Is this the British Lion or the Columbia Lion? Take your pick.
"The first is this nonsense must stop. It must stop. If you want to act like a butthead, you're butthead is going to get locked up. And if you want to act like an idiot, move. Move out of this city. We don't want you here anymore."
- Philadephia Mayor MIchael Nutter speaking August 7, 2011 at Mt. Carmel Baptist Church
Leave it to two married professors from NYU and Columbia University to blame the UK riots on Prime Minister David Cameron, budget cuts, and even the Tea Party. That's what Richard Sennett and his wife Saskia Sennen do in this New York Times op-ed
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/11/opinion/when-budget-cuts-lead-to-broken-windows.html?_r=2&src=tp
The Tea Party, indeed.
This, of course, is nothing more than the pinhead academic attitude that government must provide the sustenance of life to all, and when the money runs out-just keep spending. In the real world, things don't work that way. The lesson of the riots will be that European socialism, the great welfare state, and a fawning subservience to some foggy notion of Multi-Culturalism do not work. Sennen, who is Dutch, apparently has not learned the lesson of her own country.
What we are seeing in Britain is the culmination of a failed experiment that the rest of Western Europe is also learning. The Brits created a socialistic welfare state, and now the money has run out to pay for it.
They also created a monster of multi-culturalism that did nothing to assimilate their ethnic minorities even though previous generations of immigrants from South Asia had been able to succeed in Britain. At some point, the assimilation stopped. A lot of it was due to Islamic extremism and the likes of people like Anjem Choudary, who openly works to install shariah as the law of the land in the UK as he and his worthless followers spit on everything British..
What have the Brits been doing in this past generation that has created such division of the races? This past week, we have seen rioters of all races including whites, some from well-off families. Yet, blacks have attacked whites and Asians alike. Three of the four dead are of Indian descent-run down by a car diven by a black rioter.
If you listen to interviews with the masked rioters, it is clear that they feel entitled to take from others what they don''t have ( haven't earned) themselves.
I see the problem as two-fold, and it is a problem that is brewing in the rest of Europe. First, the Brits can no longer pay for the goodies they have been handing out in the form of welfare to people who don't work. Second, multi-culturalism has been embraced and whatever assimilation they had has stopped. Europeans didn't care if immigrants learned their languages, their customs or assimilated. Just let them settle in segregated neighborhoods, do the manual labor or collect welfare, while we "salute" their cultures. Now they (the Brits) are paying the price.
Another thing has been all too clear; has anyone ever taught the British cops how to make an arrest? How humiliating it is once again to watch cops, armed only with batons and shields, running in retreat from thugs throwing missiles and Molotov cocktails at them. You throw a Molotov cocktail at an American cop and you're going to get shot. Instead, thugs take over the streets, beat people, rob them and burn their shops as they loot. Keep in mind that there is no 2nd amendment in that country. They confiscated the guns long ago, and even the cops don't carry guns except for certain special squads. Once upon a time that might have been reasonable in civilized Britain , but not now. Britain is no longer civilized, and the rest of Europe is following just a couple of paces behind.
What Britain needs to do is find another Churchill or Thatcher to lead them and tell the people that the welfare state is over. If they want to succeed, they need to get an education, work, and contribute to society. In addition, they need to tell their bad apple immigrants that it is time to assimilate into British society or get out. If people like Choudary want to live under Islamic law, there are plenty of countries they can move back to. (Choudary is UK-born.) Surely, not all Indians or Pakistanis in Britain share Choudary's beliefs, but they are all suffering the backlash because of it.
If the Brits don't act now and act decisively, we are witnessing the death of once-Great Britain-with the rest of Europe soon to follow.
As I stated, some of the rioters were white. They have also been imbued with the attitude that they are entitled to the largess of the producers of British society courtesy of the government. In addition, Britain needs to stop treating its minorities as if they were some sort of children with Downs Syndrome, who are not responsible for their actions. That is an insult to the black and Asian immigrant communities who work, produce, assimilate, consider themselves Britains, and obey the law. The message they have been getting for years now is that their assimilation and accomplishments as immigrants are irrelevant. It is the thugs and troublemakers who must be accommodated. If the good immigrants find themselves living in dangerous neighborhoods and being victimized by the bad elements, that is just too bad.
Does that sound familiar to you American readers? How many years now have law-abiding blacks had to live in areas where they are afraid to go out at night because the police know that every time they get into a violent confrontation with a criminal in the inner city, their jobs and their very freedom are being put on the line? I saw it first-hand as a DEA agent. Most black residents in the inner city want those crack houses and heroin-shooting galleries shut down. Instead, we make them irrelevant as we find excuses for the flash mobs in Philadelphia and other places even as Philly mayor Michael Nutter has had the courage to speak to the rioters and tell them in no uncertain words what they are-bums.
http://www.americanrhetoric.com/speeches/michaelnuttermountcarmelbaptist.htm
How about other countries in Europe where assaults on Jews on the streets of Malmo, Amsterdam and other cities is met with indifference because nobody wants to upset the perpetrating minority responsible?
