From the U.K. Guardian:
The poison of inequality was behind last summer's riots
A year on from the riots, the government is still failing to identify their underlying causes
Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett
Commenters on the Guardian site were not impressed:
- Inequality - yeah, he's got better trainers than me so I'll just smash in a shop window to get some better ones.
- A year on from the riots and the Guardian/LSE is still pushing this nonsense. The only real lesson to be drawn from last summer's exhibition of violent consumerism was that if the police keep a low profile during hot weather, people take the piss.
- Does anybody want to buy a cheap LG 40" flat screen. Ive got ten left.
- The Interim Report showed that rioters brought before the courts had on average 11 previous convictions
- Almost half of those held over the riots have been re-arrested for a catalogue of crimes including rape, threats to kill and robbery. Days before the anniversary of the disorder, official figures show that 44 per cent of riot suspects have been arrested on suspicion of committing fresh offences within the last 12 months. The statistics, released under the Freedom of Information Act, have raised serious questions over the penalties handed out to offenders.
- Everyone should have the human right to take whatever they need from any shop to achieve a lifestyle that meets their expectations. Everyone should have the right to express their anger at those that own property by burning it down.
Posts
70 comments:
At one time the British deported (err, transported) people who committed the smallest of crimes to Australia.
I suspect that Australia got a better deal than the UK has now, although Australia is trying to duplicate the UK's problems.
The massive immigration of Middle-easterners and Africans to Europe in the last 50 years was massive mistake.
"The Interim Report showed that rioters brought before the courts had on average 11 previous convictions"
Would love to hear the PC Guardian response to this. Could it be anything more than "Well, they profile..."?
Nice cull here Steve. Perfect example of reality smacking the face of "liberality".
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicholas_Stoller
So, Stoller went to Harvard to make something so foul?
I for one applaud the utter unoriginality of the authors' thinking (ahem) on this. In the spirit of Occam's Razor, no need to seek long and hard when the truth is so apparent.
Does anybody want to buy a cheap LG 40" flat screen. Ive got ten left.
How cheap?
This is my favorite comment:
"What a load of nonsense, last year the Guardian was claiming that all the rioters were opera singers, brain surgeons and university professors. You can't have it both ways."
So many good comments.
"And you wonder why this paper's circulation is in the toilet. Instead of standing up for normal people you've become an organ for professional apologists of all kinds of social cancer."
The FT had a book review this weekend, on three books that had something to do with the riots, including the revised Richard Florida "Smart Cities" one. The most interesting was by some White female journalist who hung around the Black thugs from Brixton, similar to the ones who violently mugged her parents.
She tried to "rescue" one thug named "Tuggy Tug" who as the reviewer noted wanted the "respect" aka fear that he induced in other people. After all, the fear he created is what led to the female White Brit journalists desire for him in the first place. No he wasn't Edward Cullen, but he pricked that same fear-desire response White women feel given their HATE HATE HATE for White guys made their equal, who inspire fear and groveling in no one.
That's the stuff that has enabled much of the thug coddling. Too much even for the FT reviewer also.
For those interested, Florida is doubling down on "gays create wealth" and figures even fabulously gay antique dealers are "creative" and oh so much smarter and open to any new talent, no hereditary classes forming among the "creative class."
The first book reviewed spat out the Guardian/LSE nonsense.
this is a consistent pattern these days:
Brain-dead leftist garbage followed by a string of startlingly intelligent and accurate comments.
I personally have been banned from posting comments at several places, including the august weekly The Nation.
they too have been deluged by intelligent, sensible, comments condemning their ludicrous stance on so-called "Islamophobia."
who even reads newspaper articles anymore??
the comments are so much better!!
An absolutely gem of guardianista journalism is:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/jul/19/korean-conflict-time-nuanced-view
The writer is, to put in colloquial British, a standard-issue, sad, leftie git wearing a donkey jacket.
It always surprises me that Americans take so much interest in the UK press, although I must admit that the incandescent British tabloids, Cotswold pubs and a decent pork pie are the main things I miss about the place. The Kiwi press is pretty lame.
22pp22 - Go Kiwis!
Weird stuff. Liberals want us to bring them to OUR country because they are too stupid to survive in their own Stone Age country.
