seangabb
Published 25 Aug 2024This lecture is taken from a course I delivered in July 2024 on the Life and Writings of Cicero. It covers these topics:
• Introduction – 00:00:00
• The Deficiencies of Modern Oratory – 00:01:20
• The Greeks and Oratory – 00:06:38
• Athens: Government by Lottery and Referendum – 00:08:10
• The Power of the Greek Language – 00:17:41
• The General Illiteracy of the Ancients – 00:21:06
• Greek Oratory: Lysias, Gorgias, Demosthenes – 00:28:38
• Macaulay as Speaker – 00:34:44
• Attic and Asianic Oratory – 00:36:56
• The Greek Conquest of Rome – 00:39:26
• Roman Oratory – 00:43:23
• Cicero: Early Life – 00:43:23
• Cicero in Greece – 00:46:03
• Cicero: Early Legal Career – 00:46:03
• Cicero: Defence of Roscius – 00:47:49
• Cicero as Orator (Sean Reads Latin) – 00:54:45
• Government of the Roman Empire – 01:01:16
• The Government of Sicily – 01:03:58
• Verres in Sicily – 01:06:54
• The Prosecution of Verres – 01:11:20
• Reading List – 01:24:28
(more…)
January 13, 2025
The Writings of Cicero – Cicero and the Power of the Spoken Word
January 11, 2025
Euphemizing organized gang rapes of children as “grooming” won’t work much longer
It’s possible that the current upswell of anger about the decade-long cover-up of organized child rape gangs in English towns and cities may come to nothing … or it could result in a complete breakdown of law and order:
Like professional basketball, those accused of being members of “grooming gangs” tend to be monocultural.
The grooming gang thing has really blown up in the past couple of weeks. I’m not sure wholly why myself but a couple of guesses.
One is that the media really couldn’t report all that much — and for the same reason that Tommy Robinson got jailed one time around. Because there have been multiple ongoing cases and full reporting of one could — and probably would too — prejudice a jury in subsequent cases. So, those ongoing cases mean that the subject is more or less sub judice and can’t, in volume or detail, be talked about.
Thus things like Guardian reporting. Where you get the news that a gang has been tried, found guilty, sent off to jail. And no comment on who they were. Well, except for a list of names all of which are, shall we say, less than Anglo Saxon or even Viking in origin. We all draw our own conclusions at that point.
[…]
The number of abused — which means children raped, recall, arses blown up with pumps so that adult dicks can multiply penetrate to be detailed — starts to be counted up into the thousands. The tens of thousands perhaps.
There’s a point there at which I don’t think that normal societal agreement to allow the authorities to handle things works any more. At some point along that spectrum then significant civil violence breaks out.
Which brings me to the two questions. What is that number which, when known, leads to actual riots? And no, I don’t mean 15 meatheads lobbing half bricks at the police. Actual real and sustained loss of civilian authority control. The second, obviously, is are we going to reach that number?
In short, what is the level of betrayal of these girls that leaves the mob triumphant over law and order?
What really worries me is that I have a horrible — even if still slight at this point — suspicion that there was enough vileness done to enough young girls that we’re going to find out.
On Substack, Francis Turner shares concerns about the mass rapes of children and young women over too many years:
The scandal has been going on for at least 25 years and probably a decade more. That means that every year around 1000 new girls have been gang raped by the gangs.
Every year around 1000 new girls have been gang raped by the gangs
There are roughly 300,000 girls of each year cohort in the UK so that means one in around 300 girls of any age group has been gang-raped. Given that there are large chunks of the UK which are not places where the ~50 identified rape gangs have operated and indeed are places without residents of the relevant ethnicity (primarily Pakistani and Somali in a couple of cases) that means that the number goes way up in those areas. It seems likely that in one those 50 areas the ratio of new victims to their year group is more like 1 in 100 or 1%, especially when you remove the Pakistani girls that probably weren’t targeted even if some of them were in fact abused at home.
In places like Telford if you see a school year group photo for any year in a Comprehensive school in the last 30+ years at least one of the girls in that photo was being gang-raped
If successful steps had been taken in ~2010 to stop the abuse then about 15,000 girls would not have been gang-raped.
The Tory party and civil service disgust of Tommy Robinson has had the result that about 5000 girls were gang raped between when Tommy Robinson started going about the issue in around 2018 and 2023 when Sunak finally set up the national Grooming Gangs Taskforce.
