Quotulatiousness

March 2, 2024

Brian Mulroney, RIP

Filed under: Cancon, Government, History — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

In a guest post at Paul Wells’ Substack, Ian Brodie describes former Prime Minister Brian Mulroney’s role in ending the Cold War:

Prime Minister Brian Mulroney, Mila Mulroney, Nancy Reagan, and President Ronald Reagan at the “Shamrock Summit”, 18 March, 1985.
Photo from the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library via Wikimedia Commons.

Mulroney’s role has long been poo-poohed by intellectuals on the Canadian left. He was said to have an unhealthy obsession with pleasing the Americans. As a young boy, his fine voice won him an opportunity to entertain visiting American executives with a song. Amateur psychologists diagnosed a disturbing link between Mulroney’s having grown up in a company town, under the shadow of a US owned mill, and his reinvigoration of St. Laurent’s post-war grand strategy.

Mulroney never automatically fell in with US positions on the global issues of the day. His opposition to the apartheid regime in South Africa ran counter to the positions of both Reagan and Thatcher. But he drove the effort to link the American and Canadian economies through the free trade agreement. He backed our allies in the strategic competition with the Soviet bloc. And in helping to create the International Democratic Union, he helped put the west’s centre-right parties on the side of international political cooperation on the side of democracy, liberty, and the rule of law. The contrast with an earlier prime minister who could not bring himself to condemn the declaration of martial law in Poland a few years earlier was clear.

His personal relationships with a generation of American leaders gave substance to the transactional successes. As the Soviet Union came apart, he secured a spot for Canada as the first NATO country to recognize Ukraine’s independence and bolstered the independence movements of the Baltic republics. When Iraq tried to establish a precedent that, following the Cold War, large, powerful countries could invade their neighbours with impunity, Mulroney backed the US led coalition to liberate Kuwait with all the diplomatic and military power he had on hand.

And along the way, he so closely befriended both Reagan and the first Bush that he was given a privileged platform at two US state funerals, an honour never extended to a Canadian leader before and unlikely to be extended to one again soon.

Mulroney deserves to be remembered along with St. Laurent as Canada’s grand strategist of the 20th century. A trusted confidant of world leaders.

Crossing the Irrawaddy

Filed under: Britain, History, India, Japan, Military, WW2 — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Dr. Robert Lyman is on a visit to the site of a very significant event in the battle for Burma in 1945:

On 13-14 February 1945, 79-years ago this month the 7th Indian Division commanded by Major General Geoffrey Evans secured crossings over the Irrawaddy at Pakkoku and Nyaung-U/Bagan. The northern crossing (Pakkoku) was designed to allow Punch Cowan’s 17th Indian Division, and the Sherman tanks of 255 Indian Tank Brigade, to race across country to seize Meiktila. The southern ones, at Nyaung-U and Bagan (a few miles to the south still), were designed to prevent the enemy from interfering with the operations against Meiktila, and to make him believe that securing the Irrawaddy as a route to Rangoon — and not Meiktila — was Slim’s primary objective. In 2005, for the 60th anniversary of the Irrawaddy crossings, I was privileged to walk the battlefield with three veterans of these crossings, John Chiles (Probyn’s Horse), Manny Curtis (South Lancashire Regiment) and Bert Wilkins (RA, in support of the South Lancs). During that trip we travelled along the Irrawaddy from Bagan, anxiously scouring the maps in the South Lancs’ War Diary searching for B4 beach, where on the early morning of 14 February 1945 two hundred men of 2nd Battalion South Lancashire Regiment had rowed silently across the river to form the vanguard of the 7th Indian Division beachhead. I remember vividly the excitement as we found B4 — it was much easier than I had thought — disembarked from the boat and climbed to the top of the cliffs to find old trenches from the battle. It was an emotional event for the veterans as they recalled the battle and found trenches left by the defenders decades before.

