When Rousseau said you’d need to force men to be free, he wasn’t joking. It’s hard to admit the truth of that statement, especially as Rousseau, like all Leftists, quite obviously pleasured himself to the thought of forcing great masses of people to do things, but he’s right for all that. As Nikolai points out, so many people quite obviously enjoy the COVID madness, because it gives structure to their otherwise stressfully chaotic lives. Everyone, even the most rugged Marlboro Man individualist, has experienced “analysis paralysis”, that rising sense of near-panic that comes from having too many choices. Your developmentally normal person quickly snaps out of it — a mental slap upside the head in the form of “it’s just peanut butter, dummy!” usually does it — but a vast and increasing number of people never do.
Since this is my blog and it’s Friday and all that, I’ll go ahead and expand this into a nebulous Theory of Everything: What people really want, deep down, is drama within limits. Ideally, you have the sense that something better is possible — and that something worse is possible — but, most importantly, the sense that if you follow the rules, and make sure everyone else follows the rules, neither of them will happen.
If you reach what appears to be an end state — that is, there’s no realistic possibility of anyone going higher or lower — you see nasty Karen-ish behavior. From everyone, everywhere, always. The Z Man did a piece the other day on Sayre’s Law, which anyone who has ever dealt with eggheads instinctively understands: “The fighting is so vicious because the stakes are so small”. If you read the bios of the real lunatics — the insane-by-egghead-standards, I’m talking — you almost always see that they’re tenured at some second rate academy. They’re topped out, and they know it. Hang around the faculty lounge long enough, and you learn to spot it in their eyes — that precise moment when they realize that Harvard won’t be calling, so they’re stuck here at Flyover State. They can’t move up, and thanks to tenure there’s no realistic (in their minds) possibility of falling down. The only drama left, then, is interpersonal drama, which is why they’re such vicious, obnoxious bitches to everyone, everywhere, always.
It works outside the academy too, of course. The two main CRT loons, Robin De Angelo and that Ibram X. Kendi guy, are maxed out and they know it. They weep, because they’ve seen they have no more worlds to conquer. Ever-escalating lunacy is the only emotional escape hatch they have left. You saw the same deal with “the workers” under Communism. They’re stuck there, forever, and they know it. They can’t move up — wrong class background, comrade, plus you lack Party connections — but they can’t really move down, either, if for no other reason than the KGB, vast as it is, can’t bother with every moribund tractor factory in Krasnoyarsk. Can’t move up, can’t move down, so you drink yourself into oblivion and spend your still-conscious hours in petty backbiting.
Severian, “Mailbag Etc.”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2021-07-06.
November 7, 2024
QotD: Fear of … freedom
November 5, 2024
It’s not really about Peanut and Fred
Tom Knighton explains that the online furor isn’t really about poor Peanut the Squirrel and Fred the Raccoon … but they’ve become a trigger for a lot of simmering anger over the abuse of power and the unequal application of justice:
By now, you’ve probably already heard about Peanut the Squirrel and Fred the Raccoon. If you haven’t, then your blood pressure is probably thankful.
The short version is a man from New York rescued a baby squirrel, named him Peanut, and raised him. The squirrel became an Instagram star, apparently, thanks to cute pictures of him wearing cowboy hats and so on.
A woman from Texas, apparently, reported the man for having Peanut and a raccoon named Fred. Anonymously, at the time.
As a result, state officials stormed the house, took Peanut and Fred from their home, interrogated the man and his wife as if they were terrorists, tossed the house like officials were raiding a drug kingpin’s house, questioned the wife’s immigrant status (she’s from Germany), then euthanized both animals, supposedly to test for rabies.
And as a result, a lot of people are pissed.
I’m pissed.
Now, I’m someone who has put meat in the freezer by my own hand. I have no delusions about where meat comes from and I’m not some crazed animal rights activist that thinks animal lives are the same as human lives.
But that doesn’t matter because none of the outrage is really about the squirrel.
No, it’s about justice.
See, the issue with Peanut here is the uneven application of the law.
For Peanut, the letter of the law had to be applied. An animal raised inside of a home with other animals raised inside of the same home, none of which showed even an inkling of being diseased were taken from their loving owners because of some BS regulation that shouldn’t have applied in this case.
This after four years of more uneven application of the law.
