Category: Canadian Liberals

Asabiya

Peter Turchin reintroduced me to the concept of asabiya in his War and Peace and War. 

Asabiya is a term borrowed from the Arabic philosopher of history Ibn Khaldun (1332-1406). Asabiya is the power of a society to accomplish things collectively, such as build an empire, a cathedral or a bridge, or fight a war. If you want to experience the power of asabiya, just consider how the entire British nation and its institutions buried their monarch. mourned her loss, televized the funerals, held complex ceremonies in centuries-old churches, organized 4000 soldiers, sailors and airmen and the the top ranks of the governing classes into parades, solemn processions, and ceremonies of the state church, as the people organized themselves into disciplined throngs of hundreds of thousands enduring hours of patient waiting in order to flow past the coffin of the dead Queen.

 

Says Turchin:

“Different groups have different degrees of cooperation among their members, and therefore different degrees of cohesiveness and solidarity…. Asabiya refers to the capacity of a social group for concerted collective action. Asabiya is a dynamic  quantity; it can increase or decrease with time. Like many theoretical constructs, such as force in Newtonian physics, the capacity for collective action cannot be observed directly, but can be measured from observable consequences”.

Great Britain manifestly has huge asabiya. So does the United States or Japan. Canada had asabiya. It demonstrated this in two world wars. Whether it still has asabiya is doubtful. It is rent by too many ethnic fissures, and the group most asabiya-endowed,  English Canada, is constantly denigrated and weakened by the governing Liberals as a matter of multicultural policy. “Diversity is our strength.”  The French Canadians fear English Canada’s asabiya and seek always to diminish it. For that matter, all of woke ideology is an attempt of the political left and their black allies to weaken the asabiya of the American people – “white fragility”, “systemic racism”. So is the attack on organic sexual divisions in the species a different form of attack on asabiya, as the idea of fixed sex roles, indeed fixed anything, goes against the idea of personal choice.

Life is not a matter of expressing our puny selves. It is a matter of belonging  to something great. Think if the political left as being in a permanent war against every other kind of asabiya but their own, when theirs is a weak and hate-filled search for enemies.

Asabiya is real, though not material.

 

 

 

 

 

On bill C-11, an Act to make the Internet into a form of cable broadcasting

Presentation of the Internet Society Canada Chapter to the Senate Committee on Transport and Communications on Bill C-11.

https://senparlvu.parl.gc.ca/Harmony/en/PowerBrowser/PowerBrowserV2?fk=584132&globalStreamId=3

 

  1. Good evening, Senators, ladies and gentlemen. My name is Timothy Denton and I am the chairman of the Internet Society Canada Chapter, or ISCC for short. I used to be a national commissioner of the CRTC and spent a good portion of my career in Internet governance institutions. The ISCC is a network of volunteers concerned with Internet policy. Many of us have served in senior positions in government. With me today is Len St. Aubin, a director of the Internet Society, and former Director General in the Department of Industry concerned with telecommunications, broadcasting and Internet policy.

 

What the ISCC believes

 

  1. We oppose C-11 because it embodies a fundamentally illiberal idea of communications; because it constitutes a vast overreach of governmental authority; and because it threatens the engine of innovation and economic growth which is the Internet.

 

 

  1. What we object to is the nearly boundless extension of governmental regulatory authority over communications. The bill excludes content that is predominantly alpha-numeric. Otherwise, and with only a few exceptions, it captures virtually all online audio and video.

What we recommend

 

  1. In the Annex to our formal Submission, we have proposed changes intended to limit the harm that C-11 poses. I would highlight in particular our recommendations to:

 

  1. One: Exclude from the Act, and therefore from any regulation or obligation to contribute to Canadian content production, any online service that earns less than $150 million in Canada annually.
  2. Two: Exclude from the Act all user generated content. This does not exclude social media platforms that stream user generated content and whose revenues exceed the $150 million cap, which would be subject to the Act.

