If for any reason you cannot find the paperback version of Playing the Indian Card at your favourite bookstore or online retailer, please ask them to carry it. Protest and picket the store entrance if necessary.
The public conversation is clearly shifting. Recently I heard Trump condemn Somalis in America without bothering to add the formerly obligatory “not all Somalis.” I hear increasingly of “black fatigue,” meaning people getting tired of the constant demands and hostile attitude of blacks. A reporter and author laments that nobody trusts the word of Canadian “First Nations” any longer. That is striking, since until recently the governing principle of public discourse, absurd as it was, was that no Indian could ever tell a lie.
Not long ago, you used to have to say you supported feminism. Now I hear men complaining about Karens, modern women in general, and feminism all over the Internet.
Of course, you still hear also from the Karens, oblivious to all this. You still hear claims of white genocide against First Nations, and demands for reparations for slavery and colonialism and for simply being male or white.
But what has happened, I think, is that the inevitable openness of the Internet, in which everyone has a printing press and a broadcast studio, has finally burst the bonds of censorship. This of course after an obvious and desperate rear-guard effort to shut down all unauthorized opinions. But it has now failed.
People are suddenly allowed to speak their minds again. Now we are suddenly hearing both sides.
This of course necessarily means hearing some opinions with which we will strongly disagree; ideas that may upset us. But this is necessary in order to hold an honest, open dialogue. This is necessary to know where truth lies, and where public opinion lies. Much argument is the antidote to much violence.
It’s about to get wild, and creative things are going to happen. Much like they did when the old media censorship regimes were lifted in the Sixties. It is hard to create great art when you cannot express yourself freely.
Many on the left have said that ABC suspending Jimmy Kimmel was or would be a violation of his freedom of speech.
I think we need to make some distinctions. If you say ABC cannot cancel Kimmel no matter what he says, you are ignoring ABC’s free speech rights. That would be compelled speech. ABC is a publisher; it has a right to publish whom they choose, because Kimmel represents them to the public. Imagine if a corporation hired an advertising firm, and then was legally required to run their ads no matter what they sent in.
The issue is different for online platforms like YouTube or Facebook or X. They are considered to merely be providing a service, like the phone company or an ISP. This gives them special legal protections. They are the “public square.” Nobody simply speaking on YouTube represents YouTube. So if they silence anyone, they are indeed violating their freedom of speech.
And the issue is different for “blacklisting”—that is, cancelling or silencing someone not for what they are saying, but for something they said at some other time or on some other platform. That does seem a violation of freedom of speech. It has a chilling effect on public discourse.
If government steps in and requires ABC to cancel Kimmel, openly or behind the scenes, on pain of retribution, this is a violation of freedom of speech—of ABC’s freedom of speech as well as Kimmel’s.
But even the government has the right to block slanderous speech, libel, incitement to violence, or pornography. Slander, libel, or incitement to violence are not just speech, but also deed; they are performative, and can materially harm others. Pornography is not necessarily performative, but may be socially undesirable. Similarly, the government has the right to arrest someone for walking about naked or masturbating in front of children. And no inalienable rights are violated in censoring it. Freedom of speech protects opinions, information and artistic expression, for the sake of public discourse and conscience, and not personal fetishes.
The right in
America is currently undergoing some soul-searching, under accusations of
hypocrisy from the left. People are getting fired for their online reactions to
Charlie Kirk’s assassination. Some are being doxxed to their employers. Isn’t
this the very cancel culture the right has been complaining about?
This is a
conundrum always faced by a liberal democracy. It was pressing during the 1920s
to 1950s. Can you allow a Nazi Party or a Communist Party to openly organize
and compete in elections? After all, they are rejecting the electoral system
itself. How do you handle a political movement that advocates political
violence? That commits it?
If political
violence is allowed, the electoral system itself disintegrates. The decision
devolves to mobs in the streets.
Celebrating
the death of Charlie Kirk is endorsing political violence; and advocating
political violence, implicitly or explicitly.
Inciting
violence in any context is criminal. Inciting or advocating political violence
steps that up to something like treason.
The right in
America is currently undergoing some soul-searching, under accusations of
hypocrisy from the left. People are getting fired for their online reactions to
Charlie Kirk’s assassination. Some are being doxxed to their employers. Isn’t
this the very cancel culture the right has been complaining about?
This is a
conundrum always faced by a liberal democracy. It was pressing during the 1920s
to 1950s. Can you allow a Nazi Party or a Communist Party to openly organize
and compete in elections? After all, they are rejecting the electoral system
itself. How do you handle a political movement that advocates political
violence? That commits it?
If political
violence is allowed, the electoral system itself disintegrates. The decision
devolves to mobs in the streets.
Celebrating
the death of Charlie Kirk is endorsing political violence; and advocating
political violence, implicitly or explicitly.
Inciting
violence in any context is criminal. Inciting or advocating political violence
steps that up to something like treason.
The right in America is currently undergoing some soul-searching, under accusations of hypocrisy from the left. People are getting fired for their online reactions to Charlie Kirk’s assassination. Some are being doxxed to their employers. Isn’t this the very cancel culture the right has been complaining about?
