“No, those who scare me are those who (not entirely unlike the Nazis) are in positions of authority and responsibility and think that this gives them a vantage point on what kinds of speech should and should not be acceptable. It’s not that I care deeply if some truly marginal and deeply resentful fool gets caught in the sights of some kind of hate police and penalized. It’s that in creating such a precedent for thought policing, both cop and citizen naturally ask, well,
who’s next?“
Reading this quote again, I’d disagree in one respect. I do care that “truly marginal and deeply resentful fools” get caught in the HRC web as much as I do the unsuspecting restaurant owner wanting to keep his doorway free of pot smoking loiterers.
I don’t need to share their marginal views or resentment to defend their right not to be harrassed by a bureaucracy that defaults to “guilty until proven innocent”.
Why? Because, it’s the truly resentful who are most likely to carry their frustrations beyond verbal release into murderous violence when backed into a corner, and doubly so when those doing the backing trade in provocateurism and injustice. When the unbalanced finally snap, it’s rarely the bureaucrat behind the machinery who endures their wrath – it’s the innocent at their workplace, or the police officer who pulls them over for speeding who find themselves in the crosshairs.
It’s a tricky enough business dealing with these individuals within the justice system proper. The last thing we need are the thumbscrews of the human rights racket being applied to such cases.
One does wonder who’s next?
This attack in Canada on freedom of expression (and religion) began a long time ago. Just one instance is how the fembos used the infamous NAC/SOW/LEAF/ETC. and the monies bestowed to them by an (il)Liberal government, cheered on by the MSM flying monkey squad, to do everything in their power to quash the efforts of REAL Women (Realistic, Equal, and Active for Life) to alert Canadians to what was happening in our corridors of power–in the HOC and, especially, in our judicial institutions–to limit the freedoms of Canadians. Who was listening?
In fact, REAL Women had scant support from anyone, but has been proven to have been prescient in their warnings, their particular interest being the safety, health, and well-being of Canadian families and children.
Gwen Landolt, founding member of REAL Women, should be given the Order of Canada for her valiant efforts, since 1983, to alert Canadians to the dangers of run-amok quasi-government organizations (NAC/SOW/LEAF/HRCs) and judicial institutions. If she and REAL Women had been listened to 25 years ago, we might not be in the mess we are now.
Ted Byfield should also be given the Order of Canada, if we want to reward true Canadian heroes–those who have been vigilant lookouts on the watch towers. On the other hand, the OC has been so besmirched by the calibre of Canadians who have been awarded it, that Gwen Landolt and Ted Byfield probably wouldn’t want to accept such recognition even if it were offered to them.
As the song goes, a man with a briefcase can steal more money than a man with a gun. I’m not the least bit afraid of the clowns in their Doc Martens, shaved heads and black jackets. They are, for the most part, complete idiots and are incredibly obvious.
But that bureaucrat with the briefcase…
Thanks for that link Kate…a great read.
batb …right on!Gwen Landolt alone has stood up to the HRC, and exposed it for what it is…the Attourney General should have consulted her. Tsesis wouldn’t know any of the goings on that Landolt knows.
BTW batb… Hope to see you in Ottawa in September.
The plague of political correctness:
The words “judicially settled*” echo/mirror the words of the AGW Warmites: the science is settled.
The left’s mental disease is a virus, is endemic to the left, is a hammer used to suppress dissent.
Political correctness is a plague.
The rats and their plague have surfaced at the HRCs.
“In a way, I think that for Camus the plague was in this case an allegory of evil, and our attitude against it. That evil changes faces, but always reappears …” (Stuart Gilbert in a review of Albert Camus’ novel/allegory, The Plague.)
…-
Covenant Zone: *”It concerns me to know what the lawyers for the Attorney General take for granted, as judicially settled, in respect to justifications for the restraint of free speech.”
“I don’t need to share their marginal views or resentment to defend their right not to be harrassed by a bureaucracy that defaults to “guilty until proven innocent”.”
And there is the point Kinsella and his ‘lickers can’t, won’t, or obtusely deny that they understand. People who are willing to censor speech draw a line that is easily erased and moved around.
Excellent point Kate!
Sadly that point is never been made MSM Editorials with sufficient force, if ever.
Slowly it seeps out in blogs by the likes of Kate, Kathy, Wendy and lately by Ezra Levant.
The Byfield’s and the Landolts were ignored by MSM for decades and still are not awake as far as i can tell.
I think we should complain to the federal HRC for each provincial HRC that exists and then complain to each provincial HRC that the federal HRC exists.
