Quotulatiousness

April 24, 2024

Australia cribs from Trudeau’s notes and tries to censor the internet outside their borders

Filed under: Australia, Government, Law, Liberty, Media, Technology — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Tim Worstall explains to the Australian federal government why their attempt to force Elon Musk to obey Australian diktats on Twit-, er, I mean “X” outside Australia is extreme over-reach and should be firmly rejected:

It’s entirely true that Elon Musk is a centibillionaire currently telling the Australian Government that they can fuck off. It’s also true that if Elon Musk were of my level of wealth — or perhaps above it and into positive territory — he should be telling the Australian Government to fuck off.

This also applies to the European Union and that idiocy called the right to be forgotten which they’ve been plaguing Google with. Also to any other such attempts at extraterritoriality. Governments do indeed get to govern the places they’re governments of. They do not get to rule everyone else — the correct response to attempts to do so is fuck off.

So, Musk is right here:

What this is about doesn’t really matter. But, v quickly, that attack on the Armenian Church bishop is online. It’s also, obviously, highly violent stuff. You’re not allowed to show highly violent stuff in Oz, so the Oz government insist it be taken down. Fair enough – they’re the government of that place. But they are then demanding further:

    On Monday evening in an urgent last-minute federal court hearing, the court ordered a two-day injunction against X to hide posts globally….

Oz is demanding that the imagery be scrubbed from the world, not just that part of it subject to the government of Oz. Leading to:

    Australia’s prime minister has labelled X’s owner, Elon Musk, an “arrogant billionaire who thinks he is above the law”

And

    Anthony Albanese on Tuesday said Musk was “a bloke who’s chosen ego and showing violence over common sense”.

    “Australians will shake their head when they think that this billionaire is prepared to go to court fighting for the right to sow division and to show violent videos,” he told Sky News. “He is in social media, but he has a social responsibility in order to have that social licence.”

To which the correct response is that “Fuck off”.

For example, I am a British citizen (and would also be an Irish one if that country ever managed to get up to speed on processing foreign birth certificates) and live within the EU. Australian law has no power over me — great great granny emigrated from Oz having experienced the place after all. It’s entirely sensible that I be governed by whatever fraction of EU law I submit to, there are aspects of British law I am subject to as well (not that I have any intention of shagging young birds — or likelihood — these days but how young they can be is determined not just by the local age of consent but also by British law, even obeying the local age where I am could still be an offence in British law). But Australian law? Well, you know, fu.. … .

April 20, 2024

How much of your language do you have to destroy to avoid the taint of historical fascist usage?

Filed under: Germany, History, Law, Liberty, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

For understandable reasons, German governments since the end of World War 2 have been twitchy about any symbols, songs, words and phrases that were used by Hitler’s various fascist organizations … to the point of making many things illegal. eugyppius outlines one particular case where the use of a simple German phrase by an AfD politician has landed him in court, facing a possible three-year prison sentence even though he denies that he knew the phrase had such connotations:

Today, the leader of the Alternative für Deutschland faction in the Thuringian state parliament, Björn Höcke, appeared before the district court in Halle for the first day of his long-awaited speech trial. He stands accused of having used a forbidden Nazi slogan favoured by the Sturmabteilung at a political rally in Merseburg on 29 May 2021. Höcke pleads that he used the three-word phrase in a moment of spontaneous elaboration at the end of his speech, without knowing its National Socialist associations. Out of an abundance of caution, I won’t quote the phrase here, even in translation, but I’ll provide it in context below; it begins with the words “Everything for” (“Alles für“) and concludes with the name of the Federal Republic. As slogans go, it is so seemingly banal that before the trial many Germans would have been surprised to know it had any Nazi associations at all.

For the moment, not much has happened. Höcke’s lawyers filed a variety of requests, among them that the Federal Constitutional Court answer a question surrounding the court’s jurisdiction. In consequence, it’s unclear whether the trial will continue as scheduled next week or whether it will have to be substantially delayed. The state prosecutor’s position is that Höcke’s background as a history teacher makes his claims of ignorance implausible. The prosecutors’ office have also added an additional charge for Höcke’s defiance at a rally in Gera last December, where he shouted the first two words of the slogan at the crowd, and invited them to supply the last one. I fear that this was a grave mistake, because as we will see, the original case against Höcke is laughably weak.

