Panem et Circenses

"Roll Up! Roll up! Roll up for the event of this generation, the furthering of one of the great institutions of our age!

On the 29th of April every single one of you is warmly invited to witness a ROYAL WEDDING!

I'm certain all of you are excited about the forthcoming union of one of the fine heirs to our throne, none other than the Prince William, and the wonderful and totally middle-class woman Catherine 'Kate' Middleton, showing that all of you proletarian scumbags middle-class women out there can too eventually fulfil what I am sure is the ultimate dream of all of you pretties, and become a princess! In fact, we're sooo sure that you'll want to join us in our jubilation, that we've made the event a special day off just so you can be a part of it! I mean sure small-businesses and the like will suffer from it... but who cares about them? It's a Royal Wedding!

So roll out the bunting, gather up some food and grab everyone you know, because you really don't want to miss this piece of history, quite possibly the most important event this year! Who cares about those people who did that walk? Or that thing about electoral reform (which is soooooo boring, although you should totally vote no to AV, your minds are too feeble to cope with it it's stupidly complicated)? Or those people off in the Middle East kicking off and ruining our oil supplies? And what's that about welfare reform? You do realise that they're all scrounging scum, right? Yes, the Royal Wedding is the single most important thing that will happen this year, it's history in the making, and you can be a part of it!

Even though we, alas, have to reserve spaces at the event itself for esteemed democratic figures (although, sadly, our good friends, the rulers of Bahrain, cannot attend due to people kicking-off over there scum-bags), and great icons of British culture, and as such you cannot directly attend the wedding (it'd be a bit of a tight squeeze to get all 60-odd million of you in the abbey after all) but don't worry! Our wonderful, unbiased, media knows exactly what you want and so has graciously decided that, as all of you can't come to The Wedding, The Wedding can come to you! Our esteemed newspaper institutions - The Mail, The Telegraph and The Express - are sure to have wonderful coverage! And that's not the best part! The BBC, ITV, Sky and five have all dedicated themselves to covering this once in a lifetime event! And the other option's another sodding episode of that Gypsy wedding show on Channel 4. So fuck that and WATCH THE WEDDING! It's like you're there. In HISTORY! AS IT HAPPENS!

Heck, this means that you can celebrate the Royal Wedding even more than those schmucks who can only have the shitty view from the ground! You get the best damn seats in the house! And it gets better!! You can have street parties! Can those schmucks have street parties? No, so let's get the bunting, paper hats, and lukewarm cherryade out and celebrate the all important event of the year! I mean sure the deadline has been and passed, but who cares about the red-tape conspiracy by our evil, bureaucratic, faintly Communist, councils to stop you having fun?! Have a street party! Have fun. This isn't an order, since you are celebrating the Royal Wedding already. Everyone is.

Of course there is the chance that you are one of the incredibly small minority of leftist-republican-anarchists who hate Britain and its culture. In which case, you are evil, and bad, and wrong, and quite probably the sort of scumbags who would throw a protest solely to ruin the day for this wonderful couple. Don't give me that load of fecal matter about how 'monarchy is privellidge', and 'monarchy is unfair' and 'why do we have to pay', and 'waa, wa, wa, our wonderful allies in the Middle East are totally dictators because they rough up their opposition' (like we don't). You're in it this solely to be a jerk. Jerk. And no you can't have your petty street-party. Fun is only for nice obedient sheep people. Not jerks. Any you are a jerk because otherwise why would you oppose the esteemed rights of our Royal Family. Incidentally, any of you scum-bags who attack the wedding need to expect no mercy. Stuff like protesting against our wonderful monarchy has no place in a democracy.

If you aren't one of those minority lefty-anarchist scum-bags on the other hand, come along it's free* and, most importantly of all British. You aren't a jerk, so celebrate. Have fun. Have fun.

*'Free' does not include the £20million security costs. Or the few-billions it will cost the economy. But the Royals bring in cash-monies anyway that will cancel it out. They do. Honest."*

*Actually, I can't find anything to counter this (although I swear that the Royals don't bring in that much tourism money).

I'm so confiscating my grandparents' Daily Mail...

 EDIT (02/11/2012): In hindsight, I don't feel like I should have posted this. Gonna leave this up though since I only Orwell stuff if I have really good reasons to - ultimately pretending it never happened seems at the very least odd to my moral compass. Also, none of the links in this work anymore since itsyotsy got shut down and I really cannot be bothered to track them down again.