This is a conundrum always faced by a liberal democracy. It was pressing during the 1920s to 1950s. Can you allow a Nazi Party or a Communist Party to openly organize and compete in elections? After all, they are rejecting the electoral system itself. How do you handle a political movement that advocates political violence? That commits it?
If political violence is allowed, the electoral system itself disintegrates. The decision devolves to mobs in the streets.
Celebrating the death of Charlie Kirk is endorsing political violence; and advocating political violence, implicitly or explicitly.
Inciting violence in any context is criminal. Inciting or advocating political violence steps that up to something like treason.
Spanish and Portuguese possessions according to the Treaty of Tordesillas
In May of this year, Catherine Kronas, an elected member of the school council at Ancaster Secondary School in the Hamilton-Wentworth District School Board (HWDSB), was suspended from her position by the school board because she lodged a formal objection, following proper parliamentary procedure, to the board’s requirement to make a “land acknowledgement” at every council meeting. Her concern was that this was a political statement, and compelled speech.
This was equivalent to a coup by the bureaucracy overthrowing the elected government. The school board is supposed to be subject to the elected parents’ councils, not the other way around. It is also an extreme violation of human rights: of freedom of speech, of the right to petition the government, of parental rights over their children’s education.
Why would the school board act in such a dictatorial fashion over this particular issue?
In part, this is a sign of desperation. The various bureaucracies are aware they are losing control. The natural reaction is to lash out in narcissistic rage; just as Islamic terrorism is a symptom of the collapse of Muslim confidence. We have seen blatant attempts by the “deep state” to subvert democracy in the US, in France, in the UK, in Germany, recently. Canada is probably no worse.
The reason the school board is enforcing this “land acknowledgement” in the first place is, of course, that it is a lie. Forcing people to repeat a lie is an exercise in control for its own sake.
Nobody feels the need to enforce a truth. Truth can look after itself.
The various “land acknowledgements” are also violations of the principle of human equality; they imply that some citizens have, by birth, some claim to the land above that of other citizens.
One might counter that they are meant merely as a matter of historical interest. However, if so, they are still discriminatory in mentioning only approved “First Nations” groups who fought over this land, and not also historic claims to the land by the French, the British, and, by Treaty of Tordesillas, the Spanish.
Especially obnoxious is the common claims that some part of Canada is “the unceded territory” of this or that tribe. This is a plain lie. Sovereignty was expressly ceded by treaty across the Prairies and the north, throughout Ontario, and in the Peace and Friendship treaties in the Atlantic Provinces. Note, for example, this text from the “Articles of Submission,” 1725: “We, the … delegates from the … tribes inhabiting within His Majesty's said territories of Nova Scotia or Acadia and New England, do, in the name and behalf of the said tribes we represent, acknowledge His said Majesty King George's jurisdiction and dominion over the territories of the said Province of Nova Scotia or Acadia, and make our submission to His said Majesty in as ample a manner as we have formerly done to the Most Christian King.”
This is a clear surrender of sovereignty. Their land was ceded, in the same sense the French Acadian lands were ceded to Britain in 1713, or the North-West Territories were ceded to Canada by the Hudson’s Bay Company in 1870. This does not, of course, directly address the matter of individual ownership of given plots of land. That would be subject to the laws of England: “We Submitting ourselves to be ruled and governed by His Majesty's Laws and desiring to have the benefit of the same.”
Interestingly, by contrast, Spain actually never has formally ceded sovereignty over North America. So that “land acknowledgement” is the only one that might be vaguely legitimate. For what it might be worth.
The root of the current drive for censorship, “deplatforming,” cancel culture, and unfriending, which has destroyed so many lives and so many relationships, is simple and obvious. Too many people are lying; especially people in power. You never want to silence anything you believe is untrue. There is no drive to censor the claim that the earth is flat, or the sun goes around the earth. Conversely, you never want to end debate if you believe you are telling the truth. If you discover the earth goes around the sun, contrary to what others have assumed, your instinct is not to suppress the field of astronomy. It is to publish, present your arguments, and take the win.
Therefore, what we are not permitted to say is a reliable indicator of what is true.
An obvious current example is the drive to criminalize any claim that the Indian Residential schools in Canada were not genocidal, or that there are no mass graves of students.
I suppose I’d better not proceed to other examples. It is, after all, taking a risk. But you can find them for yourself.
Once one becomes committed to any one lie, there is a multiplier effect: truth in general begins to look threatening. You will want to restrict speech as a matter of principle. .Who knows otherwise what might slip out?
And underlying the commitment to a lie is a growing popular philosophy that we are gods and can decide for ourselves what we want to be true.
I am not allowed to say this person's sex or name.
I hear that, like the box office failure of a string of recent Hollywood movies, recent “woke” books have failed to earn back their advances. One is “Elliot” Page’s autobiographical account of a female-to-male transition, a $3 million advance. Another, a “queer feminist western,” got a $500,000 advance and sold 3,500 copies.
Meanwhile, white male authors say they cannot get published.
It is possible to see firms like Disney or Anheuser-Busch deciding to take a loss to push politics. One imagines they have a financial cushion. It is harder to explain this in book publishing. Book publishing runs on tight margins, and publishers often go bankrupt. They need to be more careful.
I imagine something else is going on. The editors genuinely thought that the market craved these books. Perhaps, then, this is also the truth for Disney and the others.
