Category: thought police

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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.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The pleasures of Youtube

As the universe starts to unfold as it should (I refer to Elon Muck purchasing Twitter) I have a confession to make. I am confident that you, too, waste time on Twitter. I know I do, and I like it.  Examples:

Marty T. – who finds bulldozers and tractors in New Zealand forests and brings them back to life;

Post 10: A public-spirited weirdo who goes about unclogging blocked culverts with a rake and, if necessary, an axe;

Andrew Camarata: the upstate New York maintenance contractor who fixes, demolishes, cuts down, and repairs nearly everything mechanical, and who has a giant following;

Another mechanic, Jesse Muller

Sawing with Sandy-  the Ontarian woodlot operator with a Kubota tractor and a sawmill, and a thick Canadian accent

Mr. Chickadee – the Japanese-inspired fine hand-tools only carpenter from somewhere in the Carolinas

Cabin in the woods guys: Erik Grankvist, Sean James (pretentious poseur), Finnish Playground, The Outsider

Smiths and tool makers : Torbjorn Ahman , Robinson Foundry, Black Bear Forge 

Farmers: Millennial Farmer (who runs a huge operation in Minnesota), Laura Farms,

Colin Furze – Lunatic construction and mining projects, and very funny

 

What do these people have in common? They handle practical problems of repair, installation, creation, assembly, and maintenance. They do not discuss ideas. What do I learn from them? Respect, in the first place. Also, patience. Persistence. Some skills. I have been able to undertake projects now that I would not have felt confident enough to engage in before, not because I know more things or skills, but because I am better able to face difficulties, and that has transformed my approach to risk. I accept failure more easily because I am ready to risk more,

I also watch Triggernometry, Brett Weinstein and Heather Heying, Sabine Hossenfelder (bossy German physicist), various discussion shows about physics, and religion, the obligatory Jordan Peterson, Douglas Murray, So What you’re Saying Is, Veritasium (science), Theories of Everything, Lex Fridman, Joe Rogan, The New Culture Forum, Dave Rubin, After Skool, Dr. John Campbell (epidemiology), Rupert Sheldrake (philosophy of science), Rebel Wisdom, and lots more. While these shows (largely interviews) are often fascinating, they don’t tell me things I don’t already know.

All of these shows appear on a platform, and all are user-generated. The Canadian government believes that they should come under the obligation of government licensing or various forms of regulation. See bill C-11 for details.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Fascists, fascists everywhere

You recall the de Adder cartoon about the truckers?

Terribly clever wasn’t it? Yeah, right.

I have seen people who ought to know better asserting the truckers were attempting the overthrow of the government of Canada, that they were or were led by “fascists”, and other absurdities. Rebel Yell, the other author on this site, visited Wellington Street most days of the trucker protest. What he found were Canadians having a party: whites, French and English, Dene, Innu, Cree-Ojibway, Sikh, and so on, all being gracious and polite. And having a good time, apologizing if they bumped into one another.

Now we see Putin justifying his invasion of Ukraine on the basis that he is fighting “fascists”. He proposes to “de-Nazify” the Ukraine.

“Russian President Vladimir Putin invoked the Nazis on Thursday when he announced his decision to launch a large-scale military operation in Ukraine.

“The Russian leader said that one of the goals of the offensive was to “denazify” the country, part of a long-running effort by Putin to delegitimize Ukrainian nationalism and sell the incursion to his constituency at home.”

I am not insinuating that the Canadian left and its leftist Liberal establishment are morally equivalent to Putin. Not at all. But what I do say is this: eighty years after actual Nazi and fascist regimes collapsed in rubble, stricken down and crushed, their ideologies vanquished, people still find it convenient to label their opponents “fascists” when they cannot think of anything worse to insult them with.

Is it not time we acknowledged that the two winners of World War 2 were Communists and parliamentary democracies? And that Canadians tired of COVID compulsions were just that: Canadians? And that Ukrainians are seeking to maintain national independence and are willing to fight for it?

Fascism is dead. Statism is dead. White racial supremacism is dead.

Stop fighting ghosts. Fight the present enemy.

Anti-white racism is very much alive – consider Woke, and the legion of black supremacists and race hustlers in their fifteen minutes of money and fame.

