London

When bankers do it, it’s called a bailout.

The law doth punish man or woman
That steals the goose from off the common,
But lets the greater felon loose
That steals the common from the goose.

Keynes must be spinning in his grave at the economic quackery of prosperity through austerity ravages his homeland.

I really hate the phrase “kicking off.” It says everything you need to know about the pointless machismo of soccer.

“the deputy prime minister said recent events also demonstrated the necessity of the coalition government’s GBP111 billion austerity drive.

Clegg also said rioting and looting in London over the weekend was needless opportunistic theft and violence and completely unacceptable. ”

So there you go…

If I can go out on a limb. I’d say 90 percent of the looters are there out of simple opportunism. Its the other ten percent whose motivations I’d like to hear discussed. I think these sorts of events are greatly amplified by opportunism. Maybe they can even be sustained by simple opportunist hooliganism. But real frustrations are required to get this sort of thing started.

So I have questions about underlying motivations. And I’d love to hear from our UK colleagues, about whether this is just a simple blowing off steam tantrum, or maybe the start of something more fundamental.

Maybe I should rephrase it a bit. Is this simple frustration plus opportunism, plus disregard for social norms? Or is this what happens if you try to do Tahrir square without having Eqyptian levels of discipline to keep the worst sorts from ruining the whole thing.

The Guardian suggests that part of the problem is that police crowd control tactics have evolved to intimidate political protestors through methods like kettling, which turn out to be useless against rioters whose objectives including looting, vandalism and random mayhem. Military dictatorships display the same problem on a larger scale – the military is good at dealing with domestic opponents, not so good against foreign armies.

Humble Suggestion for post title: “London Burning: the sequel.”
History repeating itself, first time as tragedy…

Seems to have provoked some uncommonly self-aware commentary in the Telegraph.

As an American I can only imagine this is analogous to those moments over here when things are getting so bleak someone like David Brooks suddenly starts making sense, in spite of himself and everything he stands for.

… So yeah, Ken Livingstone for Mayor?

Despair not for British society!

Rioters in Tottenham had the deceny to form an orderly queue taking turns to loot a sports store.

I think it’s worth paying at least a little attention to people who specifically predicted riots – see e.g. http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2010/sep/15/theresa-may-cut-police-budget-without-violent-unrest?cat=uk&type=article – and I’m not talking about the Home Secretary, Theresa May, whose “Don’t worry, there won’t be riots” line deserves to reach Michael “No hurricane” Fish levels of notoriety.

Pretty clearly this “protest” signals the death knell of organized Left-wing resistance to the City’s depredations.

Arguably, this is what the organized left-wing resistance has been trying to prevent. Not sure it’s the death-knell for organized protest though – if anything, it makes it easier to distinguish protest from rioting.

Good to see so much instant wisdom on display from our friends in Australia, Japan and North America!

I think it is probably reasonably simple, actually. Lots of poor undereducated kids with zero prospects (and hence no fear of harming them) who hate the police (often for very good personal reason) and fancy a ruck with them. And once one group shows that this is easy to get away with, then others get the same idea – and there’s lots of safety in numbers enabling mass theft and robbery.

Theresa May, the Home Secretary, blames it all on “mindless criminality”, which rather raises the question of why there’s a sudden eruption of “mindless criminality” under her government.

Punditry prize of the week goes to ever-hapless Nick Cohen, with his “No riots here” column appearing just as Tottenham went up in flames:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/aug/07/nick-cohen-recession-misery

I’d agree with Chris Bertram at 27, basically. Yes, there’s a lot of opportunism involved, but for most people it remains true that you don’t, fundamentally, go out and steal yourself a tv when the opportunity presents itself if you actually feel a good deal of allegiance to a society and its rules. So there are deeper issues at stake.

The interesting question is why these people don’t feel such allegiance. When that question gets asked by the commentariat on tv and radio, the question always seems to mean: ‘what is wrong with these people?’ But it could also mean: ‘what is wrong with the system, such that it generates no loyalty to itself, such that the police are widely hated, and people take such joy in spontaneous acts of rebellion?’ The answer is: a lot.

In the U.S.A. this might be the result of a disaffected underclass with no midnight basket programs. (or to translate – no real budget for social welfare projects, because we would be depending solely on family values which doesn’t “just happen because you wish it to” because the right would be running the country and they don’t believe in forcing taxpayers to invest in such things.)

But what’s going on there?

To judge by the comments from the police, they are hated because they prevent what is often called the underclass from having their own way. And in the case of the looters, I think it obvious that is the case.
Other people will hate the police because they’ve been subject to stop and search too many times and experienced casual racism from them. But I don’t think that the groups necessarily overlap so much. The common complaint is that people in the nice middle class suburbs don’t appreciate what goes on in the schemes and suchlike, and don’t realise how much feral youth there is out there, carrying on with drink drugs and stolen cars.

And guthrie@33 provides as crystalline an example as possible of missing the point entirely.

#12
There’s certainly an argument that during the LA riots, Korean storeowners were able to protect their property by shooting at people. The alternative would have been to rely on the LAPD. But arguing that this is how it should be – that under American gun laws all is for the best in the best of all possible worlds – demonstrates the closed mind of a reflexive nationalist, nothing more. There are plenty of American commenters here at CT. I wonder how many will look at what happened in the UK last night and decide that the situation would have been improved by more guns.

Today there’s #riotcleanup. We’ll see what happens tonight, and a rosetinted view would be deluded, but there is some sense (in Hackney at least) of the community pulling together. In LA by contrast, my sense as an outside observer is that the riots reinforced social divisions and exacerbated tensions. “One year after the riots fewer than one in four damaged or destroyed businesses reopened, according to the survey conducted by the Korean American Inter-Agency Council.” That’s from a wikipedia article that ends with a Texan politician using the LA riots to justify the sale of assault rifles.

My theory is that these folk never consented to being policed in the first place. They only didn’t used to loot because they feared getting caught. Now they think it unlikely they’ll be caught they’ve let loose. More analysis here, which is heavily caveated and uses the word equilibria, so you know its good.

Conservatives (and the plutocrats whom conservative politicians serve) pride themselves on their hard-headedness, so I’m constantly amazed at their inability to understand that social peace and the security of property are goods, which like any other goods must be paid for. You can pay for ever more brutal policing (with questionable returns in the long run, and then you pay yet again whenever containment fails, in the currency of lives and property destroyed) or you can pay for a welfare state that gives everybody a stake in the system. But you WILL pay, one way or the other.

From my view in London, there is no understanding of the motivation behind what is going. In my direct experience, it felt more like “Mars Attacks!” than any sort of deep, philosphical raging against the machine…

Looks like the conservatives finally succeeded in making Magaret Thatchers “there is no such thing as society” quip a reality.

Hope they’re pleased with the result.

I like to read the comments on online newspapers (such as: http://news.sky.com/home/article/16046248) in order to get a feel for the public response. I was pretty dismayed at the paucity of intelligent responses to these riots. A large majority use language I find extremely uncomfortable: referring to rioters as “subhuman”, “animals”, “thugs”, “feral children”… all implying that the poster, of course is a civilized, decent, and most importantly, superior human being. I don’t doubt that what is happening is criminal, but to question the humanity of disaffected people, to advocate an even higher level of control (curfews and assemblies bans) and “hard punishment” and “re-education” of the rioters is missing what is plainly obvious: the social contract is broken for these people. This is not a random outbreak of immorality which can be solved by using an even bigger stick for punishment.

