London's burning

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Welcome to the Information Revolution living up to it's name. Not to go all Glenn Beck blackboard on you, but if you can't see what, at a macro level, links (say - you can do this three dozen ways) the Tea Party with the London riots, you're... not paying attention.
oh I can see it
I even think it's so obvious it comes as a surprise it appears to be news worthy

but it doesn't really explain much
and it solves even less
I don't believe for a second our economic system has caused moral to get worse, I do however believe that decline in moral has done harm to our economic system

I'm a big believer in the Levers of Control of Simons in which Simons recognizes 2 'hard' controls and 2 ''soft' controls and presents all of these control systems as equal to each other
I also find the Control Loss theory of Williamson very interesting where the decrease in control is explained the further top and bottom are removed from eachother

while 'control' is a bit of an ugly word, it is what we're talking about IMO
but how to gain control in a society where moral (/soft controls) is in a steady decline?


also, I agree with deep that these people are not underpriviledged
the underpriviledged don't go about looting in 100 pound trainers, aided by 200 pound blackberries
 
Raw with grief, in a voice steady but tight with emotion, his appeal for calm on Wednesday was a beacon of hope amid the tumult and carnage of a horribly dark week for Britain.

Hours before he spoke, Tariq Jahan had lost his 21-year-old son Haroon, murdered in the Winson Green area of Birmingham by thugs who drove at him in their car in what appears to have been a racist attack.

No one could be more aware of the simmering racial tensions between Asians in his neighbourhood and those of Caribbean ancestry.

Yet Mr Jahan had the dignity, the compassion and the common sense to demand an end to the violence that had shattered his life. ‘Blacks, Asians, whites — we all live in the same community,’ he said. ‘Why do we have to kill one another? Why are we doing this? Step forward if you want to lose your sons. Otherwise, calm down and go home — please.’

There was no mention of feral rats or of the sickness in our society. There were no calls for revenge. If he had screamed for retribution, if he had chosen the emotional occasion of his son’s death to denounce whole swathes of the community, there could easily have been an unspeakable outbreak of racial violence.

Instead, Mr Jahan made an open and straightforward declaration of his faith. ‘I’m a Muslim. I believe in divine fate and destiny, and it was his destiny and his fate, and now he’s gone,’ he said. ‘And may Allah forgive him and bless him.’

It was a solemn, peaceful message that will make everyone who stereotypes Muslims as terrorists and fanatics feel ashamed of themselves. Tariq Jahan is a deeply impressive man, and like the great majority of Muslims in this country, he is hard-working, clean-living, guided in his conduct by religious belief, and unshakeable in his devotion to the ideal of family life.


I suspect that when time passes and we look back on this week, it is the religious sincerity of Tariq Jahan that we shall remember. All of us — Muslims, Sikhs, Jews, Hindus, Christians — have a rich religious inheritance.

At the core of this inheritance is a sense of right and wrong. And in all these religions, the school where we learn of right and wrong is the family. Muslims, Jews, Sikhs and Hindus have all, very noticeably, retained this twin strand of family structure and ethical teaching.

Faith in Christianity itself began to unravel long ago, and the majority of those whose forebears were Christian are now completely secular. They would not even recognise simple Bible stories.

The events of the past week have shown the enormous value of a living religious faith.

Not only was Tariq Jahan more impressive than any of the commentators or politicians who spouted on the airwaves this week. He was more human.

By his religious response to his son’s death, he humanised not only the dreadful and immediate tragedy. He showed us that without a religion we are all less than human.


UK riots and the Haroon Jahan death: Legacy of a society that believes in nothing | Mail Online
 
London (CNN) -- Prime Minister David Cameron blames the riots that shook Britain over the past 10 days on a "slow-motion moral collapse ... in parts of our country," he said Monday.

Cameron listed problems including "Irresponsibility. Selfishness. Behaving as if your choices have no consequences. Children without fathers. Schools without discipline. Reward without effort. Crime without punishment. Rights without responsibilities. Communities without control," in a speech in his constituency in Oxfordshire.

And he promised that the government will "review every aspect of our work to mend our broken society" in the coming weeks.
 
London (CNN) -- Prime Minister David Cameron blames the riots that shook Britain over the past 10 days on a "slow-motion moral collapse ... in parts of our country," he said Monday.

Cameron listed problems including "Irresponsibility. Selfishness. Behaving as if your choices have no consequences. Children without fathers. Schools without discipline. Reward without effort. Crime without punishment. Rights without responsibilities. Communities without control," in a speech in his constituency in Oxfordshire.

And he promised that the government will "review every aspect of our work to mend our broken society" in the coming weeks.

Sounds like a lot of countries, particularly in the West.
 
The op-ed piece financeguy posted and what Salome mentioned points to that some people believe the loss of religion in mainstream society has lead to a moral decline.

I agree to some extent, but I don't think reintroducing religion to mainstream society will solve a lot of problems. You cannot force people to believe in a deity and there are plenty of moral people who don't have religion.

What I think the problem is in the West is the increasing focus on individualism and less interdependence. Everyone is looking for themselves and no one cares for the other guy. The world is one big competition for getting ahead and cut throat ways are the norm. Its been that way for decades now, and interestingly, the loss of religion in mainstream society coincides with that.

I recently was paging through a book on psychopaths and the author said the West's attitude for the individual has lead to an increase in anti-social behavior. In more group oriented societies, psychopathic traits are less common. Look at Japan, especially after the tsunami and earthquake. There were no riots or looting. Everyone was civilized and cared for one another. They were the envy and admiration of the world. You will never see that behavior in the West any time soon because, like I keep saying, we think only for ourselves and not other people.

I think what the West needs to do is learn to balance individualism and the group, so we could keep our individuality but at the same time not be so self-centered. I don't really think bringing back religion is the answer, because as I said, you can't force people to believe in God. But religion - or at least spirituality - can teach people to be aware of each other.

Whatever it takes to get society back on track.
 
Cameron listed problems including "Irresponsibility. Selfishness. Behaving as if your choices have no consequences"

i wish he was talking about the bankers :rolleyes:

Cameron is being such an arse about this whole thing he really is :down:
 
i wish he was talking about the bankers :rolleyes:



or the politicians. or the professional athletes. or any number of people who's disregard for anyone other than themselves has made them an enormous amount of money that pays for the lawyers to keep them out of jail.
 
or the politicians. or the professional athletes. or any number of people who's disregard for anyone other than themselves has made them an enormous amount of money that pays for the lawyers to keep them out of jail.

yeah, i know... i was just thinking specifically about what's been going on in the UK lately, with the bankers getting away with daylight robbery basically, and the taxpayer having to foot the bill...

speaking of which, here's an interesting article by Naomi Klein from today's Guardian...

Looting with the lights on | Naomi Klein | Comment is free | guardian.co.uk

Looting with the lights on
The riots in Britain were political – and they are part of a wider global anger at governments that commit daylight robbery

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Naomi Klein
guardian.co.uk, Wednesday 17 August 2011 10.37 BST
Article history

Youths loot a Carhartt store in Hackney during the recent riots in London. Photograph: Peter Macdiarmid/Getty Images
I keep hearing comparisons between the London riots and riots in other European cities – window-smashing in Athens or car bonfires in Paris. And there are parallels, to be sure: a spark set by police violence, a generation that feels forgotten.

But those events were marked by mass destruction; the looting was minor. There have, however, been other mass lootings in recent years, and perhaps we should talk about them too. There was Baghdad in the aftermath of the US invasion – a frenzy of arson and looting that emptied libraries and museums. The factories got hit too. In 2004 I visited one that used to make refrigerators. Its workers had stripped it of everything valuable, then torched it so thoroughly that the warehouse was a sculpture of buckled sheet metal.

