What's with all the rioting kicking off this last couple of weeks? Seems to have come out of nowhere. Or at least, there doesn't seem to have been any particular, specific trigger. Or if there was, the news isn't talking about it.
Timing of it seems pretty sus, is the far right having a bit of a "chimp out" moment, or would this would all still be going on if the Tories hadn't just been wiped out? Is it all in response to that mass stabber incident? Was the perp a brown so they're all having a teary in response to it? I wasn't paying attention.
>>41576 They do that to make him appear more innocent, but if he's a teenage boy he probably wouldn't have wanted his picture taken and his parents won't have had many opportunities to take them if he was a bit of a recluse.
If something happened to me and I made the news I've no idea what pictures they'd use.
>>41574 There's a very suspect website/Twitter account called "Channel 3 Now". This is seemingly where the, false, name of the attacker originated as "Ali Al-Shakati". It's a tremendously Arab-eskimo sounding, very rhythmic with lots of sharp edges too, not unlike former-Caliph-current-skeleton Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, (although I suspect that was a coincidence) and has probably gotten Channel 3 Now more hits than anything else they've ever published, most of which is apparently AI generated stories about shootings in America. The site is, according to AP, "managed by people in laplanderstan and the US". So if you remember the news all the way back in 2016 about how much of the pro-Trump "fake news" was being pumped out by seemingly apolitical Macedonian teenagers only interested in making money, it is possibly a situation like that here in the Britain right now. Only instead of aiding the election of Donald Trump it's given slab-headed scallies the greenlight to, as David Starkey once so obliviously put it, "turn black".
My own opinion is that it is genuinely alarming how much absolute horseshit is being fired directly into people's heads these days. I don't know if I mentioned this already on here, but last week I was working the till in a shop and I loads of customers told me "they're getting rid of the penny" as I was giving them change. This isn't true, it's just that the Treasury isn't minting any new coppers this year because we don't need them, and this is something that happens fairly often. However, I couldn't stop wondering where had they all heard this? Who did they mean by "they"? And how far down the garden path are they to being fully convinced Klaus Schwab is going to take over the world? Probably not very far at all, still miles away in fact, but there's this little draft of irrationality I feel with so many people I speak to these days, and it makes me anxious thinking about what might find it's way through.
>>41576 >What I don't get is why we're living in some bizzarro world where the only pictures of him being shared are from when he was a child.
Given his personality (went to the seaside, didn't even look at the arcades, but did stab children to death for seemingly no reason) I suspect he was a surly teenager who didn't very much like having his photo taken. I didn't either so there are basically about four images of me in existence from ages 14 to 20. And I never even stabbed anyone, let alone a dozen children.
>>41576 Update on Nothing-Watch 2024: I looked on twitter and it was full of people I don't recognise saying that all hell is breaking loose and it's time to deploy the army and arrest MPs for hate speech. My echo chamber appears to that side of twitter so I also checked out the otherplace and they're saying the football hooligans are rising up. Both are using videos that blatantly lack context and when people point out missing context in videos with proof then they get absolutely mobbed for it.
Well I live in a major city but when I looked out my flat window just now to see all the hubbub all I saw was the reflection of a fat mong eating a cornetto. I feel like more than one person needs to get out the house a bit more.
If I try and get inside the rioters' heads, the thought that occurs to me is that it doesn't really matter if the guy was newly arrived or not, what matters to them is that a brown person stabbed and killed loads of white children, and they see that as all the justification they need for violence. Pointing out that they've been mislead by bad actors doesn't alter the situation one bit for them.
>>41578 It's depressing that even though he's not this eskimo immigrant who has been in the UK for only a year, that was the story that got into the public consciousness first and so it stuck. It doesn't matter he was was born in Wales and allegedly raised as a Christian, he is an asylum seeker unabummer therefore we must burn down hotels housing asylum seekers. He is a sign of eskimos causing so much destruction and chaos that we must burn down and loot eskimo owned businesses, even ones that have been a contributing part of the community for many years.
Still, hatred of eskimos has triggered the first steps in a reunification of Ireland. Tricolours and Union Flags side by side in Belfast, teaming up to take on coloureds.
>>41587 >Tricolours and Union Flags side by side in Belfast, teaming up to take on coloureds.
I think this will only make the Republic of Ireland less even keen on onboarding an impoverished shithole full of violent nutters than it already was.
>>41588 False news: He was born and raised in Rwanda, and came to this country only a year ago. That is 17 years of upbringing in a completely different culture and environment, which may inform his beliefs and behaviours.
What seems to be the current real news: He was born and raised in Cardiff, and was schooled in mainstream British schools, and would therefore be more likely to culturally be more British than if the false news of him being pretty much fresh off the boat were true.
