My thanks to Micheal R for this link, an article by the near-libertarian Jewish-Russian-American blogger Eugene Volokh.

Richard Warman, a lawyer who worked as an investigator for the Canadian Human Rights Commission, often filed complaints against “hate speech” sites — complaints that were generally upheld under Canadian speech restrictions. Fromm, a defender of various Holocaust deniers and anti-Semites, has been publicly condemning Warman for, among other things, being “an enemy of free speech.” Warman sued, claiming that these condemnations are defamatory.

Friday, the Ontario Superior Court held for Warman — chiefly on the grounds that because Warman’s claims were accepted by the legal system, they couldn’t accurately be called an attack on free speech. Thus, for instance:

  [25] The implication, as well as the clear of meaning of the words [“an enemy of free speech” and “escalated the war on free speech”], is that the plaintiff is doing something wrong. The comment “Well, see your tax dollars at work” also implies that Mr. Warman misused public funds for this “war on free speech”.

  [26] The plaintiff was using legal means to complain of speech that he alleged was “hate” speech.

  [27] The evidence was that Mr. Warman was successful in both the complaint and a libel action which he instituted.

  [28] Freedom of expression is not a right that has no boundaries. These parameters are outlined in various legislative directives and jurisprudence. I find Mr. Fromm has exceeded these. This posting is defamatory.

Likewise, apropos another statement (“Since then, a number of dissidents have been dragged before human rights tribunals, largely through the efforts of CHRC hatchetman Richard Warman”), the court responds:

  [32] While opposition to legislation is permitted, it is defamatory to say that Mr. Warman is largely responsible for “dragging” dissidents before the human rights tribunal, when in fact the “dissidents” were disseminating prohibited hate speech. The tribunal upheld the complaint. This posting is also defamatory.

Likewise, here’s another statement that the court treated as defamatory and legally punishable:

  [48] At the press conference after Mr. Fromm’s comments, he introduced three other people who spoke of their “problems with Richard Warman.” Mr. Fromm added, after one speaker:

      Thank you very much, Jason. So, for posting an opinion, the same sort of opinion that might have appeared in editorial pages in newspapers across this country, Jason and the Northern Alliance, his site has come under attack and people who are just ordinary Canadians find themselves in front of the courts for nothing more serious than expressing their opinion. This is being done with taxpayers’ money. I find that reprehensible.

  [49] In one posting Mr. Fromm describes Mr. Warman’s “campaign of intimidation” recitingvarious actions taken by Mr. Warman. He states that freedom of the Internet was the key issue.

  [50] Again Mr. Warman was referred to as acting like a one-man thought police agency.

  [51] The plaintiff is accused of using taxpayer money to “restrict freedom of speech” and of refusing “to allow those with differing opinions the right to express their views.”

  [52] The tone of all these allegations is derisive and holds the plaintiff up to ridicule and contempt. The words themselves and the inferences to be drawn are all defamatory.

Likewise, the court says, “[59] Mr. Warman is criticized for his anti-hate speech stance, and his professionalism and integrity are attacked. This would lead a reasonable reader to conclude that the plaintiff was an ideologue who wanted only to deny freedom of speech to those with whom he disagrees. [60 ]I find this posting defamatory.”

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Oxford Unite Against Fascism, Oxford University Student Union, Oxford & District Trades Council, Oxford University Labour Club, Oxfordshire UNISON Health, Oxford Brookes University Unison branch and Unite Against Fascism have called a peaceful demonstration against fascist BNP leader Nick Griffin and Holocaust denier David Irving who are due to speak in the free speech form [sic] on Monday 26th November at the Oxford Union.

... Fascism threatens the safety of Black, Jewish, Muslim, lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people of Oxford including students and academics. Wherever fascists are active or have a presence, racist attacks and other hate crimes increase.

For transport/coach details, please contact National UAF office ...

So ran the instructions to the thousand freaks, self-haters, simple minds and Jewish and “BEM” activists who screamed and occasionally became violent outside the Oxford Union Free Speech Forum last night.  How far we have come from the “rainbow coalition” invented by Ken Livingstone in his GLC administration of the early 80s.  Now the heir to this poisonous confection dictates acceptable speech and even debate about acceptable speech.

Anyhow, let’s get a flavour of what it was like inside the building.

Simon Darby of the BNP managed to record part of Nick Griffin’s speech - albeit, apparently, by employing technology no more effective than the wax disc.  You can hear it, complete with the baying mob without, and a heartening round of applause from Griffin’s audience to finish, here.

