Quotulatiousness

February 21, 2022

Trudeau government intends to keep (some of) the powers seized through illegitimate use of the Emergencies Act

Filed under: Cancon, Government, Liberty, Politics — Tags: , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

The Canadian government under Justin Trudeau took advantage of a peaceful protest in the streets of Ottawa to invoke the Emergencies Act, the modern-day successor to the War Measures Act (which itself had only ever been used three times). Nothing the police have done in Ottawa since the emergency was declared required the powers enabled under the legislation, but apparently the protest was just a pretext to let the government do what it really wanted to do anyway:

The regular weekly round-up from The Line was delayed until Saturday as the events in Ottawa were far too fast-moving to summarize at that point. Here’s part of the later newsletter:

As the protest in Ottawa winds down, your Line editors are beginning to ask themselves, perhaps too optimistically: what happens after the emergency is over?

The Liberal government has arrogated to itself enormous powers through the Emergencies Act: the most notable among them, the ability to freeze assets of protest participants without any kind of prior judicial approval or warrant. It’s not entirely clear to us what would constitute an offence that the government would consider serious enough to justify using this power.

If someone gave $500 to the protest movement three weeks ago, would that merit freezing a bank account? Is the number $5,000? Or $50,000? Would this act apply to independent media livestreaming the protests?

Complicating matters, on Wednesday, Justice Minister David Lametti gave an interview with CTV’s host Evan Soloman. Solomon asked whether ordinary people who donated to the trucker convoy should be worried about the provisions in the Emergencies Act. Lametti responded:

“If you are a member of a pro-Trump movement who is donating hundreds of thousands of dollars, and millions of dollars to this kind of thing, then you ought to be worried,” said Lametti.

Excuse us, but … wtf?

Threatening people who are donating cash to anything that can be construed as a “pro-Trump” movement suggests that attempts to freeze assets aren’t directed toward criminal behaviour, but are rather politically motivated.

We asked Lametti’s office for response to his “pro-Trump” comments and this was his response:

    “We always ask our police forces as well as our prosecutors to act reasonably, where they’re going to work with the banks to ensure that they act reasonably. Obviously there are going to be judgment calls that will be made and serious contributors will be treated more seriously. But, as always, we’re going to leave it to law enforcement to work with the banks, as they already do in other areas that already exist. Such as in anti-terrorism financing and in other areas through FINTRAC.”

This is, frankly, not much of an answer. It amounts to “we will be reasonable. Trust us!”

Well, we don’t. We don’t trust NDP leader Jagmeet Singh to hold this government to account in Parliament. We don’t trust the left to clue into the fact that the tactics used against the convoy will be used against their causes in turn. We don’t trust conservatives to show more principle or restraint when in power.

David Sacks, posting at Bari Weiss’s Common Sense blog, says that the federal government’s moves to seize bank accounts is a clear sign that we’re having a Chinese-style “social credit” system imposed on us:

Last summer, I warned readers of Common Sense that financial deplatforming would be the next wave of online censorship. Big Tech companies like PayPal were already working with left-wing groups like the ADL and SPLC to define lists of individuals and groups who should be denied service. As more and more similarly minded tech companies followed suit (as happened with social media censorship), these deplorables would be deplatformed, debanked, and eventually denied access to the modern economy altogether, as punishment for their unacceptable views.

That prediction has become reality.

What I could not have anticipated is that it would occur first in our mild-mannered neighbor to the north, with the Canadian government itself directing the reprisals. It remains to be seen whether Canada will be a bellwether for the U.S. But anyone who cares about the future of America as a place where citizens are free to protest their government needs to understand what has just occurred and work to stop it from taking root here.

[…]

Trudeau escalated things further on Tuesday night, when he issued a new directive called the Emergency Economic Measures Order. Invoking a War on Terror law called the Proceeds of Crime and Terrorist Financing Act, the order requires financial institutions β€” including banks, credit unions, co-ops, loan companies, trusts, and even cryptocurrency wallets β€” to stop “providing any financial or related services” to anyone associated with the protests (a “designated person”). This has resulted, according to the CBC, in “frozen accounts, stranded money and canceled credit cards”.

Banks, according to this new order, have a “duty to determine” if one of their customers is a “designated person”. A “designated person” can refer to anyone who “directly or indirectly” participates in the protest, including donors who “provide property to facilitate” the protests through crowdfunding sites. In other words, a designated person can just as easily be a grandmother who donated $25 to support the truckers as one of the organizers of the convoy.

Because the donor data to the crowdfunding site GiveSendGo was hacked β€” and the leaked data shows that Canadians donated most of the $8 million raised β€” many thousands of law-abiding Canadians now face the prospect of financial retaliation and ruin merely for supporting an anti-government protest.

Hard to disagree with Jon Kay here:

Jordan Peterson discusses the catastrophe of Canada with Rex Murphy:

February 20, 2022

That “small fringe minority … holding unacceptable views” and their banner of racism and white supremacy (checks notes) — the Canadian flag

Filed under: Cancon, Government, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

David Warren notes that if nothing else, the Freedom Convoy has managed to get some central Canadians to turn against the national flag:

There is one interesting, nearly universal feature of the demonstrations in Canada for political freedom. The members β€” called a “small fringe minority” by our prime minister β€” would seem to be almost entirely Christian. They are also patriotic, as is evident even to legacy media, who feel compelled to use photographs and footage, and thus to admit a fragment of the truth. Canadian flags are exhibited on the grilles of the honking trucks, and generally.

Indeed, a Globe reporter has tweeted that she is now traumatized by this experience, of being confronted by Canadian flags. She gags at what I used to call the “Pearson pennant”. (It is only in the last few weeks, that I have ceased to be “traumatized” by it, myself; though truth to tell, I’m not the “traumatized” type.)

But the Christian attachments, among the protestors, is not waved about as a flag. It is expressed mostly in prayers, and the articulation of blessings, and in subtle decorations worn close to head and heart, that may be illegal in Quebec.

Batya Ungar-Sargon reports on the situation in Ottawa for Spiked:

It’s been quite a few weeks for our neighbours to the north. Three weeks ago, a ragtag, grassroots campaign of disgruntled truckers made their way to the Canadian capital to protest a government vaccine mandate. As of last night, two of the organisers of what has been, by all accounts, a peaceful protest have been arrested, giving Canada – a country that bills itself a democracy – its first political prisoners in recent memory.

On Thursday, Chris Barber was arrested, while Tamara Lich had her personal bank account frozen and was detained on a charge of “aiding and abetting mischief” – a trumped-up charge resulting directly from a naked power grab by Canadian prime minister Justin Trudeau.

Instead of meeting with his citizens to hear their demands, Trudeau has spent the past three weeks smearing them as hateful and violent. On Monday he became the first Canadian leader to invoke the Emergencies Act – giving his government a series of draconian powers. Without one iota of evidence that the “violence” of the truckers’ protests has ever exceeded honking, Trudeau broadened the scope of Canada’s anti-money-laundering and terrorist-financing rules, putting the striking truckers on a par with terrorists, suspending their civil liberties and allowing banks to freeze the personal accounts of anyone linked to them. Now Trudeau is having them arrested. And on Friday morning, he cancelled a parliamentary session in which his edict was due to be voted on, and could have potentially been revoked, by the House of Commons or the Senate.

