But I don’t know why other countries don’t suffer from this.
Because the rich are getting richer and everyone else as a consequence is getting poorer. Not because of your racial & Social Darwinist fantasies.
That’s not even logically coherent. If you didn’t even ask yourself what the causes are, then you don’t know why the behavior got better, or the cause of it in the first place. By definition. You can’t reasonably claim that people are “just a bunch of idiots” while at the same time saying that you not only don’t know but you aren’t even trying to find out why they are doing anything.
There’s a definite “Ignorance is Strength” vibe here…kind of ironic on this website.
So you think people are just born ‘bad’? Do you think this distribution is equal across the races, classes, genders, etc, or is it bred?
And the answer is to let the beatings continue until [del]morale[/del] attitude improves ?
Oh, please - there have been complaints about the poor outbreeding the rich since the days of the Roman Empire. So far, the rich haven’t gone extinct and the poor haven’t taken over. It’s not “unusual”, it’s actually fairly typical in history.
Because their methods for dealing with initial, smaller scale bad behaviour are different to ours. That’s my central point.
Obviously there are other factors, like our culture on binge drinking, but the thing is, if you mention something like that it becomes the scapegoat for bad behaviour. People change licensing laws in an area and are surprised when crime doesn’t come down.
Think what you’re saying here. That we cannot respond to a phenomenon without knowing its causes? Or indeed, we can’t even say whether a given response is even useful? Seriously, do I have to give an analogy to show you why this is nonsense?
In any case, I think I can identify causes, which I’ve gone into in other posts.
Well, sort of…I wouldn’t put it like that.
We all have some propensity to doing bad things some of the time. And I think it’s innate. If you watch very young children play you’ll see clear-cut acts of spite.
And I saying there’s variation in this, like most things, so some people are inclined to do more extreme things, more of the time.
Inclination is not the same thing as behaviour though. I’m not saying anyone is “lost”.
For race and all that…let’s not go there. There’s no reason to bring this into the discussion.
As for “bred”, yes, if you mean bred by natural selection.
I’ve no idea what you’re talking about. What beatings? To whom?
There was a riot in Copenhagen in 1993 (youtube) by ultraleftist nationalists. The police shot (100+ shots were fired) them down. The riot wasn’t repeated. Plenty of peaceful demonstrations of course.
This is not a political movement. It is a band of opportunistic thugs. These arsonists and looters can and should be suppressed just as you would a spate of armed robberies. Cracking down on robbers isn’t going to attract others to their cause, because they don’t have one. All it will do is tip their cost/benefit analysis away from committing more robberies.
So it is to some degree affected by environment?
I don’t see why not. If it’s related to genetics and breeding there must be some correlation with race and ethnicity, according to your theory. What’s the difference?
Then you may need to change the rules on how your police respond to small mobs. My understanding is that in the UK police tend to hold back when it’s a property crime and then track the culprit down later - perhaps they should be more active in apprehending someone in the act of committing such a crime. Perhaps they should re-evaluate how they handle unruly crowds. Maybe something else needs adjusting, it’s hard to say since I’m not overly familiar with life in the UK.
Well, obviously, in that case drinking was not a cause of the crimes that didn’t go away. Drink might contribute, or it might be involved in a subset of crime, but if you change the alcohol laws and crime remains the same then alcohol isn’t the root of the problem.
But yes, we get the same phenomena here.
Well, of course you have to do something immediately to quell riots on this scale. You have to stop them. Once it’s over, though, you have two choices: go back to things as they were, and deal with the next riot down the road; or try to find out the root causes of why this happened - which the participants themselves might not even be aware of!
There have been lot of urban riots over the years. You know what? They tend to have a few things in common:
- discrimination (racial, class, religious - doesn’t matter, and can be a mix)
- poverty (lack of money)
- high unemployment (lack of jobs)
- lack of good educational opportunities
- lack of adequate healthcare access
- lack of adequate housing
- police brutality (real and/or perceived)
So take a look at that list and ask yourself: how many of these exist in Britain right now? Doesn’t have to be all of them, but every one of them you find increases your chance of a riot.
It’s an old joke: “The beatings will continue until morale improves” - people are unhappy about something, so we will inflict more unhappy on them until they become happy. Another way of saying that if something doesn’t work doing more of it is unlikely to result in a different outcome.
Well, you can’t ignore social injustice. These things don’t just happen in a vacuum, you know.
Of course.
Firstly, why do you insist on calling it “breeding”? I’m talking about our natural tendancies which have come about through our evolutionary history.
Secondly, it’s not my theory: It’s been well established that we have some propensity towards bad behaviour and there is variation in to what degree. What part of this do you dispute?
Finally, yeah probably there would be some variation between population groups. This is very different from saying black=good, white=bad and I think it’s quite poor form to try to lead the discussion that way.
Fine, but don’t forget:
- opportunism
What I’m saying is that this reason may be one of the most critical in the kind of riots which are taking place in britain.
Well, yes, there is a certain sort of person who, seeing what they perceive to be an opportunity to get something for nothing without getting caught will take advantage. The fact that the UK actually is using CCTV footage and other means to track down those who rioted, burned, and looted may make people think twice next time, as getting away with it is apparently not as easy as it appeared.
But tens of thousands of other people did not become opportunists. Why is that? What’s the difference between those who take and those who restrain themselves? Who is more likely to loot, those who can afford to pay for the stuff in the shop window, or those who will never be able to afford those items? It’s not that rich young idiots never smash windows, set fires, or steal, but they seem far less likely to do so. Nor is it poverty alone that drives the looting, as there were plenty of London poor who didn’t take part in all the rioting, theft, and arson.
The causes aren’t direct - you can’t point to someone and say “oh, he’s X, he’ll do Y” because people don’t work like that. On the other hand, it’s also pretty clear that if certain types of social conditions are common, then certain other conditions - like riots - are much more likely to occur.
If today’s news reports are at all representative of the facts (and I acknowledge this isn’t always the case), then you could be right. People arrested and charged who aren’t jobless, homeless or particularly poor or disgruntled
I’m not sure the answer to that is at all straightforward or obvious - and it may be the opposite of what you expect. Poverty has a reputation for inspiring a kind of earthy honesty, and people who can (or have preiviously been able to) afford stuff might generally expect to have stuff they want.
In which case Britain will have to ask why that cross-section of people thought “smash and loot” was somehow acceptable.
Quite.
It’s interesting that so much of the discussion has been about poverty, with no obvious evidence of a correlation. Sure, they’re unlikely to be the richest in society but I’d like to see evidence they’re the poorest.
The logic appears to be “They’re taking stuff…so they must be poor, right?”.
Whereas on the other hand, the fact they’re firebombing people’s homes (in some cases while people were still in them), and other acts which are despicable even through the lens of other riots…from this we’re not supposed to infer anything.
Well, go ahead and infer.
I think part of the reason discussion has focused on looting is because that’s most of what was going on, the arson, although alarming, was not the dominant activity.
Football hooliganism caused the French 2005 riots? Nothing at all to do with the social situation?
Cause from across the Channel, your riots look a lot like ours.
Firstly, it depends what we mean by dominant activity. Obviously in terms of frequency you are not likely to get more buildings razed than shops stolen from.
But secondly, the discussion hasn’t focused on looting, it’s focused on poverty. Which is really a non sequitur.
I’ve given my reasoning for why I think they’re happening in quite some detail. The poverty explanation seems to rest on it being “just obviously” about that.