Originally posted by The17sss
Did anyone see this video of the 2 girls being interviewed by a BBC reporter on the street, explaining their rationale? Incredible:
I posted it earlier :p
DJ RANN
quote:
Originally posted by The17sss
Ha... I knew I'd agree with you on something one of these days. This is totally to your point (from a UK reporter):
Did anyone see this video of the 2 girls being interviewed by a BBC reporter on the street, explaining their rationale? Incredible:
You're spot on Kev - I heard that the other day while driving and my blood was boiling so hard I nearly crashed my ing car.
I heard another interviewer talking to some other little scumbag and he was trying to say it's because of the rises in University tuition fees next year but when he was pressed on how this would affect him going to Uni, he started going "nah, it's not about that though" and wouldn't answet the question as you know that stupid little had no chance of ever getting past the entrance requirements.
There's a video of some local activist on the BBC (can't find it now) trying to liken it to the arab spring!
Yeah, I never knew that free speech, a democratic political system, a national health service, housing benefit and the dole were reasons to burn down your local community charity shop.
I think the next time someone asks if I'm Australian, I won't bother to correct them.
Lira
quote:
Originally posted by DJ RANN
I think the next time someone asks if I'm Australian, I won't bother to correct them.
BLOODY HELL, THIS IS ALL PART OF THE SUSHIPUNK COMPLOT!
FuzzQi
quote:
Originally posted by SYSTEM-J
I don't think Jay has read 1984. In the novel only the middle classes and heavily observed and controlled. The proletariat are largely left to their own devices. I don't think it's the middle classes who are smashing up Manchester city centre.
Intredasting.jpg
EddieZilker
quote:
Originally posted by DJ RANN
...trying to liken it to the arab spring!
Oh, that's rich. Because looting is so heroic. But I can't have this detente between you and Kevin.
At least British thugs can actually spell their signs better than the tea-party!
:toothless
ReclusNdangrmnt
FuzzQi
quote:
Originally posted by ReclusNdangrmnt
SYSTEM-J
quote:
Originally posted by The17sss
Ha... I knew I'd agree with you on something one of these days. This is totally to your point (from a UK reporter):
Depending on how you define London, there are between 8 and 14,000,000 people living in the city. Unemployment figures in the UK are around 8% for the economically active. Even if we conservatively estimate the economically active population of London at around 4,000,000 people, that means there are 320,000 unemployed people in the city. 2,228 vacancies doesn't mean . Unemployment is definitely a huge problem and there definitely aren't enough jobs to go around. When I finished university and moved to this city I spent months looking for a job. You'd see a basic admin role and 150 people were applying for one position.
Of course, I should stress that anger at unemployment absolutely does not validate rioting, and smashing up local businesses and charity shops is a complete non-sequitur anyway. I just want to point out that it's utterly naive and stupid to think there are jobs out there for everyone. A lot of young and poor people in this country are absolutely ed, and when thousands of people stare into the future and see no hope, their attachment to society soon falls apart like this.
jester
quote:
Originally posted by ReclusNdangrmnt
That is more like it.
kr00t0n
quote:
Originally posted by SYSTEM-J
Depending on how you define London, there are between 8 and 14,000,000 people living in the city. Unemployment figures in the UK are around 8% for the economically active. Even if we conservatively estimate the economically active population of London at around 4,000,000 people, that means there are 320,000 unemployed people in the city. 2,228 vacancies doesn't mean . Unemployment is definitely a huge problem and there definitely aren't enough jobs to go around. When I finished university and moved to this city I spent months looking for a job. You'd see a basic admin role and 150 people were applying for one position.
Of course, I should stress that anger at unemployment absolutely does not validate rioting, and smashing up local businesses and charity shops is a complete non-sequitur anyway. I just want to point out that it's utterly naive and stupid to think there are jobs out there for everyone. A lot of young and poor people in this country are absolutely ed, and when thousands of people stare into the future and see no hope, their attachment to society soon falls apart like this.
There are jobs, but they pay less than what they can claim on benefits.
Option A: Stay at home and live off your welfare payouts.
Option B: Work your arse off in a crappy job and earn less than Option A.
Obviously people are going to pick B, falling in the lovely state-dependency trap that 13 years of Labour party mismanagement has left us with.
The only reason I don't rage more is that the government here is still a 1000 times better than that in South Africa :p
Hello Rioters.
Look at your friend, now back to me.
Now at your friend, now back to me.
Sadly, he isn't me, but if he stopped using petrol bombs and started using job centre he could potentially be me.
Look down, back up. Where are we? You're at an interview with the man your friend could work for.
What's in your hand? Back at me. I have it. It's an application form to that job you need. Look again. The form is now money.
Anything is possible when you get a job and stop looting like a ****.
I'm on the tube.
iclone
quote:
Originally posted by enydo
BUT IS GLOBAL GATHERING STILL GOING DOWN??
:stongue: i'm sure it wasn't two weekends ago.
The17sss
quote:
Originally posted by DJ RANN
You're spot on Kev - I heard that the other day while driving and my blood was boiling so hard I nearly crashed my ing car.
Yeah, I never knew that free speech, a democratic political system, a national health service, housing benefit and the dole were reasons to burn down your local community charity shop.
I think the next time someone asks if I'm Australian, I won't bother to correct them.
I hear you man. . Some pretty sobering words here from a local Londoner, and I think very relevant (even though I'm not living there like you are- this just makes sense to me) Since you live there I'd like your general thoughts on some points from the article I'm speaking of below:
quote:
If you live a normal life of absolute futility, which we can assume most of this week’s rioters do, excitement of any kind is welcome. The people who wrecked swathes of property, burned vehicles and terrorised communities have no moral compass to make them susceptible to guilt or shame.
Most have no jobs to go to or exams they might pass. They know no family role models, for most live in homes in which the father is unemployed, or from which he has decamped.
They are illiterate and innumerate, beyond maybe some dexterity with computer games and BlackBerries.
They are essentially wild beasts. I use that phrase advisedly, because it seems appropriate to young people bereft of the discipline that might make them employable; of the conscience that distinguishes between right and wrong.
They respond only to instinctive animal impulses — to eat and drink, have sex, seize or destroy the accessible property of others.
The depressing truth is that at the bottom of our society is a layer of young people with no skills, education, values or aspirations. They do not have what most of us would call ‘lives’: they simply exist.
Nobody has ever dared suggest to them that they need feel any allegiance to anything, least of all Britain or their community. They do not watch royal weddings or notice Test matches or take pride in being Londoners or Scousers or Brummies.
Not only do they know nothing of Britain’s past, they care nothing for its present.
They have their being only in video games and street-fights, casual drug use and crime, sometimes petty, sometimes serious.
The notions of doing a nine-to-five job, marrying and sticking with a wife and kids, taking up DIY or learning to read properly, are beyond their imaginations.
Then he gets into some pretty interesting points that apply the same here in America; a generation or 2 of spoiled, entitlement minded people who face less and less consequence for their action are easily replaced by Eastern Europeans (in our case usually Mexicans) who work harder, and are, more importantly, willing to work harder:
quote:
When social surveys speak of ‘deprivation’ and ‘poverty’, this is entirely relative. Meanwhile, sanctions for wrongdoing have largely vanished.
When Work and Pensions Secretary Iain Duncan Smith recently urged employers to take on more British workers and fewer migrants, he was greeted with a hoarse laugh.
Every firm in the land knows that an East European — for instance — will, first, bother to turn up; second, work harder; and third, be better-educated than his or her British counterpart.Who do we blame for this state of affairs?
Ken Livingstone, contemptible as ever, declares the riots to be a result of the Government’s spending cuts. This recalls the remarks of the then leader of Lambeth Council, ‘Red Ted’ Knight, who said after the 1981 Brixton riots that the police in his borough ‘amounted to an army of occupation’.
But it will not do for a moment to claim the rioters’ behaviour reflects deprived circumstances or police persecution.
Of course it is true that few have jobs, learn anything useful at school, live in decent homes, eat meals at regular hours or feel loyalty to anything beyond their local gang.
This is not, however, because they are victims of mistreatment or neglect. It is because it is fantastically hard to help such people, young or old, without imposing a measure of compulsion which modern society finds unacceptable. These kids are what they are because nobody makes them be anything different or better.
And the 3rd leg seems to be a mix of family breakdown and how the police have shifted to a standard of supporting perpetrators' rights over the rights of actual victims (reminds me of the movie Harry Brown with Michael Caine from last year):
quote:
A key factor in delinquency is lack of effective sanctions to deter it. From an early stage, feral children discover that they can bully fellow pupils at school, shout abuse at people in the streets, urinate outside pubs, hurl litter from car windows, play car radios at deafening volumes, and, indeed, commit casual assaults with only a negligible prospect of facing rebuke, far less retribution.
Anyone who reproaches a child, far less an adult, for discarding rubbish, making a racket, committing vandalism or driving unsociably will receive in return a torrent of obscenities, if not violence.
So who is to blame? The breakdown of families, the pernicious promotion of single motherhood as a desirable state, the decline of domestic life so that even shared meals are a rarity, have all contributed importantly to the condition of the young underclass.
And what of the schools? I do not think they can be blamed for the creation of a grotesquely self-indulgent, non-judgmental culture.
This has ultimately been sanctioned by Parliament, which refuses to accept, for instance, that children are more likely to prosper with two parents than with one, and that the dependency culture is a tragedy for those who receive something for nothing.
The judiciary colludes with social services and infinitely ingenious lawyers to assert the primacy of the rights of the criminal and aggressor over those of law-abiding citizens, especially if a young offender is involved.
The police, in recent years, have developed a reputation for ignoring yobbery and bullying, or even for taking the yobs’ side against complainants.
‘The problem,’ said Bill Pitt, the former head of Manchester’s Nuisance Strategy Unit, ‘is that the law appears to be there to protect the rights of the perpetrator, and does not support the victim.’
Police regularly arrest householders who are deemed to have taken ‘disproportionate’ action to protect themselves and their property from burglars or intruders. The message goes out that criminals have little to fear from ‘the feds’.
Finally, a sad and probably all-too-true anecdote that is also a very commonly growing problem here in the States:
quote:
A teacher, Francis Gilbert, wrote five years ago in his book Yob Nation: ‘The public feels it no longer has the right to interfere.’
Discussing the difficulties of imposing sanctions for misbehaviour or idleness at school, he described the case of a girl pupil he scolded for missing all her homework deadlines.
The youngster’s mother, a social worker, telephoned him and said: ‘Threatening to throw my daughter off the A-level course because she hasn’t done some work is tantamount to psychological abuse, and there is legislation which prevents these sorts of threats.
‘I believe you are trying to harm my child’s mental well-being, and may well take steps . . . if you are not careful.’
That story rings horribly true. It reflects a society in which teachers have been deprived of their traditional right to arbitrate pupils’ behaviour. Denied power, most find it hard to sustain respect, never mind control.