If Substack would let me do a table this would be easier. However here is a summary of girls gang-raped under the prime ministers of this century based on a simple linear model
Starmer: 500 (to date)
Sunak: 1700
Truss: <100
Johnson: 3000+
May: 3000
Cameron: 6000+
Brown: 3000-
Blair: 10,000Probably half of Blair’s 10,000 was before anyone was aware that this was a systemic problem, but it was known to be a potential problem by at least 2004 when
[a] Channel 4 documentary about claims young white girls in Bradford were being groomed for sex by Asian abusers is delayed as police forces warn it could inflame racial tensions. It was finally shown three months later.
If the UK had got serious about stopping grooming gangs back in 2004 then over half of the gang rape victims could have been saved from such a terrible experience.
Take that 35,000 number a different way. There are roughly 35 million women in the UK. So one in a 1000 women in the UK have been gang-raped over the decades.
January 9, 2025
“Starmer is a banshee of a prime minister; he makes a terrible noise but is completely lacking in substance”
The extent of active disinterest to ongoing criminal activity in British towns and cities over a period of several years passes belief. The fear of being accused of racism metastasized to the extent that the authorities may even have colluded with criminals to hide the crimes to preserve politicians’ and senior bureaucrats’ careers. It’s now broken through the conspiracy of silence to being actively discussed in British media and even on the floor of the House of Commons. Even the Prime Minister may have to answer for past actions (or inactions):
It’s very easy to judge the past, particularly when you’re on the “right side of history”. What supreme confidence it must take to assume that all previous generations had got it so wrong, and that humanity was simply waiting for you to turn up and set them straight.
And yet isn’t it curious that so many who like to judge the values and behaviour of people in the past are also rarely willing to turn that critical eye on other cultures that exist today? According to the principle of cultural relativism, all societies and ways of life are equal. So we must not assert that we are morally better to a culture that permits the genital mutilation of children or that denies women an education, but we may assume that we are highly superior to the Ancient Greeks.
This debate has become particularly relevant with the recent explosion of interest in the rape gangs scandal. A report by Professor Alexis Jay in 2022 determined that more than 1,400 young girls were raped and abused in the period between 1997 and 2013 by what became known as the “grooming gangs”, so called because of the manipulative tactics that were employed to gain the victims’ trust. These groups comprised mostly of men of Pakistani heritage, which led many authorities to overlook the severity of the crimes.
Consider this example from a speech delivered by Andrew Norfolk, reporter for the Times. When police discovered a 13-year-old girl, drunk and mostly naked in the company of seven Pakistani men, they arrested her and failed to question any of the adults.
Police have admitted that such failures to investigate were largely down to a desire to avoid allegations of racism. The Jay report noted that several members of local council staff “described their nervousness about identifying the ethnic origins of perpetrators for fear of being thought as racist; others remembered clear direction from their managers not to do so”. Politicians and media commentators were more concerned with maintaining the fantasy that multiculturalism has been a success, rather than taking seriously their obligation to safeguard children. When Julie Bindel — the first journalist to investigate the grooming gangs — tried to publish her findings, she faced resistance ‘because some editors feared an accusation of racism’.
The Labour government has shown itself incapable of making amends. Jess Phillips has rejected a request for a public inquiry into child sexual exploitation in Oldham. And Keir Starmer has stated that anyone interested in a full-scale inquiry into these failings is jumping “on a bandwagon of the far right”.
This acute form of tone-deafness would, in any sound political climate, be cause for immediate resignation. While it is true that racists will be quick to weaponise the criminal behaviour of a minority, there is nothing remotely “far right” in taking an interest in the wellbeing of children and wishing to see those who abuse them held to account. But Starmer is a banshee of a prime minister; he makes a terrible noise but is completely lacking in substance.
Something may change with the release this week of crime league tables according to nationality. Up until now, there has been tremendous political resistance to releasing such statistics, with police in many European countries not recording such details at all in order to preserve the daydream of multiculturalism. And yet those that do keep such records have revealed a clear trend. Data from the Danish government, for instance, has shown that although non-Western immigrants constitute only 9% of the population, they account for 25% of convictions for violent crime. According to the Telegraph, in Sweden immigrants are “three times more likely to be registered as a suspect for assault than the native population – which grows to four times for robbery, and five times for rape”.
By happenstance, I posted this to social media the other day, which seems apposite:
January 6, 2025
The rape gangs in Britain were enabled and protected by “good people” who didn’t want to be accused of racism
Tom at The Last Ditch confesses his early complicity with the official culture of silence that protected and encouraged the exploitation of girls and young women in Britain for decades:
Everyone who ever participated in the leftist orthodoxy of identity-politics is to blame for the near-total impunity of the Muslim rape gangs in Britain. As I reported here, when I was a young solicitor in Nottingham, a police sergeant told me I was “part of the problem.” I had a choice between believing what he told me about “honour killings” in that city or preserving my good standing as an anti-racist liberal. I chose the latter. I feared my career prospects and social standing would be jeopardised (they would have been) if I accepted his honest account. I called a good man a racist (mentally equating him with the likes of Nick Griffin and recoiling in fear from the association) when he was just horrified (as any decent human should be) by young women being murdered.