If found guilty, Höcke could be fined or sentenced to prison for up to three years. It is also conceivable that his right to vote and run for office could be suspended. Whatever you think of Höcke or his politics, the political dimensions of this trial are undeniable, as it is occurring mere months ahead of the Thuringian state elections, and as Alternative für Deutschland commands a solid plurality of polling numbers in that state.

[…]

That Höcke deliberately used the SA slogan as a subtle enticement to the extreme right is more than doubtful; that he also did so in hopes that he would be prosecuted and profit politically from his victimisation is so ridiculous, I can’t imagine that even Hillje really believes this. This obnoxious thesis nevertheless recurs whenever the German press report on the harassment of AfD politicians; it is somehow their fault, because they are held to benefit from it.

Der Spiegel, always a source of unintentional amusement, ran a headline today mocking Höcke as a “history teacher with no knowledge of history“. “He claims not to know it was an SA slogan”, they report, “but there are doubts about this”. Alas, the very same news magazine last September accidentally used the forbidden phrase to headline an approving article on Olaf Scholz’s proposed “Germany Pact”. They rapidly changed the headline, appending this brief and embarrassing correction to the bottom:

    An earlier version of the article was headed with a line that was used by the SA as a slogan. This was not intended by the author and editors and has now been changed.

April 19, 2024

Yet another unintended consequence of the Online Harms Act – easier deportation of non-citizens

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

In The Line, Kevin Wiener explains another of the hidden “gems” of the Trudeau government’s ill-considered and repressive Online Harms Act that at least will please a few anti-immigration activists:

According to the Trudeau government and its defenders, the Online Harms Act is nothing to worry about. This is supposed to be a bill that will protect equity-seeking groups like racial minorities — yet one little-discussed provision will make millions of permanent residents open to deportation for even the most minor criminal offences, as long as a prosecutor can show that the crime was hate-motivated.

The resulting power to turn any crime into a deportable offence will make non-citizens — many of whom are racial and religious minorities — even more vulnerable in the criminal justice system compared to citizens.

The main focus of the Online Harms Act is regulating online platforms, but it also makes major changes to the way the criminal justice system deals with hate-motivated crimes. Under current law, if a crime is motivated by hate based on a protected characteristic, that’s considered an aggravating factor at sentencing. That means the judge can impose a higher sentence than they normally would, although they can never exceed the maximum sentence for the underlying crime. For many minor crimes, that maximum sentence is two years less a day.

The Online Harms Act uses a totally different approach to hate crimes. Rather than just being a sentencing factor, the Act would create a brand-new hate crime offence. Committing any crime, if motivated by hatred, would make someone guilty of a second crime, with a maximum sentence of life imprisonment. To counter public concern, the Trudeau government has recently sent one of its senior advisors, Supriya Dwivedi, to argue that critics of this provision are “engaging in bad faith tactics”, going so far as to make the absolutely false statement that the bill won’t allow an increased sentence unless the underlying crime already had that sentence.

That is an accurate description of the current sentencing regime, but the text and clear purpose of the new bill is to let judges go further: a serious aggravated assault that might normally attract the maximum 14-year sentence can lead to life imprisonment if the attack was hate-motivated.

Further, Dwivedi’s defence of the bill ignores that maximum sentences play an important role in Canada’s immigration policy. If someone is neither a citizen nor a permanent resident, they can only be deported if they commit a more serious (called an “indictable”) offence, or two separate less serious (or “summary”) offences.

The new hate crime provision would be an indictable offence.

April 13, 2024

“One of the banes of the traditionalist and neoreactionary is ideology”

Filed under: History, Liberty, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Theophilus Chilton urges conservatives to rebuild the crucial social structures that modern life has so signally undermined: churches, the männerbund, and militias (and no, I’d never heard of männerbund either).

One of the banes of the traditionalist and neoreactionary is ideology. Now, any thinking person has a worldview, a comprehensive picture of how they view the world and interpret what they see around them that is based on their experiences, education, and background. However, this is not what is meant with the term “ideology.” Instead, an ideology is a set of beliefs – often unsubstantiated – which are held in a doctrinaire fashion, even in the face of any and all evidences that the beliefs are wrong. Moreover, ideologues will demand adherence to these beliefs, and will actively seek to ridicule and punish those who do not sufficiently fill out the list of checkboxes demanded by the ideology. In short, an ideology is a way for people to avoid having to think for themselves, to resist bringing their worldview into line with reality as it is manifested around them. The key to the concept here is not that of having a cohesive worldview, but the fact that this worldview is held in spite of any countervailing evidence. The ideologue refuses to consider any evidences or objections to his belief system, and will try to find ways (accusing his opponent of being racist, sexist, etc.) to get around having to deal with them.

