Friday, May 01, 2009
SHOULD THE NEW YORKER BE SUED FOR LYING?
An interesting example of the extension of legal action.
While I suspect Jared may well have been embellishing to reinforce a PC anthropological view this looks very much like an artificial suit about which the nominal plaintiff wouldn't have cared had he not been put up to it. To quote from Stinkyjournalism
So why am I interested in this nonsense? Well it strikes me there are 350,000 from Kosovo who were ethnically cleansed &/or had their relatives murdered. Ditto half the population of Sarajevo & about half a million from Croatia. Our governments did this, quite deliberately, on the basis of years of lies (eg that the Yugoslavs had killed anything up to 500,000 Albanian men in Kosovo - more than 100% of them - prior to NATO bombing) told by almost the entire western media & politicians.
If I were running the Serbian government or a large contingency fee lawyers firm in New York, London or Brussels I would be looking for some photogenic Serbian clients. If 750,000 people got $1 million apiece this would only be 30 times what various silly American women & their lawyers got in scam breast enlargement suits. Wouldn't it be good if, for once, the law was used to achieve justice for people who have really suffered?
Two New Guinea tribesmen have filed a $10 million lawsuit claiming Pulitzer Prize-winning author Jared Diamond falsely accused them of murder and other crimes.Obviously I know nothing about whether Diamond did actually deliberately "sex-up" the story which the tribesman told him & which he appears now to be claiming he sexed up in the first place. Obviously to do so would a dreadful thing if anthropology were were much od a science. On the other hand he wouldn't have been doing anything that Margaret Mead didn't do a 81 years ago or indeed somebody posing as Homer did in the Odyssey.
...The magazine's Web site describes the April 21, 2008, article as being about a New Guinea tribesman who avenged an uncle's slaying by a neighboring clan by killing his uncle's murderer. The summary didn't identify the tribesman.
The lawsuit was filed Monday in New York state Supreme Court.
While I suspect Jared may well have been embellishing to reinforce a PC anthropological view this looks very much like an artificial suit about which the nominal plaintiff wouldn't have cared had he not been put up to it. To quote from Stinkyjournalism
When Papua New Guinea researcher Michael Kigl, working with StinkyJournalism, went to Daniel Wemp’s Nipa home in the Southern Highlands, in July 2008 to ask him about The New Yorker article, he was shocked. Wemp had no idea that he or people he mentioned to Diamond in random stories about tribal warfare back in 2001-2002, would be publicly named, and worse, erroneously linked to heinous crimesso this guy looks like a cut out for these people & has suffered no real damage himself.
So why am I interested in this nonsense? Well it strikes me there are 350,000 from Kosovo who were ethnically cleansed &/or had their relatives murdered. Ditto half the population of Sarajevo & about half a million from Croatia. Our governments did this, quite deliberately, on the basis of years of lies (eg that the Yugoslavs had killed anything up to 500,000 Albanian men in Kosovo - more than 100% of them - prior to NATO bombing) told by almost the entire western media & politicians.
If I were running the Serbian government or a large contingency fee lawyers firm in New York, London or Brussels I would be looking for some photogenic Serbian clients. If 750,000 people got $1 million apiece this would only be 30 times what various silly American women & their lawyers got in scam breast enlargement suits. Wouldn't it be good if, for once, the law was used to achieve justice for people who have really suffered?
