Jacob Weisberg has made a career of insulting and degrading the american people. He considers his compatriots as "big babies" incapable of reasoning and understanding the major issues of their country, undeserving of an explanation of all the "complicated matters". His contempt and elitism are hard to believe, but Weisberg is after all Slate's Editor-in-Chief. I mean, why such antipathy instead of courting a wider readership? Sounds pretty dumb to me.I'm not trying to follow the Weisberg path of insulting my readership, but I can't help thinking that the riots are sort of the outcome of two interesting dystopias: the movie "Idiocracy" and the novel "A Clockwork Orange." It truly seems that decades of misguided "social programs" in one of the strongest "safety nets" in the world finally bred a new type of rioter: the chavs and the neds, fruit mostly of broken (but subsidized) homes, and impossible to discipline nor at home or at school, because nobody wants to destroy their fragile self-esteem (the Ludovico Techinque and simple law enforcement are out of the question, and because of that, petty causes go mostly unpunished). The only things in life for these people are to breed, eat, get drunk, harass random people, to cash single-motherhood subsidies and assorted welfare benefits, and to vote to keep things the same.
Now, ultraviolence is on the chav-and-ned menu, too. Don't get confused, the british government is not cutting welfare benefits, at least for now. It is cutting public employees' pensions and most ironically, law-and-order expenses. Chavs and neds are rebelling mostly because they can, because there is small risk of doing prison time, and because like in Sao Paulo in 2006, organized crime has some muscle to show to a frightened (and unarmed) society.
Now throw some racism and black liberation theology on the mix, and you get the underreported black flash mob violence currently spreading across the United States. It is always black mobs, it is always violence against whites. After the second black president (Toni Morrison says the first was Bill Clinton), it is hard to believe such a thing, but alas, Obama dig for 20 years the inflammatory rethoric of Jeremiah A. Wright Jr., believes in "community organizing" and his own rethoric is full of demagoguery, too. Only Michael Nutter, Philadelphia's Major risked condemning these black flash mobs and is already labeled an "Uncle Tom". You do the math.
In the meanwhile chilean students are demanding not-for-profit universities, and state-managed K-12 education of quality. It would be better if the chilean protesters asked for squaring the circle. It is highly dubious that any state could achieve a public educational system of quality. nowadays The real achievement would be that of a huge unionized bureaucracy of teachers and administrators, ready to size chilean public finances and to set a pensional ticking time bomb. Not to mention the insidiousness of "non-for-profit" private universities. Good luck with that.
The major trend is without a doubt the collapse of the welfare state. Spain, Greece, Portugal, Italy and many other countries know for sure there's no way to keep those rosy promises with over an 100% public debt's ratio to GDP and huge public bureaucracies. It seems their constituencies don't know.
Or worse, they don't want to see it.
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I hate these days. People are telling you to STFU. Just say it, no matter how stupid or offensive it is.