London 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:
So newspapers are reporting. Maybe rioters are going back to pick up sound systems to go with their new plasma TVs, or going after those arrogant buildings that remain so rudely unburned.
Says Brendan O’Neill at Spiked:
Painting these riots as some kind of action replay of historic political streetfights against capitalist bosses or racist cops might allow armchair radicals to get their intellectual rocks off, as they lift their noses from dusty tomes about the Levellers or the Suffragettes and fantasise that a political upheaval of equal worth is now occurring outside their windows. But such shameless projection misses what is new and peculiar and deeply worrying about these riots. The political context is not the cuts agenda or racist policing – it is the welfare state, which, it is now clear, has nurtured a new generation that has absolutely no sense of community spirit or social solidarity.
What we have on the streets of London and elsewhere are welfare-state mobs. The youth who are ‘rising up’ – actually they are simply shattering their own communities – represent a generation that has been more suckled by the state than any generation before it. They live in those urban territories where the sharp-elbowed intrusion of the welfare state over the past 30 years has pushed aside older ideals of self-reliance and community spirit. The march of the welfare state into every aspect of less well-off urban people’s existences, from their financial wellbeing to their childrearing habits and even into their emotional lives, with the rise of therapeutic welfarism designed to ensure that the poor remain ‘mentally fit’, has helped to undermine such things as individual resourcefulness and social bonding. The anti-social youthful rioters look to me like the end product of such an anti-social system of state intervention.
It would be nice not to have to do another update on this story, but I suspect I will…
It’s not yet sunset in the UK, so we don’t know if a fourth night of rioting will follow the first three. But the glee and impunity with which rioters torched and looted large sections of London are an indictment of two beloved projects of British and other European elites: a disarmed citizenry and an all-encompassing, cradle-to-grave welfare state.
It’s hard to imagine riots of these size going on for days on end in the American South or Midwest simply because so many armed, law-abiding citizens would stand ready to defend their lives, liberty and property. Once you’ve shot a few rioters dead, it does rather tend to put a damper on the festive mood of the others. An armed shop owner in Texas or Ohio wouldn’t have to stand idly by while his life work burned, waiting vainly for police that never come.
But London shopkeepers and home-owners never had that choice. As Instapundit noted, “Unlike L.A., there are no Korean shopkeepers with AR-15s to help contain the looting.” Since handguns were banned in the UK in 1997 (tightening already restrictive firearm laws), their per capita crime rate has skyrocketed compared to ours.
As Theodore Dalrymple and others have so depressingly documented, the welfare state has hollowed out the once redoubtable English character and replaced it with crime, inter-generational dole-dependency and general hopelessness. “These youths in hoodies and men in bandanas are not fighting for a principle, they’re trashing neighbourhoods for a plasma telly and a pair of new trainers. Masked gangs are looting department stores, not waving placards.”
Will this be a wake-up call for those pushing for an ever-larger welfare state? Of course not. My liberal British friends on Facebook are already trotting out the classic liberal phrases. “Underclass,” “powerless,” etc. Why “powerlessness” leads inevitably to someone looting a plasma TV is never adequately explained, nor how an ever-more-expansive welfare state would prevent this, unless they expect that taxpayers buying a plasma TV for every single person on the dole would remove the temptation.
Edited to Add: Greetings, Instapundit Readers! Take a look around and see if there’s anything else that might interest you, such as updates on the Texas Senate race or some tidbits on Rick Perry.
My main computer is still in the shop, so here’s another roundup of brief updates…
A handful of links you may find of interest:
CHL carriers get an express lane through Texas State Capitol Security. This is a testament to how effective the CHL program has been.
Catholic Bishop killed in Turkey.
George Will on the conflict between the limited government of the founders and Progressivism’s vision of unlimited government power to meet an ever-expanding array of material “needs.”
Victor David Hanson on Europeans waking up to History returning to Europe, “from Mediterranean insolvency, to the threat of radical Islam, to demographic decline, to new international dangers on the horizon.” But I’m guessing Europeans will hit the snooze button a few more times before they will bother to rouse themselves from their slumber. And by then it may be too late.
A statement of the obvious, sure to infuriate those on the left: “The U.S. can’t afford to provide everyone with food, clothing and shelter, not to mention medical and child care, college tuition, a low-interest mortgage and a Social Security check until death.”