Nothing has changed from the riots and nothing will.
As usual after such shocking events, we had two or three days of moral clarity where you could get away with saying things that normally you can’t – like pointing out how many people live lives of amoral spoon-fed incontinent idleness.
Then we had the essential moment – known as “the Gitmo moment” – providing a cause around which confused lefties could rally (in this case the harmless but poorly expressed mutterings of a TV historian).
The next step is to draw ludicrous moral equivalences – burning down shops and killing people is, apparently, no worse than wearing a dinner jacket and getting drunk, or fiddling expenses. I don’t often agree with David Cameron but it was good to see him having a pop on that point at the BBC.
Finally you just keep repeating idiocies about how rioters were “deprived” and bringing it all back to “inequality” and such notions. It doesn’t matter how stupid it is if you say it often enough.
This is just how it works. In a few months I bet you’ll be able to call it the Tottenham Spring. We’ll “reach out”, we’ll open some youth clubs, our policing will become even more limp-wristed, vendors of steel shutters will do well, and small shopkeepers will, bit by bit, give up to take up lives of amoral spoon-fed incontinent idleness.
– Samizdata commenter m2p
Your probably correct.
But don’t forget, that which can’t last forever won’t. It is hard to predict the turning point in real time. There will be one.
I keep wrecking my brain trying to figure out when the nation that fought the Luftwaffe to a standstill after they had levelled all of central Europe turned into a nation of simpering pussies.
It’s not like Britain can get much more “unfree”. All that stuff about unlimited detention without trial and the abolition of the vote would simply be tying up loose ends. The key elements that make for a totalitarian state are all in place.
And still the people don’t see anything wrong….
I pity the UK. For decades it has given asylum and welfare to African, Caribbean, and Arab rotters. All the UK has gotten in return is contempt. How much white guilt is left? Apparently plenty. Good luck to you all.
Actually Lyn, if you followed the news, you could have noticed that many of the rioters were lily-white.
We’re now waiting for the “Gitmo II” moment, when the lefties decide the so-called “harsh” punishments were inappropriate and campaign for early release, and then police compensation for false imprisonment, then the scabby little toerags exhibited at “progressive” rallies showing how “human” they are and how nasty everyone else is to condemn them.
Complete canard. As Alisa pointed out if you were actually paying attention there were no shortages of white faces looting shops. Moreover I think you will find the majority of welfare recipients in the UK are… white. This is not a racial problem, it is a welfare-state-hollowing-out-society problem.
If something cannot continue, it will stop.
“If something cannot continue, it will stop.”
Eventually. However “it” is quite capable to continuing for decades and doing immense damage while it does so.
AKM
Yes.
This is not a racial problem, it is a welfare-state-hollowing-out-society problem.
I don’t know his “rep” hereabouts, but I was coincidentally reading Dalrymple’s “Life at the Bottom” while those riots were taking place. I thought it was very interesting (and prescient) counterpoint to what I was reading in the news.
If I understand him, the underlying problem is individuals who persist in making bad decisions. It predates the welfare state, but that the welfare state catalyzed the propagation and malevolence of the problem. He insists, as well, that immigrants to the UK have learned this behavior such that “the youth” exhibit it to a much greater degree than the previous generations.
More common sense on the riots from ordinary people than all the editorial pages put together:
http://www.worldbytes.org/the-view-from-the-streets-london-riots/