Anyone who has been to university these days has been thoroughly indoctrinated in woke ideology. No other views are heard in class; or permitted. To be smart and educated is simply to accept these dogmas. It is easy to graduate imagining that everybody thinks this way, or should think this way, and only needs to be introduced to these ideas to accept their self-evident rightness.
Then, as all other views are unacceptable, they are suppressed if heard. In the classroom, in the media, in business, on the internet. Anyone who expresses them risks losing their livelihood. Some, even most, might privately doubt or disagree, but nobody dares say so. Safer to join in suppressing them so one is not suspected of holding them oneself.
The woke no longer hear any dissent; other than perhaps some “far-right” fringe. It is easy for them to imagine that they represent the vast majority. Silence, after all, implies consent. And so they push on.
But this no longer works when it gets down to individual discretionary spending. Even if you control the airwaves, the publishers, the internet, all the breweries, all the media of distribution, people can simply not buy something they do not need: a beer, or a movie ticket, or a book. They can stop attending church.
It’s not a boycott. It’s just their true preference. Nor are they easily swayed on these matters by lecturing them on their supposed social responsibility—an appeal that might work at the ballot box. One seeks here simple enjoyment, and the thing is fun, or it is not worth the money.
And so, get woke, go broke.
This is an argument against suppressing free speech. Over the longer term, it harms even those in power. Soon they are no longer getting reliable information, are operating in the dark, and will blunder off a cliff.
In this clip, Justin Trudeau shows a notable lack of intelligence. To put the most charitable interpretation on it.
He begins by boasting that he goes by the dictionary definition of words. Then he gets the meaning of the words “misinformation” and “disinformation” confused. He thinks “misinformation” is deliberate, and “disinformation” unintentional.
Here are the definitions from the Oxford English Dictionary:
Disinformation: “The dissemination of deliberately false information, esp. when supplied by a government or its agent to a foreign power or to the media.”
Misinformation: “Wrong or misleading information.”
He then proceeds to a logical fallacy. He poses the question, “Who decides what is misinformation or disinformation?” And he responds, “There has to be an acceptance that there are experts out there who create a basis of fact.”
This is the “argumentum ab auctoritate,” or argument from authority. It is really an evasion of the question.
To begin with, what if authorities disagree—as, of course, they always do? By what authority do you choose one authority over another?
Are you going to take the “consensus of experts”? Now you have committed the ad populum fallacy as well, that truth can be arrived at by popular vote. If everyone on Earth voted that the moon was made of green cheese, this could not make the moon green cheese. If nearly everyone thought that the sun goes around the earth—as almost everyone once did—this does not make it true that the sun goes around the earth.
Is a majority more likely to be right than a minority? No. After all, the smartest people are necessarily going to be an absolute minority of the general population.
Second, how do you know that person A is an authority on the matter? What authority vouches for him being an authority? And who vouches for that authority? You are into an infinite regression; an infinite regression of unknown quantities remains an unknown quantity.
Third, authorities, even if genuine, can lie. They will have their own vested interests. To call yourself an authority is to say “just trust me.” One ought to automatically suspect a con.
Fourth, to uncritically accept the word of existing authority brings all science, all human thought and human progress to a halt. If authority is always right, then Galileo was spreading misinformation, as was Newton, or Einstein, or Columbus, or the Wright Brothers, or for that matter Martin Luther King, Thomas Jefferson, Socrates, or Jesus Christ.
In practice, who would inevitably decide what is and is not disinformation? Trudeau’s bottom line must be government—actually the usual source of disinformation. It must, in short, be him. Government is authority, and therefore gets to decide and declare the experts. Which means by definition the end of democracy and an increasingly authoritarian regime.
It is terrifying that this man is in any position of power.
Alexa Lavoie may have uncovered why Justin Trudeau and Pierre Poilievre have both declared Christine Anderson, without explanation, a hateful racist. In an interview for Rebel News, the MEP states her opinion that Islam is not a religion, but an ideology. Moreover, it is a “misogynistic, dehumanizing” ideology, more properly comparable with Communism than what we refer to otherwise as religion.
I can understand why Trudeau and Poilievre do not want to actually quote her or explain their opposition. The problem is, she has a good case. And if more people in Canada hear it, it is liable to lead to civil strife.
First of all, we must be free to criticize religions, as opposed to adherents of a religion. Nobody looks askance at criticizing Scientology’s theological claims, or those of the Unification Church (the “Moonies”); or for that matter Catholicism, or evangelical Christianity, or Christianity as a whole. In a free and pluralistic country, Islam cannot be exempt from such criticism.
On the other hand, awkwardly, Muslims themselves are not tolerant of any criticism of their faith, and are liable to issue fatwas, and generally become violent.
The politicians have a tiger by the tail. It is safest to just try to silence anyone who mentions the problem. Not that this will fix it—it will make it worse—but with luck, they will be retired from politics and living in a gated community somewhere by then.
As someone trained in Comparative Religions, I can say that Anderson’s questions about Islam are reasonable. People in general, and perhaps also our politicians, do not seem to understand that the definition of religion is uncertain in the field, and Islam is in fundamental ways not a religion like Christianity or Judaism. Unlike them, or Buddhism, it does not see a separation between religion and politics, church and state. For Islam, in principle, the only legitimate government is a Muslim government, and Islam can only be practiced, in principle, under a Muslim government.
