“The competitive dynamic in the right-wing outrage industry has forced them all over the rails,” Mr. Benkler said. “This is the first set of lawsuits that’s actually going to force them to internalize the cost of the damages they’re inflicting on democracy.”
Mr. Benkler called the Smartmatic suit “a useful corrective” — “it’s a tap on the brakes” — but he also urged restraint....
The article also quotes the First Amendment lawyer Martin Garbus: “Will lawsuits like this also be used in the future to attack groups whose politics I might be more sympathetic with?” And yet:
Mr. Garbus, who made his reputation in part by defending the speech rights of neo-Nazis and other hate groups, said that the growth of online sources for news and disinformation had made him question whether he might take on such cases today. He offered an example of a local neo-Nazi march.
Before social media, “it wouldn’t have made much of an echo,” Mr. Garbus said. “Now, if they say it, it’s all over the media, and somebody in Australia could blow up a mosque based on what somebody in New York says. “It seems to me you have to reconsider the consequence of things,” he added.
Wow! We are really losing the old-time devotion to free speech that stressed standing up for the principle especially when you disagree with what the speaker is saying. Both Garbus and Benkler know what they are giving up and make reference to the old way of thinking... right after they say they support burdens on freedom of speech. Just not too much! We need "a... corrective" and a bit more acknowledgment of "the consequence of things."
Here's the Wikipedia page for Martin Garbus. His eminence in the field of free speech law is mind-bending.
Posts
111 comments:
They have to be very cautions that they only used these tactics against Xi approved enemies.
We need "a... corrective" and a bit more acknowledgment of "the consequence of things
How could this be read any other way than we want consequences for speech we don't like
You can prove that no computer can be trusted if there's enough motivation to infect it, which a national election certainly has. In particular the computer company can't prove it works, even if they do everything openly and correctly.
If in addition it keeps no audit trail, you certainly can't trust their good faith claims. A system has to be known to be accurate, not just be accurate, to do the job.
Key theoretical item is Ken Thompson's Turing lecture "Reflections on trusting trust."
Speech that you're hallucinating is bad is much worse than speech that's bad. It threatens your standing in society, showing you to be a moron.
Hence the reactions of the left to the right.
The path to losing all your principles begins with “its different this time.”
If you start defending the right, you start agreeing with it. That switch is what must be avoided at all costs. First of all by not defending them.
If the argument is essentially: Yeah but the consequences of free speech can be really terrible, then you have abandoned the idea of free speech.
You're safe defending somebody who claims that the Jews started forest fires in California with space lasers. Nuts are entitled to say whatever they want, a long American principle. The principle is the defense, in particular a defense of you in defending them. It's sort of a humble brag that you defend a nut.
But start defending the right, ahd you notice that have an actual defense besides the principle, and there's nothing to humble-brag about. There's only you having to switch sides and admit to yourself that you were duped before.
No principle stands against hallucination.
Would Garbus have found suits regarding the “Russian collusion” and “fine people” hoaxes a useful corrective when Trump was in power?
One doubts.
"Right-wing outrage industry"
WTF! Oh well
"We have to be very cautious in our celebration of these lawsuits, because the history of defamation is certainly one in which people in power try to slap down critics."
You mean exactly like this time?
The left was willing to defend unpopular and outlandish speech when so many of its proposals were considered unpopular and outlandish.
Somebody in Australia bombs a mosque because of what somebody in New York said? And that's the reason they're going to give for censorship? Keep your powder dry, this is not going to be settled peaceably.
There is a right-wing outrage machine. It's media parasitic on left wing soap opera news. It reports what the left is saying and doing now.
Women like soap opera news, and men like the reporting on how crazy those women are.
Nobody wants hard news. City council meetings.
So two markets in the news biz.
Fox apparently is moving to the soap opera side, which must pay better.
Wow! We are really losing the old-time devotion to free speech that stressed standing up for the principle especially when you disagree with what the speaker is saying.
It’s been under attack from the left side — your side! — of the political spectrum since before Obama took office, though he and his allies accelerated the trend. And I have to note that suppression of political speech is pretty much exclusively used against people right of center. It will get worse before it gets better. That’s if if ever gets better.
