I think she’s missing the entire point of the battle.
Whether we are debating ethically turns for the most part on our intentions. Are we trying to get our point across in a way that is as productive and simultaneously harmless as possible? This is the ethical approach. Or are we trying to win by any means possible, including character assassination and the bullying of opponents into submission?
Those, such as Levant, who argue that human rights commissions should not have authority to regulate speech are, in my view, entirely right. But how some people advance that view is quite wrong.
“Those, such as Levant, who argue that human rights commissions should not have authority to regulate speech are, in my view, entirely right. But how some people advance that view is quite wrong.”
Therin lies the point which has escaped her. Being wrong isn’t illegal. And if people don’t stand up for being obnoxiously wrong, it soon will be. Oops, too late.
Surely it’s an offense by her measure to call her an idiot. Fortunately it is within my right to call her an idiot.
OK, what bothers me about this is what they have alleged against people like Ezra. Is Ms. Jennifer saying it’s OK to call him a racist, so long as you do it politely? In other words, you’re free to characterize people in any vile way you choose, so long as you don’t say “f*ck” or “b*tch”?
Does that means it OK for me to refer to Ms. Jennifer as an “ignorant vaginal orifice” rather than a “st*pid c*nt”? (And I apologize to everyone for the implied vulgarity.. I thought it was necessary to demonstrate my point.)
“… The Supreme Court disagreed and applied the U.S. Constitution to protect “the emotive function” of speech which “may often be the more important element of the overall message sought to be communicated.”
this is what guys like Lenny Bruce & George Carlin were really about. Somehow Canada just never dug the idea much. Shame.
For a member of an ethics foundation to demand only a genteel, measured response to the psychological and financial violence exerted by the HRCs strikes me as, what’s the word… unethical?
including character assassination and the bullying of opponents into submission?
That, in a nutshell, is the standard operating procedure of the CHRC and the very people who dragged Ezra in front of the CHRC in the first place.
Fight fire with fire.
Nice guys finish last.
Free speech for all.
Oh, and yes, Ezra said to his interrogator that the motive behind publishing the Mohammad cartoons was whatever was most offensive.
That is the point of “free” speech, the motive can be anything good or bad because it is “free” to be so.
To Janet on her ‘be nice planet’.
When you enter a fight you must go in to win. That is rule #1 … Anything else is surrender.
And Janet … some people desperately need their characters to be assassinated. They are rotten to the core.
You are not worthy to even critique a warrior hero like Ezra Levant. You are not worthy of cleaning the bird-shit off the statue that will someday be erected in honor of Levant and his triumph over evil repressive fools like Jennifer Lynch.
This is not a pillow fight honey, and you don’t bring a pillow to a knife fight. You are a deluxe idiot. Stop your writing career now, before everyone knows how stupid you are.
Ezra Levant was targeted by the Human Rights shakedown artists because he didn’t hold “correct” views, and now this jackass is chiding him for fighting back in a manner that isn’t “correct?”
Seriously, it’s time to start giving these people a swift kick in the pants.
Come come this is what it is to be Canadian. Nice friendly unoffensive folk who will smile and say yes thankyou as our entire society falls down around our ears. The typical liberal attitude in this country. Except of course if you happen to offend certain other populations of the country. See what they made me do!!!! Don’t piss off a muslim.. there I said it. I hope what Ezra is doing is just daring Her Highness to do is come after him with a complaint. This she dare not do, I think he would eviscerate her. Real court, real consequences.
The proper handle for people like this is “PPO”
Thats Pompus Posterior Orifice
Sure, in a sense, she is right. In a perfect world and in a perfect debate, all things would be civilized and sanitized. Just a proper academic debate of point and counterpoint.
In the real world…things are messy. People need to get the attention of the public and politicians. Sometimes emotions take over…particularly when the power of the state is being used to financial crush and silence debate of politically incorrect citizens.
The actions of Jennifer Lynch and her staff are far worse than any rudeness on the part of Ezra Levant. Until the day that these crazy commissions are disbanded, I hope that the free-speechers continue to be irreverent and impolite.
Maybe if people could remember what “thick skin” meant, we wouldn’t have to pander to the weak minded in society. For all those people who claim to be intelligent yet do not have the capacity to defend their ground verbally, should in my view be taught a lesson.
My wife used to be one of those people, and now I am very proud to say she can handle herself with excellence. I wasn’t easy with her intentionally because she wouldn’t get any easier treatment in the rest of society.
Teaching people to have no conviction is like beating them into submission.
What I found amusing by this pompous fool’s diatribe was that first she denounced personal attacks and then calmly and pompously, proceded to attack Ezra Levant personally rather than his policy/message.
