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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.
Allllllll right, then.
On one hand, sharing your opinions isn’t against the rules.
On the other, baiting angry responses is the central example of “more heat than light.”
On the gripping hand, you are remarkably consistent, and none of the mods want to deal with this shit on a regular basis.
Ninety day ban.
Could we ban a popular user for once instead? Every non-janitorial moderator action I see these days just reinforces the same tiresome monoculture that makes people rightly talk about themotte as a basically ideologically monolithic/predictable entity. At this point we have wound up with one single community-scale trapped prior; "moderation follows community sentiment" by explicit statement and this sort of "if it makes too many people angry, it causes us work" reasoning, and community sentiment follows moderation by gradually evaporating people who don't like the prevailing view cluster, attracting people who like it and occasionally banning those who bump into the Overton window's frame too hard.
A two-week ban for every angry response would have been a better choice for the sake of the forum's long-term ability to fulfil its original purpose.
We didn't ban BC for making people angry. We banned him for wanting to make people angry. The original purpose of the Motte includes understanding the culture war, not waging it, and I think that this post was a pretty clear example of the latter.
Even that's not enough on its own. But it wasn't on it's own, since BC had such a long history. What do you do when someone repeatedly announces that he doesn't give a shit about your community norms? When his actions are consistently more inflammatory, more obnoxious than his peers? You start to think about showing him the door. Or, as cjet put it,
For what it's worth, when "popular" users actively fish for angry, knee-jerk responses, we do ban them, too. FarNearEverywhere is a good example.
I was hoping that I wouldn't need to dig up living examples of posters (because I think it just causes resentment and distrust - a bit of a sense of camaraderie is one of the things this place still has going for it), but how does e.g. this not fall under the category of wanting to make people angry? How does this wall of polemic and gaslighting word games not? Is it just because the people it would make angry are unlikely to be in the audience and stick their neck out? A rule that you can't make the people here angry but are free to do smug little victory dances where you dunk on groups that are not on the forum is also an obvious recipe for reinforcing any existing biases.
Go back to a time when community norms were actually applied in a way that got in a way of the victory-dancing for the dominant group, and you'll find plenty of declarations to the effect of not giving a shit about community norms too.
The ideological homogenization of the forum is not the sort of problem that can be solved without making representatives of the entrenched ideology angry. I want it to be solved, and don't think it can be done without either aggrieving them in any way that can be slipped past moderation (so its representatives feel less welcome and leave) or enforcing the rules on them evenly (so they behave in a way that is more likely to enable retention of other groups). Either way is bound to make them angry. Since we've established that I also want to make people angry, may I inquire about the resulting delta in my social credit score?
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