Filibuster Cartoons
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I must admit that my initial reaction to the London riots was one of jealousy. After all, but two months ago, Vancouver experienced a massive riot of our own, and the international attention we received was hardly comparable. It seemed offensive, both to my sensibilities as a Canadian (long the ignored, uninteresting middle child of the western world) and a Vancouverite (the ignored, uninteresting middle child of Canada itself).
Of course, in the days that followed, it quickly became clear that the multi-day British riots, which will soon be celebrating their week-iversary, and the riots that followed our Stanley Cup loss, were actually two very different things. As awful and revealing the riots in my city were, and I certainly had a lot to say about them at the time, the spectacle in England has been infinitely moreso.
What caused the unrest? Officially, the death of Mark Duggan, a black man who was shot to death by English police Saturday night, a tragic incident spawned by (and isn’t this always the case?) confusion over how armed he was and what he was planning to do with his weapon. But any hope that the ensuing violence and chaos would conform neatly to some sort of Rodney King-esque symbolic battle between Britain’s downtrodden urban blacks and racially-insensitive police establishment were quickly dashed when Britons of all races and backgrounds began to get into the fun. Incriminating photos posted on blogs such as Catch-a-Looter, show a fairly multicultural range of faces, stealing TVs and smashing windows, and even the rich diversity of Britain’s class system seems well represented, with college students, teaching assistants, and other middle class suburbanites rubbing shoulders with the inner-city poor.
What’s become depressingly clear, therefore, is that these riots aren’t really “about” anything per se, in much the same way the Vancouver riots weren’t. They’re merely an expression of some omnipresent, disgusting side of contemporary youth culture — a culture that views all laws and authority figures, as well as basic social conventions like manners and private property, as illegitimate shackles of oppression. The second those shackles go, and one is free to steal, smash, and screw anything that catches one’s eye… well, only then is one truly free.
There’s this monstrously repulsive and evil comic on the Internet that is fairly popular in some circles, for shock value, if nothing else. I read an interview with the strip’s author a while ago, and I found it quite revealing, since it seemed to summarize a sort of logic I feel is becoming increasingly mainstream amongst members of my generation. Asked why he happily draws scenes of such incredible depravity, the artist described himself as a nihilist, claiming that only by embracing nihilism once can obtain “the ultimate in spiritual freedom.” And perhaps that’s true, so long as the rest of society, the people who build your homes and cook your meals and program your computers, are willing to believe in all that oppressive crap, and create an entertaining and well-lit world for you to inhabit.
A very good article on the riots by David Goodheart at the Prospect described the violence in England as representing a sort of “post-political disaffection,” that doesn’t really stem from anywhere deeper than a vague preference for feeling perpetually unhappy and victimized. The entire bothersome business of having to justify one’s own destructive acts with a coherent set of ideological principles, or even slogans, is now evidently oppressive, too. Basically, anyone who is not you is simply wrong, and you’re no longer obligated to even say why.
How is it that so many young people have wound up like this, so impulsively entertained by vicious violence and so seemingly empowered by the sheer senselessness of it all? Britain’s conservative commentariat certainly have no shortage of theories.
Many, such as this woman, have pointed the finger at the decline of traditional families and traditional education, both of which have been systematically undermined in recent decades by new, more progressive and “tolerant” models. Single-parent households, high divorce rates, latch-key parenting, and out-of-wedlock births have all risen massively in both popularity and acceptance in the UK, as passing judgement over someone else’s familial background is recast as the worst sort of bigotry. Undisciplined, unruly children may result, true, but at least no one’s feelings are hurt.
British history, meanwhile, is now increasingly taught as merely one long slog of oppression. The entire history of human relations is defined through narratives of abuse and victimhood. Whites oppressed non-whites, men oppressed women, Christians oppressed non-Christians. Anyone in power was wicked, anyone out of power was wronged. This is certainly the lens through which I learned the history of my own country, and indeed the entire history of the western world. For many adults my age, I imagine it’s seriously difficult to imagine learning of history in any other way. Small wonder, then, that so many of us are willing to continue the fight, and battle the vague spectre of “oppression” in our own pampered lives, having been taught for so long to fear its omnipresence.
Reforms have consequences, and many British conservatives can now sit back and say the dire warnings they’ve been issuing from the 60′s onward have, in fact, been borne out. Permissiveness and non-judgement have, in fact, bred a culture that is more lawless, violent, and gross than the one that came before it. A series of top-down experiments to make the United Kingdom more egalitarian, unstructured, multi-cultural, and post-modern have all been attempted, and if not failed outright, at least yielded some pretty disastrous side-effects.
Prime Minister David Cameron is a man I have an enormous degree of respect for, primarily because he, unlike other conservative leaders in the Anglosphere, has had the courage to identify anti-social behavior and social breakdown as serious problems slowly gnawing away at the very foundations of western civilization. He seems to take the idea of a “society” seriously, and in that respect, may be the best man for the job of fixing the broken one that his government has inherited.
August 12th, 2011 at 1:07 am
Quality post. Me likey.
Must say, I'm curious about which comic you're referring to – I have a couple possibilities in mind – though I can certainly respect you not wanting to give it traffic.
