Re: London / UK Riots
Day too late GIDSA, and I get the feeling we were taking up too much of the oxygen in the room. Since you’ve gone through the trouble of responding, I’ll bulletpoint my final replies and let you have the last word, Bill O Reilly style. The numbers are in order of the quoted text.
Its all very well to say individuals should rise up, but statistically thats not an answer thats relevant to most of the people at the margins, who like the rest of the country are not likely to change their birth class. What can the government do? Learn from governments with higher social mobility [about 4 times higher social mobility in Denmark and Finland]. What would I do? Accept that the problem is more complex and requires better answers than lets kick those yobs around.
The mainstream is relevant because this selective condemnation of ghetto materialism is hypocritical from a culture where the mainstream IS materialism and consumerism. Not to mention the fact that the first person to talk about culture in this case would be the BNP.
Thats a model of life that does not work in unequal contexts. Lets remember that we all now feel that caste systems where people were born into their vocation and social status are unjust and arbitrary. Scratch the surface of modern democracy and capitalism and you have a world where for most people of these areas the life of the privileged that they can see and enable, and the vocations available to them, is denied to them by virtue of attributes they did not choose, beginning from birth and race but also including things like intelligence and aptitude and parenting and birth order and all the things that go into determining whether or not you are the type of person that overcomes social impediments and succeeds in the modern world.
Let me also say that in this thread I have been presenting one aspect of a complex set of motivations at play here. From opportunism to genuine communal rage to nihilism. This article presents a much wide ranging, more complete, more expert opinion on the psychology of it all than anything said on this thread here:
The UK riots: the psychology of looting | Zoe Williams | The Guardian
I can’t always be logged onto GS dude!
Yay, I have the last word! Let me try this number thing…
Learn from places like Denmark and Finland? Look at the immigrant situations in those countries. SS.
You can be as mainstream as you want. Too bad you can’t help step on other people’s toes.
Life isn’t fair. You make what you can of it. And if all you can make is trouble they God/Whatever you believe in help you!
You can use as many words as you like. Unless you’re part of such community and culture and if you are naive enough to think a soft hand isn’t responsible then we’ll just have to agree to disagree.
YES I got the last word!