So now there is a video, showing Mr Tomlinson being batoned and shoved by a police officer in riot gear. Even if you agree with this kind of treatment for protesters, even if you think they are asking for it, surely you can't think that a man walking home from work deserves it?

Like John Q Publican says, it's time to set aside partisan bickering and stand together, with one voice, to call the Establishment to account for the death of an innocent man.

(from Boing Boing)

The mainstream media are avoiding reporting what actually happened in London at the G20 protests as much as they possibly can. Most of them have withdraw from their websites, without explanation, the stories about the protestors hurling bottles and bricks at the police as they tried to help Ian Tomlinson. Only the Metro, so far as I am aware, has actually admitted that this might not have been true, though.

Here is a video by two of the people who were actually there when Mr Tomlinson collapsed:



Please spread that around. I have just heard Hazel Blears repeat the lies on Radio four, and that shit needs countering.

Stephen Tall on LDV has a good dissection of the attitude of the dead tree media to this. We've got our view and we're sticking to it. We've got our view and we're sticking to it. LA LALALALA WE CAN'T HEAR YOU. Anyone who doubts that the mainstream media will either have to change radically or die needs to pay attention to this. In that respect, they are kind of like the current political system... Speaking of which, are any politicians other than Tom Brake going to say something in public about this?

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Other news about the police: I wouldn't bother handing in any stolen property to them if I were you. You'll end up being arrested and held for four hours, fingerprinted and swabbed for DNA. Way to encourage public-spiritedness there, Merseyside rozzers.

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Still, Jesus and Mo is laugh-out-loud funny today, and the barmaid continues to be my role model.

Tom Brake MP was one of those caught in the Climate Camp by police yesterday. Here's a video he has uploaded to YouTube:



The Graun seems to be the only paper not regurgitating the official police line. The blogs and twitter are telling a very different story to the official police line. My thought last night was that the truth was probably somewhere between the two camps, both of them having a vested interest in presenting things in a particular way. The more that comes out, the more I lean towards the police brutality line advanced by the protestors.

Seriously, people, it's time to back the Freedom Bill. How much further do we have to slide down this slippery slope?

Fellow Lib Dems? We have been infiltrated. James Graham just confessed on twitter that he and Helen Duffett are one and the same, and he's actually a Slitheen in human clothing. He's also claiming to be Will Howells, Tom Watson and Stephen Fry.

Follow the unfolding insanity of what happens when you let Lib Dems loose on a protest march with mobile phones and twitter accounts at #climatemarch or Lib Dem Tweets.

In related news, did you know that if you google for James Graham, the third result is "Graham's Celestial Bed"? LMAO!

Via von_geisterhand (again): Penn and Teller's Bullshit has an episode on profanity (which really does contain lots of swearing) in which Penn Jilette and his silent partner give idiot pro-censorship types just enough rope to hang themselves. If you've got half an hour to spare this fine Sunday, have a skeg at this, (especially if you're the anonymous commenter from my last post who felt the need to censor him/herself on the word "bloody". Assuming you've found the font size setting on your browser, and can read this, anyway). Watch for the cute little doggie in part one.

Part one:



Link: http://hk.youtube.com/watch?v=ojEpASQi_7o

Part two:



Link: http://hk.youtube.com/watch?v=C61mC-d8vFA

Part three:



Link: http://hk.youtube.com/watch?v=20EPn4hOrR4

von_geisterhand says in their post:

One slightly more philosophical point that does not get covered in this is that those who wish to limit the range of your verbal expression are essentially trying to also limit the range of your emotions and ideas. If this sounds a little bit like the efforts of the government in "1984", that is because it basically is. An emotion/concept/idea which cannot be expressed in speech will find it very hard to spread in the population.

Penn does obliquely refer to this, if not explicitly. Lots of the talking heads skirt around it too. Really, what it boils down to is this: a state which says that you cannot use some words because they might offend somebody is garnering power that it should not have. If you don't like the words that someone uses, tell them you don't like their words. This is the beauty of free speech: if EVERYONE has it then nobody can force you to not be heard.

