Quotulatiousness

February 7, 2023

Making Canada’s gun laws more illogical, but appealing to urban Liberal voters, regardless of the political cost elsewhere

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Cancon, Government, Law, Politics, Weapons — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

In The Line, Matt Gurney recounts the federal government’s political gyrations over their attempt to ban vast numbers of rifles and shotguns owned by law-abiding Canadians:

Classifying guns is complicated. There are a lot of ways to do it. You can do it by the “action”: is it a pump action? A lever action? Is it semi-automatic, or even fully automatic? You can do it by the length of the total firearm, or the length of just the barrel. You can do it by the caliber of the ammunition. You can do it by the type of magazine the firearm uses, and what its capacity is (the magazine is the compartment, which can be removable or integrated with the firearm, that holds the ammunition). You can try and be targeted with your definitions, or you can just go across the board and say “All rifles are allowed but all handguns are banned.” The point here isn’t to argue what the policy should be, but simply to note that whatever your policy is, you have to be able to define it in a way that makes sense.

Canada’s current gun laws date, more or less, to the 1990s. They’ve been changed a bunch of times since, for better or worse, but that’s when the current overall system of firearms legislation began. We came up with three broad categories of firearm then. There are “non-restricted” firearms, which you must be licensed to own, and mostly mean very typical rifles and shotguns, of which millions of licensed Canadians own many millions. There’s also the “restricted” category, which basically meant handguns — either semi-automatic pistols or revolvers. These require extra licensing, more background checks and training, and are subject to much stricter conditions for storage and use. And then there’s the very rare “prohibited” firearms, which are mostly either very compact handguns, or fully automatic weapons, including machine guns, which were owned by Canadians already when the new laws came in almost 30 years ago. These owners were given a special and highly limited rights to retain the firearms they already owned, but not to transfer them to others, except to someone else with a rare prohibited licence, or to a direct descendent. (That last bit was to cover family heirlooms.)

None of the above is as simple as I’ve just described it. Weird absurdities have been part of the system from the outset. The reason for these absurdities was always political. Back in the 1990s, the Liberals, under then-prime minister Jean Chrétien, realized that the categories above would result in certain kinds of rifle (including the AR-15) being classified as non-restricted, and subject to the least onerous controls. Unhappy with the optics of that, and other similar examples, they wrote in exceptions to the way some firearms are categorized. A firearm would be categorized by its technical specifications unless the government specifically ordered it classified as something else, is probably the easiest way to summarize a complicated policy.

Using the AR-15 again, according to the “evergreen” technical definitions we settled on in the 1990s, that’s a non-restricted gun. To avoid awkward political questions, the then-Liberals deemed it a “restricted” firearm, and therefore subject to tighter controls.

There were other similar examples, and they resulted, as noted above, in a lot of absurdities, with very similar guns categorized differently, but since only a relatively small number of firearms were so specially categorized, the system more or less functioned reasonably well for decades. The absurdities were limited enough to be broadly known and adapted to, and the overall system made enough sense to function coherently enough to do a reasonably good job regulating the sale, ownership and use of firearms in Canada. And very successfully: gun crime by licensed gun owners in Canada is, as is well known, quite rare. The system basically worked, and was working.

[…]

But hey, then politics happened. The sunny ways days ended. Liberal fortunes waned. Scandals and baggage and awkward photos of the PM in his younger days accumulated. And suddenly, the Liberals were talking a lot about banning assault rifles. They talked about it even more after the 2019 election reduced them to a parliamentary minority, leaving them dependent on a cluster of urban and suburban ridings in Quebec and Greater Toronto where support for just about any half-coherent sounding gun-control measure is typically high. The Liberals didn’t do much of anything — mostly just talk, as is their style. Then, in early 2020, there was the horrific massacre in Nova Scotia, and within days, the Liberals announced they were banning 1,500 models of assault rifle. (It was actually far fewer — closer to 20 — but the Liberals counted each different version and brand as an entirely different rifle to get to a more-impressive sounding figure. Those fierce opponents of disinformation at work again!)

Anything even close to meeting a broadly shared definition of “assault rifle” was already banned in Canada, of course — it had been classified “prohibited” back in the 1990s. There’s no universally agreed upon definition of an “assault rifle”, but those who know guns could agree in broad terms what it would mean — and in Canada, they were all banned, and had been for decades. So the Liberals, keen to have their lookin’-tough-and-bold moment, started talking about “assault-style” rifles.

Appending “-style” to anything is a gigantic red flag for bullshit, as I’ve noted here before. That somehow failed to deter them, alas, setting the stage for their current woes.

January 16, 2023

“The Commission has no power to find liability. Its report will not bind the government”

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

Donna Laframboise continues to cover the Emergencies Act inquiry submissions, including one from Queen’s University law professor Bruce Pardy:

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

Shortly after the Emergencies Act commission finished listening to witnesses, he authored a grim opinion piece in the Toronto Sun.

