The reason we should be angry is their attitude towards us, the consumer. Microsoft have told us a lot of things that made us unhappy and rather than address our concerns they told us to just shut up and take it. Like I said, they could have legitimate reasons for doing what they are but do they care to tell us what those reasons actually are? No, they just want us to quit our bitching and buy one. Most telling was Mattrick's recent "We have an offline console, it's called the Xbox 360". The most dismissive and horrible thing he could say in response to people's legitimate complaint that their dodgy internet connection might not be very friendly to a console that needs to go online in order to actually let you play video games on a system you already paid 500 bucks to play video games on. Well Mattrick, there's actually another option for offline gaming, it's called the Playstation 4 and it is currently your direct competition. That and his constant assurance that "He can't explain it to us but we'll see when we try it." Well in fact I won't see, because unless you give me reason to beforehand I won't buy one. You see that's how this works, you convince me to put down 500 bucks beforehand. I'm not ponying up the cash first and hoping I see what secrets Microsoft had in store for me. These two comments make it seem like Microsoft think they have a monopoly. First of all they act like our only other option is their old machine, and second of all they think we're all going to buy one and "find out". No Microsoft, they're are other options.

This is why you should not buy an Xbone, at least not until Microsoft's attitude takes a dramatic turn for the better. If you buy an Xbone you are directly validating Microsoft's arrogance. We are the customers, we give them our hard earned money and we keep them in business. They need to show us some respect and if they don't they should suffer for it. The video game industry has been getting more and more toxic over the past decade, DRM stopping everyone BUT pirates from playing games, gating off online multiplayer, a feature you already paid for when you drop what will be 65 bucks on a new title next generation (if they want to withhold half the game from me then let me pay half price for the single player only, why on Earth should I pay full retail for half a game?),equating used games to piracy, getting me to enter code after code to access content that's already on the disc I paid for with actual money at launch and now just being openly disrespectful to us, their customers. Do not buy an Xbone for the simple fact that we don't want to prove Microsoft right. We do not want to show the industry that we'll just quietly roll over and let them stamp on the other side of our face. Vote with your wallets and let Microsft know they can have our business when they show us some goddamn respect.

Last year, 5 year old April Jones was abducted, abused and murdered by Mark Bridger. A heinous tragedy, that left a community shocked. Fast forward to last week and we have Judith Woods of The Telegraph (http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/crime/10091643/April-Joness-mother-must-not-blame-herself-online-porn-is-the-evil-here.html) saying that the real cause of this type of crime is internet porn. Her proof? Well, Bridger and fellow child molester Stuart Hazell both regularly watched child pornography. In a move we rational people call "getting it ass backwards" Woods seems to propose that child porn leads to pedophilia, rather than maybe pedophiles having a certain predilection for child pornography to begin with. Now, nobody worth paying attention to is going to defend child porn but to assume it's child porn that creates child molesters is ignoring the fact that it is in fact almost certainly the exact opposite that is true.

According to Woods:

"Hazell trawled the web for child porn on his mobile phone, using the google search engine. When police raided Bridger's home they found revolting, exploitative images of children on his computer.

Could any right minded person deny a link?"

Indeed no right minded person could deny a link. The idea that a child molester might look at child porn seems like common sense. But for the exact opposite reason Woods seems to think. But that's not the contentious part of the article. No one is going to bemoan the representation of child porn in the media, people having a knee jerk reaction to be disgusted by and despise such material isn't really a problem.

The issue here comes with conflating pornography with child pornography. From here on out Woods goes on a tangent, citing shocking but meaningless statistics. Apparently "children as young as 11 are becoming addicted to obscene online material" (no I don't know how many exactly, she doesn't say, she doesn't cite sources or provide any links, I'm guessing it comes from the research out of Plymouth University). along with a host of other statistics showing that too many children have access to online porn (that may even be true, I guess we'll never know) and that it can be damaging to a young person's development. She then goes on to call for restrictions to online pornography. The "opt in" system that's being thrown around. Essentially porn will be filtered out by default, you have to clear it with your ISP to access all your favourite smut.

Now many of you may be wondering what that second part has to do with the first and that's where we get to the first trick of what Richard Herring and Stewart Lee would call Lazy Journalist Scum. Just grab any tragedy that shares a key word with what ever it is that burns your biscuits and use it to fuel your outrage machine. Hate videogames? Just wait until some troubled, deeply disturbed kid goes on a rampage (this also works for heavy metal and horror films). But the key trick here is to learn how to not feel empathy. Obviously anyone who sees the tragic death of a child or children would vomit up their own soul before they could ever get around to twisting it to fit their agenda so you're going to have to spend some time trying to become less than human. I'd suggest listening to Joe Duffy as a form of aversion therapy. As soon as you can handle that odds are you have no integrity left. It works with almost anything, socialism, videogames, porn, television, the gay agenda, immigrants, atheists. Honestly just wait until some tragedy crops up, see if any of those words apply to the perpetrator and you too can get the ball rolling on your very own hate machine.