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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   33889 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 29, 2024

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Sunderland, UK, is on fire.

It appears a tipping point has been reached; protests are seemingly erupting all over the UK right now in response to the stabbing of three young children. Ordinarily a sadly unremarkable happening, this incident was exacerbated by the authorities refusing to release any details about the attacker other than being "from Cardiff", which did not placate the mob, as media sources routinely use this kind of languages to elide criminals' real origins (saying things like "Mahmood Suleiman of Bristol", later turns out that he's a boat migrant from Albania currently being housed in Bristol), leading certain corners to pattern-match to previous instances of such attacks and conclude the killer was a boat migrant and the media and authorities were covering it up.

This narrative spread quickly in the wake of no other information being released, for which the excuse was that the killer was under-age and so no detail could be released. Internet detectives soon managed to piece together the identity regardless, that being Axel Muganwa Rudakubana, son of two Rwandan parents but nonetheless actually born in Cardiff.

Left-wing sides of the argument immediately went into crowing mode, seemingly elated that the killer was "British", to which the pithy right-wing response came that "a dog born in a stable is not a horse" and that this crime was still preventable if his parents had simply not been allowed to migrate.

Regardless, the protests were now in full swing. A vigil was held, and things got out of hand, with one man being arrested for bringing a knife and balaclava. The simmering tensions of the backdrop of mass migration seem to have come to a head, as a group gathered to damage an unrelated mosque and a police building. This is possibly a response to the boat migrant theory being spread like wildfire as the authorities refused to release any correct information, and possibly in part just a release valve for long-pent up tensions.

Government response was immediate condemnation of the protesters from all and sundry, pledges to set up specialised task forces to deal with "far right extremism" and deployment of riot police to quell the unrest. This only sparked further anger as people contrasted the response to the very recent Harehills riots in which a Roma community revolted over the removal of children from the house of negligent parents. Response on that occasion was the police in full retreat and the later total capitulation of the state in handing back the children in question. Others still remember now-PM Kier Starmer's response to the BLM riots of 2020, in which he knelt in supplication to the rioters and pledged fealty to their cause.

This has earned him the moniker of "Two-Tier Kier", with many calling out that a two tier justice system exists in the country; when minorities riot over facing justice, the state bends over backwards to appease them, but when native whites riot over the stabbing of children, the full force of the state comes out to crush them. As such, more protests have erupted across the country over this double standard, the most notable of which is Sunderland, where people attempted to torch a police station.

Further protests have been stated to be planned all week. PM Starmer has scrambled all police manpower available to suppress them, it seems, with the Home Office issuing a stern warning in the media that "we're watching you". The usual ancillary conversations about "Russian disinformation" being the cause are happening, and the Muslim Council of Great Britain has stated "law and order isn't enough to deal with Islamophobic hate" in response to the mosque attack.

This has earned him the moniker of "Two-Tier Kier", with many calling out that a two tier justice system exists in the country; when minorities riot over facing justice, the state bends over backwards to appease them, but when native whites riot over the stabbing of children, the full force of the state comes out to crush them.

I'm not familiar enough with the state of it all to opine, but if someone were to steelman the opposite position -- that there is no two-tier policing and the UK authorities and police treat everyone fairly -- what would it be?

Does it require a context wherein a certain response to BLM type or Indo-Paki protests are justified to receive tacit support, but things like anti-vax/anti-lockdown/anti-mask protests do not? Rotherham grooming gangs is sufficiently dated to where a steelman may not necessarily need to address it, but I wouldn't be surprised if there are more recent examples that a Brits would point to. What is the evidence that UK authorities do not treat the benefactors and subjects of the migrant friendly, multiculturalist policies more kindly than they do their own native citizens? Or would the argument be that they are justified in doing so to avoid, well, I would have thought they'd say they do so to avoid conflict like this.

Looking it up 3/4 of migrants that they detain file some legal dispute and the UK deports around 5,000 foreign criminals a year.

