Big Bottom and Big Brother

Hmm

I’ve just seen an interesting news article on the television about how various governments are using the internet to identify dissenters, by what they have put in blogs.

The internet is a great source of information. Repressive regimes don’t like it for exactly that reason. Others tolerate it because they have to operate within the realms, relatively speaking, of freedom of information. In places like China and Iran, people can be locked up merely for sharing what we would consider the most innocuous snippets of information if the government doesn’t like it.

This information can be as trivial as talking about the fact that people in your country are locked up, for talking about the people the government locked up for talking about them. It’s crazy, but I ask myself could that happen here in England? After all, you know by now that I think Tony Blair lied to involve us in a war, just so he could have an interesting chapter in his biography. In many countries I could be imprisoned for such a remark, and shot for not much more.

It seems to me, that when bad things like this happen, they only seem to happen in countries where the people thought, ‘that could never happen here.’ Those countries are the ones which enjoy a degree of freedom, the right to express themselves. Let me tell you this though. Having freedom is a prerequisite to losing it and this is because of the complacency it breeds. Freedom isn’t a permanent state, merely part of the ebb and flow of the tide in human affairs; it is what happens while dictatorships gather their strength and wait in the wings; democracy is the sleeping draught given to us by those who would take it away. The more we sip it, and drink our fill, the more we mistake the dream of democracy for reality until one day, like the Chilean Mothers of the missing, we dance with the dead.

So, as much as I enjoy, and take advantage of the freedom I have to express my opinions I do occasionally wonder where it will all lead. The governments of the West, generally allow this freedom of speech, but it reminds me of those times in relationships where one person or the other says, ’go on. You can tell me what you think. In this relationship you’re free to speak you’re mind. That’s what people in love do.’ Then one day when you finally admit that, ‘actually, your bum does look big in that… in fact, it’s absolutely huge… not quite like a horse, but close… perhaps more like a Shetland pony…’

Then one day, it comes back to haunt you.

Maybe on the day you’ve been flicking through the readers page in a magazine and remark, ‘good lord. You’ll never believe this, but apparently some women fake their orgasms.’

And she says, ‘well, now you mention it…’

Or even worse, after thirty years of marriage she says, ‘no. Both of them were genuine.’

It’s like that in some relationships isn’t it; the respective partners unconsciously gathering evidence for the divorce, and if our relationship with the government and law of the land ever breaks down, well… we'll remember, a lot of us thought it had a rather large arse.