Time Immortal

Wayne writes in with some kind words.

In your answers from a catholic, you referenced the group you were part of. You would know, of course that they have eliminated your posts as if they never existed.

I only caught a hint from a person responding to your intro post quoted it including the WtFdragon and your scouts involvement.

I used to be a “reformed baptist” type and knew that only the KJV Baptists were more anti-catholic than me, so when I saw the nature of those involved, I wasn’t surprised that you were summarily ‘disappeared’.

Did you ever address your bannishment from that group, and how long did you last after you posted?

btw, I am now a catholic after 42+ years of being an anti-Catholic, so God does rescue some enemies of the church just to keep them stirred up…. “did ya hear??!! Wayne went apostate!…. Catholic!”

I was married on Dec 8th, 2006 and we are still hoping for babies, congratulations to you and your wife.

Wayne

Well, thank you very kindly, Wayne.

Yes, O Reader, there is little trace of me left in the Gamespot group that calls itself the “Bible Believers Union”. And while the group’s name is not exactly a misnomer — everyone within it is some flavour of Christian, and then mostly of a strict-literalist bent — I am nevertheless reminded of a Star Wars quote. Pace Ben Kenobi, you will never find a more wretched hive of narrowness and bigotry.

Actually, that’s not entirely true — the BBU is hardly e.g. Stormfront. But it’s not a nice place to be, especially if you’re any other sort of Christian besides the Jack Chick reading, “Bible thumping”, “Jesus jumping” sort. And even then…seriously, the union is so hardcore that

The whole story of my joining, and then subsequently resigning from, the BBU involved me having a falling out, some years back, with some people on another Gamespot union, the Christian Union. Disgusted at some rather rabid anti-Catholic bigotry on display therein, I gravitated toward the BBU in the hope that it would prove to be a decent forum to continue talking about Christ online. As it turned out, I was leaving the frying pan for the fire…but in the interim, the leader of the Christian Union did a bit of house-cleaning and welcomed me back with open arms.

So the situation was resolved very well, I have to say, and fortunately the whole experience didn’t sour the Gamespot community for me any at all. Which is a good thing, as I rather like Gamespot as a resource — it is quite a good trove of information.

At any rate, many congratulations to Wayne on his conversion — the Church welcomes warmly, and is greatly enriched by, adult converts! May he persevere in faith! Congratulations are also due him over his marriage (such a blessed sacrament!), and it is my prayer that he and his wife be rewarded with the many fruits of the marital union, including (in God’s good time) children.

And yes, O Reader, more Answers will be forthcoming in due time.

Count Roland follows up on an observation he had previously made concerning the fact that Time Immortal is blocked at the Catholic high school in Lloydminster, Alberta. Apparently, I’m classified as an “advocacy organization” by the IT personnel there.

But it appears that the rabbit hole goes even deeper than that. Roland has done quite a lot of investigative work, and his conclusions are…surprising, on one hand, and yet unsurprising as well.

O Writer,

I did a more extensive perusal of a small sample of organizations that have websites.

You are still blocked as an advocay organization; FreeMarkSteyn is blocked as a message/discussion board.

I was allowed to go to Planned Parenthood, CHRC, COLF, CCCB, CCRL, and Lifesite.

Given the Catholic position on abortion, I was surprised that PP was allowed, but as a defender of free speech it must be allowed - dynamic tension that is better than simple dichotomies, no?

CHRC and CCRL are opposing legal organizations. Lifesite was to test if the Catholic organizations were only allowed because the developers were told to allow Catholic sites — it was allowed as a non-Catholic life issues site, which is good.

But I am stil surprised that they, in general, were allowed considering they are as advocative as you are, if not more.

Right away, I confess myself surprised by the level and scope of the site categorization that is in play here, not all of it accurate. Lifesite is more or less correctly categorized: it is a life issues site, though not one that takes a specifically Catholic perspective.

On the other hand, Time Immortal is very incorrectly categorized: I am just one guy, not an organization, and though I do have a couple of guest bloggers (e.g. my wife) there is no explicit advocacy done through the site, certainly not in the sense of “one cause/raison d’etre” that my being categoriezed as an advocacy organization would imply. Contrast this with the allowance of Planned Parenthood’s website, despite the fact that PP openly admits that (pro-abortion) advocacy is part of its mission.

(Note that I’m not suggesting that the Planned Parenthood website should be banned — unless the ban on advocacy groups is to remain in place: consistency is important!)

And then there’s the issue of Binks’ FreeMarkSteyn aggregator, which is not really a discussion board (not more than any other blog that allows comments is, at any rate), nor a message board (according to the normative definition of the term). It is more properly termed an aggregator; that is: a collection or compliation of links to various stories from around the internet, which may or may not revolve around a common theme.

But this is also not as deep as the rabbit hole goes, O Reader. Roland notes, in a follow-up message, that a rather peculiar, though perhaps predictable, trend has begun to emerge.

Here is a list of more sites I tried.

Blocked:
Real Women of Canada - advocacy
National Rifle Association - weapons
Stormfront - hate
Black Panther - advocacy

Allowed:
PETA
National Organization of Women
Jack Chick
Coalition for Gun Control
Canadian Islamic Congress
Jihad Watch
SteynOnline
Reverend Wright on wiki -> tucc.org
Christianity Today

From my observations so far, the blocked sites all seem to be from the “conservative” side of the spectrum. Many allowed sites, from PP to now to PETA to Gun control, are largely advocacy groups but are on the “progressives’” approved list, although it also has a fair number of ‘conservative’ sites. How, though, realwomen/nra is blocked while now/gun control is not is beyond me.