Her husband is also big in the U of C law scene among other areas.
http://www.themarknews.com/authors/354-phil-elder
As an added reason that Ezra’s tactics are not innapropriate, while the HRC’s may be saying the words quietly and professionaly, they are very deliberately attacking the characters of the people they convict. What sounds worse to society than to be convicted of “hate speech”? People’s values are personal, and therefore their investigations and convictions are personal.
If Ezra doesn’t make his retaliation personal, how will people ever view the HRC’s as anything other than a faceless bureaucracy. They are not. The investigators are people, and I find it ironic that Jennifer Lynch takes offense to bloggers singling the workers out and making it personal. Her workers are singling people out and attacking what is intensly personal to them.
It is personal, deeply so. The personal attacks are warranted.
Jennifer Lynch should bear in mind that she is judging herself by her intentions and judging everyone else by their actions. It makes for an unequal playing feild.
Jennifer Lynch and the HRC have a personal vendetta with Ezra from the get go. They stand on the sidelines chirping away, but yet won’t show up and debate the subject with him. The HRC drew first blood I know two wrongs don’t make a right, but it sure can make you feel better. To you Ezra, make sure you get your monies worth.
Jennifer Lynch and the HRC have a personal vendetta with Ezra from the get go. They stand on the sidelines chirping away, but yet won’t show up and debate the subject with him. The HRC drew first blood I know two wrongs don’t make a right, but it sure can make you feel better. To you Ezra, make sure you get your monies worth.
The abuses of the Human Rights Commissions would have quickly been forgotten if they were ever noticed at all without both Ezra and Mark Steyn continuing to keep the scandals front and centre.
In matters of this nature the only thing you get by being polite is ignored.
As Ann Coulter says “The truth cannot be administered with novacaine”.
The true sign of a leftie losing an argument will be when they employ the “method of delivery” gambit.
My favorite method of delivery is the sledge.
The haven for pompous neddling bureacrats that is the HRC needs to be beaten to a pulp, buldozed and scraped into the incinerator.
Jenifer Lynch can kiss my a$$.
Can you believe it? Freedom of speechers are not polite enough. Basically boils down to the controllers of speech being pussies. They cannot defend their positions, and so they throw out stupid weak arguments. There really is no polite way to tell people they are stupid and weak.
Meddling …… bureaucrats … Jennifer ….
It’s funny how lefties always go on about being polite etc., yet they are always the ones who do the exact oposite. Disagree with their pov and they are merciless in their attacks.
I’ve never met a leftie yet who wasn’t an asshole. Just degrees of assholeness.
That’s Mr. Levant to you Jenny-poo.
The people who run these ‘courts of niceness’, which serve only to attack ideas they don’t like, could avoid the ranting about themselves by simply closing the doors of these wretched HRC institutions. Maybe they could find productive work elsewhere (or maybe not).
Its time Canadians got mad. Being nice just gets you the patsy award.
I’d say that if the person that Levant is trying to debate squirms and hides under the table, he has every ethical right to attack her character. At that point the debate isn’t just about the uselessness of her organization, but the very character of a leader that will not stand up for her commission.
If you’re nice to people, why, they’ll be nice right back. A nice POV – if you’re six years old.
This person has a lot of time on her hands and would like to be important in this debate. Unfortunately she has nothing relevant to contribute, so she indulges in this thinly veiled personal attack. Another poster mentioned her connections to academia; I’ve no doubt there’s an anti-conservative bit of snobbery going on also. It burns these people that one of their own isn’t out in front with this, but they didn’t have the spine to offend in the first place.
It’s what PC is all about-the loss of real meaning-with the inevitable guv/buro consolidating power.
What none of you seem to notice, is that this foundation is a front for militant islam. Go look at their web site.
There should be civility. There should also be severe reprecussions if someone called someone else a racist when he is not.
It would have been far more productive for her to have gone in a different direction after:
Rule No. 1: It is nearly always wrong to personally attack those who hold opinions different from yours
I would have been much more interested in an enumeration of the conditions where it is appropriate to personally attack those holding different views from one’s own. One obvious case is when one is approached by a stranger with a knife on the street who holds a differing opinion than yours regarding involuntary redistribution of wealth. In this case, the solution to the argument is to shoot him through the head before he stabs you.
IMHO, the HRC’s are so obscene that they are most analogous to an armed mugger. The response of freedom loving individuals to HRC’s should be to ensure their utter destruction and attempting to ensure that such an obscenity will never occur again in this country. Ezra Levant has been remarkably restrained in his debate with the HRC’s. That Janet Keeping cannot understand the nature of the threat speaks volumes about where she stands on free speech and on freedom in general.