In this regard I completely agree with Rowan Atkinson, and what he said when he was campaigning against SOCPA and the Racial and Religious Hatred Act. He said that in my view the right to offend is far more important than any right not to be offended. The right to ridicule is far more important to society than any right not to be ridiculed because one, in my view, represents openness - and the other represents oppression. And he's completely right. Completely and absolutely correct.

I have things that offend me, everyone does. Religious fundamentalists offend me. Hazel Blears offends me. The BNP offend me. But I don't want to ban any of those things. I want to debate them. I want to drag them kicking and screaming into the full light of day and make sure everyone can see their flaws, their inconsistencies, their lies, and their stupidities. I abhor the "no platform" stance lots of people take to the BNP. If you don't allow the BNP to speak publicly, you give them power. Paranoid tinfoil hat wearers will see this censorship and say to themselves Well, there must be something in it, or They wouldn't be trying to shut them up. The proper response to people like the BNP is to let them spout their illogical claptrap in public, pick out all the logical inconsistencies, hold them up for everyone to see, and then point and laugh.

Freedom of speech is important. It's important for big things like racism and homophobia and sexism, but it's also important for little things like the right to say "fuckety bollocks" when you stub your toe without fear of being arrested. To curtail the right to swear in public because somebody might get offended is to erode our right to protest, to express our feelings, to engage with society in a meaningful way. So next time you hear someone swear, don't bemoan the decline and fall of civilisation. Be glad that you live in a society where people can freely express ideas, even if they are ideas that other people don't like.

It's a beautiful thing. You cunts.

matgb, you covert Carlsberg drinker? The wedding is definitely off, because I want to marry this man.

I am totally going to do what he asks, too. I shall be DVD-Ring a couple of political news shows, and posting screencaps this very evening, hopefully.

♥

I'm being very blonde today and keep getting distracted by shiny things, so depth is not about to happen. Have a random series of unconnected paragraphs instead:

Do you know any Swiss people? Direct them to this petition. Sadly I, as a Brit, can't sign it. But I'm passing the link on in case you know anyone who can.

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In the light of this article, in which the US government blithely states that it would be quite happy to commit what I would call an act of war against us, when we are supposedly it's closest allies, Davide Simonetti has a convincing argument that American Imperialism isn't on the horizon, but is actually with us and has been for some time (thanks to Amused Cynicism for the link).

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qi_quote is... well... Quite Interesting today.

Sir Richard Burton, the Victorian explorer and translator of The Arabian Nights spoke 40 languages and dialects. At 19, he could already speak seven of them. Born an Anglican, he converted to Roman Catholicism, then Hinduism, then Sikhism, then Sufism, then Islam, before finally reverting back to Sufism. He also wrote A History of Farting and spent the latter years of his life measuring the cocks of African tribesmen.

I wonder if he'd be able to tell matgb and I why we have both been doing incredibly stinky farts (that smell the same, too) since Sunday night...? It's not like we've had the same diet... [/tmi]

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I have a friend, raven_oreilly. This friend is American, and was brought up in a household where she was taught to believe certain things. She has been going through the process of questioning those beliefs for a while now; reading lots of books, researching, finding things out and evaluating what she's found. She might decide that the beliefs she was brought up with are entirely correct, she might not. But watching her emerge, butterfly-like, from the restrictive cocoon of received wisdom and into the freedom and daylight of thinking for yourself is a beautiful thing, and it will remain beautiful whatever colour her wings turn out to be.

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Speaking of beautiful: Sam West. He's beautiful, obviously, but so are his words.

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Vince Cable Watch Special!

Millennium Elephant (well, his daddies) organised yet another Lib-Dem-Bloggers-meet-top-Lib-Dems thingie, and apparently last night was the turn of the lovely Mr Cable (the previous ones being Ming, Chris Huhne and Nick Clegg). alixmortimer is the first to get her report in (with a fabulous punning title), but others are bound to follow in due course

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And finally, Vote for Mister Splashy Pants!

NB: any links which may have been in the original entry are no longer there. Sorry.

( Originally Posted 10th December 2005 )