Mark Duggan Shooting

Moderators: Elvis, DrVolin, Jeff

Re: Mark Duggan Shooting

Postby Byrne » Sun Aug 14, 2011 6:52 pm

The Croydon Bus with the Lancashire accent warning autowoman voice:
http://www.youtube.com/user/tlustyblant ... JI6Bgo1OIc

The empty bus is then set on fire:
http://www.youtube.com/user/tlustyblant ... ePAcNQ2cx0
(police stand at the end of the road, idle)

A fire engine strolls along:
http://www.youtube.com/user/tlustyblant ... OiiLhYyA-o

The small fire in a chair in the furniture shop Reeves - no police or fire fighters in sight:
http://www.youtube.com/user/tlustyblant ... ZzHE4atWvk


Very wierd, I'd say.
User avatar
Byrne
 
Posts: 955
Joined: Wed Aug 03, 2005 2:45 pm
Blog: View Blog (0)

Re: Mark Duggan Shooting

Postby kenoma » Sun Aug 14, 2011 8:35 pm

Image
Expectation calibration and expectation management is essential at home and internationally. - Obama foreign policy advisor Samantha Power, February 21, 2008
User avatar
kenoma
 
Posts: 498
Joined: Sat Mar 01, 2008 1:32 pm
Blog: View Blog (0)

Re: Mark Duggan Shooting

Postby wintler2 » Mon Aug 15, 2011 9:24 am

Byrne wrote:..Very wierd, I'd say.

Underpoliced, you mean?
"Wintler2, you are a disgusting example of a human being, the worst kind in existence on God's Earth. This is not just my personal judgement.." BenD

Research question: are all god botherers authoritarians?
User avatar
wintler2
 
Posts: 2884
Joined: Sun Nov 12, 2006 3:43 am
Location: Inland SE Aus.
Blog: View Blog (0)

Re: Mark Duggan Shooting

Postby Pierre d'Achoppement » Mon Aug 15, 2011 9:33 am

David Cameron today vowed to make all 16-year-olds enlist in a non-military national service programme in a bid to solve the 'very modern problem of alienated, angry young people.'

(...)

He also pledged to tackle human rights laws which have been so 'twisted and misrepresented' that they have had a 'chilling effect' on society by creating a 'British Bill of Rights'.

(...)

Cameron launched a scathing attack on how the 'twisting and misrepresenting of human rights' has undermined personal responsibility.

He said the government is using its chairmanship of the Council of Europe to agree big changes to the European Convention on Human Rights.

'The interpretation of human rights legislation has exerted a chilling effect on public sector organisations, leading them to act in ways that fly in the face of common sense, offend our sense of right and wrong, and undermine responsibility,' he said. He also said the excuse of ‘health and safety’ was now regularly 'trotted out to justify all sorts of actions and regulations that damage our social fabric.'

Mr Cameron also wanted to release police officers from sitting behind a desk while completing lengthy paperwork for every crime and instead wants them to spend more time on the beat. But he said slashing the police budget would still go ahead.


http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article ... z1V6WLKq75
Jeff: I'm afraid that Earth, a-all of Earth, is nothing but an intergalactic reality-TV show.
Man 2: My God. We're famous! [everyone stands and whoops it up]
- script from "Cancelled" - South Park
User avatar
Pierre d'Achoppement
 
Posts: 453
Joined: Fri Mar 21, 2008 7:26 pm
Blog: View Blog (1)

Re: Mark Duggan Shooting

Postby Byrne » Mon Aug 15, 2011 11:37 am

wintler2 wrote:
Byrne wrote:..Very wierd, I'd say.

Underpoliced, you mean?


Yes, but police were there - a gang of riot police, standing at the end of the road where the bus was on fire, doing/contributing nothing.

However the lack of response of the Police/Fire service in the required areas (around the burning bus & around the Reeves furniture store, which went on to become the evening's TV story), is very noticeable.