His expectations are exceedingly low. In his words, the commission’s

    mandate is not to rule on the legality of the government’s actions but to inquire into “the circumstances that led to the declaration being issued and the measures taken for dealing with the emergency”. The Commission has no power to find liability. Its report will not bind the government. The Commission is ritual, and the purpose of ritual is performance not outcome – to make it appear that there is accountability without having to provide it. [bold added]

Let us hope he’s mistaken, and that Commissioner Paul Rouleau has a pleasant surprise in store for us. Whatever happens, Pardy’s article provides a useful history lesson. It describes the series of events that prompted the use of similar legislation the last time around:

    Between 1963 and 1970, the Front de libération du Québec (FLQ) committed hundreds of bombings and several robberies, killing six people, including Quebec deputy premier Pierre Laporte. In response, Pierre Trudeau’s government invoked the War Measures Act.

Six murders – including the politically motivated kidnapping and execution of a deputy premier. Seven years of violence. Hundreds of bombings. Compare and contrast to the three-week festive, bouncy-castle, hot-tub trucker protest in which not a single person was robbed, bombed, or murdered.

Times sure have changed. Today, the same Canadian federal government that talks constantly about equity, diversity, and inclusion failed to do a single thing to make the protesting truckers feel as though their concerns, perspectives, or lives mattered. Diversity is something the government preaches, but doesn’t practice. Disagree with the Prime Minister and you’re a fringe minority with unacceptable views. Inclusion is a fancy word that makes politicians feel good about themselves, but it isn’t a principle that informs their actual behavour.

January 11, 2023

“The PM and the public safety minister were lying to the public. That should matter.”

Filed under: Cancon, Government, Law, Politics, Weapons — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

The editors of The Line regretfully return from holidays to start a new year, and the federal government’s gun confiscation bill (not called that, of course) gets both barrels:

The first item worth mentioning: remember how back in November and December the prime minister and the public safety minister, Messrs. Trudeau and Mendicino, were dismissing any suggestion that they were banning hunting rifles as hype? Or Conservation misinformation? When they were saying that the suggestions were false, and those making them were sowing confusion?

Well! Funny thing happened over the break. The PM, in his year-end interviews, is now admitting that the suggestions were, in fact, right. 

Take this, for example, from his sit down with CTV News (our emphasis added): 

    “Our focus now is on saying okay, there are some guns, yes, that we’re going to have to take away from people who were using them to hunt,” Trudeau said. “But, we’re going to also make sure that you’re able to buy other guns from a long list of guns that are accepted that are fine for hunting, whether it’s rifles or shotguns. We’re not going at the right to hunt in this country. We are going at some of the guns used to do it that are too dangerous in other contexts.”

We’ll skip much analysis here. We think this is dumb policy, and we’ve explained why before, but it’s at least an acknowledgement of what their policy actually is, and very obviously was since the very time it was announced back in November. There’s no room for any confusion or doubt here. The Liberals spent weeks crying LIES! and MISINFORMATION! at people who were accurately describing what they were doing.

You can support the policy being proposed — again, we don’t, but that’s fine — but you can’t excuse this. The PM and the public safety minister were lying to the public. That should matter.

We’ll have more to say on this later. But for now, that’s the update: The Liberals now admit they’re trying to do the dumb thing they spent weeks insisting they weren’t doing.

This is, incredibly, a kind of progress.

Related somewhat to the above: a smart friend of The Line, who cannot be named as this stuff is their day job, told us weeks ago to watch for a schism in the NDP over this issue. For the Liberals, their dumb policy proposal still makes political sense. Well, it probably does — we have some suspicion that the LPC has maxed out the electoral utility of hammering on guns, and may now face more blowback than benefit, but time will tell. Still, the proposal may make sense for the Liberals: they are utterly dependent on urban and suburban women to survive, and the dumb gun proposal apparently resonates with them. And that’s true for part of the NDP’s base, too, but, critically, our friend reminded us, not for all of it.

The federal NDP of today is a strange creature. It’s partly very much a party of the deepest, wokest downtown ridings, but there’s also a big contingent of Dipper MPs from places like northern Ontario and rural parts of Manitoba and British Columbia. Cracking down on guns just plays differently there. When the policy was first announced, this division among NDP MPs didn’t take long to come into public view. Jagmeet Singh, himself very much of the NDP’s woke urban contingent, was quiet for a few days before very clearly and obviously pivoting to oppose the proposed expansion of the banned firearms. The Liberals can afford to write off their last remaining rural, non-urban MPs. The NDP simply can’t.

And, our friend told us — again, this was weeks ago, right at the outset — if Singh didn’t get the message pronto, the party would fracture over this … and that Wab Kinew, leader of the Manitoba NDP, would be the leader of the rebels.

We aren’t experts on Kinew, or in internal NDP power dynamics, so we simply thanked our friend for the tip and analysis, and assured them we’d keep an eye on it. And we did.

And wouldja look at that.

Interesting, eh?

Anyway. As of now the Liberals are still talking tough on the amendment. But they need at least one party to work with them to push it forward. We can’t say for sure, but we wonder if the Liberals are comfortable talking tough about it because they now accept they can’t push it forward — at least not any time soon. The Bloc seems wary of getting saddled with this and the NDP, indeed, might split over this issue if Singh were to try.

