Remember Walt Tuvell? He was the commenter from a few years ago that I banned for various (good) reasons, and he subsequently sued me in Massachusetts for “defamation.” I won the frivolous suit and the subsequent appeal (representing myself) at the cost of quite a bit of money and time, but with a renewed appreciation for how much the civil justice system is willing to bend over backwards to allow pro se litigants to have their day in court even when the justification for that day (or many days) is fanciful.

Well, last week the esteemed law professor Eugene Volokh discovered the case, and wrote at The Volokh Conspiracy:

I just came across a case that seriously considers the issue of whether (here, falsely) accusing someone of being an academic is defamatory. From Justice Christopher Barry-Smith in Tuvell v. Marshall (Mass. Super. Ct. 2017), a libel lawsuit that stemmed from a commenter banning controversy at the Ethics Alarms blog:

“Tuvell takes particular issue with Marshall’s statements in the Initial Post that the author of the email was an “academic” and that the “American Left” (which includes academics) “have gone completely off the ethics rails since November 8, 2016.” Even if Tuvell had been identified as the author of the email, these statements could not serve as a basis for a defamation claim. The term “academic,” even when used in this context, cannot be properly viewed as a statement that “would tend to hold the plaintiff up to scorn, hatred, ridicule or contempt, in the minds of any considerable and respectable segment in the community” and is therefore not defamatory. Phelan, 443 Mass. at 56 (emphasis added)….”

Good to know!

The complaint about my mistaken (BOY was it mistaken!) description of Walt as “an academic” was,remarkably, among the more legitimate of his defamation claims.

1. Speaking of Professor Volokh, he noted that the SCOTUS justice intimidation Jen Psaki proclaimed as no big deal is, in fact, illegal.under 18 U.S.C. § 1507:

1. Whoever, with the intent of interfering with, obstructing, or impeding the administration of justice, or
2. with the intent of influencing any judge, juror, witness, or court officer, in the discharge of his duty,
3. pickets or parades in or near a building housing a court of the United States, or
4. in or near a building or residence occupied or used by such judge, juror, witness, or court officer, or
5. with such intent uses any sound-truck or similar device or resorts to any other demonstration in or near any such building or residence,
6. shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than one year, or both.

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That idiocy above is courtesy of Occupy Democrats, who are responsible for many of the dumbest memes on the web, and a longtime friend who may be sliding into dementia based on the fact that she posted that to Facebook approvingly. In addition to serving as an integrity test for the woke and their knee-jerk allies, the leaked draft opinion portending a reversal of Roe v. Wade has also been a boon in that it has largely exposed the logical and ethical deficits of the pro-abortion position. Its advocates can’t really argue intelligently on the merits, or if they can, they’re not. What does the supposedly clever statement above have to do with abortion? No one is regulating sex. That’s a straw man. (The last few days have been an orgy of straw men.) The reversal of Roe means that there is no Constitutional right to kill the results of your own conduct when you are careless, reckless or unlucky. Moreover, there never was one: the “right” found in Roe was made up out of whole cloth at the peak of the sexual revolution and as women’s rights were a mounting cultural feve. A mediocre SCOTUS justice (the otherwise forgettable Harry Blackmun) wrote an unpersuasive, bootstrapping opinion that virtually no lawyer nor legal scholar respected, except that some liked the result.

Now the demoralized Roe fans are reduced to threats, fantasies, insults and dire predictions based on the fallacious reasoning that since the Court (may have) overturned this single, especially bad and still destructive opinion after 50 years, no established SCOTUS precedent is safe. Since Roe, there have been more than 63 million American lives ended in the womb, most of which would be still lives today had their mothers not availed themselves of the “right” to snuff them out for varying reasons. That rather material distinction, as Justice Alito clearly explains, takes Roe out of the usual class of stare decisus cases.

Since we last visited the freakout… Continue reading →

Not for the first time, Senator Paul has demonstrated the integrity, guts and skill to not only expose a government villain but also to explicate some basic cultural values and truths in the process.