They're two completely different contexts and situations, and therefore would have affected his place in the world differently. The only commonality is that he will still be black and his parents will still be Rwandan in both narratives.
You've got to try and get into the mindset of the rioters.
The stabbings in Southport were the spark, but this powder keg has been ready to ignite for a long time. In their eyes, the killer wasn't British and it's the straw that has finally broken the camel's back. It's not like this is the only bad thing a migrant, or child of migrants, has ever done.
The Manchester arena bomber was born in this country, the son of Libyan parents. Lee Rigby. Muslamic ray guns in Rotherham (and many other shitholes up and down the land). This hasn't exactly come out of nowhere. There is a lot of resentment to the level of immigration (and the rate at which migrants breed once they're here), which was handled very poorly by the Tories with the migrant hotels and the obsession with boats crossing the channel.
Not everyone is going to get so angry over it they smash up a Shoezone, but a lot of people share similar thoughts on this (hence Brexit) and it has not come from nowhere. If this has caught you by surprise then you're probably in a bubble.
>>41590 >He was born and raised in Cardiff, and was schooled in mainstream British schools
Are we sure he's not from Rwanda? We don't tend to raise stabby brown kids in Cardiff. Our daft militants tend to be white blokes who drive Lutons into foreign churches.
>>41594 > We don't tend to raise stabby brown kids in Cardiff
It seems pretty obvious this isn't the same kind of knife violence you'd find on an estate in London. The Southport attack is probably more like a US style school shooting, like Adam Lanza at Sandy Hook. I don't think county lines gangs are grooming lads to murder random groups of children, not unless an as-yet-unknown supervillain has released some kind of droogification drug into our water supply. But let's not discount that out of hand.
>>41593 >You've got to try and get into the mindset of the rioters.
The problem is I've known these kinds of people my whole life and they are thick as mince. I'm not even trying to be a smart arse, they really are daft. And as I seem to be saying at least once week on here now, because I grew up in a shithole that was almost entirely white, I can't buy into this idea these areas were a land of milk and honey before brown people arrived there. The rioters, to me, just appear to be violent opportunists. I don't see some long prior record of trying to improve their communities before this. To be pushed to the brink you generally need to start somewhere in front of the brink, and have better reason for going beyond it that "it seemed like a laugh at the time". All that is bad enough, but when you combine that with the obvious far-right nature of the events, my sympathy for these people is basically nill. They'd have the likes of me and half the people I care about up against a wall if they had their way, so fuck 'em.
>If this has caught you by surprise then you're probably in a bubble.
Oh, give me a break, Sally-bloody-Morgan.
>>41596 Poor people are heavily motivated by spite. It's why the benefit cuts were so popular; if you could be better off by someone else by improving your lot or making someone else's lot worse they'd, more often than not, choose the latter.
It's the crabs in a bucket mindset because they haven't really left school and grown up. They'd never want to improve their communities themselves because in their mentality that it's always someone else's responsibility, but they want to be the ones taking advantage of the system rather than a bunch of brown folk.
The thing is you've got to look one stage deeper. Why is it that the people who have grown up in these impoverished places are thick as mince? Why are these crabs too stupid to figure out their way out of the small circular container they find themselves trapped in?
Like real crustaceans, it is because they lack the means to climb out, and it is not their own fault. They there is a way out, but it is denied to them. They know something's going on that is unfair to them and left them behind, but they can't properly identify it because they were brought up in the dark. Migrants take the brunt of their anger because they don't know any better and without the proper education to see the world more clearly, they would never see the correct targets.
Yes, that's right. I am once again telling you, it's class. It's always class. It will always be class. We have neglected these communities for decades, and you are right these places were never perfect utopias before Thatcher shut down all the mines, but people there were at least able to live a decent life, and that's something people should have a right to. They don't deserve the accusation that it's their own fault that we generationally pulled the ladder up out of their hands.
All of this was inevitable when we decided participating in the neoliberal race to the bottom was the number one priority. Migration and ethnics committing violence were just the tinder and the spark. The real firewood is class inequality.
>>41599 In my experience, council estate people broadly fall into two categories:
1. Those who would have been able to make something of themselves, but their life has been derailed due to an unstable home life, growing up with alcoholic parents or some other hardship which means their opportunities have been limited.
2. Scratters.
I guess it isn't that dissimilar to the old "deserving vs. undeserving" poor mindset that the Victorians had, but the reason we have sink estates is because those who fall into category #1 will leave until we reach a critical mass of scratters. Before you know it they're setting fire to food banks and community libraries.
I don't think it is class, at least not in any conventional sense.
One of the great under-discussed issues in modern western societies is the fact that you need to be much cleverer to navigate the world than you used to.
