Do Guardian:

The prime minister said last week that the government would investigate whether social networking platforms should be shut down if they helped to “plot” crime in the wake of the riots.

The 20-year-old from Colchester was arrested on Friday after Essex police discovered the alleged plans circulating on the BlackBerry Messenger service and Facebook.

The unnamed man has been charged with “encouraging or assisting in the commission of an offence” under the 2007 Serious Crime Act, police said.

He was arrested with another 20-year-old man the day the water fight was allegedly due to take place, and has been bailed to appear before Colchester magistrates on 1 September. The second man was released without charge.

E há quem ache que eu exagero… A foto é do ano novo tailandês (comemorado à base de água) e eu peguei no Telegraph.

O André citou esse vídeo num comentário de post e me ocorreu: será que vão achar assunto pra autotunar algum falante londrino?

Material pra isso é o que não falta:

Foto: Guardian

Chupinhei o título do post da jornalista inglesa Laurie Penny para citar parte dele aqui:

The truth is that very few people know why this is happening. They don’t know, because they were not watching these communities. Nobody has been watching Tottenham since the television cameras drifted away after the Broadwater Farm riots of 1985. Most of the people who will be writing, speaking and pontificating about the disorder this weekend have absolutely no idea what it is like to grow up in a community where there are no jobs, no space to live or move, and the police are on the streets stopping-and-searching you as you come home from school. The people who do will be waking up this week in the sure and certain knowledge that after decades of being ignored and marginalised and harassed by the police, after months of seeing any conceivable hope of a better future confiscated, they are finally on the news. In one NBC report, a young man in Tottenham was asked if rioting really achieved anything:

“Yes,” said the young man. “You wouldn’t be talking to me now if we didn’t riot, would you?”

“Two months ago we marched to Scotland Yard, more than 2,000 of us, all blacks, and it was peaceful and calm and you know what? Not a word in the press. Last night a bit of rioting and looting and look around you.”

Eavesdropping from among the onlookers, I looked around. A dozen TV crews and newspaper reporters interviewing the young men everywhere ‘’’

There are communities all over the country that nobody paid attention to unless there had recently been a riot or a murdered child. Well, they’re paying attention now.

(…)

Riots are about power, and they are about catharsis. They are not about poor parenting, or youth services being cut, or any of the other snap explanations that media pundits have been trotting out: structural inequalities, as a friend of mine remarked today, are not solved by a few pool tables. People riot because it makes them feel powerful, even if only for a night. People riot because they have spent their whole lives being told that they are good for nothing, and they realise that together they can do anything – literally, anything at all. People to whom respect has never been shown riot because they feel they have little reason to show respect themselves, and it spreads like fire on a warm summer night. And now people have lost their homes, and the country is tearing itself apart.

Noone expected this. The so-called leaders who have taken three solid days to return from their foreign holidays to a country in flames did not anticipate this. The people running Britain had absolutely no clue how desperate things had become. They thought that after thirty years of soaring inequality, in the middle of a recession, they could take away the last little things that gave people hope, the benefits, the jobs, the possibility of higher education, the support structures, and nothing would happen. They were wrong. And now my city is burning, and it will continue to burn until we stop the blanket condemnations and blind conjecture and try to understand just what has brought viral civil unrest to Britain. Let me give you a hint: it ain’t Twitter.

Todo o post vale a leitura. A dica foi do Tubaína, valheu!

E se tudo isso for uma bomba-relógio sendo detonada na hora certa?

Não era imprevisível, como dizem Mary Riddell, no Telegraph…

It is no coincidence that the worst violence London has seen in many decades takes place against the backdrop of a global economy poised for freefall. The causes of recession set out by J K Galbraith in his book, The Great Crash 1929, were as follows: bad income distribution, a business sector engaged in “corporate larceny”, a weak banking structure and an import/export imbalance.

All those factors are again in play. In the bubble of the 1920s, the top 5 per cent of earners creamed off one-third of personal income. Today, Britain is less equal, in wages, wealth and life chances, than at any time since then. Last year alone, the combined fortunes of the 1,000 richest people in Britain rose by 30 per cent to £333.5 billion.

Europe’s leaders, our own Prime Minister and Chancellor included, were parked on sun-loungers as London burned. Although the epicentre of the immediate economic crisis is the eurozone, successive British governments have colluded in incubating the poverty, the inequality and the inhumanity now exacerbated by financial turmoil.

