{"id":222,"date":"2011-09-09T06:03:00","date_gmt":"2011-09-09T06:03:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/believingbullshit\/2011\/09\/09\/the-riots-not-linked-to-poverty-fallacy\/"},"modified":"2011-09-09T06:03:00","modified_gmt":"2011-09-09T06:03:00","slug":"the-riots-not-linked-to-poverty-fallacy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/believingbullshit\/2011\/09\/09\/the-riots-not-linked-to-poverty-fallacy\/","title":{"rendered":"The riots-not-linked-to-poverty fallacy"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Did poverty play a significant causal role in the riots?<\/p>\n<p>Those who would prefer this was not true often employ the following argument &#8211; they say, &#8220;ah, but these <span style=\"font-style:italic\">other<\/span> poor people didn&#8217;t riot, so poverty cannot be the cause.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>So for example, David Cameron: &#8220;These riots were not about poverty. That insults the millions of people who, whatever the hardship, would never dream of making others suffer like this.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>Letter to Newsweek magazine: &#8220;<span style=\"font-style:italic\">Saskia Sassen blames conditions in disadvantaged areas for the UK riots, ignoring urban areas for the UK riots, ignoring that other deprived regions &#8211; Glasgow, Tyneside, South Wales &#8211; didn&#8217;t riot.<\/span>&#8220;<\/p>\n<p>By the same logic we could also show that smoking doesn&#8217;t cause lung cancer. &#8220;Smoking clearly wasn&#8217;t the cause of Dave&#8217;s lung cancer. After all, Mary, John and Peter also smoke and <span style=\"font-style:italic\">they<\/span> didn&#8217;t get lung cancer, did they?&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>Poverty may or not be a causal factor re the riots (obviously it was a factor), but this sort of logic reveals nothing other than the desperation of those who see the obvious potential link and want to bury it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Did poverty play a significant causal role in the riots? Those who would prefer this was not true often employ the following argument &#8211; they say, &#8220;ah, but these other poor people didn&#8217;t riot, so poverty cannot be the cause.&#8221; So for example, David Cameron: &#8220;These riots were not about poverty. That insults the millions [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":13,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-222","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/believingbullshit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/222","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/believingbullshit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/believingbullshit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/believingbullshit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/13"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/believingbullshit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=222"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/believingbullshit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/222\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/believingbullshit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=222"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/believingbullshit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=222"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/believingbullshit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=222"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}