Say what you will about the Bri'ish Isles, but UK government reports seem so much higher quality than stuff America puts out. That second link is nicely packed with information. Especially the part where they explain EU human rights commissions fudge up "deport first, appeal later" policy where they kicked people out before hearing out their disputes. Just what exactly did Brexit do for the UK in this regard? Anything? As an aside, opening up your nice Western legal system to the world continues to appear untenable. Where can I invest in human rights law firms?

In 2023, just under 4,000 foreign offenders were removed from the UK. This was the highest number in four years, but removals remain lower than pre- pandemic levels. From 2010 to 2019, removals averaged 5,500 per year. [39]

There were 10,400 foreign national offenders in prisons in England and Wales as of 31 March 2024, accounting for 12% of all prisoners.

Whether those numbers are a lot or a little does little to quell concerns about importing tragedy. Anyone knowledgeable enough and feeling steel manny enough to explain why this is just a common nativist rage, the UK government deals with these issues handedly, or alternative angles? From this side of the ocean it does seem like this is a long time coming.

EDIT: Thinking about it, if they're deporting about half the number of "foreign offenders" that they keep in jail, that seems like a significant amount. Although this doesn't engage with the fact that foreign criminals become classified as native ones in a quick 15 years, stuff like the criminality of 2nd generation immigrant citizens, and so on.

The steelman to there being no two-tier policing is that the difference in police response to different demographics is motivated not by racism, but instead by a desire to prevent escalation to violence. The police know that if they break up a BLM riot, the next day half of London will be aflame, so they don't touch it. But milquetoast anti-lockdown protesters, who are maybe protesting for the first time in their life? There's no risk to baton charging them, so they get baton charged. Repeat for Hamas vs Israeli marches. If they start arresting tens of thousands of Islamists for terrorism offences, as the letter of the law would demand, they'd face retaliatory terror attacks. Peaceful Jewish counter-protesters might similarly provoke the violent Islamists, however, and need to be stopped.

This steelman is the mainstream response to arguments of two-tier policing (when not simply ignored). The police are biased because they're pragmatic, rather than because they are racist or serving as the paramilitary wing of the Labour party.

It has two problems

  1. It means that those who dislike being on the receiving end of two-tier policing are instructed to be more violent if they want it to stop
  2. As is being demonstrated now, being more violent doesn't actually get it to stop, because the argument is wrong.

Yeah, my gut says we're failing the Turing test. That reads too closely to online doomer well-of-course-the-whites-won't-revolt rage thinking. A person that thinks that nativist uprisings in this context are completely unjustified isn't going to defend their position with a through-and-through justification of the lopsided enforcement. Maybe they do, but if they're a dedicated pragmatist, then surely they can see the inherently impractical nature in failing to sufficiently placate the majority native population? All you have to do is demonstrate that the majority is sufficiently cared for and protected from [bad people]. It doesn't take much to Set Examples for said population. If there were enough examples to support a policy choice they'd be easy to point to?

It may be the case that the authorities deliberately decided it was safer to align against the majority to some extent, but I'm struggling to think of alternatives explanations that aren't ideological. If it's been a misjudgment of pragmatic policy (less strife and chance of ethnic misgivings if we stack the deck this way) that'd be one thing, but it's ended up so predictably wrong I don't know how you can really say it was a practical policy choice at all. UK decided to do this in 2005 when all was nice enough and inertia carried it through 20 years I guess?

You are right, but you asked for the Steelman argument. That isn't the political turing test argument for it, which is that two-tier policing in any form doesn't exist.

How morbidly fascinating that riots erupted in Ireland and the UK in the span of less than a year over exactly the same catalyst: a man of African descent stabbing one or more young native girls.

A North African Muslim (the Algerian immigrant in Ireland) and a Sub-Saharan Christian (the son of Rwandan immigrants in Wales) are profoundly not the same catalyst - a large part of the anti-immigrant sentiment in Western Europe (including the UK) is in effect single-issue anti-Islamic.

