Jump to content

London Rioters: 'showing The Rich We Do What We Want'


waerth

Recommended Posts

By coincidence this week I've started reading Chomsky and Herman's Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media which surprisingly confirms a lot of what I have always thought anyway. B)

 

Chomsky is just as predictable/cliched as the fellas on the right (Limbaugh, O'Reilly, etc. - though a hell of a lot more fancy). I went to go see him at Berkeley when I came home from the military. Was reading him and Howard Zinn at the time and I respected him (in some ways still do). Anyway, he was giving his anti-government anti-Western anti-Corporate spiel and talking about military oppression, and I remember there was a Vietnam Vet there who asked him if any military action ever was OK. He said no. Everything had to be solved through non-violence. So the Vet asked him about the resistance to Nazi aggression in WWII, and Chomsky just went off on how innocents were killed and violence was never the answer. And all these PhDs from Berkeley were clapping in unison and there was this one soft spoken Vet telling him it wasn't that easy. And they started booing him.

 

And all I was thinking was: fucking idiots.

 

Chomsky is smart but he's one track and as dogmatic as you can get.

 

And wrong.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

  • Replies 46
  • Created
  • Last Reply

Besides the voice of US rightwing crazies like Ann Coulter - who are usually a part of the problem, not of the solution - there are voices of reason AND experience:

 

US 'supercop' Bill Bratton says riot arrests not only answer

 

Communities cannot "arrest their way out" of gang crime, the prime minister's new crime adviser, US "supercop" Bill Bratton, has warned.

 

The former New York police chief meets David Cameron next month to discuss violence in English cities and says the issue is for society as a whole.

Mr Bratton gained a reputation for introducing bold measures to reduce crime over two decades, particularly in LA after riots in 1992.

 

He told US broadcaster ABC: "You can't arrest your way out of the problem." Arrest is certainly appropriate for the most violent, the incorrigible, but so much of it can be addressed in other ways and it's not just a police issue, it is in fact a societal issue.

 

"Accepting that the necessary changes would not be easy, he went on: "Part of what the government is going to do is to take a look at what worked and what didn't work during the course of the last week."

 

BBC News

 

PS: More info on Bratton: In Los Angeles, a Police Force Transformed

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Archived

This topic is now archived and is closed to further replies.


×
×
  • Create New...