Welcome SDA Readers!

I just noticed the link in! I must say, the old girl doesn't pack the same punch as she used to, traffic-wise. Really, I'm doing her a favor.

Ezra Levant On Linking To Libel

In his discussion on the statement of claim filed by Kathy Shaidle and Kate McMillan, Ezra writes:

Warman seeks to establish new defamation law, in the realm of the Internet. In his statement of claim, he wants the courts to hold websites legally responsible not only for what they publish, but for what they link to. By that theory, anyone on the Internet is liable for everyone on the Internet. For you are liable for everyone you link to, and they're liable for everyone they link to (and so are you, too), and so on and so on. It sets up a cascading series of infinite liability.

Fortunately, such a punitive approach to defamation and censorship is not Canadian law. Yet.

The paragraph he is talking about is:

16. These defendants admit that the blogs posted contained a link to the web site of freedominion.ca. These defendants deny that publishing a link amounts to a publication or republication as alleged or at all.

Well, I think both Ezra and our gals' lawyer have got it wrong. I wish I could find a more authoritative source to back up my recollections, but...

In Canada, hyper linking to libel is republishing a libel. Further, if the act of hyper linking can be shown to be hateful, criminal libel penalties can be levied.

Just as an aside, the various Crookes cases are a little bit different. they involve (among other things) trying to sue Michael Geist for maintaining a blogroll that linked to a site that linked to a site containing defamatory material.

Sask. Blogs Aggregator: Striking A Martyr's Pose

Sask. Boy writes:

The first casualty of the Conservative bloggers lawsuit has claimed an unlikely victim. The SaskBlogs Aggregator, run by Lance Levsen, has been taken offline due apparently to the likely threat of a lawsuit. The Aggregator contains Small Dead Animals as a member, and thus has stored posts claimed as libelous, even though they only LINK to an alleged libelous statement.

"Likely threat of a lawsuit"? As opposed to an actual threat? I suspect that the names in yesterday's statement of claim are all the names there will be, but if Lance is really worried, it isn't as though R. Warman's email is that hard to find.

However, it is more fun, I suppose, to nail oneself to the cross and harvest sympathy from passer's by.

Incidentally, the passage in the statement of claim that Lance (and others) seem to be worried about concerns Kate MacMillan letting SDA guest blogger K. Shaidle link to the original FreeD post re. Senator Cools (something I've done at least once, incidentally). I think the first part of paragraph 28, which most people seem to be ignoring, is the important one:

Ms. McMillan permitted the defendant Shaidle to access SDA and post the Cools posting along with the allegation that Mr. Warman was responsible for it...

This does not seem at all analogous to the Wayne Crookes case at all, as far as I can tell. Here the offending material appeared on SDA, plus there was a link back to the source, plus there was a claim on SDA that Warman had written said material.

With Crookes, a blog-roll linked to a site that linked to a site.

As for Lance, well, Bloggers die more often opera stars and for the same reason...bad acting! I imagine he'll be back in a week or two.

Warman Drops The Bomb, Sues National Post (And Others)

Richard Warman has named The National Post Company, Jonathan Kay, Ezra Levant, Kathy Shaidle, FiveFeetOfFury.com, SmallDeadAnimals.com, Catherine McMillan, Mark Fournier, FreeDominion.ca and Constance Wilkins-Fournier in a statement of claim filed today.

Warman is looking for $50,000 from the defendants, "jointly and severally", apologies, and retractions, and etc. Central to this case is the "Anne Cools" Post of which I have written so often.

Remember, this is not about possibly frivolous uses of the HRC process anymore. We're talking libel now.

PS. My favorite bit from the documentation:

"Mr. Lemire and his direct associates had always been cautious enough never to spread the allegation [re the Cools post] outside of the Canadian Human Rights Tribunal hearing. Indeed, one of Lemire's closest associates indicated in an Internet posting that they had legal advice not to do so (presumably knowing they would be sued for libel)."

Never, never, never trust them Nazis.

He Won't Be Attending Nazipalooza

He (its gotta be a guy) writes at FreeD under the name of "Edward Kennedy", and if Connie and Mark booted him from their forum it would go a long distance from being Nutz to being "merely Conservative". (Note: They've done this kind of thing before. You don't hear Bill Whatcott spouting off anymore)

A typical example of his freely exercised speech is:

Typical n****r behavior. Concealed carry would have made the outcome much different. Note if the perpetrators had been White, they would have all got the death penalty for a hate crime against n*****s. And the lieberals wonder why a large segment of Whites hate blacks and distrust them. I am surprised the black bastards did not try to rape them, that is standard fare for n*****s.

That's an old post, though. More recently he's taken to advocating Muslim genocide and issuing incoherent threats against Warren Kinsella. He thinks Ezra, Mark Steyn, and Mark Lemire are righteous, but Ezra is not convinced he's real.