For example, we’ve seen George Soros-backed district attorneys vow not to prosecute people for some crimes. Some of those are victimless crimes, which doesn’t bother me, but it also includes things like shoplifting, which is anything but victimless. As a result, shoplifting got so bad and brazen in some places that many chains just shuttered locations because they couldn’t make a profit.
It wasn’t all that long ago that we were locked in our homes and told we couldn’t go to church, to school, to visit our dying family in the hospital, to do anything except for approved activities, and even then, there were rules we were forced to follow.
All of that went out the window when a career criminal died at the hands of a police officer and mobs throughout the nation set fire to entire neighborhoods. At that point, the deadly virus that was akin to ebola and the Black Death really wasn’t that bad and people should totally be fine with rioters destroying communities.
Very few of them were arrested and even fewer were convicted over their actions during those riots.
[…]
See, on every level, our nation of laws has been corrupted so that only some people get a pass while others don’t. Peanut and Fred didn’t have to be seized like they were. While the law is the law, anyone could see that there was no threat to people or the animals. There was absolutely no reason for any of it, but the law was suddenly the law whereas New York is notorious for giving certain parties a pass when it comes to the law.
Then we have them questioning the wife’s immigration status, whereas they turn illegal immigrants back out onto the streets after committing actual crimes. It’s rank hypocrisy at best.
But the truth is that while the law itself provides equal protection, the application of that law is anything but equal. There, some animals are more equal than others, and so Peanut and Fred were murdered by the state.
We love our pets. We cherish them. We understand the sense of loss when people lose a pet.
November 3, 2024
QotD: Minutemen
Granted, there’s not necessarily much overlap between the two groups. But one has supplanted the other in the mass media, the public imagination, and the affection of the right-wing radio hosts — and so help me, I think I miss the days when I felt a certain kinship with the crazies.
Jesse Walker, “More ’90s Nostalgia”, Hit and Run, 2005-07-28.
October 31, 2024
QotD: How to increase your Barbarism Quotient (BQ)
The digital barbarians have for now made themselves illegible to the hyper-surveillance, algorithmic discipline, and intrusive analytics that loom like the hundred-eyed Argos over all online interactions. In fact, insofar as a key technique of the cyber-panopticon is the construction of predictive models of user behavior, to be unpredictable is an important component of being ungovernable. The other option is to hide.
Hiding is a strategy that some people attempt offline as well, either by building a compound in the woods or by adopting protective coloration and hiding in plain sight. But as the bots grow ever more omniscient, hiding gets more expensive and less effective. Another classic barbarian-inspired strategy is to maximize mobility, and indeed contemporary economic and technological conditions seem ripe for a renaissance of nomadism. But the trouble with always being ready to pack your bags is it makes it hard for anybody to count on you.1 Is there anything that can be done for those of us who want to live marginally more barbarically, but still sip lattes and put down roots? Yes, because the ultimate lesson of Scott’s book is that barbarism is really more of a state of mind that can be practiced anywhere. Three brief examples of ways to increase your Barbarism Quotient (BQ), suitable for the discerning urban barbarian:
- Keep your identity small. Paul Graham once said this, but we can go much further. An expansive identity implies its contrapositive: a similarly expansive set of ideas, behaviors, and lifestyles which we cannot adopt without incurring psychic damage. This limits our space for action, and makes us easier for the machines to predict and for the man to control. Better far to figure out what you really care about, figure out what the real red lines are, and convert everything else from a non-negotiable into a piece of the optimization frontier. The ethnic and cultural mutability of barbarous peoples is an example of this kind of suppleness, but there are other sorts of mutability that can be useful too.
- The great Boston T. Party once declared: “it’s better to have $1,000 of ammunition in your garage than $1,000 in your bank account; but it’s even better to have only $100 of ammunition in your garage and $900 of practice.” A lot of would-be modern barbarians daydream about burying gold bars in the ground or sewing them into the lining of their clothes (like the barbarians of yore hiding their tubers in the ground), but Mr. Party’s insight generalizes well here. Physical gold is admittedly a less legible form of wealth than T-bills or CBDC; but skills, knowledge, and relationships are even harder to seize than bullion, and even easier to transport across borders. The wise barbarian judiciously transmutes a fixed percentage of his financial capital into human capital. Nothing improves your ultimate BATNA like having friends or being useful.
