LONDON RIOTS

There has to be a better way to protest than to use violence. Martin Luther King Jr. said that if you want to live equally with your oppressor you have use nonviolence, for violence creates bitterness that will continue to exist in the community. These people have suffered inequity, but now they've given pain and anger to families and employees of these businesses.

It reminds me of A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens. Hatred and violence speads until it stops being about justice and starts being about revenge.

The Western news is not reporting it because it's not an Arab country that's rioting, just like there were media blackouts when there were riots in Iceland and Portugal.

So I guess I'm not gonna hold my breath for Western leaders to demand that David Cameron step down like they did to Hosni Mubarak and Muammar Gaddafi.

Perception is everything and is easily manufactured for an ignorant public. The powers that be know this all too well and have been profiting from this fact for a very, very long time.

Read the comments in the original story. The people themselves are quite keen on the idea of a police state.

What we are witnessing is how an oppressed underclass is created and its dissent subdued, and how a population is manipulated into accepting a police state. This show will be coming to a theater near you (when this exact same thing happens in the U.S.).

We will crush our own dissent and demand a police state, exactly as we are meant to do.

I actually found this out on the BBC... I don't mean to start a shitstorm, but I think our government wanted to see the reaction of people if their welfare was cut. Why not try it out on our brother across the pound?

When people are desperate, out of work, marginalized, and heavily policed, they do tend to lash out erratically the the whole of a society that only seems to be keeping them prisoner in a state of abjection. The police murder of yet another minority man in London, and the subsequent attempt to cover it up, was the spark that set off the fire.

The massive cuts to social services as part of the austerity budget, recently implemented and with more cutting underway by the conservative government, have left millions in the country with no hope. The burning of business that are not hiring, and the looting of goods they could never afford are all responses to the same problem: economic disparity.

Many in London are poor with no prospects of employment, and watching the entire political class talk about bailing out other countries' banks while their own nation cuts every meager benefit they receive is maddening. Add constant surveillance on every street, a corrupt police force (who are busy taking News Corp bribes instead of solving crimes), and the occasional murder/cover-up of unarmed suspects, and you get a large part of the population that feels like cattle being starved and killed by its own.

Now some of the rioters are just opportunists, but the riots are so widespread that writing them all off as thugs is not only inaccurate but an active attempt to misdirect public anger away from the failing state and towards those lashing out. Riots are always irrational, always hurt innocent people, and rarely solve anything. I'm not arguing they work, especially when they are not targeted at any specific goal. But the reason so many feel like they might as well just burn the damn place down is indicative of a society that is failing its people, a people who feel trapped with no other options. Despair makes people act crazily. Just don't blame the rioters for starting the insanity. That started in bank boardrooms.

We may well be next if some well coordinated and directed frustration isn't directed at the proper source and in the right direction. They can not be faulted for objecting to exploitation and abuse.