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Huan Yi
Member Ascendant
since 2004-10-12
Posts 6688
Waukegan

0 posted 2011-10-31 07:12 PM


.


“While the British Treasury is busy writing checks to Amsterdam prostitutes, one-fifth of children are raised in homes in which no adult works — in which the weekday ritual of rising, dressing, and leaving for gainful employment is entirely unknown. One tenth of the adult population has done not a day’s work since Tony Blair took office on May 1, 1997. . . .


“Want has been all but abolished. Today, fewer and fewer Britons want to work, want to marry, want to raise children, want to lead a life of any purpose or dignity.” The United Kingdom has the highest drug use in Europe, the highest incidence of sexually transmitted disease, the highest number of single mothers, the highest abortion rate. Marriage is all but defunct, except for William and Kate, fellow toffs, upscale gays, and Muslims. From page 204:


“For Americans, the quickest way to understand modern Britain is to look at what LBJ’s Great Society did to the black family and imagine it applied to the general population”.  


http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/274492/new-britannia-mark-steyn?pg=2


This article bothered me.


.

© Copyright 2011 John Pawlik - All Rights Reserved
Bob K
Member Elite
since 2007-11-03
Posts 4208

1 posted 2011-11-01 12:02 PM




     I'd want to fact check it before I let it bother me very much.  The last statement about LBJ's Great Society was begging the question, and depended on the audience being willing to accept the proposition naively.  I think it may well be possible that the other statements in the quotation are constructed along similar lines.  The reader needs a little more Missouri in his bloodstream — Show me, in other words — before settling into a funk.

Uncas
Member
since 2010-07-30
Posts 408

2 posted 2011-11-01 03:07 PM



quote:
I'd want to fact check it before I let it bother me very much.


Very sound advice Bob, the only suggestion I'd add is that it's a good idea to check a 'fact' that's  easy to verify - 'The United Kingdom has the highest drug use in Europe' - seems like a prime candidate.

If that turns out to be wrong you can then decide whether to check out some of the other stuff or ignore the entire article as dubious.



Huan Yi
Member Ascendant
since 2004-10-12
Posts 6688
Waukegan
3 posted 2011-11-01 04:30 PM


.


"One tenth of the adult population has done not a day’s work since Tony Blair took office on May 1, 1997"


Is that false?


What was all the burning and looting
recently really about?


.

Uncas
Member
since 2010-07-30
Posts 408

4 posted 2011-11-01 05:44 PM



quote:
"One tenth of the adult population has done not a day’s work since Tony Blair took office on May 1, 1997"


I didn't check that one - once I found out the United Kingdom doesn't have the highest drug use in Europe I ignored the rest.

.

Bob K
Member Elite
since 2007-11-03
Posts 4208

5 posted 2011-11-01 06:06 PM



     I’ve offered two links.  One is to an interesting brief opinion piece that offers five quick summaries of theories that may account for the causes of the riots:


http://theweek.com/article/index/218125/what-caused-the-london-riots-5-theories


     The other is at the end of this excerpt of the article the next link sends you to.  Not so surprisingly it seems to suggest that the riots in Great Britain may have causes that would provoke unrest in other places as well, and which may seem familiar to you.

     If your political party supports an attack on those economic forces that created and maintained a middle class and throw that class to the wolves, then attack the working class as well while trying to remove the economic safety net that keeps the whole societal structure from collapsing into chaos, then the fact that chaos appears should not be a shock.  Blaming the people who are upset about the results is something to do instead of fixing the mess.  The fact that communism failed doesn’t mean that the outrages that it was expressing about much of modern society were unreal.  It meant that the system that it offered to repair those complaints didn’t work.  We still need to deal with the problems in western society that are there and that are real enough to stir up regular outbursts of rage on the part of those that are on the bottom of the heap.  

     This should not be a shock.

quote:


