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The increasingly inaccurately-named blog of journalist and futurist Chris Taylor. Either the most sporadically brilliant amateur blog, the most brilliantly amateur sporadic blog, or the most amateur sporadic brilliance on the Web since 2001.
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Daily Blah FAQ
Who are you?
I'm the newly-appointed Future editor at Business 2.0 and the former San Francisco correspondent for Time Magazine.
Wow, so does this mean everything you write reflects Time Inc's opinion? Or do you perhaps have some sort of standard disclaimer to the effect that it doesn't?
Naturally, the opinions contained in this blog are not those of my employers. In fact, some opinions may be the polar opposite of my employers. Some may be the same, for all I know. Hey, it's not like I ask my employers their opinions about everything in the news, okay? Let's just say that if this were a Venn diagram with one circle marked "my opinions" and the other one marked "my employers' opinions", there would doubtless be some overlap. But neither I nor my employers are able to pinpoint exactly where that overlap is.
What is this Daily Blah thing?
An experiment for a column I wrote about blogging back in December 2001. All these years later, I haven't been able to kick the habit.
Do you write any other blogs, by chance? Could that have something to do with the fact that Daily Blah isn't always Daily?
Yes -- the Future Boy blog for Business 2.0. And yes. If you want true, editorially-mandated daily coverage from me, that's probably the best place to look.
Mister, you talk funny. Are you one of them furrners?
Why yes I am, as it happens. I was born, raised and educated in Great Britain. I've been living in the U.S. since 1996 and identify as British.
I say, old chap, you forgot the "u" in "colour."
No I didn't. I may identify as British, but I am also an American journalist writing for an American audience about mostly American issues. These two different sides of me are a constant source of tension. Nevertheless, Daily Blah will adhere to American English grammar and spelling.
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Daily Blah for... Thursday, July 29, 2004
Free the Speech
While we were in Munich, P and I visited Dachau. She couldn't help but see a number of parallels in the exhibit on the rise of the Third Reich (particularly the provision for endless detention) with the paranoid atmosphere of today's America. I try to remain skeptical of such comparisons, but real life isn't making it very easy for me. Take the "free speech zone" built by the city of Boston, better known as The Cage. The first time I saw pictures of The Cage -- here on Wired News -- there was a sickening wrenching feeling in my gut. I'd seen this before. The barbed wire, the vast metal fence, the guards ... it's Dachau with security cameras.
Call me a naive foreigner, but I find it stunning that the First Amendment's guaranteed right to free assembly could be so brazenly flouted. Free speech zones started cropping up after September 11, almost unnoticed amid the roar of the terrorized. The Secret Service, it seems, suddenly decided that protecting the President included preventing anyone from criticizing him within a mile radius. Protestors were fenced in, miles away from the motorcade route. (The poor lad musn't get his feelings hurt).
The first time I saw this disturbing Newspeak term -- does that make the rest of America a non-free speech zone? -- I believed it would soon take its place next to ethnic cleansing on the shelf of unloved euphemisms. It seemed such a profoundly un-American concept, to fence in free speech, I was sure some federal court or other would tear down the Zones before long. Three arduous years later, and I'm still waiting.
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