There’s a simple thing that I believe blogging is about: honest argument and debate. We bloggers aren’t usually in the forefront of direct reporting, but we ought to make up for it in intellectually honest argument.
Sadly, not everyone agrees with this.
Jeralyn Merritt, at TalkLeft, is a passionate advocate for progressive values through the law. I read her blog for some time. And then she proposed a silly comments policy, and I wrote her this email:
Jeralyn, I noted your new comment regime before, and now see that you’ve implemented it. As I noted in my post, I find what you’re doing in targeting ‘conservative’ posters to 4 messages to be the height of false liberalism; You’re not banning people or deleting their posts because of what they do, but because of who they are.
You linked to Red State and suggested that your policy is the equivalent of theirs; nothing could be further from the truth. Their policy simply says “don’t be disruptive of the spirit of this place” – you could do the same, and choose not to.
I’m going to take a break from reading you. I doubt you’ll miss me. But I’ll leave you with one thought: I really, really hope that you change this. We liberals have to find a way to have honest dialog with conservatives, if for no other reason than to convince the undecided that we won’t delete their comments if they say the wrong thing, and that a vote for us might in fact be a vote for positive change.
Take care.
Marc
Jeralyn replied:
the purpose of talkleft has never been about dialogue with conservatives. It’s purpose is to stir up the choir. I have been unfailingly gracious in allowing the other side to comment at all.
I’m tired of repeating myself, for those, including you apparently, who don’t want to listen. The four a day is limited to right wing troll type commenters whose purpose is to divert the discussion and obscuring the information. There are plenty of conservative commenters whose comments are not being limited. In fact, only about five have been limited and they are troublemakers, just like at red state.
If you want the information talkleft disseminates, then you will be the poorer for not stopping by. If you want to hear debate, there are lots of better sites to do that at.
Thanks for writing and for reading.
Jeralyn Merritt
TalkLeft: The Politics of Crime
http://talkleft.com
I let it go at that point, and then tonight, I read this at Patterico:
The controversy concerns a TalkLeft post that portrayed a blogger as a victim of governmental harassment — a visit from the Secret Service — supposedly for the simple offense of being “critical” of President Bush. In a comment to TalkLeft’s post, I had the audacity to quote the blogger’s post, to show that said blogger had not simply “criticized” Bush — she had actually advocated President Bush’s assassination! Once you get past TalkLeft’s whitewash of the blogger’s ugly behavior, you can understand why the Secret Service might have gotten involved.
Here’s where the irony gets rich. TalkLeft, having stood up for the blogger who advocated killing Bush — and having misled people as to what that blogger had actually said — edited my comment, to remove any reference to the fact that the blogger had advocated Bush’s assassination!
Then she added a snarky update trying to make me sound like a jerk for pointing out that she had defended someone who was expressly advocating killing George Bush.
You know, there’s a word for this – Orwellian.
It’s both offensive to what blogging should be about – the pursuit of intellectual honesty – and stupid in the terms Jeralyn defines for herself, as “stir[ring] the choir.” It makes the choir look at itself with embarrassment, as it should. And that’s hardly stirring.
[Comment sent back to writer for slur]
[comment deleted by A.L.]
FWIW, I once had a comment deleted by Patterico because I said he was wrong. But I don’t really care too much.
I look in from time to time, and I don’t have a problem with TalkLeft.
Customs and practices on the Left are different. Values are different. To allow a right voice at all, edited or not, is a show of graciousness, not a recognition that those not of the left may have a valuable contribution to make.
As noted above, TalkLeft aims to stir up the choir, not to encourage debate. Therefore rules conducive to an echo chamber are appropriate.
If we had similar attitudes to things like fair play in conversation there would not be a left and right in any fundamental, unbridgeable sense. We would be one people in some deep way that transcended our divisions.
But we’re not.
What I’ve found is, it’s the ideological divisions that are strong, and the things we hope and wish would unite us that are weak, that are ultimately futile. Friendship, family, faith and fair play fail and fade. What holds its potency is the old game of “us or them”.
Maybe you should expect this? Especially from a blog specifically called TalkLeft.
Sadly, I think we’re going to have to remove TalkLeft from our Honour Roll in the “Liberty” category.
Jeralyn’s reply to A.L. first post struck me as reasonable.
The actions re: Patterico are utterly indefensible, however, and make a mockery of any claim the site has to support people’s rights. “Orwellian” is PRECISELY the right word.
