A Chat With Some Teenage Rioters...

(video link)

- Everyone was just gonna riot. It was just going mad. Like chucking things, chucking bottles.
- Breaking into stuff. Breaking into shops.
- It was good though.
- It was madness. Mad.
- Yeah, it was good though.

Is it good though?
- Yeah.
- Course it is!

So you're drinking a bottle of Rose wine?
- At half nine in the morning!
- Yeah free alcohol!

Have you been drinking all night?
- Yeah.
- Like, it's the government's fault... I dunno.
- Conservatives!
- Yeah whatever, whoever it is. I dunno.
- It's about showing the police that we can do what we want, yeah.
- Yeah, that's what it's all about, showing the police we can do what we want. And now we have.

Do you reckon it will go on tonight?
- Yeah hopefully.
- Definitely.
- Hopefully.

But these are like local people. Why are you targeting local people? Your own people?
-It's the rich people.

Really?
- It's the rich people. The rich people have got businesses and that's why all of this has happened. Coz of rich people. So we are showing the rich people that we can do what we want.

Professionals with Blogs Talk About the Riots

PC Bloggs - Police Officer's Blog

Young People Are Angry

 

 

 

The aftermath of a fundamentalist terrorist attack.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 Young people being angry.

 

 

 

You can understand anger at the police when an unarmed man is accidentally shot by an officer wearing too-big gloves in a raid based on malicious intelligence.  Incidents like that are embarrassing to say the least.  Yet the residents of Forest Gate did not see the need to rush onto the streets and set fire to their own local shops.

Mark Duggan, who was shot on Thursday, came within a whisker of shooting dead a police officer before he was "gunned down" - as the papers describe it.  The Daily Mail, Independent and Guardian have been quick to quote friends who called the gunman "a good daddy" and "not a trouble-maker".

 

Now local dismay at Duggan's death has been hijacked by arsonists and rioters, who have created scenes similar to those seen on London's streets after the July Bombings.  Yet the usual apologists are already out bemoaning police action to every BBC camera crew they can find.  If the killing of an armed attempted murderer justifies widescale looting and petrol bombing, and the hospitalisation of eight police officers, you wonder how the family of Jean-Charles de Menezes - a genuinely innocent victim of botched police work - restrained themselves from blowing up Parliament.

(Read the rest at PC Bloggs)


Winston-Smith - Youth Offender Worker's Blog

The Riots in London are a Culmination of Decades of Failed Social Policies

The underclass are rising up. No longer content with simply burglaring and mugging the decent law abiding working classes that have the misfortune to dwell amongst them, they have now decided to torch and terrorise the very communities they come from. What we are witnessing in London and in other cities across Britain at the moment is an attack upon the decent and law abiding citizenry of the country. Their places of work have been attacked, looted and even burned down. Opportunisitic burglaries have occured and violent attacks upon the police and innocent individuals are widespread. Fear is endemic and people are anticipating a fourth night of chaos and disorder. The once great nation of Britain is being brought to its knees by a festering parasitic underclass that has been fostered by decades of failed social policies in the spheres of education, criminal justice, social services and welfare provision.

(Read more at Winston-Smith)


Scenes From The Battleground - Teacher's Blog

These Riots Prove Whatever the Hell it was I was Already Saying

I thought I’d join in with the latest internet craze: explanations of the riots which are actually thinly veiled efforts to raise completely unrelated issues. Let me be the first to claim that the riots were the inevitable result of mixed ability teaching, performance management and Brain Gym. Or something.

Well, okay, I won’t actually try and make that argument, but having already seen attempts to blame the riots on tuition fees and “high stakes testing” I could make those arguments and still not be responsible for the most ridiculous riot-related claims in the education blogosphere.

(Read more at Scenes From The Battleground)

An important part of this blog entry within the main of the article:

Even though so many of the rioters are young, the education system could not have prevented this. Better discipline in schools cannot ensure better discipline in the streets.  I never cease to be amazed how the sources that suggest discipline in classrooms used to be clearly much better also suggest behaviour outside the classroom wasn’t. Schools can’t social engineer the whole of society and despite all the reforms I want to see in our schools, none of them are likely to make a difference to a breakdown of law and order.

THIS is what I mean by "atheist spirituality"

The following is a clip from a tv programme about near-death experiences. A major focus is an atheist woman who is a secular officiant. (She performs non-religious weddings and other non-religious ceremonies. In the video they strangely call her an atheist minister.)

The way she describes her brush with death in purely non-religious terms is really uplifting and quite beautiful. Even her interviewer, who understood their own NDE from a religious perspective, seems to be somewhat moved by the way she expresses her interpretation of the experience.

(video link)

(Some little details are cleared up at Friendly Atheist)

(Cross-posted to atheism )