If a correction falls in the forest…

Big City Liberal recently expressed surprise that he'd missed that Ezra Levant had posted a minor correction related to his Giacomo Vigna defamation case. (Vigna, in case you forgot, is suing Ezra for suggesting that he'd faked an illness before a Human Rights Tribunal.)

How is it that the ever-vigilant BCL has missed this? The reason becomes clear if you look at the dates. The post in question presently looks like this (apart from the red arrow, pointing at the date):

The blog aggegrator Silobreaker, however, didn't get Ezra's post until a week later (again, note the red arrow):

This can only mean, I think, that Ezra's correction was not originally published on January 18, as it claims, but on the 23rd. As confirmation one might note that the first comment to the post was also made on the 23rd (as noted by me and others here). (Those comments have subsequently disappeared.)

Now, there has been some discussion over at BCL (here, in comments, and here) about what this means. Clearly the post has been "back-dated". (Blogging software allows bloggers to override the dates of their posts, making things appear to have have published either earlier or later than they were written.) Why? Such back-dating has the effect of burying it below other blog posts, with the result that it receives less attention than it otherwise might. Whether that was the purpose here is for others to judge.

Update.

When did Ezra really publish his 'correction'? His post was picked up by the aggregator regator.com as its item 229754183:

The posts are apparently numbered in sequence:

• 229754181 is from Jan. 22, 2010 at 09:30 PM
• 229754182 is from Jan. 23, 2010 at 12:31 AM

Since Ezra's post is next in the numerical sequence it too must be dated to the 23rd.

Second Update.

If there is any doubt, here is Ezra's own atom feed, which dates the post to January 23rd:

Should the USA put Oklahoma on a watch list and invade Louisiana?

Over recent months the blogosphere has seen discussions about freedom of expression and its limits in Canada, where the focus has been especially on the roles of provincial and federal Human Rights Commissions.

There has long been a tendency among conservatives to idealize our great neighbor to the south, and this again illustrated by recent critics of the HRCs.

Ezra Levant, for example, appealed to the United States Congress to put Canada on the watch list of human rights abusers (here) because of his experience with the Alberta Human Rights Commission.

Deborah Gyapong (who once worked for Ezra in Stockwell Day's communication shop) posted the cartoon to the right: a light-hearted call to the Americans to free us (one can only assume) from such limits.

There is no country, however, where speech is completely free, not even the United States.

Take the T-Shirt to the right, which repeats the anti-war jingle "Bush lied". ("They died", as you might have guessed, is on the reverse.) This headline is printed over a list of the names of fallen American soldiers: the deaths that Bush (implies the t-shirt) is responsible for.

Now, this is clearly the kind of political statement that we are used to from the anti-war movement.

The t-shirt, however, has been outlawed in five states: Oklahoma, Louisana, Arizona, Texas, Florida. The problem? Some are offended by its use of the names of America's war-dead.

Here is the story from last year: Commercial use of fallen GIs’ names under fire:

Incensed by the sale of anti-war T-shirts and other paraphernalia emblazoned with the names and pictures of America's military dead, some states are outlawing the commercial use of the fallen without the permission of their families.

Despite serious questions of constitutionality, Oklahoma and Louisiana enacted such laws last year, and the governors of Texas and Florida have legislation waiting on their desks. Arizona lawmakers are on the verge of approving a similar measure.

Now, as the story points out, the laws probably will probably be found unconstitutional, and it may well be that an American court will eventually intervene and strike down the laws that prohibit their sale.

While we wait for that to happen, however, we surely cannot expect Ezra to ask the American congress to put Oklahoma, Louisana, Arizona, Texas, and Florida on its watch list, or Gyapong to jokingly urge an invasion of these states.