a pissed-off Blinger speaks out

Blinger isn't happy about the lackluster response to South Korean censorship, either. I reprint the relevant parts of Blinger's letter here:

Kevin,

Re: your latest censorship post.

A few months ago I discovered the adopt-a-blog project by sinosplice and wrote him an email offering to host blogs but never heard back. If their own project doesn't even respond to volunteers to help how can they expect support from western bloggers outside of China.

I also publically made this same offer on my blog and in comments on various Korean blogs at the beginning of this fiasco. I am willing to help but nobody wants it. The blogging community is itself apathetic in the response to what is happening. A few bloggers have written messages on their blogs but do nothing else.

After two weeks you only have 80 signatures on [Joel's] petition, that is pathetic and makes me disappointed in the community here. Not only bloggers themselves but the readers should have responded en masse to this censorship. Since there hasn't been any real outcry other than for the first 2 days, I can only conclude that no-one really cares.

Thank you

Blinger

I feel a good bit of frustration about this as well. While it was great for several of us to get the Instapundit nod, the Western blogosphere's attention turned very quickly elsewhere-- which is, again, an experience the Chinabloggers probably know all too well (and again, I apologize for my own complicity in that... sometimes you just don't understand a problem until the same problem hits you). I hope to see more agitation on this issue by people who get more traffic than I do-- not just expats in Asia, but folks in the States and Europe and elsewhere who give a damn about this issue, and who view the South Korean government's measure as a huge step backward.

Regarding being adopted... I appreciate the kind offers that I think we've all received from various bloggers to have our blogs adopted and relocated in various ways, redone as mirror sites or reincarnated in totally different blog skins or what have you. But I'm not budging, because (1) if the Hominid's a special target, a new URL will simply be tracked and blocked, and (2) I shouldn't have to move, goddammit, that's the whole fucking point. (Again, thanks to Blinger and others who've made the offer; I never properly thanked you all before.)

It's not lost on me that a more enlightened and peaceable course of action would involve quietly adapting to the situation, but I'm going to take an unrepentantly Judeo-Christian approach this time and declare this a justice issue. Hier stehe ich.

I give the last word to the Infidel, who wrote the following, which got published in FEER:

One does not have to be bullish about freedom of expression to realize that Seoul is not telling its citizens all they need to know to make a real decision about South Korea's place in the world. But the Western media have not fulfilled their responsibility to report what is happening in South Korea either. Communication has taken a lower profile than expediency.

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