At Nyaung-U the first wave of a company of the 2nd Bn South Lancs (including Manny Curtis) managed to seize the high ground above B4 in the early morning of 14 February. It was the longest opposed river crossing in any theatre of the Second World War. The beaches had been recced by a Sea Reconnaissance Unit and a Special Boat Section. However, subsequent waves of troops from the remainder of the South Lancs, the 4th Battalion 14th Punjab Regiment and the 4th Battalion 1st Gurkha Rifles were mauled by enemy machine gun fire as the leaky canvas boats and temperamental outboard motors failed to cope with the distance they had to cover and the strength of the river’s flow. The enemy? Pagan and Nyaungu were defended not by the Japanese but by three battalions of the Indian National Army’s 4th Guerrilla Regiment, some 2,000 men in well-sited positions overlooking the Irrawaddy. This was the only major engagement of the war when troops of the Indian Army fought in direct combat against the INA. To subdue the enemy positions causing casualties on the water, Sherman tanks of the Gordon Highlanders sniped the enemy positions, and an artillery bombardment by 25-pdrs and a Hurribomber strike pummelled the east bank of the river. Together these actions succeeded in forcing the INA to surrender. Further to the west, at Pagan, the INA’s 9th Battalion took a heavy toll of the assaulting 1/11th Sikh Regiment, before they withdrew to Mount Popa to the rear. River crossing are dangerous, especially for troops with little training in boatmanship, across one of the world’s greatest rivers. But this time the 7th Indian Division succeeded with little training or preparation. By the end of the day the east bank was in its hands. Amazingly, a cinematographic unit were available to film some of the crossings at Nyaung-U. An 8-minute reel of the landings can be seen in the IWM on JFU35.

Today I was able to revisit B4. Not much had changed in nearly 20-years. The size of the Irrawaddy even in the dry season is astonishing, the task given to the men of 33 Brigade enormous. In 2005 we climbed the cliffs that Manny and his friends had raced up in 1945. Looking at them again today, I realised just how Gallipoli-like was the terrain. In the hands of of better trained enemy, 33 Brigade should never have managed to get off the beachhead. Rippling rows of gullies flow behind the initial landing site: if these had all been defended, a position of great depth and near impregnability could have been achieved. These photos look down on B4 and across to the position up which the men of 2nd South Lancs scrambled.

The Hindenburg Disaster – Dining on the Zeppelin

Filed under: Food, Germany, History, Technology — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Tasting History with Max Miller
Published Nov 28, 2023

Decadent vanilla rice pudding with poached pears, chocolate sauce, and candied fruit

City/Region: France
Time Period: 1903

Everything about this dish exudes fanciness, and it comes as no surprise. A ride across the Atlantic on the Hindenburg cost around $9,000 in today’s money, and the whole experience was meant to be luxurious. The head chef on the Hindenburg, Xaver Maier, had worked at the Ritz Hotel in Paris, which was still cooking from the recipes of Auguste Escoffier.

The Escoffier recipe for pears condé seems simple enough, until you realize he references about 5 other recipes in total in order to make the dish. It’s a lot of work, but it’s so good. The rice pudding has such an intense vanilla flavor that really elevates it and is the perfect base for the poached pears. Don’t get too much of the rich chocolate sauce or it will overwhelm the other flavors.

Really you could make just the rice pudding and have that be a fancy dessert all on its own if you don’t want to go to all the fuss.

    Poires Condé:
    Very small pears which are carefully peeled and shaped are most suitable for this preparation. Those of medium size should be cut in half. Cook them in vanilla-flavored syrup then proceed as for Abricots Condé, recipe 4510.
    Abricots Condé:
    On a round dish prepare a border of vanilla-flavored Prepared Rice for sweet dishes (recipe 4470)

    — Auguste Escoffier, 1903

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QotD: Early siege warfare

Filed under: History, Middle East, Military, Quotations, Technology — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

Now the besieger’s side of the equation may seem like an odd place to start a primer on fortifications, but it actually makes a fair bit of sense, because the capabilities of a potential attacker is where most thinking about fortification begins. Siegecraft, both offensive and defensive, is a case of “antagonistic co-evolution“, a form of evolution through opposition where each side of the relationship evolves new features in response to the other: neither offensive siege techniques nor fortifications evolve in isolation but rather in response to each other.