So we’ll keep watching this, and particularly Mr. Kinew, who may indeed covet Mr. Singh’s job.

To our friend: you were right. Thanks for the tip.

January 9, 2023

QotD: Property is theft

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

The French socialist philosopher who was much ridiculed by Marx as a sentimental petit-bourgeois moralist, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, is now remembered mainly for his aphorism, so good that he repeated it many times, “Property is theft”. But in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, the reverse of this celebrated but preposterous dictum has actually become true: Theft is property.

Pictures of the looting that followed the devastation in New Orleans have been flashed around the world. Everyone is, or at least pretends to be, shocked and horrified, as if the breakdown of law and order couldn’t happen here, wherever here happens to be. Smugness is, after all, one of the most pleasant of feelings; but for myself, I have very little doubt that it could, and would, happen where I live, in Britain, under the same or similar conditions. New Orleans shows us in the starkest possible way the reality of the thin blue line that protects us from barbarism and mob rule.

Of course, an unknown proportion of the looting must have arisen from genuine need and desperation. Who among us would not help himself to food and water if he and his family were hungry and thirsty, and there were no other source of such essentials to hand?

But the pictures that have been printed in the world’s newspapers are not those of people maddened by hunger and thirst, but those of people wading through water clutching boxes of goods that are clearly not for immediate consumption. There are pictures of people standing outside stores, apparently discussing what to take and how to transport it, and of men loading the trunks of cars with a dozen cartons of nonessentials. They are thinking ahead, to when the normal economy reestablishes itself, and the goods that they have stolen will have a monetary value once more.

Theodore Dalrymple, “The Veneer of Civilization”, Manhattan Institute, 2005-09-26.

January 8, 2023

Conservatives “vote harder”, progressives take advantage of “procedural outcome manipulations”

Filed under: Government, Law, Media, Politics, USA, Weapons — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Theophilus Chilton on a key difference between progressives and conservatives in how they address perceived problems with “the system”:

“Polling Place Vote Here” by Scott Beale is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0 .

Over the past decade or so, many folks on the broad Right have noticed that practically all of our institutions don’t really work as they should. The natural tendency on the part of normie conservatives is to chalk this up to incompetence and corruption. Granted, those do come into play – and will continue to do so increasingly. Yet structurally speaking, our institutional dysfunctionality runs a lot deeper than a little graft or some skimming off the top. Our institutional failures are both purposeful and towards a specific end.

Normies can perhaps be forgiven for not immediately coming to this conclusion. After all, as the name suggests, they’re the norm. They’re the mainstream. They’re not out on the “fringe” somewhere, for better or for worse. These are conservatives who have been conditioned by decades of playing by the rules to trust the rules and the processes under which government and institutions operate (even if they think they “distrust government” or whatever). They’re the ones who believe we have to keep voting harder because voting is the only “proper” way to act in our system. And yet, many times they end up being mystified that not only do the institutions and procedures not “work right” but that nobody in power (even their own so-called representatives) seems the least bit bothered by this.

Yet, purposeful it truly is. There is a concept about our institutions that I wish every conservative understood, which is that of “manipulating procedure outcomes”. Basically, what this refers to is the process by which bad actors will take an established procedure — a rule or statute, an institution inside or outside of government, a social or political norm — and subvert it to their own use while still “technically” adhering to procedure. However, the process of doing so completely warps the results from those which “should” happen had the procedure been played straight. This intentionality explains why our institutional failures always seem to tend in one direction — Cthulhu always seems to swim left, so to speak. The American Left are masters at manipulating procedural outcomes, while the American Right rigidly tries to adhere to “the way things oughta be” and end up getting outmanoeuvered every time.

Allow me to give some examples of this; seeing them will start to train the eye towards recognising other instances of this process.

Let’s take, for example, the recent revelations of government censorship of dissident ideas and individuals that we saw in the Twitter files. Now, we all know that the government can’t censor speech and ideas because of the First Amendment. So this means that they’d never do so … right? (LOL) Well, as the Twitter files revealed — and which absolutely assuredly applies to every other major tech company in the field — FedGov and the alphabet agencies simply use companies like Twitter as a way to work around the 1A. They can’t censor directly, but they can rely upon a combination of selective pressure on tech companies and ideologically friendly personnel within these companies to censor and gather information about right-leaning, and especially dissident Right, users all the same. And technically, none of this is illegal, because muh private company and all that. So a functional illegality nevertheless remains within the boundaries of “procedure”.

The same type of manipulation is underway with regards to the Second Amendment, too. Again, the plain wording of the 2A, as well as a long train of prior judicial interpretive precedence, militates against federal and state governments really being able to restrict the gun rights of Americans (not that they don’t try anywise). They can’t make it illegal to buy or own guns. Schemes like prohibitively taxing ammo won’t pass muster either. So if you’re a left-wing fruitcake who hates the Constitution and badly wants to disarm your fellow Americans for further nefarious purposes, what do you do?