- Barbarians have a deserved reputation for not taking too kindly to strangers, but this xenophobia and clannishness is tactical. For the hill dweller, most strangers are in one way or another the representatives of hostile alien entities that are out to conscript, tax, and subjugate. The situation for we cosmopolitan, urban, dare I say urbane barbarians is a little bit different. We’ve already reached an accommodation with centralized despotic states, having found the advantages they offer to be worth the tradeoffs. Be that as it may, states have a tendency to try to unilaterally change the terms of the deal. To protect ourselves from this form of encroachment, the correct attitude is not xenophobia, but rather paranoia. The toolkit of modern states is to direct all our enthusiasm towards the Current Thing whilst deadening our senses towards everything else. “We had no idea it could get this bad” is a recurring theme in testimonies given by survivors of oppression and genocide, to which a family culture of “they really are out to get us” is a salutary corrective. Every pinprick ought to raise an alarm, because it could be the prick that precedes the onset of anesthesia. Finally, the cultured barbarian remembers that states are not the only hostile, alien entities waiting for us in the night with drooling jaws.
I could come up with a dozen more such practices, inspired by the hill people Scott documents, and ready for incorporation into the family culture you’re creating. But barbarism is a state of mind, and reflecting on how to keep yourself distinct and aloof from the fat, decadent agriculturalists is part of it. So read this book, and then begin carving out your cultural mountain fastness or your ideological swamp hideout. The barbarians are within the gates, they live among us, and we welcome you to join our ranks.
John Psmith, “REVIEW: The Art of Not Being Governed by James C. Scott”, Mr. and Mrs. Psmith’s Bookshelf, 2023-01-16.
1. Unless, that is, you all move together. If somebody wants to pitch me on peripatetic cyber-gypsy life, I am all ears.
October 30, 2024
QotD: The right to bear arms
Whether one agrees or disagrees with it, the Second Amendment is usually interpreted in these latter days as an axiom of and about political character — an expression of republican political thought, a prescription for a equilibrium of power in which the armed people are at least equal in might to the organized forces of government.
It is all these things. But it is something more, because the Founders regarded political character and individual ethical character as inseparable. They had a clear notion of the individual virtues necessary collectively to a free people. They did not merely regard the habit of bearing arms as a political virtue, but as a direct promoter of personal virtue.
The Founders had been successful armed revolutionaries. Every one of them had had repeated confrontation with life-or-death choices, in grave knowledge of the consequences of failure. They desired that the people of their infant nation should always cultivate that kind of ethical maturity, the keen sense of individual moral responsibility that they had personally learned from using lethal force in defense of their liberty.
Accordingly, firearms were prohibited only to those intended to be kept powerless and infantilized. American gun prohibitions have their origins in racist legislation designed to disarm slaves and black freedmen. The wording of that legislation repays study; it was designed not merely to deny blacks the political power of arms but to prevent them from aspiring to the dignity of free men.
The dignity of free men (and, as we would properly add today, free women). That is a phrase that bears thinking on. As the twentieth century draws to a close, it sounds archaic. Our discourse has nearly lost the concept that the health of the res publica is founded on private virtue. Too many of us contemplate a president who preaches family values and responsibility to the nation while committing adultery and perjury, and don’t see a contradiction.
But Thomas Jefferson’s question, posed in his inaugural address of 1801, still stings. If a man cannot be trusted with the government of himself, how can he be trusted with the government of others? And this is where history and politics circle back to ethics and psychology: because “the dignity of a free (wo)man” consists in being competent to govern one’s self, and in knowing, down to the core of one’s self, that one is so competent
Eric S. Raymond, “Ethics from the Barrel of a Gun”.
October 21, 2024
QotD: Libertarianism
The reason that the state/individual relationship is concentrated upon is that the state has a monopoly on coercive force. Only the state is allowed to kill you. In the twentieth century, of the half billion or so people who have been killed outside of war, almost all have been killed by the state. Maybe 30 people have been killed by intermediate organizations. Labor unions got a couple. John Gotti got a couple. But basically it’s the state that endangers people.
P.J. O’Rourke, interviewed by Scott Walter, “The 60’s Return”, The American Enterprise, May/June 1997.
October 11, 2024
German free speech – only applicable when used to criticize the “far right”
C.J. Hopkins discovers the stark contrast between actual freedom of speech and German freedom of speech:
The first rule of New Normal Germany is, you do not compare New Normal Germany to Nazi Germany. If you do that, New Normal Germany will punish you. It will sic the Federal Criminal Police on you. It will report you to its domestic Intelligence agency. It will ban your books. It will censor your Tweets. It will prosecute you on fabricated “hate-crime” charges.
