Yesterday, the Western Standard ran my Tyranny of Nice co-author Pete Vere’s essay about freedom of speech.
Today, they’re running my piece on the subject. (Note: I’m more of a recovering anarchist, really, but I like Jaworski’s description of anarchists, so now he’s got me thinking: “Anarchists have a profound respect for customs and norms, and for spontaneous, rather than centrally planned, order.”)
Anyway, here are some excerpts:
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.”
Thanks again to everyone at the Western Standard’s Shotgun blog for helping promote our book. I’d encourage everyone to sign up for the Shotgun blog’s RSS feed; if you enjoy combative comments exchanges, you’ll love fighting it out over there.
And here’s the song I start the column with. Regular readers will have heard it before:
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