You should, too. We can pound the keyboards in limp frustration at the hollow-souled priests of Leviathan, or we can put our money where our mouth is.
Tomorrow is Independence Day. Fight for your freedom.
Tag Archives: Aaron Walker
On the Aaron Walker Swatting
This is blowing up all over, but Patterico has the key detail:
I just got off the phone with Aaron and he and his wife are a little shaken up but OK. The officers had machine guns but did not point them at Aaron. They were quickly able to determine it was a hoax.
At some point, the SWAT teams are going to start taking in mind the possibility that they’re being played. So the likelihood of anybody being anything other than shaken up by a SWAT-ting diminishes with every SWAT.
Sure, there’s the sense of being terrorized. But has anyone SWAT-ed atcually, you know, stopped as a result? Patterico hasn’t stopped. Why would Aaron Walker.
This sounds like an insidiously clever way of scaring a political opponent. Unfortunately it’s based on a lie. Lies have this habit of getting uncovered.
No Fat Chicks were actually targeted.
Steyn on the Kimberlin/Walker Trial, and Judge Cecil Jeconiah Vaughey…
The more you read Vaughey’s conversation with Walker, the more random, the more insane, the more I-misplaced-my-geritol it becomes:
WALKER: He has no right to do that, Your Honor.
THE COURT: Well, he’s — you incited him.
WALKER: But, your honor, I did not incite him within the Brandenburg standard though.
THE COURT: Forget Bradenburg [sic]. Let’s go by Vaughey right now, and common sense out in the world. But you know, where I grew up in Brooklyn, when that stuff was pulled, it was settled real quickly.
WALKER: I’m not sure what that means, your honor.
THE COURT: –Very quickly. And I’m not going to talk about those ways, but boy, it ended fast. I even can tell you, when I grew up in my community, you wanted to date an Italian girl, you had to get the Italian boy’s permission. But that was the old neighborhoods back in the city. And it was really fair. When someone did something up there to you, your sister, your girlfriend, you got some friends to take them for a ride in the back of the truck.
Remember, this is a semi-retired administrative law judge who has no idea what relevant law is. He’s a dinosaur. So he can think of nothing more useful to do than rhapsodize about the old days in Brooklyn when you could get your ass beaten by a handful of neighborhood boys for dating someone’s sister.
Someone on the Maryland State Bar needs to inquire about this man’s status and qualifications.
Judge Mortimer Cecil Ira Ogilvie McTavish Confused on What This Gosh-Fangled “Internet” Is… UPDATED
David Hogbert of Investor’s Business Daily was at yesterday’s hearing in Rockville that got Aaron Walker sent to jail for blogging about a public figure. The magistrate who did so was semi-retired and clearly did not grasp how Google works.
“I find that this is worse than harassment. It’s a nasty, dirty thing to do to somebody … you’ve got people all over writing these things. He’s got 54 pages that he says come directly from you, and he’s got volumes of people who are doing it.”
People… all over … writing THINGS!
Via Other McCain, where commenter Adjoran points out that Vaughey is an Aminstrative Law Judge and has no idea what recent precedent is on these matters.
UPDATE: Jeff Goldstein sees a vindication of what he’s been saying all along: control of language is everything.
That the left would celebrate such an ill-informed and frightening ruling is further proof that “progressivism” — for all its talk of fairness and protection for the little guy — is about nothing more than power and control. And any way they can seize it is fine with them, the ends justifying the means and all.
– Which is why it isn’t at all unhelpful or “fundamentally unserious” to point out how and why progressives adopt a particular view of language and a particularly convenient anti-foundationalist epistemological stance: it is through the institutionalizing of the collectivist assumptions inherent in the left’s philosophical outlook (which is inherently egalitarian, and so inherently anti-liberty and, in the strictest sense therefore anti-American) that they’ve been able to lay the foundation for the normalizing of a postmodernist worldview, one in which Enlightenment principles are overthrown and replaced by a cheap relativism in order to reach an end stage where a mandate to rule is the product of coalition politics, a Balkanized society, and manufactured consent aided greatly by a compliant propaganda arm in the media.
In other words, when “free speech” is a right and “harassment” is a crime, then it all depends on what gets called “free speech” and what gets called “harassment.” If you concede to the proggies their definition of “harassment,” then simple mission creep does the rest.
