After an unusually active week, here’s a LinkSwarm for a lazy Friday, including a few things I meant to link to earlier and didn’t have the time.
Archive for the ‘Crime’ Category
LinkSwarm for Friday, September 9, 2011
Friday, September 9th, 2011Two Great Scandals that Taste Great Together
Sunday, September 4th, 2011You’ve heard about the Fast and Furious Gunwalker Scandal. And you’ve heard about the scandal involving the Obama Administration’s raid of Gibson Guitars. But it took Iowahawk to combine them.
Still More Riot Fallout
Monday, August 15th, 2011A few more reactions to the London riots:
First up is Peter Hitchens:
I am not really very sorry for the elite liberal Londoners who have suddenly discovered what millions of others have lived with for decades.
The mass criminality in the big cities is merely a speeded-up and concentrated version of life on most large estates – fear, intimidation, cruelty, injustice, savagery towards the vulnerable and the different, a cold sneer turned towards any plea for pity, the awful realisation that when you call for help from the authorities, none will come.
Just look and see how many shops are protected with steel shutters, how many homes have bars on their windows. This is not new.
As the polluted flood (it is not a tide; it will not go back down again) of spite, greed and violence washes on to their very doorsteps, well-off and influential Left-wingers at last meet the filthy thing they have created, and which they ignored when it did not affect them personally.
No doubt they will find ways to save themselves. But they will not save the country. Because even now they will not admit that all their ideas are wrong, and that the policies of the past 50 years – the policies they love – have been a terrible mistake.
(Hat tip: John Derbyshire at NRO.)
Second is the indomitable Mark Steyn, who brings his usual pith to bear:
The news shows were filled with scenes of London ablaze, as gangs of feral youths trashed and looted their own neighborhoods. Several readers wrote to taunt me for not having anything to say on the London riots. As it happens, Chapter Five of my book is called “The New Britannia: The Depraved City.” You have to get up pretty early in the morning to beat me to Western Civilization’s descent into barbarism. Anyone who’s read it will fully understand what’s happening on the streets of London. The downgrade and the riots are part of the same story: Big Government debauches not only a nation’s finances but its human capital, too….The London rioters are the children of dependency, the progeny of Big Government: they have been marinated in “stimulus” their entire lives….
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.
If you were born into such a household, you’ve been comprehensively “stimulated” into the dead-eyed zombies staggering about the streets this past week: pathetic inarticulate subhumans unable even to grunt the minimal monosyllables to BBC interviewers desperate to appease their pathologies. C’mon, we’re not asking much: just a word or two about how it’s all the fault of government “cuts” like the leftie columnists argue. And yet even that is beyond these baying beasts. The great-grandparents of these brutes stood alone against a Fascist Europe in that dark year after the fall of France in 1940. Their grandparents were raised in one of the most peaceful and crime-free nations on the planet. Were those Englishmen of the mid-20th century to be magically transplanted to London today, they’d assume they were in some fantastical remote galaxy. If Charlton Heston was horrified to discover the Planet of the Apes was his own, Britons are beginning to realize that the remote desert island of “Lord Of The Flies” is, in fact, located just off the coast of Europe in the northeast Atlantic. Within two generations of the Blitz and the Battle of Britain, a significant proportion of the once-free British people entrusted themselves to social rewiring by liberal compassionate Big Government and thereby rendered themselves paralytic and unemployable save for nonspeaking parts in “Rise of The Planet Of The Apes.” And even that would likely be too much like hard work.
Third, the redoubtable Theodore Dalrymple weighs in again on the appalling state of British youth:
In Britain nowadays, the difference between ordinary social life and riot is only a matter of degree, not of type…
If the authorities show neither the will nor the capacity to deal with such an easily solved problem—and willfully do all they can to worsen it—is it any wonder that they exhibit, in the face of more difficult problems, all the courage and determination of frightened rabbits?
The rioters in the news last week had a thwarted sense of entitlement that has been assiduously cultivated by an alliance of intellectuals, governments and bureaucrats. “We’re fed up with being broke,” one rioter was reported as having said, as if having enough money to satisfy one’s desires were a human right rather than something to be earned.
