Category: Freedom of Speech

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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.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

My sentiments exactly: the catastrophe that is Canada

My consternation about the descent of Canada into politically generated distrust, fascism and chaos are well expressed in the video conversation above. The press is bought. The opposition from the Conservatives is weak and tepid. The NDP is a lapdog of the Liberals. The government is unhinged. It believes – or acts as if it believes – that the Canadian working class is a force needing suppression. I am out of words.

Then, having discussed Canada,  they get on to the real issues driving the whole mess: the World Economic Forum, the capture of the elite by the global warming madness, and the measures that have been taken by the federal government to ruin the oil and gas industries. Note that the attack on the Coastal Gas Pipeline construction site was mentioned only 24 hours after it happened by State News under the caption “alleged attack” on pipeline worksite.

Canada’s GDP per capita has remained at about $45,000 for a decade, while the US figure has gone from about that level to about  $67,000 per capita. Canada is stagnating.

Watch this for confirmation.

us gdp per capita – Google Search

 

 

Automated censorship, COVID, and Bill C-10

 

The idea that COVID was a bioweapon, and that it was unleashed accidentally, has gone from heresy to orthodoxy in the course of the last 18 months.  The chain of events is documented in Ron Unz’s American Pravda here. 

The transformation has taken slightly less than a month. On May 2 Nicholas Wade, the science writer, published a careful essay on the subject in a low impact website and which was then augmented in subsequent places and by significant endorsements.  Unz describes the amplification which the theory has received in various articles since then, which it is not my purpose to recapitulate.

As Unz writes about Wade’s work:

“Although nearly all the facts and evidence that Wade discussed had already been publicly available for most of the past year, his careful analysis and considerable journalistic credibility quickly transformed the intellectual landscape. He began his long article by explaining that from February 2020 onward a huge ideological bubble had been inflated by political propaganda masquerading as science, a bubble that was afterwards maintained through a combination of journalistic cowardice and incompetence. President Donald Trump had proclaimed that the virus was artificial, so our media therefore insisted that it must be natural, even if all the evidence seemed to suggest otherwise.”

If Trump had said that gravity worked, a host of science reporters would have denied it and called it “problematical”. The Office of the Holy Inquisition – AKA Facebook – changed its policy on COVID’s origins on May 28th, a mere five days ago.

Unz again:

“By May 28th, the Wall Street Journal carried the headline “Facebook Ends Ban on Posts Asserting Covid-19 Was Man-Made,” so that in less than one month a self-published article had already changed what nearly three billion individuals around the world were allowed to read and write. This illustrates the totalitarian control of information on the Internet held by American’s huge Tech monopolies, which determine the limits of permitted discussion worldwide at the flip of a switch. Can there be any better example of the ridiculous, Stalinesque climate of intellectual censorship currently enforced by those corporate giants?”.

Indeed.

And this brings me around to Canada’s Bill C10, an Act to Amend the Broadcasting Act. It is currently stalled in the House of Commons Committee on Heritage. This is a relief. What C10 seeks to do is to bring the large platforms, and everyone else communicating across the Internet, into the legal regime of “broadcasting”. There are two regimes of communication, essentially: printing and broadcasting. Printing requires no licence and makes you liable for what you have said after you have said it. Broadcasting requires a licence and imposes heavy consequences for “broadcasting” without a licence or contrary to the terms of the regulations under which you are privileged to communicate.

Publishing is a right, broadcasting is a legal privilege, like a driver’s licence. If Zoom calls are broadcasting, then you are subject to complex and expansive regulations, just as radio and TV are. C10 could well make zoom calls “broadcasting”, at the discretion of the regulator.

It is bad enough that the platforms have the power to automate the censorship of unpopular or unfashionable opinions, and I would be first to argue that something ought to be done about that power. However, the case for regulating the platforms, and user-generated content, is not to control the power of the platforms. No no no. It is to use the power of the platforms in conjunction with state policy to “harness” the Internet – to use a favourite terms of the CRTC – to public purposes. In truth the Liberal government intends not to curb the power of the platforms, such as Facebook and Twitter, but to enage their power to shape public discourse in the way that government desires. The censorship is outsourced to the agencies with the power to effect it. Putting it more crudely, the government intends to deputize the platforms to perform the censorship that government has not the tools to do for itself.