Of course, as soon as we have imported them and they have failed to find work that pays the median income in OUR country, we are guilty of disparate impact racism.
We brought them here because they were dumb and couldn't get along or survive in their 75 IQ Stone Age country. How stupid must that be?
And now we are supposed to turn their children into rocket scientists and thoracic surgeons in equal proportions?
Lesson Number One: If you are sincere about not wanting inequality, stop importing unequals by the millions. The second they cross the border, their success or failure magically becomes Our Fault.
So Australia receives England's criminal classes and becomes one of the most livable places on Earth, while England receives the Caribbean's MIDDLE classes, and is turned into a violent, chaotic mess. Regression to the mean, red in tooth and claw.
At least the Guardian allows comments. Those on the New York Times are carefully curtailed to prevent the free expression of opinion. As does the woeful Rochester, NY "Democrat and Chronicle" which has such stringent requirements that very few people make comments there anymore.
'The massive immigration of Middle-easterners and Africans to Europe in the last 50 years was massive mistake.'
A few gold medals by African-Britons will be enough for many people to forget about the main perpetrators of the riots.
'At one time the British deported (err, transported) people who committed the smallest of crimes to Australia.'
I find it odd that Australians don't seem to resent the shabby way their ancestors were treated. I've never heard an Australian express resentment about this. Let bygones be bygones? Not a very modern way of thinking.
Last anon comment: I could not have put it better myself!
But how long before all comments on Leftie/Liberal sites are moderated in advance.
How much drubbing can they take?
RB London
who even reads newspaper articles anymore?? the comments are so much better!!
Some of us don't even read *cough* blogposts *cough* anymore. We just head straight for the comments.
Guardian readers posted these comments? Wow, there is hope for Britain after all. In this country nonsense like this has been accepted by leftists as the Revealed Truth since the late 1960's.
Newspapers and formal news organizations have somebig advantages in getting at the raw locally-available data--they have reporters whose 9-5 job is to go find stuff out, they often are given access to meetings and events that most of us can't attend, they build up a network of sources over time that they can call on for verification or background, they have some formal fact checking mechanisms (however flawed) in place, they tend to be big enough to resist a lot of attempts at intimidation (threatening to sue a local blogger to shut him up is much easier than threatening a local paper, who has some kind of legal department or arrangements, knows something of the law regarding libel), they may even be enough of a local power that the police chief won't want to antagonize them by, say, having the reporter writing irritating stories about his corrupt police department arrested and roughed up.
But that's all in the area of low-level fact finding. When you get up to the "what it all means" analysis, there is no reason to think the editorial writers of a newspaper are any wiser than the guy sitting next to you in the bar. Better informed, probably--they are hanging around a lot of people who talk directly to interesting sources of information about their stories. But not wiser, and where ideology comes into play, with no more depth of understanding than anyone else. This is one of the wonderful things about blogs, right? Instead of reading the What It All Means sort of analysis from half a dozen columnists picked for nationwide viability (not too offensive to advertisers and owners and subscribers) and ideological alignment with the editors and owners of the paper) or from the editors of the paper, you can read it from people with no such ideological / career filters. And this makes a much bigger world open up. Greenwalds and Balkos and Sailers and Coles make for much more interesting and informative commentary on the news than those older kind of colunmists.
The danger is that you will select a narrow range of people to listen to who all agree with you. Lots of people from the old media seem to be capable of seeing why this would be a bad thing. Hardly any recognize that it's also exactly what was happening with the old media, where the entire range of respectable opinion on some issue like affirmative action or US foreign policy covers a tiny sliver of the possible space of intelligent opinion on the issue, and a priori excludes all kinds of facts and ideas.
Sometimes I wonder whether they are following the John C Dvorak method of intentionally writing an easily skewered article (i.e. trolling) so as to increase circulation.
The Guardian may be correct that inequality increases crime. So let's decrease inequality by not accepting low-skilled immigrants.
Slightly off topic but fun: Link to a blog post on two continuing iSteve themes: Speaking fees as bribery/influence buying, and the fact that paranoid claims of AIPAC having a lot of power in Washington are anti-Semetic fantasies spread by Nazis with no basis in reality whatsoever.
There hasn't really been a massive immigration to Europe. Just three European countries Netherlands, UK, and France have large minorities.
