Everything Tagged with 'violence'
‘There Will Be Riots’
The signs were already there. 18-year-old Chavez Campbell from north London, for instance, saw them:
A week before it began, Campbell, in an interview with the Guardian about cuts to youth services, predicted what would happen. Asked what he thought the future held, he said, simply: “There’ll be riots.”
Looking at his words again, he said: “I did see the riots coming and the government should have seen it coming, too. Jobs are hard to get and, when they do become available, youths don’t get the jobs. There is nothing to do, they are closing youth clubs so the streets are just crazy. They are full of people who have no ambitions, or have ambitions but can’t fulfil them.”
Of Riots and Revolutions
With the riots that have broken out across England continuing for a fourth night in a row, Andrew Sullivan has culled together highlights from how the United Kingdom’s major press outlets are responding to them. It’s interesting to see the wide range of ways we as human beings process and characterize events like these, as well as the motivations of those behind them. Consider, for example, the difference in these two characterizations:
They are essentially wild beasts. I use that phrase advisedly, because it seems appropriate to young people bereft of the discipline that might make them employable; of the conscience that distinguishes between right and wrong. They respond only to instinctive animal impulses — to eat and drink, have sex, seize or destroy the accessible property of others. Their behaviour on the streets resembled that of the polar bear which attacked a Norwegian tourist camp last week. They were doing what came naturally and, unlike the bear, no one even shot them for it.
It is meaningless complaining that many teenagers show no respect without appreciating the reality that they too are often treated without respect.
Sex, Violence and the Supreme Court
Writing in an op-ed for the New York Times, Timothy Egan takes on a little sex and violence – with some mild dismemberment and naked boobs thrown in for good measure – as he considers one of the more peculiar double-standards held by American culture, one which only continued to be upheld by last month’s Supreme Court ruling in Brown v. EMA:
Ultimately, the back-and-forth by the high court reinforced the notion of a nation that will always be a little skittish about sex, while viewing violence as American as apple pie. If this ruling is indeed a triumph for the First Amendment, it continues a strange double standard. […]
Settling the law of the land on this latest iteration of age-old question, the court’s decision makes it clear that children are free to slice a clothed Godiva to bits — on screen — but should be shielded from seeing her as she was when she rode through the streets of Coventry.
I think Egan’s perspective falls apart a bit when he tries to poke holes in Scalia’s opinion on the effects of video game violence (the whole of the research clearly backs up Scalia on this, I believe), but Egan’s central premise is great: Why does America feel so uncomfortable with nudity, and yet not violence?