These things that scare me about this country:

Yesterday a woman was shot dead in Sevenoaks by armed police. Apparently (according to the mirror?!) she was living in sheltered housing for people with mental and physical disabilities and was waving around a ball bearing gun. The thing that really scares me about this is not the event itself, but the media reaction to it.

When Jean Charles de Menezes was shot the press went mad about it and it was all over the papers for about a week. This time the media doesn’t seem to be paying any interest at all. Its hard to find any mention of it on the BBC News website. I don’t understand why, but to me it feels like they have been told to keep quiet about it becasue the police don’t want all the fuss they had last time. If that’s the case then that is media censorship and that is scary.

In any case the BBC has already started censoring its new articles. Yesterday this article was titled, “Man shot dead by police officer” but they have gone back and ammended it.

Changing the news is like trying to change history and its a very manipulative way of controlling people. It is a process that Big Brother uses in 1984 to maintain his dicatorship.

The other scary thing is this clamp down on “curb crawling”. Apparently if you are caught curb crawling you will face a ?1000 fine and you may be “outed” (i hate that word) in the press. Whilst I don’t want to advokate that kind of behaviour, isn’t this a kind of pre-emptive punishment. These people haven’t actaully done anything wrong YET. This seems like the first stage along the road of punishing people for crimes they may commit in the future and I don’t like it.