We are developing the social individualist meta-context for the future. From the very serious to the extremely frivolous... lets see what is on the mind of the Samizdata people.
Samizdata, derived from Samizdat /n. - a system of clandestine publication of banned literature in the USSR [Russ.,= self-publishing house]
I am delighted to see that some people are ‘taking the law into their own hands’ and not just abandoning their communities to the barbarian thugs…
When the trouble came, hairdressers, sales assistants and butchers were among the scores of Turkish and Kurdish workers who stood outside their businesses in Green Lanes, Haringey, from 8pm having been warned by police to expect trouble.
The Guardian filmed others – some armed with baseball bats – on guard outside shops and restaurants in Kingsland Road, only a mile away from Hackney’s burning high street. Three workers from Re-Style Hairdressers were among those out in Green Lanes, after word spread that an attack was imminent at about 4pm
[…]
“We were outside ready and expecting them,” said the manager of Turkish Food Market, who asked not to be named. “But I felt very panicky because we are not safe from either the rioters or police. We put all of our efforts into this shop. It took 20 years to get it like this. But we do not know about our rights. I’m scared that the police and the government will attack us if we defend our businesses. We are being squeezed between the two.”
Firstly, to those blaming ‘immigration’ rather than the welfare state, and the utterly grotesque way the state demands you do not protect what is yours, well people would do well to emulate the Turkish and Kurdish community in Britain. Indeed the looters we see on television and streamed over the internet are so multi-racial it must gladden the hearts of the Welfare Statists who created them.
So when the police decry ‘vigilantes‘, I would point out that communities can often do a better job at protecting themselves than the police can and the folks who got out on the streets, not to loot but to defend their neighbourhoods, well they are the real heroes here.
The safety of you and your property is only tangentially of interest to the state (certainly they want to tax what you own, so to that extent they do indeed care about your life and property), but as demonstrated starkly over the last few days, the state also created the conditions that led to these riots and is therefore rather uneasy about punishing people who, after all, only do what the state does every day only without having to smash any windows.
A community of few people with rifles and something worth protecting are not such a soft target to thugs, even armed thugs, compared to a disarmed general population looking vainly for the Plod to save them. But for all sorts of reasons, the British state has so effectively propagandised this country that to even suggest armed self-defence puts you on the lunatic fringe… so crowbars and cricket bats it is then.
If these last few days shows anything it is that when push comes to shove, only you and your neighbours can defend against what can only be called barbarian scum. Contrary to what the state would have you believe, you have the right to defend yourself and your property that morally supersede any law that would deny that right. The rioters ‘took the law into their own hands’ so I applaud those Turks and Kurds (and many others whom the Guardian would not be so keen to report on) who did the same… they took the law back from the barbarians with and put it where it belongs: in their own hands.
The state is not your friend, so do what you have to do and if you drive off some thugs, do not call the police after it is all over as nothing good will come of that.
As far as I can see no one seems to be pointing out the essential cause of all these riots. Rioting is fun, exciting and you get to pick a prize at the end. Even young bloods at Oxford have been known to smash stuff up for the hell of it. It relieves the tedium of it all.
Talking about “the” essential cause is silly. I can think of about a dozen “essential causes” of these riots, as could you, each as “essential” as each other (this being one reason why there have been so many recent postings here on the subject (this being the ninth consecutive one)). Causes do not work alone; they combine, in clusters. For “the” read “an”. “The” Englishman, as he signs himself at the bottom of each posting (is there only one of those?), himself immediately proceeds to add some more “essential causes” of the rioting, like the fact that the penalties for rioting are now too small, along with the fun of it being fun.
Another essential cause of the rioting is that the rioters don’t think that rioting is wrong. They are, in short, scum. Why are they scum? Partly because so many of them have no live-in dads, which is another essential cause of all this.
Another essential cause of the rioting is, as was much discussed by me and the commenters here, that we, the non-rioting classes, are severely discouraged by our rulers from defending ourselves and counter-attacking against the rioters, which is one of many reasons why rioters now face too few penalties for their rioting. (Such defending and counter-attacking might also be fun. Different posting.)
Another cause of the rioting is that the rioters are stuck in a welfare trap. They are paid and consequently trained to do nothing, and have become incapable of doing anything more honestly lucrative. The Englishman alludes to all this by quoting at some length from a piece in the Guardian by Zoe Williams. Her description of what it’s like being stuck in a welfare trap is quite a good one, and should not be dismissed as mere “guff”, as the Englishman dismisses it, merely because Zoe Williams’s opinion about welfare is (I presume) that there should be more of it, and hence that more should be sucked into welfare traps. She describes the problem well.
Nevertheless, the Englishman has a good, big point here. Rioting is fun. This is not the only or “the essential” cause of the rioting, but it is definitely one of the causes of it.
