Tag Archives: Riot

News

In California, students protest the results of their own liberal voting

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Victor Davis Hanson writes about it National Review.

Excerpt:

Here in California, students just marched on Sacramento in outrage that state-subsidized tuition at the UC and CSU campuses keeps climbing. It is true that per-unit tuition costs are rising, despite even greater exploitation of poorly paid part-time teachers and graduate-student TAs. But the protests are sort of surreal. The California legislature is overwhelmingly Democratic. The governor is a Democrat. The faculties and administrative classes are largely Democratic. Who then, in the students’ minds, have established these supposedly unfair budget priorities?

Sales, income, and gas taxes are still among the highest in the nation (and are proposed to rise even higher) — prompting one of the largest out-of-state exoduses of upper-income brackets in the nation. The state budget is pretty much entirely committed to K–12 education (whose state-by-state comparative test scores in math and science hover between 45th and 49th in the nation), prisons, social services, and public-employee salaries and pensions. Whom, then, can the students be angry at?

Are students angry at public-union salaries and pensions that are among the highest in the nation? Do they think the many highly compensated retired Highway patrol officers have shorted students at UC Davis? Are they mad at the 50,000 illegal aliens in the California prison system that might have siphoned off scholarship funds from CSU Monterey Bay? Or is the rub the influx of hundreds of thousands of children of illegal aliens who require all sorts of language remediation and extra instruction in the public schools, and so might in theory divert library funds from UC Santa Cruz?

Perhaps the students don’t want billions to be committed to high-speed rail that might rob Berkeley of needed funding, or environmental efforts to introduce salmon into the San Joaquin River, in which the $70 million spent so far in studies and surveys might have come from nearby CSU Fresno? Are they mad at state social services, whose medical expenses have skyrocketed to address the health-care needs of millions of illegal aliens, and thus in theory could curb the choice of classes at CSU Stanislaus? Are they angry that some $10–15 billion a year probably leaves the state as remittances to Mexico?

If one cannot blame the wealthy for “not paying their fair share” (the top 1 percent of Californians now pay about 37 percent of all income-tax revenue — and their numbers have decreased by one-third in recent years, as the state has come to rely on the income tax for half its revenue), or Republican majorities in government, who, then, is left to blame?

Not only are their tuition costs going UP but their likely salary is going DOWN.

Students majoring in booze and hook-up sex
How's that hopey-changey stuff workin' for ya?

I got that image from a post at the American Enterprise Institute.

Excerpt:

  • Only 35 percent of students starting a four-year degree program will graduate within four years, and less than 60 percent will graduate within six years.
  • The U.S. college dropout rate is about 40 percent, the highest college dropout rate in the industrialized world.
  • Over the past 25 years, the total number of students in college has increased by about 50 percent. But the number of students graduating with degrees in STEM subjects has remained more or less constant.
  • In 2009, the United States graduated 37,994 students with bachelor’s degrees in computer and information science. That’s not bad, but we graduated more students with computer-science degrees 25 years ago!
  • Few disciplines have changed as much in recent years as microbiology, but in 2009 we graduated just 2,480 students with bachelor’s degrees in microbiology—about the same number as 25 years ago. Who will solve the problem of antibiotic resistance?
  • If students aren’t studying science, technology, engineering, and math, what are they studying?
  • In 2009, the United States graduated 89,140 students in the visual and performing arts, more than in computer science, math, and chemical engineering combined and more than double the number of visual-and-performing-arts graduates in 1985.
  • Moreover, more than half of all humanities graduates end up in jobs that don’t require college degrees, and those graduates don’t get a big income boost from having gone to college.

I think this is interesting. What exactly are these students paying for?

If there is one thing I learned from my love of Shakespeare, it’s that it is tragic to be the cause of your own downfall because of your own tragic flaw. Right now, there are a bunch of young people who have been totally brainwashed by the unionized public school teachers and professors to have views on economics that are completely opposite to what works in the real world. They keep voting for bigger and bigger government, which creates more and more debt in order to provide their parents with bigger and bigger benefits. They have lots of self-esteem, but very few marketable skills. Eventually, the bill for all the government spending on “helping the poor”, (e.g. – food stamps for millionaires and bailouts for bankrupt green energy firms), comes due, and it’s the students who will be paying the bill. I wonder if they will look as favorably on socialism and global warming alarmism then?

UPDATE: I noticed that in Quebec, the most liberal province in Canada, students are doing the same thing.

Videos

Conservative Michael Gove defeats Labour’s Harriet Harman in debate

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From Jonah Goldberg at National Review.

It’s a knock-out! She tries to defend the rioters as victims, and justifies their rioting.

Here is my previous post on Harriet Harman and the riots. She is opposed to marriage, fathers, shared-parenting and law and order. She just doesn’t like men parenting their own children. She wants to treat everyone as victims, and coddle them when they act irresponsibly. She favors subsidizing women who have children out of wedlock with taxpayer money.

And here’s another article from Life Site News about the riots.

Excerpt:

In fact, all of these are valid observations, but some factors are more fundamental than others. Social order in some communities – and unfortunately more often in the most vulnerable communities – is breaking down. And it is being driven by an unprecedented breakdown of the family, which in turn is causing a vicious cycle of poverty, lack of education, lawlessness and further erosion of the basic values people need to keep society in order.