 

  1. Three: Amend the policy objectives in Section 3 to ensure that CRTC regulation respects user choice, and recognizes that competition and market forces are contributing to achieving the objectives of the Act. Bill C-11 implicitly assumes that in a large measure the burden of Canadian program production is to be taken up by foreign, read American, streamers competing with Canadian broadcasters. Yet nowhere in this Bill do we read of competition and consumer choice.

 

 

  1. Four: Remove the amendments in clauses 7 and 8 of the bill so as to reinstate the current Act’s limitations, and Parliamentary oversight safeguards, on the authority of the Governor in Council to issue policy directions to the CRTC.

 

Bill C-11 is Fundamentally Flawed

 

  1. C-11 vastly exceeds the government’s stated objectives, and then leaves entirely to the CRTC the ability to determine its own mandate and the extent of its intervention in the online economy and in Canadians’ ability to access the content of our choice. In our view, C-11 invites fears of undue and harmful intervention.
  2. We believe that it is entirely possible to obtain a reasonable contribution to CanCon from global streamers without bill C-11’s massive intervention in the digital economy and in Canadians’ freedom to access online content of our choice.

 

 

Internet Streaming is Not Broadcasting

 

  1. Let us look at two basic features of broadcasting. The first, which C-11 retains, is that you broadcast by permission of the state. Broadcasting is a licensed activity, and the CRTC is the licencing authority. The second was a set of characteristics, business and technical, that limited who and what broadcasters were. Those characteristics were largely based on the scarcity of radio waves. C11 eliminates those characteristics nearly completely.

 

  1. The assumption that justified broadcasting regulation was that a very few speakers would have a captive audience of many tens of thousands of listeners, and later of viewers. The direction of traffic was one way. The audience had highly limited choices.
  2. In exchange for highly detailed regulation, traditional broadcasters have benefited from a host of measures that have created a walled-garden and sought to protect broadcasters from competition so that they could fulfil their CanCon and other obligations.

 

 

  1. C-11 declares all audio- and audio-visual content on the Internet to be broadcasting. It is a kind of reverse takeover of the Internet. The tiny Canadian broadcasting system can take on the world of the Internet by the mere trick of redefining “broadcasting”. C-11 is that bold, and that absurd.

 

 

Impact of C-11 on the Internet

 

  1. C-11 is about protecting the economic interests of an obsolescent niche of Canada’s music and video industries. It is not about bringing “broadcasting” regulation up to date. It is not even about “streaming”. It is about controlling content on the Internet, the persons who transmit content on the Internet, and what reaches the persons who access Internet content.
  2. Instead of introducing an actual Online Streaming Act – one that would have considered the unique nature of Internet-delivered content and the functioning of the markets for that content – C-11 tries to stuff the most vibrant and adaptive marriage of technology and culture within the stultifying embrace of the regulated broadcasting system. Bill C-11 seeks to prolong and reinforce the supply-side dynamics of broadcasting regulation. C-11 fails to affirm or even acknowledge the primacy of the audience and its right to choose the programming that suits it. C-11 embodies a set of bad ideas that ought to be rejected.

 

  1. In the time available we have had to concentrate our comments on the essentials. Our formal submission covers other issues that are also significant, which you will have received earlier. We thank you for your time and attention and look forward to your questions.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Go away and come back

Monday 12 September 2022 at 7:45 in the morning

We went away this past weekend to a fishing camp which was located at the end of a fifty minute drive along a rough track over Laurentian rock. We drove at somewhat better than a walking pace. I recommend the periodic withdrawal from wider society, and the fishing camp was the perfect retreat: no yoga, no periods of silence, no meditation. Just reasonable people conversing on a dock and occasionally going boating on paddle boards and canoes. No fish were caught or harmed, it being the wrong season for trout on the surface . Plentiful food, wine and booze, though less than we  did in our forties.

