Over the last several days I have come to appreciate the many responses to the British riots on various sites condemning the rioters as irresponsible dolts. Now let's analyze the responses. Thousands of Brits are designated irresponsible dolts. How could so many members of a society be such? Certainly it could be pure genetic chance, but if so, why do other societies not produce such a high percentage of irresponsible dolts? Indeed, if the percentage of irresponsible dolts is so high, how do those identifying the irresponsible dolts as such not know they are irresponsible dolts simply getting judgment wrong because they are irresponsible dolts? Putting this aside and assuming rioters are irresponsible dolts, perhaps it is something in the physical environment which renders so many so incompetent. If so, then humanity ought to abandon the British Isles as dangerous. Alternatively, it might be speculated it is something in the social environment, not physical environment, which renders so many so irresponsibly doltish. Assuming this, then the riots should be a clarion call for Brits to evaluate themselves. . . . Naw, that's too uncomfortable. It's a lot easier to simply label the rioters irresponsible dolts.

Oh, by the way, is it true David Cameron has begun secret communication with Bashir Assad and the Emir of Bahrain, seeking advice on how to respond to the rioting in Britain?

"These riots suggest boredom - and inarticulate rage. The youth are smashing and grabbing the things society tells them to want."

The only sensible thing which I read in the whole piece.
The youth involved in these riots are criminals, gang members, young males (largely black), who have no interest in education. They have been given everything in life - education, free health care, housing, youth projects and sports centres, yet they still want more.
They did not want to study, because that was not cool, they wanted to "chill wid da bruddas", deal drugs, get guns, show "dat dey de man".
These rioters are dressed in designer clothes, and they are stealing high value material goods, and more designer c,lothes, and then they are burning the houses and workplaces of hard working business people.
I for one cannot wait until the police start to use water cannon and plastic baton rounds, because these scum are ruining the lives of many innocent people.

No one listens to the poor, except when they do something dramatic like rioting. During the riots, reporters will speak to the disenfranchised poor. But as soon as the riots end, reporters will talk only to the rich, who will condemn the poor as violent enemies of civilization. Then the rich will go forward and cut more and more social programs and jobs, because they can.

The rich are different and mostly sociopathic. For thousands of years, humans have based their societies on hierarchical structures, modeled on their religious beliefs (or perhaps the other way around, no one knows). People at the top in modern societies have gotten there with ruthless determination. We know that a tremendous amount of change has occurred in the human genome in the last 10,000 years, brought on by the move from hunter gatherer societies to agricultural societies. From adaptation to drinking milk and eating grains, humans have changed. But I believe the genome has changed also because of the great advantage gained by a few by a complete lack of empathy and a cold-blooded willingness to do anything to get to the top.

We see this sort of individual in every society in every era. Obama, W, Clinton, and their counterparts in other countries are merely heartless mass murderers.

We can decry the rioters, but in the end, the harm they cause pales before the harm caused by the elites every single day.

The rioters were interested in sneakers, track suits, electronic appliances and hoodies but damn sure were not interested in stealing books that had an educational value

Well not really...you can bet that almost all that has been looted has now been sold on at least once...very little of what was actually stolen will problably be kept. Books are hard to carry and you won;t be able to sell many copies of 'War and Peace' down the pub. We know that in several places people were seen to be dividing up the spoils very quickly. The 'loot' wll be converted into cash asap, less easy for the police to track. Promising arrest and long prison terms really is a non starter, the prisons are overcrowed as it is and I'm not sure we really want a new generation of criminals graduating from prison with new improved criminal techniques. Further many or these young people would view a prison sentence as a rite of passage, a badge of honour among their peers. We can decry this mind set all we like but prattling on about it won't change it. Peaceful protest is well worth a try but the police don't have a great record of tolerating that as was seen at Fortnam and Masons not so long ago. Marching on Parliament might have some success or not as was the case prior to the various wars so much money and energy have been lavished on. Its very improtant not to equate trying to undersand behaviour with condoning it....the violence we have seen is inexcusable. I lived in South London for some years, just north of Croydon and was heart sick to see Reeves furniture go up in flames. A dreadful waste indeed. This will be a long hot summer I fear. One question does spring to mind already though..CCTV was promised to be a deterrant to crime...what happened....perhaps it will prove usufull in apprehending the culprits but I suspect there are some 'ring leaders' Fagan types whose faces won't be seen. I don't have any easy answers, I'm not even sure of the questions any more but anger, frustration, pure bloody mindedness and a perception that there is nothing left to loose are very bad bedfellows. Oh and please don't prattle on about how education is the key...I know several people with good degrees from excellent UK unis who haven't found work since they graduated 2 years ago and its not for the want of trying.