Back in the 70s, you could go down the Jobcentre and ask "are there any jobs going?". If there were (of course that was far from guaranteed in that decade), then the lady behind the counter would have a look in her big file, ring someone up, send you down for a chat with the gaffer and you could start the same day. Nobody was likely to notice if you were completely illiterate.
Today you need to make a CV, get an e-mail address, sign up for a load of job sites, click through some incomprehensible online application and be able to answer questions like "What do you think you bring to the role?" just to get a job as a cleaner. There are dozens of little hurdles that are mildly annoying if you're clever and literate, but completely insurmountable if you're properly thick. If you can't figure all of that stuff out, you might get help from your "work coach", but you're more likely to get your benefits sanctioned.
You used to get your pay in a little envelope full of cash on Friday. You knew how much money you had to get you through the week, because it was there in your hand. If you ran out of money, you just had to make do until payday.
Today, you get a BACS on the 17th of the month. For the rest of the month, money just gets taken out of your account for reasons that aren't always obvious even to people who regularly check their statements and can work out what "REF: EDF Ltd 400530" means. If you run out of money, you don't really run out of money, but somehow you owe the bank even more money for not having enough money.
Thick people can't help being thick, but the modern world has become a bewildering ordeal for them. The people rioting aren't working class, but part of an ever-expanding lumpenproletariat. They are in a very real sense disabled, because the increasing complexity of the world is leaving more and more people behind. They're helpless children in a world that perpetually screws them over for reasons that they can't begin to understand even if it was explained to them slowly by someone very patient. Unfortunately we don't even try to patiently explain things to them, we just mock them for something that isn't their fault. The class theories of the 1970s or the 1870s don't apply, because we're living in a radically different world that demands radically different solutions. We can't bring back the pits and the mills even if we wanted to.
I'm not going to defend the rioters because their actions are indefensible, but I am going to defend a lot of the hangers-on. There was a clip circulating on social media yesterday of a mostly toothless middle-aged woman shouting "get 'em out!" outside of an asylum hotel. She was being uniformly mocked in the comments for a) having no teeth and b) having the wrong kind of Northern accent, but I felt a terrible sense of shame. It's not her fault that NHS dentistry has collapsed and she can't afford thousands of pounds to get her teeth fixed; for that matter, it's not her fault than nobody taught her to look after her teeth in the first place. Nobody wakes up one morning and decides that losing all their teeth would be a good laugh. If I lived in a mouldy housing association flat and I saw a load of foreigners being put up in a nice modern hotel I'd be fucking furious, and I have the intelligence and the education to understand who those people are and why they're in that hotel.
I've seen a lot of references to 1930s Germany regarding recent events and rhetoric, but I've seen very little reflection on the social and economic conditions that led to the rise of fascism. There's no excuse for putting a brick through someone's window, but if we don't understand and empathise with the anger behind that brick, then all we'll do is suppress it until it flares up again. We all bear some culpability for this, if only through our indifference.
Yet everything you describe is part of that parcel.
You're right about a lot of the things you talk about, but they do all go back to class. "Class" is the shorthand to describe all of those issues, and when I say it, I'm not talking about the pits and the mills, I'm talking about the very same things you have just mentioned. Because they are functions of social class.
Those people are not thick because of their council estate genes, they are thick because they didn't have the upbringing that teaches you all of that stuff you take for granted. That's what being middle class gets you, it's not about the fact you lived in a semi-detached instead of a back to back. It's about the fact you learned, whether by being taught or just osmosis from competent enough parents, how to handle all those aspects of the world.
Of course there's people who break through through sheer bloody minded grit and people like me who somehow are knowledgeable and competent despite their roots; if my parents never had the foresight to buy a computer and encouraged me to read, I might have turned out very fucking different. I have friends who I can see very clearly were failed in that regard. But for the majority of people, their environment and upbringing is responsible for shaping them more than pretty much any other factor.
The vast majority of those people are thick because of their genes. That's the brutal truth that we aren't willing to confront, because it would lay bare the lie of meritocracy and force us to empathise with thick people.
We know this because of twin and adoption studies. If you take identical twins and raise them apart, their different environment only accounts for about 20% of their intelligence by the age of 18. Same goes for adopted children compared to their non-adopted siblings. You can nudge things around a bit - being malnourished as a child will slightly reduce your intelligence, spending longer in education or having a more enriching home life will slightly increase it - but these effects are all incredibly marginal compared to genetics.
We all have an upper bound on what we're capable of, dictated by our genes. I could spend a hundred lifetimes studying and I still wouldn't be a chess grandmaster, because I'm just not that clever. I had an ELO of 2000 in my teens and I've still got an ELO of 2000, because that's just the limit of my ability. I've been playing the game for thirty years, but there are seven-year-old kids who can thrash me. I'm reasonably clever, but I can think of a thousand things that I'm just not clever enough to do, regardless of the amount of effort I put in.
