In no particular order, I would like to extend my deepest thanks for their support to the Republicans Overseas France (ROF) organization in Paris and its members, particularly Randy Yaloz and Paul Reen. Stateside, deep thanks are due, over at Instapundit (without which it would have been hard to survive the past two decades), to Glenn Reynolds, Ed Driscoll, Sarah Hoyt, Stephen Green, and — last but not least — Gail Heriot. Also to Damian Bennett, Duncan Hill, Linda, Michael, Donna, Valerie, LTK, Hervé, Aléric, Carine, Fausta, and Benny Huang, not to mention W2, who was present as a fellow blogger at No Pasarán's birth in 2004. There are many others, but life has been a bit stressful these past weeks, so forgive me if I left anybody out.
Ed Driscoll goes on to reminisce and provide some perspective:
OLD AND BUSTED: “Don’t Be Evil.”
The New Hotness? Evil:
… In the early 2000s, Blogspot, which Google had then only recently acquired, was a great platform to get started on; the original version of Instapundit was on Blogspot, which encouraged both Steve and I to launch our first blogs there. It took only a few minutes to get a new blog uploaded, and then it was off to the races. But any blog that’s remotely controversial … runs the risk of angering Google’s rapacious censorship department, and then it’s down the memory hole.
In my honest opinion, I'm assuming that Google did not make this decision as a company or as a blogger department, but that it was either some young radical "fact-checker" (sic) who lashed out or, as a lawyer recently advised, some machine (AI?) which automatically responded to some algorithm. That may sound like "If only the Tsar knew", but the thing is that over the years, a (very low) number of posts — including posts that had been on the internet for as many as ten years without the slightest controversy — have been reset to "draft status" for allegedly violating "community values." In the previous sentence, "allegedly" was the correct term as every single time that I protested and asked for a review (which indeed was every single time), the post was reinstated. Also, I have reason to believe that the Belgian government, or at least its premier television channel, bears at least some responsibility.
Other people have been saying I should migrate to, say, Substack, sometimes calling me quite nasty names for the folly (real or alleged) of remaining with Blogger/Blogspot. There may be some truth in that, and this weekend, I will be looking into Substack, WordPress, and Brave (are there others of good repute?), but there is something that the critics don't understand. Even if this migration were to take effect, and even if the Wayback Machine can find posts in the archives, I would still want — needless to say — the 21 years, and the 14,000 posts, of commentary, to remain visible to the reading public. I have for instance a number of posts on American history that I think are quite definite, that I want to remain visible plus that I want to revisit myself…
As Damian Bennett writes,
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