Archive for the ‘internet/free speech’ Category

…when writing about Google and China:

As of now (still early morning in Beijing), Google.com.hk is accessible from mainland China although specific search results for sensitive terms result in a browser error – or in other words, are blocked. Same as it’s always been for sensitive searches on Google.com from inside mainland China. This is network filtering and would happen automatically as part of the “great firewall” Internet filtering system.

via Glenn Reynolds who put me to shame.

Oh BTW I’ve been calling Rebecca MacKinnon the free speech diva since I was blogging at Hiwired, to my knowledge nobody else does. They should.

…but stories like this remind me why you couldn’t pay me to live there:

“The University of Ottawa is really easy to get into, isn’t it?” she said in an interview after the cancelled event. “I never get any trouble at the Ivy League schools. It’s always the bush league schools.”

Coulter said she has been speaking regularly at university campuses for a decade. While she has certainly been heckled, she said this is the first time an engagement has been cancelled because of protesters.

“This has never, ever, ever happened before — even at the stupidest American university,”

There are quite a few American universities that might be jealous, shame about that pesky first amendment isn’t it? Smitty comments:

Mark Steyn will no doubt have something blistering on this one, but Canada, you really have wet yourself. Your osteoporosis has reached a point where a woman with long hair and pointed remarks cannot offer them without you fearing for ’safety’. For crying out loud in the dark, I hope all honest Canucks, who can remember a time before the last hair was shaved off their public bottom in the name of some bogus ‘empathy’ god, just come South of the border right now.

Over at Atlas Pam is her normal quiet self:

These same savages welcome the most hate speech sponsors with open arms and open legs, but truth is verboten….
…They welcome Israel Apartheid Week and its accompanying violence. They welcome Robert Fisk. They welcome George Galloway, today’s Oswald Mosley….no protest except when he was barred from Canada by the Feds for supporting Hamas…..he is a hero of free speech……

They embrace inciter to genocide, George Galloway.

They employ a Muslim terrorist wanted in France for blowing up a synagogue.

Don’t be shy Pam, tell us how you really feel.

Canadians, if you aren’t embarrassed you ought to be. If you are embarrassed but aren’t going to do anything about it then you ought to consider Smitty’s suggestion above. Oh and he’s right about Steyn:

This is the pitiful state one of the oldest free societies on the planet has been reduced to, and this is why our free speech campaign matters – because those who preside over what should be arenas of honest debate and open inquiry instead wish to imprison public discourse within ever narrower bounds – and in this case aren’t above threatening legal action against those who dissent from the orthodoxies. Lots of Americans loathe Ann Coulter but it takes a Canadian like François Houle to criminalize her. The strictures he attempts to place around her, despite his appeal to “Canadian law”, are at odds with the eight centuries of Canada’s legal inheritance.

It’s not a coincidence that Mark is typing this from the US, Ann again.

I would like to know when this sort of violence, this sort of protest, has been inflicted upon a Muslim — who appear to be, from what I’ve read of the human rights complaints, the only protected group in Canada. I think I’ll give my speech tomorrow night in a burka. That will protect me.

I feel bad for those Canadian vets at Normandy who game their lives for this. I suspect they would be asking someone to explain how it came to pass that the only person with balls in Canada is an American woman?

UPDATE: At 12:16 A.M. Glenn Reynolds linked to a poll at CBC news on if Ann’s speech. As of 5:35 a.m. the poll is inaccessible. I wonder why? Perhaps they don’t like the results.

Update 2: Alinsky when he was not clogging restrooms suggested people use their own rules against them. Ann obliges.

The “[i]nflammatory right-wing pundit” spoke at the University of Western Ontario yesterday. In a move that has to be tongue-in-cheek, Coulter said she will file a human rights complaint alleging that University of Ottawa vice-president academic and provost Francois Houle’s e-mail to her constituted “hate speech.”

I hope it is not tongue-in-cheek I say use their own courts against them. Make them defend their rules and spend their money to do it.

So lets take another trip around that wonderful place that is my blogroll:

At the Hermeneutic of Continuity Fr finds a wonderful thing, a balanced story about the Pope:

It is by no means a hagiography and I wouldn’t agree with everything he says, but it is a relief to read something from a commenter in the secular press who knows what he is talking about. John Hooper has done us a service with this objective appraisal which is a welcome contrast to the Catholic baiting of the Times.

The article in question is here.

You know for the first time ever I actually fell asleep at the keyboard in mid post so I’m continuing this post 6 hours later…

Over at Robert Stacy’s he reports on Ann Coulter’s First amendment demonstration for our Canadian neighbors.

Assuming that Dudley Do Right doesn’t catch her first, tonight Ann speaks at the People’s Republic of Ottawa. Should she escape from that Stalinist gulag, on Thursday she will speak in Calgary, and then return to America to hang out with me at Saturday’s Vegas Tea Party.

Between the time I started this post last night and now (4:53 A.M) Dudley do Right and co demonstrated why our Canadian friends today would no longer be trusted with a beach at Normandy.

Meanwhile it’s a good thing we have Tim Blair to take a closer look at environmental law in the Illinois:

Wind, solar, burning thousands of tyres … it’s all good:

With just five words quietly slipped into legislation, Illinois lawmakers are moving to include tire burning in the state’s definition of renewable energy, a change that would benefit a south suburban incinerator with a long history of pollution problems.

Hey Illinois? Isn’t that where the president came from. I wonder how many words like these were quietly slipped into the healthcare bill that was just signed?

Next time I’ll try to be more awake when I’m posting.

…she points out on Morning Joe that google gets only 1 1/2% of its revenue from China and has struggled there. She must have read this Wall Street Journal article on the subject.

So Apparently google is making lemonade out of lemons here. A pretty smart move.

Then again it doesn’t change the fact that it is the right thing to do so I’ll give them kudos anyway for taking the road less traveled by, as the Journal says:

Google is trying to continue to offer search services to Chinese users outside the purview of mainland Chinese law, a strategy that few other companies, even those who have expressed growing frustrations with doing business in China, are likely to follow. Google appears to be setting itself up to fight China’s rules on its own and to manage what is likely to continue to be a complicated relationship with Beijing as it tries to ensure the government allows it to maintain some of its operations in the country. “This is an elegant solution if it were to hold, but I’m not convinced China will allow this to continue,” said John Palfrey, an Internet scholar at Harvard Law School.

Could it also be that Google sees that China’s bubble might be ready to burst too? If so such a move has even greater rewards long term.