In many ways the choice of where to begin following that process of evolution is arbitrary. We could in theory start anywhere from the very distant past or only very recently, but in this case I think it makes sense to begin with the early Near Eastern iron age because of the nature of our evidence. While it is clear that siege warfare must have been an important part of not only bronze age warfare but even pre-bronze age warfare, sources for the details of its practice in that era are sparse (in part because, as we’ll see, siege warfare was a sort of job done by lower status soldiers who often didn’t figure much into artwork focused on royal self-representation and legitimacy-building).

But as we move into the iron age, the dominant power that emerges in the Near East is the (Neo-)Assyrian Empire, the rulers of which make a point of foregrounding their siegecraft as part of a broader program of discouraging revolt by stressing the fearsome abilities of the Assyrian army (which in turn had much of its strength in its professional infantry). Consequently, we have some very useful artistic depictions of the Assyrian army doing siege work and at the same time some incomplete but still very useful information about the structure of the army itself. Moreover, it is just as the Assyrian Empire’s day is coming to a close (collapse in 609) that the surviving source base begins to grow markedly more robust (particularly, but not exclusively, in Greece), giving us dense descriptions of siege work (and even some manuals concerning it) in the following centuries, which we can in turn bring to the Assyrian evidence to better understand it. So this is a good place to start because it is the earliest point where we are really on firm ground in terms of understanding siegecraft in some detail. This does mean we are starting in medias res, with sophisticated states already using complex armies to assault fairly complex, sophisticated fortifications, which is worth keeping in mind.

That said, it should be noted that this is hardly beginning at the beginning. The earliest fortifications in most regions of the world were wooden and probably very simple (often just a palisade with perhaps an elevated watch-post), but by the late 8th century, well-defended sites (like walled cities) already sported sophisticated systems of stone walls and towers for defense. That caveat is in turn necessary because siegecraft didn’t evolve the same way everywhere: precisely because this is a system of antagonistic co-evolution it means that in places where either offensive or defensive methods (or technologies) took a different turn, one can end up with very different results down the line (something we’ll see especially with gunpowder).

Bret Devereaux, “Collections: Fortification, Part I: The Besieger’s Playbook”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2021-10-29.

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.

Women behaving badly on [police bodycam] video

Filed under: Law, Media, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Janice Fiamengo suggests that demands to the use of police bodycam footage involving young women being arrested for criminal behaviour is a weird bit of official white-knighting on the part of the authorities:

Moments of public outrage can be opportunities to consider deep-rooted cultural assumptions.

There’s been moral outrage lately over a popular YouTube channel called Drive Thru Tours. Launched in 2020, the channel started out by posting videos of tours through parts of New Jersey and New York. It hit paydirt last year when it began showing videos of police arrests, with titles such as “Rude 19-year-old Girl Arrested for DUI in Pullman, WA” (recommended if you want to get a flavor of the site) and “Belligerent Woman Arrested for DWI after Police Pursuit and Taken to Jail” (not recommended — very disturbing). The channel owner obtained the content — which until recently has focused exclusively on female offenders — from police bodycam recordings, now publicly available through freedom of information requests.

Bodycam footage was originally made accessible to the public so that American citizens can hold police accountable for their actions. Scrutiny of police behavior is widely considered a public good. Scrutiny of female behavior, however, is quite a different story — as responses to the channel demonstrate.

According to a small flurry of recent news reports, New Jersey police are warning that Drive Thru Tours is harming “vulnerable” young women by posting the evidence of their arrests. The bodycam footage was never intended, they protest, for such a purpose. In consequence, the Association of Chiefs of Police of New Jersey is calling for legislation against what they are describing as “online sexual predators“, and lawmakers in that state are considering a bill that would prohibit publishing the footage except within narrow parameters, including with the written consent of the subject.

Quite apart from whether such a bill is a good idea or not (I favor public access but have not given the matter serious thought), the language used in the articles is remarkable for its gynocentric sentimentality and misplaced sympathy.