One such ideology is modern American conservatism, along with its close relative by cousin marriage libertarianism. Just as much as modern neoliberalism demands a blind adherence to a rigidly held set of ideological positions which are increasingly out of step with human nature and reality, so also does modern conservatism. One of the most obvious examples of this is the conservative/libertarian idolisation of “rugged individualism” and “the sovereign individual”. Indeed, these folks have created an elaborate mythology which places the “rugged individual” at the centre of the American experience throughout our history. Like most beliefs built on a purely ideological foundation, this mythology is deeply held while being deeply out of touch with actual history and reality.

If I were to make this criticism on a typical conservative site such as Free Republic, it would be roundly met with automatic and unreasoning condemnation. How dare I suggest that Americans should be anything less than atomised individuals with no connexions or associations of community to each other! I must be the reincarnation of Josef By-George Stalin!

And yet, the whole history of America has been one of traditional communities acting in concert. The Revolution was driven by citizen associations formed in churches and taverns, who then fought as community militias. The settling of the West was not done by individuals, by and large, but by groups who traveled by wagon train for mutual support and self-defence. Even today, most local community matters are handled by citizens acting together. While the individuals in American history may have been rugged, they were not alone. America, like most other traditional Western societies from the classical period forward, was communitarian and group oriented.

In other words, there is ample evidence which suggests that our choices don’t have to be either Ayn Rand or Bernie Sanders. There is a third option, which is to recognise the organic bonds of community, society, and nation which bind men together.

This is important for us to keep in mind today because there are any number of influences due to the modernism of our world today which act to draw people away from community and the positive associative bonds we used to have with each other. One of these which I’ve discussed previously is the set of social phenomena surrounding the creation of suburbia after World War II. Our forms of popular entertainment work toward this end as well – instead of towns and villages coming together to celebrate births, marriages, and deaths with song, dance, and competitions, modern American man sits alone in front of his television or in a darkened movie theatre where he’s not allowed to talk to those sitting next to him. Modern American religion plays into this as well, with its selfish emphasis on “what church can do for me”, rather than the other way around, and where Americans “church hop” from assembly to assembly, never integrating into a body of believers, but always flitting about looking for the next new program for their kids.

I say that we ought to reject this modernism as inferior to what we once had. In place of the atomised individual of conservative and libertarian phantasies, those of us in tradition and neoreaction ought to seek to restore and then strengthen traditional social bonding institutions.

The three institutions which I’d like to discuss in particular here are churches, the männerbund, and militias. Each of these institutions play different, yet complementary, roles in communitarian society. Each also, I believe, appeals particularly to one of the three complementary and interdependent tripartite divisions (spirit, soul, and body) of the holistic makeup of man.

April 9, 2024

QotD: A social conservative criticism of libertarianism

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

Libertarians are also naive about the range and perversity of human desires they propose to unleash. They can imagine nothing more threatening than a bit of Sunday-afternoon sadomasochism, followed by some recreational drug use and work on Monday. They assume that if people are given freedom, they will gravitate towards essentially bourgeois lives, but this takes for granted things like the deferral of gratification that were pounded into them as children without their being free to refuse. They forget that for much of the population, preaching maximum freedom merely results in drunkenness, drugs, failure to hold a job, and pregnancy out of wedlock. Society is dependent upon inculcated self-restraint if it is not to slide into barbarism, and libertarians attack this self-restraint. Ironically, this often results in internal restraints being replaced by the external restraints of police and prison, resulting in less freedom, not more.

Robert Locke, “Marxism of the Right”, American Conservative, 2005-03-14.

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”

Filed under: Britain, Law, Liberty, Politics — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

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.

