London Rioting

life is cheaper then... anything you can steal

 

Class warfare has been a large topic in English literature since the Middle Ages. Bronte, Dickins, Forster, wrote long after the English renaissance.

 

Something to remember about literature though... its fiction... and alot of it.. is rubbish.

This riot isnt about class, you see these people, in the reebok/ellesse/lacoste track suits? and hoodies? and trainers? yeah, that stuff isnt cheap ive seen one image of a hoodie giving his finger to the camera.... he had 3 gold rings on his fingers, chav's dont often live in poverty, alot of these youths are quite well off.

 

They have to spend all the drug money, the stolen loot and the riches they get from the government on something.

 

Really? Are you for real?

 

I guess I'm busting by butt to get into university to study rubbish!

Decent law abiding citizens don't need to "open their minds and try to understand" a damn thing. These people who are looting businesses and violently rioting need to understand that there is no, zero, zilch reason fir them to act this way in a decent, civilized, democratic, pluralistic society like England. Those of us who do have respect for the law and the rights if others to go about their lives peaceably have no respect for such behavior. There is just no excuse for this sort of thuggery.

Lots of people go through rough times. Thriving use that as a "reason" or excuse to break windows and steal TVs.

 

Of course, we should just all just hug the simplest and most comforting explanation at all times. Makes everything so much easier for us. Everything becomes oh so very easy if you can blame everything on individuals and their personal evil.

 

"The 9,350,000 inhabitants of Sweden reported 1,410,000[1] offences to the authorities in 2009 (approximately 151 offences/1000 inhabitants)."

What a wonderful example of a correct society Sweden is. We all must make efforts to copy this utopia!

Look, crime happens everywhere. Your talk of trying to reform every single person is commendable, but never, ever going to happen. Not every person turns out a productive member of our society. Some people are just bad eggs.

 

I've been out of the loop. Are the riots still ongoing or have the police finally put an end to them?

 

The rioting itself has curbed but arrests are still ongoing, including people who have been trying to stir the riots up again.

Increased police presence in city areas and lack of community support towards the rioters seems to have bitten it back the most.

London police are still accepting volunteers for if the riots kick off again. Got a few friends who have signed on for that, including a few who are already on the force who have had strangers walking up to them on duty and just shaking their hands.

The courts still haven't closed in several areas.

 

joaqin, why are you so averse to the idea of holding people accountable for their own actions? Why is it that you are so eager to blame society for actions of individuals? You say that you are looking not for excuses but for reasons, but the way you approach the two, it is difficult for me to see the difference.

Being poor does not excuse their behaviour. Nor is it a valid reason. Many people are poor and do not commit such crimes.

Being unemployed is not an excuse. Nor is it a valid reason to go steal televisions, electronics, and other luxury items, all the while destroying property. Many unemployed people deal with the situation in far more socially acceptable manners. Rioting is over the line.

Being marginalized is not an excuse. Nor is it a valid reason. EVERYONE feels marginalized from time to time in life. That's tough, but when people react to it by violence and theft, I simply cannot get behind that. No matter how pissed on you feel, rioting is not the way to make your voice known. If they are too stupid to know that, then they have no business walking around free.

Don't you care at all about the law abiding people who are having their livelihoods destroyed by these thugs?

It's not about being some sort of short sighted moron who cannot "look beyond the simple" -- I can see a variety of factors at play the same as you. Despuite your insinuations to the contrary, I and others like me are not simple minded fools. I would go so far as to say that you are looking beyond the obvious in search of something "deeper" that in this case simply isn't there.

 

Because it is idiotic to fixate on the individual. Did every single individual German turn evil 1939? Good people do bad things. Why? By fixating on the individual you address the symptoms instead of trying to cure the disease. Packing people into prisons and labelling them as worthless scum may help to satisfy your need for vengeance and to drain our tax money but it doesn't stop the children of the "worthless scum" to repeat it all again in 15 years. You always ramble on about who thinks about the victims and "scum" have all the rights and bs like that, well I think about the victims. I want to find ways to lessen the amount of victims instead of just giving them the hollow satisfaction of revenge. I want to understand why "worthless scum" are what they are to maybe stop others from joining them.

