London Riots: They’re Paying Attention Now
Posted in Main Blog (All Posts) on August 10th, 2011 4:45 am by HL
London Riots: They’re Paying Attention Now
It’s day four of riots and madness in the U.K., and if we want to understand what’s happening, we’d best pay attention to young journalists like Laurie Penny, who wrote Tuesday: “Angry young people with nothing to do and little to lose are turning on their own communities, and they cannot be stopped, and they know it.” Penny Red (posted on Aug. 9) via @JPBarlow: In the scramble to comprehend the riots, every single commentator has opened with a ritual condemnation of the violence, as if it were in any doubt that arson, muggings and lootings are ugly occurrences. That much should be obvious to anyone who is watching Croydon burn down on the BBC right now. David Lammy, MP for Tottenham, called the disorder ‘mindless, mindless’. Nick Clegg denounced it as ‘needless, opportunistic theft and violence’. Speaking from his Tuscan holiday villa, Prime Minister David Cameron – who has finally decided to return home to take charge – declared simply that the social unrest searing through the poorest boroughs in the country was “utterly unacceptable.” The violence on the streets is being dismissed as ‘pure criminality,’ as the work of a ‘violent minority’, as ‘opportunism.’ This is madly insufficient. It is no way to talk about viral civil unrest. Angry young people with nothing to do and little to lose are turning on their own communities, and they cannot be stopped, and they know it. Tonight, in one of the greatest cities in the world, society is ripping itself apart. Violence is rarely mindless. The politics of a burning building, a smashed-in shop or a young man shot by police may be obscured even to those who lit the rags or fired the gun, but the politics are there. Unquestionably there is far, far more to these riots than the death of Mark Duggan, whose shooting sparked off the unrest on Saturday, when two police cars were set alight after a five-hour vigil at Tottenham police station. A peaceful protest over the death of a man at police hands, in a community where locals have been given every reason to mistrust the forces of law and order, is one sort of political statement. Raiding shops for technology and trainers that cost ten times as much as the benefits you’re no longer entitled to is another. A co-ordinated, viral wave of civil unrest across the poorest boroughs of Britain, with young people coming from across the capital and the country to battle the police, is another. Read more
It’s day four of riots and madness in the U.K., and if we want to understand what’s happening, we’d best pay attention to young journalists like Laurie Penny, who wrote Tuesday: “Angry young people with nothing to do and little to lose are turning on their own communities, and they cannot be stopped, and they know it.”
Penny Red (posted on Aug. 9) via @JPBarlow:
In the scramble to comprehend the riots, every single commentator has opened with a ritual condemnation of the violence, as if it were in any doubt that arson, muggings and lootings are ugly occurrences. That much should be obvious to anyone who is watching Croydon burn down on the BBC right now. David Lammy, MP for Tottenham, called the disorder ‘mindless, mindless’. Nick Clegg denounced it as ‘needless, opportunistic theft and violence’. Speaking from his Tuscan holiday villa, Prime Minister David Cameron – who has finally decided to return home to take charge – declared simply that the social unrest searing through the poorest boroughs in the country was “utterly unacceptable.” The violence on the streets is being dismissed as ‘pure criminality,’ as the work of a ‘violent minority’, as ‘opportunism.’ This is madly insufficient. It is no way to talk about viral civil unrest. Angry young people with nothing to do and little to lose are turning on their own communities, and they cannot be stopped, and they know it. Tonight, in one of the greatest cities in the world, society is ripping itself apart.
Violence is rarely mindless. The politics of a burning building, a smashed-in shop or a young man shot by police may be obscured even to those who lit the rags or fired the gun, but the politics are there. Unquestionably there is far, far more to these riots than the death of Mark Duggan, whose shooting sparked off the unrest on Saturday, when two police cars were set alight after a five-hour vigil at Tottenham police station. A peaceful protest over the death of a man at police hands, in a community where locals have been given every reason to mistrust the forces of law and order, is one sort of political statement. Raiding shops for technology and trainers that cost ten times as much as the benefits you’re no longer entitled to is another. A co-ordinated, viral wave of civil unrest across the poorest boroughs of Britain, with young people coming from across the capital and the country to battle the police, is another.
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Anonymous Is Going to Try to Kill Facebook (Video)
Remember, remember the fifth of November 2011. That’s the day hactivist collective Anonymous plans to “kill” the second-busiest website on the Internet “for the sake of your own privacy.” In a video message, Anonymous warns that “you are not safe from them [Facebook] nor from any government” to which the social networking website feeds information. It “is impossible” for Facebook members to delete their own accounts, the message continues, and “Facebook knows more about you than your family.” Unless your family is on Facebook, in which case your relatives tend to know all too much about you. Anonymous has a lot of trophies on its wall, but Facebook is an ambitious target, perhaps having been selected as a show of strength amid police raids against alleged members of Anonymous. If the group is successful, in addition to upsetting Facebook it will irritate many of Facebook’s 750 million active users, who, together with the site’s other visitors, twiddle away more than 700 billion minutes each month poking each other (this according to Facebook’s numbers). Anonymous acknowledges as much in the video below, which takes more of a persuasive angle than its other messages, as in: “One day you will look back on this and realise what we have done here is right, you will thank the rulers of the Internet, we are not harming you but saving you.” (By the way, the fifth of November is Guy Fawkes Day, in commemoration of the night in 1605 that Fawkes tried to blow up the British Parliament. Anonymous supporters sometimes don Guy Fawkes masks as seen in the movie “V for Vendetta,” and the comic book series it was based on.) —PZS Via Business Insider:
Remember, remember the fifth of November 2011. That’s the day hactivist collective Anonymous plans to “kill” the second-busiest website on the Internet “for the sake of your own privacy.” In a video message, Anonymous warns that “you are not safe from them [Facebook] nor from any government” to which the social networking website feeds information.
It “is impossible” for Facebook members to delete their own accounts, the message continues, and “Facebook knows more about you than your family.” Unless your family is on Facebook, in which case your relatives tend to know all too much about you.
Anonymous has a lot of trophies on its wall, but Facebook is an ambitious target, perhaps having been selected as a show of strength amid police raids against alleged members of Anonymous.
If the group is successful, in addition to upsetting Facebook it will irritate many of Facebook’s 750 million active users, who, together with the site’s other visitors, twiddle away more than 700 billion minutes each month poking each other (this according to Facebook’s numbers). Anonymous acknowledges as much in the video below, which takes more of a persuasive angle than its other messages, as in: “One day you will look back on this and realise what we have done here is right, you will thank the rulers of the Internet, we are not harming you but saving you.”
(By the way, the fifth of November is Guy Fawkes Day, in commemoration of the night in 1605 that Fawkes tried to blow up the British Parliament. Anonymous supporters sometimes don Guy Fawkes masks as seen in the movie “V for Vendetta,” and the comic book series it was based on.)? —PZS
Via Business Insider:
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