In that moment, I very much was “part of the problem” and I am profoundly ashamed of that. It is fortunate that – unlike the politicians, local councillors, social-workers and police officers who should have brought the rape gangs or the “honour” killers to justice (or prevented both phenomena altogether) – I had no occasion ever to make any real life choices on the matter. I believe – faced with actual evidence – I would have made better ones, but the way I failed the good sergeant’s test that long-ago day in the early 1980s proves I would have wanted to look the other way, just as they actually did.
I am not still playing the stupid rainbows and unicorns game of cultural moral equivalence (still less the foul Critical Race Theory game of cultural moral hierarchy) when I make the point that the young white working class girls in our cities have not been the only victims of multiculturalism. Those murdered Muslim girls who (so the sergeant told me) had paraffin poured over them and were burned to death were victims too. It was racist to refuse to consider that their Muslim dads, uncles and brothers might murder them because of their primitive religious and cultural notions. It was racist for our authorities to treat Muslim men who gang-raped white girls differently than they would have treated others. It was racist to cover up these horrors in order to protect the myth – shamefully repeated just days ago in his annual Christmas message by His Majesty the King – that multiculturalism has been an overall benefit to Britain.
Some of us have been making these points as best we can for a long time. Many of us had given up, if we’re honest. It was clear that the official narrative that we were racists and that these stories were disinformation – a “moral panic” as Wikipedia puts it – was going to prevail. Until recently the key social media market of ideas – Twitter – was controlled by the Left and attempts to raise the issue were likely to be memory-holed by their private sector woke equivalent of Orwell’s MiniTru.
Miraculously, Elon Musk – a modern Edison, with plenty to occupy him besides our concerns about free speech – bought Twitter and (in one of history’s greatest acts of philanthropy) set it free at his own personal expense. He told advertisers who sought to maintain its old Newspeak regime to “go fuck themselves.” Miraculously he got involved in the issue not just in America (where the Constitution gives him some basis for hope) but in Britain too.
My British Constitution textbook at law school illustrated the supremacy of our Parliament by jokingly saying that it could – in law – make a man into a woman. Little did its authors know that dimwit politicians would later prove the educational point of their joke by making it real. Our constitution – as a result of centuries of struggle with the monarchy, which Parliament decisively won – can be summarised in just three words – “Parliament is supreme”
QotD: The right to bear arms
Thomas Jefferson’s question, posed in his inaugural address of 1801, still stings. If a man cannot be trusted with the government of himself, how can he be trusted with the government of others? And this is where history and politics circle back to ethics and psychology: because “the dignity of a free (wo)man” consists in being competent to govern one’s self, and in knowing, down to the core of one’s self, that one is so competent.
And that is where ethics and psychology bring us back to the bearing of arms. For causality runs both ways here; the dignity of a free man is what makes one ethically competent to bear arms, and the act of bearing arms promotes (by teaching its hard and subtle lessons) the inner qualities that compose the dignity of a free man.
It is not always so, of course. There is a 3% or so of psychotics, drug addicts, and criminal deviants who are incapable of the dignity of free men. Arms in the hands of such as these do not promote virtue, but are merely instruments of tragedy and destruction. But so, too, are cars. And kitchen knives. And bricks. The ethically incompetent readily (and effectively) find other means to destroy and terrorize when denied arms. And when civilian arms are banned, they more readily find helpless victims.
But for the other 97%, the bearing of arms functions not merely as an assertion of power but as a fierce and redemptive discipline. When sudden death hangs inches from your right hand, you become much more careful, more mindful, and much more peaceful in your heart — because you know that if you are thoughtless or sloppy in your actions or succumb to bad temper, people will die.
Too many of us have come to believe ourselves incapable of this discipline. We fall prey to the sick belief that we are all psychopaths or incompetents under the skin. We have been taught to imagine ourselves armed only as villains, doomed to succumb to our own worst nature and kill a loved one in a moment of carelessness or rage. Or to end our days holed up in a mall listening to police bullhorns as some SWAT sniper draws a bead …
But it’s not so. To believe this is to ignore the actual statistics and generative patterns of weapons crimes. “Virtually never”, writes criminologist Don B. Kates, “are murderers the ordinary, law-abiding people against whom gun bans are aimed. Almost without exception, murderers are extreme aberrants with lifelong histories of crime, substance abuse, psychopathology, mental retardation and/or irrational violence against those around them, as well as other hazardous behavior, e.g., automobile and gun accidents.”
