MsJack wrote:I'm at a loss as to how honestly thinking either Dan or the Review have been "vicious or mean-spirited" can be slanderous. To illustrate with some examples from Dan's side of the fence, his friend and former occasional Review contributor Russell C McGregor recently wrote in an online message board post that I am an "extreme feminist," "female supremicist" and possible "man-hater." His other "good friend" and would-be JBMORS contributor, William Schryver, has called me a "feminazi," "deceitful," "propagandist," and "anti-Mormon." While I certainly think those are vicious and mean-spirited things to say, and that any reasonable evaluation of the evidence would find those statements to be false, I don't think they were slanderous (or rather, libelous). I have no doubt that in Schryver-McGregor bizarro world, a pro-life Republican attending a conservative evangelical Christian divinity school counts as an "extreme feminist" and "feminazi," or that things like decrying the sexualization of women who want to engage in dialogue and debate counts as "female supremacism." Etc. So long as they sincerely believe their own allegations, and those allegations are subjective opinions of sorts, then their attacks on me are not libelous. Vicious, mean-spirited, and arguably false, but not libelous.
OTOH, for Schryver to insinuate that I am guilty of forgery without presenting a scrap of evidence to that effect was libelous. Likewise, Dan has a better case that those accusing the Review of slander are themselves engaging in slander, if they present no evidence for that. The charge of "slander" isn't generally a subjective opinion in the same sense that the charge of "vicious" is.
Well, if they don't believe that they have done any wrong, and they are willing to state as much to each other and others, then that must settle the issue. "Facts" and "evidence" such as quoted above hardly tip the balance at all.