Griffin spoke in a separate room from Irving, who was in the main debating chamber.  The mob had made it impossible for some of the ticket-holders to access the latter.  So the police, who don’t seem to have been especially effective, ushered them to another room.  The speakers were split accordingly.

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I just got off the phone with another Ron Paul supporter—this one an official Ron Paul campaign organizer in a major metropolitan area—who told me that his Republican County Chairman sent out a notice to the Republican Party mailing list for that county announcing the grand opening of the campaign headquarters for Mitt Romney.  Romney’s “campaign headquarters” turned out to be a gas station with a little folding table holding a dish rack holding bumper stickers, buttons, etc. with hardly anyone showing to the “grand opening”.  The Ron Paul organizer then notified the Republican County Chairman of the date of the grand opening of the Ron Paul campaign headquarters.  The Ron Paul campaign headquarters being opened is a retail store which the merchant has agreed to convert to a full campaign office with several times the floor space supporting walk-in service to the public.  As with most other metro areas the Ron Paul supporters are far more numerous and active.

The Republican County Chairman refused to send out a notice of of the grand opening of the Ron Paul campaign headquarters.

When asked why he would send notice for Mitt Romney’s lame HQ opening but not for the robust Ron Paul campaign and headquarters, the Chairman replied:

“Because I can.”

This is some way to treat the Republican candidate that has the best likelihood of being elected President, if nominated, according to such hard-nosed measures as the Zogby blind poll of general voters and the intrade.com prediction market:

Two nights of riots  and counting:-

Thirty police officers have been injured in a second night of violence between youths and officers in the flashpoint suburb of Villiers-le-Bel in Paris.

About 160 riot police came under attack in the notoriously crime-ridden district, 20 miles north of the centre of the French capital.

The violence was sparked on Sunday by the deaths of two young boys, who were killed when their moped collided with a police car.

The boys who died were said by locals to be “aged between 12 and 13”.

Police insisted that their car had not been chasing the boys when the crash occurred soon after dusk.

Two years ago just such an event triggered 20 nights of rioting, and accounted for almost 9,000 torched vehicles and 2,888 arrests.  A state of emergency was declared.  The French media stopped reporting the incidence of burned cars for fear of giving succour to Le Front National.  And in April of this year Nicolas Sarkozy got himself elected, in part by stealing the FN’s clothes.

Now there’s no incentive for Sarko the American to play to white France.  He’ll look to avoid inflaming the situation, and distance himself from it if the unrest continues.

Martin has sent me his latest Prudent Bear piece, which deserves the posting here.

GW

Close observers of the US housing finance disaster in recent months will have noted a curious phenomenon. Companies such as Countrywide that were in late August regarded as rock solid have recently passed clearly into the danger zone while those like Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac that were regarded as potential market saviors have come under a cloud. In Britain Northern Rock, whose September bailout was said to be modest, involving little risk to the taxpayer has now turned into an immense 25 billion pound ($51 billion) potential black hole – real money even in the US economy let alone in the much smaller British one. This illustrates a deeply troubling quality of the largest downturns: the tendency for the free market to turn into a death spiral, in which even sound well-run institutions are engulfed.

Death spirals are fairly rare in financial history. The Wall Street Crash of 1929 was perhaps the most virulent example. After the first downturn, the market recovered for several months. Then the collapse of the Bank of the United States in December 1930, together with the further economic damage from the Smoot-Hawley Tariff caused a further collapse in confidence and activity that was concentrated in the banking sector, as relatively solid institutions followed the Bank of the United States into bankruptcy. The Federal Reserve failed to correct for the money supply contraction caused by the bank bankruptcies, leading the US economy further into the pit. The additional shove given by President Herbert Hoover’s 1932 tax increase was almost unnecessary; only the confidence brought by a new president (albeit with equally counterproductive economic policies) brought recovery from 1933. By the time the spiral was over, more than one fourth of the banks in the United States had gone bankrupt and the stock market had bottomed out at one tenth of its peak.

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On April 19, 2007, anniversary of “the shot heard round the world” which started the US revolutionary war, a suspected foreign agent introduced a despotic piece of legislation to the US House of Representatives.  The House has now, apparently fearful of the Ron Paul revolution, overwhelmingly voted to pass H.R. 1955: Violent Radicalization and Homegrown Terrorism Prevention Act of 2007 which defines:

HOMEGROWN TERRORISM- The term `homegrown terrorism’ means the use, planned use, or threatened use, of force or violence by a group or individual born, raised, or based and operating primarily within the United States or any possession of the United States to intimidate or coerce the United States government, the civilian population of the United States, or any segment thereof, in furtherance of political or social objectives.

