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There is a race at school. Bobby, is one of the youngest kids in his class. His family isn't really wealth, but they make due. Keith, is one of the oldest kids in Bobby's class, 11 months older than Bobby. Keith's family is much better off and can purchase some of the best items for their family.
The race starts, Bobby tries his hardest to win, but being smaller and younger, he can't beat Keith. Keith wins the race.
Afterwards, Bobby comes to his father crying, "It's not fair! Keith is almost a year older than me! He has really good running shoes, and I have the same tennis shoes I wear everyday! He shouldn't get to race with us! It's not fair!" Bobby's father takes his chin in his hand gently and looks in Bobby's eyes, "Did you try your best?" Bobby nods yes, tears running down his face. "Then why are you upset? Because you didn't win? That is nothing to be ashamed of. There will always be someone bigger and faster than you, someone with more advantages. You can't always live your life worrying about if you the best or not. You have to live your life being the best you that you can be. In the end, the only race that truly matters is you against yourself. Now wipe those tears and let's go see your mother."
Sadly our society has forgotten this. We too often judge our accomplishments by how others are doing, then what we are doing ourselves.
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However, I firmly believe that ‘society / my situation made me do it’ is never a good justification for violence.
And you're still not getting it. It's not a justification, it's an explanation. There is no justification for rioting. Rioting is pretty much a universally bad option to exercise. it will never make your situation better, and will almost always (without fail) make it worse.
I am very surprised that you have no sympathy for people who’s homes and shops have been burnt and looted, especially given that many of them are in, from or serve the same sort of disadvantaged regions that the riots began in. And if they are ‘Middle Class’, that does not equate to ‘opporessor’. One of the problems with a riot is that it is indiscriminate, it will hurt people who are sympathetic to the plight of the rioters just as much as those who are not.
All of these problems we have? Fixable. Why aren't they fixed? Because for the most part the Middle Class would rather kiss the ass of the rich and dream of one day having the same wealth and power, rather than actually fix the problems.
I guess I have a little sympathy for that tiny, tiny slice of people who have really dedicated themselves to solving these problems and get hurt. But your average small business owner, even if very liberal, still consistently votes for unserious reform and a do-as-little-as-possible attitude towards the desperately poor.
I wonder how the poor and disenfranchised of London would feel about you categorising them as animals? While I agree that ‘society’ has a lot to answer for for creating a situation where people can feel justified in such a riot, or feeling that they have no other outlet, I think you are SEVERELY overstating the case in saying that they are kept ‘just this side of starving’ and ‘confined’ and ‘poked’. Most of the rioters you will find are not living in extreme poverty, but are living in difficult situations, in a difficult time, and feel understandably frustrated by their apparent lack of options. They are not cornered, hungry, abused animals as you categorise them.
I dunno. I've seen council housing in London, when I was living there. It looks a lot like a gussied up prison to me.
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All of these problems we have? Fixable. Why aren't they fixed? Because for the most part the Middle Class would rather kiss the ass of the rich and dream of one day having the same wealth and power, rather than actually fix the problems.
Don't blame only the middle class on this count. A lot of the lower class share the same dreams and vote for the parties that have established policies that only seek to enhance the divide.
Generation F@~&ed: How Britain is Eating Its Young
Every evening, at around teatime, the occupants of the small council house in the non-descript English market town of Northampton become nervous.
They are waiting for it to start.
Soon stones will be hurled at the home for hours on end. The mother, barely out of her teens herself, keeps her two disabled sons, aged four and nine, away from the windows in case they shatter. On some nights the siege continues until three or four in the morning. On others, the crowd of nine- to 16-year-olds has better things to do.
As victims go, the stone-throwers are hard to pity.
The UN’s first ever report on the state of childhood in the industrialized West made unpleasant reading for many of the world’s richest nations. But none found it quite so hard to swallow as the Brits, who, old jokes about English cooking aside, discovered that they were eating their own young.
According to the Unicef report, which measured 40 indicators of quality of life – including the strength of relationships with friends and family, educational achievements and personal aspirations, and exposure to drinking, drug taking and other risky behaviour – British children have the most miserable upbringing in the developed world. American children come next, second from the bottom.
The report confirmed many people’s suspicions about the “British disease,” in the process raising doubts about the Anglo-American model of progress in general. As the older but also weaker partner, Britain may well serve to warn a host of nations following closely behind on its path. While an ageing, ever more crowded Europe looks on anxiously at the stress behaviour currently being exhibited by its own dysfunctional young – be it Parisian car barbeques or riots in Denmark and Germany – our continental cousins can’t help but notice that many of these behaviours debuted in Anglo-American cultures. The report explicitly demonstrated that, at least on this side of the Atlantic, the British are trailblazers of generational instability and social deterioration. On the whole, British children were more disconnected from their families, with nearly half of 15-year-old boys spending most nights out with friends, compared to just 17 percent of their French counterparts. Forty percent of UK youth had sex before age 15, compared with 15 percent of Polish teens. They drank nearly four times as much as the Italians, and, perhaps most saliently, had the lowest sense of subjective well-being among all the youth surveyed.
But to what degree was the report accurate, and how much of it was hyperbole? The Independent’s Paul Vallely quickly dismissed it as just another tabloid chapter in the UK’s ongoing moral panic about its feral children. “Consider the hugely varied responses,” he observed, “Everyone sees in it confirmation of their pre-existing worldview. It’s an indictment of our dog-eat-dog society. It showed how the furious pace of technical and cultural change is accelerating childhood depression and behavioural problems. It confirmed how rubbish New Labour has been on eradicating poverty. It is the result of market forces pushing children to act, dress and consume like adults. It is the fault of junk food, computers and paedophiles lurking round every corner. Pick your prejudice, you can find the evidence here.”
Others were neither as sure nor as reassuring. Veteran columnist Mary Dejevksy noted that “while Labour politicians swerved frantically away from accepting the findings – variously blaming Margaret Thatcher, the subjectivity of the categories, or the supposed obsolescence of the statistics – large numbers of people across the country breathed a sigh of relief. Here was documentary support for their fears. After ten years of official assurances that things were only getting better – greater all round prosperity, less child poverty, more nurseries, fewer teenage pregnancies, and improved exam results – callers and emailers embraced the Unicef findings as an alternative truth more in line with their own experience.”
Around the nation, airtime was cleared for cathartic phone-ins, heated discussions, and a torrent of contributors that simply would not stop. As if sensing that many of the problems might in part stem from the government’s unparalleled obsession with monitoring, measuring and homogenising the very children it once sought to cherish, many former Labour advisors suddenly sought to introduce daylight between their ideas and those of the heavily surveilled nanny state. Neil Lawson of the Labour think-tank Compass bleakly admitted: “Society is hollowing out, but not just in the rotting boroughs of south London. The middle classes are anxious too. Many are richer but few seem happier. Mental illness abounds. White-collar jobs are outsourced to India. Everyone looks for meaning in their lives – but all they find is shopping.”
“The reason our children’s lives are the worst among economically advanced countries is because we are a poor version of the USA,” he said. “So the USA comes second from bottom and we follow behind. The age of neo-liberalism, even with the human face that New Labour has given it, cannot stem the tide of the social recession capitalism creates.”
Others claimed that Labour had conducted a botched experiment in social engineering through financial incentives that favored full-time work for all parents, except the super rich or the desperately deprived. Popular psychologist and Affluenza author Oliver James called on the UK to raise the status of being a parent over the status of the worker-consumer. “Being a stay at home mother has a lower one than that of a street-sweeper,” he lamented, adding that after spending a decade trying to advise the current administration, they had done almost the exact opposite of what was needed.