Anyone who thinks that the power of the platforms will be curbed under C10, if it passes into law, is gravely mistaken. The platforms will become a new form of CBC adapted to the Internet age. The platforms will consult the government and be consulted by the government. The directives that will issue from the CRTC will be generated after public hearings, at which the platforms will be the dominant voices. The censorship will be smooth and oh so Canadian. Anyone who thinks the CRTC does not control content has not seen the system at work.

 

 

 

Bill C10 – Internet censorship coming to a site you read

For some time now I have been tweeting and organizing resistance to Bill C-10. This has kept me busy in my personal capacity, as it were, and Dalwhinnie has had to take back seat to my public-facing self.

I have learned or been reminded of several truths in the course of the past few weeks, but first let me tell you about the bill.

There are two modes of communications, legally speaking. On the one hand, there are speech and writing, film production, and others which occur without prior permission from the state. You write what you want and assume responsibility after publication for slander, criminal conspiracy, obscenity, and other legal liabilities. Then there is that creature of the twentieth century, called broadcasting, which requires a licence from the state. You broadcast under conditions established for a particular class of speaker, one who is assumed to be few in number talking to hundreds of thousands who are limited in their choice of “stations”. This was the original rationale for broadcasting regulation,  few-to-many, one way and which used airwaves that interfered with one another unless carefully assigned by central authority.

It will be readily understood that every advance of electronic communications has served to increase the number of stations, from three to seven to thirty to fifty, to the Internet. The internet has exploded the number of speakers into the millions, or tens of millions. With new forms of addressing, such as IPv6, the number of “stations” will be in the trillions.

Despite this, Canadian law still treats the Internet as a form of “broadcasting”, a licensable activity that for thirty years the government had the wisdom not to touch. Previous CRTC decisions had said that regulating the Internet as broadcasting was superfluous and unneeded. These decisions of the CRTC claimed jurisdiction over the Internet but did not exercise it.

Now that restraint has been overthrown. In a search for revenue from web giants, and egged on by the Canadian cultural organizations – the ones who feed on television productions subsidies – the government, led by the Minister of Canadian Heritage Steven Guilbault, has plunged recklessly into a gigantic extension of federal authority over communications.

Bill C10, which is a series of amendments to the Broadcasting Act, would treat

  • all websites
  • all user-generated uploads to social media sites

as “broadcasting”, that is, occasions where you could be regulated by the CRTC. The difference is that, in the case of user generated content uploaded to platforms, you would not be the broadcaster, the platform would be the broadcaster. This would outsource government control and censorship to the large platforms, who would act under CRTC or other government regulations.

This website, and all others, commercial, artistic, political, would be treated as broadcasting if they were “predominantly” -word undefined – audio-visual rather than printed in nature. It is not difficult to imagine that by bit count alone, and by inclusion of a few video inserts, a newspaper would become a “broadcaster”, in the same way that a podcaster is now, according to this Bill, a radio station.

It reaches the absurdity of a zoom call among church attendees being considered broadcasting, and subject to federal regulation. Will “balance” in religious programming be imposed on church services? Will the imam share time in the pulpit? If you think this is absurd, you don’t know the CRTC.

 

The authors of C10 are seeking to jam the internet into the form of broadcasting, rather than make  broadcasting conform to the Internet.

It is readily evident that a large number of issues will remain undecided by the bill itself and that years of hearings and lawsuits will ensue, including challenges to the constitutionality of the bill, on several grounds.

But back to the tweetstorm.

