Category: wokeness

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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 anti-human agenda is manifested

I said it yesterday and Neil Oliver says it today: the Greenies (if that is the right label for this blob) are pursuing an anti-human agenda. Farming is the next big target, reduction of food supply by deliberate destructive policy is the means. Time was when you had to extrapolate a little from intention to policy; now the policy is becoming increasingly obvious. Your breathing is problem, your food choices are a problem. you are the problem, and your elimination is the solution. Scratch an ecologue, and you find an exterminationist close to the surface.

“Normal is not allowed” – Neil Oliver

 

https://twitter.com/i/status/1550918900178632707

 

Since I have been away, the world has fallen apart – what else is new?

A short note. In my month away from blogging, Russia has launched a war against Ukraine, and has not won yet, COVID seems more and more to be a manufactured virus escaped from a lab in Wuhan, COVID vaccines have been shown to be neither safe nor of durable effectiveness, inflation has run rampant, after central banks printed trillions of dollars, Trudeau is still in power, Biden dodders towards his earthly demise, Kamala Harris proves to be even more vacuous than originally supposed, and the Democrats seem paralyzed before the oncoming headlights of the great truck of electoral obliteration. Oh! and the Gay/Transgender Identity Thing gathers force. The crisis of over-compassion continues.

I have been silent, and my excuse is this. I have been overwhelmed. I have not felt that a word of mine will make a difference to various unfolding catastrophes. In the past, forgive me, I used to think that what I wrote had some importance for somebody. I ought to have known I was writing as a witness, not a participant. My testimony may well be forgotten. It will be forgotten. get used to it!

Nevertheless despite superior knowledge, I return to the fray.

Of the many things I have seen in the last while, I strongly recommend the Triggernometry interview with the historian of religion Tom Holland

on the Great Awokening. He reminds us that Christianity is frequently riven with religious fanaticisms, of which the Woke thing is the most recent example. His analysis of   the dispute between the Woke and the unWoke is that it is a replay of the struggle between Pelagian view of man as capable of infinite self improvement, and the Augustinian view of man as stained with original, ineradicable sin, incapable of self salvation and dependent on divine grace. In Holland’s view, we are living through a replay of frequently occurring movements in Christian and specifically American Christian religious history.

As the black police sergeant said to a Woke rioter, “Lady, America does not have a racism problem, is has a sin problem.”

Holland says he is now attracted to the idea of original sin, as a democratic idea. The 1960s were an outburst of Pelagianism, and again with Wokeism. Moral self satisfaction is the key to understanding both epochs.

“Strange religious ideas keep re-occurring over centuries” says Holland.

Worth your time.

_____________________

I replayed the movie Steve Jobs last night, after having seen it in 2016. Michael Fassbender inhabits rather than merely plays Steve Jobs. It was directed by Danny Boyle and written by Aaron Sorkin. It was better the second time than the first, and it was great on the first viewing. Kate Winslet disappears into the character of Joanna Hoffman, Job’s right hand man. Its many excellences need to be experienced rather than described.

 

 

 

 

 

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.

What the right gets right about the trucker revolt

A left-wing writer on the trucker rebellion is fascinating. She looks at the trucker revolt as “right wing”, though I am sure the organizers of the trucker blockade of Ottawa streets have no such conception of themselves, and would reject it if they were called it. It also has a strange flavour of a person who lives in a bubble peering out from it dimly to discern, as Bob Dylan said many years ago, “something happening here an’ you don’t know what it is, do you? Mr. Jones”

Emma Jackson writes:

“Whether we want to admit it or not, there’s a lot that the anti-mandate movement is getting right from an organizing and movement-building perspective.

“For starters, in stark contrast to the Left, the past few days have revealed how much better the Right is at meeting people where they’re at.

“Instead of building an insular movement restricted to people who agree with each other 93 per cent of the time, the Right has successfully tapped into widely held resentment and built a mass on-ramp for people with highly divergent views. It’s why the Freedom Convoy isn’t just being ardently defended by white supremacists on Rebel News, but also by anti-vaccine Green Party supporters in the inboxes of mainstream environmental organizations.”

<snip>

Imagine the power that comes from not insisting that everyone agree on everything before you agree to act together! Who knew?

“In the anti-mandate movement, everyone’s participation is welcome. Of course, this also extends to participants brandishing yellow star pins, thin blue line badges, and flags with swastikas—a level of acceptance that should never be tolerated.

“But the degree to which thousands are willing to come to the defense of the movement the second its racist and antisemitic elements are exposed—insisting that they’re just a “few bad apples”—is telling. It proves their commitment to building and defending the biggest possible “we,” against the smallest possible “them”—in this case, the liberal establishment, mainstream media, and those of us naïve enough to be under the spell of both.