Fortunately for everyone whose going to be in Ottawa later this week, the OPP has a less sanguine opinion:

I just received the occupants of two OPP crusisers into my house, and was warned that I am personna non grata at the star chamber hearing this week in Ottawa. I think the name attached to the warning was Katherine Slater, and if I appear there I will be arrested.

Ed has never posted his real name, but I suppose the important thing is that the police have it.

PS. I'd probably condemn Kate's latest if I could figure out what the hell she was on about. If anyone can pull a rational assertion from this, let me know. The Nazis merely employed the already existing German bureaucracy to implement the Holocaust? Is that her point?

If so, its crazy, but perhaps a product of the Conservative habit of seeing "The State" as an evil abstraction apart from the people who make it up.

Blogging Tories Should Give SDA The Boot

Progblogs kicked out MyBlagh for far less than this. Raphael seems a relatively decent sort, and makes claims to centrism. He should get the ball rolling.

The First Of The Grovelling Apologies

Comes from Kate at SDS, and is echoed here by Kathy Shaidle, the toxic femi-dwarf.

What am I talking about? Two days ago Connie and Mark at FreeDominion made some intensely nasty and possibly libelous allegations re rights activist Richard Warman, which they sourced to Mark Lemire. Note that these accusations are not new (they amount to the claim that Warman "entrapped" Lemire and several other Neo-Nazis into making racist remarks). Furthermore, they have been denied by Warman in the past, and they were judged irrelevant to the origonal CHRC complaint against Mark Lemire.

These allegations were then repeated on Small Dead Animals (guest posted there by Ms. Shaidle), Five Feet of Fury, and elsewhere.

Sometime last evening, prompted by Kinsella, our two ladies realized they might just be facing lawsuits for the rest of their natural lives (longer, if someone keeps up their supply of virgin blood), and so the wretched self-abasement began.

Now, this story got played far and wide in the Righty blogosphere. Prominent folks who were suckered by Lemire and have not yet prostrated themselves include Mark Steyn and Ezra Levant.

Time to assume the position, gentlemen.

Ironic that two men so concerned with defended their own right to unregulated speech should be caught spreading possibly defamatory material. I am reminded of that story about giving loaded guns to small children

Also, I am sure there were a couple of MSM columns that referenced the same postings. If anyone remembers one and can provide a link, I would appreciate it.

Update: Mark Lemire's argument hinges on his ability to show that he can trace a user-ID that Warman admitted using to post on Freedomsite (a Nazi site), plus a user-ID that Warman claims he did not use, to the IP address 66.185.84.204. However, run this number through google and you find people arguing about junior hockey, dog grooming, and a whole lot of other stuff besides. I ain't no techie, but it looks like a whole whack of people have made use of the IP. How you can make any accusations about Warman from this is a mystery to me.

Another Update: From Mike in Scott Tribe's comments:

According to ARIN reverse lookup, the IP is owned by Rogers Cable:

[...]

As a customer of Rogers myself, I know they rotate their IP to residential users every 3 weeks or so. They also send their residential customers between netblocks - I have had IP addresses from this same 66.xx.xx.xx block, as well as from 72.xx.xx.xx, 74.xx.xx.xx and 99.xx.xx.xx That only evidence that whomever posted was doing so from a Rogers customer computer. Throw in a NAT, and you can’t even tell which computer it was. Consider an open wifi access point and it could have been someone wardriving. None of this so far indicated Warman. It is no evidence at all. Christ I hate amateurs who think IP logs are written in stone.

A Small Dead Syllogism

Kate writes:

The Toronto Humane Society struggles as global warming results in more hours of daylight.

From which we can extract the following argument:

1) The humane society claims that global warming is behind the explosion of winter-born cats.
2) As cats mate only when there are over 8 hours of sunlight in a day, they can't breed in winter (September to January, to be precise).

Hence:

3) The explosion of winter-born cats can't be caused by Global warming.

However, even if valid what the argument actually proves is that the explosion of winter-born cats the Toronto Humane Society claims to be seeing isn't happening in the first place (cats can't breed during the short, dark winter days), and therefore can't be caused by Global warming. Hence the Toronto Humane Society are lying commies bent on wealth redistribution.

In fact, the argument fails outright:

Long haired breeds tend to be more seasonal than short-haired breeds, with 90% of long-haired cats experiencing a period of anestrus compared to only 39% of short-haired cats. In an extensive survey of 168 queens, approximately 50% of cats cycled year-round while the remainder experienced a period of anestrus from September to the end of January.

Some cats obviously can breed through the winter. It's presumably these lucky cats that are doing the EXTRA breeding.

And actually I didn't even have to google this, just scroll a few lines further down through the link Kate provided. Clearly, she expects her regular readers to get tired after the first paragraph. Its hard work moving your lips when your sucking your thumb, I guess.