Quotulatiousness

March 14, 2024

Oddly, Jen Gerson finds her fears about the Online Harms Act unassuaged

There was a point during the last Line podcast where Jen Gerson used the word “assuaged”, and then realized that although she knows what it means and when it’s appropriate to use it, she didn’t know how to say it out loud (a problem I’ve encountered many times in my life, having read widely but not listened to lectures on the various topics I’ve read about). I reference that in the headline, as she recounts going through a belated “technical briefing” on the already tabled bill:

Let’s start by noting that it’s a little bit odd for a government to hold a technical briefing for a bit of legislation more than a week after that legislation has been tabled. Usually presentations of this kind are held for media, MPs, and various stakeholders as or just before a complicated issue or bill is about to be announced to the public.

For the federal government to hold a briefing on the Online Harms Act on March 6 — as it did — raises questions. Questions like “Why?” Questions like “Is this really a ‘technical briefing’ or is this an attempt to assuage concerns about what is actually written in the bill?” And, most importantly, questions like “Am I so assuaged?”

I think, dear readers, that I am not.

Let me explain by appending a caveat about the Online Harms Act, or Bill C-63, which was tabled about two weeks ago. About 75 per cent of what’s in this bill is either good, or benign but potentially useless, and is genuinely focused on mitigating real online harms like child porn and revenge porn. I might nitpick some of those parts if it weren’t for the rest of it. The rest of it consists of “will result in the most significant expansion of Canada’s hate speech laws and create one of North America’s most rigid regulatory environments for media and social media companies”, as law firm Norton Rose Fulbright put it.

In C-63, and its attempts to explain this bill, this government has consistently muddied the waters that delineate between hate crimes and hate speech, and has demonstrated a deep unwillingness to deal with the philosophical problem of defining hate speech in a way that is clear, consistent, and fairly and evenly applied. More specifically, the bill’s attempts to increase the penalties for “advocating genocide” to life imprisonment; the use of peace bonds for pre-crime hate speech; and the re-introduction of Section 13, to be administered by the already questionable Human Rights Tribunal apparatus. All of these present such punitive measures that they would have a chilling effect on speech that is fundamentally incompatible with the freedoms we expect in a Western liberal democracy.

There’s no nice way to put this. These measures reveal deeply authoritarian instincts toward speech and regulation, all the more pernicious as they’re being introduced by people who are absolutely convinced of their own righteous good intentions.

And that brings us back to the aforementioned technical briefing, which attempted to address each of these concerns in turn. I should note that I don’t believe I was invited directly to this briefing — and as I’m not in the Parliamentary Press Gallery, this is not surprising or unusual. I was, however, provided a copy of the briefing in its entirety, and I was told that I was free to quote from it, provided I did not name the Department of Justice official speaking.

To that end, I’d like to provide some excerpts and paraphrases from this briefing, followed by my own observations on what was being presented to an audience of, broadly speaking, laymen. I’ve also run these observations by criminal lawyers to ensure my understanding of the law is sound. If I am in error in any point, I welcome any correction.

March 13, 2024

The true “Online Harms” are coming from inside the bill

Even the state media lapdog CBC admits that the Trudeau government’s proposed Online Harms Act is an incredibly authoritarian piece of legislation:

Justice Minister Arif Virani is defending his government’s Online Harms Bill after celebrated Canadian writer Margaret Atwood shared views comparing the new legislation to George Orwell’s dystopian novel Nineteen Eighty-Four.

The award-winning author took to social media late last week to share an article from the British magazine The Spectator titled, “Trudeau’s Orwellian online harms bill”.

“If this account of the bill is true, it’s Lettres de Cachet all over again,” Atwood wrote on X, referring to letters once sent out by the King of France authorizing imprisonment without trial.

The federal government introduced late last month its long-awaited Online Harms Bill, which proposes to police seven categories of harmful content online, including content used to bully a child, content that sexualizes children or victims of sexual violence, content that incites violence or terrorism, and hate speech.

As part of proposed amendments, “hate speech” would be defined based on Supreme Court of Canada decisions.

“The possibilities for revenge false accusations + thoughtcrime stuff are sooo inviting!” Atwood wrote.

In Orwell’s cautionary novel about a totalitarian society, thoughtcrime is the illegal act of disagreeing with the government’s political ideology in one’s unspoken thoughts.

Atwood famously tackled authoritarian regimes in her novel The Handmaid’s Tale, in which a religious patriarchal society forces women to bear children and those who speak freely are severely punished.

March 12, 2024

Canada is rapidly becoming “a cauldron of authoritarianism”

The degree of control exercised over individual Canadians by various levels of government was already on the increase before the human rights disaster of the Wuhan Coronavirus pandemic handed the power mongers even more control than they’d dreamed of. In Spiked, Brendan O’Neill outlines the horrific Online Harms Act provisions for even more dystopian government oversight if it is passed in its current form:

It seems Justin Trudeau isn’t only a dick – he also gets his ideas from one. Philip K Dick, to be precise. Trudeau’s government has proposed a new law that would give judges the power to put an individual under house arrest if they fear he might commit a hate crime. That’s right – might. It’s right out of The Minority Report, Dick’s 1956 dystopian tale of a future America in which a “Precrime” police division uses intelligence from mutants known as “precogs” to arrest people before they’ve committed an offence. Welcome to woke Canada, where Dickian nightmares come true.

