I admire your compassion, Nephylim, and I agree with the sentiments you're expressing. Ideally, we wouldn't view material gains, HD or otherwise, as a necessary factor, and I'm not commenting on it now.
At the same time, Dannsar has some relevant points, no matter how repugnant the reality may be. Pragmatically speaking, no one reading this (and probably no one you know either) got up this morning and said, "Well! Nothing to do today! Let's go throw a molotov at the Police Station." (and if you did, then wtf?)
No one gets that angry over nothing - environmental pressures build up, and ticked off people feed off of each other and get pissed. There's been a lot going on over there right now, good and bad - Royal Weddings, massive journalistic scandals, including hacking and privacy issues, and some of the same economic downturn that's affecting everyone else. A lot of psychological issues occur when people are out of work for whatever reason. Studies have proven that young men in particular are seen to react especially badly to long periods of forced inactivity or to feelings of emasculation when they fail to provide for themselves and their families - self-anger is just as easily used to feed the blaze.
Does that make it right? No. No one is saying that. No one is really in the right here - I honestly wonder how much of the issue is really even about what's right and what's wrong. Plenty of people who feel it's wrong aren't rioting - don't forget about them. (If even a slight majority of people felt that it was right, the story would be a lot more drastic than it is right now.) I would like to be able to say that I wouldn't resort to violence except to protect my household, because that fits my definition of moral integrity; but honestly, there are some things we don't know about ourselves until we're faced with them, and I'm fortunate enough not to have been. As for the people who are rioting, like everyone else, many of them have their own personal reasons for it, don't you think?
Reblogged by Laughterkey on Tumblr
Maybe that means we should be focusing our question how easily we turn to violence, and of course on what environmental pressures led to this feeling of desperation or entrapment that made this seem like a good idea to those people; or maybe it means we should continue investigating journalistic practices that don't come around until things turn bloody, thereby validating that young man's point of view. Maybe Dannsar has a point that we should investigate what we're teaching our young adults - many around my age across the pond feel that they are entitled to HD goodness regardless of the quality of their work ethic, and it doesn't always work that way.
Personally, there are days when I wish a few more people thought the way Nephylim does.
Back to the main topic; live streaming coverage is available on bbc.co.uk, and my fiancee told me police have just been authorized to use rubber bullets on rioters. If you follow a deity and haven't spoken a few words of peace yet, now isn't a bad time.