I suspect that the kids who have been arrested so far are the easy ones because they were already in the system. Checking the PNC might have turned out the details of a lot of them without much effort.

That's a debate and a half in itself.
If we take the second option, we place our future in the hands of a sliding scale of regulations designed to curb the anti social habits of the raw untamed man. If we don't take it far enough we get mis-selling scandals, corruption, graft, nepotism and all the other little ills that ail us. If we take it too far, there is restraint of trade, "PC gone mad!!!", "Health and Safety gone MAD!!!, and all the little ills that ail the Daily Mail. There seems to be a thin and porous line between anarchy and the nanny state, and relying on common sense can often seem futile.

All those things seem terrible and dispiriting unless you consider the alternative. Changing the people to match the needs of the system - any political, religious, moral or economic system - is an objective of totalitarianism. That doesn't mean that fascists and communists hold a monopoly on this activity; every time we collectively try to stamp out racism and homophobia, we are trying to change people in a fundamental way - we are redefining those who suffer as our moral equals, and we are changing those who see these people with contempt. Think about it, do you want to reform a racist for his own good, or for the greater good?

In Greek legend there was a bandit called called Procrustes who took hostages and made them sleep in an iron bed. If the hostage was too tall to sleep comfortably, he broke their legs to make them fit. This is where we get the term Procrustean when relating to political systems that rely on people changing to suit the needs of the system.

I prefer to accept that people will sometimes lack either sense or morals, and that need to be prepared for that. We should also spurn fashionable ideas that claim to overcome these failings with magic, such as the "wisdom of crowds". It was group thinking that lead fund managers to follow each other like lemmings into the sub prime mortgage fiasco, and it was the amoral elation of crowds that lead many normally well behaved crowds to loot BHS in Walthamstow High Street last week.

I've categorised things differently here, but the modern philosophical approach to these questions tends to look at two types of freedom (positive and negative). I tend to side with a chap called Isiah Berlin, there's a brief overview of his main essay on the subject here http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Two_Concepts_of_Liberty
Or the full thing here http://www.wiso.uni-hamburg.de/fileadmi ... iberty.pdf
It's not the kind of philosophy that requires 5 years of technical study and a phd in logical algebra to understand.

The best philosophy is that which is elegant in it's simplicity and yet relevant and profound at the same time.

Good answer, I'll have a read in a bit...

EDIT: Basics of the two concepts makes sense to me. Will save the pdf for a bit later. Thanks, looks interesting.

We had an economic boom which we were cold was both the longest in history, and the end of boom and bust. Then we had a bust. If you look back on it, lots of people got nothing much from the boom, and the next few years are probably going to conform to the pattern of balance sheet recessions (the ones that follow excessively extended booms) where the private sector devotes its energy to paying down debt, and then the public sector is obliged to follow suit. A limp economic recovery is guaranteed. So on that front things are bleak.

On the social front, we have this whole unravelling of society theme. We are surrounded by teenagers that we don't understand, their music appalls us, their manners offend us, their goals and objectives are shallow, they blame us for everything; they are hopeless degenerates.

Our employers despise us, they seem to actively wish us harm. They didn't enjoy having us in their employ when times were good, and now they plot to replace us with compliant underpaid Indians.

The world is overpopulated, more and more people appear every day, they all need fridges, food, cars and iPads. Surely the world cannot continue to deliver these things at a greater rate, especially if we keep selling them medicines and they all live to be centenarians? Before long overpopulation will destroy us all. Worse still, if we stop increasing our population, we get a demographic time bomb and there aren't enough youngsters to pay for our pensions, we'll all be 100 years old and living in a box under a railway arch that smells of piss.

It's easy to get pessimistic in such circumstances - surely that's the rational response?

But the reality is that this gloom is eternal, it comes with being a person of finite lifespan in a changing world. Our memory doesn't tell us much about the past. The first 20 years of our lives are spent in ignorance of what's happening to the world. The rest of our time we tend to view the changes to the world through a localised prism, taking heed only of what happens to us and those around us. Our brains are evolved to perceive in these terms; nature denies us long term global perspective. But our fears tend to arise from that confusion.

I find that it helps to consider the example of the oak forests in the south of England. Why are they there? Because they were planted during the French revolutionary wars at great expense. It was noted at the time that England lacked oak trees, we were building war ships with imported wood. A catastrophe was predicted, everyone believed that within a century or two, Britain would not be able to maintain a decent navy, we would be at the mercy of the French who could neuter us by cutting off our wood supply. The result was a civil engineering project that in today's money cost billions, to plant enough oak for the royal navy to once again reign supreme. None of those people lived to see that their panic was unfounded, some of them went to their graves still sickened with worry.

Our modern terrors are not so different. The teenagers we fear will grow up, some of them will remain very bad people, most will be fine. Jobs will return from India, trade with the developing world will grow as those countries grow richer, they will open up markets which are currently protected and we will introduce them to joys of Tesco. Outsourcing to China has already started to reverse, apparently the mass media don't find that a very interesting story though. Did you also know that world population is already stabilising? Only Afghanistan and Somalia have female fertility rates above 3 now.

The demographic "time bomb" can be defused quite simply, although we may not like the obvious methods. By the time we retire - later than initially promised - it is likely that state pensions will graduated. When you are in your late 60s you may only get 50% pension, and then qualify for the higher level a few years later when you can no longer be expected to supplement your income with part time work. It sounds like a [LIFTED] deal, but by then the NHS should be able to cure a bunch of age related ailments, and I suspect people will adapt. They will still continue to fear that things will be 10 times worse for their grandchildren though.