The rioting in the UK started because the rioters wrongly believed that the killer was Muslim and the crime was part of the unfortunately longstanding pattern of sexually motivated crimes against white girls by (mostly) Mirpuri Pakistanis. As with all riots, they spread because it looked like the police were off the ball and there were trainers to be looted.

I see where you're coming from, but I get the impression a lot of British anti-immigrant sentiment isn't strictly focused on Muslims e.g. a major motivating factor behind Brexit was to decrease the rate of immigration from Romania, or immigrants from Romani backgrounds, both of whom are primarily at least nominally Christian. Prior to Brexit, such people generally didn't require a visa or need to seek asylum.

I'd agree in one sense, but BAME is a grouping for a reason. Recent African immigrants might not all be Islamic, but it's still confusing what real utility they're offering when most of the UK's indigenous stock have their own grievances with the status quo.

A similar response from the media too, the attacker was described as an 'Irishman' because he had migrated from Algeria and attained citizenship. This fact itself was quickly overshadowed by the riots but I can see why it made people angry in the context of Irish men being told to stop being so misogynistic after the killing of Aisling Murphy by a migrant and Irish men being told they need to fix their homophobia problem after 2 gay men were beheaded by an Islamic migrant.

Happens in Germany, too, but we don't riot.

Whether it's a good tactic remains to be seen (I doubt this is very organised but it's going to have consequences nonetheless), Dubliners rioting alongside Protestant Loyalists in Belfast the past few days has given the left ammo to turn the accusation of 'traitor' back on to the anti-migrant nationalists.

Might be something you lot could consider looking into.

They are, in effect, an occupied country though.

We might, but we know better than to contradict our betters.

Eh, I'm not sure that's it. I think it's less that we refuse to contradict them, as that they've come to be in charge properly and so we don't attempt to hinder them. You may gripe about your orders but you still carry them out.

True enough. There is plenty of low-level bitching and "I sure know better than those ivory tower politicians", but nothing that would have any practical effect.

At risk of catching flak for being snarky/pithy, are your 'betters' in this case the authorities who Know Better, or the migrants who can Do No Wrong?

Depends slightly on whom you ask. There certainly are enough leftists who will tell you to defer to the greater wisdom of the migrants, who after all do not share in our German sins. But generally very much the authorities.

Almost certainly The Experts in Authority who Know Better- Southkraut has talked about this before, how the Germans never dispute the king's ministers even if they're elected.

It’s interesting in that in the end it had little or nothing to do with Islamism, shariah, terrorism or deliberate political or ideological action of any kind on the part of the migrants. Instead, it was seemingly primarily the consequence of dramatically higher rates of psychosis, schizophrenia and other severe mental illness in certain parts of the world.

It is interesting to me that this murder, which does not appear to have been an Islamist attack, and not Rotherham or Manchester or whatever else, set off this wave of riots. There is footage online of Muslims and black people being beaten by mobs, pulled out of cars and busses, that kind of thing. Perhaps I had underestimated the low level anger in some of these communities, but it also begs the question of why their response to the grooming gangs was so very different.

There's much more footage of armed blacks and muslims marching around city centres and attacking whites; but predictably none of this footage has made it to the mainstream media or the headlines.

Link it? To be fair much of the press I’ve seen has been very vague about what is actually happening.

Even BAP and friends’ twitter seems to show some groups of Muslim men walking around with sticks / possibly bladed weapons (hardly something to condone but I suppose a relatively likely escalation) and one brawl by a bus stop between some south asians and some whites where the ‘victims’ appear hard to distinguish.

Andy Ngo has been posting videos of the 'Muslim Patrol': https://x.com/MrAndyNgo/status/1820207241095442708

It's the last straw that breaks the camel's back.

