Metal Reviews

Hmmm, Zad, the rioting and looting seems to widespread and en masse to blame just on the riff raff of society. It seems like you have to explain why regular people are participating as well.

Well, my firsthand knowledge is why I subscribe to the ideology which I do.

I thought you had stated that you grew up on a farm.

What do you mean by the riff-raff of society, Trapt? I was quite clear-

Interesting stats from the BBC about make up of rioters and the crime's they've been committing.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-14489984

Not the whole story but it seems that 76% of the crimes were burglary/handling stolen goods and that 70% of the crimes occurred in postcodes other than their own.

Violence and disorder are only 21% of the crimes.

This seems to indicate that a lot of these people were going to other neighnourhoods to loot.

Hardly venting anger and more like an organised approach to burglary on a massive scale.

Indeed in Manchester gangs have been using children as lookouts while they loot.

I think even the local Marxists can't attribute this to anything but immoral opportunism.

Forget it zad... we have had some of this happen here (not on this scale in a long time, though) and it's always the same excuses from the same people. Your post pretty much covered it, trapt just wants to spread a little marxism, is all.

It's nothing more than usesless scum taking advantage of the anonymity of sheer numbers to engage in violent criminal behavior. Like you said, naked oppurtunism masked behind the flimsiest of excuses.

I grew up on a farm till my father passed away and then it was just my mother taking care of four kids.

Hmm I just didn't imagine this large of a number of people would count as opportunistic scum. Either England has more unsavory folk than I imagined or maybe I'm imagining the number of participants higher than it actually is.

What poor urban area did you live in?

Cincinnati.

And you are claiming to have witnessed the opposite of what I saw growing up "underpriviliged" in urban SoCal? Genuinely curious, because it seems odd.

Yes, I saw people abuse the system. But the system did a lot more good than the harm it caused anyone to contribute to people abusing it. I also don't automatically write the abusers off as wastes, despicable and dishonest but I could see why they do it.

We had the riots in Over the Rhine when I was growing up. Hundreds if not thousands of blacks took to the street because a boy was shot for no reason by the police. The area is still recovering because of the damage done to the local businesses there. However, this boy wasn't the first to be shot by police. A lot of those people suffered harassment from the police, not to the degree of having been shot but still beyond the point anyone should ever be harassed for nothing. Yeah, there were opportunistic fucks who stole shit for their own benefit but a lot of it was people talking to one another and getting pissed off at how they were being forced to live.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2001_Cincinnati_riots

Then you overestimate humanity.

I see opportunistic stuff everyday every day from normal people with normal jobs, normal lives etc.

However most people don't descend into criminality because they fear the repurcussions (e.g. losing their job, criminal charges, damage to their reputation etc).

But in the non-working lower classes, they don't care much about that.

They don't fear criminal charges because a criminal record has no impact on their life. They don't fear the law cause prisons are cushy and in most instances they walk free anyway (e.g. suspended sentences).

Prison time also gets them credibility (in my area it was source of pride to have relatives doing time - it proved how hard core they were).

They don't fear loss of reputation/community standing cause their community doesn't care about those things.

They don't care about losing their jobs cause generally they don't have jobs and aren't interested in working. They know the government will always pay them, house them, give them benefits etc etc.

Oh and we don't have police harrassment but then we don't have significant ethnic minorities and most of the culprits are white.

Yeah. If the riots are just people jumping on an opportunity to break and steal shit I don't get why the magnitude seems to be of a different level than those in Vancouver.

Do they teach maths at school anymore?

London = 8,278,251 (urban), 12,300,000-13,945,000 (metro) - 2010 figures

Vancouver = 578,041 (2006 census)


Even if only 0.1% of the London population was involved in the looting, that's 8,278-13,945 people.

For Vancouver that's 578 people.


From what I've read the UK rioters were operating in smallish groups (up to 200 people) across many different parts of the city. They were also very mobile and in many instances very organised.

Also once they figured out the cops were not going to do much, they figured they could keep going on.


Furthermore Vancoouver has a much different socio-economic structure to London.

Given that Vanouver has for at least decade been regarded as one of the most liveable cities in the world, the fact there was rioting there is quite damning!

lol Vancouver has way more than 500,000 people. But you might be right with your general point about population density.



Doesn't this concede trapt's point? 8-)

Vanceouver's population according to Wikipedia and Vanceouver's own website (http://vancouver.ca/aboutvan.htm) state population of about 500,000. But this appears to be only city and overall metro population in entire area is 2 million.

Still 2 million v up to 13 million.



Not really.


London is larger and poorer than Vancouver and had riots.

Vancouver is apparently one of the best places to live on the entire planet and had riots.

It just shows that criminal scum is criminal scum regardless of where they live in.

Exactly.
In fact, it kind of debunks trapt's assertion of poverty being the motivation here.
I think this type of behavior is more related to a culture in which empathy and respect for others is trampled by instant gratification and lack of basic common decency.
Plus, society is becoming more and more dehumanized with each new generation, or so it seems to me.

Poverty doesn't exist in places with affluence? Hmmm. Idk enough about Vancouver's riots to use the same explanation for both. I just think it is silly to ignore harassment, integration and economic inequality in explaining the London riots.

Worth pointing out that there was a lot of gang involvement too, particularly in areas of Manchester. Police were faced with literal hordes, kept busy in one place whilst chaos was happening everywhere.

TBH Trapt I think you have it backwards. So many people of so many backgrounds were involved that you can't explain them all away with economic factors or reaction to police racism a la Brixton.

Edit - http://edition.cnn.com/2011/WORLD/europ ... ?hpt=hp_c1

Vancouvers riots had nothing to do with poverty .. it was a bunch of yobs (numbering in the hundreds) taking advantage of the general anarchy following the Canucks loss in the Stanley Cup to commit criminal activity. Sports, not society, was the trigger.

Police have been fairly successful in tracking down the perpetrators from citizen cams and pics produced from cell phones.

http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-c ... arges.html

Thank goodness, to re-iterate this point once more, this wasn't a family controlled dictatorship like Syria and nobody was shot.