What all the wise men promised has not happened, and what all the damned fools said would happen has come to pass.
—Lord Melbourne
If you drop a frog in a pot of boiling water, it will of course frantically try to clamber out. But if you place it gently in a pot of tepid water and turn the heat on low, it will float there quite placidly. As the water gradually heats up, the frog will sink into a tranquil stupor, exactly like one of us in a hot bath, and before long, with a smile on its face, it will unresistingly allow itself to be boiled to death.
–Daniel Quinn, The Story of B
Hey man, wtf just happened here? Well, lemme tell ya’ll wtf just happened here: The mostly teenage children of London’s underclass—joined eventually by sundry opportunists from every walk of life—took over our capital city and looted it for four days and nights in a saturnalian orgy of destruction.
A similar pattern was repeated in many of our Northern cities, but on a smaller scale.
And on the fifth day—the rioters just melted back into the population.
There is no sense in which the authorities won. There was no defeat of the rioters. There was no unambiguous imposition of order. The authorities—including the police—stood by and watched. The rioters ended the riots spontaneously and unilaterally.
The street kids will have learnt—unless they are, like our leaders, human vegetables unable to respond to external stimulus—that they can take the city whenever they like, that no one dares to stop them from doing whatever they want.
In short, they discovered who is scared, and it isn’t them.
The response of our thinking class is already that “like Norway we need more democracy”—give them more of anything and maybe they won’t hate us. Why do they hate us? Nobody knows. This event stands before them like an inexplicable mindboggling mystery. They wheel out inarticulate teenagers to mumble and mangle the stock phrases they trained them in: “it’s, like, they don’t have nothing to do cause its summer”; “the youth feel, like, no one listens”. They dissociate themselves from the events via the magical soma of the Youtube upload. Watch, do not think or feel—you might accidentally understand the truth.
Anyway, whatever it is, this thing must be made to go down the memory hole as soon as possible. “The fight back starts here.” “England fights back.” “Robust policing.” “Robust responses.” Robust this, robust that. We’re in charge! We’re not scared! Everything is normal!
Our future slouches a bit closer towards us.
"we carry death out of the village" 