For the 1st time in my life im hoping to see some serious police brutality tonight if this shit carries on.
Dont tell me these kids are under priveledged but can still afford designer clothes, the lastest games consoles & mobile phones. Fuck these little skip rats they dont know how good they've got it. Also what the fuck do they know about paying taxes when they're either living off their parents or off the state?
Camila Batmanghelidjh: Caring costs ??? but so do riots
These rioters feel they don't actually belong to the community. For years, they???ve felt cut adrift from society
Tuesday, 9 August 2011
Shops looted, cars and buildings burnt out, young adults in hoods on the rampage.
London has woken up to street violence, and the usual narratives have emerged ??? punish those responsible for the violence because they are "opportunist criminals" and "disgusting thieves". The slightly more intellectually curious might blame the trouble on poor police relations or lack of policing.
My own view is that the police in this country do an impressive job and unjustly carry the consequences of a much wider social dysfunction. Before you take a breath of sarcasm thinking "here she goes, excusing the criminals with some sob story", I want to begin by stating two things. First, violence and looting can never be justified. Second, for those of us working at street level, we're not surprised by these events.
Twitter and Facebook have kept the perverse momentum going, transmitting invitations such as: "Bare shops are gonna get smashed up. So come, get some (free stuff!!!!) F... the feds we will send them back with OUR riot! Dead the ends and colour war for now. So If you see a brother... SALUTE! If you see a fed... SHOOT!"
If this is a war, the enemy, on the face of it, are the "lawless", the defenders are the law-abiding. An absence of morality can easily be found in the rioters and looters. How, we ask, could they attack their own community with such disregard? But the young people would reply "easily", because they feel they don't actually belong to the community. Community, they would say, has nothing to offer them. Instead, for years they have experienced themselves cut adrift from civil society's legitimate structures. Society relies on collaborative behaviour; individuals are held accountable because belonging brings personal benefit. Fear or shame of being alienated keeps most of us pro-social.
Working at street level in London, over a number of years, many of us have been concerned about large groups of young adults creating their own parallel antisocial communities with different rules. The individual is responsible for their own survival because the established community is perceived to provide nothing. Acquisition of goods through violence is justified in neighbourhoods where the notion of dog eat dog pervades and the top dog survives the best. The drug economy facilitates a parallel subculture with the drug dealer producing more fiscally efficient solutions than the social care agencies who are too under-resourced to compete.
The insidious flourishing of anti-establishment attitudes is paradoxically helped by the establishment. It grows when a child is dragged by their mother to social services screaming for help and security guards remove both; or in the shiny academies which, quietly, rid themselves of the most disturbed kids. Walk into the mental hospitals and there is nothing for the patients to do except peel the wallpaper. Go to the youth centre and you will find the staff have locked themselves up in the office because disturbed young men are dominating the space with their violent dogs. Walk on the estate stairwells with your baby in a buggy manoeuvring past the condoms, the needles, into the lift where the best outcome is that you will survive the urine stench and the worst is that you will be raped. The border police arrive at the neighbour's door to grab an "over-stayer" and his kids are screaming. British children with no legal papers have mothers surviving through prostitution and still there's not enough food on the table.
It's not one occasional attack on dignity, it's a repeated humiliation, being continuously dispossessed in a society rich with possession. Young, intelligent citizens of the ghetto seek an explanation for why they are at the receiving end of bleak Britain, condemned to a darkness where their humanity is not even valued enough to be helped. Savagery is a possibility within us all. Some of us have been lucky enough not to have to call upon it for survival; others, exhausted from failure, can justify resorting to it.
Our leaders still speak about how protecting the community is vital. The trouble is, the deal has gone sour. The community has selected who is worthy of help and who is not. In this false moral economy where the poor are described as dysfunctional, the community fails. One dimension of this failure is being acted out in the riots; the lawlessness is, suddenly, there for all to see. Less visible is the perverse insidious violence delivered through legitimate societal structures. Check out the price of failing to care.