The competitive dynamic in the right-wing outrage industry has forced them all over the rails,” Mr. Benkler said
This is a terrible analogy. THINK about it!! You are either ON the rails or OFF the rails. There is no such thing as "all over" the rails.
The "rails" is a metaphor for being on the straight and narrow track. The approved path. The track that has been laid out and which is the official track.
When you are off the rails, this is when you have deviated from the approved path. In railroads, it is the train engineers who have set the path to get you from one destination to another.
In social engineering....the BIG QUESTION is who has decided what the true or correct path is. PLUS...what is our destination.
Frankly...I want to get off of this train.
"The competitive dynamic in the left-wing cable news outrage industry has forced them all off the rails,”
Fixed it for you.
rhhardin said...
You can prove that no computer can be trusted if there's enough motivation to infect it, which a national election certainly has. In particular the computer company can't prove it works, even if they do everything openly and correctly. If in addition it keeps no audit trail, you certainly can't trust their good faith claims. A system has to be known to be accurate, not just be accurate, to do the job.
Haven't read the complaints to know the exact claims (anybody have a link?).
But RH points out one reason it's likely to be difficult to assemble the elements of defamation under an actual malice standard in these cases.
Ignoring the essential question: WHO is the decider of what is a lie, or what is inflammatory and dangerous?
We may all agree that inflammatory and dangerous speech should be discouraged or even curtailed. But that is not where the issue arises. The issue arises when them have to decide who gets to decide what speech meets the definition. Facebook? Twitter? Harvard? The New York Times? The DHS?
Ah yes, somewhere on the horizon, the old question: what if this shit is done to us some day?
Post-World War II, Jews were prominent in all the legal reasoning behind the UN and International Court(s), as well as in civil liberties and civil rights cases in the U.S. If it is fair to say that rational Jews always wonder "Is this good for the Jews?," then they probably thought that defending minorities, including right-wing minorities, would ultimately be good for the Jews. Now there is a sense that the whole society has shifted comfortably to the left, the real anti-Semites and racists can be isolated as minorities with no negative repercussions for liberals or Jews, so: fire away. If I'm right, it's not that anti-Semites are newly powerful; it is that (progressives hope) they are newly weak. Trump didn't really show the likelihood of a truly racist regime in America; he just brought the racists out in the open, where they can be seen. We are close to hearing that the invention of the printing press was a bad idea unless the "right" people can control it.
All progressives are demanding that we "live up to our principles": if we think our society as a whole is against racism, etc., perhaps moreso than any other society, ever, then it is incumbent on us to try to eliminate the last traces of it. A kind of consistent progressive view would be that we should not replace stupid prejudices with smart ones, such as better and worse ways of life; we should aspire to no prejudices whatsoever. I would think this is undesirable, impossible, or both.
"Here's the Wikipedia page for Martin Garbus. His hypocrisy in the field of free speech law is mind-bending."
IMO.
"Free speech" was always a means to an end.
“This is the first set of lawsuits that’s actually going to force them to internalize the cost of the damages they’re inflicting on democracy.”
That's... not what defamation law is for.
This is just a challenge for the new Reality Czar to take care of.
When you wish upon a tsar.
As someone else said, if the Dominion machines are not subject to hacking, then why is Dominion not used as a contractor for the CIA to prevent Chinese and Russian theft of our spy secrets. I hope the defamation trials have effective counsel.
On second thought Dominion will offer a settlement that involves a debasing groveling apology.
Lou Dobbs could not be reached for comment
Trump is a big fan of defamation lawsuits, so it must be wrong.
Its called lawfare its how bin mahfouz yasin qadi and nahim auchi name three have avoided accountability
It's nice when you can hold one side accountable, and the other side just skips past us and smiles as they flout their lawlessness.
Ballot harvesting anyone? Fixing FISA warrants anyone? Holding years of Congressional hearings over a known fictional dossier anyone? Censoring the discussion of a Presidential candidate who is on the payroll of China, Ukraine, Kazakhstan anyone?
Surely wish Martin Garbus had been a younger man and been asked to defend the NY Post when it published the actual words off of Hunter Biden's laptop.
Soap opera doesn't seem to be the savior of democracy.
“A bit more of a...” is a sure fire way to tell that the person speaking doesn’t believe in a principle - only powers. That speaker is trying to get you to compromise your principle and, in the process, the speaker will leverage your guilt of hypocrisy against you knowing you can never fully return to that principle once it’s compromised. It’s a vile business - to destroy free people’s minds.
