Oh, my. Steyn is not going to pull any punches after seeing what Esra Levant just did in Canada. He hints at a strategy to “go nuclear”. He writes:
When I ran into trouble with the “human rights” commissions five years ago, I had lunch with an old friend in Montreal who said just stay quiet, keep your head down, it’ll all blow over. If I’d taken his advice, I would have lost, Maclean’s would have lost, Canada’s media would have lost basic free press rights, and Canadian citizens would have lost basic free speech rights. And then I ran into Ezra Levant, who said no, you need to go nuclear. That’s Ezra’s advice for everything – parking ticket, slow line at Tim Hortons, whatever.
So we did go nuclear.
And Elmasry and the Canadian Islamic Congress couldn’t withstand the publicity, any more than the “human rights” racket could. By the time the CIC lost in court in British Columbia, they had already lost in a far more profound sense. I wish I were in Madam Justice Matheson’s courtroom rather than trapped on a roulette wheel of procedural sophistry in the District of Columbia. But I promise you this: by the time this is through, Michael Mann will have lost as profoundly as Elmasry did.
More on Ezra’s day in court here and here. To help support my pushback against Mann, please see here and here.
Read the full article here: An Inspiring Day
I probably sit on the fence on the Steyn vs Mann case and put it in the people behaving badly category. There is a very sobering message to Mann in these cases which is best put by Sue Scheff as “the winner” in a bitter Internet Defamation case winning damages for $11 Million dollars.
Perhaps read the result in Sue Scheff’s own words
http://admittingmistakesasa.blogspot.com.au/2008/05/sue-scheff-vs-carey-bock-proving-free.html
The result did almost nothing to help Sue Scheff’s plight you can not win against someone who really does not care about the result in full on warfare.
I side with Ken White and much of legal view expressed on his site. I suspect Mann will find this gets very ugly very fast and even if you saw it to a conclusion, if Steyn really is prepared to go down in flames in an uncompromising war you gain nothing.
Don’t you think Mann’s scientific reputation has already been disposed of by the ‘scientific ‘self-correction’ process, if fellow scientists giggling behind his back is a reasonable definition of ‘scientific self-correction’?
My guess is: giggle.
John
luca turin (@lucaturin) says:
March 10, 2014 at 4:08 am
I so hope Steyn wins, but to call Mann a fraud was reckless
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Are you sure? Didn’t Steyn actually call Mann famous? What did the article actually say?
“I so hope Steyn wins, but to call Mann a fraud was reckless, since that word can mean many things, some of which are libelous unless proven true.”
But that’s irrelevant. If only one of those meanings can be proven to either be non-libelous, (whether by being true or non-damaging) provided that the person who uses a word can plausibly claim he used that meaning, it isn’t libel.
The fact that a word has more than one meaning does not provide license to insist that someone “really meant” something other than what they actually meant to convey by using it, despite how fashionable such “reinterpretation” has become in some quarters. Certain officially recognized victim groups have made an industry out of sussing out “wolf whistle” meanings and decoding super-secret racist/sexist/homophobic language. It’s downright amazing how quickly these people can find such meaning in what others say.
Guy Holder says:
March 10, 2014 at 5:19 am
We need a paypal button so people can contribute without buying anything.
Just buy vouchers and never redeem them. Amounts to the same thing, after all.
…I’m saying this from the other side of the planet, so I might be very wrong, but contributions may be viewed as income (and taxed?), whereas a purchased gift certificate will have to be recorded as a debt – a much more effective way to contribute.
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A gift certificate is indeed a debt. A million dollars in debt – they spent $500K on the first appeal to dismiss – may be a promise that you know or should know that you can’t make good on. To solicit while knowing you can’t make good on your promise is – fraud. Now imagine a Bill McKibben type purchasing Steyn certificates and then suing him for fraud. Also imagine an ambitious US Attorney General or State’s Attorney of the applicable ideology prosecuting for criminal violation.
The Deep Pockets of Dark Money on Mann’s Side – or whatever they call themselves – get contributions that are tax-laundered.
If I say to Michael Mann, I think you are a fraud, Sir, because you will not show me the data and compute code, from which you are making proclamations where decisions are being made about possibly affecting my bank balance.
