I protest.

"The Obsidian manifest."

It turns out that there's some guy running a "blacklist" website who has targeted so-called "leftist" blogs. (No, I won't give this guy a link, sorry.) Back on May 18, he apparently pointed his readers to this weblog, saying

Interestingly, I received no click-throughs from his site at all. I've had a negative commenter or two, but none worth mentioning.

What's a bit more interesting is his characterization of me as a "liberal conspiracist." As far as I know, I have used the term "conspiracy" exactly zero times since beginning this weblog. I suspect that he is reading a lot more into what I write than I put there. The truth is that I really don't think that there's a "conspiracy," as such. Bush himself is simply not smart enough to take part in a conspiracy. The rest, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Ashcroft, et al, are simply behaving selfishly. They are helping their friends, who are typically very rich Republicans, since these men (and woman) are themselves very rich Republicans. They are pursuing their own agendas, such as Ashcroft's "shred the constitution" agenda, or Rumsfeld's "I know better than the Pentagon" agenda. They are self-involved and if they consider how their actions affect others at all, they dismiss it as unimportant.

Just because there's not a "conspiracy," though, doesn't mean that we stand idly by and let them walk over us.

In another entry, Mr. Obsidian-guy says,

The article to which he refers is about Huang Qi who ran a Chinese website that hosted "an essay calling for the prosecution of those responsible for the bloody suppression" at Tienanmen Square. Mr. Huang was arrested in June of 2000 and was sentenced on May 9 to five years in prison. Mr. Huang, of course, didn't write the essay, he just owned the website where it was posted. I've known about this case since it happened and I am only surprised by how light the sentence is that he received. The students who carried out the protests at Tienanmen Square in 1989 were typically executed.

The point here, of course, is that I and others like me want to avoid this situation. It happens in China, but we don't want it to happen in the United States. Unfortunately, it appears that we are headed in that direction. Dissent is taken as "treason" and criticism of the President or his cabinet is not allowed. It is true that people aren't imprisoned here for speaking their minds, else I would be in serious trouble. The problem is that there are those who, like Ashcroft (or at least like he seems to be), would happily imprison me for the words I have written here, casting them as "treason" and casting me as a "danger to society," a "troublemaker." It can happen here, unless we act to stop it.

Thus this weblog and my other actions, my membership in the EFF and the ACLU, my contributions to those and other organizations, the many letters I have written to my Representative and Senators.

"All that is necessary for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing." — Edmund Burke