[Note also the connections between chief executive of Carpetright (the store which was first burned to the ground in Tottenham), Lord Harris of Peckham, and David Cameron:
Harris made donations to David Cameron as leader of the Conservative Party. He is considered to be one of his personal friends. He is said to have played a role in convincing Cameron to contest the party's leadership in the summer of 2005. His ties to Cameron came under scrutiny two years later when it appeared that Andrew Feldman, a political associate of his and a fellow donor to Cameron's leadership campaign, used Harris's name to claim privileges accorded to active members of the House of Lords ......

source


Gathered from here]
User avatar
Byrne
 
Posts: 955
Joined: Wed Aug 03, 2005 2:45 pm
Blog: View Blog (0)

Re: Mark Duggan Shooting

Postby Stephen Morgan » Mon Aug 15, 2011 11:54 am

The British Bill of Rights was... the Bill of Rights, which rather precedes the American one. Fucking idiots. Don't they teach you anything at Eton, Dave?
Those who dream by night in the dusty recesses of their minds wake in the day to find that all was vanity; but the dreamers of the day are dangerous men, for they may act their dream with open eyes, and make it possible. -- Lawrence of Arabia
User avatar
Stephen Morgan
 
Posts: 3736
Joined: Thu Apr 19, 2007 6:37 am
Location: England
Blog: View Blog (9)

Re: Mark Duggan Shooting

Postby Bruce Dazzling » Mon Aug 15, 2011 2:31 pm

Everyone Agrees: Looting Is Always Wrong!
August 13, 2011
Arthur Silber


I would never be so foolhardy as to challenge what is indisputably the consensus view on any subject.

Thusly and therefore: Fucking colonists. What a bedraggled bunch of criminal, immoral, lazy, destructive bastards. And they didn't even use the tea. They just destroyed it! Goddamned nihilists. No moral compass! No self-discipline! And all because of some teeny little tax, all the while enjoying the lavish benefits that accrued to them as privileged members of the British Empire! Those rotten bums never heard of paying their fair share, or shared sacrifice?

To top it off, some of those criminal lowlifes didn't even have the courage of their rotten, immoral convictions -- so they pretended to belong to the already designated disfavored group, Native Americans. Because everyone who mattered knew what lazy, shiftless, immoral, criminal bastards they were. Well, once the colonists got their own racket going, they showed those uncivilized barbarians! A mere one hundred years later, almost none of them were left.

But what a downer that turned out to be. There was hardly anyone left to murder in these magnificent United States, unless you counted Black Americans. Nobody who mattered counted them. So all those upright, super-moral white boys, who simply loved murdering in a righteous cause, had to look farther afield. There's that American initiative for you!

Next stop: the Philippines! That was after a little warmup exercise in Hawaii, but nobody remembers that anymore. And after the Philippines, they never stopped.

They still haven't stopped today. In addition to all the righteous murder going on overseas, they're coming after you now. Whatcha gonna do?

Hmm ... ah ... well ... oh, I know, I know! Be sure to vote in the next election, and in every election! That'll fix up everything, lickety-split.

And for God's sake, whatever you do, don't loot! That is, like, totally wrong!

Everyone says so. And you probably shouldn't mention the Boston Tea Party. Certainly not to conservatives (need I spell out why? didn't think so), but not to liberals and progressives, either. Everyone says looting is wrong. Wrong, wrong, wrong!

Anyway, the Boston Tea Party couldn't actually have been "looting." People who would soon be Americans did that, which makes it completely different. I know I don't have to explain that to good Americans like you. And don't even think of talking about how the ruling class is sucking up all the wealth of "ordinary" Americans, and now their lives, too. That can't possibly be looting! This is America!

Confused? That's because you're a criminal, immoral, lazy, rotten nihilist. And a potential or actual looter! You better keep that to yourself. Wait...oh, geez, Napolitano and Holder say they already know all about you. And I do mean all. But if you haven't done anything wrong, you don't have anything to worry about. This is America!

God bless us, every one. Except for the looters. And God bless America!
"Arrogance is experiential and environmental in cause. Human experience can make and unmake arrogance. Ours is about to get unmade."

~ Joe Bageant R.I.P.

OWS Photo Essay

OWS Photo Essay - Part 2
User avatar
Bruce Dazzling
 
Posts: 2306
Joined: Wed Dec 26, 2007 2:25 pm
Location: Yes
Blog: View Blog (0)

Re: Mark Duggan Shooting

Postby AhabsOtherLeg » Mon Aug 15, 2011 4:05 pm

Stephen Morgan wrote:The British Bill of Rights was... the Bill of Rights, which rather precedes the American one. Fucking idiots. Don't they teach you anything at Eton, Dave?