On what basis you ask? Systematic discrimination based on race, gender and ethnicity.
I would be good money that not one single target of any HRC which has made it to completion has been non-white, non-male, and of non-Christian or Jewish background.
I would further bet that every single complaint against persons that are not white, male, Judeo-Christian background (and it’s background, not current belief I refer to) have been dismissed.
Are every one of these HRC’s not guilty of discrimination for prosecuting one group but not others based on bigotry?
I would love to see the HRC’s have to tackle each other and explain to the media their reasons why they refuse the cases…
and the gov’t is doing what?
I’m loosing respect for Harper
Who’s next? Us, of course. We all have views that don’t match the “accepted norms” of PC society.
You guys notice you can’t buy any gun magazine at Chapters? That’s private enterprise bending to the prevailing “accepted norm” on that subject.
The Chapters ban is a private company shooting itself in the foot for political correctness. You have to wonder if the personal foibles of the management would be enough to make the company kiss off that money. Maybe a little government bird whispered in someone’s ear that it would be better if those magazines didn’t get shelf space? Otherwise maybe the government would start to wonder if Chapters should be the only book store in the country? Maybe, eh?
Pretty soon you’re going to be seeing take-down notices for popular web sites and blogs. They are already having a go at silencing Kate and company through civil court, and the process is already enshrined in law in Australia where web censorship is reality.
On the bright side, the Cubans have shown us the way. You can get a LOT of anti-government data on a 1 gig usb stick. Sneakernet!
Alas, yes, Kate.
But don’t forget the “truly marginal and deeply resentful fools” are also now operating within high places, and their sentiments are easily transmogrified into cross-hairs by supporters.
I think of a very respected person (not DS!) who is totally brainwashed by the global-warming hysteria. Who could have thought he would have assaulted me in front of colleagues when I backed him into an argument’s corner?
Great post Kate. Here’s my one of my favorite sentences: “However implausible it sounds to a lawyer, the law is not in a position to know how new things come into this world.”
Law is all about protecting and controlling. Therefore Law is a force against Freedom and works against change. This leads to stagnation of progress which is needed for a healthy society. However, Law is necessary to keeping society functional. Total anarchy would result in the absence of law which would destroy any society. Therefore the key to having a free and law abiding society is striking a dynamic balance between Law and our Freedoms. Law by its’ very nature is unbalanced and when taken to extremes becomes the guiding hand for the iron rod of a totalitarian state.
That’s an important reason why democracy is needed to maintain balance. The strong voice from the “ruled” is necessary to challenge, and when necessary, push back the neverending encroachment that Law makes on our Freedoms.
There has been significant and consistent erosion of our freedoms through the new laws decreed by Canada’s HRC’s. Those decrees have taken place in the absence of democracy – for example, votes in the House of Commons are not taken to accept the legal precedents set by HRC’s.
Because there are no built-in democratic checks and balances imposed on HRC’s, it will try to continue it’s inherent, and up till now, unfettered behavior of freedom encroachment.
It’s very interesting, to say the least, that blogs such as SDA are assuming part of the function of democratic check and balance for Canada’s HRC’s. That is why HRC’s are on the attack…to protect and control.
Canada will be taking a huge step forward if bloggers survive the attack of the HRC’s. However, the work isn’t done – more democratic voice is still needed in Canada to balance Law. Elected judges anyone?
I remember reading “The Gulag Archipelago” in the 1970s and Solzhenitsyn(sp?) making exactly this point about the necessity of the bureaucracy and its mindless complicity in perpetrating these crimes. Once created the machine had to be fed or lose its raison d’etre. Hall effectively made this point when complaining that there weren’t enough discrimination cases brought to the Ontario HRC by outsiders so, surprise, surprise, the Ontario HRC would just have to go out and find them. The machine must be fed. It’ll start with the easy and safe victims, exercise its muscle, spread intimidation, then go to work on whomever it fancies. Guillotine! Guillotine!
Well if they can’t be destroyed then perhaps a campaign to add one more category should be started. Protection for political minorities.
Progressives often remark that conservatives/libertarians are not the majority opinion in Canada. Therefore, I think we should be protected from offense. No longer should we be subjected to the insensitive MSM and progressive majority calling us names like “knuckle-draggers, neo-cons, bible-thumpers”. It promotes humiliation and ridicule and I fear that somewhere, someday, someone may act on this all to common prejudice.
