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sm78
11 August 2011, 06:24 AM
Seems to be an accurate analysis by Theodore Dalrymple.

http://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/opinion/british-rioters-the-spawn-of-a-bankrupt-ruling-elite/story-e6frg6zo-1226112640970


THE riots in London and elsewhere in Britain are a backhanded tribute to the long-term intellectual torpor, moral cowardice, incompetence and careerist opportunism of the British political and intellectual class.
They have somehow managed not to notice what has long been apparent to anyone who has taken a short walk with his eyes open down any frequented British street: that a considerable proportion of the country's young population (a proportion that is declining) is ugly, aggressive, vicious, badly educated, uncouth and criminally inclined.
Unfortunately, while it is totally lacking in self-respect, it is full of self-esteem: that is to say, it believes itself entitled to a high standard of living, and other things, without any effort on its own part.
Consider for a moment the following: although youth unemployment in Britain is very high, that is to say about 20 per cent of those aged under 25, the country has had to import young foreign labour for a long time, even for unskilled work in the service sector.

The reasons for this seeming paradox are obvious to anyone who knows young Britons as I do.
No sensible employer in a service industry would choose a young Briton if he could have a young Pole; the young Pole is not only likely to have a good work ethic and refined manners, he is likely to be able to add up and -- most humiliating of all -- to speak better English than the Briton, at least if by that we mean the standard variety of the language. He may not be more fluent but his English will be more correct and his accent easier to understand.
This is not an exaggeration. After compulsory education (or perhaps I should say intermittent attendance at school) up to the age of 16 costing $80,000 a head, about one-quarter of British children cannot read with facility or do simple arithmetic. It makes you proud to be a British taxpayer.
I think I can say with a fair degree of certainty, from my experience as a doctor in one of the areas in which a police station has just been burned down, that half of those rioting would reply to the question, "Can you do arithmetic?" by answering, "What is arithmetic?"
British youth leads the Western world in almost all aspects of social pathology, from teenage pregnancy to drug taking, from drunkenness to violent criminality. There is no form of bad behaviour that our version of the welfare state has not sought out and subsidised.
British children are much likelier to have a television in their bedroom than a father living at home. One-third of them never eat a meal at a table with another member of their household -- family is not the word for the social arrangements of the people in the areas from which the rioters mainly come. They are therefore radically unsocialised and deeply egotistical, viewing relations with other human beings in the same way as Lenin: Who whom, who does what to whom. By the time they grow up, they are destined not only for unemployment but unemployability.
For young women in much of Britain, dependence does not mean dependence on the government: that, for them, is independence. Dependence means any kind of reliance on the men who have impregnated them who, of course, regard their own subventions from the state as pocket money, to be supplemented by a little light trafficking. (According to his brother, Mark Duggan, the man whose death at the hands of the probably incompetent police allegedly sparked the riots, "was involved in things", which things being delicately left to the imagination of his interlocutor.)
Relatively poor as the rioting sector of society is, it nevertheless possesses all the electronic equipment necessary for the prosecution of the main business of life; that is to say, entertainment by popular culture. And what a culture British popular culture is!
Perhaps Amy Winehouse was its finest flower and its truest representative in her militant and ideological vulgarity, her stupid taste, her vile personal conduct and preposterous self-pity.
Her sordid life was a long bath in vomitus, literal and metaphorical, for which the exercise of her very minor talent was no excuse or explanation. Yet not a peep of dissent from our intelllectual class was heard after her near canonisation after her death, that class having long had the backbone of a mollusc.
Criminality is scarcely repressed any more in Britain. The last lord chief justice but two thought that burglary was a minor offence, not worthy of imprisonment, and the next chief justice agreed with him.
By the age of 12, an ordinary slum-dweller has learned he has nothing to fear from the law and the only people to fear are those who are stronger or more ruthless than he.
Punishments are derisory; the police are simultaneously bullying but ineffectual and incompetent, increasingly dressed in paraphernalia that makes them look more like the occupiers of Afghanistan than the force imagined by Robert Peel. The people who most fear our police are the innocent.
Of course, none of this reduces the personal responsibility of the rioters. But the riots are a manifestation of a society in full decomposition, of a people with neither leaders nor followers but composed only of egotists.

Mana
11 August 2011, 07:42 AM
I feel that the cartoon image accompanying this report is important too.

http://resources2.news.com.au/images/2011/08/10/1226112/657490-110811-nicholson.jpg

Mana
11 August 2011, 07:54 AM
Where are the mentors?

Where are the role models?

Reduced to consuming units for the use of the economy the reductionism of humanity will naturally cause revolt. Shiva where are you?
Occupied by the reflection of the self, the hamster wheels turn relentlessly producing goods with which to hide the very bars of the cage which enslave. mAyA will as she must.

Are these children the uneducated deluded ones?

charitra
11 August 2011, 08:40 AM
Namaste Mana,
you aint seen nothing yet, come here to America for witnessing krishna's or shiva's apathy or go to India for that matter.

Here the day of 16th birthday miraculously becomes the day of driving test in almost all cases. You go to the test center with your kid you get see many those kids waiting nervously and in anticipation, you know its their birtday that day.The sustained campaign for a NEW car begins from 6 months ahead of the day of liberation. So that by sixteen they get to drive a new car unsupervised, get it? Combine that with dads/moms credit card you will see a 16 yr old texting her/his way to a restraunt, armed with the nascent license.... Same evening the partying begins. Im not sure how one handles a 16th birthday for girls over there, here in US its a very big celebration for all these 10th graders, even valedictorians (school final gold medalists, who are typically18 yr old) wont match that totally (false) egoboosting jamboree.

