[holden]

Anger subsides as soon as the looting begins in most of these cases (Gotta get the stuff home)

It's most curious how that happens. Is "South LA's principled, violent outburst" assuaged by setting the new sofa down in the living room, with a similar scene repeated in a thousand lower-middle-class homes?

Or does someone's rent-a-mob simply deem itself to have been adequately paid off at that point, confidently knowing there will be no criminal price to pay?

Or failing an adquate sofas-to-dissidents ratio, I remember the camera indelicately catching on tape handouts from fat stacks of hundred dollar bills. Somebody must have a grand, knowing insight to understand a priori how the handouts will quell principled violence, right?

HF

[IrishPennant]

It's most curious how that happens. Is "South LA's principled, violent outburst" assuaged by setting the new sofa down in the living room, with a similar scene repeated in a thousand lower-middle-class homes?

Uh, yes...

Or does someone's rent-a-mob simply deem itself to have been adequately paid off at that point, confidently knowing there will be no criminal price to pay?

See ACORN

Or failing an adquate sofas-to-dissidents ratio, I remember the camera indelicately catching on tape handouts from fat stacks of hundred dollar bills. Somebody must have a grand, knowing insight to understand a priori how the handouts will quell principled violence, right?

"...sofas-to-dissidents ratio" Now that's funny right there...I don't care who you are.

[wbill]

It's most curious how that happens

I read an interesting comment on the Rodney King riots awhile back.

The USPS refused to deliver mail to the worst affected areas. The rioting died down when people who were supposed to be getting their gov't checks, stopped getting them.

Of course thousands of heavily armed National Guardsmen might have had something to do with it too. :-) But, I thought that it was an interesting premise.