It is courtesy of Bill C-63 that the pitiable citizens of Canada might soon find themselves languishing in court-ordered confinement despite having committed no crime. The bill is devoted to tackling “hate” on the internet. As is always the case when officialdom puffs itself up and declares war on mean words online, it is riddled with draconianism. For example, the mad law, if passed, would allow people to file complaints (shorter version: snitch) to the Canadian Human Rights Commission if they spot “hate speech” online. Those found guilty of this sin of making a nasty utterance could be ordered to pay victims up to $20,000 in compensation. [NR: Other reports say it’s up to $50,000 with an additional $20,000 in fines … per complainant.]

Imagine the levels of grift this would give rise to. The offence-seeking snowflakes of the phoney left would finally be able to monetise their hurt feelings. Call a “transwoman” a fella and he (yes, he – sue me) could potentially drag you to the CHRC for a nice little payday. The law would incentivise complaint-making. Worse, it would foster self-censorship. Who would risk getting angry online, far less logging on when drunk to wind up the woke, when it’s possible they’ll have their pockets turned out by a misnamed Human Rights Commission so that some professional victim can be compensated for the pain of having seen a word or idea he doesn’t like?

It really is possible it will be ideas, not just blind hatred, that will be punished under C-63. The justice minister Arif Virani’s promise that speech that is “awful but lawful” will not be censored, and that a “high threshold” will have to be met before people are penalised for what they post, is not reassuring. After all, Canada’s a country in which entirely legit publications have found themselves under investigation by the Human Rights Commission just for publishing controversial matter. Maclean’s magazine had its collar felt by the human-rights overlords following a complaint from the Canadian Islamic Congress about an excerpt from a book by Mark Steyn. The CHRC also launched an investigation into Alphonse de Valk, a priest, after he raged with passion against same-sex marriage.

I’m not confident that a nation that has such an inquisitorial body, a body whose very description of itself as a “human rights” commission is a brazen act of Orwellian deceit, will keep its promise of permitting the expression of “awful” thoughts. So much is branded “hate speech” these days – from correctly calling “transwomen” men to saying Islam has a lot of dumb ideas – that it feels inevitable that the expression of fairly normal ideas that Canada’s woke regime just doesn’t like will get swept up in this crusade against “hate”. Indeed, under Canada’s C-16 gender-identity law, “deliberately misgendering” a trans person is treated as a potential “violation” of their human rights. I predict that C-63’s incentivising of snitching will cause an explosion in complaints of “misgendering”. Perhaps Canada will become a no-go zone for thoughtcriminals like JK Rowling.

But it is C-63’s proposal to introduce something like precrime into Canada that has caused most waves. The idea is that individuals who are talking shit online, especially if they’re aiming their invective at minority groups, could be ordered to stay indoors or to wear an electronic tag if a judge fears there could be an “escalation” in their behaviour. Precrime, then. Dick’s idea made flesh. The newspaper headlines give a sense of how chilling this suggestion is, how headlong Canada’s descent into dystopia has become. “Justice minister defends house-arrest power for people feared to commit a hate crime in future”, says the Globe and Mail. Mate, when you’re defending the confinement of people who’ve broken no law, it’s surely time to stop and think.

March 11, 2024

The ever-increasing risk that they’ll destroy the US political system to “save our democracy”

Filed under: Government, Law, Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

David Friedman outlines not only the threat of a re-elected Donald Trump, but the threat of what his opponents are clearly willing to do to stop him:

    I’ve run into a surprising number of progressives who apparently genuinely believe that if Donald Trump wins the 2024 election, that will be the last free and fair election that America ever has. These people believe that if Trump wins, then by the 2026 midterms, if not by the 2025 gubernatorial elections, Trump and his acolytes will have figured out a way to rig the elections, or disenfranchise large number of Democrats, or hack the voting machines, or some other nefarious plot that will end self-government. The irony is that these people are the mirror image of the Trump fans who insist that the 2020 election was stolen, and that Democrats (or the Deep State, or whomever) rigged the elections, hacked the voting machines, etc. (Jim Geraghty in National Review, “A Reality Check on the Trump-as-Dictator Prophecies“)

Trump is a competent demagogue but an incompetent administrator. Having won the election and become president, he did very little with his power. The most important thing he accomplished was getting three conservatives onto the Supreme Court, something that a more conventional Republican could probably have done as well.

He did, however, succeed in scaring the center left establishment, parts of the conservative establishment as well. He had no respect for the political, academic, media elite, for Hilary Clinton, Harvard professors, the New York Times or National Review. He was an outsider in a sense in which previous Republican presidents were not, with enough political support to raise the frightening possibility of a government, nation, world no longer going in what they saw as the right direction.

Responses included:

Russiagate, the attempt to claim that Trump was a Russian asset.