Hence, Anderson is right to say it is a political ideology as much as it is a religion.
It cannot coexist with other faiths in peace on an equal playing field. Whenever and wherever there is a substantial concentration of Muslims, they will demand their own government. If they control a government, they will want to impose sharia law on all citizens.
This is not compatible with a pluralistic liberal democracy.
So—if we continue to accept Muslim immigration, should we require new citizens to take an oath to support liberal values like free speech, equality of the sexes, and religious tolerance?
Problem: we are then in effect asking them to renounce their religion. Those who do may not turn out to be ideal citizens; we may be selecting for the unscrupulous and irreligious.
It is a serious problem, which we are building for our future. It is probably past due for us all to have a discussion of this. Anderson is forcing such a discussion, as are some others in Europe. Trudeau and Poilievre fear one.
Pierre Poilievre has made a serious mistake, in condemning Christine Anderson. He now risks losing enough voters to Maxime Bernier to take away his chance of beating Trudeau. Even if this does not happen, we know from past experience that moving to the middle does not get you any more votes. It gives people no reason to vote for you. Ask Erin O’Toole. Ask Andrew Scheer. Ask Tom Mulcair. Ask Mitt Romney. Ask John McCain. It is a losing strategy.
What Poilievre should have said is something like this:
“Christine Anderson is a democratically elected representative of the German people. Not to entertain and to respect her shows contempt for the German people, our good friends and allies. It does not mean we agree with all her views. Cooperating with those with whom we sometimes disagree, on matters of agreement, is the lifeblood of democracy. It is the lifeblood of civil society. Much of the ill-will and suffering in Canada today is caused by a Prime Minister who refuses to even speak with those with whom he disagrees, who simply calls them names and slanders them, as ‘racists or ‘misogynists’ or ‘antisemites’ and the like.
This man who danced around in blackface with his tongue out and a banana stuffed down his trousers.
We Conservatives do not want that kind of Canada, nor that kind of world. We respect people, the people of Germany and the people of Canada, and we welcome those who come here from abroad.”
Poilievre has now stupidly missed his chance. I guess he thought he could duck the issue by having the statement sent out by someone in his office, and just to one reporter, Brian Lilley. Lamely playing right into Trudeau’s accusation that the Conservatives hide their true feelings behind claims they “just didn’t know.” That backfired, because everyone noticed it anyway, it painted Trudeau in the right and the Tories in the wrong, and it made him look like a coward.
Now that he has not immediately dissociated himself from it, he will not be able to convince anyone he is sincere in doing so, that it was some advisor going rogue. He will just look more cowardly, less principled, and callous as well. He will also be throwing Brian Lilley under the bus. He cannot afford to alienate the few members of the media not already trying to destroy him. He will not look like a leader.
I suspect his failure to either acknowledge the statement by his operative, or dissociate himself from it, reflects indecision. He and his office do not know what to do. Yet this too now makes him look weak and cowardly. He cannot stay silent now, and he cannot dissociate himself from the controversy. He put his foot in it.
He has t take full responsibility, and apologize. People will respect him the more for it. It worked for JFK after the Bay of Pigs. It is something I firmly believe as a teacher: if you do not know the answer, you immediately own up to it. If you gave the students the wrong information, you immediately own up to it. Indeed, if you are a good human being, and you realize you have done something wrong, you immediately own up to it. That is what real leadership looks like.
He should issue something like the following statement:
"I regret deeply my lack of respect last week, expressed through a member of my office, but with my knowledge and consent, for Christine Anderson, a duly elected fellow parliamentarian and representative of our friends, the German people. I cannot endorse all her views. That is not the point. We are all individuals, and have the inalienable right to our views, and to express them freely. We do not have to always agree with each other to support and love one another, to work together to build a better Canada and a better world—a lesson I wish our present Prime Minister would learn. I must humbly remember it too. I apologize to Ms. Anderson, a fellow democrat and believer in human freedom, and to the German people, for my lapse in judgement. And I pledge to try to do better."
If Poilievre is a good man, and a leader, he will say something like this.
Pierre Poilievre is in trouble with the mainstream media for giving a speech to the Frontier Centre. Because the Frontier Centre, in turn, has done radio spots claiming, presumably with data, that those who went to Indian Residential Schools graduated knowing more about Indian culture and language than those who did not attend. This counts as “residential school denial,” and no one is allowed to speak to you ever again if you are guilty of it.
Another example of the growing influence of “cancel culture.” There is an ever-growing list of things you cannot say, and people you must not talk to.
You must not talk to truckers if they come to call. You must not say the Covid vaccines are ineffective. You must not mention abortion. You must not mention the Nuremberg protocols. You must not question the series of assertions collectively referred to as “climate change.” You must not call people by their birth name—that’s “deadnaming” them. You must not call them a mn if they assert that they are a woman. The list keeps growing.
The critical thing to realize about such extreme censorship: nobody censors lies. Nobody cares if what you say is untrue. Then they are happy to refute it. Nobody cares if you say the Earth is flat, or that the sun goes around the Earth, or that the Chinese discovered America. Only truth needs to be censored, precisely because it cannot be refuted, and people will believe it if they are exposed to it. The more agitated and extreme the censorship, the more certain you can be that whatever is being silenced is true. This is the golden rule.