August 12th, 2011 at 1:39 am
Same here. I would be most interested to know.
August 12th, 2011 at 6:30 am
LMAO, so when JJ writes disparagingly and at length about the decay of morals in culture and among the many points he raises, he makes an off-hand comment about an infamous comic which he pointedly doesn't name – what is the FIRST thing people ask about? They want to know which comic that was. The better to disparage it too, presumably. Right?
August 12th, 2011 at 8:37 am
It's not difficult to find based on the information in JJ's post. I found it, though I kind of regret looking for it now. It's utterly vile beyond what I anticipated when I went to find it.
August 12th, 2011 at 8:43 am
JJ, you are way off. Don't you read facebook or salon.com? Everybody knows that bankers with unreasonably high salaries cause people to smash windows, burn cars, and beat each other up; rioters have no choice in the matter.
August 12th, 2011 at 8:47 am
Of course, a comment like this is more likely to strengthen the resolve of people want to see it, rather than warn anyone off. So-called atrocity tourism is one of those darker aspects of Internet culture.
August 12th, 2011 at 9:50 am
JJ,
Very well-said. While I am an American, David Cameron is among the best leaders I have seen for a conservative movement/party in the West in a long time. Honestly, I wish we could have him here in the US…but then again, the Tories in Britain have generally tended to pick leaders of a slightly better quality than we manage in the US.
To some extent, I think many in society have confounded (and confounded very badly) the concepts of "oppression" and "restraint". Restraint is necessary for any society to work…it means not giving people license to simply do as they will, giving them a stable, reasonably solid moral framework to operate in. Oppression, on the other hand, involves actively denying people rights without any sort of basis whatsoever (or at least one that can stand up to some sort of reasonable analysis). When the two get blended (and let's face it, it is easy to "buzzword" any sort of societal restraint into being seen as a form of oppression, violate Godwin's law (I can't even think of how many times I've seen any opponent of societal license called a "fascist" or some variant thereof, and those attacks have particularly powerful effects in Europe given the last century), and more or less intimidate a lot of folks into going along with letting that restraint fall.
It is good that Cameron is willing to recognize the folly of this and stand up. In some ways, it may be too little too late (and at least some of it may well be a response to the rise of the "hard right" in Europe, though ironically I think both symptoms have a similar cause in the passage of time dulling the linguistic cudgels that have been used against them)…but at least it's actually happening for a change. The sad thing is that he seems to be one of the few leading conservatives who understands that capitalism is not a moral system, for example (a disconnect which has cropped up in the US; see also Adam Smith's theory of moral sentiments)…and the other sad thing is that he is so alone in understanding that which he does seem to understand.
I will close with a question, primarily rhetorical: At what point does it become necessary, in order to stop the runaway rot in a society, to turn to people who cry oppression or hurl vicious insults at people who try to maintain some semblance of social order, and simply embrace their insults and take them as complements that maybe you're actually doing the job that needs doing? I know this is an uncomfortable question to ask (and even more uncomfortable when the answer is in the affirmative), but I think it needs asking at times. After all, let us face the fact that it is not just Britain that has had such problems…there was an incident in Atlanta, Georgia where a mob of youths stormed a local transit train and beat up a bunch of the passengers (and I believe more or less got away with it), and let us not even get into the piles of riots on the Continent.
Anyhow, I've said enough for now…thanks for a great analysis of the riots in England and a solid commentary on how things have been going.
August 12th, 2011 at 10:27 am
I will start by offering a few solution to your question. Most of these degenerates are minors. Most of them come from broken homes. Most of them come from homes that receive generous amounts of government assistance. Clearly these aren't the best and brightest of British society. Maggie Thatcher said there is no society. Well for these people she was correct. They lack any semblance of civilized society other than receiving government benefits.
One thing that needs to be adopted is parental accountability laws. Simply put… if your kid commits a crime, you both face punishment. I hate the idea of government telling people to be parents, but we have reached that point. Be a parent or face the consequences.
Next, you need to discourage anti-social behavior in general. This includes teenage pregnancy and child birth before marriage. It is time to cut off the support network that promotes this behavior. Really I don't care if these people visit the abortion clinc. Having a generation of degenerates they will not properly raise is more troublesome to society than abortion.
August 12th, 2011 at 10:34 am
Well I am less charitable on Cameron. While I think he is right in caring about these issues, he responded to this in the wrong way. These riots were a repudiation of the authority of the state and society. By failing to crush this within hours instead of days, he failed to send a message that these punks are meaningless in the grand scheme of things and their behavior is harmful to civil society and the state. He really missed a chance to show whose boss and teaching these degenerates a lesson. Smacking them on the wrist and denouncing this behavior really does not solve the underlying problem: a complete lack of respect for any kind of authority. These people lack any respect for the political system and need to be brought into line.
August 12th, 2011 at 11:07 am
Single-parent households, high divorce rates, latch-key parenting, and out-of-wedlock births are never good things and while not optimal, aren't the great contributor to the urban discontent.