@37: There is a big difference between LA and London in that the LA riots were racially motivated and targeted whites and Koreans. These riots seem to be doing more damage to property, including people’s homes and are about taking whatever can be found. Either way, the knowledge that the owners of such homes and shops are willing to defend their property with force would be a strong deterrent. The police are fundamentally incapable of providing the bourgeois rights of property to the poor, and that is what we are seeing right now.

@Jack: sure, the middle class could restore order. Do I really need to point out that it will do so on the basis of the BNP, not a restoration of the welfare state? Ordnungspolitik does not lead to a just society.

Why not? Push people far enough and eventually you’ll get a backlash; predicting when and exactly where is the tricky point; similar to trying to figure out when a market bubble will pop.

https://crookedtimber.org/2011/04/26/the-bristol-riot/#comment-356940

I wonder what BJK thinks is going on? Judging by the level of reading comprehension exhibited here, the analysis would not be cogent.

bjk above forgot one (see @16 above): they tried to contact the police, they tried to get the media to respond. None of this worked. (It was never going to work.) So they did the next best thing.

Now we’re reminded that they’re there. And there but for the grace of god go us.

@48 race has nothing do with this, unless you consider the racism of society. Always blame racism first.

So what you’re saying is, CT commenters are the real racists?

Do not feed the troll.

I actually agree with bjk, but not for the moral reasons he, she or it wants to be agreed with.

I totally agree with ChasW.

If the undeservedly rent-seeking super rich and their political poodles treat their society like crap, then no wonder it all turns to shit.

Actually, one of the lessons I took from Hurricane Katrina is that the state should provide security. And its failure to do so amidst the violence that followed the storm in fact has roots in the history of the federal government’s decision not to intervene when armed civilians took it on themselves to defend their property from newly emancipated slaves during and after Reconstruction (i.e. Posse Comitatus).

Watson if the shopowners had easy access to firearms wouldn’t the rioters have that same access?

In response to your other comment the lesson I learned from Katrina is that the government shouldn’t abondon people to fend for themselves in the middle of a disaster (and that former heads of horse racing associations should not be placed in charge of emergance response agencies), not that more guns would have improved the situation.

We Americans who understand guns were entirely unsurprised by that recent incident in Norway where the Right-wing Christian terrorist killed 69 people with nothing but a brick.

Err, that should read when armed civilians took it on themselves to “defend their property” from newly emancipated slaves during and after Reconstruction.

“Is it pure opportunity (the rich are too far away to get to)?”

That would be my guess. In my experience middle class and poor sometimes share living space but rich and poor almost never do. Would someone with a bit more familiarity with the specific geography of London chime in on this?

Actually, you can be be pretty rich in parts of London and have a bad estate just next door. But, judging by an interview with “riot girls” I just listened to on the BBC, they think of anyone who has a business as being among the “rich people”.

It’s worth remembering that the cuts haven’t hit people with full force yet: the housing benefit changes (which will cap the amount payable at the 30th percentile of market rents) come into effect next April and, if enforced, will result in a wave of evictions—of working families as well as unemployed—across London.

PS: The writing style may be a tad florid for the academic set, but the essence is there..

bq. Watson, lad, you need to explain …

Nope, not even close. But while you continue to struggle with that, there’s another second-order consideration.
Let’s assume we agree about the kind of cities we want. Public spaces where people aren’t afraid; private spaces where people feel secure.
Now imagine a world in which Watson Ladd gains power. Weapons can be freely traded, and the use of guns both to threaten and to defend property is privatised. In recognition of the inadequacies of the police, the permitted use of force spreads in an ad hoc manner, reflecting the immediate perceived needs of each situation.
Would this promote the growth of the kind of cities we want to live in? Or would it encourage the spread of the kind of social problems you complain about in LA?

It’s a much looser question, of course, and an invitation for you to waffle in response.
It seems clear, to me at least, that it’s a question you’re entirely on the wrong side of.

Virgil, nobody should comment on Canada Free Press articles ever because they are crazy nonsense for loons.

Virgil, that piece is exactly what I’m talking about when I say that people are using this as “X, therefore my entire political program must be enacted”. Essentially his argument is that this happened in the UK, therefore social programs are bad.

For example he writes: “What kind of people behave this way? Those who have come to think of wealth as an infinite pile from which everyone grabs as much as they can.” Has he no sense of history? All sorts of people behave that way. Some of them might believe of wealth as an infinite pile from which everyone grabs as much as they can. Others might believe (rightly or wrongly) that they have been deliberately excluded from a limited pile. Others might just enjoy smashing things. Others might have all sorts of motivations that I’m not thinking of right now. But he lazily assumes a motivation that just happens to support all of his priors.

Dublin, Dundee, Humberside?

Ah yes, bert, “when seconds count the police are only minutes away” is a “truism ” that happens to have the added advantage of actually being true. Which is why Ladds commentary dovetails so nicely with Greenfields piece. When the bonds of social constraint are broken (we will probably differ as to casual factors) there are not enough police in the world available on a timely basis to prevent the small shop, pvt home, etc., from being looted. So your alternative is for the law-abiding citizen to flee for his life and call his insurance agent at a safe remain as he watches his life’s work, net worth and/or a life-time of personal memorabilia (if pvt residence) go up in smoke or be carried away, eh?

And what of those trapped and unable to safely flee, as were those white State Fair goers in Milwaukee, Wisc., last week when set upon by mobs of gleeful black rampaging youth attacking women and children as well as adult males as they left the Fair? Far better, I guess, to remain hospitalized for life in a coma like that Emergency Technician at the LA Dodgers baseball game after getting kicked in the head rather than dispatching the “wilding” thug to the reward he so richly deserves so that his special brand of “fun” will never be visited upon another hapless, unsuspecting defenseless victim, right?

I’ll let you two flail around.
Meanwhile, fuck me. Where can I get a gun?

Sebastian@80/

Nicely put. Such criticism is exactly what I was seeking (not that I hadn’t perceived of the same sort of objections–as well as others–but mainly in order to sample a range of thought processes from those “on the left” with which I, as a “man of the right” am ordinarily in disagreement. ) My motto, btw: “Often in error–never in doubt! ” lol

I realise that there are (some) Americans who think that everything is about _you_, but this is actually happening in the UK.

Watson Ladd/

I think you are mis-reading Greenfield. He too emphasizes the small-business owner, etc. But his larger point about the informal restraints on the civic culture being broken are, to a degree, valid. Remember, during the Great Depression almost 1/4-1/3 of the total American population were jobless. yet riots of any sort were rare. An “old timer” who could remember such things once told me back in the early 80s that in Louisville, during the depression on hot sweltering nights the people surrounding Central Park in the “Old Louisville” section just off the CBD (yes, Louisville has an Olmstead-designed park system too) took their mattresses out of their un-airconditioned homes and slept in the Park. Today that would be to think the un-thinkable,,

Evidently someone a the BBC really likes that ‘riot girls’ clip as it’s linked to from just about everywhere on their website. You’d almost think that only two people took part in the riots. Their interview with Darcus Howe (or ‘Marcus Dowe’ as the cretinous Fiona Armstrong refers to him) was also really something:

I think some kind of credit must be extended to the relevant authorities (in this case, David Cameron, Theresa May, and Boris Johnson) for not freaking out and refusing to engage in a hyperactive way.

