Describing situations in which violating a sound rule will make the world a better place is surprisingly easy. The reason for this ease is that the very purpose of rules – “the reason of rules” – is that they are tools to better enable us always-imperfectly informed human beings to successfully navigate a world filled with uncertainty. All that such descriptions require is the assumption that we human beings know more than we know.
An omniscient being would be foolish to bind itself to rules.
When we adopt a rule, we wisely admit our ignorance. For a clever assistant professor or ambitious politician to then describe situations in which violating this or that rule will make the world a better place is to achieve absolutely nothing. Although such descriptions often appear to be ingenious discoveries of means for improving the human condition, such descriptions are nearly always nothing but trite demonstrations that if we knew what we do not and cannot know, then acting in disregard of the rule would bring about a state of affairs better than the state of affairs that would be brought about by following the rule.
Well duh.
As a rule, whenever you encounter someone peddling a scheme for improving the world by giving the state discretion to act in violation of well-established rules – for example, to make workers better off by blocking the operation of the price system with minimum wages, or to enrich residents of the domestic economy by substituting free trade with “strategic trade policies” or “optimal tariffs” – recognize that these scheme peddlers arrogantly assume that they or those who will carry out their schemes possess knowledge and information that human beings, as a rule, do not and cannot possibly ever possess.
Don Boudreaux, “Quotation of the Day…”, Café Hayek, 2019-08-20.
April 16, 2024
QotD: Binding and non-binding rules
April 15, 2024
El Salvador’s approach to fighting serious crime draws gasps of horror from NGOs
In Niccolo Soldo‘s weekend collection of links, he devotes some attention to the amazing success of El Salvador’s current government in driving down the murder rate and why it’s causing much pearl-clutching and dives for the fainting couches among the transnational “elites” and their media handmaidens:
Honduras, Guatemala and El Salvador
Image via Google Maps.
We are bombarded daily with news of mass/random shootings, subway stabbings, and so on. Many of the perpetrators of these violent acts are repeat offenders who for some reason or another (politics) are allowed to roam the streets and attack innocent bystanders. The effect of these lax policies on law and order is the condition known as “anarcho-tyranny” i.e. where the state permits random acts of violence while offering/permitting no solution/resolution … until it has no option but to try and do so.
In NYC, the National Guard is now patrolling the subway. This is a band-aid solution for a problem that was largely fixed already via the policy known as “stop and frisk”. This policy was deemed “racist”, so it had to end. The price of ending this successful policy was a bit of the ol’ anarcho-tyranny. The conflict between rights and law and order continues unabated for the foreseeable future, at least in the USA.
El Salvador has taken a different approach. Since taking office, President Bukele has arrested some 77,000 gang members, locking them up in prisons throughout the country. In one fell swoop, its notoriously high homicide rate has collapsed. Bukele’s law and order policy has resolved El Salvador’s internal security issue … but at what cost? Western media and human rights NGOs insist that the cost has been El Salvador’s democracy:
Under President Nayib Bukele, El Salvador has experienced one of the most spectacular declines in violent crime in recent memory, anywhere in the world. Despite ranking among the most dangerous countries on the planet a mere decade ago, the Central American state today boasts a homicide rate of only 2.4 per 100,000 people — the lowest of any country in the Western Hemisphere other than Canada.
El Salvador owes much of its dramatic drop in crime to Bukele’s crackdown on street gangs and criminal organizations, including MS-13 and Barrio 18. Although homicide rates were trending downward before Bukele took office in 2019, violent crime declined sharply after March 2022, when his government declared a state of emergency following a spike in murders, allowing the government to suspend basic civil liberties and mobilize the armed forces to carry out mass arrests. This state of exception granted Bukele’s administration a blank check to fight gangs and detain suspects without consideration for transparency, due process, or human rights.
Bukele is wildly popular at home, and his policy is now gaining currency elsewhere in Latin America:
Bukele’s iron-fist measures and their apparent results have not only made him wildly popular in his country — earning him a landslide reelection in February 2024 — but also captured the imagination of politicians elsewhere grappling with rapidly deteriorating public safety. Members of the political elite in other states are now toying with the so-called Bukele model. In Ecuador, for instance, President Daniel Noboa has unabashedly followed in Bukele’s footsteps in response to prison riots and a major surge in homicides, declaring a state of emergency in January that gave the armed forces free rein to detain suspects and to take over control of the country’s prisons. The Bukele-style security measures appear to be succeeding there, as well: a little over a month into the crackdown, the government reported that the daily average of homicides had fallen from 28 to six. The fact that militarized public safety campaigns are proving effective outside El Salvador has only enhanced the model’s growing appeal across Latin America, which has long suffered the highest rate of violence of any region in the world.
Here’s the part where the author lodges his protest, and suggests alternative models:
But as appealing as a Bukele-style crackdown might seem, these punitive campaigns against organized crime come at a serious cost to democracy and human rights. These measures concentrate power in the hands of the executive, chipping away at other democratic institutions, such as Congress and the judiciary, that are critical bulwarks against governmental abuse. They also fail to solve the underlying problems, such as corruption and impunity, that generate such violence and instability in the first place.
There are alternatives to the Bukele model for reducing crime. In cities in Brazil, Colombia, and Mexico, politicians have managed to decrease homicides without eroding civil and human rights by making sustained investments in democratic policing, which emphasizes transparency, accountability, and civil liberties. These measures may not work as quickly, and they may not be as conspicuous. But they do not sacrifice democracy on the altar of public safety. Militarized states of emergency are no silver bullet: for any public safety measures to permanently succeed, they must not come at the expense of the democratic institutions that protect civilians from abuse at the hands of the government.
