Yeah, fuck em. We can solve murders and rapes without those meddling pigs.

It's sort of like vaccination, if cops stop more murders and rapes than they perform themselves by utilizing their cop immunity to all human philosophies, both legal and moral, it's a win! Most human endeavors that actually work only look good over the span of the statistics, and outright insanely horrible on a case by case basis. Other examples include the military, Hollywood, and microcheeseries.

It's also the way to totally misunderstand the entire point of V For Vendetta and the entire point Alan Moore was trying to make. V is not the hero of the story, per se, but rather the example of violence against a greater evil gone out of control. It's pretty obvious to anyone with a fucking brain that the underlying theme is that V is stark raving fucking mad and if he hadn't died by the end, he probably would have gone on bombing and killing anyone he perceived as a problem.

Did we watch the same movie? The movie I saw had the government black bagging people. That doesn't seem like the motivations behind V were psychotic and whimsical. It seems rather like a vendetta (gasp!)

I've never seen V for Vendetta. I always said I'd get around to watching it one day, but then all the nerds started prancing around in Guy Fawkes masks and I just couldn't do it. Which is a shame, because I feel like I'm missing out on a major part of the Matrix/ Fight Club/ Clockwork Orange school of movie-based cultural criticism.

What's it about? Guy Fawkes meets 1984, right?

It's actually more like you took the Joker and Batman and fused them together into a wooden talking doll that spouts the worst poetry you'll hear this side of Lord Byron. It was not a very good movie, not even fun to watch bad.

Stephen Fry has a pleasant 20 minutes pretending to be a skirt chaser, though.

Gmork, read the comic. The comic was written during the Thatcher regime and was more a commentary on her heavy-handed (and that's putting it nicely) way of dealing with parts of society she didn't like. The movie was made post-9/11, so you get a lot of mixed signals about security, terrorism, etc.

Underlying all of this is a significant failure on those who wear Guy Fawkes masks as some kind of symbol of liberation and freedom, forgetting his plans were to blow up Parliament and replace it with a Catholic monarch.

I lost him when he was like "If the Jews had fought back when they were loaded on cattle cars." People who tend to go for the most cinematic version of resistance don't usually have such a great picture of how society actually works.