It appears that there is an attempt to shut down the only voice of a serving convict in the blogosphere, Ben’s Prison Blog, about which I disagreed with A Tory. If you agree with me, or if you have not read it yet, please do visit the site to learn more about this potentially illegal effort to silence an intelligent, articulate voice.
Letters From A Tory has a Letter today addressed to Prisoner Ben claiming very forcefully that Ben should not be allowed to author a blog.
Since Ben’s friend accesses the blog from outside prison there appears to be no practical way Ben could be prevented from blogging. I cannot think of any that would not curtail the the freedom to write letters, a freedom assumed thirty years ago when his ten-year minimum sentence was recommended on that basis. However not forgetting that I would like to disregard it and answer A Tory.
I saw no reason in anything in the post or comments that Ben should not be allowed to blog.
It is not, as implied in the Letter, an increase in Ben’s liberty, as he is using his traditional liberty to achieve it. There has always been heavy restriction on prisoners' communication, and this is no exception. I am sure we can all imagine the restriction of having to access the internet via a friend and the Royal Mail. Given that prisoners have never been entirely isolated blogging in this way is no real change to Ben’s liberty.
I would argue that blogging is an excellent medium for rehabilitation. In a good blog there must be an attempt to communicate well and to reason. If a blog of the style Ben is writing is to be successful and well-read then the author must not only write something interesting but must engage the reader and develop some empathy, some consideration for those who disagree with him and indeed those like LFAT and Iain Dale who dispute that he should be allowed to blog. A good blog receives feedback, and a good blogger responds to this in an effort to increase readership. All of these are aspects of rehabilitation that can easily be missed in traditional education, and especially in artificial environments, like a prison.
The blog can also allow aspects of rehabilitation that the essential isolation of a prison prevents and the environment of prison necessitates, interaction with the real world. Open prisons and day-release towards the end of a sentence have similar effect, but where used give far more liberty than blogging via mail!
My final point is that Ben’s is an excellent blog. I even toyed with the idea of making it a Featured Blog, but the first two I have chosen both relate to injustice, and Ben has made it clear that his life sentence is fair. Ben is intelligent, articulate and direct. Today he addressed an issue others have not and perhaps would not dare to address in the same way. It so happens that I agree with him, but that is not the point. A new viewpoint is welcome, as long as it is coherently argued.
No it was not Obama’s election, in fact they were not successful. However Bernie Goldberg has further proof that CBS deliberately lied to try and influence the close Presidential race in 2004.
It has long been known that Dan Rather presented documents on the CBS documentary programme 60 minutes that seemed to show a senior officer’s criticism of a young Lieutenant G W Bush, suggest that he went absent without leave and support accusations that he failed to fulfil his obligations to the Air National Guard. The accusation was that he was a slacker, who was trying to avoid being drafted to Vietnam by joining the ANG and avoiding duties where possible, protected by his father in the Senate.
Of course it turned out that the documents were fake, and there the story ends for most of the news media, an embarrassment brushed over.
Well it turns out that not only did Lt Bush not shirk his duties, not only did he specifically volunteer to go to Vietnam (others with more experience were chosen instead), but that Mary Mapes, the producer of that episode of 60 Minutes, knew at the time it was made that he had volunteered. She had been told on more than one occasion.
This is really very serious.
I was no Bush supporter (although knowing more now I am relieved Gore and Kerry lost) but neither did I ever subscribe to the ridiculous ‘idiot’ or ‘Hitler’ memes. It was always known that election was close, and Vietnam was important. The media painted Kerry as a hero to help his cause (although his record was suspect while he was there, and he told lies about atrocities once he returned).
The Democrats were trying to paint Bush as a coward to contrast, and the 60 Minute episode was widely quoted in the press to support that; it could easily have changed the election result. Mary Mapes was a known ‘liberal’ as the Americans put it. It appears she produced a programme that she knew all along was advancing a lie, in order to influence an election. That is shocking, even for the modern news media.
What is even more widely relevant is that this information has been available for several years, and the US news media do not want to know. They will not tell the truth.
Background For Those Unfamiliar
This incident brought Charles Johnson’s Little Green Football (UPDATE: link removed as Charles Johnson has descended into insanity, and I am not willing to direct people to his creepy blog) libertarian blog to national (and to some degree international) media attention, when he challenged the documents and proved that the document below, dated 1973, was almost certainly produced on Microsoft Word (the animation compares the 60 Minutes fax, and identical wording written in Word with default fonts and paragraph settings), and could not have been written on any known typewriter available in 1973.
Some months ago I followed a link to Generation Y, a Cuban blog written by Yoani Sànchez. The name comes from a generation born in the 1970s and 1980s, parallel with my generation, many of whom were given names beginning with a ‘Y’.
Generation Y is a subversive blog critical of the Cuban Government, although the feel is not violent or extreme, and the language rather moderate (as well as articulate and well-constructed in the English translation), the tone of the blog far more restrained about far worse government than I would with our own. Perhaps that is one of the reasons, alongside the blog’s wide readership and reputation abroad, that Miss Sànchez is still free to write the blog, although she has at times had difficulties.
The blog is interesting for its tales of ordinary life, philosophical ponderings on the nature of Fidel Castro’s thoughts, and most of all discussions of the restrictions and annoyances of life in Cuba. We can learn of the benefits of socialism for workers, the freedoms allowed by socialism and the caring social workers.
This is a great blog that I certainly recommend to anyone who loves freedom.