One of the most vocal on the subject is Montville, New Jersey Police Chief Andrew Caggiano, who is quoted as stating that “It was never the intent of OPRA [the Open Public Records Act] to create such a platform that preys on young women and takes advantage of them at a time when they are vulnerable”. He also expressed a personal repugnance: “As a law enforcement professional and the father of three daughters, I am sickened by the fact that people are abusing OPRA to post these types of videos on social media sites”.

Given that it is not (yet) illegal to use bodycam material in the manner described, Chief Caggiano’s dramatic reaction seems overstated. One wonders in what sense the reckless and self-absorbed young people shown in these videos are “vulnerable”. Wouldn’t such language be better suited to their victims? Perhaps Caggiano knows something about his daughters that we don’t know (there is a video in which a “Cop’s Daughter Gets Arrested for DWI after Fleeing Accident Scene”): one would not normally expect a chief of police to so quickly substitute in imagination his own daughters for the inebriated and flagrantly dishonest women shown on Drive Thru Tours.

Caggiano’s bluster is, of course, all too familiar in a culture that cannot bear to hold women fully responsible for their bad actions — no matter how anti-social or potentially lethal — and must habitually frame them as innocent victims. It’s impossible to imagine such outraged sympathy being expressed for any male offenders in similar situations.

Understanding the modern media

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

It’s hard for Baby Boomers and even some older Gen X folks to grasp just how much the mainstream media has changed since the 1960s and 70s. Helpfully, Severian provides the context to properly understand what drives them and why they do the things they do:

Proposed coat of arms for Founding Questions by “urbando”.
The Latin motto translates to “We are so irrevocably fucked”.

There is no local news, because all “news” is Apparat audition tape. Back when — back when they were called “reporters” — news people had a clear career progression within a specific industry. A hungry young reporter for the Toad Suck, Nebraska, Times-Picayune might end his days as a reporter for the New York Times or Washington Post, but that was as high as he could reasonably expect to go. Same with the television division — the bobblehead at WSUX in Toad Suck might end up, at most, on CNN or Fox.

These days, though, they call themselves “journalists”, and “journalist” is just an entry-level Apparat post. They’re not just auditioning for the NYT or CNN, of course. A hungry young “journalist” might end xzhyr career at either, of course, but also as a corporate communications director, a political campaign consultant, a professor of “journalism”, a Diversity Outreach Coordinator, any one of a million “Media strategies” and “Media consulting” gigs … or, of course, as an outright lobbyist, because all of those are just euphemisms for “lobbying” anyway.

And that’s before you consider that all the “independent” papers and stations have been bought up by huge conglomerates, and depend on advertising revenue. Noam Chomsky was right — the Media does dance to the tune its corporate paymasters’ call. He was just wrong on those paymasters’ political orientation. Combine all that, and even the most straight-up, just-the-facts-ma’am local “news” story will find some way to insert The Sermon. If you don’t see The Sermon, you’ve either found an incompetent journalist (which happens) … or you might be looking at something subtle.

[…]

The Media, like Skynet, is self-aware. This significantly complicates the stoyachnik‘s task, as The Media understands its own power, and it increasingly wants to drive Narratives itself, especially as its power is on the verge of… well, not collapse exactly, but certainly a sea change. Because The Media is not monolithic, and that’s part of its self-awareness. So many “journalists” do nothing but hit refresh on Twitter all day, and Twitter knows this — that makes Twitter the real power broker. Google, too, obviously is more self-aware than traditional Media. That ludicrous AI image generator represents years of effort; they expended enormous resources to get precisely that result. They understand how utterly dependent the lower layers of The Media are on them; they are more self-aware.

Let us […] use Google’s own AI “summarizer” to refamiliarize ourselves with the tale of Comrade Ogilvy:

    Comrade Ogilvy is an imaginary character in the novel 1984, created by Winston Smith to replace Comrade Withers, an Inner Party member who has fallen into disgrace and been vaporized. Comrade Ogilvy supposedly lived a patriotic and virtuous life, supported the party as a child, designed a highly effective hand grenade as an adult, and died in action at the age of 23 while protecting important dispatches for his country. He did not drink or smoke, was celibate, and only conversed about Party philosophy, Ingsoc. Comrade Ogilvy displays how easy it is for a member of The Party to be pulled from thin air, and how determined The Party is to keep unpersons from the media.

