Imagine: two years of not having to listen to those idiots blather on… It would almost be worth it…
Anyway, American blogger Andrea Harris takes that proposed Canadian law, making it a crime to link to “hate sites,” to its logical conclusion:
Here is how utterly clueless the people who wrote that bill are about the internet: a link is not, as they seem to think, some sort of stamp of approval, of “this is a site I agree with here’s the link.” All a link is is a pointer to some other website. It has no context of its own — it’s a method of citation. I mean, if you were writing a bio of Hitler and you quoted a passage from Mein Kampf, you’d have to cite it, wouldn’t you? As a footnote or endnote or in your bibiography. Would that mean you’re encouraging Hitler’s “hate speech”? (See, I still use the Nazis in my analogy, as they are safe. Isn’t that funny. Nazis as safe analogy use-objects. Anyway.) But never mind mere citation, this is even worse. This bill does the equivalent of making it illegal to even indicate there’s a Nazi in the room. A link is like someone pointing at someone (I said it was a pointer). This idiotic bill will make it so that if someone points and says “Look, a Nazi!” the one who warned about the Nazi will be the one in trouble. But the creators of this bill clearly don’t know what a link on the internet even is. Or worse — maybe they do, and they don’t care; it’s more important to reign in Certain People who have the inconvenient habit of finding and linking to websites the Powers That Be would rather not be brought to enough light to send all the bugs scurrying.
And I don’t mean Nazis.
