Saturday, November 21, 2009

Richard Warman threatens Walker Morrow

Richard Warman is threatening to sue Walker Morrow. Must read.

http://walkersunknownthoughts.blogspot.com/2009/11/my-newspaper-caved-in-to-richard-warman.html

7 comments:

Anonymous said...

The comment "Truepeers" left there sounds like it was written by a complete pedo.

truepeers said...

Oh for goodness' sake, what kind of prick uses italics to do that?

Dag said...

The fool above would be anonymous even if he had a name, Peers. These creatures float, attaching themselves parasitically to anything with a root, anything strong enough to allow them safety from unbeing. It's the nature of the eternal fasces an the fate of the masochist.

You on the other hand have the patience of a glacial age. If I couldn't find and personally trash the commentator, I'd trash his comment.

truepeers said...

There's nothing wrong with seeking out the presence of Being, whether its generation is understood as ultimately a human or divine process. It's how you do it that matters.

The fascist and/or Gnostic is the one who needs to believe that what is on offer, or what we could reasonably in good faith achieve, is never going to be good enough, but is somehow perverted, humiliating, exploitative (racist, homophobic, sexist, etc. etc.) and generally not representative of the fully-nuanced diversity of existence as one might imagine when in most gay spirits (the failure to "fully be" that is of course the necessary fate of any moment of shared presence, any ordinary communion, that is always but a discrete event on the glacial path of yet-unfulfilled-history, a moment that leaves us with a further demand on our good faith... so you see, Dag, to be patient is simply to recognize reality as it really is...) And since, to the Gnostic, the limited presence on offer lacks the fullness of the great man's imagination, are we to give up on the hope of greatness and be humble, compromised, men? NO, how dare we give in to the ordinary!! No, the past and present is a humiliation from which we have to escape by signing on to the Dear Leader's/Artist's promise of a redeemed world!

The "masochist" looks for meaning in the ultimately almost meaningless violence of fascism because what is already on offer just isn't good enough. Thus the metaphor of the parasite entails that he seeks to destroy that insufficiency on which he nonetheless resents being wholly dependent in this fallen world. I'm not sure that the idea of "safety from unbeing" quite captures the fool who can never be happy with ordinary being and thus seeks to mock and destroy it in the name of the Great Idea.

Either we learn glacial patience or we keep falling in line, one way or another, with the Gnostic's violence. The Gnostic imagines his special ends justify his violent means, when what really defines us are our means, not our fantasies, given the glacial nature of a never-ending history. But patience does not mean stupid passivity. There may be times when we have to "trash" those who want to trash the systems and exchanges by which we freely construct our mundane presence, whether here on the internet or elsewhere; and maybe my judgment was off; but we'd better make sure we are doing it as part of a shared commitment to protect our freedom to construct together an ordinary presence, a humble communion, and not feeding our own desire to do "heroic" violence to redeem our own failure to become initiated into normal being. That means giving fools a chance to redeem themselves, if they really want to know humble pie

truepeers said...

Could be confusing the masochist and sadist there; but that's the nature of the beast!

Anonymous said...

I haven’t followed the CHRC controversies carefully. Take this for what it’s worth then.

I thought Morrow’s original piece (found by Googling; did he link to it?) did make it seem as if Warman was being investigated by the RCMP and others. The retraction, then, struck me as appropriate (I’m assuming here that if Morrow doesn’t have evidence to suggest Warman was investigated).

Warman comes off as a petty prick in the original article, and he didn’t bother challenging what I thought was the most ethically backwards claim made by Morrow; namely, his purported attempts to gin up hate on online racist sites using BS internet personalities. The portrait of the petty prick is confirmed that he’d actually pursue legal threats against a small-town paper.

Unfortunately, the petty prick looks like he was right in his complaint. So Morrow talks his lumps. Embarrassing, but I can’t see it being career ending.

na

truepeers said...

na,

As you may know, the Supreme Court in the Rafe Mair vs. Kari Simpson case recently revised the libel law in favour of greater freedom for expressing opinions about people in the public eye, if a person could honestly come to his opinion from actual facts. So, i won't delete your comment.

Still, the onus of libel law remains on the defendant to prove his factual claims. I wouldn't know what an experienced lawyer would advise after weighing what is known but I suspect you are right to think Walker (and family) needs to consider cooly his position. A settlement might cost a pretty penny; full-scale litigation could entail a lifetime's savings and so standing on principle can only be expected from the rich. No one should be egging Walker on. "Justice" in civil law is for the rich and perhaps for lawyers and poker players and we shouldn't be surprised if Walker folds.

and he didn’t bother challenging what I thought was the most ethically backwards claim made by Morrow; namely, his purported attempts to gin up hate on online racist sites using BS internet personalities.

-who didn't bother challenging??

-Warman has admitted that he used a pseudonym in his dubious dance with "hate speech". See here. Just what was his intent in all of this is, inevitably, a point on which the various parties involved will argue and just what a judge might conclude is anyone's guess. Whether this is any longer a relevant legal question after the Mair-Simpson case I wouldn't know.

The portrait of the petty prick is confirmed that he’d actually pursue legal threats against a small-town paper.

-I'm not sure this is logical. If a paper ruins your reputation, you shouldn't sue because it's small town? What has Walker's friends up in arms, i imagine, is that the piece in question, while perhaps worded in a provocative/polemical way a lawyer would not advise, was jumping onto a bandwagon of a story and hence could only have affected Warman's reputation in some marginal way, since, for those interested in the CHRC story, or in Warman, he has become a widely known public figure, with 100s of articles already and many opinions/claims have been made about his conduct as a "Nazi" hunter. One might have thought he would be content to focus on winning his previously initiated lawsuits with Levant, Shaidle, et.al. One might have thought that winning or losing these will be the key to his reputation (though maybe going after Walker is part of his strategy in the other suits; I wouldn't know if that makes any sense...); so people may well ask what does it say that he is now pressuring a passionate, not cautious, 17-year old to apologize or pay up for some copy that was ill advised?