Slashdot Mirror
It's Hard To Run a Blog In Sweden
mpawlo writes "Swedish foreign minister Carl Bildt is being investigated by a prosecutor because of his blog. In a blog post, Mr. Bildt states that some 13.000 comments are posted (Swedish link) on his blog and that he and his staff try to erase all inappropriate comments. However, they apparently missed a comment proposing genocide of Palestinians. This prompted a Swedish leftist blogger to report the conservative foreign minister's blog and the comment to the authorities. Now a prosecutor is looking into the matter and the foreign minister will likely be held responsible for the comments due to poor Swedish legislation on freedom of speech relative to the Internet."
Pay attention everyone; expecially those of you who support hate crime and speech laws. This is what happens when you regulate certain "unacceptable" kinds of speech with the intent of "correcting" unpopular beliefs.
"Thoughtcrime" won't be relegated to fiction for long.
"Ask not what your country can do for you." --John F. Kennedy
but trolling one couldn't be easier
Would the owner of an apartment building be liable if someone posted a similar message on a bulletin board along side all of the for sale ads from other tenants?
-Xoltri
I don't know anything about Swedish law (except that Pirate Bay seems to get away with anything they want), but if the blog host is making reasonable good faith efforts to remove inappropriate comments and missed one, it seems morally reprehensible to hold him responsible.
A Møøse once blogged my sister.
Slashdot Burying Stories About Slashdot Media Owned
So apparently Sweden has the same problems with blogs and web-boards as Germany. Over here the
blog/board owner can be held responsible for any offensive/illegal content posted by someone on
the discussion board or comments. Even if the owner isn't aware of any such posting. This is called
"disturbance liability". If he is sued and agrees to remove the incriminating content there are some
stiff financial penalties if the poster is continuing.
Some courts think it is technically possible to monitor a web-board with 200k comments per month
like http://heise.de/
I'm glad you do too.
It's not universal. First, we're imprisoning mostly the wrong people for the aforementioned effect to occur, people who don't have any money. If you get busted for drugs, they're likely to take away all your money and claim it came from drugs whether it did or not; so see point 1.
Second, the War On Some Drugs is too profitable for too many influential groups for this to work. Think about all the beneficiaries! The biggest motivation to ban Marijuana originally came from Hearst (with his paper industry) and DuPont (with his plastics industry) but it also benefits the pharmaceutical companies, who get to sell bullshit drugs for things which can be treated with cannabis; the liquor industry, which would probably see a decline in sales; the private incarceration industry including both companies which build prisons and companies which run them; and of course, the justice system, which has dramatically higher volume with marijuana illegal than it would without it. There's also special organizations created just to reduce marijuana production, like CAMP, which would have no reason to exist without the prohibition (although they did cut CAMP's funding this year, or so I hear.)
What I find particularly annoying about this issue, though, is that the American public is being pretty fucking stupid by going along with the bullshit arguments. I don't know about you but I learned in school (partly in college, but just a lame two-year) that prohibition was an abject failure all along, and that it was terminated because it essentially provided endless positive PR for organized crime; they could make people happy and grateful by breaking the law! And, of course, make the usual pile of money in the process. It made gangsters famous instead of infamous and made them rich to boot. But we have precisely the same situation today with the other controlled substances; plus it is honestly true that some import drug sales fund terrorism. (Of course, so did paying OBL's Taliban to combat opium production in afghanistan, but never mind that for just now.) So the government is telling us "don't buy drugs, because they fund terrorism" while at the same time literally creating a market for foreign drugs by outlawing their production (and use of course) here in the states! And on top of that, it harms the US economy by sending that money out into the world instead of having it spent here and remain in local communities, let alone in the country.
I don't understand how so many people in this country can continually vote to keep drugs illegal except to believe that they did not at all learn the lessons of prohibition of alcohol - the only constitutional amendment ever passed that limits freedoms. And, of course, an amendment which was later revoked.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"