To believe one is incompetent to bear arms is, therefore, to live in corroding and almost always needless fear of the self — in fact, to affirm oneself a moral coward. A state further from “the dignity of a free man” would be rather hard to imagine. It is as a way of exorcising this demon, of reclaiming for ourselves the dignity and courage and ethical self-confidence of free (wo)men that the bearing of personal arms, is, ultimately, most important.
This is the final ethical lesson of bearing arms: that right choices are possible, and the ordinary judgement of ordinary (wo)men is sufficient to make them.
We can, truly, embrace our power and our responsibility to make life-or-death decisions, rather than fearing both. We can accept our ultimate responsibility for our own actions. We can know (not just intellectually, but in the sinew of experience) that we are fit to choose.
Eric S. Raymond, “Ethics from the Barrel of a Gun”.
December 29, 2024
In Louisiana, gerrymandering is illegal … or is it mandatory?
Louisiana politicians created an electoral map that returned eight Republican congressmen to only one Democrat, despite the Republicans only getting about two-thirds of the popular vote. Clearly a partisan gerrymander that the courts will set aside … but perhaps not:
District 6, pink on the map, is the second black majority district, a long thin diagonal, stretching about two-thirds of the width and height of the state. It is an obvious gerrymander.
Two thirds of the voters getting eight congressional seats out of nine would be anomalous in a proportional representation system, but US congressional elections are first past the post. If the population of Tennessee were evenly distributed, with the same percentage of Republican and Democratic voters in each congressional district, the majority party would win all of them — even if the division of votes was 51/49. With a majority of almost two to one, the only way the Democrats get any seats is if their voters happen to be concentrated in one or a few districts.
I do not know whether Tennessee districts are actually drawn to favor the Republicans but the facts offered in the article are not evidence of it. Compare the outcome of the most recent UK elections, also under first past the post. Labor got 33.7% of the vote and ended up with 63% of the seats, 411 out of 650.
[…]
The difficulty in the claim that the failure of a group to elect a number of representatives proportional to their share of the vote is nicely illustrated by the litigation, still ongoing, over Louisiana redistricting.
In June 2022, Chief Judge Shelly Dick, an Obama appointee to a federal court in Louisiana, determined that state’s congressional maps were an illegal racial gerrymander. Under the invalid maps, Black voters made up a majority in only one of the state’s six congressional districts, despite the fact that Black people comprise about a third of Louisiana’s population. (Vox)
As best I can tell, no evidence was offered by the court of actual gerrymandering beyond the fact that the percentage of districts with a black majority was less than the percentage of blacks in the population.
After some litigation, the Louisiana legislature drew a new map with two black majority districts — and a new set of plaintiffs sued on the grounds that the new map was a gerrymander drawn to create a black majority district, in violation of the Equal Protection guarantee of the Fourteenth Amendment. They sued in a different federal appeals court and won, a 2 to 1 majority verdict.
One court was insisting that Louisiana had to create a second black majority district to comply with the Civil Rights Act, the other that it could not create such a district, more precisely that it could not create it in the form the legislature had proposed, in order to comply with the Constitution. The case was appealed to the Supreme Court, which let the legislature’s map stand for the 2024 election, about to happen, but has not yet ruled beyond that.
Louisiana, in other words, is now subject to two competing court orders. The first, from Judge Dick, forbids it from using the old maps. The second, from the two Trump judges in the Western District, forbids the state from using the new maps it enacted to comply with Dick’s order. (Vox)
December 9, 2024
“Take the lecture, America. This person is tired of you being so weird all the time”
Chris Bray checks in on the vocational mental health clinic known as the New York Times:
Non-binary New York Times op-ed writer M Gessen
A cruel government official absolutely brutalized and devastated some journalists this week, in a horrifying showdown that the New York Times op-ed writer M Gessen bravely describes this morning:
Shortly before allowing reporters into the main chamber of the Supreme Court for oral arguments in United States v. Skrmetti, a court employee asked us all if we needed to use a bathroom. The men’s room was right next door, the staff member said, and the women’s room down the hall.
“Where should nonbinary people go?” one of the reporters asked.
An uncomfortable back-and-forth followed. The staff person seemed not to understand the question. In the end, there was no answer. It just didn’t seem to compute.