The Apparatchiks at Google are more self-aware than the Apparatchiks at, say, the New York Times. That is, they understand their place in the Apparat better, and see the networks more clearly. They know how mal-educated “journalists” are, far better than the “journalists” themselves do. Google, like Winston Smith, knows full well that there’s no Comrade Ogilvy. But the “journalists” at the New York Times who are utterly reliant on Google for their “facts” do NOT know this. How could they?

And thus, the only White people in all of human history were Nazis. At least according to Google’s AI image generator, and therefore — soon enough — it’s what “everybody knows”. (And it’s necessarily recursive. The second generation of Google engineers will not know there’s no Comrade Ogilvy, any more than the current generation of “journalists” does).

Was JUNO BEACH The Deadliest On D Day? | Canadian Army | Normandy WW2

Filed under: Cancon, France, Germany, History, Military, WW2 — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

The History Explorer
Published Oct 27, 2023

During the invasion of Fortress Europe the casualty figures sustained on Omaha beach were terrifying; approximately 2,500 US casualties were sustained of which around 800 were killed, depending on which source you use. The ratio was said to be 1 in 19 soldiers would become a casualty.

But it was at Juno beach where the fighting Canadians landed that the casualties were 1 in 18. The fighting on Juno beach resembled modern urban warfare – silencing fortified residential houses, clearing rooms and bunker busting. So was this the more deadly beach? This is the story, of Juno beach and the brave sons of Canada.

On June 6th, 1944, the 3rd Canadian Infantry Division and the 2nd Armoured Brigade were tasked with establishing a bridgehead on the beach codenamed “Juno”. This was an eight-kilometre long stretch of beach between Sword beach to the East and Gold beach to the West.

Come with me as we walk the beaches and take a look at what made this beach so well defended.
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QotD: Canadian neuroticism

Filed under: Cancon, Media, Quotations — Tags: — Nicholas @ 01:00

Canada remains unmatched in its ability to turn somebody else’s tragedy into a debate about our own neuroses.

Paul Wells, quoted by Mark Steyn, Western Standard 2005-01-31.

February 29, 2024

The incredibly harmful Online Harms Act

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

Michael Geist thinks a substantial part of the Online Harms Act should be removed:

Having a spent virtually the entire day yesterday talking with media and colleagues about Bill C-63, one thing has become increasingly clear: the Criminal Code and Human Rights Act provisions found in the Online Harms Act should be removed. In my initial post on the bill, I identified the provisions as one of three red flags, warning that they “feature penalties that go as high as life in prison and open the door to a tidal wave of hate speech related complaints”. There is no obvious need or rationale for penalties of life in prison for offences motivated by hatred, nor the need to weaponize human rights complaints by reviving Human Rights Act provisions on communication of hate speech. As more Canadians review the bill, there is a real risk that these provisions will overwhelm the Online Harms Act and become a primary area of focus despite not being central to the law’s core objective of mitigating harms on Internet platforms.

Indeed, these concerns are already attracting media coverage and were raised yesterday in columns and commentary from Andrew Coyne and Professor Richard Moon, who I think rightly describes the core provisions of the Online Harms Act as “sensible and workable” but notes that these other provisions are troubling. Bill C-63 is effectively four bills in one: (1) the Online Harms Act, which forms the bulk of the bill and is focused on the duties of Internet platforms as they respond to seven identified harms, (2) the expansion of mandatory child pornography reporting requirements to include those platforms, (3) the Criminal Code provisions, which opens the door to life in prison for committing offences that are motivated by hatred of certain groups, and (4) the changes to the Canadian Human Rights Act, which restores Section 13 involving communicating hate speech through the Internet as a discriminatory practice. The difference between the first two and the latter two is obvious: the first two are focused on the obligations of Internet platforms in addressing online harms, while the latter two have nothing directly to do with Internet platforms at all.

