Vaporized!

“Unquestionably Syme will be vaporized,
Winston thought again.”
.....................................—Orwell’s 1984




Along with my two other blogs hosted by Blogspot, today my blog was deleted for about an hour. When I tried to see it I got a message that I didn’t write down, something like: “Sorry, the blog at caesartort.blogspot.com has been removed. This address is not available for new blogs.”

As can be ascertained in my stats page, at 14:48 people still were visiting this blog. After that visitors were going to the cache page and my blog was not restored until about 15:40.

At the same time my G-mail was blocked. They wanted me to verify with a mobile number which I did and I got a code which I inputed. At that time my three blogs and G-mail were opened.

At the beginning of December 2009 something similar happened to D.M.... for several days! In his article “Thoughtcrime,” Malcolm Pollack comments of the temporary deletion of D.M.’s blog:

I can tell you from personal experience that for a dedicated blogger, having one’s website go down is profoundly disconcerting; I don’t think it is an overstatement to say that it feels like a sudden existential amputation. My advice to any of you out there who have blogs on Blogspot: do yourself a favor and get your own site, especially if you have anything pungent or controversial to express.

Besides Pollack’s full article, I would also recommend D.M.’s own “Restored to Life,” which contains a series of interesting linked comments about censorship in the internet.

If Big Brother permanently vaporizes The West’s Darkest Hour, I would like my visitors know that in that case I will transfer all of the content elsewhere.