I personally have been banned from posting comments at several places, including the august weekly The Nation.
I haven't ever been banned from comments anywhere probably because I'm careful not to be too controversial. But I do seem to be on some "watch lists" that subject anything I write to extra scrutiny.
Most of my comments are about music on YouTube. I recently wrote a comment on a particular song's tempo. I listed the times of other posted versions, and cited the time markings in the original score. I was reacting to a previous comment that had claimed that this particular version was too fast. But I didn't even comment. No subjectivity. I just reported facts.
My comment raised some flag. I got reviewed. Or maybe published tempo marks offend some advocacy group?
So you shouldn't really be upset by comment censorship. The software robots who enforce the rules are still pretty crude.
My advice, enjoy it while it lasts. This is the Golden Age of blogging and blog commenting. I don't think it can last.
Albertosaurus
They rioted because a mulatto drug dealer was shot by the "coppers, innit".
The most striking picture of the riots was a black yoof literally taking an English kid's pants. Those Afro-Caribbeans are so underprivileged they can't even afford to buy pants they have to take them off of Anglo-Saxons.
Guardian commentators also seem unimpressed by this victim of police racism who was arrested but then cleared of looting in the riots.
"I gave my side of the story in court and explained that I'd left my house to see all the madness on TV in real life – it looked like history in the making and I didn't want to miss out. I'd followed others into a shop for five minutes and had no intention of stealing anything.
Damned racist pigs!
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/aug/06/riots-one-year-on-fear
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-latin-america-19081302
Paradoxically, even though liberal elites push the gay agenda on all of us, me thinks the appeal of stuff like 'gay marriage' is precisely because it turns off a lot of people. Moral narcissism is both universalist and elitist. It is universalist in trying to push its values on the world but elitist in the belief that 'we tiny few' are smart, decent, and cutting edge to be members of the moral best/brightest.
So, even as the gay agenda is conversionary, its very appeal is it can never be embraced by all. Same conceit as modern art. It's officially for everyone but appeals not to everyone.
Call it the fairytocracy.
Never buy a television from an immigrant who is out of breath.
One place where it seems to me having a gay community is a big boost to a local economy--gay men are often willing to move into much rougher neighborhoods than straight couples are, and that's often the first step toward gentrifying some nasty unlivable neighborhood. I'm not sure how much that will continue--in the extreme case, if gay bars and bathhouses can go anywhere, then there's no need for gay men to colonize marginal neighborhoods. On the other hand, someone who has zero intention of ever having a girl live with him or having any kids, and whose life is focused around picking up guys for casual sex, is just going to have a higher risk tolerance in general than a married guy with kids, or even just a man with a pretty girlfriend living with him.
Hey, I have an idea. How about we allow the oppressed loser athletes to riot and loot the medals from the winners?
http://www.nbcolympics.com/medals/2012-standings/index.html
Wow, I don't think I've seen discrepancies like this. Russia and Japan have won a lot of medals but so few golds. Usually, a nation that wins a lot also collects a lot of golds.
http://www.nbcolympics.com/nations/nation=china/index.html?etx=medals&etx2=2012-medalists
China, the bogus athletic superpower. Just look at the all the medals they got in bogus sports. I say get rid of them dinky sports. Badminton indeed.
Why not billiards then?
If you want to make a point about reality without getting either banned or casually ignored as a nut or bigot, it helps to avoid offering the people running the comment thread overt reasons to ban you. Slurs, foul language, violent imagery, all are things that make it easy to justify deleting a comment, whether it makes a good point or not. By contrast, if you avoid those things, and can make a clear, pithy comment that calls attention to what's going wrong with the story, it's really hard to justify deleting it. The TV comment was a beautiful example of that--no overt reason why the comment should be removed (ethnic slurs, foul language, violent imagery), funny, memorable, and making exactly the point that needed to be made.
It's usually a lot easier to see what's wrong with a comment from someone with whom you disagree than someone with whom you don't disagree. That means if you want to comment somewhere where you are in the minority, it helps to go to some effort not to give the moderators reasons to remove your comment, or readers reasons to justify ignoring what you say up front.
Never buy a television from an immigrant who is out of breath.
Or from a Native who's out of breath.
I find it odd that Australians don't seem to resent the shabby way their ancestors were treated.