Yeah, people immediately assumed when details weren't forthcoming that it was Muslims and that this fact would be slow-rolled again by the media class.

The headline pointing out that he was a choirboy was more about absolving the Muslim community than the criminal imo but it came too late.

Response on that occasion was the police in full retreat and the later total capitulation of the state in handing back the children in question. Others still remember now-PM Kier Starmer's response to the BLM riots of 2020, in which he knelt in supplication to the rioters and pledged fealty to their cause.

This has earned him the moniker of "Two-Tier Kier", with many calling out that a two tier justice system exists in the country; when minorities riot over facing justice, the state bends over backwards to appease them, but when native whites riot over the stabbing of children, the full force of the state comes out to crush them.

Further context on this is that criticism of Two-Tier policing began with the difference in how anti-Lockdown protesters were treated by the police compared to BLM protesters in 2020. To summarise, the handful of arrests at BLM protests were for sporadic violence. Other left-wing omnicause protests went unchallenged. Meanwhile, the smaller and less violent anti-Lockdown protests faced blanket arrests for violating lockdowns, which de jure criminalized all protest but de facto criminalized only anti-Lockdown protests.

There have been a number of smaller incidents over the next few years which further enflamed this criticism. The light-touch treatment of JSO, XR, and other environmentalist protesters who sought to commit vandalism, often getting justified in the mainstream on the basis that "climate emergency" justifies unrestrained criminality, was compared to how government media and politicians treated anti-ULEZ protesters. Another was buffer zones around abortion centres outlawing forms of protest as mild as silently praying.

Then then escalated in 2023, where the Israel-Gaza conflict meant that there were constant protests that, in theory, violated the UK's extremely broad anti-terrorism laws, but were met with milquetoast police response. When a counter-protest to these was organised in November 2023, and met by a violent police response, the charge of two-tier policing escalated to the point where a minister was sacked for criticising the police over it. Further incidents, like police going after a Jewish man for being "Visibly Jewish" near protesters, only made it worse.

Edit: And this all takes place in a context that the police have increasingly failed to police crime in general..

The "moderate" explanation for why these events keep happening is that the police are trying to placate a violent mob over permitting peaceful protesters because their goal is to keep the peace, and keeping the peace takes precedent over fairness even when it means arresting innocent bystanders instead of violent mobs. The lesson some people will take from this is that the most violent group wins. Therefore, they should become more violent so that they become the mob that the police have to placate instead. Unfortunately, this lesson is wrong, because the actual explanation for these events is that being left-wing puts you above the law and being right-wing puts you beneath it.

Today, the counter-protesters and the police will argue that they are standing against racism. They are wrong. For the last 9 months, they have either participated in, or been complicit in, their own forms of racism. Forms that the current British government finds more acceptable to it's tastes

I mean, the riots between Tory-voting Hindus and labour-voting Muslims went mostly unpoliced, didn’t they?

The goal is pulling immigrants into Britain to prop up the economy without doing things that feel bad. You can’t do that when the natives are driving them out. It doesn’t have a lot to do with skin colour or political beliefs- no doubt if these were anti-shithole-parts-of-EU-migration riots, there would be the same response.

The meta for avoiding accountability is 'disparate impact', and the Conservatives has a surplus of Nigerians and Hindus who have decided that playing into the game is a viable strategy. I love the fact that the Tory leadership election is a coterie of brown women leading the pack, and how Labour tried to emphasize the diversity of their leadership lineup with Reeves as the first woman to hold the Chancellor of the Exchequer, when the Tories literally put a hindu man with all great offices held by 'minorities'.

Ultimately though the great gutting of the UK police (and globally most police forces dealing with disparately impactful criminal minorities) and the consequent 2-tier policing evidently visible is due to the Macpherson report and some updated review that hamstrung police forces. That the police likely were not actually hamstrung but were marginally optimized to underpolice instead of overpolice does not change the fact that the macpherson report acts as a useful fallback to let lazy cops off the hook for failing to investigate. No charity is extended to white wrongthinkers, but 'I didn't want to seem racist' is a good enough excuse to let a bomber blow up a concert full of girls or let a teen boy into a childrens school to slaughter kids.