I’ll give her a day to respond in this thread, and give me a good explanation. Maybe there is one. But I doubt it.
There seems to be a “churn” issue with the left and Winds of Change. That (TalkLeft) will be at least two lefty blogs that fell from grace, with Matthew Yglesias, and I think there may have been another? And left wingers like Daily Kos have come in for attention (“mercenaries” etc.) while it seems to me right wing blogs have more often been ignored. (But not always – Little Green Footballs has been controversial.)
Maybe Winds of Change is biased to the right, calling it as though prominent leftie blogs were crossing lines when everybody has been doing so equally.
Or maybe it would be better to accept that standards you are applying as universal are actually right wing standards.
Don’t we see this again and again? I found Right on Red’s roundup of reactions or rather non-reactions to Beslan shocking, and then coldly instructive. The left looked away. With the CBS forgeries, there was no “blogsphere” reaction, investigation or anything else. The left reacted in one way, mostly ignoring the issue or trying pathetically to aid the CBS coverup, and the right reacted in another way. The recent fiasco with exit polls is being blamed on the “blogs,” but apart from the little matter of the mainstream media, some blogs like the Mystery Pollster and Jay Cost’s Horserace Blog were having none of this, while others like Wonkette went for the gusto.
Armed Liberal: ” There’s a simple thing that I believe blogging is about: honest argument and debate.”
Is there this one thing, blogging, that all do with a similar understanding of how you do this? Really? Cause it doesn’t look like it to me.
I think you see common ground, a bedrock of shared decency and simple, understood rules of thumb. And what I see is Coyote, looking fixedly but nervously ahead, feeling round with his big toe . . .
It doesn’t seem like Talkleft is applying a coherent, fair-minded policy. (I believe, of course, that they should be entitled to apply any speech policy they like; just as we can choose to ignore or attend their speech as we like.)
There is another explanation, perhaps. Some (mostly left) thinkers hold to Stanley Fish’s view that “there is no such thing as free speech”. Basically – to bastardize and truncate his ideas – he believes that (1) we already begin with a non-neutral speech zone, given that there are things we always assume we should not say and (2) speech is almost always performed to promote a course of action. Thus, for him: “The condition of speech being free is not only unrealizable, it is also undesirable.” Understanding free speech this way, he believes that speech by those with non-Fish approved views should be “stamped out” – censored.
Now, I find his views bizarre, but the left – and often the religious right – often employ a position like this: the value of free speech should be subordinate to a particular(progressive or religious) value. Recall that Talkleft advises that the purpose of the blog is to stir up the choir, and attempts to criticize Talkleft positions amount to “diverting the discussion” and “obsuring the information”.
/shrug Just a thought. My explanation could be wrong.
Yeah, I had this problem with lots of lefty blogs, to the extent that I mostly stopped reading them because they were exclusively about their point of view.
So I ask you, what IS a good lefty blog, run by someone who is reasoned/reasonable?
FWIW, I once had a comment deleted by Patterico because I said he was wrong. But I don’t really care too much.
What are you talking about? I don’t remember this, and it doesn’t sound like something I’d do.
Mark: You are more correct than you know. I once had a chance, some years ago, to spend a few minutes talking to David Horowitz (of _Ramparts_ fame) over the phone while he was doing a guest appearance on a talk show. I asked him this question: “In the ’60s, liberals were big on free speech and trying to guarantee the civil rights of everybody. What happened?” His answer was simple: “We wanted our rights so that we could take away everyone else’s.” It’s right in line with the Stalinist position that the only legitimate purpose of art is to propagandize for the Party. (Another one that is popular with today’s leftists.)
I contend that any philosophy that subordinates free speech to a party or a philosophy is anti-democratic on its face. There’s a fine line between speech policing and thought policing, and it’s one that today’s Left would dearly love to cross. Whatever the purpose of a particular blog may be, for a blog owner to edit someone else’s comments so as to change their meaning is incredibly bad form.
The saving grace for everyone else is, as David Blue pointed out: it becomes an echo chamber. It can’t progress, because new ideas can’t get in, and it will never gain any new converts, because its explicit purpose is to preach to the devout. Now, I’m a frequent commenter on LGF, and yes, it is a bit more of a congregational blog than some on the right, but even there you find good debate and fact-checking going on, and liberal posters are pretty welcome as long as they can make some sense of their arguments. (Trolls, on the other hand, are not. But I contend that the purpose of trolling is not to engage in free speech, but rather to suppress it, by eating up bandwidth with content-free noise. And this applies to blogs anywhere on the political spectrum.)