Martin Garbus is a living lie.
It's not that the left has changed. It's that the tactical needs of the left for this time have changed.
By the time Martin Garbus was a teenager, the left was in retreat, having been discredited by its actions as the party in power both in the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany. This is true even if you believe the Nazis were right-wing. This is true since the majority and possibly nearly all of Americans on the far left had supported Nazi Germany in the late 30s.
Martin Garbus is too young to have done this himself, but he's close enough in time to have had some direct, or at least indirect, knowledge that this had occurred.
If the left had pushed for an inquisition against people in the United States who had supported National Socialism it would have been the primary victim.
And thus the advocacy of free speech as a virtue and value by the left at that time. An appreciation that we now discover, that even for those on the left who have seemingly dedicated their lives to it, was purely tactical.
And pushing free speech worked well because the American right already believed in free speech and wanted to believe it was a universal value. But this was only the temporary adoption of a right-wing value by the left.
That "democracy" word they keep using....
I don't think it means what they think it means.
Everything is different in an emergency. All you need to do is scare the bejeezus out of the defenders of free speech and most will change in an instant. There isn't much courage to be found among our elites.
There’s no art in this White House. There’s no literature, no poetry, no music.
The artists didn't want to get cancelled.
Josephbleau said...
On second thought Dominion will offer a settlement that involves a debasing groveling apology.
I suspect you are right. I hope not, but you probably are. At least in the case of Fox and oan. They have a lot to lose.
But Powell and Lin? Perhaps not.
Fox already did a groveling apology 2-3 weeks ago. The noagendashow.com played a clip of it any you can probably find it in the show notes or at bingit.io
Doesn't seem to have done any good.
John Henry
As eric and mandrewa have observed above, to Garbus (like all those who believe there is a right side of History), there are no "principles" of Free Speech, Due Process, Equal Protection. There are only positions that temporarily favor the Left.
Appeals to abstract neutral legal principles are effective in persuading people of good will to go along with cases that benefit the march of the Left through society's institutions. But only a sucker adheres to them once the Left is in power. And Garbus' mom didn't raise no fool.
Wow! We are really losing the old-time devotion to free speech that stressed standing up for the principle especially when you disagree with what the speaker is saying.
I am really hoping that this is not something you only recently noticed. The universities are well on the path to totalitarianism. The larger society is next. Biden's "Reality Czar" will be our Ministry of Truth.
Let's hope that the three Trump SCOTUS justices are what they were advertised to be because I do not trust Breyer, Kagan and (obviously) Sotomayer to protect Free Speech.
He's 86 years old. I assume there's a bit of cognitive decline. Same thing happened to Hugo Black, the most important voice for free speech in the 20th century. In 1971, Black joined a dissent that said that wearing a "Fuck the Draft" T-shirt was not protected by the free speech clause.
He was 85 when he joined that dissent.
It's either cognitive decline or their balls have shriveled up to raisins. Seriously, dude, you protected Nazis! And now you want Republicans to never work again.
At a minimum we should take his driver's license from him. Just to be on the safe side.
A cold wind blows.
Plenty of warnings it was coming. Plenty of alarms. And rather than stand against it, so many encouraged it.
More speech is always better than less...doesn't matter the viewpoint or the content.
Any speech that is stifled is a loss, and a victory for the enemies of freedom.
I trust nothing, NOTHING, from the NYT. Same for the WaPoo and the TV "news". As I keep saying, I don't know if the media is/are a wholly-owned subsidiary of the Dem Party, or if it's the other way round, but it's OBVIOUS that they're in CAHOOTS.
Slap suits are being used to silence all public speaking that exposes the Narratives to truthful measured facts. (See, Global Warming Hoax)
mandrewa said...
Martin Garbus is a living lie.
It must suck for people like Garbus to realize their entire life's work was a fraud. He was either wrong then or is wrong now. Unless of course the principle of free speech itself has changed. Maybe it "bent toward the arc of justice" or something.
Joe Smith said...More speech is always better than less...doesn't matter the viewpoint or the content.
Back in the day, that statement was the cornerstone of Classical Liberalism.