El Salvador has traded off some civil liberties for public safety, but to suggest examples from Brazil, Colombia, and especially Mexico as workable alternatives boggles the mind. This isn’t the first essay written about El Salvador that laments its “loss of democracy” … The Economist keeps pumping out this same argument over and over again. What these articles do tell us is that for many, democracy is indeed a god, and being a god, it is infallible. Not only can the openness of liberal democratic societies not be at fault for some of the crime that has plagued these countries, but Bukele’s heavy-handed approach is doomed to failure in the long run because it is not based on democratic principles. These democratic critics of Bukele are engaging faith-based reasoning, because their god cannot fail.
April 14, 2024
More evidence of Canada’s dwindling state capacity – not enough judges
Matt Gurney discussed this issue along with several others in this week’s Line podcast (highly recommended listening/watching, by the way):
Superior Court of Justice building on University Avenue in Toronto (formerly the York County Court House).
An evolving line of defence we see from the federal Liberals is that they’re actually doing a great job. It’s those darned provincial premiers that are screwing things up.
We touched on this in our last dispatch. And you know what? There’s some truth to it. Some, I stress. A lot of issues that are much vexing Canadians today aren’t fully or even primarily in federal jurisdiction. Health care and housing are two obvious examples. Canada is a complicated place, and the Liberals no doubt prefer to not talk about things that they’ve done that have exacerbated challenges faced by other orders of government. But the basic point is fair: Justin Trudeau ain’t to blame for all that ails you. Or at least, the blame ought to be spread around some.
This national disgrace, though, lands squarely on him.
You might have read about the shortage of judges across the country. It’s a pretty niche issue, so you might have missed it. Even if you’ve heard about it, you may not have paid much attention to it. Most Canadians won’t have much contact with the criminal justice system over their lives, let alone make their careers in it. But the crux of the issue is this: appointing judges to provincial superior courts, where many of the most serious matters are heard, is in the federal jurisdiction. Solely. Ditto appointments to the courts of appeal: totally in the federal jurisdiction. And the feds have fallen way behind on filling vacancies and aren’t appointing judges fast enough to erase the backlog. Despite a spate of recent appointments, there are dozens of vacancies across the country. These are funded positions that ought to be filled and overseeing cases. But they aren’t, entirely because the feds haven’t made the necessary appointments. That’s the issue.
A lack of judges is creating bottlenecks in the justice system. Arrests are being made and charges are being laid and cases are being prepared and then … nothing happens. Because you can’t hold a trial if there isn’t a judge available to oversee it.
The Toronto Star‘s Jacques Gallant has established something of a bleak speciality in his recent reporting. He’s written a series of articles in recent months documenting serious criminal cases that are being thrown out of court, with the accused set free, because their trial has been delayed so much that it cannot be completed before the Supreme Court-ordered limit for a “reasonable” wait for a trial runs out. That’s 18 months for more minor issues, and 30 months for serious ones.
To be clear: the decision to throw out the cases is, in a legal sense, correct. Indeed, it’s mandatory. The Supreme Court determined what a hard limit should be, and a case that exceeds that is dead. Full stop. That’s the law of the land. The judges forced to preside over these dismissals are not to blame, and are increasingly venting their frustration in their rulings. They’re mortified, and they’re criticizing the government in unusually blunt terms, to put it mildly. You don’t often read court rulings that come off more like op-eds, but we live in weird times.
But it’s a good thing that they’re saying something. Because these vacancies are having appalling real-world consequences. Gallant wrote recently about a case that I felt would mark the low point in the entire embarrassment. A woman had accused a man of raping her. She did a brave thing and reported it. The police believed her and made an arrest. The Crown reviewed the evidence and believed her, and proceeded with a trial. A jury believed her, and after considering the evidence against the accused and hearing his defence, convicted him of the crime.
And then the judge tossed the case, setting aside the verdict and letting the accused go free, innocent in the eyes of the law. Because the clock had run out.
April 10, 2024
Saving Our Democracy watch – “[Trump] has to do at least ten years, or everybody will hate the navy”
Chris Bray suggests that reading the full linked document may be hazardous to your mental health, so he’s helpfully highlighted a few of the key points that may have you scratching your head and saying something like “The Fuh? What??”
I have a mixed view of Donald Trump’s argument about presidential immunity, which you can read here. But an amicus brief filed with the Supreme Court today by retired flag officers and service secretaries is so bizarre that reading it may permanently alter the structure of my face.
You can read the whole amicus brief here, but treat it like a solar eclipse and don’t stare at it directly. As a first sign of how much good faith the thing contains, one of the amici is Michael Hayden.
The first argument is that Trump has to go to prison or else civilians won’t control the military anymore. You think I’m kidding.
“Amici are deeply interested in this case because presidential immunity from criminal prosecution would threaten the military’s role in American society, our nation’s constitutional order, and our national security.” See the connection? If Donald Trump doesn’t go to prison, “the military’s role in American society” will be damaged. He has to do at least ten years, or everybody will hate the navy.
The prevailing feature of the entire brief is an essence of flattening. Every issue is very simple. There are no competing examples. None of this has ever come up before: The brief deals with questions of presidential immunity around Obama drone-killing a 16 year-old US citizen, or Lincoln unilaterally suspending habeas corpus and using the military to arrest critics of the war, by not mentioning any of it, or any other historical example. Everything is a surface. I’ve graded undergraduate essays, so the tone and depth of the effort feels familiar.