I know this, because that’s what happened to me. I broke the first rule of New Normal Germany. I compared New Normal Germany to Nazi Germany. I did it with the cover artwork of my book.
Yes, that’s a swastika on the cover. A swastika covered by a medical mask. I tweeted that artwork in 2022. The German authorities prosecuted me for that, and convicted me for that. So, now I’m a “hate criminal”, and an “anti-Semite”, and a “trivializer of the Holocaust”.
That’s the second rule of New Normal Germany. You never, ever, display a swastika. Displaying a swastika is not “in Ordnung“. Displaying swastikas is totally “verboten“.
Unless you are the Health Minister of New Normal Germany, and you’re comparing your political opponents to the Nazis. Or unless you are a popular German celebrity, and you’re comparing the Russians and their supporters to the Nazis. Or unless you are a mainstream magazine, and you’re comparing German populists to the Nazis.
In which case, displaying a swastika is fine. And is not “verboten“. And definitely not a “hate crime”.
And that’s the third rule of New Normal Germany. If you agree with the government, obey their orders, and parrot their propaganda, you are not a “hate criminal”. If you are the government, like an actual minister in the government, like the Minister of Health, you’re definitely not a “hate criminal”. And, if you are part of government’s propaganda apparatus, needless to say, you’re also not a “hate criminal”.
However, if you criticize the government, or if you compare the government to Nazi Germany, and if you do that using your book-cover art featuring a swastika behind a Covid mask, then you’re absolutely officially a “hate criminal”, and an “anti-Semite”, and a “trivializer of the Holocaust”.
October 3, 2024
Refuting one old myth about “shouting ‘fire’ in a crowded theatre”
In the visible portion of a pay-walled post, Andrew Doyle explains why we should stop using the hoary old anti-free speech cliché that was refuted nearly 50 years ago by the US Supreme Court:
There are few people who are courageous enough to openly admit that they oppose freedom of speech, and so we would be forgiven for thinking that the authoritarian mindset is rare. In truth, those who believe that censorship can be justified typically resort to a set of hackneyed and specious arguments. It doesn’t seem to matter how often these misconceptions are conclusively rebutted, they continue to be trotted out with depressing regularity.
Take yesterday’s Vice Presidential debate between JD Vance and Tim Walz, in which one of these very misconceptions was parroted once again. This is how it happened:
JD Vance: You guys attack us for not believing in democracy. The most sacred right under the United States democracy is the First Amendment. You yourself have said there’s no First Amendment right to misinformation. Kamala Harris wants to …
Tim Walz: Or threatening, or hate speech …
JD Vance: … use the power of government and big tech to silence people from speaking their minds. That is a threat to democracy that will long outlive this present political moment. I would like Democrats and Republicans to both reject censorship. Let’s persuade one another. Let’s argue about ideas, and then let’s come together afterwards.
Tim Walz: You can’t yell fire in a crowded theatre. That’s the test. That’s the Supreme Court test.
The cliché that “you can’t shout ‘fire’ in a crowded theatre” originates in the 1917 United States Supreme Court ruling against Charles Schenck, a socialist who had issued a broadside calling for young men to refuse military conscription and was convicted under the Espionage Act. These were the circumstances under which Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes wrote the statement: “The most stringent protection of free speech would not protect a man in falsely shouting ‘Fire!’ in a theatre and causing a panic”. Note that the word “falsely” is invariably dropped when quoted by advocates for censorship.
Leaving that telling little edit aside, it should be remembered that this was never a legally binding statement. Walz maintains that this is “the Supreme Court test”, but Holmes merely used the analogy to justify upholding Schenck’s prosecution. In fact, the decision of the court in Schenck v. United States was overruled in 1969.
Do I need to say that I didn’t watch the debate? I don’t even watch the debates when I actually have a vote to cast, so I’m going on highly selective sources to at least pretend to care about the VP debate. I do like a waspish line on almost any politician, so Bridget Phetasy’s description gave me a mental image of the event that seems highly truthy: “The vibe of this debate is adult confronting the coach who molested him”. J.D. Tuccille has more:
To illustrate the contrast between the recent presidential debate and this week’s vice-presidential match, I’ll say that I dread either Donald Trump or Kamala Harris taking office as president, but I fear the policies of veep hopefuls J.D. Vance and Tim Walz. At the top of both party’s tickets are individuals of uncertain competence and shaky basic decency, while their sidekicks come off as the designated adults, ready to step in if the winning presidential candidate falters, and more than excited to implement their chosen programs, God help us. That said, Vance had a much better night than Walz.