Oh, they do, they do. But they're currently more interested in sneering at Americans.
The relationship of those who are on the stage holding the megaphone to those peons in the audience getting lectured by their betters on what opinions they should have is clear. The former have the upper hand and will continue to do so. If the rabble get too loud then steps will be taken to muzzle them. Comment sections will be increasingly edited, as they are now in most places, to give the illusion of a consensus of opinion that agrees with that of the megaphone-holders. Democracy is only wanted when the masses go along with the program, not when they don't. As the PC police gain greater power the less they'll care about such niceties as tolerance of other viewpoints. The smile fades away and coercion increasingly supplements the propaganda barrage.
"The most interesting was by some White female journalist who hung around the Black thugs from Brixton, similar to the ones who violently mugged her parents."
I think you mean Harriet Sergeant, who researches and writes for a right-of-centre think tank, the Centre for Policy Studies, founded by the late Thatcher adviser Alfred Sherman.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alfred_Sherman
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/home/search.html?s=y&authornamef=Harriet+Sergeant
Lots of Whiskey-bait there ...
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2164185/Middle-class-mother-befriended-teenage-thugs-dressed-suit-encounter-shocked-core.html
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/article-1214549/Feral-youths-How-generation-violent-illiterate-young-men-living-outside-boundaries-civilised-society.html
"There hasn't really been a massive immigration to Europe. Just three European countries Netherlands, UK, and France have large minorities."
Check out Sweden, ca. 15 % of the population is foreign born. Then think of the children...
"One place where it seems to me having a gay community is a big boost to a local economy--gay men are often willing to move into much rougher neighborhoods than straight couples are, and that's often the first step toward gentrifying some nasty unlivable neighborhood."
Homen--homo men--but not lesbians. Why do homen do this? Maybe some are into body building and well-built. Maybe gay guys feel stronger being with other guys.
If you're a straight guy with a girl and if a bunch of thugs attack you, YOU ALONE have to fight off the thugs. And if you get beat up, you've lost your manhood in front of your gal.
But if two homen are attacked, it's still two guys vs other guys. More power. Two guys fighting other guys still has better chance than one guy fighting other guys while his girl just watches.
Also, even if gay guys get beat up, it's not as humiliating as a straight guy who gets beat up. A gay guy will understand and still love another gay guy who got beat up. But a girl may not respect a guy who gets beat up.
Beatology.
Chicago:
You mean all those owners of megaphones that keep hovering on the brink of bankruptcy? The ones that used to be untouchable even when they made stuff up, edited the hell out of their hidden camera footage to make up a scandal, etc., and that now get called on their crap all over the blogosphere whenever (often) they say dumb things or ignore important facts?
The NYT can close comments, or heavily censor them on ideological grounds. But they can't regain the place they held in the world even a decade ago. That's like trying to unspill water.
Comment sections will be increasingly edited, as they are now in most places, to give the illusion of a consensus of opinion that agrees with that of the megaphone-holders.
yes the NYT and NPR are notorious for this - the close comments, quietly prune the intelligent opposition and allow a few vanilla opposition comments or some really stupid ones to re-enforce the idea that only stupid trash opposes them.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4D-PYBQQSZk
Olympic level Badminton is quite exciting to watch. Granted most of the top level players are Asians sprinkled with a few Northern Europeans (Danes today, it used to be Swedes). So I suppose it's not as exciting for Americans who seem to enjoy watching blacks at play.
Fear made me do it.
The convict-descended Aussies do nurse grievances against England. But the majority of Anglo-Australians are either a) pre-c20 free settlers, b) convict descendents who like to think of themselves as free settlers, or c) the "ten-pound poms" of the post-WW2 era or their descendants. These groups don't feel an especial anti-English animus.
Recent migrations - young British people visiting Australia and (especially) young Australians coming to Britain - have created a huge degree of familiarity between the two countries. Mutual animosity tends not to survive these experiences, and many Australians end up as positive Anglophiles. Many are already - the children of the ten-pound poms often feel a strong pull to the mother country.
The rivalry is mainly a sporting one - England-Australia cricket contests are exceptionally competitive and intense, and have been for many decades. The rugby can be keenly contested too.
