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PeonForHer -> RE: roiting in croydon and penge (8/11/2011 11:07:12 AM)
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quote:
ORIGINAL: Aynne88
Peon, sorry I have been at my other job bartending all night and just got in. Just to clarify, I am very liberal, a progressive, always have been. I despise the right wing and the GOP in general. I also pretty much find myself in the anti-authority camp, however... with age comes some wisdom and looting isn't nor has it ever been an effective political statement. Al I am saying is that these punks are not doing one thing that has a political undertone to it, they are jacking shit, plain and simple, it's like all of a sudden everyone that doesn't want to be drafted is a goddamn "conscientous objector". My ass.
Trust me when I tell you I am not a friend of the law or police in general. Corruption isn't pretty on either side of this mess.
OK, fair enough. To me, the motives of the rioters still don't matter much. Pretty clearly these rioters weren't weren't there to 'protesting politically', in any ordinary sense of the words 'protest' and 'political'. A British historian was on TV here last night suggesting that we'd need to go back to the eighteenth century to find a comparable kind of riot - well before the suffragettes, even before the movement for universal male suffrage was making any real impact. I also can't be bothered to get into a debate about whether or not the rioting is excusable. No, of course not. Like I said earlier, I don't think that's a useful debate. Except to point out that one common phenomenon anyone who suggests non-right-wing causes behind such outbreaks is all too often accused of justifying the outbreaks. This is rubbish. Also dangerous - (to echo Aswad) because we need a range of views so as to work out how to prevent more outbreaks, and worse ones, in the future.
It's also pretty damned crucial that we to *move beyond* the knee-jerk analyses, and bog-standard proposals for solutions, of left and right, too. Again - I think, too risky just to settle into what we're used to. Also, we need a sense of time frame here: some problems will take fundamental shifts of attitude and those don't happen overnight. We need plans of action for *now* - ones that won't risk fomenting things.
At risk of being accused of what's already been dubbed 'armchair riot policing', I suggest the plans for the immediate term depend upon a cautious minimalism. There's evidently a will here for people to group to protect themselves and their communities. It's being encouraged - but we have to avoid the dangers of vigilantism. Secondly, a small change in the law, already proposed and widely accepted: that the police can require people whose faces are covered to uncover them. Thirdly, we fight technology with technology - the rioters, it seems, have been using social networks - and we can do similar. And we can send photos - because most of us, now, carry some gadget or another that will take photos. Small, cautious, safe things to do.
It could be that all the much-publicised threats of arrests has done the job in frightening would-be rioters in the future. But I wouldn't bank on it. The rioters have generally been young, fit and obviously ready to be extremely violent - even lethally so. Nonetheless, I think some generally safe measures to protect ourselves are possible. Intelligent, restrained, open-minded community spirit, and debate, seems to be the key thing in the short term.
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