The Unarmed Emasculation

This week, in England, six months pregnant Amanda Mancino-Williams boarded a train with her three children and approached the seats she had previously reserved. Sat in two of them were an old, posh couple who refused to move even when seeing that the woman had the right to the seats AND that she was 2/3 of the way to being a mum of four.

Unfortunately for the old couple, Amanda has a Twitter account with over 47,000 followers and the internet was soon humming with angry commentary on the seat stealing shenanigans of two sour faced septuagenarians (who she took a photo of) with various news websites picking up the story and asking if anyone knew who these two were.

I live in Rome after having got bored of England and moving here in 2017. I keep up to date on current news “back home” via social media and really wasn’t prepared for the anger I felt in the three days after I read this story for the first time.

I meditate twice a day (trust me it helps) and it took me a long time to calm down and process exactly why this event I had no personal attachment to, had kinked my karma so badly.

It boils down to this…

In Britain there is still the belief that the “rules” are enough and the majority of people are decent, hard working and will do “the right thing”. Cops aren’t armed for the simple reason that the government, police senior management and City of London investors don’t want to accept that times have changed and society has become much more self serving and violent. By parading a police service of 95%+ routinely unarmed cops, the message the powers-that-be are trying to send is “we don’t need lethal force to enforce the law. People know what is right and wrong”.

I worked for just over 3 years as both a Special (volunteer) Constable with City of London and a Regular (paid) Constable with Kent. This was from 2004 to 2008 and even then, the cracks were not so much starting to appear but were begging for a tube of Super Glue. Violent incidents were met with a mob handed approach to subduing a suspect, which is fine in a police force of one square mile but I still shudder to recall the drugs bust we did on a house in Kent where I jumped over a back garden fence armed only with pepper spray and a baton to be confronted by the dealer’s Boxer dog running at me (which luckily just wanted me to throw its toy for it). No guns, no tazers and no real way to deal with an increasingly ugly and argumentative set of people who had long since realised that if they got lippy with the boys in blue, there was little to nothing they could do in retaliation if they were outnumbered.

We weren’t trained in anything like decent self defence. Instead we were shown techniques that I like to call the Chief’s Conscience. Nothing that was ever likely to do any damage (no punching or kicking techniques, only the safest of take downs) or result in my force having to cough up to an jnjured “suspect” (we were specifically told to aim baton strikes ONLY to the upper arms and upper thighs, no matter how violent a “suspect” was).

Despite all this bollocks, the myth that they wanted us to believe was that society wasn’t all that bad and provided we were pleasant and dealt with things fairly and reasonably it would nearly always go right for us.

As we moved into the era of I, Daniel Blake and where the adjective “Dickensian” is used more and more to describe the poverty and misery of the poorest people in the UK, the myth still tries to hold onto its existence, that things aren’t really so bad and that all it takes is everyone to just calm down, have a cup of tea and talk about it.

A video posted by blogger Inspector Gadget recently showed a cop in London searching a man in public. The cop was making jokes and smiling a lot during his search, just like he’d been trained to do. The problem was that the man had a knife and tried to run when he realised it was about to be discovered. This caught the cop off guard because, due to his “nice boy” demeanour he wasn’t braced for anything except convivial compliance with his wishes. A struggle then ensued and the “suspect” was brought down by both the crestfallen nice officer and his colleague with the body cam.

In Rome if the traffic is bad or people act like dicks when driving, others will blare their horns and shout abuse. It gets quite volatile and can be quite entertaining (on the road from Circus Maximus to the Appia Antica on a hot August day the only thing that’s missing is a conductor to accompany the blaring of horns at rush hour). However I have only seen ONE incident in the 23 years I’ve been coming here where a punch was thrown. Italians let it all out at the time, they don’t bottle it up and then let it spill over by adhering to a code of conduct that was on the way out by the 1920s.

In England we still believe that being charming, remembering Ps and Qs and being dignified will allow us to get our own way when faced with bullies, miscreants and horrible cunts.

The lack of real consequences for obnoxious behaviour (and by this I mean from our peers, not cops) is the reason that people are becoming worse and worse to each other.

A recent poll in the UK showed that over 70% of Leavers and Remainers in the ongoing wank fest that is Brexit said that, in their opinion, it was acceptable to use physical violence against a politician if it meant they got their own way.