In the time away, Her Majesty the Queen died, the Russians suffered a large defeat in Ukraine, and Pierre Poilievre was decisively affirmed as Conservative leader.

I don’t think that it is possible to exaggerate the immense stabilizing influence of Queen Elizabeth on the United Kingdom or the world. For seventy years she maintained a discreet and effective role as advisor and occasional admonisher to the great. She lived a life of unimpeachable dignity while still showing that she was not deceived by earthly pomps and quarrels. She was a devoted Christian and I think some of her annual Christmas messages were in fact sermons of profound relevance.

When we got the news we were in a restaurant in the village of St Jean de Matha, surrounded by French Canadians having lunch, who treated the matter, as I suppose legions of other nations would have,  with courtesy and respect. The Queen had earned the respect of people of many nations, including republicans of the breakaway United States. I think everyone naturally measures life ‘s events in terms of the life and death of Sovereigns, however powerless they may be in constitutional terms. Like the passing of Queen Victoria, the death of Queen Elizabeth will be marker between one era and the next.

Then we left the village to go to the the fishing camp. We drove along an atrocious rock- strewn path at 10 kilometers an hour. An hour and a quarter later, we unloaded cars and went by pontoon boat to the ancient fishing camp, an artifact of the era of lumber barons picking out choice lakes for their buddies to fish in. Huge beams, gas mantle lamps, and low to non existent internet connectivity, coupled with copious quantities of alcohol and food.

 

We heard the news of Poilievre’s decisive victory on Saturday night, by which I was greatly gladdened. Unfortunately I was surrounded by five  devotees of the milquetoast conservatism – if that is what it is – of Jean Charest, who are persuaded that Poilievre is the sure path of defeat for the Conservative Party. You know the type, I am sure: all reform is acceptable short of actual change. In terms that a western Conservative would be happy with, they were perfect exemplars of the Laurentian consensus. Highly intelligent people of good faith, the lot of them, but politically clueless, as far as I am concerned. If Poilievre fails, they will be sure to crow about my so called radicalism in leaving the sure path of Jean Charest. 68.15% of my fellow conservatives agreed that Poilievre was the better candidate, which should be enough to silence the whining of advocates of the losing candidates, even in a party that romanticizes losing.

Predictions are difficult, especially about the future. Nevertheless I think that the abhorrence I feel for the current Liberal government in Ottawa is shared by a possible electoral majority. We will either succumb to the Woke shit of Trudeau the Lesser, after we go down fighting it, or we will rescue the country. The Liberals and their media allies are asking us to acquiesce in the ruin of Canada,  and I for one will not abide it.

As to the Russian defeats in Ukraine, I am as surprised as I am pleased. I had thought that the Russians would take over Ukraine in six weeks.  The fact that large piles of equipment are being abandoned, so much so that this offensive marks the largest weapons transfer by far since Lend Lease, indicates that Russian morale is collapsing. In World War 2 , Allied soldiers noticed that the German soldier began to abandon usable equipment only in the Falaise Pocket in July-August of 1944, six years into the war. The Russians may rebound; the war is by no means over, but I think the recent defeats of Russian arms show that the era of Russia as a great power is over.

It is evident that the drone has come to be decisive. In many case the drone is substituting for an air force at a small percentage of the cost. Russians are abandoning equipment because, if they flee in their trucks and armored vehicles, they will be killed by drones. So they flee on foot. Drones are still not cheap enough to waste on individuals. They are however, sufficiently cheap to offer the less powerful an air force at a price they can afford. Much as I loved them, the tank has become too cheap to destroy relative to its utility as an offensive weapon. They talked of the foolish bravery of Polish cavalry attacking columns of German tanks; they will soon talk of the folly of tanks attacking across open fields  against anti-tank missiles and drones.

 

 

What I believe is going on: COVID and the Liberals

New rules going after blockade financing an overreach, critics say | CTV News

 

I believe the following to be, roughly and in the main, true. I cannot prove some assertions but I believe them on what I think are reasonable grounds.

