Southport, 2024

[pete75]

What they are doing seems to have nothing to do with politics

It has a huge amount to do with politics.

They are the deniable shock troops of the political neo-libertarian, anti-state, far right, as are for instance the Proud Boys in the USA. If the politicos secure power, these shock troops will be used for as long as they can be directed into targets, then eliminated the moment they become a threat to the politicos. See for instance “Night of the Long Knives”.

You're not wrong.

[axel_knutt]

The big problem is why the media gives him so much air time to spread his nasty views.

Thatcher tried gagging the IRA, that worked out well for her, didn't it.

The big problem is how millions became sufficiently disaffected and disenfranchised to be attracted to demagogues offering scapegoats and easy answers. Simply calling for more police action/powers is like reacting to a lung cancer diagnosis by calling for morphine instead of paracetamol.

This has been half a century in the making, and sadly I don't think any government, even one with the right ideas, is going to be able to make enough headway in a single term to stand much chance of winning a second. Thatcher carries a large part of the blame for running down the social housing system, and both parties have presided over an unbridled increase in inequality. I think FPTP contributes significantly to disenfranchisement too.

Tim Harford presented a convincing argument recently.

[Cugel]

I can't understand why these rioters are being continually referred to as "Far Right". What they are doing seems to have nothing to do with politics, no aims to persuade change in any political policy. From a political perspective it's totally counter productive, alienating the perpetrator's views making the change they might seek less likely.

So to me it has nothing to do with politics so why the "Far Right". At best they are a small subset of "Far Right". Why not refer to them as "Monster Truck Enthusiasts" or "WWF Fans" (where they would also be a small subset of those groups, most of whom pursue their interest peacefully).

ie Why keep using a political label when their actions have nothing to do with politics.

Ian

I kind of agree. This Right/Left way of seeing things doesn't explain everything. They are bigots who know only what and who they hate, but don't have a collective view on other matters.

They don't have a collective view on what and who they hate, either. They seem to choose from an array of various historical pariah and scapegoated ethnicities, skin-colours, nationalities, genders, political allegiances, clothing styles and many other traditional identifiers-of-the-hated. It's the same syndrome as choosing to support some football team or other, for no apparent reason, then hating all the other teams and their "supporters". Or Mods & Rockers. Just us and them.

Some humans need an excuse, any excuse, to be hateful and violent. They'll find one, no matter how doo-lally.

[Cugel]

The big problem is why the media gives him so much air time to spread his nasty views.

Thatcher tried gagging the IRA, that worked out well for her, didn't it.

The big problem is how millions became sufficiently disaffected and disenfranchised to be attracted to demagogues offering scapegoats and easy answers. Simply calling for more police action/powers is like reacting to a lung cancer diagnosis by calling for morphine instead of paracetamol.

This has been half a century in the making, and sadly I don't think any government, even one with the right ideas, is going to be able to make enough headway in a single term to stand much chance of winning a second. Thatcher carries a large part of the blame for running down the social housing system, and both parties have presided over an unbridled increase in inequality. I think FPTP contributes significantly to disenfranchisement too.

Tim Harford presented a convincing argument recently.

It's become something of a trope, this: a poor economic experience generates a justifiable disaffection with "society" ..... but this also justifies a complaint which consists of being violent and hateful towards any and everybody but especially others of the disenfranchised and powerless - but not against those who are the actual cause of the problem.

Do you see any of these thugs "protesting" against big business, The City or any of the other constructors, enablers, supporters or beneficiaries of neoliberal privations and degradations that are claimed to have caused their disaffections? On the contrary, thugfolk are happy to vote for Bojo the evil klown, an Eton messer and Bullingdon hooligan; or for Farago the toxifier of all and everything he inserts himself into (and a one-time stockbroker). They actually admire the Bigger Hooligans who have caused all of their depravations!

I recall yobs such as these from my youth in Tyneside. They were an exception then, with no excuse from socio-economic privations - suffered by 99% of the population post-WWII - for their inclination to be racist, violent, destructive and generally nasty to those they found to be weaker than themselves.

As another mentions, their only political aspect is their willingness to be recruited into some violent cohort employed by a demagogue seeking some form of totalitarian power. They'd like their violence and hatred to be legalised and made a virtue.

[briansnail]

Intelligence agencies warn Putin/Russia pour money into Europe.To support both the Ultra Right and Left to cause dissent.A small fraction of any population will be extremists. They seek to exploit the "left behinds" with poor housing in run down estates with poorly paid jobs.They should be allowed to peacefully protest.With no masks and CCTV to identify people who do not protest peacefully.
****************************
I ride Brompton,Hetchins 531

[Geoff_F]

I can't understand why these rioters are being continually referred to as "Far Right". What they are doing seems to have nothing to do with politics, no aims to persuade change in any political policy. From a political perspective it's totally counter productive, alienating the perpetrator's views making the change they might seek less likely.