The thickest kid in your year at primary school could spend a hundred lifetimes studying and still fail to grasp basic grammar and arithmetic. It's not his fault, he just doesn't have the wiring for it. He might have been failed by the system to some extent, but the reason he fell behind his peers and stayed behind was overwhelmingly innate. His time at secondary school was a frustrating waste of time for everyone, because he was being taught things that were just fundamentally beyond his ability.
In the 1930s, it didn't matter very much if you were thick, because the economy had an essentially unlimited demand for unskilled manual work. We needed every available pair of hands just to provide for our basic needs. Conversely, there just weren't very many jobs that needed much in the way of brains - we needed a few doctors, a few lawyers, a few engineers, but most of us simply didn't have any options that weren't the the pit or the mill.
The explosion in technology that followed completely reversed those facts. In 1930, there were 1.2 million people working in the mining industry. In 1970 - nine years before Thatcher came to power - we were mining twice as much coal with 300,000 workers. The jobs in the mills and the factories might have temporarily gone overseas, but they were ultimately lost to increasingly sophisticated machines. The demand for manual workers has fallen globally, not just in the rich west. Today we have a small and dwindling number of jobs that require only half a brain and a strong pair of hands, but effectively unlimited demand for the smartest workers in the most demanding fields.
We want to believe that education can make people clever, but it's just not true. The expansion of education - in tandem with the increasing demand for highly skilled workers - increased opportunities for clever people, but it didn't make anyone cleverer, it just unleashed the intelligence that it was already there. Rates of illiteracy are broadly the same across all Western countries and haven't changed in decades.
The number of people going to university has plateaued and the dropout rate has increased, because nearly everyone who is clever enough to go to university already does. We've played silly games in reclassifying vocational subjects as academic subjects, we've created loads of new universities with loose entry requirements and easy courses, but Blair's target of 50% seems to be the upper bound. Efforts to expand university have become a cruel con, as we lumber people with lifelong debts for a qualification that won't meaningfully benefit them. If you've been involved in recruiting, you'll be very aware of the number of university graduates who can't string a sentence together.
As a society, we have to come to terms with the fact that upward social mobility has essentially run its course. The people who are stuck in precarious unskilled work - or no work at all - are overwhelmingly just incapable of functioning beyond that level. A few people do still fall through the cracks as children and pull themselves up by their bootstraps as adults (and I'm one of them), but the point is that they do pull themselves up because the opportunities are there for those with the ability. Those left behind are stuck for reasons beyond anyone's control.
We can react to that reality with compassion or indifference, but we will pay a price for our indifference. The lads who are out setting fire to Shoezone aren't going to become software developers or management consultants, no matter how much support we give them; the only meaningful question is why they should be barred from having a decent life simply because they're morons.
>>41596 >It seems pretty obvious this isn't the same kind of knife violence you'd find on an estate in London
Otherlad makes an interesting point. This is all the problem of spearchuckers in the North (and the valleys), and when there is trouble in London it's because you lot descend on us like a swarm of locusts. I think it's time we started warning people about the dangers of travel outside of London and the threat of television radicals.
>>41605 >"Class" is the shorthand to describe all of those issues
No, it's a loaded term to describe an emergent social identity in industrial relations but like the pseudo-science obsessed with it there is disconnect with the reality we live in and it does nothing to actually help people.
Take for example the geographic problem we have in this country where decades of chronic underinvestment give a significant difference in outcomes between the working class people in different areas of the country or, dare I say it, even the competent middle class who could otherwise have lucrative asset management jobs in the city.
>>41606 You should talk to more skilled folk, a lot of them are thick as shit. Don't even get me started on the foreigners in more prosperous countries - some of whom can't even speak English I'll add!
You see the problem with that, though, is very simple: There's plenty of rich and successful people who are thick as absolute fucking pigshit too. Just look at the lad kicking off in the other thread, he must be successful despite evidently being a complete fucking retard.
It's not about being thick or not. It's not about intelligence even remotely. It's about having the right connections, it's about just simply acting in the proper manner, speaking in the proper tone. It's about going to the right school and getting the right degree, not because you are smart but because you come from a background where somebody was able to clue you in that's the right path to take.
I sense we share a lot of common ground, we just view it from different angles.
>Take for example the geographic problem we have in this country where decades of chronic underinvestment give a significant difference in outcomes between the working class people in different areas of the country
If you factor in housing costs, Londoners are on average only £5 a week better off than people in Yorkshire. After housing costs, London has the third highest rate of poverty after the North West and the West Midlands and the highest rate of persistent low income.
Underinvestment has certainly been a factor in reducing the number of highly-paid jobs in the North, but I'm not sure it can account for the very concentrated pockets of severe deprivation in particular neighbourhoods.