Third argument: Donald Trump has to be prosecuted, because America promotes democracy all over the world, and Trump not being prosecuted is against democracy, so it will be harder for us to promote democracy if we don’t prosecute him. Authoritarian regimes say that American democracy doesn’t work, so: “Presidential immunity from criminal prosecution feeds those false and harmful narratives. Unless Petitioner’s theory is rejected, we risk jeopardizing America’s standing as a guardian of democracy in the world and further feeding the spread of authoritarianism, thereby threatening the national security of the United States and democracies around the world.”
We have to imprison the leader of the political opposition, or people won’t think we’re a democracy, and then there will be more authoritarianism, like when regimes imprison the political opposition.
April 8, 2024
“At the time of writing, the Scottish first minister Humza Yousaf edges J. K. Rowling in the battle for the inaugural title of Scotland’s Most Hateful Person”
At Oxford Sour, Christopher Gage updates us on the mental gymnastics required to navigate Scotland’s new hate crime law:
To the surprise of many terminally online folks, J.K. Rowling is not the top offender under Scotland’s new hate crime law. That “honour” goes to Scotland’s current first minister, Humza Yousaf for a speech delivered several years ago.
One-third of the Scottish police are yet to receive any training on this sweeping new law. Amongst the rank-and-file, the spectre of threatening and abusive material seeping out of public performances such as plays creeps like sarin gas. Such forbidden filth threatens to mutate ordinary Scots into far-right zombies, parroting Andrew Tate’s pitiful jock philosophy.
Police have absorbed over 4,000 reports of hate crimes in the first 48 hours. Mercifully, many Scots are still evidently well-versed in the timeless Scottish art of taking the piss. At the time of writing, the Scottish first minister Humza Yousaf edges J. K. Rowling in the battle for the inaugural title of Scotland’s Most Hateful Person. Second prize, I believe, is a set of steak knives.
Not to worry, those coppers recently announced a new “proportional response strategy”. Police will no longer investigate crimes such as smashed windows, or run-of-the-mill thefts. This “new approach” to policing, which contravenes the very definition of policing, saves the rozzers 24,000 fewer investigations and 130,000 man-hours per year. That leaves plenty of time to investigate those unenlightened beings poxed with the false belief that women don’t have cocks.
Nobody has any idea what is going on. On the first day of the Scottish Unenlightenment, a Scottish National Party minister said J. K. Rowling’s gender-critical tweets could bring the coppers to her door.
On Twitter, J. K. Rowling had reeled off a string of photographs of trans people. She then called those biological men “men”.
Siobhian Brown, the SNP’s community safety minister, had claimed referring to a trans woman as a “he” would not break the new law. Later on, she said the police would decide whether such misgendering would count as a hate crime.
“It could be reported, and it could be investigated. Whether or not the police would think it was criminal is up to Police Scotland for that”, said Brown.
You could taste the acrid, small-town glee steaming from the repressive and literal minded. Rajan Barot, a former fraud prosecutor for the Crown Prosecution Service, warned Rowling that her Twitter posts, many of which state that biological men are not and cannot become women, would most likely contravene the new law and advised her to delete them.
Police later confirmed the very rich and very visible author would not face prosecution for her stubborn grasp of biological reality — at least whilst the universe watched on in a state of unadulterated fremdschämen.
March 23, 2024
“At least they didn’t arrest the dog”
Andrew Doyle revisits the Nazi pug story as new Scottish blasphemy hate speech laws are about to come into force at the beginning of April:
If you’re deluded enough to suppose that human history works in a progressive linear fashion, the example of Scotland should swiftly change your mind. Once the home of the Enlightenment, the country has now veered into authoritarianism under the control of the SNP. The party’s new hate crime law will come into force on April Fools’ Day, and no-one in government is seemingly able to give examples of “crimes” that would be covered by this legislation that aren’t already criminal. When specifically asked on the BBC’s Newsnight whether “misgendering” would result in prosecution, SNP backbench Fulton MacGregor could only mutter: “Well, it depends on the circumstances”. How reassuring.
For all MacGregor’s “faith” that the law would be “properly” implemented, nonbelievers are right to be cautious. Vaguely worded legislation is bound to be exploited, and has been many times in the past. This is particularly the case when it comes to “hate speech”, a concept for which no adequate definition has ever been achieved. The best the Irish government could muster for their forthcoming hate crime bill is that hatred “means hatred”. In these times of slippery authoritarian wordplay, that’s about as specific as we can expect.
The Scottish police have claimed that they will not “target” comedians and actors under the new legislation, and yet at the same time have sworn to investigate every complaint. Thankfully, activists never make spurious complaints against their ideological opponents in the hope of seeing them silenced. Oh wait. They do. All the time.
[…]
So for all of the claims that our concerns about the new hate crime law are unfounded, and that the police would never prosecute anyone for a gag, we should remember that they already have. This legislation will simply make it easier for activists within and without the police force to weaponise the law against those deemed to be subversive. On the day of Meechan’s arrest, one police officer affirmed that he must be “an actual Nazi trying to inspire people to become Nazis”. The judge eventually agreed, in spite of the fact that after two years of investigation the police had uncovered no evidence of far-right sympathies.
Of course those who wish to criminalise dissent will not stop at comedians. They’ll also be keen to crack down on anyone who knows the difference between men and women and is willing to declare this esoteric knowledge out loud. Although it has become a cliché to cite George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four in such circumstances, that is only because it is so apposite: “The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command”.