You know the stereotype of old people being conservatives of both the big 'C' and small 'c' types? Well I think my paternal grandparents may well conform to that (I think my dad is also a Tory). Well, my grandmother certainly does, at least, going off a conversation I had with her yesterday. In a bullet point list, here are a few views she expressed. Whilst reading this I ask you to bear in mind that she's actually British Chinese (I think her father was a second-generation Chinese immigrant) :

• 'Enoch Powell was right when he said he didn't want all of those coming in here' I'm paraphrasing slightly, but the first part is what my grandmother said word for word.
• Schools should bring back Christian assemblies as they teach people morals (I didn't even realise she was a practising Christian).
• We'll soon be majority non-white-British.
• The Muslims will be taking over with their Diwali and what have-you (yes, Muslims, I actually face-palmed at this, I feel quite bad as this was my Grandma I was talking to, I did point out the mistake).
• Christians are oppressed and can't express their beliefs (like that electrician who was transferred to another depot for having a cross in his van), whereas Muslims can (related to the one above, I can't actually remember what she cited, or even if she did).
• Children of immigrants don't count as British
• Immigrants have taken all of our jobs
• They've also taken all of our university places
• Basically immigrants are bad and are ruining this country
• We shouldn't bail-out <insert other country here> as there's no money left (note: I agree with her, kind of, but more due to me thinking that the imposing of economic shock therapy measures on 'bailed-out' countries is wrong,)

There was also the general implicit feeling that this was Labour's fault (my grandfather at least has never voted Labour, excluding in 2005 (I'm inferring this based off a reference to Gordon Brown)).

By way of reference, here's a sampling of what comes up on a search for 'immigration 2011' on the site- all links go direct to the website to istyosty, for best effects read the comments*:

• Boom in immigration helped cause the economic crisis, says Cameron (Jan-2011)
• White children in Birmingham 'a minority' this year due to immigration (Jan-2011)
• Tony Blair changes tune over immigration saying it produced a 'challenge' (March-2011)
•  UK will NOT hit its target to cut immigration in 2011 due to Irish influx, coalition warned (Dec-2010)
• Immigration is too high, say four in five Britons (Jan-2011)
• Migrant cover-up: Reports kept secret by Labour show mass-immigration cut wages, raised tensions, and that too many stayed too long. (March-2011)
• Immigration DID hurt wages and Labour 'under-estimated significantly' the influx, admits Milliband (Feb-2011)
• Schoolgirl, 15, dies from TB after Government warns immigration has caused disease to soar (Jan-2011) 

Not found on the site is their egregious coverage of David Cameron's speech on the subject.

 And the results for 'Muslims 2011':

• Number of British Muslims will double to 5.5m in 20 years (Jan-2011)
• 'Muslim Eton' at centre of Channel 4 hate-preaching allegations is forced to shut over far-right safety fears (Jan-2011)
• 4 men slashed teacher's face and left him with fractured skull for 'teaching other religions to Muslim girls' ( Feb-2011)
• How 100,000 Britons have chosen to become Muslim... and average convert is a 27-year-old white woman (Jan-2011)
• Extremist cleric to lead White House protest calling for Muslims to 'rise up and establish Islamic state in America' (Feb-2011)
• 'We need to be a lot less tolerant towards Islamic Extremists': Cameron calls for immigrants to respect British core values (Feb-2011)
• Mlitant Muslim warns Royal Wedding terror attack is 'highly likely' (April-2011)
• While Muslim sexual predators have been jailed, it is white Britain's hypocritical values that are to blame (Jan-2011, by Melanie Phillips)
• Shame of Britain's Muslim schools: secret filming shows pupils being beaten and told Hindus 'drink cow's p***' (Feb-2011)

Gee, I wonder where my grandma got her views from. And you know what the terrifying thing is? MailOnline is the second largest English language news website in the world. It had 39.6 million readers in March, and chances are not all of them were there to mock it. It is the largest news site in Britain. Regarding the dead-tree copies, according to the Wikipedia, the Daily Mail has a circulation of 2.1million. And this is the sort of stuff they're reading (okay, this and a ton of shallow show business stuff), yeah, likewise, some people take Melanie Phillips seriously. Hell, I think that I used to take Melanie Phillips seriously in my Daily-Mail reading days (I dismissed Littlejohn as being less funny than Clarkson though, and my maternal grandma put me off Jan Moir). Although, in the Mail's defence, they did dedicate 1/3rd of a page to this story concerning 'Hindus, Muslims and Sikhs' standing up for the electrician I mentioned earlier (I did read out the headline to my Grandma...), it's no wonder the far-right are so popular (even if the Mail does pretend to not support them), when we have a media (I've picked on the Mail as I have the most experience with it) which makes it sound like we're under attack from 'Muslamic rape gangs'.

