Today I want to take this time to discuss an incident that has occurred involving my good friend "Danger." Our command, by regulation, required all of us who are writing a blog to turn in the address to our commander, at which point he would then send it to the proper people within the Brigade who had a "need to know." All of us have turned in our blogs to the command as required (as far as I see it, Big Brother was already watching). It is my opinion that the command felt there were more blogs out there than what were turned into him. So, this guy sends out the spreadsheet with our blogs on it to the entire battalion. Obviously, we felt that this was a horrible lapse in judgement on his part. These were personal blogs that we had given out to our family and friends, if someone discovers it on their own great, but we didn't want them put out to 100+ people. So Danger finds a picture of the Commander and throws it up on his blog with a little piece basically saying (I'm paraphrasing) "Thank you sir for giving this out to everyone in the battalion. This was meant to be for my family and friends only." So the commander sends him a scathing letter accusing him of attempting to slander him on the net. Sir, let me address you directly and say "You need to learn what slander is."

First and foremost slander is a verbal defemation of character. The term you are looking for is libel. Libel is the defemation of character in writing. Second off in order it to be defematory the statement in question has to be untrue. Now I'm not completely positive, but in most cases of libel or slander all the defendant has to do is prove that the statement was true in order to be innocent of the charge. Danger did not accuse you of anything untrue. He stated the fact that you did send the email to everyone on your mailing list, that this email did contain all the blogs that had been turned into you up to that point. He did not try to "slander" you as you have accused him, nor did he in my opinion even remotely attack your character. He basically said that what you did was wrong and that he was pissed off (understandably, we all were and are.)

Well, for further information I would point you to wikipedia's entry on the terms slander and libel.

Oh, and on a different note, congradulations to me on the birth of my new baby boy. I would say thank you sir for saying congratz and good tidings, but you haven't.