Yesterday evening I received word from my host that someone had filed a complaint against me and was demanding that one of my posts be removed. Here’s the text of the complaint, sent not to me, but to my host:
From: [XXXXX]@hushmail.com
Date: Thu, Mar 7, 2013 at 7:41 PM
Subject: Defamatory blog
To: help@[redacted]
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
[...]
Please can you give us guidelines on getting this removed. https://proteinwisdom.com/?p=47841 You cannot mock people with illness, or deceased people so openly. It's is disgustiing and poor humour. Please can this be removed?
The laws on defamation are pretty simple, but this incites hate against people with addiction and so openly mocks them. It is not right if we want to be in a civilised society. This is not freedom of speech, this is just victimisation and inciting prejudice against people who need help, and those who cannot answer for themselves, since all the people referred to are deceased.
Is it not fraud, prentending to be someone else also?
Now, I’m no lawyer, but it seems to me that “prentending” [sic] to be someone else when that someone else is not only a public figure but a quite dead one — and more specifically when “he” is, as the context makes clear, not really speaking nor representing himself (these posts are pointed satire, not the transcripts of a seance, for example; just as I had no special deal with Martha Stewart’s to publish “her” prison diaries) — is perfectly in keeping with an entire history of parody and satire. And so quite legal.
Therefore, demands that I take down my post(s), when proffered in the form of attacks on me personally, are probably not the best use of the complainants’ time.
Look: Some may not like the content of these posts — it seems, for instance, that I’ve awakened an entire hive of Corey Haim fanbois and fangals on Twitter (that such a thing even exists I find unspeakably sad), some with names like @NeverforgetHaim — and those critics wish to make it known to me that I’m a despicable human being, with “human” often encased in sneer quotes, while being is, I suppose, something they’re conceding can, as a factual matter, go unchallenged.
And they have every right to express their distaste. But what they can’t do — and shouldn’t do — is try to pretend that what they’re doing is not an attack on my free speech rights, particularly when they go behind my back to try to force a third party to remove what I’ve written.
What you find funny I probably would not; what I find funny you may not. And that’s fine. But your sensibilities, tied to showy indignation and a lot of lofty-sounding horseshit about protecting the feelings of those with addiction issues, are nothing more than your sensibilities — and while you might think protecting the feelings of those suffering from, say, heroin addiction, is doing them a service, I happen to believe that pointing a mirror at them does a whole lot more net good.
— None of which is even relevant to the Corey Haim posts. I’ve used Haim as a kind of foil to comment on contemporary issues. And, given that “he’s” speaking from the “afterlife,” only the most moronic of people, or those most invested as Corey Haim fans (and even then, only some of them; I happen to be a very big fan of License to Drive and Lost Boys, eg, and believe that my posts help in some small way keep Haim’s name alive), could conceivably confuse my musings about Haim in the afterlife with, say, a documentary of his post-being-alive exploits.
Or, to put it more succinctly, blow me, you phony sanctimonious speech fascists.
Not too long ago — and I never mentioned this here — Google Adsense canceled my account because I refused to remove a post in which I dealt with the potential rape of our Ambassador in Benghazi.
Given that, paltry as it was, Google Adsense was one of the few means I had to support this site from the advertising side, it should be clear to any self-appointed speech police that I value my right to express myself as I see fit on my property a whole lot more than I value some pittance I received quarterly for click-through ads.
On this site, you get what you get. I don’t shame easy, I don’t scare easy, and the last thing I’d ever do is surrender my right to express myself in the ways I find most interesting and effective to the task to a bunch of self-righteous, nostalgic thirty-somethings who have taken on as their life’s mission to burnish the image of a dead celebrity whose career he himself sabotaged.
One final note: I have an unsettling feeling that perhaps I’m being outparodied here. Because, come on. Are there really extant tribes of Corey Haim adepts? Willing to admit to being such?
This could just be Feldman pulling my leg. In which case, kudos, tiny dancer.
This is a joke, right?
Why is it so hard for these assholes to just, oh I don’t know, not read the F!@#ing blog? There’s plenty of excretable stuff spewing from places like media matters, Kos, etc and the way I cope with all the lying, venomous bullshit those sites produce? I just don’t read them. I certainly don’t spend even 1 minute of my life worried enough about them to try to get them taken down.
And I love how he starts with “The laws on defamation are pretty simple” then proceeds to show that he/she has no idea what the defamation even is. The scary thing is when these equally idiotic service providers or advertisers, like googleads, take these emails seriously.
Google is a creepy fascist collective of obamawhores. They make applicants take Myers-Briggs tests for so they only hire fascist-minded people of the exact right flavor who won’t go against the googlegrain.
After reading the Tweets of these fools, I am reminded of something George Orwell wrote:
This age makes me so sick that sometimes I am almost impelled to stop at a corner and start calling down curses from Heaven.
Those asshats are beyond parody. And no sense of humour.
Clearly, you can.
This is someone clearly fucking with you. Hushmail? Seriously?
My guess it is one of your more dedicated trolls who’s been following your twitter, saw the outpouring of outrage from the artsy freshman girls club, and decided that NOW was the time to ACT!
