Wednesday, February 05, 2014

Huffington Post Defends Free Dominion

Wow, kinda surprising.

Maybe they understand what's at stake here:

Far more impressive than a string of wins before the Kangaroo courts of the Canadian human rights establishment is Warman's most recent victory: an actual Canadian court found in the lawyer's favour, ordering political discussion forum Free Dominion to pay a huge award of costs and forcing the site to close -- all because of some mean forum posts. For someone like Warman, a staunch enemy of free speech in Canada, it just doesn't get much better than that.

Now, I've just made a claim: Richard Warman is an enemy of free speech. To consider that statement libel or defamation is to say that the phrase "enemy of free speech" can be objectively either true or false -- but it can't. As part of an earlier suit, Warman suggested that he sees no benefit to allowing professional madman David Icke to speak about reptilian world domination -- I claim the right to identify that as evidence that Warman is an "enemy of free speech." I further claim that his stated goal of using the system to inflict (in his own words) "maximum disruption" of groups he dislikes makes it irrefutable that Warman is a censor.

And yet, that very statement was deemed illegal in a landmark jury case that awarded Warman $42,000 plus huge legal expenses. Though Free Dominion won the right to protect its posters' anonymity until those posters had been shown to have done anything at all improper, the final ruling was delivered such that Free Dominion had to close or else be liable for any further postings about Warman of the type that were ruled on -- postings by anyone.

Among those comments deemed unworthy of constitutional protection by the court of Canada was the suggestion that Warman is a "devious character," a "professional complainer" and a "censorship champion." Many high-profile writers have called Warman far, far worse than any Free Dominion poster could hope to, and they've enjoyed enormous readerships while doing so, but these professionals have avoided litigation by speaking with the protection of powerful, moneyed publications. Small sites like Free Dominion have no such luxury, and are regularly made victims by those more familiar with the system.

When you try to stop people from posting their opinion, you are an enemy of free speech, point à la ligne.