As it was with France, it comes down to jobs. Many of the originally rioting neighborhoods have incredibly high rates of unemployment (something around 80%) to say nothing of the poverty, crime, and general neglect of educational funding. Sure, there's welfare but that was always meant to be a stopgap measure, not one for upward mobility.
In New York City, we had the same neighborhoods with poor blacks, Latinos, and even some whites. After better police training, educational funding, community unity, and opportunities for jobs came, places like Red Hook, Fort Greene, Crown Heights, Flatbush, Marcy Projects, and Bedford-Stuyvesant once thought to be lost to gangs forever suddenly improved.
People will not riot and destroy civilization as long as they have a stake in it and it's clear the rioters either had none or were offered none.
August 12th, 2011 at 11:18 am
JJ, Cameron suggesting to block social media to rein in the riots – slippery slope to Orwellian government control or acceptable infringement on private liberty for the good of the nation?
August 12th, 2011 at 12:14 pm
Whatever you say my Lord
August 12th, 2011 at 12:35 pm
"At what point does it become necessary, in order to stop the runaway rot in a society, to turn to people who cry oppression or hurl vicious insults at people who try to maintain some semblance of social order, and simply embrace their insults and take them as complements that maybe you're actually doing the job that needs doing?"
This actually touches on a point I wanted to incude in my original article. I think we need to move beyond the "oppression/freedom" narrative that increasingly defines absolutely everything in our modern culture and embrace a more old-fashioned paradigm of right versus wrong. And in order to do that, I think the forces of order in society need to call the bluff of the professional victim set and their enablers, and say, yes, we ARE actually going to impose more "oppression" on you.
The "oppression" of a structured, stable family.
The "oppression" of high-standards education and strict teachers.
The "oppression" of a mass media and popular culture that models more good behaviour than bad.
The "oppression" of peers, friends, and fellow citizens who are willing to judge and discriminate against rudeness, stupidity, and nihilism.
So I completely agree with you, Gray. This sort of "oppression" is merely success, and should be recognized as such.
August 12th, 2011 at 12:37 pm
I think his comments on this front have been largely taken out of context. He was talking about the idea of disrupting subversive online plotting, not flipping a giant Mubarak-like Internet kill switch.
August 12th, 2011 at 1:02 pm
In the end when dealing with such a broad issue ,how much of causation is knowable and doesn't boil down into mere Rorschach projection of one's own personal vision of causation.
August 12th, 2011 at 1:14 pm
It's been reported that many people arrested and responsible for the rioting, have jobs. So this isn't it. It's much closer to the stupidity that occurred in Vancouver… people have the opportunity with low chance of being caught.
This isn't that different from people creating hate forums/blogs/facebook pages to embarrass and humiliate a target. The internet doesn't forget… but real life does if you get away with it.
The UK is more of a surveillance society than Canada and the USA is. On news-humour sites the UK is often called a "nannystate." But the fact that most of it is property damage and not people fighting the government distinguishes it from the Arab spring. The Iranian president even went so far to try and make this comparison, laughably. http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2011/aug/10/uk-riots...
The police cracking own on property crimes in progress, is restoring order, not oppression.
August 12th, 2011 at 1:39 pm
Perhaps they need context of what something oppressive is if they are rioting about how oppressed they are.
August 12th, 2011 at 2:16 pm
Regardless, breaking up communication is a big deal.
August 12th, 2011 at 2:53 pm
A nice thought, but parental accountability laws would have to go hand in hand with giving parents back the authority to actually punish their kids, something we're steadily taking away.
August 12th, 2011 at 3:00 pm
I think you pretty much hit the nail on the head with this one. Although I think I will never fully comprehend what goes on in the minds of people who choose to do something like this. It is truly deplorable and there is no excuse for such violence and destruction.
August 12th, 2011 at 3:07 pm
Is it? If the cops bust down a door and interrupt two plotters mid-conversation is that infringing on freedom of speech? Or what if they cut the phone lines?
August 12th, 2011 at 3:38 pm
Modern Values: Corrupting London since 1780! http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gordon_Riots
August 12th, 2011 at 4:09 pm
Nah, actually your post worked for me.. I'm not going to look now, no need to see disgusting comics.
August 12th, 2011 at 4:33 pm
I really like the toon, but I don't like this analysis at all. In the toon you're essentially admitting that we're trying to figure out what's in the mind of a rioter, but now you've come to all these conclusions based on little evidence, and are ready to swing the hammer of oppression on us all.
If I am an African woman sold to a man who beats and rapes me, and I'm forced to stay married to him all my life because of society and law, are my children really better off than the western woman who leaves the same kind of man and raises the children on her own?
If a child lives with the parents who don't believe in physical discipline, you're going to allow a stranger to do this for whatever reason he likes? What recourse do the parents have if the state empowers every teacher the right to smack their children?
Hollywood is now forced to take directions from politicians to only show happy moral movies? I guess the only video games we can play are bobble and pacman now?
I take no issue with the last one though, as anyone is free to judge in whatever way they want in a free society..
August 12th, 2011 at 5:47 pm
Interesting: http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/world/what-ha...
