The Stray World

There is a good con­nec­tion from within my study site today, which allows me to surf the web for a bit.

While it has been tough, I am still informed enough about the recent per­se­cu­tion of Julian Assange and Wikileaks to feel abso­lutely naus­eous that a great many smart people would con­demn these whistle-blowers who have risked their free­dom and maybe lives to ensure we stay informed about the lies our gov­ern­ments tell us.

To that end, noth­ing more has motiv­ated me to wish to carry out acts of protests than the thought that there are people out there, blinded by calls of pat­ri­ot­ism — to actu­ally, des­pite all reas­ons sup­port­ing the con­trary, to sup­port the per­pet­rat­ors whose secrets have been exposed, and attack those who have enlightened us regard­ing the evils that have been com­mit­ted in our name.

To that end, I hereby swear off any future own­er­ship of credit cards with Visa or Mas­ter­card emblazoned upon them, and will not be using PayPal, nor shop at Amazon, until they return the right to receive dona­tions and host­ing to Wikileaks.

To put it in per­spect­ive, Jeff Jarvis:

You know, I can use Mas­ter­card and Visa to give a con­tri­bu­tion to the Ku Klux Klan (I looked it up yes­ter­day), but I can’t use it to sup­port free speech on Wikileaks!

P.S. The concept of DDoS attacks as a form of an online picket-line protest is an inter­est­ing point-of-view that never occurred to me until the video above.