The truckers’ protest began with Trudeau smearing the truckers as Nazis and fascists – a line gladly repeated, day in day out, by reporters and pundits in the elite liberal media. It is now ending with those same elites cheering on Trudeau’s authoritarianism.

Although the media have promoted Trudeau’s falsehoods and cheered his overreach, many Canadians see the protests for what they are. The Canadian Civil Liberties Association is taking the federal government to court for invoking the Emergencies Act. “It’s possible for protests to be both disruptive and peaceful”, Noa Mendelsohn Aviv, its executive director, rightly argued. Others have pointed out Trudeau’s hypocrisy. In 2020 the Canadian PM threw his support behind both Black Lives Matter’s disruptive protests and protesting farmers in India who were blocking major highways. “Canada will always be there to defend the right of peaceful protest”, Trudeau said back then.

H/T to Samizdata for the link.

Of course, it’s totally reasonable (in the government’s view anyway) to set the mounted unit and riot-helmeted, baton-wielding police against the dangerous bouncy castle terrorists in Ottawa, but on the other side of the country actual terrorist actions are being downplayed:

There has been an outbreak of political violence in Canada. A member of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police was hurt and people going about their daily business were threatened by masked men with axes. Roads were blocked with barricades, Millions of dollars of damage was caused. At one point some of the workers were trapped in a building while the demonstrator tried to set light to it with them still inside.

This happened on Thursday night. It didn’t happen in Ottawa where hundreds of truck drivers maintained their protest despite emergency powers being granted to the authorities. Powers to steal their trucks, close their bank accounts – including those who have donated to their cause, and now they are talking about forcibly removing their children, and euthanising pet dogs, all because they have engaged in peaceful protest. People who have been vilified in the Canadian media as terrorists or as insurrectionists intent on overthrowing the democratically elected government of Canada as the January 6th protesters did at the White House, but this time in plaid shirts.

No this attack took place, not in Ottawa, but in British Columbia, at an industrial site. This is what the RCMP (Royal Canadian Mounted Police) had to say: “Shortly after midnight, Houston RCMP was called to the Marten Forest Service Road (FSR) after Coastal Gas Link (CGL) security reported acts of violence at their work site … approximately 20 people, some armed with axes, were attacking security guards and smashing their vehicle windows …

“Upon police attendance at the 41 km mark, the roadway had been blocked with downed trees, tar covered stumps, wire, boards with spikes in them, and fires had been lit throughout the debris. As police worked their way through the debris and traps, several people threw smoke bombs and fire lit sticks at the police, injuring one officer.

“At the 43 km mark, an old school bus blocked the road … When police arrived … they found significant damage had been done to heavy machinery, fencing, and portable buildings …

“This is a very troubling escalation in violent criminal activity that could have resulted in serious injury or death. This was a calculated and organized violent attack that left its victims shaken and a multimillion dollar path of destruction,” says Chief Superintendent Warren Brown, North District Commander, “While we respect everyone’s right to peacefully protest in Canada, we cannot tolerate this type of extreme violence and intimidation. Our investigators will work tirelessly to identify the culprits and hold them accountable for their actions.”

And from the “That was then, this is now” file, here’s Justin Trudeau taking a knee over police brutality in the far, distant days of the past:

H/T to JoNova for the screencap.

February 19, 2022

Freedom Convoy organizers arrested, Ottawa police “operations” pre-empt Parliamentary session to debate the invocation of the Emergencies Act. Just another day in Trudeaupia

Filed under: Cancon, Government, Liberty, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Parliament was scheduled to debate the Prime Minstrel’s use of the Emergencies Act, but the session was cancelled because the Ottawa police were conducting an “operation” on Parliament Hill. The police also warned journalists to avoid the area for their own safety. Nothing disturbing or authoritarian about attempting to ensure that there won’t be any independent reports on the “operation”, right? This isn’t the kind of “free and democratic society” most of us imagined it was just a few days ago.

Jordan Peterson points out the amazing tone-deafness of the federal government on yet another topic:

ReasonTV looked at the “Revolt of the Canadian Truckers” and compared it to other populist protest movements of recent years:

PPC leader Maxime Bernier sent out this email to supporters:

There is violence in the streets of Ottawa.

The police, armed with riot gear, are brutalizing and arresting peaceful demonstrators from the truckers’ convoy.

Meanwhile, Parliament is not sitting today because of this police operation. All parties agreed to stay away while the regime cracks down on dissidents.

Just like in a banana republic.

They should have been debating Trudeau’s decision to invoke the Emergencies Act.

The Emergencies Act replaced the War Measures Act in 1988. The only other times in Canadian history that it was invoked were during the First and Second World Wars, and during the October Crisis in 1970.

There is no emergency in Canada. No war, no insurrection, no terrorist attack, no sanitary or environmental catastrophe that justifies invoking this law.

It’s outright illegal, undemocratic, and unconstitutional for this government to give itself exceptional powers to deal with peaceful demonstrators.

It’s a power grab on Trudeau’s part to crush dissidence, that’s all it is.

Trudeau and his Finance minister Chrystia Freeland have given themselves the power to freeze the bank accounts not only of the organizers of the Freedom Convoy, but of anyone who is suspected of helping and funding them.

And we’re supposed to believe that a government that has violated our Constitution and our rights and freedoms for two year will not abuse these new powers?

Nicholas, it’s a dark day for Canada.

But it’s not over. We will continue to fight this authoritarian government, and bring back freedom, respect and justice to this country.

Don’t despair. Stay strong and free.
-Max

The good folks at Spiked explain why the truckers must win:

GiveSendGo sent an email in response to queries about whether the truckers had received the money that had been donated:

Where’s the money?

The questions keep on coming, so we want to answer!

The number one question people are asking right now is, “Have the truckers received the funds?” Our answer is this: “Yes, the truckers have received some of the funds paid out to the ‘Adopt a Trucker’ campaign.”

As this plays out with the Canadian government, there have been steps taken to prevent the funds from being “frozen”. Currently, the bulk of the funds are in an undisclosed U.S. bank.

Right now, the teams involved are actively discussing the legal options for getting the funds where they need to go. (Thank you to those who’ve sent in suggestions, you’ve definitely had some creative ones!)

What we need from you:

We ask that you do not request a refund at this time as these funds will be needed for the truckers and their legal teams. Additionally, please be patient and pray for wisdom for all involved. We will keep you updated as we move forward.

Thank you for all your prayers and support over these past few weeks!

“But as for you, be strong and courageous, for your work will be rewarded.” ‭‭2 Chronicles‬ ‭15:7

‭‭Shine Brightly!

Antique Antics: The Doge’s Palace

Filed under: Architecture, Europe, Government, History, Humour — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Overly Sarcastic Productions
Published 5 Nov 2021

To celebrate my marriage to my Darling Wife Cyan, I asked her to select this video’s topic. Now, given she chose Venice, I wonder who truly gave the gift to whom?

