"People" don't have to be completely mental about something - I very much doubt that the looters out there at night are representative of a cross-section of society, from what I'm seeing it's just youth being lawless and purposefully looting and causing damage - no genuine justified anger here, just youth looking for a fight and what seems to have now been defined as "fun". Ken is saying that they're unloved basically and have nothing else to do - what the fuck? Too much hand-holding, you shouldn't need to be guided so carefully through live, have a f'in backbone and do things for yourself.

As stereotypical as it may sound, I would say that the parents and the abundance of easy credit and social assistance have quite a bit to do with causing all this.

Rt @truffy: If I could up your post, I would. You've just crystalised most of what's wrong with twitter.

They'd have had to have heard of Luton, in order to be looking for it.

They thought they were going lootin'

There's undoubtedly a hard core of ringleaders orchestrating this. What they have doing all the dirty work though is bunches of kids with a cultural inability to just get out and do something positive for themselves. There's loads of kids out there who simply don't have the wherewithal or imagination not to be bored unless someone tells them what to do. Depending on who is doing the telling or how "interesting" the doing appears to be, they may or may not actually do it. Their need to be led and their need for "entertainment" makes it very easy for a situation like this to flare up and get out of hand. They're caught up in the hysteria, seeing safety in numbers and are too dumb and selfish to even consider that the people whose homes and livelihoods they're destroying could be their own family (specially if they've never known anyone in their family actually work for a living).

Some people just need a nanny state, unfortunately.

I'm glad someone got my poor joke :'S

I think when people are smashing things up and setting fire to shit it's pretty safe to assume they're angry.

Most of the rioters might not say they're angry, some might even say they're just doing it for fun. But you don't smash up the fabric of your surroundings unless you've been so estranged from it - have so little sense of belonging and ownership and community - that the alienation you feel is indistinguishable, objectively, from anger.

I don't mean crazy as in angry, I mean crazy as in your thoughts/perceptions of a situation have degraded well past any societal definition of normality.

 

And that wasn't what Livingston said at all :-/

 

Ken was saying, in.between interuptions, that there are sections of.society that, through recesion and culture, have so little hope for their own future that the potential repercussions from looting are no worse, in their mind, than what they can reasonably expect from life anyway.

Oh, I'm sorry, I misread yours as being London/Luton, not looting/Luton :(

 

(hug)

But that's bullshit though, isn't it? "I'm angry at not having a job/money, so I'm going to destroy the livelihood of some guy who's worked hard all his life".

 

People like that are a drain on society and should be expunged. The only value that they have is if their carcasses were sent to Somalia as food relief.

That's likely not what they think. It'd guess it's more like "I'm angry at not having a job/money. Oh look, riots. RAAAAGH BURN! STEAL!"

I still just don't see any anger here, just opportunists getting a thrill out of doing something they know they could never normally get away with, with the added bonus of walking away with some very expensive new TV for their bedroom.

 

But maybe I'm too detached from this shit now.. not many riots in my little village.. B-)

http://www.londonrioters.co.uk/

It's not about being angry (consciously, at least), it's about being estranged, as I said.

Riots won't happen in my village not because the people here are smarter or less pissed off with the government or whatever but because everyone knows each other and feels a sense of community (by which I mean specifically that who owns what is less important than this being 'our place').

The people who are rioting are politically disenfranchised and all that entails (culturally, educationally, economically) and, more importantly in a way, have no community as such, just rows of shops not generally owned by people who live there but fronts for faceless corporations/landlords who do nothing for the community except take money out of it and (in the former case) give it to their shareholders.

If people felt any sense of connection to these businesses, if they felt respected or trusted or enfranchised or involved in some way they would not be able to behave this way. It's the perfect understandable estrangement that matters most, here.

" At times like this the rioters must wish they'd not skipped Physics class: http://bit.ly/pYbGCs "

:'D

What Truffy said - there's relatively legitimate anger (ie: you raised taxes, you took away help from me, you're making me work even harder and yet I now find myself unable to cope) and then there's self-righteous, delusional, unrealistic "I used to get all my sh!t on credit cards/etc and now I can't live like I used to so I'll go out and smash things up and get sh!t for free".

Again you're replying to what you think of the situation rather than what I said. Which is fine, but ignores the real issue.

 

Interestingly Ive seen loads of people on FB/twitter referring to the rioters as scum today. Mostly the same people who'd refer to these people as scum a week ago, a month ago, whatever. Opinions towards these people haven't changed, just that they've got a new telly and we've got a new reason to despise them.

Well said, Kosbo.

Well.. maybe they are, in a way?
"Scum" is a bit extreme for probably a lot of them, as in those who are just following the herd. However there's no excuse for this kind of behaviour. Are you saying (not putting words in your mouth here, geniuenly wondering) that because they're estranged and society isn't taking care of them that's a suitable excuse for them to behave like this?

 

There's no positive action happening around here from almost anyone - only thing I'm grateful for is that no-one's been killed yet (besides the initial spark for all this, of course).