Class condescension is thriving. Just read the Globe and Mail any day of the week. Our former Supreme Court Chief Justice Beverley McLachlin is a case in point:

The Ottawa truck convoy has revealed the ugly side of freedom

Of course these people who shout “fascism” look at themselves in the mirror and do not know who they see: minions of Satan. I think they are in for a big surprise when the Last Judgment is rendered.

Censoring the dead: E O Wilson, Darwin, Mendel, and so on

This is from Scientific American’s non-eulogy to the great entomologist and founder of sociobiology EO Wilson. A careful reading reveals that the author calls for a complete scheme of censorship of scientific publications  by “experts” – in wokeness I assume – so that the reader will be continually reminded of the dangers associated with reading “problematical” authors whose thought is <gasp> “racist”.

 

“To put the legacy of their work in the proper perspective, a more nuanced understanding of problematic scientists is necessary. It is true that work can be both important and problematic—they can coexist. Therefore it is necessary to evaluate and critique these scientists, considering, specifically the value of their work and, at the same time, their contributions to scientific racism….

“First, truth and reconciliation are necessary in the scientific record, including attention to citational practices when using or reporting on problematic work. This approach includes thinking critically about where and when to include historically problematic work and the context necessary for readers to understand the limitations of the ideas embedded in it. This will require commitments from journal editors, peer reviewers and the scientific community to invest in retrofitting existing publications with this expertise. They can do so by employing humanities scholars, journalists and other science communicators with the appropriate expertise to evaluate health and life sciences manuscripts submitted for publication.

“Second, diversifying the scientific workforce is crucial…feminist standpoint theory is helpful in understanding white empiricism and who is eligible to be a worthy observer of the human condition and our world….

“Undoing scientific racism will require commitments from the entire scientific community to determine the portions of historically problematic work that are relevant and to let the scientific method function the way it was designed—to allow for dated ideas to be debunked and replaced.”

The author is Monica McLemore, pictured below. This is the future of science people. Prepare for political control of speech, thought, research and the elimination of the scientific method.

 

Monica McLemore, PhD, MPH, RN, FAAN | ANSIRH

 

For more of the same you can read about “white empiricism”.  https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/full/10.1086/704991

Chanda Prescod-Weinstein writes:

“I introduce the concept of white empiricism to provide one explanation for why [there are so few black women in physics] . White empiricism is the phenomenon through which only white people (particularly white men) are read has having a fundamental capacity for objectivity and Black people (particularly Black women) are produced as an ontological other.”

I cant do the maths either, and I feel happier that my mathematical incompetence is not impeding the development of physics, whereas this new mafia of semi-intelligent black women in “science” is stting about to turn it into a branch of affirmative action.

40% of science writing is junk: the replication crisis

An article by Peter Shawn Taylor in the C2C Journal covers the replication crisis in science. The result is in the title above: 39, not forty, percent of what is touted to be science is not reproducible. “Study shows”. That means that important assertions of science in every field, particularly politically important fields, such as climate change, or classes of inquiry, such as systemic racism, are false.

As regards social psychology (viz the Staley Milgram experiments in inducing people to administer shocks to others), the man who studied the field, Augustine Brannigan wrote:

 

“They are all very entertaining studies, and they ask some really interesting questions,” admits Brannigan. These dramatic “high-impact” experiments are also hugely influential, occupying large sections of undergraduate textbooks and representing the very foundations of the field. “But as science, they’re terrible,” Brannigan says. “Much of what passes for science in social psychology is just morality in an experimental idiom.” Asked what such a revelation might mean for the future of the discipline, he retorts, “If the entire field were to disappear overnight, I don’t think the world would be any worse for it.”

Taylor concludes:

If there’s an overarching message arising from the replication crisis beyond the fate of social psychology, it’s that relentlessly questioning all scientific work is the most effective cure for bad science. This includes scrutinizing new and flashy claims as soon as they are unveiled as well as re-evaluating long-accepted ideas that have already gained status as scientific certainty. Along with renewed emphasis on tough and unsentimental scientific replication must also come more rigorous fact-checking by scientific journals and a less chummy attitude towards the peer review process, with more emphasis on “review” and less on “peer.”

The Internet is broadcasting, therefore let us regulate!

The new Broadcasting Act, Bill C10, may be stymied in the Senate of Canada, but the actual content of its policy objectives has just been released. Heritage Canada has published “Guiding Principles on Diversity of Content online”. The Guiding Principles have several advantages over the policy objectives of section 3 of the Broadcasting Act. They are not legislated, they can be revised and adapted according to the how the technologies or the societies that adopt them evolve, and they have no legally binding force. They have only the force of the large platforms to back them, if they sign on to the Guiding Principles.