There will be a temptation to beat ourselves up as a society for not doing enough to address problems faced by these groups, especially the inadequate education and consequent lack of qualifications that makes it hard for them to get jobs, which largely go to immigrant workers from eastern Europe. That should be resisted. Billions of pounds have been spent trying to improve schools and regenerate run-down areas. The suggestion from some Left-wing politicians, such as Ken Livingstone, that the riots were due to the impact of Government spending cuts is grotesque. If anything, the biggest problem has been the creation of a sense of entitlement sustained by an overly generous (and no longer affordable) welfare system, which expects nothing in return for the benefits dispensed.
If you have been unfortunate enough to be following the UK media’s breathtakingly awful attempts to say something useful about the riots… such as tut tutting about ‘social media’ for enabling the looting to be organised (cue calls from that hideous Janus-faced Guardian/Daily Mail Chimera to “Do Something”)… well you might get a giggle from Alec Muffet’s take on that subject.
This is not a political rebellion; it is a mollycoddled mob, a riotous expression of carelessness for one’s own community. And as a left-winger, I refuse to celebrate nihilistic behaviour that has a profoundly negative impact on working people’s lives. Far from being an instance of working-class action, the welfare-state mob has more in common with what Marx described as the lumpenproletariat. Indeed, it is worth recalling Marx’s colourful description in The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon of how that French ruler cynically built his power base amongst parts of the bourgeoisie and sections of the lumpenproletariat, so that ‘ruined and adventurous offshoots of the bourgeoisie rubbed shoulders with vagabonds, discharged soldiers, discharged jailbirds, swindlers, pickpockets, tricksters, gamblers, brothel-keepers, organ-grinders, ragpickers, knife-grinders, tinkers, beggars… and from this kindred element Boneparte formed the core of his [constituency], where all its members felt the need to benefit themselves at the expense of the labouring nation.’ In very different circumstances, we have something similar today – where the decadent commentariat’s siding with lumpen rioters represents a weird coming together of sections of the bourgeoisie with sections of the underworked and the over-flattered, as the rest of us, ‘the labouring nation’, look on with disdain.
You don’t have to buy some of the slightly misty-eyed stuff about working class “communities” to see that he has a strong point. As I often like to point out, an open liberal society requires a modicum of basic respect for the lives and property of others, a certain amount of fertile soil for particular virtues to take root in and flourish.
When you read this kind of thing in a newspaper, it’s bad. But when you read it at cricinfo …:
The riots and looting in Birmingham were copycat incidents following events in London over the previous days. The vandalism was concentrated around the city centre, with masked young men and women going on a rampage from early evening, looting shops and destroying property.
They started by snatching mobile phones and handbags from pedestrians, followed by kicking, punching, breaking windows of shopping centres, banks, pubs, restaurants, forcing people to shut down these establishments. Groups of two or three suddenly grew larger and created an atmosphere of panic and fear. Through the evening and night riot police were on the main streets, armoured police vehicles and other cars scanned the roads, and a helicoper hovered overhead.
The headline above this says: “Test likely to begin despite riots”.
One of the more depressing things about these riots is the way that the only thing that the Police can think of to say to us non-looters and non-arsonists is: “Don’t join in” and “Let us handle it”. If the bad guys start to torch your house, let them get on with it. If they attack your next door neighbour, don’t join in on his side. Run away. Let the barbarians occupy and trash whatever territory they pick on and steal or destroy whatever property they want to.
There was a fascinating impromptu TV interview with some young citizens of Clapham last night, not “experts”, just regular citizens, one of whom stated the opposite policy. Law abiding persons should get out of their houses, he said, en masse, and be ready to defend them.
The trouble with “letting the Police do their job” is that in the precise spot in which you happen to live, or used to live, their job probably won’t start, if it ever does start, for about a week. In the meantime, letting the Police do their job means letting the damn looters and arsonists do their job, without anyone laying a finger on them, laying a finger on them being illegal. This is a doomed policy. If most people are compelled by law to be only neutral bystanders in a war between themselves and barbarism, barbarism wins. The right to, at the very least, forceful self defence must now be insisted upon. The Police, as we advocates of the don’t-disarm-the-victims-of-crime policy have been pointing out for decades, can’t be everywhere. They cannot instantaneously attend every crime, and magically prevent it. Only the potential or actual victims of crime can sometimes immediately prevent or immediately punish crime, provided only that they are not forbidden to.
Unlike L.A., there are no Korean shopkeepers with AR-15s to help contain the looting.
Precisely.
The best thing about these riots is that they have distilled and aggregated the folly of the “let the Police see to it” policy into a large and combined event, and they have done it right next door to where our political class lives. These riots are not confined to Birmingham, or some such second-tier city. They are happening in the backyard of our rulers, even as they hurry back home from Tuscany.
