Dennis Mangan's new blog

Dennis Mangan's new blog is hosted with Typepad, the same company I use for my blogging.

So far, I haven't heard that Typepad has deleted the blog of any paying customers. They also always answer my support tickets when I complain about weird bugs, although they don't always fix the weird bugs.

However, among the things that Typepad says you can't do:

(a) upload, post, transmit or otherwise make available any Content that is unlawful, harmful, threatening, abusive, harassing, tortuous, defamatory, vulgar, obscene, libelous, invasive of another's privacy (up to, but not excluding any address, email, phone number, or any other contact information without the written consent of the owner of such information), hateful, or racially, ethnically or otherwise objectionable;

Unfortunately, Typepad reserves the right to prohibit you from doing the same stuff that Google prohibits, they just choose not to censor blogs that often.

UPDATE

Mangan's original Blogger blog is back up. Was its absence merely a software bug, or did Google ban it and then un-ban it?

Comments

[AllanF]

Why don't people use Wordpress and an ISP that does nothing but host the web site? I pay less than $100/yr for the luxury of truly free speech. My site isn't that popular so bandwidth isn't an issue, but what does typepad and blogger have that Wordpress on a 3rd party server doesn't?

Thanks.

[HS: Typepad has an easy to use interface that you don't have to install. I've gotten too familiar with it to think about switching. Maybe other blogging services are better, but I liked Typepad better than Blogger even before I found out about the Blogger censorship.

The company that sells you hosting services could also decide they don't like your website and turn you off. I guess if you want real security, you need to go with the hosting company that Stormfront uses.]

[Matt]

http://mangans.blogspot.com/
is back for me, at the moment.

[Gorilla]

Strangely enough his original blog is back online. I think it could have something to do with his recent posting on HIV skepticism. With all the other topics (global warming, race, Islam), one can blog on those and not be demonized too much.

But HIV/AIDS skepticism is on another whole level that only 2012 apocalypse conspiracy theories seems to approach. People are willing to debate AGW/HBD/Game/H1N1, but to express doubts about the gospel of HIV/AIDS is to out oneself as the most dangerous kind of racist, sexist, homophobic evildoer around, more dangerous than anti-Semites, and deserving of no response but a swift silencing and a blacklisting for life. Of all these topics, HIV/AIDS is the only one in which I have heard experts propose longingly that dissent be criminalized.

[Gorilla]

Rather, I think the original disappearance of the blog could have something to do with HIV/AIDS. Who knows why it showed up again.....

[dearieme]

Bum. Poo. Titty.

[empirical]

"The company that sells you hosting services could also decide they don't like your website and turn you off. I guess if you want real security, you need to go with the hosting company that Stormfront uses"

With a non-proprietary blogging platform, its easier to have a backup of your whole blog.

Its easy to get a new host, upload your files, and redirect the domain to the other host in the event that your webhost bans you.

[HS: This is partially true, but I'm not paranoid enough to worry about it. Typepad does let you export your blog to a Movable Type file fomrat which can be imported by several other blogging platforms.]

[outlaw josey wales]

What is "HIV/AIDS skepticism?" That AIDS is not caused by HIV?

[Gorilla]

HIV/AIDS skepticism means doubting, dissenting, and arguing against the consensus view that HIV is the sole cause of AIDS, necessary and sufficient for it.

Peter Duesberg at UC Berkeley is the top academic among the skeptics, and his papers go further and argue for his own chemical hypothesis: Western AIDS has nothing to do with HIV or any virus and is caused by immuno-suppression from use of poppers and IV drugs and also the anti-AIDS medicines and cocktails themselves, while African and third world AIDS is a phenomenon the largely doesn't exist, with the numbers based only on dubious statistical estimates that falsely lump a variety of non-AIDS diseases into being called AIDS and presume an HIV infection without testing. Most of the supposed AIDS cases, he argues, are caused by poor public health and terrible water contamination (fecal matter, etc).

Mangan has been playing devil's advocate with that view while stating, like many skeptics, that he remains agnostic on the issue, and that his real issue is with the silencing of dissent and the fraudulent practices of the establishment that they pass off as doing science. His readers were pretty divided, and several commenters felt the evidence for HIV/AIDS is too overwhelming to doubt.

[tommy]

You're right. Typepad isn't a perfect solution, but being a paying customer of the company should give you more leverage than you would have using Blogger.

[sabril]

The problem with HIV/AIDS is that there's no ethical way to test the hypothesis that HIV causes AIDS.

Moreover, the definition of AIDS is a bit circular: immune system failure + presence of HIV = AIDS diagnosis.

That said, a lot of otherwise healthy people suffered immune system failure and died after receiving blood transfusions back in the 1980s. After the authorities started screening the blood supply for HIV, the problem abated. To me this is strong evidence that HIV causes AIDS.

[Le Mur]

"tortuous" = full of twists, turns, or bends; not direct or straightforward; intricate; circuitous; deceitfully indirect.

[Seth Kalichman]

AIDS Denialism is destructive when people ignore their HIV test results and when people refuse HIV treatment because they are misinformed. It can be a very sad state of affairs.

If you are interested in AIDS denialism, you may want to check out my new book Denying AIDS: Conspiracy Theories, Pseudoscience, and Human Tragedy. All royalties are donated to buy HIV meds in Africa. I dedicate a whole chapter to trying to understand Peter Duesberg.
Thanks
Seth Kalichman
htp://denyingaids.blogspot.com

[Josh]

You should give a recommendation of blogs for people like me. I stumbled upon your blog one day while researching, but I'm not really into the blog scene. Not because I don't like blogs, but just because I'm a little ignorant to them. What's on your blog playlist?

[Alrenous]

If you're not into blogs, Josh, then I guess you can be forgiven for not knowing what a blogroll is for.

The blogroll, immediately to my right, is the exact answer to your question.