Anarchy and Austerity: Why London Won't Be the Last City to Burn

From The Atlantic magazine:


As a number of us have been saying, there are two stories in play in the UK. One is about the criminal activity of the rioters, the second is about their social situation. If you don't improve the second, you'll get more of the first. Guaranteed.

"And yet, somewhat miraculously, crime has fallen in the U.S. through the Great Recession. James Q. Wilson offered four explanations: (1) More criminals in prison; (2) Better police tactics for finding and patrolling crime hotspots; (3) Better home security technology; and (4) Fewer drugs, including lead in our blood and cocaine. The long decline of American crime is one of the quiet miracles of the last 40 years. We're about to find out if it can hold up to American-style austerity."

I don't think this explains it enough. I agree that the criminal justice and prison system is brutal all right, but I think it has more to do with racism and scapegoating of immigrants, which keeps people divided and unable to organize effectively for change.

Also, the propaganda machine is very effective at dividing people idiologically. Anyway, as long as people are divided, it will be very difficult for everyone.

was not a viable strategy -- it appeared only to reinforce the worst of the reaction from the Right and the State's police powers. Many on the Left decided to try the electoral alternative -- change from within.

Well, now, we see the high-technology police state's neoliberal economic foundations crumbling, and have witnessed the failure of Blair and Obama-style reform politics. Many are reconsidering their approach to social activism.

Bad things happen when a pressure cooker explodes.

Not sure that Obama (or any of the current crop) have the right stuff to prevent this thing from blowing up.

Has anyone ever wielded emergency powers (relatively) benignly and effectively outside the context of a major war? Is that what's next in the First Responders manual?

of Obama's Compromise and of British hacking away at the Welfare State.

Expect more CHAOS.

Rising food and gasoline prices (aka Climate Change and Peak Oil) spring to mind, along with the whole question of how secure our newly transferred Chinese/SE-Asian manufacturing base is...

My impression is that Obama is a highly competent crisis manager, but a deficient leader. He's too conventional in his thinking and too much an organization man. FDR had a stronger character and was more independent in his thinking and approach to the Presidency.

Any crisis management that Obama will probably do in this situation would be on the level of putting the rioters in jail. It will solve nothing. The crisis itself is very deep and multi-factorial, and the pressures from the law-and-order side of the house to view it through an authoritarian lens will be very hard to resist.

When someone breaks their neighbors window and steals their property, what is the philosophical principle that justifies it?

People cannot always control what occurs in their lives; however, they can control how they respond. A moral response requires an analysis and adjustment to the factors; not the abandonment of moral standards.

When people get frustrated enough they act out. Nothing justifies the acting out, but if you don't fix the causes of frustration, it's going to happen.

ETA: "Explanation" is quite different from "justification", right?

You seem to be suggesting that human beings have no control over their actions...that we are animals, acting on instinct, rather than reason.

A human being's values, not instincts, are the motivating force for their actions. I see these looters as people who have no moral values. The do not respect themselves; thus, they are unable to respect others.

that believes humans ARE herd animals and instincts do play a lot of a role in our behavior. Albeit it is fairly recent... it does say that this little thing called free will is an invention... it also puts this theory forward... we are PART OF NATURE... not above it.

Oh and pheromone study is part of it. What should scare you, I know it gives me all kinds of not so warm fuzzies, is that political research and PSYCHOLOGICAL research are coming together. One conclusion is that manipulating POPULATIONS is this easy actually.

Personally I do not put that much stock in free will, due to life and family experience... but that is just me.

Are you suggesting that humans are no longer evolving...a theory of de-evolution...?

Biological evolution takes place over tens of thousands of years. To use an analogy from the world of computing, we can think of culture as an operating system and human beings are the machines it runs on. The OS can be upgraded fairly easily, but the meat computer is essentially hard wired.

It sounds to me like you need to read more about the structure and behaviour of the human brain. Everybody involved with modern neuropsychology accepts the fact that there are both instinctive and cognitive components to human behaviour. And in fact recent psychological research suggests that much more of our behaviour has unconscious, emotional, instinctive drivers than has been recognized up till now.