I was thinking about this leftist tactic of “let’s make nice” when they have lost an argument. What popped into my head was Obama and his having Gates and Crawley share a beer together at the White House (if you see the video you can see that there is a wide table between the prof. and the police officer at the White House get-together outdoors).
Some of your talk I hear about Muslim are really funny like
Russells Peters ( watch below 18+ scene I mean)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nn5jlrxcpkI&feature=PlayList&p=8B24D255089DF6B6&playnext=1&playnext_from=PL&index=4
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NJIyaBG0mZk
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SyCFofaTy-c
http://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=russell+peter+july+2009+youtube&search_type=&aq=f
====
In some topic we have similarity and we have differnces
we can walk with placard and join and separted with change placard over each topic
have fun enjoy company or fight as well
All depends on topic of differences not
even Muslim are disagree with all topic you said
What you gain of Naming and abusing each others
Canadian must find better and new ways so far all method heard is borning to me and not realistic of what we heard people talk about Muslim
really
These are the leftist idiots that allow the world to use them as a doormat. These are the leftist idiots that force us to be the world’s doormats along with them (And pay for it out of pocket).
The author states that Ezra should not resort to “personal attacks”.
Perhaps Ezra thought that the human rights tribunal et al, laying charges, were engaging in an attack that was also quite “personal”.
“There should be civility. There should also be severe reprecussions if someone called someone else a racist when he is not.”
As long as the reprecussions are not from the government, that is likely true. People who are free to speak are free to defend themselves.
“”Perhaps Ezra thought that the human rights tribunal et al, laying charges, were engaging in an attack that was also quite “personal”.””
and very expensive
I wonder how this twit would have “UNOFFENSIVELY” dealt with Hitler’s POV on Jews????
Keeping believes in the secular version of “hate the sin but love the sinner”. Thus, she can (pretend to) disassociate behaviour from identity (although how she reconciles this with the contemporary identity politics of race and gender is beyond my comprehension). In one sense, the gay lobby has it right: behaviour IS identity, defining the very soul. It follows that changing a deep-seated behaviour requires waving someone’s Dorian Gray self-portrait in his face while very visibly gagging. To do otherwise is the most appalling selfishness.
Too many “official” Christians have turned tolerance into a synonym for love, forgetting that love isn’t cheap. (Shaidle missed a good opportunity to hammer this home: “The Tyranny of Nice” should really be called “The Tyranny of Tolerance”.)
It is not about destroying an adversary, but about creating a friend.
She forgets that there would have been no debate into which she could now belatedly inserted herself UNLESS Ezra Levant and others had gone ballistic. Playing nice and quiet got other HRC victims precisely nowhere.
Flannery O’Connor once said, “When you’re talking to the deaf, sometimes you have to shout.”
“Tone” is the last refuge of the coward and the fool. “I don’t like your tone” is something nuns used to say to me when they knew I was right but couldn’t bring themselves to back down during the argument.
This woman is just parroting Perceived Liberal Wisdom; it’s up there with “if you don’t vote, you have no right to complain” and other unexamined crapulence.
In the TVO green room, Steve Paikin said something similar to me, that my “tone” or whatever “did my cause more harm than good.” I replied that I have no “cause”. I am not an agent of the Conservative party or any organization. I don’t care about “Canada” or “the future” or “the children.”
I am raising hell for my own sake and a few friends and strangers, based entirely on eternal principle, not P.R.
I am right. They are wrong. If other people are put out because the truth makes them squirm, they can squirm away.
She represents the pointless conformity that all civilizations in decline demand of their “citizens”. Yawn.
There really is a time and a place for everything. Someone mentioned Lenny Bruce and George Carlin, I might add Andrew Dice Clay, I don’t like any of them and most other stand-up comedians, I tend more to self-deprecating types like Bob Newhart. Although I have satellite radio, I’ve never listened to the comedy stations, because I don’t like smart alecs, but I suppose some find them funny, I just don’t and yet people say I have a great sense of humour?
I would just like to note another article Janet wrote entitled Canadian Human Rights Commissioner [Jennifer Lynch] has free expression wrong http://www.chumirethicsfoundation.ca/main/page.php?page_id=203
And some articles written by other members of the Sheldon Chumir Foundation.