This time Paul’s oh-so-deserving target was Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, he of the deliberately porous Mexican border and the deceitful disrespect for enforcing the law, and the topic was the agency’s new and ominous “disinformation governance board.” The setting: a Senate hearing this week.

After the Homeland Security Secretary ducked Paul’s question about whether the Steele Dossier included “Russian disinformation,” Son of Ron said,

“Here’s my question: The FBI concludes that the Steele dossier was full of Russian disinformation. CNN propagated this disinformation gladly for years and years. The difference, I guess, between your opinion and our opinion is that as despicable as it is that CNN propagated this disinformation, I wouldn’t shut them down, I wouldn’t lecture them, I wouldn’t put it on a government website that CNN is wrong for propagating disinformation. The problem you have is you’re not even willing to admit — I mean, we can’t even have an agreement on what the FBI said was disinformation.”

When Mayorkas huminahumina-ed that his board would not be responsible for policing disinformation in general, but only “when there is a connectivity between disinformation and threats to security of the homeland,” Paul said,

Well, the Russians might be considered that. You mentioned the Russians the other day when you tried to pivot away from this being about censorship. Let’s just say … you’ve discovered tomorrow Russian disinformation that is going to hurt our national security, and CNN is broadcasting it, what are you going to do? Here’s the problem: We can’t even agree what disinformation is!  You can’t even agree that it was disinformation that the Russians fed information to the Steele dossier. If you can’t agree to that, how are we ever going to come to an agreement on what is disinformation so you can police it on social media?”

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May 5 isn’t much of a date in ethics history, though it does mark one of the weirdest episodes of WWII. The Fu-Go balloon bomb was a weapon launched by Japan in late 1944 as a creative (and cheap) way to bomb U.S. cities. The hydrogen balloons carried antipersonnel incendiary devices, it was designed as a cheap weapon that the jet stream over the Pacific Ocean was supposed to deliver in the U.S. with deadly effect. It didn’t work as well as that other surprise bombing attack. Although 10% of the 9000 Fu-Gos launched were predicted to cause death and destruction, only one did. On May 5, 1945, a pregnant woman and five children were killed when they discovered a balloon bomb in a forest in Southern Oregon. Archie Mitchell, a pastor, and his pregnant wife Elsie drove up to Gearhart Mountain with five of their Sunday school students to have a picnic. Elsie and the children were looking for a good place to spread their blankets when they discovered a strange, large balloon lying on the ground. When they tugged at it, there were two explosions: the children were were killed immediately, and Elsie died while Archie tried to extinguish the fire on her clothing. Another student survived the initial blast, but died later.

Success!

One of the sites I use to track down these historical ethics markers is History.com, and in this instance, not for the first time, its bias pollutes its writing. Here’s the last paragraph:

The explosive balloon found at Lakeview was a product of one of only a handful of Japanese attacks against the continental United States, which were conducted early in the war by Japanese submarines and later by high-altitude balloons carrying explosives or incendiaries. In comparison, three years earlier, on April 18, 1942, the first squadron of U.S. bombers dropped bombs on the Japanese cities of Tokyo, Kobe, and Nagoyo, surprising the Japanese military command, who believed their home islands to be out of reach of Allied air attacks. When the war ended on August 14, 1945, some 160,000 tons of conventional explosives and two atomic bombs had been dropped on Japan by the United States. Approximately 500,000 Japanese civilians were killed as a result of these bombing attacks.

Or, as a further “comparison,” the Japanese army murdered an estimated 200,000 (or more) Chinese civilians and raped 20,000-80,000 during the Rape of Nanking.

1. Those clever Satanists! In the wake of the OTHER SCOTUS decision recently discussed here (but I can’t find the post right now), where Boston was told that it couldn’t ban a Christian flag from flying over City Hall when the city routinely allowed any organization to have its flag displayed, The Satanic Temple in Massachusetts is requesting that Boston fly its flag:

I see no way Boston can refuse, and the inevitable result will be that the city will stop flying any flags other than the nation’s and the state’s.

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