From the very beginning, J.D. Vance gave us a glimpse of what Trump might be like minus a personality disorder and with focus. He looked cool and collected, with his arguments organized in his head. He was also able to quickly pivot to address — or dodge (this is politics, after all) — the CBS moderators’ questions.
By contrast, Walz appeared like he was sweat-soaking his notes into illegibility as he tried to remember which part of the previous night’s memorized cram session he should spit out. He eventually regained some of his footing, though he generally seemed nervous and unprepared.
“The vibe of this debate is adult confronting the coach who molested him,” quipped podcaster and writer Bridget Phetasy, who isn’t known for being merciful.
The Democrat’s discomfort probably came to a head when he was asked to explain why he long claimed to have been in Hong Kong in 1989, with front-row seats to the Tiananmen Square massacre, when news reports and photographic evidence showed he was at home in Nebraska. Much hemming, hawing and references to a small-town upbringing ensued, which was painful to watch. The closest he came to admitting he lied was conceding, “I’m a knucklehead at times” and that he “misspoke.”
September 30, 2024
“This quite obviously proves that free speech is a tyrannical concept”
At The Critic, Titania McGrath decries the manifest horrors of letting ordinary people say whatever they want … without punishment:
“Titania McGrath” and Andrew Doyle
The government has repeatedly pointed out that the riots in the UK were directly caused by bad words on the internet. One of those arrested was an elderly retired midwife from Devon, who had accidentally read an inflammatory Facebook post whilst browsing for cupcake recipes. Within ten minutes, she found herself punching Persian toddlers and throwing grenades at a mosque.
For all the endless whingeing of free speech extremists, Starmer appreciates that words must be controlled to ensure that his subjects behave themselves. Surely most reasonable people would rather have their liberties restricted than live in a fascist state?
The next step is to see Elon Musk extradited. It was bad enough that he renamed Twitter as “X”, which is just a swastika with a few bits chopped off. But he has also allowed users to say whatever they like. As a result, wrong opinions are being duplicated at an alarming rate.
“Regulators around the world should threaten Musk with arrest if he doesn’t stop disseminating lies and hate on X,” wrote Robert Reich in the Guardian. Although I don’t approve of his surname, he makes a valid case.
Back in 2013, Starmer was quoted as saying that too many Twitter prosecutions could “have a chilling effect for free speech”. These were dangerous words, and although Starmer has since changed his mind, he should probably be calling for his own prosecution.
If you don’t want to be arrested, don’t say the wrong things. It really is that simple.
September 19, 2024
We’re approaching Halloween … expect the offensensitive inquisition!
Andrew Doyle with a timely reminder that Brits can — and have been — arrested, prosecuted, and (potentially) even imprisoned for wearing “offensive” Halloween costumes, and it’s likely to get worse:
The novelist Simon Raven once received a telegram from his wife which read: “Wife and baby starving send money soonest”. He replied: “Sorry no money suggest eat baby”. At the risk of sounding callous, I must admit that my first reaction on reading this was to laugh. It was involuntary, like the best of laughter. The reader should rest assured that this does not mean that I in any way approve of cannibalism and infanticide.
There is a brand of humour which relies on its sheer inappropriateness. It’s why we can find ourselves laughing during funerals or other solemn occasions. The social responsibility to take the matter seriously nags at our senses and dares us to rebel. John Cleese understood this all too well when he delivered the eulogy at Graham Chapman’s funeral and noted that his deceased friend would obviously have liked him to say: “Good riddance to him, the freeloading bastard. I hope he fries.”
The same principle applies, albeit in a cruder manner, to the convention of Halloween costumes that are intended to shock. It might seem puerile, but rather than donning the costume of a ghost or a vampire, many partygoers now celebrate this season of horror by dressing up as the most appalling human beings in history, such as Adolf Hitler, Myra Hindley, or Jedward.
The “gross out” is the whole point. The more outrageous the better, and the guest who displays the worst taste sometimes wins a prize. This is precisely what happened to David Wootton, who dressed as an Islamic terrorist, complete with Arabic headdress, and a t-shirt bearing the words “I love Ariana Grande”. To top it all, he carried a rucksack with “TNT” and “boom” written on it. This was in reference of course to the horrendous terrorist attack at an Ariana Grande concert at Manchester Arena in 2017 that killed twenty-two people, including many children, and injured a further thousand.
