davidthompson

Causes, More Causes and the Politics of Trainers

Further to this, some post-riot rumination. Of variable quality.

First up, Daniel Hannan on criminal opportunism:

Potential criminals will always outnumber police officers. Law enforcement works on the theory that not all potential criminals will go on a spree at the same moment – just as banking rests on the assumption that we won’t all simultaneously withdraw our deposits. When potential criminals realise that the forces of order are overstretched – during a blackout, for example, or in the aftermath of a natural disaster – looting usually follows. What happened earlier this week was that potential criminals made precisely such a calculation. The trigger was not a power cut or an earthquake, but the television images of police in Tottenham standing by while shops were plundered. Even the dimmest hoodie was capable of making a cost-benefit analysis. If the police were unwilling to defend property on one London high street, they would be quite overwhelmed by more widespread disorder. All that was needed was numbers and, thanks to Blackberry and Twitter, numbers could now be concentrated.

Next, Theodore Dalrymple on dependence and degeneracy:

The riots are the apotheosis of the welfare state and popular culture in their British form. A population thinks (because it has often been told so by intellectuals and the political class) that it is entitled to a high standard of consumption, irrespective of its personal efforts; and therefore it regards the fact that it does not receive that high standard, by comparison with the rest of society, as a sign of injustice. It believes itself deprived (because it has often been told so by intellectuals and the political class), even though each member of it has received an education costing $80,000, toward which neither he nor - quite likely - any member of his family has made much of a contribution; indeed, he may well have lived his entire life at others’ expense, such that every mouthful of food he has ever eaten, every shirt he has ever worn, every television he has ever watched, has been provided by others. Even if he were to recognise this, he would not be grateful, for dependency does not promote gratitude. On the contrary, he would simply feel that the subventions were not sufficient to allow him to live as he would have liked.

And finally, here’s a podcast of the BBC’s World Tonight, in which Laurie Penny offers her “intelligent analysis.” 

The comedy starts around ten minutes in, shortly after one self-declared rioter says he wants “more things for the community” and “less tax.” The same gentleman also thinks the police should have “more power” to “clamp down” on rioters… i.e., on people such as himself. I kid you not. Swollen with righteousness and keen to interrupt, Laurie tells us, “there’s been no attempt to understand” the rioters, which is a typically bold and puzzling statement, not least given the acreage of commentary attempting to do precisely that. Ms Penny also tells us that what frightens her isn’t the delinquent nihilism, the mugging of children or the attempts to burn people in their homes, but the use of the word “feral” to describe the people doing so. It seems we, not the rioters, are the ignorant ones. “Violence,” she repeats, “is rarely ever mindless.” And so, if your home or business was burned to the ground by people who don’t have an explanation for why they did it, besides it being “a laugh” and an opportunity to steal or smash your stuff, then you really should try harder to understand our society’s “social divisions.” And do please note the implied redefinition of the word understand, which now means agree with Laurie Penny.

“Nicking trainers,” Laurie tells us, is a sign of “desperation” and “a political statement.”

Friday Ephemera

It’s a sign of the End Times. // Cat scans. // The remarkable head stability of the Brown Owl. // Beard-measuring T-shirt. // Roof garden apartment, London. // Fog in San Francisco. // World’s highest tennis court. // Drainpipe hotel. // Garbage trucks of yore. For the garbage truck enthusiast. // The internet movie cars database. (h/t, Coudal) // How to deal with vehicle thieves. // Abandoned remains of Russian space shuttle project. // Tetris in the round. (h/t, Anna) // Hiroshima panoramas, six months after the bomb. // Picture of note. // Rating the Bond films. Die, Moonraker, die. // And finally… Stopping looters, the American way.

The Riots, Summarised

“A disorientated and bleeding teenager on the streets of London. A gang pretend to help him, and then mug him.”

Captures the ethos, I think.

Meanwhile, our pocket-size revolutionary Laurie Penny - who of course has “no problem with principled, thought-through political ‘violence’” - is telling her readers: “Violence is rarely mindless. The politics of a burning building, a smashed-in shop or a young man shot by police may be obscured even to those who lit the rags or fired the gun, but the politics are there.” Doubtless Laurie will soon tell us exactly what those politics are and how closely they match her own. She is, after all, keen to see the emergence of a “radical youth movement” – “a movement not just for reform but for revolution” – one that “requires direct action” and “upsetting… our parents, our future employers… and quite possibly the police.” Ms Penny also thinks that spitting on women she doesn’t know is pretty rad too.