One word: KaliYuga.

On a sidenote,I concur with Bhutan.Measure the nations development with Gross National Happiness, but not with that of its GDP, the submissive himalayan kingdom roared some 3 yrs ago.

Ananda
11 August 2011, 11:20 AM
Hello sm78,


I think the article has some fair points, but most of it just comes across as a blind rant. The fact of the matter is is that the rioters came from all different social backgrounds; not just the less affluent. This isn't a case of the poor rising up against the rich; no, that would be a political or social upheavel, that would have some justification, but this is simply a large group of greedy opportunists make a bad situation worse.

These are both unemployed people and well off people, people with degrees and even school teachers, all of them taking advantage of a volatile incident in which the death of a criminal sparked sparked a peaceful protest which was quickly hijacked. The rioting spread across London and then travelled north, and also hit the city where I live, Manchester. Lots of places here got trashed because a mob mentality saw a chink in the country's armor.

These are people who don't care about others, they only consider themselves or their nearest relations. They don't care how their actions affect others, how the looting and vandalism and threatening behaviour ruins businesses and lives. These people don't act out because they're poor, or opressed, or because they lack opportunity; the government has given everybody equal opportunity to get a job, get an education and contribute to society. These are many people who bullied other children when they went to school and simply were not interested in learning, so they are completely stupid. Some of these people dropped out of school and never attended a higher learning facility. They then go on to commit minor crimes and make themselves unemployable, or simply prefer to live off government hand-outs and raise families who go on to do exactly the same. But, as I said, it isn't limited to the social underbelly; even those who would want for nothing at all were involved in the riots, they simply see an opportunity to have more and take it.

There were children as young as 10 in those riots, and adults as old as 60; generations of people all compelled to break the law and for what? At best you can steal a flat screen TV which will be obsolete in a few years and then broken, and at worse you can spend a long time behind bars!

All of this is motivated by short sightedness- they can only see what they want to have next and they forget everything else, even other people. Our culture promotes individualism, a 'live for the now' attitude and competition to an extreme degree, whereby materialistic success and ambition is lauded as the highest virtue and goal in life, and everything else becomes a means for that end. This is a poison which has inflicted all groups of society, from the greedy bankers to the youth who steals a game console from a boy's bag as he helps him stand up after being knocked down and injured by rioters.

Ethics, intelligence, common human values and even the law are all subservient to the relentless pursuit of acquiring material wealth. There is little or no room for spirituality in this country, it is all but dead, and intellectual strength is seen as a sign of weakness, which in turn becomes an isolating stigma.

What it all comes down to, basically, is an innate immorality within pockets of society. Its cause is parents abandoning values and the widespread promotion of materialism and self-entitled individualism at the expense of a national identity and shared spirituality, as well as a general disdain for any kind of intellectualism which runs counter to the common consensus. These are greedy, stupid philistines, and all of them are being treated as criminals- not protesters, by the government. Over a thousand people have already been arrested, the Prime Minister has promised that anybody convicted will go to jail, and the government is quickly bringing in new measures to get to the bottom of it all.



:)

Mana
11 August 2011, 12:05 PM
Namasté Ananda

Is not our conciousness one?

Are these events not a direct reaction to and a release caused by another gross imbalance within the universal conciousness?

Not only must we remove our own ego to see truth but also the ego of others to truly understand their actions.

Karma and dharma are at play here not the individual jivas, for most these actions come from the sub concious and not the concious mind.

Where is the logic in punishing a dog for being a dog? Especialy if you have beaten it down.

Why would you blame the negative terminal of a battery for making a spark?


Mana

yajvan
11 August 2011, 06:46 PM
hariḥ oṁ
~~~~~~

namasté


Namaste Mana,
you aint seen nothing yet, come here to America for witnessing krishna's or shiva's apathy or go to India for that matter.

I do not understand your notion.... can you kindly explain ?
There are many parts of society that are not right, but there are also many parts that are right, growing and wholesome.
What we see on TV is only a small portion of the world.

praṇām

charitra
11 August 2011, 11:35 PM
hariḥ oṁ
~~~~~~
namasté
I do not understand your notion.... can you kindly explain ?
There are many parts of society that are not right, but there are also many parts that are right, growing and wholesome.
What we see on TV is only a small portion of the world.
praṇām
Namaste,
I was responding to Mana’s “shiva where are you” wail and then continued my post with the presumed apathy of Shiva and Krishna. The apathy connotation is more of a swipe at our own contemporary generations and not so much aimed at the divine figures mentioned. In Kaliyuga the people lost it to such a degree that even the gods are appearing like silent spectators.
Well, as one can see it is a satire. It is more to do with the times and has nothing to do with the eternal brahman or his representations. Hope I made myself clear. Overall, the incidence of crime has gone up with improved economy in current Indian setting. Shanti

dogra
13 August 2011, 04:30 PM
Big respect to the Brave Sikh community for coming out to protect the areas.
Need more from our Hindu community

RIP to those brave Pakistanis who died and the gentleman in Ealing

PrahaladB
04 October 2011, 10:25 PM
re:

Big respect to the Brave Sikh community for coming out to protect the areas.
Need more from our Hindu community

RIP to those brave Pakistanis who died and the gentleman in Ealing

Hindu's did protect their areas in parts of east and south London, but as usual this has been overlooked they were Tamils (The only South Asians with a backbone in my opinion) and not fair skinned Punjabis or the so called 'warrior race'.