What is the situation? If I am specific surely if he took me to court he would have to offer up the info.
Ah in the old days a good duel at dawn would take care of this one way or another.
Mark Steyn made not agree but, for some reason, this trial reminds me of the illustrious Mae West, the siren of her time. The sultry Mae West was brought to court on obscenity charges. Never one to be cowed, when asked in trial if she was showing contempt of court she responded, “No, I’m trying my best to hide it.”
She once said (probably not an exact quote), “When I’m good I’m very good. But, when I’m bad, I’m better!”
Time to be bad, folks.
“To claim a tree ring is a thermometer is fraudulent.”
To claim some tree rings are thermometers. but others nearby aren’t, is even more fraudulent.
Mann has a scorched earth strategy against anyone who has a reason based finding of ‘no confidence’ in his body of work that he claims is ‘consensus’ science. He is no friend of science, only a friend of his own hubris.
Steyn recognizes Mann’s scorched earth strategy and adopts a reasonable counter strategy. Steyn is letting Mann scorch every bit of his own credibility within the scientific community.
John
I’m bad!! I just contributed $100 American to Mr. Steyn. Buy a gift certificate and never redeem it.
Did not Mann’s hockey stick plot dispense with the Medieval Warming Period? The existence of that warm period has never, ever been a matter of dispute.
Are we to believe that Mann was unaware of this discrepancy?
Has it not been shown that Mann’s algorithm, which produced the hockey stick, will also produce a hockey stick if the entered data are random numbers?
Are we to believe that Mann was unaware of this?
What part of Climate Gate testifies to the honesty of Mann?
Frankly, Mann is a total fraud and has STOLEN taxpayer funds to fund his scam. He is Bernie Madoff in climate drag . He should be forced to pay back every penny he has received in funding – plus pay a huge fine- plus sent to jail for 100 years. PENN STATE and his former employer, UVA, should also be heavily fined and punished for sponsoring his fraud.
I read through the first dozen or so comments, then couldn’t stand any more. Mark Steyn is a g.d. hero, a guy with the brains, courage, and style to finally nail that loony coward Michael Mann for good and all. This has the potential to be orders of magnitude more damaging than the recent “ship of fools” fiasco, perhaps even approaching or exceeding“climate-gate” in the damage it might do to the warmist agenda..
That hockey stick graph galvanized the world around the issue of global warming. At the time I was a wavering warmist, and it temporarily convinced me that CAGW was imminent. I’m sure it did many others. And it was a fraud! It’s almost unbelievable. Perhaps ultimately even more damaging to the cause, is that all those establishment climate scientists who damn well know by now it was a fraud, are by their silence revealing their utter lack of integrity.
Any skeptics who can afford to send money to Steyn who have not yet done so, should be ashamed.
Mann might not have intended to commit fraud when he first published his paper, but he has not materially corrected anything after it has been shown his statistics and methodology were suspect.
In fact, he has conspired with his cohorts, as shown in the Climategate emails, to prevent anything that shows his work is questionable. To me, that is fraud.
The problem is that Steyn has decided to be his own lawyer. He could very well be right on the merits, but lose because he doesn’t understand the law, because he will get outfoxed on a technicality that will sink his case. And then we will all be losers, because Michael Mann will have won, and won a case that had Steyn had a real lawyer, he would not have won.
stan stendera:
You’re better than very good, I think you mean. Why not redeem it when Steyn is awarded his $11 million? But just to consider a somewhat worse case:
philjourdan:
A lot of money will have been spent on the Steyn cause, to be sure. And in return? How about this statement having been read and pondered by masses on both sides of the North American border?
Like the author I don’t have the honour of being a citizen of the United States but I’d say you can’t put a price on that. Keep it up, Mr Steyn.
Example of why you have to fight fire with fire.
As I opened my lap top today…lead head line bar on yahoo and at&t….
“Unknown gases indanger the Ozone layer”….!!!
If you allow them to control the message they take your rights away day after day after day.
We let a traitor off the hook allowed this fraud with fake awards and citations in a combat zone get away with lies about American Fighting men. What we got was Sec. of State John F. Kerry.
If you do not fight fire with fire,, we all get burned.