The attempt to discredit the information in Hunter Biden’s laptop, which included a bunch of former intelligence leaders implying, on no evidence, that it was a Russian plant, Twitter blocking links to the New York Post‘s article on the laptop.

After the 2020 election, with the federal government back in Democratic hands, attacks have mostly involved weaponizing the legal system to punish Trump and his supporters. The strongest of the cases against him, for deliberately holding classified documents after the end of his term, clearly illegal, looked less unbiased after it became clear that Biden had knowingly retained classified documents from his time as Vice President and knowingly revealed them (although, unlike Trump, he returned the documents once his retention of them became public) and was not being prosecuted. The weakest of the cases was a prosecution for an offense, falsifying business records, on which the statute of limitations had run — on the grounds that the expenditure being concealed had been intended to protect his image and so counted as a falsified campaign expenditure on which the statute had not run. That and prosecuting him for optimistic claims for the value of properties used as collateral for loans — all of which were repaid in full — and finding him liable for hundreds of millions of dollars in damages were based not on legal necessity but on the predictable bias of a judge or jury in New York City, where the 2020 electorate voted against Trump by more than three to one.

My previous post described a tactic by which, if Trump won the 2024 election, Democrats might have tried to prevent him from taking office. The recent Supreme Court decision makes that particular tactic unworkable but it is clear from the Atlantic article published before that decision that some Democratic politicians were willing to take the idea seriously. Arguable the three liberal justices took it seriously enough to object to the majority preventing it, although there are other possible explanations of their dissent from that part of the decision. The Colorado Supreme Court took seriously, indeed endorsed, the idea of defeating Trump by keeping him off the ballot. It is far from clear that if there is another opportunity to defeat Trump’s campaign in the courts instead of the voting booth it will not be taken. If, after all, the survival of American democracy is at stake …

Trump has been charged with both federal and state offenses. If he wins the election he can use the pardon power to free himself from conviction for a federal offense but not a state offence. James Curley spent five months of his term as mayor of Boston in prison for mail fraud, until President Truman commuted his sentence. Georgia’s Republican governor does not have the power to give pardons even if he wanted to; the State Board of Pardons and Paroles does but only after a convicted felon has served five years of his term. The governor of New York has the pardon power but is a Democrat unlikely to use it on Trump’s behalf. If Trump wins the election but loses at least one of the state criminal cases, does the state get to lock up the President?

Suppose that, despite any legal tactics of the opposition, Trump ends up in the White House, in control of both the federal legal apparatus and, through his supporters, those of multiple states. After the repeated use of lawfare against him by his opponents it is hard to imagine Trump refraining from responding in kind or his supporters expecting him to.

March 1, 2024

Online “harmful content” is in the eye of the beholder

It’s almost refreshing to find so many people realizing just how dystopian the Trudeau government’s proposed Online Harms Act could be if implemented in its current form. Ezra Levant on Twit-, er, I mean “X” points out to Jordan Peterson just how the system would be set up to suppress and punish online speech the complainant didn’t like:

For years the Canadian Human Rights Act (CHRA) has banned discrimination against people based on “gender identity or expression”. You of course have never discriminated against anyone.

But this new bill adds s. 13 to the CHRA, which now says that mere speech is considered discrimination if it is “likely to foment detestation or vilification of an individual or group”.

So now, if someone watches one of your YouTube videos or reads on of your tweets about, say, transgender athletes changing in the girls change room, and as a result is “likely” to have hard feelings towards trans people, that’s hate speech.

That’s step 1. Here’s step 2.

Any member of the public (including non-citizens) can lodge a complaint against you to the Canadian Human Rights Tribunal — an activist quasi-judicial tribunal run by non-judges, appointed by Trudeau.

They can get up to $20,000 per complaint from you — and they don’t have to be the “victim”. (There doesn’t have to be a victim at all — remember it’s a future crime. They only have to show that your tweet or video is “likely to” (i.e might) cause one person to have hard feelings about another person. $20,000 that you’d pay the complainant — plus $50,000 in fines to the government.

Per complaint.

So there could be a new complaint for every tweet you make. Every video. And the complainants can be professional busybodies and activists — they don’t have to be a “victim”.

Why wouldn’t woke activists literally file a CHRA complaint after every single thing you do or say on social media? It’s free. There’s no limit. Even if you “win”, you lose — the process is the punishment. And of course, they’re going to win. This will become an industry — to enrich woke grifters and destroy you financially.

But here’s the truly amazing part: the complainants can keep their identity a secret from you. Secret testimony from secret witnesses — who get paid up to $20,000 to take a run at you.

That’s how they’re going to come for you — and for us at @RebelNewsOnline

In the National Post, Jamie Sarkonak considers how the “digital safety” provisions of the Online Harms Act might be implemented:

The law would put “harmful content” in scope of government regulation by way of “arm’s-length” agencies. Targeted content would include media depicting sexual abuse (and understandably so), as well as any content that “expresses detestation or vilification” of any group considered by human rights legislation to be vulnerable and is likely to foment such feelings given the context of the communication (less understandably so). Identity-based protections are inherently more subjective, and they aren’t afforded equally to everyone: human rights law tends not to protect white people, for example.