To many of us the idea that our apparent free will and free moral choice is still constrained by our animal heritage is very uncomfortable. Here are a couple of links with some background that might help you integrate this information more easily:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biological_psychology
http://www.cnsspectrums.com/aspx/articledetail.aspx?articleid=566

in fact, humans continue to evolve to adapt to their environment... but that has nothing to do with being a herd animal. In fact a herd, aka social animal, is part of that evolution. Or are you saying humans are not social animals?

about society by studying human beings. On the other hand, there is nothing to be learned about humans by studying society. For unlike the environment, society is not something that is separate and apart from the sum of its individual human members.

Herd is synonymous with tribe. During prehistorical times, humans formed tribal associations as a means for protecting themselves from an inhospitable environment, as well as from other tribes. However, as humans evolved they created, invented and developed the means for becoming independent and self-sufficient beings.

Humans living in advanced civilizations, do not depend on the herd for their survival or the shepherd for their decisions.

For civilized humans are creatures logic and reason.

except for aspects that have been left in us from earlier forms of man. Our species is relatively young, so we still have several traits from prior species/manifestations.

But yes- we are still evolving. For example: red heads are becoming less common and within our lifetimes will likely become extinct. That is a form of evolution. I think I read somewhere (don't quote me) that there is a growing number of people born without an appendix? If that's true- that's another example.

and dentition has changed to adapt to softer food stuffs (aka cooked) over the last 10K years... and the muscles in the head, are not as strong as they used to be.

Forms of evolution indeed.

However, human behaviour does have a surprisingly large unconscious, instinctual component. We can tell that's true by the change in our behaviour when we become emotionally aroused or triggered. When we're calm and relaxed we're quite rational, but as we become more emotional our behaviour becomes harder to control - we become more reactive. In higher arousal states, value-driven, algorithmic cause-and-effect thinking become less and less accessible. At the top end of the arousal scale there are emotions like "blind" rage, "mindless" panic and "paralyzing" fear. There's a reason those adjectives are associated with those emotions.

On a less dramatic level, as nadinbrzezinski points out, we have the herding instinct or "groupthink". It's a very well-known phenomenon that is seen in otherwise quite rational people - like the group of engineers at Morton Thiokol who stayed silent about the O-rings on the Challenger's booster rockets, rather than do the reasonable, rational thing and speak up in the meeting. Their limbic brains signaled that the immediate risk of speaking up and standing out from the crowd was the greater threat. That irrational mistake was a product of our evolved neuro-psychology.

She also raised the idea of pheromones, which reminded me of a fascinating and frightening talk by a scent researcher I saw a few years ago. He had developed a very subtle (virtually unnoticeable) scent for a casino in Las Vegas. During the live test they isolated the air supply of one wing of the casino and treated it with his scenting agent. An identical wing of the building was left untreated. Over the course of the three-day test the casino's take in the treated wing was 40% higher than in the untreated wing. The scent apparently made the gamblers more risk-tolerant, so they bet larger amounts on longer odds. Not rational behaviour by any stretch of the imagination.

That's a long-winded way of saying that it's easy to sit in our safe environments and apply reason to situations like riots. The fact that we can do it in our calm state makes us assume (mistakenly) that they can do it as easily in their agitated state. To assume that such cool reason is always accessible under any and all circumstances is, well, unreasonable.

However, it does not prevent them from doing so.

Free will...if a person is free to choose, they have control of the choices they make, and that is what determines their moral character.

But wrong.

For I believe in "free will."

But if you insist that others act out your belief you'd best be ready to back it up with some evidence. The research is pointing more and more in the other direction.

is nothing more than moral cowardice.

And nothing can corrupt a culture or a person's character as thoroughly as the notion of moral agnosticism...that nothing is wrong, nothing is right...nothing is black and nothing is white.

The Bible is wrong when is says judge not lest ye be judged.

I say, judge me, as you judge everyone else--by the same *objectively* valid legal principles.

If you look at the history of riots, in almost every instance the same conditions are there before there is an explosion of anger which is, yes, irrational and often turns criminal. But would these riots have happened, without the factors that are present in almost all of them?

Would you, eg, be able to remain rational if you and/or your mother, your children were subjected to police brutality on a daily basis? Have you ever wondered why there are no riots in upscale neighborhoods?

What morals are involved in Governments that starve their own people? I tend to agree with you regarding free will. Eg, the British Govt had the free will not to impose draconian austerity measures which have crushed the already poor and the working class. Why did they do that? It really wasn't necessary.