Much of the animus comes from the self-identified Irish Australians, who are often as tediously anglophobic as their chums in Boston and New York. The ease of air travel is definitely strengthening the bond between the Anglo-Australians and the English, though.
Olympic level Badminton is quite exciting to watch. Granted most of the top level players are Asians sprinkled with a few Northern Europeans (Danes today, it used to be Swedes). So I suppose it's not as exciting for Americans who seem to enjoy watching blacks at play.
No, I'm with you.
Even other lefty social scientists don't buy into Wilkinson & Pickett's. Tino Sanandaji had an excellent smack-down of it.
Londoner said:
"The convict-descended Aussies do nurse grievances against England. But the majority of Anglo-Australians are either a) pre-c20 free settlers, b) convict descendents who like to think of themselves as free settlers, or c) the "ten-pound poms" of the post-WW2 era or their descendants. These groups don't feel an especial anti-English animus."
This is absolutely nonsense - Australians of convict descent do not comprise a distinct or endogamous sub-group within the general population, and there's been so much intermarriage amongst Australians of predominately British extraction that ethnic distinctions between the English, Scottish, Welsh and Irish have already been significantly effaced.
Anti-English animus amongst Australians is generally pretty light-hearted and jocular - a little bit of sledging because of the general perception that the English are effete and whiny, but beyond that I've never noticed any serious grievances. White Australians of British descent usually do not usually retain a strong sense of attachment or affinity to their ancestral origins, with the exception of the Irish.
Nor do Australian Irish-Catholics necessarily harbor animosity towards the English - most of them migrated long before the intensification of animosity embodied by the 1916 Easter Uprising, and a great many remain staunch monarchists (for example, current opposition leader Tony Abbot).
"I suspect that Australia got a better deal than the UK has now, although Australia is trying to duplicate the UK's problems."
Given its putative and much ballyhooed convict origins, Australia is a remarkably safe and civil society even by Anglosphere standards.
The country has no equivalent of English football hooliganism, and even its bogans are not nearly as menacing or vicious as the standard British chav.
Ron Woo: many Anglo-Australians do define themselves as being of either convict or free settler/post-convict stock. As you say this is often a fiction because there are few if any Australians of pure convict ancestry left, but in people's minds the distinction does remain. However, it's not something they think about very often, and I probably did overstate the extent to which any grievance exists - it's confined to sport and is therefore unimportant.
"who even reads newspaper articles anymore??
the comments are so much better!!"
I usually go right to the comments. Then, maybe, I'll read the article. "Journalist" and "editors" are either insane, insanely fearful of so-called "minorities", or evil. Over and over again, especially in the case of interracial crimes, you just have to ask WHY do they "report" and "analyze" it as they do. The quotes are because they neither report it accurately, nor analyze it intelligently. They just repeat politically religious superstitions, hoping to keep themselves from being mugged or murdered in their own land by "minorities."
Australia "has no equivalent of English football hooliganism, and even its bogans are not nearly as menacing or vicious as the standard British chav."
Convict transportation ended generations ago. Most Australians are descended from settlers rather than convicts.
"At least the Guardian allows comments"
"Guardian readers posted these comments? Wow, there is hope for Britain after all. In this country nonsense like this has been accepted by leftists as the Revealed Truth since the late 1960's."
Britain is more crowded. The media lies that worked in the USA only worked because people could run far enough away from seeing things with their own eyes. People who can afford to move away are doing so but even after doing so they're still physically closer to the problem than people in he states were - partly because of better, or at least more, public transport.
The US version of the problem was worse in the 1960s than the UK's is today but the greater crowding makes it more noticeable despite that.
Pat - "My advice, enjoy it while it lasts. This is the Golden Age of blogging and blog commenting. I don't think it can last."
I fear that too, hope its not true.
I dont think the genie can ever quite be put back in the bottle though.
The powers that be can also perform some damage control. Stop collecting racial/crime data for example. Then everyone is reduced to throwing around anecdotes.
Sweet and tender hooligan
He will never do it again
Not until the next time.
So many of the protestors against the Man keeping him down have been back in front of the beaks for such "crimes" of protest like rape.
the guardian the jam donut of the newsagent.
Classes tend to reproduce amongst themselves, including the criminal class. It would not surprise me if there were more than a few people with 100% convict backgrounds.
Check out Sweden, ca. 15 % of the population is foreign born. Then think of the children...