The bill states that expressing disdain and dislike — or discrediting, humiliating, hurting or offending — is not necessarily hateful for the purposes of online regulation. Critically, it’s silent on what does make speech cross over into unacceptable territory. There’s no hard threshold.

At what point does discussion of the fact that most gender-diverse sex offenders in federal prison are transwomen (male) cross over into “harmful content” territory? Or the fact that Black people make up only three per cent of the population, but represent six per cent of all accused in criminal courts? Or the fact Eritreans in Canada, half of whom arrived after 2016, and who come from a country known for not cooperating with the deportation process, are increasingly rioting in response to politics back home?

Regardless, the promotion of actual hate propaganda, and the incitement of genocide, are already crimes in Canada, so the very worst speech was already covered by the current law and enforceable by the police. If the Liberals wanted better work done on these fronts, they could have simply raised police funding and staffed the courts with judges, as manpower is a primary constraint in dealing justice.

Instead of maintaining the systems that exist, the online harms law would add proactive measures in the form of a new bureaucracy to ensure that everything from genocide advocacy to the insulting recitation of upsetting facts don’t get out of hand. These will work in tandem with reactive measures: the crime of “hate crime” will be enforceable at criminal law, and the Canadian Human Rights Commission will be empowered to adjudicate cases of rights-violating content online.

August 8, 2022

The British left briefly rediscovers an interest in free speech … no, wait, they’re back to loving Big Brother again

In Spiked, Tom Slater recounts the brief moment last week that the great and good of British left wingers found nice things to say about freedom of speech. A very brief moment:

The British left – or what passes for it today – briefly pretended to care about free speech this week. Which was kind of cute. It was all sparked by Tory leadership no-hoper Rishi Sunak’s bonkers suggestion that people who “vilify” Britain should be put on the Prevent anti-radicalisation programme, alongside all the Islamists and fascists. “Who are the real snowflakes?”, thundered one left-wing commentator. “Fascism creeps ever closer”, warned Richard Murphy, a one-time adviser to Jeremy Corbyn, as he wondered out loud if he might soon end up in “some camp of Sunak’s choosing for ‘re-education'”.

This is probably the meme that Darren Brady posted which drew the attention of Hampshire Police’s crack “hurty words and pictures” squad last week.

Such principled expressions of horror, over an insanely authoritarian policy that almost certainly will never be implemented, might have had a bit more weight had the exact same people not studiously ignored a very real incident of state censorship – and attempted re-education – that went viral last week. I’m referring, of course, to Hampshire Police’s arrest of 51-year-old army veteran Darren Brady, all because he posted an offensive meme, which arranged four “Progress Pride” flags to resemble a swastika – a clumsy commentary on the authoritarianism of the contemporary LGBT movement.

The details chillingly echo Richard Murphy’s tweeted fever dream. Reportedly, the police had visited Brady 10 days before they tried to arrest him, informing him that he had committed an offence by posting the flag meme. They offered him a deal: pay for a £60 “community-resolution course” and they’d downgrade his offence to a “non-crime hate incident”, which would still appear on an advanced background check. Brady refused and contacted Harry Miller, leading campaigner against thoughtpolicing, who was present at the arrest and spent a night in the cells himself for trying to obstruct the cops. Going by the footage, now seen around the world, the (several) officers who attended Brady’s home had no idea what offence he was supposed to have committed, saying only that he had “caused anxiety”.

So, state censorship? Yep. Threats of re-education? Yep. The police showing up at someone’s door for no other crime than expressing an opinion? Big yep. Just because it was done in a Keystone Cops sort of fashion doesn’t make the treatment of Brady any less sinister. And yet there hasn’t been a peep of protest from the left-leaning intelligentsia. The armed wing of the state is going about harassing and arresting people purely for upsetting someone on the internet. And yet the people who pass themselves off as liberal, progressive, radical even, are clearly not the tiniest bit bothered about it.

Brady isn’t an isolated case, either. Britain is fast becoming a warning to the Western world about “caring” censorship, about trying to quite literally police “hurtful” speech. According to one investigation, nine people a day are arrested in the UK over offensive things they post on the internet. On top of that, more than 120,000 people have had so-called non-crime hate incidents recorded against their name. These alleged incidents needn’t be investigated or even be credible to be recorded. So much so that an Oxford professor once managed to get a hate incident recorded against then home secretary Amber Rudd, for a speech she gave about immigration that he later admitted he hadn’t even listened to, let alone witnessed in person.

February 13, 2022

In full: Rowan Atkinson on free speech

Defend Free Speech
Published 15 Aug 2018

The forerunner of the Defend Free Speech campaign was called “Reform Section 5”. This speech by Rowan Atkinson at the launch event in Parliament in 2012 should be heard by every politician, journalist and campaigner before they start calling for laws to silence those they regard as “extremists”.

