A few days ago, I checked into Dennis Mangan's site and found a vague disclaimer from Blogger. At the present time, the site is still down and Mangan has not received an explanation from Blogger, a company run by Google. I'm still hoping that this reflects some technical glitch and not outright censorship of un-PC opinions. I'll refrain from postulating what specific content may have caused this potential silencing. Hopefully Mangan will get his site back soon and this situation will reveal itself as some trivial coincidence. If not, I assume he'll start his site on another platform.
Some are encouraging us right-wing Blogspot bloggers to find a new home. I'm not planning on it and I doubt I'll be "next". Hopefully, this doesn't begin a PC purge of the HBD community.
10 comments:
Some are encouraging us right-wing Blogspot bloggers to find a new home. I'm not planning on it and I doubt I'll be "next".
It never hurts to be prepared for the worst. An XML file only takes about a minute to download.
I like your optimism, but the "Report Abuse" button is too accessible.
Anyone can be next. While I despise the idea of censorship, Google pays for the storage and bandwidth - they have final say. I think it is a good idea to either move to another company, or pony up the dough for a private server.
Perhaps this is the time for the creation of an HBD server company. It would guarantee the right of expression of ideas.
Even if this isn't a TOS issue, private dedicated servers to HBD should offer more stability and freedom of expression.
@ Ferdinand:
Don't worry. When Mangan got taken down, I copied my entire blog history. I tried the XML way, but a much better way (saves all pics and links) is to do a search (will show all posts) and then copy into Word. Not sure if this is available for Wordpress though.
@ Anon:
Why I'm not afraid: Sailer's been around, with a much larger readership, more well-known amongst liberal creationists, and probably "worse" commenters than me, yet he's never had problems.
If it happens, I'll be prepared. I'll save my history every week and if Google banishes me, then I'll move to Wordpress. Until then, I'm staying at Blogspot (which I think is a better program than Wordpress, though I'm in the minority on that one).
Since sites like "Why Blacks Suck" are still up and running on blogspot, I am still leaning towards some sort of technical problem than censorship.
On the other hand, even if this is a technical snafu, Blogspot hasn't responded to Mangan which indicates poor service on behalf of Google.
If Google doesn't respond to Mangan's demand for an explanation, then it might be wise to consider switching to some other platform just because you can't trust Google to respond to technical problems or even give you an explanation about what is going on.
Google may not be engaging in systemic, wholesale censorship but rather responding in a heavy handed way to a complaint.
A while back I participated in Yahoo answers in a forum where heated debates between atheists and evangelicals raged. Several atheist posters where targeted by a particularly frothing christian and lost their avatars and all comments.
The site has been down quite a while. I find it difficult to believe this is a glitch but I'll be happy to be proven wrong.
JGP
1) I think it has got to do with Dennis Mangan's support for Bruce Charlton's magazine's problems with the Duesberg paper. These people were pushing very hard to shut Charlton up and get him fired. I do not doubt that they would be just as intolerant towards a blogger as well. Filing a complaint against a blog is quite easy to do. Mangan was pretty supportive (or open-minded) of the Duesberg paper. No doubt that pissed off some people.
2) Dennis' blog always took a long time to load, so it could be some technical error that irritated blogger on blogs. In my company there once was a bug in a tool that, all in all, still worked and someday out of the blue the whole thing got messed up during some kind of 'change' procedure and everything was broken beyond repair.
OneSTDV,
I use the "notes" feature of my facebook account as an archive (and have security settings set so that I am the only one who is able to view my notes). It feeds immediately (within a matter of minutes) and automatically. Comments are lost, but it's a zero-maintenance way to keep all your stuff instantly accessible.
I also doubt that it's a glitch. Keep backing up your blog.
I have no way of contacting Mangan. If I could I'd tell him to demand that google allow him to access his blog to download it, then to move to typepad or wordpress.
There's always the wayback machine....
(I'm the Anon from 2nd comment)
I agree this seems less and less likely to be a technical issue.
@OneSTDV
One important difference - you are not Steve Sailer. I don't mean that in a bad way. He just has a huge following that would make it more difficult to censor. You haven't been on the scene as long.
Like I said earlier, the "Report Abuse" button is too accessible. Once somebody hits that you will lose temporary access. Whether a site is offered again depends on what technician responds to the email or phone call - NAM or SWPL will be less sympathetic.
You will probably be fine, but who knows anymore?
Anyway, I enjoy your insights. Your blog is on my regular rotation.
Blogspot has restored Mangan's old site.
It looks like technical incompetence/bad customer relations management on the part of Google.
http://mangans.blogspot.com/
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