*In order to make sure the results were recent, I put '2011' in. I can't remember the name of the Daily Mail proxy, and I'm only quoting the headlines here - the actual story may show them to be misleading (which probably helps my point here). All headlines come from the articles themselves (there are two headlines visible sometimes) as I'm assuming these were the ones they were printed under. The 'other headline' as it were is visible in the URL the header of the page. I used Google to find them by doing a 'this site only' search, since I couldn't find MailOnline's search function. The results received using this may be different and more positive (or negative, the Mail could just about conceivably be worse than this).,

EDIT: Have istyosty-ified the links.

Old Post: F**k The Coalition

The following was posted originally on my old LiveJournal here on the 22nd of November 2010, it has been edited for spelling, grammar, and spacing, but the original hasn't, I've also tried to clarify a few points in square brackets. I'm also reposting this here because, if I can remember my password, I'm probably going to only use my LJ for fangirling over mainstream rock/emo bands. And I really doubt you're interested in my thoughts on Hayley Williams's latest hair colour (not that I've ever posted about that, it's just nice to have the option to).

"The phrase which makes the title of this post has turned into a catchphrase of sorts on twitter (alongside "Hooray #not"), seeing as I've had good call to say it at least 4 times today (well, yesterday as of alone. Admittedly it was over 3 things which I used it, but I think I need to explain WHY I need to say this in more detail. Or just write it repeatedly going by the rather disorganized nature of my thought process and the fact that, to be frank, I am PISSED right now. 

There were various things which made me angry, although most of my anger is still directed at tuition fees rising (I'm a twin and there's no way my parents can afford £18,000 a year [am now aware that this might not work that way, still irritated at the fees rise], plus living costs, so I'd need to work; which, in this day and age, is easier said than done, and I'm not the most emotionally competent of people (I may or may not have mentioned this before, but according to an internet test my EIQ is probably in the 50's [for self-actualization, the site claimed its tests had been scientifically tested, and it was presumably set so that 100 was the average], so yeah)) and, in my opinion, more importantly are the revelations in this article in the Guardian/Observer concerning the response to the Millibank protests (which, incidentally, I mostly agree with, but that guy who threw the fire extinguisher off the roof was a plonker, like Paul O'Grady said, he should have used it to smash a few more windows/doors [this was a joke, this was also, I think, before Edward Woolard handed himself in, I definitely don’t agree with his sentence]).

Apparently the police are planning on working with defence firms to 'militarise' their response to stuff like this, disregarding the fact that they're privatising yet another thing, there is something mildly disturbing about this, especially when you realise what they're working with the defence firms for: "armoured vehicles, body scanners and better surveillance equipment". Basically they want to be better able to observe us/keep an eye on us and at the rate we're going it'll probably turn out that George Orwell was only off by 30 years in 1984 in my opinion. Then again, I may be being alarmist, and he was behind with the technology too, seeing as I don't think that the Party in 1984 had 'unmanned spy drones' to get intelligence on demonstrations, which is what the Tories are planning on using (I seriously wish I was exaggerating here).

They're also planning to counter "threats of civil disobedience from 'political extremists'", which is a rather vague term (for starters define 'civil disobedience', I have a horrible feeling that the Government's definition is one that dictates that anything less tame than the protests by the 'peaceful majority' of students counts, not to mention the definition of 'Political Extremists', which I have a hunch to be more Socialist Worker's Party than EDL , if only due to the former, in my opinion, having far more sympathetic aims and being left-wing [yeah, not sue where I stand on the SWP now, and I’m not even sure that my statement concerning the EDL is accurate]), and "monitoring “extreme leftwing activity”", which is another vague term, does it mean the activity of people who are extreme leftists (like the non-media definition of anarchist, according to my interpretation of the term [not sure what I mean here, probably the same definition by which I consider myself an anarcho-syndicalist or Libertarian Socialist]) or extremist activity from leftists (like the media definition of anarchist [people who smash things up/actually do anything outside of march from A to B]), not to mention that it's only focused on left-wing activity, which actually does make sense as the right-wingers are probably pretty chuffed with the Coalition government,. And we're supposed to think that the Tories aren't being ideological, yeah [though they’re actually being more factional and authoritarian here, the stuff they’re pulling off is ideological though].