George Orwell, in The Lion And The Unicorn I think, once noted to the effect that English government and order relied on a kind of complaisance from the very top. I think this particularly applies well here. The basic problem is that the more the legitimate government engages with the rioters in any kind of way, whether via water cannons or whatever, the more we make them equal and opposing parties when they clearly should not be equal parties.

Thus I think it was actually quite masterful of Cameron to delay the cancellation of his vacation until the very last moment, and the same for Boris Johnson (despite the heckling). The rioters are an amorphous mass of angry persons and worked up emotions looking for a target, and the government is the most obvious such target around which all that anger and worked-up emotions could cohere. By excusing themselves, the heads of legitimate authorities and thus the most visible targets around which the rioters could emotionally and politically cohere, from the country, and more importantly in enacting a muted response, Cameron and Johnson have done what is probably could be done in their personal capacities. After all, they hardly have any specific skills in policing and public order that their presence would be of any operational help to the police.

Watson Ladd/

When is defending the right of self-defense extolling the “virtues of violence?” And you are making HUGE unwarranted assumptions not based upon the evidence. NOWHERE did I say that, had the EMT now in a coma somehow survived the attack relatively unscathed, he would have been justified in hunting down his assailants and meting out his own personal brand of fatal “justice”–only that he certainly had a justified right imo, to be legally capable of employing armed resistance at the point of attack in the absence of police presence/protection–a point with we both seem to be in agreement. That the two slimeballs who perpetrated the crime deserve to die imo, automatically follows from the constitutional/legal basis I would use to justify their killing. i.e., the right of armed self-defense when one’s life is threatened–alone ample enough legal, constitutional AND moral justification..

For god’s sake, they’ve looted Oxfam in Ealing and all sorts of other charities and they set fire to an occupied residential building containing 26 flats in Tottenham – some people are just stupid thugs.

Actually, you can be be pretty rich in parts of London and have a bad estate just next door.

And you can be in an area that’s grown more affluent via people seeking the next affordable, gentrifiable part of town — Dalston, Peckham, etc. — and still be aware of how that exposes the social fractures, even as regeneration money gets pissed away on vanity projects.

As for the ‘riot girls’: in an environment where consumer goods are the things over which you can claim ownership, nabbing more of them while ‘owning’ the streets gives you the temporary illusion of power.

London Calling,
Clash:
London calling to the faraway towns
Now war is declared, and battle come down
London calling to the underworld
Come out of the cupboard, you boys and girls
London calling, now don’t look to us
Phoney Beatlemania has bitten the dust
London calling, see we ain’t got no swing
‘Cept for the ring of that truncheon thing

[Chorus 1:]
The ice age is coming, the sun’s zooming in
Meltdown expected, the wheat is growing thin
Engines stop running, but I have no fear
‘Cause London is drowning, and I live by the river

London calling to the imitation zone
Forget it, brother, you can go it alone
London calling to the zombies of death
Quit holding out, and draw another breath
London calling, and I don’t wanna shout
But while we were talking, I saw you nodding out
London calling, see we ain’t got no high
Except for that one with the yellowy eyes

[Chorus 2: x2]
The ice age is coming, the sun’s zooming in
Engines stop running, the wheat is growing thin
A nuclear error, but I have no fear
‘Cause London is drowning, and I live by the river

Now get this

London calling, yes, I was there, too
An’ you know what they said? Well, some of it was true!
London calling at the top of the dial
After all this, won’t you give me a smile?
London calling

I never felt so much alike [fading] alike alike alike

@virgil xenophon I would be interested (really! NOT a pro forma rhetorical utterance) in reading this crowds’ critique of his pov.

I thought, OK I’ll take a go at this. So I read the article looking for something – anything really – that had any actual evidence behind it, that was not simply the restatement of a prejudice. And I found nothing. So if you want a critique, it would go something like this:

The new counterculture draws in two groups, disaffected upper middle class white youth and lower class black youth. — No it doesn’t.

These are the children of the welfare state with little in common except a rejection of the commercial way of life. — No they aren’t.

Neither the entitled white university brat or the posturing ghetto teenager has any interest in working. — Wrong. At the very least, you (in New York) have no evidence that these are the groups involved (even putting aside the crude racial stereotypes), and no evidence about their attitude to work.

An understated civil war is already raging in Europe, between Muslim and African immigrants and the society they have penetrated. — Wrong. And what the hell does this have to do with the riots?

And on and on. There really is no point. Sorry.

virgil, nobody cares about the latest garbage spewed by stupid assholes like Lileks and Dalyrymple.

An arsehole citing an arsehole citing an arsehole? That’s a lot of arseholes.

the end product of a state that excuses everything with the warm bath of sociological bromides, divorces itself from its cultural antecedents, anesthetizes the lower classes with payouts and a meretricious culture, and finds itself stuffed to the gunwales with pleasure-seeking sociopaths addicted to a life of sensation, both personal – and usually meaningless – and vicarious, which only fuels resentment for those having a better quality of sensory fulfillment – I disagree with every single assertion here and almost all those in the rest of the article. Seriously – what do you expect when you post this kind of evidence-free borderline racist rant (“divorces itself from its cultural antecedents”)? There is no conversation to be had.

I’m waiting for the links to the latest from Steve Sailer and/or Charles Murray accompanied by entreaties to engage in an open dialogue. It seems it’s either this or the 2nd Amendment (!). Jesus fucking wept.

Virgil: in your linked article I got as far as

“Neither the entitled white university brat or the posturing ghetto teenager has any interest in working”…

and decided that it was not worth continuing.

I hope that helps.

@Kvetch @ 85 “I was hoping for a little insight and perspective from commenters in or from the UK.”

Here goes – The reaction living and working in London that I’ve heard today from people of all ages and political persuasions is pretty uniformly of the “string them up from the lamp columns” variety.

David Cameron and Boris Johnson’s statements seem to me somewhere pretty far to the liberal/left of most working people in London, who are horrified at what has gone on. I think either would have got a standing ovation if he’d come out today and announced that Northern Ireland trained soldiers were on their way driving water cannons over from NI. Depending on where you stand they are either commendably restrained or totally out of touch.

If you stand broadly on the side of “rehabilitation and understand” rather than “take responsibility for yourself – lock them up and throw away the key” then I think you’ve lost ground. I think a generally liberal, urban living, population have hardened their attitudes considerably.

This may mark a sea change in attitudes to law and order and a shift towards a much more authoritarian view across a lot of people who didn’t previously hold this view.

@bh: But do the shopkeepers have the right to employ such violence? Violence after all is the means the police use to deter disorder and gain compliance with the law. We all agree that violence should be used, the question is how, and by whom, and to whom? My argument has two points:

1: The working class is not now served by police

2: They have the right to defend themselves against imminent lawless attack.