I do not sincerely believe that the police will turn up at our Comedy Unleashed show next Monday. It seems unfathomable that we might see a kind of re-enactment of the closing scenes of The Blues Brothers, with police officers standing in the shadows of the club to monitor the show for heterodox content. But then, I would never have anticipated that in a free country someone who made a video mocking Nazis would end up with a criminal record. Of course our show will be offensive to those who choose to be offended. Such is the nature of comedy. The only way to avoid such a situation would be for the acts to stand on stage in total silence. And even then, someone might find this offensive to mutes.
March 16, 2024
Canadian courts bracing for a “tsunami” of Pretendians
Tristin Hopper on the dawning realization among Canadian provincial courts that they are facing a huge increase in the number of offenders hoping to take advantage of the reduced sentences available to First Nations people:
“The Pretendians”, a CBC documentary – https://www.cbc.ca/passionateeye/episodes/the-pretendians
A B.C. judge has warned that a “tsunami” of fake Indigenous people are set to hit the Canadian court system as offenders increasingly claim Indigenous status in a bid to obtain lighter treatment.
“A Tsunami is coming; driven by the desire of non-Indigenous people to get what they perceive to be the benefits of identifying as Indigenous,” B.C. Provincial Court Judge David Patterson said in a decision published this week.
Patterson warned his fellow judges “to be alive to the issue of Indigenous identity fraud” and begin demanding “proof” that offenders are “entitled to be sentenced as an Indigenous person”.
The decision was in regards to a Prince George, B.C., pastor, Nathan Legault, who was convicted of several charges related to the sexual victimization of young girls under his supervision, including a conviction for the making of child pornography.
But before the sentencing, Legault told the court he now self-identified as Métis, and should thus be subject to Gladue Rights — a system wherein judges are required to consider lighter and “alternate” sentences for Indigenous offenders.
First written into the Criminal Code in 1995 and then encoded in the 1999 Supreme Court decision R v. Gladue, these principles were explicitly introduced to reduce rates of Indigenous incarceration by requiring judges to consider “the circumstances of Aboriginal offenders” before applying a legal sanction.
R v. Gladue states specifically that the principle is “not to be taken as a means of automatically reducing the prison sentence of aboriginal offenders”. The decision also says that it’s “unreasonable to assume that aboriginal peoples do not believe in the importance of traditional sentencing goals”.
Nevertheless, lighter sentences and more ready bail are often the effect — to the point where the Gladue process has been criticized by Indigenous women’s groups for favouring Indigenous male offenders at the expense of Indigenous female victims.
March 15, 2024
Toronto’s blue-uniformed surrender monkeys say … just make it easier for criminals and maybe they won’t hurt you
Crime has been increasing lately, and Toronto’s boys, girls, and all 57 other genderbeings in blue have their very best advice for you: surrender now.
… Toronto Police have reflected on the problem. They’ve mulled it over. Thought long and hard. And they’re advising people just give up. To stay safe.
This advice came out at a community safety meeting between Toronto Police officials and concerned citizens last month. (The meeting was covered by City News Toronto, but didn’t get widespread coverage until this week, when clips went viral online. Tell me that isn’t a microcosm of the 21 century.) In remarks to the citizens at the meeting, a Toronto police constable said this: “To prevent the possibility of being attacked in your home, leave your fobs by your front door. Because they’re breaking into your homes to steal your car. They don’t want anything else. A lot of them that [the police] are arresting have guns on them. And they’re not toy guns. They’re real guns. They’re loaded.”
Oh. Okay.
Look, it’s not bad advice, in any individual circumstance. There probably are a lot of people out there who’d be relieved if someone kicked in their door, grabbed the fob and took off. And it’s certainly not novel advice from a police service. We’ve all heard variations of this before, right? “Just give up your wallet” when you’re mugged. “Just get out of the car” during a carjacking. You can always replace things. Right?
The problem is that, in the other scenarios above, you’re out and about in public. There’s no guarantee of safety in public, as much as we all wish otherwise. The advice now being given by Toronto police isn’t what to do when someone jabs a gun into your ribs in a seedy back alley, but how to avoid being harmed by bad guys in your own home. And the police advice is “Make it so easy on them that they have no reason to hurt you”.
There’s no charitable read on this, and in this case, truth isn’t a defence. I accept that the police are giving their real, best, true advice. I accept that they are being sincere. That’s the problem: the police are sincerely surrendering. They’ve given up, and they think it would be best if you gave up, too. These violent robberies are just going to continue, and it’s on us — the public — to minimize the bloodshed and risk to ourselves by … submitting.
I try to avoid hyperbole in columns, with the odd exception for comic effect. But this isn’t funny at all, so I won’t make a joke of it. Let’s be extremely serious for a moment. If this is where the Toronto Police Service has landed in terms of their best advice for the public, as a member of that public and Toronto resident, I’d like to ask this: why stop with leaving my fob by the front door? I have a laptop computer. It’s a few years old now, but still in workable condition. It’s worth a few hundred bucks. Maybe I should leave that by the door, too? I don’t keep a lot of cash on hand — who the hell does, in 2024? — but there’s usually a few bucks in my wallet, or my wife’s. Should part of our nightly routine now just be emptying our wallets into a little bowl that we can leave on the radiator by the front door, and come morning, if the door hasn’t been kicked down and the cash grabbed, we can just put the money right back into our wallets as we get the day started? I’m not really a jewelry guy, but my wedding band is worth something, I guess. Pop that into the bowl with the cash?