Honestly, I'm 14, so I can't vote, but if I was 18 I probably would have voted Tory in the election (admittedly they always get in where I live, but this is still an incredibly embarrassing fact), or probably Lib Dem, so yes, I would have voted in the coalition. But it is worth bearing in mind that all I've experienced is Nu Labour and the press was largely supportive of them [the Tories, not Nu Labour, also I think I still thought of the Grauniad as a paper for ‘posh’ people (ironic for someone who used to read the Mail, I know)], and back then I believed pretty much every opinion voiced there (including <shudder> the Daily Mail). This was because, if I'm being honest, all of those changes were happening to 'Benefit Scrounging Scum' who were, to me at the time, pretty much that [scrounging scum].

I can't even relate to the person I was a few months ago politically apart from the disagreeing with banker's bonuses. Really, I wish I was kidding. So basically seeing this stuff going on (especially since I think the Tories criticised Labour for using too much surveillance) made me feel betrayed. And it isn't just this, I've now realised that the stereotyped portrayal of people on benefits as 'Benefit Scrounging Scum' is just plain wrong, and for the life of me I can't help but wonder why the state lets these lies continue for any reason other than this stereotype suiting their ideological aims, of course they probably don't care. Heck, I can't even get my head round the logic behind some of the coalition's policies (like the whole 'forcing long-term unemployed to work below minimum wage in the private sector' to make less people claim JSA thing), so yeah: F**K The Coalition.

The quotes are from the Guardian/Observer article I linked to at the start, with the emphasis mine."

Also, I really need to start saying the stuff I said would be my catchphrase more...

 

On Austerity and Shock

I've been reading The Shock Doctrine The Rise of Disaster Capitalism by Naomi Klein recently (over a period of a few weeks; it's a large book and I mainly read it at school due to my mother's derision of anything political (something I'll go into detail about, or not, in a later post)), and was immediately struck by the resemblance of the "economic shock therapy", and the related/congruent shocks of crisis and enforcement, described with in to what the Tories are doing to this country, especially where it is "democratic" governments doing the 'shocking'.

From what I can gather, "Economic shock therapy" is the ideologically driven wholesale privatisation and stripping down of the state accompanied by the reduction of restrictions on Big Business, and it usually provides those at the top with a lot of money. Said economic shock therapy is normally done quickly (like "a short sharp shock"), due to/during a crisis (or 'disaster', hence the subtitle of the book), be it real or imagines and can be accompanied by a "shock of enforcement" of sorts, usually a massive jump towards authoritarianism towards those who speak out against the Government... or in short there are 3 main shocks: The initial shock of crisis (be it real or imagined), followed by economic shock therapy, with the "planned misery" (to use, I think,  Orlando Letelier's term) being enforced with a further shock, with this last shock being in some cases literal.

There are numerous similarities within this pattern to what this government is doing now; first there's the 'crisis' and 'shock' of the deficit which, which is apparently far larger than the Tories realised before taking office (I'm unsure whether I agree with the assertation that there's no money left, although leading credit agencies did threaten to ruin the UK's Perfect AAA rating, and urge a more ambitious plan to cut the borrowing back in June 2010 (something similar, I think, to what's happened to Canada in the past... with said claims being baseless, but with this knowledge coming too late to do anything against the measures taken)).

The various cuts and privatisation or marketisation (functional at least) of the NHS (at least, there's probably more services that are privatised or are functionally becoming that way)  the Government is making also share strong similarities with "economic shock therapy", coming rather quickly, being what is referred to as "voodoo politics" (behind closed doors and expressly not what the Government was voted in for (well, the tories did promise to make cuts, but not to the scale and they weren't really elected (not to mention all the lies both parties in the coalition (and other governments before hand) made in the run up to the election)), and being accompanied by what George Monbiot has described as the heist of the century; allowing businesses to pay no tax on their foreign branches, cutting corporate tax and  allowing businesses to claim back expenses on the foreign branches that they aren't paying tax for. Not to mention the non-taxing of banker's bonuses (which are worth a *lot*), and there are more. And the Tories claim people on benefits are the scroungers. Numerous charities have also warned of the dangers of the Government's cuts, which seem to be rather similar to the "planned misery" of other economic shock therapy programmes.

