{"id":3163,"date":"2011-08-15T15:56:32","date_gmt":"2011-08-15T20:56:32","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/cloggie.org\/wissewords2\/2011\/08\/15\/some-simple-rules-for-writing-about-the-uk-riots\/"},"modified":"2011-08-15T15:58:03","modified_gmt":"2011-08-15T20:58:03","slug":"some-simple-rules-for-writing-about-the-uk-riots","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/cloggie.org\/wissewords2\/2011\/08\/15\/some-simple-rules-for-writing-about-the-uk-riots\/","title":{"rendered":"Some simple rules for writing about the UK riots"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>\nCombining the subjects of my last two posts, <a href=\"http:\/\/600transformer.blogspot.com\/2011\/08\/history-and-rioting-inevitable-riots.html\">here&#8217;s Guy Halsall commenting on David Starkey&#8217;s odious little stunt on <cite>Newsnight<\/cite> the other day<\/a>. In the process he puts together a few simple rules good historians should adhere to when trying to analyse something like the London riots:\n<\/p>\n<blockquote>\n<p>\nAs I see it, the skills of an historian, when confronted by a complex phenomenon like this, ought (and  this is neither original nor controversial) to include at least the following:\n<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>The evasion of a simple catch-all explanation, of whichever &#8216;political&#8217; narrative, particularly a doctrinaire explanation<\/li>\n<li>The avoidance of reliance on untestable notions like &#8216;innate human nature&#8217;<\/li>\n<li>The avoidance of sweeping generalisation<\/li>\n<li>The ability to disentangle different elements within the phenomenon; to tease out geographical and other variables<\/li>\n<li>An aversion to reducing a complex phenomenon to simple cause and effect<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/blockquote>\n<p>\nIf only the various talking heads on the BBC radio and television pontificating on the riots this past week had been using those rules. For example, the fools who I heard on <cite>Broadcasting House<\/cite> yesterday morning, who dismissed the idea that the riots could&#8217;ve been political in nature because some of the rioters didn&#8217;t even know which party was in government &#8212; as if politics end outside of the Westminster bubble. There seems to be a deliberate refusal to engage the questions of how and why the riots started, why they persisted so long and why they spread on a more than superficial level, at least in the mainstream media and especially at the BBC. If reporting is the first draft of history, this particular one will be unreadable. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Combining the subjects of my last two posts, here&#8217;s Guy Halsall commenting on David Starkey&#8217;s odious little stunt on Newsnight the other day. In the process he puts together a few simple rules good historians should adhere to when trying to analyse something like the London riots: As I see it, the skills of an [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[104,292],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3163","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-manufacturing-consent","category-uk-politics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/cloggie.org\/wissewords2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3163","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/cloggie.org\/wissewords2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/cloggie.org\/wissewords2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cloggie.org\/wissewords2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cloggie.org\/wissewords2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3163"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/cloggie.org\/wissewords2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3163\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3164,"href":"https:\/\/cloggie.org\/wissewords2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3163\/revisions\/3164"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/cloggie.org\/wissewords2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3163"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cloggie.org\/wissewords2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3163"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cloggie.org\/wissewords2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3163"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}