As for the Indian Residential Schools specifically, it should stand to reason that an education is an education: one graduates with more knowledge, not less. Even if a school wanted, as is claimed of the residential schools, to actually suppress what you know of your own culture, it would seem to be a nearly impossible task. Memories are durable. You do not forget your first language by learning another—indeed, Latin and other languages have traditionally been taught on the premise that they help you understand English better.
Moreover, if your intention was to teach Indian students only the mainstream culture, and integrate them into the mainstream, why would you send students to a segregated Indian school, instead of integrating them into the public system? In fact, the residential schools were designed to preserve Indian culture.
Pretty much everything we are told about the Indian residential schools is a lie; which is why any defense of them must be suppressed. There are too many people with vested interests in the lie.
“Deadnaming,” “misgendering,” and “preferred pronouns” are a comparable example. If, by contrast, you happened to mistake the sex of a real woman, or call her by the wrong name, she would probably simply correct you.
It is all denial.
We see something similar with the rash of statue-toppling and public renamings of buildings. It is always the good guys whose statues go down. Nobody is upset if you honour a villain. Egerton Ryerson, who founded the public school system in Ontario, and did his best to advance the interests of the native people, must have his statue removed and his name effaced from the university which, in a sense, he founded. Meantime, across town, nobody comments on the name of George Brown College—although George Brown has no connection to the institution, and was prejudiced against the French, the Catholics, and opposed any formal recognition of native land rights. Sir John A. Macdonald, who fought him over this in defense of the native people, and wanted their enfranchisement as full citizens, gets his statues torn down, supposedly for his treatment of the native people. Despite his great accomplishment, Canada itself. Meanwhile, nobody calls for the removal of the public statues of Louis Riel, guilty of treason, wanting to split the West from Canada and sell it to the States, not to mention murder. Even though, oddly, all the statues of Confederate figures in the US are being torn down on the premise that they were guilty of treason. Yet they, unlike Riel, were never convicted of it, and could not have been—since they were loyal to their states, and the American states were then considered sovereign.
Henry Dundas’s name is similarly being erased from downtown Toronto, supposedly because he supported slavery--although he was a leading figure in the abolition movement. He should have kept his mouth shut and gone along with it, I suppose.
Meanwhile, nobody calls for pulling down the public statues of the Famous Five, in Calgary and Ottawa, and the many other memorials. Although they promoted eugenics and forcible sterilization, and opposed non-white immigration.
And nobody objects to the several public statues of Norman Bethune. Granted, he did some humanitarian work in Spain and China. But why him in particular? Canadians are apparently entirely unaware that he was just one of many medical missionaries Canada sent to the Far East in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Many of them, like Bethune, died there. Many stayed longer, and made greater humanitarian contributions. Many are commemorated in those lands: Scofield, Avison, Hall, et al. Avison even has a memorial in Toronto—donated by Koreans. Yet only Bethune gets honoured here, by Canadians, and by our government.
Bethune was a confirmed Stalinist who worked to put Mao Zedong in power; these are perhaps the two worst mass murderers who ever lived. The others went for Canadian church groups.
That’s the only obvious difference between him and these other missionaries; so apparently that is why he gets honoured, and they don’t.
When did we start shouting people down? When did we turn away from truth?
If I had to pick a date, perhaps the day Henry Morgentaler was given the Order of Canada for breaking Canadian law to abort children, an activity from which he profited personally.
I suspect it all goes back to abortion, and our collective guilt over it. That is when it first became important to shut up.
A lot of the media are agitated over Jagmeet Singh having been heckled in Peterborough on Tuesday.
From the videos I can find on line, the small mob shouted “traitor,” “I have children and you will not touch them,” “You turned your back on the people,” “for our children,” “We will fight for this country,” ”Not welcome,” “Shame on you,” and “boo.” One male voice said ““get the f*** out of Peterborough,” then, as the car drove off, “stay the f*** out of Peterborough.” Presumably Singh never heard the second sentence.
It was hard to hear clearly. All the legacy outlets had someone talking over the clip so you could not hear what was actually said. This fact is in itself most interesting. You had to take their word for everything; deliberately.
Singh claims he heard “death threats,” and both the Peterborough police and the RCMP claim they are investigating possible criminal behavior. The Peterborough chief went on the air to say to the protesters “your actions and belief systems are reprehensible, unconscionable, and, in some cases, criminal.”
A death threat would be criminal, but I need evidence of one. Otherwise, free speech. There was nothing even immoral in anything I could hear. BlogTO had it right, if inadvertently, in calling the protest “inappropriate.” Exactly—it was simply rude.
If you are a good person, you should never condemn another for being rude. Only your upbringing tells you what is and is not proper in company. In a pluralistic society like Canada, indeed in any society, upbringings differ. A recent immigrant can have no idea what you consider rude, and vice versa. Even people from different regions. And, significantly, people from different social classes.
If the police and the government want to criminalize “rudeness,” they are waging a pogrom on immigrants and the working class.
Which indeed they have been doing for some time, increasingly obviously. This is what is behind Trump Derangement Syndrome: he grew up in Queens, and so has the manners of Queens and the working class. It is his manners they find intolerable.