It’s also evidence of their collective disdain for any whiff of social elitism—something that is likely only being exacerbated by the urban left’s impulse to wag our fingers at these “backward, selfish people.”

Translating from the wokish, they are open, and anti-snobbish and to borrow her phrase, committed to the biggest possible “we”.

“In order to actively and constantly be recruiting everyday working people into your base (i.e. build power), you actually have to talk to them and ground your recruitment in the everyday institutions and networks they belong to. It’s obvious that the anti-mandate and anti-vaccine crowd is doing just that by engaging in one-on-one conversations with their neighbors, co-workers, and complete strangers, and listening to their collective grievances.

“But the anti-mandate movement isn’t just recruiting participants one-by-one, they’re also successfully bringing entire institutions into the movement and providing them with opportunities to visibly show their support. They’ve successfully recruited evangelical churches, private trucker associations, and far-right outlets like Rebel News, all of whom are fueling the movement—whether by distributing ham sandwiches at rest stops or amplifying their message to hundreds of thousands of people on YouTube.”

<snip>

They have genuine, broad based support. They build coalitions. Who knew?

Emma Jackson continues;

“Labour’s institutional heft is unparalleled, but those of us belonging to other movement threads—climate justice, anti-racism, Indigenous solidarity— must also reflect on how it is that the far-right is doing a better job of recruiting our own family, friends, and co-workers into their movements, than we are into our own.

“Insularity has prevented the left from reaching the mainstream. We have an opportunity to examine our tendency to build organizations that feel more like exclusive clubs for the “already woke,” than they do welcoming spaces for political education and transformation where people feel deeply valued and needed.”

Emma, Emma, listen to Uncle Dalwhinnie:

  1. There is no such thing as the “far right”. The “right” and “the far right” are left wing mental constructions. Those inside the Marxist thought prison imagine that everyone who opposes them is in their own, equally restrictive, thought-prison.  Not so. The only people inside the thought prison are the political left (in my experience) . Other people are quite free to disagree, argue, and have a beer together.  David Horowitz write about this sudden realization when he left the political Left, which he wrote about it “Radical Son”, which is a must-read for all evolving soon to be former Marxists.
  2. Precisely what makes the political left an exclusionary cult is its false but wholly sincere sense of its moral superiority. If you give up believing in your moral superiority, you realize you are a sinner like the rest of the sinners. Then yu are ready to build broad coalitions politically and even religiously.
  3. Living without moral superiority is really difficult. Millions do it every day. If the political Left tried it, they might find themselves being listened to.

The woke revolution isn’t over

The Woke revolution isn’t over. This is a deeply depressing and well thought out article. I recommend it warmly.

N.S.Lyons, at the substack source called The Upheaval, writes

“One would think that by now all these anti-woke conservatives and moderate liberals would have learned at least some of the bitter lessons from the last decade about how political power and cultural change actually work, but I guess not. They could have taken note of all the fundamental factors driving this ideological belief system, all of which had to be painstakingly uncovered, layer by layer, even as it swept through every institution. But they have not.”

Wokeism is defined as

“The world is divided into a dualistic struggle between oppressed and oppressors (good and evil); language fundamentally defines reality; therefore language (and more broadly “the word” – thought, logic, logos) is raw power, and is used by oppressors to control the oppressed; this has created power hierarchies enforced by the creation of false boundaries and authorities; no oppression existed in the mythic past, the utopian pre-hierarchical State of Nature, in which all were free and equal; the stain of injustice only entered the world through the original sin of (Western) civilizational hierarchy; all disparities visible today are de facto proof of the influence of hierarchical oppression (discrimination); to redeem the world from sin, i.e. to end oppression and achieve Social Justice (to return to the kingdom of heaven on earth), all false authorities and boundaries must be torn down (deconstructed), and power redistributed from the oppressors to the oppressed; all injustice anywhere is interlinked (intersectional), so the battle against injustice is necessarily total; ultimate victory is cosmically ordained by history, though the arc of progress may be long; moral virtue and true right to rule is determined by collective status within the oppression-oppressed dialectic; morally neutral political liberalism is a lie constructed by the powerful to maintain status quo structures of oppression; the first step to liberation can be achieved through acquisition of the hidden knowledge of the truth of this dialectic; a select awoken vanguard must therefore guide a revolution in popular consciousness; all imposed limits on the individual can ultimately be transcended by virtue of a will to power…

I could go on, but the real point is that these are faith-beliefs, and ones capable of wielding an iron grip on the individual and collective mind.”