But what if the behaviour of broken British children is less a violent reaction to their inadequate pasts than calculated defiance against their hopeless futures? Looking ahead, demographers and sociologists have begun to map out the downward trajectory on the bell curve called “progress.” They’ve spotted trouble – the kind of trouble that may already be written in the faces of today’s teens’ older siblings. In their Class of 2005 survey, LSE economist Nick Bosanquet, along with Blair Gibbs of the independent think tank Reform, branded Britain’s under-35s the “ipod Generation” – insecure, pressured, over-taxed and debt-ridden. Warning that Britain was at a generational tipping point when it came to quality of life, they argued, “The common perception is that today’s young people have it easy. But the true position of young people is thrown into stark relief when compared to their parents . . . who enjoyed many advantages of which the younger generation can now only dream, including a generous welfare state, free universal higher education, secure pensions and a substantial rise in housing equity which has augmented their lifetime savings.”
Others have called the tripling of housing costs in under a decade the largest generational asset transfer – from young and poor to old and rich – in UK history, and it is almost certainly the key factor contributing to both the nation’s plummeting birth-rate and its record £1.2 trillion in personal debt, a figure that puts even the most voracious American consumer to shame. Debt, whether measured in a natal deficit or angry letters from the bank, is a sure sign that the good times are up, because the only way the pretence of affluence can be continued is if tomorrow’s hardship is used to pay for today’s brief consumer whims.
The first stirrings of major intergenerational conflict are already being noted. The basic rights of the recent past – a safe job, free education and healthcare, secure homes to raise a family, a modest but comfortable old age – have slipped quietly away, all to be replaced by a myriad of vapid lifestyle choices and glittery consumer trinkets. Excluded from a national social housing scheme sold off by their parents, unwilling to give birth in the UK’s draconian new system of rental accommodation which gives tenants no more than six months grace from eviction, and unable to afford homes of their own in 85 percent of the country, today’s ipod generation is stunted: trapped halfway between childhood and adulthood. It now takes them until 34, on average, before they can afford a house, let alone have a family of their own. Little surprise that they are such a woeful models of grown-up responsibility for their younger siblings to emulate. Mom and Dad aren’t much better. By blowing their children’s inheritance on 80 percent of the UK’s luxury good purchases, from suvs to cruises and antiwrinkle creams, Britain’s baby-boomers seem hell bent on ensuring that, even without coming resource shortages such as Peak Oil, their offspring will be the first generation in living memory to have a lowered standard of living.
The economic impact of baby boomers is certainly no surprise to those in the city, who have long described the boomer charge through the decades as the “pig in the pipeline.” As Channel 4’s economics correspondent Faisal Islam observed, “They embraced social liberalism, flower power and a large state when they were teenagers, and low taxes, a smaller state and loadsamoney individualism in their period of high disposable income. Then on the realisation of their own mortality, up goes spending on the health service and pensions. Fifty to 64 year-olds also have the largest carbon footprints – 20 percent bigger than other age groups – yet the climate change phenomenon will not affect them. Perhaps we are seeing the scary sight of a generation that has been rather brutal in getting its own way squeezing everything it can out of its children.”
Or, as Conservative MP David Willetts, put it: “A young person could be forgiven for believing that the way in which economic and social policy is now conducted is little less than a conspiracy by the middle-aged against the young.”
No wonder the UK is increasingly repressing its youth. As the generational divide deepens, it makes sense for the older generations to stake their claim now, while they have the power of the state on their side. Aside from handing out more than 10,000 Asbos (Antisocial Behaviour Orders, a cross between a human parking ticket and the sort of condemned notice you sometimes see on the walls of derelict buildings), the petty misanthropy that bans hoodie-wearing teenagers from shopping malls, forces parenting classes on failing single mums, and allows 79 percent of police forces to impose curfews on children, comes easily to a nation that thought up the idea that its young should be seen and not heard. But never before have we put them under this degree of surveillance while simultaneously turning a blind eye to our adult responsibilities. Satellites track their phones, marketeers groom them on cyberspace, police add the dna from 600 innocent children a week to a 50,000-sample database, while libraries fingerprint them to borrow books – all linked by rafts of new childhood databases joining the dots. In an age of hyper-individualism we are recoiling from the very children we have created. Monitoring is not enough, we must be protected from them. So Conservative leader David Cameron’s call to “hug a hoodie” was mocked, but Tony Blair won praise for ignoring compelling crime statistics and launching a “Respect agenda” to protect the societies safest members (the over-50s) from those most at risk of crime (the under-25s)
In 2000, the country stood aghast upon hearing of ten-year-old Damilola Taylor, who bled to death, alone, in a public stairwell after being stabbed in the leg with a glass bottle by two boys aged 12 and 13. Fast forward through a few years of steadily rising violent crime rates, to the recent case of a 19-year-old who raped a 79-year-old grandmother, stabbed her to death and then left her body to burn on a cooker – it barely registered on the front pages. In 2005, a Reading teen’s binge-drink killing of his 14-year-old friend and a 16-year-old neighbor – one of whom had his throat cut so deeply that police first thought he’d been decapitated – was equally forgettable. Until recently, victims of crime under the age of 16 didn’t even make the official statistics.
The downward spiral of our progeny has been done to death in glorious tabloid Technicolor, but rather than dwelling on the carnage in order to understand our own part in this tragedy, we’ve instead moved to the role of cynical observer. Now we are busily examining the new life that has emerged from the wreckage: the Chav, Britain’s very own white trash. Although the label is thought to derive from “charva” – the Roma word for child – it is more frequently thought to stand for a different and altogether more lazy, cultural shorthand: “council housed and violent.” Mocked for their expanding waistlines, plummeting vocabularies, “Croydon facelift“ hairstyles, and a slavish devotion to gold jewellery and knocked-off Burberry sportswear, Chavs have become figures of chortlingly ironic ridicule by the media. But only from a distance. Because make no mistake, these most marginalised of children are neither poor nor noble savages. They throw dogs from bridges in front of trains. They beat fathers into comas to make mobile phone videos for YouTube. They are every bit as unpleasant as they are damaged.
Chavs are the foot soldiers of corporate consumerism. They wear branded kit, congregate around halls of bland consumerism – shopping centers, cinemas, fast food outlets – and target anyone who stands out. Their chief weapon is not surprise, but a volley of inarticulate abuse and violence backed up by safety in numbers. Though they suffer from a dearth of so many intangibles in their young lives, one thing they do not know is real material poverty. They own expensive sports gear, expensive mobiles, watch Murdoch satellite channels on large flatscreen TVs, and aspire to a souped-up motor with a massive stereo system. They are not so much poor as culturally and imaginatively impoverished, because the main characteristic of Chavs is not social class but an utter lack of hope.
Once upon a time it was possible to grow up with a genuine pride in being working class. As the UK’s manufacturing sector declined, that pride has all but vanished. Shiny trinkets have bought off whole sections of the working class. That Chavs seek the more crass and vulgar ostentations of material wealth is just a refection having been colonized by consumer capitalism. The Chavs are Thatcher’s revenge.