So to me it has nothing to do with politics so why the "Far Right". At best they are a small subset of "Far Right". Why not refer to them as "Monster Truck Enthusiasts" or "WWF Fans" (where they would also be a small subset of those groups, most of whom pursue their interest peacefully).

ie Why keep using a political label when their actions have nothing to do with politics.

Ian

"Far Right" is a meme that has been pushed since the end of WW2 by Globalists to describe people that want national sovereignty. It is a highly successful meme in as much as most people if asked to describe what far-right means would say something like Nazis, Fascist or something violent and horrible. Nazi aka National Socialism was an ethnically based authoritarian Socialism while Fascism was an Italian larping of ancient Rome - a sort of authoritarian civic nationalism.


In other words, "Far Right" is just a synonym for a vague bogyman because it avoids the need to address the actual reason why people do not like being obviously despised by the ruling regime.

[Psamathe]

I can appreciate that there are puppet masters who might be "Far Right" but I'm still not convinced that the majority of the rioters are "Far Right". To given them a political title suggests they have thought about the issues, analysed the impacts and concluded that they feel political policy is not addressing their concerns so they consider what they can do to effect change ...

I don't see that happening as anybody seeking to effect change would appreciate that rioting will be counter productive.

Cynic in me would consider even the puppet-masters (those organising and instigating) are not seeking change but probably have some other agenda.

Ian

[axel_knutt]

It's become something of a trope, this: a poor economic experience generates a justifiable disaffection with "society" ..... but this also justifies a complaint which consists of being violent and hateful towards any and everybody but especially others of the disenfranchised and powerless - but not against those who are the actual cause of the problem.

I'm not justifying anything, just pointing out that if you try to use power to crush people who are disaffected for good reason rather than addressing the reasons for their disaffection, you'll just exacerbate the problem.

Do you see any of these thugs "protesting" against big business, The City or any of the other constructors, enablers, supporters or beneficiaries of neoliberal privations and degradations that are claimed to have caused their disaffections?

Yes, Just Stop Oil, Extinction Rebellion, and Insulation Rebellion have been doing just that, and they're no more popular than these louts, are they. On the other hand, The Equality Trust campaigns quietly without any fuss, how many people have even heard of them?

On the contrary, thugfolk are happy to vote for Bojo the evil klown, an Eton messer and Bullingdon hooligan; or for Farago the toxifier of all and everything he inserts himself into (and a one-time stockbroker). They actually admire the Bigger Hooligans who have caused all of their depravations!

Because they are the ones wooing them with scapegoats and easy answers.

I recall yobs such as these from my youth in Tyneside. They were an exception then, with no excuse from socio-economic privations - suffered by 99% of the population post-WWII - for their inclination to be racist, violent, destructive and generally nasty to those they found to be weaker than themselves.

Countries with lower levels of inequality have been shown to have lower levels of virtually all the social ills, the privations of WWII were quite egalitarian compared with todays society, and it's relative inequality that's damaging, not absolute poverty. In 1940, the poor didn't have their noses rubbed in wealth every time they switched on the TV, or walked down the street.

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Status-Syndrom ... 136&sr=8-1
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Spirit-Level-E ... 134&sr=8-2
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Luxury-Fever-M ... 159&sr=8-2
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Spent-Sex-Evol ... 142&sr=8-2

As another mentions, their only political aspect is their willingness to be recruited into some violent cohort employed by a demagogue seeking some form of totalitarian power. They'd like their violence and hatred to be legalised and made a virtue.

Yes, and what's causing their willingness? Don't you think that's politics? Why was Farage able to split the Tory vote? Is that nothing to do with politics? Who do you think these people are voting for, the Lib Dems?

There were reasons why the population of Germany fell easy prey to Hitler in the 1930s, they didn't just follow him because they were yobs looking for any excuse, he was offering an 'answer' to their problems, and a scapegoat to blame. You could argue that crushing Hitler with force worked eventually, but look at the cost.

Look at what's happening in the USA, they way they're going the election will end up a choice between civil war if Trump loses, and civil war and a dictatorship if he wins.

[axel_knutt]

I can appreciate that there are puppet masters who might be "Far Right" but I'm still not convinced that the majority of the rioters are "Far Right". To given them a political title suggests they have thought about the issues, analysed the impacts and concluded that they feel political policy is not addressing their concerns so they consider what they can do to effect change ...

I don't see that happening as anybody seeking to effect change would appreciate that rioting will be counter productive.

Cynic in me would consider even the puppet-masters (those organising and instigating) are not seeking change but probably have some other agenda.

Ian

Suggesting that people won't have reason to lash out unless they have thought about their situation is absurd, if people are in pain they will yell out whether they understand the cause of their pain or not.

