Thursday, November 02, 2006

Free Speech Ain't Free....Oh Wait....Yes It Is

One of the nice things about blogging is that people can respond to what you write and can post it themselves without hoping for some editor/publisher to print their "letter to the editor." I think it's great that people can respond to something I've written without me, as the owner of this site, deciding whether or not it is a worthy comment. And I don't delete comments, for the most part. The few times I have deleted comments was during the time period when blogs were getting spammed in the comment section like crazy, before blogger instituted the word verification that has saved me from long, idiotic, automated messages showing up. My five readers have better things to do than read ads for hair-loss treatment or work from home opportunities. Besides, if someone wants to put an ad in my blog, I'm damn well going to get paid for it.

Other than spam, I think the only time I deleted a message was when someone posted a comment after a blog I wrote that mentioned David Duke in some context that now escapes me. One of his apparent followers put in a comment that was a collection of links to Duke web sites, as well as a bunch of Holocaust-denial, neo-Nazi, KKK, and other racist and Jew-hating sites. It was surprising just how many the guy linked to, it was something like over twenty.

I wondered where I would draw the line, and I guess that was it. Honestly, if the guy had just written some stupid racist bullshit, I probably would have let it stay and then just made fun of him (much like I did with that stop-immigration.org dumbass). But I wasn't comfortable with my site being used to link to some horrible racist propaganda like that.

Feel free to let me know if you think that was a reasonable thing to do. Or do you think that it went against the whole philosophy of free speech?

Give me your thoughts. But please, no linking to killakike.org.

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Coming tomorrow - I'll go through the old mailbag and write some responses to comments left on my blog over the last few months. Can't you just feel the anticipation?

1 comment:

Joe said...

What? You deleted Nazi links? What the hell is the matter with you? Did we learn nothing from the movie Skokie? Did Danny Kaye's suffering mean nothing to you? For shame, sir. For shame.