SOURCES & Further Reading: A History of Venice by John Julius Norwich, Francesco’s Venice by Francesco Da Mosto, Venice: City of Dreams from Rick Steves’ Europe, and perhaps literally the most fun source I’ve ever stumbled upon: a 17-page document from the actual Museum of the Doge’s Palace in Venice, explaining the history of the building and the collections inside. The bottom of their building-history webpage has a link to download the magnificent full-PDF, enjoy: https://palazzoducale.visitmuve.it/en…

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February 18, 2022

The “small fringe minority … holding unacceptable views” who can now have their bank accounts seized without recourse

Filed under: Cancon, Government, Politics — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Prime Minstrel Justin Trudeau invoked the Emergencies Act earlier this week, which gives the federal government the kind of powers previously reserved for wartime. Among other measures, it is claimed that the act gives the feds the power to have Canadian banks seize the accounts of Canadians holding unacceptable views. Even those of us who donated to the support of the trucker convoys in Ottawa and several border crossings are now “legally” able to be deprived of our property. This is far from the kind of free and democratic society most of us thought we inhabited before the public health crisis of the Wuhan Coronavirus somehow transmuted our country into a would-be dictatorship.

At Essays in Idleness, David Warren demands that we stop it now:

The idea that one has the right, under a “Charter”, to speak freely, demonstrate and protest, but not the right to occupy physical space and time, has long been apparent to persons of the cold-blooded, criminal disposition.

In this respect Justin Trudeau is hardly unique. Like, for instance, the New Zealish prime minister, Jacinda Ardern, he rose to his present eminence as the embodiment of an empathy, that was entirely fake. Indeed, he had no other skills or gifts, and like Miss Ardern, has only offered administrative incompetence. He is what we call “a nasty piece of work”.

He has now declared a national State of Emergency: because there are trucks parked illegally on Wellington Street in Ottawa. Had he been quicker with his proclamation, he could have mentioned a bridge in Windsor and border crossings in Manitoba and Alberta. But this would not have made his claim more plausible, as all the demonstrations were provocatively peaceful. The only chance of violence is to use force against them.

An economy is a controversial thing, for economic activity will often involve the use of space and time. For instance, truckers, and most others who are inclined to resist government “mandates”, are known to have bank accounts. They buy food to put in themselves, and fuel to put in their vehicles. By “freezing” these financial instruments, Trudeau vainly hopes to starve his opponents into panicked submission.

As Jen Gerson notes on Twitter, Canada is suffering a psychotic break. The technical term is “Bug Fuck Crazy”:

She continues:

I mean, perhaps this was inevitable. No country can be this uptight and stoic for so long without losing its collective bugfuck crazy mind eventually.

    @MacLeodKirk: Yeah, to be honest I’m rather tired of us measuring our level of excellence based on the batshit crazy happenings in the US.
    Perhaps we could aim just a tad bit higher?

The difference is that America can tolerate a certain baseline level of crazy. It’s like having an alcohol tolerance.

Canada, by comparison, is an 18-year-old Ontario girl crossing into Quebec and taking her first shot of Sourpuss right now. We can’t handle our shit.

“ALL OF YOU ARE ACTING LIKE CRAZY PEOPLE” she screamed into the Internet abyss before throwing her wine glass at the wall and disappearing for three days.

Earlier this week, the government’s spokesgoons in the media made not-so-veiled threats against the children of truckers and other supporters. On Thursday, Ottawa officially threatened to dognap any pets at the protest … for their own good, of course. Interestingly, Thursday was also the day that workers began to install a fence around the Parliament buildings, in imitation of the fortifications at the American Congress.

Malcom Kyeyune calls it “Justin Trudeau’s phoney dictatorship”:

When Justin Trudeau invoked emergency powers to quell protests against mandatory Covid-19 vaccinations this week, it was another sign that for Western liberal democracy, business as usual is over. This is the first time Canada’s Emergencies Act has ever been called upon by a Prime Minister. Its predecessor, the War Measures Act, was used three times: once for World War One, once for World War Two, and once to deal with a violent campaign of bombing, kidnapping, and murder by Quebecois separatists in 1970.

Yet Trudeau’s invocation of the Emergency Act is also a bizarre moment. Consider that the law stipulates that the government can fine people violating the act between 500 and 5,000 dollars. On the face of it, these are not numbers that seem commensurate to punish violators of the most powerful emergency law in the Canadian state’s armoury. But the reason these numbers seem so strange is simple: the law hasn’t been updated to keep up with the times, or inflation.

The oddness doesn’t end there. A law that in a real sense was forgotten β€” and designed to handle the most extreme situations a nation state can find itself in β€” is now dredged up to deal with a fairly routine political protest. Trudeau, and his finance minister Chrystia Freeland, have also called on financial institutions to freeze or suspend any bank accounts without a court order if they are being used to fund the protests. They believe, as David Frum writes in The Atlantic, that the truckers represent a “form of performative intimidation”.

Compared to the mass burning and vandalism of Catholic Churches in Canada last summer β€” which Trudeau both denounced and sympathised with, calling the arsons “understandable” at one point β€” the truckers hardly represent a nadir of public order. Across the border in the United States, the rioting that occurred there in the summer of 2020 involved loss of life, and massive damage to property. Back then Kamala Harris’s response was markedly similar to that of Trudeau β€” hand-wringing, sure, but also sympathy with the motivations of those who rioted.

Perhaps buildings being burned down, sometimes with their occupants still inside them, is just part and parcel of living in a vibrant democracy. Meanwhile, a protest that has led to zero loss of life and no torched buildings is cast as a grave threat to democracy. Put up bouncy castles for kids to play in and have public barbecues, as the truckers have done? Then, in the words of the New York Times‘ editorial board, you are “far-Right”, and represent a “test of democracy” itself.

Or you will be accused of “sedition” by the usually phlegmatic Mark Carney. The former Bank of England governor may support Trudeau’s use of emergency powers, but by all indications it is a spectacularly ill-conceived move. Many provincial leaders are already openly rejecting the necessity of such extreme measures.

Kim du Toit responds to a rant by one of Sarah Hoyt’s contributors:

As I see it, most ordinary Americans β€” if faced with the choice β€” would rather go to war against our own government than against Canada, present company included.

And as Mr. Free Market put it to me during a semi-drunken phone call last night: how bad does the Canadian government have to be, to have pissed off the nicest, politest people on the planet?

They’re so nice that SoyBoy Trudeau is highly unlikely to have a CeauΘ™escu Moment, even though it could be argued that he deserves one

As always, Canadians love it when foreigners (especially Brits and Americans) call us “nice” and “polite” … it shows they don’t follow hockey or know many actual Canadians. Canadians are polite, generally, but it’s a kind of passive-aggressive niceness that can snap unexpectedly under sufficient provocation, then the gloves come off and there’s blood on the ice. That last bit is only sometimes metaphoric.