After all, the bad guys have guns. Real guns. Loaded guns. And there is apparently nothing to be done about this except submit and co-operate. So say the police.
<sarc>No, that can’t be right. Justin Trudeau made guns illegal, so the bad guys just can’t have guns. It would be against the law, and they might get in trouble.</sarc> Oh, and should the propitiatory offerings be placed inside or outside the door? I guess outside, to make it even easier for them, but make sure everything is protected from rain or snow … it’d be risky if they had to pick everything up soaking wet and they might take it out on you and your family.
That’s Matt Gurney from The Line, so you really should read the whole thing.
QotD: The ever-growing state
That one phrase sums up all the problems we are having with government in this country. It justifies the humiliating personal searches at airports. It justifies the police state tactics of “sobriety checkpoints” or “identification stops”. It justifies the Patriot Act, and the new Intelligence Reform Act, with all their draconian intrusions on personal privacy, including the repulsive, illegal and un-Constitutional parts, such as no-warrant-required searches, a national ID card, federal snooping into our reading habits at libraries and book stores. It justifies any intrusion into private, personal, or intimate matters. After all, if someone has more than one wife (or husband), doesn’t your peace of mind require that that person be harassed, jailed, or otherwise punished for violation of your religious or moral code? It doesn’t matter that the people involved are adults who freely and willingly consent to live in that situation. For that matter, if two men or women live together, doesn’t your peace of mind require that their “immoral and ungodly” lifestyle be exposed, and the people involved publicly pilloried?
Ron Beatty, “Peace of Mind”, Libertarian Enterprise, 2005-03-06.
March 14, 2024
Oddly, Jen Gerson finds her fears about the Online Harms Act unassuaged
There was a point during the last Line podcast where Jen Gerson used the word “assuaged”, and then realized that although she knows what it means and when it’s appropriate to use it, she didn’t know how to say it out loud (a problem I’ve encountered many times in my life, having read widely but not listened to lectures on the various topics I’ve read about). I reference that in the headline, as she recounts going through a belated “technical briefing” on the already tabled bill:
Let’s start by noting that it’s a little bit odd for a government to hold a technical briefing for a bit of legislation more than a week after that legislation has been tabled. Usually presentations of this kind are held for media, MPs, and various stakeholders as or just before a complicated issue or bill is about to be announced to the public.
For the federal government to hold a briefing on the Online Harms Act on March 6 — as it did — raises questions. Questions like “Why?” Questions like “Is this really a ‘technical briefing’ or is this an attempt to assuage concerns about what is actually written in the bill?” And, most importantly, questions like “Am I so assuaged?”
I think, dear readers, that I am not.
Let me explain by appending a caveat about the Online Harms Act, or Bill C-63, which was tabled about two weeks ago. About 75 per cent of what’s in this bill is either good, or benign but potentially useless, and is genuinely focused on mitigating real online harms like child porn and revenge porn. I might nitpick some of those parts if it weren’t for the rest of it. The rest of it consists of “will result in the most significant expansion of Canada’s hate speech laws and create one of North America’s most rigid regulatory environments for media and social media companies”, as law firm Norton Rose Fulbright put it.
In C-63, and its attempts to explain this bill, this government has consistently muddied the waters that delineate between hate crimes and hate speech, and has demonstrated a deep unwillingness to deal with the philosophical problem of defining hate speech in a way that is clear, consistent, and fairly and evenly applied. More specifically, the bill’s attempts to increase the penalties for “advocating genocide” to life imprisonment; the use of peace bonds for pre-crime hate speech; and the re-introduction of Section 13, to be administered by the already questionable Human Rights Tribunal apparatus. All of these present such punitive measures that they would have a chilling effect on speech that is fundamentally incompatible with the freedoms we expect in a Western liberal democracy.
There’s no nice way to put this. These measures reveal deeply authoritarian instincts toward speech and regulation, all the more pernicious as they’re being introduced by people who are absolutely convinced of their own righteous good intentions.
And that brings us back to the aforementioned technical briefing, which attempted to address each of these concerns in turn. I should note that I don’t believe I was invited directly to this briefing — and as I’m not in the Parliamentary Press Gallery, this is not surprising or unusual. I was, however, provided a copy of the briefing in its entirety, and I was told that I was free to quote from it, provided I did not name the Department of Justice official speaking.
To that end, I’d like to provide some excerpts and paraphrases from this briefing, followed by my own observations on what was being presented to an audience of, broadly speaking, laymen. I’ve also run these observations by criminal lawyers to ensure my understanding of the law is sound. If I am in error in any point, I welcome any correction.
March 13, 2024
The true “Online Harms” are coming from inside the bill
Even the state media lapdog CBC admits that the Trudeau government’s proposed Online Harms Act is an incredibly authoritarian piece of legislation:
Justice Minister Arif Virani is defending his government’s Online Harms Bill after celebrated Canadian writer Margaret Atwood shared views comparing the new legislation to George Orwell’s dystopian novel Nineteen Eighty-Four.
The award-winning author took to social media late last week to share an article from the British magazine The Spectator titled, “Trudeau’s Orwellian online harms bill”.
“If this account of the bill is true, it’s Lettres de Cachet all over again,” Atwood wrote on X, referring to letters once sent out by the King of France authorizing imprisonment without trial.