That figure might be misleading. Does it distinguish between intra-European immigration and extra-European immigration?
"The ease of air travel is definitely strengthening the bond between the Anglo-Australians and the English, though."
What a pile of shit. The bond was much stronger when Australia actually saw itself as part of the empire.
"I did but see her passing by..."
Clyde - yes it was. Then it was severely weakened when Britain more or less turned its back on Australia and New Zealand and re-oriented itself towards the EEC/EU. Regular back-and-forth travel by the young people of both countries is now helping repair the damage.
To Lucille: Finns are still the largest foreign born group in Sweden, but its rapidly declining (they came in the 60s and 70s). The foreign born population of extra-European extraction is probably just under 10 % at this very moment, but Sweden has added around 10 000 MENAs + Somalis already this year...
"has no equivalent of English football hooliganism, and even its bogans are not nearly as menacing or vicious as the standard British chav."
Yeah, probably. Although I did read recently that Darwin is the broken jaw capital of the world"
Still, I'd rather be punched in the face by Crocodile Dundee than have my head stamped on by Wayne, Darren and Kevin Chavscum.
"I dont think the genie can ever quite be put back in the bottle though."
I don't think it can either. The difference is that now, the odious truths of ours are now getting an airing. Even the journalists are exposed to them, something which couldn't be said ten years ago. Once they are exposed to the crimethink, the internal mechanisms of their religious devotion to PC start to break down.
Do you remember the first time you looked at a site like isteve? I certainly do - back nearly a decade ago. I remember a feeling of sick revulsion, that I shouldn't be doing this. I remember looking at vdare - "The white doe", and feeling that there was something wrong about even mentioning the word "white" in a positive context. This was something only bad and crazy people do. If I go down this path, I will certainly be castigated for it by anyone who knows.
After you start reading for a while, you realize that they are in fact, correct. Now you have tasted of the forbidden fruit. You know the truth. Your head will hurt for weeks, as you wrestle with the programming vs your brain's desire to hew to the truth.
After a while, you know you can never go back. You start to resent seeing the party line spewed in almost everything you see and read.
A lot more people are reaching that point. People are less afraid than they used to be, the fear is certainly less these days. And something else I've noticed - there used to be a lot of comments that were notably cointelpro-like, the internet version of a Jerry Springer "racist" (really, an actor). The intent being, to provoke aversion in the "right thinking" majority.
That seems to be something they've given up on, too much effort and no real point any more.
"Do you remember the first time you looked at a site like isteve? I certainly do"
Me too... I'm basically going against everything television and movies told me was truth.
"Anonymous said...
"Do you remember the first time you looked at a site like isteve? I certainly do"
Me too... I'm basically going against everything television and movies told me was truth."
The situation has begun to remind me more and more of the Soviet Union where fewer and fewer people believe what the MSM and MSM politicians are saying just like fewer and fewer people believed Pravda.
I recently read a well respected policy analyst talking about current events in China who suggested that once people stop believing in the system the only thing that keeps people in line is “fear” and if the military or the police balk at cracking down harder then the system collapses and a new order is established just like in the Soviet Union.
Several people, who also apparently just woke up to what is going on, have asked me why don't people just rise up and say enough of this BS?
I am not sure. Maybe critical mass has not been reached (White consciousness when Steve first started blogging in the early 1990s was probably close to zero) and demographics are working against Whites.
How the coming change will take place will be interesting to see.
One person, a scientist I met, recently voiced to me concern about the fact that people are "reading all sorts of things" and not just getting their news from the MSM (but of course he was "Scotch-Irish” and probably nervous about the new narratives people are reading).
Now that more and more White people (particularly White males) are seeing the “system” (i.e. the MSM, Wall Street thieves, Academic Cultural-Marxist charlatans, dual citizen Neo-Cons promoting the Scotch-Irish agenda, sold out DC curruptocrats, etc ...) as a sick joke you wonder what is going to happen over the next twenty years or so.
Numerous possibilities:
1. The MSM and PTB recognize their ridiculousness and takes self-correcting steps to be more fair minded ... and politicians, aware that 50 million are unemployed or under employed according to the federal government’s own statistics begin to pull back on immigration and foreign wars etc. ... (personally don’t think this is likely … a tiger doesn’t change its stripes as they say in China … unlikely any of the above mentioned groups will become more fair and tolerant).