[pwa]

And back in Southport, with the louts gone and the streets cleaned up, there are still three dead children and others in hospital. None of this really related to the stuff the rioters claim to be "protesting" about. When the dust has settled and people look seriously at the tragedy, this is likely to become a discussion about possible mental health issues and what went wrong with a young man/teenager to make him want to do something like this.

[Nearholmer]

In other words, "Far Right" is just a synonym for a vague bogyman because it avoids the need to address the actual reason why people do not like being obviously despised by the ruling regime.

I don’t agree.

To me it seems that “far right” is a very specific set of very real positions, united by a belief in leaving capitalist enterprise to do its own thing without much involvement (except in some cases facilitation) by the state. Zero attempt to prevent or ameliorate the depredations of unrestrained capitalism by regulation.

What complicates matters is that there are (as there are on the left, in fact), both authoritarian (aka “nazi”) and libertarian (far neo-liberal) versions of the further right, and that the “fighting far right” (the people we are talking about here) are so easily manipulated and whipped-up by several different political interests, who can use them for their own purposes. The “fighting far right” is probably the easiest bunch of people there are to wind-up like clockwork soldiers, and point which way you want (look at the way they’ve been re-targeted from being virulently anti-Jewish, to virulently anti-Islamic, almost in the blink of an eye).

Right now, the “fighting far-right” are useful to:

- anti-state extreme neo-libertarians, mostly US originated, who can use them to distract states and undermine statehood, because that furthers their aim of ridding the world of democratically elected bodies that can pass laws that restrict the ability of the very rich to exploit natural resources and people at their will;

- states like Russia which wish to destabilise and undermine “western liberal democracy” for strategic reasons, one of those being that Russia in particular is a state that has already been captured oligarchs/kleptocrats, so wishes to spread that approach wider, another being territorial and cultural paranoia.

The reason things are so dangerous currently is that there is a huge community of interest between the two above, hence things like the murky Trump-Putin axis of love.

The techniques and tactics of this spectrum of rightists shows great commonality,always involving corroding independent thought and understanding of objective truths, and chipping away at democracy and alliances between democracies. They sow division, because to divide is to control.

Which doesn’t answer why some people become members of the “fighting far right”, or even simply supporters of further-right politics, or just fellow travellers. To get into that you need to get into why some people feel un-valued, un-loved by broader society, left behind, or whatever term you want to use. That, to a large extent, has its roots in things like the disappearance of heavy industry, the growth of equality, which makes shockingly apparent to for instance unskilled white males that they are bottom of the heap now that women and non-white people aren’t, socio-techno change which makes older, less neophilic people feel like fish out of water, and the starkness of economic division in a shrinking, ever less paternalistic state.

There is a lot going on here, and it’s not a foregone conclusion that paternalistic, large-state, liberal democracy will survive …….. we could find ourselves living under either large-state, paternalistic to the chosen, brutal to the excluded, authoritarianism, or in a universally non-paternalistic, devil take the hindmost, state which has been captured by oligarchs, kleptocrats, and mega-capitalists.

Flag-waving nationalism is a part of this, BTW, because one way to capture the emotions of the “disaffected” is to give them false-pride in nation and an imaginary enemy to hate, so that they gain some cheapjack version of self-respect. Nationalism also serves the interests of people who can only remain powerful by creating wars.

[reohn2]

The big problem is why the media gives him so much air time to spread his nasty views.

Thatcher tried gagging the IRA, that worked out well for her, didn't it.

The big problem is how millions became sufficiently disaffected and disenfranchised to be attracted to demagogues offering scapegoats and easy answers. Simply calling for more police action/powers is like reacting to a lung cancer diagnosis by calling for morphine instead of paracetamol.

This has been half a century in the making, and sadly I don't think any government, even one with the right ideas, is going to be able to make enough headway in a single term to stand much chance of winning a second. Thatcher carries a large part of the blame for running down the social housing system, and both parties have presided over an unbridled increase in inequality. I think FPTP contributes significantly to disenfranchisement too.

Tim Harford presented a convincing argument recently.

It's become something of a trope, this: a poor economic experience generates a justifiable disaffection with "society" ..... but this also justifies a complaint which consists of being violent and hateful towards any and everybody but especially others of the disenfranchised and powerless - but not against those who are the actual cause of the problem.

Do you see any of these thugs "protesting" against big business, The City or any of the other constructors, enablers, supporters or beneficiaries of neoliberal privations and degradations that are claimed to have caused their disaffections? On the contrary, thugfolk are happy to vote for Bojo the evil klown, an Eton messer and Bullingdon hooligan; or for Farago the toxifier of all and everything he inserts himself into (and a one-time stockbroker). They actually admire the Bigger Hooligans who have caused all of their depravations!