From this I conclude they should use this right, to avoid the banditry now plaguing London. Such an exercise would not end the banditry, but would increase the costs of engaging in it. It would ensure that it does not harm those who exercise such a right: the renters whose flats are now in flames, the storeowners who have lost a great deal of their wealth and livelihood, and the bystanders who have been sent to hospital by the rioters.

Maybe you can pull up your skirts and primly fuck off.

“Trying to avoid getting into exactly that no-win situation in the first place is pretty much what social democracy is about.”

and pretty much why wanna be authoritarian politicians let the situation fester in the first place

We are with a group of American university students between Bayswater and Notting Hill, definitely an upscale neighborhood. Last night we heard sirens and smelled smoke until the early morning–our students witnessed people breaking windows and looting–there were vehicles set on fire just two or three blocks over. Friends in south London had their high streets burn. I feel the same sadness as when I watched New Orleans drown. It seems too soon to turn it into a political wrangle.

Has no one noted how much damage the rioters and looters are doing to their own communities and themselves?

No, nobody has.

Has no one noted how much damage the rioters and looters are doing to their own communities and themselves?

That’s exactly what I just did at 118, and others did it more explicitly earlier in the thread. Reading comprehension fail.

Did you have a point?

This sounds a lot like the US ghetto riots in the 1960s – counterproductive (in the sense of prompting a hostile reaction) and destructive to the communities involved, but motivated by actual and severe social problems. Understanding the latter does not imply that you fail to recognize the former.

http://twitpic.com/63j8ia

Lemuel: The Nixon backlash was substantively fueled by law-and-order rhetoric, and white flight from the cities was dramatically escalated by the riots (e.g. Detroit, Newark). The seeds of the Reagan (and Nixon) Democrats in the north can be attributed pretty directly to the aftermath of the riots.

It’s hard to come up with a case in my memory where they helped liberal causes, to put another way; do any examples come to mind?

I think the Daily Mash has got it spot on: http://www.thedailymash.co.uk/news/society/riots-caused-by-society-or-lazy,-thieving-pricks,-say-experts-201108094174/

“seismologists reported a sudden lurch to the right as people who own tagines found themselves calling for the immediate deployment of the Parachute Regiment and a couple of RAF Tornadoes”

did ye see?? http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=6Gex_ya4-Oo

Fighting back against an abusive police raid on a gay bar isn’t the same as looting shops and middle-class houses. Analogy fail…

Er no. What actually happened was people being a bit miffed at what looks like murder by the police.

But as you say, ‘looting’ ‘middle class’ houses. Oh the horror.

@137 et alia: “like the US ghetto riots in the 1960s”

The race riots of the 1960s in the U.S. were usually triggered by police misconduct, in a general atmosphere of racial tension with the police. In that respect, I suppose there’s a superficial resemblance to the situation today in London.

In terms of the larger economic context, the contrast is striking. The U.S., in the 1960s was in the midst of the great egalitarian expansion, which had begun in 1932, and been accelerated by WWII. The social conformity and political paranoia created by the extreme solidarity of WWII was wearing off, after 1958, both the Democratic White Supremacist Right and the Republican Business Right was in eclipse, and the Liberal Consensus dominated social, cultural and economic politics. The amazing affluence afforded by the automated mass-production of the Second Industrial Revolution had spread out geographically, and the decision was taken to fully admit the last excluded classes: the South, blacks and women and gays.

LBJ’s Great Society would reduce the number of people in poverty markedly, in the first great Keynesian expansion, and Civil Rights laws, adopted by overwhelming popular majorities, swept away de jure racial discrimination.

Intellectuals in sociology and history were chewing the remaining cud of Marxism, and spitting out theories of revolution, right and left. It was a very popular topic in the 1950s and 1960s. The notion that the riot/revolution started, when heightened expectations were dashed, was quite popular conventional wisdom; I can remember Barrington Moore (or someone like that) applying it anachronistically to the French Revolution. And, it had its vulgar expression in a lot of hot-headed rhetoric from young black men and white boys with student deferments from the draft. It was kind of weird in a way: riots in the moment of liberal triumph. Just on the level of police conduct, though, it is clear that it took a while for the previously oppressed to lose their shame, and find paths for ambition, as well as time for police to adapt, and professionalize their conduct. The 1960s were the time, when the police, in both the U.S. and the U.K., started giving Miranda warnings, and stopped routinely beating confessions out of suspects.

The Stonewall Riots in NYC were a faint echo of the large-scale race riots earlier in the 1960s. But, in many respects, the same core dynamic was at work: the flashpoint was oppressive and abusive police conduct, which had become archaic in light of decisions already taken by the society at large. The Sexual Revolution was past its mid-point (circa 1967). The society as a whole had already made a number of key decisions on sexual and gay rights. The police had not gotten the message, however, and were engaged in a routine, pre-mayoral campaign, “clean-up” the city program. Police conduct would be reformed — it was already being reformed, in the sense that the legal steps to legalize “gay bars” had already been taken, and Vice Squad practice had begun the switch from prosecuting gay victims of blackmail to prosecuting the blackmailers, etc. Like the blacks, gays would take inspiration from the Stonewall Riots, organizing “Gay Pride” parades, which have continued and spread around the world. That celebration of “pride” was the antidote to the shame internalized after decades of systematic humiliation and oppression. So, Stonewall was less about demanding something from teh Man, than about the oppressed adjusting to the possibilities of new status, already granted in principle.

A major crime wave started in the U.S. in the 1960s that only began to peter out in 1990s. Rates of violent crime climbed markedly. It is hard to know if this crime wave was socially and politically endogenous, a by-product of social and economic change, or just lead poisoning.

The economic context, today, is just the opposite of the 1960s U.S. The U.S. and U.K., today, are at an extreme of economic inequality, and the total global wealth — the proverbial pie — is shrinking, and appears likely to shrink for many decades to come. Instead of a Liberal Consensus setting the agenda, we have a Plutocracy dominating all. The only part of the “Left” represented in politics is a corrupt neo-liberalism, rationalizing every plutocratic theft and seizure as “serious” and “practical”. If the filthy rich are to retain their stupendous claims on wealth and income, larger and larger swaths of the mass population will have to be progressively excluded from any hope of affluence and prosperity.

This kind of progressive exclusion will require changes in law and police conduct. To a large extent, those changes in law have already taken place: Britain is, in formal legal terms, an authoritarian police state, complete with universal surveillance. Naturally enough, the first to feel the tightening grip are poor black immigrant communities; they are to be excluded from any possibility of economic affluence, in a society in which social mobility is at a total standstill. This riot, then, may be a mere rehearsal, for what promises to be a long-running play of increasingly authoritarian police conduct, enforcing economic exclusion and oppression. Humiliation will, no doubt, be a part of the police, judicial and propaganda program that accompanies progressive economic exclusion and oppression, and shame will follow. (Maybe, someone will organize shame parades to comemorate the occasion, like the Orange parades in Northern Ireland.)

It is not entirely coincidental, I suppose, that the Wisconsin recall election is taking place today, as public employee unions put on the block for economic exclusion by the Republican Governor there, attempt to use the ballot box in place of violence. We’ll see how well that goes, as well.

