the UK is burning!

sorry that them vs. us thing lost me and so did IJUHP. mind clarifying?

 

+1 Thanks to Roachboy. A similar bee was buzzing in my head, and I was nowhere near being able to write about it coherently.

 

well, I live in a country like the UK where private citizens aren't allowed to own guns, so I can't really comment on this, as I don't know anyone who owns one.

Anyway, I don't want to turn this thread into a gun control debate (if we haven't already).

 

IJUHP stands for "It's just us here, people." That's not a very popular sentiment, I know, but I stand beside it. I realize our leaderships have other things to worry about, but I submit they'd have less to if they realized THAT. No, that doesn't stand for anything. Maybe Too High-hat's Aggravating Them?

 

Maybe they think they are unlikely to get arrested, but quite a few have been...

 

Not a bad read, spindles, though it handily minimizes people's reasons for rebelling.

 

I can understand why people are protesting in Greece, Syria, Egypt, Libya, and Tunisia. Even Iran a few years ago... I don't understand why they aren't doing anything in Somalia (but fixing that country by eliminating evil people is a different topic)...

But England?

Now there are reasons they should be rioting (right-wing gov, taking away benefits, taxing the poor, trickle-down taxes, corporate welfare, corporate control, police state, evil business processes (meatpacking/food/phone tapping/media propaganda), labor laws, etc...). But just because a cop shot someone, I don't see it.

 

Is it the straw that broke the camel's back. I dunno, I live in the USNA.

 

i wish i had more information about the people who are out in the streets that wasn't framed through some nitwit official source. i'll have time tomorrow to poke around, but the past week or so has been ridiculous....does anyone have sources on the opposite side of the mirror?

neo-liberalism is fundamentally indifferent to questions of social solidarity. this has been obvious since the thatcher period. what you're seeing now is, in significant measure, the chickens coming home to roost. and it's about fucking time. people have rolled over before this nonsense for a long time. and you're seeing the consequences of the dissolving of the notion of the social, and of social solidarity, in the reactions to the past few days. there's been an ideological war going on for a long time. people have in the main been blind to it. this has been less true in the uk, judging from the left press (which still exists though it's hard to know much about readership or influence from where i am), but it's nonetheless been the case. and neo-liberalism was able to sell itself so long as no significant crisis happened. but those days are over now. and neo-liberalism has fuck all to say about the crisis it engendered. but it's generated a terrible political environment. and the crisis of neo-liberalism has engendered dangerous cognitive paralysis amongst the conventional political classes. the left is now set up as a bogeyman. the door is open for a drift into fascist space.

i was reading more of the official reactions to these actions this afternoon. it really is repellent at the level of language. so much disease imagery. some ludicrous bit regarding tottenham that linked the past few days to lax parenting. it looks like the dominant order is panicking.

 

i wonder how many of those dumb fucks are running around in guy fawks masks because they saw V for Vendetta too many times and do nothing but lurk in the internet's unwashed festering pit of social fecal decay and ethical fermentation (4chan)

 

In Birmingham there has always been a lot of tension between the black and muslim community, and the killing of the 3 guys yesterday there is a big risk of kicking off race riots to go along with the simple looting and burning. Last night there was a massive police presence, but it only takes single spark to set things off when its like this.

There was a guy on Newsnight last night who I thought made the most sensible comments I saw on this whole thing. He said people dont riot BECAUSE of cuts, or job losses... but it creates a recklessness and a misery that feeds into mass hysteria very easily... a few trouble makers started it and every jumps on the bandwagon as a way to vent their general anger and frustration. I'll say more but have to leave for work now!

 

Be safe, OK?

 

Firstly, Zen and Strangely Famous - stay safe. Asu - I dont think you should use the term 'just because' when a person has been killed, one persons death causes many to grieve. As to the riots, I think it quickly became inflamed with youngsters wanting to participate in a mad form of 'Supermarket Sweep', just there for the looting. These assorted little tick turds ought to be taken home to their parents, and then the doors and windows need to be bricked up or something so their parents can have the joy of living with what they have produced. I like the way Cameroon blames lack of discipline at schools - like teachers can do anything - their hands are tied and the little bastards know it. You know kids turn up to start school, and some cant eat with knives and forks - the teachers said 'we start them off with spoons'.
Yes young people can look around and think what can I do for employment or education - what can my future be. The minister for education - David 'Wanker' Willetts has said that British children (sorry - English) should go overseas to college. Go David! Brilliant idea! When you are running short of money, dont tend your own child, pay the neighbour to mind them. Used to be our education system was seen as good enough for overseas students to want to come here.
Of course those involved in the riots know they will get merely a few hours of community service, maybe a couple of months of tagging. Arson does carry a life sentence - but I bet none will be given out.
Interesting that they blame gang culture etc - no mention of those trying to prevent these children going into gangs in the first place. In one of the areas mentioned, Staffy rescue people go in to schools to teach responsible dog ownership, they use a volunteer from their own background, as that works better, and the kids will see a strong young adult with his happy loved dog, and he is the alternative, he is what they can be instead of a thug with a beaten dog on a length of chain and a rep as a 'hard man'. Of course they are aware also, that dogs such as his status symbol almost certainly face death when the owner goes to prison. I am told they have very good results - the dog people do it primarily to help the breed - deed not breed - but they know to help the dogs they must educate the future owners, encourage them to be responsible, teach them to be kind. Nothing to do with Cameroons 'big society' - they have been working at this sort of thing for years. Need more of this, the community educating kids/young adults, doesnt have to be big things, just little things. I remember being taught politics at about the age of four - how much do these young people know or understand about politics - other than you can lie rob and mass murder with immunity if you are a politician.
There seems to be much more cruelty in the world, and much less respect for the value of life. How do we turn that around?