February 15, 2022

King James I and his court favourites

Filed under: Britain, Government, History — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

In the latest Age of Invention newsletter, Anton Howes continues the tale of King James I of England (also King James VI of Scotland at the same time, the crowns still being legally separate) and his use of favourites to help him avoid going back to Parliament to ask for money:

Portrait of George Villiers, First Duke of Buckingham, 1625.
Oil painting by Peter Paul Rubens (1577-1640) via Wikimedia Commons.

At the same time, James found a way to filter many of the petitions before they even reached him. This was something he already did in his original kingdom, Scotland, occasionally sending a noble “favourite” β€” like his kinsmen the duke of Lennox and the marquess of Hamilton β€” to dispense patronage and manage its parliament. Yet he increasingly, and even scandalously, relied on favourites in England too.

Using a favourite could make some sense from a political standpoint. Favourites often owed everything they had in terms of wealth, protection, titles and standing to the king personally. As creatures of the king, their loyalty was assured. They served an important practical function by dispensing patronage and absorbing pesky petitions, and could insulate the king himself from blame. Should the king make a mistake, his favourite was the obvious man to take the fall.

But for James, the use of favourites went beyond mere practicality, if they were ever practical at all. His interest could also be romantic.

Although James was married with kids, his favourite by 1607 was one Robert Kerr, the younger son of a minor Scottish laird. A mere groom of the bedchamber, about twenty years James’s junior, he had fallen from his horse in a jousting accident and broken his leg. The king helped nurse him back to health, and was soon besotted. Kerr β€” often anglicised to Carr β€” was very rapidly given money, titles, and lands. Within a year he had been knighted, after four years made a viscount, and in 1613 an earl.

But what had been so rapidly gained, could be just as rapidly lost. In 1614, a rival faction at court made sure that another, even younger and more attractive man would catch the king’s eye. This was George Villiers, the 22-year-old younger son of an obscure knight. With his “effeminate and curious” hands and face, as well as a remarkable physique β€” a clergyman, later a bishop, marvelled at his “well compacted” limbs β€” Villiers’s rise made Kerr’s seem slow. Every year brought him a new title: in 1615 Villiers was made a knight, 1616 a viscount, 1617 an earl, and 1618 a marquess β€” a very rare title in England, last given to an influential co-regent of Edward VI, and before that to Anne Boleyn so that she could marry king Henry VIII.

Eventually, incredibly, in 1623 James made Villiers a duke. This was a title that was typically reserved for members of the royal family, or else given by very powerful regents to themselves β€” Villiers was the first in neither of those categories to be made a duke in 140 years. And he hadn’t even been born into the nobility! The apparent lesson: working on your triceps can really, really pay off.

Yet Villiers had more than just an angelic face and muscles. He seems to have had a real talent for politics, very quickly asserting independence from the faction that had put him before the king. And he would somehow remain the favourite even after James died and was succeeded by his heterosexual son, Charles I. In the dangerous waters of courtly faction β€” Robert Kerr had meanwhile been found guilty of murder and was imprisoned in the Tower β€” Villiers knew how to keep himself afloat, and even to chart a course of his own.

And he was extraordinarily corrupt.

February 14, 2022

QotD: Canadians and imaginary peacekeeping

Filed under: Cancon, Government, Military, Quotations — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

… the word “peacekeeping” triggers a series of powerful memories and positive images in the Canadian mind: Lester Pearson’s Nobel Peace Prize; a Canadian soldier in a blue helmet interposed between warring factions; the peacekeeping monument in Ottawa, and the widely believed mantra that, while Americans make war, we Canadians keep the peace.

Canadians are fixated on peacekeeping. We believe that Mike Pearson invented it, that Canadians are the best in the world at it, and that if we do peacekeeping, ideally for the United Nations, then we will not need large numbers of troops or much expensive equipment. The idea of peacekeeping as our mΓ©tier has certainly shaped Canadian defence policy, and not for the better. The billions of dollars that Liberals and Conservatives have belatedly pledged to rebuild the Canadian Forces will take years to make a difference and to undo four decades of neglect …

J.L. Granatstein, “Wake up! This is our war, too”, Globe and Mail, 2006-02-28.

February 13, 2022

Update on that “small fringe minority … holding unacceptable views”

Filed under: Cancon, Government, Health, Liberty, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

First up, David Warren has a few “little truths” to share:

A screenshot from a YouTube video showing the protest in front of Parliament in Ottawa on 30 January, 2022.
Photo via Wikimedia Commons.

My mind is in Ottawa, and all other places in Canada and abroad where people are struggling to get their lives back β€” now, before they die. These people are overwhelmingly the self-employed, and workers in small businesses: such as truck drivers, who bought their own rigs. They have consistently been made to pay in many ways for government lockdown measures, and are generally despised by the “laptop class”, who cannot lose their jobs, and work from home.

Few people in the Big City (which includes Toronto and Ottawa) have ever met a trucker, or would think of chatting with him. They may patronize small “boutique” operations, for conspicuous consumption. But Amazon drivers deliver their regular goods, and their services, too, are mostly dialled up.

True, the Batflu has sometimes interfered with their holiday bookings, so I must add, boo hoo.

A Rasmussen report on public opinion recently showed that in America, three-quarters of Democrats supported vaccine mandates, more than half thought those who refuse should be fined, and almost half would give them gaol sentences. Nearly a third thought the “vaccine hesitant” should have their children taken away. As Californicators, and the inhabitants of most urban constituencies, seldom have children, this can be received with rolling eyeballs. For luckily, there are Republicans in the more rural places, whose votes are sometimes counted.

Ottawa (outside “the Valley”) offers a caricature of this point of view. I recall my days as a columnist, published in the Ottawa Citizen. (Eventually, I was deleted.) To walk downtown was to invite verbal assaults by those who recognized my mug in the paper. Some were actually friendly, and said hiya. But I was often called a fascist, or something else obscene, by people who didn’t notice I was human. “Are you David Warren?” the grim inquiry would come. I tried to counter it with some jest. (“It depends: do you like David Warren?”) This might cause my assailant great pain. (Humour is violence, as every Leftist knows.) But it was tiresome for both of us.

One may check election results from the middle of that town, to learn that a large majority of its inhabitants vote Liberal, in the manner of zombies. One thinks of The Invasion of the Body Snatchers.

Rex Murphy (paywalled, unfortunately, so no link) suggests that things are desperate within the imperial capital thanks to the ravaging barbarians beseiging Caesar Justin:

How deep is the terror in our once cozy capital? I am told there are certain fine bakeries in Ottawa where it is no longer possible to get a fresh croissant. There are advisories warning about heading out alone to go to yoga classes. And there are rumours that DoorDash delivery from the better Italian restaurants can take over an hour. It is a horror, a scene too grim for the human mind to grasp, or the human heart to bear. In occupied Ottawa, you may, unasked, be offered soup. Where is the United Nations? Is the Security Council asleep?

Not to despair completely, however, as Canadians know that when the politicians fail, the police stand idle and the military are still, they have the Ottawa press gallery.

It is they who alerted us to the Confederate flag guy. The tribunes of the CBC have been all over him. There’s hardly been a report without the mention of a Confederate flag at the protest. Mention of the wildly more numerous Canadian flags have been wisely subdued.