Back in my day, Anonymous were closing Habbo Hotel pools due to AIDS, bullying people into suicide, and throwing the g-word about willy nilly. These tourist posers who assumed the name are doing good work doxxing protestors I guess, but they're Anonymous in name only.
>There's plenty of rich and successful people who are thick as absolute fucking pigshit too. Just look at the lad kicking off in the other thread, he must be successful despite evidently being a complete fucking retard.
He can write in complete sentences, which disqualifies him from being thick as pigshit. I don't think that many people understand what "thick" really means, because they rarely interact with properly thick people in any meaningful way.
Here's an example question from the OECD Survey of Adult Skills.
"Yesterday, it was announced that the cost of riding the bus will increase. The price will go up twenty percent starting next..."
Which of these words makes the most sense as the next word in this sentence?
wife or month
One in eight British adults cannot reliably answer questions at this level.
Here's another:
Look at the picture. In total, how many bottles are in two full cases?
Nearly a quarter of British adults can't reliably answer questions at this level.
Think about what this means for society. Really think about it. Think about what it'd be like to go through a decade of mandatory full-time education and still be functioning at this level. Think about what daily life is like for these adults. What are your job prospects? How do you manage your household expenditures? What do you do when you get an official-looking letter? When you go to the doctor, how do you explain your symptoms?
You are severely overestimating the number of people who are handicapped to this extent by intellectual incapability. And that's even without even getting into the weeds about types of intelligence, the way I know some lads who would definitely struggle with working out the number of bottles there, but can wire up a house like it's second nature to them. All that nonsense.
The ultimate angle I am coming from is that the vast majority of jobs really aren't difficult. They're just not, and if you tell yourself they are it's a cope to make yourself feel better about being just a slightly elevated button pushing monkey instead of a brick laying monkey. The vast majority of jobs, even the decent well paying ones, are actually very fucking easy, and could be done by basically anyone with a year or two of specific training for the task. We know this is the case because so many fucking idiots are out there, in charge of things, making a pig's ear of it, even at the highest levels of public office, and yet society goes on.
And yet some people are just thick in the wrong kind of way, and they fail to pass through the various filters. They end up on the scrap head because they are lacking specific components of what we call "intelligence", not because they are thick overall.
Okay, for the sake of argument I'll accept your point. The vast majority of jobs are actually very fucking easy. What does that say about our society? What does that mean for people who are stuck in gruelling jobs that pay poverty wages?
I assume you aren't arguing that they're just suckers for not whacking in an application to be lead counsel for corporate affairs at Merrill Lynch. Are you arguing that the lass who works at Greggs could get a law degree from Cambridge if she just pulled her finger out? If not, then the only conclusion I can draw is that our society unfairly denies people good jobs based on pure whim, in which case it's time for guillotines. Is that your argument? That we could all have rewarding, well-paid jobs were it not for some conspiracy to keep the working man down? That the British economy is forecast to fall behind Poland within a decade because of spite? I'm really not trying to strawman, I just can't work out the implications of your premise.
>>41619 >Are you arguing that the lass who works at Greggs could get a law degree from Cambridge if she just pulled her finger out?
Nta, but are you implying we live in some kind of perfect meritocracy? I guarantee there are people working in Greggs who could get a law degree if you teleported them to Cambridge.
My apologies, I always assume people are intelligent enough to infer my worlview from the rest of what I say. My argument is we've set up an arbitrary, byzantine, kafkaesque set of filtering mechanisms by which to artificially keep some people stuck in place at the bottom, while other people are able to pass through.
We are well aware of the truth that both somebody has to do the shit jobs, and that there aren't enough fancy jobs to go around for everyone, so we've had to come up with an artificial scarcity kind of mechanism. Yes, there's your doctors and lawyers and whatnot, those jobs are actually hard; but they are like 5% of the job market total. The rest of them are just varying shades of Microsoft Excel proficiency.
Do you actually think how well you write your CV and covering letter has anything to do with job aptitude? No, of course it doesn't, but it's the first in a long series of hoops we as a society have decided you must jump through in order to qualify even for the toilet cleaner position.
When everybody has a degree, nobody has a degree. And that's the system working as intended.
>>41621 >I always assume people are intelligent enough to infer my worlview from the rest of what I say.
Other people's intelligence doesn't come in to it - that's not a realistic thing for anyone to infer from so little information - that's your failure to communicate.
>>41606 >The lads who are out setting fire to Shoezone aren't going to become software developers or management consultants
I think the point you are making doesn't really mean a lot. In my experience, more half the kids from broken homes (abusive or addicted parents on a low income), even if some of them behaved like thugs (by no means most of them, but some did), got a grip on life and became serious about making something of their life. What I'm saying is, some of the lads I'm talking about probably would have been out setting fire to Shoezone if they'd had the opportunity to. Also, and this is probably less respectable towards your point, why is this "violent white people are just irredeemably thick" argument never applied to ethnic minorities who engage in similar behaviour with the same amount of scrutiny? (Maybe you could argue the previous government thought that to be fair).