I got a call yesterday morning. The kids gave me a run-down of what had happened in Brixton. A street party had been invaded by a group of young men out to grab. A few years ago, the kids who called me would have joined in, because they had nothing to lose. One had been permanently excluded from six schools. When he first arrived at Kids Company he cared so little that he would smash his head into a pane of glass and bite his own flesh off with rage. He'd think nothing of hurting others. After intensive social care and support he walked away when the riots began because he held more value in his membership of a community that has embraced him than a community that demanded his dark side.
It costs money to care. But it also costs money to clear up riots, savagery and antisocial behaviour. I leave it to you to do the financial and moral sums.
Camila Batmanghelidjh is founder of the charities The Place To Be and Kids Company
For the 1st time in my life im hoping to see some serious police brutality tonight if this shit carries on.
Dont tell me these kids are under priveledged but can still afford designer clothes, the lastest games consoles & mobile phones. Fuck these little skip rats they dont know how good they've got it. Also what the fuck do they know about paying taxes when they're either living off their parents or off the state?
I'm with you, the US police wouldnt tolerate this why should we
Camila Batmanghelidjh: Caring costs ??? but so do riots
These rioters feel they don't actually belong to the community. For years, they???ve felt cut adrift from society
Tuesday, 9 August 2011
So many interesting perspectives/accounts right now.
I hope there's some serious (re)consideration of Cameron's plan to tackle inequalities by creating a "BIG SOCIETY" moving forward (basically, less state funding for established programs, more reliance on existing community-based support systems, charity and "families"). I read the white paper when he released it last year and it seemed really vague and inadequate (and was probably going to be underfunded anyway). It will obviously be really interesting to see what (if anything) is done on that front moving forward.
So many interesting perspectives/accounts right now.
Thats certainly a perspective but its not the truth , claiming they had arrested the guy then shot him, how come one of the policeman ended up with a bullet lodged in his chest radio which saved his life
DocMcCoy"Go and laugh in your own country!" 5,913 Posts
ZomB said:
For the 1st time in my life im hoping to see some serious police brutality tonight if this shit carries on.
Dont tell me these kids are under priveledged but can still afford designer clothes, the lastest games consoles & mobile phones. Fuck these little skip rats they dont know how good they've got it. Also what the fuck do they know about paying taxes when they're either living off their parents or off the state?
Fuck off, eh?
DocMcCoy"Go and laugh in your own country!" 5,913 Posts
gaz said:
ketan said:
Tuesday, 9 August 2011
So many interesting perspectives/accounts right now.
Thats certainly a perspective but its not the truth , claiming they had arrested the guy then shot him, how come one of the policeman ended up with a bullet lodged in his chest radio which saved his life
Except it was a police issue bullet.
Thats certainly a perspective but its not the truth , claiming they had arrested the guy then shot him, how come one of the policeman ended up with a bullet lodged in his chest radio which saved his life
Except it was a police issue bullet.
totally unsubstantiated and if that turns out to be true it means he tried to turn the gun to the policeman
So many interesting perspectives/accounts right now.
Thats certainly a perspective but its not the truth , claiming they had arrested the guy then shot him, how come one of the policeman ended up with a bullet lodged in his chest radio which saved his life
Sorry, Gaz - I didn't realize you were the arbiter of truth. (Normally that's SoulStrut's job.)
Regardless, you might be missing the point (I have no idea, because I am not the arbiter of truth). The guy in that video is clearly frustrated - nay, pissed off - about life in his community over the last few decades. Now, maybe he's a totally wacky conspiracy nut and has lived his whole life compiling one misguided perspective after another. But I'm seeing his perspective pop up a whole lot as the riot continues, so you may want to start assuming that you live in a bizarre, uncontrollable world where the truth nary matters.
Or, just appreciate and glean what you can from what he's saying as lived experience, and then we don't have to sit here and spend 5 pages figuring out WHAT REALLY HAPPENED THAT FATEFUL NIGHT. (But as this is SoulStrut, I'm sure we will...)