Also, how is Jack Chick or TUCC not a hate site, or at least problematic on advocacy grounds for black liberation / anti-Catholic Theology?

I am somewhat confused (although I guess the web-block company likely has a liberal bias) and dismayed. I would hope that any censorship be in favour of groups closer to Church teaching and that Censorship be minimized, or if more widespread, to be at least not in favour of non-Church teaching sites.

This is a confusing trend, to be sure. For all intents and purposes, the person or persons responsible for policing the Internet access at the Catholic high school in Lloydminster — Holy Rosary High School — seems to be operating under something of a liberal bias in terms of how he or she applies the school’s presumably extant web access policy.

To wit: if advocacy groups are banned, why can the websites of organizations like PETA, Planned Parenthood, NOW, and the CIC still be accessed? If weapons-related sites are banned, why can the websites of gun control groups still be accessed? Roland points out other dichotomies which would appear to exist as well.

The extent of the bias is not great, but in general this situation doesn’t pass the old “sniff test” — there does seem to be some effort that has gone in to reducing access to conservative opinion on the Internet at Holy Rosary. And since censorship in any form is unacceptable…

Holy Rosary High School

Principals
Principal: Mr. T. Brochu
Vice Principal: Mr. Vince Orieux
Vice Principal: Mr. C. Musyj

Contact Information
Address: 6611A-39 Street
Lloydminster, AB T9V 2Z4
Phone: (780) 875-3600
Fax: (780) 875-9516
Email: hrhs@lcsd.ca

Do drop them a line, O Reader. There’s quite enough censorship — especially censorship of conservative opinion — going on in this country of late as it is, without some tin-pot IT dictator adding to the list of problems. That this sort of thing is happening at a Catholic hich school, especially one which states that its mission is to “nurture spiritual, academic, emotional, social and physical growth in every individual.”

Update: Welcome, readers from Sleepy Old Bear, Walker, and BCF! And welcome, Steynians!

Ezra Levant has a couple of good articles up on his blog. The first is the inauguration of a new feature on his site that will hopefully become a regular thing: the CHRC bigoted comment of the day.

It sounds like a joke, but it really isn’t. In their ongoing investigations, members of the Canadian Human Rights Commission have written all manner of racist, misogynistic, and hateful things on various web forums. Certain employees of the CHRC are even registered members of Stormfront, a white supremacist organization.

The italicized text below is the words of Richard Warman, the man who has filed almost every Section 13 complaint on record.

I think Louis has hit the nail on the head. but why couldn’t we get Whiteville off the ground? I think it was a good idea and held somepromise for those of us who want to be among our own kind - but isnt Alberta too cold in the winter???

Did you get that? The conversation is about visible minorities. A Stormfront member calls them a “mud flood”, and laments the disappearance of “White nation”.

Warman agrees, and goes further — calling for a whites-only city, which he names Whiteville. He suggests transforming Louis’s comments from passive racist complaining into action. He thinks it would be a good idea for “those of us” who don’t like minorities. And that leads to a whole stream of comments discussing the merits of creating an Apartheid city in Canada. The site was racist before Warman’s post. But he helped shape their discussion, he focussed it, he encouraged it, he added to it, and he suggested action, not mere words.

In other words, he spread hate.

You can read the whole thing right here.

Were Warman a cop, his actions would be called entrapment. And while Warman is not an employee of the CHRC anymore, he was at one point — and, at any rate, this same illegal technique of entrapment is used by other CHRC investigators.

Ezra also brings news that the operators of Free Dominion — Connie and Mike Fournier, two of the defendants in Richard Warman’s lawsuit against several prominent Canadian conservative website operators — have filed their statement of defence against Warman’s claim.

You can see a copy of that defence here.

…

The Free Dominion defence is a fascinating read. It’s obviously a document written for the court of law, but it’s also a powerful weapon in the court of public opinion. It’s quite readable — not too leaden with legalese — and it tells a hell of a story. As I predicted when Warman first sued us, we might well be the nominal defendants in this case, but it’s Warman who’s really going to be on trial.

I don’t propose to go through the entire defence here; I really do recommend that you read it.

It is worth a read, O Reader. The document is very solid, and every bit as accessible as Ezra notes. What is more, it is one statement only — Ezra himself, Kate MacMillan, and Kathy Shaidle have yet to file their respective statements.

Warman is, I suspect, going to get his ass kicked around the courthouse — repeatedly. He’s used to playing by CHRC rules, and it’s doubtful, especially against such an array of skilled orators and debaters, that he will last long in a proper courtroom.

Update: Welcome, Steynians!

Today only!

That’s right — any Mark Steyn merchandise or books purchased today will mean money donated to the legal defence funds of Canadian bloggers Ezra Levant, Kathy Shaidle, Kate MacMillan, Mark and Connie of Free Dominion, and National Post columnist Johnathan Kay against the lawsuit filed by Richard Warman. These men and women have been vocal, vital advocates in the cause of freedom of expression rights in Canada, and both need and deserve our support, O Reader.

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