For the last few decades the don’t-get-involved, let-Them-handle-it policy has applied only to more isolated crimes, or to riots only way beyond our capital city, which has meant that its doomed nature has impacted only upon those individuals or local populations attacked by criminals, not on the nation as a whole as perceived and lived in by those ruling it. Now our rulers can see this policy in vividly dramatic “action” (i.e. inaction), live on TV, and near enough to where they live for them to be scared, along with everyone else. And the rest of us will see them turning into the kind of vengeful right wing monsters they despise, as soon as their own houses are attacked. Which they well might be.
I recall reading about a yob who stole something from a street stall in Nigeria, many years ago. He was promptly set upon by a mob, of stallholders and their customers, and beaten up. Are you civilised? It depends which side your mobs are on. All our mobs, except the little mobs that are the Police, are anti-civilisation.
I own a cricket bat, inherited from my late Uncle Guy (whom I wrote about towards the end of this ancient blog posting), with “G Micklethwait” written on it. I hope I don’t find myself thinking about using it during the next few days, but I have already checked where it is.
Of course the predator political class are going to use the behaviour of the predator social class they created to justify their continued existence… no surprise there.
But all it takes is a look at the footage or a walk down the right street if you live in London, to see that the thugs in question, with a Blackberry in one hand and wearing expensive trainers, are not doing this because “Haringey Council has lost £41m from its budget”. Does anyone seriously think these rioters are doing what they are doing because their ‘Youth Services’ Danegeld was cut back?
Just look at this…
… these are the bastard children of Diane Abbott and David Cameron… and their lineage goes all the way back to Clement Attlee…and all the other members of the political class who created them as the Welfare State progressively hollowed out civil society. These are the product of the demon seed that was planted in 1945 and progressively watered ever more lavishly each year.
So yes, the largely fictitious ‘cuts’ are indeed to blame. Far far far too little and 20 years too late.
My area of central London – Pimlico – has not, yet, been hit by the mayhem engulfing many boroughs of this great city. My friends who live in or near these areas are safe, as far as I can check. (I heard from Michael Jennings, who lives in Southeast London, and he’s okay). I have been interested in the sort of reactions from Americans and others from abroad. Clearly, fewer than 12 months ahead of the Olympic Games, this violent disorder comes at a terrible time for the organisers of that pointless junket:
“As an American in London, I am seeing it first hand. Your statement about the welfare state’s death convulsions are true — there is a small business owner on BBC news talking now about a restaurant of his getting trashed in Ealing, a rather nice part of West London. He noted that despite all the talk of this being a response to poverty, the looters are wearing designed tracksuits and communicating by I-Phones. This family has had a furniture business in South London for 140 years. No longer — it is burning to the ground right now. There even was a street fire in my neighbourhood of Notting Hill. One difference from the US is that in London, there is much more mixing of socio-economic groups than in the US. So I think we may see a long night.”
(Via Instapundit). Another point is that UK homeowners and business owners are not allowed to use deadly force in self defence, a point that has been made regularly, of course, by this blog.
In the meantime, these books are worth reading, in my view, if you want to understand what has gone wrong in the UK:
I’d add that a common complaint – sometimes made by libertarians and conservatives – is that our police are more interested in political correctness than enforcing the law severely. There may be some truth in that, but I am not sure that this is the issue here. And I am struck by the BBC’s coverage. The Labour MP, Diane Abbott, was interviewed this morning on BBC Breakfast television and instead of making any sort of excuses, such as the usual crap about Tory “cuts”, was pretty blunt about the need to deal with these thugs. Interesting.
These riots could be Cameron’s Falklands War. That’s what just occurred to me, as I was watching my television, as the arson and rioting spreads throughout London and beyond.
Some man on the telly – I don’t know who or what he was – has just said, very uneloquently, that we are about to learn what David Cameron is made of. His decision concerning when to come home from his holiday (arguably he left it far too late), in Tuscany, will pale into insignificance beside the decisions that he will have to make in the course of the next few days.
Enoch Powell said something very similar of a previous Prime Minister, a great deal more memorably, at the time of that earlier war. You can read here what Powell then said, if you scroll down to the bottom of the page:
“The Prime Minister, shortly after she came into office, received a soubriquet as the ‘Iron Lady’. It arose in the context of remarks which she made about defence against the Soviet Union and its allies; but there was no reason to suppose that the Right Hon. Lady did not welcome and, indeed, take pride in that description. In the next week or two this House, the nation and the Right Hon. Lady herself will learn of what metal she is made.”
Nobody has ever made any such observation about David Cameron, or not in my hearing, but a similar examination of him is now about to occur.
It could actually be the making of the man. But then again, …
Alas, this kind of thing is the Health of the State.