Britain’s lack of growth is not an economic debating point or a stick with which to beat George Osborne, any more than our deskilled, demotivated, under-educated non-workforce is simply a blot on the national balance sheet. Watch the juvenile wrecking crews on the city streets and weep for all our futures. The “lost generation” is mustering for war.

…E Nina Power, no Guardian:

Combine understandable suspicion of and resentment towards the police based on experience and memory with high poverty and large unemployment and the reasons why people are taking to the streets become clear. (Haringey, the borough that includes Tottenham, has the fourth highest level of child poverty in London and an unemployment rate of 8.8%, double the national average, with one vacancy for every 54 seeking work in the borough.)

(…)

Images of burning buildings, cars aflame and stripped-out shops may provide spectacular fodder for a restless media, ever hungry for new stories and fresh groups to demonise, but we will understand nothing of these events if we ignore the history and the context in which they occur.

O Guardian fez um “antes e depois” com as fotos dos lugares atingidos pelos tumultos do fim de semana.

No site deles tem mais fotos – e dá pra comparar as duas cenas de forma mais dinâmica, veja lá.

Essa, na capa do Guadian, é uma das imagens dos tumultos de Londres:

Um ícone não-ícone. O Subcomandante Marcos colide com a lógica No Logo ao contrário, um Rage Against the Machine bancado por uma corporação. Quem é o anonymous: o baderneiro ou a multinacional?

O Marcus, que trabalhou comigo no Link e agora tá no G1, entrevistou o Ernest Greene e perguntou sobre o Brasil. Ele disse que vem no início do ano que vem. Massa. E pra não perder o costume, mais um vídeo dos caras, esse feito pelo Guardian.

Essa história do News of the World, pelo visto, mal começou. O que era apenas um escândalo de jornalismo marrom invadindo privacidades já fechou um jornal centenário, derrubou executivos de diferentes redações, fez cair o segundo nome da Scotland Yard e o CEO da Dow Jones, rendeu um pedido de desculpas amarelado no fim de semana, bateu no FBI e agora temos o primeiro cadáver, do jornalista que começou a fazer as denúncias e os hackers do Lulz Sec já começaram a mexer nos sites de Murdoch, primeiro avisando que ele havia morrido. Vale conferir também a geral que o Telegraph fez nos arquivos do News of the World, apontando matérias que teriam saído de grampos telefônicos, para ver que todo mundo estava na mira do jornal: famílias de vítimas de crimes, jogadores de futebol, políticos, celebridades, a família real inglesa. Não duvide se o furdúncio de merda derrubar até o primeiro ministro inglês…

Será que Rupert Murdoch cai? Não custa lembrar que foi a Fox News quem puxou toda a onda de neoconservadorismo que permitiu mutações canhestras da direita (como o Tea Party nos EUA e várias cocotas reaças de plantão espalhadas em sites, jornais e canais de TV pelo planeta)…

Vale – e muito – assistir ao depoimento de Nick Davies, jornalista do Guardian que encampou essa briga contra o magnata das comunicações a ponto de valer-lhe o apelido de “Capitão Ahab”, tamanha sua obsessão em caçar sua Moby Dick, que explica o que está acontecendo no vídeo abaixo:

Traduzo uns trechos:

“É sobre poder e sobre a forma que a elite do poder é acostumada a cuidar de si mesma. Eu acho que razoável para qualquer um perceber agora que a corporação de Murdoch tem muito poder. É claro pela forma que a polícia, a imprensa e alguns políticos automaticamente saem do caminho e dizem: ‘Não vamos causar problemas, eles podem nos machucar’. Eles já tinham muito poder antes disso tudo começar e acho que é muito improvável que seja do interesse de nossa sociedade como um todo dar ainda mais poder para essa organização”.

(…)

“Pra mim, isso não é uma história sobre jornalistas se comportando mal. É uma história sobre a elite do poder. É sobre a organização de notícias mais poderosa no mundo, sobre a polícia mais poderosa no país, sobre o partido mais poderoso no país e, em todo caso, sobre a Press Complaints Commission (órgão regulador da imprensa no Reino Unido). E sobre como todos eles espontaneamente se reuniram para tornar suas vidas mais fácil, como presumiram casualmente que a lei não valeria para eles e que era perfeitamente confortável mentir para o resto de nós, pois somos pessoas pequenas, não saberíamos que eles estavam fazendo isso. É isso que definitivamente me deixa com raiva, sobre essas presunções dessa elite do poder”

Isso está apenas começando…

What is the trait you most deplore in others?
A lot of people seem obliged to have a viewpoint.

De uma entrevista pro Guardian.

Do Guardian, dica da Taís.