December 8, 2021

Pandemic authoritarianism in the EU will be the death of Europe’s liberal traditions

In Spiked, Brendan O’Neill says we’re watching the “death of Europe” driven by the authoritarian instincts of government and EU leaders in thrall of public health officials:

Europe is on a precipice. It has marched, blindly, towards something very much resembling tyranny. Austria will shortly criminalise those who refuse the Covid vaccine. Germany looks set to follow. Ursula von der Leyen, president of the European Commission, is wondering out loud if every member state should do likewise and make offenders of those who reject this form of medication. In Italy you are deprived of your livelihood rather than your liberty if you say no to vaccination: the unvaxxed are not permitted to work. Anywhere. In Greece, everyone over the age of 60 must pay the government 100 euros for every month they remain unvaxxed. As if the Greek government, in cahoots with its masters in Brussels, had not immiserated Greek pensioners enough already.

Police in Rotterdam opened fire on people protesting against Covid restrictions. Three were seriously injured. Austrian cops have wielded batons and shields against the thousands who took to the streets of Vienna to say no to mandatory vaxxing. In Brussels, the black, bureaucratic heart of the EU project, water cannons and tear gas were unleashed upon citizens agitating against vaccine passes. The irony is almost too much: in the European quarter of Brussels, the very part of Europe in which the modern European sensibility was forged by politicians, experts and technocrats, ordinary people make a blow for freedom and the forces of this supposedly liberal new continent beat them down. Rarely has modern Europe’s bluster about “human rights” and “respect” been so savagely exposed.

What is happening in Europe right now is nothing short of terrifying. We are not merely witnessing another round of Covid restrictions. This isn’t just the introduction of another set of emergency measures that some people believe are necessary to stave off the latest Covid wave and the Omicron threat lurking on the horizon. No, we are living through a chilling overhaul of the entire relationship between the state and the individual, with the state empowered to such an extraordinary degree that it can now instruct its citizens on what to inject into their bodies, and the individual so politically emaciated, so denuded of rights, that he no longer even enjoys sovereignty over himself, over that tiny part of the world that is his own body and mind. We are witnessing the violent death of European liberalism and the birth pangs of a new and deeply authoritarian era.

Many seem not to recognise how serious a development mandatory vaccination is. Even those of us who are pro-vaccination, who have been happily vaxxed against Covid-19, should look with nothing less than horror upon the proposal that it should be an offence not to be vaccinated; that a citizen should be fined thousands upon thousands of euros if he refuses this treatment. One of the ideas being discussed in Austria ahead of its mandatory vax law that will be introduced in February is that citizens who refuse vaccination will be summoned to a local court. If they ignore the summons twice they will face a fine of 3,600 euros. If they continue ignoring the state’s demand that they receive medical treatment that they do not want, they’ll be fined 7,200 euros. These are life-ruining fines. There is no talk – yet – of imprisoning people who reject the vaccine, but the Austrian state is making it crystal clear that it will happily wield its power to propel the unvaxxed into destitution.

[…]

This spells the end of freedom as we know it. Bodily autonomy is the foundation stone of self-government, and self-government is the thing that gives freedom meaning. If we do not enjoy sovereignty over our minds and our flesh, then we are not free in any meaningful way. And it won’t just be the minority of people who feel forced to receive the vaccine whose freedom will suffer under this new regime of state power over people’s bloodstreams and muscles and flesh – everyone’s freedom will. The state diktat determining that only those who receive a certain form of medical treatment will get to enjoy freedom will make freedom itself contingent upon doing what the state wants you to. Even the vaxxed will not be truly free people in this world. Rather, we will be the beneficiaries of state favour, the enjoyers of small privileges, in return for our agreeing to receive an injection. We will have a license from on high to go about our daily lives. And we will know that that license could swiftly be revoked if we refuse medical treatment in the future. The redefinition of “freedom”, the making of liberty contingent upon submission to medicine, will throttle the rights of all of us – vaxxed and unvaxxed alike.

QotD: Self-bullying

Filed under: Health, Media, Quotations — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

On August 2nd, 2013, 14-year-old Hannah Smith of Leicestershire, England, took her own life. She had been receiving cruel messages on the social networking site Ask.fm for months, and her parents concluded that cyberbullying was the main cause of her suicide. But then evidence emerged that the hatred Hannah had been receiving came from … herself — 98 percent of the messages were posted from the IP address of the computer she was using.

This tragic event inspired a research project by Sameer Hinduja and colleagues at the Cyberbullying Research Center in Florida. Their analysis of around 5,500 teenagers produced some surprising results: “We knew we had to study this empirically,” Hinduja remarked, “and I was stunned to discover that about 1-in-20 middle- and high-school-age students have bullied themselves online. This finding was totally unexpected, even though I’ve been studying cyberbullying for almost 15 years.”

Boys reported digital self-harm more often (7.1 percent) than girls (5.3 percent). Asked why they participated in such behaviour, their replies included: “I already felt so bad with myself that I wanted to make myself feel even worse” and “I wanted to see if someone really was my friend.” However, there were also those who claimed that they did it to justify their aggressive behaviour towards others, or just for fun, to see how others would react.

