Censorship

David Warren, at the Catholic Thing, discusses how he was hounded out of mainstream reporting by repeated lawsuits: his crime?

When writing a column in (mainstream) newspapers, I was memorably pursued by an amateur litigator in Ottawa, who brought quite literally (numerally?) hundreds of time-consuming formal complaints against me, all invariably frivolous. By her steadfastness, she was able to get hearings for her “complaints” against me before, e.g., the Ontario Press Council – one of which included the allegation that my column was appearing in a secular newspaper, even though I was a “self-admitted” Roman Catholic.

The tactic was effective. After more than a decade, tired of the extraordinary amount of time and legal expenses I was costing them to defend me, as their token conservative, the paper’s management offered me a sufficient sum of money to just go away.... 

the object of the sour-faced people is to wear you down.

For the smaller targets in the Internet world, as I have discovered, denial-of-service attacks are routine. But the same people, embedded in Internet service companies, now find that unanswerable “hate and racism” blocks are more effective.

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TeaAtTrianon links to a report about a similar hate attack against philosopher Roger Scruton by taking isolated sentences out of context and spinning them to distort what he actually says.

and the reason for the kerfuffle was his appointment in advising how to make new housing more beautiful. In other words, something that has nothing to do with partisan politics.

Numerous Labour MPs have now called for Scruton’s scalp, including Andrew Gwynne, the shadow communities secretary. ‘Nobody holding those views has a place in modern democracy,’ he told BuzzFeed, momentarily forgetting Jeremy Corbyn’s attic full of (anti Semetic) baggage. ‘The prime minister needs to finally show some leadership and sack Scruton with an investigation into how he was appointed in the first place.’

 Yes, let’s have an investigation into how a fellow of the British Academy, the recipient of the Czech Republic’s Medal of Merit and the author of more than 50 books, including The Classical Vernacular: Architectural Principles in an Age of Nihilism, was asked to lead a commission on the aesthetics of new housing developments.

a film where he discusses the need for beauty in architecture and public life can be found here.