If your baby is screaming all through the night keeping you awake until you think you are going insane what would you prefer to do? Put the baby in a room further away so you can't hear it or maybe find out what is wrong with it to stop it from screaming so it can sleep and you can sleep. This is the "soft hearted liberal" stance on crime and it has nothing to do with being soft even if I am very soft and very proud. By helping "worthless scum" and trying to understand them we can try to stop them from "screaming" and if not them others like them. Harsh penalties and a fixation on individual evil only perpetuates the cycle and create even more "worthless scum" that needs to be pushed down even harder which in turns creates even more and so forth and so on only serving to satisfy the self-righteous mob's thirst for vengeance and scapegoats.

 

The ones who turn to crime chhose that path. It's that simple. Stephen Covey has used this quote, though in my research I've seen it attributed to Viktor Frankl. It goes like this:

Lots of people have the same stimulii that I mentioned in my earlier post. But they make different choices. Some choose to be good, decent people regardless, and others choose to go out and commit crimes. The difference lies in their choices. A society is perfectly within its rights to seek to punish and curb such behaviour*.

I'm not adverse to looking at some stimulii that tends to have people react to it via violence. Poverty, societal rejection, unemployment, lack of education -- all of these are factors that a society should seek to alleviate**. But in my final analysis, people should never use these factors as crutches to claim that a choice was beyond their power, or that they were "forced" to steal that TV. That to me is nonsense. Individuals must be held accountable for their actions or society really is in trouble.

* And we're not talking about babies here who are helpless and don't know any better. We're talking about grown humans with the ability and means to choose.

**Yet no matter what a society does, there's still going to be those who choose to commit crimes. How much are we really willing to lay off onto society? At what point do we draw a line and say "enough!"?

 

Well, as far as I know we have punishments everywhere. It is not a choice between one or the other. If someone do something bad and gets caught they will suffer consequences pretty much everywhere. That is the easy part but the difference is that for you that seems to be enough, for me it is the start. Seeing as this is the internet and every discussion sooner or later comes back to the nazis I will elaborate on my first post. According to your reasoning LKD every single German soldier, camp guard, factory worker pretty much anyone who didn't speak out or run away made a conscious choice to be part of the group of people who threw the world into a war that killed countless millions and who killed people on an industrial scale in factories designed for death.

Is this what you believe? Or were people caught up in a string of circumstances which turned normal decent persons into mass murderers? The individual responsibility is of course there but by your reasoning and if personal choice is so much stronger than circumstances and outside stimuli shouldn't we have thousands of people setting up extermination camps in their back yards and invading France on the weekends? Apparently 60 million people made that choice back in the 30s and I really do not think the human psyche has changed that much since then.

 

While that's not an excuse, I'm sure that plays a big role. In fact, it's not always an issue of education. Look at the US. The unemployment rate as a whole is about 9%, but it's over 20% for people under 25, and it's over 15% for people under 25 with a college education. Like I said, it's not an excuse to riot, but I would hazard a guess that a large portion of the rioters are young people.

 

Yeah look I'm not trying to excuse individual behavior. Individuals should and will probably be tried and punished to the full extent of the law. Still I'd rather see the government tackle the youth unemployment as a real problem instead of moaning about the "lack of morality". That benefits no-one and is a dubious claim at best anyhow. And yes, youth unemployment is even a problem here, as it seemingly tends to be pretty much everywhere these days.

 

I saw a news report that a guy was stupid enough to post on his Facebook page a picture of himself with all of the stuff he had stolen during the riots. He even gave an itemized list, and where he stole what from. The police showed up at his house yesterday and arrested him.

 

@ Aldeth - wow, that guy sure sounds like a complete idiot. I guess his case may provide some much-needed levity in the courts.

@ Morgoroth: I agree. Order has to be restored, and at least some of the perpetrators - and those of the most excessive cases - brought to justice. However, the reasons all this happened should not be restricted to "they are a bunch of dumb, self-entitled drug-addicted punks."

 

There are major differences between what's going on in England and Nazi Germany. No one is forcing, threatening or coercing these rioters to do what they are doing. In addition, I believe that the people who physically committed the most heinous atrocities in WW2 (target practice with babies, rapes, etc) should be subject to punishment. The idea that "dude, it wasn't me, it was the peer pressure that made me steal this TV and burn that cop car" is enough to get someone off the hook for their criminal choices is laughable.

But let me re-iterate -- this isn't Nazi Germany. Not even close.