If teenagers are prepared to harm themselves in cyberspace to attain the status of victim, it should not be especially surprising that some adults do so in the real world. In the most notorious example of this behaviour, actor Jussie Smollett told police he had been the victim of a racist and homophobic attack on January 20th, 2019. He immediately found himself at the centre of media attention and public opinion. But the subsequent investigation revealed that Smollett had paid two men to assault him and that he had sent himself the threatening letters he had received the week before.

This was not an isolated incident. In his book Hate Crime Hoax, political scientist Wilfred Reilly analysed 346 alleged hate crimes and found that fewer than a third were genuine. He provides detailed descriptions of almost a hundred high-profile cases that never actually happened, most of which were supposed to have taken place on university campuses. Reilly concludes that, contrary to popular belief, we are not experiencing an epidemic of hate crimes, but an epidemic of hate crime hoaxes perpetrated by people searching for public attention and sympathy.

Nor is it only hate crimes that are the subject of hoaxes and false accusations. A meta-analysis conducted by Australian scholars Claire E. Ferguson and John M. Malouff in 2015 revealed that as many as 5.2 percent of all reported rape cases are false. The authors note, however, that their analysis only accounts for accusations that were disproven in the course of investigations — many others were never confirmed or were withdrawn for reasons unknown.

Tomasz Witkowski, “The Victims’ Race”, Quillette, 2021-08-27.

July 25, 2021

The plight of the Uyghurs in China

Filed under: China, Government, Religion — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

In this week’s excerpt from his full Weekly Dish, Andrew Sullivan considers the Chinese government’s ongoing suppression of the Uyghur minority:

There’s a story in a recent Atlantic memoir by a Uyghur refugee that lingers in the mind. The Chinese authorities in Xinjiang Province now regard the possession of any religious literature, including the Koran, as prima facie evidence of terroristic activities. Terrified Uyghurs in Urumqi, the regional capital, have learned these past few years to quickly dispose of any such items — some throwing out books into the streets overnight so they could not be traced to their households. But one old man in his seventies forgot about a Koran he had possessed, and, coming upon it late, was too scared to hand it over, so threw it into a river. Alas,

    the authorities had installed wire mesh under all bridges, and when the mesh was cleaned, the Quran was found and turned over to the police. When officers opened it, they found a copy of the old man’s ID card: In Xinjiang, the elderly have a habit of keeping important documents in frequently read books, so that they are easily found when needed. The police tracked down the old man and detained him on charges of engaging in illegal religious activities. He was sentenced to seven years in prison.

The “prisons” this elderly, devout Muslim was shipped off to now have a capacity of around one million people. They have been built at breakneck speed. Buzzfeed News has found “more than 260 structures built since 2017 and bearing the hallmarks of fortified detention compounds.” The more recent building suggests they are going to become permanent parts of a bid to wipe Uyghur culture from the face of the earth.

The Atlantic story helps you understand how eerily reminiscent this campaign is to the early Nazi-era treatment of Jews, all the way down to the initial disbelief that the genocidal campaign was beginning, to the slow creeping oppression, the sudden new checkpoints and security procedures, the separation of Han and Uyghurs, knocks on the door at night, the attempts of some to escape without detection, and the sudden disappearances of friends, relatives, co-workers — never to be heard of again.

We cannot know for sure what happens inside the camps, but reports from survivors include torture, starvation, force-feeding, solitary confinement, and brainwashing. And in some ways, the entire region is now an open-air prison: security cameras are everywhere, the imprisoned are pressured to incriminate others, police go house to house searching for illicit materials, mosques and neighborhoods are razed, Uyghur language is banned, phones monitored, face recognition technology is ubiquitous. Family members, waiting for their turn to be arrested, leave notes like this one from a husband to his wife:

    If they arrest me, don’t lose yourself. Don’t make inquiries about me, don’t go looking for help, don’t spend money trying to get me out. This time isn’t like any time before. They are planning something dark. There is no notifying families or inquiring at police stations this time … I’m not afraid of prison. I am afraid of you and the girls struggling and hurting when I’m gone. So I want you to remember what I’m saying.

It’s important to note that the concentration camps for Muslims in China are not extermination camps. (At least not yet. “They are planning something dark” is not a sentence one ever wants to read.) But it is the greatest, systematic detention of a religious minority since the Second World War, championed by a newly emerged dictator-for-life, Chinese President Xi. And it is not going to stop any time soon.

August 25, 2020

QotD: Collective punishment

We used to take calls for collective punishment much more seriously. In the 1949 Geneva Convention it was determined that: “No protected person may be punished for an offense he or she has not personally committed.” Collective punishment was seen as a tactic designed to intimidate and subdue an entire population. The drafters of the Geneva Convention clearly had in mind the atrocities committed in WWI and WWII where entire villages and communities suffered mass retribution for the resistance activities of a few. In their commentary on the outlawing of collective punishment the International Red Cross stated: “A great step forward has been taken. Responsibility is personal and it will no longer be possible to inflict penalties on persons who have themselves not committed the acts complained of.”

