Hays Travelogue

On October 9, there was an article in the San Francisco Chronicle about police brutality. I was going to post the link here, but all of a sudden I can’t get to www.sfgate.com at all. How interesting. Everyday I read the liberal news from the Chronicle to balance out the liberal news from the Times. When I couldn’t get to the Chronicle, I was a little unbalanced. The next day, I was bothered. Yesterday, I was suspicious.

At school, we live with a ridiculous web ‘filtering’ (censorship) program called WebSense which classified Poetry as ENTERTAINMENT. God forbid that we should enjoy our poetry. I had to petition to have that site and Garrison Keillor’s Writer’s Almanac unblocked. Last week, WebSense (which the kids call WebNonSense) had suddenly recategorized one of the education sites I like as SEX. WebSense is an American invention that fits right in with conservative notions all around the globe about education as a tool to tell people what, not how, to think. Maybe it will backfire, because there is certain sense to WebSense. If we just keep classifying .edu and .org sites as SEX and ENTERTAINMENT, kids will be intrigued. Suddenly education will become forbidden, sexy, and desirable. The difficulty of motivating students will disappear.

There is a way around WebSense. Peacefire recommends circumvention sites like StupidCensorship to get around web blocks. I can usually get to sites that the school blocks from my home computer, but apparently the Chronicle is blocked for the entire country. I tried StupidCensorship and I was able to get into SFGate one time to check that the article was still available. It is, but I can’t make a direct link to it. After that one time, I was blocked again.

If you want to look up the article, cut and paste the link below. If that doesn’t work, try a Google search with the key words: bloggers, police, torture. Maybe add the name of this country to refine your search.

www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2007/10/09/MNLRRUSMH.DTL