Posts by Rich Lock
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Hard News: London's Burning, in reply to Danielle,
There's an app for that, I'm sure.
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Hard News: London's Burning, in reply to Paul Campbell,
We've all been feeling a bit shagged and fagged and fashed, it being a night of no small expenditure.
Oddly enough, I started re-reading 'A Clockwork Orange' a couple of weeks ago.
Nothing in there really that would illuminate the current situation, except that teenagers do it because they can, and because they enjoy it.
But, brothers, this biting of their toe-nails over what is the cause of badness is what turns me into a fine laughing malchick. They don't go into the cause of goodness, so why the other shop? If lewdies are good that's because they like it, and I wouldn't ever interfere with their pleasures, and so of the other shop. And I was patronizing the other shop. More, badness is of the self, the one, the you or me on our oddy knockies, and that self is made by old Bog or God and is his great pride and radosty. But the not-self cannot have the bad, meaning they of the government and the judges and the schools cannot allow the bad because they cannot allow the self. And is not our modern history, my brothers, the story of brave malenky selves fighting these big machines? I am serious with you, brothers, over this. But what I do I do because I like to do.
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David Cameron: "I have also asked the police if they need any other new powers."
Yep, because all those other ones they've been given over the last 20-30 years have worked so well....
"You will pay for what you have done. We will track you down, we will find you, we will punish you."
Seriously dude, you're not the fucking terminator.
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Hard News: London's Burning, in reply to Hebe,
Isn't the buzz all about power -- gaining it, using it, and coming out on top (even if its only in the form of a new pair of trainers)?
In the situations I found myself in, it wasn't. There may be far more of an element of that in this/these case(s).
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Hard News: London's Burning, in reply to Russell Brown,
I'm more or less blocking out what's happening with sovereign debt and the financial markets right now, because worrying about it would simply be too depressing.
You'll be fine when society collapses: you've got a wind-up radio, remember?
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Hard News: London's Burning, in reply to Russell Brown,
Certainly not. But I did feel like an up-close observer rather than a participant.
I guess a more precise way of saying what I was saying in relation to '100% contagious' would be to say that all of the individuals who make up the crowd will be affected. How that plays out will differ from person to person.
Edit: It's also a far more intense and visceral experience than any gig or sporting event I've been to, before or after - orders of magnitude more so.
I can quite easily disengage from and dispassionately observe a sports crowd or gig crowd. I doubt it would be that easy in any sort of public disorder-type circumstances.
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Hard News: London's Burning, in reply to Richard Aston,
They can't export their social problems to Australia, US and New Zealand any more.
And they can't put them all in the army and make them fight on the North-West frontier, either!
Oh, wait....
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But I didn't throw anything, break a window or loot either. So I was a bystander.
Well, neither did I, so by that definition, I was a bystander, too. But I bet you weren't exactly 100% cool, calm, collected and dispassionate either. :)
not sure if crowd dynamics are inherently evil. Surely it’s the same dynamic at work in revivalist meetings, huge sports events, religious events , political meetings, the military, street clean ups the list goes on. Some of these could be experienced as cathartic and positive by many.
Yes, of course. But we're specifically talking about rioting here, and I was posting about my particular experience. Like I said, I'm struggling to decently articulate it, and that's the closest analogy I can get at the mo'.
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Hard News: London's Burning, in reply to BenWilson,
There's probably scientific versions, analyzing crowd psychology. But I expect it's pretty soft science.
Yeah, I'm interested in the causes. But what I was trying to get across was the feeling of visceral emotional volatility of being in those sort of situations, even on the fringes, and even when, relatively speaking, it's quite minor.
Individuals, and groups of individuals within the crowd, really do act as if they've suddenly been possessed (violence, fight or flight, crying, screaming, hysterics), and it sweeps randomly across the crowd. And then they'll snap out of it almost as abruptly as they started. The atmosphere is 100% contagious, too - there's no such thing as a bystander unless you've been trained to it or experienced it before and can deal with it.
It's deeply disturbing to experience - it was nearly 20 years ago for me, but it's still raising goosebumps.
Anyway, there's a couple of good pieces here and here. The second one from the perspective of a female chaplain who was in the thick of it.
Oddly, one man put down the golf club he was using to smash shop windows when he saw my collar. He went red and nodded at me. Others put down stolen goods, and still others walked up to proclaim their disgust at what was happening.
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Trouble is, water cannon make almost no sense.
It did occur to me that they might have a use in snuffing out newly-set small fires before they turn into the sort of raging conflagrations that gut multi-story buildings.
Plus which, a bunch of bedraggled and cold teens are possibly more likely to disperse and go home than re-form.
Admittedly, that article makes clear that neither of those uses is particularly feasible at their current high-pressure setting. And it doesn't address the 'policiing by consent' issue either - their use would certainly be an escalation.