Bad taste? Offensive? Juvenile? I would agree with all of these assessments. But the partygoers understood the rules of the game, and Wootton later claimed to have been awarded the prize for Best Costume. Once his image was posted online, however, it became a police matter, and he was quickly arrested. He pleaded guilty and now faces up to two years in prison. He has also relocated and changed his name.
I have complete sympathy for anyone who found the images upsetting, grotesque, and not remotely funny. Nobody worth knowing would deny that the terrorist had committed an unforgivable crime. I find it particularly shocking that so many of us seemed to forget all about it with ease, as though we should accept that this kind of atrocity is simply an occasional aspect of living in modern Britain. Personally, I find this far more offensive than any tasteless Halloween costume.
September 10, 2024
Chilling effect (with a British accent) – “No one is now sure what they are allowed to say”
Spaceman Spiff makes a bid to star in one of Gauleiter Keir Stürmer’s big show trials, coming far too soon to a town hall near you:
In Britain many of us now walk on eggshells.
The country and its systems are broken. Free speech is being outlawed. Many are frightened to say anything, although it doesn’t stop them noticing and thinking.
Recent emphasis on invented categories of offence — misinformation, disinformation and now malinformation — mean almost anything can come under the purview of the State and its informers, from ill-timed comments to jokes and humorous observations.
Famously, memes based on simple observation are admissible in Britain’s world-famous show trials, including this one no doubt:1
It is difficult to know what people are thinking when they endorse the importation of people who want to kill them for their lifestyle choices.
Everything must be monitored because less and less can be tolerated by those in positions of authority. Their narratives are failing, and they are panicking. They are getting desperate.
Noticing is verboten
Many of the topics that trigger the strongest response by the British Government are simply unpopular policies that normal people can no longer ignore.
More accurately, policies that directly affect growing numbers of law-abiding taxpayers who did not vote for them.
Do not discuss immigration
Mass immigration is the supreme example. Britain’s cities are being flooded with “asylum seekers”, most of whom are economic migrants with no right to settle in the country.
Many are alien peoples from distinct cultures with no connection to Europe and a poor track record of assimilation.
They are aided by an army of well-funded human rights lawyers who distort laws designed to help the genuinely dispossessed, which most immigrants are not.
Thanks to our generosity many privileges are extended to foreigners that are unavailable to natives such as free housing and financial help on the understanding these are used sparingly and temporarily to aid the desperate.
These myriad of kindnesses did not emerge to serve those who want the benefits of first-world living while dodging the corresponding costs; the development of high-trust social structures, the communal spirit that transcends tribalism, and the selflessness it all requires. These are rare phenomenon much of the world cannot produce or maintain, and they are being squandered in Western nations by the selfish obsessed with demonstrating their own virtue.
No serious discussion of immigration is tolerated at any level in Britain. However, this does not stop the erosion of goodwill upon which most of their schemes depend. The generosity they abuse is a limited resource and the magnanimity upon which it depends is evaporating quickly.
1. Many are being jailed in Britain for posting memes and related social media content. The judges often go to some lengths to confirm it is not the content of the material they are questioning as they are perfectly legal, but the perceived intent behind the posting itself.
This unprecedented legal descent into clairvoyance, hate speech and arrogance is relatively new. It will not age well and tells us more about the decline in competency in the judiciary than anything else. Standards are clearly not what they once were.
To put this kind of absurd reasoning on display in irremovable public court records speaks to the level of delusion and arrogance we are now dealing with in Britain. Our social betters are truly lost in a world of their own.
QotD: Contempt of court
Steve H., “Was I Wrong About Cooper? Don’t Think So”, Hog On Ice, 2005-07-06.
September 9, 2024
Bill C-63, the Online Harms Act
In the National Post, Barbara Kay explains why the Trudeau government will probably be urgently trying to get Bill C-63 through into law when Parliament resumes sitting later this month:
The sands of time were already running low for Justin Trudeau’s government. Jagmeet Singh’s just-announced withdrawal from their mutually supportive contract has widened the waist of the hourglass. Parliament resumes sitting on Sept. 16, and the Liberals will urgently seek to pass Bill C-63, the Online Harms Act, now in its second reading.
If passed in its present incarnation, this deeply flawed bill will drastically curtail freedom of speech in Canada (which, to be fair, is not an outlier on digital crackdowns in the West. Switzerland, of all places, just passed similar legislation).
