Re: PETA Fascists Begin Bullying Meat-eaters

I'll just explore the topic of bullying and the right to free speech a
bit further. A good friend of mine, about my age, just fini****ng off
an accounting degree and with a fairly small salary working for Animal
Liberation NSW, was recently in court facing a seven-figure lawsuit
because she went to Pitt Street Mall a couple of times and handed out
a few leaflets discussing a practice that quite a lot of Australian
sheep farmers do known as "mulesing". With this procedure a large
chunk of flesh is removed from a sheep's backside with a pair of
gardening shears, for the purpose of preventing blowfly strike. At the
time of the protests my friend was doing it was usual to do this
procedure without any anaesthetic. There is now a legal requirement to
use anaesthetic and the wool industry has made a commitment to phase
out the practice, I think our campaign can take some of the credit for
that. We made the statement that mulesing is cruel, there was some
discussion of that in court, apparently they found the statement in
some way objectionable. Anyway, Australian Wool Innovation claimed
that we had violated the Trade Practices Act by calling for a boycott
of Australian wool (which we hadn't, although PETA had done that, but
they had to bring us into court along with PETA because it's an
Australian law and they had to get an Australian organisation
involved). They sued two Animal Liberation NSW activists and claimed
that they should be liable for $5 million to cover the costs of an
advertising campaign that they had to do in response to our campaign.
They kept Animal Liberation NSW tied up with the initial hearings for
many months. This of course meant that we had to devote time and money
into arguing our case that the matter shouldn't go to court, thereby
preventing us from functioning effectively as an organisation. I
myself was involved in these protests and it is only a matter of good
fortune that I did not have to go to court myself. As you can imagine,
for individuals like myself or my friend the idea of potentially being
liable for seven-figure amounts, even if the possibility is fairly
remote, is fairly stressful. I think at the time we were handing out
the leaflets we had this crazy idea that we lived in a liberal
democracy and were allowed to publicly express our opinions about
practices that concerned us.

That may help to clarify the concept of "bullying" for you.

The McLibel trial is another example, though that one backfired.

Understand? That's what bullying is. A public expression of an opinion
that it's immoral or in some other way undesirable to eat meat is an
exercise of the right to free speech, phenomena like the above two
examples are what you call bullying.