My experience with pikeys (travellers) in the UK is that they are sneaky, underhanded, manipulative and sometimes violent people who only obey the rules of society beyond their kin in so far as it serves them. When I was in police training, a former constable turned trainer said to us “Romany Gypsies are a protected ethnic minority. I’m sure they’re lovely. I have however, never met any Romany Gypsies. All I’ve met is thieving Irish travellers who get drunk, steal and hit their wives”.

Recently, unarmed English police officer Andrew Harper was dragged to his death under a vehicle driven by a pikey who had no regard for the law or that Andrew represented it. The public outcry against this was almost unique in its ferocity and in the days that followed, newly appointed Northamptonshire Police Chief Constable Nick Adderley made the unprecedented move to offer tazers to all his frontline officers if they wanted one. This was seen as a radical move by many but undoubtedly had private citizens in southern states of the USA sniggering into their reloaders.

Society has waned so much that aggressive and/or violent and selfish people are becoming more and more common but we still choose to see this as the exception rather than the norm.

The two festering old cunts who took two random, reserved seats on a train and then refused to give them up to the heavily pregnant woman they belonged to were worthless scumbags but, being British, we try to evaluate and rationalise and justify. Respect for the elderly, not causing a fuss and the fact that the train guard, when informed of the situation, upgraded the woman and her children to First class really don’t get past the fact that these two disgusting, self-entitled bags of dogshit thought that nobody else’s feelings mattered and they could do whatever they wanted. The guard should have confronted them but found another way to defuse it. The woman and her family got the better deal but the two festering cunts still kept seats they had no right to be using and went unpunished.

Personally I would have simply threatened to stand there and fart in their faces for the entire journey if they didn’t fuck off and make good on that promise if they didn’t budge. But the British part of me, that upbringing that wants to prove I’m “better than that” tells me in a whiny little voice that that would make me the bad guy and would be very rude and naughty.

A while back I flew from Melbourne to Abu Dhabi (13 hours) had a 7.5 hour stopover and then flew for 7 hours to London. My body was aching and I was grumpy, like the majority of the passengers and to really ice the cake, the twat sitting behind me objected to me reclining my seat and eventually stuck his knee against it to prevent me doing so. When I stood up and went “seriously?!” he replied with petulant obstinacy, “yes, I don’t want you to put your chair back!”. Rather than get into a slanging match with the little tit I simply told a stewardess who, in a broad Glaswegian accent, told him “I don’t care, he’s got every right to put his seat back!” and the little turd caved in while I glared at him over the top of the seat. This was about the fairest way to deal with it as he was being a prick and a little bit of public humiliation did him the world of good. The guy sat next to me said later “to be fair, I don’t like it when people recline their seats” and I replied “if he doesn’t like it he should fly Business class”. Fact the steward had my back and specifically stated that it was completely acceptable for me to recline my seat at any time other than meals, take off or landing (and turbulence) didn’t seem to get through. The rules pissed this little berk off so he was, in his own passive/aggressive tantrum going to try and get his own way.

But I digress…

As a teenager I saw Mad Max 2 before the first one. The sequel is set after society has collapsed and everyone is struggling for survival. When I finally got round to watching the original movie (set a few years prior to the sequel where society is in a state of terminal decay but still functioning) a scene where a suspect is released due to no witnesses turning up to his trial for rape has the arresting officer going batshit and trying to assault both the guy himself and his lawyers. One of the solicitors says repeatedly “the courts will hear of this” and the chief of police later adds “as long as the paperwork is clean, you boys can do what you want out there”. Even as a child it struck me as bizarre that in a dystopian, almost lawless society people were still obsessed with their rules.

As an English teacher I teach a wide variety of Italian students from children to adults and one of my classes has a Polizia Commisario Capo in it. This rank is equivalent to Chief Superintendent in the UK and the guy was flabbergasted when I told him that a). English cops are mainly unarmed and b). They are taught to strike to upper arms and outer thighs with their batons. Italian cops are trained to hit to elbows and knees. Reason being…well, do you need to be told?

The story about the two fucking horrible bastards on that train upset me to my core because it showed me that rules aren’t merely broken by chavs, schoolkids or the badly educated. They are broken by supposedly intelligent, posh, well-to-do people who are meant to set an example.

Some comments have stated that Amanda’s children should have let the old cunts have their seats but as Amanda said, they spoke to her like she was nothing and were using bullying tactics, knowing that she was powerless to do anything.

Society is broken and unless we realise that nothing is going to change.