The public debate on this bill took a while to get started, for several reasons. The first is that members of Parliament are not clever lawyers on the whole, and it took them a while to scope out the extent of the government’s ambitions. Both the Bloc Quebecois and the NDP favour large public subsidies to their unionized buddies in the TV production industry. The Liberals favour their own guy and they are not averse to totalitarian controls on the Internet, it seems. That left the Conservatives to slowly appreciate that the Liberals had handed them a major electoral campaign issue if they wanted it. They finally realized what the bill meant to ordinary Canadians. And ordinary Canadians are waking up.

This state of affairs was changed only by professors of communications, like Michael Geist, members of the Internet Society of canada, and former CRTC commissioners such as Peter Menzies, Konrad von Finckensten and Timothy Denton to write op-eds in papers until the latter woke up to the notion that they would become “broadcasters” if this bill passed. Open Media got involed and that meant that the political left started to agitate against it. As one wit said of the left-right alliance on C10: “we want to be able to shout at each other without the state refereeing.”

The ignorance of the press on this issue has been astounding, if you were not already cynical about their capacity to understand issues. They had to be told in black and white what the Act said, and even then they still hesitated to get it.

The opinion battle among the elites has taken place principally on Twitter. Throughout, the motives of those opposed to the Bill have been questioned. Vast conspiracies have been imagined by the proponents of the bill, sponsored by the likes of Google and Facebook. It has not occured to them that people could actually freely spend time opposing the bill because of principled concerns for freedom of speech. If you speak only for money, it comes as a shock that people will speak and write for no money at all.

Not once have the arguments of the opponents of the bill ever been frontally addressed. Not once. The Minister has been reduced to blithering incoherence on several occasions by being asked factual questions about what the Bill plainly says. It is as if he had not read his own bill, or did not understand it. A reasoned defence of the Bill has been missing. It might have been attempted, but was not, largely because to address the issues would be to deal with some real concerns that the bill’s proponents would rather not discuss.

The TV production and other recipients of cultural largesse in Canada have only tweeted their unanimous support for C10. (Canada spens about as much money on cultural subsidies overall as we spend on the Candain navy). The French Canadians, it would appear, have no concerns for freedom of speech, and seem not to understand what English Canadians are going on about. Their confidence in a federal institution, the CRTC, to decide matters of cultural concern to them, appears to be unbounded. We are confidently told by those who feel they understand Quebec that even to raise these concerns with them is a provocation.

Normally a story has a two or three day run. The C10 issue has occupied weeks of media attention, and won’t go away because it constitutes an immense assault upon historic rights of free speech won by revolutions and bloodshed in the 17th and 18th centuries, revolutions that passed French Canada by. It remains to be seen whether the Liberals have handed the Conservatives a winning election issue or not. But if enough people say they will die on this hill, not even the federal Liberals can overcome the resolve of the nation.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Dear Professor Attaran

Trudeau calls for end to ‘Quebec bashing’ after Ottawa professor says province run by ‘white supremacist government’

 

Dear Professor Attaran:

I take exception to your characterization of the Quebec government as “white supremacist”. I think that is wide of the mark, and quite unfair to the Government of Quebec.  Quebec’s government is not white supremacist. It is French supremacist. The French speakers just happen to be white. Let us imagine for instance that the original founders of French Canada were not French but Tunisians. As the only Muslim majority and North African-origined ethnos in North America, the government of Quebec would believe it was its duty to protect the historic Tunisian and Muslim nature of the country. In this conjecture,  street signs and public advertizing would have to be in Tunisian Arabic with Latin letters distinctly smaller. There is an endless fret about whether the Tunisian nature of Quebec is being lost because the immigrants are assimilating to the English speaking majoriy of Canada. And so forth.

To call the government of Quebec “racist” is misleading. The only race they are concerned about is their own. Need I point out that English-speakers are not part of their “race”? Nor are any other peoples of any skin colour. Their axis of discrimination is entirely ethno-cultural.

And here is the irony. No place in North America is now safer for white people from the anti-white propaganda of the woke. If you attack Quebec for racism they will put on the armour of righteous indignation and the Prime Minister will come to their defence, as he ought to. The Quebecois are immune to “woke” because their politics are frankly about French supremacy. They just happen to be white.