They taught him how to smash up people's places of business: http://mobile.salon.com/politics/war_ro ... index.html

"This is criminality pure and simple and it has to be confronted and defeated," Cameron said on Tuesday, having returned from his vacation in Italy three days after the riots first ignited in the British capital. He added: "If you are old enough to commit these crimes you are old enough to face the punishment" (referring to the fact that many of those involved are in their early teens).

The prime minister has never applied such strong words to condemn the actions of his former club. The Bullingdon Club -- a members' only dining society in the university preserved for the most privileged of (male only) students -- is known for breaking the plates, glasses and windows of local restaurants and drinking establishments and destroying college property in Oxford.



Whereas Nick Clegg learned to be a drunken teenage arsonist the hard way, all on his lonesome: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/home/moslive ... grets.html

The boys weren't arrested, because they ran away. 'We didn't know what we were doing. We were teenagers, we'd drunk too much - frankly, we did behave appallingly, irresponsibly, criminally. Next morning, one of the organisers of the exchange rang me up and said, "We know you did this." I came clean.'


National service for the pair of 'em I say.
"The universe is 40 billion light years across and every inch of it would kill you if you went there. That is the position of the universe with regard to human life."
User avatar
AhabsOtherLeg
 
Posts: 3285
Joined: Sun Dec 30, 2007 8:43 pm
Blog: View Blog (0)

Re: Mark Duggan Shooting

Postby semper occultus » Tue Aug 16, 2011 2:37 pm

I never figured you as an apostle of privatisation Ahab but the corollary of all this "bring-it-on"-ism & "what-do-you-expect"-ism & "its-like-the-bullingdon-club"-ism & the frigging Boston-tea-party is anyone with a grievance or illegal lifestyle choice is entitled to make up their own laws ( & yeah I know the US mortgage banks are busily doing it & look where that's getting us )...because if anything "they" do is fine for these bally-clad, brick-wielding shock-troops for a fairer society then everyone caught in the middle goes to hell in a hand cart....so what was it, only about 4 or 5 dead this time around but extrapolate forward & I don't see that leading anywhere good..anyone !?

in Croydon, that desolate inner-city hell-hole Croydon "its about showing the police we can do what we want..."...I've never lived in a lawless society & I have no wish to or come within 100 miles of it & projecting progressive fantasies onto those who do is fraught with the liklihood of terrible disappointment - by all means rebuild the social contract but calls for pretty radical change on both sides of the contract

from a kid I have always & will always hate & fear violence - not always for the highest of motives, quite selfish & cowardly ones actually because absolutley no feat of imaginative gymnastics could ever put me anywhere else except in the shoes of those poor bastards cowering behind their front door in a flat over a kebab-shop whilst a crowd of wilding "gangstas" start torching the place or of some other poor bastard who god forbid tries to stop them & bacuase when advanced as a political solution the ultimate results are uterly uncontrollable & unpredictbale , except that once the state retreats then what takes its place is not likely to be desirable or preferable "chaos or fascism or warlordism" - looking over that precipice you can see the quickest way to Mogadishu, the skeletal structure is already in place : the organised crime gangs & street gangs basically taking over control of areas by outright violence & intimidation, those cuddly organisations that gang-rape your mother or sister if you don't join or otherwise knuckle-under, whatever anyone says their presence around the nasty core of these events is discernible at the very least - anyone thinking Theresa May is the last word in frikken oppression wait til people like that get the upper-hand - what are the RI community going to do to control them - go in waving a copy of the latest Slavoj Zizek at them ?
User avatar
semper occultus
 
Posts: 2974
Joined: Wed Feb 08, 2006 2:01 pm
Location: London,England
Blog: View Blog (0)

Re: Mark Duggan Shooting

Postby American Dream » Tue Aug 16, 2011 4:47 pm

American Dream
 
Posts: 19946
Joined: Sat Sep 15, 2007 4:56 pm
Location: Planet Earth
Blog: View Blog (0)