But while the rioters have been maintained in a condition of near-permanent unemployment by government subvention augmented by criminal activity, Britain was importing labor to man its service industries. You can travel up and down the country and you can be sure that all the decent hotels and restaurants will be manned overwhelmingly by young foreigners; not a young Briton in sight (thank God).
The reason for this is clear: The young unemployed Britons not only have the wrong attitude to work, for example regarding fixed hours as a form of oppression, but they are also dramatically badly educated. Within six months of arrival in the country, the average young Pole speaks better, more cultivated English than they do.
The icing on the cake, as it were, is that social charges on labor and the minimum wage are so high that no employer can possibly extract from the young unemployed Briton anything like the value of what it costs to employ him. And thus we have the paradox of high youth unemployment at the very same time that we suck in young workers from abroad.
Speaking of Dalrymple, the folks behind The Skeptical Doctor, a site dedicated to his writings, dropped me a line, and their site is well worth pursuing for those who can’t get enough Dalrymple, and for anyone interested in what lead the UK to it’s current state (among many other topics).
Remember, looters are “disenfranchised members of the working class” but Tea Party protesters are bigots.
Finally, in what may be vestigial traces of a spine, British courts have been ordered to ignore the usual sentencing guidelines and actually send rioters to jail.
J. G. Ballard and the London Riots
Saturday, August 13th, 2011You may know that I have another, non-political blog, mostly on topics like science fiction, book collecting, movies, etc. But every now and then a piece comes along that could fit on either blog, such as this Andrew Fox piece on J. G. Ballard’s works and the London riots.
Having been interned as a child in a Japanese prisoner of war camp in World War II (the source of Empire of the Sun), Ballard has always been interested in what happens when you strip the veneer of civilization away. Much of Fox’s piece concerns Ballard’s later novels, which I have not read, “all of which feature middle class professionals either diving into or being pulled into revolutionary, nihilistic violence due to ennui, boredom, or a cancerlike consumerism which has replaced religion and patriotism at the center of their psyche.” (Though I have a number of Ballard first editions, I’m still catching up on the reading them, having just finished The Crystal World earlier this year.) Ballard’s penultimate novel, Millennium People, evidently features “middle class professionals in suburban London instigating terrorism and revolution in an effort to shock a sense of meaning back into their lives.” Which does tie rather neatly into the London riots of the last week…
Also, I must have missed this Theodore Dalrymple piece on Ballard.
(Hat tip: Instapundit.)
Loot a Store, Lose Your House
Friday, August 12th, 2011At least if it’s a taxpayer-subsidized flat in the UK.
In the first case of its kind, Daniel Sartain-Clarke, 18, and his mother have been served with an eviction notice as council bosses seek to turf them out of their £225,000 taxpayer-subsidised flat.
Sartain-Clarke is charged with violent disorder and attempting to steal electronic goods from the Currys store at Clapham Junction, South London, on Monday night.
I think if the UK were to implement a policy that anyone caught looting would be kicked off all government benefits (the dole, housing, NHS, etc.) for life, I believe you’d see the last of rioting there for a very long time.
The Secret History of Guns
Thursday, August 11th, 2011Alphecca linked this interesting article on The Secret History of Guns. It talks about some of the ironies of gun control, such as the Black Panthers enthusiastically embracing the 2nd Amendment, while California Governor Ronald Reagan signed a law limiting the bearing of arms in government buildings.
I don’t necessarily agree with all of author Adam Winkler’s conclusions (such as they are), but he makes an interesting historical case, though I am not an expert. I would be interested to hear the take of some of the more prominent gun bloggers and historians on the piece.
Theodore Dalrymple Weighs In On The London Riots
Thursday, August 11th, 2011I’ve cited him several times as a particularly acute observer of the British underclass, so its worth noting that he’s weighed in on the riots here:
The ferocious criminality exhibited by an uncomfortably large section of the English population during the current riots has not surprised me in the least. I have been writing about it, in its slightly less acute manifestations, for the past 20 years. To have spotted it required no great perspicacity on my part; rather, it took a peculiar cowardly blindness, one regularly displayed by the British intelligentsia and political class, not to see it and not to realize its significance. There is nothing that an intellectual less likes to change than his mind, or a politician his policy….Only someone who never looked around him and never drew any conclusions from the faces and manner of the young men he saw would have been surprised.
