this guy<\/a>.\nBut the point is that of course<\/i> everyone in a riot thinks that they are in extraordinary circumstances, and that extraordinary measures are called for. And I have no idea whether they are right or wrong in any specific case—but I have no idea whether I would be right or wrong in any specific case, myself. I have no scheme in mind for when a riot might have salutary effects, and when it’s just burning down warehouses. Easier to tell twenty years after, but even then, when it’s not much help, it’s hard to gauge.\n
I’m putting these two together—recalls and riots—despite their being utterly different things, because it strikes me that they are responses to similar situations. Or, rather, that they are symptoms of similar problems. In both cases, they seem to be responses to extraordinary failures of government as well as extraordinary failures of societal norms. In Wisconsin, of course, it was the shutdown of the parliamentary system—not only the attack on collective bargaining rights, which was the policy issue in question, but the breakdown that led to a walkout from the state legislature. In England, the proximate cause is a police shooting, but there are clearly neighborhoods for which the police and the government are viewed (probably correctly) as existed not to protect the neighborhood and its residents but to protect society from the neighborhood and its residents. If the police come in to your neighborhood to shoot people, to beat them up and frame them, and the Government is abandoning the social contract, then ordinary politics is not going to be very attractive.\n
But what comes to my mind is … how many of us, here in the United States, view the police as protecting us, rather than protecting other people from us? How many people view the Government as part of the social contract? How many people look at the Government (however they see it and however they think of it) and see themselves? How many see the police that way?\n
And for as many people as don’t see themselves in the system, what new norms are they thinking will make that happen? Fires? Recalls? Tea Parties? The Tea Party impulse—the original one, where they pitched the tea in the river rather than pay the duties on it to a government they felt excluded from, as well as the rallies where people shouted about the tyranny of bailouts—is that a different impulse, really? I’m not saying that it’s all equivalent, you understand. There’s a difference between a rally, a recall and a riot, and there is still a large difference between a good policy and a bad one. What I think I’m observing is an undercurrent of alienation that sees itself not as the ordinary alienation of living in the world, but as an extraordinary circumstance that requires extraordinary measures, that requires setting aside the rules and norms that we want to govern ourselves with in ordinary times.\n
I don’t know. All times are extraordinary, of course, and all times are ordinary, and the rules and norms ought always to be in question and ought never to be put aside lightly. It’s always the millennium, isn’t it? And the world never ends. It feels like it should balance, and it feels out of balance.\n
Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus<\/I>,
-Vardibidian.\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
In Which Your Humble Blogger may just be off-balance because of this damned summer cold.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[202],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-13799","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news-item"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13799","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/7"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=13799"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13799\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":19403,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13799\/revisions\/19403"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=13799"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=13799"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=13799"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
![this guy<\/a>.\nBut the point is that of course<\/i> everyone in a riot thinks that they are in extraordinary circumstances, and that extraordinary measures are called for. And I have no idea whether they are right or wrong in any specific case—but I have no idea whether I would be right or wrong in any specific case, myself. I have no scheme in mind for when a riot might have salutary effects, and when it’s just burning down warehouses. Easier to tell twenty years after, but even then, when it’s not much help, it’s hard to gauge.\nI’m putting these two together—recalls and riots—despite their being utterly different things, because it strikes me that they are responses to similar situations. Or, rather, that they are symptoms of similar problems. In both cases, they seem to be responses to extraordinary failures of government as well as extraordinary failures of societal norms. In Wisconsin, of course, it was the shutdown of the parliamentary system—not only the attack on collective bargaining rights, which was the policy issue in question, but the breakdown that led to a walkout from the state legislature. In England, the proximate cause is a police shooting, but there are clearly neighborhoods for which the police and the government are viewed (probably correctly) as existed not to protect the neighborhood and its residents but to protect society from the neighborhood and its residents. If the police come in to your neighborhood to shoot people, to beat them up and frame them, and the Government is abandoning the social contract, then ordinary politics is not going to be very attractive.\nBut what comes to my mind is … how many of us, here in the United States, view the police as protecting us, rather than protecting other people from us? How many people view the Government as part of the social contract? How many people look at the Government (however they see it and however they think of it) and see themselves? How many see the police that way?\nAnd for as many people as don’t see themselves in the system, what new norms are they thinking will make that happen? Fires? Recalls? Tea Parties? The Tea Party impulse—the original one, where they pitched the tea in the river rather than pay the duties on it to a government they felt excluded from, as well as the rallies where people shouted about the tyranny of bailouts—is that a different impulse, really? I’m not saying that it’s all equivalent, you understand. There’s a difference between a rally, a recall and a riot, and there is still a large difference between a good policy and a bad one. What I think I’m observing is an undercurrent of alienation that sees itself not as the ordinary alienation of living in the world, but as an extraordinary circumstance that requires extraordinary measures, that requires setting aside the rules and norms that we want to govern ourselves with in ordinary times.\nI don’t know. All times are extraordinary, of course, and all times are ordinary, and the rules and norms ought always to be in question and ought never to be put aside lightly. It’s always the millennium, isn’t it? And the world never ends. It feels like it should balance, and it feels out of balance.\nTolerabimus quod tolerare debemus<\/I>,-Vardibidian.\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"In Which Your Humble Blogger may just be off-balance because of this damned summer cold.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[202],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-13799","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news-item"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13799","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/7"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=13799"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13799\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":19403,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13799\/revisions\/19403"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=13799"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=13799"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=13799"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}](\"http:\/\/4.bp.blogspot.com\/-50gJyPVqD4w\/TkKYrXEMtuI\/AAAAAAAAAAo\/Tri3pWjZPI8\/s1600\/uk-riots-smashed-barbershop-photograph.gif\"){kind=link}