The federal government introduced late last month its long-awaited Online Harms Bill, which proposes to police seven categories of harmful content online, including content used to bully a child, content that sexualizes children or victims of sexual violence, content that incites violence or terrorism, and hate speech.
As part of proposed amendments, “hate speech” would be defined based on Supreme Court of Canada decisions.
“The possibilities for revenge false accusations + thoughtcrime stuff are sooo inviting!” Atwood wrote.
In Orwell’s cautionary novel about a totalitarian society, thoughtcrime is the illegal act of disagreeing with the government’s political ideology in one’s unspoken thoughts.
Atwood famously tackled authoritarian regimes in her novel The Handmaid’s Tale, in which a religious patriarchal society forces women to bear children and those who speak freely are severely punished.
March 12, 2024
Canada is rapidly becoming “a cauldron of authoritarianism”
The degree of control exercised over individual Canadians by various levels of government was already on the increase before the human rights disaster of the Wuhan Coronavirus pandemic handed the power mongers even more control than they’d dreamed of. In Spiked, Brendan O’Neill outlines the horrific Online Harms Act provisions for even more dystopian government oversight if it is passed in its current form:
It seems Justin Trudeau isn’t only a dick – he also gets his ideas from one. Philip K Dick, to be precise. Trudeau’s government has proposed a new law that would give judges the power to put an individual under house arrest if they fear he might commit a hate crime. That’s right – might. It’s right out of The Minority Report, Dick’s 1956 dystopian tale of a future America in which a “Precrime” police division uses intelligence from mutants known as “precogs” to arrest people before they’ve committed an offence. Welcome to woke Canada, where Dickian nightmares come true.
It is courtesy of Bill C-63 that the pitiable citizens of Canada might soon find themselves languishing in court-ordered confinement despite having committed no crime. The bill is devoted to tackling “hate” on the internet. As is always the case when officialdom puffs itself up and declares war on mean words online, it is riddled with draconianism. For example, the mad law, if passed, would allow people to file complaints (shorter version: snitch) to the Canadian Human Rights Commission if they spot “hate speech” online. Those found guilty of this sin of making a nasty utterance could be ordered to pay victims up to $20,000 in compensation. [NR: Other reports say it’s up to $50,000 with an additional $20,000 in fines … per complainant.]
Imagine the levels of grift this would give rise to. The offence-seeking snowflakes of the phoney left would finally be able to monetise their hurt feelings. Call a “transwoman” a fella and he (yes, he – sue me) could potentially drag you to the CHRC for a nice little payday. The law would incentivise complaint-making. Worse, it would foster self-censorship. Who would risk getting angry online, far less logging on when drunk to wind up the woke, when it’s possible they’ll have their pockets turned out by a misnamed Human Rights Commission so that some professional victim can be compensated for the pain of having seen a word or idea he doesn’t like?
It really is possible it will be ideas, not just blind hatred, that will be punished under C-63. The justice minister Arif Virani’s promise that speech that is “awful but lawful” will not be censored, and that a “high threshold” will have to be met before people are penalised for what they post, is not reassuring. After all, Canada’s a country in which entirely legit publications have found themselves under investigation by the Human Rights Commission just for publishing controversial matter. Maclean’s magazine had its collar felt by the human-rights overlords following a complaint from the Canadian Islamic Congress about an excerpt from a book by Mark Steyn. The CHRC also launched an investigation into Alphonse de Valk, a priest, after he raged with passion against same-sex marriage.
I’m not confident that a nation that has such an inquisitorial body, a body whose very description of itself as a “human rights” commission is a brazen act of Orwellian deceit, will keep its promise of permitting the expression of “awful” thoughts. So much is branded “hate speech” these days – from correctly calling “transwomen” men to saying Islam has a lot of dumb ideas – that it feels inevitable that the expression of fairly normal ideas that Canada’s woke regime just doesn’t like will get swept up in this crusade against “hate”. Indeed, under Canada’s C-16 gender-identity law, “deliberately misgendering” a trans person is treated as a potential “violation” of their human rights. I predict that C-63’s incentivising of snitching will cause an explosion in complaints of “misgendering”. Perhaps Canada will become a no-go zone for thoughtcriminals like JK Rowling.
But it is C-63’s proposal to introduce something like precrime into Canada that has caused most waves. The idea is that individuals who are talking shit online, especially if they’re aiming their invective at minority groups, could be ordered to stay indoors or to wear an electronic tag if a judge fears there could be an “escalation” in their behaviour. Precrime, then. Dick’s idea made flesh. The newspaper headlines give a sense of how chilling this suggestion is, how headlong Canada’s descent into dystopia has become. “Justice minister defends house-arrest power for people feared to commit a hate crime in future”, says the Globe and Mail. Mate, when you’re defending the confinement of people who’ve broken no law, it’s surely time to stop and think.
March 11, 2024
The ever-increasing risk that they’ll destroy the US political system to “save our democracy”
David Friedman outlines not only the threat of a re-elected Donald Trump, but the threat of what his opponents are clearly willing to do to stop him:
I’ve run into a surprising number of progressives who apparently genuinely believe that if Donald Trump wins the 2024 election, that will be the last free and fair election that America ever has. These people believe that if Trump wins, then by the 2026 midterms, if not by the 2025 gubernatorial elections, Trump and his acolytes will have figured out a way to rig the elections, or disenfranchise large number of Democrats, or hack the voting machines, or some other nefarious plot that will end self-government. The irony is that these people are the mirror image of the Trump fans who insist that the 2020 election was stolen, and that Democrats (or the Deep State, or whomever) rigged the elections, hacked the voting machines, etc. (Jim Geraghty in National Review, “A Reality Check on the Trump-as-Dictator Prophecies“)
Trump is a competent demagogue but an incompetent administrator. Having won the election and become president, he did very little with his power. The most important thing he accomplished was getting three conservatives onto the Supreme Court, something that a more conventional Republican could probably have done as well.