Point 19 of his argument is as follows:

“19. None of the levers of power have changed or will change hands. At the risk of sounding like one of them conspiracy theorists: who really controls the power centers in the United States? The intelligence agencies; the domestic security services; the military officer corps; the diplomatic service; the regulatory administrative state; the Ministry of Information [sic]; and so on. Are all these run by elected representatives accountable to the people, including an elected president and his appointees, who then set a policy direction which is faithfully executed? It may be worth considering that this is simply not the case. That, instead, these power centers are run by a certain interchangeable class of people who already staff them permanently and run them as they think best and only cooperate if they so please. …”

JDs are Juris Doctor degrees. Elite overproduction, or the new clergy is being created.

 

 

The Rule of Midwits, by Brian Chau at Tablet Magazine, seeks to explain why things keep going leftward and downward.

Between the two of them, these articles give no reason to hope that political change to the Republicans will affect the forces that are driving cultural and social dissolution.

Czeslaw Milosz on “The Captive Mind”

 

Czeslaw Milosz (pronounced roughly as Cheswav Miwosh) wrote The Captive Mind in 1950, when Stalin still had three years to live. He was an escapee from Communist Poland, where he had served in the post war Polish communist government for a time as a diplomat.

In the era of Wokeness, it is important to recall that we have been through this before,  albeit on the other side of the Iron Curtain.

I am reading it with great enjoyment.

One chapter of the book concerns a practice call “ketman”, which is taken from Islamic Persia. It was described by the French diplomat Arthur de Gobineau in the 1850s. Ketman is a term for the practice of total deception as regards one’s adherence to Islam. Ketman had to be practiced in the era of total control of thought by the Islamic mullahs (in which we have seen no change in Iran since the 1850s).

Milosz quoting Gobineau (at page 57)

“The people of the Mussulman East believe that “He who is in possession of truth must not expose his person, his relatives or his reputation to the blindness, the folly, the perversity of those whom it has pleased God to place and maintain in error”. One must . therefore. keep silent about one’s true convictions if possible.”

The Ketman of the 20th century was of course the degree of necessary deception regarding one’s adherence to Communist doctrine. Milosz writes “nevertheless, Ketman in its narrowest and severest forms is widely practiced in the people’s democracies. As in Islam, the feeling of superiority over those who are unworthy of attaining truth constitutes one of the chef joys of people whose lives in general do not abound in pleasures.” (p. 60)

[Ideological] “deviations… are not an illusion. They are cases of accidental unmasking of Ketman; and those who are most helpful in detecting deviations are those who practice a similar form of Ketman. Recognizing in other acrobats the tricks they themselves employ, they take advantage of the first occasion to down an opponent or friend. Thus they protect themselves; and the measure of dexterity is to anticipate by at least one day the similar accusations which could be levelled against them by they man they denounce. Since the number of varieties of Ketman is practically unlimited, the naming of deviations cannot keep pace with the weeding of a garden so full of unexpected specimens of heresy.”

Now apply this to contemporary universities in the grip of Wokeness and watch for the practice of systemic Ketman , and for it to be exposed by other practitioners of the same devious arts.

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.

The number is 30

Number of unarmed black men killed by police in 2019 in the USA was 30, in fact.

The coloured bars indicate that there is a grotesque exaggeration of the number of deaths of unarmed black men at the hands of police in the minds of many Americans; the rightmost two bars in each grouping stand for “about 10,000” and “more than 10,000”. The interesting point is that across the political spectrum, so many believe massive numbers of unarmed black men are killed annually by police, falling from about 22% among the very liberal to about 7% among the very conservative.

I might have answered “zero” but I was thinking the word was “innocent”, not “unarmed”. That was a very wicked thought and I must now go and perform acts of repentance before attending mandatory sessions of DIE supervized by aggressive black dykes. Sorry. 🙁

3.9%

Yes folks, that is the figure for CBC television share of viewers in 2018-2019. 3.9% for 1.5 billion dollars of direct subsidy from the taxpayer. A drop of 25% from the year before. What is it now?

As Jordan Peterson remarked recently, broadcast television is so dead kids these days would not even recognize its corpse.

A toxic melange of covidism, climate catastrophism and wokism has put it there, which has produced a lack of relationship to its intended audience, which is all Canadians.

 

Wokism: all differences in outcomes between races is the result of a pervasive malaria of white racism and structural privilege;

Catastrophism: the additions of the trace gas CO2 made by humans through burning fossil fuels is the cause of an imminent climate catastrophe, and drastic anti-market actions are needed, such as only governments can provide;

Covidism: The strongest measures of inoculation through vaccines and lockdowns of the economy are the exclusive  means of stopping the spread of COVID19, and no other disease protocols are appropriate, despite the fact that COVID presents wildly different risk factors by age of person infected.