Hard as it may seem, there is one sort of youth even more demonized and legally suspicious than the Chav. In this war on terror without end, Blair’s revenge, no child is more frightening than a Muslim one. So it is unsurprising that the group at the front of the queue in Britain’s criminalization of childhood are the country’s estimated half-million Muslim youngsters of South Asian origin. In many respects they are doubly marginalized: once by the hypervigilant and distrustful authorities, who have increased stop-and-searches of South Asians by 302 percent between 2001 and 2003, compared to a 118 percent increase among whites; and again by their parents, who are reluctant to let them integrate with the all-consuming love of binge-drinking and sex that constitutes stereotypical British youth culture.
“While we loathe what happened,” human rights lawyer and cultural commentator Rajnaara Akhtar remarked shortly after the 7/7 tube bombings, “We recognize why and can comprehend the rage.” Noting that many UK-born Muslim children feel culturally distinct from both the inward-looking attitudes of their immigrant parents, and from established religious communities that “fail to recognise and relate to the challenges facing the youth,” she argued that the turn toward extremism is all too easy when “issues such as lack of integration, identity crises and their roles in this society” are left to children to decipher by themselves.
Yet this is not necessarily a simple story of spiritually ablaze, fundamentalist Muslims rebelling against British corruption and decadence. Many commentators argue that by choosing to espouse a distorted version of militant Islam unrecognisable to many first-generation communities, youth are rebelling as much against the shortcomings of their parents as the country as a whole. Just like the Chavs, these youth are torturously dislocated from the communities that raised them.
As Akhtar puts it, “When depressing social predicaments and inadequate adult guidance are coupled with the sorrow and anger arising from unjust wars and occupations, the surge of negative emotional energy is easy prey.”
The tendency towards extremism is even easier to comprehend when one considers just what exactly Muslim youth have to lose. Not much, according to the statistics: 35 percent of Muslim homes have no adults in employment, double the national average; three-quarters of Pakistani and Bangladeshi children live under the poverty line compared to just a third of children in the country overall; and 31 percent of Muslim youth leave school without any qualifications, compared to 15 percent of the total population.* Given the imbalances, perhaps we should not even be asking why a few young Muslims are turning against the society that raised them. Perhaps we should be asking why more of them haven’t already.
Just how much more hopeless does the situation have to become before Britain’s children wake up and realise that they no longer want to be monitored, marketed and manipulated for the benefit of their elders? Is it possible to wake and warn them? Some would seem to have neither the skills nor the will to articulate their anger and isolation. If indeed they are angry. While Chavs appear to have been swallowed up by their corporate clothing, it does offer them camouflage as they haunt the benches outside McDonalds and the faceless plains of identikit retail parks that we built for them to inhabit.
As a small, densely populated island that spawned both the industrial revolution and colonialism, Britain has a lot to tell the rest of the developed world in general, and America in particular, about our common future. If the crisscrossing faultlines of greed, geopolitics and social inequality do reach a tipping point, we may well see a conflict between youthful brutality and the power of old age that will only accelerate the decline. Maybe we should hope that our young people never wake. Because, if they do, Britain may soon be no place to grow old.
Maria Hampton lives, writes and cycles around Cambridge, UK. She’s currently trying to hatch an escape plan to opt out of a frenetic modern life, but still eat.
* Sources: Oxford Center for Islamic Studies, Department for Work and Pensions, and the Office of National Statistics, respectively.
There is a race at school. Bobby, is one of the youngest kids in his class. His family isn't really wealth, but they make due. Keith, is one of the oldest kids in Bobby's class, 11 months older than Bobby. Keith's family is much better off and can purchase some of the best items for their family.
The race starts, Bobby tries his hardest to win, but being smaller and younger, he can't beat Keith. Keith wins the race.
Afterwards, Bobby comes to his father crying, "It's not fair! Keith is almost a year older than me! He has really good running shoes, and I have the same tennis shoes I wear everyday! He shouldn't get to race with us! It's not fair!" Bobby's father takes his chin in his hand gently and looks in Bobby's eyes, "Did you try your best?" Bobby nods yes, tears running down his face. "Then why are you upset? Because you didn't win? That is nothing to be ashamed of. There will always be someone bigger and faster than you, someone with more advantages. You can't always live your life worrying about if you the best or not. You have to live your life being the best you that you can be. In the end, the only race that truly matters is you against yourself. Now wipe those tears and let's go see your mother."
Sadly our society has forgotten this. We too often judge our accomplishments by how others are doing, then what we are doing ourselves.
Are you honestly arguing that the rich are literally genetically superior to the poor?
You also forgot the part of the race where Keith hired someone to trip Bobby, and then stole all his money after the race, and that he doesn't have a dad to comfort him because his dad was murdered by the police (if not thrown into jail), and that his mom can't do much to comfort him because she spends all day trying to find a job so she can keep feeding him.
What I'm saying is, your analogy is crap.
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Poor people are generally very badly trained domesticated primates that are under too much continuous stress have any real awareness or enlightenment.I can’t believe you wrote that. Do you actually believe it? Am I misunderstanding you, because that sounds really horrific man.
Yeah, I actually believe that.
What, is it news to you that humans are primates? That we are animals?
It's kind of old hat.
So no, the problem isn't multiculturalism. It's only when that "culturalism" consists of opposing religious views (Christian sects vs. Christian sects, Christianity vs. Islam etc.).
So tell me, what are those "values" you are referring to?
And I'm not making this a right vs. left problem.Ok, thread blew up and might end up being locked, so I'm not going to give this the attention it deserves, but...
The mixing of cultures is inevitable and has been going since different groups of people discovered different ways of doing things. What bothers me is ideological multiculturalsim. A civilization that bends over backwards to tolerate and appease all worldviews doesn't have a coherent one of its own. A society that teaches that values and traditions are arbitrary and all equally valid uproots itself from its own history. And when people feel uprooted and unconnected, they no longer care and they become nihilistic in a basic, existential way.
This is a broad generalization coming, but I'd say that modernism and post-modernism have dealt the West a crippling spiritual blow to both the secular and the religious. And until we deal with that fundamental issue it is all just right vs left ping pong.
Now, I agree that one shouldn't just bend over backwards to incorporate and accept all cultural norms. Some are just too abhorrent to accomplish anything good.
On the other hand, just because something is historic and "how we always do it" doesn't validate it either. Things weren't always better "back in the good old days."This is a line we often see from republicans (not talking about the US political party, although most of their members would probably fall into this category), nationalists and conservatives.
That the good old (often so-called Christian) values should be defended at all costs.
But we've survived lots of changing values, heck, we're even mostly better off today BECAUSE of changing values. So it's not a question of values and traditions being arbitrary, it's about finding the right mixture. Fearmongers on both sides will often say that it's either or and paint everything as binary. So I'd disagree with you that modernism has dealt any part of the world a crippling "spiritual" blow (how it can do that to the secular world I'm not even sure...).
Now, as an atheist, I obviously don't see anything fundamentally useful in religious traditions when it comes to societal morality, values and traditions. The good parts are already universal agreed upon values and morality of modern man and have been learned through general social understanding.
The rest are closely tied into those cultural norms I find abhorrent and I don't think anyone should accept those.
But that's one of the problems, separating religious norms from cultural norms and thus criticizing those norms one finds wrong, because of the special protection religions enjoys in most places.
All of these problems we have? Fixable. Why aren't they fixed? Because for the most part the Middle Class would rather kiss the ass of the rich and dream of one day having the same wealth and power, rather than actually fix the problems.Don't blame only the middle class on this count. A lot of the lower class share the same dreams and vote for the parties that have established policies that only seek to enhance the divide.
I know it's not the perfect example, but over here (Denmark), one of the reasons even the "lower class" votes for one of these parties (albeit only a supporting party of the current government) is because of their anti immigration stance (think borderline nationalist/racist rhetoric - heck, some of their prominent party members have been convicted of outright racist speech).