Re: Mark Duggan Shooting

Postby Searcher08 » Tue Aug 16, 2011 6:32 pm

semper occultus wrote:I never figured you as an apostle of privatisation Ahab but the corollary of all this "bring-it-on"-ism & "what-do-you-expect"-ism & "its-like-the-bullingdon-club"-ism & the frigging Boston-tea-party is anyone with a grievance or illegal lifestyle choice is entitled to make up their own laws ( & yeah I know the US mortgage banks are busily doing it & look where that's getting us )...because if anything "they" do is fine for these bally-clad, brick-wielding shock-troops for a fairer society then everyone caught in the middle goes to hell in a hand cart....so what was it, only about 4 or 5 dead this time around but extrapolate forward & I don't see that leading anywhere good..anyone !?

in Croydon, that desolate inner-city hell-hole Croydon "its about showing the police we can do what we want..."...I've never lived in a lawless society & I have no wish to or come within 100 miles of it & projecting progressive fantasies onto those who do is fraught with the liklihood of terrible disappointment - by all means rebuild the social contract but calls for pretty radical change on both sides of the contract

from a kid I have always & will always hate & fear violence - not always for the highest of motives, quite selfish & cowardly ones actually because absolutley no feat of imaginative gymnastics could ever put me anywhere else except in the shoes of those poor bastards cowering behind their front door in a flat over a kebab-shop whilst a crowd of wilding "gangstas" start torching the place or of some other poor bastard who god forbid tries to stop them & bacuase when advanced as a political solution the ultimate results are uterly uncontrollable & unpredictbale , except that once the state retreats then what takes its place is not likely to be desirable or preferable "chaos or fascism or warlordism" - looking over that precipice you can see the quickest way to Mogadishu, the skeletal structure is already in place : the organised crime gangs & street gangs basically taking over control of areas by outright violence & intimidation, those cuddly organisations that gang-rape your mother or sister if you don't join or otherwise knuckle-under, whatever anyone says their presence around the nasty core of these events is discernible at the very least - anyone thinking Theresa May is the last word in frikken oppression wait til people like that get the upper-hand - what are the RI community going to do to control them - go in waving a copy of the latest Slavoj Zizek at them ?


Bloody Hell, SO, I dont think things are that bad.

Part of the situation in Somalia is a culture which was/is hugely clan influenced , highly territorial and extremely weaponised. Regardless of several burning warehouses and lots of theiving, warlord gangs are not driving around in landrovers with anti-aircraft guns last time I looked.

There has been an aspect of English society which has been round since Mods and Rockers, which is the sort that likes a damn good punch-up / trashing the place.

I think in London the violence has been also related to senior power plays by the Met post News International power vacuum. Just an order like "Let's see how the situation develops before coming to a way forward" when given at the right time could have a HUGE effect on the situation. I NOT having a pop at the ordinary cop btw.

Remember the acting head is Common Purpose supporter Cressida Dick, who was promoted for the debacle resulting in the the public execution of Brazilian JeanCharles deMenenzes, following the Mets indoctrination in Israeli terrorist sorry I mean policing methods. Never ever take anything which has Peter Mandleson's fingerprints on it at face value.

The most barf inducing thing I have seen since the riots? -

The heads of the major banks offering £25k to people burnt out of their homes for free!
Well, not free, just free of Fees and Interest payments.
Well, not actually free of Fees and Interest payments reeeeally -
just for the first six months then you have to have paid it all back or it becomes a standard loan.


There are no gangs that would try and take areas over cept maybe Brixton and Moss Side. Seriously, youf try and trash Southall, the Sikhs and Indians
will have them, they try Richmond and the Mumsnet crowd will form pram barracades and post to Facebook and SMS and chatter and Tweet at approaching crowds till they are fleeing screaming down the street.

Londoners tend to get very united when backed onto a corner.
User avatar
Searcher08
 
Posts: 5887
Joined: Thu Dec 20, 2007 10:21 am
Blog: View Blog (0)

Re: Mark Duggan Shooting

Postby Bruce Dazzling » Wed Aug 17, 2011 10:04 am

Facebook riot calls earn men four-year jail terms amid sentencing outcry
Owen Bowcott, legal affairs correspondent, Helen Carter and Helen Clifton
guardian.co.uk, Tuesday 16 August 2011 23.02 BST


Two men who posted messages on Facebook inciting other people to riot in their home towns have both been sentenced to four years in prison by a judge at Chester crown court.

