“You go into Afghanistan, you got guys who slap around women for five years because they didn’t wear a veil. You know guys like that ain’t got no manhood left anyway, so it’s a hell of a lot of fun to shoot them.”

General James Mattis

He has won his court battle. Slowly, England’s libel laws become more sane.

The science writer Simon Singh has won his court of appeal battle for the right to rely on the defence of fair comment in a libel action.

Singh was accused of libel by the British Chiropractic Association (BCA) over an opinion piece he wrote in the Guardian in April 2008.

He suggested there was a lack of evidence for the claims some chiropractors make on treating certain childhood conditions including colic and asthma.

The BCA alleged that Singh had in effect accused its leaders of knowingly supporting bogus treatments.

In May last year, high court judge Mr Justice Eady, in a preliminary ruling in the dispute, held that Singh’s comments were factual assertions rather than expressions of opinion – which meant he could not use the defence of fair comment.

Today, the lord chief justice, Lord Judge, master of the rolls Lord Neuberger and Lord Justice Sedley allowed Singh’s appeal, ruling that the high court judge had “erred in his approach”….

… Fabriqué en France.

A French mystery writer is being sued for defamation by the owners of the well-known Parisian fabric store where she set her latest crime novel.

Lalie Walker’s psychological thrillers are often set around Paris, and her latest, Aux Malheurs des Dames, is no exception.

… [T]he book takes place at Marché St. Pierre, a 60-year-old landmark store in the Montmartre district of Paris known for its extensive selection of fabrics and low prices.

… The corporation that owns the store, Village d’Orsel, is suing for two million euros ($2.7 million Cdn), according to a report in The Guardian newspaper.

“No one can have anything to do with or talk about the Marché Saint Pierre without the authorization of the owner and the director,” Robert Gabby, the store’s director…

CBC News

… what expensive webs we weave when first we prosecute for libel.

From the transcript of Simon Singh’s appeal in response to the British Chiropractic Association’s libel action against him:

THE LORD CHIEF JUSTICE: I want to come back to something I raised before lunch which is still troubling me and it still has nothing to do with the outcome of the case, but here we are. Your clients [the BCA] are very steamed up at what they perceive to be a very serious libel. It has been said about them that they have indulged in happily promoting bogus treatments. Your case is – their case is: “That is absolute nonsense. We don’t. That’s not what we are running our professional lives for.”

It is now two years on, jolly nearly, since the matter that caused all this umbrage was published. The opportunity to put it right was not taken. The end of this litigation will not be for another how long – another twelve months?

MS ROGERS QC: Well that depends on a number of factors.

THE LORD CHIEF JUSTICE: Yes. So all the opportunities to put this right – to make it clear to the public that these allegations are nonsense – simply have not been taken, and yet it matters. I quite understand that it matters to your client that they should not have to put up with defamatory statements. I am just terribly troubled about the entire artificiality of all this and all of the huge expense. Somebody at the end of this litigation – somebody – is going to pay a vast amount of money. It will either be Dr Singh out of his funds or it will be your clients out of the contributions made by the subscriptions paid by their members. I am just baffled.

MS ROGERS QC: If your Lordship thinks that my clients relish spending years and money and time on this litigation, that is not right.

THE LORD CHIEF JUSTICE: I do not think anybody is relishing this. No, forgive me. I am not for a moment thinking anybody is relishing it – plainly nobody is relishing it. But, at the end of the day, as to this issue about whether there is any reliable evidence [supporting various claims of chiropractic cure] or not as we speak now, it is either there or it is not. If there is reliable evidence, goodness gracious, why isn’t somebody publishing it?

Precisely the argument made to Calvo-Goller by the editors of the journal she believes libeled her. They offered her prominent space in their journal to comment and set things right. Instead, she sued, and is currently a figure of fun among the scholarly communities of the world.

Things have gone yet worse for the BCA. The trial has attracted enormous publicity to the way they advertise, and indeed to the legitimacy of the health claims they make.