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Poor people are generally very badly trained domesticated primates that are under too much continuous stress have any real awareness or enlightenment.I can’t believe you wrote that. Do you actually believe it? Am I misunderstanding you, because that sounds really horrific man.Yeah, I actually believe that.
What, is it news to you that humans are primates? That we are animals?
It's kind of old hat.
Yeah, we get the 'humans are primates' thing. I applaud you, you paid attention in Junior Science.
However, the implication that you are "poor" makes you lack "real awareness" or do not possess "enlightenment" is the problem.
Actually, it makes you sound ignorant.
EDIT: I took out an inflammatory word.
We won't find solutions if you refuse to examine the rioters as people and not just "vague criminality"
Sure, man. We should just study people some more, make a few more excuses, and then buy them dinner.
Or, as an alternative to putting wiords in my mouth, you could actually pay attention. People who commit bad acts dont get the social ill excuse. It's great poetry to say "but their life is so hard, we can excuse them", but then poetry is all that is. People every day choose poverty or mediocrity over success and living their dreams. THat's cause dream are hard, and quitting is easy.
The idea of the underpaid, underappreciated middle class worker is tropic, it's so prevalent. Sometimes people take what is given to them and then blame everyone else when they don't have more. People actually do that, and rather than me dehumanizing them (who do you think you are?), I could jsut as easily say that you enable them.
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As a gay guy, I'm a third party here. I gotta say you're painting a fairly complex dynamic in monotone. Power and sex leave men disenfranchised in a -lot- of ways (like only women can choose an abortion). But, this thread has enough going on in it to bring sex and power in it too.So here's something I've never really gotten about the "don't have kids you can't afford" bit. Sometimes people have every reason to believe they are ready to have kids...they have a good job, decent savings, stable household, etc. So they have a child...and then things take a dump. They get fired. Someone gets very sick. A spouses leaves. And suddenly they can't afford to support their children any more. The point is, situations change, a fact that seems to get routinely glossed over by the "don't have kids you can't afford" crowd. As usual, things aren't that black and white.Yeah, and here's the other thing I notice: The "don't have kids" crowd is almost always male. And generally straight males at that. Which means they don't really know what its like to be a woman and the pressure that men exert in order to get sex.
I don't want to go all Andrea Dworkin and be like "all heterosexual intercourse is rape," but the radical feminists are right that men -- even good, decent, honest non-rapey men -- can exert a lot of pressure on women to put out. And men don't always think about the consequences of that.
Which is how a lot of women end up with kids they can't afford. Because some guy said he loved her, but then he threatened to leave if she didn't put out, so she put out, then she got knocked up (because he didn't want to use a condom that one night, and she was too afraid of him leaving to argue), and then he dumped her.
Or, you know, she's a minority, and the father got arrested for one of the many "crimes" that is only illegal if you're not white (you know, like drug possession or trespassing).
That monotone is also leading to him misquoting / misinterpreting Dworkin too.
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However, I firmly believe that ‘society / my situation made me do it’ is never a good justification for violence.And you're still not getting it. It's not a justification, it's an explanation. There is no justification for rioting. Rioting is pretty much a universally bad option to exercise. it will never make your situation better, and will almost always (without fail) make it worse.
Then ... I do get it?
Because you just wrote pretty much the same thing I have previously in this thread.
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There is a race at school. Bobby, is one of the youngest kids in his class. His family isn't really wealth, but they make due. Keith, is one of the oldest kids in Bobby's class, 11 months older than Bobby. Keith's family is much better off and can purchase some of the best items for their family.
The race starts, Bobby tries his hardest to win, but being smaller and younger, he can't beat Keith. Keith wins the race.
Afterwards, Bobby comes to his father crying, "It's not fair! Keith is almost a year older than me! He has really good running shoes, and I have the same tennis shoes I wear everyday! He shouldn't get to race with us! It's not fair!" Bobby's father takes his chin in his hand gently and looks in Bobby's eyes, "Did you try your best?" Bobby nods yes, tears running down his face. "Then why are you upset? Because you didn't win? That is nothing to be ashamed of. There will always be someone bigger and faster than you, someone with more advantages. You can't always live your life worrying about if you the best or not. You have to live your life being the best you that you can be. In the end, the only race that truly matters is you against yourself. Now wipe those tears and let's go see your mother."
Sadly our society has forgotten this. We too often judge our accomplishments by how others are doing, then what we are doing ourselves.
Are you honestly arguing that the rich are literally genetically superior to the poor?
You also forgot the part of the race where Keith hired someone to trip Bobby, and then stole all his money after the race, and that he doesn't have a dad to comfort him because his dad was murdered by the police (if not thrown into jail), and that his mom can't do much to comfort him because she spends all day trying to find a job so she can keep feeding him.
What I'm saying is, your analogy is crap.
I think the 11 month difference there he's refering to is the fact that some people make a conscious choice to time their kids birth in January for the host of advantages it gives children in North America. Not a genetic thing, just a result of when kids are allowed into school that has a knock on effect for sports and other measured learning outcomes.
Being 6 months or close to a year older can make a huge difference. I think they call it red-shirting in football.
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Yeah, I actually believe that.
What, is it news to you that humans are primates? That we are animals?
It's kind of old hat.
Yes, humans are primates, I understand evolutionary biology, you understand it, we're both very clever.
So let’s replace ‘primate’ with ‘human’ in your quote.
Poor people are generally very badly trained domesticated humans that are under too much continuous stress have any real awareness or enlightenment.
It still sounds awfully elitist and discriminatory man. Maybe you didn’t mean it. It doesn't sound like you to imply that some people's circumstances makes them better than others.
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Now, I agree that one shouldn't just bend over backwards to incorporate and accept all cultural norms. Some are just too abhorrent to accomplish anything good.
On the other hand, just because something is historic and "how we always do it" doesn't validate it either. Things weren't always better "back in the good old days."
This is a line we often see from republicans (not talking about the US political party, although most of their members would probably fall into this category), nationalists and conservatives.
That the good old (often so-called Christian) values should be defended at all costs.
But we've survived lots of changing values, heck, we're even mostly better off today BECAUSE of changing values. So it's not a question of values and...
True, the character of the West has changed and evolved over the centuries, but we reached a point where we pulled that process up by the roots and put it on the shelf. And even though, yeah, traditions and history don't validate themselves, we can't live without them without becoming nihilistic.
What really struck me about the London riots (following them on the internet here in the US, anyway) was all the rioting in the Muslim parts of London... No wait, there was none as far as I know. Why? Probably because they have a community they care about founded on traditions that they are not going to throw away. People absolutely crave that and do not want to live without it, and if we can't manage to provide some kind of tradition for the next generations besides the choices of consumerism and fundamentalist Christianity (both afflicted by materialism), we are going to falter and fail on a wide scope.
p.s. As to whether secular people can be spiritual, I guess I meant by the "spiritual" vital emotions or feeling a kind of fullness and joy in life accessible to every human no matter their beliefs.
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Yeah, I actually believe that.
What, is it news to you that humans are primates? That we are animals?
It's kind of old hat.
Yes, humans are primates, I understand evolutionary biology, you understand it, we're both very clever.
So let’s replace ‘primate’ with ‘human’ in your quote.
Poor people are generally very badly trained domesticated humans that are under too much continuous stress have any real awareness or enlightenment.It still sounds awfully elitist and discriminatory man. Maybe you didn’t mean it. It doesn't sound like you to imply that some people's circumstances makes them better than others.
