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Comment by jasonkester | Hacker News Reader

I hate to say it, since this guy clearly must have suffered a lot, but this is just not a very well written article.

At no point does he try to explain who he is or why he was in prison. You get the idea that he was falsely accused, and you learn (at excruciating length) that he's been released, but no details as to the how and why of either event.

Then, 1000 words in, just when he's ready to tell you some of the interesting things that happened to him in prison (hence the title of the article), it just ends.

Really disappointing. I want my ten minutes back.

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Black founded the National Post and his trial was extensively covered in Canada (and even in the US). He's quite right to presume that his audience know who he is and (roughly) why he was in prison. As for how the article's written, your objection is really to the headline, which is scoped somewhat inaccurately. The article itself is written fine. (And I would have said one of its main points is that he didn't really suffer a lot.)

It's interesting that this prominent arch-conservative is, through personal experience, now citing facts and making arguments that are unfortunately nearly exclusively those of the left. It's like the old line, "a conservative is a liberal who has been mugged", in reverse. I wonder if he will do anything about it in the future.

I'd always heard it as "a conservative is a liberal who's been mugged; a liberal is a conservative who's been arrested.'

Why should the reader of a newspaper (or is it a magazine?) be expected to know who founded it?

I hadn't realized that this was a newspaper article, but if so that actually makes it worse. A journalist should know how to write in such a way that people don't require external context to process a story.

It should more be considered as an opinion/ccolumn, as opposed to a news story (you'll notice it's in the 'Full Comment' section of the paper). It's also not a one-off piece; since he's been in jail, Conrad Black has continued to write these columns for (what was formerly) his paper about life in prison, what he's been up to, and general news issues of the day.

In short, this shouldn't be considered (and wasn't intended) as a news report on life in prison, but rather one person's account of what life was like for them.

Prisons are a dark corner of American politics where everyone's uninformed preferences produced a system that's bloated, expensive, inefficient and doesn't meet its stated goals.

California's prisons are a good example: law and order on the right; tax and spend on the left; public sector unions throughout; massive waste, individual and systemic injustice the result.

Indeed, as the above mentioned, he founded the Post.

Followers of the story (largely, Canada and UK) have seen quite a drama over the last few years. It's helpful to understand he is, in fact, a British Lord - after renouncing Canadian citizenship under a Prime Minister blocking the appointment due to a personal vendetta - and was convicted of defrauding shareholders under a law recently deemed by SCOTUS as open-ended and unconstitutional.

Thanks for that. Your one sentence did a better job of summing up what was going on than the whole article. I wish he could have worked it into the story at some point, so that the rest of us could figure out what he was talking about.

I can guarantee that there isn't a person in Canada that reads the National Post that doesn't know who Conrad Black is. I actually appreciate that they didn't waste my time with any backstory. I think in this day and age people can google shit if they want backstory.

It's worth pointing out that Black sued the Government of the day over blocking his peerage (Black v. Chretien) and lost. So while he may say that it was a personal vendetta that caused him to renounce his citizenship, it's not like he didn't have a recourse to due process.

As for his conviction, it was both for honest-services fraud (which SCOTUS is in the process of unravelling), as well as for obstruction of justice - brought on by, among other things, being caught on a security tape removing (with the assistance of his chauffeur) a number of boxes of documents from his former office without court permission and in the middle of an investigation.

He removed those boxes from his office in Toronto. Since when does US law have jurisdiction in Canada?

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