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The ongoing riots in the UK and the senseless destruction they have caused remind me of Bertold Brecht's famous poem he wrote in response to the 1953 East Germany strikes. While Brecht, himself a communist sympathizer, initially intended his poem to be a satirical polemic about heavy handed work quotas it recently struck me that he might have been more correct than even he had anticipated.
The Merriam-Webster dictionary defines "to dissolve" as "to become dissipated or decomposed". After seeing the behaviour of the rioters right now as well as the rhetoric that has been coming from that class of people over the last few decades one must wonder if the right solution isn't really to dissolve the people. By this I don't mean immersing them in sulphuric acid until dissolution but rather dissipating their population density as a fraction of the whole country until there is no longer enough of a critical proportion of people which can light the fuse so to speak. There's a reason why even though there are far more "natives" in London than Sunderland the violence in the former has been more chickenhearted and more easily put down.
These rioters are generally low human capital people who take out a lot more over the course of their life than they put in. It's not scientists and lawyers you see giving the middle finger to police officers and pushing garbage bins in their general direction. I think it is perfectly fair to say that as a group they are best characterized as failures who have disappointed their betters and what's more don't even think there is anything wrong with their current state and behaviour. They are even confused and disoriented about the flashpoint of the current disorder: unlike what their prejudices told them the person who killed the three girls in Southport was not a fresh off the boat Muslim migrant but rather a black Welsh 17 year old child who had been born in the UK having a schizo moment. The true facts about the stabbing coming out did not placate their desire for an orgy of violence in the least.
Furthermore they live off the tax contributions of people like me and instead of being thankful for what they are given they blame us for making the country worse and want to bleed us even more. I like to quip that if the majority of people want to see a human parasite they would be better served by looking in the mirror instead of the Times Rich List and I think that applies perfectly here.
Another good example of a city that had some riots is Manchester; when the thugs tried their trade there they were met with swift counter protests bigger than what they could muster and were forced to disperse, leading to no public damage. It appears that the violence only really gets out of hand in the minor cities where the concentration of "natives" is too high. To prevent future riots the obvious solution is to reduce this concentration or namely, to dissolve the people.
Whenever there is dissolution there must be a solvent. And what would make the best solvent here? The usual answer provided by the left is something like "integration" where rich and well off people are asked to live amongst the lower classes in the hope that they will have a civilizing effect on the poors. Normally this is done by mandating the building of housing intended for poor people very close to housing occupied by the well off. While this may work at preventing tantrums from being thrown in the first place it won't do very much to quell them if they happen: a bunch of effete button pushers (Note: I count myself as among this group) doesn't put the fear of God into anyone. They would never have the guts to go up to the rioters and do this (choice moment: the rioter responding with 2 fingers when asked how many brain cells he has).
Instead the best solvent you can get is someone who will also stand up to debauchery when it rears its ugly head: migrants who are unafraid of giving it just as good as they get (see above video). And what's more, unlike the low tier "natives" who Great Britain is saddled with because they were born here the non-natives are all people who were either themselves selected by the UK as being positive for the country or descendants of such people which means they still have a portion of the net positive genetics (I'm ignoring refugees here because they make up a very small proportion of total migrants and something tells me the rioters of today wouldn't be happy if illegal migration stopped but legal migration continued at the same levels as today).
In fact a more reasonable word for these migrants would be "elects", since they are the chosen. Each and every single legal migrant in the UK has been collectively chosen as being worthy of being allowed into the country. They should be accorded the respect such an honour deserves instead of being told that they don't belong here. In fact the reason so many of them were chosen in the first place is because the "natives" have continued to disappoint the real decision makers day in day out for the last however many decades where importing so many migrants was the only choice left to keep a stable state going: firstly refusing to take care of older family members and foisting them onto the state and then refusing to have enough children if they're net contributors/having too many children if they aren't net contributors. Any attempt to talk sense to these people about how a welfare state with sub replacement birth rates and no migration is unsustainable was (and is) met with fingers in ears and "na-na-na can't hear you". Is it any surprise that with such a badly behaved lower class the elites decided to do away with them like you do with a bad employee and get someone new?
And we shouldn't forget that many of the migrants had far worse starting conditions than the gentlemen throwing bricks but through industry and positive sum contributions to human flourishing have managed to make something of themselves, only to be looked at enviously by the people who previously have been appropriating the wealth of the successful and now want to get even more at the elects' expense.
So yes, the elite class in the Western world has taken Bertold Brecht's words to heart. When confronted with unruly and disruptive lower classes it really is simpler for them to dissolve the people and elect another. I for one am looking forward to the consummation of this process; we'll probably end up with fewer riots at least.