Thats certainly a perspective but its not the truth , claiming they had arrested the guy then shot him, how come one of the policeman ended up with a bullet lodged in his chest radio which saved his life
Except it was a police issue bullet.
totally unsubstantiated and if that turns out to be true it means he tried to turn the gun to the policeman
Tell that to Smiley Culture.
Or Charles De Menez.
Or Harry Stanley.
Or Azelle Rodney.
Or James Ashley.
Or James Brady.
Or Ian Tomlinson. The official line was shown to be a load of cr*p. Why believe the MET Police now, weeks after it's been shown that they're corrupt to the core?
For the 1st time in my life im hoping to see some serious police brutality tonight if this shit carries on.
Dont tell me these kids are under priveledged but can still afford designer clothes, the lastest games consoles & mobile phones. Fuck these little skip rats they dont know how good they've got it. Also what the fuck do they know about paying taxes when they're either living off their parents or off the state?
Fuck off, eh?
You sound arse burnt. Did they run out of cotton knickers by the time you got to H&M, eh?
Hulk Hogan was just on 5Live offering his opinion with Richard Bacon.
'If it wasn't for my ten back surgeries brother, I'd put a stop to this rioting gaga. '
Proud Christian Americans died fighting English tyrannical rule.
DocMcCoy"Go and laugh in your own country!" 5,913 Posts
ZomB said:
DocMcCoy said:
ZomB said:
For the 1st time in my life im hoping to see some serious police brutality tonight if this shit carries on.
Dont tell me these kids are under priveledged but can still afford designer clothes, the lastest games consoles & mobile phones. Fuck these little skip rats they dont know how good they've got it. Also what the fuck do they know about paying taxes when they're either living off their parents or off the state?
Fuck off, eh?
You sound arse burnt. Did they run out of cotton knickers by the time you got to H&M, eh?
Big man with your gunman avatar.
Yeah, they can't be underprivileged - they dress too well, they've got games consoles, they've all got box-fresh trainers. All those "chavs" you take the piss out of on Jeremy Kyle...not so fucking funny now, are they?
Many of them also live in some of the shittiest, most miserable areas of London and, unlike people like me, are stuck there for however fucking long with even fewer opportunities to make something of themselves and/or get the fuck out of Dodge than ever. They have no sense of social responsibility because nobody ever gave enough of a fuck to try and drum one into them. Yes, they're fucking little toerags, and the likelihood is they'll get a good walloping off the 16,000 police who are set to fortuitously appear on the streets tonight. But I tell you one thing; you'll never, ever see even a hundredth of that number of bill down in some of those places until the next time these kids riot, no matter what's going on. Because unless they go on a tear-up, nobody in authority gives a fuck, which is a pity, because they've got the streets now. Literally.
I have never been one to mince words, especially when it comes to England, or Britain or whatever you want to call it. It is an Island nation of dirty satanic perverts
For the 1st time in my life im hoping to see some serious police brutality tonight if this shit carries on.
Dont tell me these kids are under priveledged but can still afford designer clothes, the lastest games consoles & mobile phones. Fuck these little skip rats they dont know how good they've got it. Also what the fuck do they know about paying taxes when they're either living off their parents or off the state?
Fuck off, eh?
You sound arse burnt. Did they run out of cotton knickers by the time you got to H&M, eh?
Big man with your gunman avatar.
Yeah, they can't be underprivileged - they dress too well, they've got games consoles, they've all got box-fresh trainers. All those "chavs" you take the piss out of on Jeremy Kyle...not so fucking funny now, are they?
Many of them also live in some of the shittiest, most miserable areas of London and, unlike people like me, are stuck there for however fucking long with even fewer opportunities to make something of themselves and/or get the fuck out of Dodge than ever. They have no sense of social responsibility because nobody ever gave enough of a fuck to try and drum one into them. Yes, they're fucking little toerags, and the likelihood is they'll get a good walloping off the 16,000 police who are set to fortuitously appear on the streets tonight. But I tell you one thing; you'll never, ever see even a hundredth of that number of bill down in some of those places until the next time these kids riot, no matter what's going on. Because unless they go on a tear-up, nobody in authority gives a fuck, which is a pity, because they've got the streets now. Literally.