Well, you make it too legally dangerous for gun owners to actually use their guns for anything beyond target shooting. You install a bunch of Soros-funded prosecutors in all the jurisdictions that you can so that you can go light on criminals but throw the book at gun owners who defend themselves from criminals. You creatively interpret laws to mean that harming someone while defending yourself is a crime or, barring that, open up self-defenders to civil attack from the criminal’s family. From a self-defence perspective you set up an anarchotyrannical regimen that can be used against ideological enemies. This is basically the same thing the Bolsheviks did when they were consolidating their power as “Russia” transitioned to “the Soviet Union”, as recorded by Solzhenitsin in The Gulag Archipelago. They used administrative courts and ideological judges to punish people who legitimately defended themselves against criminals. If you injured someone who was attacking or robbing you, you went to the gulag. Of course, as we’re also seeing today, these criminals were functionally agents of the Regime by that point.

January 5, 2023

The injustices inherent in “asymmetrical multiculturalism”

Filed under: Books, Britain, Law, Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Ed West traces the start of “asymmetrical multiculturalism” to a 1916 article in The Atlantic by Greenwich Village intellectual Randolph Bourne and traces the damage that resulted from widespread adoption of the policy:

“Asymmetrical multiculturalism” was first coined by demographer Eric Kaufmann in his 2004 book The Rise and Fall of Anglo-America, and later developed in his more recent Whiteshift, in a chapter charting Bourne’s circle, the “first recognisably modern left-liberal open borders movement”. 

Kaufmann wrote how asymmetrical multiculturalism “may be precisely dated” to the article where Bourne, “a member of the left-wing modernist Young Intellectuals of Greenwich Village and an avatar of the new bohemian youth culture,” declared “that immigrants should retain their ethnicity while Anglo-Saxons should forsake their uptight heritage for cosmopolitanism.”

Kaufmann suggested that: “Bourne’s desire to see the majority slough off its poisoned heritage while minorities retained theirs blossomed into an ideology that slowly grew in popularity. From the Lost Generation in the 1920s to the Beats in the ’50s, ostensibly ‘exotic’ immigrants and black jazz were held up as expressive and liberating contrasts to a puritanical, square WASPdom. So began the dehumanizing de-culturation of the ethnic majority that has culminated in the sentiment behind, among other things, the viral hashtag #cancelwhitepeople.”

The hope, as John Dewey said of his New England congregationalist denomination around the same time as Bourne, was that America’s Anglo-Saxon core population would “universalise itself out of existence” while leading the world towards universal civilisation.

These ideas certainly didn’t remain in New England or even the United States, as Britain has certainly seen just how destructive they can be recently:

Late last year I wrote about the tragedy of Telford, a town in the English midlands where huge numbers of young girls had been sexually abused. Telford, along with Rotherham in South Yorkshire, had become synonymous with this form of sexual abuse, mostly committed by men of Kashmiri origin against girls who were poor, white and English. 

This is the subject of an upcoming GB News documentary by journalist Charlie Peters, and it is quite clear, from all the various reports, that grooming had been allowed to carry on in part because of the different ways the system treats different groups.

Had the races of the perpetrators and victims been reversed, this tragedy would almost certainly be the subject of countless documentaries, plays, films and even official days of commemoration. But it wouldn’t have come to that, because the authorities would have intervened earlier, and more journalists would have been on the case.

Sex crime is perhaps the most explosive source of conflict between communities, and most recently the 2005 Lozells riots began over such a rumour. It is understandable why journalists and reporters were nervous about this subject; less forgivable is the way that, away from the public eye, those in charge signal how gravely they view what happened.

Until Peters revealed the story, Labour had planned to make the former head of Rotherham council its candidate for Rother Valley; this week Peters revealed that one of the councillors named in a report into the town’s failures to deal with the grooming gangs scandal has gone onto become a senior Diversity & Inclusion Manager working for the NHS. Presumably the people who hired Mahroof Hussain knew about his previous job, and still felt that it was appropriate to have him in a “diversity and inclusion” position. Again, were things different, would a Mr Smith whose council had been condemned for its handling of the gang rape of Asian girls have landed that job? The whole thing seems as morbidly comic as Rotherham becoming Children’s Capital of Culture.

Such a clear inconsistency can only exist because of socially-enforced taboos and norms which have developed over race. In Whiteshift, Kaufmann cited sociologist Kai Erikson’s description of norms as the “accumulation of decisions made by the community over a long time” and that “each time the community censures some act of deviance … it sharpens the authority of the violated norm and re-establishes the boundaries of the group”. Every time an individual is punished for violating the anti-racism norm, it strengthens society’s taboo around the subject, to the point where it begins to overwhelm other moral imperatives.

Then there is regalisation, the name for the process “in which adherents of an ideology use moralistic politics to entrench new social norms and punish deviance”, in Kaufmann’s words. This has proved incredibly effective; after paedophilia or sexual abuse, racism is perhaps the most damaging allegation that can be made.

Few people wish to be accused of deviance, which perhaps explains why Peters’s story has received so little coverage in the press this week. Again, were the roles reversed, it’s not wild speculation to suggest that it would feature on the Today programme, seen as clear evidence of racism at the heart of Britain. When the Telford story broke, it did not even feature on the BBC’s Shropshire home page.