>Also, and this is probably less respectable towards your point, why is this "violent white people are just irredeemably thick" argument never applied to ethnic minorities who engage in similar behaviour with the same amount of scrutiny?
I would apply the same argument. I'd also point at this chart.
>>41630 Am I the only person left with a job in this country? I'm pretty sure they've cracked down on those mouse wiggling devices.
Anyway, best not commit any crimes over the next week, apparently the police have all been called in to work 12 hour shifts so you'd better watch what you say to me online.
The flashpoint in Nottingham is meant to be an old woman's house in the upmarket West Bridgford area. The old woman's son uses her house as the registered address for his freelance immigration business. So could be hundreds of fash and antifash clashing in one of the nicer parts of city area.
>>41632 Allegedly it's going to kick off in Wakey this weekend and it'll either be at Cedar Court Hotel, Holiday Inn or Trinity Walk shopping centre. It's also the pride parade this weekend.
A British businesswoman accused of being the first person to post false information that the Southport stabbings suspect was an asylum seeker who had arrived in Britain by boat says she is 'mortified' by what happened.
Just hours after three girls were murdered at a Taylor Swift dance workshop last Monday, Bonnie Spofforth posted on X the wrong name of the boy accused of carrying out the attacks. Before the victims had been identified, Mrs Spofforth, 55, wrote at 4.49pm: 'Ali Al-Shakati was the suspect, he was an asylum seeker who came to the UK by boat last year and was on an MI6 watch list. If this is true, then all hell is about to break loose.'
The false information, including what is believed to be a fictitious name, spread rapidly around social media, sparking far-right anti-immigration riots across the country.
Responding to the mass rioting that took place in response to the incorrect information spread on social media, Mrs Spofforth told MailOnline: 'I'm mortified that I'm being accused of this. I did not make it up. I first received this information from somebody in Southport.' She added: 'My post had nothing to do with the violence we've seen across the country. But I acknowledge that it may have been the source for the information used by a Russian news website.'
Ms Spofforth is a prominent campaigner against lockdowns and net-zero climate schemes and had tens of thousands of followers on X before she deleted her account. MailOnline was able to establish her identify after conducting an extensive trawl of X posts featuring the name Ali Al-Shakti which showed that hers was the first. When challenged about this, Ms Spofforth claimed that she had seen someone else post the name on X but was unable to provide any evidence.
Her post was deleted an hour after it appeared but by then the false information was widely repeated by far-right social media activists such as Tommy Robinson and Andrew Tate. It is also believed to have been used as a source for an article published by the Russian-linked Channel 3 Now website which was extensively retweeted. Channel 3 Now later removed the article and apologised.
Ms Spofforth told The Times: 'Yes I did [post it] … It was a spur of the moment ridiculous thing to do, which has literally destroyed me. It was just a mistake. I did a really stupid stupid thing, I copied and pasted it from what I saw, and I added the line 'if this is true.'
Since this all started 3 East Asian women have caught a cold or found themselves facing a sudden work deadline when I was about to finalise a date. They all suggested that this weekend might be better for them but as the riots have progressed they have all bar one stopped responding.
So I guess that I'm a left-wing bongo-enricher now.
>>41634 Imagine if it turns out that she's actually an asylum seeker.
Does 'far-right riots' include the eskimo counter-rioting? I've seen little to no mention of it in the news otherwise, but plenty of videos across social media. I assume it's actually happening, right, and not old footage of past incidents?
>Sir Keir Starmer to review social media laws in wake of riots
Imagine if tech companies just go "well you' know what, no" and we get the old internet back before normal people started using it along with a separate 'Britnet' similar to teletext for all the invasive bullshit we have to use.
>>41649 I read a story a couple days ago about a counter-protest where the protest didn't turn up so they just decided to riot themselves but it's impossible to search for anything at the moment.
>>41638 > Does it count as being kettled by the police if they're the only thing stopping you having your head kicked in?
No, that's being protected and the police doing what I hope they would. Kettling is surrounding protestors and then denying them basic amenities like going for a piss or shit in privacy when that would be quite safe, for example.
>>41650 >I read a story a couple days ago about a counter-protest where the protest didn't turn up so they just decided to riot themselves but it's impossible to search for anything at the moment.
If you'd travelled some way to get there, you'd want to get your money's worth too.
When he was 19 he walked into a police station to hand over four knives. He was the ringleader of a plan to attack a European shop or takeaway and kill all Europeans. He got off with 30 days community service including Prevent training, because he was a literal autistic retard. Also the judge said there was little chance he could have pulled off the crime successfully anyway so no harm done.