In times of peace, collective punishment may come in the form of social media dust-ups over sombrero hats or Chinese dresses. Gradual softening on the taboo of collective punishment does not bode well for the health of liberal democracies. Which is also why it is important for us all to remember that social-justice activists who complain about cultural appropriation only represent themselves, and not the minority groups to which they belong.

Claire Lehmann, “The Evils of Cultural Appropriation”, Tablet, 2018-06-11.

May 16, 2020

Remy: “Surfin’ USA” (Beach Boys Lockdown Parody)

Filed under: Government, Health, Humour, Law, Liberty, USA — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

ReasonTV
Published 15 May 2020

Remy discovers the dangers of exercising alone.

Written and performed by Remy. Music tracks, mastering, and background vocals by Ben Karlstrom. Video produced by Meredith and Austin Bragg.

LYRICS:
If you go out on the ocean
Across the USA
And you’re wearing a swim shirt
‘Cuz of your scrawny weight (it’s for the sun, I swear)

Well, uh, you just might notice
The police in your wake
Cuz it’s illegal to be surfing
In the USA

They’re catching them out paddle boarding
Letting their children play
While they’re releasing this guy
A logical checkmate

You’re out in nature alone now
No one in six-foot range?
Well it’s illegal to be surfing
In the USA

If only you had flashed some children
It’d be your release date!
But you’re going to jail for surfing
In the USA

You’ve been distancing for months now
To keep the spread rate down
The only places you’ve been going
Are where there are no crowds

You’re making sacrifices
For your community
Now put your hands on your head because you are surfing
In the USA

He’s helping the flattening the curve now
He’s exercising alone
Rocking a super baggy swim shirt
To hide his muscle tone (I said it’s for the sun)

If only you had flashed some children
It’d be your release date!
But you’re going to jail for surfing
In the USA

The Wuhan Coronavirus, the excuse for an emergency without end

Mark Steyn on the seven-hundred-and-fifty-third day of our captivity:

Emergency without end is the staple of almost every futuristic dystopia — and that’s true for real life, too. So Americans shuffle shoeless through the airports for twenty years while their governments negotiate with the very organization that enabled those attacks — the Taliban — to restore them to power. Is a culture that cannot see off goatherds with fertilizer really going to rouse itself to decouple from a global superpower that supplies everything from its crappy “These Colors Don’t Run” T-shirts to its surgical masks and pharmacy medications?

~For my own part, I have been reading ancient accounts from Occupied France and Vichy for tips on finding workarounds for restraints on the citizenry. As wily and innovative as the French Resistance were, I wonder if their efforts would even be possible in an age when cheap Chinese-made drones can hover unseen and monitor every conversation.

[…]

Even without governors terrorizing those tavern-keepers or hairdressers who defy them, the lockdown has exaggerated the contradictions: The state wants open borders for “migrants” but a security perimeter around the homes of its citizens. Maybe the absurdities become so obvious that there is widespread rejection of them. Or maybe, one by one, the poor put-upon over-surveilled citizenry take a cue from their undocumented non-brethren. Perhaps I should just mug an illegal immigrant and steal his fake ID…

~The emergency is already feeling permanent. It starts with the social norms: Dr Fauci tells us the handshake is gone for good. That’s not a small loss. I don’t care for the suggested replacements, like the lame-o hand-on-heart gesture. I bow from the neck to the Queen — and just last year I did so to her Canadian vicereine, Mme Payette. Her Excellency then stepped forward and gave me a hug. But I don’t suppose she’s doing that anymore…

People ask me why I haven’t been on TV lately. Well, I mainly like going on TV to behave like a person who’s on TV. So, if you notice, on the “Fox & Friends” live-audience shows, I come bounding in like Tigger and do a lot of gladhanding with those on the aisle (including the odd hug), and then I give Steve and Brian manly handshakes and do a little light kissy-kissy with Ainsley. And all that — the basic language of telly for seventy years — is gone, apparently forever.

[…]

The WHO, the Beijing public relations firm whose pronouncements the BBC, The New York Times et al insist on taking as gospel, now says Covid-19 is here to stay — like HIV. With HIV, it wasn’t that difficult to avoid catching it, because it required the exchange of bodily fluids, which is a fairly intense and specific degree of intimacy. With Covid, we are rolling a protective condom down over every routine social intercourse.

A contributor at the Continental Telegraph explains why he no longer supports the lockdown:

First, it turns out that the drastic steps we were taking were based on one model. That no one outside the team using it was allowed to review. We were even told that we couldn’t check the coding because it was so old & patched together that it’s too hard to follow. That’s like saying you can’t check the brakes because you won’t be able to see all the duct tape and Velcro we’re using. Further, we’re told that this software doesn’t provide the same results from one run to the next.