This brings me to my final point; the 'shock of enforcement'. The government is not fully authoritarian (yet), but the usage of 'kettling' during protests (especially to peaceful, and relatively young (not entirely 'children', but I think the ages of those protesting did lean towards the young side (after all, we're the ones who are losing our futures)) protestors, as seen on Day X (24th November 2010) and Day X3 (9th December 2010),although happily averted on DayX 2 (30th November)) and the, admittedly isolated, usage of CS spray on protestors for UK uncut, who were protesting against tax avoidance, and the cuts, arguing that, if big business paid its taxes, the cuts would be largely unnecessary (when one man (the lovely Sir Phil Green, owner of Arcadia, who is an advisor to the Government on the cuts (well, he's the "efficiency adviser")) has dodged more in tax in one year than my mum'd earn in 100000 years I can say that this is probably not far off, although the tax reforms mentioned before will probably make this less of the status quo) in particular stick out. The discussion of banning protests and the introduction of water cannons (and the police being praised for their restraint in not shooting protestors who surrounded a car carrying the Duchess of York and Prince Charles to the Royal Variety Performance) also raise issues for the fture.

All in all, I'd say that the government's austerity measures are economic shock therapy but less so; perhaps just a jolt from one of those 'shocking pens' or those games which give you electric shocks if you get the answer wrong, rather than a full on ECT shock, but still not very nice nonetheless.

This said, this blog post was written before many of the cuts hit in full and the 'March for the Alternative' on the 26th March (and the Royal Wedding), and the government's handling of those events may very well change my view.

On the EDL

"Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers."-Article 19 of The Universal Declaration of Human Rights. This quote pretty much sums up my whole mentality towards freedom of expression. 

There are people who hold views which, to be frank, are reprehensible, the infamous twit wearethebritish being just one example (of many, he was literally the first person I came up with (it was going to be the EDL, but I'm inclined to believe at least some of the membership believe the line that it is against radical Islamism), not even necessarily the best example (maybe crutchbender would have been better...))), however I believe that they have the right to mouth off whatever views they may have, and protest (peacefully) to that effect (I think the pressure of being out in public tends to deter people from not doing so (largely due to accountability/social norms; hence why the police tend to be rather violent), and that any law against protesting is probably more to do with governments being scared of people realising that there's an alternative to what's going on, which is another reason why freedom of expression and thought is important). I believe this regardless of their views, although I do believe that anyone who spouts bile about how people who don't adhere to a certain thing should be killed also should have an eye kept on them (largely because the other rights are also pretty damn important).

Discriminatory and fascistic views are reprehensible, but banning them -in my opinion- isn't the answer, even from a non-moral standpoint; banning people from expressing such views only breeds resentment, it won't stop people having them and may very well result in racists/sexists/homophobes/islamophobes/any other type of discriminator I may have missed claiming the moral high horse. Considering what we're dealing with, this is probably not a good thing. Furthermore, whilst the Right to freedom of Expression is a right, being listened to is rather less so*. This said, I don't necessarily think that ignoring them is the best policy, since I think that quite often people listen to them simply because it seems like the speaker is on their side when no one else is. I'm technically just re-saying what has already been said of this subject, but demonising the EDL and the like, whilst it does make us feel oh so very morally superior and may be justified, will do nothing but enforce the (mistaken) belief that groups like the EDL are the only ones who are sticking up for them (the 'chav' stereotype, as pointed out by Lisa Ansell, and the nose-look-downery that results not helping here (this also being pointed out by Lisa)). This is also why the (popular, mainstream) media has such a right-wing bias, and the despite such politics not being good for humanity (this being in my opinion, and I'm not arguing that the right-wing media needs to be banned), and especially the sort of people who said media is aimed at; they manage to keep up a plausible pretence of supporting the working-class, whilst the mainstream left has the image of being a bunch of detached posh people (or 'Guardian readers' as it were (and I speak as a Guardian reader), and the far left are just 'anarchists' (media definition, basically people who want to ruin this fine country). Just like how 'we' (as in lefties, and I'm making another gross generalisation here) demonise the working-class as 'chavs' and thugs, thus alienating them from both the mainstream political discourse (which focuses entirely one the 'squeezed middle' class of Daily Mail readers (and there's another generalisation)) and left-wing politics (to paraphrase the Wikipedia page for fascism, liberalism is bourgeoisie (or, at least is seen that way), and (not paraphrasing the Wikipedia) socialism (and, as mentioned before, anarchism) is treated pretty badly by the popular media) so along comes the EDL claiming to stand for the working class against the Islamist threat (and indeed I think that a sizable chunk of the people who clicked 'like' on the page for them believe this) and of course people follow them. Then the EDL is demonised, which results in an almost reflexive response of defence and further alienation, especially when you consider that the EDL is basically just spouting off what the right-wing press says in response to immigration, results. The crux of the issue is not the beliefs of the far-right, but the social attitudes and structures which lead to people joining up with the far-right (and quite possibly religious extremism (right down to the demonization, although please note that this is pure conjecture here)), and, more critically, the belief that no one is sticking up for the white working-class. 

