It looks like our good friend Den Beste has succeeded in using his position as a well-known blogger to cow a less well-known blogger into removing content. Way to go, Steven! Unfortunately, I think this kind of groupthink enforcement will become ever more common as the class distinctions in the weblog community become more like those in real life.
From the looks of things, Den Beste didn’t ask the author to remove the entries. It also looks like the author didn’t remove them from his archives yet either. I had quite a nice rant ready to go about censorship, I even found a google cache of the offending entries. The end of this entry contains a modified mini-rant on censorship.
For now, your best bet is to avoid reading warbloggers in general. Oh, and watch out for public radio. Last time I turned it on, I got WAR-FM instead.
Here are the good bits that still apply from the rant that was not to be:
True censorship is hard these days on the web. If you’d like to take a peek at the posts that have now been removed, all you have to do is pull up a google cache. This applies to pretty much anything that is censored on the web. I’ve seen it happen in the past, and we’ll see it happen in the future.
Sure, I’d be pissed off if someone wrote a post slamming me, though as long as I don’t have any legal ground, there ain’t a whole lot that I’m going to be able to do about it. At least in the states, you’ve got your free speech, go ahead and use it. As long as it doesn’t infringe on the rights of others, enjoy.