From yesterday’s Guardian:

As the British Chiropractic Association’s battle with Simon Singh continues to work its way through the legal system, chiropractors are counting the financial costs of a major backlash resulting from a libel action that has left the Lord Chief Justice “baffled”. What was originally a dispute between the BCA and one science writer over free speech has become a brutally effective campaign to reform an entire industry.

A staggering one in four chiropractors in Britain are now under investigation for allegedly making misleading claims in advertisements, according to figures from the General Chiropractic Council.

The council, which is responsible for regulating the profession and has 2,400 chiropractors on its books, informs me that it has had to recruit six new members of staff to deal with a fifteenfold increase in complaints against its members – from 40 a year to 600. While it declined to comment directly on the costs inflicted by the reaction to the BCA’s actions, it is clear that a six-figure sum will be involved for the extra staffing costs alone, to which will have to be added the considerable costs of any misconduct hearings.

Hymn #272

Give Me the Libel

Calvo-Goller Version

Give me the libel, star of gladness gleaming!
To cheer my sad heart lone, reviewer-toss’d!
No storm can hide that glorious settlement beaming.
Cour de Cassation! Seek and save the lost!

Refrain

Give me the libel – holy message shining,
Thy cash shall guide me in my narrow way.
Vengeful and chilling, law and rage combining,
‘Til freedom vanish as I take my pay.

2

Give me the libel when my heart is broken
When criticism fills my soul with fear,
O precious words by precious French judge spoken:
Hold up your laws to show revenge is near.

3

Give me the libel, all my foes enlighten,
Teach them the danger when they knowledge sow.
Once I’ve destroyed them, all my gloom shall brighten,
This light alone the path of wealth can show.

… the latest in Norwegian faculty speech codes.

The University of Oslo recently fired Arnved Nedkvitne, a medieval history professor with a mouth on him. He appealed, but a court backed the university, which argued that he often said mean things about his colleagues.

Spurred on by this victory, the university’s human relations specialist Mette Børing

… proposed to work out guidelines as a kind of code of conduct at the university with lists of words and expressions not to be tolerated when describing a colleague. She claimed this was needed, having four or five other cases on her table after the Nedkvitne case, with similar accusations of improper characterisations of colleagues. She said something had to be done.

This strange proposal brought her to the front page of the major Oslo finance newspaper, Dagens Næringsliv, with a comment by Kristian Gundersen that he regarded this as a clear breach of his democratic right of expression. The following day, Oslo Rector Ole Petter Ottersen denied such a work was in progress.

Several people commented on the proposal with Professor Bernt Hagtvet of political science at the university asking rhetorically: “Would for instance the expression ‘braindead perfumed puma’ be accepted in her list of words?”…

***********************************

Update: Limericks:

1.) From Ahistoricality:

There was a braindead perfumed puma
subsisting on gossip and rumor:
“When I make up rules
to govern these fools
I can fire all these Molly Bloomers!”

2.) Dave:

I said “you’re a puma: brain-dead, perfumed”
To the Dean, and my tenure was doomed.
It wasn’t much to the liking
Of a censorious Viking.
“Should’ve called him a lynx,” I assumed.

3.) UD:

The brain-dead and perfumèd puma
Lives deep in the hills of Exuma.
At first it was Prussian.
Then, quite briefly, Russian.
Until banned from the halls of the Duma.

In the aftermath of an organized shout-down of a campus speech by the Israeli ambassador, UC Irvine’s Erwin Chemerinsky clarifies the way free speech works:

The government, including public universities, always can impose time, place and manner restrictions on speech. A person who comes into my classroom and shouts so that I cannot teach surely can be punished without offending the 1st Amendment. Likewise, those who yelled to keep the ambassador from being heard were not engaged in constitutionally protected behavior.