It is difficult to say this without being accused of targeting single mothers or attacking absent fathers. I know many single mothers who are doing an amazing job, in difficult circumstances, and who have raised the best of kids. And there certainly are other pressing issues which need to be tackled, such as the fact that there are huge inequalities of income and opportunity in British society.

But some facts are so startling, and some effects so obvious, that even the most liberal newspaper of the British press, the Guardian, is now acknowledging that lack of family structure is creating a huge problem. On Wednesday, the paper interviewed a youth worker from Tottenham who has spent 30 years working with disadvantaged communities. He said that parental authority had now been eroded to the point where the parents of rioting children would be afraid to discipline them.

His views were echoed by the local MP David Lammy who commented, “There is none of the basic starting presumption of two adults who want to start a family, raise children together, love them, nourish them and lead them to full independence. The parents are not married and the child has come, frankly, out of casual sex; the father is not present, and is not expected to be. There are not the networks of extended families to make up for it. We are seeing huge consequences of the lack of male role models in young men’s lives.”

There are 3.5 million children from broken homes in Britain. Their growing numbers, and the effect on of family breakdown on children, caused a leading family law court judge, Sir Paul Coleridge, to recently describe the scale of the problem as “social anarchy” and to urge the government to work to promote marriage.

The decline of marriage has left a significant proportion of children with a confused understanding of stability and of boundaries. And the lack of a male role model means that young men in particular seek out the toughest in the gang for an authority figure rather than their father. That means just one bad apple can influence a whole community of young teens.

I was recently talking with someone online who was a fiscal conservative, but a social liberal. I think that view is mistaken. It turns out that government will expand to deal with the problems caused by people being irresponsible and reckless in their private lives. That will have an impact on tax rates and the free market, but it will also impact the very liberty that the social liberals want to protect. The more government grows to restrain these riots, the less liberty we will have. Being too permissive on social issues is bad for liberty, in the long run.

News

Can citizens rely on politically correct police to enforce the law?

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This Wall Street Journal article provides more insight into why the unionized police did nothing during the UK riots.

Excerpt:

The night before, at approximately 9:30 p.m., between 30 and 40 teenagers broke into the shop and left with all its liquor, cigarettes and cash. Mr. Raif, his brother and a handful of customers were inside at the time.

“I saw them coming and started to lock the doors, but they kicked through the glass and forced the doors open. All the customers ran to the back and my brother called the police,” he recalls.

[…]Once inside, the looters snatched six-packs of Supermalt from the shelves nearest the entrance and hurled them at the cigarette and alcohol cases behind the register. They appeared to be 16 or younger and sober to Mr. Raif. He doesn’t know if they were kids from the neighborhood, but despite their hoods and balaclavas he could tell “from their hands” that his looters were mostly white.

“They were very shameful. It was a horrible experience.”

The police never did appear, although they followed up nine hours later with a phone call. “Everything we pay here—taxes, rates, rents—it’s all so expensive. And we can’t even get the police when there are people robbing our shop.”

[…]”I’ve been here 12 years,” says the Pakistan native. “I’ve never seen anything like it.”

So what’s the problem? Welfare cuts, racist police, the “rich”?

“Please,” he laughs. “We’re all poor.

“Look, my point of view is this: It started in Tottenham, on Saturday, when a man got shot by the police. People protested, and then some people went and burned down a police car. And the police did nothing. They burned down more police cars, they burned down a bus, they burned down a building—and the police did nothing. They needed to respond. Instead the police retreated in Tottenham. So this, whatever you call it, it started as something against the police. The police did not show the strength to push back, and it spread. And that is why I’m out here now like a security guard.”

As we speak, “it” is spreading to Manchester, Birmingham, Nottingham, Wolverhampton. Elsewhere in London, locals have formed vigilante groups and are patrolling their own streets.

Home Secretary Theresa May earlier on Tuesday had defended the government’s use-of-force policies, declaring that “the way we police in Britain is not through use of water cannon. The way we police in Britain is through consent of communities.”

Perhaps if the police had been privatized, and had to please customers in order to get paid, then this would not have happened. But the market forces of choice and competition are nowhere to be found when government has a monopoly on some service. Taxes are deducted automatically, and you get the service they provide. They have no incentive to risk their necks for you – they get paid regardless. If they want a raise, then they go on strike.

Now where do you suppose that this disdain for the use of force against lawlessness came from? Could it be from the secular left, that is so uncomfortable with the ideas of moral standards, moral duties and moral accountability? They have been in power in the UK for over a decade. You may also recall that they have passed many measures opposing private property, self-defense, legal firearm ownership – and weakened prosecution and incarceration of convicted criminals. Bleeding heart liberals just hate the idea that criminals might be shot while committing crimes against law abiding citizens – they don’t want criminals to be frightened by gun-wielding property owners. That’s why they banned hand guns in 1997, leading to a doubling of the violent crime rate in the next four years.

This story reminds me of what happened in Canada a while back, when the police refused to do anything about vandalism committed by the native Canadians. It’s not politically correct to enforce laws against groups who vote for secular leftists, didn’t you know?