In my honors year at university studied the French riots of 05 and the early 80s and 90s. Like the article shown above, I too have noticed some significant differences in the way the UK riots have unfolded. This article begins to touch on some of those issues. One thing I hadn't thought of however - is the reparations and the healing process. The isolation of the French housing estates meant that the perpetrators and mainstream French society were mostly separated by spatial barriers ??? thus allowing some space for healing and reconciliation to take place.
In London, this is not the case. Resolving the tensions created by these incidents is going to be vastly more complex and difficult than what went down in France. The close proximity of the riots to almost all areas of London, and the involvement of such a wide range of groups and communities as both victims and perpetrators, and dare I say it, the role of social media in both the reporting of, and organisation of the riots as they have evolved will make it difficult for people to "blame", or address issues relating to just one group or just one cause.
This is new. Something quite unlike what has happened before, and it actually makes the whole situation quite scary.
"Man with all his noble qualities, with sympathy which feels for the most debased, with benevolence which extends not only to other men but to the humblest living creature, with his god-like intellect which has penetrated into the movements and constitution of the solar system???with all these exalted powers???Man still bears in his bodily frame the indelible stamp of his lowly origin."
The Credo of Birmingham's refuribished, up-market, glitzy international shopping destination known as the Bullring (specifically Selfridges):
Sabadababa's reaction that these are 'leftist' rioters is obviously wrong in that I don't think anyone invloved in this is chanting Marxist slogans about Property being Theft. But they are the end-product of capitalism writ large. They have been priced out of the mainstream, denied access to in-store credit cards, and yet told that they should measure the value of their lives in material possessions that are unobtainable. Schools no longer have the ability to instill a true understanding of consequences, and when the future looks bleak, why would they even consider the consequences? They're Nihilists!
For once I hope Cameron is right that we're all in this together.
Comments
Basmati da gangsta essential.
Looks like FindersKeepers TwistedNerve & Bird have lost 90 percent of our stock in the PIAS fire. Dunno how most labels are gonna recover :(
Dont tell me these kids are under priveledged but can still afford designer clothes, the lastest games consoles & mobile phones. Fuck these little skip rats they dont know how good they've got it. Also what the fuck do they know about paying taxes when they're either living off their parents or off the state?
way to make a problem worse
Camila Batmanghelidjh: Caring costs ??? but so do riots
These rioters feel they don't actually belong to the community. For years, they???ve felt cut adrift from society
Tuesday, 9 August 2011
Shops looted, cars and buildings burnt out, young adults in hoods on the rampage.
London has woken up to street violence, and the usual narratives have emerged ??? punish those responsible for the violence because they are "opportunist criminals" and "disgusting thieves". The slightly more intellectually curious might blame the trouble on poor police relations or lack of policing.
My own view is that the police in this country do an impressive job and unjustly carry the consequences of a much wider social dysfunction. Before you take a breath of sarcasm thinking "here she goes, excusing the criminals with some sob story", I want to begin by stating two things. First, violence and looting can never be justified. Second, for those of us working at street level, we're not surprised by these events.
Twitter and Facebook have kept the perverse momentum going, transmitting invitations such as: "Bare shops are gonna get smashed up. So come, get some (free stuff!!!!) F... the feds we will send them back with OUR riot! Dead the ends and colour war for now. So If you see a brother... SALUTE! If you see a fed... SHOOT!"
If this is a war, the enemy, on the face of it, are the "lawless", the defenders are the law-abiding. An absence of morality can easily be found in the rioters and looters. How, we ask, could they attack their own community with such disregard? But the young people would reply "easily", because they feel they don't actually belong to the community. Community, they would say, has nothing to offer them. Instead, for years they have experienced themselves cut adrift from civil society's legitimate structures. Society relies on collaborative behaviour; individuals are held accountable because belonging brings personal benefit. Fear or shame of being alienated keeps most of us pro-social.
