Ezra Levant, The Alberta NDP, And Journosplaining

I guess I should say something about this.  Alberta's NDP government decided they weren't willing to put up with any more disruptions out of kooks from The Rebel (the online HQ of Ezra Levant's personal death cult), and kicked them out of one of their press conferences.  They're rationale was that Ezra was, in his own words, "not a journalist".  Of course, when the real journos heard about this, they collectively shat, and rushed to our lads defense. Not like rational men.  Like Pavlov the dog drooling at his master's bell.  Like chimps chasing a stray banana.

And their arguments were quite silly. There's apparently no way to tell who is a journalist and who isn't; also, its important to allow even bad journalism.  Imagine if someone had applied this line of thinking to cars.  How can we really know which cars are safe?  But we must allow even shitty cars!

But of course nobody making these arguments believes them for one second.  What real media outlet would be willing to hire Ezra Levant after all those lost libel cases?  Let alone the nine-tooth yobos that make up the "contributors" to his cult newsletter.

Theoretically, though, a news outlet is supposed to accept as a journalist anyone who shows up on the front step with a pencil and a notepad.

The fact is, we regulate pork, we regulate cheese, we regulate guns, we can certainly regulate words; we can eliminate whatever kind of talk we think demeans the public discourse in the same way we've eliminated spitting on the floor.  When journos tell you you shouldn't regulate them discount what they say and get to the root, in the same way you would if you were listening to a herring fisherman bitching about new regs on the herring fishery.  "As the herring fishery goes, so goes the nation!  If you destroy the herring fishery, then you will be the ones who suffer!!!"  And etc.

And the thing with the MSM and Ezra, they're not defending him because its a free speech thing. They defend him because accept him as being one of the family, the slow cousin in the basement that they can feel superior too and occasionally decide he's really got a dabble of wisdom in him in his own thuggish way, even if they've seen him eating live baby squirrels or running naked through the woods at night.

Or maybe its like they've been stuck with him so long they've all got a version of Stockholm's Syndrome.

And about this journosplaining nonsense.  Please, journalists, when arguing this issue don't whip out the few lines your remember from On Liberty, or Mencken, or that book by John Milton with the name that sounds like a piece of gym equipment, as though folks on the other side of the issue didn't read them in college 30 years ago and weren't impressed.  D'you know that Mill's arguments for absolute Freedom of Speech rely on the purest form of truth relativism?  We can't deny Ezra's droolers whatever because, who knows, we can't know they're wrong about the ROMA being sub-human.

Or do you (journalists) spout these lines like you're dropping little semantics turds that sound nice but which  you don't know the meaning of.  In either case, it is insulting.  Stop it.