Elsewhere, while Mothercare burned to the ground and female fire-fighters were dragged from their vehicles and punched insensible, a number of leftist anti-cuts groups announced their “solidarity” with the thugs, thieves and predators. “London,” we learn, “is the world’s biggest Black Bloc.” While student “activist,” chronic liar and Independent blogger Jody McIntyre was busy using his new media profile to urge further rioting and arson. No doubt the Indie, the Guardian and the New Statesman will be swollen with pride at the doings of their latest protégé. But remember, people. As the Guardian’s Priyamvada Gopal told us recently, setting fire to occupied buildings - resulting in this - isn’t “real” violence. Not when compared to “hypocritical language.”

Update, via the comments:

Elsewhere (44)

Jeff Goldstein quotes Victor Davis Hanson on matters inexplicable:

Another mystery is the leftism of those who live in a world of hierarchical privilege. If we examine the elite media (the MSNBC or New York Times megaphones), or Hollywood (the lifestyle of a Sean Penn), or leftist politicians (a Nancy Pelosi, John Kerry, or Al Gore), there is almost no tangible difference in the way they live their lives from those of the corporate or private sector elite they deprecate. […]

That [raises] the question — is the elite left’s infatuation with the good life not so much a paradox, not a hypocrisy at all, but rather a sort of medieval exemption, or perhaps penance? The price for living well is to advocate government subsidies for the less well-off that are rarely seen, and disdain for those who grub for money and as tea partiers lack the refinement that is the dividend of the very rich or the so well connected. Does buying a $40,000 ticket to the president’s 50th birthday party mean that one is exempt from the presidential invective against “millionaires and billionaires” and “corporate jet owners”? As a general rule, the more I hear of such carping, the more I assume the whiner covets what he so childishly is obsessed with ending.

The mysteries of the millionaire leftist have been pondered here quite often. It seems reasonable to suppose that our leftwing elite aren’t vehemently opposed to their own status, influence and unusual wealth, which often exceeds that of those whose “unjust rewards” they publicly denounce. It seems they merely object to the wrong kind of rich people. Which is to say, people whose views and backgrounds may differ from their own. Maybe Alan Rusbridger, Jeremy Irons and Polly Toynbee, for instance, imagine themselves as part of an exempted nomenklatura – as consultants and advisors, clearing the road to our egalitarian utopia, where their influence and status will grow accordingly. Or maybe they’ve simply managed to construct personalities that are impervious to their own kleptomania and colossal hypocrisy. Which would also explain why Rusbridger, Irons and Toynbee are so comically unprepared for having their own affairs considered in any way relevant.

Nearly ten years on, Johnathan Pearce, Nick Gillespie and Tim Sandefur reflect on terrible events and inadequate art:

What is an artist, who has spent his or her career producing work to condemn capitalism, going to produce to mourn the loss of the World Trade Centre at the hands of anti-capitalist terrorists? They certainly aren’t going to produce a second Mourning Athena. As Robert Hughes says, American artists particularly are obsessed “with creating identities, based on race, gender and the rest. These have made for narrow, preachy, single-issue art in which victim credentials count for more than aesthetic achievement. You get irritable agitprop…. The fact that an artwork is about injustice no more gives it aesthetic status than the fact that it’s about mermaids.”

And Jan Blits revisits the University of Delaware’s infamous “social justice education” programme: 

At every opportunity students were told that their identity, first and foremost, is not “human,” but this or that ethnic, racial, religious or sexual group: “Native American,” “Hispanic,” “black,” “Asian,” “white,” “male,” “female,” “Muslim,” “Hindu,” “gay,” straight,” and so on. Whites and males were singled out and publicly shamed for their “privilege.” […] Students were also forced to behave like bigots and spew forth stereotypes about members of other ethnic, racial, religious or sexual groups. When students objected that they were being forced to say things they didn’t mean, the [resident assistants] told them that they were saying what, deep down, they really thought. The obvious purpose of this exercise was to shame whites in general, and white males in particular. But, in fact, minority students especially hated the exercise, because it was in their name that other students were being unfairly shamed and abused.

Details of the pathological race fantasies at the heart of Delaware’s “social justice” programme can be found here, including the belief that “the term [racist] applies to all white people (i.e., people of European descent) living in the United States.” Students’ accounts of their tribal indoctrination – referred to by its proponents as a “treatment” intended to leave “a mental footprint on [students’] consciousness” - can be found here: “The immediate effects were to intimidate and humiliate. The long-term effect is to teach conformity.” And if you believe such behaviour must be a one-off aberration, better think again.

As usual, feel free to add your own.