FURIOUS nads! by The One True b!X

Reading through the anti-blog screed by Edward Fadeley in today’s Theo, I can’t help but wonder if the reason he’s a “retired associate justice of the Oregon Supreme Court” rather than an active one is the fact that he doesn’t know what he’s talking about.

(He actually retired in order to receive treatments for throat cancer. But I wasn’t making a crack about that.)

Okay, to be fair, it could be that he knows exactly what he’s talking about and is abusing that knowledge to convey a false picture in order to advance an agenda. Neither option is of particular benefit to anyone living in the 21st century, as most of us are.

“Ten years ago Congress passed a law requiring blog operators to protect the public by self-regulation,” Fadeley writes. In reality, what was adopted last decade was the Communications Decency Act, much of which was struck down by the courts, but not the bit that protected online publishers which provide some manner of public posting ability from being responsible for what individual posters say.

It was, in a very real sense, only just recently that a court specifically ruled that this covers blogs as much as it covers, say, AOL. That ruling was written by one of the judges who rationally dealt with the CDA a decade ago, so he knows what he’s doing.

Fadeley goes on to suggest that protecting online publishers who offer public forums is the equivalent to protecting “libel, defamation or spoken-but-fraudulent activity” and also runs counter to the Oregon Constitution’s provision that “every person shall be responsible for the abuse” of their free speech rights.

What he ignores here, of course, is the fact that the free speech rights at issue at those of the individual posters to public forums, who are in no way protected by the CDA from actions against them for any “libel, defamation or spoken-but-fraudulent activity”.

(Philosophically, the basic idea is that online publishers who provide public forums are enabling the free speech rights of others, and so just as the City of Portland can’t be sued for slander shouted by someone on a sidewalk, providers of public forums online can’t be sued for libel posted by someone else.)

Fadeley continues the distortions by rhetorically combining a case in which online publishers posted “information about a rumored new Apple product” with the problem Fadeley perceives with a lack of protections against online libel.

You’ll notice, of course, that the Apple case had nothing whatsoever to do with libel, but Fadeley conflates the two issues anyway, because it serves his scare tactics.

Continuing on to raise the example of various individuals or organizations whom an online publisher attacks as cultish, Fadeley says that “the law should protect their rights and demand journalistic standards and accountability.”

Of course, there really isn’t a law which covers “journalistic standards and accountability” per se, and in fact that’s precisely one of the things the courts discussed in the Apple case. “We can think of no workable test or principle that would distinguish ‘legitimate’ from ‘illegitimate’ news,” the judge in that case wrote. “Any attempt by courts to draw such a distinction would imperil a fundamental purpose of the First Amendment.”

Fadeley concludes by warning, “It’s high time to fill the gap in a system that allows defamation in the blogosphere to go unchecked.”

The problem is that no law has been passed, nor any court ruling issued, which exempts blogs or posters to public forums from existing proscriptions against libel or slander.

Of course, it’s also possible that Fadeley has a general inability (scroll down) to understand (scroll down) the rules.

Addendum: Oh, the irony. It seems that Fadeley once was on the Wayne Morse Historical Park Corporation Board at a time when the Wayne Morse Free Speech Plaza was conceived and dedicated.

Rather than retell the story here, you can see my Mom’s take on it, in picture and words.

Addendum: I should also pass along the reminder from my Dad, which came in this morning with “Weird Visit” as the subject line.

Holy cripe! Complete with some resounding thumps on the door instead of the doorbell, I just had a disturbing visit from two guys who identified themselves as local FBI. Turned out they were looking to talk to you and wondered if you were here and if not, where you were. I thought to call Mark [Last Name Redacted By b!X] rather than answering them but instead asked them why and what their interest in you was. Oh, no trouble, they said, just under the No Misdeed or Misstep Left Behind provision of the Patriot Act, they’d been going through local “permanent records” and noticed it was time to wish you a happy nineteenth anniversary of your criminal career. And they were right, so happy anniversary.

He has never once failed, each year since, to so remind me, although this is the first such reminder that in my pre-coffee just-awakened mind made me very confused.

So I finally remember to go to the farmers market in my neighborhood on Thursdays. Except the only reason I went was to get some bratwurst from Wood Family Farm. And they weren’t there. Someone please tell me this is a fluke, and that normally they are there. If they got dumped when Portland Farmers Market took over I am going to be very angry. And you wouldn’t like me when I’m angry.

“Liberty High School has decided not to stage a fall production of the controversial play The Children’s Hour,” reports Theo today, “because of parent and school administrator concerns.”

The play, described by the paper as “about a troublemaker student who tries to smear two teachers at a boarding school by starting a rumor that they are lesbians” at the end of which “one of the teachers commits suicide off stage” was seen by the school principal as not adding “value” to the students’ education.

Worse yet? In the words of the paper, the drama teacher herself ultimately “worried that doing a play that requires a lot of pre-education or talk-back sessions” might be problematic.

High school is not a time of hearts and flowers. It’s right in the midst of adolescence and young adulthood, with all of the surging conflicts that can be both deep and dark. If a play about rumor-mongering and the destroying of reputations isn’t approriate for high schoolers, for whom, exactly, is it good?

“I think it’s kind of sad that our community isn’t quite ready for us to do something like this,” the paper quotes sophomore Mallory Everton as saying. “Everyone has been affected by the words of others. I don’t have any friends who haven’t been hurt by rumors.”

If I can ignore the often-bogus line between so-called high culture and so-called pop culture for a moment, I’d like to add the following Hard Harry quote from Pump Up The Volume: “High school is the bottom. Being a teenager sucks, but that’s the point. Surviving it is the whole point.”

There is a fine line between educating students and patronizing them. It would be nice if public schools remembered on which side of that line they are supposed to be.

Addendum: For background on the now-ironically named high school’s debate over the play, see the earlier Hillsboro Argus story by someone who bases their description of the play on “play reviews” rather than the play itself, but does have sensible remarks from the drama teacher and yet another student. Also see a brief Theo item from several days ago in which Liberty’s principal, who apparently would be feel right at home in 1925 Dayton, Tennessee, says, “If the community doesn’t see this as a positive experience, then our students don’t benefit.”

Mr Bush’s comments come three days after guards at Guantanamo found three inmates - two Saudis and a Yemeni - hanged in their cells. US officials at first dismissed the simultaneous suicides as “a good PR move” and an “act of asymmetric warfare”, although later a more humanitarian gloss was put on the deaths.

- The Times