Peter Hume I am surprised and disappointed at your angry response to my post , I thought I was an anti Socialist I am now tragic having found out otherwise . I am going to give all your Posts a Brown eye from now on , was it because I refused to vote for Sir William McMahon , how 'DiD' you find out !

Could you please give a breakdown of those 150,000,000 deaths you attribute to "people acting on socialist political opinion", together with your sources, Peter Hume?

If there is any basis to it, then socialism would truly have to be a monstrous ideology, wouldn't it? Any adherent would, by definition have to be far more evil than Hitler, Genghis Kahn and Timur combined.

In comparison, the devastation of Indo-China in the sixties and seventies and the deaths of at least the order of 3,000,000 would seem like school yard bullying.

Even Hitler's Final Solution would seem no worse than the Saint Valentine's Day Massacre by comparison.

Clearly the toll of deaths caused by Stalin (disregarding WW2) supposedly in the name of socialism seems to me to have been around the order of 10 million at least. I would be happy to look at evidence which could establish as accurately as possible what that figure would be and what would have been the result of famine, and, of course, war. Of course mass murder by Stalin's regime should be condemned unreservedly, but let's not forget that many of Stalin's first victims were socialists and a good many socialists would hotly contest that what he did was in any way inspired by socialism.

Apart from that I would like to know what else makes up Peter Hume's total figure of 150,000.

Let's not also forget, if it had not been for President Kennedy defying his Generals again and again and again, a pre-emptive nuclear strike would have almost certainly been launched against the USSR with at least 10's of millions, if not hundreds of millions of deaths.

If the US military-industrial complex had survived the counterstrike intact, who would have been next on the US Generals cross-hairs? China? IndoChina?

I suggest people closely watch this 30' video "Beneath the hype: Is Iran close to nukes?" at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_DxyA4LT7MA of retired CIA analyst Ray McGovern and then contemplate how close we may be from the US launching an all out war across central Asia and the Middle east which could well involve Russia also.

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So, it would seem only by good luck that the rulers of the US have not been able to commit mass murder on a scale even larger than what they have accused 'socialism' of having committed.

In reality, I believe these sorts of ludicrous figures that Peter Hume has cited are inventions by CIA-funded propagandists in order to excuse the real past and planned future crimes of the US Government.

Shazbaz - what percentage of people would you think a) are invloved in these acts and b) search for them online?

I would think it is a very small percentage.

Internet filtering is a sledgehammer approach to addressing a small list of problems that are affecting a small segment of the population that would be better handled using some of the suggestions in the article.

Plenty of people get bashed and killed every weekend due to alcohol. Should we ban this too?

Socialism has progressed a lot in the last 70 years. Look to Scandanavian countries for how well Democratic Socialism works in the modern world. The increasing social problems in Australia, US and UK are primarily due to one thing - an ever increasing wealth gap. Health care and education are becoming more and more geared to making this gap even worse. We have an upper elite becoming richer and smaller and an ever increasing lower class becoming more and more angry.

A free and open Internet may be our only safeguard against our society sliding into outright dictatorship (as if we have not slid far enough in that direction already).

If that continues, it seems unlikely to me that, overall, the number of crimes, that, some claim, the Internet facilitates, will diminish.

But the scale of other far more serious crimes against humankind, particularly crimes of war, that the free Internet of today, to some extent, keeps in check is likely to vastly increase.

So, why are so many people in these discussions intent on keeping the discussion so focussed on abberent sexual material made accessible through the Internet to the expense of of this far more critical question?

Stephen Conroy is wasting our money & time on this draconian internet filtering policy idea. Its common knowledge that the vast majority of
unwanted content online is distributed through email and file-sharing networks, NOT WEB PAGES! The filter can be circumvented easily anyway by anybody who is technically competent (or just google how to bypass the filter). Many legal sites will inevitably get caught up in this filter because it operates by searching for "keywords". I can imagine something like a "rape crisis centre" being blocked because of the "rape" word for example!

Fundamentally this is COSTLY and UNNECESSARY.

There are plenty of alternatives too; like distributing software to parents to use at home, or making the filter opt-in rather than mandatory. Genuine public consultation (mainly from parents) would be a very good idea Mr Conroy.

ISP filtering will detract resources from tackling child abuse and waste tens of millions of dollars as well. Tackling illegal content like child abuse is really just a convenient excuse to attempt blanket control.

Its funny we sit here criticizing China & Iran for their internet filtering & censorship & here we are proposing to block the free flow of information, much of which is not illegal in any manner. This is just about the control of that flow of information & the control of its citizens.

This makes me feel like spewing up live online. So who's voting Labor in the fast approaching election? (not that I think Tony Abbott is any credible or desirable alternative... sigh)