2. None of the above happens and Whites continue to live in a charade as the country slips into Brazil light or worse...
3. Open violence with a government crackdown (maybe why Janet Napolitano said that homegrown "Domestic Terrorism" is her biggest worry). Undoubtedly, the Rand Corp. and the CIA have plotted scenarios and maybe that is why we have a 1.8. million strong Dept. of Homeland Security. I dunno.
It is interesting to ponder what is going to happen although one Harvard professor who planned a course on the "future possibility of civil war in the U.S." found out the hard way that the PTB prefer that the public not consider such things (his course got canceled after alumni became outraged over the silliness of the idea …hmmm).
Any thoughts from the iSteve posters (slam dunk smartest group of posters on the web by a country mile)?
Really curious of what other’s think regarding all the Race Realism 101 comments I see all over the MSM articles (not just the Guardian) posted on the web where they don’t aggressivley edit or monitor.
Even my home town newspaper has people posting on its website and talking about the USS Liberty, Neo-Cons, and other matters that has put our town’s local Rabbi on a damage control mission. The Town Hall is hosting a movie next month on 911 Truth for Heaven’s sake (sponsored by the Mayor’s office)!
Something is happening. Where are we headed?
Come on guys I want some answers.
On the South Island of New Zealand, there are so many first-generation Brits that there is a continuum of accents from heavily Kiwi to pure English regional dialect. It's easy to forget there not the same country. It's great in the Olympics. You get to support TWO countries doing really well.
Up North, things are different.
'Classes tend to reproduce amongst themselves, including the criminal class. It would not surprise me if there were more than a few people with 100% convict backgrounds.'
Highly unlikely. Too much immigration, too few convicts, too much moving about.
Anon 4:50:
A big part of controlling a society is controlling what each person in the society thinks everyone else believes. You can keep a theocracy going in which many people don't really think the Ayatolahs rule at the behest of God, so long as most of them think they're very rare. But if many people in that society come to realize that there are *lots* of doubters, a big change is likely to happen. And so any dictatorship is careful to try to control what people think their neighbors think.
US society isn't a dictatorship or a theocracy, of course, but there are some parallels here--many beliefs that are favored by the MSM and US elite benefit from the fact that it's often hard to know how many people besides you think they're nonsense.
In the runup to the Iraq war, the MSM went to great lengths to keep most of the American people from knowing how many people opposed the war (it was about the same number of people as supported the Tea Party before the 2010 midterm elections), and minimized and carefully edited coverage of antiwar protests. That's an example of this process in action--some folks at the top decided we should go to war, and in order to make sure that we did, they made it hard for those citizens with doubts about the wisdom of the war to know how common their views were.
About once a month, there is some high profile made-up outrage or media "teaching moment" about race. And this seems to be overwhelmingly about this same goal--convince most people that everyone else thinks what the MSM thinks about racial issues, model the appropriate outrage against Mel Gibson's drunken anti-Semetic rant or Larry Summers' moderate but politically unacceptable comment about women and men in science. This teaches us to expect the same outrage if we express those ideas. And as long as that's the only way to see/hear anyone's reactions outside of personal conversations, this is pretty effective.
All kinds of modern media, like Twitter and Facebook and blogs and Youtube and podcasts, break this.
Partly, that's by bypassing the things the MSM decides ought not to be discussed--if NBC news thinks you ought not to see the cops busting protesters' heads at a political rally, or a bunch of black kids beating some white guy senseless, or hear about the latest politically incorrect book or article in anything other than full denunciation mode, those alternatives mean you can just do an end-run around them. More importantly, they allow the formation of bigger communities of people who can discuss issues the MSM has decided are off limits, and thus can come to think deeply about them, to work out their implications, etc. And perhaps most importantly, they allow us to learn something about how common various ideas are in different communities. If you comment on a news article on Facebook, and a dozen people give you thumbs up, that lets you and them know that the ideas expressed in your comment are not so uncommon as you might have started out thinking.
Seneca:
Most of the MSM is hemorraging money. They will change or they will die. (Or both.) I imagine there will be an interesting tension in the next few years, between the desire to pick up more viewers by covering stories that the MSM/elite consensus says ought not to be covered, and the desire to use their waning but still potent influence on the culture while they can.
