Ghost of a flea

This is terrible news for Canadian bloggers, of course, and it’s small consolation that they’re probably only a year or so ahead of their American counterparts on this particular highway to hell. It seems a little odd that Ghost of a Flea didn’t make Warman's cut. Not that I wish you ill, of course, but being left off a list of dangerous subversives like Kate McMillan must feel like a bit of a snub.

Ha! I have been lucky that way. Someone did try to go after my job once but no SLAPP suits so far.

"may find it difficult to believe how quickly things can go so far wrong"

Flea, didn't radical feminist lawyer Andrea Dworkin manage to get laws enacted in the 80's which criminalized speech and writing deemed offensive to women? I cannot remember anything at all about it, so maybe you can tell us how relevant that was or was not to the current devolution into Maoist thuggery.

That would be the "Butler Decision". Catharine MacKinnon had a big part in that one. Bear in mind these were American activists/academics shopping around an ideology their own courts would not buy into.

But your point is well taken. We really do not have the same tradition of freedom of speech and expression. I should also say I have a much more authoritarian bent than is my impression of my American cousins. That said, there is a line and some petty bureaucracy over-riding a thousand years of common law - and countless lives sacrificed - in defense of freedom is well over that line.

I should add too the main victims of the Butler decision were feminist/gay/lesbian bookstores whose shipments from the United States were regularly confiscated by Canadian customs agents. The most notorious title customs went after was "Hothead Paisan", an American "homicidal lesbian terrorist" comic book. So major foot-bullets for the feminists who had cheered the decision.

Thanks, Flea. I had no clear idea what Dworkin and MacKinnon had done. Nor did I know that they were Americans.

Is there a single point to donate for defense to all the bloggers at once? Assuming this is a single lawsuit where the defense would be unified, of course.

At this point it looks as though each blogger is collecting individually. I am not certain about the National Post blogger; I would have thought the paper would cover that. Michelle Malkin posted to the effect she had made individual contributions.

Found one - The Nose On Your Face has reopened its Ezra Levant Tshirt store and is donating all profits to a collective fund. www.thenoseonyourface.com

At least one case (admittedly from an unsympathetic character) was refused because it had been submitted on two-sided paper. As Mark Steyn put it, it must have been the first double-sided fax on the planet.

No, no. It's quite clear they mean all cases must be submitted in the form of a Mobius strip.

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