The riots.

Well here goes. An attempt to put something I find complex and baffling into some kind of structured post.

Here are the points I want to make:

1. The rioters are not in the main fighting for progressive social change.
2. It's a mix of anger and opportunistic crime
3. I got bullied regularly by my generation's equivalents of the people that are doing this, and it's hard not to say "Fuck them. Let the police beat them to a pulp"
4. The liberal, the leftist in me, while condemning them, seeks to understand.Result: I'm confused.
5. While the rightist response has been depressingly predictable (send in the army, summary executions for looters, any assylum seekers who rioted to be deported, etc) the Left have been trying to justify and condemn it at the same time and occasionally end up looking bloody silly.
6. The community action against the rioting is generally good, but it's also become a beacon for racists and vigilantes.
7. Many people want to see this, as everything else as a black and white issue. It isn't.
8. "Reactionary" means something. It's not always a term of abuse. I understand the emotional footings behind the stated desire to use extreme forms of punishment, but am spending a lot of time attempting to call for more reasoned reactions.
9. The bigoted and far right elements of the reaction to these events is annoying me more than the events themselves. 
10. The riots could be argued to have been caused by a failure of the left.
11. That failure was inevitable not because the left is bad, but because the right have won.
12. Anarchism required an educated populace and a culture of social interaction
13. Getting to the current atomised and individualistic state took at least a generation. Changing to something different seems likely to need a similar timescale.
14. The whole thing is utterly fucking depressing.

Well there you go. A structured post. Who'd have thought it?