Give him the benefit of the doubt, maybe he's a believer in Maslow's hierarchy of needs.
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Are you honestly arguing that the rich are literally genetically superior to the poor?
You also forgot the part of the race where Keith hired someone to trip Bobby, and then stole all his money after the race, and that he doesn't have a dad to comfort him because his dad was murdered by the police (if not thrown into jail), and that his mom can't do much to comfort him because she spends all day trying to find a job so she can keep feeding him.
What I'm saying is, your analogy is crap.
I think you are trying to take too much of a literal interpretation. My point was that some people are born with advantages others don't have. Paris Hilton was born with access to more money than I will probably ever earn in my lifetime. You can spend your entire life crying out that it is not fair, or you can work your ass off and do the best you can do. Does that mean you will catch that other person, not necessarily, but that is my point, you shouldn't be measuring your success from the viewpoint of what others have gotten, but on what you have done.
People point out that someone's success isn't just due to their own efforts. Surprise, I agree. But just because you can't control SOME things in your life doesn't mean you can't control ANY thing in your life. What is that Serenity Prayer (I realize not everyone is religious, I don't offer this as a literal prayer)?
God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, Courage to change the things I can, And wisdom to know the difference.
Control and/or change what you can and don't focus your energies uselessly lashing out at the things you can't.
As for kids growing up without a parent especially a father, I'm not suggesting that is the only source this can come from. A mother teach it to her children. A neighbor could teach it to the child. A teacher can help students realize this. But part of the reason we have fathers in these situations is because we have failed to get them to realize that they should be striving to be the best person they can be.
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Now, I agree that one shouldn't just bend over backwards to incorporate and accept all cultural norms. Some are just too abhorrent to accomplish anything good.
On the other hand, just because something is historic and "how we always do it" doesn't validate it either. Things weren't always better "back in the good old days."
This is a line we often see from republicans (not talking about the US political party, although most of their members would probably fall into this category), nationalists and conservatives.
That the good old (often so-called Christian) values should be defended at all costs.
But we've survived lots of changing values, heck, we're even mostly better off today BECAUSE of changing values. So it's not a question of values and...True, the character of the West has changed and evolved over the centuries, but we reached a point where we pulled that process up by the roots and put it on the shelf. And even though, yeah, traditions and history don't validate themselves, we can't live without them without becoming nihilistic.
What really struck me about the London riots (following them on the internet here in the US, anyway) was all the rioting in the Muslim parts of London... No wait, there was none as far as I know. Why? Probably because they have a community they care about founded on traditions that they are not going to throw away. People absolutely crave that and do not want to live without it, and if we can't manage to provide some kind of tradition for the next generations besides the choices of consumerism and fundamentalist Christianity (both afflicted by materialism), we are going to falter and fail on a wide scope.
I believe what you are describing is anomie.
As an atheist I've always had trouble articulating what a norm building and continuing set of traditions should be. I don't want to have beliefs dictated to me, and don't really want to dictate them to others.
The best things I've come across have been RPGs like D&D, and the common law. A base set of rules worked out largely by consensus that can be modified to fit particular circumstances of the era.
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I believe what you are describing is anomie.
As an atheist I've always had trouble articulating what a norm building and continuing set of traditions should be. I don't want to have beliefs dictated to me, and don't really want to dictate them to...
Yeah, that's pretty much what I'm trying to get at. I guess I'll put Durkheim on the TBR list.
And I think a lot of people turned to Dungeons and Dragons out of a craving for the stories and myths that transmit values -- or at least the trappings thereof.
This thread is like a sewage plant during the plants annual s@$&e fight and picnic. Nobody is walking out of here not covered in another persons crap, and a bad taste in their mouths.
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I never post in these threads, but this seemed like a special occasion.
Hey, Gailbraithe, guess what? I just flagged every single post of yours from the last two pages. Why, you ask? Because for the first bit, every single post you wrote made me ashamed to be reading them. After a while, I just started flagging them on principle.
Speaking as an *actual* member of the working poor, I think that your ideas on class are absolutely ridiculous, and what's worse, insulting. Go take your faux-revolutionary screed elsewhere, and stop polluting our minds.
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I believe what you are describing is anomie.
As an atheist I've always had trouble articulating what a norm building and continuing set of traditions should be. I don't want to have beliefs dictated to me, and don't really want to dictate them to...
Yeah, that's pretty much what I'm trying to get at. I guess I'll put Durkheim on the TBR list.
And I think a lot of people turned to Dungeons and Dragons out of a craving for the stories and myths that transmit values -- or at least the trappings thereof.
If you are going to read Durkheim, I would also suggest Alexis de Tocqueville (democracy in america), Pierre Bourdieu (forms of capital, and Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste or (intro to the book)) and Robert Putnam (Bowling alone).
I wonder if there has been any research on the effects of rpgs on literacy, school attendance and success.
Poor people are generally very badly trained domesticated primates that are under too much continuous stress have any real awareness or enlightenment.I can’t believe you wrote that. Do you actually believe it? Am I misunderstanding you, because that sounds really horrific man.
My reply would have been "speak for yourself, dude."
I never post in these threads, but this seemed like a special occasion.
Hey, Gailbraithe, guess what? I just flagged every single post of yours from the last two pages. Why, you ask? Because for the first bit, every single post you wrote made me ashamed to be reading them. After a while, I just started flagging them on principle.
Speaking as an *actual* member of the working poor, I think that your ideas on class are absolutely ridiculous, and what's worse, insulting. Go take your faux-revolutionary screed elsewhere, and stop polluting our minds.
Thanks bro. Needed doing but I'm too busy working to flag that trash.
Can't believe Gary and Ross haven't locked this one yet. Sooooo..... IBTL!
This thread is like a sewage plant during the plants annual s@+!e fight and picnic. Nobody is walking out of here not covered in another persons crap, and a bad taste in their mouths.
NNNgngnngng.
<flossing his teeth.>
This thread is like a sewage plant during the plants annual s@+!e fight and picnic. Nobody is walking out of here not covered in another persons crap, and a bad taste in their mouths.NNNgngnngng.
<flossing his teeth.>
You would need a 1.25L Bottle of OP rum to wash the taste of this thread away.
I think you are trying to take too much of a literal interpretation. My point was that some people are born with advantages others don't have. Paris Hilton was born with access to more money than I will probably ever earn in my lifetime. You can spend your entire life crying out that it is not fair, or you can work your ass off and do the best you can do. Does that mean you will catch that other person, not necessarily, but that is my point, you shouldn't be measuring your success from the viewpoint of what others have gotten, but on what you have done.
These are not incompatable though.
I can work hard and do the best I can in my life and still know that the things that lead to situations such as Paris Hilton is wrong and need to be fought again.
You can spend your life fighting against it AND working your ass off.
People point out that someone's success isn't just due to their own efforts. Surprise, I agree. But just because you can't control SOME things in your life doesn't mean you can't control ANY thing in your life. What is that Serenity Prayer (I realize not everyone is religious, I don't offer this as a literal prayer)?
God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, Courage to change the things I can, And wisdom to know the difference.
Control and/or change what you can and don't focus your energies uselessly lashing out at the things you can't.
Again, these are not incompatible.
Also, I would disagree quite hilariously with the idea that this is useless or that these things can never change. Segregation was something that "could never be changed." The lack of women's sufferage was something that "could never be changed."