August 12th, 2011 at 6:18 pm
"Reforms have consequences, and many British conservatives can now sit back and say the dire warnings they’ve been issuing from the 60′s onward have, in fact, been borne out. Permissiveness and non-judgement have, in fact, bred a culture that is more lawless, violent, and gross than the one that came before it."
That would have been more salient in 1994. At that point it was true that lawlessness and violence was happening in record amounts. In 2011, though, it's not true at all. Violent crime has been decreasing in much of the West (including the United Kingdom) since then.
August 12th, 2011 at 10:09 pm
Things don't have to be extreme.
Support for a stable family doesn't mean opposition to divorce for cause. Support for disciplined schools is not support for child abuse. Opposition to rape porn is not opposition to anything less than child-friendly. There are middle grounds, and they are where we live 99% of the time. Ignoring them makes no sense.
August 12th, 2011 at 10:19 pm
Wasn't that a comment by the Chinese government about why the riots happened in London?
August 13th, 2011 at 12:58 am
"British history, meanwhile, is now increasingly taught as merely one long slog of oppression."
Where are you getting this from, exactly, and when did they start teaching this? Recognition that hm, that was probably a bit oppressive come to think about it is not examined and discussed only sometimes. Never mind actually doing a full analysis of oppression. When dealing with social issues, history teaching in the UK seems to be more of the flavour of "isn't it wonderful that we're so enlightened nowadays and have votes and clean water and stuff".
Even those rioters who have jobs know they're the lucky ones and come from a community which is often not connected or valued but at best tolerated. Even the deputy PM was pointing out that it's because people feel they have no stake in society.
August 13th, 2011 at 4:03 am
Hi JJ,
I'm a Brit who has stumbled upon your blog and while your analysis of the looters is quite correct I do not share your faith in Mr.Cameron's abilities or motivation. You are correct that an nebulous sense of anti-elitism has engendered a dangerously subjective set of morals within British society however both Tory & Labour administrations have fueled this ethos since the 1980's. For thirty years UK governments of all stripes have been almost soley concerened the promtion of laissez faire market conditions in leiu of grappling with tricky non vote winning moral issues (increasing equality, increasing crime rate, reduction in education standards etc) in the false belief that social problems could be overlooked as long as the economy remained expanding. Mr Camerons knee jerk reaction to the rioting has been high in headline winning soundbites about rubber bullets & shutting down Facebook and low in any substance regarding community revival. Not that its all the goverments fault, we have all watched this decline for years and cared little as long a house prices continued to rise.
It is for all of us to promote a sense of respect, care and pride in our communities.
August 13th, 2011 at 7:26 am
JJ, Who is this 'we', these 'forces of order'? Who is making these decisons, and who is empowered to enforce them?
I mean, the media already try to do this to the best of their ability. Politicians are hardly spotless moral arbiters (both for behaviour as politicians and in previous lives – Cameron and other senior Tories used to be in a posh boys' drinking and rioting club, for example). Nevertheless they are also quick to weigh in on this sort of thing.
The police already have a very wide remit to gear up and use violence without fear of being held to account, and when the immediate cause of the riots is a police shooting in an area of poor community relations, arguing we need a tougher and more invasive police force requires a lot more justification. They're also issuing press releases and quite possibly still selling stories to the papers.
And who are these rules being imposed on? Are they going to be imposed on people who have jobs, savings and own their own homes, who have the freedom to live more or less where they choose and how they choose? Or are we talking about evicting people from social housing, 'clearing out' people who don't have homes or the permission to use the homes they've made for themselves? Are we talking about imposing yet more tests to make sure recipients of benefits for incapacity or unemployment are 'deserving', without considering how people considered 'undeserving' will be forced to survive?
Maybe you're not aruing for that, but other people are, and if you've an atual practical alternative, perhaps you'd like to explain it?
See, i wonder if maybe it's just that living in a society which is manifestly hyopocritical, arbitrarily violent, and economically unjust, one that offers little hope and no sympathy that makes people conclude that there is no real point (moral or private) in strictly following the rules.
August 13th, 2011 at 8:26 am
Pablo… I agree with your analysis of Cameron. He is just getting headlines for shock value.
I would disagree with you though on his ability to solve these problems. He would need to bring forward draconian measures like parental accountability laws. As American columnist Peggy Noonan points out, these are not government problems that government can solve, but societal problems that people have to solve outside government.
August 13th, 2011 at 9:46 am
I'm not entirely sold on this idea that permissiveness is to blame. I've read some of your other posts on the subject and I must say I've never seen the topic so well summarized or made accessible as you have done. However, attributing the laudanum rowdiness to alternative family structures is a bridge too far. Granted, the idea that I can say the words alternative family structures with a straight face should be noticed as a way in which this conversation about the traditional form has changed.
You have presented this theory of permissiveness as it relates to the London riots as coming out of different mouths and it complicates how I might use "you" when referring to it. As someone studying psychology I'll leap right on board if you want a campaign for more structured parenting. This attitude among new parents that "everything will turn out right if I love them enough" is stupid and naive. It's a neuro-typical response to care for your children, but that it should be the only preparation or contingency is downright foolish if not irresponsible. But all of these these are tangent to the larger civics question as to what should a humanitarian state do with its powers to interfere in the private lives of its citizens. This is ultimately the question that should be asked when a government considers doing anything whether its funding the roads or making sure there is water in the taps and it has spawned natural, understandable, and reasonable differences of opinion. I imagine this as the organic precursor to modern political parties.