Next, I heard about Dr. Ferguson’s history of wildly overestimating the fatalities from mad cow disease and bird flu (50k compared to <200, 200 million versus <500 respectively). Also, the CDC’s estimate of Ebola deaths in Sierra Leone (1.4 million compared to 8k). And let’s not forget the U.S. Public Health Service’s overshoot on the number of AIDS infections in 1993 (450k versus 17k). At this point I gave more thought to the issue of modeling – prior to retiring I was an actuary and modeling was what I did for a living. A few points about how modeling works: The more complex a system is, the more difficult it is to build a good model. And, more importantly, the more difficult it becomes to test your model and confirm that it accurately mirrors the real world. And this looks like one of the most complex systems to model I’ve ever heard of. How can you test this against reality? I don’t think you can. You can run simulations and confirm it looks like you expected, but that doesn’t mean the virus behaves like your model. Another point about modeling is that the results are extremely dependent on the assumptions you’re using. And in this case two critical assumptions are how infectious the virus is and how lethal it is. We still have a poor understanding of these variables months after we started Lockdown. Then a lot of us noticed that the goal shifted from “flattening the curve” to avoid a catastrophic overflow at hospitals to Lockdown until “fill in the blank” (in some states a vaccine, in others no deaths for 14 days, etc.). And the lockdown rules are inconsistent and illogical – in Michigan you can’t buy plant seeds but you can buy lottery tickets. To add insult to injury, many of the people with their foot on our necks violate the rules (the mayors of Chicago and New York, Dr. Ferguson, etc.). I’m stunned and angry at how little attention the human costs of the Lockdown receive. We know that this will lead to increased suicides, homicides and drug overdoses. Let’s not forget more child abuse, domestic violence, depression, drug and alcohol abuse, the list of miseries goes on a very, very long way (I may write up an article just on this, the Lockdown harpies should have to admit to all the harm they’re so enthusiastically spreading).

June 4, 2019

What do you get for your tax money?

Filed under: Britain, Bureaucracy, Government — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Alex Noble conducts a small experiment:

I suggest we stop thinking about taxes as paying for something useful – this type of thinking paralyses us and causes us to refuse to do that which needs doing. Because our taxes are supposed to pay for it.

We are no longer charitable, because our taxes pay for dole money.
We no longer look after the verge outside our homes, because our taxes are supposed to pay for a council worker with a strimmer.
We don’t repair potholes in our roads, because council workmen are supposed to fill them in.

Just to check that last one, I contacted my local council.

    “I was wondering if I could personally pay a local company to make repairs to the potholes that are causing damage to my car out of my money, and if so, would they be granted permission to close the road while my privately-funded repairs were being carried out?”

And they said…………

    “It would not be possible for you undertake these repairs, and no permission would be given to close the road.”

So I proposed I make a payment to them, to be spent on repairing the road:

    “…could I instead make a voluntary tax contribution on the condition the money is to be spent on these road repairs?”

And they said…

    “…the County Council will not accept payment from members of the public for the provision of highway maintenance over and above that already collected via the Council Tax”

I made one last attempt…

    “I have obtained quotes for the work which are acceptable to me and my neighbours – is there really no way we can as private individuals simply pay for the repairs to our road?”

They responded:

    “…it is not possible to accept any from of funding other than that accepted via the Council Tax and Central Government.”

So I just went out and bought a bag of sand and pounded it into the hole one night. A temporary fix, admittedly.

£5 of sand and five minutes of my time.

No doubt the council are scouring CCTV as we speak in an attempt to bring to justice the criminal that repaired the road.

May 3, 2019

The rarely used US Foreign Agent Registration Act (FARA)

Filed under: Government, Law, Liberty, Russia, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Ron Paul wonders why Russian national Maria Butina got a harsher sentence under the Foreign Agent Registration Act than an actual foreign agent who was paid millions of dollars by the Iraqi regime under Saddam Hussein:

Russian gun rights activist and graduate exchange student Maria Butina was sentenced to 18 months in prison last week for “conspiracy to act as a foreign agent without registering.” Her “crime” was to work to make connections among American gun rights activists in hopes of building up her organization, the Right to Bear Arms, when she returned to Russia.

She was not employed by the Russian government nor was she a lobbyist on Putin’s behalf. In fact the Putin Administration is hostile to Russian gun rights groups. Nevertheless the US mainstream media and Trump’s Justice Department are treating her as public enemy number one in a case that will no doubt set the dangerous precedent of criminalizing person-to-person diplomacy in the United States.

The Foreign Agent Registration Act (FARA) was passed in 1938 under pressure from the FDR Administration partly to silence opposition to the US entry into World War II. While a handful of cases were prosecuted during the war, between 1966 and 2015 the Justice Department only brought seven FARA cases for prosecution.

Though very few cases have been brought on FARA violations, one of them was against Samir Vincent, who was paid millions of dollars by Saddam Hussein to lobby for sanctions relief without registering. He got off with a fine and “community service.”

Millions of dollars in unregistered payments from Saddam Hussein gets no jail time, while Butina gets 18 months in prison for privately promoting a cause most Americans support! How is this justice?

The US Justice Department is not even as tough on illegals who commit capital crimes in the US!

Unfortunately Maria Butina was in the wrong place at the wrong time. With the rise of the “Russiagate” hysteria, Butina’s case was seen as a useful tool by Democrats to push the idea that President Trump was put into office by the Russians. Plus, many of them are also hostile to our Second Amendment and to the National Rifle Association. So it was a perfect storm for Butina.

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