Thus the left is doomed to wallow in their own stale bathwater. Having banned both the drain and the faucet, they are down to continuously adding more soap in hopes of covering up those nasty stains. The liberals who make sense have been pushed out by these “intellectually unconstrained” leftists, and it’s a golden opportunity for us to try to recruit them and add their brand of classical liberalism as an ingredient of conservatism. (And to a considerable extent, this is already happening.)
Deleting comments that offend you is one thing. Editing someone comments, without noting the whos, whats, and whys is beyond the pale. How could you trust anything posted there?
Opinionated Bastard,
Kevin Drum’s blog is great, though many of his commenters are nuts.
Deleting comments that offend you is one thing. Editing someone comments, without noting the whos, whats, and whys is beyond the pale. How could you trust anything posted there?
Some of that was noted. My problem was that the “whys” were misleading. My comment was supposedly “edited for language” — and an update suggested that I was trying to get “post words in the comments to this post that will result in this site being linked to unacceptable behavior.”
In fact, all I was doing was telling the truth about what the post in question had said.
Can’t agree at all with the Talkleft policy. However, after having spent years doing the political chatroom/blog comments thing, my experience is that the right usually shows up more prepared to debate in these environments than the left. So it’s not surprising that a left-wing board would want to limit their involvement.
Perhaps it comes from being in the majority so long. You end up thinking something without actually knowing or being able to articulate WHY you think it.
One thing for sure: if the left wants to win on the intellectual playing field, they have to be willing to fight. And a lot of them aren’t.
Re: Yglesias… A.L. sort of despaired a while back, but Lewy14 came back with a great Beslan post that explained why the two actually weren’t that far apart. Talked to Yglesias about it, and he agreed with that assessment (liked the post too, Lewy).
I found M.Y. subject to BDS on occasion during the election, but if we shot everyone who did that there wouldn’t be a left any more. I still link him myself (vidd. Fallujah Briefing as the most recent example).
What we’re looking at re: TalkLeft is a whole new ball game, however. Right or left, you do NOT Dowdify people’s comments like that. It is, as noted above, beyond the pale. Especially for someone enshrined in our blogroll as an exemplar of “Liberty”.
Uh, no. That sort of thing WILL produce a BIG fallout with us.
Agree that the left’s whole mindset these days makes staying out of our liberty-loving gunsights a bit of a challenge. Alas. Maybe getting the c–p kicked out of them for being such hateful snobs post-election will help change that orientation, and help them “weck up to thees” re: debate and respect as important political habits.
With that said… Lessig, who is also a lefty, is still up there in that blogroll and he will remain there – because he totally belongs. Maybe I’ll add John Perry Barlow (regardless of what happens), a leftie who also preaches it and lives it.
Nevertheless I haven’t heard TalkLeft’s side yet. I’m willing to hear an explanation. Unlike A.L., I don’t think her troll containment policy was unreasonable – but she got a lot of ‘splainin to do on this one.
Joe – You don’t think it’s unreasonable to say that partisans of one side get a limited numkber of posts – regardless of quality or contribution to the discussion?
I think that’s horrible. Tokenism at it’s finest; you know, imagine this: black people can register to vote, but we’ll only let them vote for one office each. I mean why would they be upset? They got to vote, didn’t they?
A.L.
Her reply made it clear that she applied it to those being majorly disruptive, not to everyone. That’s how I read it, anyway.
We do that too. There’s a difference between Dingo and, say, Vesicle Trafficker. There are differences between conservative commenters too, and some of ’em do deserve warning or even fumigation. Heck, we’ve warned a couple right here (and I fumigated one).
TL’s comment policy is beyond insane. I’ve posted on there several times where people have started to see my point of view, only to be smacked down by their stupid comment policy. I won’t contribute to a site that seeks to censor valid comments. Unfortunately Jerilyn is being quite short-sighted on this issue.
BOPnews routinely bans people who disagree with them. If you try to reason with their fantasy world, your comments are deleted and you are banned. If you disagree with them, you are called”ignorant” “stupid” “Fascist” etc.
Honest discussion is a thing of the past- the Left is slipping into La-La Land.