The national press have been unmatched in getting the word out on what the brigands and racists and misogynists and white supremacists and yobs and Islamophobes and louts have inflicted on our national capital. With strong earplugs and stouter hearts, they have braved the chaos, enduring “taunts”. They shuffled past parked transport trucks, some of them with Alberta drivers in the cabs!

But the real glory belongs further up. The fact that Canada is, for the moment at least, still functioning as a country is a miracle due to the steel will and captivating oratory of our resolute prime minister. Much like England in those tenebrous days of 1939, our country has found its Churchillian voice.

In the free exerpt from his Weekly Dish newsletter, Andrew Sullivan admits that despite acquiring deep knowledge and understanding of Canadian culture from the invaluable South Park, he did not see the truckers’ protest coming:

To be honest, I didn’t quite see the Canadian truckers coming. I’ve watched a lot of Canada coverage over the years (mainly via South Park, I concede) and the whole anti-vaxxer, campfire-burning, horn-tooting, macho revolt among our gentle neighbors to the north nonetheless took me by surprise.

Rob Ford was a harbinger, I guess. It’s as if the ancient, manly, lumberjacky Canadian id was finally roused from its cultural slumber by a soy-boy prime minister, forcing truckers to take a jab or forfeit their livelihood. And some reports suggest that the vaccine issue seems just the proximate trigger for the rage, and not the real source β€” a rage which has been steadily building for some time, especially in the pandemic, in the most progressive-left country on the planet.

And there’s something very blue-collar male about this populist anger. Trump, of course, identified the testosterone tribe he helped define and rally:

    I can tell you I have the support of the police, the support of the military, the support of the Bikers for Trump β€” I have the tough people, but they don’t play it tough β€” until they go to a certain point, and then it would be very bad, very bad.

You can see similar “tough people” fault-lines in the other recent Covid contretemps involving Joe Rogan. The millions of men (71 percent male, and evenly split between high school and college grads) who listen to Rogan’s legendary podcast have rallied to him, even as the media establishment has been waging a fully-flexed campaign against him and some of his Covid coverage. There’s something about masking β€” chin-diapers β€” and mandating vaccines, and vaccines themselves, that some men seem to find feminizing.

February 12, 2022

QotD: One of those pre-9/11 things we’ve lost … personal dignity

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Government, Liberty, Quotations, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

I was directed, shoeless, into the little pen with the black plastic swinging door. A stranger approached, a tall woman with burnt-orange hair. She looked in her 40s. She was muscular, her biceps straining against a tight Transportation Security Administration T-shirt. She carried her wand like a billy club. She began her instructions: Face your baggage. Feet in the footmarks. Arms out. Fully out. Legs apart. Apart. I’m patting you down.

It was like a 1950s women’s prison movie. I got to be the girl from the streets who made a big mistake; she was the guard doing intake. “Name’s Veronica, but they call me Ron. Want a smoke?” Beeps and boops, her pointer and middle fingers patting for explosives under the back of my brassiere; the wand on and over my body, more beeps, more pats. The she walked wordlessly away. I looked around, slowly put down my arms, rearranged my body. For a moment I thought I might plaintively call out, “No kiss goodbye? No, ‘I’ll call’?” But they might not have been amused. And actually I wasn’t either.

I experienced the search not only as an invasion of privacy, which it was, but as a denial or lowering of that delicate thing, dignity. The dignity of a woman, of a lady, of a person with a right not to be manhandled or to be, or to feel, molested.

Peggy Noonan, “Embarassing the Angels”, Wall Street Journal, 2006-03-02.

February 11, 2022

QotD: “By their proposals, shall ye know them”

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Business, Government, Liberty, Quotations, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

Of politicians in power it might be said, “By their proposals, shall ye know them.” What they say they want to do is almost as significant as what they actually succeed in doing, for it offers an insight into their fundamental philosophy or state of mind. This is especially important, of course, when they seek to cling on to power by re-election or by some other means such as behind-the-scenes-influence.

That is why the proposal that the IRS should have access to the data of all bank accounts from which or into which more than $600 a year are paid (hardly a king’s ransom) is so important, despite the fact that it has not been enacted. The very fact that someone wanted to enact it, and thought it right that it should be enacted, is highly significant β€” and sinister β€” in itself, for the proposal demonstrates a totalitarian mindset.

The ostensible purpose of the proposal, of course, is the elimination of tax evasion. (Incidentally, I have noticed recently an increasing tendency, in the press and elsewhere, for the term tax avoidance to be used interchangeably with that of tax evasion, as if the difference between legality and illegality were of no real importance. This conflation is itself indicative of a totalitarian attitude, according to which a governmental end may be reached without the necessity for any law.)

The people who proposed that, in effect, every bank account should be routinely available for examination by the IRS, without any specific warrant for such an examination, thereby revealed that they thought that the gathering of tax so important that it superseded all other considerations.

Psalm 24 begins: “The earth is the Lord’s, and the fulness thereof, the world and they that dwell therein. For he hath founded it upon the seas, and established it upon the floods.”

A better version, according to the proposers, would be: Money is the government’s, and the fulness thereof, money and they that have any. For it hath founded it upon the printing press, and established it as legal tender.

I do not go as far as some economists of my acquaintance, who believe that tax evasion is a citizen’s civic duty: at least it is not in the circumstances prevailing in any western country, however unsatisfactory they may be. In my own case, I do not evade taxes and even my attempts to avoid them are rather feeble, for unfortunately there is so little at stake.

But I reject completely the idea that, morally, the first call on anyone’s money is the government’s, which in effect has the right to leave you pocket money by its grace and favor after you have paid your taxes at any rate that it likes. This is the very tyranny that the founders of America feared in majoritarian democracy, untempered by inalienable rights β€” inalienable even, or especially, by or to the government.

Theodore Dalrymple, “Monitoring Bank Accounts Would Make the People of the Government, Not the Government of the People”, The Iconoclast, 2021-11-01.

February 10, 2022

QotD: Classical Greek Polis governance

Filed under: Europe, Government, Greece, History, Quotations — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

Before we dive in, I want to give a brief primer on the basics of how nearly all Greek poleis – Athens, Sparta, Corinth, Thebes, Plataea, Tegea, whatever – are structured, because it’ll help in understanding Sparta. (Reminder: the polis, sometimes called a city-state, is the basic unit of Greek governance – these are all independent micro-states).

The standard ingredients of a Greek polis are an assembly of all adult citizen males (often called an ekklesia, meaning “assembly”), a smaller advisory committee (frequently called a boule), and then a set number of elected officials who carried out the laws of the other two (magistrates). I’ve given the common names for these components, but they often have different names in different poleis.

Those basic units don’t change from a democracy (like Athens) to an oligarchy (like Corinth) or even a tyranny (like Syracuse) – the type of government just reflects the division of power between them, and the method of selection. In a democracy, like Athens, the ekklesia will have most of the power, being able to overrule the boule or the magistrates. Often the members of the boule can come from a wide range of wealth classes or even be randomly selected.