How about the rich looters, they ones who crashed the world's economies? They surely caused far more damage to people's lives than the more obvious looters who stole a few TVs during the London Riots.

Is there 'respectable' looting and 'not respectable looting' and if so, what does that say about our judgement?

Stealing trillions from tax-payers, engaging in corrupt, criminal behavior that caused the collapse of the US and European economies, why have none of these people been held accountable? They knew when they cheated their investors what they were doing. Yet the anger towards them is far more muted than the anger against their victims.

There were many warnings of civil unrest if these Austerity programs continued to be imposed on people. So really, why is anyone acting surprised?

You asked above if human beings were evolving. Well, we have developed more powerful weapons of mass destruction eg. But I see little evolvement in the area of the 'haves and have nots'. If anything there appears to be a regression. A civil and evolved society understands that everyone does better when everyone is doing better. But here in the US and in Europe at this point, prejudice against the poor, resentment that someone might getting something for free, fear of those who are 'different' is creating a huge underclass which, whether you like it or not, like all human beings who become desperate, hopeless, will eventually react.

I am fascinated by the difference in the outrage against poor criminals and wealthy criminals. What causes that? I'm also fascinated by the outrage over the murder of one individual while the State murders of hundreds of thousands of people barely causes a reaction at all.

Hasn't it always been that way though? So have we evolved at all? Imo, no. There are few societies we could point to that have evolved. Norway might be one of them. But generally speaking the world is still where it was centuries ago, still believing that violence, wars and torture eg, will keep us safe, and then we wonder why citizens of countries with that belief turn to violence themselves.

Nor have they been overtly violent, being committed entirely by means of signatures on paper. In this case the pen is mightier than the molotov - and far more evil.

For on one side of the equation I see the looters, while on the other, I see their law-abiding neighbors. I ask you, what is their neighbors sin? How are they in any way responsible for the behavior of these irrational criminals?

Likewise, what are the moral or philosophical principles that sanction the violation of an innocent individual's rights?

There are indeed two sides to every story...the right side and the wrong side. In order to pretend that no choices or values exist, some people seek a "middle side" that does not exist.

Stealing trillions from tax-payers, engaging in corrupt, criminal behavior that caused the collapse of the US and European economies, why have none of these people been held accountable?

The last time I checked, the UK had a Parliament and the US had a Congress. Thus, the responsibility for holding those who caused the economic damage accountable, rests in the hands of the People. Accordingly, they are morally bound to make themselves heard at the ballot box, not by the sound of broken glass and other forms of destruction.

I do indulge in the abject evasions that allow others to claim that these people can't help it. For that would require an abandonment of reason.

a certain group for their benefit, the rest of us have no recourse?

If was used in the context of a certain group winning a free and fair election, the only recourse you have is to better explain, or improve the ideas that you are pushing.

On the other hand, if the context was inferring fraudulent or other illegal activity as a means of controlling, other recourses may be necessary and considered legitimate. However, no legitimate recourse would include, stealing from, vandalizing, or killing your neighbors.

For that is not how civilized human beings treat their neighbors.

recourse to acquiring necessary resources, such as Oil eg, would or should include bombing a foreign country into oblivion and killing and torturing hundreds of thousands of its innocent civilians, men women and children in order to get it.

For that is not how civilized human beings treat other innocent human beings. And yet, that is exactly how the Governments of the US and its fellow Colonialist Government in the UK, have treated untold numbers of decent, innocent human beings in various countries. And then they just take, loot, pillage, whatever you want to call it, what they want, on a grand scale!

Maybe such cultures, cultures that are steeped in this kind of violence, regarding how to get what you want, are simply NOT so civilized after all?? Should we be surprised, really? Your logic doesn't work very well here. If you want a civilized society, you hardly get that by slaughtering people who have things you want on a massive scale, and then expect the lower echelons of such a society to act differently.

You offer nothing of value really, on how to either explain or prevent more of this from happening. So long as Governments continue to rape, kill and pillage other nations and the police continue to shoot dead ordinary citizens in their own countries, the truth is, these are cultures of violence, and to expect anything other than violence throughout such cultures, simply isn't logical!

killed by the police. The relationship between the police and the very poor in that area had a history of problems. Still, the initial demonstration was peaceful. They wanted to know what happened. The police refused to speak to them. Disrespect by the police is something they are accustomed to.