Jordan Blackshaw, 20, set up an "event" called Smash Down in Northwich Town for the night of 8 August on the social networking site but no one apart from the police, who were monitoring the page, turned up at the pre-arranged meeting point outside a McDonalds restaurant. Blackshaw was promptly arrested.

Perry Sutcliffe-Keenan, 22, of Latchford, Warrington, used his Facebook account in the early hours of 9 August to design a web page entitled The Warrington Riots. The court was told it caused a wave of panic in the town. When he woke up the following morning with a hangover, he removed the page and apologised, saying it had been a joke. His message was distributed to 400 Facebook contacts, but no rioting broke out as a result.

Sentencing Blackshaw to four years in a young offenders institution, Judge Elgan Edwards QC said he had committed an "evil act". He said: "This happened at a time when collective insanity gripped the nation. Your conduct was quite disgraceful and the title of the message you posted on Facebook chills the blood.

"You sought to take advantage of crime elsewhere and transpose it to the peaceful streets of Northwich. The idea revolted many right thinking members of society. No one actually turned up due to the prompt and efficient actions of police in using modern policing."

Sutcliffe-Keenan, the judge said, "caused a very real panic" and "put a very considerable strain on police resources in Warrington". He praised Cheshire police for their "modern and clever policy" of infiltrating the website.

The Crown Prosecution Service said in a statement that the men's posts on Facebook "caused significant panic and revulsion in local communities as rumours of anticipated violence spread".

It added: "We were able to serve upon the defence in both cases sufficient case material that led to early guilty pleas and we were able to present the facts in both cases in a fair but robust manner.

"While the judge heard the two defendants were previously of good character, they admitted committing very serious offences that carry a maximum sentence of 10 years. The consequence of their actions could have led to more disorder and this was taken into account."

The heavy sentences came as defence lawyers and civil rights groups have criticised the "disproportionate" sentences imposed on some convicted rioters as the latest official figures show nearly 1,300 suspects have been brought before the courts.

The revelation that magistrates were advised by justices' clerks to disregard normal sentencing guidelines when dealing with riot-related cases alarmed a number of lawyers who warn it will trigger a spate of appeals.

Also on Tuesday, a looter was warned he could be jailed for helping himself to an ice-cream cone during disturbances.

Anderson Fernandes, 22, appeared before magistrates in Manchester charged with burglary after he took two scoops of coffee ice-cream and a cone from Patisserie Valerie in the city centre. He gave the cone away because he didn't like the flavour.

Fernandes admitted burglary in relation to the ice-cream and an unconnected charge of handling stolen goods after a vacuum cleaner was recovered from his home. District judge Jonathan Taaffe said: "I have a public duty to deal swiftly and harshly with matters of this nature." Fernandes will be sentenced next week.

In sentencing four other convicted Manchester rioters, a crown court judge, Andrew Gilbert QC, made clear why he was disregarding sentencing guidelines when he said "the offences of the night of 9 August ... takes them completely outside the usual context of criminality".

He added: "The principal purpose is that the courts should show that outbursts of criminal behaviour like this will be and must be met with sentences longer than they would be if the offences had been committed in isolation. For those reasons, I consider that the sentencing guidelines for specific offences are of much less weight in the context of the current case, and can properly be departed from."

The Ministry of Justice's latest estimate, at midday on Tuesday, shows the courts have dealt with 1,277 alleged offenders of whom more than 700 have been remanded in custody. Two-thirds of the cases were in London.

By midday on Monday, 115 people had been convicted; more than three-quarters of those were adults. About 21% of those appearing before the courts have been juveniles. The proportion of alleged youth offenders was higher in Nottingham, Birmingham and Manchester. An MoJ spokesperson said: "Everyone involved with the courts and prison service has put in a huge effort to make that possible and that work will continue."

But doubts are now being expressed about the fairness of some sentences. For example, one student has been jailed for six months for stealing a bottle of water from a supermarket.

Sally Ireland, policy director of the law reform organisation Justice, said: "The circumstances of public disorder should be treated as an aggravating factor and one would expect that to push up sentences by a degree, but not by as far as some of the cases we have seen.