If the private lives of a nation are not organizing themselves into the proper form and imagined by the ruling group what sort of measure would you want that government to undertake? It's easy to just say that the culture is the problem but how would you actually reform it without abusing your powers? It seems like the only option for a government agency would be to engage in broad, intrusive, social re-engineering projects that would ultimately come to stand in as an anachronism of its own conservative spirit. This is what I see as playing into the problem of permissiveness where you say there is no right turn. There is no conservative solution to conservative problems. I will absolutely tip my hat to that point. But I think it is a very different thing to say that conservatives cannot create an ideologically consistent or palatable solution therefore there must be a liberal mirror image of the problem. Where conservative logic stalls, no conservative solution to conservative problems, there must be a liberal perpetual motion machine in which there is always a liberal solution to liberal problems, its just that they never work.
August 13th, 2011 at 6:40 pm
Riots are not the disease, they are the symptom. Curing the symptom will do nothing to cure the disease, but curing the disease is going to take decades.
When we (by which I mean "people who were in charge in the 80's," by which I mean "Thatcher") tore out the visera of Britain's manufacturing sector, we assumed that the workforce could be retrained and the country reborn as a services-based economy. This did not happen, but a needling side effect was to create in British culture the view that manufacturing is somehow beneath us. Or perhaps British culture was just so stratified anyway. In any case, the result was a generation born with a much reduced pool of jobs for unskilled labour to enter and, poisonously, no desire to enter that pool.
August 13th, 2011 at 6:40 pm
New Labour stuck putty in the gap by trying to fill people's time with apprenticeships and youth centres and the like, a temporary measure at best but one which bore short-lived fruit. And now? Now you have a generation of listless, directionless, poor, ill educated people who feel betrayed by their leaders (Ah, Lib Dems, you promised so much, delivered so little, your downfall will be a delight to many) and impotently furious at a situation that they see no legitimate way to solve.
In a situation like that, all it takes is a spark.
To cure the disease, rather than the symptom, is going to involve reversing the trend of the last thirty years. It's going to involve making British manufacturing competitive again, and that means investment (and jobs!). It's going to involve the infinitely more difficult task of finding and training an entire workforce to want to work again. That alone will probably take a generation or three. It's probably going to require a reasonably steep rise in taxation (over a number of decades) to deliver a corresponding rise in services (Hello, drastically underfunded NHS, how are you?).
In short, it's going to involve turning Britain into the mutant lovechild of Germany and Norway.
August 13th, 2011 at 6:41 pm
Of course, I don't expect anyone in the riots to actually say what I'm saying. The thing about being poor and poorly educated is that you're generally ignorant of the causes of your plight and therefore unable to explain it. All they know is that they've been shafted and they're pissed off about it. Since they don't know what else to do, they lash out randomly and violently. And other people, people who may not be in the same boat, will join in. Out of ennui, I expect. This can of worms was opened a long time ago and there's no putting them back; we just have to fix this, and that won't be accomplished by stepping on people who only lash out because they see no alternative.
What follows is the (far more eloquently phrased than I could ever manage) opinion of an acquaintance of mine who lives "in the thick of it," as it were. I've *'d out some of the words, which he doubtless wouldn't approve of, since I don't know what's generally permitted here.
August 13th, 2011 at 6:42 pm
"I don't condone the rioters' behaviour at all but it would be incredibly ignorant to not realise there are fundamental underlying reasons as to why there's a whole underclass of people who feel society doesn't give a **** about them, who have a limited education and practically zero prospects (in Tottenham, for example, there's 1 job on average for roughly 54 people), who have a lifestyle they can't hope to attain flaunted in their face 24:7, who have nothing to do, nowhere to go and nothing to look forward to while greedy bastards who bear a great responsibility for the **** the country is in continue slapping each other on the back, paying themselves bonuses in the tens of thousands and tell the rest of the country that they have to tighten their belts, scrimp and save just to get by in a system that's completely and utterly failed them."
August 13th, 2011 at 6:43 pm
"People aren't born criminals, 'criminality' – the favoured buzzword of late of those disgusting Old Etonian millionaires who run the country – has actual causes that are being completely ignored and swept under the rug so all the crypto-fascist horse**** that lurks beneath the so-called moderate and civilised surface can be dragged out and declared front and centre.
You've got people raiding Poundland, you've got 11 year olds stealing bins worth £3.50 for Christ's sake. 11 year old's don't want bins, they want Leader Class Optimus Prime or Malibu Stacy or something but they'll take what they can get in the mob in the heat of the moment because being in the midst of it all is about the only chance a largely inarticulate and badly educated element of society has to (poorly) express its anger and frustrations to an uncaring world. Why you might even say it's a fabulous example of the Big Society in action – communities shouldn't rely on governmental public spending, they should chip in and sort things out for themselves."
