Or, as one might also say, perhaps they should start by introducing him to the wonders of the 21st century. No, that’s too much to absorb. Let’s start out by bringing him up to speed on the 20th.
We are referring, of course, to the blatantly, based on what we have been able to find out only, unconstitutional and just bull-ignorant ruling by a septuagenarian retired judge brought back for a guest appearance in the Circus Court of Montgomery County, MD, who, from what we can tell, had the victim of lawfare and other harrassment, Aaron Walker, arrested for something or other at a hearing where he tried to defend himself against the claims of convicted terrorist Brett Kimberlin.
We say “for something or other” because it’s really hard to tell right now. Some say it was contempt of court which, based on one eyewitness statement, might actually be the closest we can get to a sane explanation in an otherwise supremely bizarre story about judicial ignorance. It’s never a good idea to go to court representing yourself, and it’s a particularly unwise decision when it’s in a case where you are, justifiably and understandably, under a lot of pressure. Emotional, economical and otherwise. You’re bound to blow your top and play fast and loose with the rules and procedures, and judges, understandably enough, don’t like for their proceedings to turn into a loud free-for-all.
Others say it was for a previous bogus assault charge filed by Kimberlin, but that sounds strange since that one had been dismissed prior to today’s hearing.
And then there’s “incitement.” To what, pray tell? We may never know, since what would be helpful would be a first-hand account from the defendant here, and he can’t speak because of the core idiocy of this whole charade, which is that the judge signed off on a “peace order” (which is what normal people, i.e. people not living in the Kafkaesque Republic of Maryland, call a “restraining order”) basically prohibiting Aaron from speaking about the whole mess at all for the next six months.
The reason for him signing off on it? We’re glad you asked. It was because, according to the strange “logic” of judge Methuselah, Aaron had previously violated the same then-temporary “peace order” by posting publicly available and provable facts about plaintiff.
Because talking about somebody on the Internettubes that hadn’t been invented when judge Methuselah passed his bar exam (nor had the cathode ray tube or the telegraph, but that’s beside the point) is apparently tantamount to harrassment of, abuse of or contact with plaintiff.
Oh, and something about death threats issued by some unknown third parties, allegedly, it’s not clear whether the judge was presented with any tangible proof (it’s hard to make a printout of an email when no printers, to our knowledge, accepts stone tablets in the feeding mechanism and apparently anything more recent than that is beyond judge Solomon’s ken), but we’ll have to assume that such was the case. We can’t really bring ourselves to imagine that the judge just took the word of a convicted terrorist for “evidence.”
Not that it really matters, as case law establishes that whatever third party assholes may or may not do is not the responsibility of the blogger unless clear intent to incite such can be proven on the part of the blogger. And we’ve read, we think, every word that Aaron Walker has written about this and found no such thing anywhere. Keep in mind that we’re not exactly neophytes when it comes to identifying questionable hyperbole as we’ve been known to engage in such from time to time. Ahem…
But we could be all wrong about the “incitement” bit and, of course and as always, if anybody can point us to any actual incitement of Aaron’s, then we’ll without undue delay update our ruminations on this subject as is only fair. Note: Calling somebody an asshole, and we can’t remember Aaron having done even that, is not incitement to make somebody issue a death threat.
Nor is posting “Brett Kimberlin is a convicted terrorist”, since that happens to be public knowledge, fairly easy for anybody to confirm in a second or so by using a search engine (note to judge Methuselah: ask your great-great-grandkids to do this for you. It is something on the Internettubes) and, as is established precedent, the truth is an absolute defense in those kinds of cases.
But the bottom line is this: You would have to be the proponent for a pretty strange interpretation of the First Amendment in order to uphold a restraining order against a respondent based on said respondent stating provable facts that plaintiff doesn’t like to hear.
If that kind of idiocy is to become precedent, then pretty much anybody can file a restraining order against anybody who ever said something that annoyed them and get it upheld.
Like, as a hypothetical, if a bunch of leftist bloggers were to start posting that His Imperial Majesty was a right wing warmongering imperialist racist death beast… Wait a minute. Somebody call our lawyer. We have about 2,649 people we need to shut up by having a court order them to not ever mention us ever again. Be sure to file all of the complaints in Maryland, because apparently the judges up there are all morons.