I feel this all begs the question of the point of recent unskilled migrants. The majority of advanced Western economies are struggling to generate sufficient employment for their native population, unskilled labor is increasingly dead (and what remains is 'unskilled' service economy work which requires cultural awareness and language skills as opposed to the manufacturing of yesteryear) and thus all that seems to happen is a strange choice between either entrenched unemployment or pouring large amounts of resources into attempting to create economic productivity out of the unskilled.

I don't know about other places, but in the US low-skilled labor is very much alive. Obviously-recent immigrants form a large share of restaurant kitchen workers, landscaping workers, agricultural workers, and delivery drivers.

The UK, like the US, has essentially full employment, in that everyone who wants a job can get one. There is still huge amounts of unskilled labour to be done due to a few things:

  1. A huge number of people who could work, don't. This goes beyond the normal numbers of underclass people who are incapable or unable to hold down a job. The UK lags behind the rest of the developed world here. It seems to be a case of our easy to access welfare system coinciding with COVID idleness and people moving onto disability benefits due to 'mental health issues' (what proportion of these are malingerers are left as an question for the reader).

  2. The previous Conservative government seemed to believe the dire warnings from business and threw open the borders to all comers to avoid labour shortages post-Brexit. It turned out that most of those being imported were inactive (either students or dependents) and lacked the high labour participation rate that previous EU immigrants showed. They later tightened up the rules a bit. So the labour market's needs weren't met by these immigrants.

  3. Business wanting to keep down wages. This is most obvious in the care sector. The previous government explicitly allowed wages for work visas to be 20% lower than the standard in the UK, although they did abandon this after Labour flanked them on it.

  4. Low productivity growth. UK business is addicted to cheap labour from abroad, obligingly provided by every government since Tony Blair. This means they don't invest in productivity enhancements, which means that the only way governments can generate more tax revenue and GDP growth is through yet more immigration.

  5. Left-wing pro-immigration attitudes. In my view, these are best described as anti-anti-immigration attitudes. Left wingers don't make an explicit case for importing deliveroo drivers from Pakistan, but they (and their base) are strongly opposed to any restrictions on immigration, which smell of nativism to them.

The current government is saying that they expect immigration to reduce to 'reasonable numbers' (a net figure of 200,000 per year, still massive of course). It's unclear what Kier Starmer actually believes on immigration at the moment. His authoritarian streak has shown itself in his reaction to the recent anti-immigration riots, but whether he will follow this up with more immigration (to spite the nasty racists) or less immigration (to avoid future riots) is unclear.

Left wingers don't make an explicit case for importing deliveroo drivers from Pakistan

They don't usually make a public case for doing it but they do defend it after it's done. Recall 'diversity is our greatest strength' and the other multiculturalism slogans. This stuff is taught in schools, it was taught to me in Australia. In the old days, everyone was white and British and that was bad. Now taxi drivers and lawyers can be Chinese or African or whatever and implicitly that's good. They didn't explicitly say bad and good but the meaning was impossible to miss.

In the UK specifically there was a letter about how the New Labour immigration program had one of its causes being to rub the Right's nose in diversity, that it was social policy as well as an economic operation: https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1249797/Labour-threw-open-doors-mass-migration-secret-plot-make-multicultural-UK.html

Neather was being a smug prick when he wanted to prove to the evil gammons of Norf FC that the UK would not be compromised by having poles and lithuanians come in to the UK. I believe Blair was however caught off guard when he thought France and Germany would also allow poles/lithuanians to go to their countries, when instead the UK was the one to get the brunt of eastern european migration.