August 13th, 2011 at 6:43 pm
"You don't have to sympathise but if you can't at least empathise, you may well be a psychopath in the literal sense. Like the Bitch Queen's so charmingly put it, there's no such thing as society. And let me say right now that anyone who seriously thinks evicting rioters from council homes and cutting off their benefits is the answer is, quite frankly, a ****ing idiot because all it's going to do is alienate them more and put them in an impossible position of being unable to contribute to society in any way other than by causing yet more crime. When you're at rock bottom, when've you've absolutely nothing left, you've nothing left to lose so fuck it, what's the worst that can happen?"
In summary, far from "permissiveness," being to blame, it's indeed a kind of oppression. Not the kind that takes away your free choice of options, no, a far more insidious and less dramatic version. One that simply ensures you never had any to begin with.
August 13th, 2011 at 7:28 pm
I’ve noticed this anarchist trend among millennials too, but I strongly disagree with you about the cause. I see this as mostly about the breakdown of political discourse in the West, not some vague side-effect of liberal reforms.
If you’re coming of age in one of the Western nations today, you face a society showing signs of decline. The government is heavily in debt. The infrastructure is crumbling. Your civil rights are frequently infringed upon by ever-increasing levels of paranoid “War on Terror” security. Your elders who seem to be primarily interested in taking you for all you are worth, via state-run welfare programs that heavily favor the old. You probably don’t have a job, due to the recession (millennials got hit much harder than most other groups, by the way) And most of all, the people running the government are more interested in pointing fingers at each other then doing anything about it.
More than anything else, it’s a sense of disenfranchisement that leads to civil unrest. In the face of all the political problems young adults face today, there’s a strong temptation to simply give up on society. If it is going to treat you like dirt regardless of what you do, then why should you obey it’s rules?
Incidentally, your post is exactly the kind of partisan finger-pointing that frustrates a lot of millennials. It vaguely asserts that liberal values caused the riots, without providing any evidence whatsoever of that claim, beyond the fact that conservatives have been saying it would happen for the last 40-odd years.
August 13th, 2011 at 8:54 pm
"What the Rioters/Oppressors have done is heinous! It is simply the most Evil Thing to have ever been done in the sum total of existence and only the harshest and most extreme forms of Direct-Action/Criminal-Justice/Retaliation are acceptable! So break-out the Brickbats/Riot-Gear/Hammers/Water-Cannons/Molotovs/Firearms and give Oppression/The-Decay-of-Social-Order What For!"
Near as I can figure, western society as a whole has just simply lost the ability to be Reasonable somewhere along the line.
August 14th, 2011 at 12:54 am
I'm curious, is British manufacturing production off, or just manufacturing employment?
I ask because US manufacturing production is continually up up up, while manufacturing employment is down down down. Automation, you see.
August 14th, 2011 at 5:54 am
Oh, I'm not saying the rioters are being oppressed just that this took place in long-neglected neighborhoods for a reason. The same kinds of riots took place in France and it was mainly along lines of economic class, not race.
Sure some of the rioters arrested had jobs but you have to admit there's a lot of pent-up rage being released. Maybe this will force the UK to institute reforms as the French were forced to do several years ago.
August 14th, 2011 at 6:01 am
The test will be how much of a net they cast. The police can still subpoena the BBM, Twitter, or Facebook messages of anyone they arrest although I could see them passing a law to start that kind of data retrieval automatically now without using the courts.
August 14th, 2011 at 7:54 am
What he is saying is that the framework of 'socially acceptable' and 'socially unacceptable' are just not cutting it. Over the years we have given, one millimeter at a time, the values that are required for a stable society.
The root issue here is this: whether or not the rioters knew 'right' from 'wrong', they allowed themselves to ignore that and take others' property, destroy others' property, and hurt people.
We have allowed our standards of conduct to erode, and JJ is saying that we need to put them back into place. He's not talking about teachers abusing children when he says 'stricter teachers'. He means that when a child is late for class he should be held accountable. When the homework isn't done he should be held accountable. It's somewhat depressing that this is considered "strict".
The 'structured, stable family' means a family that teaches their child right from wrong. It is much easier to keep kids accountable for their actions when there are 2 people working together to do so, HOWEVER it's not strictly necessary.
As far as mass media modeling more good behavior than bad: This means that 'human interest' becomes the front page, not 'tragedy'. That we have more movies made like 'the blind side' and 'miracle' than 'wall street'.
The "oppression" of peers, friends, and fellow citizens who are willing to judge and discriminate against rudeness, stupidity, and nihilism. — Quite simply, this is going back to the way every species instinctually acts: everyone works together to discourage behavior that is inappropriate and encourage behavior that is appropriate.
Who are these rules being imposed on? Everyone of course. Who will feel it? Only the people that don't already act appropriately. We are talking about social reform, not legal reform.
August 14th, 2011 at 8:59 am
Excellent post, Patrick.
I think it's quite telling how in our "everything is oppression" culture a lot of people's first reaction to someone who says "we need to strengthen public morality" is to fear some sort of heavy-handed state tyranny. That's the message of a movie like "V for Vendetta;" either you have the wonderful, liberated status quo, or you have fascism.