We’re kidding, of course. We’d never do such a thing. But, seriously, and we may have to say this again, this is exactly why this whole thing is NOT a “left vs right” issue, or at least it oughtn’t be to leftists who still believe in the rule of law, because what’s to stop us? Other than us having honor and integrity, of course. It’s not like we can’t go through the filing process and, even if we bring the case pro se (we’d hate to pay good money to have somebody represent us in a case that ought, by law, to be sneeringly dismissed), it’s still a good deal of bother for the person we brought suit against.
This is about refusing to put up with this sort of shit, and we can guarantee you upon our sacred honor that if somebody on the right lost their mind enough to bring that sort of suit against a leftist, we’d be defending the leftist. We’ve done so before and we WILL do so again. Some things are wrong no matter WHO does it.That’s generally the case where something is objectively WRONG. Alright, that’s ALWAYS the case.
Either it’s wrong or it isn’t, and if it’s wrong then good people, no matter what they believe, need to oppose it no matter WHO it benefits.
If some hypothetical Congress were to outlaw socialism then we can guarantee you that we’d oppose it, because they have no right, even though we’d dearly love to live to see the day when nobody ever uttered a socialist word ever again. People have a First Amendment RIGHT to have utterly disgusting, ridiculous, asshatted ideas, and we’d fight to our dying breath to protect that right.
Finally, every single word of this post is based entirely upon what data is available to us at this point. As such it might very well be all wrong. We welcome, we INVITE corrections so that we may understand it better and we will retract/alter/modify/update as appropriate.
But it’s kind of hard when a “court” has told one side of the issue to shut up on pain of imprisonment.
If THAT’s what America is about now, then it’s time to build another one, because it sure as FUCK is not the America that we believe in.
Thatisall.
UPDATE: Because it never truly IS all in our case, the Lame Stream Mediots, including the ones allegedly on the “right”, STILL don’t consider this newsworthy. Of course it isn’t. Somebody convicted of blogging. How is THAT newsworthy. Hey, did you hear that Romney once forgot to look both ways before crossing the road? Clear the press! Page one story! Film at eleven!
Daily Caller, National Review, Rush Limbaugh? Anybody home?
Fucking cowards. Just keep that in mind when you’re the next in line for the latest fad among left wing terrorists. We won’t even know it’s happening. You can go royally fuck yourselves.
Actually, that’s not true. When that happens, we’ll STILL stand up for you. Because we have honor and integrity. You shallow fucks, on the other hand, don’t. But that doesn’t bother us. We’ll still be able to look ourselves in the mirror the next day, and you’ll still be cowardly, worthless, honorless fucks unworthy of licking the boots of a barracks janitor.
UPDATE THE SECOND: Already, we have an update from Patterico about what actually went down, again with the caveats that one can only report on facts that are known to one, but it appears that Maryland has some strange judicial process under which any complaint, frivolous or otherwise, gets automatically rubber-stamped initially and any “breach” of said complaint can lead to your arrest, with no judicial oversight involved. No wonder some of these United States didn’t feel like staying in that club some 150 years ago, since it has nothing at all in common with what is known as The Constitution.
Among those of us who can actually read, ignorant hillbilly racist hayseeds that we are.
But the real nugget here is that it appears that Aaron Walker was, indeed, arrested on charges of blogging and that the “judge” not only was completely unaware of the legal precedent in cases where “incitement” was claimed, he stated that he didn’t even care about such precedent.
If that is true, then he clearly needs to be retired on a permanent basis instead of being brought back on occasion to provide actual Constitutional Scholars with a laugh, because his laughably ignorant “ruling” won’t stand for five seconds in an actual court of law. Seriously, the man deserves better than to be made a laughing stock of in his dotage. Just leave the man to his Geritol and Metamucil, will you?
We mean, seriously? He may have been a good judge back before motor cars were invented and started scaring the horses, yet now he’s going to be a textbook example to future law students of terminal ignorance, somebody you pass jokes about around the campus cafeteria? Why does Maryland hate seniors so much?