In which the pond checks in on the reptiles doing their best for the 'no' vote in the singularly useless, very expensive Malware postal survey ...

The reptiles were wildly excited this day at the way big government has intruded on private lives, and kept them off the grog. 

After all, they're poor people and so they deserve what poor people deserve ... big brother looking over their shoulder ... so that better off people can get on with living ...

But enough of the perks and pleasures of the overlords (the HuffPo story is here, the HUN might be paywalled but can be googled), because the pond would like to dedicate its TGIF lunch to tracking the story of the postal survey, as told in the pages of the lizard Oz ...

The pond made the mistake of plunging into the comments section of one of the lizard Oz stories about the very expensive and exceedingly useless postal survey ... and discovered a cesspit of homophobic bigotry, fear and loathing ...

There was a sewer stream of nastiness, and the pond got to wondering why the Oz readers were so feral, vicious and bigoted ...but then on a nanosecond's reflection, the pond was deeply surprised at the pond's surprise ...

The Murdochians have adapted easily to their job of purveying hate in the cause of the 'no' campaign ... with the usual suspects out and about ...

The lizard Oz reptiles have also taken to featuring the bigots at the top of the page ...

Every story or column seems infested by a negative skew ...

Thinkers? That's the new word for it?

Oh sure there was the odd note about nattering negativity ...

But how did the reptiles cover that fuss? 

Why by showing the real victim ...

It was a classic piece about pitying the real victim by the urbane 'Becca ...

Of course it didn't occur to 'Becca to ask why The Gippsland Times ran an unattributed ad on such a controversial theme. Or why the advertising manager of the rag might be guilty of, at the least, foolish and unprofessional behaviour ...

The first thing any sensible person might ask is should we run this sort of ad on an unattributed, anonymous basis? Can we expect blowback? Should we ask for attribution, and if not forthcoming, should we refuse to publish the sort of nonsense embedded in it, which the reptiles of Oz gaily reproduced ...

And that's how it's done, with the talk of the telly ad defanged by the suffering of the fundamentalist Xians ... and never mind the wanton stupidity and mindless stupidity involved in killing a tree to publish a bit of hate speech ...

More reptile follies followed today.

The pond knew it was more important, because the reptiles led with a story about the column, the column itself apparently not being capable of standing on its own or able to reveal its full significance ...

This is another splendid ploy.

Please note the re-use of the 'bigot' label, and yet without a shred of irony, having played this particular 'bigot' card, Okotel will, in due course, go on to deplore the use of 'bigot' ...

There's something astonishingly navel-gazing and fluff-gathering - not to say narcissist - about the reptiles writing a story about a column and in the process mindlessly repeating much of the content of the column ...

It's about as irritating as all those product-placement routines that the ABC has taken to doing in its news reporting, where suddenly the latest Four Corners or Australian Story is also headline news, and scores a plug 24/7 on News 24 ...

But back to the Okotel, now doing a Helen Lovejoy and thinking of the children ...

When it came to the actual column, the same obfuscating, conflating skills were artfully employed.

Where first applied to 'bigotry',  the clarion cry was now for "freedom" ...

The pond knows about this sort of "freedom" ... it's up there with "peace is our profession" ...

Yes, peace is our profession, and freedom is freedom from the pesky, difficult gays ...

And so to Okotel's logic-free zone.

It will be recalled in the story about the column that bigot' and 'bully' was freely applied to those arguing the 'yes' case ...

So the pond couldn't resist chortling when reading "even more disturbing to me are the hateful labels of 'bigot' ..."

Well it seems fair to say that bigots who call others bigots can hardly complain about being called bigots ..

She's scared? No wonder her kids are traumatised ...but then it's really no different in its alarmism than in the Coryisms about rainbow Trojan horses that found a home in the lizard Oz the previous day ...

How to know we're not in company of someone worried about freedom, so much as just another eager to conflate and confuse in the cause of bigotry? 

Well Okotel offers up the usual litany, which always arrives in the standard fundamentalist Xian homophobic list of complains, with Coopers being given yet another run ...

Is there an even deeper irony in this, with all the talk of freedom?

Yep, it came as the Liberal Party introduced more people, this time in the west - greetings sandgropers - to the heavy hand of big government ... and the persecution of the powerless, offered a controlling welfare card or nothing ... while the pigs in power delight in their swill ...

The pond swears it's all a cunning plan to send it back to cable television to admire the full-flowering of bigotry in the land of the Donald, as celebrated by Rowe ... with more celebratory Rowe here...

The Donald might be swimming in a flood of hate, with two thirds of the country thinking he's dividing it (a Fox poll of all things), but at least it means the pond won't be swimming in the cesspit of hate to be found in the lizard Oz's comments sections ...