"Some instances are completely out of all proportion. There will be a flurry of appeals although, by the time they have been heard, those sentences may already have been served.

" There's a question about this advice [from justices' clerks] and whether it should have been issued at all. We would expect them to be giving advice [to magistrates] in individual cases rather than following a general directive."

Rakesh Bhasin, a solicitor partner at the law firm Steel & Shamash, which represents some of those charged following the riots, said some reported sentences seemed to be "disproportionate".

Paul Mendelle QC, a former chairman of the Criminal Bar Association, said: "The idea that the rulebook goes out the window strikes me as inherently unjust. It sets all manner of alarm bells ringing. Guidelines are not tramlines. There are guidelines and they take account of aggravating and mitigating circumstances.

"There have been rulings following the Bradford riots and Israeli embassy demonstrations that said which sort of guidelines should be followed. I don't see why [magistrates] should be told to disregard these."

The judiciary and the MoJ have denied that they were involved in circulating the advice to justices' clerk last week.


"Arrogance is experiential and environmental in cause. Human experience can make and unmake arrogance. Ours is about to get unmade."

~ Joe Bageant R.I.P.

OWS Photo Essay

OWS Photo Essay - Part 2
User avatar
Bruce Dazzling
 
Posts: 2306
Joined: Wed Dec 26, 2007 2:25 pm
Location: Yes
Blog: View Blog (0)

Re: Mark Duggan Shooting

Postby MacCruiskeen » Wed Aug 17, 2011 10:37 am

Naomi Klein:

Looting with the lights on

We keep hearing England's riots weren't political – but looters know that their elites have been committing daylight robbery

Comments (508)

Naomi Klein guardian.co.uk, Wednesday 17 August 2011 10.37 BST

I keep hearing comparisons between the London riots and riots in other European cities – window-smashing in Athens or car bonfires in Paris. And there are parallels, to be sure: a spark set by police violence, a generation that feels forgotten.


But those events were marked by mass destruction; the looting was minor. There have, however, been other mass lootings in recent years, and perhaps we should talk about them too. There was Baghdad in the aftermath of the US invasion – a frenzy of arson and looting that emptied libraries and museums. The factories got hit too. In 2004 I visited one that used to make refrigerators. Its workers had stripped it of everything valuable, then torched it so thoroughly that the warehouse was a sculpture of buckled sheet metal.


Back then the people on cable news thought looting was highly political. They said this is what happens when a regime has no legitimacy in the eyes of the people. After watching for so long as Saddam Hussein and his sons helped themselves to whatever and whomever they wanted, many regular Iraqis felt they had earned the right to take a few things for themselves. But London isn't Baghdad, and the British prime minister, David Cameron, is hardly Saddam, so surely there is nothing to learn there.


How about a democratic example then? Argentina, circa 2001. The economy was in freefall and thousands of people living in rough neighbourhoods (which had been thriving manufacturing zones before the neoliberal era) stormed foreign-owned superstores. They came out pushing shopping carts overflowing with the goods they could no longer afford – clothes, electronics, meat. The government called a "state of siege" to restore order; the people didn't like that and overthrew the government.


Argentina's mass looting was called el saqueo – the sacking. That was politically significant because it was the very same word used to describe what that country's elites had done by selling off the country's national assets in flagrantly corrupt privatisation deals, hiding their money offshore, then passing on the bill to the people with a brutal austerity package. Argentines understood that the saqueo of the shopping centres would not have happened without the bigger saqueo of the country, and that the real gangsters were the ones in charge. But England is not Latin America, and its riots are not political, or so we keep hearing. They are just about lawless kids taking advantage of a situation to take what isn't theirs. And British society, Cameron tells us, abhors that kind of behaviour.


This is said in all seriousness. As if the massive bank bailouts never happened, followed by the defiant record bonuses. Followed by the emergency G8 and G20 meetings, when the leaders decided, collectively, not to do anything to punish the bankers for any of this, nor to do anything serious to prevent a similar crisis from happening again. Instead they would all go home to their respective countries and force sacrifices on the most vulnerable. They would do this by firing public sector workers, scapegoating teachers, closing libraries, upping tuition fees, rolling back union contracts, creating rush privatisations of public assets and decreasing pensions – mix the cocktail for where you live. And who is on television lecturing about the need to give up these "entitlements"? The bankers and hedge-fund managers, of course.