In an oligarchy, power is generally focused in the magistrates – drawn from the upper-crust of society – and a smaller boule, with the ekklesia having much less power to restrain them. Alternately, the ekklesia may be restricted in size to only a wealthy subset of the citizenry. In a tyranny, a single person (the tyrant) is able to gain control of the system, through a mix of demagoguery, charisma and well-placed cronies. Even under a tyranny, the basic three-part system still exists, it is simply subverted and controlled by one person (much like how some modern dictatorships have all of the institutions of a democracy – courts, elections, etc – but all of the power is still in one set of hands and the elections are shams).

I want to note this up front because it is important to recognize that the existence of a popular assembly does not make a Greek polis a democracy, nor does the existence of a powerful magistrate make it a tyranny. As we’ll see, Sparta has an assembly, it is just laughably weak; it also has two very powerful magistrates, but their power is strongly checked. What matters is the division of power between these parts. I also wanted to start here because Sparta follows this basic model, but with some interesting variations. Knowing what the normal model looks like will make it easier to spot the variations that are unique to Sparta.

Bret Devereaux, “Collections: This. Isn’t. Sparta. Part V: Spartan Government”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2019-08-29.

February 9, 2022

QotD: Paper or plastic?

Filed under: Business, Economics, Environment, Government, Quotations — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

In his Nobel Lecture, The Pretence of Knowledge, Friedrich Hayek told us that it was never going to be possible to centrally plan an economy for economies are big, complex, even chaotic, things. That centre can never gain enough information in real time to be able to make decisions which bear much relation to reality. We can also run his logic backwards, if we do insist upon planning then we can only have a simple economy – all the knowledge we have allows us to plan – and simple economies are poor ones with poor people in them. Planning and poverty or market chaos and wealth: take your pick.

This point is illustrated in microcosm by those trying to get rid of single use plastic bags. The 5p charge for plastic bags has meant the sale of billions of so-called bags for life, which use twice as much plastic as the cheaper alternative. All those bags for life mean we use more plastic than we started with and even, possibly, more bags themselves. This was something that was warned about before the plastic bag charge was introduced, with some observing that even “single use” bags did tend to get used more than once.

So far, then, we have learnt that the planning deployed to reduce plastic has had the opposite effect. That, however, has not stopped the central planners from redoubling their efforts. The necessary charge for a bag is to double, the system is to be expanded to the tens of thousands of small shops that don’t currently have to charge. “It doesn’t work, let’s have more of it”, the cry of bureaucracies through the ages.

But this is the blending of government planning with the fashionable nostrums of our day so of course it gets worse. It’s not even true that the bags for life – and especially not the cotton ones, even less so the organic cotton – are more environmentally friendly than the single use ones. Even recycled ones use more resources than single-use ones – for yes, recycling is an industrial activity using energy and other resources.

We can even construct a little spectrum here. How many times do we need to reuse a bag for it to have as little resource use – and thus environmental effect – as just the one use of those thin single use plastic ones? Obviously enough, the single use that we’re told not to use has a value of one here. The bag for life must be reused 35 times. A bag for life from recycled plastic 84 times. A paper bag must be reused 43 times – yes, paper. A cotton bag 7,100 times and an organic cotton? 20,000.

Which is the environmentally friendly option here? Clearly and obviously the one that everyone insists we must not use. So much for fashionable nostrums then.

Tim Worstall, “Plastic bags and the problem with central planning”, CapX, 2019-01-02.

February 8, 2022

“… across the developed world the elite rise up against the masses: it’s like an anti-1848, prefiguring the post-democratic era that the 2020s will usher in”

Filed under: Cancon, Government, Health, Liberty, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

A round-up at SteynOnline of various “elites” in Canada and elsewhere rising up against the sexist, hate-speechin’, Islamophobic, transphobic, Putin-controlled white supremacists who are demanding an end to rule-by-decree:

In Ottawa, attempts by agents provocateurs to provoke violence at the Freedom Rally have gone nowhere. So last night, “anti-hate” buffoon Bernie Farber, friend to censors everywhere, was reduced to hate-hoaxing for Justin by circulating “anti-semitic flyers” sent to him by a “friend” “in Ottawa”. Inevitably, within moments, they were revealed to be from something entirely different in Florida some weeks ago. So Bernie explained that his imaginary friend in Ottawa had seen actual hate flyers in Ottawa but had accidentally emailed him a similar flyer from America or something … These days Farber disgraces even himself.

Meanwhile, the Ottawa police have begun arresting citizens trying to deliver food to the truckers. There is no basis in Canadian law for the actions these goon coppers are taking, but the attitude of their dreadful police chief is: hey, the law is whatever I say it is. So he has ordered the arrest of citizens for “mischief”. By mischief, he means bringing sustenance or heat to protesters passing the night in temperatures of twenty below.

~Many parts of the western world are in a very dark place right now, but none more so than Canada. Its unseen prime minister, who came into office promising “sunny ways”, can no longer appear in public and sweepingly, tweetingly declares that he doesn’t need to because the sort of chaps you run into out there are rubes who don’t even know they’re Islamophobes, transphobes, thisaphobes, thataphobes, too dumb even to be aware they’re working for Putin.

As Tucker and I used to joke five years back, across the developed world the elite rise up against the masses: it’s like an anti-1848, prefiguring the post-democratic era that the 2020s will usher in. The present showdown between the Bollywood Bridesmaid and the truckers who deliver his quinoa has made it about as explicit as you can get. The good humour in the face of elite contempt is impressive. Here are a couple of typical “angry” “hate-filled” “white supremacists”:

Who are the real “Sunny Ways” guys? A serial blackface fetishist is calling the masses racist and the court eunuchs of Canada’s state-funded media dutifully tag along.

~The truckers are rallying against “vaccine mandates”, which have no justification in science: The Prime Minister, who is as vaxxed, jabbed and boostered as any mammy singer on the planet, is supposedly hors de combat because he’s down with a second dose of the Covid.

Oh, but don’t worry! To be sure, the common understanding of the word “vaccine” is that you won’t catch what you’re being vaccinated against. But what we really mean is that, if you do get it, it won’t be serious, you won’t be in the ICU, and you certainly won’t die of it.

And by “certainly” we mean, well, probably. Israel, en route to be the world’s first entirely fourth-jabbed nation, currently has a daily death toll higher than before it started giving anyone the first jab. There is no public-health justification for making liberty conditional on compliance with the developed world’s failed strategy of coerced vaccines and constant testing.

At SDA, Francisco provided some quick notes on the situation on the streets in Ottawa over the last couple of days:

Looks like the cops got a couple of slip tanks and some jerry cans. A couple of pickup trucks got towed for having slip tanks on them. Nothing major. The new rule is if you have the paperwork to prove you’re a trucker you can transport fuel to your own vehicle but not to someone else’s. A campaign has started to get everyone on the hill to carry an empty jerry can with them at all times. Let the cops figure out which ones have fuel.

There was a show of force by police. Estimate was up to 100 officers in one group. They got their photo-op for the corporate press. Looks great on TV but it had no real impact. Everyone is still there.