Marginalisation, division, and demonization don't help anybody, except maybe those who want us divided. Countering fascism is very good, but going on about how all members of the far-right are scum is not the best way to go about it, consider how the press (and the right) treats us and bear this in mind. Mass tarring of people with the same metaphorical brush may make us (again a generalisation) feel good (and, admittedly, is convenient), but it won't get us anywhere.

I sincerely hope the preceding post makes sense, Lissy.

tl;dr: Yes, racists are bad, no we shouldn't take away their rights. Yes the EDL are not good, but the reasons behind its low-grade popularity are what we should be targeting, not the members. So we should probably stop trolling them (I'm including myself in this) and focus on targeting the factors which (indirectly) caused  its formation. And this has probably been said in a better way before.

*note: I'd like to take this opportunity to say that, apart from suspected spam-bots (and even then, with spam followers, I have a mini argument with myself), I've decided that I don't actually believe in blocking (not that I've really had anyone worth blocking (I've only interacted with wearethebritish, and he blocked me (presumably on the basis of me being a teenage girl and my opinions therefore not counting), and bodderick), so I might very well change my mind on this) even if they're idiot and/or insult you (although I do tend to get rather indignant when I'm told that I'm stupid, trolls be warned.).

Little Brother

The United States Department of Justice has given twitter a subpoena asking for the details of 'customer or subscriber accounts for each account registered to or associated with WikiLeaks', from November 1 2009, or over a year ago. You can read the subpoena in more detail here. The reason: it [the information] is 'relevant and material to an ongoing criminal investigation'.

I'm unclear as to what precisely 'associated with WikiLeaks' means, but I'm under the impression that the subpoena applies to every single one of WikiLeaks's, as of me writing this, in the region of 635,000 followers (although, presumably, there are SpamBot followers).

Although I'm not an expert on US law I am under the impression that only the stealing of state secrets is actually illegal, making the criminal investigation either tangentially towards Julian Assange or towards Private Bradley Manning, who is believed to be the one who provided WikiLeaks with the material for the Iraq War Logs and Cables leaks, as well as the 2007 video taken on an Apache helicopter which showed (I think) civilians being shot dead by it. I doubt that the data would be material to the allegations against Julian Assange (which he may actually be guilty of, but he may also be innocent and it is the latter which would normally be assumed (most likely for the worse, but there is little doubt that who Julian Assange is is the main motivation for the efforts to charge him, not the crime itself (this being a sad reflection of our time))) due to them being unrelated with WikiLeaks except for the man these allegations are towards, nor would knowing these details be material in any investigation towards Private Bradley Manning (who is presently being held in solitary confinement) especially considering that he has spent most of the last year imprisoned.

In fact this is likely just another stage in the US Government's attacks on the organisation; making people afraid to support it, to quote @Nick4Glengate "They don't need to charge us with anything - they are relying on fear.". Of course there is one other advantage I can think of that the US government would have; the information on more people, people with whom they may not agree politically. Knowing that the US know who you are is actually terrifying, meaning that they get two advantages which enable them to better control us; knowledge of who we are an us being afraid of them. I believe that this can be classified as tyranny and almost certainly violates the US's own Constitution (though whether this is viewed as an issue by the government remains to be seen).