This is the global saqueo, a time of great taking. Fuelled by a pathological sense of entitlement, this looting has all been done with the lights on, as if there was nothing at all to hide. There are some nagging fears, however. In early July, the Wall Street Journal, citing a new poll, reported that 94% of millionaires were afraid of "violence in the streets". This, it turns out, was a reasonable fear.


Of course London's riots weren't a political protest. But the people committing night-time robbery sure as hell know that their elites have been committing daytime robbery. Saqueos are contagious. The Tories are right when they say the rioting is not about the cuts. But it has a great deal to do with what those cuts represent: being cut off. Locked away in a ballooning underclass with the few escape routes previously offered – a union job, a good affordable education – being rapidly sealed off. The cuts are a message. They are saying to whole sectors of society: you are stuck where you are, much like the migrants and refugees we turn away at our increasingly fortressed borders.


Cameron's response to the riots is to make this locking-out literal: evictions from public housing, threats to cut off communication tools and outrageous jail terms (five months to a woman for receiving a stolen pair of shorts). The message is once again being sent: disappear, and do it quietly.


At last year's G20 "austerity summit" in Toronto, the protests turned into riots and multiple cop cars burned. It was nothing by London 2011 standards, but it was still shocking to us Canadians. The big controversy then was that the government had spent $675m on summit "security" (yet they still couldn't seem to put out those fires). At the time, many of us pointed out that the pricey new arsenal that the police had acquired – water cannons, sound cannons, teargas and rubber bullets – wasn't just meant for the protesters in the streets. Its long-term use would be to discipline the poor, who in the new era of austerity would have dangerously little to lose.


This is what Cameron got wrong: you can't cut police budgets at the same time as you cut everything else. Because when you rob people of what little they have, in order to protect the interests of those who have more than anyone deserves, you should expect resistance – whether organised protests or spontaneous looting. And that's not politics. It's physics.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/profile/naomiklein
"Ich kann gar nicht so viel fressen, wie ich kotzen möchte." - Max Liebermann,, Berlin, 1933

"Science is the belief in the ignorance of experts." - Richard Feynman, NYC, 1966

TESTDEMIC ➝ "CASE"DEMIC
User avatar
MacCruiskeen
 
Posts: 10558
Joined: Thu Nov 16, 2006 6:47 pm
Blog: View Blog (0)

Re: Mark Duggan Shooting

Postby Searcher08 » Wed Aug 17, 2011 10:41 am

This is the crimnal justice system going into oscillation - out of sunc with reality, the reality changes, it tries to get back into equilibrium - totally overshoots...then tries to go the other direction.

There will be appeals, the sentances will be drastically reduced, there will be an outcry about the reduced sentances, new laws around riot will be brought in, these will be decried as etc etc
User avatar
Searcher08
 
Posts: 5887
Joined: Thu Dec 20, 2007 10:21 am
Blog: View Blog (0)

Re: Mark Duggan Shooting

Postby norton ash » Wed Aug 17, 2011 10:53 am

Naomi nails it.

At last year's G20 "austerity summit" in Toronto, the protests turned into riots and multiple cop cars burned. It was nothing by London 2011 standards, but it was still shocking to us Canadians. The big controversy then was that the government had spent $675m on summit "security" (yet they still couldn't seem to put out those fires). At the time, many of us pointed out that the pricey new arsenal that the police had acquired – water cannons, sound cannons, teargas and rubber bullets – wasn't just meant for the protesters in the streets. Its long-term use would be to discipline the poor, who in the new era of austerity would have dangerously little to lose.


While the conference went on indoors, outdoors was the trade show and display of new products and efficiencies. They also spent a fair bit on the warehouse/prison with the wire-mesh horse stalls to hold the multitude arrested for the finishing touch.

We got the velvet, suckers... you get the iron fist.
Zen horse
User avatar
norton ash
 
Posts: 4067
Joined: Wed Nov 08, 2006 5:46 pm
Location: Canada
Blog: View Blog (0)

PreviousNext

Return to General Discussion

Who is online

Users browsing this forum: No registered users and 43 guests