In America we've had over hundred and fifty years of oppressing blacks, and at any time those black people had the moral right to rise up and kill their oppressors (as all oppressed people do). In an age of endless western wealth - wealth past civilizations could have only dreamed about: machines do the almost all the labor - why do so many, particularly the young feel disenfranchised, and hopeless? Because the international economies have focused on the endless and "mindless" pursuit of wealth for a tiny minority of people and not a broad based prosperity.

But they are calling these riots "mindless" violence. Mindlessness was America's housing crisis. It was the most affluent in society doing something absurdly stupid and then being bailed out. Mindlessness is thinking swapping paper back and forth between the stock market, gold and silver, currencies, and bonds will somehow create real jobs.

Though riots may appear mindless, they often have real benefits to the communities rioting. Riots have real economic gains: large scale theft (a vigorous redistribution of wealth); insurance companies are forced to pay out, so meaningful sums of money can be forced into circulation; rebuilding creates jobs; firefighters, cops, lawyers, judges, and the whole social justice system is ramped up; factories have to make the
replacement cars and other items; essentially riots can accomplish what governments are failing to do, transfer static (fictional paper) wealth from the rich and simulate local real economies. Ya, it's a horrible way to go about reinvigorating an economy, but obviously their government and welfare Royals aren't doing any better, or there wouldn't be riots.

And of course another reason the young are rioting is because capitalism has convinced them their lives are meaningless without all the stuff it dangles before their eyes to beguile them, ironically, into surrendering more and more of the means to get stuff.

One good that will come out of this, which we could use in America, is when it's all over their police will be a lot more reluctant to shoot someone.

When the poor and unfortunate people of Britain are treated like excrement day after day after day....I guess there reaches a point where they decide to act like excrement.Negative reinforcement.

Good Luck to them.

Our materialist and consumerist culture is getting what it deserves: rioters who go for the goods that they have been teased with for years while watching the dumb box.

We have entered the wobble zone of the Long Emergency.

Some examples of wobbling:

the recent behavior of the stock market and of the U.S. Congress, the insurrections in Europe and the Middle East that get stuck in mid-stream, the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq that go nowhere, the climate catastrophes, the ecological disasters, the corporate media's constant lying and denying about the ambient wobbling, the fate of nuclear power, the oscillating price of oil, the recession - recovery back and forth, the bail outs that yield few or no results, the growth economy that refuses to grow, the oil that withholds itself, et cetera.

OK, lets get a few things straight here.
The original riots on Broadwater farm estate, started following the shooting of a criminal/gang member/drug dealer who carried a gun (listen to his relative's comments if you do not believe that he carried a gun). The family and friends of this man are criminals and gang members, who would rather the police left them alone to commit their criminal acts.
The original riots were composed manily of young (14 - 25) black youths, who are themselves gang members/drug users/criminals. Then the rest of the dregs of society, the people who do not want education, do not want to put any effort into making a good life for themselves, they started to riot.
Certain communities have been taking a stand against these riots - Asian, Turkish, Kurdish, African, poor people who have built small businesses from scratch, only to see them burnt and looted.
These are not protests, they are wanton violence and destruction by the criminal classes, who have been allowed to get away with crime for decades, without being punished.
This is no "Arab Spring", where decent people are fighting against dictators and tyranny, these are people who have been given every chance in life and thrown it away, preferring the life of "Gangstas" (from a very early age) to education and work.