This time he attacked the car of immigrants, looted, destroyed shit. He had an opportunity to turn his life around but he chose to continue being scum. My girlfriend says he's a victim because he's autistic and was probably groomed into this mindset. At what point do we stop making excuses for retards?
I'm autistic myself and I know it's not an excuse for if I chose to commit a racist assault.
I'm not going to defend anyone for rioting, but I do think we should reflect on the characteristics of the people who have been convicted. Many parts of the media have been portraying the riots as having been committed by hardened far-right extremists; while I'm sure that they were key in instigating the riots, they seem to make up a fairly small proportion of the people who've ended up in court. You've just got to look at the state of the people in their mugshots, the number of them who gave their address as "no fixed abode", the number of them who mentioned drug addiction or alcoholism in mitigation. Unless we address the underlying factors that have created so many people with broken lives and nothing to lose, we're just storing up trouble.
>>41677 I'm not entirely certain if I believe this myself, but I'm starting to think I do: maybe we can't use mental differences to excuse crimes, because you have to be mental to commit a crime anyway. It's never the cleverest or rightest decision. Therefore, every criminal is either crazy or retarded by definition. The more we help people with their problems, the fewer crimes we will see, because every crime ever committed has some kind of motivating excuse behind it to replace the default explanation of "evil". If you find a crime where you think otherwise, you just haven't looked at it closely or sympathetically enough. Maybe, just maybe, evil as we understand it doesn't exist at all. What this would mean for the justice system, I'm not willing to wonder about.
>>41680 >we can't use mental differences to excuse crimes
I wouldn't say being labelled as a violent mentalist is a get out of jail free card. If we had a working system of justice and healthcare it's a designation that can put you in a straightjacket forever and it's actually a very hard bar to reach where, in a perfect world, you'd get treatment as part of your rehabilitation into society anyway.
Imagine a dystopia where we had a functional society - you'd murder your neighbour with a hammer and instead of it being an oopsie-woopsie where you spend a year in prison before being released to free up space, you spend the rest of your life in a rubber room watching Bluey while on a cocktail of powerful drugs and being surrounded by unkempt and frustrated mental women.
It's easiest to see in white collar crime - there are an awful lot of people who would happily take the risk of doing 18 months in prison if there's a good chance they could get away with millions.
Some career criminals make the perfectly logical calculation that they can commit hundreds of offences for every one that they get caught for, making the risk of imprisonment a tolerable cost of doing business. Being a burglar or a credit card fraudster might be a rational choice of employment for someone with few other options.
Most people who commit crime aren't particularly rational, but that's mainly because the threat of punishment deters rational people from committing crime most of the time. I think that's the basic paradox at the heart of modern justice - almost by definition, most of the people in prison are people who are undeterred by the threat of imprisonment.
There is some reasonably low-hanging fruit if we want to reduce crime. We've got a large population of highly dysfunctional people who are constantly in and out of prison, many of whom could be dealt with far more cost-effectively with a mix of drug treatment, mental health treatment, probation and social work; the effects of austerity on this population are obvious and dramatic. A prison bed costs about £50,000 a year and there's a lot you could do to change someone's life with that kind of money.
That sort of patter often sounds a bit wishy-washy, but it's starkly visceral in the case of someone like Valdo Calocane. The three murders he committed could have been prevented, but an incredibly high-risk person was allowed to slip through the cracks due to a lack of resources. There are thousands of ticking time bombs like Calocane still out in the world and most of them will be completely ignored by the system until they do something too awful to ignore.
>you spend the rest of your life in a rubber room watching Bluey while on a cocktail of powerful drugs and being surrounded by unkempt and frustrated mental women.
>>41682 we aren't talking about what the state actually does we are talking about the thoughts and opinions of the terminally online mumsnet poster who will swing between hangings too good for them and they didn't mean it they can't help it, depending on what the meme they are looking at told them to think.
>German authorities have identified the man who confessed to a mass knife attack as a suspected member of the Islamic State group (IS).
>Prosecutors named the man as Issa Al H, omitting his surname because of Germany's privacy laws. The 26-year-old had given himself up and admitted to the stabbings, police said. Three people were killed and another eight injured during Friday's attack in the city of Solingen, during a festival to celebrate its 650-year history.
>He is a Syrian national, police and prosecutors confirmed, and German media reported that he arrived in the country in December 2022, after leaving war-torn Syria. Bild reported that special task force (SEK) officers stormed a refugee centre that the suspect was associated with, detaining another person there.