 

this from al jazeera:

http://english.aljazeera.net/indepth/opinion/2011/08/201189165143946889.html

there's no either/or here it seems to me. multiple tensions/factors seem to play into this. it is a problem--a political and politically motivated problem---to do things like point to parenting. that evacuates social and political factors. it's also likely a problem to simply do the reverse--though frankly i find the connection to parenting to be little more than recoded class prejudice, really. i can't take it seriously. but that's not to say that say, economic pressures on poorer families are not considerable and that it may be that couples have two or more jobs if couples they are and so on. not so straight forward.

sometimes it seems that because one's social situation works most powerfully and consistently as constraints that it is easy for bourgeois "common sense" to erase it. vanity combined with the fact that when one looks around and doesn't think sociologically (or conceptually) the social seems invisible in that way...at the level of constraining actions, conditioning choices, operating as factors that shape parameters. we are systems that unfold in time and the parameters that constrain that systems are identity. christianity talks about soul, and from there it's easy enough to think of human beings as meat objects and the soul as some vaporous essence. that plays into it as well. so does thatcherite style neo-liberal ideology. there are circles that link almost any individual action back to social frameworks without necessarily being determinate---in the sense that there's no 1:1 relation frame/action. but there's more often than not relations between them. this includes the actions of the wealthy whose wealth is often used to distance from necessity, like pierre bourdieu said a bunch of times. but i digress.

but effect discursively in creating another level of us/them divisions.

 

and then there's this:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6-oqGZ5CBZs&feature=player_embedded

maybe police racism as a proximate cause and brutality a flash point.
this is far more likely an explanation than any bromides about parenting style.

neo-liberalism has caused a shredding of the old social contract.
it has intensified class polarization.
it has substituted medicalized discourse for a coherent view of social class.
this has been an aspect of the systematic avoidance of links---which are self-evident---between massive transfers of wealth into the hands of the upper reaches of the holders of capital and an intensification of class conflict.
so it has been easy peasy to expand the police and intensify its activities.
because police are not typically recruited from the same social group that produces brain surgeons, this expansion of function comes with problems.

but hey, it's all good: containment of the effects of neo-liberal class warfare, keeping it invisible, fragmented and streamed toward crime rather political organization, all that feeds the privatized prison-industrial complex, source of cheap labor for all kinds of corporate interests because, god knows, the edifying effects of direct capitalist exploitation can never be overstated why look at the brilliant success these prison sweatshops have had in changing recidivism rates.
o wait.
they haven't.

this is pretty clearly a consequence of neo-liberal "management" of the social consequences of their policies in another way as well---check out the comments on the youtube clip for yet another explosion of vile, paranoid language.

it's hard to quantify this, but it is intuitively pretty clear that lots of people are feeling lots of pressure and that the ways the react, the ways they frame the effects of that pressure, kind of runs up the fault lines made available by the political discourse they latch onto. it's remarkably polarized--inside/outside, us/them. like the u.s. but subject to a flash point.

it may not be too far from this:

http://www.themodernword.com/pynchon/pynchon_essays_watts.html

which is thomas pynchon's 1966 account of the watts riots.

it seems important for people to learn absolutely fucking nothing from social conflict.

 

good point BG - I wonder why we don't see this type of reaction in other countries like Japan or Singapore?

 

this is another interesting piece on the events of the last few nights from al jazeera:

http://english.aljazeera.net/indepth/opinion/2011/08/201189161741876869.html

digression: why exactly is it that al jaz is not available in the united states again?

a bit later: thought you might enjoy this little piece about the fine gentleman who's behind the "support the police" group on facebook:

http://wosblog.podgamer.com/2011/08/10/david-camerons-new-best-friend/

um....yeah.

 

Just got back from Planet of the Apes - whilsy buying my muchcheaper sweets in the newsagents I saw the front page of the Express - a picture of one little oik with his mums hand on his collar as she escorts him into court. When she knew what he was doing, she marched him down the police station it seems. Makes you smile, the thought that for the rest of his life thats what he will be known as - the boy whos mum marched him into court. Good for her. Doubt he will be doing it again.