Years ago some self-righteous Liberal apparatchik who normally lives in Westboro, a posh part of Ottawa, was in North Hatley, Quebec. He said how typical it was to find me in the whitest part of North America, or was it just the whitest part of Quebec that he referred to? I can’t quite recall, but he did not mean it in a complimentary or friendly way. Apart from his towering condescension and hypocrisy, of which he was completely unconscious, I find myself in agreement with him. [And what, pray tell, was he doing there?] It is nice living in a place where locking your doors is optional. It is nice living in a place where there is high social trust. Being a part of an English-speaking minority in a French language majority is sometimes aggravating because not all the Quebecois are worldly or accepting of outsiders of any description. But they do not suffer from doubt that the main point of politics is to keep themselves in existence and able to speak French. I like the protective umbrella this offers to fend off the anti-white cultural and racial attacks of the likes of yourself, and the self-loathing of my Liberal apparatchik.

And if we could have just five percent of that attitude in English North America, we would spare ourselves a great deal of grief.

Yours sincerely,

 

Dalwhinnie

 

 

 

 

 

QAnon, Facebook and the Inquisition

Many years ago (in 2003) a man drove his truck up the steps of the main entrance of the Canadian Parliament buildings. CBC just happened to be there. He was wrestled to the ground as he shouted: “you are all a bunch of Satan worshippers!” . I heard him say this on CBC news, and I thought to myself, how did that slip through the censorship? How had he guessed? Who had told him?

So when I heard that the basic premise of the evolving doctrines of the QAnon conspiracy was that an elite of pederastic or hebephile Satan worshippers is running the United States, I thought – nothing new here. That it was being run out of some pizza joint somewhere just adds that piquant touch of pseudo-facticity that lends credence to nonsense on stilts. Do they not know it is being run out the Council on Foreign Relations?

There has always been wickedness in high places, to cite St Paul. Always will be.

Thus I was interested to read on Unherd that “Facebook is radicalising your parents“. As the avergae age of users of Facebook rises, the kinds of concerns expressed naturally reflect the concerns of middle-aged and older people. (This usage pattern reflects the gradual ageing of the population, as births have crashed since the 1970s)

I quote: “The most shared news pieces on the site are increasingly on the Right. On 20 July of this year, for instance, the top-performing Facebook link posts by US pages were:

1. Fox News
2. Fox News
3. Occupy Democrats
4. Fox News
5. Ben Shapiro
6. Ben Shapiro
7. Ben Shapiro
8. An0maly
9. Blue Lives Matter
10. Dan Bongino”.

 

In possible accordance with this concern for radicalization of the elderly and the stated concern for spread of the dangerous ideology of QAnon, FaceBook announced the following:

“On October 6, we announced that we will begin removing any Facebook Pages, Groups and Instagram accounts representing QAnon, even if they contain no violent content, in line with our expanded Dangerous Individuals and Organizations Policy.”

Naturally I was interested in what the policy said. Under the “Dangerous Individuals and Organizations Policy’, Facebook has announced the following on its webpages:

 

Policy Rationale

In an effort to prevent and disrupt real-world harm, we do not allow any organizations or individuals that proclaim a violent mission or are engaged in violence to have a presence on Facebook. This includes organizations or individuals involved in the following:

  • Terrorist activity
  • Organized hate
  • Mass murder (including attempts) or multiple murder
  • Human trafficking
  • Organized violence or criminal activity

 

We also remove content that expresses support or praise for groups, leaders, or individuals involved in these activities. Learn more about our work to fight terrorism online here.

 

We do not allow the following people (living or deceased) or groups to maintain a presence (for example, have an account, Page, Group) on our platform:

Terrorist organizations and terrorists, which include:

Any non-state actor that:

  • Engages in, advocates, or lends substantial support to purposive and planned acts of violence,
  • Which causes or attempts to cause death, injury or serious harm to civilians, or any other person not taking direct part in the hostilities in a situation of armed conflict, and/or significant damage to property linked to death, serious injury or serious harm to civilians
  • With the intent to coerce, intimidate and/or influence a civilian population, government, or international organization
  • In order to achieve a political, religious, or ideological aim.