As for kids growing up without a parent especially a father, I'm not suggesting that is the only source this can come from. A mother teach it to her children. A neighbor could teach it to the child. A teacher can help students realize this. But part of the reason we have fathers in these situations is because we have failed to get them to realize that they should be striving to be the best person they can be.
No, the reason we have these situations is because the police actively target minorities and the poor. The reason we have these situations is because of things like the War on Drugs centered around targeting drugs used most often by the poor and minorities. The reason we have these situations is because the VAT gets higher and corporate taxes get lower. The reason we have these situations is because the infrastructure crumbles, the social safety net falls apart, and business profits have never been higher.
This isn't a feel good BS thing. People are being targeted and attacked. You're just giving another BOOTSTRAPS! argument. I've heard those before, they didn't help anything then, they won't help anyone now. Never let those who have nothing be satisfied with it.
Why should they be grateful for the crumbs that fall from the rich man’s table? They should be seated at the board, and are beginning to know it. As for being discontented, a man who would not be discontented with such surroundings and such a low mode of life would be a perfect brute. Disobedience, in the eyes of anyone who has read history, is man’s original virtue. It is through disobedience that progress has been made, through disobedience and through rebellion. Sometimes the poor are praised for being thrifty. But to recommend thrift to the poor is both grotesque and insulting. It is like advising a man who is starving to eat less. For a town or country labourer to practise thrift would be absolutely immoral. Man should not be ready to show that he can live like a badly-fed animal. He should decline to live like that, and should either steal or go on the rates, which is considered by many to be a form of stealing. As for begging, it is safer to beg than to take, but it is finer to take than to beg. No: a poor man who is ungrateful, unthrifty, discontented, and rebellious, is probably a real personality, and has much in him. He is at any rate a healthy protest.
Sure, man. We should just study people some more, make a few more excuses, and then buy them dinner.
Or, as an alternative to putting wiords in my mouth, you could actually pay attention. People who commit bad acts dont get the social ill excuse. It's great poetry to say "but their life is so hard, we can excuse them", but then poetry is all that is. People every day choose poverty or mediocrity over success and living their dreams. THat's cause dream are hard, and quitting is easy.
The idea of the underpaid, underappreciated middle class worker is tropic, it's so prevalent. Sometimes people take what is given to them and then blame everyone else when they don't have more. People actually do that, and rather than me dehumanizing them (who do you think you are?), I could jsut as easily say that you enable them.
Thanks for pointing this out, now I shall jump into my time machine and go back in time to make myself post more nuanced things to make you look stupid. This is because literally the only possibility as to why you made this post is that, in your timeline, those posts did not exist when you made it.
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However, the implication that you are "poor" makes you lack "real awareness" or do not possess "enlightenment" is the problem.
Actually, it makes you sound ignorant.
Really. Well, okay. I'm not really sure how to respond to that.
All I'm saying, to put it in the simplest language possible, is that if you grow up in poverty in the Western world, you will tend to be surrounded by ignorance and irrationality, and that environment is not conducive to developing a person from a domesticated primate into a realized human being.
I'm using enlightened here in the same sense that Thomas Jefferson would have used it, to mean a person who operates from a detached, semi-objective and rational point of view. In the sense of "enlightened self interest," but also in the sense of having intellectual curiosity and creative aspirations (whether they be artistic, scientific or entrepreneurial).
And the reality is the more luxury (as in freedom from toil) you have, the easier it is to develop that enlightened self interest.
This is kind of why poverty is bad. Poverty isn't just lack of money, its lack of access to one's own culture and intellectual heritage. If you grew up with academically challenged and anti-intellectual parents, and went to impoverished schools that lacked even basic textbooks for students, where the classrooms are full of dysfunctional and abused children who act out and turn the school into a prison for poor kids as much as an educational facility, then the chances are you didn't get the exchange above between Robert and I about Hobbes and Leviathan. And that's just the tip of the iceberg of things you don't get if you don't have a decent education.
People in poverty tend to also be people with a lot of ignorance. People in poverty also tend to be under a lot of stress all the time, for all the obvious reasons. Being ignorant and stressed out does not contribute to a whole lot of personal growth and development.
What's your position? You think that being poor and ignorant tends to lead to people making a lot of rational decisions and having generally stressful lives?
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The reason we have these situations is because the VAT gets higher and corporate taxes get lower. The reason we have these situations is because the infrastructure crumbles, the social safety net falls apart, and business profits have never been higher.
Did they raise the VAT without a corresponding rebate for low income people? That's tax policy 101, consumption taxes are regressive and bad if you don't do that.
Raising VAT and lowering corporate rates is a fairly reasonable way of ensuring an adequate tax mix. I'm not super familiar with the UK tax system but a 28% corporate rate is not crazy low - and iirc you get double taxation of dividends to shareholders.
Probably not the right thread for this discussion. I'll drop it.
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When there were the Paris riots a few years back, everyone abroad, but mostly in France itself, blamed it on the french system for integration and how it was obviously bound to fail.
Now we have riots in London and the english system for integration is criticized in the same way (even though they are very different).
Also, in both cases, many people took the riots as an excuse for some good Islam-bashing.
Of course, when similar riots happened in Northern Africa, they were painted as struggles for Democracy and when they happened in Greece and Spain as political demonstrations.
The origin is likely far more basic : people (especialy young people) who do not believe anymore in the promises for a better future that the established systems make.
These are not incompatable though.
I can work hard and do the best I can in my life and still know that the things that lead to situations such as Paris Hilton is wrong and need to be fought again.
You can spend your life fighting against it AND working your ass off.
You can, but in that case your going to be better off than if you fight against AND aren't working your ass off.
Again, these are not incompatible.
Also, I would disagree quite hilariously with the idea that this is useless or that these things can never change. Segregation was something that "could never be changed." The lack of women's sufferage was something that "could never be changed."
They could be changed and some people didn't have the wisdom to recognize the difference. I am not suggesting that people don't try to change things that can be changed. But that means you have to work at changing them.
No, the reason we have these situations is because the police actively target minorities and the poor. The reason we have these situations is because of things like the War on Drugs centered around targeting drugs used most often by the poor and minorities. The reason we have these situations is because the VAT gets higher and corporate taxes get lower. The reason we have these situations is because the infrastructure crumbles, the social safety net falls apart, and business profits have never been higher.
This isn't a feel good BS thing. People are being targeted and attacked. You're just giving another BOOTSTRAPS! argument. I've heard those before, they didn't help anything then, they won't help anyone now. Never let those who have nothing be satisfied with it.
Are you arguing that every poor person that ends up in prison is because the police framed every single one of them? I certainly agree that we should reexamine our drug laws, but that doesn't excuse people who choose to break the ones in place right now. I might think a law is stupid, but I can't really blame society if I choose to break. I can blame society for passing it and I can work to get it changed, but if I choose to break it, I am solely responsible at that point for the consequences of my actions.
And again, I'm not saying people have 100% control over their situation. Of course things happen that people can't control. I support a strong safety net. What I don't do is say that people have 0% of control over their situation in life. I'm saying if you want help, I will help you, but I will not do everything for you, especially the things you are quite capable of doing for yourself.
Nathaniel Tapley (of Sir Ian Bowler MP semi-fame), gets angry and makes some damn good points:
An Open Letter to David Cameron's Parents
Dear Mr & Mrs Cameron,Why did you never take the time to teach your child basic morality?
As a young man, he was in a gang that regularly smashed up private property. We know that you were absent parents who left your child to be brought up by a school rather than taking responsibility for his behaviour yourselves. The fact that he became a delinquent with no sense of respect for the property of others can only reflect that fact that you are terrible, lazy human beings who failed even in teaching your children the difference between right and wrong. I can only assume that his contempt for the small business owners of Oxford is indicative of his wider values.