I don’t think the subtle distinctions he is trying to make hold up, but I’ll wait for the longer piece. I think what he writes here is interesting. Kenan Malik is a curious guy, someone who tries to be a reasonable, scientific anti-racist as if a scientist during the Salem Witch Trials would be reasonable only if he was willing to entertain seriously the charge of a woman being a witch only to refute it carefully, and in a somewhat qualified manner.

http://kenanmalik.wordpress.com/2011/08/09/five-quick-points-about-the-riots/

Who made that decision?

you import an underclass and this is the result. that’s my structural interpretation

Andrew F: Steve LeBonne at, right now, 124:
Having seen this happen in the US more than once in my lifetime, I think you can count on it. That’s one of the the tragic things about the whole situation. It was pretty much predictable that something like these riots would happen sooner or later, yet when they do they can only make life worse for everybody except authoritarian politicians. Trying to avoid getting into exactly that no-win situation in the first place is pretty much what social democracy is about.

The numbers here move about as comments come on line. If I wanted to be needless confrontational I would insert some snotty comment here about; but, I don’t so I won’t.

For what it’s worth, I also wondered what your point was.

@152

Yes, “a decision was taken”. I hope it is obvious that I’m using a metaphoric short-hand by ascribing agency to society as a whole and speaking of a singular “decision”. But, societies do make collective choices about culture and politics and economics, although maybe societies make those choices in waves, not singularly. There’s definitely such a wave — several concurrent waves — beginning in the mid-1950s, or so, as the Liberal Consensus takes hold, concerning a whole agenda of reforms and liberalizations. The Liberal Consensus is a kind of zeitgeist way to label the phenomenon, but the phenomenon is real enough, however one labels it; the vast majority of people, in the country, including elites, come to accept, as shared conventional wisdom, a liberal agenda of social, political and economic reform. There are those, like William F. Buckley, Jr., noisily protesting every step of the way, of course, but from a position of self-conscious isolated minority status.

I could catalog a whole series of cultural events and turning points and legal and political decisions, to document the timing, but this is a comment, not a history of the 1960s. From the moment, the Warren Court ruled unanimously in Brown and LBJ started contesting with the Senate Republicans over the Civil Rights Act of 1957, both sides championing the bill to look good before a national audience, it was pretty clear where the politics of racial segregation was headed. The Warren Court’s decisions implementing legal changes on a range of issues, from racial discrimination to the publication of obscenity to police procedure, followed definite themes.

There are “revolutions” in civil rights and race relations, and in sexual politics. And, a big economic expansion. There’s a whole series of choices, decisions and developments, which continue into the 1970s, and later, but the trend is set, by the initial adoption of the Liberal Consensus agenda and its guiding principles of individual autonomy and social and economic egalitarianism. (Eventually, the whole thing is subverted by Nixon and Reagan and a political re-alignment.)

I could spin out a whole catalog of political decisions and cultural events, in series, to document step-by-step the political and cultural “revolutions” of the 1960s.

Anyway, my point is that the 1960s riots come after, not before, the reforms and liberalizations had been accepted in principle by the society at large. So, to the extent that one is wondering whether riots “accomplish” anything, it is important to take that timing into account.

By parallel construction, I’m arguing that the 2011 London riots are occurring after “a decision has been taken” to begin a process of progressive economic exclusion, as a means of maintaining (and financing), during a widely anticipated, prolonged period of economic stagnation and decline, an extreme concentration of wealth and income, which will be enforced by increasingly oppressive legal authoritarianism and policing.

Substance@162

I’m finding it hard to read if you’re being sarcastic here, would you clarify?

WRT 161: I think you might even say that the riots are not merely occurring after the decisions, but they are an almost inevitable result of those decisions. And I feel your assessment of a bleak future for Britain is depressingly accurate. For all of us really.

I’m finding it hard to read if you’re being sarcastic here, would you clarify?

That’s an honest thank you. I don’t buy the societal decision – then even more than now there are large portions of society unhappy with providing equality to some of the groups enumerated – but I appreciate the effort. It’s as if society is an animal at war with itself, or perhaps like me on a bender.

@165

No war, but class war.

I suppose at least one should be glad that this isn’t a New Labour government handling this. (Perhaps that the same kind of riots would not have occurred absent Coalition cuts, but I don’t think they made as much difference as some think.) Just imagine David Blunkett or Charles Clarke handling this, and Tony Blair talking about zero tolerance.

At the end of the day, there must be grievances, but that there are grievances doesn’t mean that the grievances are legitimate. What’s the grievance? That society hasn’t looked after them? But how? How does society look after people of the kind who were torching shops and houses with no sense of restraint whatsoever?

In North America, people would say “get yourself into a trade” or something. You know, become a roofer. Or a bartender. Or something. But the kind of behaviour demonstrated in these riots are indicative of not even the bare minimum of that kind of temperament or inclination. At some point, the agency of society and government stops and the agency of the individual begins. I honestly don’t know on which side of that point these people are, but the evidence so far is not encouraging.

Normal people can, and are, pushed beyond the breaking point by deplorable external conditions. I’ve almost been there myself. But this kind of looting, a kind that manages to be both gratuitous and premeditated, isn’t just being pushed beyond the breaking point; it’s psychopathy and pathology.

“it’s psychopathy and pathology.”

Gee, you really have been thinking things through.

Is it any surprise that someone who religiously cheers all the policies that have created these underclasses by reducing the availability of jobs in developed countries also subscribes to the belief that anyone can just get a job by magic and will?

Channeling my reactions to other recent CT posts and mixing it with my reactions to these posts (I think I’ve at least skimmed all of them), and also my reactions to everything going on in GB, Wisconsin, Hama…; to Obama; oh and yeah, to that global economic crisis:
The neo-liberal technocrats + plutocrats (on all points of the political spectrum, including what we laughingly call “the left” these days) + the various -isms (e.g. racism and sexism, though the latter is usually ignored though it’s crucial to the mix) = riots, whose cause can’t be reduced to any simple formulation but is part of a counter-nexus. (Counter-nexus — did I just say that? Sorry.)
God, I feel like some kind of old-fashioned Marxist (or, as I would have preferred in my youth, when we worried about these things, Marxian). And, yeah, this is (given my upbringing and orientation) also a Christian response (hello Cornell, hello, Martin — and hello any generous spirits of any “faith tradition”).
The word ALIENATION comes to mind. Mix in adolescent anxieties and immature versions of self-assertion/affirmation (make that especially MALE adolescent anxieties — this doesn’t get females off the hook, by a long shot, but just sayin’).
People can be very very poor yet not for a moment contemplate looting/theft/appropriation (choose your poison) IF they have (drumroll) a sense of SOLIDARITY with others in the face of life’s vicissitudes (hey, crap will happen, no matter what — and we all die, in the end), a reasonably secure sense of their own individual AGENCY in the world, of a FUTURE that they can project themselves into. It’s not news that small shopkeepers (the petit b.) and poor kids in the estates/hoods (yea old lumpen) will be falsely pitted against one another.
I am truly not some old left Marxist, but gee whiz, there’s some basic wisdom in that old-time stuff.

the social programs being axed because the country can’t afford it were introduced at the end of the 2nd world war when Britain was on it’s knees after 6 years of total war.

at the time the national debt was through the roof.

what’s different?
the debt is throught the roof now,though corporate riches are somewhat enhanced this time.

hmm.

