Judgement on Dr Matthew Garrett (@mjg59) vs. Dr Roy Schestowitz (Techrights.org)

Re:Judgement on Dr Matthew Garrett (@mjg59) vs. Dr Roy Sches... by mindslight on Thursday November 20, 2025 @11:19AM (#45994300)

The problem is that viewing this as justice is based on some assumption that the legal system fully resolves, as if everyone who is wronged can be made whole. For example in this case - there is some third unknown party carrying out the harassment, against which Techrights would have a much higher bar to bring their own suit and recover their own damages (assuming discovery even went anywhere, and the person wasn't judgement proof). So Techrights is basically left "holding the bag" at the discontinuity between anonymous anarchistic free speech and trying to bring it into the realm of trustable statements by known identities and institutions.

Merely adjudicating truthfulness with injunctive relief might be understandable in this day and age of persistent shameless lying. But the hefty monetary damages for what seems to be good faith (though seemingly entirely unsupported and possibly even delusional [0]) speech is a tough pill to swallow.

[0] I took a quick scan through Techrights's wiki page "documenting" all this and the only thing substantiating the connection I could find was Garrett and the IRC harasser ping-timing-out at the same time. But there are many different ways that could happen. Yet every screenshot is captioned as if it was definitely Garrett saying those things.

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Re:Judgement on Dr Matthew Garrett (@mjg59) vs. Dr Roy Sches... by bawolff on Thursday November 20, 2025 @02:56PM (#45996897)

> The problem is that viewing this as justice relies on an assumption that the legal system fully resolves, as if everyone who is wronged can be made whole.

Are you suggesting being the victim of a crime should give you the right to hurt other people? Unrelated people at that?

Two wrongs do not make a right. I think it is entirely just to punish wrongdoers even if some other unknown party has also wronged the wrong doer at some point in the past.

> But the hefty monetary damages for what seems to be good faith (though seemingly entirely unsupported and possibly even delusional [0])

How could entirely unsupported speech ever be in good faith?

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Re:Judgement on Dr Matthew Garrett (@mjg59) vs. Dr Roy Sches... by mindslight on Thursday November 20, 2025 @03:26PM (#45997241)

First, I never said anyone has the right to hurt other people. In fact I explicitly said I understood the injunctive relief. Surely if posts on a well-known blog are sufficient to cause such significant damage, then removing the posts and issuing a longstanding correction on the same blog should be sufficient to repair it [0].

Second, the two wrongs are directly related in that one caused the other, as a result of the victim trying to figure out who was responsible and/or delusionally focusing on the wrong person because of the harassment. The point is that the more above-board instance of speech is being legally punished (talking in terms of names and real-world identities), whereas the less above board speech is not (because doing so is up against the limit of anonymous communications).

> How could entirely unsupported speech ever be in good faith?

In this case, it seems due to some kind of delusional thinking that is seeing a connection where one does not exist, or at least cannot be substantiated. But regardless, Techrights seems to earnestly believe Garrett is behind the harassment, as opposed to say knowingly making false statements to damage his reputation.

[0] Though based on Techrights's response posted elsewhere in this thread, I don't have much hope they're going to come around to understanding why there is a problem here.

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