These are the lessons that we outside of Britain need to take away from these riots and from what is happening in other European countries.
Instead, these two goofy professors from over-rated Columbia University and NYU tell us that the lesson America needs to learn is that we must never turn off the welfare spigot, lest the unhappy dependents "justifiably" run amok.
From your introduction Gary, I was expecting to read some facile pseudo-Marxist liberal tripe, a brand we are both familiar with, and both reject, although for markedly different reasons.
ReplyDeleteInstead, I found a presentation that had many truths in it, although not all presented exactly as I would. Of note, they explicitly rejected the old notion that these riots are protests against the regime, or reflections of an angry working class rejection of capitalism.
Further, they speak well of the efforts of law abiding citizens to protect lives and property from looters and rioters. Isn't that something you've spoken well of also?
More important, they highlight than "government budget cuts" mean we will be doing without some services government has been providing. This may well, and usually does, include police protection.
People have had various views about police protection over the years. Sometimes, the police protect certain citizens, and prey on others. Sometimes, the police are so corrupt as to constitute a protection racket. Sometimes, e.g. certain wards of Chicago, police consider collecting pay offs from prostitutes and after-hours bars to be their main job, and arresting the occasional burglar a sideline.
But, most of us rely to some extent on the presence of an increasingly competent and professional police force to keep the lid on what might well be rampant armed robberty and home invasions. The fact that people are complaining about slow and inadequate police response, at a time when the government is cutting expenditures on, inter alia, police protection, is worth pondering.
Some things are worth paying taxes for. Preventing these riots without deficit financing might have been worth paying more taxes for.
You might argue, yes, the police budget should be increased, but there are OTHER budget lines that should be cut even MORE deeply. I've asked you many times to offer specifics. You have always declined to do so, spluttering some excuse for why it should be obvious.
Its not obvious to anyone. We ALL have certain programs we want preserved. The problem in reaching a consensus on which ones we will do without. Even Republicans have ways of filling in the blank in this sentence: "Of course we need to balance the budget, but we must not touch ____________." If we can't get a majority to agree on what to cut, the alternatives are paying sufficient taxes to cover the cost of what we refuse to give up, or deficit spending.
In short, you used a batch of rhetoric on the authors of this Op-Ed that might apply to half a dozen things you've read in the last ten years, but doesn't speak to what these authors wrote at all.
I don't think the main thesis was not to cut police. The thesis was not to cut social spending.
ReplyDeleteHere is an easy and what should be a non-controversial place to start is with waste and duplication.
ReplyDeletehttp://politics.blogs.foxnews.com/2011/02/28/gao-details-billions-federal-waste-report-obtained-fox
I don't know why Siarlys can't find this stuff himself without demanding that somebody else provide a source he is then sure to demean.
As to the substance of the problem, it turns out that unemployment benefits in England is for LIFE. Working is sort of lifestyle choice. You can live on the dole for life and expect the rest of the people to pay for it. If you don't get what you feel you are entitled, you can riot or just burn down stuff other people have.
As I once heard Malik Ali tell the UCI students, .... Oh the money is there! There is plenty of money. It is just a matter of who gets it... The fat cats on Wall Street or the
poor people (and students). In other words, it isn't really necessary to actually earn anything much less actually produce anything.
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Columbia University and NYU? Their grads, for the most part would be much more useful to society if they had gone to the Diesel Driving Academy. At least they would have jobs that are honorable and useful to society.
ReplyDeleteI pretty much think the same about all the Ivy and most Patriot League schools. Don't think NYU is in either but they probably should be.
Gary, perhaps you weren't READING the article. Maybe you just noted the background of the authors, jumped to the conclusion that you knew what "those kind of people" would say, and ran off half-cocked to post an ideological denunciation. They did talk about the value of certain social services to maintaining the peace. They also talked about the importance of police protection, and the fact that as with everything else in life, we get what we are willing to pay for.
ReplyDeleteMiggie, I don't at all mind checking out a link when you provide one, and the cost savings discussed in the Fox News article sound reasonable and sensible. However, a half a million here and 18 billion there does NOT add up to one trillion, let along four trillion. So unless Sen. Coburn flunked basic arithmetic, he is telling a bold faced lie when he indulges in that pathetic grandstanding about that report showing "why we're $14 trillion in debt."
That's the problem with the facile "waste and fraud" propaganda, which is merely the twin of the claim that "the money is there" for endless spending and entitlements. Neither adds up. Both are an end run about the hard truths that we have to make painful choices, either to raise taxes to pay for what we want, or give up things we want in order to lower taxes.