As far as social effects of all this, that's a good question, and I'm curious about Steve's take on it, since he's spent the last decade writing well-thought-out articles for very low-circulation, fringe publications and blog posts that were one form of leakage of forbidden ideas past the prestige-media's blockade.
One thing I think is important to keep in mind: it's a mistake to only think about the good effects of this--like it being harder to drum up support for a dumb war or keep people from noticing some kinds of crime. What are the good things made possible by the MSM/elite control over the public's view of itself and the world? What will happen when those go away?
For example, in that world, it will be a lot harder to get everyone pointed in the same direction. If there is a war or some other hard thing that is necessary for US well-being, it will be harder to organize it in that world. (Though the list of wars since WW2 doesn't read like a commercial for how well this ability has been used so far.)
Perhaps the people at the top will lose all legitimacy with most of the people. That could have very ugly effects. (It's worth noting that in opinion polls among Americans, neither the president nor congress nor the courts have nearly as high an approval rating as the military. It doesn't take a lot of imagination to see how that plus even less perceived legitimacy for the current order could go very badly for us.)
NOTA - "If you comment on a news article on Facebook, and a dozen people give you thumbs up, that lets you and them know that the ideas expressed in your comment are not so uncommon as you might have started out thinking."
Up to a point. Facebook, deliberately or not, is a backward step in some respects.
Most people exist on Facebook under their own names thus the old 'you can't say that!' rule applies a lot of the time. Speech codes are enforced as they are on the MSM and in real life. Not as strongly to be sure but the pressure is still there, not to say the wrong thing.
We here can say a lot because we are either anon to some degree.
Facebook is not anonymous, but it does allow lateral communications. That means that while you can't say absolutely everything you might think without risking some social fallout, you can certainly communicate in ways that can spread widely very quickly, without any authority or media gatekeeper approving. You can +1 something you like without writing a tract on why the conventional wisdom is all wrong. Perhaps even more powerfully, though, you can comment on a comment or story in a sensible, calm way where the MSM gatekeepers would only allow discussions of the subject to take place in two-minutes'-hate format.
NOTO and Anon@6:41 thanks for the response and excellent points.
Regarding whether Facebook "intentionally or not" is a step backward or forward.
It appears that the PTB are concerned that the anonymous nature of the web is giving rise to an “I am Spartacus” type moments in the comments section where by being anonymous people are more inclined to stand up for what they believe or openly state what they think even if very not PC(even if the anonymous nature is merely a “perception” and not a reality unless you are posting through an encrypted service)
To me, it seems the PTB is attempting to “deanonymize” the web, by requiring people to “sign in” to their Facebook account or other account to leave comments ( I noticed that Yahoo news section and a couple of other sites have recently added this feature to “certain” articles). Apparently, Cass Sunstein’s internet counter intelligence propaganda wing is not working effectively enough.
Whatever reason they give, e.g. to discourage “bullying,” etc. …, the real reason is to discourage the voicing of unpopular opinions that the MSM think are illegitimate (regarding free trade, diversity, globalism, Black crime, the Scotch-Irish, etc… take your pick).
However, this puts them in a “double edge sword” (or Scylla and Carbides, rock and a hard place, devil and the deep blue sea, etc…) situation.
Because now that people have gotten into the habit of actually saying what they think by posting anonymously, if people who faced with a choice, of either not posting or posting without anonymity, decide to post anyways and get more “thumbs up” the PTB attempt to control the course of the conversation will have backfired….
Since some such opinions will become “openly” acceptable not just the purview of anonymous posters (this is already happening to some degree).
Therefore, this attempt to retard social change or “contain” the course of the public conversation may actually lead to its acceleration. (This is of course assuming that the PTB are actually “thinking” about such things as narratives, but of course we know that they never think about such things, Cass Sunstein and his government commission excluded of course … ha).
Anyways, thanks for the great comments.
Hey, the thread isn’t dead yet … come on people chime in.
Seneca
"Any thoughts from the iSteve posters (slam dunk smartest group of posters on the web by a country mile)?"
Slide to authoritarian government with domestic terrorism as the excuse. Beyond that who knows but whichever way it's all different varieties of bad.
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