Word on the street is that the goal for the police is to get everyone out of there today, clean things up tomorrow and have parliament resume on Wednesday. To which I say good luck.

Morale amongst the protesters is high.

Again take everything I just wrote here with a grain of salt. It’s a fluid situation and good intel is hard to come by in the heat of the moment.

I am not a lawyer, but I’m deeply puzzled at what part of the Criminal Code the Ottawa police are depending on for these imposed restrictions on fuel, food, and other supplies being provided to the truckers by ordinary Canadians. I don’t recall any provision in the law allowing police to confiscate the legal goods of ordinary people on a whim.

Brendan O’Neill on the shitshow that was the original fundraising campaign to help the truckers on their way to Ottawa:

We need to talk about GoFundMe’s withholding of millions of dollars from the Canadian truckers protesting against vaccine mandates. This is union-busting 21st-century style. This is a multimillion-dollar company using its corporate clout to starve working-class activists of funds. This is a signal from Silicon Valley, clear and loud, that it will wield its power to crush any form of political agitation from “the lower orders” that pushes too hard against the political consensus. Anyone who thinks this clash between a profit-making fundraising website and drivers pissed off at being pushed around by Covid authoritarians is just another weird online spat needs to think again. This is far more than that. It is a scoping out of the battlelines over freedom and power that are likely to define the internet era.

GoFundMe’s deprivation of funds to the truckers protesting against Canada’s vaccine rules is, to my mind, one of the most egregious and anti-democratic acts yet carried out by the California-based elites who oversee the World Wide Web. These truckers, such essential workers, are revolting against Canadian PM Justin Trudeau’s introduction of a new rule earlier this month stipulating that truckers who cross the Canada-US border will need to be vaccinated or else go into quarantine after every trip. This is a mad demand. It would severely undermine some truckers’ ability to earn a living. So truckers have risen up. They drove their vast rigs across Canada in what came to be known as the Freedom Convoy before stopping in the capital Ottawa where they have been blocking roads and causing fainting fits among middle-class liberals who cannot understand why these oiks won’t just carry on dropping off sacks of kale to the local Whole Foods and stop going on about their pesky rights.

There has been an outpouring of support for the truckers. Canadians and Americans tired of corona-authoritarianism are cheering the truckers for honking a huge collective horn at the elite consensus on Covid. Despite the best efforts of woke politicians and columnists to depict the truckers as QAnon on wheels, as a motorised version of Mussolini’s March on Rome, many people know that in truth they are decent working people who simply object to the state making their lives that bit harder. People also know that the woke set’s attempts to delegitimise the Freedom Convoy by flagging up “far-right” comments made by a tiny handful of the truckers is a tactic as old as capitalism itself. Elite opponents of working-class organisation have always used smear and innuendo to try to nullify the throng. Seeing this smear campaign for what it is, lots of folk decided to give the truckers a few bucks. But GoFundMe had other ideas.

GoFundMe says the 10million Canadian dollars raised via its website, on a page titled “Freedom Convoy 2022”, will not be given to the truckers after all. It cited police reports about “violence” in the convoy. What violence? Where? Thousands and thousands of people have joined the truckers’ protest and yet there have only been three arrests. One person was arrested for being in possession of a weapon, one for causing “mischief”, and one for making a threatening comment on social media. As far as mass protests go, this is a staggeringly low level of allegedly criminal behaviour. I once visited the Occupy camp at St Paul’s in London and witnessed at least three misdemeanours in the one hour I was there (public urination, threatening speech, and a disturbing of the peace by a man on smack who kept shouting “GET TAE FUCK”). For a mass, angry, revolting movement, Freedom Convoy is uncommonly peaceful. GoFundMe’s “violence” blather is clearly a jumped-up pretext for its political decision to punish the truckers.

On Friday, GoFundMe issued a statement saying that Freedom Convoy was a peaceful movement when it first started but it has since “become an occupation”. And so, “no further funds will be directly distributed to the Freedom Convoy organisers”. Instead, the $9million that remains in GoFundMe’s coffers will be distributed to “credible” charities or refunded to the people who donated if they fill in a form. As if to make it super clear that this is all very political, Facebook has now removed a page promoting a Freedom Convoy in Washington, DC and deleted the personal account of the trucker who set it up. “It’s censorship at its finest”, he said, and he’s not wrong. This looks like a cut-and-dried case of the new capitalist oligarchies siding with the political establishment – in this case, Justin Trudeau – to shrink and silence the consensus-threatening cries of ordinary people.

I didn’t donate to the original crowdfunding campaign for the truckers on GoFundMe, but after that company attempted to quite literally steal $10 million away from the truckers and donate the money instead to causes they approved of, I scraped up a few bucks to add to the replacement fundraising efforts with GiveSendGo and I will actively avoid ever sending GoFraudMe a penny.

Matt Gurney has driven in from Toronto to see for himself what the protest looks like:

Depending on which person you’re using as your explainer of the local vibe, you could reasonably walk away convinced that most of what was happening in Ottawa was a pretty big party, or a hostile invasion by thugs and harassers. I wanted to find out which one it was, so on Sunday, I drove in from Toronto, arriving early Monday morning. I spent hours wandering the city, particularly the area immediately around Parliament Hill, trying to answer that question. Is this a huge group of friendly people? Is this a mob of unruly, dangerous types?

The answer is yes.

The following is my view of the situation in Ottawa, and should be seen entirely in that light. I should also note that I’m a tall, unsmiling white dude with a buzzed head who wandered the area in a gigantic and delightfully warm NFL hoodie, and it’s very possible that my experience was skewed by the fact that I blended in. There are other protest sites at other parts of the city, as well, and I’ll be heading out to some of them later. The observations below are what I saw around Parliament, and within perhaps a 10-minute walk of it.

The first thing you should know is that the protest is, in the main, friendly, at least to someone like me. The photos you’d have seen do it justice. Large transport trucks and smaller personal vehicles are packed tightly together along major streets around Parliament, and the road space and surrounding sidewalks have been colonized by the occupants. Booths and folding tables are everywhere, some selling trinkets, others for supplies or flyers and leaflets. I suspect this will anger locals tired of the protest, but I have to call it as I see it: the overall vibe was quite friendly. I spent about two hours wandering the largest sites, and was struck by the amount of direct eye contact. There’s none of the usual practiced disinterest in those around you that you internalize when you live in a big city (Ottawa is big enough, in that respect). The protesters are eager to make eye contact and to chat, about everything β€” the weather (warmer!), the Superbowl, and, oh, how Trudeau has to go and the pandemic is a lie. And how about those Maple Leafs?!

[…]

For all the friendly chatter, there is another element in the group. I haven’t owned any bars, but I’ve spent some very pleasant evenings in them, plus an entire career observing people, and I have passable danger-spotting skills. (My success rate at avoiding getting suddenly sucker-punched at dive watering holes hovers at very near 100 per cent!) There is a harder, nastier edge to this group, what my bar-owning friend would have called “the hard men.” It’s not large, at least not in the area immediately around Parliament during daylight β€” there are other areas I’ll be checking out later today, and the vibe may well change. The group around Parliament is overwhelmingly quite pleasant and, as noted, unusually friendly and eager to chat. But anyone who denies there’s another element there, though, is blind to it, wilfully or otherwise.