Freedom of speech, on campuses and elsewhere, is rendered meaningless if speakers can be shouted down by those who disagree. The law is well established that the government can act to prevent a heckler’s veto — to prevent the reaction of the audience from silencing the speaker. There is simply no 1st Amendment right to go into an auditorium and prevent a speaker from being heard, no matter who the speaker is or how strongly one disagrees with his or her message.

… of vicious fanatics and their role in campus life.

The BBC:

… [A] working group …will be formed from university vice-chancellors and other academics [to] consider how to achieve the balancing act of preventing campus extremism without undermining the right for students and staff to hold free debates.

The group will “consider how universities can work with all relevant organisations, nationally and locally, to ensure the protection of freedom of speech and lawful academic activities, whilst safeguarding students, staff and the wider community from violent extremism”.

… Among the issues to be considered will be invitations to outside speakers – and whether controversial views should be banned…

Controversial isn’t quite the right word, implying as it does two sides to a question. There is no Should All Homosexuals Be Slaughtered? controversy, is there?

We invited Mr X to campus so that he can help our students understand why, as opposed to what some people argue, the answer to civilization’s problems lies in the mass murder of gay people…

… responds to the controversy described here [subscription], in which a new book about Heidegger’s Nazism goes beyond intellectual attack and calls for the criminalization of his writings as hate speech.

UD thinks, by the way, that the New York Times, in quoting Richard Wolin about the issue —

Richard Wolin, the author of several books on Heidegger and a close reader of the Faye book, said he is not convinced Heidegger’s thought is as thoroughly tainted by Nazism as Mr. Faye argues. Nonetheless he recognizes how far Heidegger’s ideas have spilled into the larger culture.

“I’m not by any means dismissing any of these fields because of Heidegger’s influence,” he wrote in an e-mail message referring to postmodernism’s influence across the academy. “I’m merely saying that we should know more about the ideological residues and connotations of a thinker like Heidegger before we accept his discourse ready-made or naïvely.”

— should have revealed that he signed a petition in support of the book. He is more partisan than he appears in his remarks to the Times.

Bloomberg’s Middle East correspondent visits the Cavafy Museum in Alexandria, Egypt:

… Much … has disappeared from Alexandria: the taverns where Cavafy’s illicit liaisons took place, the exotic interaction of a diverse population and a tolerance that inspired the late Egyptian filmmaker Youssef Chahine and the novelist Ibrahim Abdel-Meguid.

… In Cavafy’s era, the Mediterranean port city was a mix of Greek, Italian, Armenian, Syrian, Maltese, British and other nationalities adding to the majority Arab-Egyptian population, all lured there by trade in cotton and wheat.

The city, and Egypt as a whole, grew more homogenized after the ouster of the monarchy in 1952, the rise of Arab nationalism and the confiscation of private property by Egyptian leader Gamal Abdul Nasser.

In the past two decades, the emergence of Islam as a prime source of identity among many Egyptians made Cavafy’s sensuous subject matter unfashionable. By all accounts, Alexandria is a stronghold of the Muslim Brotherhood, Egypt’s biggest opposition party. The brotherhood wants Egypt ruled under Islamic law. Alexandria was once a place where women strolled in sun dresses, not headscarves and caftans, and where religion was a matter of personal choice …

After visiting the museum, I discuss Cavafy at the office of Sobhi Saleh, a Muslim Brotherhood member of parliament. Saleh says Islamic law precludes publishing Cavafy’s poetry.

“Cavafy was a one-time event in Alexandria,” he says. “His poems are sinful.” …

Cavafy wouldn’t be surprised. Long ago he wrote a poem, Walls, about the failure to pay attention to the killers of cities, the builders of burqas.

Without consideration, without pity, without shame
they have built great and high walls around me.

And now I sit here and despair.
I think of nothing else: this fate gnaws at my mind;

for I had many things to do outside.
Ah why did I not pay attention when they were building the walls.

But I never heard any noise or sound of builders.
Imperceptibly they shut me from the outside world.

… rise up in Iran. Follow it on Andrew Sullivan.

… leadership for stifling free speech.

