Do the politicians/experts moaning about BBM have no idea how dumb they sound? It's basically just texting. Maybe the history books have it wrong, maybe the Boxer Rebellion was organised via Blackberry Messenger and Twitter.
All attempts at politicising this are failing terribly. Ken Livingstone is going on and on about how it's due to spending cuts. WRONG, half these kids don't even know what spending cuts means. Others are blaming police cuts. But they haven't even started cutting the police yet. Others going on about youth clubs. Do they really think these kids wouldn't go looting if they went to youth clubs? Some blame the fact that these kids grew up in poverty. Except so did millions of other kids, and they aren't rioting. Others are going on about how the police treat these kids badly, and those tensions caused it. No, they really didn't - these kids would hate the police whether they were the hippies we have now or hard-ass militants.
The weirdest part of all this is that all the bullshit politicising is coming almost solely from the left. Normally you'd think there would be a huge firestorm about immigration, multiculturalism, etc due to the significant number of ethnic minorities seen in the pictures. But none of the people being interviewed on tv are talking about that stuff, and credit to them for it. This is nothing to do with immigration or even race. Even Sky News seem to get that. And crazier still, the Conservatives are the party going on about 'hug a hoodie' and 'we must police by consent' and not wanting to take a hard line. HELLO? You're the fucking Conservative party, you're the Security party, you're the party that is supposed to take a hard line, zero tolerance approach to rioting scum and not give a fuck about their human rights.
The only political angles that I think have any legitimacy in this issue are:
1. Are future police cuts sustainable, when they can't even protect the public at full strength?
2. The police need more effective ways of dispersing rioters. i.e. rubber bullets, water cannons.
3. The BBC need more funding so that they can buy another news helicopter. The current one goes down every 5 minutes to refuel or some shit.