The ruling elite clearly both hate and fear the ruling class. They seem to know no scruples in harassing and wanting to subdue and control them.
The fact that they make no distinction between bad manners and immorality is most telling. This is the sign of someone who has no conscience. They see ethics itself as no more than manners, and as easily dispensed with.
Also chilling—the Peterborough police chief is openly and unilaterally declaring the Orwellian crime of wrongthink: it is not just the protesters words, but their ‘belief systems” which he calls criminal.
So much for freedom of thought and freedom of conscience.
In any free society, this public statement by a public servant should result in immediate dismissal.
If the Peterborough police chief is not immediately cashiered, that will say all we need to know about our present governments.
I wonder if anyone really does not understand that the way to defeat a bad idea is to let as many people hear it as possible. This after all is the simple insight that gave us modern science: publish your results. Let anyone who can challenge them.
If anyone instead wants to suppress speech, or suppress an idea, it is because they think it is true.
Choose your reading or listening material accordingly.
Okay, people are saying they are offended by statues.
The remedy is the same as with freedom of speech: if you disagree, put up your own statue. Just as, if you disagree, you do not try to silence the other, but counter his argument.
Like many other places in the former British Empire, Montreal has a Nelson’s Column, commemorating the great British admiral.
In Dublin, they blew theirs up, to express their distaste for English rule.
The Quebecois, surely, had more reason to feel offended, since, after all, it was France against which Nelson won his victories. But they hose the civilized Canadian way. Instead of tearing Nelson down, as they surely could have any time in the past hundred years, they put up another statue nearby, of Vauquelin, a French naval hero of the Seven Years’ War. Both ethnic groups get their heroes.
The Confederate statues, like them or not, are important memorials for some Americans of their history. If seeing them offends some, it is equally true that seeing them come down offends others. Mutual respect requires that they stay.
But by all means, all other groups ought to feel free to fund and erect their own public statues, then, of Malcolm X, or Martin Luther King, or John Brown, or Nat Turner, or Sitting Bull, or Pontiac, or, really, anyone else..
More public art is good. Less public art is bad. More free speech is good. Less free speech is bad.
That Shakesperian rag-- Most intelligent, very elegant, That old classical drag Has the proper stuff The line, "Lay on MacDuff" Desdemona was the pampered pet Romeo loves his Juliet And they were some lovers You can bet, and yet I know if they were here today They'd Grizzly Bear in a different way And you'd hear old Hamlet say "To be or not to be" That Shakesperian rag...
The New York Times published an op-ed by Senator Tom Cotton suggesting President Trump should invoke the Insurrection Act if the rioting continues. An obvious point. Other Times columnists immediately branded the piece “Fascist,” there was apparently a general staff insurrection, and the paper apologized for allowing it into print. They promised never again to host such reprehensible opinions. In Canada, Stockwell Day, former leader of the Alliance, patriotically insisted on a CBC panel that there was no systemic racism in Canada. He was apparently promptly thrown off several corporate boards for this heresy.
If opinions someone in power disagrees with are going to be aggressively censored like this, democratic government will not be possible, because political discourse will not be possible. Especially if it includes opinions, like those of Day or Cotton, that are held by a majority of the people; especially opinions expressed by active politicians.
Tim Pool seems convinced this must now end in civil war; that civil war has already begun. It seems to me that is an optimistic scenario. It is more likely, at least in Canada, to end in either totalitarian government or social chaos and a “failed state.”
A bit more hopefully, it also seems to me likely that this latest extreme intolerance is a matter of mass hysteria. Calls to defund the police? That seems almost self-evidently irrational. That means, in effect, no government, and social chaos in one easy step. And how about this for tight reasoning: a week ago, it was deliberate murder to allow businesses to reopen. But now it is Fascist to break up gangs of tightly-clumped people getting physical and touching things in the streets. Words are violence, just as they were a week ago, but looting and destroying property is not violence?
War is peace? Assault is “peaceful protest”?
This is hysteria. People are acting out of blind emotion, without thinking things through.
Everyone saw the video of George Floyd being killed. Anger is a natural reaction. I felt it too. Finding someone to blame and punish is also a natural reaction, but an unworthy one. That is how scapegoating starts. A large proportion of the population is now a lynch mob looking for someone to hurt. Many others are going along and miming the slogans, spraypainting “BLM” on their boarded-up storefronts and publicly kneeling, for fear of the mob turning on them.
But here’s the big new problem: this time around, the mob isn’t only in the streets. It has taken over the newsrooms, the boardrooms, the government offices, the legislatures, even, it seems, the military. There is almost no leadership left taking that sober second look, weighing the facts, keeping it all within the established systems, and urging the mob to calm down. Only a small and embattled minority, themselves in danger of being lynched: the Tom Cottons, the Trumps, the Rand Pauls, the Candace Owens, the Stockwell Days.
The Ralphs are dangerously outnumbered by Jack and the choir.
This is what we have leaders for; this is the justification for elites. To see above the crowd and its passions. With their greater education, intellectual training, and demonstrated mental gifts, they are supposed to be able to deal with such matters calmly, without becoming hysterical.
If you can keep your head when all about you
Are losing theirs, and blaming it on you…
Somehow, but for the odd seemingly self-educated exception, we have stopped producing such leaders, such an elite.
