can’t make. It has fostered cooperation between labor unions and employers and between industrialists and the government in defense of German jobs. The youth unemployment rate is under 10 percent.
It has not tried to race to the bottom to compete with China, or imagined that financial and other services could sustain a society, or shirked on training, or tried to dismember unions, or believed that markets held all the answers. Past cataclysm has contributed to Germany’s ability to see past ego to the common good needed for stability.
Alas, Germany is also involved in a fit of navel-gazing. It is tired of others’ problems. It is sick of bailing out the Greeks. Surveys suggest 50 percent of Germans now have little or no faith in the European Union, the country’s postwar route to rehabilitation. German leadership has become an oxymoron just when needed.
The United States and Western Europe saved Germany. Perhaps it’s time to return a little of the favor — not with money alone, but ideas.
A feeling has grown in Western societies that uncontrollable forces are at work shrinking possibility.
1) There's nothing trancendent to rail against anymore. God's all but dead in the EU, so who are they going to blame all this violent, virulent angst on now? Allah? Mother Nature? The Flying Hedge Fund Monster?
2) Communism fell, Socialism is falling, and now Capitalism is next to go. We're running out of -isms. Twitter-driven Anarchism looks like it's next on the menu.
3) We're supposed to look to Germany as the model for saving the world? So the model for salvation will be having everyone make more clocks, MRI machines and BMW's?
Let them drive Porsches.
This is some scary, scary sheehit.
jrodmc wrote:A feeling has grown in Western societies that uncontrollable forces are at work shrinking possibility.1) There's nothing trancendent to rail against anymore. God's all but dead in the EU, so who are they going to blame all this violent, virulent angst on now? Allah? Mother Nature? The Flying Hedge Fund Monster?
2) Communism fell, Socialism is falling, and now Capitalism is next to go. We're running out of -isms. Twitter-driven Anarchism looks like it's next on the menu.
3) We're supposed to look to Germany as the model for saving the world? So the model for salvation will be having everyone make more clocks, MRI machines and BMW's?Let them drive Porsches.
This is some scary, scary sheehit.
that's what you took out of the article?
martin wrote:jrodmc wrote:A feeling has grown in Western societies that uncontrollable forces are at work shrinking possibility.1) There's nothing trancendent to rail against anymore. God's all but dead in the EU, so who are they going to blame all this violent, virulent angst on now? Allah? Mother Nature? The Flying Hedge Fund Monster?
2) Communism fell, Socialism is falling, and now Capitalism is next to go. We're running out of -isms. Twitter-driven Anarchism looks like it's next on the menu.
3) We're supposed to look to Germany as the model for saving the world? So the model for salvation will be having everyone make more clocks, MRI machines and BMW's?Let them drive Porsches.
This is some scary, scary sheehit.
that's what you took out of the article?
Was there something else? As I'm obviouly missing something, it identifies the riots stemming from the poor youngsters' inability to have a thriving future, due to the evil billionaire monsters at the top of the food chain. And don't get me wrong, I hate hedge fund managers and disconnected Western politicos as much as the next proletarian, but the article sounds like pseudo-Marxian drivel for the most part, with a little clever M.Night Shaylaman-twisted-ending thrown in for good reading.
What did you take out of the article?
I agree with Cohen that times of upheaval and shattering change (e.g., globalization, downsized Western growth and benefits, and lack of higher education in the workforce) inevitably lead to the sort of unrest demonstrated by thuggish "droogs" in London (like Alex from Clockwork).
When "austerity" in social welfare accompanies record-breaking corporate profits and 15% taxes on the incomes of the super-rich, do Average Joes have a reason to complain? When the ship begins listing, it makes sense to balance the load and start bailing, not give the few remaining lifeboats to the wealthy and let the whole mess sink into oblivion.
We'll muddle through this to the next period of reckless growth until the concomitant next bubble pops. And on and on we'll flow, tides creeping up our shores. At some point, technological breakthroughs may reduce the cost of living, but for now we better learn to swim.