This brings me onto the second part of this post; yesterday, by some coincidence, I was reading a 'book' (well, a PDF version of a book) by Cory Doctorow called "Little Brother", I won't spoil the details of the plot here (although, if you want to read it, it's available free to download off the official website, I personally picked the fan-made PDF), but a blog is started in the book called 'Abuses of Authority' which details the 'Big Brother' actions of the Department of Homeland Security, and abuses of power. I'm thinking that we need something like the the one in 'Little Brother' to keep an eye on not only the 'Big Brother' circumstances which can arise in this country, like as detailed by Police State UK amongst others, but the ones in other countries, such as the US, all in one place; I'm of the belief that, if dots can be connected (to use a term similar to that used in the 'about' section of Police State UK) between the various attack on our civil liberties by the ruling class in the UK then those same links can be made with other countries, and if we are going to tackle the 'Big Brother' complex in which many countries have settled then it must be a more international co-ordinated effort which stops it, if we're being oppressed then it's our right to stand up to our oppressors, and we should stand up against all oppression, not just that which effects us.
Incidents like this abuse of power by the US DoJ are precisely why I think we need a collaborative effort to detail abuses of power wherever they happen, not just in places such as China (which would almost certainly be lambasted for pulling a similar move), but in ostensibly 'free' countries, such as the UK and the US, where civil liberties are being excessively curbed in the name of security.

We need to show our governments (as, to paraphrase the Constitution, Government comes from the consent of the people) that we won't stand for this sort of thing, regardless of whether it occurs in the place we live or overseas, whether it serves the interest of our countries or not; isolation between peoples of different nationalities serves only the interests of those in power, enabling them to get away with things they ordinarily wouldn't by stirring up fear of people in those countries and making us feel that, for our safety, our liberty, and the liberty of others has to be taken away. We need to collectively make a stand against and spread awareness of these abuses of power, otherwise they'll keep happening.

Dear Kenneth Tong

We’ve given your stupid irresponsible statements/tweets far too much attention, which let’s face it, is one of the main motivators for them. So I would like to take this opportunity to say two words to you: Bugger. Off.

Seriously, I actually have nowhere to start with your statements which claim that women should starve themselves to size 0 (presumably US) [note: he may have tweeted with that exact wording, but I’m just paraphrasing as far as I’m concerned], but I think the notion of ‘controlled anorexia’ is a good place to start.
I’m going to go out on a limb and assume that no, you haven’t seen the results of uncontrolled anorexia, however I have (albeit in one case coupled with alcoholism) and I must say this, it isn’t pretty. So no, getting people to starve themselves won’t actually alow that wet dream of yours to become reality.

And no, I’m not being unreasonable in calling this a ‘wet dream’, although, seeing as it’s aimed at controlling women, ‘misogynistic’ may be more appropriate. From what I cn gather you want a Stepford Wives-esque scenario where women are forced to act identically according to the whims of men. I shouldn’t have to explain why this is wrong, and if I do then I must say that I feel deeply piteous towards you.

Not to mention, although I technically already have, that, if your determination for every woman to be size 0 is realised, people won’t be healthy. People are naturally different sizes, some tall, some short (I myself falling firmly into the latter category), some fat, some thin, size isn’t what matters in health, and, in the case of many accusations concerning the obesity epidemic, nor do outside appearances as long as you aren’t starving yourself (or, following your proposals) or your mobility isn’t seriously hampered by your girth, in fact even in these cases what’s outside isn’t what counts, it’s what you’re like on the inside.

Indeed there are the so-called ‘TOFIs (Thin Outside Fat Inside), who are unhealthy due to not exercising and eating a lot of junk food (heck, I’m very probably one of them), not to mention that there is evidence that being fat is helpful (it’s even in the tabloids (well, the Daily Fail Mail), which are usually very fatophobia-y) to health, ironically enough given every one’s expectations.

So yeah, I’m going to assume you either don’t know what you’re on about, which is pretty bad, or you don’t care, which is worse, either way, please kindly bugger off with these statements. Because after this I’m not giving you the time of day.

No love, LissyNumber
[note: this was originally posted on my Tumblr,( link )]

[EDIT: 2/1/2012 (yes almost a year after this was first published): finally adding paragraph spacing into this, hopefully it's less of a Wall of Text now]