January 4, 2023

QotD: Hate speech

Filed under: Law, Liberty, Politics, Quotations — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

Since it is often the progenitor of evil, and since the appetite for it sometimes grows with the feeding, public expression of hatred might seem a suitable case for prohibition. Do away with hate-speech, that is to say speech that is intended to bring designated protected groups into hatred, ridicule or contempt, and you do away with hatred.

However he who will attend to the motions of his own mind (to use Doctor Johnson’s wonderful, but sadly disregarded, formula for real and searching self-examination) will discover that hatred is by far the most powerful and durable of political emotions. One’s feelings for one’s political enemies are warm and lively, while those for one’s political friends are cool and torpid. It is obvious that the rich and the foreigner are in general hated much more than the poor and the fellow-countryman are loved; while hatred of oppression is much stronger than love of freedom, especially when it is other people’s freedom. To hate injustice is easy, to love justice, or even to know what it is, is difficult. Hatred, in short, makes politics, and much else besides, go round; and while Freud spoke of the narcissism of small differences, he might just as well have spoken of the hatred caused by small differences.

Nor is hatred exhaustible. On the contrary, it is indefinitely expandable. It often increases with its own expression, becoming more virulent with every word uttered; it is not a fixed quantity like fluid in a bottle. It is very easy, as most people must surely know, to work oneself up into a fury of indignation and insensate rage merely by dwelling on some slight or humiliation. Above all, hatred is fun: it gives a meaning to life to those who otherwise lack one.

The idea therefore that hate speech can be banned, is of course, is a sign of impatience with the intractability of the human condition. It wants to legislate people into kindness, decency and fellow-feeling. It appeals to the sort of people who forget (or never knew) that supposed solutions to human problems frequently throw up further problems that are greater than that which the solution is designed to solve. For its protagonists, it has the advantage of creating a bureaucracy of virtue with pension arrangements to match.

Theodore Dalrymple, “Hating the Truth”, The Salisbury Review, 2011-06.

January 1, 2023

Public Domain Day for 2023

Filed under: Books, Law, Media, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Duke University School of Law’s Center for the Study of the Public Domain highlights just some of the creative works that have entered into the public domain (in the United States: other countries’ laws may vary substantially) today:

Here are just a few of the works that will be in the US public domain in 2023. They were supposed to go into the public domain in 2003, after being copyrighted for 75 years. But before this could happen, Congress hit a 20-year pause button and extended their copyright term to 95 years. Now the wait is over. (To find more material from 1927, you can visit the Catalogue of Copyright Entries.)

Books:

  • Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse
  • Arthur Conan Doyle, The Case-Book of Sherlock Holmes
  • Willa Cather, Death Comes for the Archbishop
  • Countee Cullen, Copper Sun
  • A. A. Milne, Now We Are Six, illustrated by E. H. Shepard
  • Thornton Wilder, The Bridge of San Luis Rey
  • Ernest Hemingway, Men Without Women (collection of short stories)
  • William Faulkner, Mosquitoes
  • Agatha Christie, The Big Four
  • Edith Wharton, Twilight Sleep
  • Herbert Asbury, The Gangs of New York (the original 1927 publication)
  • Franklin W. Dixon (pseudonym), The Tower Treasure (the first Hardy Boys book)
  • Hermann Hesse, Der Steppenwolf (in the original German)
  • Franz Kafka, Amerika (in the original German)
  • Marcel Proust, Le Temps retrouvé (the final installment of In Search of Lost Time, in the original French)

[…]

Movies Entering the Public Domain

  • Metropolis (directed by Fritz Lang)
  • The Jazz Singer (the first feature-length film with synchronized dialogue; directed by Alan Crosland)
  • Wings (winner of the first Academy Award for outstanding picture; directed by William A. Wellman)
  • Sunrise (directed by F.W. Murnau)
  • The Lodger: A Story of the London Fog (Alfred Hitchcock’s first thriller)
  • The King of Kings (directed by Cecil B. DeMille)
  • London After Midnight (now a lost film; directed by Tod Browning)
  • The Way of All Flesh (now a lost film; directed by Victor Fleming)
  • 7th Heaven (inspired the ending of the 2016 film La La Land; directed by Frank Borzage)
  • The Kid Brother (starring Harold Lloyd; directed by Ted Wilde)
  • The Battle of the Century (starring the comedy duo Laurel and Hardy; directed by Clyde Bruckman)
  • Upstream (directed by John Ford)

1927 marked the beginning of the end of the silent film era, with the release of the first full-length feature with synchronized dialogue and sound. Here are the first words spoken in a feature film from The Jazz Singer: “Wait a minute, wait a minute, you ain’t heard nothing yet.” Read about the transition from the silent film to the “talkie” era, and the quest to preserve some of the remarkable silent films on this list, here. Please note that while the original footage from these films will be in the public domain, newly added material such as musical accompaniment might still be copyrighted. If a film has been restored or reconstructed, only original and creative additions are eligible for copyright; if a restoration faithfully mimics the preexisting film, it does not contain newly copyrightable material. (Putting skill, labor, and money into a project is not enough to qualify it for copyright. The Supreme Court has made clear that “the sine qua non of copyright is originality.”) In the list above, while some of the titles were not registered for copyright until 1928 or 1929, the original version of the film was published with a 1927 copyright notice, so the copyright expires over that version in 2023.

