|
April 04, 2005Gomery-mania! Above is a graph of my traffic for the last month. I was happily averaging about 100 hits a day until I linked to that story at Captain's Quarters. And I'm getting only a tiny fraction of the hits some other Canadian blogs are getting. Canadians want to find out what's going on, and instead of just waiting patiently for Peter Mansbridge to tell them, they're going out to find out for themselves. It's all good. The publication ban has some people worried about what the authorities could do to naughty blogs such as mine that continue to link to that disrespectful foreigner. It's manifesting itself in different ways. Some, like Andrew at Bound by Gravity -- who had done such a great job of gathering the Canadian content together -- have backed down and removed their links. Then there's Angry in the Great White North, who's consciously daring the government to come after him. (Of course, he's not using his real name, and the government would have to bully Google to get it.) I'm going to walk between these two extremes and continue to link to the forbidden coverage until someone tells me otherwise. And I'll even comment obliquely on what it might mean. It's foolish to ignore this source of information on the corruption of our government and pretend it doesn't exist. Now if someone does tell me to pull my links and be a nice quiet Canadian, well... there's no telling what I might do. I've been known to be stubborn and have a real problem with authority... Posted by Bruce Gottfred at April 4, 2005 11:34 PM | TrackBackComments
Hell, if the hammer *does* fall upon someone, it will be open season on linking to those synopses. Serious question percolating in my head--if only the *names* of the witnesses had been kept from publication, but the details allowed out, do you think there would be as much consternation among the civil libertarians, given the "right to a fair trial" argument being floated by defenders of the ban? I imply no agreement or opposition with that argument by asking--I'm pretty much just gauging where you fall in terms of information freedom. I think, within the legal framework we are all stuck within at the moment, such a limitation would have been the better of two poor choices, since it would have kept the names away from potential jurors long enough to ensure them the "fair trial". Of course, this would work best for everyone *but* the ruling regime, so it's lucky for them that the names were published before anything could be done about it. Posted by: Mark Bialkowski at April 5, 2005 12:03 AMIt's clear to me in such an instance the social benefit of havng full access to information far outwieghs the risks of not having a fair trial. In fact, I doub the latter is a risk at all, espcially when compared to forecefully keeping the wool over our eyes on such massive fraud. You can take refuge in my house and request political asylum if you ever need to flee the country. Posted by: Andrew Barden at April 5, 2005 07:55 AMRESPECT MY AUTHORITi!!! ...Yeah... you probably dont watch south park. I have the same problem though. Posted by: Ian Baxter at April 5, 2005 01:27 PMHang in there Bruce. I was finally believing that there might be freedom of speech in Canada, but I guess not. Does the US need to come up there and liberate you guys too? Posted by: Michael at April 5, 2005 02:36 PMPost a comment
|