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That was, to put it mildly, a success- somewhere in the region of 300 people at its peak, at the main headquarters, and then a lot of public interest outside the recruitment office. Leaflets were handed out, passers-by's questions were answered, lulz were had. There was even a guy with a stereo Rickrolling them... and there was something pretty awe-inspiring about hearing the first Message To Scientology being broadcast from somewhere in the middle of a crowd, all masked.
I got a shit-load of footage, but most of it's undoubtedly going to be really shaky because I had an awful hangover. Once I've found some that's YouTube-worthy, I'll post the link.
It was weird hearing all the memes spreading into real life, though... "Anonymous, what is your profession?" shouted through a megaphone, and responded to with a crowd of "HRGH!!!"s, "The Cake Is A LIE!!!". The slogans being chanted were a mixture of sensible anti-$ci stuff and memes which the poor $cis must have had no clue about whatseoever. ("Tom Cruise hates mudkips", anyone?). And combinations of the two. One minute everyone's singing Happy Birthday Lisa (McPherson), or chanting "why are they dead?", the next there's a bunch of masked Anons dancing to Chocolate Rain or the Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, or chanting "should have bought a dog!". There were a lot of press there- I got interviewed by a freelance guy, but there were BBC camera crews and stuff, especially when we moved to Tottenham Court Road. It was all pretty good-natured, too, considering the vast majority of London representatives of the Internet Hate Machine were probably in attendance.
It was still all going on when I left (had no dogsitter so came home to see Sheena), which was about an hour or so ago.
The cops didn't seem too bad, either- saw one guy possibly being arrested, but don't know what for or if he was even one of us. When we were at the main church, their spokeswoman (I've seen her defending them on Richard & Judy- it's on YouTube somewhere) came out to ask the police to move us on, and was told, politely but firmly, that we had every right to protest outside their building and there wasn't shit she could do about it.
tl;dr- this afternoon Anonymous proved to have a power level of over 9000.
Anyone else go, or got any info about the other protests around the world? |
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