You’re aware that this is a rude gesture, right? If someone asked me that question, I’d likely respond with one finger, but it would be a horrible misinterpretation to assume that I meant I only had one brain cell.
The middle finger is less likely to be misinterpreted as "one" because people don't usually count starting from the middle finger.
I wouldn’t say it’s any less likely, but rather that both are equally unlikely. Neither gesture admits of any reasonable interpretation other than the one that was intended, at least not to a British audience.
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When you own yourself, you own yourself.
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Yes, I am aware it is a rude gesture (dating back to the time just after Agincourt when the English archers stuck up their two fingers at the French to show they would continue to shoot at them; likely the person who made this gesture wouldn't know this, I'd be surprised if they could name even the war in which Agincourt happened), however that doesn't mean it's any less stupid to do this when there is an alternative reasonable interpretation that makes you look very stupid.
You may be missing some uniquely UK context here, being a late arrival to our fair shores and having no familial history of time we last stood alone in WW2.
It's not actually anything to do with Agincourt, it's from much later (possibly related to a cuckold's horns - calling your opponent a cuckold is an old sport - there's a brilliant banner from our civil war on the topic) but no one appears to have a definitive answer to its real origins other than the earliest photograph is from 1901 (it doesn't even appear in cartoons or drawings before). It was used a lot during WW2 as a more mocking form of the V for victory when we were standing alone against invasion, playing on Churchil's use of the symbol, and can be summarized as "Up yours".
It always signals disrepect, defiance (typically of authority) and a general "fuck off". It's not a number or related to archery, and it seems a bit... uncharitable to assume others are stupid here especially if you yourself are running off an urban legend yourself. The meaning is clear.
Interesting. I did not know the Agincourt origins were an urban legend. You learn stuff every day. I freely admit that I was misinformed and thank you for helping me improve my model of the world.
Now this is a bit too strong a statement. For one the two fingers sign also symbolizes bunny ears so it doesn't always mean disrespect. I have fond memories of pranking friends with think back in my carefree youthful days.
This I also disagree with. Holding the index and middle finger up is the British sign language method of indicating two.
Extremely overrated Prime Minister of the UK. I have no idea why he commonly comes near the top of the UK's list of PMs. Sure he got the country through WWII but there was nothing exceptional about him personally that led to this. He provided competent governance in difficult times and little more (see what happened the second time he became PM). It was the times he lived through that made him notable rather than the reverse. Had WWII not happened he'd be almost as forgettable as Henry Campbell-Bannerman. Even the Marquess of Salisbury was a tier above Churchill.
Bunny ears (at least in the UK) would be with a pronated hand position i.e. palm facing away. The gesture of disrespect is with the palm facing inwards.
I've never seen someone indicate two with the palm facing inwards.
I (American) remember ordering two beers at an English pub, holding up two fngers, palm-inward, and being told by the bartender something to the effect of "Mate, never do that. Palm facing me."
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That's literally the sign for two in BSL, see the linked page which has a photo of a person making the sign.
And I'm saying I've never seen that gesture used that way. And I've seen plenty of people using two fingers to indicate two.
I don't know BSL and if that's the official sign then that's the official sign, I guess. Although I wouldn't be surprised to find out that the person responsible for that website just googled "person displaying two fingers" and used the first image that came up.
They've got photos for all the BSL symbols in the same artistic style so it's not just random internet photos but rather images specifically made for the page. For instance here's the page for cat: https://www.british-sign.co.uk/british-sign-language/how-to-sign/cat/
I think it's pretty clear two fingers palm inward is indeed the BSL sign for the number 2.
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Your alternative interpretation is not, in fact, reasonable. Neither the recorder nor his audience nor you nor I are at all confused about the meaning of the gesture. Pretending otherwise is just another example of waging the culture war.
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Wow, you're really smart, mister.
This adds nothing. Don't do this.
@BurdensomeCount's comment can be boiled down to "please allow me an additional paragraph to sneer at the proles." What better response is there than to sneer back? It's certainly not a ban-worthy comment but is genuinely deserving of some mockery. I considered writing up a sincere rebuttal (honestly, the alternative reasonable interpretation probably makes it a better rude gesture) before deciding that this conversation probably is not the place for sincerity.
Comment length can be an okay proxy for comment quality but they are not the same thing, and my comment was less snide and spiteful than the one I was responding to.
Yah well he might be banned for his sneering, so do you want the same treatment that he gets?
He won't be banned for the comment I responded to nor should he be, and my response to that comment was still less banworthy. Failing a ban, social censure is the next best response.
Disagree
Disagree
Agree
Agree, which is why I'm saying it was bad.
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