  1. COVID originated in a lab leak.
  2. The Wuhan virology labs were conducting gain of function research on behalf of American health agencies.
  3. It is almost certain that Fauci was involved in the approval of this research, but that is not relevant to the thrust of what I am saying.
  4. The COVID pandemic was used to accustom people to mass surveillance and visible compliance with government orders: isolation, masks (vexatious and close to useless), and lockdowns.
  5. Vaccines for COVID are neither safe nor particularly effective, though they may have had good results for the first few months, after which their effectiveness wears off rapidly.
  6. The vaccinated  transmit the disease as readily as the unvaccinated, or nearly so.
  7. Booster shots are designed to hook the general population onto the need for government-approved mandatory drug therapies (of highly dubious effectiveness).
  8. COVID’s effects are extremely age-stratified. That is, deadly at 80, serious at 60, and a bad cold you would not wish on your enemy at 50 and inconvenient at 30. Measures appropriate to an older age group are out of place for the young. This fact has not be reflected in public health responses, so that children and even infants are being vaccinated, contrary to  the medical evidence of dangers from the vaccines themselves, and the superfluousness of vaccines among the young.
  9. Year over year mortality rates across the world will show that there has been a massive death toll from all causes (excepting COVID), and that all the anecdotal evidence that far too many young and vigorous people dying of heart attacks will be shown to be part of a large scale mortality upsurge. There may also be shown a significant decline in fertility (birthrates).
  10. So that, in addition to the short duration of vaccine effectiveness, it will become evident that COVID vaccines are themselves the cause of these deaths. The implications of these facts will be opposed vigorously.
  11. Canadian government measures were designed to isolate and humiliate those who refuse the vaccines. You are free to disobey them, says our Prime Minister, but you will lose your job and must be isolated from other people. These measures are vindictive acts of malice against the unvaccinated population, based on pseudo-science,
  12. To pay for the massive unemployment engendered by lockdowns, governments printed billions  of dollars to pay for the emergency measures they devised.
  13. Inflation has been the inevitable result of too much money pursuing too limited investment opportunities.
  14. Coincidentally, and for reasons dissociated from COVID, but accelerated by the responses to the pandemic, we are experiencing a massive transfer of wealth upward from the 99% to the 1% and further concentrations of wealth from the 1% to the 0.1% of society.
  15. Our governments and public health authorities are acting in a way that is best explained by active malignance towards the general population, and not merely incompetence.
  16. This is especially so in Trudeau’s Canada, where the Liberals continue to engage in all sorts of measures to denigrate English Canada with fantastic contrivances like Indian residential school death tolls, maligning patriotic expressions of revolt like the trucker’s convoy, and generally fabulating the existence of  right wing white male extremism as a general excuse for repressive measures. I would add the deliberate demoralization of the armed forces by means of accusations and dismissals for sexual impropriety.
  17. Government in western countries, and particularly in Canada, are intent on passing legislation controlling what is said and who sees what on the Internet, by means of massive expansion of regulatory authority over private communications (viz, Bills c-11, C-18, on line harms Act, subsidies for newspapers,) to keep the press compliant and the people quiescent.

Consequently, I realized last night why Pierre Poilievre was going to be the next leader of the Conservatives, and quite possibly the leader of the country. His theme, which he expressed from the moment the leadership race started, was to “take back the power.”

I realized that if I, establishmentarian and patriot as I am, had reached this stage of concern for the country, then the relevant political choices lay between Pierre Poilievre, the official Conservative, and Mad Max Bernier of the even  more disenchanted Freedom Party.

I will be thought nutcase by those still in the grips of the Establishment Laurentian view. Yet as Orwell says, sometimes the hardest thing to do is to see what is plainly before our eyes. To this observer, the current Trudeau government has gone beyond total incompetence into malignance. I want a divorce from these people. I think they are evil, not just bad in the usual human way that people can be.