@153

Shorter Kenan Malik.

1: These riots aren’t political. I mean they are political, but the fact that they are political doesn’t mean they are political.

2: These riots aren’t about race. I mean they are about race, but the mere fact that they are about race doesn’t mean they are about race.

3: These riots aren’t about unemployment. I mean they are about unemployment, but merely because they are about unemployment doesn’t mean they are about unemployment.

4: Anyone who talks about what the community wants or needs, such as myself, should be ignored.

5: Even though the rioters are awful, there are other people who are more, or possibly less, awful. (Or who possibly have the same level of awfulness: it’s hard to be sure).

(Apologies for the lack of logical thought in this piece, I will update it with reasoned argument later).

This Guardian piece is a bit impressionistic but does at least make the point that there’s more of an age/race/gender mix among the rioters than most of the reports imply:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2011/aug/09/london-riots-who-took-part?cat=uk&type=article

PS to Petty Unifying Theory:

May I suggest we take a step back and survey the wreckage? There is plenty of blame to go around, for both sides of politics.

Among its many mixed-up blessings, post-modern society brings the semi-collapse of moral codes in both the over-class and under-class. Meanwhile the middle-class keeps its clean nose to the grindstone, busy as a blue-arsed blowfly. So Wall Street+Mean Streets clean out Main Street with charges and taxes.

Both ends of the class system have more or less escaped accountability. The former because they can cook the books, the latter because they evade the books. By contrast the middle class is all-too accountable, being both supervised and supervising.

Its too busy to engage politically, working 24/7 to pay off our mortgages, shuttling two cars for the daily run-around, saving up to put the kids into better schools etc. It would be nice to have Marc Rich on speed dial or at least let off steam on the streets, but who has the money or time?

To be sure, politicians pay lip-service to “working families”. But thats just boilerplate for election campaigns. Meantime the over- and under-class have dedicated political lobbies, ever-ready to spin blatantly criminal behaviour.

Twas’ not ever thus. Once upon a time the nation had centripetal forces -faith, flag and family. (Admittedly after suffering a SIW during the Great War.) That checked the centrifugal forces of class.

But this past generation post-modern liberals have been busy under-mining the traditional pillars of society. The EU does not seem to be an effective substitute, yet. So it does not take much austerity for the thin veneer of civility to collapse.

I don’t have any grand solutions apart from urging the alert citizenry to be ever-vigilant. But middle class people are, by nature, reluctant to express political class consciousness. Its a little unseemly. (They will engage in special interest group politics, but that has little ideological valency.)

A modest proposal: lock the banksters and the gangstas in the same cell, throw away the key and let God sort ’em out.

Jack surveys the scene from Australia, and finds that all that he reads confirms him in the view he had all along, a bit like virgil above really. Quelle surprise.

Could it be that they are making a point to a government which thinks they cost too much?

I’m not seeing any gloating from the police officers I follow on Twitter – although there’s plenty of anger about proposed cuts. And no significant criticism of orders, which I might expect to see if the idea came from high up without involving the rank-and-file. So my guess is probably not, unless the culture of omerta is stronger than it looks.

So… rubber bullets and water cannon for the next student demo, anyone? It seems peaceful protesters are the only ones who’ll stand still long enough to get a dose of “robust policing”.

@soullite

It’s a scientific fact(*) that when the number of guns and bibles per head drops below a critical level then disorder instantly starts up. The logical conclusion in this case is that it was Mark Duggan’s gun – confiscated, please note, by agents of the state – that sent us below the threshold.

(*) There’s no real evidence for it, but it is scientific fact.

Bruce Wilder @166: I see little that is rational, much less justifiable, in the disorder, which suggests to me, that the rioters are in positions, where they have much less power and agency.

It’s completely irrational from the perspective of the community affected, but that’s too high a level of analysis – and, of course, most of the communities in question aren’t rioting. If we get more granular, we can focus on the particular individuals rioting and looting. Their interests diverge in important ways from the rest of the community, and their decision calculus does as well.

Where you see a community oppressed, and the rioting and looting as an expression of violent despair to use your phrase, I see a large number of mostly young males taking advantage of a police force temporarily overwhelmed. Where you want to use analysis at the level of classes to understand this, I want to use an analysis that takes divisions within classes seriously.

In a slave revolt, no matter how bloody pointless, I don’t blame the slave. ymmv

A slave revolt? Really?

Chris Bertram @184: They’ve really shown that they can enjoy themselves battering students and envirnonmental protesters (as well as bullying individuals – especially black ones) but faced with tough poor kids from estates looting, and they just stand well back and let shopkeepers be ruined.

Oh come on, the police engage on a much more regular and more dangerous basis with “tough poor kids from estates” than they do with students and environmentalists. Describing them as essentially cowardly bullies is unjustified.

Stopping looting and rioting is a question of resources, not the inner virtue of the police. One must respond to a riot with an organized force sufficient to defend itself and quell the disturbance – you can’t simply hurl numerically insufficient units into the fray. Political protests allow police to mobilize beforehand, so that the organized force required is already there. Outbursts of riots, by contrast, don’t. And if the location of the riots and looting was in some sense coordinated, that would make it all the more difficult.

“Rioters in Tottenham had the decency to form an orderly queue…”

That’s the true spirit of Britain there: ‘keep calm and carry on looting.’ (Goes back centuries.)

_Describing them as essentially cowardly bullies is unjustified._

Have you or any member of your family been on the “wrong end” of an encounter with the police?

Tell me, oh wise idiots. Why, if ‘90%’ or ‘100% of the looters are just criminals, do they not riot every weekend. Forever. Both in the past and the future?

As sg says, they do, in fact, commit crimes every weekend. And during the week too.

faced with tough poor kids from estates looting, and they just stand well back and let shopkeepers be ruined.

44 police officers have been injured so far in the riots. Over 450 people have been arrested.

Given the nature of the disturbances, ajay, I wouldn’t be surprised, but note that they claimed that 70 police were injured during a climate change protests, but the truth turned out to be different:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2008/dec/16/kingsnorth-environment-police-inquiry-injuries

Meredith @ 175, perhaps you could have somebody fluent in – well, any human language – review your comments for clarity, sense and meaning?

44 police officers have been injured so far in the riots.

43 if you don’t include the officer they are no longer claiming was shot by Mark Duggan…

FFS, ajay, when the minster says “I was informed … ” who do you think informed him?

That’s the true spirit of Britain there: ‘keep calm and carry on looting.’

In the U.S., this is also true of Wall Street.

I agree with both ajay and Chris. Most police officers I know, or have had dealings with, are dedicated professionals trying their best to do a difficult job. Some however are power mad assholes who are just dying for the oppurtunity to get a good boot in.

Strangely enough, ajay, I’m not entirely convinced of that either. But I know enough about how the House of Commons works to think that a specific number on police injuries will have been supplied to a minister by his department (the Home Office) who will have sourced it from the relevant Constabulary. Not very likely that he just made the number up himself.

I have a limited appetite for the more handwringing sympathy-with-the-oppressed stuff on display here and elsewhere. But I can appreciate where it’s coming from.
This man, on the other hand, is a bad-taste joke.