A saying in the early 80's was that some liberals were so open minded that they could not take their own side in an argument. Things have changed. Some of those liberals are now open minded to promoting totalitarianism.
I appreciate that our hostess remains a classical liberal.
Shut up he explained
If what you say is a proven lie and you continue to repeat that lie then there are legal consequences, I thought that’s our our system works.
“ If what you say is a proven lie and you continue to repeat that lie then there are legal consequences, I thought that’s our our system works”. What has been proven a lie Shit For Brains?
In the old days, only their families would bear witness to their mental decline. Today, with social media, they can completely destroy their reputations by sliding into dementia in public.
and how long ago did USA Supreme Court hold speech and act are synonymous for all intents and purposes?
iow : both are performances ??!!
Paul Zrimsek said...
“This is the first set of lawsuits that’s actually going to force them to internalize the cost of the damages they’re inflicting on democracy.”
That's... not what defamation law is for.
-----------
educate me ….
is defamation law different from 1A law?
does 1A require anyone to internalize the cost of the damages they’re inflicting [on X etc.?]
was NYT v Sullivan ""holding"" correctly reasoned ?
would Sullivan have /standing/ in current legal thinking climate?
"We are really losing the old-time devotion to free speech that stressed standing up for the principle especially when you disagree with what the speaker is saying." We have arrived at the destination the Left wanted. Time to get off the 'free speech' bus.
Josephbleau said...
As someone else said, if the Dominion machines are not subject to hacking,
------------============
an even simpler Q is do they even need to be hacked?
- if certain features [floating point, etc.] are already built in with hidden (= proprietary) subroutines? processing the outcomes/outputs
If what you say is a proven lie and you continue to repeat that lie then there are legal consequences, I thought that’s our our system works.
And you were wrong yet again.
They discovered that their speech and policies were not winners, and had to resort to stealing elections to gain power. Now they need to keep power by stifling the superior alternative facts and ideas. Freedom of thought and liberty be damned.
They need to internalize: Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.
Slap suits are being used to silence all public speaking that exposes the Narratives to truthful measured facts. (See, Global Warming Hoax
Michael Mann's case against Mark Steyn is about to enter its tenth year.
R/V. Your comment explains so much about the true depth of your ignorance.
rhhardin said...
You can prove that no computer can be trusted if there's enough motivation to infect it, which a national election certainly has. In particular the computer company can't prove it works, even if they do everything openly and correctly.
If in addition it keeps no audit trail, you certainly can't trust their good faith claims. A system has to be known to be accurate, not just be accurate, to do the job.
Key theoretical item is Ken Thompson's Turing lecture "Reflections on trusting trust."
--------------=============
I understand Turing Test was proposed for machines - falsely assuming human can recognize human
Frank Herbert had a better idea : Gom Jabbar as test for human in a world that has abolished thinking machines.
Discuss
If what you say is a proven lie and you continue to repeat that lie then there are legal consequences, I thought that’s our our system works.
A basic course in logic would be useful here.
Your if/then structure is not the problem (at least with regard to defamation - if no entity is defamed, then who cares if someone tells a "proven lie"?). BUT - in order for your "then" to be true, your "if" must be true first. And there's no "proven lie" to it so far, only repeated and angry assertions that Trump etc. are lying.
Of course you know that. Your tactic is to say, "If A, then B. And A is a fact, therefore B is true," when in reality A is a postulate - a statement that isn't subject to proof but that your argument requires to be accepted as fact.
Britain has stricter laws against libel, but also a more freewheeling press than we have here.
I don't know how they do it, but I don't think we could manage the same thing.
For some reason, big media thinks that the laws won't affect themselves.
"Freedom of the press" is coming to mean special privileges for those who constitute "the press" or "the media," while the rights of those not part of "the press" to express their opinions are being curtailed.
Even for those in "the press" or "the media," words that don't have official editorial approval can get you cancelled. Ask Donald "Mr. N-word" McNeil.
To paraphrase President Erdogan of Turkey, support for free speech is like a streetcar, when you reach your stop you get off.
@ Lurker21 - freedom of the press does not mean that people who call themselves "the press" have special privileges, though that is what it is taken to mean now. It means that citizens have equal freedom to publish stuff. That's quite different, ain't it?