 

Hate organizations and their leaders and prominent members

A hate organization is defined as:

Any association of three or more people that is organized under a name, sign, or symbol and that has an ideology, statements, or physical actions that attack individuals based on characteristics, including race, religious affiliation, nationality, ethnicity, gender, sex, sexual orientation, serious disease or disability.

 

Mass and multiple murderers (including attempts)

We consider a homicide to be a mass murder if it results in three or more deaths in one incident
We consider an attempted mass murder to be one where an individual uses a weapon or vehicle to attempt mass harm in a public space or against more than one person
We consider any individual who has committed two or more murders over multiple incidents or locations a multiple murderer

 

Human trafficking groups and their leaders

Human trafficking groups are organizations responsible for any of the following:

Prostitution of others, forced/bonded labor, slavery, or the removal of organs
Recruiting, transporting, transferring, detaining, providing, harboring, or receiving a minor, or an adult against their will

 

Criminal organizations and their leaders and prominent members

A criminal organization is defined as:

Any association of three or more people that is united under a name, color(s), hand gesture(s) or recognized indicia, that has engaged in or threatens to engage in criminal activity, including (but not limited to)

  • Homicide
  • Drug trafficking
  • Arms trafficking
  • Identity theft
  • Money laundering
  • Extortion or trafficking
  • Assault
  • Kidnapping
  • Sexual exploitation (covered in section 7 and section 8)

We do not allow symbols that represent any of the above organizations or individuals to be shared on our platform without context that condemns or neutrally discusses the content.

We do not allow content that praises any of the above organizations or individuals or any acts committed by them.

We do not allow coordination of support for any of the above organizations or individuals or any acts committed by them.

We do not allow content that praises, supports, or represents events that Facebook designates as terrorist attacks, hate events, mass murders or attempted mass murders, serial murders, hate crimes and violating events.

End quote

__________________________

There you have it. Without appeal or means of address to the decision makers, your collection of 3 friends may be designated supporters of ‘hate events’,  without any actual event having taken place.

It is really much more pernicious than it appears.

Suppose for instance I became convinced that cousin marriages should not be allowed. (The case is made in Joseph Henrich’s “The WEIRDest people in the world” that the abolition of cousin marriage has marked the character of the people of western Europe profoundly, and in a positive direction for the emergence of modernity). Then I pointed out that in many societies of the world, mainly though not exclusively Muslim, cousin marriages are encouraged. If I pointed out that the suppression of cousin marriages was a necessary condition for the emergence of broadly based non-kinship societies, as Henrich’s book does, and that the secret of success of Western European societies was the suppression of cousin marriages, would I be banned from FaceBook as a hate group, if three of us decided it was an important idea to agree upon and promote?

Now a lawyer might quibble, but you know the answer. You betcha. Some social justice warrior kid would ban you in a flash if he or she thought that a discussion of the negative effects of cousin marriages was aimed at Muslims. Or even if it was not aimed at Muslims but Muslims complained.

We are inventing the new Office of the Inquisition. It is being done before our eyes. It is being done for all the right reasons, as long as you believe harm results from speech.

The least that could be done was what they did about the Inquisition in Portugal in the 1750s. No penalty imposed by the Inquisition was effective unless ratified by the state. That sharply reduced its power. If we cannot avoid the creation of these new Offices of the Inquisition, we should limit their jurisdiction and effectiveness.

 

Controlling the Human Spirit The Inquisition and Slavery 1250–1800 | by I POWER ALLAH | Medium

 

A calm inquiry  into the nature of beliefs about time, space, law and God is conducted in the 1700s. Are we there again?

Bari Weiss Resigns from the New York Times

Her resignation letter is fascinating, and what we suspected is happening, is. Calling it American Pravda is not an exaggeration.

 

“….a new consensus has emerged in the press, but perhaps especially at this paper: that truth isn’t a process of collective discovery, but an orthodoxy already known to an enlightened few whose job is to inform everyone else.

