Posts by Rich Lock
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Hard News: London's Burning, in reply to Stephen Judd,
I think any analysis of what is happening has to take into account that the behaviour of people in groups is not a simple aggregate of their individual motivations, but something more complicated, more chaotic, and more primal. When enough of us are together, our relationships transcend the merely spatial, especially when some outside force acts on us. In those moments, it is not all about me.
If all your friends jumped off a cliff, would you jump too? If we are honest, sometimes the answer is yes, we would.Agreed. Myself and Russell mentioned something along these lines back on pg 2.
I've been struggling to think of a way to describe it for a few days now. The closest I can get (and I'm not at all religious or spiritual) is that the crowd are almost like collective puppets on the strings of some malign unseen demonic presence hovering above and making the little ants dance to its evil, random and chaotic whims.
Trust me, I know how daft and OTT that sounds. But it's the best I've got.
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2 swedish twin sisters does get one there.
Although I suspect that one may wish to check that google safesearch is fully engaged before carrying out any searching along thoses lines......
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Hard News: London's Burning, in reply to Russell Brown,
The mores and manners of Victorian England have been rather glossed over in recent times.
Oh, and before and since.
Yes. But Victorian Britain was specifically mentioned in the article (and almost inevitably crops up in these sort of analyses when an example is needed).
It does make me wonder how much the modern urban UK city environment feeds into this. Upmarket areas in London are cheek-by-jowl with some pretty run-down estates, and even if they're not, the number of relatively good transport links makes it easy to move a long distance pretty quickly.
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If we're talking analysis, here's Zoe Williams from the Guardian, and Michael McCarthy in the Independent.
I'd take issue with some of the examples in the Indie article: for a population that was/is supposedly 'not an aggressive or violent people', and 'not naturally good at fighting', it strikes me as rather odd that Britain had an awfully big empire at one point.
However, the general vibe and conclusion resonates.
ETA: I'd also note that you'd have been a fool to venture out into some of the murkier areas of Victorian London without a cudgel, pistol and bodyguard. The mores and manners of Victorian England have been rather glossed over in recent times.
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He looked desperate at that stand-up in Clapham, didn't he?
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Hard News: London's Burning, in reply to giovanni tiso,
The only disadvantage is that civil unrest could eventually become an election issue, but it could be spun in favour of the conservative party as a Law and Order issue only?
That Theresa May story was cropping up as one of the 'most read' on the Guardian website yesterday....
I wonder if their web elves did a naughty bit of shuffling the link to a prominent position.
Also, from Channel 4's snowmail news roundup:
what a day it has been already. Politicians hauled back to work, booed on the streets, facing public fury at the lack of security.
Shops in Birmingham city centre were looted and 138 arrests were made, but when the Deputy Prime Minister, Nick Clegg, went on a walkabout today he was jeered. Boris Johnson encountered similar heckling in London.
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Hard News: London's Burning, in reply to BenWilson,
So what was the difference to the lumpenproletariat?
I don't see it as a pejorative term quite so much as Marx did, btw. They're still people, making choices that are a likely consequence of the system they find themselves in. They have to be accounted for in a fair society. They're also quite a rich seam of the most important people society ever produces - the various idle intellectuals and artists whose contributions simply aren't valued, and don't have a rich patron to keep them going.
Lumpenproletariat: The term was originally coined by Marx to describe that layer of the working class, unlikely to ever achieve class consciousness, lost to socially useful production, and therefore of no use in revolutionary struggle or an actual impediment to the realization of a classless society...In The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon (1852), Marx refers to the lumpenproletariat as the "refuse of all classes", including "swindlers, confidence tricksters, brothel-keepers, rag-and-bone merchants, beggars, and other flotsam of society".
Hmmm, I learn something new every day.
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Hard News: London's Burning, in reply to Russell Brown,
Try typing something in the comment box before doing the file upload. Crazy, I know.
'K, try three.
Does anyone else find this photo...odd?
ETA: Oh, FFS.
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Hard News: London's Burning, in reply to giovanni tiso,
What, because they don't aspire to you reckon?
No, they're just being realistic about their chances of ever achieving it by the conventional route.
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Hard News: London's Burning, in reply to BenWilson,
The UK's got a big underclass that are outside any "social contract". They aren't materially poor in the sense of a third-world nation, or even New Zealand, but they exist outside the whole "legal" economic and social structure. When the cops threaten their livelihood, they'll fight back.
Is that what's known as the Lumpenproletariat?
No. Just that the UK has a far larger proportion of people who at least partly rely on, and exist within, a parallel shadow economy. Their cash income will be far more reliant on day-to-day cash-in-hand jobs, the proceeds of petty crime etc.
Obviously, these things are hard to measure outside of a gut feel and anecdata, but my feeling is that Rich is correct that there are sizable numbers (proportionally far more than NZ), and that they exist outside of any implicit or explicit social contract. They simply don't buy into the idea of having a salaried job, paying taxes, educating and furthering themselves, or generally doing all that good citizen type stuff.