2008-10-11

Was Doug Collins onto something?

The recent Mark Steyn ruling by the BC Inhuman Rights Tribunal has sent famed liberal blogger Dr. Dawg rabidly foaming at the mouth because, as he and almost everyone else predicted, the Tribunal just happened to acquit Steyn and Canada's oldest newspaper.

Well Dawg now insists that the right-wing blogosphere was in error, and laughs at how the fantasies of a totalitarian speech-restricting government agency turns out not to pass. Of this, two things may be noted: firstly, as I'm sure Dawg has read before the issue is not that the government might not prosecute a specific person is irrelevent to the fact that they still find the need to investigate said person. Defending yourself, even when you're innocent, is a long and costly and arduous process. By Dawg's logic we can even eliminate the category of "wrongful arrest", as in the end only the guilty will be convicted after a harmless little trial just to establish the facts.

The second thing was noted in my comment to his blogpost:

And just so, the mob of sadistic kangaroos at the BC Human Rights Tribunal have failed to deliver the sweet lash of tyranny. They refused to hop all over our basic rights and freedoms with their big hind feet

Great news! So are you going to call Doug Collins and let him know he can get back to writing newspaper columns about Spielburg movies, and should be getting his money refunded?

Will Guy Earle get to go on with telling lousy jokes and not have to attend any hearings?

(I confess I haven't gone through all the BCIRT decisions yet to find other speech-specific ones, as I'm engrossed in reading how false claims don't preclude getting a judgement in your favour in this sham of a "proceedings")
So far the comment has gone uninjured, posssibly because the claim was already made by Dawg that "the guilty hate speech" and "the guilty not hate speech" is clearly defined, with Doug Collins and Stephen Boisson in the former with Steyn in the latter.

For unfamiliar readers, Doug Collins writes articles about how Jew-run Hollywood promote a Jewish agenda. Seeing how the liberals in Hollywood are clearly setting a liberal agenda [pace Steyn, the only movie so far showing American forces decidedly defeating terrorists is Team America: World Police -ed], this claim may spook people but Collins makes his case. He's wrong, of course, but he makes his case.

One of the things Collins has said (and specifically was prosecuted for) was that the Holocaust was exaggerated roughly tenfold. Well, with last night's Dawg comment bouncing in my brain, imagine my surprise when watching my Star Trek: The Next Generation DVDs I come across more Hollywood math. The episode Remember Me, penned by (it should be noted non-Jewish) Lee Sheldon, features the lovely Dr. Crusher trapped in an alternate universe where everybody except for her starts disappearing. Near the climax of the episode, she's left alone on the Enterprise whilst the universe starts closing around her: at one point the computer establishes that the universe is 705 metres in diameter. Later, the universe contracts further, taking the starship with it.

Cut away to the real Enterprise, where they are tracking the pseudo-universe. LaForge comments that the warp bubble is "contracting at a rate of fifteen metres per second: we're going to lose it in about four minutes". Of course, the trouble is that with 60 seconds in a minute, the warp bubble is contracting 900 metres per minute, requiring at least a 3600m bubble in the first place. But the warp bubble turns out to be Dr. Crusher's universe, and moments earlier she had that same four minutes long after the 705m bubble started to contract. An actual bubble of, say, 700 metres taking four minutes to collapse would contact at less than 3 m/s. Its a small victory for Collins, but Hollywood has gotten its numbers wrong before...

"I promise never to run afoul of government speech police again!"