Update: Michael Geist explains why there’s no equivalent Public Domain day for Canada:

December 18, 2022

Euthanasia, Canadian-style

Filed under: Cancon, Health, Law — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

In the free-to-cheapskates portion of his Weekly Dish, Andrew Sullivan considers the alarming growth of euthanasia in Canada:

Front view of Toronto General Hospital in 2005.
Photo via Wikimedia Commons.

I mention all this as critical background for debating policies around euthanasia or “assisted dying” (a phrase that feels morbidly destined to become “death-care”.) Oregon pioneered the practice in the US with the Death with Dignity Act in 1997. At the heart of its requirements is a diagnosis of six months to live. Following Oregon’s framework, nine other states and DC now have laws for assisted suicide. Public support for euthanasia has remained strong — 72 percent in the latest Gallup.

But this balance could easily get destabilized in the demographic traffic-jam to come. In 2016, euthanasia came to Canada — but it’s gone much, much further than the US. The Medical Assistance in Dying (or MAID) program is now booming and raising all kinds of red flags: there were “10,000 deaths by euthanasia last year, an increase of about a third from the previous year”. (That’s five times the rate of Oregon, which actually saw a drop in deaths last year.) To help bump yourself off in Canada, under the initial guidelines, there had to be “unbearable physical or mental suffering that cannot be relieved under conditions that patients consider acceptable”, and death had to be “reasonably foreseeable” — not a strict timeline as in Oregon. The law was later amended to allow for assisted suicide even if you are not terminally ill.

More safeguards are now being stripped away:

    Gone is the “reasonably foreseeable” death requirement, thus clearing the path of eligibility for disabled individuals who otherwise might have a lifetime to live. Gone, too, is the ten-day waiting requirement and the obligation to provide information on palliative-care options to all applicants. … [O]nly one [independent witness] is necessary now. Unlike in other countries where euthanasia is lawful, Canada does not even require an independent review of the applicant’s request for death to make sure coercion was not involved.

This is less a slippery slope than a full-on, well-polished ice-rink. Several disturbing cases have cropped up — of muddled individuals signing papers they really shouldn’t have with no close relatives consulted; others who simply could not afford the costs of survival with a challenging disease, or housing, and so chose death; people with severe illness being subtly encouraged to die in order to save money:

    In one recording obtained by the AP, the hospital’s director of ethics told [patient Roger Foley] that for him to remain in the hospital, it would cost “north of $1,500 a day”. Foley replied that mentioning fees felt like coercion and asked what plan there was for his long-term care. “Roger, this is not my show”, the ethicist responded. “My piece of this was to talk to you, (to see) if you had an interest in assisted dying.”

It’s hard to imagine a greater power-dynamic than that of a hospital doctor and a patient with a degenerative brain disorder. For any doctor to initiate a discussion of costs and euthanasia in this context should, in my view, be a firing offense.

Then this: in March, a Canadian will be able to request assistance in dying solely for mental health reasons. And the law will also be available to minors under the age of 18. Where to begin? How do we know that the request for suicide isn’t a function of the mental illness? And when the number of assisted suicides jumps by a third in one year, as it just did in Canada, it’s obviously not a hypothetical matter.

December 17, 2022

Capital punishment

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

Tam at View From The Porch expresses some of her concerns about the death penalty and government’s fitness to carry out such punishments fairly:

“Tombstone Courthouse State Historic Park” by August Rode is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0

I’ve written numerous times that I’m pretty ambivalent about capital punishment. There are some crimes so heinous that you can’t just walk back from them and say “Hey, I’m sorry I ate grandma’s face with some fava beans and a nice chianti, but I was off my meds. I’m feeling better now and ready to be a productive member of society!” I’m comfortable with the concept of having society’s lifeguard blow the whistle and order that dude out of the pool.

Thing is, it turns out that a lot of people wind up on death row for Felony Being Black In A Lineup with a further count of Aggravated Having A Bad Lawyer. It’s bad enough having to try to make things right with a dude you’ve locked in a cell for years by mistake, but it’s impossible to do with a dude you’ve put in a coffin.

Conservatives don’t trust the government to do most anything right, from writing & enforcing gun laws to delivering the mail, but when it comes to making sure they strap the right guy in Ol’ Sparky, suddenly y’all act like the government couldn’t possibly screw up.

So while in theory I’m pretty okay with the idea of capital punishment, in some frictionless setting where all cows are spherical and have equal mass and libertarianism works, here in the real world I just don’t trust people to implement it right.

If we as a society screw up and off the wrong dude, who gets the sentence for that? Or do we all get ¹⁄₃₃₃,₀₀₀,₀₀₀ of a sentence?