The men’s room is over there, the Nazi said, not even seeing what a vicious act this was.
This is the lede; given the richest real estate in journalism, Gessen opens a discussion of a Supreme Court case with the story of victims denied the right to drop a deuce in a manner that fully provides them with the rich tapestry of social equity. The arc of the moral universe is long, but it apparently bends toward just using a gendered toilet stall to wipe your ass. The piece goes on the warn about the American descent into Trumpian autocracy, in case you hadn’t guessed.
After an election season in which Tim Walz, of all people, was sent out to sell the narrative that JD Vance, of all people, was deeply weird and socially marginal, I constantly find myself seeing representations of strangeness and darkness and cruelty and horror that make me … shrug? “Which part is the bad part?”
I mentioned this yesterday, but I’m fixating this morning on the journalist who just crushed Pete Hegseth, just absolutely caught his ass, dead to rights, and bragged that she had the receipts. Mic drop, bitch — she got you! Your deviant behavior is on video. And then you watch the video, and it’s some way-obvious dads drinking a glass of whiskey together, obviously sober and acting with restraint, in a dead-center normal piece of social behavior.
This happens daily. HERE IS A SCARY WEIRD THING, a headline says, and I click on the link and see an unremarkable thing. The nonbinary journalist M Gessen is deeply concerned that the Supreme Court building is operated in such a bizarre way, consistent with a brutal descent into autocracy, not the socially reasonable way in which a diverse regime of toilet facilities are aligned with the infinite number of possible ways to represent your relationship to your crotch. M Gessen.
Take the lecture, America. This person is tired of you being so weird all the time.
December 8, 2024
QotD: Who invented the vending machine?
Richard Carlile was a shit-disturbing English bookseller. He insisted on selling Thomas Paine’s The Age of Reason despite it being seditious and blasphemous for its attacks on organized religion, particularly the Church of England. Impressively stubborn, Carlile was arrested in 1819, imprisoned, and fined a massive £1,500 for selling Paine’s work. While a guest of the state, his wife, Jane, and other associates kept selling The Age of Reason, leading to more arrests.
Sometime around his release in 1822, Carlile came up with the idea of automating sales. His device was crude, but effective. A person inserted coins and pulled a lever that opened a compartment from which a copy of The Age of Reason could be retrieved without human intervention. Police had no one to arrest for selling seditious material.
The book vending machine didn’t keep Carlisle out of jail — he would spend nine years locked up for acts of political rebellion. Nor was he able to patent his device. I admire the hell out of him, tho.
Jump ahead to the early twentieth century and vending machines were being used in France and Germany to sell newspapers, postcards, maps, as well as books. The idea crossed the English Channel in 1937. Allen Lane, who single-handedly invented the modern paperback and founded Penguin Books with his brothers in 1935, launched the Penguincubator two years later. Based on the German machines, it was described by the Times as “an unfamiliar contraption of metal and glass”. Lane installed it at 66 Charing Cross Road, outside Collet’s bookshop.
Lane’s contraption was no more successful than Carlile’s. It got wheeled out of Collet’s shop at closing time every night and wheeled back in every morning when the shop opened. Another Charing Cross bookseller recalled seeing letters shoved under the shop’s door each morning complaining of coins lost in the machine. Customers also learned that you only had to pound the side of the box in order for it to disgorge about a third of its inventory. The Bookseller reported that when this was pointed out to the manager of Collet’s, he “gave his incontinent robot a terrific thrashing. As a result of this all the rest of the Penguin’s promptly fell out.”
That perhaps explains why I couldn’t find a mention of the Penguincubator in Stuart Kells’ otherwise excellent book, Penguin and the Lane Brothers: The Untold Story of a Publishing Revolution.
Ken Whyte, “Have I got a business for you!”, SHuSH, 2024-09-06.
December 5, 2024
QotD: Oscar Wilde
H.L. Mencken, “Portrait of a Tragic Comedian”, The Smart Set, 1916-09.
November 28, 2024
“Fly the flag, you bigoted rural cis scum!” said the Human Rights Tribunal of Ontario
Apparently just failing to vote for a “voluntary” observation of Pride season is enough to get the Human Rights Tribunal of Ontario to impose fines and mandatory re-education sentences on elected municipal officials here in the most tolerant province in Canada:
Emo is a township of about 1,300 people located in the far west of Ontario, along the border with Minnesota.
In a decision handed down last week, the Human Tribunal of Ontario ruled that Emo, its mayor and two of its councillors had violated the Ontario Human Rights Code by refusing to proclaim June as “Pride Month”.