Working at street level in London, over a number of years, many of us have been concerned about large groups of young adults creating their own parallel antisocial communities with different rules. The individual is responsible for their own survival because the established community is perceived to provide nothing. Acquisition of goods through violence is justified in neighbourhoods where the notion of dog eat dog pervades and the top dog survives the best. The drug economy facilitates a parallel subculture with the drug dealer producing more fiscally efficient solutions than the social care agencies who are too under-resourced to compete.
The insidious flourishing of anti-establishment attitudes is paradoxically helped by the establishment. It grows when a child is dragged by their mother to social services screaming for help and security guards remove both; or in the shiny academies which, quietly, rid themselves of the most disturbed kids. Walk into the mental hospitals and there is nothing for the patients to do except peel the wallpaper. Go to the youth centre and you will find the staff have locked themselves up in the office because disturbed young men are dominating the space with their violent dogs. Walk on the estate stairwells with your baby in a buggy manoeuvring past the condoms, the needles, into the lift where the best outcome is that you will survive the urine stench and the worst is that you will be raped. The border police arrive at the neighbour's door to grab an "over-stayer" and his kids are screaming. British children with no legal papers have mothers surviving through prostitution and still there's not enough food on the table.
It's not one occasional attack on dignity, it's a repeated humiliation, being continuously dispossessed in a society rich with possession. Young, intelligent citizens of the ghetto seek an explanation for why they are at the receiving end of bleak Britain, condemned to a darkness where their humanity is not even valued enough to be helped. Savagery is a possibility within us all. Some of us have been lucky enough not to have to call upon it for survival; others, exhausted from failure, can justify resorting to it.
Our leaders still speak about how protecting the community is vital. The trouble is, the deal has gone sour. The community has selected who is worthy of help and who is not. In this false moral economy where the poor are described as dysfunctional, the community fails. One dimension of this failure is being acted out in the riots; the lawlessness is, suddenly, there for all to see. Less visible is the perverse insidious violence delivered through legitimate societal structures. Check out the price of failing to care.
I got a call yesterday morning. The kids gave me a run-down of what had happened in Brixton. A street party had been invaded by a group of young men out to grab. A few years ago, the kids who called me would have joined in, because they had nothing to lose. One had been permanently excluded from six schools. When he first arrived at Kids Company he cared so little that he would smash his head into a pane of glass and bite his own flesh off with rage. He'd think nothing of hurting others. After intensive social care and support he walked away when the riots began because he held more value in his membership of a community that has embraced him than a community that demanded his dark side.
It costs money to care. But it also costs money to clear up riots, savagery and antisocial behaviour. I leave it to you to do the financial and moral sums.
Camila Batmanghelidjh is founder of the charities The Place To Be and Kids Company
I'm with you, the US police wouldnt tolerate this why should we
So many interesting perspectives/accounts right now.
I hope there's some serious (re)consideration of Cameron's plan to tackle inequalities by creating a "BIG SOCIETY" moving forward (basically, less state funding for established programs, more reliance on existing community-based support systems, charity and "families"). I read the white paper when he released it last year and it seemed really vague and inadequate (and was probably going to be underfunded anyway). It will obviously be really interesting to see what (if anything) is done on that front moving forward.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2011/may/23/david-cameron-big-society-project
So many interesting perspectives/accounts right now.
Thats certainly a perspective but its not the truth , claiming they had arrested the guy then shot him, how come one of the policeman ended up with a bullet lodged in his chest radio which saved his life
Fuck off, eh?
Thats certainly a perspective but its not the truth , claiming they had arrested the guy then shot him, how come one of the policeman ended up with a bullet lodged in his chest radio which saved his life
Except it was a police issue bullet.
Thats certainly a perspective but its not the truth , claiming they had arrested the guy then shot him, how come one of the policeman ended up with a bullet lodged in his chest radio which saved his life
Except it was a police issue bullet.
totally unsubstantiated and if that turns out to be true it means he tried to turn the gun to the policeman
Sorry, Gaz - I didn't realize you were the arbiter of truth. (Normally that's SoulStrut's job.)