I think this general failure has to be traced back at least in part to the education system. It is the education system’s job to give us such leaders. Inculcating such a capability was always the essential aim of being schooled: to develop character and the ability to deal calmly and justly with whatever befell. In Tom Brown’s Schooldays, Tom’s father says this explicitly: he does not send his son to Rugby to learn to read Greek, but to become a decent Christian gentleman.
We lost this core of education at about the beginning of the 20th century, when the progressive ideal became instead to turn out useful employees in large numbers for industry. We have accelerated this emphasis over time, to the present concept that STEM is what education really should be all about. This was always in direct violation of Confucian principles: “a gentleman is not a tool.”
Over time, perhaps also in reaction to larger social pressures, we abolished religious and ethical education, those things that give the mind a reliable navigational system. We stopped teaching the humanities, the wisdom we had accumulated over the millennia. We say we still do in places, but instead, we teach “social science,” and simply call it the humanities. Social science produces nothing, and does not teach you how to think.
And now we are reaping what we sowed. We have no leadership, no elite, left. There is no one on the bridge. There is no one at the helm. Everyone is running around the decks waving their arms. And perhaps imagining someone else is in charge.
After a hundred years, after perhaps four generations wrongly educated, it is going to be magnificently difficult to rebuild amidst what is likely to be growing social chaos. Western Europe did it once before, in the medieval monasteries. Perhaps it is time for the Benedict option.
Or perhaps new light may come from the East, perhaps from East Asia or Eastern Europe. They too have been devastated by modernism; but at least, having recently known true hardship, having already hit bottom, they may be prepared to make the sacrifices and do the hard work of rebuilding civilization.
The Democratic Party and the legacy media seem determined to commit suicide by tantrum. The Communist Party of China seems determined to do the same. And now it looks as though it’s Twitter and Jack Dorsey.
By labelling a tweet by the President fake news, they seemed to be daring him to go after them and the rest of social media, and end their practice of censoring political views. Many on the right have been demanding this for some time. Now Trump can no longer ignore these demands.
Now he has signed an executive order demanding that the matter be investigated. And what is Twitter’s immediate response? To immediately flag another of his tweets.
It seems reckless enough to pick a fight with the president of the US, and seem to claim the right to tell him what to do. But it is worse than that. Trump is entirely responsible for the profitability of Twitter. It was on its way to die a natural death when he came along, and made it his main platform. Since he began, everyone had to have a Twitter account, in order to follow Trump.
Never mind Trump’s legal powers as president. All he would have to do is move off Twitter onto another platform, and Twitter is dead.
And it is exactly the kind of controversial tweets that Twitter is flagging that make him a must-read.
Has Jack Dorsey gone mad? Surely he is a smart enough businessman to realize that he is destroying his business.
Here is what I think must be behind it: Dorsey wants to force Trump to promote legislation requiring Twitter, and everyone else, to stop censoring and publish everything. He might even be in collusion with Trump on this, and be giving him cover.
The fact that Trump doesn't simply move off Twitter and kill it suggests that this is so.
Dorsey’s main interest, presumably, is in making money. So too with the other tech barons. It is in their financial interests to run everything, to promote higher levels of readership. Even if that were not so, policing what is posted costs money.
They have been censoring not because they want to, but because advertisers demand it. And advertisers demand it because people on the left have been complaining to them, and threatening boycotts if they are associated with political content the left does not like.
If they ignore this pressure and fail to censor, the advertisers can simply move their money to another platform that does. So none of the big companies dares to be the one not to censor.
It is a classic situation in which legislation can benefit everyone. Make it illegal to censor, and the advertisers will have nowhere else to go. And the advertisers are happy too—they reach more people, and can no longer be threatened with boycotts or bad PR by left-wing activists over where they advertise.
In our discussion last night, my friend Cyrus defended “hate speech” laws. I argued that the only speech that can legitimately be regulated is speech with clear material consequences, on the familiar principle that “my right to swing my fist ends where your nose begins.” Accordingly, slander, libel, fraud, yelling “fire” in crowded theatres, or incitement to violence should be outlawed—but no more.
Because, among other reasons, any speech that makes a point worth making is guaranteed to upset someone. No free speech, no meaningful discussion, no democracy, no human progress.
He countered that it was in practice difficult to distinguish speech inciting violence from speech that simply expressed an opinion. He offered the examples “blacks do not deserve to live” and “kill all the blacks.” Can we really clearly distinguish the former from the latter?
I do not see any difficulty here.
We have always made this same distinction in common law. It would be fairly unremarkable for someone to say, “Jack Poulson does not deserve to live.” A bit shocking, because it is a severe condemnation, but fairly acceptable in polite company. After all, we have a common phrase, “Jack Poulson is a waste of oxygen.” Same meaning.
But to tell someone to kill Jack Poulson we understand as incitement to action; if the listener follows through, the speaker is, like Charles Manson, guilty of murder.
A dramatic distinction, that we have always understood. No different for groups.
I could name people who I would say do not deserve to live. People whose net contribution has been to make the world a worse instead of a better place. That does not mean I would either murder them, or condone murdering them. Just as, if I said someone did not deserve their wealth, it would not be an endorsement of robbing them.
I hear that, in its second week of existence, Don Cherry's Grapevine is already the number 1 podcast on Apple iTunes.
