Maliki wants to be Saddam

Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki wants to become a strongman in the tradition of Saddam Hussein. That’s my conclusion after reading Eric Martin’s detailed account of how Maliki’s government is cracking down on the Sons of Iraq / Sunni Awakening groups, the Sadrists, and other possible centers of power away from the Baghdad government.

Message from Harry’s Place

My Bloglines feed includes this message from the Harry’s Place blog (which has been taken down):

Don’t panic if we disappear briefly…
By Brett on Admin

Harry’s Place may be removed (or rather have it’s DNS disabled) after a ‘complaint’ to the company that our domain name is registered with.

We assume after threats were made on the weekend that this ‘complaint’ originates from Jenna Delich or her supporters.

Though we have not yet seen the complaint submitted, we assume it runs along the lines that pointing out that Ms Delich linked to the website of a known neo-Nazi figure and former Ku Klux Klan leader is defamatory.

This is extraordinary since Ms Delich has not denied that she circulated links to David Dukes website. There would be no point since the evidence is in the public domain.

Nevertheless, a malicious complaint has been made to the company hosting our DNS.

We would like to assure readers of Harry’s Place that we are doing everything we can to prevent a disruption, but that – of course – we will not concede any ground. We have posted nothing defamatory, and we stand by the information we have supplied.

ISPs often run scared of UK libel law and malicious complaints are thus common. Sadly, it is a well known - and usually successful - way of censoring websites which publish truths that they’d rather not be generally known.

We ask our readers and supporters in the meantime to publish this information as widely as possible. The disgraceful tactic of dishonest and malicious complaining should not be allowed to succeed.

Those on the UCU list, please also make this know there.

Please spread the word.

If we go down, email us at harryblog at gee mail dot com for updates.

UPDATE: For those who can still see us – we’ve put up an archive of the Delich-related material here, which we will use to post updates on this saga:

http://jennadelich.blogspot.com/

Has Harry’s Place been taken down?

I cannot access the blog Harry’s Place at the moment (17:41 on Tuesday 26-Aug-2008). It appears that it may have suffered a takedown notice. As Norm Geras writes:

If Harry’s Place should go silent…

… it will be for the reason that you can still read about at Harry’s Place itself: a complaint has been sent to the company hosting HP’s domain name – they think because they pointed out someone’s having linked from the UCU activists list to a far-right website.

While I have had my disagreements with Harry’s Place, it is wrong for people to be able to use legal threats to take down websites.

Linux not supported at Democratic Convention video

The currently ongoing Democratic National Convention has a streaming video service where you can see the proceedings from your computer. But only if you run certain operating systems; Linux isn’t included. If you do try using it with Linux, you get this message:

We’re pretending to be sorry, but the Democratic Convention video web site isn’t compatible with your operating system and/or browser. Please try again on a computer with the following:

Compatible operating systems:
Windows XP SP2, Windows Vista, or a Mac with Tiger (OS 10.4) or Leopard (OS 10.5). If you are using Linux, we think you are a nerdy loser and we don’t give a fuck about your vote. This does not prevent us from running our website using Linux, nor will it prevent us from trying to associate ourselves with Internet startups, which typically use Linux and other Open Source software.

(via Slashdot)