We already have hate-crime laws in the Criminal Code that address advocacy for genocide, incitement of hatred and the wilful promotion of hatred. Apart from its laudatory intentions in removing online content that sexually victimizes children, Bill C-63 seeks to curb all online hate speech through unnecessary, inadvisable and draconian measures inappropriate to a democracy.
The law would create a new transgression: an “offence motivated by hated” which would raise the maximum penalty for advocacy of genocide from five years to life imprisonment. What kind of mindset considers the mere expression of hateful ideas as equivalent in moral depravity to rape and murder? Such instincts call to my mind the clever aperçu by anti-Marxist pundit David Horowitz that “Inside every progressive is a totalitarian screaming to get out”.
Another red flag: The law would give new powers to the federal cabinet to pass regulations that have the same force as legislation passed by Parliament, and that could, say, shut down a website. Unlike legislation, regulations created by cabinet do not require debate, votes or approval of Parliament. They can be decided in secrecy and come into force without public consultation or debate.
Yet another is the restoration of the “communication of hate speech” offence to the Canadian Human Rights Act, a provision similar to the one repealed in 2012. Frivolous or malicious complaints could be made against persons or organizations, granting complainants significant potential for financial reward at no personal cost, win or lose. Moreover, under this law, a complainant’s sense of injury from published words would trump a defence of objective truth. This is an open invitation for myriad social malcontents and grievance-mongers to swarm the system, with no regard for the inevitable harm done to those who they target.
September 3, 2024
Second Amendment case involving switchblades in Massachusetts
J.D. Tuccille summarizes a (surprising) court decision in Massachusetts which struck down a state law banning switchblade knives:
“IMGA0174_tijuana” by gregor_y is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0 
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The Second Amendment to the United States Constitution undisputedly protects the individual right to own and carry firearms for self-defense, sport, and other uses. But the amendment actually says nothing about guns; it refers to “the right of the people to keep and bear Arms”, of which firearms are just one example of what dictionaries define as “a means (such as a weapon) of offense or defense”. In Massachusetts, last week, that resulted in a decision by the state’s highest court striking down a law against switchblade knives.
Protected by the Second Amendment
“We conclude switchblades are not ‘dangerous and unusual’ weapons falling outside the protection of the Second Amendment,” wrote Justice Serge Georges Jr. for the court in an opinion in Commonwealth v. Canjura that drew heavily on two landmark U.S. Supreme Court cases: Bruen (2022) and Heller (2008). The decision found the state’s ban on switchblade knives unconstitutional and dismissed charges against the defendant.
The case involved a 2020 dispute between David E. Canjura and his girlfriend, during which Boston police officers found a switchblade knife on Canjura while searching him. As is often noted, “everything is illegal in Massachusetts” and “a switch knife, or any knife having an automatic spring release device” is only one of a long list of weapons proscribed under state law. Canjura was accordingly charged.
Such absolute prohibitions on arms aren’t permitted in the wake of the Heller decision, so Canjura and his public defender, Kaitlyn Gerber, challenged the ban on switchblades, citing the federal decisions. They also relied on Jorge Ramirez v. Commonwealth (2018) in which the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court overturned a similar prohibition on stun guns on Second Amendment grounds.
“We now conclude that stun guns are ‘arms’ within the protection of the Second Amendment. Therefore, under the Second Amendment, the possession of stun guns may be regulated, but not absolutely banned,” the court found in that case.
Canjura required similar analysis based on the same earlier decisions, this time with Ramirez in the mix.
The Second Amendment Protects All “Bearable Arms”
Citing Heller, Justice Georges pointed out, “the Second Amendment extends, prima facie, to all instruments that constitute bearable arms, even those that were not in existence at the time of the founding”. Importantly, though, knives and other bladed weapons have a long history, extending back well before the birth of the country.
“A review of the history of the American colonies reveals that knives were ubiquitous among colonists, who used them to defend their lives, obtain or produce food, and fashion articles from raw materials,” commented Georges. Folding knives, in particular, grew in popularity to the point they became “almost universal”. The court saw no significant difference between the many types of folding knives used over the centuries and spring-assisted varieties developed somewhat more recently, finding “the most apt historical analogue of a modern-day switchblade is the folding pocketknife”.
QotD: The Libertarian Party clown car
Jeff Maurer, “Why Can’t the Libertarian Party Be Normal?”, I Might Be Wrong, 2024-05-28.