Even worse, your neglect led him to fall in with a bad crowd.
There’s Michael Gove, whose wet-lipped rage was palpable on Newsnight last night. This is the Michael Gove who confused one of his houses with another of his houses in order to avail himself of £7,000 of the taxpayers’ money to which he was not entitled (or £13,000, depending on which house you think was which).
Or Hazel Blears, who was interviewed in full bristling peahen mode for almost all of last night. She once forgot which house she lived in, and benefited to the tune of £18,000. At the time she said it would take her reputation years to recover. Unfortunately not.
But, of course, this is different. This is just understandable confusion over the rules of how many houses you are meant to have as an MP. This doesn’t show the naked greed of people stealing plasma tellies.
Unless you’re Gerald Kaufman, who broke parliamentary rules to get £8,000 worth of 40-inch, flat screen, Bang and Olufsen TV out of the taxpayer.
Or Ed Vaizey, who got £2,000 in antique furniture ‘delivered to the wrong address’. Which is fortunate, because had that been the address they were intended for, that would have been fraud.
Or Jeremy Hunt, who broke the rules to the tune of almost £20,000 on one property and £2,000 on another. But it’s all right, because he agreed to pay half of the money back. Not the full amount, it would be absurd to expect him to pay back the entire sum that he took and to which he was not entitled. No, we’ll settle for half. And, as in any other field, what might have been considered embezzlement of £22,000 is overlooked. We know, after all, that David Cameron likes to give people second chances.
Fortunately, we have the Met Police to look after us. We’ll ignore the fact that two of its senior officers have had to resign in the last six weeks amid suspicions of widespread corruption within the force.
We’ll ignore Andy Hayman, who went for champagne dinners with those he was meant to be investigating, and then joined the company on leaving the Met.
Of course, Mr and Mrs Cameron, your son is right. There are parts of society that are not just broken, they are sick. Riddled with disease from top to bottom.
Just let me be clear about this (It’s a good phrase, Mr and Mrs Cameron, and one I looted from every sentence your son utters, just as he looted it from Tony Blair), I am not justifying or minimising in any way what has been done by the looters over the last few nights. What I am doing, however, is expressing shock and dismay that your son and his friends feel themselves in any way to be guardians of morality in this country.
Can they really, as 650 people who have shown themselves to be venal pygmies, moral dwarves at every opportunity over the last 20 years, bleat at others about ‘criminality’. Those who decided that when they broke the rules (the rules they themselves set) they, on the whole wouldn’t face the consequences of their actions?
Are they really surprised that this country’s culture is swamped in greed, in the acquisition of material things, in a lust for consumer goods of the most base kind? Really?
Let’s have a think back: cash-for-questions; Bernie Ecclestone; cash-for-access; Mandelson’s mortgage; the Hinduja passports; Blunkett’s alleged insider trading (and, by the way, when someone has had to resign in disgrace twice can we stop having them on television as a commentator, please?); the meetings on the yachts of oligarchs; the drafting of the Digital Economy Act with Lucian Grange; Byers’, Hewitt’s & Hoon’s desperation to prostitute themselves and their positions; the fact that Andrew Lansley (in charge of NHS reforms) has a wife who gives lobbying advice to the very companies hoping to benefit from the NHS reforms. And that list didn’t even take me very long to think of.
Our politicians are for sale and they do not care who knows it.
Oh yes, and then there’s the expenses thing. Widescale abuse of the very systems they designed, almost all of them grasping what they could while they remained MPs, to build their nest egg for the future at the public’s expense. They even now whine on Twitter about having their expenses claims for getting back to Parliament while much of the country is on fire subject to any examination. True public servants.
The last few days have revealed some truths, and some heartening truths. The fact that the #riotcleanup crews had organised themselves before David Cameron even made time for a public statement is heartening. The fact that local communities came together to keep their neighbourhoods safe when the police failed is heartening. The fact that there were peace vigils being organised (even as the police tried to dissuade people) is heartening.
There is hope for this country. But we must stop looking upwards for it. The politicians are the ones leading the charge into the gutter.
David Cameron was entirely right when he said: “It is a complete lack of responsibility in parts of our society, people allowed to think that the world owes them something, that their rights outweigh their responsibilities, and that their actions do not have consequences.”
He was more right than he knew.
And I blame the parents.
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All I'm saying, to put it in the simplest language possible, is that if you grow up in poverty in the Western world, you will tend to be surrounded by ignorance and irrationality, and that environment is not conducive to developing a person from a domesticated primate into a realized human being.I'm using enlightened here in the same sense that Thomas Jefferson would have used it, to mean a person who operates from a detached, semi-objective and rational point of view. In the sense of "enlightened self interest," but also in the sense of having intellectual curiosity and creative aspirations (whether they be artistic, scientific or entrepreneurial).
And the reality is the more luxury (as in freedom from toil) you have, the easier it is to develop that enlightened self interest.
This is kind of why poverty is bad. Poverty isn't just lack of money, its lack of access to one's own culture and intellectual heritage. If you grew up with academically challenged and anti-intellectual parents, and went to impoverished schools that lacked even basic textbooks for students, where the classrooms are full of dysfunctional and abused children who act out and turn the school into a prison for poor kids as much as an educational facility, then the chances are you didn't get the exchange above between Robert and I about Hobbes and Leviathan. And that's just the tip of the iceberg of things you don't get if you don't have a decent education.
People in poverty tend to also be people with a lot of ignorance. People in poverty also tend to be under a lot of stress all the time, for all the obvious reasons. Being ignorant and stressed out does not contribute to a whole lot of personal growth and development.
That gives a much clearer picture of what you were getting at, and I agree, although it is somewhat of a generalisation.
It is part of the cycle of poverty problem, one that can be difficult to break.
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Nathaniel Tapley (of Sir Ian Bowler MP semi-fame), gets angry and makes some damn good points:
An Open Letter to David Cameron's Parents
Dear Mr & Mrs Cameron,Why did you never take the time to teach your child basic morality?
He has some good points. Most of them do tax evasion / avoidance too.
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Yes, humans are primates, I understand evolutionary biology, you understand it, we're both very clever.
Do you really understand what it means? Do you understand that most human behavior isn't rational, it's instinctual and subconscious, programmed into us by millions of years of primate evolution?
And I'm not talking about criminal behavior, not killing and assaulting and other "bestial" behaviors. I mean like when we look in people's eyes and when we don't, how high we hold our heads, how we walk through a room, how we feel about the oncoming day when we wake up in the morning, whether we want to commit suicide or conquer the universe, so much of everything we do is stuff we do because we aren't actually thinking about what we're doing.
It's because we are a species of primate that domesticated itself. It's sounds odd at first, but if you look at all we know about the development of humanity, we went from being tribal hunter-gatherer apes to tribal hunter-gatherer humans and remained that way for tens of thousands of years, just going on instincts, until we discovered agriculture. And that's when we started domesticating animals, and the process started domesticating us.
So let’s replace ‘primate’ with ‘human’ in your quote.
No, dude. You're not getting it if you do that. A domesticated primate is a human that doesn't think for itself. It just follows the rest of the herd and does what the herd does. It learns survival skills, but it doesn't learn to think.
Domesticated primates exist at all levels of society. Its why I call people in congress "congresscritters" on occasion, because many representatives are domesticated primates. Monkeys in suits, trained to smile and spout platitudes.
