Out of interest, Novelty Bubble, why do you pick 1980 as my starting point not 1979?
well, it is either
A) I’m making a serious point that a government can’t be truly said to be culpable until some months have passed…or
B) I forgot
OK, it is B.
I appreciate your previous reply though and I feel I do have to apologise.
In hindsight, my original points to you were far too personal. I think I was reacting more to elements in your post that echoed a lot of the blinding stupidity and short-sightedness of most political commentators regarding the these current riots. On reflection, I don’t think what you said warranted such a particularly harsh response from me.
So, sorry.
(edited to add - aha! I see your reference to 1984 as well, strange times. I’m halfway through it as we speak, just a little light holiday reading. First time I’ve ever read it and now that I’ve got me a kindle I’m soaking up loads of the classics, my opinion so far?..fresh and frightening.)
No apology needed, Sir. I think another thread is showing that we are both civil chaps (relishing the spanking of the Indians) :D.
We all have our habits of getting somewhat strident on politics, and if I took offense at someone else calling my views out, I’d be a very hypocritical person indeed.
well that shows how much notice I take of names doesn’t it?
Perhaps that is the key to our current plight. Cricket will save us all.
A sport that I’ve always viewed as classless. One that treats you as a sportsman first and a skin colour…pretty much never.
Back on topic, and with a more serious tone. I fondly recall some of my schoolteachers taking time out, after school, to arrange and train us for various sporting events, cricket included. That happens less and less and I can’t help feeling that with such small erosions we begin to lose young people to other, less positive influences.
I think the apparent death of team sports in the British state education system is a very bad thing indeed. And has wide ranging effects, such as a breakdown of community.
But, to give fair disclosure, I left the state system at age 10. I think. Too long ago to remember precisely. Good champagne socialist that I am.
or maybe it’s not disenfranchised kids, maybe it’s just people in general that become a mob and see an opportunity …
A nation of looters: it even happened in the Blitz
Although I tend to think it’s less likely to happen if there’s not such an entrenched underclass.
- It’s not justified. No-one has said it is.
- It’s just a symptom of an underlying problem.
- If we want to fix that problem, than understanding just what is causing it is a good starting point.
You want to stop this shit happening again? Well, carrot and stick time. Give people something to aim at that will see them rewarded. Encourage greater sense of society by funding local sports, youth facilities, training courses, yadda. Carrot.
Stick - identify wherever possible anyone involved in these riots, and punish them as fully as the law allows. Though I doubt we’ve actually got enough jail space left for that number of people, so we’ll have to do something creative on that front. Couple of years of compulsory peacecorp style work in Somalia building infrastructure/irrigation/essential facilities? The average cost of jailing someone in Britain is around £26,000 per annum. I reckon you could spend a fraction of that feeding someone in a remote part of the sahara, and the rest on building materials for them to use. And yes, that is just me being daft, but I really would think that there’s got to be something more productive you could do with £130,000 than the equivalent of a 5 year stretch on the naughty step to think about what they did wrong.
I’m sure many of you are not aware of The Bullingdon Club.
“Andrew Gimson, biographer of Boris Johnson, reported about the club in the 1980s: “I don’t think an evening would have ended without a restaurant being trashed and being paid for in full, very often in cash. […] A night in the cells would be regarded as being par for a Buller man and so would debagging anyone who really attracted the irritation of the Buller men.”[15]”
Cameron (UK Prime Minister) was also a member.
(bolding mine)
When the chav cunts who’ve smashed up England pay for what they’ve done, this will be a valid comparison.
Disaster struck both Latvia and Iceland. One responded with austerity, the other with rapid depreciation of their currency. They are both hurting, but Iceland fared better. Cite.
Same in the US: every single major party agrees that it is time for austerity. That doesn’t imply that the solution is consistent with mainstream economics. Every major US economic forecaster agrees that the stimulus package stemmed the bleeding and lessened the contraction: in other words it worked. Cite. Yet there is no appetite for a bigger better deal, quite the opposite.
Math is hard!
The proximate cause for the Lesser Depression was the failure of Lehman, the ultimate cause was a housing bubble fed by structured investment products and overly permissive regulation. That’s actually a hard question, though, requiring study. HCR is another one. Stagflation is a third.
