The Socialist Paradise

Monday 23 May 2011 - Filed under Uncategorized

At least we’re not (yet) Europe. Ars Technica:

Talk of social media injunctions in the UK began earlier this month when a British judge attempted to protect the identity of a brain-damaged woman by ordering her name to stay off of Twitter and Facebook. The two sites were actually included in a list of “media” forbidden from publishing the information, according to the order seen by Reuters, despite the fact that both companies are US-based and the content they host is entirely user-generated.

But that’s just a “regular” type of injunction—there’s also a concept called a super-injunction. While an injunction simply bars a specific aspect of the story from being discussed (in the previous example, a name), a super-injunction is “super” because it bars any element of the story from being discussed at all. So, if a celebrity has an affair with her poolboy’s dog and somehow manages to get a super-injunction from a judge, the mere discussion of any of it—the celebrity herself, the poolboy’s clothing that day, the breed of the dog, whether the celebrity had a relationship with the poolboy before moving onto the dog, etc.—is not allowed.

They are literally outlawing speech, at the request of connected individuals, as a means to avoid personal embarrassment, yet the Prime Minister is only “reportedly uneasy about the practice”.

I fail to see why we should strive to be more like Europe.

2011-05-23  »  madlibertarianguy