When the circumstances in which we play the game change, we tend to assume that the rules have changed with them. People have become accustomed to having certain things. One or two foreign holidays a year, a new car every X years or whatever. If the cost of such items rises relative to our pay packets, we come to view this as a theft. The rules are now that I get two holidays, take that away from me and I should be able to sue someone. But this is an error. Sometime a commodity can become too cheap, everyone can afford too much of it for a while because there is a hidden inefficiency forcing its price down too low, or pushing your purchasing power too high (that's probably not a valid distinction).

It would be helpful if people were encouraged to develop a better sense of these things; the current economic situation has been worsened by the like of Alan Greenspan trying to play God with economics and use monetary policy to end some perceived era of unnecessary recessions. Let us learn from this that recessions serve a purpose, they are painful but necessary to correct imbalances that left unchecked create crises. It seems that the greatest danger abroad today is a lack of political will to deal with this sort of thing. Politicians in America and Europe seem determined to avoid the electoral cost of learning a lesson and fixing a problem - our own seem remarkably assured by comparison...

I seem to have strayed from the topic yet again. My point is that we have no problems that cannot be fixed with honest analysis and effort. Our society is unfair, but we can fix that by spending money. We do have money, and we do have a long history of using it to fix injustices - just think where we got most of it, much of Britain's wealth came about through slavery and the exploitation of entire continents. So we can use our money to fix problems if we want, or we can use it to subsidise cars and holidays if we prefer. Of course we will make the wrong choice at the next election - but don't panic, people will still get stuff done, we just won't fix everything as quickly as we could. Being a "have not" in 21st century Britain is much less terrifying than being one in the 19th C was, it's just a shame that we seem to prefer BMWs to eradicating that category.

Which brings us back to modifying people or system. I would much prefer it that conversations of this type were possible in a wider variety of contexts and company. In my experience, not only are they not possible, but for many people they are entirely inconceivable.

I take your point and I agree. Fundamentally, the issue here is people. We are the problem. If we could converse about this (and many other things besides) and decide together on solutions, the world might have less problems. But I can't say that for sure.

Without wanting to fan the flames of the ego, I would still like to know what it is you do for a living and how you developed your understanding of all of this? I find it very rare to discuss things in such depth.

I'm a Cisco / Microsoft engineer by day. By night I study on and off for a history and philosophy degree with the Open Uni that I may or may not ever complete. I like the Economist for current affairs, they tend to analyse according to evidence, which is something I find lacking even among the best daily newspapers (although I won't hear a word said against Robert Fisk), they also have a far more international outlook than our other press.

I wouldn't get too down on people. Evolution spend millions of years creating a beast suited one type of community, then [LIFTED] just got out of hand. The animal proved so versatile and ingenious that it turned evolution on its head, and in the space of a few thousand years created cities of millions of people, space travel, laws and poetry. That's quite a hectic schedule, yet somehow we also found time to invent Tetris and anal bleaching. The direction of travel is ok, we just haven't finished the journey, and there is still a little of the paranoid monkey left in us.

As for the issue of changing people or systems, there is a need for some positive liberty. If we take negative liberty as "freedom from" interference in ones choices, positive liberty is "freedom to" make better choices. So if we force a child to go to school and learn, his freedom to do what he wants is taken away, but he gains instead a range of new opportunities only available to those who can read and add up etc.

Now there are some politicians who want our schools to teach "citizenship". No matter how benevolent the intention, this still reeks of using schools as little mind control factories, and should (in my view) be avoided. But what if we take our three Rs, and make it four - reading, writing, arithmetic, reasoning? Most of the skills in reasoning are very simple, everyone knows the main ones, but you can get through an entire education today without really exercising them properly. If we force people to master their critical faculties at an early age, we will have a less easily fooled selection of voters, although I can't make any promises that they will make choices better than those we make today. But those children burning down shops last week have never spent an afternoon discussing the ethics of Aristotle versus Bentham or Kant, and the odd thing is that if a teacher asked them to (with examples relevant to their experience) I guarantee they would have found that lesson a lot more interesting than any other, ever.

Well there we have it. Somebody who likes to read

I welcome the optimism and I share it in bursts. In truth I find myself on opposite ends of most positions simultaneously in a lot of arguments and the state of "people" is a classic in that department for me.

So in essence, your proposed solution begins with education. I'd love to see that. I believe it COULD work. Will it though? I don't believe it's likely. But perhaps a discussion for another time...

I spoke to a German friend last night, they visited their daughter last week (lives in Chelsea, I think) and they only became aware of the unrest, once they had travelled across London, took the train to Stanstead and got home and saw the news...

Chelsea, the epitome of an inner city slum.

Yes and the people so pretentious.

I saw that floppy haired one in the middle looting puffer jackets in Croydon last week.

Here in Germany, it is pretty much reported that the whole of London has been ransacked, along with other major cities. Therefore it seemed amazing, that travelling across London on public transport, they didn't notice any unrest or signs of looting.

Tottenham is miles out from the centre, as was Hackney and Ealing. Even Clapham Junction is at least five miles from the city centre. So it would be quite easy for most of the city to be well away from any trouble.

There's a few maps online of exactly where there was unrest. Google's version might be the most refined.

It really shows how the lamestream media blanket coverage, like it was some ringside seat at a gladiatorial contest, blew the whole thing out of proportion. Sure, it was an important story, but the rest of the world now thinks the UK is in permanent turmoil.