The donkey in the bathtub
Culture, not the law, should determine what is right and wrong on the internet and in company.
Kathy Shaidle - September 24, 2008
Now, Ezra Levant is the most outsiderish “insider” I know. Sure, he’s a lawyer, but he doesn’t write like one, thank God. He takes sides. He loses his temper. We need more like him.
But I don’t share his regard for the electoral process or the unelected bureaucracy. Had I received the HRC notice Ezra did two years ago, I would have scrawled “I hope you like cellulite, cuz that’s what you’re getting” all over it in red ink, tossed in a picture of my butt, and couriered it all back.
I only vote Conservative because I prefer their particular brand of baloney (and find the Liberal’s stale olive loaf particularly unappetizing). But it is still baloney.
If we blow the Section 13.1/HRC zombie’s head off, ten more will rise to take its place.
Ideally, the blogosphere would be a libel-free zone. Parliamentarians are immune from libel suits on House grounds; why shouldn’t ordinary Canadians enjoy a parallel privilege online -- the cyberspace equivalent of a boxing ring? Faulty analogies create no end of trouble, and one particularly pernicious one sees the blogosphere as the new “newspaper” when it is, and should be, the new “hockey rink” or “mosh pit.”
Those who fret that the internet is a slanderous free-for-all don’t realize that, increasingly, the blogosphere is also becoming a highly effective anti-SLAPP suit weapon as well. Why? Because that’s how we’re using it, and it’s working. None of that was in the manual. There is no manual. There shouldn’t be.
New laws won’t keep the blogosphere free-ish, anymore than the old ones are keeping most of us in line. In the long run, only Culture can and will. I leave the politicking to those temperamentally and philosophically at ease with such things.
For the rest of us: live as if the revolution has already happened.
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