… [T]he administration informed the ethics committee that if [Senator Grassley’s] aide spoke, no administrator would be allowed to partake in the [conflicts of interest] panel. As students at Tufts, it is crucial for us all to recognize the administration’s misstep. While it is understandable that Tufts wants to avoid any conflict regarding the investigation, it seems unreasonable that the topic could not be avoided for the educational purposes the event could provide.

The symposium is intended to provide the audience with multiple views and stances on the medical issues of today. Mr. Thacker has firsthand knowledge and experience about a subject that would have provided a unique and fresh viewpoint at the conference. His voice differs from the professionals of Harvard or Tufts, allowing for some diversity and debate at the symposium itself.

Possibly most outspoken on the issue is ethics committee co-chair Sheldon Krimsky, who removed himself from the issue and the organization of the event when the decision was passed. We praise Krimsky for standing behind his belief and the purpose of the ethics committee as a whole…

Background here.

… with Paul Thacker, a Charles Grassley staffer.

They ate at Two Quail, a place UD used to go to quite a lot when she lived on Capitol Hill, and which now seems to have gone out of business.

Tufts University invited Senator Grassley to speak at a conference there on conflict of interest, and because he wasn’t able to attend, he suggested to Tufts that Thacker, a specialist on the matter, attend in his place. For reasons that remain obscure, Tufts said no to Thacker.

One of the conference organizers has pulled out, in protest.

… Sheldon Krimsky, an environmental-policy professor at Tufts who is co-chairman of the university’s Committee on Ethics…. wrote [in an email message] that he had recused himself after feeling his role as organizer had been “compromised,” and the university’s commitment to academic freedom diminished, by the refusal of Tufts administrators to accept Mr. Thacker’s presence.

Bravo, Krimsky. Just because some of what Thacker says at the conference will embarrass your university doesn’t mean university officials should bar speakers and shut down discourse. Major black mark for Tufts. If I were Grassley, I’d take another look at my schedule and figure out some way of attending this conference.

**************************
Update: An insider’s account, from the excellent Carlat Psychiatry Blog.

… seems to have learned his trade from the chef in The Dirty Fork Sketch is in trouble.

Having encouraged a student to give a speech on a controversial subject, the professor interrupted the student to inform him that he was a fascist bastard.

Yet more cleverly, the professor refused to give the student a grade, but wrote on his evaluation form

Ask God what your grade is.

Of course the best way to handle this sort of thing is to impose a speech code on the school that says you can’t say anything about anything to anybody.

No. There must be a better way.

The better way to go involves recognizing that the reason this story is ALL over the global media this morning, even though in the scheme of things it doesn’t amount to much, is that a real live professor – embodiment of thoughtful dispassion – flipped his lid. This doesn’t happen – at least on so spectacular and stupid a scale – every day.

Also that this particular lid flipping flips over into the culture wars.

What to do? Punish the professor. If he’s not tenured, you might ask yourself whether a rageful ideologue who attacks students is the sort of person you want modeling rhetorical form. If he’s tenured, he needs at the very least to apologize to the student (assuming accounts of the event are correct) and to the rest of the class.

Happens all the time. This one happened in Canada. As long as decent people exist, these programs will die on the vine. But eternal vigilance is the price of liberty.

Calling it “incompatible with the atmosphere required for free speech,” Queen’s University in Kingston yesterday scrapped its controversial “dialogue facilitator” program.

It caused a scandal last year when it was revealed the six student “facilitators” were mandated to intervene in private conversations to encourage discussion of social justice issues and discourage offensive language.

In a report to the administration, a panel of experts expressed “strong reservations about unsolicited interventions into the lives of students” because of the risk of “making students feel unsafe or under surveillance because of their opinions.”

… The panel faulted Dean of Student Affairs Jason Laker for importing an American model of diversity promotion. [Hey, don’t blame us for your fuckup.]

… The review was launched in response to “a tempest of negative, sometimes searing, comment in the national press.” [Duh.]