The town was also cited for failing to fly “an LGBTQ2 rainbow flag”, despite the fact that they don’t have an official flag pole.
The dispute began in 2020 when the township was approached by the group Borderland Pride with a written request to proclaim June as Pride Month.
Attached to the letter was a draft proclamation including clauses such as “pride is necessary to show community support and belonging for LGBTQ2 individuals” and “the diversity of sexual orientation, gender identity, and gender expression represents a positive contribution to society”.
Emo was also asked to fly an “LGBTQ2 rainbow flag for a week of your choosing”.
Borderland Pride then asked Emo to “email us a copy of your proclamation or resolution once adopted and signed”.
[…]
The claim of discrimination ultimately hinged on a single line uttered by Emo Mayor Harold McQuaker. When the proclamation came up for consideration, McQuaker was heard to say in a recording of the meeting, “There’s no flag being flown for the other side of the coin … there’s no flags being flown for the straight people”.
As Human Rights Tribunal vice-chair Karen Dawson wrote in her decision, “I find this remark was demeaning and disparaging of the LGBTQ2 community of which Borderland Pride is a member and therefore constituted discrimination under the Code”.
Dawson also ruled that given the “close proximity” of McQuaker’s comment to his nay vote — that too “constituted discrimination under the Code”.
[…]
The Human Rights Tribunal ultimately ordered the Township to pay $10,000 to Borderland Pride, and for McQuaker to personally pay them another $5,000.
This was lower than what Borderland Pride had been seeking; they wanted $15,000 from the township and $10,000 each from the three councillors who voted no.
But McQuaker and Emo’s chief administrative officer were also ordered to complete an online course known as “Human Rights 101” and “provide proof of completion … to Borderland Pride within 30 days”.
The course is offered by the Ontario Human Rights Commission, and their latest edition opens with an animated video telling viewers that the Human Rights Code “is not meant to punish”.
November 21, 2024
“If the Federal Court of Appeal greenlights that standard for freedom of peaceful assembly … then governments would have the power to ban virtually every large protest”
In The Line, Josh Dehaas explains why Justice Mosley’s Federal Court decision earlier in 2024 didn’t go far enough to protect Canadians’ rights, specifically their right to assemble in large numbers where the government claims to think that things might get violent:
Arms of the Federal Court of Canada
Earlier this year, Justice Mosley of the Federal Court of Canada ruled that the invocation of the Emergencies Act in response to the Freedom Convoy protests was illegal.
There was a lot to like in that ruling, not least of which because it agreed with the official position of my organization, the Canadian Constitution Foundation.
First, Mosley agreed that the definitions of “national emergency” and “threats to the security of Canada” weren’t met by the federal government, thus invalidating their use of the Emergencies Act. Second, the Justice agreed that freezing bank accounts without a warrant violated the Charter right against unreasonable searches. Third, he agreed that the regulations that banned travelling to, participating in, and funding certain assemblies under threat of up to five years in prison violated freedom of expression.
But not all of Mosley’s ruling was commendable, from our point of view. What we didn’t like was a finding that the same regulations that violated expression because they banned a person from “merely going onto Parliament Hill waving a placard” regardless of whether that person had blockaded or breached the peace, didn’t also violate the Charter guarantee of freedom of peaceful assembly. How could that be? The CCF is asking the Federal Court of Appeal to overturn that finding when it hears the government’s appeal, most likely in early 2025.
This week, we got the government’s stunning and frankly, disturbing, response to that very point of contention. We expected the government to argue that the limitations to individuals’ rights to peaceful assembly were reasonable, given the need to deal with the protest writ large. That wasn’t their only claim.
Instead, the government pulled out an entirely novel line of reasoning, arguing that the Charter doesn’t protect assemblies if they might turn violent or breach the peace. If the Federal Court of Appeal greenlights that standard for freedom of peaceful assembly — establishing a new precedent on when Charter freedoms can be subject to limits — then governments would have the power to ban virtually every large protest. The federal government’s view that assemblies are not Charter-protected and can be blocked in advance if someone in the crowd might reasonably be expected to breach the peace cannot stand if we’re to have any meaningful right to peaceful assembly at all.
November 20, 2024
Trump’s electoral victory may help get rid of “lawfare” as a political tactic
Chris Bray thinks that one of the best things to come out of the last US federal election was that it may have totally discredited the notion of using the courts as a weapon to damage a political opponent:
A hundred years from now, Americans will benefit from a lesson learned in this election: When a political party prosecutes the leading figure of the opposing party in an attempt to influence an upcoming election, voters revolt against the politicization of criminal justice. Prosecuting the other side as a political maneuver makes a martyr — who probably wins the next election, the retribution election.