I recall yobs such as these from my youth in Tyneside. They were an exception then, with no excuse from socio-economic privations - suffered by 99% of the population post-WWII - for their inclination to be racist, violent, destructive and generally nasty to those they found to be weaker than themselves.

As another mentions, their only political aspect is their willingness to be recruited into some violent cohort employed by a demagogue seeking some form of totalitarian power. They'd like their violence and hatred to be legalised and made a virtue.

That's about the sum of it,a very small minority of idiotic thugs out to cause as much destruction as possible without even a second for anyone or anything.
That's not to excuse the man made poverty of many and the unrestricted and obscenity of the over rich blood stuckers pulling the strings of the "underclass" without a thought for anyone but self!

[Cugel]

That's about the sum of it,a very small minority of idiotic thugs out to cause as much destruction as possible without even a second for anyone or anything.
That's not to excuse the man made poverty of many and the unrestricted and obscenity of the over rich blood stuckers pulling the strings of the "underclass" without a thought for anyone but self!

Humans can be devils, angels and often both at the same time. Nature and nurture produce a hugely complex animal that can be induced into a thousand kinds of behaviour. Deprivation and disaffection due to the machinations of those in various kinds of socio-economic power no doubt have their effect but there are many other factors involved.

One is a certain kind of human nature that lacks empathy and/or sympathy (the ability to imagine the experience and feelings of others). There are varieties of psychopaths and sociopaths who have had what might be considered a very good nurture .... but something of their physicality, including the metal apparatus, makes them nasty no matter what.

Others have a terrible childhood, usually at the hands of parents but also at the hands of a wider set of others, from a school to a national war and everything in-between. Such experiences certainly transcend any social class. There are nasty brutes engendered in the lowest hovels and in the poshest palaces. Most of the nasty thugs I encountered in the rough times and places of my youth were parent-damaged, by evil fathers in particular - part of a family tradition that probably had a very long historical tail of abusive patriarchs injecting both their physical and metaphysical toxins into a family for many generations. (There are nasty mammies too - but perhaps not so many as the bad-dads).

Certain upper class schools are toxic environments, designed to turn their pupils into uncaring monsters who will be able to take and hold various powers by crushing any opposition using oppression, suppression and the ability to do anything at all without regret to keep their powers.

But whatever the causes (and there generally are many more than one simple cause) of brutish intolerance and violence, the perpetrators rarely have a purely political motive. Such people do exist but even they are likely to have acquired their political dogmas and beliefs as a result of some embedded nature or applied nurture. Even the nicer sort. A disinterested politician is a rare beast but one that any polity should be full of. Alas, we tend to have the opposite kind.

**************
In the end what matters becomes the methods for dealing with violent and thuggish people. The sad fact is that the families, cultures, economies, educational styles and other contributors to their mad behaviours and inclination to employ any excuse to do harm to others are not going to be fixed in the next few months ..... or ever. So the question becomes: how to minimise their effects. Once they were recruited into the armed forces or the police. That still happens to a degree but not as per the C18th and C19th practices as democracies are less tolerant of thugs in uniforms.

Currently, one obvious means to reduce the thuggery would be to squash the so-called social media and other mass media channels that not just allow but actively seek to use inflammatory means to construct both pariahs/scapegoats but also the "communities" of thuggish loons who are gathered and motivated in the name of some nasty political intent - intents usually constructed by the amoral and immoral power-mad amongst us. Big Hooligan gathers a gang; and does so much more easily than in the days before mass-media of the post-modern ilk.

Putting the mass media trouble back into Pandora's box, too, is no easy task and, as another poster points out, there's no obvious fix or any way to know if the trend towards some form of violent and intolerant totalitarian polity can be avoided, as thuggery becomes fashionable and famous. Personally I feel that such human political behaviour (demagoguery and its trappings) is a human historical norm and that we've been living in a highly anomalous bubble of liberty and tolerance in The West since the end of WWII. Back to normal soon! Perhaps very soon.

[reohn2]

Cugel
I think we're in strenuous agreement,though I do hope we can avoid the "back to normal" but sadly fear it's part of the human norm foisted on the rest.

[pwa]

Most of us here have been around long enough to have seen occasional riot seasons, usually with several years in between. The trigger varies, but the senseless violence and looting tends to look the same. We get a week or so of it, then the wind goes out of its sails and it dwindles to nothing. I am hoping that the current series of riots is partly that, a venting of anger that will be followed by the next protracted quiet phase.

I know that in this case there is a specific focus for the anger, but anger isn't rational and can be a vague, pent-up frustration that has deeper roots than one particular grievance. But when a suitable grievance comes along, it serves the purpose of giving the anger a focus, an outlet. These are angry people, and perhaps for some of them, if they weren't angry about this particular issue, they'd find another to be angry about.