It was Tim Wu in The Master Switch who pointed out that the structure of an industry mattered a lot more than any other factor in determining whether there could be censorship. Vertical integration of the movie-making business with distribution and movie theaters meant that the censors could govern the industry through the code of conduct, one that lasted from Mae West in the 1930s to Easy Rider in the 1960s.

The basic idea of the Guiding Principles is the achievement of diversity, equity and inclusion. It is a set of principles that its signatories are expected to work towards. The most important signatories will be the Internet platforms, because without their compliance, the Principles will be mere hot air.

The private sector companies to which the guiding principles are to apply particularly include “services operating online, whose primary purpose is to broadcast or distribute content or share user-generated content online.” Governments, media sector representatives, regulators and civil society organizations are likewise to be included as signatories.

The goal is to promote diversity on-line, understood as

  • Creation access and discoverability of diverse content online
  • Fair remuneration and economic viability of content creators
  • Promotion of diverse, pluralistic sources of news and information as well as resilience against disinformation and misinformation
  • Transparency of the impacts if algorithmic treatments of online content.

 

Signatories are to agree to implement these goals within the scope of their responsibilities and to develop specific commitments by December 2022 at the latest, to show concrete actions they will take to implement these guiding objectives”.

There follow a number of principles which assume, as a matter of fact, that

  1. There are “equity deserving groups” whose access is limited
  2. Hate, racial prejudice, disinformation and misinformation “can disproportionately affect indigenous people and equity deserving groups”.
  3. “Equity deserving individuals and groups” are defined as those facing significant barriers to participation in different facets of society, a marginalization that could be created by attitudinal, historic, social, economic, legal and environmental obstacles.

Having seen the cartoons of the kids of various heights standing on boxes of various heights to see the baseball game over a wooden fence, “equity” may reasonably be interpreted to mean active measures to overcome the consequences of inequalities, natural or artificial. The term ‘equity’ involves, in modern parlance, an ongoing governmental interference to achieve goals that might not otherwise be achieved in the absence of governmental actions.

The Principles are organized around themes:

  • Creation access and discoverability of content
  • Fair remuneration and economic viability of content creators
  • Promotion of diverse, pluralistic sources of news and information as well as resilience against disinformation and misinformation
  • Transparency of the impacts of algorithmic treatments of online content.

 

The last-mentioned goal says that “content recommendation algorithms and their developers should minimize potential systemic biases and discrimination in outcome, related to such things as race, sexual orientation, gender identity and ability.”

Content recommendation algorithms now seek to interest me in what is related to what I have previously expressed an interest in. If I have expressed interest in videos of Andrew Camarata fixing bulldozers, the algorithm is likely to recommend other machine-oriented males fixing tractors, chainsaws, and building log cabins. Inevitably the algorithms will direct me to things of interest to males, such as myself. I imagine the same happens with videos on golf, tastes in music, physics, flower gardens, or cooking, Japanese art or any taste whatever. How then, it may be asked, will an algorithm correct for systemic bias in male oriented videos if I am a male, and female oriented videos if I were female?

The Guiding Principles do not say, but they expect content recommendation systems to “respect freedom of expression in a way that allows for safe and diverse content.” In other words, safety and diversity, as defined by governments or the platforms, are to constrain freedom of expression.

The Guiding Principles are a kind of Broadcasting Act for the Internet, or a set of objectives that the platforms are expected to implement  By this I mean that the system it envisages is systemic, organized, comprehensive, global (as far as Canadians will see) and subject to government regulation, and that in Annex A to this document, the signatories are expected to develop by December 2022 at the latest “concrete actions they will take to complement the guiding principles.  These specific commitments will remain evergreen and continue to evolve”.

The great advantages for the government, in its efforts to regulate the Internet, are that the Principles utterly bypass legislation, need no Parliamentary approval, require the cooperation of the platforms but not of society, and subject large areas of private tastes to algorithmic manipulation.

The Guiding Principles are creepily totalitarian, and yet one imagines the authors of this document think of themselves as being great public benefactors. In order to explain what I mean, I ask you, as a thought experiment, to replace the content of the particular goals to be achieved by the guiding principles. Look at the whole thing, and ask yourself what the document, conceived as a whole, says. It says in short, that speech carried across the Internet is to serve particular purposes. All speech, everywhere, that is carried on the Internet.