QotD: The female murderer

Filed under: Books, Britain, Law, Quotations — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

Each volume of Notable British Trials came with a lengthy introduction by its editor, many of whom were distinguished writers — for example, William Roughead, the originator of the true-crime genre and much admired by Henry James; or F. Tennyson Jesse, the poet’s great-niece, a good novelist and author of a wonderful study of murderers, Murder and Its Motives, which remains in use. She wrote with cool irony about the worst crime in the criminal code; she says, for instance, of some women murderers:

    The woman who murders her husband has nearly always ceased to think of him as such, and cannot really believe that he ever stood in that relationship towards her. It is only a tiresome insistence on the part of the law that makes her drastic step necessary. She loves another man who is her husband “in the sight of God”, and it is to her both unreasonable and indecent that the first man should be obstructing her path.

Jesse writes things that I think would nowadays call down upon her all the anathemata of which right-thinking intellectuals are capable. In describing the trial of a Mrs. Carew, who poisoned her husband in order to join her illicit lover, Jesse says:

    Her counsel made a point that did not succeed in weighing the scales in her favour … but which shows him to have been a man of some penetration in the matter of female psychology. He said: “It must be borne in mind that a woman never thinks it wrong for a man to be in love with her”, and when he said that he said something profoundly true. A woman may think it shows a lack of pride, utter shamelessness, complete lack of all decent feeling for another woman to be in love with her husband, but she will always feel convinced that it is a sign of something nice and perspicacious in a man for him to be in love with her.

This was written in 1924. Subsequently, it seems to me, male psychology has — in this regard, anyway — become feminized; what once applied specially to women now applies equally to men.

Theodore Dalrymple, “A Quiet Evening’s Reading: Notable British Trials is as complete an inventory of human depravity as has ever been assembled”, City Journal, 2018-06-24.

December 10, 2022

“Notes from the administration of a private social media company: ‘Weekly sync with FBI/DHS/DNI'”

Filed under: Law, Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Chris Bray on the tendency of people in a group to “go along to get along” with the group consensus:

Elon Musk has gone from letting us in on some very interesting things to holy shit somebody just dropped a bomb, with a little help from Matt Taibbi:

Especially:

Notes from the administration of a private social media company: “Weekly sync with FBI/DHS/DNI“. Re: election security, they say, in a discussion about killing a story that harmed one political party and helped the other political party.

This isn’t left and right, anymore — if you regard yourself as a liberal, a progressive, a Democrat, or any other related identity, surely you agree that the national security state shouldn’t be intervening in our political discourse, even though in this instance the person who was harmed was Donald Trump. Surely this is something we can all agree on, across lines of identity and party politics. Right?

“We blocked the NYP story”, of course, means that they blocked the story from the New York Post about Hunter Biden’s laptop, wide public awareness of which could have changed the outcome of the election. So the alphabet-soup agencies were shaping the public discourse around partisan politics during the run-up to an election, at least sometimes telling private social media companies what posts and accounts they wanted limited, silenced, and removed. And Twitter was glad to comply. (See Taibbi’s complete thread for more.) Federal agencies intervened in our politics, for what the available evidence strongly suggests to have been partisan ends.

I suspect the statement “could have changed the outcome of the election” is overstated. From everything I’ve read, the election results were “fortified” enough to survive any amount of unwelcome fact leaking through to the voters. I mean, really: who would want to live in a country where the unwashed voters might have a say in what went on with the government?

December 5, 2022

“… when confronted, our self-proclaimed warriors against fake news and misinformation are just lying about what they’re doing”

Filed under: Cancon, Government, Law, Media, Politics, Weapons — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

From the free-to-cheapskates excerpt from this weekend’s dispatch from The Line:

A typical haul of weapons confiscated by Toronto Police Services in 2012. Most of these guns are in the “restricted” or “prohibited” category of Canadian firearms and would not be available for legal purchase by anyone who had not gone through a rigorous RCMP background check and passed multiple training courses. Almost certainly none of them came from a legal owner.

We hate this as much as you do, but we must discuss guns with you again. We think the Liberals have screwed up, and we aren’t sure yet they realize it. (But they’re probably clueing in.)

You know why we’re suspicious? The Liberals are extremely good at marketing. A depressing amount of the time, it’s all they’ve got. They can take the smallest morsel of accomplishment and make it the centrepiece of a coordinated nation-wide grassroots mobilization campaign and fundraising drive. They have memes and other social shareables ready to go. Cabinet ministers release cringe videos captured by staffers who probably realize, in the very moment of their filming, that they’ve wasted their God-given potential on … this. 

Outcomes? The hell with those. Let’s talk about those inputs, baby! In both official languages. 

But this time? When the Liberals have actually embarked on what would be the most significant overhaul of our firearms laws in a generation? Not only have they not said boo. They’re going out of their way to deny that they’ve done anything. Or, when confronted, our self-proclaimed warriors against fake news and misinformation are just lying about what they’re doing.

So either they don’t know what they’re doing (very possible), regret what they’ve done (also very possible) or it’s a confused mix of both (our working theory).

But let us explain. And forgive us, but things will get a bit technical. (We’ll keep it as simple as possible, but guns are complicated.) 

