Thoughts on the insane policies in the UK:
The trouble with “letting the Police do their job” is that in the precise spot in which you happen to live, or used to live, their job probably won’t start, if it ever does start, for about a week. In the meantime, letting the Police do their job means letting the damn looters and arsonists do their job, without anyone laying a finger on them, laying a finger on them being illegal. This is a doomed policy. If most people are compelled by law to be only neutral bystanders in a war between themselves and barbarism, barbarism wins. The right to, at the very least, forceful self defence must now be insisted upon. The Police, as we advocates of the don’t-disarm-the-victims-of-crime policy have been pointing out for decades, can’t be everywhere. They cannot instantaneously attend every crime, and magically prevent it. Only the potential or actual victims of crime can sometimes immediately prevent or immediately punish crime, provided only that they not [be] forbidden to.
When seconds count, the police are only a week away.
[Update a couple minutes later]
More British riot links at Instapundit.
[Update a while later]
More thoughts from Andrew Stuttaford:
The British state lectures, hectors and micro-manages the law-abiding. When it comes to defending them, it is, all too often, AWOL.
I wonder what the political ramifications of this will be?
[Update a while later]
Jeez. They can’t stop the riot, but they can stop the cleanup:
About 20 residents with dustpans and brushes offered small businesses help cleaning up their destroyed stores.
But people waiting to clean up Clapham Junction have been told they cannot help because of health and safety issues.
Even in the midst of social catastrophe caused by it, policy insanity reigns.
From a comment on the subject at Althouse’s blog:
Lileks on Ricochet this morning:
“Burgess pegged these yobs fifty years ago in “Clockwork Orange”: the end product of a state that excuses everything with the warm bath of sociological bromides, divorces itself from its cultural antecedents, anesthetizes the lower classes with payouts and a meretricious culture, and finds itself stuffed to the gunwales with pleasure-seeking sociopaths addicted to a life of sensation, both personal – and usually meaningless – and vicarious, which only fuels resentment for those having a better quality of sensory fulfillment. Theodore Dalyrymple’s close-hand examination of the pathology of the underclass in “Life at the Bottom” warned everyone years ago what sort of culture Britain had produced, adding something Burgess didn’t anticipate: the elevation of the thug culture by the upper classes and the artistic set, keen to show they were “authentic” by aping the demotic.
Add to that a political class keen to excuse the enthusiasms of youths, if it fits into the dead progressive template.”
“Oh? And what’s so stinking about it?”
“It’s a stinking world because there’s no law and order anymore! It’s a stinking world because it lets the young get on to the old, like you done.”
Although predictable, I do hope the government regains control of the matter quickly. And then, after learning a harsh lesson, they start walking back from this failed attempt at social control by the government.
What else did you expect? He wants to be Margaret Thatcher 2.0 so unsurprisingly there are riots in the streets after massive layoffs and wellfare state curtailing. I wouldn’t be surprised if the cops in that area were laid off to decrease expenses in the first place. This in a country which plants surveillance cameras everywhere.
This guy even goes one step beyond Thatcher. He basically wanted to get rid of all aircraft carriers including aircraft before the next generation carrier is done. This guy is basically bonkers. Regarding both domestic and foreign policy.
Sales of baseball bats of all things, seem to be going smashingly at amazon.com.uk. Wonder who’s buying?
How are the bowler hats and straight-razors selling?
(Warning: Ultraviolence!)