I edited the comments for language that would get Talkleft googled and blocked by paypal –the comments were repetitively referring to an act of violence against the president. I noted the editing and tried to put in substitute words that would reflect the commenters meaning.
The post at issue was not on line because it had been deleted by its author. I hadn’t seen the cached version, until I followed the links in the comments at talkleft. It doesn’t change my mind that it was a sarcastic post and one that attempted, although obviously failed, at humor.
I left the link to the cached version up so people could make their own judgments. But I took down the quotes from it because they weren’t necessary and could adversely impact talkleft.
TalkLeft had it’s funds seized by paypal for referring to a beheading video–I am trying to avoid that happening again. I don’t believe anyone except a right wing conspiracist would seriously take the author’s post as a threat–it was written in her usual humorous, sarcastic style. But when googled, it would be talkleft that was associated with the words if the comments remained
I censor for profanity all the time–so as not to get blocked by law firms and businesses. that use censor software. My comment policy says so on the front page. It also advises that comments may be edited for content and length.
No one has to read talkleft or comment there –if they do, they must abide by my rules. It is a personal site, not a government site, I make the rules and I try to be fair. But I will not allow language referring to a violent act against the president to be repeated over and over, drawing attention from robots, spiders, search engines, and most particularly, paypal.
Of course, prosecutors like Patterico don’t have to worry. They are part of the government’s law and order squad so when the language comes up on their sites, the Secret Service and FBI would probably just pass it off.
By the way, the Secret Service made another ridiculous visit, this time in Boulder, I’m about to write about it–without using the buzz words that will create a potential liability.
“There’s a simple thing that I believe blogging is about: honest argument and debate. We bloggers aren’t usually in the forefront of direct reporting, but we ought to make up for it in intellectually honest argument.”
Count me as one who does not agree with you about this. Blogging is and should be diverse. WOC is an excellent blog and it is exactly what you want it to be, but that does not mean all blogs should be like it. There’s plenty of room for all kinds, including advocacy blogs, nutty blogs, niche blogs, etc.
Jeralyn, you’re a freaking lawyer. You write for a living. Are you trying to suggest that you couldn’t restate what was said in an inoffensive but accurate way? I like it better when you simply say “my blog, my rules” – but note that you’re subject for scrutiny when you do that (as I’m trying to do here).
A.L.
My dictionary defines “liberty” as “freedom from arbitrary or despotic control.” TalkLeft is restricting speech based upon political content. TalkLeft is certainly free to do this; its her dime.
But chosing to run the most politically restrictive comments section that I’ve heard of does not make TalkLeft the exemplar of “liberty,” unless liberty is simply synonymous with liberal.
But that’s Joe’s call and his dime. I’m not familiar enough with TalkLeft (and it doesn’t sound like my kind of site, anyway), but I would really hope that there were “liberty” blogs more accepting of diversity.
Patrick
Funny, I got a post deleted by Jarvis a couple of weeks ago.
I questioned his 9/11 story as potentially “bullshit” due to its striking similarities to John Kerry’s histrionic Vietnam recollections with regard to making him look more “believable” in his WOT stance.
Not denied, not argued, just deleted. Makes me think I hit that nail on the head…
I posted to TalkLeft only once, in the interesting thread about Kos’ infamous mercenary remark, and his subsequent mindless attack on Glenn Reynolds. Armed Liberal, Tacitus, and others here were also commenting.
Until the comments were closed on the grounds that “the right wingers caught onto the thread and began posting their hateful comments. Rather than delete them, we will close the comments now.”
That pretty much ended my interest in that forum. People have an absolute right to police their own blogs as they see fit, of course. But if they judge Kos to be a good “liberal” (when he is so obviously anything but) and a “tremendous asset for the Democrats” (when he isn’t) – and they are judging the commenters by this warped political yardstick – why bother?
Ah yes, the Secret Service, PayPal, and Google… nests of right wing conspiracists every last one of them.
Congratulations on disappearing those comments down the memory hole before anyone noticed that the usual humorous, sarcastic style of acceptable commenters on TalkLeft includes advocating assassination of elected U.S. leaders. Those righties can be so uptight sometimes; I can see why you wouldn’t want to make them welcome to comment at your blog.
Jeralyn responded on my site, here. Her comment read:
The “over here” looks like a link but isn’t. My best guess is that she meant to include a link to this post. I certainly didn’t edit her comment.