I think the state has some role in rebuilding our broken culture. Divorce should probably be made more difficult in cases not involving one of the "big As" — abuse, adultery, addiction — and school curriculums should probably be reformed in a less politically-correct direction. But beyond that, I see this as very much an issue where we all, as citizens, have to begin making a conscious effort to model good behaviour in our individual lives, and use our own realms of power and influence, however small they may be, to help alter the larger societal whole.
So, for example, I try to avoid foul language in the stuff I write and try not to draw overly vulgar cartoons. I'm not holding myself up as some paragon of virtue, here, I'm just saying it starts with the individual. Parents, teachers, politicians, entertainers, cops, businessmen, etc. We all need to be a bit more conscious of ourselves as contributors to a culture larger than ourselves, and view the consequences of our actions accordingly. I also believe that entails a greater willingness to speak out against, and judge, our peers and contemporaries who do not.
August 14th, 2011 at 9:33 am
You raise some good points, and I think I responded to some of them in my response to Patrick, above. I will say, though, that I think one of the most deranged outcomes of our overly libertarian-influenced political culture has been the rise of this idea that "conservatism" should be synonymous with "anti-law," which I think is just absurd. There's been this weird conflating of the idea that laws that tell criminals how not to behave in an orderly society that are basically no more than "the government telling us what to do!" for crazy and arbitrary reasons. I think conservatives need to get back to the idea that law serves a greater purpose than just "telling us what to do," and stop pandering to paranoid individualism.
I also think it's important to reject, however, this idea that liberal laws are somehow "neutral" while conservative laws are reactionary or backwards. So, for example, I think a lot of people regard the liberalization of divorce as being almost an anti-law, something that just sort of erased a previously complicated and burdensome conservative legal regime. But if you read the Canadian Divorce Act today, you'll find that it's actually this huge, sprawling, hundreds-of-clauses-and-sub-clauses document. So in this case, and in other matters of social policy, the question is not really about "regulating" lives versus keeping them unregulated, as is the fantasy to believe they are today, it's merely to change one regime of regulation with another.
I guess what I'm trying to get at is that we as a society made peace some time ago with the idea that social policy was a legitimate realm of government intervention. We should stop having this fantasy debate over "whether" social policy should be regulated, which it already is, and discuss how to reform the existing, liberal legal order to yield more socially beneficial ends.
August 14th, 2011 at 10:59 am
Yes, cops can infringe rights if they have a warrant (which is the only way they could legally enter that home) but would you think it's ok if the police broke into every house, warrant or not, and told them to stop talking to each other?
Does digging moats around everyone's house infringe on the right to assembly by reasonably preventing it? Yes. Cutting phones lines is tantamount to infringing on free speech.
August 14th, 2011 at 1:00 pm
We in the United States will not stand for British rebellion. When has anything good ever come from British citizens turning against crown and country in violent uprising?
August 14th, 2011 at 3:47 pm
I second Benjamin.
August 14th, 2011 at 6:59 pm
I believe he was talking about blocking it during the rioting; blocking cell phone data transfer within the affected areas would make sense.
That's exactly the purpose of having martial law and curfews in emergencies – by restricting people to their homes, it used to break the lines of communication and prevent the critical mass necessary for mob psychology and anonymity. This merely extends it to the immediate vicinity of the riots.
August 14th, 2011 at 8:27 pm
Legally, cops still can't infringe on rights even with a warrant. You have a legal protection against arbitrary search and seizure that we call the "right to privacy," but if they met the legal standard to acquire a warrant they have demonstrated that the search is not arbitrary.
August 14th, 2011 at 8:44 pm
Every time someone has told me that a debate on something has already been settled, i'm always left scratching my head wondering when it exactly happened, and if so why wasn't I previously informed.
August 14th, 2011 at 8:46 pm
You're quite right, MS paint is a disgusting picture editor
August 14th, 2011 at 8:48 pm
Someone's mad that Harper is going to spend the next 4 years catering to the business wing of the Conservatives
August 16th, 2011 at 9:34 am
I see this as started as Crowd Psychology (Herd mentality) on the first day then it became more in line with a Convergence Theory of Crowds. This is probably why it made you think of Vancouver in the beginning (HM) then not so much (CTC). We are probably looking too much into finding meaning.
August 16th, 2011 at 10:46 am
The disenchantment faced by youth today is the root cause. We go to school, and yet many of us don't see the benefit or rewards for doing so. Work is harder to come by, and tuition is rising, and who does it all affect the most.
August 17th, 2011 at 2:36 pm
Lots of people see no purpose to school (me, for example). Not so many of them riot.
August 18th, 2011 at 4:24 am
All of this discussion on why the rioters did their rioting does raise an interesting point, and one worth seriously considering: At what point ought we turn to the rioters and say "We do not care why you rioted. We simply do not care, and we will in no way take your motives into account. You did so and you now have to face the consequences of your actions." There are a number of offenses (and they do run the gamut from rioting on the low end to mass murder on the high end) where I think utter disinterest in the motives of the perpetrators would do society well.