It's soothing to think of all the revenue his ex-employers are losing.
I spend last weekend with a clan of suburbanites. These were not right-wingers. They were unanimous, for example, in despising Trump. Yet they were also unanimous in saying Cherry was unjustly fired.
Unsurprisingly, my left-leaning friend Xerxes enthusiastically supports the firing of Don Cherry. “About time,” he writes.
I think Cherry was fired for doing his job.
Can anyone think Cherry was there just as a hockey commentator? Such a popular figure, voted one of the greatest Canadians, making so much money for his employers and sponsors, because of the quality of his hockey insights? People with the expertise for sports commentary are thick on the ground. There is really rarely much to say in that regard. It ain’t rocket science. Most after-game shows are deadly boring.
Don Cherry is an entertainer. People watched for his flamboyant act, his outrageousness. His recent comments about immigrants were entirely within this character and role. Just what he was there to do.
Don Cherry is a clown. He even wears motley, for goodness sake. He even has a straight man.
Humor requires the reversal of expectations—always. That’s what makes things funny. Accordingly, the job of a clown or comedian is always to say or do things that are superficially outrageous.
To fire a clown for clowning is unreasonable and unjust.
You might respond, “Don Cherry’s not funny.” Matter of taste. He does not make people laugh out loud. But he obviously entertained. His viewership numbers prove it. He made folks smile.
It is worse than bad form, bad manners, to be unable to take a joke. Joking also serves important social functions. For one, jokes and laughter allow us to let off steam, which otherwise will be expressed in more disruptive ways. Every clown also at least in part serves the traditional role of the court jester: gently and unthreateningly speaking truth to power. We always need this so as not to slip off the rails and be lost in our own delusions. There is not much authentic humour in a totalitarian state.
Firing Don Cherry is a strong indication that this is the way we are headed.
And any aggression here, any ‘bullying,’ is not by Don Cherry, but by the wider society. He has always said things like this; he has not changed. The rules have, without fair warning.
And there was nothing objectively wrong with what he said this time, for anyone, let alone a clown.
Xerxes cites the legal adage, “your right to swing your fist stops at the end of my nose.” This helpfully demonstrates why all ‘hate speech,’ let alone anything Cherry said, should be constitutionally protected. It is in the US. The Canadian Constitution matches the American in guaranteeing free speech; but in the US, this matter has come to the Supreme Court, and they have ruled so.
For words, after all, never come in contact with anyone’s nose.
Except in certain specific circumstances, words cause no material harm. The specific circumstances are well-defined in common law: libel, slander, fraud, incitement to violence. One can see the common thread: material harm. Upsetting someone does not count. Any such imagined harm is ultimately self-inflicted: nobody is obliged to watch Don Cherry.
Abandon this principle, and there is no free speech whatsoever. The term then means nothing.
But even were this not the case, Cherry’s recent remark was not “hate speech,” illegitimate as that term is.
It is one thing to criticize people as groups based on race, creed, or colour. That is, at best, morally wrong, even if it must not be illegal. The problem is that these are things over which no one has any control. (Religion fits here because, if one believes, one’s conscience puts the matter beyond free choice.) But “immigrants,” or rather, to use Cherry’s words, “you people that come here,” are defined only by a shared action, done freely, that of moving to Canada. It is perfectly reasonable to suggest that actions have or should have consequences, implying certain responsibilities. If it is discriminatory to make general unfavourable comments about such a group, defined only by a voluntary action, then it must, to be just, be considered equally discriminatory, and a firing offense, to make any criticism of lawyers, or politicians, or used car salesmen, or the rich, or the Toronto Maple Leafs, or Torontonians, and so forth. Theoretically, it would seem wrong even to say anything against, say, criminals.
Which may, I suspect, be the real reason behind the growing social intolerance. A lot of people have a guilty conscience, and so are invested in objecting to anyone pointing out anything wrong about anyone. This seems of a piece with the US Congress trying to impeach Donald Trump for asking for investigation of a possible crime by Hunter Biden, rather than investigating Hunter Biden. Or the US media suppressing the story of Jeffrey Epstein, and attacking in full outrage the supposed ‘whistle-blower’ who revealed that the story was suppressed. The crime now has become pointing out the crime.
Surely it is obvious that it will be impossible to run a democracy on that basis. Let alone tell jokes.
Another little bit in Xerxes’s column perhaps shows why clowns are needed.
He reports approvingly that “the United Church of Canada has policies that will not permit an unmarried minister to fall in love with a member of the congregation.”
Now, that statement is surely false. To begin with, falling in love is not something any authority can prevent from happening, or even know has happened. Moreover, it is an entirely good thing, and certainly not harmful to its object. See St. Paul on the nature of love. Surely any denomination should want its ministers to fall in love with all their congregants; it is the core of the Christian message.
What he or the United Church actually mean, surely, is that their ministers are prohibited from having sex with members of the congregation. They do not want to say this because it sounds unsettling. It requires the tacit admission that their ministers are otherwise free to have sex outside of marriage.
This is the sort of politically correct falsehood, meant to mislead, that we need clowns to call us on. Like John the Baptist in his day, they “make the paths straight for the Lord.”
Which is to say, aside from gravely harming our democracy, and social peace, the firing of Don Cherry does not speak well for our shared morality either.
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