Removing a democratically elected leader in favour of a crazed despot so that you can keep getting cheap oil is stealing freedom from someone. The UK were just as much to blame for Iran, so it's not like it's just a US thing, but it was a seriously bad thing to do and still hasn't been put right. Your points have some merit, but the anti-American (and anti-UK) stuff is not un-justified simply because some other countries were/are badly run before/after the attempts to interfere with their governments. What would things have been like if we had left well alone?

From people I've spoken to, the anti-American feeling in Britain comes from a mixture of:
1. The US does do the things mentioned by the GP far more than any other country does. Killing civilians is always wrong and the reasons are rarely good enough to counterbalance the harm, so it winds people up to see it happening.
2. Americans often take the line that it's not such a big deal for other people/countries to be devastated like this, as if it doesn't matter or it was needed because they're not very civillised anyway (like you hint at above). To be fair, I think all people feel this way about their own country's military action, but seeing as the US does so much more military action these days, it just shows more. Still not nice to hear though.
3. The 'freedom' thing. Most people's definition of freedom involves being able to choose their own political leaders and to not get bombed, so it's clear to an impartial (non-American) observer that the Freedom often spoken about means 'freedom for us to live as Americans' and not 'Freedom for everyone to live as they choose without interference', which is what it should mean. It kind of adds insult to injury when people claim that e.g. Iraq was about Freedom, when it was clearly about Oil.

If US foreign policy shifts towards helping other countries for the sake of it rather than for strategic benefits, then I think the anti-American feeling will start to fade.

Also, consider visiting Avebury and Stonehenge (In that order). Very atmospheric and arguably the oldest computing devices in the world.

For extra geek fun, read up on relevant archaeoastronomy first e.g. Gerald Hawkins so that you know what the scientific function of the sites was and can put it all into context.

Hah! another victory for capitalism - profits for all!

Here in the UK with our appallingly 'socialist' government, the interest rate on student loans is currently -0.4%. Demand better!

Find me an empire that didn't.

This makes a big difference.

Like me, after spending 3 hours on /.

It would be interesting to see someone develop a distributed site mirroring protocol so that anyone with a server can opt-in to being a TPB mirror by downloading the archive and then getting real-time updates from one or more mirrors as more torrents are posted. The same distributed network idea for the tracker index sites as gets used for the file downloads.

With it being so easy, the sites could go offline after very short intervals. Imagine several thousand TPB mirrors at any one time, each one only up for a week or so before being retired. Try and stop that!

I can't see this being very popular. If people care enough to sort out an external news source to email them, then they care enough to set up a proxy or VPN. Why settle for someone else's choice of news to be mailed to you when you can go and get your own?

The issue is not whether the censors can be evaded, it's the cost/benefit of bothering. Most people don't care enough to try.

Germany in 1939 was the only world superpower, and was in the process of invading everyone else and making a serious bid for world domination. They needed stopping.

However, none of the over 20 countries that the US has bombed since then has been even remotely similar. How many of them were actually a threat?

Sadly, in the eyes of the non-US countries, the role of terrorist world superpower is now in American hands rather than German. If you disagree, you might want to remind yourself what terrorism is: tactics designed to coerce people through fear. As just one example, the 'Shock and Awe' policy used in Iraq in 2003 was described by it's designers like this:

The fact that it is done by a state, rather than a dispersed trans-national ideological group like al Qaida makes no difference - the effect is the same. Defence spending is a very good idea, but the military spending you're talking about is used to fight wars of aggression, often with little regard for civillian caualties. That needs to stop.

What exactly does 'stabs us in the back' mean? Who's bombing who here?

Total rubbish.

It's the story. A good story bypasses the rational parts of our brains, goes straight to the emotions and grabs us.

The subtext of the Iran story is about the surprise of realising that a people we previously thought of as hostile (and frankly a bit too Muslim for comfort) are as much against their crazy muppet of a ruler as we are and decidedly less Muslim than the scary hard-line ones (relaxed dress codes, keen to party). It's the underdogs fighting The Man and we especially identify with the underdogs, because they use Twitter and speak English on TV. It has resonance.

It shouldn't work that way, but it does. Compare to a certain recent internet phenomenon. Someone who we previously thought was ugly (and a bit too Scottish for most Western tastes), is as good a singer as any that the crazy muppet Simon Cowell could point to. It's the underdog fighting The Man and we especially identify with the underdog because she sings in a perfect English accent and embodies all of our fairytale ideas of how the world should ideally be.

We don't care about Honduras for the same reasons we don't care about Fabia Cerra (Who? Exactly!) - the story has no resonance, so we ignore it.

If they didn't give a damn, they wouldn't be blocking YouTube, Twitter, the BBC, etc.

Dupe.

Are you implying that for the 1 billion people living on less than $1 a day, scarcity is 'perceived'? Fix the economic system that increasingly concentrates resources in the hands of the few and that sort of thing might be possible.

Not always the case. The Roman Catholic church was outraged at the idea of the common people being able to access the bible for themselves and strongly resisted attempts to translate it. They even burned the bones of the guy who translated it into English and made further translation into a heretical act.

Not really. The Xenu-overlord thing is consistent with 50s sci-fi culture when LRH formulated the 'religion', just like the zombie-rises-after-death-to-save-us was consistent with the agrarian pagan religious myths that were common at the time of christ. It's only wacky if its unfamiliar.

What about the inquisition? Or witch hunts?

You have a point about most modern christians being very different, but in fact, Scientology follows the classic pattern of an early religion and given 400-500 years, may well end up looking a lot like middle America does today. Surely if we oppose one, we should oppose both.