The Criminal Code and Human Rights Act changes originate in Bill C-36, which was introduced in 2021 on the very last sitting day of the Parliamentary session. The bill died on the order paper with an election call several weeks later and did not form a core part of either the online harms consultation or the 2022 expert panel on online harms. These provisions simply don’t fit within a legislative initiative that is premised on promoting online safety by ensuring that social media services are transparent and accountable with respect to online harms. Further, both raise legitimate concerns regarding criminal penalties and misuse of the human rights complaint system.

At the National Post, Carson Jerema points out that under the Online Harms Act, the truth is no defence:

As much as the Liberals want everyone to believe that their proposed online harms act is focused almost exclusively on protecting children from predators, and that, as Justice Minister Arif Virani said, “It does not undermine freedom of speech,” that simply isn’t true. While the legislation, tabled Monday, could have been much worse — it mercifully avoids regulating “misinformation” — it opens up new avenues to censor political speech.

Under the bill, condemning the Hamas massacre of 1,200 people on Oct. 7, could, under some circumstances, be considered “hate speech”, and therefore subject to a human rights complaint with up to $50,000 in penalties. As part of the new rules designed to protect Canadians from “online harms”, the bill would reinstate Section 13 of the Canadian Human Rights Act, the hate speech provision repealed under the Harper government.

The new version is more tightly defined than the original, but contains the same fatal flaws, specifically that truth is no defence and that what counts as hate speech remains highly subjective.

Under the new Section 13: “it is a discriminatory practice to communicate or cause to be communicated hate speech by means of the Internet or any other means of telecommunication in a context in which the hate speech is likely to foment detestation or vilification of an individual or group of individuals on the basis of a prohibited ground of discrimination”.

It is distressingly easy to imagine scenarios where everyday political speech finds itself under the purview of the Canadian Human Rights Commission. Criticizing Hamas and the murderous ideology that motivates it could, to some, be seen as “likely to foment detestation or vilification” against a group, especially if the condemnation of Hamas notes that Palestinians generally support the terrorist group or that Hamas is driven by religious fanaticism.

Dan Knight calls it “the sequel no one asked for”:

Morning my fellow Canadians and lets break into the liberals latest sequel with Bill C-63 the its failed predecessor, Bill C-36, which is a sequel nobody asked for in the saga of online hate speech legislation. We’re witnessing a government’s second attempt to police what you can say online.

Now, the Liberal government in Canada initially put forward Bill C-36. This bill aimed to tackle extreme forms of hate speech online. It sought to bring back a version of a section that was repealed from the Canadian Human Rights Act in 2013. Why was it repealed, you might ask? Because critics argued it violated free speech rights. But here we are, years later, with the Liberals trying to reintroduce similar measures under the guise of combating hate speech. Under the proposed changes, folks could be fined up to $20,000 if found guilty of hate speech that identifies a victim. But here’s the kicker: the operators of social media platforms, the big tech giants, are initially left out of the equation. Instead, the focus is on individuals and website operators. Now, the government says it plans to hold consultations over how to make these social media platforms more accountable. But the details are hazy, and the timeline is, well, as clear as mud.

The justice minister of Canada has framed these amendments as a way to protect the vulnerable and hold individuals accountable for spreading hatred online. But let’s be clear: there’s a thin line between protecting individuals and infringing upon free speech. And that line is looking blurrier by the day in Canada. Critics, including the Opposition Conservatives, have voiced concerns that these measures could curb freedom of speech and be difficult to enforce. They argue that the government’s efforts might not just be about protecting citizens but could veer into controlling what can and cannot be said online. And when the government starts deciding what constitutes “hate speech”, you have to start wondering: Who gets to draw that line? And based on what standards?

And, just when you thought it couldn’t get any more Orwellian, enter the pièce de résistance: the Digital Safety Commission of Canada. Because, clearly, what’s missing in the fight against “hate speech” is another layer of bureaucracy, right? Another set of initials to add to the alphabet soup of governmental oversight. So, here’s the deal: this newly minted commission, with its CEO and officers — oh, you better believe there will be officers — is tasked with overseeing the online speech of millions. And let me tell you, nothing says “independent” like a government-appointed body policing what you can and cannot say on the internet. I can just imagine the job postings: Now Hiring: Online Expression Regulators, proficiency in silencing dissent highly valued.