The riots are the apotheosis of the welfare state and popular culture in their British form. A population thinks (because it has often been told so by intellectuals and the political class) that it is entitled to a high standard of consumption, irrespective of its personal efforts; and therefore it regards the fact that it does not receive that high standard, by comparison with the rest of society, as a sign of injustice….
Long experience of impunity has taught the rioters that they have nothing to fear from the law, which in England has become almost comically lax—except, that is, for the victims of crime. For the rioters, crime has become the default setting of their behavior; the surprising thing about the riots is not that they have occurred, but that they did not occur sooner and did not become chronic.
Read the whole thing.
Random London Riot Updates
Wednesday, August 10th, 2011London and the rest of the UK seems quiet tonight, with rains helping to dampen the spirits of looters. The only new flare-up seems to be Eltham in south-east London, and which seems to already have calmed down.
A few more random links of interesting on the rioting:
More UK Riot Coverage From The World Of The Daily Mail
Wednesday, August 10th, 2011Two notable features of the recent round of riots wrecking havoc across the UK is the complete lack of remorse among the rioters, and the lack of any sort of overriding cause to the disorder other than the fact they could get away with it.
Both can be seen on display in this interview with two Manchester rioters, who said they were doing it because they could get away with it, and would continue doing it until they were caught.
This essay analyzes the rioters with depressing familiarity:
If you live a normal life of absolute futility, which we can assume most of this week’s rioters do, excitement of any kind is welcome. The people who wrecked swathes of property, burned vehicles and terrorised communities have no moral compass to make them susceptible to guilt or shame.
Most have no jobs to go to or exams they might pass. They know no family role models, for most live in homes in which the father is unemployed, or from which he has decamped.
They are illiterate and innumerate, beyond maybe some dexterity with computer games and BlackBerries.
They are essentially wild beasts. I use that phrase advisedly, because it seems appropriate to young people bereft of the discipline that might make them employable; of the conscience that distinguishes between right and wrong.
They respond only to instinctive animal impulses — to eat and drink, have sex, seize or destroy the accessible property of others.
[snip]
A former London police chief spoke a few years ago about the ‘feral children’ on his patch — another way of describing the same reality.
The depressing truth is that at the bottom of our society is a layer of young people with no skills, education, values or aspirations. They do not have what most of us would call ‘lives’: they simply exist.
[snip]
Not only do they know nothing of Britain’s past, they care nothing for its present.
They have their being only in video games and street-fights, casual drug use and crime, sometimes petty, sometimes serious.
The notions of doing a nine-to-five job, marrying and sticking with a wife and kids, taking up DIY or learning to read properly, are beyond their imaginations.
Read the whole thing.
I want to point out that the above comes from that most derided of British newspapers, The Daily Mail. Disdain for The Daily Mail runs high from liberals on both sides of the Atlantic. But those who follow (even casually) its steady diet of stories on England’s cultural decline, and the rising incidents of casual violence from England’s permanent dole underclass, the recent riots are sad, but hardly shocking. Month after month, year after year, The Daily Mail has been reporting on the nature of those who have been rampaging through the streets these last few days. For political reasons, tony British liberals, safe in their secure upscale neighborhoods, have been disinclined to listen to those reports.
So which newspaper do you think more adequately reflects the reality of the English underclass? The Guardian, or The Daily Mail?
London Calmer, But Other Parts of England Flare Up
Tuesday, August 9th, 2011The Telegraph’s live newsfeed reports that rioting has spread to “Birmingham, West Bromwich, Manchester, Wolverhampton and Salford.”
And here’s audio of two drunk female rioters describing the “good times” they had burning things and drinking stolen wine. “It’s the government’s fault!” “Yeah, conservatives.” It’s hard for me to tell if this is real, or a parody of mindless British underclass hooligans.
Now some videos from the riots. Cheerful looters hauling away goods:
Rioters attacked outnumbered police in Tottingham:
Croyden on fire:
Cars and shops on fire in Lewisham and Hackney:
More rioters looting, and the police response:
Very recent footage of looted shops tonight on Woolwich High Street:
Manchester:
Birmingham: