London is burning...

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And I thought I was ignorant . In my eyes, self righteousness isn't a good enough reason to murder someone.

You are, darling, if you are so-outraged by (ill-targeted, unorganized) acts of resistance,
and not at all by the centuries of (institutional, systematic) horrific and total disregard for human life and dignity provoking them.

No, but the inability to live a quite, dignified life is...

PS

They just need to target the right people.

The tree of liberty is hungry.

Last edited by GoonSquad on 09 Aug 2011, 2:25 pm, edited 1 time in total.

It involves no self-righteousness to desire for wielders of great suffering and brutality, in the name of justice,
to experience a minute portion of the pain they have themselves inflicted in the name of individual and oligarchical financial self-interest.

You just defined self-righteousness right there. You think a disproportionate amount of damage is justified as a response to perceived injustices. Sorry but if someone isn't violating your right to life and property then killing someone is murder. And before anyone starts getting all "You think it's justified to kill someone over a damn PS3 you capitalist pig?", property includes your home and your place of business if you own it.

I wouldn't spare Bernie Madoff from a bullet to the head, so I don't see where the double standard lies.

Last edited by AceOfSpades on 09 Aug 2011, 2:39 pm, edited 1 time in total.

"Disproportionate"? There can be no proportionate justice for a handful of individuals who've killed or caused suffering to billions.
Although it is telling that you condition the circumstances warranting corporal action against them as having to be so dire as to cause death themselves or loss of property. I don't subscribe to the ethical legitimacy of the claim to property of any kind, so that's a tough row for you to hoe, if you're intent on appealing to a love for property as-projected on to me.

We can agree to agree, then.

Burning down their own neighborhoods didn't really help anyone in the 60s either. You just increase the blight and drive out investment.

(Singing)

London-town is burning down,
Falling down, to the ground!
But we won't let that get us down;
We're Californians!


(... with a nod to Animaniacs... )

It seems to me somewhat facile to blame all of this on thugs, nihilists and anarchists. There are substantive causes that underlie this, and even if there are ringleaders, they are tapping into a more generalized level of discontent, that should not be ignored or dismissed.

But conversely, the United Kingdom is a parliamentary democracy which adheres to the rule of law. Whatever the level of discontent, there are political and legal processes that can be brought to bear to address it. While resistance--even violent resistance--might be justified as a response to tyrrany and repression, this is no "Arab Spring."

A crackdown will accomplish nothing but to further deepen people's discontent. But with the Olympics and Paralympics are a year away, I fear a crackdown is what we will see. LOCOG will put significant pressure on the city and the government to ensure that nothing of this nature is allowed to occur during the Games, and we may see a much more intense security presence in London than we saw in Vancouver (even allowing for the much larger scope of the summer games).

Simonsays, what I just heard on the news is that the rioters are not destroying businesses in their own neighborhoods; they are going to different neighborhoods to do it.

They're also saying people are getting messages over the Internet to meet at particular places to riot and the police doesn't have the technology to track where these messages are coming from.

Let me just say that the laissez-faire, destroy the welfare state, New Right has proven itselft to be the biggest enemy of capitalism. While doctrinaire communists like DentArthurDent like to chastise social democrats like myself for "enabling" capitalism, I'm beginning to see this as a compliment. The Wide-Eyed Utopian Capitalists, with their disregard for the welfare of the people, lack of any historical perspective, and irrational faith in shock therapy, who are threatening the civilized society itself. The very system of Anglo-American capitalism has been rotting, criminalized (witness the vast white collar fraud that led to the 2008 collapse), excessively finanicalized, and destablized by the actions of the New Right. Cameron's moronic austerity cuts are jeoporadizing society and exaccerbating social tensions in Great Britian. Unlike DentArthurDent and other Communist utopians, however, I don't think the collapse of industrial capitalism will lead to a communist utopia, it will lead to chaos. The Wide-Eyed Utopian Capitalists are the biggest enemies to the capitalist system out there and it's time that leftwing social democrats reassert themselves with stablizing, democraticizing, and equalizing reforms to prevent the end of civilized society (or, if this is too sensationalist, several years of brutal, crime intensive, 19th century style, bipolar capitalism).

Errrr..... you're going into some pretty dark territory with this.

I'd rather activsts stick to shutting down tax dodging businesses by parking themselves outisde stores, like the No Cut movement did, which had BROAD support from across Britain. Smashing down the homes of the financial lumpenbourgeoisie may seem fun and retributive at first, but like all forms of vigilantism and taking justice into one's own hands, it's prone to error and gets out of hand quite quickly. Hell, this initially started as a protest against police brutuality, can you imagine if it had started as a "smash the banksters" movement and then escalated?

Now I sorta get why ValentineWiggim supports the death penalty.

That's a brilliant idea. After all, let's just assume anyone we find with dark skin is an immigrant to London, ignore the young, jobless whites who've been doing quite a bit of opportunistic looting, and exaccerbate an already existing problem with a racist police department.

I sorta love this argument, becase both ValetineWiggin and AceOfSpades believe in "retributive justice" and retributive killing. Yet they disagree over who has to die and whether only directly harming somebody counts as a punishable offense (AceOfSpades) or whether indirect actions that deprive people of their pensions and savings through stock manipulations also count (ValentineWiggin). Either way, I think this displays the morbidly comedic aspects of the death penalty, as (despite both refusing to acknowledge it) both debators believe in self-righteously exacting retribution through death against "scumbags".

One of the few sensible things you've posted recently. People across the political spectrum would agree with that.

Very few people voted for their leaders. And even out of those that did vote, most voted for representatives that never made it anywhere near the Commons. A huge amount of very politically-aware people - even those who write blogs and such - don't vote. They just don't see the point, because all three main parties are so similar and lacking in character. They have largely the same policies with different wording. It's the 'unseen hands', the people we cannot remove nor elect, who really run this nation. And, of course, the power that the increasingly Soviet-style European Union has here.