Arizona GOP pushes to legalize hunting down suspected illegal immigrants with deadly force! Film at 11!

Filed under: Government, Law, Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Chris Bray reports on this utterly abhorrent piece of proposed legislation that will literally condemn any brown person in the state of Arizona to be murdered out of hand by evil red-hatted Trump supporters … or will it?

Republicans in the Arizona legislature have advanced a bill that would allow anyone in the state to just casually gun down any migrant anytime they feel like that filthy brown person might be trespassing. You can trust that this is really happening, because it’s in the news.

Delightfully, Axios reporter April Rubin trained at the New York Times. Here’s how she starts this story:

    Arizona Republicans are advancing a bill that would allow people to legally kill someone accused of attempting to trespass or actively trespassing on their property.

    The big picture: The legislation, which is expected to be vetoed if it reaches the state’s Democratic governor, would legalize the murder of undocumented immigrants, who often have to cross ranches that sit on the state’s border with Mexico.

These monsters, they’re legalizing the murder of undocumented migrants.

So, as always, let’s read the actual bill:

A person in lawful possession of property can threaten deadly force, or potentially use deadly force, in response to an act of criminal trespassing: You can go out on your property with a gun and tell a trespasser to get lost.

But Subsection B is the key to the actual use of deadly force, and journalists aren’t saying anything about it (emphasis added): “A person may use deadly physical force under subsection A only in the defense of himself or third persons as described in sections 13-405 and 13-406,” existing sections of Arizona state law. The bill explicitly references an existing legal standard for the use of deadly force.

Ukraine asks for mothballed Canadian missiles that should have been destroyed 20 years ago

Filed under: Cancon, Europe, Military, Russia, Weapons — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

In The Line, Alex McColl makes a case against granting a Ukrainian request for obsolete CRV7 70mm air-to-ground rockets:

An SUU-5003 bomblet dispenser with six CRV7 air-to-ground rockets (left) and six BDU-33 bombs (right).
Photo by Boevaya mashina via Wikimedia Commons.

Canadian parliamentary committees — and even the leader of the official opposition — are endorsing a request by the Ukrainian military to send that beleaguered country thousands of mothballed rockets that have not been adequately stored or maintained. The plan has received nothing but approval from Canadians; however, according to multiple sources I have interviewed, the rockets in question are probably useless. In a worst case scenario, a few could go off and hurt or kill the Ukrainians trying to jury rig them into a short-range rocket artillery weapon.

This is about Canada’s stockpile of expired CRV7 rocket motors, which were slated for environmentally responsible disposal twenty years ago. Despite this, these weapons are being requested by the Ukrainian military, which is desperate for any kind of munitions as the war with Russia drags on.

[…]

During the Cold War, the Canadian-made CRV7 was one of the best 70mm NATO rockets thanks to its powerful motor, high speed, and consistent accuracy. It was carried by NATO fighter jets and attack helicopters. In the early 1970s, it could outrange most Soviet short-range man-portable surface-to-air missiles (MANPADS), giving pilots an advantage in air-to-ground missions. Our pilots could shoot at the bad guys from far enough away that the bad guys couldn’t shoot back.

That was then. Today, surface-to-air weapons have advanced to the point where unguided rocket attacks are rarely worth the risk, which is why these rockets were retired 20 years ago.

One of the CAF officers I interviewed reached out again the next day to get in the final word. Here’s what I was told:

“In general, I’d say that the phase when donating from existing inventory was relevant ended in early 2023. Canada has donated many useful things, but focussed on what Canadian industry can provide, not what Ukraine desperately needs. Unarmed ACSVs and drone cameras are useful, but Ukraine needs predictable and reliable supplies of battle decisive munitions, most of all air defence missiles and artillery ammunition. The conversation Canada should be having isn’t about rotten surplus, but how we support new production of key ammunition, ideally at home but ultimately whoever we can fund to get it to Ukraine fastest.”