I'm not replacing the word primate for the word human, I'm contrasting the concept of a domesticated primate against that of an enlightened human being.
And what I'm saying about the poor is that a disproportional number of people in poverty are wicked stressed out monkeys who haven't been trained to be useful to society (generally because that would require the rich to have a little less than ALL OF IT), so its not really a big shocker when occasionally they go crazy and tear the joint up.
Poor people are generally very badly trained domesticated humans that are under too much continuous stress have any real awareness or enlightenment.It still sounds awfully elitist and discriminatory man. Maybe you didn’t mean it. It doesn't sound like you to imply that some people's circumstances makes them better than others.
It depends on how you define better. The more opportunities for intellectual growth one has, the more likely one will experience intellectual growth. Some people are born into better circumstances for encouraging that kind of intellectual growth. So not better so much as luckier.
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...An Open Letter to David Cameron's Parents
Dear Mr & Mrs Cameron,Why did you never take the time to teach your child basic morality?
As a young man, he was in a gang that regularly smashed up private property. We know that you were absent parents who left your child to be brought up by a school rather than taking responsibility for his behaviour yourselves. The fact that he became a delinquent with no sense of respect for the property of others can only reflect that fact that you are terrible, lazy human beings who failed even in teaching your children the difference between right and wrong. I can only assume that his contempt for the small business owners of Oxford is indicative of his wider values.
Even worse, your neglect led him to fall in with a bad crowd.
There’s Michael Gove, whose wet-lipped rage was palpable on Newsnight last night. This is the Michael Gove who confused one of his houses with another of his houses in order to avail himself of £7,000 of the taxpayers’ money to which he was not entitled (or £13,000, depending on which house you think was which).
Or Hazel Blears, who was interviewed in full bristling peahen mode for almost all of last night. She once forgot which house she lived in, and benefited to the tune of £18,000. At the time she said it would take her reputation years to recover. Unfortunately not.
But, of course, this is different. This is just understandable confusion over the rules of how many houses you are meant to have as an MP. This doesn’t show the naked greed of people stealing plasma tellies.
Unless you’re Gerald Kaufman, who broke parliamentary rules to get £8,000 worth of 40-inch, flat screen, Bang and Olufsen TV out of the taxpayer.
Or Ed Vaizey, who got £2,000 in antique furniture ‘delivered to the wrong address’. Which is fortunate, because had that
Excellent and well made points in that letter.
From two years ago... how prophetic.
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We need to stop stacking the deck against small businesses - they have historically been what has pulled America out of recession. But they are severely hurt by the credit crunch which the nanny state created.As someone who works for a family owned small business and is intimately familiar with the workings of such animals, I'd just like to point out that this is 100% the opposite of my experience.
If you think credit is what small businesses need, then you really don't understand how an economy works. My family's business has excellent credit can borrow far more than we need - what we don't have is demand. We're staying afloat, but its lean and until people start buying again we have no reason to expand our operations.
You want to help small businesses? Invest in infrastructure. Put a bunch of people back to work building bridges, highways and high speed rail over the Rockies. All of the money has accumulated at the top, and the top can't spend it fast enough to keep the economy going. There needs to be a huge transfusion of wealth into the working class so that they can buy things so that small businesses like my family's can sell things so that we can expand production and hire more people.
I said literally -nothing- about whether small business thrives or not in regards to the strength of the social net. One of the issues I was sort of alluding to is the ton of regulations the federal government piles on business (many of which make no sense and raise the barrier to entry for small business). But I never implied that the only way to provide a strong social net is to clog up the market with a tangle of regulations.In twenty years of business, we haven't once encountered one of these so called onerous regulations. I'd love an example of one of these horribly onerous examples.
In fact, the only time our business has had an issue with government regulations, it was over some large rocks we installed...
Japan has the best infrastructure in the world. And they have been in recession more of less for two decades. Infrastructure is not sufficient.
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We need to stop stacking the deck against small businesses - they have historically been what has pulled America out of recession. But they are severely hurt by the credit crunch which the nanny state created.As someone who works for a family owned small business and is intimately familiar with the workings of such animals, I'd just like to point out that this is 100% the opposite of my experience.
If you think credit is what small businesses need, then you really don't understand how an economy works. My family's business has excellent credit can borrow far more than we need - what we don't have is demand. We're staying afloat, but its lean and until people start buying again we have no reason to expand our operations.
You want to help small businesses? Invest in infrastructure. Put a bunch of people back to work building bridges, highways and high speed rail over the Rockies. All of the money has accumulated at the top, and the top can't spend it fast enough to keep the economy going. There needs to be a huge transfusion of wealth into the working class so that they can buy things so that small businesses like my family's can sell things so that we can expand production and hire more people.
I said literally -nothing- about whether small business thrives or not in regards to the strength of the social net. One of the issues I was sort of alluding to is the ton of regulations the federal government piles on business (many of which make no sense and raise the barrier to entry for small business). But I never implied that the only way to provide a strong social net is to clog up the market with a tangle of regulations.In twenty years of business, we haven't once encountered one of these so called onerous regulations. I'd love an example of one of these horribly onerous examples.
In fact, the only time our business has had an issue with government regulations, it was over some large rocks we installed...
Japan has the best infrastructure in the world. And they have been in recession more of less for two decades. Infrastructure is not a sufficient precursor for economic health. Sure, it helps, but you can get carried away. That said, both the US and the UK could do with better infrastructure, but it isn't going to solve the problems in Tottenham, where they can jump on the tube anytime. Or the bus. Or the train.
I know it's not the perfect example, but over here (Denmark), one of the reasons even the "lower class" votes for one of these parties (albeit only a supporting party of the current government) is because of their anti immigration stance (think borderline nationalist/racist rhetoric - heck, some of their prominent party members have been convicted of outright racist speech).
GentleGiant - Yep, coming from Australia I can 100% agree with your statement.
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For all of those claiming "Oh just get a job," here's some numbers for you. There's 54 unemployed people for every 1 opening in Tottenham. The jobs don't exist.
1) That number is almost certainly false. London hasn't been that badly affected by the recession. In fact, there are places away from the South-East of England where unemployment is going to be much more intractable. I notice you don't link it. 2) Tottenham is a suburb of one of the richest cities in the world. Why just pick on Tottenham? Are these people incapable of getting on the tube to Islington? The West End?
Try writing about what you know.
He's simply stating that "spending is rising" without saying what it's being spent on.
He's trying to allude that oh noes nanny state, but the fact is, you've got widespread austerity measures and a big spike in the VAT (which overwhelmingly targets lower classes).
Oh wait, there was also a huge decrease in corporate taxes.
See, I don't get this idea of "we need to give more power to the corporations." We do! We give them incredible power and tax relief. We've been giving it to them since the 80's. This is what it's lead to. This rhetoric isn't anything new. "We need to cut social services. We need to lower taxes for corporations. We need to protect the 'job creators.' We need to let the poor pull themselves up and not give help." You're acting like this is a new thing. We've been hearing it for thirty years now. At what point do you admit that austerity and powerful corporations and increasingly rising wage gap doesn't work?
How about - because they employ people? You seriously have no grasp about how the world works. I'm not claiming I'm some visionary either - I'm simply pointing out my views, not suggesting they came from the white heat of my seething intellect alone - but I'm not seeing particular originality in your thought either. As for the vast power wielded bu corporations, consider the way BP has been kicked around over the last few years, both in the US and Russia. If you want to look for the source of social ills, look at who runs the country - that's politicians, not business people.