Really a Joke
I am finding Andrew Coyne's live blog of the Canadian hate speech "trial" to be endlessly fascinating. Imagine taking the the most self-important but dysfunctional local school board you can find, give them a knowledge of court procedure and the rules of evidence mainly through watching People's Court reruns, and put them in charge of enforcing speech and censorship, and you will about have duplicated this proceeding.
Interestingly, the current evidence being entered in the proceeding seems to be blog comments made on non-Canadian blogs. Every so often, we have to go through an educational process with the MSM to help them understand that commenters on blogs do not necessarily represent the opinion of the blogger. It may be OK to use blog comments as evidence that the community at the Free Republic or the Democratic Underground are loony, but not to say that blogger X or Y is a racist because racist comments have been posted on his blog.
It appears that the government of Canada needs a similar education, but I can see this being hard to do. Remember, each of the hearing "judges" are essentially people who make their living as government censors. Their job is wiping out speech with which they do not agree. It is therefore quite likely difficult for them to comprehend that many bloggers (like myself) have no desire to edit or control the content of our commenters.