It seems now that the people were correct, the man did not fire at the police, so how come he ended up dead? And the beating of the 16 year-old girl was what finally created the anger that sparked the riots. Yes, others joined in, for the kicks or whatever, which is what usually happens, but the riot did not begin so that people could steal TVs. Amazing how the real cause has been entirely forgotten.

Use your imagination for a moment and exchange the location to an upper class neighborhood. The police shood and kill a resident of that neighborhood. The people ask for an explanation. They are ignored. A teenage girl, the daughter of a wealthy resident of the area, is beaten by the police.

Yes, I know, it would never happen that way so it is hard to try to imagine. Police generally don't go around shooting the sons and daughters of the wealthy which is why there are never any riots in wealthy areas. Or had that occurred to you? I can't think, offhand, of a riot in an upscale neighborhood. Because if there was a shooting there, requests for an explanation would not be ignored. Nor would the beating of a wealthy teenager by 15 police officers occur on the street in such a neighborhood.

As for this:



I have to admit, that me laugh my head off. Are you serious? The entire Republican party belongs to the Koch Bros and their ilk, bought and paid for and that's who they work for, and at least half of the Dem Party. Sure, the power 'rests in the hands of the People'! Corporations ARE people too so I guess you do have a point, only not the one you thought you had! :rofl:

You are funny!

The Koch Bros. are responsible for causing some Londoners to steal from, vandalize and kill their neighbors. And further, that the electorate is not responsible for the government that they have elected to serve them.

research, and a bit more contact with the reality of the political situation, you'll probably catch up eventually.

I get that the police shooting poor people to death is not particularly important to the 'comfortable' and definitely no reason for their loved ones (do they actually have loved ones, the poor I mean, in the minds of the 'upper class'?) to be complaining.

Just take it and stfu is what they are supposed to do. And have been doing apparently, which was never a good idea to begin with. And then every once in a while, they can't take it anymore, just human nature, something else you might come to appreciate if you keep trying.

I tried to be nice to you. I really, sincerely tried. But as my sainted mother used to tell me, "You can lead a horticulture, but you can't make her think." I think I've had enough pig-wrestling for today.

Thus, the logical conclusion is that you are opposed to the premise.

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looks at many aspects of the entire socio-economic system as a whole.

A moralizer seeks to accuse and condemn. A systems thinker strives to profoundly understand what makes a system fail or work.

This cartoon illustrates the systems thinker's view of the London riots.



Thanks to n2doc for first posting this pic.

where I asked the 'moralizer' why the level of anger directed at the London 'looters' was so much more intense than the anger at the Corporate Looters who have destroyed the economies of the entire first world and caused more harm to this world than we can even calculate. And not one of them has been arrested so far.

Thanks for posting this, it would saved me from typing all those words :-)

Cowardice indeed.

to the misrepresentation of reality.

about the bankers and their toadies in government who stole more money than all these "looters" could steal together in a million years? Or do you just excorciate the poor and working class?

not that I disagree with the main point of the article, but London was not consumed by fires.

It was part of the trivium, after all.

Hyperbole is the use of exaggeration as a rhetorical device or figure of speech. It may be used to evoke strong feelings or to create a strong impression, but is not meant to be taken literally.

I'm not sure what your objection is.

And it is normal in informal English to leave out the obvious. It is obvious here, for example, that "all of London" was not intended, since all of London has not been burned, yet anyway, so it was not necessary to fend that possibility off.

Edit: to be fair, the word "consumed" was used too, which does suggest a thorough job of burning.

Yep, we do have such a crowd.

you managed to post that same picture and response again!
Let's hope it doesn't get deleted this time!
Hopefully(for you), there will be a riot here soon so you can tell us all how you predicted it.

Combine the constant 6-7 threads a day that say "riots are gonna happen here" with the threads about how "voting doesn't matter" and it's easy to see why some might say you and Glen Beck have something in common. Cuz he says those things quite a bit too!

Rec

In fact, cheap prison labor will grow because Chinese labor + shipping is more expensive. It's pretty clear they don't care about our lives.

minus the riots.

We have to make sure we don't cross that line. People might call us names.