All while desperately trying to achieve orgasm without prostate manipulation. Because, well, hemorrhoids. And, no, he didn’t get them from sitting on the toilet too long, the Sports Illustrated isn’t his he only reads Mother Jones or the New Yorker in there, someone must have left it. He probably got them from the new saddle on his fixed gear bike. And before you say it, he does so ride it, occasionally. It’s just that it’s hard to go up hill, so he doesn’t use it for errands.
From NeverSeenBlue Twitter profile:
Evidently it’s ok to keep peace by force if you have someone else do the forcing for you. By that logic, Vegans could eat steak provided someone else slaughtered it.
Also: “givecoreyastar” refers to the OTHER Corey, believe it or not.
Clearly, this business of mocking people with illness is itself an illness, and so cannot be criticised.
Disregard that last. Clearly I’ve got my Coreys mixed up.
Haha! You never know where fanboydom and the Perpetually Outraged are going to strike. A couple of years ago I gave a one-star rating to a Husqvarna mower on Amazon – OY the hate that started flowing in my direction!! I was stunned at first – Husqvarna? Really? Who Knew? – but now find it highly amusing. My review is still garnering hate posts – it’s kind of like a drift net in the Amazonian sea, gathering outraged Husqvarna fanboys as it meanders down the years. :-)
Oh. Wow.
She’s got an interesting blend of Marilyn Manson and Corey Haim fixations going on. There has to be some mental illness involved in having both of those running on the same FB page, never mind in the same head.
You can also lose a gig for Supporting The Wrong Positions.
Granted, nothing illegal or unconstitutional about it, but pretty damned spiteful, all the same.
seems like you can also lose elections the same way
I’m pretty sure I’ve lost at least one job because I expressed political positions different from the rest of the people in the company.
I try not to say anything now.
If you have a few minutes, go read his wiki entry. Talent, opportunity, all wasted.
Ow, dammit, Slart! My eyes!
Rumors are that most kid actors have been molested, sometimes when their own parents pimp them out to producers and other muckity-mucks.
If that happened to him, and it might have, then no wonder he was so messed up.
I think my response to someone complaining about a post I made would likely be to post a lot more just like it.
I’m contrary that way.
I wonder whether Tracy Lorimer has asked her idol Marilyn Manson to stop singing songs like I Want To Kill You Like They Do In The Movies? Because of the awful, literal meaning of the lyrics.
It’s offensive! Intrinsically, objectively offensive. And it must be stopped right this second.
Note the rote spewing that speech you don’t like isn’t really “speech” but is rather potrayed as the moral equivalent to a physical assault on anybody who has been designated a “victim” by the speech police.
Idiots.
What an odd coincidence that one of my favorite sites is targeted this way, so soon after I had a seemingly completely unrelated tangle on Monday, which led me to post a policy.
These adolescent narcissists must be Canadian. There is no hope for them.
I’m with Andy, knock it off with the making fun of dead people sht*hic*
This is just a continuation of the pointed satire, isnt it? Well played Not-So-Tiny Protein Dancer.. Well played.
STILL no apology for “Lucas” –
Fuck him. Even if he is dead.
[…] UPDATE: Is that you, Corey Feldman? | protein wisdom […]
She’s got an interesting blend of Marilyn Manson and Corey Haim fixations going on.
I can’t see a mention of Marilyn Manson without thinking of this old article from the Onion. Given that the mockery is a dozen years old at this point, one might think that this Manson cult should be just as dead as the previous one.
Ha! Corey Haim I had to g00gle, after the first CH Afterlife post I saw here.
From that, I can say with certainty that the only things I find interesting about Corey Haim are these CH Afterlife posts. Keep ’em coming!
But speak any ill about dead Jim Morrison? We’ll have to talk. )
Marilyn Manson is still alive?
I’m speechless. A cult for Corey? That’s just creepy.
Now they’re talking about visiting His grave, as if that will make some kind of difference.
Remember that lunatic who was threatening some sort of (poorly-specified) legal action because I was posting public domain pictures of Theda Bara, on the theory that Ms Bara wouldn’t like my politics?
Yeah, these people exist.
P.S. http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/7d/Theda_Bara_in_Salom%C3%A9_%281918%29_-_01.jpg
Theda Bara: still lovely.
“Clearly you can”
Well placed Pablo,
Well placed B-)
Jumping Jesus, and they say that Conservatives have no sense of humor.
Sorry about the ad revenue loss, wish I was in a position to contribute but first funemployment and now limited fixed income funretirement is my current fate.
(I was hoping for a Romney victory just so I could go back to work. How pathetic is that?)
I find these last few years fascinating in the amount of twisting and turning the so called defenders of the first amendment have gone to destroy that very amendment. And done so very openly. They can’t walk this back after Obama’s gone.
They have been emboldened by the embargo the Presstitutes have imposed on any bad or negative news but even that hasn’t stopped the word getting out what hypocrites they really are.
Know this: you are not alone, you are not unappreciated and you will be vindicated at some point. (cold comfort, I know but it’s all I have right now.)
Be kinda funny if Jeff could get there first and litter the ground with empty Funyons wrappers, dead whippits, and maybe get a Haitian or two to hang out there for awhile.
Jeff, that Twitter page under “attacks on me personally” no longer exists.
She withdrew her demand, so I guess she decided to rescind the tweet.
She should just suck my giant cock.
[…] someone is demanding Jeff Goldstein take down a post, for reasons very different and from a legal standpoint that even my lawyer complainant would have […]