John Linton
.....So I'm going to damage my business as a protest....because I rival Krudd as a complete tosser.
The degree of unreality that has deluged Australia over the past two years as evidenced by the constant stream of almost lunatic public utterances of Labor politicians and the attendant media reproduction/mis-reporting of those utterances, and particularly those of the communications media, seem to have reached new lows in relating to any semblance of common sense recently. I am referring to the infantile and entirely nonsensical "web site blackout" of a tiny number of company web sites in Australia over the past few days or so and the mealy mouthed reporting of that pointless, entirely stupid and irrevocably useless 'self immolation' reporting of it in articles such as this:
http://www.itnews.com.au/News/165728,pipe-networks-blacks-out-as-internode-sees-red.aspx
For Heavens sake!
It is laughable that the Krazy Krudd embarked on his attempt at buying the Senate vote of a religious loony Senator by purporting to somehow address the problem of paedophilia by attempting to legislate some sort of "control" of internet access. (the impossibility of doing that is known to every 12 year old onwards in the world and needs no more words to point out how impossible it is). It is totally ludicrous for some allegedly technically aware internet providers to somehow give a loony politician some credibility by "protesting" against something that will never work and, in the event it's ever put in place, will collapse under the weight of its own silliness without any 'assistance' from the ever stupid morons who seem to have nothing better to do with their lives than make complete geese of themselves.
Krudd is just (as memorably declaimed in "The Remarkable Mrs Pritchard" by the lead character) "a duplicitous tosser" whose attempts at getting re-elected have reached a previously unheard of level of, well, duplicity. To dignify his 'censor the internet' by even commenting on it is stupid. However to comment on such stupidity by self harm seems even crazier.
I am sure the Bhuddist monks who used self immolation in Vietnam as a protest against whatever it was they were protesting against in the 1960s and 1970s made graphic pictures but ending their own harmless and useful lives produced a net negative and changed nothing at all.
If Exetel 'blacked out its web site' we would lose approximately 200 new customers each week day and seriously annoy a proportion of the 100,000 plus current customers who depend on information from the web site and, like the Vietnamese monks, accomplish absolutely nothing but damage ourselves - hardly an intelligent thing to do.
Having said that - what occurs to me is that the companies that have decided to shut down their web site (or perhaps just change the front page) aren't as totally dependent on web access to operate their business whereas Exetel is totally dependent on its web site for every aspect of its business? Perhaps obscuring iinet's web site is the equivalent of a self indulgent person having a medium fries instead of a large fries on World Starvation Day? Who knows? Certainly not me.
If these irredeemably stupid people who close their company web sites in some way want to make an effective protest against a government that does something they believe is wrong then there is only one effective way of doing that - don't vote for them at the upcoming election.
Then again; perhaps business isn't as tough as I am assuming it is and these people can afford to throw away a week's new revenue?
PS: The ongoing murder of spoken English coming from Labor politicians was recently raised to a new level by the current minister for overwhelming immigration who referred to the current bunch of morons occupying office not only as the "gubmant" but as the "comm'wulf gubmant". No wonder those American schoolchildren asked their teacher what language the screech owl was using when she visited their school.