Cabbie, I often advise kids who have had it drummed into them that they must go to college, but have no clue what they are going to college FOR, to go to truck driving school. It pays good money, there is a high demand, its skilled work, and if they find some other interest later, they will have money saved up to go to college on.
But, I don't find the way you cast asparagus on whole categories of universities particularly helpful in sorting out whether the specific Op-Ed Gary is ranting about makes any sense or not. Even a Columbia graduate, or professor, can make sense on a good day.
Siarlys maintains his unbroken record of demanding references from others and then demeaning them all the while making unsupported statements of his own.
ReplyDeleteAs to the substance of the quibble, it took us years to get into this mess and it is obvious that it will take a long time to get out. Nevertheless, we have to start. We are digging ourselves into a deeper and deeper hole. It starts with eliminating the duplications in the government and should proceed to stop nanny state, negative incentives. On the other hand, Ali's nonsense economic world view poisons the minds of the students stupid enough to listen to him.
Getting career counseling from Siarlys is like getting it from Carrot Top.
If we are serious about the debt Miggie, we have to find a way to climb out faster than the rate we are digging ourselves in. At least we should get ourselves into a position to pay all the interest due each year, AND make some minimal progress at paying down the surplus. Otherwise we are only making matters worse. That will require additional tax revenue.
ReplyDeleteI take it from your off-hand reference to career counselling that you think high school graduates with no idea what they would do in college should spend thousands of dollars (and get Pell grants) to go to a university, rather than get a job they can rapidly qualify for, and make some good money while they think about it. It's people like Miggie that are driving this country deeper and deeper into debt.
Liberals never saw a tax they didn't love. The economic fact of the matter is that the government gets more tax revenue into its coffers when taxes are CUT. There is more business incentive, more people working, more taxes coming in. Raising taxes is stage one thinking. No liberal ever considers what comes next. Namely, tax avoidance, business shrinking, fewer jobs, more uncertainty ... all hostile to commerce.
ReplyDeleteLook up what happened on the recent sales tax holidays. People shopped until they dropped to the great benefit of retailers, suppliers, and everyone on the supply chain. NO sales tax for a day or so and business boomed.
People respond to incentives and penalties.
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I know I contributed more to the economy that Siarlys did in his welfare state world view.
ReplyDeleteHe would be last person in the world to accept career advice from.
While I try to avoid reading his posts, I am not always successful. Some of the nonsense he posts is so incredible and pure left wing dogma that it is hard not to refute.
Miggie never heard a cliche he wasn't addicted to repeating. Never mind that it has nothing to do with either who or what he is responding too. You're the most liberal person here Miggie -- you know, laissez faire, free markets, all the British crap.
ReplyDeleteSiarlys,
ReplyDeleteYou are misinformed, uneducated, and stupid on top of all that.
Free markets and laissez-faire is the OPPOSITE of liberal. It means getting the government OUT of our lives as much as possible... in other words, liberty!
http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/laissez-faire
Don't give me that "I was kidding" or "Can't you understand sarcasm" crap.
You just don't know what you are talking about and the convictions you have are flat wrong. Your opinions and observations are worse than worthless.
"You are misinformed, uneducated, and stupid on top of all that."
ReplyDeleteMiggie, if operated at the grade school level of maturity you consistently display, I would repeat those words with some classic rhyme like "I am rubber, you are glue..." and I'm sure we all learned the rest of it when we were small.
But I am feeling my 57 years, so I won't do that. I will merely note that you are terribly uneducated as to the history and meaning of the word "liberal."
For a start, look up "Liberal Republicans." They were the ones who wanted to stop worrying about the rights of the freed population in the South, and focus on free market capitalism.
I wanted to start with an example from America, but looking at England can be instructive. The Conservative Party, historically, was the party of the landed gentry, the military, and the party of law, order, tradition. The liberal party advocated, as you say, liberty, laissez-faire, getting the government out of our lives.
The labor party, as distinct from either one, wanted the military and the aristocracy out of our lives and government, and wanted the government to interfere with the liberty of the liberals to exploit the workers in their factories.
Read up on the history of the word "liberties," plural. It used to mean, the liberty of those privileged to possess liberties to lord it over those who didn't have any. Slave revolts in the U.S. were routinely denounced as "an attempt to overthrow our liberties."
Now, due to some fortuitous circumstances circa 1776, a much larger population claimed extensive liberties, and developed a constitutional process that EVERYONE could eventually lay claim to. That was a good thing. It changes the equation somewhat. But still, mass employers of labor continued to demand the "liberty" to impose on their employees "for any reason or no reason," and to pollute the water and the air without complaint from the neighbors.
It is not "liberal" to curb such abuses of power. It may be "left" to some degree, but it is not "liberal." If you want a classic liberal, in practice, look to Ronald Reagan. Just compare him to Gladstone.
Your problem Miggie is that you don't read any history, but you want to give pompous lectures about it based on the base prejudices in your fertile imagination.