I do divorce this from looking at steps to prevent a repeat incident, which may involve an examination of root causes, but as to the rioters themselves I would very much like to see them not just ignored but actively told that "The world does not care" when they start spouting explanations. Consider it the difference between excuses (which might apply to the individuals themselves) and reasons (which would likely apply more generally). This comes to mind not only because of the tendency of "searching for their reasons" to give some individuals a lot of attention for misbehavior (call it a mixed message, perhaps?), but also because sometimes a clear message does need to be sent akin to parents ignoring a misbehaving two-year-old that no, you won't get more attention by burning down your neighborhood.
August 18th, 2011 at 4:56 am
I would argue that the London riots aren't all that different from uprising, riots, mobs, and revolutions throughout history, well before the dreaded sixtees, or even the 20th century. In many cases, there was a spark, an incident, where a group felt unjustly treated, which became rather mood in the later violence, when the mob had taken a life all of it's own. I would ask for further evidence before I'd be willing to conclude that this particular riot could have been prevented with more traditional families and upbringings.
On a lighter note, an explanation for the position on the poorer of the rioters (though many would probably not have made up this justification): http://partiallyclips.com/2004/06/10/rickshaw/
August 18th, 2011 at 6:02 am
Ha! Funny comic!
It's misleading, though. The rider is certainly hurt far worse, but the man pulling the rickshaw is also hurt if the rickshaw burns. He might be out of a job, or he might be in legal trouble, or he might only live in a society with fewer of the protections of law and order. It is at best cathartic, not purely beneficial, for him to burn the rickshaw.
October 4th, 2011 at 2:48 am
I would argue that the London riots aren't all that different from uprising, riots, mobs, and revolutions throughout history, well before the dreaded sixtees, or even the 20th century. In many cases, there was a spark, an incident, where a group felt unjustly treated, which became rather mood in the later violence, when the mob had taken a life all of it's own. I would ask for further evidence before I'd be willing to conclude that this particular riot could have been prevented with more traditional families and upbringings. What's???
October 4th, 2011 at 2:49 am
I do divorce this from looking at steps to prevent a repeat incident, which may involve an examination of root causes, but as to the rioters themselves I would very much like to see them not just ignored but actively told that "The world does not care" when they start spouting explanations. Consider it the difference between excuses (which might apply to the individuals themselves) and reasons (which would likely apply more generally). This comes to mind not only because of the tendency of "searching for their reasons" to give some individuals a lot of attention for misbehavior (call it a mixed message, perhaps?), but also because sometimes a clear message does need to be sent akin to parents ignoring a misbehaving two-year-old that no, you won't get more attention by burning down your neighborhood. What's?
October 4th, 2011 at 2:49 am
I see this as started as Crowd Psychology (Herd mentality) on the first day then it became more in line with a Convergence Theory of Crowds. This is probably why it made you think of Vancouver in the beginning (HM) then not so much (CTC). We are probably looking too much into finding meaning. I think so 1
November 1st, 2011 at 7:23 pm
As the OWS demonstrations have dragged on, my mind has come back to this comic. First there were reports of defecating on police cars and doorsteps, and now sordid stories of rape are emerging. One paragraph of yours really seemed to hit it on the head.
Brain riot
Comic
Brain riot
August 11th, 2011 – 64 Comments
* emoticon
I must admit that my initial reaction to the London riots was one of jealousy. After all, but two months ago, Vancouver experienced a massive riot of our own, and the international attention we received was hardly comparable. It seemed offensive, both to my sensibilities as a Canadian (long the ignored, uninteresting middle child of the western world) and a Vancouverite (the ignored, uninteresting middle child of Canada itself).
Of course, in the days that followed, it quickly became clear that the multi-day British riots, which will soon be celebrating their week-iversary, and the riots that followed our Stanley Cup loss, were actually two very different things. As awful and revealing the riots in my city were, and I certainly had a lot to say about them at the time, the spectacle in England has been infinitely moreso.
What caused the unrest? Officially, the death of Mark Duggan, a black man who was shot to death by English police Saturday night, a tragic incident spawned by (and isn’t this always the case?) confusion over how armed he was and what he was planning to do with his weapon. But any hope that the ensuing violence and chaos would conform neatly to some sort of Rodney King-esque symbolic battle between Britain’s downtrodden urban blacks and racially-insensitive police establishment were quickly dashed when Britons of all races and backgrounds began to get into the fun. Incriminating photos posted on blogs such as Catch-a-Looter, show a fairly multicultural range of faces, stealing TVs and smashing windows, and even the rich diversity of Britain’s class system seems well represented, with college students, teaching assistants, and other middle class suburbanites rubbing shoulders with the inner-city poor.
"What’s become depressingly clear, therefore, is that these riots aren’t really “about” anything per se, in much the same way the Vancouver riots weren’t. They’re merely an expression of some omnipresent, disgusting side of contemporary youth culture — a culture that views all laws and authority figures, as well as basic social conventions like manners and private property, as illegitimate shackles of oppression. The second those shackles go, and one is free to steal, smash, and screw anything that catches one’s eye… well, only then is one truly free."
Very well said and sadly prophetic.
November 1st, 2011 at 7:25 pm
In the last comment, I only meant to quote the final paragraph, not the whole thing up until that point. Sorry.