LATER:
Labour politicians and spokespersons are out in force, if only to make it clear that they too are against it all. Smart move. The trick in these situations is to blame your political opponents, but without seeming to blame your political opponents.
Kevin McGuire, a journalist close to the previous political regime, has just said something rather more memorable:
“If he comes back from holiday, and it makes no difference, what’s the point of having a Prime Minister?”
In other words, if he makes no difference, we should have a different Prime Minister. As indeed we should. Nicely put.
Writing in today’s Times behind a paywall, Natascha Engel, Labour MP for North East Derbyshire, relates how she stood in the rain outside a miner’s welfare hall smoking with a angry but partially mollified constituent.
…he told me about his father in law who used to come to the welfare every night and spent all evening drinking one pint of Guinness. He was a chain smoker. Since the smoking ban he’s never been back.
“He’s can’t stand outside in the rain like this. He’s an old man.” He told me about how his father-in-law never goes out any more. “He’s lonely and miserable. And he still chain smokes.”
Natascha Engel now says that, given the chance again, she would not vote for the ban. It is good that she has the empathy to see and the courage to state that the reason the smoking ban is wrong is that it makes people more miserable than they would otherwise have been. Just that. That is reason enough. Arguments about health are very interesting, and I have no doubt that the dangers of passive smoking have been exaggerated, but the fact that an old man has had the solace of smoking in company with his friends denied him trumps all that. I do wish Ms Engel had been able to perceive this at the time when her vote might have done some good, but better late than never.
The riots in London over the last couple nights can be condemned as assaults on private property by predatory opportunists. That much is easy.
What is rather harder is commenting on what sparked them off and I have felt no urge at all to swiftly form any opinions.
The police say the dead man was shot after shooting at a policeman and that said policeman’s live was saved by the incoming round lodging in his radio.
Well… is that true or is it a self serving fantasy to exonerate the use of deadly force by the police? I have no idea. But in the aftermath of the Jean Charles de Menezes killing, where just about every single ‘fact’ provided by the authorities turned out to be either mistaken or a total fabrication, quite simply how can anything said by the Met be taken at face value until it is corroborated by multiple sources?
Was this a ‘righteous shoot’ of a gangster who fired first or another cack-handed murder by the state justified by a flood of lies?
Only time will tell and my unwillingness to give the police the benefit of the doubt is entirely the fault of the police’s handling of the appalling Menezes affair.
This paragraph from a good posting by Victor Davis Hanson, at the National Review’s Corner blog, applies not just to the US, but also to the UK:
“The strangest thing about the current paradox of cash-flush companies and little or no economic growth is the administration’s puzzlement over the lethargy — as if no one outside Washington ever listened to what the administration has said or noticed what they have done the last three years.”
Exactly. I’d also add to VDH’s list of things that have stymied recovery: the still-lingering and damaging impact of the Sarbanes-Oxley law on things such as initial public offerings and the foolish FASB tampering with share option payments that have crimped venture capital startup businesses. (I can, by the way, recommend this book by Dale Halling about why US entrepreneurship is stalling – it controversially argues that a key problem has been the erosion of patent law in the US, an argument that is bound to get some libertarian opponents of IP excited).
VDH’s points apply in Britain, too, such as what he says about demonisation of some businesses, as well as things like bailouts, Green regulations and so on. Of course, a key problem here is the European Union and all the red tape that comes from that.
Regime uncertainty, if I can use that term, is a big problem. We have a tax authority (HMRC), given the power to decide, as it goes along, what constitutes tax “avoidance”, so that avoidance is now seen as wrong, as is tax evasion. This relates to a wider problem of uncertainty. Even the daftest tax laws are more tolerable if they are predictable. The problems get even worse, though, if officials have the ability to retrospectively decide that this or that business practice is wrong and should be shut down. Our tax code remains one of the longest and most complex in the world.
We need far fewer laws, and those that remain should be simple, easy to understand and enforce. Sometimes though, doing things the simple way seems to be so hard.
The Samizdata people are a bunch of sinister and heavily armed globalist illuminati who seek to infect the entire world with the values of personal liberty and several property. Amongst our many crimes is a sense of humour and the intermittent use of British spelling.
We are also a varied group made up of social individualists, classical liberals, whigs, libertarians, extropians, futurists, ‘Porcupines’, Karl Popper fetishists, recovering neo-conservatives, crazed Ayn Rand worshipers, over-caffeinated Virginia Postrel devotees, witty Frédéric Bastiat wannabes, cypherpunks, minarchists, kritarchists and wild-eyed anarcho-capitalists from Britain, North America, Australia and Europe.
All content on this website (including text, photographs, audio files, and any other original works), unless otherwise noted, is licensed under a Creative Commons License. Powered by WordPress & Atahualpa