Agreement or disagreement with the guiding principles as they are stated is less important than the whole purpose of the document. Take out the language about diversity, equity and inclusion (the new modern woke credo) and replace it, in this thought experiment, with any other set of goals to be achieved. These goals could be anything: the divinity of Christ, the supremacy of the Aryan race, the sanctity of the Roman Church, the triumph of scientific socialism, the grandeur of the Aztec Sky God Huitchilopotchtli, the preservation of the British Empire, or the values of the Enlightenment. So let [x] stand for the content of the Guiding Principles. Forget whether you agree with them or not. Just think of the Guiding Principles as a block of ideas that can be lifted out and replaced with some other set of desiderata. In effect, by calling the Principles an evergreen document, Heritage Canada virtually guarantees that they will be revised in time.

Then perhaps it becomes clearer that my point is not the DEI principles, though they are creepy enough. It is the idea that everything on-line should be aimed at any guiding principle at all.

Would you think it normal that the publishing industry in Canada be enjoined to publish books that exclusively promote a certain political agenda?

Would you think it right that speech across various telephone and voice applications be organized to conduce to the achievement of diversity, equity and inclusion?

To make the point even clearer, I recall the story of a Canadian diplomat who served in the Soviet Union, as it then was, in the Brezhnev era. I asked whether there was freedom of speech in the Soviet Union. He said ‘yes there was, absolute freedom of speech’. I was startled.

-What do you mean absolute freedom of speech?!!

– If you are out on the ice fishing in winter, and in your shelter, and out of range of prying microphones, and talking with people whom you have known all your life or from high school, and you have developed trust over decades, you can talk about anything. And they do. They talk about stuff no one talks about here, like whether Hitler was right to invade Stalin’s USSR, or whether Communism is a pile of crap, or whether the USA is actually imperialist. There is complete freedom of discussion. You just have to be careful with whom and where you share your ideas.

People need to look at the Guiding Principles from this perspective. Canada will have complete freedom of speech. Just not the kind we have been used to. Thank you, Peter Grant.

 

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.

 

 

 

You are not even allowed to observe: “benign racism”

North American racial totalitarianism is reaching new levels of absurdity. According to this “news” item in the CBC Ottawa site, three policemen are under investigation about a private conversation they had two years ago. Here is the CBC story.

“The Ottawa Police Service (OPS) is conducting an investigation after a video circulating online this week shows uniformed members of its force having a racist conversation.

“The video is a partial recording from a security camera at a person’s home and was originally posted on social media by a friend of the person involved.

“On Thursday, that person confirmed the video was recorded in his garage in the summer of 2019. He said the officers were there to serve a warrant after he had been pulled over for driving without a licence a few days earlier. He asked CBC not to identify him because he fears for his safety and that of his family.

“The video shows three police officers standing in a garage, seemingly unaware that their conversation was being recorded.

“One officer said, “Our days are done. White man’s day is done.”

“Another officer replies, “you’re probably right.”

“A third said, “you’re onto something.”

“The population of North America, we’re the minority I think even at this point,” one officer goes on to say.

“You go to Toronto and every couple you see walking by is a mixed couple. You don’t see white and white people together. It’s white [and] Asian, white [and] East Indian,” he said.

“I told my son he can find a Chinese, Asian girlfriend,” he continued. “If he wants to stay in the mix, get your foot in the door.”

The reaction of the ottawa Police Service was:

Regardless of the intent, the comments expressed in the video have negatively impacted community members and service members. The comments are offensive and they have further eroded public trust as well as internal morale.” 

The police statement goes on to say “such statements are not consistent with the values of the Ottawa Police Service and they have no place in the policing profession.”

In order to turn this banal if somewhat gloomy exchange into a “news” story, the obligatory authority figure is called in to  describe this as “racist”.

“Reacting to the video, Xiaobei Chen, a sociology professor at Carleton University, said: “I think these are very troubling racist ideas that we are seeing behind the conversation.”

“The conversation in the video, Chen said, is a prime example of the “enduring notion of white ownership of this nation,” despite North America first belonging to Indigenous people and being “built on the back of free labour, of Blacks under cruel conditions, under slavery and also exploitation of Chinese labour.”

“What’s especially problematic about this [conversation] is it’s benign. What it tells us is that these conversations are probably happening a lot of times, but we just don’t see it,” Chen said.

