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Having finally read the judgment, my thoughts are as follows: firstly I hate it when judges deal with these types of matters. Lawyers who don’t care about the issue are called on to make final determinations on complex philosophical questions they do not understand https://twitter.com/johanlorenzen/status/1194263813127909377">https://twitter.com/johanlore...
The second thing is I think defense counsel made a lot of mistakes. I think @JohanLorenzen is correct that they should have focused more on the truth and public interest aspect of it rather than trying to prove they could say what ever they want. They can’t. It’s trite.
They accepted without contestation that the words were prima facie defamatory and that’s wild. There were many ways that they could have deepened the court’s understanding of racism, this didn’t happen. The only discussion about what it means to be racist and to be called racist
Is by the old Afrikaans plaintiff. It was always going to be a disaster. Thirdly I take issue with the judge a lot. They accept too much as being true from the plaintiff. I don’t think the reasonable person reads anything into when the ANCYL call people racist. It has no effect
There is no harm to fama. It didn’t materialize here and there is no chance that it would. I also think the reasoning around incitement of harm is particularly terrible. Quite aside from the fact that it didn’t. The judge buys into racist angry farm murder propaganda.
There is nothing convincing. Hotz is quoted and then ignored because I think the discussion around “fuck white” people would have been useful to this court.
Lastly the judge gives the DA too much credit for how it deals with racism. There was a case in the equality court two weeks ago where the DA refused to deal with racists. In summary, the lawyers are bad, judges was bad. I don’t want the case to go on appeal.
This is because the party will be bound to a record where the correct party made every strategic mistake they could. It’s the wrong case to try set precedent on