Shorter version: Donald Trump just buried lawfare. Maybe forever, certainly for a long time. And political lawfare, this profoundly authoritarian misuse of police and prosecutorial power, needed to be killed and buried. Conservative-ish media interprets the moment narrowly:
So lawfare against Trump, by Democrats, is over. I don’t think that’s the point. I think the point is that lawfare is discredited, full stop. Ninety years from now, when the Taylor Swift Party thinks about prosecuting the presumptive presidential nominee of the Drake Party, they’ll be all like, wait, didn’t that like not work and stuff? Donald Trump didn’t kill Democratic lawfare against Donald Trump; Donald Trump killed lawfare. Win elections with political arguments, the end.
Now, NBC News has published a story today that would win all the prizes for tone-deafness and missing the point, if we had journalism awards for that. I’m hinting about a new kind of journalism award, by the way, if anyone wants to design the trophies.
Oh no, Trump might “prosecute adversaries”.
November 15, 2024
“OK, you’re here to accuse me of causing offence but I’m not allowed to know what it is. Nor can I be told whom I’m being accused by? How am I supposed to defend myself, then?”
At the current rate, future generations will have to be persuaded that Franz Kafka wasn’t actually and Englishman:
Franz Kafka’s The Trial opens with the novel’s protagonist, Josef K., being arrested early in the morning by two officers of the law. When he asks them to explain their reasons, one of the men tells him: “That’s something we’re not allowed to tell you. Go into your room and wait there. Proceedings are underway and you’ll learn about everything all in good time.” He never finds out, of course. Even after the story’s abrupt and chilling end, the reader is none the wiser as to why any of this has occurred.
And so it is hardly surprising that Telegraph columnist Allison Pearson described it as “Kafkaesque” that she was visited by two police officers on the morning of Remembrance Sunday. She was informed that she had been accused of “stirring up racial hatred” by means of an unspecified social media post from a year ago. Anyone who is familiar with Allison’s writing will understand just how improbable this is. Her account of the discussion that followed could have been lifted directly from The Trial itself:
“What did this post I wrote that offended someone say?” I asked. The constable said he wasn’t allowed to tell me that.
“So what’s the name of the person who made the complaint against me?”
He wasn’t allowed to tell me that either, he said.
“You can’t give me my accuser’s name?”
“It’s not ‘the accuser’,” the PC said, looking down at his notes. “They’re called ‘the victim’.”
Ah, right. “OK, you’re here to accuse me of causing offence but I’m not allowed to know what it is. Nor can I be told whom I’m being accused by? How am I supposed to defend myself, then?”
The term “Kafkaesque”, like “Orwellian”, has become something of a cliché, precisely the kind of writing that Orwell continually urged us to avoid. But what else are we to call it? I am reminded of Christopher Hitchens’s account of his visit to Prague in 1988 to report on the Communist regime. He had decided in advance that he would be “the first visiting writer not to make use of the name Franz Kafka”. As it transpired, this resolution was impossible to fulfil. During one of Václav Havel’s “Charter 77” committee meetings, police burst into the building, threw Hitchens against a wall, and arrested him. When he asked for the details of the charge, he was told that he “had no need to know the reason”. How else could he describe this other than “Kafkaesque”? As he was later to say at a lecture at the University of Western Ontario: “They make you do it”.
This is all very well for the Státní bezpečnost, but I’m not sure even Hitchens could have imagined that such behaviour would become routine in the United Kingdom in the twenty-first century. I have written previously on my Substack about the phenomenon of “non-crime hate incidents” (NCHIs), but it’s worth repeating here the key points. Estimates suggest that the police in England and Wales have recorded over a quarter of a million NCHIs since the practice began in 2014. Those who are so branded are often not informed, and these can show up on DBS (Disclosure and Barring Service) checks, thereby impeding their employment prospects. According to the Times, three thousand people are arrested each year in the UK for offensive comments posted online, even in cases where a joke had clearly been intended. This is because Section 127 of the Communications Act 2003 criminalises online speech that can be deemed “grossly offensive”. Whatever that means.
November 12, 2024
Canada in the news … for all the wrong reasons
In the National Post, Tristin Hopper explains why your non-Canadian friends may be finding their opinions on the dysfunctional Dominion getting more and more sour in recent years:
… within just the last few years, multiple foreign outlets have profiled Canada for the singular purpose of asking what happened to it, and worrying if Canada’s ills will soon be their own. What’s more, these articles are not limited to a single topic; so much is going sideways in Canada right now that everything from our assisted-suicide regime to our economy to our internet legislation is attracting overseas notice like never before.