Garber and Benkler are being socially influenced to be like the others, and they are moving toward that. We all do, though some hardly put up a fight and just go instant highschool and believe what the cool kids tell them to. How in the world else would highschoolers Maureen Dowd and Frank Rich have had careers? Yet none of us is that good at flying solo in our ideas. We can be part of a counterculture or cantankerous minority with full courage, but we need at least the few. Hence comment sections on blogs. Even the chronic disagreers come out of some other group they believe has their back and applauds them for being brave enough to be snarky to Deplorables. (I mean, imagine the courage that must take.)
That lions of free speech advocacy can begin to abandon this view means that within their circle, support for these ideas is eroding. They are trying to find a place where they think there will still be some support and they will not be cast into the abyss.
4 years+ of leftwing lies get swept under the rug.
-Covering for Hunter Biden - swept
-Covering from Biden family grift - swept
-Lying about a smirk on a kid's face based solely on his support for Trump - swept.
-Lying about Russian collusion with a dossier created by Christopher Steele that is nothing but lies and BS - and that was all paid for my the Clintons - swept
Imagine fighting for a principle all your life only to betray it at the end. Could be written into a moving tragedy.
All the little maws of groupthink sucking at people, trying to draw them in.
roesch/voltaire said...
If what you say is a proven lie and you continue to repeat that lie then there are legal consequences, I thought that’s our our system works.
You will have to define "proven" for me and tell me who decides if a lie is proven.
Should we prosecute Joe Biden for all of his lies, such as saying Trump was the most racist POTUS in our history and gave succor to White supremacists?
Asking for a friend.
roesch/voltaire said...
If what you say is a proven lie and you continue to repeat that lie then there are legal consequences, I thought that’s our our system works.
&&&&&&
NO, there are not consequences for lying, UNLESS your lie actually or legally harms someone in particular. (as in actionable libel and slander)
Example: "If you like your doctor, you can keep your doctor".
What were the legal consequences for Barack for "that" lie?
You've never had a "thought" about anything.
Narayanan said...
was NYT v Sullivan ""holding"" correctly reasoned ?
would Sullivan have /standing/ in current legal thinking climate?
****************
Clarence Thomas has unofficially opined that it's time to review that decision, given the massive changes in the powers and pervasiveness of the news media.
Roesch/Voltaire is a smelly dog turd.
Prove me wrong.
And so, in the best example of timeless wisdom so often found in his works, the bard advises first we kill all the lawyers. Lawfare oppresses all.
It's when you see all the $1000/hr. "defenders" settle, and walk off counting their cut.
“ This is a terrible analogy. THINK about it!! You are either ON the rails or OFF the rails. There is no such thing as "all over" the rails.”
Yeah, that bugged me too. I think he mixed up the rails with the map.
Whatever you think of defamation and free speech, this is going to be a great lawsuit because the stakes are so high and it should be hard fought. I hope Fox News fights hard and doesn’t settle and we get great discovery into the workings of these computers. I hope it turns out that Dominion is completely safe and secure. I’d love the reassurance. Somehow I doubt we’re going to get i though.
If anyone thinks these lawsuits are not political, they haven't been paying attention. Does either of these companies have the financial resources to handle this many lawsuits at one time? From what I have read, it doesn't appear any of the suits are slam dunks.
The Time mag article tells us the extremes Democrats were willing to go to "win" the election. Maybe the election isn't really over!
I bet the case settles and we’re not allowed to see the amount of money, but Fox will issue and apology and say it was wrong and Dominion works just fine.
(A clarification: Not saying the lawsuits are a betrayal of principle, but the walk back from free speech is.)
roesch/voltaire said...
If what you say is a proven lie and you continue to repeat that lie then there are legal consequences, I thought that’s our our system works.
************
Isn't it....hilarious...that r/v denies the idea of Free Speech while his avatar Voltaire is one of Free speech's greatest defenders?
Talk about "lack of self-awareness" and beclowning oneself!
"I hope it turns out that Dominion is completely safe and secure."
It's possible that Dominion was hacked by outside actors and doesn't know it.
Garbus as an individual and the ACLU more generally are living examples of Dineen's thesis is his book Why Liberalism Failed. By its nature, civic religion eventually breeds a Martin Luther looking to reinterpret scripture and overthrow existing dogma. All the more so when there is so much pressure to embrace the New Narrative or face excommunication from the reformed church.
