Censorious Asshat alert! Engage Streisand Effect!

Ok, I'm not normally one to jump on this kind of bandwagon, but these people have royally annoyed me. I first learned of the situation while reading Popehat, so hats off to them.

A blogger, who clearly identified himself as a "freelance journalist" sent a series of questions to the group Straight Pride UK. He received a document from their press liaison titled "Press Release". He then published said release and now they are claiming copyright infringement, have filed a DMCA take-down notice with his hosting company and are threatening to turn everyone who posts this over to the police.

So, in keeping with the great American tradition of defending free speech, and with the permission of the original author, the "copyrighted" post is re-blogged, in full, below. To Oliver, I say fight these thugs, in court if necessary; I'll throw a few quid your way just on principle. To the asshats at Straight Pride UK (who have apparently deleted their Twitter account now), I say come at me. Send my host a bogus DMCA and I will dispute it. Since the DMCA is an American law, and I'm an American citizen, writing in America, and posting on an American server you'll have to file any legal action over here. Good luck finding a solicitor willing to kill his career on that hill.

Oliver's original post follows past the jump. Read and enjoy!

Knife Bad, Tree Pretty

In my real life I am a retail manager at a big box store. That means that I deal with any number of complaints. Some of these are real, and I handle them as best I can, and some are utterly silly based on misunderstandings or outrage that we won't change our policy "just this once". This last group is particularly challenging since no one at the store actually did anything wrong that I can fix. The reason I bring this up is earlier this week, toward the end of my shift, I was walking the store with my direct supervisor making sure everyone was doing what they were supposed to be doing and I was approached (if you can call being yelled at from thirty feet away approached) by a customer who had a concern in the second category.