He did, however, succeed in scaring the center left establishment, parts of the conservative establishment as well. He had no respect for the political, academic, media elite, for Hilary Clinton, Harvard professors, the New York Times or National Review. He was an outsider in a sense in which previous Republican presidents were not, with enough political support to raise the frightening possibility of a government, nation, world no longer going in what they saw as the right direction.
Responses included:
Russiagate, the attempt to claim that Trump was a Russian asset.
The attempt to discredit the information in Hunter Biden’s laptop, which included a bunch of former intelligence leaders implying, on no evidence, that it was a Russian plant, Twitter blocking links to the New York Post‘s article on the laptop.
After the 2020 election, with the federal government back in Democratic hands, attacks have mostly involved weaponizing the legal system to punish Trump and his supporters. The strongest of the cases against him, for deliberately holding classified documents after the end of his term, clearly illegal, looked less unbiased after it became clear that Biden had knowingly retained classified documents from his time as Vice President and knowingly revealed them (although, unlike Trump, he returned the documents once his retention of them became public) and was not being prosecuted. The weakest of the cases was a prosecution for an offense, falsifying business records, on which the statute of limitations had run — on the grounds that the expenditure being concealed had been intended to protect his image and so counted as a falsified campaign expenditure on which the statute had not run. That and prosecuting him for optimistic claims for the value of properties used as collateral for loans — all of which were repaid in full — and finding him liable for hundreds of millions of dollars in damages were based not on legal necessity but on the predictable bias of a judge or jury in New York City, where the 2020 electorate voted against Trump by more than three to one.
My previous post described a tactic by which, if Trump won the 2024 election, Democrats might have tried to prevent him from taking office. The recent Supreme Court decision makes that particular tactic unworkable but it is clear from the Atlantic article published before that decision that some Democratic politicians were willing to take the idea seriously. Arguable the three liberal justices took it seriously enough to object to the majority preventing it, although there are other possible explanations of their dissent from that part of the decision. The Colorado Supreme Court took seriously, indeed endorsed, the idea of defeating Trump by keeping him off the ballot. It is far from clear that if there is another opportunity to defeat Trump’s campaign in the courts instead of the voting booth it will not be taken. If, after all, the survival of American democracy is at stake …
Trump has been charged with both federal and state offenses. If he wins the election he can use the pardon power to free himself from conviction for a federal offense but not a state offence. James Curley spent five months of his term as mayor of Boston in prison for mail fraud, until President Truman commuted his sentence. Georgia’s Republican governor does not have the power to give pardons even if he wanted to; the State Board of Pardons and Paroles does but only after a convicted felon has served five years of his term. The governor of New York has the pardon power but is a Democrat unlikely to use it on Trump’s behalf. If Trump wins the election but loses at least one of the state criminal cases, does the state get to lock up the President?
Suppose that, despite any legal tactics of the opposition, Trump ends up in the White House, in control of both the federal legal apparatus and, through his supporters, those of multiple states. After the repeated use of lawfare against him by his opponents it is hard to imagine Trump refraining from responding in kind or his supporters expecting him to.
March 3, 2024
From bank robbery to church burning to welfare state collapse
Kulak talks about an old Canadian TV show episode and how the lessons learned could be (and arguably are already being) used to undermine any western welfare state:
In a show that had helicopter escapes, motorcycle chases, modded out James Bond spy cars, teenage money forgers, veteran jewel thieves, super hackers, aviation engineer super smugglers … This one stood out for its nigh stupid simplicity.
He treated bank robbery as a literal door to door business.
Gilbert Galvan’s great innovation wasn’t any innovation, it was stripping bank robbery itself down to its barest essentials. And then repeating it at scale. To the point where he could rob one bank, and then rob the bank across the street whilst police were still in the first investigating (literally! this was how they found out he existed).
He’d line up with the rest of the customers, wait his turn, approach the teller, and then quietly show her his pistol before demanding the money, and WALKING out the front door of the bank, the person behind him in line never knowing that the robbery had even happened.
The limitation was of course he never hit the safe, and only got one teller’s worth of cash, about 5-20k per robbery (1980s dollars, so double or triple modern dollars), but wearing elaborate theatrical disguises for every heist the chance of of him ever being tracked down were effectively Zero. And needing only one man, there was no accomplice to rat him out.
He carried out FIFTY heists this way, and to this day this remains the greatest lesson I’ve learned from the show… The devastating effect of simple marginally effective things, done at scale. It’s certainly served me well marketing this blog.
Now apply this lesson to the modern Cradle to Grave Total State
Since the Trudeau government funded media started promoting a blood libel against Christian church run Residential schools, falsely alleging ground penetrating radar had found “mass graves” at the site of the schools from the first half of the 20th century, over 100 churches have been attacked or burned in Canada.
Whilst the first few fires were probably set by the same person in British Columbia, once it became a national story with political valence disaffected copycats quickly sprung up around the nation. There is basically a zero percent chance the vandals on one end of the country know or have ever met the vandals on the other side. And basically no way that catching even one group of vandals or arsonists would stop the attacks.