Upthread a few comments, Matt McIrvin mentioned some of the gun arguments getting made. Remember, there were people blaming the bodycount at Virginia Tech on the university’s on-campus gun ban and the state’s restrictions on concealed carry permits.

There’s a difference between honest muddleheadedness and outright derangement.
The way some people’s minds work seems very foreign to me.
Fwiw, it’s the same story with the overtly religious.

Some have said they want some English-sourced insight. This is worth a look:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/aug/10/liverpool-riots-mob-mayhem

Yeah, in the U.K., the term for the public housing is council estates.

213: you don’t think it’s possible that the relevant constabulary said (truthfully) “well, our onsite medics treated 70 policemen” and the minister might have exaggerated? You know, sexed up the evidence a bit? It’s been known for ministers to do that. Ah well.

217: or, north of the border, “housing schemes” or just “the schemes”. Whence “schemie”, the Edinburgh version of what the English call a chav.

Incidentally, the Guardian’s got someone watching the rioters go in front of the magistrates now and liveblogging it. Occupations listed so far: college student, unemployed, not given, teaching assistant, not given, scaffolder. All men, late teens to late twenties.

The more I read of all this (see this account for example) the more it looks like profit-driven raiding activity. The Vikings are still with us. I suppose it will end in another bloody Levitt & Dubner whimsy-nomics book. But it is all so seriously horrible that the reaction of the usual jerks doesn’t seem to matter much.

ajay: nice stats.

Yes, well you may be puzzled. That was me being a dickhead. I was referring to this:

http://chaplainmediacity.wordpress.com/2011/08/09/salford-riots/

which I somehow thought was your link.

So apologs for asperity. But it is a good piece (the one I’ve linked to I mean), and quite insightful, I thought.

Absent evidence to the contrary I reckon they are both honest accounts, describing different incidents from different viewpoints. Blood & Treasure has more in common with the War Nerd than with a Salford vicar.

Chris Bertram @197: Have you or any member of your family been on the “wrong end” of an encounter with the police?

Completely irrelevant Chris. You claimed, remember, that the police are afraid to engage with “tough poor kids” but “enjoy…battering students.” It’s a claim rendered improbable by the fact that the police engage quite regularly with violent persons, and infrequently batter students and environmentalists. And it has nothing to do with my personal experience.

There’s also, moreover, no contradiction between a cop being prone to excessive force and abuse, and that same cop acting quite courageously in the face of danger. Courage is not necessarily a function of one’s respect for civil rights.

Bruce at 166

“In a slave revolt, no matter how bloody pointless, I don’t blame the slave. ymmv”

I want you to know I am stealing this, and claiming it as my own. Pith personified.

“Civilization will and must go on…”

Three cheers for Civilization! Huzzah! Huzzah! Huzzah!

“perhaps the organizational capability of psychopaths has just gone way up…”

I dunno. They haven’t that done badly for centuries in their capacity as “the ruling class”.

If the English rioters are anything like the people I met when I lived in a terrible neighborhood in Hartford, Connecticut, they have very limited understanding of how the world works, hence the tendency to think that burning out a local shop keeper is a blow against the ruling class. During the Watts riots back in the 60s, white people were terrified that the angry blacks would boil out of their ghettos and burn down nearby middle class suburbs; but that never seemed to happen, perhaps because underclass individuals, at least in my experience, tend to have remarkably circumscribed geographic horizons. The accounts I’ve read of what’s been going on in the U.K., whether moralizing or forgiving, seem to ignore the lived experience of ill-educated rioters who don’t necessarily inhabit the same world as educated professional or middling class folks.

Jim Harrison @237 makes a valid point: “If the English rioters are anything like the people I met when I lived in a terrible neighborhood in Hartford, Connecticut, they have very limited understanding of how the world works”.
I’d add that they have, however, a stronger understanding of (and resentment for) structural unfairness than most of us, if more difficulty in analysing and describing it than the CT contributors I’ve read.

novakant 08.11.11 at 4:38 am
“Slave revolt”, “Class struggle”, “Stonewall riots” – you guys are sure trying hard to totally ignore what actually happened and instead impose a narrative that suits your preconceived ideas. It would be funny if the whole thing weren’t so sad.

You mean, more like this:

http://www.abc.net.au/unleashed/2834278.html

I think I understand you now, Tim. Superimposed narratives are both inevitable and necessary. Reactionaries and hardliners have already set out their own narrative, and are attempting to shut down debate by branding competing narratives “political”. They now need to be taken on.
I don’t disagree. And the article at the end of my link would be nobody’s idea of the last word on the subject.
A word of advice, though. If this is a political battle, be very careful about whose side you end up on. Seumas Milne is not someone I’d expect to handle this at all deftly. But in fact he does a pretty good job with his moral indictment – I can imagine that piece getting approving nods from well beyond the Guardian editorial office.

I suspect you may disagree. But from what I’ve seen, in the very different context of national party politics, Ed Miliband has struck a good balance between competing pressures. Let’s see how he does in today’s debate.

bert – Well, I was only recommending that piece, not endorsing whatever Milne may yet come up with, sight unseen.

I would clarify one thing, without suggesting you’re not aware of it. Reactionaries and hardliners (qua Rs & HLs) who insist that blaming the govt mustn’t be permitted because it denies individual responsibility genuinely (though ideologically) miss the point that blame (and responsibility, explanation) is not limited to a one-to-one correspondence with nasty events – as you say, different levels of explanation etc. are ‘superimposed’.

The government on the other hand are clearly quite aware of the underlying socio-economic hydraulics involved, and are using the reactionary approach as a pretext. I.e. rather than ‘we shouldn’t blame the govt because all blame must go to the rioters’ their actual (private) reasoning is ‘all blame should go to the rioters because we mustn’t blame the govt’.

It’s not even just a question of non-cognitive causation, either – while there have been distinct things going on (Tottenham started as a fairly standard police/race riot), plenty of those involved in looting have, with varying focus and sophistication, described their own conception of what they are doing as rebellion against various kinds of injustice, or at least as political – that is, concerned with power relations, including those over property.

“But that doesn’t mean that they shouldn’t be prosecuted and sanctioned as according to the law of the land. Thus the revolting slaves following Spartacus were nailed to the cross”

Myles are you actually coming down on the side of crucifixion? Sometimes your posts make me wonder if someone is playing a very long practical joke on CT commentators…

“If they weren’t cowards, and this wasn’t just about petty theft against people who can’t protect themselves, then they’d be revolutionaries, plotting Fawkes-like events year-round.”

So something cannot be a legitimate social movement or social expression (as opposed to ‘mindless criminality’) unless it happens year-round? I’m not sure that that’s a coherent thesis. I also don’t see how simmering tension/anger is any less legitimate because it only spills over into violence when things like the recent police controversy happen. Sure, some of it’s opportunistic, in a sense. C.f. how a heck of a lot more people marched for civil rights in the US when it became clear that there were enough fellow protesters that they would have safety in numbers and be listened to. There’s not much point in being a lone-wolf martyr, so why does it matter than some of these people are only out on the streets cause everyone else is? Can you think of any significant social movement ever that was truly ex nihilo?