Canadian firearms policy has generally tried to classify firearms by their technical specifications. Three broad categories were created by the major reforms of the 1990s. “Prohibited” firearms essentially were machine guns, automatic assault rifles of the kind used by modern militaries, and easily concealed short-barrelled handguns; prohibited licences were issued in the 1990s to a relatively small number of individuals who already owned such firearms and their immediate descendants (to cover family heirlooms), but prohibited firearms otherwise are not available to the public. “Non-restricted” firearms were the very common rifles and shotguns suited (and frequently used) for hunting or target shooting sports, and require the least onerous level of licensing (but still, you do need a licence that involves background checks and vetting). In the middle we had “restricted” firearms — mostly handguns — that require a special licence beyond the normal licence, requiring extra training and conditions. 

These broad categories do not always reflect the reality of how the laws actually shaped up. The prohibited and restricted categories were often stretched by meddling politicians to apply more broadly than they ought to have, so that politicians (mainly Liberals) could claim to be “tough on guns” in particular instances. But these three categories have been generally stable for a generation, and functioned well, more or less. Perfectly? No. But our gun-control laws worked for the public at large, which is why violent gun crime by licensed individuals is rare despite a relatively high rate of firearms ownership in Canada.

You wouldn’t think it given all the political controversy, but Canadian gun control has been a fundamentally successful public-policy program, for decades. The very real problem we have with gun violence in this country is overwhelmingly committed with illegal guns smuggled in from the United States, and fall outside the scope of our gun-control system, which works well doing what it is supposed to do: licensing lawful gun owners, regulating the legal uses of guns and regulating, as well, the lawful hunting and shooting sports industry. 

For all its success as public policy, though, the system didn’t work for the Liberals politically. So they decided to get cute. And that’s where their problems began.

November 29, 2022

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, expert projectionist

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

Donna Laframboise on part of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s performance last Friday at the Public Order Emergency Commission’s hearings in Ottawa:

There’s a concept in psychology known as projection – accusing others of your own shortcomings. Last week Canada’s Prime Minister, Justin Trudeau, told an Emergencies Act hearing that Freedom Convoy protesters didn’t just want to talk. They wanted, he said, to be obeyed.

That was a strange word for him to use. About people he’d never spoken to. Yet it sums up his own posture rather nicely: Don’t bother trying to change my mind. I’m in charge, you must obey. Conversation over. Case closed.

According to Mr. Trudeau, the Freedom Convoy didn’t deserve a face-to-face meeting with his government because it wanted to change public policy. How terrible that free people, in a free country might want some influence over the increasingly draconian COVID rules they were required to follow. How unreasonable for them to come to Ottawa in an attempt to communicate the depths of their desperation.

A Prime Minister who received less than 33% of the votes cast during the federal election a mere four months earlier chose to thumb his nose at these protesters. Get lost, peasants. You will not be changing public policy.

[…]

We need to recognize what has happened here. The same federal officials who meet with corporate lobbyists by the thousands refused to have a single meeting with the truckers.

This, ladies and gentleman, is the state of Canada’s democracy.

November 25, 2022

“… no Canadian should trust any government enough to settle for a ‘trust me’ on matters this serious”

Filed under: Cancon, Government, Law, Liberty, Media, Politics — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Matt Gurney at TVO Today on the likely outcome of the Public Order Emergency Commission’s deliberations after testimony ends on Friday with whatever Prime Minister Justin Trudeau is planning to say:

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

We can’t simply outsource decision-making to federal agencies, particularly intelligence services! The federal cabinet has the right to disagree with CSIS’s conclusions, especially as it may consider a broader range of information. That’s why we elect leaders. That’s democracy.

But a democracy is supposed to empower the people. We are citizens, not subjects. And there is something very worrisome in Vigneault’s comments. He noted that he had information that informed his decisions — information that cannot be publicly disclosed. This apparently includes legal opinions that the federal government has not disclosed (citing attorney-client privilege) and also, reportedly, classified information.

Attorney-client privilege is important. So is secrecy on matters of national security. Both of these things are essential for a society to function. But, in this case, they are corrosive to democracy and public faith in the federal government.

The Trudeau government’s case for invoking the Emergencies Act isn’t a slam dunk. It’s not bulletproof. I’ve been swayed by some of its arguments and some of the testimony and documents that have been produced. But it hasn’t sealed the deal. And if its final argument hinges on legal advice and classified information, that’s … awful. That’s just a terrible situation. That would amount, in effect, to Trudeau saying, “We can’t tell you why we did this incredibly rare and controversial thing, but trust us.”

No.

That’s it. Just no.

I don’t trust this government. That’s partially, I grant, a criticism of this particular government, which I am not a fan of. It is often high-handed, arrogant, and incompetent, and I do not trust it won’t try to duck criticism by hiding dirty laundry behind privilege and secrecy. Its conduct over the past seven years in office simply has not earned it any benefit of the doubt.

But there’s a deeper truth here: no Canadian should trust any government enough to settle for a “trust me” on matters this serious. That’s not how a democracy is supposed to work. Bluntly, if that’s how your democracy is working, it isn’t working or a democracy.

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