Now I would like you to imagine the implications for civil strife in the US, and western welfare states, when this starts happening to government offices or schools which get embroiled in LGBTQ or Childhood transition scandals.
Remember that the average public elementary or high school has 1000+ students in it, the bottom 10-20% of whom absolutely despise the place. People always wonder at how many mass shootings there are in the US, I’m always shocked at how few there are. there are 40,000 suicides a year in the US, and while the numbers are hard to grab at least 10,000 of those are youth suicides. That so few decide to take classmates with them always struck me as bizarre, given human beings have killed 100s of millions of each other in the past 100 years, but then isn’t it also interesting the number of mass shootings has risen so rapidly since Columbine and the media cycle popularization of it public conciousness?
Likewise half a million Americans are treated for self inflicted injury every year, of which over 100k are Youth, and 424,000 youth are arrested on some crime or other every year.
I’m going to call it right now:
In the next 5 years someone out there, might be in America, might be Europe, is going to start burning down schools for some ideological reason, we might never even know why if they are never caught.
And At that point copycat school burnings will become one of the most dramatic and prominent trends in western life as it’s quickly copied around the western world. In the past 3 years of those 100 Canadian churches vandalized, 33 burnt right to the ground (10 per year). If you assumed the same number with no boost from all the students/parents who despise their school or maybe even feel mortal danger from them, that’d still be (population adjusted) something like 100 schools per year burning in America, probably til the end of time. Assuming those government buildings have the usual ludicrous construction costs of 20ish million … that’d be about 2 billion dollars per year in lost buildings, which lets be honest probably won’t get replaced in a timely manner.
There are 97,500 public schools in America, assuming just that Canadian Church burning rate of attacks that’d be more than 1% of American public schools gone in a decade.
March 1, 2024
Online “harmful content” is in the eye of the beholder
It’s almost refreshing to find so many people realizing just how dystopian the Trudeau government’s proposed Online Harms Act could be if implemented in its current form. Ezra Levant on Twit-, er, I mean “X” points out to Jordan Peterson just how the system would be set up to suppress and punish online speech the complainant didn’t like:
For years the Canadian Human Rights Act (CHRA) has banned discrimination against people based on “gender identity or expression”. You of course have never discriminated against anyone.
But this new bill adds s. 13 to the CHRA, which now says that mere speech is considered discrimination if it is “likely to foment detestation or vilification of an individual or group”.
So now, if someone watches one of your YouTube videos or reads on of your tweets about, say, transgender athletes changing in the girls change room, and as a result is “likely” to have hard feelings towards trans people, that’s hate speech.
That’s step 1. Here’s step 2.
Any member of the public (including non-citizens) can lodge a complaint against you to the Canadian Human Rights Tribunal — an activist quasi-judicial tribunal run by non-judges, appointed by Trudeau.
They can get up to $20,000 per complaint from you — and they don’t have to be the “victim”. (There doesn’t have to be a victim at all — remember it’s a future crime. They only have to show that your tweet or video is “likely to” (i.e might) cause one person to have hard feelings about another person. $20,000 that you’d pay the complainant — plus $50,000 in fines to the government.
Per complaint.
So there could be a new complaint for every tweet you make. Every video. And the complainants can be professional busybodies and activists — they don’t have to be a “victim”.
Why wouldn’t woke activists literally file a CHRA complaint after every single thing you do or say on social media? It’s free. There’s no limit. Even if you “win”, you lose — the process is the punishment. And of course, they’re going to win. This will become an industry — to enrich woke grifters and destroy you financially.
But here’s the truly amazing part: the complainants can keep their identity a secret from you. Secret testimony from secret witnesses — who get paid up to $20,000 to take a run at you.
That’s how they’re going to come for you — and for us at @RebelNewsOnline
In the National Post, Jamie Sarkonak considers how the “digital safety” provisions of the Online Harms Act might be implemented:
The law would put “harmful content” in scope of government regulation by way of “arm’s-length” agencies. Targeted content would include media depicting sexual abuse (and understandably so), as well as any content that “expresses detestation or vilification” of any group considered by human rights legislation to be vulnerable and is likely to foment such feelings given the context of the communication (less understandably so). Identity-based protections are inherently more subjective, and they aren’t afforded equally to everyone: human rights law tends not to protect white people, for example.
The bill states that expressing disdain and dislike — or discrediting, humiliating, hurting or offending — is not necessarily hateful for the purposes of online regulation. Critically, it’s silent on what does make speech cross over into unacceptable territory. There’s no hard threshold.
At what point does discussion of the fact that most gender-diverse sex offenders in federal prison are transwomen (male) cross over into “harmful content” territory? Or the fact that Black people make up only three per cent of the population, but represent six per cent of all accused in criminal courts? Or the fact Eritreans in Canada, half of whom arrived after 2016, and who come from a country known for not cooperating with the deportation process, are increasingly rioting in response to politics back home?
Regardless, the promotion of actual hate propaganda, and the incitement of genocide, are already crimes in Canada, so the very worst speech was already covered by the current law and enforceable by the police. If the Liberals wanted better work done on these fronts, they could have simply raised police funding and staffed the courts with judges, as manpower is a primary constraint in dealing justice.
Instead of maintaining the systems that exist, the online harms law would add proactive measures in the form of a new bureaucracy to ensure that everything from genocide advocacy to the insulting recitation of upsetting facts don’t get out of hand. These will work in tandem with reactive measures: the crime of “hate crime” will be enforceable at criminal law, and the Canadian Human Rights Commission will be empowered to adjudicate cases of rights-violating content online.
