Canadian blogger being sued for defamation of character

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This doesn’t give me a warm fuzzy feeling:

When Richard Johnson began posting online critiques of Aurora’s governance under the moniker “councilwatch,” he never expected he would become the target of legal action from the city’s outgoing mayor.

Now, he is among several residents named in a $6-million lawsuit alleging defamation against Mayor Phyllis Morris, who was ousted by political newcomer Geoff Dawe in a landslide vote last month. Her statement of claim, filed in Superior Court this week, says critical blog posts on the website auroracitizen.ca — including allegations of corruption, lies and extreme fiscal mismanagement — made Ms. Morris the subject of “ridicule, hatred and contempt,” and even led to threats.

The case pits the rights of bloggers to freely opine against the rights of politicians to defend their reputations against online attacks, and raises the question of what constitutes fair comment in the increasingly unwieldy Internet realm, where a solitary comment may be read by millions of people worldwide.

“The wild west, that’s what it’s like out there,” said Lorne Honickman, an expert in defamation law and a member of Toronto mayor-elect Rob Ford’s legal team. “The Internet is the world now. And courts haven’t even caught up with the ramifications, from a damage point of view, of what that means.”

Although the moderators of the blog and wordpress.com are named in the suit, the offending remarks were actually made by anonymous commentators:

Mr. Johnson and his co-defendants, William Hogg and Elizabeth Bishenden, are named as the alleged moderators of the website, though Mr. Johnson denies he played any role in moderating comments. The offending posts are attributed to anonymous individuals, who, along with web host wordpress.com, are also named as defendants.

The site is here.

Some animals are more equal than others

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As is often the case with socialism in practice, taking care of the poor ends up turning into taking care of poor me.

From here:

[I]f the attitude of NDP power couple Jack Layton and Olivia Chow is any indication, many MPs still haven’t learned the most important lesson of last spring’s expense controversy: You are not entitled to this money, no questions asked, just because you are an MP.

Last year, Chow claimed $530,000 in expenses, Layton claimed $629,000. Both are above average and a little surprising given that both represent Toronto ridings. Last time I looked, T.O. was not that far from Ottawa. One might be forgiven for thinking it would cost less to ferry Toronto MPs back home as opposed to say, Yellowknife MPs or ones from Labrador. But maybe the short distance prompts them to take more trips back to their constituencies, racking up more expenses.

Chow’s sensitive, caring-for-the-average-working-stiff response when asked about her above-average expenses? “It’s within the law,” she told the Toronto Star curtly.

[T]he Layton-Chows act more like the Duke and Duchess of Downtown Toronto. They live more lavishly than the average Conservative or Liberal, then insist we peasants have no right to know more because they are acting “within the law.”

Amazon defends selling a book entitled “The Pedophile's Guide to Love and Pleasure”

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From here:

The e-book, authored by Phillips Greaves, was published late last month, according to product details on Amazon.com. It sells for $4.79 on the company’s Kindle Store.

“This is my attempt to make pedophile situations safer for those juveniles that find themselves involved in them, by establishing certian [sic] rules for these adults to follow,” a product description reads. “I hope to achieve this by appealing to the better nature of pedosexuals, with hope that their doing so will result in less hatred and perhaps liter sentences should they ever be caught.”

Amazon is standing by the decision to sell the e-book.

“Amazon believes it is censorship not to sell certain books simply because we or others believe their message is objectionable,” the company said in a written statement. “Amazon does not support or promote hatred or criminal acts, however, we do support the right of every individual to make their own purchasing decisions.”

In the last month or so the book has had 1737 consumer reviews on Amazon, 1688 of them negative. I rather doubt that most of the reviewers have actually read the book, but this might be a rare occasion when judging a book by its cover isn’t such a bad idea.

Our civilisation has reached a grubbily sordid point when a vendor of books feels the need to appeal to the evils of censorship to justify publishing a how-to for pedophiles by a barely literate imbecile.

I generally dislike slippery slope arguments, but this all started when I was a teenager and D. H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover was the subject of an obscenity trial. The book was deemed not obscene by the jury – partly because it was thought to have literary merit; the jury was wrong on both counts. I was delighted at the time since it meant I could get my hands on a copy. Lady Chatterley was rapidly followed by Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer, Tropic of Capricorn, Nexus, Plexus and Sexus – all of which I devoured with considerable interest; even then I noticed Miller’s books were marginally more literate than Lawrence’s,  although that was not what had initially piqued my interest in them.

