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UK riots: No10 slaps down Elon Musk for 'civil war is inevitable' post
(www.standard.co.uk)
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this post was submitted on 05 Aug 2024
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UK Politics
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The way that Musk is riling up and egging on these rioters on the world's biggest social media platform is really frightening and dangerous. The guy's in total control of the algorithms that control people's feeds - including the sorts of thugs and bigots turning out on these race riots.
I think we really are going to need a much more grown up national conversation about regulation of social media companies and the damage they're doing to our democracy.
There are also clearly some very profound community tensions which we're going to have to address on some fundamental level in the long-run through processes of deradicalisation, integration, education and community cohesion strategies. But that still seems like a discussion that's necessary to have but maybe after we've locked up these Neo-Nazis.
The tension is largely inflated. It exists mostly because people like Tommy Robson and Nigel Farage claim that it does.
For example take the housing crisis, it would be a problem even if it weren't for immigrants, maybe they slightly increase the pressure but only marginally and only in certain areas, but the racists and the fascists have decided to ignore nuance and simply claim that immigrants are causing the housing crisis. Then they imply, do not outright say, that if there were no immigrants everyone would have a house, which of course is demonstrably untrue, but thicko idiots believe it.
I don't agree. They inflate tensions that pre-exist them, and I think if we keep pretending these issues don't exist, then this is only going to get worse.
Immigration is not the cause of the housing crisis, but it's also not possible to address the housing crisis without also reducing immigration because it's not possible to build housing for 700,000+ people each year. Yearly net migration of almost 1 million is not sustainable, so the number will need to come down substantially.
40% of that figure is international students, who tend to be wealthy and live in student accommodation which wouldn't house regular people anyways. They also tend to leave after they finish their studies. So that would leave us closely with the recommended number of building new houses. People should really find another excuse to blame immigrants or bother reading the details of the stats they use. (Also, ONS and other think tanks said that this number is not going to continue going forward.)
Except these lot don't care about the housing crisis, they're literally looking for an excuse to smash things up. Problem is unadulterated racism, pushed by the media, the previous government, and the likes of Farage and Tommy Robson. Sure we need societal change too but that alone won't fix the issue unless these problem causes are dealt with at the root.
And since dealing with them is much quicker than dealing with large social issues that should be the priority in the next few months.
I don't think that's true in many cases. You can literally just go on YouTube and look at the Sky News, Channel 4 and ITV reportage where they interview people at these protests/riots and many of them explicitly say that the reason they're there is because of the crisis in housing, the NHS, etc. and which they pin on the scale of immigration.
I'm not agreeing with them, but when you say they're just looking for an excuse to smash things up, I think you're sort of sidelining what they themselves are often saying. Obviously the vast majority are also expressing deplorable racist prejudices too, but again, we should at least take them at their word that that's why they're on the streets.
I don't think you can solve this at the root without a) solving the very real problem that we might very well have net immigration of 1 million this year which is fucking insane; b) meaningfully invest in local councils, public services like SureStart (or some new version of it), free English language services, and finding ways to sort of push together communities with new arrivals so that they just have to get to know each other and get along, while the new arrivals revise their opinions and values in line with the new expectations. Even that would really just be a starting point but I've had a couple of pint safter work so I don't want to overstretch myself with 'grand plans.'
Agreed. Smash the rioters, lock them up, then I think/hope our new government will be able to take a proper look at this issue that's been bubbling up for so many years. This violence isn't isolated, it's not about social media or Tommy Ten-Names or whoever, and it won't go away even if we lock up all the rioters. We have problems in this country which require serious, thoughtful, nuanced responess in national policy.
But, again: I want the police to fucking smash these people, slam them up in a prison cell and make them regret their vile, racist, brutal attacks on innocent people.
There are still crime patterns, though