Regardless, you might be missing the point (I have no idea, because I am not the arbiter of truth). The guy in that video is clearly frustrated - nay, pissed off - about life in his community over the last few decades. Now, maybe he's a totally wacky conspiracy nut and has lived his whole life compiling one misguided perspective after another. But I'm seeing his perspective pop up a whole lot as the riot continues, so you may want to start assuming that you live in a bizarre, uncontrollable world where the truth nary matters.
Or, just appreciate and glean what you can from what he's saying as lived experience, and then we don't have to sit here and spend 5 pages figuring out WHAT REALLY HAPPENED THAT FATEFUL NIGHT. (But as this is SoulStrut, I'm sure we will...)
Except it was a police issue bullet.
totally unsubstantiated and if that turns out to be true it means he tried to turn the gun to the policeman
Tell that to Smiley Culture.
Or Charles De Menez.
Or Harry Stanley.
Or Azelle Rodney.
Or James Ashley.
Or James Brady.
Or Ian Tomlinson. The official line was shown to be a load of cr*p. Why believe the MET Police now, weeks after it's been shown that they're corrupt to the core?
You sound arse burnt. Did they run out of cotton knickers by the time you got to H&M, eh?
'If it wasn't for my ten back surgeries brother, I'd put a stop to this rioting gaga. '
http://christwire.org/2011/08/london-is-burning-why-god-hates-england/
Big man with your gunman avatar.
Yeah, they can't be underprivileged - they dress too well, they've got games consoles, they've all got box-fresh trainers. All those "chavs" you take the piss out of on Jeremy Kyle...not so fucking funny now, are they?
Many of them also live in some of the shittiest, most miserable areas of London and, unlike people like me, are stuck there for however fucking long with even fewer opportunities to make something of themselves and/or get the fuck out of Dodge than ever. They have no sense of social responsibility because nobody ever gave enough of a fuck to try and drum one into them. Yes, they're fucking little toerags, and the likelihood is they'll get a good walloping off the 16,000 police who are set to fortuitously appear on the streets tonight. But I tell you one thing; you'll never, ever see even a hundredth of that number of bill down in some of those places until the next time these kids riot, no matter what's going on. Because unless they go on a tear-up, nobody in authority gives a fuck, which is a pity, because they've got the streets now. Literally.
Daily Mail website's that way. >>>
Anything that starts off with
gets my seal of approval.
Bravo.
In my honors year at university studied the French riots of 05 and the early 80s and 90s. Like the article shown above, I too have noticed some significant differences in the way the UK riots have unfolded. This article begins to touch on some of those issues. One thing I hadn't thought of however - is the reparations and the healing process. The isolation of the French housing estates meant that the perpetrators and mainstream French society were mostly separated by spatial barriers ??? thus allowing some space for healing and reconciliation to take place.
In London, this is not the case. Resolving the tensions created by these incidents is going to be vastly more complex and difficult than what went down in France. The close proximity of the riots to almost all areas of London, and the involvement of such a wide range of groups and communities as both victims and perpetrators, and dare I say it, the role of social media in both the reporting of, and organisation of the riots as they have evolved will make it difficult for people to "blame", or address issues relating to just one group or just one cause.
This is new. Something quite unlike what has happened before, and it actually makes the whole situation quite scary.
It is spotlessly clean and he is carrying it upside down.
"Man with all his noble qualities, with sympathy which feels for the most debased, with benevolence which extends not only to other men but to the humblest living creature, with his god-like intellect which has penetrated into the movements and constitution of the solar system???with all these exalted powers???Man still bears in his bodily frame the indelible stamp of his lowly origin."
Sabadababa's reaction that these are 'leftist' rioters is obviously wrong in that I don't think anyone invloved in this is chanting Marxist slogans about Property being Theft. But they are the end-product of capitalism writ large. They have been priced out of the mainstream, denied access to in-store credit cards, and yet told that they should measure the value of their lives in material possessions that are unobtainable. Schools no longer have the ability to instill a true understanding of consequences, and when the future looks bleak, why would they even consider the consequences? They're Nihilists!
For once I hope Cameron is right that we're all in this together.