Back then the people on cable news thought looting was highly political. They said this is what happens when a regime has no legitimacy in the eyes of the people. After watching for so long as Saddam Hussein and his sons helped themselves to whatever and whomever they wanted, many regular Iraqis felt they had earned the right to take a few things for themselves. But London isn't Baghdad, and the British prime minister, David Cameron, is hardly Saddam, so surely there is nothing to learn there.

How about a democratic example then? Argentina, circa 2001. The economy was in freefall and thousands of people living in rough neighbourhoods (which had been thriving manufacturing zones before the neoliberal era) stormed foreign-owned superstores. They came out pushing shopping carts overflowing with the goods they could no longer afford – clothes, electronics, meat. The government called a "state of siege" to restore order; the people didn't like that and overthrew the government.

Argentina's mass looting was called el saqueo – the sacking. That was politically significant because it was the very same word used to describe what that country's elites had done by selling off the country's national assets in flagrantly corrupt privatisation deals, hiding their money offshore, then passing on the bill to the people with a brutal austerity package. Argentines understood that the saqueo of the shopping centres would not have happened without the bigger saqueo of the country, and that the real gangsters were the ones in charge. But England is not Latin America, and its riots are not political, or so we keep hearing. They are just about lawless kids taking advantage of a situation to take what isn't theirs. And British society, Cameron tells us, abhors that kind of behaviour.

This is said in all seriousness. As if the massive bank bailouts never happened, followed by the defiant record bonuses. Followed by the emergency G8 and G20 meetings, when the leaders decided, collectively, not to do anything to punish the bankers for any of this, nor to do anything serious to prevent a similar crisis from happening again. Instead they would all go home to their respective countries and force sacrifices on the most vulnerable. They would do this by firing public sector workers, scapegoating teachers, closing libraries, upping tuition fees, rolling back union contracts, creating rush privatisations of public assets and decreasing pensions – mix the cocktail for where you live. And who is on television lecturing about the need to give up these "entitlements"? The bankers and hedge-fund managers, of course.

This is the global saqueo, a time of great taking. Fuelled by a pathological sense of entitlement, this looting has all been done with the lights on, as if there was nothing at all to hide. There are some nagging fears, however. In early July, the Wall Street Journal, citing a new poll, reported that 94% of millionaires were afraid of "violence in the streets". This, it turns out, was a reasonable fear.

Of course London's riots weren't a political protest. But the people committing night-time robbery sure as hell know that their elites have been committing daytime robbery. Saqueos are contagious. The Tories are right when they say the rioting is not about the cuts. But it has a great deal to do with what those cuts represent: being cut off. Locked away in a ballooning underclass with the few escape routes previously offered – a union job, a good affordable education – being rapidly sealed off. The cuts are a message. They are saying to whole sectors of society: you are stuck where you are, much like the migrants and refugees we turn away at our increasingly fortressed borders.

Cameron's response to the riots is to make this locking-out literal: evictions from public housing, threats to cut off communication tools and outrageous jail terms (five months to a woman for receiving a stolen pair of shorts). The message is once again being sent: disappear, and do it quietly.

At last year's G20 "austerity summit" in Toronto, the protests turned into riots and multiple cop cars burned. It was nothing by London 2011 standards, but it was still shocking to us Canadians. The big controversy then was that the government had spent $675m on summit "security" (yet they still couldn't seem to put out those fires). At the time, many of us pointed out that the pricey new arsenal that the police had acquired – water cannons, sound cannons, tear gas and rubber bullets – wasn't just meant for the protesters in the streets. Its long-term use would be to discipline the poor, who in the new era of austerity would have dangerously little to lose.

This is what Cameron got wrong: you can't cut police budgets at the same time as you cut everything else. Because when you rob people of what little they have, in order to protect the interests of those who have more than anyone deserves, you should expect resistance – whether organised protests or spontaneous looting. And that's not politics. It's physics.

• A version of this column was first published in The Nation
 
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