One thing you can't say about the Germans is that they haven't learned from history at all. Even close to 80 years after the end of the Third Reich, right-wing extremism is still taken very seriously and right-wing movements and factions are under close scrutiny by federal and state authorities. There are a plethora of laws against right-wing speech (technically, those laws also apply to left-wing extremism or any other extremism that threatens the German Constitution). The public display of Nazi symbols or even symbols reminiscient of it, like swastikas, the Third Reich flag and the pre-Nazi era Imperial Flag, is a criminal offence in the country's Penal Code.
What it hasn't been able to prevent is the growing undercurrent of right-wing extremism among the general poulation especially in the former East. It's no longer just the underground. With regional elections looming in the two Eastern states of Saxony and Thuringia this autumn, the right-wing AfD, while far from looking at an absolute majority in the polls, could end up being the party with the most seats in both states, at around 30 percent. Which is more than a bit unsettling, although so far in similar cases in other parts of the country, the other parties have been able to form coalition governments, thus precluding the AfD from attaining true power.
So there's two ways of looking at it. One is that the German government has many more safeguards at its disposal against a right-wing resurgence than a lot of other Western democracies, but the other way of looking at it is that especially in the eastern, formerly communist parts of the country, quite ordinary people are increasingly buying into right-wing propaganda in concerning numbers, with real consequences.
>>41714 The economy is stronger and dispersed while Germans are in general much more submissive to the authorities. You can contrast it with France.
>>41717 I think this thesis collapses once you notice that the most repressive side of Germany for the far-right has always been in the East for reasons and the far-right has seen success across Europe. The issue is that it's also the side of Germany dominated by useful idiots for the Soviet and then Russian regime that evolved into more of an undercurrent of general facey-tier politics than the rest of Germany.
The obvious proof of this is that Wagenknecht, a far-left ideologue, is polling in double digits and uses the rhetoric we've come to recognise of the latte-sippers dictating bollocks for the rest of the country. I'm sure Wagenknecht would be opposed to ULEZ expansion despite being on the far-left.
>Which is more than a bit unsettling, although so far in similar cases in other parts of the country, the other parties have been able to form coalition governments, thus precluding the AfD from attaining true power.
This is a dumb strategy that's already failed. When the other parties unite against the far-right then they become the de-facto opposition that can claim the system is rigged while taking pot-shots from the side-lines.
>This is a dumb strategy that's already failed. When the other parties unite against the far-right then they become the de-facto opposition that can claim the system is rigged while taking pot-shots from the side-lines.
Yes, but it doesn't change the fact that the AfD still won't be a part of government. They can moan about it, falsely, until they're as blue in the face as their chosen party colour, but as far as forming a government after an election, they will still be the de facto opposition, no matter how haphazardly the other parties join an anti-AfD coalition government.
>while Germans are in general much more submissive to the authorities
You could say that two authoritarian regimes will do that to you, but it goes back further than that. To the Kingdom of Prussia, which at its peak comprised the entire northern half of the German Reich in the early 20th century, and was the most populous part of it, and almost one and a half times larger by area than the present-day UK. On top of a kind of blanket militarism permeating through all of society which held that true citizenship could only be achieved through military service (almost in a Starship Troopers kind of way), Prussia had a culture of rigid government and public institutions that was unmatched in non-autocratic countries of Europe at the time, and which demanded quite strict obedience of its citizens. The Germans called it the Obrigkeitsstaat, "Obrigkeit" meaning something like the powers that be. It's not that you had no recourse against government or administrative decisions. Prussia wasn't that authoritarian, although a monarchy with few democratic institutions. But as a good citizen, you were simply expected to follow and obey the authorities.
It has now been over 75 years since the formal dissolution of Prussia in 1946, after existing for almost 250 years, and Germans enjoy all the freedoms of people in other European democracies, but that whole culture of the Obrigkeitsstaat is still rooted deeply in the country and its citizens, and you run into remnants of it everywhere in daily life.
>Even close to 80 years after the end of the Third Reich, right-wing extremism is still taken very seriously and right-wing movements and factions are under close scrutiny by federal and state authorities.
Indeed, whereas we applied that to the left instead.
Because lefties are communists, and too many people in this country give the Right too much of a benefit of doubt that they're just Conservatives gone a bit daft.
>The teenager accused of murdering three young girls in Southport has been charged with producing the poison ricin and possessing a military study of an al-Qaeda training manual.
>>41878 Who among us can honestly say we haven't ourselves ever read a guide to committing terrorism? I have one saved but it's boring and was written by the US Army so that makes it okay.
>>41878 Not everyone who downloads a copy of The Anarchist Cookbook is an anarchist. If he is ultimately an apolitical murder-enjoyer it doesn't seem odd to me that he'd look to unabummer training documents for inspiration. People with political motives for their crimes tend to mention it at some point, otherwise why bother? But whatever, none of this matters to the common garden Anglo-troglodyte, who are fast forming into a vanguard for British MAGAism.