“Chen said she hopes OPS uses this video as a stepping stone to address white “nationalistic notions and racism and colonialism within the police force.”

What’s especially problematic about this conversation is it’s benign, says the Chinese Canadian sociologist. So according to the CBC it is a racist conversation, and according to the Chinese sociologist it is benign – and that’s what makes it “especially problematic”.

Thus it is possible to be racist, colonial and benign in almost the same breath. You are not even allowed to observe the fact that white people, as such, are being shoved out of power and told their feelings of belonging to the former Canada are both racist and colonialist.

Many thoughts come to mind.

The first is a photo taken [not shown here], I think in 1916 at the rebuilding of the Canadian Parliament after the fire that year, but it could have been taken in 1872 after the orginal building was completed. It is about four feet wide, and shows the entire work crew, numbering over a thousand men, with the architetcts and foremen seated in the centre, in Victorian hierarchy. They are lined up in many rows between the two central towers of Centre Block. What strikes you immediately when you see it is that not a single person among them is black or Chinese. Some faces look French Canadian or a tiny few may be Amerindian, but the overwhelming majority of workers are white  people of British origin. No women. No other ethnic or racial minorities. This was a white Dominion. The photo is found downstairs at Irene’s Pub, 885 Bank Street, just outside the washroom. To see this photo is to see how much change has happened in a hundred years to this country. [Google Images does not have it, because I suspect it shows too many white people gathered together for a historic triumph].

Original Canadian Parliament Building, Centre Block before the 1916 Fire

 

The second thought that comes to mind is that racial or national consciousness of any kind, even benign, is now considered “problematic”. As John Derbyshire has observed, you are not allowed even to observe.

While it is obvious that race and racism -but not actual racial differences – are obsessions of the political Left, it is also clear that the term racsim, rather than connoting a grievous moral fault, has morphed into racial consciousness or awareness of any kind. It is useful to our thought controllers to conflate racism with simple awareness of race. We must be exquisitely conscious of race, but not conscious of what race might actually mean.

The state of doublethink has arrived: we are simultaneously to be hyper-aware of race, but white people are not allowed to converse about it among themselves on any terms, even benign.

 

 

Try to be more virtuous today

The scientific accomplishments of white culture exceed the entire rest of the world not just qualitatively but in kind. The difference is absolute . Indeed, until the time in the 19th or 20th ceturies when these cultures adopted the scientific method and the mental habits and assumptions that made it possible, they did not possess “science” as we undertand the term. Many have written about Arab, Chinese and Hindu “science”. These civilizations, each for its own intrinsic reasons,  did not reach what today is recognized as the form of rational inquiry known as “science”. Some historian of science said that the achievements of Faraday and Maxwell in their work on electromagnetism exceeded the wntire corpus of Arabic civilization’s contributions to knowledge, Al-Khwarizmi and Al-Ghazali notwithstanding.

Seems strong, doesn’t it? Yet it is true.

Is this racism? Is this cultural chauvinism?  I hardly know and I care not. The attacks on white people and “whiteness” -which is a stand-in for cultural habits that made the modern world, are relentless. How soon before bridges fall down? How soon before this magnificent and complex apparatus that keeps us alive and warm (it is -10C outside as a I write) falls to peices because not enough order-creators are available to prevail against the disorder creators? Kind of like a table full of squabbling children and no adult supervison, only worse because the adults have resiled from their educative duties, refuse to cook, refuse to set an example, refuse to enlighten, refuse to think straight, refuse to do any hard work and bang the table for someone to serve them. They have low impulse control and they are armed with AK-47s. I have seen the future, brethren, and it’s murder.

 

Here’s my formula for Coca-Cola and other anti-white personnel training programs. Try to be less black today, for starters. Try to be less superstitious, undeducated, lazy, presumptuous, aggressive, ill-disciplined and ignorant. It would be a good start.

Whites are not inherently superior to anyone. Their cultures allowed them to attain superiority for a time in world affairs. Whether they keep it, or not, is up to them. At the moment they seem intent on destroying themselves with self-loathing, assisted by the doltish ideologies of half educated black professors who could not think clearly if they tried.

Try to be more virtuous today. It is a good start. If you interpret that as trying to be more white, you won’t go far wrong. But stick to virtue, and you will see the issue more clearly than the miseducators at Coca Cola.

 

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?