Now, a few days ago I was wondering what to dedicate this week's post to, when an email from avaaz.org (which you might know is an international civic organisation that promotes activism on issues such as human rights) basically answered the question for me. The email was a link to a petition against the brutal treatment of WikiLeaks whistleblower Bradley Manning - which needless to say, I immediately signed.
I don't know much about Bradley Manning, so I was going to do a lot of research about him before I posted this, so I can talk about the things that he has done and exactly why this is cruel and inhumane. However, as soon as I started, I came across a really wonderful article that completely hit the nail on the head. The writer of this article, Ryan Gallagher, describes it much better than I can, so I will simply leave a link to this article so everyone can read it. Here it is:
http://www.opendemocracy.net/ourkingdom/bradley-manning-is-uk-citizen-we-have-a-duty-to-help-him
And of course, here is the petition calling for Manning's release:
https://secure.avaaz.org/en/bradley_manning/?cl=1008236539&v=8793
I absolutely urge you to sign this immediately. I don't care who you are or what you do, but this is a man's life we're talking about here. Please don't click off and plan to do it later; you might forget. Come on, you'll feel really good about yourself afterwards!
There is one more thing I'd like to talk about this week. It has been announced that popular reality TV show Big Brother is returning on another channel, only a year after what was meant to be the last series ended. I personally am a bit of a fan, so I'm quite excited about this, even though I think this has happened much too quickly.
Anyway, last night I was having a conversation about elections last night, and I had a marvellous idea: elections should be like Big Brother! We get all the candidates into a studio house for a few weeks, get them involved in silly tasks, film them non-stop, vote off all the annoying ones and then the winner becomes Prime Minister, or whatever it is we're electing them for.
Yes, I know saying it like that sounds really stupid, but I think it would be a much better system than what we have at the moment. It's a much better way of finding out things about a group of people you know nothing about. The big problem at the moment is that we don't see the candidates under pressure until they've been elected in. If they were all involved in a confined situation that brings out the worst in everyone before the election, the whole country could see what they're really like and know which one they want in charge. I actually think this could work?
For people I respect and admire this week, I have to go with Bradley Manning - who else? And also Ryan Gallagher, because he wrote a really great article about him. And made this post much easier for me to write.
See you next week, peoples!
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