How should I take this comment — especially “Feel free to stop reading TalkLeft any time now”? Does that mean that I can count on my comments being “edited for language” in the future, any time I have the gall to post something that shows one of her posts to be deceptive?
praktike,
I have asked you to give me an example of my supposedly deleting a comment of yours because you said I was wrong. I’m still waiting for a response.
I don’t recall ever doing anything like that. I have banned, to my recollection, three people: a person who made threats about my work; a person who falsely claimed that I took the bar more than once; and someone who used excessive profanity in an insulting way, and who proved himself a troll with his numerous nasty comments on other blogs.
You were none of these, unless you were posting under a different name. So what gives? What did you supposedly say I was wrong about? If you don’t back up your claim then I’ll just assume you have me mixed up with someone else.
Well, clearly I can’t find it because … it’s been deleted. And I don’t remember what it was about, but I think it had something to do with media bias. Like I said, it was no big deal. One possibility is that something went screwy and it never actually got posted. In which case, my mistake. Since your memory seems better than mine, let’s assume that’s what happened.
Difficult issue. Business firewalls DO filter for profanity, and we’ve been known to intervene for it here. A threat against the President, sarcastic or not, can get you (and the blog) in serious trouble. And I wasn’t there. I know and trust Patterico, yet Jerilyn’s explanation leaves legitimate doubt.
I don’t spend a lot of time in TalkLeft’s comments section, so it’s hard to judge.
I do have enough people here whom I know to be reasonable, who are giving diverse and separate examples of behaviour incompatible with TalkLeft’s listing here under “Liberty”. That’s more than troubling.
I definitely have a reasonable doubt about TalkLeft’s qualification for its particular listing here, and even a balance of probability standard is probably running against them.
I’m going to defer to A.L. here, since he reads it regularly. A.L., if you want TalkLeft off the blogroll, drop me an email and I’ll make it so.
One possibility is that something went screwy and it never actually got posted. In which case, my mistake. Since your memory seems better than mine, let’s assume that’s what happened.
Fair enough. I actually think that’s a pretty good bet. I think it’s important that people not get the wrong impression, because I don’t just delete comments that say I’m wrong. My site is littered with such comments, in fact.
(Also, by the way, I would never delete a comment for any reason without some explanation, at a minimum — unless it was from one of my already banned trolls. Which you aren’t, as I have explained.)
Joe,
I would feel guilty about you guys taking any action on account of me. I accept Jeralyn’s statement that she 1) didn’t know the blogger had advocated Bush’s assassination when she originally wrote the post, and 2) deleted language to protect her site from problems with Google and Paypal.
I remain disturbed by the particular way she did it, including: 1) saying the post had been “edited for language” as if I had been cursing; 2) implying that I wrote what I did for the purpose of causing her site problems with Google and Paypal, as opposed to the true purpose: discussing the truth; 3) bringing my employment into the discussion as if it had the slightest relevance; 4) not being forthright enough in her post and edits about what the blogger had really said; and 5) basically telling me that I’m not welcome on her blog any longer.
Come to think of it, that’s a pretty long list.
Oh, well. It’s your call.
My response is still above if you scroll up.
I am a hardliner when it comes to comments on talkleft not violating the rules listed on the front of the site. I get 500 to 600 comments a day and I’m just one person. Blogging is a hobby, I do have a more than full time job. I try to read them all but sometimes I can’t. I work too hard on the site to see it get banned from law firms or paypal or to have it come up on google in association with something like an assassination attempt because of repetitive comments by people who disagree with me and insist on posting objectionable material.
For some reason, the link to your thread here did not show up in the comments at Patterico when I responded there. I just put another link there so his readers could see it if they wanted.
Jeralyn,
Your attempts to point the finger of blame elsewhere are not convincing. Because I made a truthful comment about the subject matter of one your own posts, you claim that I “insist on posting objectionable material.”
I’m not the one who suggested Bush should be killed — your blogging buddy whom you were defending was. It’s a little odd to blame me for posting “objectionable material” when I’m simply quoting or paraphrasing someone you defended.
You also say that I “violat[ed] the rules listed on the front of the site.” Just what rule did I violate? The unwritten rule that says anything that doesn’t stir up the choir can get edited or blocked?
Until it’s changed, your comments policy says:
What rule did I violate? Do you consider the truth “abusive” or “offensive”? I said nothing “profane” — though you suggested otherwise by saying my comment had been “edited for language.” And I have no idea what violates the terms of service for your host provider.