Below, a cursory guide to some of them. If you’re noticing that your non-Canadian friends suddenly have a darker picture of your home country than they used to, here’s a clue as to why.
“Justin Trudeau is killing Canada’s liberal dream”
Ever since the 2019 federal election, The Economist‘s coverage of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has usually followed a general theme of noting that the bloom is off the rose of his photogenic ascendancy to power in 2015. But in a trio of articles published last month, the publication laid into the Canadian leader as an icon of what not to do.
Justin Trudeau is killing Canada’s liberal dream, published on Oct. 14. Canada’s Trudeau trap, published on Oct. 17. And then, just for good measure, Justin Trudeau is paying for solar panels in the cold, dark Arctic.
[…]
“Canada Is Disintegrating”
The Telegraph in the U.K. ran an entire series of essays last week on the topic of Canada taking it to the limit on progressive laws covering everything from drugs to national identity.
[…]
“Canada’s Extremist Attack on Free Speech”
The June tabling of the Online Harms Act prompted a wave of foreign coverage unlike few pieces of Canadian legislation. Although virtually every non-U.S. country has legislated controls on extreme speech, the Online Harms Act went noticeably farther than its peer countries in two respects: It prescribes a life sentence for the speech crime of “advocating or promoting genocide”, and it authorizes pre-emptive custody for anyone suspected of committing hate speech in future.
November 9, 2024
Bill C-413 “is aimed at preventing her fellow Canadians from saying anything positive about Indian residential schools”
Nina Green suggests that Bill C-413’s sponsor might be the first person in Canada to face criminal charges in that piece of legislation if her private member’s bill gets Royal Assent:
On 31 October 2024 Member of Parliament Leah Gazan called a press conference to lobby for Bill C-413, her private member’s bill designed to criminalize her fellow citizens for disagreeing with her views.
Gazan led off the press conference with this statement:
Good morning, everybody. I’m Leah Gazan, and I’m the Member of Parliament from Winnipeg Centre, and we’re here to discuss support of Bill C-413 to amend the Criminal Code to include the willful promotion of hate against Indigenous peoples by condoning, downplaying, justifying the residential schools.
To evoke an emotional response, Gazan used the word “violence” a dozen times during her press conference, falsely equating speech with violence, although violence by definition involves physical force.
Gazan’s bill is obviously not aimed at preventing physical violence against Indigenous people. It is aimed at preventing her fellow Canadians from saying anything positive about Indian residential schools.
Earlier, on 27 September 2024, Gazan made the bill personal, telling CTV News that “my family has been impacted by residential school”, implying that she had been motivated to introduce her bill because of the serious harm residential schools had inflicted on her own family.
In fact, the exact opposite is true. Residential schools had a positive effect on Leah Gazan’s family.
On her father’s side, Gazan is Jewish, and her maternal grandfather was Chinese. Thus her only possible connection to Indian residential schools is through her maternal grandmother, Adeline LeCaine, the daughter of Leah Gazan’s great-grandfather, John LeCaine (1890-1964).
What we learn about John LeCaine turns out to be surprising. He was the son of a white North West Mounted Police officer, William Edward Archibald LeCain (1859-1915), and Emma Loves War, whose Lakota Sioux family sought refuge in Canada with Chief Sitting Bull and 5000 of his people after the massacre of Custer and his men at the Battle of the Little Big Horn. […]
Since he had a white father and an American Indian mother, John LeCaine was, in the terminology of the day, a half-breed, and ineligible to attend a residential school since federally-funded Indian residential schools were reserved for status Indians under the Indian Act. However an exception was made, and both John LeCaine and his sister Alice LeCaine (1888-1976) were admitted to the Regina Industrial School. John LeCaine attended for seven years, from 1899 to 1906 when he was 9 to 16 years of age. While there he learned to read and write English proficiently, and mastered agricultural and carpentry skills which equipped him to apply, like white settlers at the time, for a homestead, which he proved up in 1913. In 1914 he wrote to the Department of the Interior asking for a ruling on whether his two half-brothers — who were full-blooded Sioux — could also apply for homesteads.
The proficiency in English he acquired at the Regina Industrial School enabled John LeCaine to became a writer and a historian of the Lakota people. In later years he mapped the places he and his stepfather, Okute Sica, had visited on a journey to the Frenchman River in 1910, and wrote a collection of stories told to him by Sioux Elders, Reflections of the Sioux World, as well as other articles, including some published in the Oblate journal, The Indian Record.
