Monday, May 12, 2008

Broadly Interpreting Fault and Cause

Expat Yank Robert Tuminello reports on the over-extension and outright inversion of the usual atmospheric accusations leveled against anything American on the BBC.

Leaving no notion of sovereignty intact and thinking that there exists somewhere a “a big book of International Law “ that all the children are forced to live by, quite unsurprisingly, some hack has construed the ability anyone in the world has to level stifling, abusive, libel charges in the UK freedom of speech.

Why so cranked up?

Governor Paterson signed legislation yesterday that will allow New York writers to go to local courts to seek legal protection if they are sued for libel in foreign countries.

The law was proposed in response to a defamation judgment that a Saudi financier secured in Britain against a journalist in New York, Rachel Ehrenfeld. The new law bars New York courts from enforcing the libel judgments of foreign countries that have fewer free speech protections than America…
I assume the writer thinks this, because in the US, you can’t use the court to gag anyone who writes anything about you without examining the veracity of the libel. According to the BBC, this inability to snuff others, by some miracle, has been renamed “laws governing freedom of speech in the US” as if there was none. This about a country that has a Constitution and a Bill of Rights, from the position of someone in the UK where there are no explicitly outlined rights, and the “Constitution” amounts to what normal people call a “state of mind” and not tangible legal writ in the way anyone living in civilization would understand it. I’ll draw you a picture: by “fewer free speech protections” in this case, they mean the UK not Saudi Arabia.

The only thing that BBC parasite sees worth protecting here isn’t free speech – quite the opposite – the scribbler’s noble cause is a meal-ticket for lawyers that leads to an imposition of limits on speech abroad. In fact this very much matches Europeans notions of what trans-nationalism is: their mountain of administrative rules imposed on others, robbing others’ freedoms from below either for their notion of “your own good”, their managed-society Jinna, or money.

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