What seems lost on those in power is their role in triggering the riots—how the UK coalition government’s assault on the middle class, working class, students, school children, the working poor, the unemployed, the disabled and everyone else who does not count themselves as rich or super-rich ultimately led to this eruption of arson, muggings and looting.
Severe spending cuts for higher education, tuition subsidies and assistance for those attending English universities went into effect in December last year. The cuts may not have been carried out by people who broke the glass on storefronts in Brixton and Enfield but this state-sanctioned looting could easily be characterized as “opportunistic” criminal behavior. The government saw an opportunity to fix the economy without applying pressure to those responsible for the economic crisis and made the most vulnerable pay instead.
In the past year, there has been a state sanctioned thieving of funding for public services, such as housing assistance, disability assistance, community outreach programs and health care. There has been vandalism of government programs dear to those in the direst economic situations. And, if you ask those who are rioting, they would likely tell you they have been hit just as hard as anyone in the UK by the austerity measures that have been imposed on society.
UK Uncut, a group that formed in response to the push by the UK government to impose cuts, has done its best to educate UK citizens on true economic reality in the UK. If the government were to clamp down on tax dodging by corporations and the rich, an estimated £95bn a year could be put toward funding public services. Last year, banks in the UK paid out £7bn in bonuses. Four banks made £24bn in profit. If banks were made to pay for the economic crisis they created, that would go a long way toward preserving and growing the social safety net.
The UK government along with banks and corporations conspired to cut programs that have the capacity to prevent people from rioting in the streets, to keep people from feeling like all is hopeless, like society is stacked up against them and they have must act out to get someone to pay attention to their needs or go out and claim what they fear they will never be able to afford.
In 2010, a National Equality panel reported the richest in the UK are now “more than 100 times as wealthy as the poorest 10% of society.” When chief executives and bankers were figured, the wealth gap was “even more stark.” The panel concluded the large gap that has existed since at least the 1980s has not been reversed. The deepening divide between the haves and have nots precipitated many, many protests over the past months. None appear to have had much impact on the government’s decision to cut public services.
In a video produced in the final week of July by The Guardian, teenagers from the area react to the Haringey council’s decision to shut 13 youth clubs. They tell The Guardian the clubs were a place for youth to go when they wanted something to do. Youth could make music and produce videos. People went to the youth clubs every day, but now they are out in the streets. Police are pulling youth over for stop and searches and gangs are out running into each other and getting into fights. The report closes with one teenager saying, “There’ll be riots.”
A chilling interview with one youth from an NBC News report has been circulating. A television reporter asks, “Is rioting the correct way to express your discontent?” The young man responds, “You wouldn’t be talking to me now if we didn’t riot, would you?” The TV reporter doesn’t have anything to say to that. So, the young man continues:
Two months ago we marched to Scotland Yard, more than 2,000 of us, all blacks, and it was peaceful and calm and you know what? Not a word in the press. Last night a bit of rioting and looting and look around you.
Another issue that is believed to have touched off the riots can be detected in the shooting of a black man, Mark Duggan, by police. His death is believed to have touched off much of the rioting. And, as a local explains in a video, 150 people went to a police station in Tottenham to get some answers on what happened. The protest began peacefully. The police ignored the protesters and treated them with “contempt,” but for the most part there was little tension. Then, a young 16-year old girl approached the police to get them to provide some information. The police drew their batons and pushed at her and the people protesting retaliated.
Three hundred and thirty-three people have died at the hands of police in the last eleven years. But, no officer has been found guilty of any crimes. This finding, which was part of a report by the Independent Police Complaints Commission (IPCC), led the IPCC to conclude “juries quite often find it difficult to convict police officers.”
The lack of justice for crimes committed by police, such as murder, unsurprisingly creates revulsion in communities. The perception that all citizens do not have equal protection under the law breeds resentment and anger.
Another police practice that breeds resentment in many of the communities with youth rioting are “stop and searches.” StopWatch, a UK group working with communities, ministers, policy makers and senior police officers to ensure that police reforms are fair and inclusive, has called the stop and search powers used by the UK police a “wedge between communities and the police.” In October 2010, the group released findings from research conducted that showed the use of the powers against black people was disproportionate. African-Caribbean people were twenty-six times more likely to be stopped under section 60.
US civil rights leader Jesse Jackson called the findings a “moral outrage.” He charged, “It is racial profiling. It’s as fundamental as that. It is based on sight, suspicion and fear. It’s a systematic pattern. In the US it is called driving while black. In Arizona it is called driving while Latino.”
It was possible to see that riots were coming. They should not be dismissed as some action that is not political. The destruction being witnessed on the streets of London can be regarded as a response to the growing destruction of government programs and services the poor, working and middle class in the UK had come to depend upon. Hundreds of thousands of people tried to protest and defend their communities, but many youth have grown deeply cynical and disillusioned.
Violence of this nature is indefensible, but as Martin Luther King Jr, “A riot is the language of the unheard.” This is the response to a society where police single out “specific areas and individuals for monitoring, stop and search and daily harassment.” This is what happens in society when government refuses to tax the rich, make banks and corporations pay their fair share or cut investment in defense and military programs. And, the tension in society will only increase so long as government fails to address the needs of the wider population.
If society is serious about preventing property destruction and violence, riots that bring a metropolis to its knees and test the defensive capabilities of police and firefighters, crimes committed by the most elite must face just as much punishment as those caught rioting will face in the coming days.
*

http://dissenter.firedoglake.com/2011/08/09/the-london-riots-the-burning-looting-of-uk-public-services/




Uncas
Member
since 2010-07-30
Posts 408

6 posted 2011-11-01 06:55 PM


quote:
One tenth of the adult population has done not a day’s work since Tony Blair took office on May 1, 1997


To answer your question Huan, it's false.

.

Bob K
Member Elite
since 2007-11-03
Posts 4208

7 posted 2011-11-02 11:34 AM




     What's your reaction, John?  Mr. Steyn is an occasional substitute for Rush Limbaugh, and I've tended to think of him as a source of inflammatory rather than dependable statements simply because of that connection.  It seems that this article may be more of the same.  To tell the truth, though, I wouldn't know which country had the highest rate of drug use in Europe right now.  My thought would have been Holland.  I also would have thought that the most dangerous problem would have been alcohol by far because it's so enmeshed in the various European cultures.

Cari
Member
Posts 411
Englnand
8 posted 2015-12-05 09:31 AM


Yeah, and we all have rotten teeth, exist on fish & chips and don’t have the facility to shoot each other cos the nasty government took our guns away. Have I missed anything?
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