The 'diversity is our strength' phrase really started taking off post-Obama, and was doubled down in the wake of the backlash towards mass MENA immigration. The problem of this message is that it automatically raises up literally everyone except the majority race, and the majority starts to notice. This can keep going so long as the pie is not rugged from under the majority, and the sheer volume of bad-faith MENA actors exploiting white british male achievements (as opposed to poles and lithuanians and indians and nigerians who didn't cause as much trouble) has come to a head. Perhaps the suspicion that Labour will do nothing to help the natives out, as opposed to the Tories who at least pretended to give a shit, has also lead to the back finally being broken.

The point is to kill and dispossess whites. The plan is to import the browns, get them to vote, and turn the country into minority white. Then, when over half the population is foreigners, they will vote to dispossess the whites and seize their property.

It's the same plan everywhere.

Naked culture warring with inflammatory assertions backed by your feels.

You've been warned repeatedly about this, and you've made it clear that this what you're here for. Your last ban came with a note to permaban you next time, but that was ten months ago and you've earned an AAQC since then (in which you showed you are capable of dialing down the heat and engaging in good faith), which suggests you've made some effort to improve your behavior. So I'm just giving you another two-week ban which will hopefully serve as another course-correction.

left wing bias mod last two bans showing clear left wing bias

  • -30

I kind of feel like his comment is such that it could be copy and pasted and dropped anywhere, and that makes it highly suspect. The original comment was talking about economic trends that could be argued to be recent and about unskilled labor more broadly, and how it relates to perhaps a reduced need for migrants. The response was a condensed polemic making approximately zero attempt to engage with the conversation. Consider for a moment the use of the word "they" which is in itself a blaring warning light too. Who the hell is "they" and why on earth would they benefit from such a plan if it even existed? Would foreigners even vote as a bloc? For that matter how do we know this is anything knowing rather than the result of larger macro forces? The comment again does not even begin to gesture at these points. It's, simply put, consummately "waging" the culture war rather than discussing it, which is at least in my eyes the 'red line' of the law here. It's just reddit behavior from a different ideology and so it sort of feels like a deserved ban in that respect, yeah?

Several people have rolled this out lately, yet cannot articulate the alleged bias. Someone who clearly violates the rules but says things you agree with does not mean they are being modded for reasons of political bias. Both the people I banned had very long and bad track records (and had earned warnings and bans from multiple mods).

What exactly do you hope to gain with this ankle-biting? I will feel bad that you don't like my modding and it will spoil my evening? I will be convinced by your fact-free expressions of indignation that I should stop banning people if their political views align with yours?

even if you ding me when I get too out of line I appreciate your efforts Amadan.

@remzem can correct me if I'm wrong but I think there was an implied "/s".

Very much doubt it. This isn't our first go-round with him.

What left wing posters are there even to ban such that it could possibly go the other way? Outlaw and Stingray?

The point is to try to prop up pension obligations without making the compromises to women's empowerment necessary to goose the fertility rate/tame inflation at the same time. If you don't acknowledge HBD or the structural problems with western economies it makes sense, and these people don't acknowledge those things.

prop up pension obligations

I see this a lot. And I suppose it could be conditionally true. But considering a French banlieue of poor unemployed unintegrated immigrants or their unintegrated unemployed children: are these people propping up pensions?

Or as American, considering illegal Mexicans working for day wages. If they are paid under the table, in what sense are they propping up social security?

I get that productive employed taxpaying H1Bs are a net tax benefit. But other examples of mass immigration are not clearly net tax benefit to me.

A lot of illegal immigrants pay payroll taxes in America; roofers and meatpackers and such are usually on the payroll through fraud. Daylaborers aren't, but most illegal immigrants have more stable employment scenarios, often through contractors who commit identity fraud for them. They wouldn't be net taxpayers if they were able to access benefits from the government but they aren't, and contractors are more concerned with avoiding the wrath of the IRS than ICE.

In any case, we as a society do need some people to do low-productivity hard work for low pay on an ad-hoc basis, and local roustabouts no longer have their once upon a time single redeeming virtue(being willing to do that), so daylaborers from Latin America enable some real economic activity which eventually gets taxed that otherwise wouldn't get done.

A lot of the American elite's attitude towards immigration is driven by the assumption of these people being largely Mexican construction workers who mostly intend to retire in their home country due to cost difference and are employed by contractors who genuinely fear the IRS; I know less about France and Britain, but in America this was true up until relatively recently.

Western states want to maintain a high ratio of working-age population to retirees and that definitely will help to achieve certain goals. Even if the immigrants are destined for low-wage roles, that means that hiring care workers won't be as expensive (higher labor supply equals lower wages) and current levels of care can be maintained. Another common reason was to address the ostensible post covid labor shortages that business interests in many Western countries were arguing for. And yet a third is that many of these countries feel it's in their strategic interests to make their populations as large as possible, which I've seen French, Canadian, and American establishments explicitly endorse. In reality, I think the first two explanations are serving a few powerful interest groups at the expense of general welfare and future prosperity, and that the third explanation is misled as it's not overall population that matters but high value HBD, but this isn't taken into account by the establishment probably because it serves other purposes to deny. There's also a dark fourth reason, which is that elite interests converge on diverse populations as they are easy to divide and conquer and thus dominate. We do live in an era of anti-competitive corporate consolidation, top-bracket tax cuts, corporate welfare, and persistent privatization of inappropriate industries despite gross failures, whilst the broader populace bickers primarily over matters of racial prestige, so if the elites indeed orchestrated this they've done a good job...

Governments should be terrified of riots. Unless you’re capable of sending in the troops and shooting to kill (like China or North Korea) no government has the ability to stop a riot when it gets large enough. 100 police cannot stop 1,000 rioters, much less 10,000. I believe that many in government on the left treated left wing protests with kid gloves partly out of knowledge of how difficult it is to control riots, but mostly from ideological commitments that favored the rioters cause. Now those same officials think they can crack down on right wing rioters successfully, and they will find they’re sorely mistaken. The best way to stop rioters is to stop the riot from beginning in the first place: if you let it get this far, with this much built up resentment, and having shattered the cultural value that rioting is wrong (which might have otherwise kept normies from jointing in), there may be no way to put the genii back in the bottle. At this point there may be nothing they can do but hunker down and try to mitigate the damage until the riots burn themselves out.

Unless you’re capable of sending in the troops and shooting to kill (like China or North Korea) no government has the ability to stop a riot when it gets large enough. 100 police cannot stop 1,000 rioters

nonsense

tear gas, water cannons, rubber bullets exists

you can arrest people

Absolutely. If this was true France would have a revolution every second month. It’s really not that difficult to stop rioting and modern states got scary good at it.

The fact that riots can be easily contained is proof by negative: rioting farmers and strikers are easily corralled and contained, so why are pro-palestine and blm protests allowed to run unchecked.

There will ultimately be a very severe reckoning about visible disparities in police actions within western countries: Jan 6th and Charlottesville rioters are ground to the dirt, but BLM and Hamas protests goes unimpeded. The left wing media ecosystem can pretend it didn't happen and keep its adherents in the Guardian-MSNBC-Vox-Slate-Newrepublic bubble of liberal comfort, but the images get circulated out regardless. This disparity will be taken as proof of institutional capture by traitors who embolden disruptive actors, and riots will give way to rebellion in due time.

Governments should be terrified of riots. Unless you’re capable of sending in the troops and shooting to kill (like China or North Korea) no government has the ability to stop a riot when it gets large enough.

Most governments are capable of sending in the troops and shooting to kill if it becomes necessary. And they have a whole arsenal of lesser options. That includes the US and the UK. The only time it's not possible is when the troops might not be reliable (e.g. Venezuela). They can indeed pretend to be powerless in the face of riots for things they like, and crush riots for things they don't like, January 6 style.

The British police were able and willing to contain the 2011 London riots within 72 hours - for those positing political motivations, that was despite the 2011 riots over-representing blacks and nominally being against racist policing (the police had shot a black gangbanger who was wanted for illegal gun possession and who had, but did not fire, a gun when he was shot).

The anti-immigrant riots we are seeing now have been the first thing since 2011 with close to that level of destruction. So unless we see a dramatically harsher response (which is unlikely - the sentences handed down in 2011 were notoriously harsh, as they should be) I don't think this is a case of obvious two-tier policing. Both the UK BLM protests and the recent Palestinian protests were an order of magnitude less violent than 2011 or the last few days.

Right-wing media claimed that the Southend machete fight was an example of minorities being allowed to run riot by the police, but in fact the participants were arrested and at least one has been charged with attempted murder.

I'm not actually sure the British army would be willing to use live ammunition against protestors that aren't currently storming Buckingham palace, and I definitely don't think the US army would- they waited until the J6 protestors went home before arresting them, after all.

The national guard is regularly deployed during large riots. The marine were deployed during the LA riots. Though that was prior to the Navy and Marine Corp being added to Posse Comitatus in 2021.

The British army has 30+ years of experience acting as a supplementary police force from their time in the Troubles in Northern Ireland, not to mention the Northern Irish police who still deal with at least one riot a year (the last one was yesterday iirc).

If the rioting in England gets serious they've got plenty of institutional experience and lots of active Northern Irish policemen to call upon. They're more equipped than most to employ the military against rioters without jumping straight into shooting people.

Except Ashli Babbitt. They shot her. If they'd needed to shoot more, they'd have shot more.

Should be, perhaps, but what I suspect will happen is the full hammer of the state will be brought down upon these protests while they are small, pour encourager les autres. This is possible pretty much only because white Brits are an acceptable target for state violence in a way that no other group would be; the same people who were bemoaning the kicking of a muslim suspect (who later turned out to be the aggressor once video was released by police, another case of withholding relevant information making things worse) in the head at MAN last week are practically begging the police to bring out the shotguns this week. The people bemoaning 5-year sentences for JSO disrupting a national motorway will be calling for life sentences for these folks.

Two-Tier Kier's tactics only work because there's a large enough contingent of -- and I don't use this word lightly -- traitorous whites who will sell out their own race for a headpat from a minority, to feel like "one of the good ones".

The contingent isn't large, except for where it matters: in the civil service and universities. Look at Young Labour to see the threat that Starmer is facing: the man is basically a reformed socialist and he managed to annihilate Momentum and Corbyn to FINALLY kick out years of dysfunctional Tory government, and Starmer STILL has to keep in mind a militant left that wants to open the borders entirely and drown out the UK in a sea of loyal muslim socialists.

This is almost entirely* the product of the past 5-10 years of the handling by the government/media alliance of every altercation between groups perceived to be white and groups perceived to be non-white or oppressed, most notably the Manchester Arena bombing where the government was more afraid of blowback against protected communites and threats to the status quo than they were about the fact that 23 people had just been murdered by a suicide bomber.

It doesn't actually matter that the suspect doesn't yet conform to the theist boat person stereotype. What matters is that enough people do not see this person as part of their ingroup and resent the fact this person has been brought into their country either to inflate the GDP graph or serve some impossible kumbayist phantasm of human unity. It is endlessly amusing to me that many left of centre commentators and politicans are citing the return of the EDL as the cause of this. The EDL is dead and has been for about a decade at this point. To me, this unrest is more remeniscient of the protests in Ireland around migrant housing that flare up whenever one of the occupants commits a crime.

*The remaining product is the fact it was 28-30 degrees here for most of this week and quite warm in the past few weeks, when the country only really functions at around 5-20 degrees and beyond that things start to break down.

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