I couldn’t agree more.

Hotchkiss Portative: Clunky But Durable

Filed under: Britain, France, History, Military, USA, Weapons, WW1 — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Forgotten Weapons
Published Nov 27, 2023

The Portative was an attempt by the Hotchkiss company to make a light machine gun companion to their heavy model (which had found significant commercial success). The Portative used the same feed strips, albeit loaded upside down, and the same gas piston operation, but a very different locking system. Instead of a tilting locking block the Portative had a “fermeture nut” that rotated to lock onto the bolt with three sets of interrupted thread locking lugs. In addition, many of the traditionally internal parts were mounted externally on the Portative, and it was quite the awkward gun to use.

The Portative was adopted by the American Army as the Model 1909 Benet-Mercié, and by the British early in World War One as a cavalry and tank-mounted gun. The remainder of Portative contracts were relatively small from second-tier military forces, including several South American countries.
(more…)

QotD: The fallacy of “engineering” economic growth

Filed under: Economics, Quotations — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 01:00

[The] ability to achieve the commercial exploitation of new scientific knowledge is heavily dependent also upon – as Deirdre McCloskey explains – people’s attitudes toward market-tested innovation, creative destruction, and progress.

Economic growth – while it is made possible by, and itself makes possible, countless impressive mechanical and technological feats – is not itself a mechanical, technological feat. Sustained economic growth cannot be engineered as can successful missions to the moon. The economic, legal, and social institutions required for there to be sustained growth are many, indescribably intricate and complex, and largely unseen (and, hence, unappreciated). To observe with one’s senses, statistics, and measuring instruments a successful economy, or even just a successful firm within a successful economy, is to observe only the surface of economic and social reality. A vast, deep ocean of complex attitudes and margins of adjustments swirls beneath.

Among the many, typically unappreciated implications of this reality is this: even if people in country B manage to acquire, by whatever means, all of the intellectual property belonging to the people of economically successful country A, the people of country B do not thereby gain any sure means of successfully “growing” their economy.

Don Boudreaux, “Quotation of the Day…”, Café Hayek, 2019-08-19.

February 28, 2024

The rise of the “Pretendian” is an inevitable consequence of academia’s ultra-woke culture

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Cancon, Education, Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Freddie deBoer summarizes why we’ve seen a vast increase in the number of Pretendians in western academia, but especially in Canada and the United States (and we can be almost certain that there are a lot more who haven’t yet been revealed, because the incentives to pretend are so enticing):

“The Pretendians”, a CBC documentary – https://www.cbc.ca/passionateeye/episodes/the-pretendians

  1. Certain jobs in academia are highly prized
  2. There are far more applicants than openings for those jobs and so competition for them is incredibly fierce
  3. Representing yourself as a member of an underrepresented minority significantly improves your odds of getting such a job, and in certain fields representing yourself as a person of indigenous descent improves those odds dramatically
  4. Indigenous identity is easy to fake and difficult to disprove, and the cost of accusing someone else of faking it, in academia, can be very high indeed
  5. Most crucially of all, the social culture of academia strongly prohibits speaking frankly about these facts

Jay Caspian Kang’s new piece on the “Pretendian” crisis in academia is deeply researched and compulsively readable, and read it you should. But fundamentally everything you need to know about the problem is in the numbered list above. You’ve created a fiercely competitive process in which a segment of people are given a very large advantage, there are few if any objective markers that can disprove that someone is a member of that segment, and you’ve declared it offensive to question whether someone really is a member of that segment, outside of very specific scenarios. (When I was in academia people spoke very darkly about the concept of ever questioning someone’s indigenous identity, called it the act of a colonizer, etc etc.) The obvious question is … what did you think was going to happen? Humanities and social sciences departments have, through the conditions described above, rung the dinner bell for people pretending to have indigenous heritage. They now act shocked when such people show up. I find it disingenuous and untoward. This behavior is the product of the incentives that you yourself built. Of course it’s a stain on the integrity of the fakes. But you made it inevitable that this would happen. Reap what you sow.

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