The Second Amendment to the US Constitution:

A well regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed.

It is clear from the language, and even more so the history of the Second Amendment to the US Constitution that “planned use, or threatened use, of force or violence by a group or individual born, raised, or based and operating primarily within the United States” is “necessary to the security of a free state”.

Specifically, the “group.. born, raised… within the United States” is “the people” and the founders qualified “state” with “free” specifically to distinguish it from the current state of “the United States government”.

In March of this year I put up a post about sociobiology and Conservatism.  It was, in fact, simply a reproduction of a thread debate at Troy Southgate’s New Right Forum.

It was overly long, I know, and self-indulgent, and it entered upon some abstruse territory.  Well, we are heading back in that direction with this post.  It’s another, still-live thread from Troy’s Forum, this time dealing with the tension between empiricism and New Right philosophy.

Now, tactically, the American radical right, to which I belong, should make its accomodation with the European New Right.  Both are marginalised.  Both are attempting to confront the existential threats to their respective peoples.  For both, these involve a traitorous elite, untrammelled immigration, neo-Marxist extremism, Jewish ethno-aggression, etc.

But it isn’t that straightforward.  The ARR, beset as it is by racial guilt-mongers, Jewish media power, and official lies, seeks proofs to pave its people’s path.  The ENR, beset by American neo-liberalism, egalitarian democracy and plain history, damn it, reifies the European spirit to inspire its people upward towards the light.

Neither appreciates the other.  For American empiricism, it seems, is anti-human to the one, and the European spirit is a fiction to the other.

Here, in miniature, is the way contact between these two brothers pans out.  The thread is long and complex, and the quality of contributions is not always as considered or literate as a properly crafted blog entry.  Feel free to dive in and cherry pick, rather than labour through the whole thing.  If you are completely incurious or just impatient, look away NOW!

If further interesting Forum comments appear in my OE Inbox, I will, of course, update the entry.

OK ... the thread began innocently enough with an announcement by Welf Herfurth of his latest article.

From there it wandered contentedly into a discussion about Apollonianism and Dionysianism as understood by Nietzsche and a number of New Right philosophers and writers.  I confess that I am not at all well read in this area, and inevitably find myself on the margins of such discussions.  However, the discussion reached the point where Troy averred:-

The reason why Nietzsche’s philosophy inevitably relates to the East, of course, is because the innate Indo-European mindset tends naturaly to look in that direction and away from the imported religions of the Middle East. It’s quite ironic, really, as though East and West have changed places or exhanged values. Not that it can’t be explained by Indo-European migration on the one hand and, on the other, the spread of Christianity through the Roman Empire and Islam through immigration. I’m being decidedly Euro-centric here, of course.

This piqued my interest.  Here was that word again ... “innate”.  And used to make Europe a spiritual child of the Sub-Continent rather than the Jewish Middle East.  I couldn’t care less about the Jewish Middle East, but   I do care about intellectual integrity:-

There is nothing in the Indo-European religious canon that is “innate”. On the contrary, it needs to be understood that everything innate is selected, including a tendency, where it occurs, towards a “spiritual” explanation of Nature and Existence ... but ONLY the tendency, NOT the forms which that may take. Certainly, Troy, we are not Jungians, and have no need to cling to forms of collective consciousness.

The intellectual procession of Western Man can be understood as a Manichean and unwinnable contest between that 50 to 60% or so who are naturally religious (including liberals) and the 40 to 50% or so who have no idea whatsoever what all the fuss is about, but generally have to go along with it anyway. The tendencies to faith and rationalism are both selected qualities of the European mind.

Troy, however, was unfazed:-

On the contrary, GW, I am a Jungian.

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THE MOON OVER ALBION

by Xenia Sunic

She emerged late one night
Heavy–orbed and unnaturally red
Pregnant with some strange powers
Over Albion.

Forests of never-dying city-dazzling lights
Always in conflict with her celestial appearance,
And the maddening crowd twitching for short excitements
Ignoring the beauty of her sudden sight.

She remained with herself,
Her bygone worshippers; long time dead,
And now finding a hideout within a white cloud,
Then powerfully emerging, madly lightning,
Over the ancient waters and stones of Albion.

Her mystery absorbed; carried on the wings of an Albatross
Over the distant seas, reflecting in the deepest waters
Far away from the mechanical city lights
That obliterate the living darkness of the nights,
And the mystery of her existence.

Hail to thee, that carry us over to shores of after-life,
Through your glimmering moonlight gardens
To the worlds of unknown time,
Through your mighty pull and cosmic flow
To everlasting deathless otherness.

The Moon over Albion!