“Twitter is not on the masthead of The New York Times. But Twitter has become its ultimate editor. As the ethics and mores of that platform have become those of the paper, the paper itself has increasingly become a kind of performance space. Stories are chosen and told in a way to satisfy the narrowest of audiences, rather than to allow a curious public to read about the world and then draw their own conclusions. I was always taught that journalists were charged with writing the first rough draft of history. Now, history itself is one more ephemeral thing molded to fit the needs of a predetermined narrative.\…”

“Part of me wishes I could say that my experience was unique. But the truth is that intellectual curiosity—let alone risk-taking—is now a liability at The Times. Why edit something challenging to our readers, or write something bold only to go through the numbing process of making it ideologically kosher, when we can assure ourselves of job security (and clicks) by publishing our 4000th op-ed arguing that Donald Trump is a unique danger to the country and the world? And so self-censorship has become the norm.

“All this bodes ill, especially for independent-minded young writers and editors paying close attention to what they’ll have to do to advance in their careers. Rule One: Speak your mind at your own peril. Rule Two: Never risk commissioning a story that goes against the narrative. Rule Three: Never believe an editor or publisher who urges you to go against the grain. Eventually, the publisher will cave to the mob, the editor will get fired or reassigned, and you’ll be hung out to dry.”

The Prosecution of Naomi Seibt

Greta Thunberg.jpg

Greta Thunberg

 

The prosecution of Naomi Seibt by the Ministry of Truth in North-Rhine Westphalia indicates just how rough the Left will play in suppressing climate skepticism of the most reasonable kind.

Repeat daily: science is not a doctrine but a process of inquiry into one’s own premisses.

Christopher Monckton reviews the case here in WattsUpWithThat.

Francis Menton, the Manhattan Contrarian, compares and contrasts the treatment of Greta Thunberg and Naomi Seibt here.

Don’t apologize Don Cherry

National Post reports this morning:

“You people … you love our way of life, you love our milk and honey, at least you can pay a couple bucks for a poppy or something like that,” Cherry said. “These guys paid for your way of life that you enjoy in Canada, these guys paid the biggest price.”

Sportsnet has apologized for hockey commentator Don Cherry’s remarks about what he believes are new immigrants not wearing poppies ahead of Remembrance Day.

Everyone apologizes. His buddy Ron McLean apologized. Everyone was insensitive.

Don Cherry has the same place in Canadian society as the Queen’s late mother had in England: the one authorized truth teller. Don’t back down, Don. Don’t apologize. Even if you are not always right, you express the natural and normal reactions of English Canadians to a lot of contemporary cant and nonsense.

My bubble

Occasionally I am forced to realize that i live in my own opinion bubble. Or if you prefer, sphere. We organize our lives to stay away from strife, and so we live as much as possible in a place where we have filtered out the unwelcome. I do it, you do it, he does it.

Today’s lesson came from members of the NDP (Canada’s lefter that Left opposition party) objecting to an invitation to Jordan Peterson appearing at a parliamentary committee. The National Post stated:

“The NDP is objecting to an invitation Conservative MPs have extended to psychology professor and author Jordan B. Peterson to testify before the House of Commons justice committee, calling it “irresponsible and morally reprehensible.”

“In a statement released Tuesday, NDP MP Tracey Ramsey said the Conservatives are “dangerously pandering to divisive politics instead of standing up for human rights.”

If I were an NDP member of Parliament, I would enjoy having a set-to with Jordan Peterson. What dismays me is the constant effort not to engage other ideas. As the NDP representative on a CBC television show once said, in respect of a mildly controversial topic, “We shouldn’t even be discussing this”. Wrong – we should.

Everything has been settled, in this view. Only we keep finding that the number of topics that have been settled: gay rights, abortion, global warming, keeps expanding, and the zone of the discussable keeps shrinking, all in the name of “inclusion” and “diversity”. Of course as you will know, inclusion means exclusion, and diversity means uniformity, only the Left does not know that, or if it knows it, will not admit it.