"We are really losing the old-time devotion to free speech that stressed standing up for the principle"
Aside from good-faith liberals, that devotion was always strategic, supported only as progs did not dominate everything and might have to use it themselves. Under prog hegemony, we don't need no stinkin' principles.
"especially when you disagree with what the speaker is saying."
Once you attain sufficient power, you can just crush the people you disagree with. That's the old-time prog devotion.
It's just a little more apparent now, so apparent that even nice liberals like Althouse now have to deny their cruelly neutral denial.
Security is a little more serious than checking. You actually can't tell whether a machine will be doing what you think you told it to do, if somebody is motivated to make it do something else.
That holds not only for the company concealing fraud it put in, but for an honest company doing its best.
It gets into the mechanical weeds a little why that is, but at some level you're using a product by somebody else, be it the compiler or the microcode assembler that Intel used in making the hardware, that can conceal an undiscoverable hack. Undiscoverable means even if you read the software to check it.
It's explicit politics that that's true these days, in banning Chinese telcom hardware. Just not discussion-wise spread to general software from any number of potential and motivated bad actors elsewhere, including the democrats.
"We have to be very cautious in our celebration of these lawsuits, because the history of defamation is certainly one in which people in power try to slap down critics."
Shhhhh! Wee must be vewwy quiet when we are hunting Twumpsterrs.
Such a hack has only to be highly motivated, to be economic. It's always possible.
Lesson, paper ballots only. If they take too long to count by hand, get more hands.
Count them where they're cast, is a good idea for ballot insertion and shredding prevention.
Observers of both parties everywhere, so that every motivation is met by a counter-motivation.
Lesson, paper ballots only
And a green inked thumb to remind us to never be so green again. Dispense with the Electoral Press to steer and certify the vote. Perhaps restore the original color associations: Republicans are blue. Democrats are dyed in the wool red. Humpty Dumpty is violet.
" the old-time devotion to free speech"
that devotion was always strategic
Civil rights bullshit.
"I hope it turns out that Dominion is completely safe and secure."
If Dominion was in on rigging machines, they would have been un-rigged by now.
Wiped...like with a cloth.
Personally, I'm really looking forward to these lawsuits,
Because the people getting sued are going to get Discovery against the companies suing them.
If there are games going on, the Discovery should let them find it.
If there isn't, they were lying, and shoudl get screwed
" the old-time devotion to free speech"
That was free speech for Nazis 9who were losers, and couldn't win) or for leftists.
Free speech for actual conservative who can use that to win elections?
Of course they're against that.
Because they're amoral, power hungry scum
And yet: Mr. Garbus, who made his reputation in part by defending the speech rights of neo-Nazis and other hate groups, said that the growth of online sources for news and disinformation had made him question whether he might take on such cases today. He offered an example of a local neo-Nazi march. Before social media, “it wouldn’t have made much of an echo,” Mr. Garbus said. “Now, if they say it, it’s all over the media"
IOW, Garbus never actually believed in the principle of free speech. What he believed was that pushing that position tactically helped his side
Now that his side is the one with the power to censor, he's all in favor of censorship.
Because he's a moral leper.
Which is to say, he's a person of the Left
“The competitive dynamic in the right-wing outrage industry has forced them all over the rails,”
All over the rails?
I'm surprised this got past AA's confused metaphor detector.
I have a ESL friend who, charmingly, says "Fly off the handlebars."
Garbus never actually believed in the principle of free speech. What he believed was that pushing that position tactically helped his side
That's often been said about the ACLU. I suspect they're flexible like everybody else, though they pretend to be First Amendment absolutists. For a Jew to defend Nazis there has to be some belief in free speech, but Garbus isn't going to take every case that comes his way. He can make a convenient distinction between direct censorship by governments on the one hand and libel suits and decisions of private media companies that can have a chilling effect on the other and oppose the first and tolerate the second. The implication seems to be that Trump is worse than the Nazis for Garbus, but I suspect he doesn't think the Nazis have any chance of actually achieving anything.
Breaking: Stand-up comedian Chris D'Elia is getting cancelled for Anthony Weinering or John Weavering young women with provocative emails to high school girls and others. If you don't know who he is, that's okay too.