I think I will make this an occasional series, of blogs i think people should at least look at. The idea came when I saw this first one, through a comment one of its contributors made on Voice of The Resistance.
The blog is Muslims Against Sharia, a group blog supporting an Islamic Reform Movement.
While you have probably gathered I am an atheist I have nothing against religion per se. As a libertarian I certainly encourage those who wish to to exercise their right to freedom of religious thought. With that aim I can certainly support any Islamic philosophy that embraces freedom. It is also warming to see an Islamic site which offers a Hebrew translation. Please do check out this intelligently-written blog, and also the website for the movement.
Update: Muslims Against Sharia has been kind enough to leave a comment, and direct me to a better logo. Thank you MAS!
All property rights are important for freedom, and in that I include the right to the benefits of creative endeavour, tangible or otherwise. However the holders of copyrights and their intermediaries need to start understanding not only those laws but how to effectively manage licensing in a world of instant global communication where communities might be spread over the world.
I have noticed disparate cases, all with the common themes of licensing management and technological development. Sometimes the licences are behind the times, others someone is trying to get ahead, but at odds with the consensus of their customers.
At least Amazon apologised and agreed to change practices for the future when they failed to understand people’s feelings about copyright, and even apparently their own user agreement. They should treat new media like old – you buy it it’s yours. If it wasn’t there’s to sell that is Amazon’s problem. The latter is critical to Amazon’s future in the new medium of electronic books.
The case that triggered this post was Associated Press announcing a crackdown on unpaid use of its articles on the internet.
The first problem with this is that they have no right to do so, or at least not to the degree the AP intends. Leaving that aside, the AP just seems not to understand the modern world. Hot Air, where I found the story, calls it “…the fast track to AP irrelevance”. If Tom Curley (AP’s President and CEO) thinks this then I reckon Hot Air has a point:
“If someone can build multibillion-dollar businesses out of keywords, we can build multihundred-million businesses out of headlines, and we’re going to do that,” Mr. Curley said. The goal, he said, was not to have less use of the news articles, but to be paid for any use”
In my less-than-humble opinion he is deluded. We shall see.
People will just be fed up of AP. They don’t play nicely people won’t want to play with them. It is they who will lose. AP has not understood the modern world, let alone anticipated the future.
This is an increasingly noticeable phenomenon. Large businesses run by people isolated from the real world make licensing decisions that fail to take account of modern reality. In many cases they then complain when they lose money. A letter in the Telegraph last month signed by representatives of copyright holders demanded stricter enforcement of laws. I managed to get a reply published, but they edited out my main point, that the copyright holders are themselves to blame if they abuse their monopoly when making license agreements that don’t take into account the modern world.
When internet music download came about the licensed sites lagged far behind the illegal sites. At the same time CDs were overpriced. The price of an album went up when CD replaced tape and vinyl, although the manufacturing and distribution costs were in fact lower. Of course people then stole the music. When paid download finally arrived the cost varied depending on where the recipient was, by IP address. Of course people felt cheated, and some either bought from foreign sites anyway (via a proxy say) or simply carried on using illegal sites.
The latest ridiculous anachronism in licensing is on internet TV, and mirrors the region-code cock-up that is DVD. The internet is international. There are no borders. I have friends in the USA, Australia, New Zealand, Hong Kong, Denmark, Greenland, Norway among others who might be recommending ideas, sharing favourites with me. 35% of my traffic here comes from the USA, a similar proportion of my blog-reading time is probably spent on US sites. So why does Hulu, the internet TV site, give me this message when I try to watch Family Guy?
This is a fundamental misunderstanding of the nature of the internet. Why are licensing rights on the internet still sold in such a piecemeal way? That alongside the regional codes on DVD are driving the bit torrent phenomenon.
There will always be problems with copyright that crop up as technology develops. Globalisation caused the Amazon Kindle problem, where a work is no longer copyright in some jurisdictions. However such problems need to be addressed with reference to reality, not some idealised world with no pirating. I can see no excuse for major production companies, record producers and publishers not to negotiate world rights to material that is still copyright in all major markets, and charges that roughly correspond over those markets. If they refuse to do so they can hardly be surprised if people circumvent their restrictions.
Associated Press is likely to resolve its own case, as it either backs off its stated intentions or fades away, being ignored.
I have just worked out how to make my background green. Hoping for freedom and democracy in Iran.
For fuck's sake, you have no clue. You have thrown away everything that makes you a serious newspaper, everything you once stood for, every claim to uphold the public good and the historic values of the news media, for one cheap headline in a small story that will mean little enough to your readers now, and nothing in a month's time. For that you threaten to ruin the life of the Nightjack, and consigned his award-winning blog to history. On net your story destroyed news. Far more has been deleted from the internet, from the sum of what we can read, than you have added. You have completely reversed your purpose, become the anti-newspaper.
The Times went through an entire court process and not once did anyone think. Not once did anyone consider the effect on this man's life and career, the response he might make and the damage you might do and compare it with the utterly trivial public benefit of releasing his name.
I cannot think of words to express how stupid, how unbelievably crass and how clueless this decision has been. How can the Times ever again defend an editorial decision? How can you quote an off-the record source? How can you keep quiet about your whistle-blower?
There is a proud history in newspapers of journalists going to court, even being imprisoned, to protect an anonymous source. The Times is the first newspaper I have seen to go to court to expose an anonymous source.
[Small correction made to grammar]
