Written by: Goemagog

Everyone is missing. At least not writing. I don't know where the rest of the Incite! writers went, although I'm inclined to assume it's some sort of economic conference that'd bore me. Boring me is really a very hard thing to do, I have learned to find amusement in blank walls.

I did get an email from someone who used to post to our comments regularly. It was regarding the placement of a urine-ignition system in Belgian urinals as retaliation for their government producing Bush urinal stickers.

I caught a film on PBS called 'Dirty War', about a 'dirty' bomb being set off in London. Afterwards, there was a panel discussion about how great and wonderful planning has been to deal with such matters. Several of the experts on the panel made a point to emphasize that the primary problem facing contingency planners is that the general public will, immediately upon hearing that there was something amiss, turn into a riotous mass of barricade storming thugs.

The last thing anybody wants, of course, is the general public to go home. No, can't have that. They need to be kept as close to danger as possible until the government has rubber stamped them as being 'clean'. Couldn't set up a cleaning center and bus them over to it, they might not riot.

This ties into an older post of mine, the one about the television show 'Andromeda' and it's acclamation of societal suicide. American cinema tends to have a central villain. The bad guy is unlike us, a corporate boss, janitor killed by vigilante mob, or a giant cockroach. In Japanese cinema, the same is true, except for horror films, where the bad guy is often an untangible evil, no central figure and often unbeatable.

British cinema again follows the same pattern, except for their horror films. In British horror films, the evil monster is a sidestory. The great evil, the great threat to the heroes, is always other people. It used to be a reinforcement of their civilization's self-image as the only force preventing a descent into barbarity. Whatever was left of the government was all that was left holding together the fragments of humanity. Now, whatever is left of the government is the greatest threat. If you are running from flesh-eating zombies, random civilians will help you but soldiers will only rape your women.

No longer a 'thin red line' defending civilization from barbarity and tyranny in either a literal or figurative sense, any attempt at collective defense is now being presented as the thing most threatening. It used to be that everyone knew how the British were supposed to act. Everything had to be done 'properly', stiff upper lip and so forth, but that's been chucked aside in favor of some sort of pretend anarchy. There's still a 'proper' way to act, but it's not what it used to be. Instead of doing your bit to keep barbarians away from the gates, you have to talk about the greatness of diversity or risk your head on a pike. The problem of course, lies with France.

For centuries, during what are known as the Dark Ages, very few people had access to decent information, leading many to think France was a nice place. French became the lingua franca, the roman tradition of bathing stopped, and being unpopular was enough of a reason to get your head cut off and put on a pike. After the Hundred Years War, the British stopped being enthralled by French imbecilism and started doing stuff on their own. Europe followed France's example of centralizing all power to prevent coups (about as common for European countries at the time as they are for the third world now), Britain decentralized power because the nobles didn't want the king to have enough power to kill them arbitrarily, and the king didn't want them to have the power to kill him arbitrarily.

This led the British to re-invent the roman concept of rights. The United States revolted, and copied large parts of British 'common law' (a set of societal rules to make sure everyone did 'their part', whatever 'their part' happened to be.) This worked quite well and the United States became rich, fat, and happy. France, however, didn't. The French, tired of their own stench, held a revolution and adopted 'rights'. French 'rights' have only one real component, anyone has the right to kill someone who isn't popular. This is how the 'Committee for Public Safety' ran the 'Reign of Terror'. A governmental and legal system based entirely on popularity mades this almost inevitable, as anyone unpopular enough to not get power is probably going to be seen as a threat by someone with power.

We have the Bill of Rights to protect unpopular causes and people from popular opinion, no European country has anything of the sort. Power in Europe is held by those who can best sway popular opinion in their favor, and the traditional structures of british society aren't very good at it. They're being beaten into oblivion by socialists who claim to be protecting the people most likely to be fed into the next socialist genocide.

This is where I tie everything back to the silly film panel. Instead of everybody doing 'their part' to avert and minimize damage from terrorist actions, they're expected to stand around like sheep and wait for someone to give them orders. Instead of giving them helpful orders, like 'get out of the street so radioactive dust doesn't land on you', 'turn on that hose so more people can wash radioactive dust off of themselves', the general public is told to stand still and wait for an insuffucient number of officially approved decontamination showers to be set up.

If I was present at such an emergency and a government official acted so stupidly, I'd be inclined to join a riotous mass and thuggishly storm a barricade. That the panel experts assumed this to be a problem tells me that they know they're morons and they know I won't be the only one pissed off about it.

Goe, apparently the holder of online forts for missing administrators.