“His eminence in the field of free speech law is mind-bending.”
So what is it Althouse? Are you too slow to question yourself re what it is that you, spinning yur wheels in a Madtown public school, don’t understand, but he does? Or are you a POS that knows what you are doing?
What kind of idiot voting machine company would name itself "Dominion" anyway.
Could one file a suit against news agencies for 4 years of lies about Russian collusion? Who would have standing?
When the speech-surpressors were trying to suppress left-wing speech in the 1950's, liberals supported free speech, even when the speakers were Right extremists, e.g., the ACLU defending the rights of Nazis to march through a Jewish neighborhood. That showed that the ACLU was acting on PRINCIPLE! Now, the speech-suppressors are mostly lefties; the few right-wing suppressors are nothing but a nuisance. Don't expect the Left to go to a lot of trouble to defend free speech by the Right.
Ann Althouse said...
I bet the case settles and we’re not allowed to see the amount of money, but Fox will issue and apology and say it was wrong and Dominion works just fine.
2/7/21, 1:29 PM"
I'll bet you a hundred bucks it will be the other way around. Fox has and is continuing to have a serious erosion of viewers precisely because of their craveness and will soon realize they need to get their street cred back if they want to survive. Rhhardin makes the case perfectly clear that it is a hurdle the plaintiff cannot meet.
The real question will be if Fox allows the plaintiff to settle confidentiality or forces the plaintiff for a jury trial that will be a public ruination of Dominion and could cause them to compensate Fox for their legal fees. Unless the Murdochs are willing to trash Fox News, Fox has as great if not greater a reason to fight this tooth and nail to the end. Dominion almost had to sue less the stench substantially reduce their revenues and Fox has to fight for the same reason. Dominion's biggest legal hurdle to overcome is limiting discovery unless it either is convinced their system is bullet proof or can prove it really is. As a lawyer you can far better appreciate than I can that hurdle and the hurdle for attorneys eyes only discovery production.
The lesson here in terms of elections is first vet who can cast a vote, second vet the ballot is legitimate, hence no ballot harvesting and other schemes of questionable honesty. Third have a standardized voting law and regulation in place prior to the election for the entire state and no allowances for any precinct to veer from that. Fourth all ballot are paper ballots and mail in ballots are counted before ballots cast in person and that each precinct report it's tally two hours after the polls close. Precincts that can't do the job on time get all of the votes cast in that precinct voided. Not a perfect plan but it will without doubt remove most of the chance of fraud in that precinct.
Blogger Joe Smith said...
"...If Dominion was in on rigging machines, they would have been un-rigged by now..."
2/7/21, 3:43 PM
Only if Trump had won the election!
Garbus has thrown in with the garbage people.
I mean, he probably always placed the advancement of a cause ahead of the principle of free expression. Leftists beyond the most rigidly principled and ideological ones, the most annoying ones like Greenwald and Chomsky, are reliable defenders of the interests of their side and nothing else.
Why are these lawsuits not considered SLAPP suits? Strategic Lawsuits Against Public Participation? The accuracy of voting machines is clearly an issue of public interest, and I expect that these news outlets will win their cases. But they ought to be dismissed outright.
"What kind of idiot voting machine company would name itself "Dominion" anyway."
Every time I hear them discussed, it reminds me of the Sisters of Mercy song, 'Dominion/Mother Russia.'
Some day, some day, some day.... DOMINION!
Some say prayers... and I say mine
We serve an old moan in a dry season
A lighthouse keeper in
The desert sun
Dreamers of sleepers
And white treason
We dream of rain and the
History of the gun
There's a lighthouse in the
Middle of Prussia
A white house in a red square
I'm living in films for
The sake of Russia
A Kino Runner for the DDR
And the fifty-two daughters
Of the revolution
Turn the gold to chrome
Gift... nothing to lose
Stuck inside of Memphis
With the mobile home, singing-
Mother Russia
Mother Russia
Mother Russia rain down down down
"I hope it turns out that Dominion is completely safe and secure. I’d love the reassurance."
Every computer scientist with their salt will tell you that is an impossibility. Such a thing is completely unprovable; the annals of computer science are full of the discussion of the difficulty of writing provably correct programs.
...worth their salt, sorry...
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