I just don’t get it.
You have the *right* to do whatever you want with comments on your site. But it doesn’t wash to try to blame me for supposedly violating some stated policy on your site.
The way I see it is fairly simple and does not break down along right/left or party lines. Jeralyn brought up the post in question; Jeralyn defended it as innocuous; Jeralyn needs to expect and deal with the possibility that someone will argue against her position in the most obvious way, by quoting the post she is defending. Expecting anything else is unrealistic to the point that I have to question whether the excuses about getting into trouble with Paypal and/or the Secret Service are honest.
Actively editing or deleting comments is a power that it’s easy to fall into the habit of abusing, and censoring them in order to remove a powerful argument against one’s own position is abuse of that power. Period. This is the case whether or not the person doing it quite realizes it or not. I’ve been in this position, I’ve written policy for opinionated virtual-community hosts, and I know that this is one of the easiest traps to fall into when hosting a contentious forum that deals with issues dear to one’s own heart. Particularly when it’s a post of your own that’s being argued with. But to act in this position with integrity you have to guard against this natural tendency. Otherwise you might as well turn comments off.
Hmmph, in search of the reasonable communust.
Gulag dreamers, Marxist hell hole helpers, still dismissing the recently found mass grave of children with holes in the head and toys in the hand, still spewing their malignant bile in our universities, where Peter Singer gets awards for ethics, and Noam Chomsky, the quack of lingustics is taken in by his moonies as an authority on history, the same way Bellesiles work of historical fraud was accepted by the wishfull thinking left.
“I’m sorry, but not since Professor Peter Singer explained that we should give as good as we get from dogs who hump our legs, have I been so exasperated with the way some academics think they can use their head for a colonoscopy and then crab-walk around expecting all the world to think their new hats make them look smart. ”
http://www.nationalreview.com/script/printpage.asp?ref=/goldberg/goldberg072403.asp
The UN flew the flags at half mast for the inventor of modern terrorism today, the man that left a trail of blood all over the world hailed like a fallen hero, the same bunch would have displayed no such respect for anything remotly resembling a good man.
The left however saw nothing wrong with it, just like the leftist reporter whos eyes flowed with tears as the helecopter lifted up the butcher of Ramalla, she is like all the other leftists, in sympathy and support of evil and have nothing for the decent good and innocents protectors but contempt.
“Communism had been approvingly described as liberalism in a hurry, and liberals like Roosevelt affectionately dubbed Stalin ‘Uncle Joe.’
Even today, few liberals blame Roosevelt for his abject truckling to Stalin.
The wartime alliance between the United States and the Soviet Union ended with ten Christian countries falling to Communist tyranny, with persecution on a scale Nero would have blanched at — a persecution liberals didn’t, and still don’t, care to talk about.
Today’s liberals also like to forget that Roosevelt extended admiration and aid to Stalin long before World War II. He knew a kindred spirit when he saw one. After all, ‘liberalism in a hurry’ sought the same sort of social order American liberalism seeks – a secularist, materialist society in which power is centralized and the state controls economic life.
When Americans finally awoke to the evil of Communism, liberals had harsher words for Joe McCarthy, who cost a few people their government jobs, than for Joe Stalin, who cost tens of millions of people their lives
If Communism was liberalism in a hurry, liberalism is Communism in slow motion. Where Communism smashed, liberalism erodes. The end result is the same: a soulless society in which liberty perishes and tradition is forgotten.
There is ample testimony that liberalism and Communism are essentially interchangeable, and much of that testimony comes from liberals themselves.” –Joseph Sobran
Dont expect a leftist to have any respect for truth, even if they selectively allow some to be spoken in their midst. they have an agenda that would not be accepted by decent people and one of their main tools is deception.
Objective truth, fact and holding all assertions up to ruthless scrutiny is an anathma to them.
What leftist state ever allows an actual free press ? what leftist state allows free speach ?
They never allow such freedom to expose the lie and evil of leftism in states where thay are in control, what makes you think one of those stalinists would allow it on their blog ?
Orwellian indeed, look to the presentation of Arafat as an example, everyone saying good things about him today, has, to those of us that are not monsters, have fingered themselves as black hearted monsters. I bet you will find some on the blog your talking about, without me even having to look.