Beecher’s Bible: A Sharps 1853 from John Brown’s Raid on Harpers Ferry

Filed under: History, Liberty, Military, USA, Weapons — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Forgotten Weapons
Published Jan 8, 2024

On October 16, 1859 John Brown and 19 men left the Kennedy farmhouse and made their way a few miles south to the Harpers Ferry Arsenal. They planned to seize the Arsenal and use its arms — along with 200 Sharps 1853 carbines and 1,000 pikes they had previously purchased — to ignite and arm a slave revolt. Brown was a true fanatic for the abolitionist cause, perfectly willing to spill blood for a just cause. His assault on the Arsenal lasted three days, but failed to incite a rebellion. Instead of attracting local slaves to his banner, he attracted local militia and the US Marines. His force was besieged in the arsenal firehouse, and when the Marines broke through the doors they captured five surviving members of the Brown party, including Brown himself. All five were quickly tried and found guilty of murder, treason, and inciting negroes to riot. They were sentenced to death, and hanged on December 2, 1859.

Most of Brown’s 200 Sharps carbines were left in the farmhouse hideout, to be distributed when the insurrection took hold. These were found by local militia, among them the Independent Greys, and some were kept as souvenirs — including this example.

There is an intriguing historical question as to whether Brown’s raid was ultimately good for the country or not. It was extremely divisive at the time, and it can be argued that the raid was a major factor leading to Lincoln’s election and the Civil War. Could slavery have been abolished without the need for a cataclysmic war if John Brown had not fractured the Democratic Party? To what extent is killing for a cause justifiable? Do the ends always justify the means? John Brown had no doubts about his answers to these questions … but maybe he should have.
(more…)

March 28, 2024

Why European farmers are revolting

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Economics, Environment, Europe, Government, Liberty, Politics — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

spiked
Published Mar 27, 2024

Europe’s farmers are rising up – and the elites are terrified. From the Netherlands to Germany to Ireland, farmers are taking to the streets, parking their tractors on the establishment’s lawn, spraying buildings with manure and bringing life to a standstill. The reason? Because unhinged green regulations, dreamt up by European Union bureaucrats, are immiserating them. In this spiked video polemic, Fraser Myers explores the roots of the farmers’ revolt across the continent – and explains why it must succeed. Watch, share and let us know what you think in the comments.

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March 23, 2024

“At least they didn’t arrest the dog”

Filed under: Britain, Government, Law, Liberty, Politics — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

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 22, 2024

Four years later

Filed under: Cancon, Europe, Government, Health, Liberty, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Kulak hits the highlights of the last four years in government overstretch, civil liberties shrinkage, the rise of tyrants local and national, and the palpably still-growing anger of the victims:

4 years ago, at this exact moment, we were in the “two weeks” that were supposed to flatten the Curve of Covid.

4 years ago you were still a “conspiracy theorist” if you thought it would be anything more than a minor inconvenience that would last less than a month.

Of course if you predicted that this would not last 2 weeks, but over 2 years; that within 2 months anti-lockdown protests would end in storming of state houses and false-flag FBI manufactured kidnapping attempts of Governors; that within 3 riots would burn a dozens of American cities; that the election would be inconclusive; that matters would go before the US Supreme Court, again; that a riot/mass entrapment would take place within the halls of congress … And then that this was just the Beginning …

That Big-Pharma would rush a vaccine which may well have been more dangerous that the virus; that Australia and various countries would build concentration camps for unvaccinated; that nearly all employers would be pressured or mandated to FORCE this vaccine on their employees; that vaccine passports would be implemented to track your biological status; that Canada and several other countries would implement travel restrictions on the unvaccinated and collude with their neighbors to prevent their population escaping; and then that, nearly 2 years from 2weeks to slow the spread, Canadians!? would mount one of the most logistically complex protests in human history, in the dead of winter, besieging Ottawa and blockading the US border to all trade in an apocalyptic showdown to break free of lockdowns …

Well … not even Alex Jones predicted all of that, though he got a remarkable amount of it.

Indeed the reverence with which Jones is now treated, a Cassandra-like oracle who predicts the future with seemingly (and memeably) 100% clairvoyance only to doomed to disbelief. That alone would have been unpredictable, or unbelievable in those waning days of the long 2019, those first 2-3 months when you could imagine 2020 would MERELY be an Trumpianly heated election cycle like 2016, and not a moment Fukuyama’s veil threatened to tear and History pour back into the world.

Oh, and also the bloodiest European war since the death of Stalin broke out.

March 15, 2024

QotD: The ever-growing state

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

“Inconvenience would seem to be a small price to pay for peace of mind.”

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

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

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

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

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”

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

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 1, 2024

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

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

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.

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