But we know how to cure an insufficient aggregate demand problem. That’s conceptually easy. We just lack the will.
So it’s ok to smash up shops and restaurants if you (or in the case of Boris and Dave, your father) can pay for it?
No, of course it’s not ok. That doesn’t mean it’s in any way comparable to rioting and looting. If you were to compare the Bullingdon Club to drunks on a Friday night getting out of hand, you might have a point. If the drunks were made to pay for the damage they’ve caused.
Amazingly, there’s a decent article in the Telegraph (of all places) illustrating the hypocrisy here.
Never thought I’d see a day where the Telegraph argues against just blaming the poor. Shit.
Everybody’s so wrapped up in blaming “social deprivation” and “poverty” that nobody’s actually established that the majority of those involved in the rioting and looting were amongst the poorest or most deprived in the country. Based on the faces that seem to be appearing before the courts there’s a fair share of professionals, students, and so on. I’m not sure how these people fit the narrative that we’re currently hearing from the British Left.
This is a riot that’s largely been organized via Blackberry Messenger and social media websites like Twitter and Facebook. Perhaps it’s impolitic to suggest that anybody with access to a £300 mobile phone, contract or not (and I’ve just got rid of my Blackberry contract for being too expensive, so no shit about how inexpensive they are these days), and access to the Internet wouldn’t actually know the meaning of “social deprivation” or “poverty” if it hit them in the face.
Further, I’m convinced that we’ll never find a decent explanation for why this riot happened, why it happened now, or why it was allowed to spread so quickly and so far outside of London. My feeling is that no explanation proffered so far is actually anywhere close to explaining what we saw last week. I do feel though, that if the Met had come down hard on the rioters in London on the first night we would have had a far more localised problem than one that took over the entire country. Thankfully, this is a point that’s now being realised by both the Met and the Government.
Ah, so it’s OK to go around smashing things as long as you’re rich. So the real crime of these rioters isn’t that they are going around destroying things and stealing, but that they aren’t wealthy enough to pay everyone off after they’ve had their fun.
I dunnabout rich, but it seems a lot more pardonable to smash up shit that you can and do pay for within hours of committing the offence than to smash up shit that you cannot and will not pay for in the rest of your life; and the Bullingdonites, crass boorish hooray-Henries that they were, at least didn’t burn things down or destroy businesses. But carry on arguing as if this were purely a class thing if you like.
Until they started bringing the accused in front of a judge there was no way to know for sure what the composition of the rioters was. Given that it started in poor neighborhoods it seemed reasonable there was a large component of such people.
When the authorities started releasing names, photos, and more information that turned out not to be true - that didn’t happen until when, Wednesday?
So you’re criticizing at least some of the people because they didn’t know all the facts. Statements made Monday and Tuesday were made without being able to know key facts. I’m sure it was a surprise to many, and it’s not like the participation of middle class and well to do people, people with jobs, hasn’t now been broadcast. I stumbled across an interesting website yesterday, which for some reason I can’t find again today, which had an interesting breakdown of those arrested which indicated, among other things, that many if not most were not from the neighborhoods with the worst damage, which contradicts what seems to be the logical assumption if you don’t have that information.
Are the people who are still saying this is a problem of the poorest doing so out of ignorance or malice? I’m not sure, the meme of “poor people riot” is a pretty strong and may be true of other riots even if that doesn’t apply here.
The “Left”? I certainly heard at least as many people on the Right blame it on the poor, including people on this board. Except they were talking more about how this shows the inborn inferiority of the poor and how they should be sterilized or killed.
I wonder if they’ll be so hot to sterilize or shoot “professionals, students, and so on”.
Yes, the left. I realise it’s hard for those sitting thousands of miles away to understand what’s being said on British political TV shows, in the newspapers etc., but Diane Abbot (amongst many others) seems to have made a small fortune this week selling the same narrative to everybody that would listen that this is clearly a problem with social deprivation, and so on, without much supporting evidence.
It’s complete and utter poppycock. Iceland is currently in the grip of a severe recession, far more so than the UK. To quote Wikipedia: