Horrendous to see my home town torn apart: all best wishes and hopes for a peaceful dawn to everyone who lives there (and of course to those in other affected cities). It seems pretty impossible not to be close to some chaos: I don’t remember events kicking off so widely spread across the suburbs.
London’s Burning is a must read from the New Yorker (apart from the phrase “microcosmically speaking”). Interesting that they see the rioting as a result of a series of nudges and refer to the 1981 riots (which I did experience), as did a now-prescient David Lammy.
Inchoate rage against the machine or opportunist looting? As the New Yorker article says “where have the opportunists been for the last thirty years?”. The idea of a series of nudges reaching a tipping point goes some way to making sense of the “what the hell is this all about” question that I can’t currently answer.
The idea of socially-minded cleanup gangs seems to already be taking shape, and I hope that this under-reported response to the Vancouver riots works in and for London.
Peace all: our thoughts are with you in the UK from HK.
[Update: my thoughts are absolutely not with these unspeakables. WTF?]
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