Sunday, May 3, 2009

Enemies of Free Speech Attempt to Shutdown a Scholar

It is sad to see that economist George Reisman had to put this up on his blog:

The enemies of free speech are attempting to silence me. Here is the notice I just received, supposedly from Google. Let Google hear from you about this outrage.

"This blog has been locked due to possible Blogger Terms of Service violations. You may not publish new posts until your blog is reviewed and unlocked.
This blog will be deleted within 20 days unless you request a review."
First, it should be made clear that Google's Blogger plays a only a very minor role in this drama.

Most likely, someone wrote to Blogger and stated that Reisman somehow violated Blogger's terms of service. And, I'm guessing, Blogger responded with an automated response.

For the record, George Reisman Ph.D.is the author of Capitalism: A Treatise on Economics and is Pepperdine University Professor Emeritus of Economics. He is also a Senior Fellow at the Goldwater Institute. His web site is http://www.capitalism.net/ and his blog is http://www.georgereisman.com/blog.

Last summer, when I used Word Press, my site was knocked off by Word Press when I stated some purely factual events about a conference Michelle Obama attended. It's not fun. I still haven't recovered all the posts I lost via Word Press.

There's a small group that appear to be left wing types (maybe there are some right wingers who do the same, but I never had this type blogging problems when I commented negatively about GW) who know what to say to blogging services to get them all riled up.

I'm sure it was either Reisman's negative analysis on global warming or anti-Obama comments that set off some group to distort his comments to Blogger. Let's hope Blogger does indeed look at a site before taking a site down. They will see the quality analysis that Reisman brings to his writing, and that there is simply zero that could be considered abusive in any manner.

And a note to those of you who may from time to time write controversial material, you are much better off using Blogger then Word Press. First, it appears that Blogger gives you some warning, which I guess gives you time to attempt to rectify the situation. Word Press does not. In my cased they just yanked years worth of posts.

Second, the method of posting via Blogger is different than with Word Press. At Blogger you post to your internet service provider's servers, thus you have a quick ready backup. With Word Press, you are posting to Word Press servers. Thus, if they knock you out, unless you have manually saved your posts somewhere else, they are gone, forever, completely removed.

8 comments:

  1. The smart thing is to get your own site and not worry about it. It's not expensive. My blog uses wordpress software on an independent host. Reisman sees ghosts where there are none.

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  2. Reisman received an email from Google. That doesn't sound like a ghost to me.

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  3. Mr. Wenzel - were you unable to retrieve your old blog posts using the way back machine (archive.org)?

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  4. That's how I was able to retrieve most of them. There is a lag though between when they are posted on a web site and when they appear on wayback, of at least six months. Also, there is the possibility that the wayback crawler may have not have picked my last month or so of posts.

    Some of these I was able to pick up by other means.

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  5. Murphy had the same thing happen. I let him know and I think he's going to e-mail Reisman. It could be a malicious attack by vile leftists. It could also be a problem with their anti-spambot detection software.

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  6. @Taylor

    The wording appears to be different from what Murphy received from Google and what Reisman got.

    They warned Murphy about having certain coding at his site and that they would stop following in in their Google search directory.

    They are telling Reisman they are going to shut him down, a much more severe penalty, which suggests to me that someone is actively contacting Google and reporting some kind of nonsense about Reisman.

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  7. Robert,

    Oh, okay, maybe I was confused then. That does sound a little more severe. Luckily Reisman has his own website... maybe he can just host his blog from his own site going forward. The best part is his blog is at "georgereisman.com/blog" or something so he can easily forward the URL to the new blog location and hopefully not lose any previous readers.

    I think Reisman is one of the underappreciated/under-referenced thinkers and writers of the Austrian/Randian school... sure would be a shame if his blog got cut off somehow.

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  8. Reisman's blog is excellent. There is a depth of analysis in his work that is very rewarding to read. It would be a crying shame if he was shut down.

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