Myles are you actually coming down on the side of crucifixion? Sometimes your posts make me wonder if someone is playing a very long practical joke on CT commentators…

Well the punishment in the antiquities for insurrectionary activity is execution, and cruxification is one form of execution which was considered suitable for serious violations of the law such as insurrectionary activity. That was the law as given, the persons engaged in insurrectionary activity knew the law very well, and they elected to take the rational risk of overthrowing the regime which, had they been successful, would have allowed them to have evaded this law.

Given that in a scenario of Spartacus succeeding it’s pretty much guaranteed that most innocent Roman patricians and lots of plebeians would have been slaughtered, it’s hardly a cause for moral outcry if on the other hand, based on the law the revolters knew very well, that they are executed according to a stipulation they understood very well, under a scenario where they failed. The gamble is weighted on both sides; you can hardly make an argument that the slaves should get to slaughter everybody if they succeed and get off scot-free if they fail. They are fully aware of the risks, and they elected to take them. (And I’m not even going to bother with the argument that we should be just as morally outraged if the slaves succeeded and then slaughtered their masters; I mean seriously, the absurdity of this is obvious.)

Andrew F.

_Completely irrelevant Chris._

Er no, because I also wrote “as well as bullying individuals – especially black ones”. If you’d been on the receiving end (or someone close to you had) then I’m willing to bet you wouldn’t have written what you wrote.

“Civilization must be preserved, even if we have destroy everything it stands for, in order to do it” has been the mantra of the right wing for some time now.

Civilization for me but not for thee. In the name of defending “civilization” Mr. Cameron has been eliminating libraries and police, while he dallies among the art masterpieces and fine wines of Tuscany.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/11/opinion/when-budget-cuts-lead-to-broken-windows.htm

Would you support crucifixion of rioters in the future if it has been made clear that this is the punishment?

Rioters should be made to understand that the Army will be called in the next instance of riots. I doubt cruxification is involved.

Let’s be tough on Myles and the causes of Myles, particular when his cause is defending slave-owners.

This hardly matters. The slaves understood very well what the possible consequences of insurrectionary activity were, and they made a reasonable decision to take the risks of obtaining those consequences, for what presumably was a greater likelihood of obtaining satisfactory results of their success over SPQR. The fact of the matter is that the slaves undertook highly dangerous activity for which they understood and expected cruxification to be a fairly likely (and squared and forthright) outcome; you could hardly maintain order if you let people get away at that point, because then there’d be no deterrent whatsoever. It’d be like advertising the death penalty for murderers and then at the actual court session revealing that it was just a bluff; it’s just not a tenable way to run things, whether you are a left-wing or a right-winger. I don’t see what morality’s got to do with it.

There is no way the British rioters can be compared to the Spartacus slave revolts. These were not people who “understood very well what the possible consequences of insurrectionary activity were, and they made a reasonable decision to take the risks of obtaining those consequences.”

These were mostly teenagers and children engaging in hormone-fueled, out-of-bounds behavior — as used to happen regularly in black ghettos and even on white campuses when I was young — young people with no stake in society, nothing to lose, and a lot of diffuse pent-up rage, who live in the moment and have no thought for whatever for the consequences. In fact the consequences may well be very terrible, the city of Newark, New Jersey, has yet to recover from the riots of fifty years ago.

In Nazi Germany it was illegal to be a Jew. If we follow Myles logic civilization demanded that being murdered for being a Jew was right. Obviously, there is something wrong with Myles logic. Civilization isn’t the sum total of the current set of prejudice of this or that powerful elite but is rather an aspiration. For some of us, the aspiration is seeing to it that the least among us aren’t debased, murdered, or otherwise abused. For amoral thugs the aspiration is seeing to it that violating the law, howsoever amoral it might be, is punished to fullest extent of an amoral system of social organization.

And just as by the way, it’s not just that slavery was and is wrong but also that enforcing laws about slavery and slave revolts led to wretched results. Don’t believe me? And why should you. Read Dubois book on Haiti and its successful slave revolt and the repugnant response from Jefferson and France. Millions in “fines” and an international embargo because, you know, Haiti had successfully destroyed one of the worlds most murderous slave regimes. The law, as some one or another noted, is an ass.

I’ll leave the last word to this brave Hackney resident:

What stands out for me is the comprehensive failure of the police. They’ve really shown that they can enjoy themselves battering students and envirnonmental protesters (as well as bullying individuals – especially black ones) but faced with tough poor kids from estates looting, and they just stand well back and let shopkeepers be ruined.

I really think that this comes under the heading of “making mock of uniforms that guard you whilst you sleep”.

It’s Copper this and Copper that
an’ “Copper it’s your fault!”
But it’s “Where the fuck is Copper?”
When they’re trashing JD Sports

_So if my civil rights are violated by a police officer, then I am justified in claiming that police officers are sadistic cowards?_

No the point is that treating urban youth like this is routine and part of police culture, and a big part of the explanation of what happened. Most middle-class white people don’t experience the sharp end of this, but if you had done, you’d be less inclined to write what you wrote.

See today’s FT btw

http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/df5180a0-c4ed-11e0-9c4d-00144feabdc0.html

270,

I’m tempted to answer your post on its own level and and ask that now we’ve tried having the police in control of the situation and the violent criminals in control of the situation which you felt was preferable.

Actually, that’s not my position. In abstract I think that institutions and practices that are subject to criticism and debate are healthier than those that are not. In concrete my small practical knowledge of the way the police operate and my general taking of an interest in the world around me lead me to the tentative conclusion that as far as the police are concerned there are plenty of things that could be improved. However, the one occasion where I was unfortunate enough to find myself in a position where I had to protect someone from a violent criminal tough kid from an estate I found the experience rather frightening and am very grateful that there are people braver than I who are prepared to do this sort of thing on a regular basis. Whatever you think of the police, in this instance the officers on the front line were asked to control a dangerous situation where it was distinctly possible that they could be injured or killed. I therefore regard dishing out virtual white feathers from the comfort of one’s armchair to be a little bit shabby.

A culture that promotes the enjoyment of beating students, the bullying of minority minors, and the refusal to “face” “tough poor kids” committing property damage?

The third part is rendered a bit dubious by the fact that most police race towards a report of a violent crime in progress – while other people will generally, wisely, cross the street to avoid one.

As to the first two parts, we should remember that of the huge number of daily interactions with police officers, most do not involve any violation of civil rights, even though many of those interactions might be highly unpleasant. Of those that do involve violations, many will be enormously difficult to prosecute.

Rather than convictions, I’d look at the universe of disciplinary measures, from suspensions to forced resignations to terminations.

@266

You don’t actually have to go as far back as that to get a whiff of the pungent smell of hypocrisy. As Salon was almost alone in pointing out, David Cameron was a member, in the 1980s, of the Bullingdon Club, an elite, rich boys club that specialised in, I suppose you might call them ‘mini-riots’ in local restaurants, causing thousands of pounds worth of damage. And young D. Cameron was very lucky to escape without a police record for those little escapades (indeed, David Cameron almost certainly ran away on one particular night when arrests were made and then lied about it).

Nick Clegg on the other hand, rather mind-bogglingly, is a convicted arsonist.

But it’s different when rich people do it isn’t it?