Stop us if you’ve heard this: Piddling administrative rulings aside, the U.S. court system is not only dysfunctional but actively maleficent, exploited by peculating “attorneys” whose sole conventional purpose is to delay, obfuscate unintelligible legalisms to their extortionate benefit.
In this context, anyone contesting matters of substance had best profess pathetic victimization or look elsewhere. If ability, character, integrity are your institutional Judiciary criteria– bug out.
It is more than plausible that NRO/CEI could prevail in their anti-Slapp appeals. They will surely argue, first, that Judge Weisberg’s ruling characterizing their respective alleged libels as statements of fact and not expressions of opinion is judicially unsustainable. They should win on that point. Case dismissed.
That appeal decision will, in all likelihood, be rendered long before Steyn’s trial case would ever appear on the DC Court’s calendar.
An NRO/CEI appeal victory would have enormous negative consequence to Mann’s case against Steyn. In fact, Mann would likely have to approach Steyn, hat in hand, for an out-of-court settlement of their opposing claims. That prospect is a delicious one indeed.
“Steyn called Mann a “Fraud” which is definitely libellous. The only way Steyn can win is to prove that Mann had intent to commit fraud, and not just that Mann made many mistakes.”
If you would have read Steyn’s offending blurb on NRO (check out SteynOnline), you would have noted that he said Mann’s hockey stick was fraudulent. Steyn never called Mann a fraud. And being a professional pundit, Steyn is allowed to express his opinions freely. Using your logic, Mann could sue every commenter who used far worse language than Steyn’s.
You inadvertently prove Steyn’s main theme these days: the rapid loss of Free Speech in this nation. Before long, every single American will be required to lawyer-up when expressing even the slightest opinion that deviates from public orthodoxy.
Steyn did NOT call Mann a fraud. He called Mann’s hockey-stick graph “fraudulent”. (Not a fraud, but fraudulent.) Very, very different things, folks.
http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/309442/football-and-hockey-mark-steyn
Mann’s bullying propensity is self-limiting . . . .
Steyn does well if he entices Mann to extend his bullying . . .
: )
John
It has been mentioned once on this thread, but but only once, so I’ll mention it again, Steyn doesn’t have to prove a thing. Mann has to prove by preponderance of the evidence that Steyn libeled him, and that is very hard to do, because Mann is a public figure. This bears repeating, because the opposite has been stated several times on this thread.
John says:
March 10, 2014 at 7:33 am
“The problem is that Steyn has decided to be his own lawyer.”
You have to appreciate what Steyn’s doing here. He’s basically flipping the bird to the US Justice system. If a guy can spend 1/2 a million bucks in attorney fees for a year’s worth of silence and litigation that results in the judge being unable to identify the parties, then something is seriously wrong. The federal gov’t should refund his costs for hiring incompetent judges and wasting everybody’s time. Steyn may very well lose the trial – he’s doing it at minimum expense. Then it’s up to the appeal. The US Justice system can flush the first amendment down the crapper to ensure that other defendants don’t follow Steyn’s lead and rob lawyers of their take, or it can stand up for principle and reaffirm the concept of freedom of speech. Either way, it’ll be good to know where we stand in this country. And either way, it’ll be one hell of a show.
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2014/03/10/quote-of-the-week-steyn-ups-the-ante-on-the-mann-lawsuit/#comment-1586932
I don’t know, Jim Bo. There are political undercurrents to this lawsuit. I’ve speculated that the D. C. judges might have it in for Steyn and those who launch personal attacks against “consensus” climate scientists. Unlike Combs Greene, Weisberg is apparently a competent judge, but he does have a history of liberal connections and rulings. Those of us who post on skeptic websites are perhaps a little deluded as to what is going on in other areas of the culture where “all they know is what they read in the papers,” so to speak.
Certainly, McIntyre’s work would lead one to think that the case should be dismissed. But again, in the current atmosphere in Washington, it wouldn’t surprise me to see motions to dismiss be denied and the trial proceed.
I hope he wins, not just for the effect on Mann (and himself), but also to help put an end to using the coercive power of the state (and a corrupt tort system) to block legitimate inquiry/debate into how our money is being spent and who is truly steering the ship. This goes for public institutions of higher learning, e.g., UVA, too.
Bravo zulu, Mark.