Political Courage needed to reform Alberta’s Human Rights Commission http://www.chumirethicsfoundation.ca/main/page.php?page_id=177
Free Speech won, but what about Ethics? http://www.chumirethicsfoundation.ca/main/page.php?page_id=170
Even obnoxious speech should not be censored http://www.chumirethicsfoundation.ca/main/page.php?page_id=178
And a report the SCF issued in which they recommended “that free speech be protected by amending section 3 of the Act” http://www.chumirethicsfoundation.ca/main/page.php?page_id=175
Oh and Janet and the SCF, in partnership with the University of King’s College School of Journalism hosted an event in Halifax The Media’s right to offend: Exploring legal and ethical limits on free speech http://www.chumirethicsfoundation.ca/main/page.php?page_id=168
Present at this event were
* Stephen Ward, the director of the Center for Journalism Ethics at the University of Wisconsin;
* Noa Mendelsohn Aviv, the director of the Canadian Civil Liberties Association’s Freedom of Expression Project;
* Ezra Levant, a lawyer and former publisher of the Western Standard;
* Kelly Toughill, an associate professor of journalism at King’s and Toronto Star columnist;
* Wayne MacKay, a Dalhousie Law School professor and expert in constitutional and human rights law;
* John Miller, the associate chair of the Ryerson School of Journalism in Toronto;
* David Swick, a lecturer on journalism ethics at King’s.
* Krista Daley, Director and CEO of the Nova Scotia Human Rights Commission (she got her ass handed to her btw!)
Yes, they invited and paid Ezra Levant to come give a speech about freedom of the press. They helped fill his defense fund by inviting him to speak at their event. Would an enemy of free speech do that?
The event was a big success, and a resounding endorsement of free speech and the media’s right to offend.
Janet is no enemy of Ezra’s, or of free speech.
She was telling a friend that he might be better served to lay off the ad hominem, something Ezra will readily admit.
Let us see now,
Keeping wrote
……….Levant has written recently about her: “Jennifer Lynch is a damned liar” and “an execrable woman,” he has said. “What an odious woman. When she accosted me … I didn’t recognize her … She is much more haggard and old than her ancient publicity picture.”
If Lynch lied, she is a damned liar, what is it that Keeping does not understand about damn liars.
Perhaps Keeping would use some of the New Speak, like “ Lynch put forward a counterfactual proposition”?
If what Levant said about Lynch is an observation that accurately describe her afflictions, what is he suppose to do lie like her?
I suspect ms lynch (and how apropos the name) and that crowd severely misjudge, obscenely underestimate the intelligence of Canadians in Ezra Levant’s camp. see, it’s like this: they are accustomed to dealing with clucking nodding fawning yesmen, they have ‘missed out’ in learning there really is a Canada out there intensely adamant about defending truth and freedom of speech and who know that that means feathers will get very ruffled.
the lynch gang needs to be driven to extinction the way paleontologists pick over the bones of gigantic megasauruses, very powerful in their era but long deceased.
anything else reminds me of an old Mad Magazine spoof about how the bad guy in the movies was always so polite considerate and cordial just before preparing to drop the hero into a vat of acid.
but this ain’t the movies. this politeness is just another layer of scam and obstrefusion meant to distract the opposition, the truth seekers and freedom defenders.
we’re on to their game. the path to defeating the ‘lynch mob’ has been laid out. the fence is razor sharp along the top, no place for fence sitting. and all will need to choose sides. I made my choice long ago.
Kathy @ 10:47- Not to be insulting, but I wish half my gender, had the balls (so to speak) that you exhibit. We wouldn’t have sunk to the morass in which we now find ourselves. What the hell happened??
If Lynch lied, she is a damned liar, what is it that Keeping does not understand about damn liars.
Perhaps Keeping would use some of the New Speak, like “ Lynch put forward a counterfactual proposition”?
Posted by: Lev at July 30, 2009 11:27 PM
Perhaps Ezra could have … calibrated his words differently. 😉
Tenebris wrote: It is not about destroying an adversary, but about creating a friend.
Marxists STILL don’t understand this concept because they are too obsessed. Or maybe programmed. And if they *are* actually programmed, they fit right into today’s environment where software dictates many decisions. Often GIGO rules though.
Snagglepuss, no offense taken, believe me!
I’ve said it before: if some of the people hauled before the HRCs ten years ago, especially sucky baby ‘Christians,’ had been more aggressive, and more worldly, they could have started this debate earlier and saved others, like Ezra, from the same fate.
Christians should be embarrassed that the person yelling loudest about Christians persecuted by the HRCs (Boisson et al) is a Jew named Ezra Levant, and they’ve left all the heavy lifting to him.
But again, Christians think “being nice” is in the Bible or something. What is really in there is stuff about being willing to die for your beliefs, and sacrificing yourself for the sake of others.
She misses the point that speaking the truth often offends some one.
If there is ever any infringement placed on speaking the truth then democracy and the just society collapse. We as a free and enlightened society act on what is true and not what is false, even if that truth may not be what we want it to be. We must make decisions based on fact or our existance becomes a lie. Even when the facts are quite ugly and speaking this truth may be “obnoxious”.
The hard truth is ugly to many people. That is no reason to suppress the truth.