To protest the murder of Van Gogh, a fellow painted a mural showing an ascending angel and the words “tho shalt not kill”, and the Dutch police forced him to remove it, and took the film and jailed the reporter attempting to record its destruction.
The same day, Radio Holland blamed Van Gogh for his own murder, saying it was his fault for angering his attacker with the film he made.
Thats the liberal idea of “freedom of expression” for you….
Orwellian indeed, evil, indeed.
Both the Guardian and the New York Times have called for presidential assasins, the Times, the same rag that covered up Stalins genocide of the Ukraine, was calling the killing of presidents as “acts of god” and yearing, wondering, when god will act again, it wasnt any more veiled than the Guardian outrage.
Leftists have hearts of black, those that arnt simply their “Usefull Idiots” anyway …
Moraly obtuse they are, their sympathies,, their sympathy, is for the devil.
Jeralyn’s claim that she only edited the comments for “language” is not only a lie, it’s a ridiculously transparent lie. Right now, a Google search for the phrase “assassinate President” on her site turns up 24 hits. Does she honestly think that leaving up a 25th would have made a whit of a difference? Even if she did, she could have edited the language of the comments so as to remove whatever key search terms she was worried about, while retaining the content of the messages themselves, worded differently. Instead, she simply covered her tracks.
Also, there’s still a comment up in Jeralyn’s thread from a leftist who used the phrase “kill the president.” That language is unedited.
Of course, the leftist was supporting Jeralyn’s point, whereas I was trying to attack it. Perhaps that’s the difference.
And the “kill the president” language she left up — from the leftist — has now made it onto Google!
As one of the apparently few blog consumers on this thread, I have the following comments:
1. Note that Jeralyn’s main concern is the effect that this episode might have on paypal. Market forces at work, this is good.
2. Blogs make my daily reading list primarily for the level of intellectual discourse, and the credibility of the blogger. The latter factor cannot be stressed enough. My guess is that most blog consumers are like me.
3. Obviously, Jeralyn is free to set her own rules. But if she desires an influence beyond her choir, she will have to submit to the rules of the marketplace.
Credibility is the key source of capital in the blogosphere. Time consuming to acquire, easy to lose.
Interesting, isn’t it, that a “sarcastic” call for the President’s assassination is presented as mere “criticism” by TalkLeft, and the Secret Service is mocked for investigating it, as they are required to do, no?
TalkLeft is, of course, free to do anything it wants, and the desire to keep in PayPal’s good graces is utterly understandable. But, well, I’m talking about different things here; the decision to call something that looked like a death threat (I can’t see the original LJ post, since it’s “protected”) mere “criticism”. If I call (note to law enforcement: This is a hypothetical point, not a plan or an incitement!) for someone to burn down Jeralyn’s house because of her actions, I think it would be unfair for someone to simply call that “criticism” of her, in that it leaves out a very important bit of context that changes the entire tone of the conversation.
(The person who got investigated by the Secret Service doesn’t seem to think that it’s a Terrible Thing that her post could be construed as a possible threat or that she was interviewed for ten whole minutes. She does seem oddly concerned by the fact that she now has “a file” with her… name, picture, address, and a “not a threat” report from the SS in it. Why this is a problem, I don’t know. It’s not like merely Having A File is, er, harmful. Unless, say, you’re trying to get a Top Secret security clearance or something.)
There is further evidence of TalkLeft hypocrisy here.
Sorry I’m late to the party.
Uh. Guys. You don’t get it. The Left is no longer about politics.
The left is about following the true religion.
It is no longer about reason. It is about heresy vs. the true faith.
Thus you are wasting your time trying to reason with them.
Armed Liberal: ” There’s a simple thing that I believe blogging is about: honest argument and debate.”
Roger L. Simon, your buddy, bans people all of the time for disagreeing with Roger L. Simon, your buddy.
In the blogger’s dictionary next to “echo chamber” we see Roger L Simon, LGF, Free Republic and WOC.
You Mr. Danziger, Mr. “armed” liberal, Mr. A Threat In Your Own Eponymous Name, are a joke.
“You linked to Red State and suggested that your policy is the equivalent of theirs; nothing could be further from the truth. Their policy simply says “don’t be disruptive of the spirit of this place” – you could do the same, and choose not to.
I can’t speak intelligently about ‘Red State’ but the other blogs are nothing like what the above comments describe. Freerepublic and others cannot stand dissention from the droll they profess. All those sites are very exclusionary and do not tolerate free open discussion.