the UK is burning!

let's think about this language of some imaginary breakdown in parental authority.
and here i'm only indirectly addressing you, cc...just as much stuff discussed here:

http://nplusonemag.com/the-day-after

first off, it's become increasingly clear that the whole "leftist elements" thing was a canard.
secondly, as the author of the article linked above points out---but from a perspective situated in tottenham and not, as mine is, in an eastern massachusetts shipbuilding village---everyone loses.

but. this language of parental authority: what's it actually saying? is there an equation between the legitimacy of the state and some dad figure? does it imply that people who protest or who act in a more spontaneous (and problematic) manner are to be understood as errant schoolchildren?

that entirely evacuates the political. it's the functional equivalent of the language of "terrorism". point for point: in both political motivations are replaced with some nitwit idea of "bad" or "errant" or spitefulness or resentment--all subjective attributes. attributing these attributes to children and then calling for more "discipline" implies a justification for violence---unlimited violence if you couple that language with the stuff that i've also seen circulating, which is far more vile, of some assault from "outside" against the "fabric of english society".....and if you couple that with the accusations of systematic police racism and the overlapping of povery and ethnicity thats WAY too common in anglo-american societies, things get even more foul. now the dad figure becomes whitey and the errant school children those dusky folk who are too child-like to get with the authority program and who have to be taken into hand by the stern arm of Parental Authority and given a good hiding.

political motivations, economic motivations, questions of the relation between these actions and the wider effects of cameron's neo-liberal hatchet job on the future prospects of an entire generation---all connection between police racism and the ambient conditions that enabled these actions, the problems of police brutality--->erased.

it's not a great idea to buy into this way of speaking.
it leaks into your thinking, especially under pressure.

but it does provide a window into the surreal world of neo-liberal "management" of the consequences of their policies---pretend they aren't there until the shit hits the fan and then justify an unlimited assault on a new Enemy on the one hand while denying there could possibly be any political basis for opposing neo-liberal policies and the signifiers (like the police, as arms of the state) who stand (in) for them.

 

In terms of the risk of arrest... what are you going to get for criminal damage? community service. Aggrivated burgulary might get you 6 months if youre pretty unlucky... but the point is that these kids dont seem to really care.

This whole this is to me a cry of despair. There is a big element of self destructiveness in it, they are burning down and smashing up their own city after all.

The riots seem to have calmed down for now, but it wouldnt surprise me if something minor set them off again. And the 24 Hours News and social media culture is always an accelerant to trouble.

 

here's a map from the guardian of the incidents:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/news/datablog/interactive/2011/aug/09/uk-riots-incident-map

 

and this from the london review of books:

http://www.lrb.co.uk/blog/2011/08/10/thomas-jones/austerity-and-anarchy/

you can go to the centre for economic policy research site where you can gaze upon an abstract of this paper. if you have access to a university with a subscription for the cepr, you can download it. if you don't and are interested in the paper, bounce me a message.

 

They did have race riots in Singapore back in 1964, when it was still part of Malaysia. They haven't had any since for a number of reasons.

General economic prosperity
Encouraged home ownership (vast majority of Citizens own rather than rent)
Government controlled media (soft censorship)
Government campaigns to promote racial harmony (policies that mandate a mix of races in all neighbourhoods)
Solid government services (public transit, healthcare, etc)
Laws that prevent public assembly (no more than five people may assemble)

It goes on...

 

the paper linked above demonstrates in a clear and obvious manner that moves toward austerity and social unrest are closely linked.

the problem here is that there's been 30 years of ideological domination by people who have tried to make class invisible, whose policies have exacerbated class conflict and who have attempted to deal with it through increases in police actions and by clamping tight controls over attempts to make that police action public.
they've played old-school nationalism as a central element in the selling of their ideology.
now you're seeing what that leads to.
it's an ugly reality that neo-liberalism has made.

 

From the perspective of the eleven year old in court yesterday, I think it was a case of 'free stuff at Dixons electrical shop, rather than politics or frustration I think the motive in many cases was greed. Most wont go to prisons, because we have such overcrowding and magistrates hands will be tied.
Watching the little sods firbombing police in Northern Ireland again, a new generation, that was sad - when neighbours find a way to live in peace, they dont need the kids screwing it up with old bad behaviour.
Feral pack behaviour.

 

I think that Point #4 goes a long way to promoting peaceful co-existence. Similar to Yugoslavia before it disintigrated.

 

david harvey on the actions of the past days:

http://www.socialistproject.ca/bullet/535.php

a glimpse of the circulation of more of this nasty rhetoric.

 

yeah. so maybe that particular point is not sustainable. But I live in a community in Toronto that is very much like that (i.e. cosmopolitan & integrated) and is the reason why we moved our youngest (still in the public school system) kid out of a downtown school that was becoming too much weighted in one particular direction and into our integrated neighbourhood school.

 

Interestingly there was a news article this week about a Chinese family complaining about the smell of an Indian neighbour's curry. The Chinese family had taken the complain to the community board to help with the dispute. There was a compromise reached.

The twist in this story is that the Chinese family were Chinese immigrants rather than Singaporean Chinese. There was an outcry, via the Internet and newspaper comment sections, that the immigrants were in the wrong. There is, like you would expect from the US or UK, a certain anti-immigrant movement in Singapore.

One of the better protests was a Facebook page: Cook a Pot of Curry

 

Interestingly? Charlatan! Why was London burning? We silly fucks have no ideas beyond our own. Maybe London only vaguely realizes that the sun does set. Or that "Winter is coming." Maybe the international/cultural rapists never had a moral leg to stand on. Maybe legitimate viewing of one's superiority comes not so much out of history as doesn't fantasy. This partial thought will remain incomplete. People want to know each other until they feel abused.

 

I've been a member for maybe eight years but I am not allowed to post a link, so...
w w w . counterpunch . org

 

i don't buy this total kantian we-can-only-see-our-own categories thing. it's way too easy. and it's both intuitively and demonstrably false. the party i attended yesterday afternoon was plowed into by a van. this was entirely outside my expectations and correlated to nothing in my previous experience. if you were correct, ocm, i would not have perceived it. it would not have happened. sadly there are some people who are quite dead independently of my beliefs.

fact is that there are many possible interpretations of what's been happening in england over the past week.
there's also a symbolic conflict that's still playing out over the interpretations of these events.

there's no definitive take.

and while i think the rhetorics i've been pointing to above as being problematic-to-fascist in the lineage and effects are as i have described, there's little doubt that the point to some aspect of the conditions of possibility for these events--however small that might be---and even less that the resonate with how segments of the population in england are inclined to interpret those events and the ways they impute causation because of that.