Paranoid State

This story, of a guy taken off a train and interrogated for several minutes just because he had the words "The Killers" on a musical set list on a notepad just shows how paranoid the state and its functionaries have become.

They're not looking for terrorists, they're looking for any activity they deem "un-normal". Go about your daily drudgery and you won't be inconvenienced, but do something creative, out of the ordinary and you instantly gain the full attention of the state and its lackeys, your liberty will be withdrawn and you will be hauled from a train, interrogated and not allowed back on the train even when they are satisifed you are harmless (for god only knows what reason).

In any other country, this would be called tyrrany by our media. But instead because its our state doing being tyrranical, its ok. LIKE FUCK IT IS.

Old Holborn has it right: we need to start disobeying, we need to feel what its like to disobey, to refuse to kowtow to authority. Otherwise it'll be too late.

This other story, about a French TV program where contestants were asked to torture other contestants, shows how far people will go, how inhuman people can be, given the right stimulus, the right orders, the slow greying of what is good and what is evil. It happened in Hitler's Germany, it happened in Stalin's Russia, it happened in Pol Pot's Cambodia. It has happened countless times in recent history. Do we let it happen again? Do we let our children and Grandchildren suffer a totalitarian regime?

Or do well learn to rebel, to peacefully riposte that which we know to be evil and wrong, do we start to turn back the tide of security, surveillence, authoritarianism and corporatism?

I know where I stand.