Since then, of course, our pornography has not needed redeeming features of any sort and we have – I hesitate to say struck bottom – reached a nadir: Pedophilia for Dummies.

Update: Within the last hour or so (it’s 11:19 p.m. EST), Amazon has removed the book from its site. When it was there, it looked like this:

Killing babies for a living

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From here:Add an Image

A Nebraska doctor who is one of the few in the country to perform abortions late in a pregnancy said Wednesday that he would open new clinics in Iowa and the Washington area.

LeRoy Carhart said he decided to open the clinics because Nebraska had implemented a new law that made it illegal to perform abortions beyond the 20th week of a pregnancy. Only a handful of doctors perform abortions in late pregnancy, and Carhart has been the target of antiabortion protests. George Tiller, who was one of the few doctors who were public, was fatally shot by an antiabortion demonstrator while attending church in Wichita in 2009. Carhart said he worked with Tiller for 11 years.

How can a civilised society allow evil bastards like this to ply their murderous trade?

Global warming is not a problem: God said so

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From here:

A Republican congressman hoping to chair the powerful House Energy Committee refers to the Bible and God on the issue of global warming.

Representative John Shimkus insists we shouldn’t concerned about the planet being destroyed because God promised Noah it wouldn’t happen again after the great flood.

Speaking before a House Energy Subcommittee on Energy and Environment hearing in March, 2009, Shimkus quoted Chapter 8, Verse 22 of the Book of Genesis.

He said: ‘As long as the earth endures, seed time and harvest, cold and heat, summer and winter, day and night, will never cease.’

I have a lot of sympathy for Shimkus’ views: God is ultimately in control of what happens to the earth and man’s presumption of self determination is largely vanity. At the same time, although I think anthropological global warming is a hoax, I have enough of the hobbit in me to like green fields, woods, and meadows with wild flowers. Our world is filled with spectacular beauty: it is ours to enjoy, not despoil.

Disagreeable photos about to appear on cigarette packages

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From here:

Graphic pictures depicting the possible consequences of tobacco use are soon to adorn boxes of cigarettes sold in the US, officials have said.

The pictures- which include a corpse on a morgue slab and a man with a tracheotomy hole in his neck – are intended to scare people off smoking.

Does this mean that graphic photos depicting the certain consequences of abortion are about to appear on the doors of abortion clinics? No.

Michelle Obama’s unclean handshake

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From here:

Information Minister Tifatul Sembiring — a conservative Muslim who says he makes no contact with women who are unrelated to him — admits he shook Mrs. Obama’s hand today, but adds that he was basically forced into it.

“I tried to prevent (being touched) with my hands but Mrs. Michelle held her hands too far toward me (so) we touched,” Sembiring said on his Twitter account.

Was the problem that Michelle didn’t wash after flushing or that the mere touch of her hand would send the minister into a frenzy of erotic lust? Not the latter, surely.

UK's Islam channel in trouble for advocating marital rape

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From here:

A Muslim religious channel that allowed presenters to condone marital rape and call women who wear perfume in mosques ‘prostitutes’ has been censured by the TV watchdog.

In one programme, the host told viewers that it was ‘not strange’ and ‘not such a big problem’ for a man to force his wife to have sex.

A phone-in show in May 2008, in which a female caller asked if she had the right to hit a violent husband back, was deemed in breach of the code.

The presenter at one point stated: ‘In Islam we have no right to hit the woman in a way that damages her eye or damages her tooth or damages her face or makes her ugly.

Apparently none of this bothers Lauren Booth, Tony Blair’s sister-in-law and presenter on the Islam Channel: she recently converted to Islam. That she has a bit of a blind spot concerning the Islam Channel’s view of women goes without saying, since she chose to convert while visiting Iran  – one of the most violently misogynistic regimes in the world.

It’s not all bad news, though since the newly minted Muslim Booth has assured us that:

‘Now that I’m Muslim,’ I said, ‘I will never have my breasts out in public again.’