Again, I’m a big white guy, and I blend in by default, but more than once I felt myself being calmly but directly observed by exactly the type my bar-owning friend spoke of. There are hard people there, often in small groups, talking quietly by themselves, or standing silently, watching the comers and goers. If you know what to look for, and not all of us do, they’re easy to spot. The more friendly, chatty types give them a wide berth. I spent a few interesting moments standing by a folding table stacked high with hygiene supplies, observing three stone-faced men participating in a kind of staredown with one of the roving police units. The police simply stopped and stood in place. No one said a thing. After maybe a minute, the hard men left. The police marched off. A woman behind the table with the toilet paper and tooth paste tubes looked at me with relief.

February 4, 2022

Canada’s delusionary approach to the question of providing military support to Ukraine

Filed under: Cancon, Europe, Government, Military, Weapons — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

In The Line, “Tommy Conway” explains why it makes no sense to take Canadian government and military leaders’ talking points on the situation in Ukraine seriously:

Canada has not done these things. We say we’re not sending weapons because “diplomacy is the solution”, but the reality is we can’t send anything meaningful. Any small arms we send would likely be on a NATO standard, and thus not very useful for Ukrainian forces who use Soviet calibers. As for the stuff the Kyiv really needs β€” the anti-tank and anti-air systems that the Americans, British, and Balts are sending β€” we are not sending them because we barely have any. Our anti-tank capability is mostly theoretical. Because we have not replaced older, worn-out systems, we have less anti-tank capability now than we did during the “decade of darkness” in the 1990s. We’ve known for decades that we need to equip the infantry with highly-portable, effective guided missiles like the U.S. Javelin, but we haven’t bothered, save for a few Spike missile systems for our special forces. Maybe our regular ground forces will get something similar by 2033. We have literally no air defence capability besides shooting machine guns in the air and hoping for the best, so we have no air defence missiles to send. Besides the fact that we can’t support Ukraine with weapons, we can’t really support NATO allies with reinforcements either because our units, on a modern battlefield, would lack the ability to defend themselves. We might be welcome as a political gesture, but we might also just be in the way.

Our deficiencies go deeper than weapons. CAF is well below strength. But instead of doubling down on core capabilities, CAF leadership insists on putting more people and resources into newer, faddish capabilities like cyber and information warfare, when we already have an entire government agency that does cyber. Our brigades β€” the core of the Canadian Army’s fighting power, are under-strength, and the army’s recent “Force 2025” concept concedes that the army should hope to field small, combat team elements as the core of any near-future operational deployment. To put this in perspective, a combat team makes up part of a battlegroup, which makes up part of a brigade. The Russians have 50 battlegroup equivalents on the Ukrainian border, and roughly 16 in the Kaliningrad exclave bordering Poland and Lithuania.

A Canadian deployment of a few combat teams would be too small a force even to help manage a large number of refugees in an active combat zone. We might be able to scrape together a battlegroup, but it would be vulnerable to air and tanks β€” in other words, not very useful. Once it was destroyed, that would probably be the majority of the Canadian Army’s combat power gone, with no hope of reconstituting it.

It would be one thing if the army sold this reorganization as a necessary evil in lean times, but this sort of hollowing-out is instead presented as allowing the army to “remain[…] ready to operate not only in the land domain, but pan-domain in a joint environment beyond simply reinforcing its existing capabilities.” Strip away the jargon, and it should be obvious that this phrasing is the victim of too much powerpoint and too little thinking. Junior NCOs and junior officers alike are instructed to build a “priority of work” into their plans for even small, simple operations. Given that we don’t have realistic “current capabilities”, reinforcing our shell of an army should obviously be on the top of the list before we commit resources to new things. At the very least we should be open and honest about what we can and can’t do.

If you ask most talking heads in the Canadian “defence space”, battlegroups that can’t battle aren’t a big deal. The idea that modern war will be won on social media or through “integration” and digital technologies, thus making the old ground-pounders outdated, is a common staple among civilian defence academics. It’s also present in the government’s defence policy, which goes on at length about space and cyberwar and climate change and “ungoverned spaces”, but little about building a realistic fighting force. This hopeful language about an army that can operate in a chaotic world without much messy stuff like hurting people or breaking things is obviously nonsense, but novelty and wishful thinking are pretty standard fare for academics and politicians. It’s much more concerning to see supposedly practical military people hold reality in such low regard.

The officer class’ shoddy thinking comes from decades of misguided pseudo-intellectual development. After the Somalia Affair in the 1990s, the CAF turned to liberal arts education as a way to buy credibility. There was nothing wrong with the idea of intellectual broadening in theory β€” the officer corps obviously needed reform. But the reforms were rushed and packaged, so they replaced one set of intellectual deficiencies with another.

February 2, 2022

Neil Young revives the PMRC

Filed under: Business, Government, Media, USA — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Jim Treacher invites you on a trip down memory lane to a time when musicians like Neil Young were [gasp!] against censorship:

If you’re Generation X or older, you might be getting flashbacks over this whole “Neil Young vs. Joe Rogan & Spotify” contretemps. On one side, we’ve got a popular public figure who’s expressing his thoughts and opinions, just as America’s Founding Fathers told us we get to do. On the other side, we’ve got a bunch of miserable old fuddy-duddies who want to shut down free speech because they believe it hurts people.

In other words, Neil Young just revived the PMRC.

If you don’t know what the PMRC was and you’re too lazy to google it, here’s the short version:

Back in the ’80s, a senator’s wife named Tipper Gore got sick of her kids listening to music she didn’t like, so she started an organization called the Parents Music Resource Center. The PMRC compiled a list of songs they found unacceptable, including “Darling Nikki” by Prince, “We’re Not Gonna Take It” by Twisted Sister, and “She Bop” by Cyndi Lauper. Then Tipper used her political connections to convince the Senate to hold hearings about this supposedly dangerous music.

A lot of Americans decided they liked what popular entertainers were saying, and a handful of busybodies tried to put a stop to it. “If we don’t want to listen to it, nobody should get to listen to it. We need to protect the helpless unwashed masses from themselves!”

Sound familiar?

But then this happened:

If you’ve got a half-hour to spare, you can watch Dee Snider’s entire Senate testimony here. By the time he was done, the PMRC had been exposed for the meddling, hypocritical clowns they were. Their brief moment of relevance was over, at the hands of a guy who looked like Bette Midler transitioning into a Wookie.

The PMRC did get a consolation prize, though: the “PARENTAL ADVISORY” sticker you can find on a lot of cassettes and CDs from the era. Y’know, the sticker that made kids want to listen to what was inside because their parents wouldn’t like it.

Over the next couple of decades, the PMRC ended up helping a lot of artists sell a lot of records. Like this one:

I remember seeing that CD cover for the first time and thinking, “Damn … this must be awesome.” And it was! If not for Tipper Gore, NWA might not have become superstars and Dr. Dre probably wouldn’t be a near-billionaire now.

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