No longer should we fear that outing ourselves will prevent career advancement and social blacklisting. It is inhumane. It is not a conservatives fault that they were born with a cold reason and logic brain that makes it hard to understand or comply to the rambling and emotional progressive politics.
Like other of societies “victims” we should not to be blamed but protected and our lifestyle promoted. In fact, we need affirmative action for conservatives in underrepresented occupations like university profs, bureaucrats, judges etc.
Welcome to the New Stalinist version of Canada!
Good point, Kate. I’m going to update. Thanks for the link.
The virus of multiculturalism/political correctness is contagious. The virus infects Conservative Minister Day; it has spread to his head and his heart.
The HRCs are cheering this.
…-
“Thousands of Montrealers fête Jewish state
In separate speeches, Conservative cabinet minister Stockwell Day and federal Liberal leader Stéphane Dion … “We are a multicultural nation,” Day said.” (montreal gazette)…
These bloody idiots are out to deny us the benefits of the progress in understanding humanity that we have made in the last centuries.
Benefits that were largely derived, not from controlling of and for human perfection, but from the hard-learned lessons of, sometimes colossal, human failure.
It is as if we, once on the disorderly path to adulthood, have now, by reason of these past failures, determined ourselves to be in the process of reverting to infancy. By arbitrary measure, our errors have been toted up, itemized and deemed to be excessive. We are incapable of either growth or reform. Superior surrogates of ourselves must protect us from and for ourselves. Our punishment for growing up so awkwardly and unpredictably.
There is no recognition that it was largely through and because of these failures that we have moved, however slowly, toward greater compassion for and understanding of humanity.
And so, we have protective agents hovering over and around us, like any good helicopter parent. So fearful are we of our capacity to make mistakes, that we must be denied the right to make any more of them and in doing so, the capacity to learn from them. We, apparently, have learned enough. Now with oversight, we can either be pronounced perfect or utterly incompetent.
In short order, we will be a stunted society like the coddled child who can never move beyond the protective roof of the parent until finally forced upon death to do so. And, then, what?
I’m right with you, batb and bluetech! Landolt and Byfield should be nationally recognized for their lifetime contributions to reason and freedom, which are the greatest of the secular values bestowed by our Western/Christian heritage. I don’t know Landolt other than by what I have read, but Ted Byfield is one of my personal heroes and a national icon; he was warning us against the dangers of the HRC’s and other instruments of political correctness back in the 1970s and 1980s.
Do either of you have “The Book of Ted”?
Jan: “…And, then, what?”
There’s great 20th century examples of “what?” None have happy endings.
The term ‘human rights’ is an amorphous and dangerous term. After all, claiming that, as a human, one has certain rights is certainly morally defensible. The problem emerges when the state, such as our HRC, moves beyond the most basic rights of ‘life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness’ to claiming that any and all experiences, if desired, are to be understood as a ‘right’. And any and all experiences, if not desired, are a violation of this right.
Therefore, Canada’s HRAct defines a violation of human rights to be any feeling of ‘being hated or viewed with contempt’. So, anyone and anything that is assumed to cause someone to experience this feeling- whether it actually did so or not is immaterial to the HRCs – is a violation.
Can you imagine a legal system based around subjective emotions? That’s the Canadian Way.
But there’s yet another area emerging in our postmodern morass that threatens to equally overwhelm us with state-induced punishments. That is the emerging definition of ‘religion’ as covering all aspects of behaviour, belief, feelings, actions. Anything one believes, any behaviour one has, is no longer understood as a habit of culture but is now being subsumed under the sanctity of religion.
The old definition of religion as pertaining to the non-physical, the metaphysical, has been forgotten. Now, religion is defined as behaviour. Therefore, if I wish to have four wives, that is defined as my right because I declare it, not as a cultural form of behaviour, but as a religious edict. If I wish to murder a population, that is defined as a religious duty.
I was listening to three feminists on TVO’s Agenda last night, supporting polygamy as an ideology within a religious belief system – and as such, outside of the touch of the criminal code. The lone male was astonished at such postmodern blather, pointing out that polygamy was a mode of patriarchal domination.
The women then actually declared that there are two dominant modes of marriage in the world: monogamy and polygamy, equating the two. This is factually incorrect; polygamy occurs only in tribal cultures based around agriculture, not in civic industrial democracies. What an incredibly ignorant statement.
But, we are seeing more and more behaviour being defined as outside of the law, outside of criticism, outside of debate, outside of change – because these behaviours are removed from definition as cultural constructs and are instead defined as a religious edict.
Since when has religion moved out of its focus on the metaphysical and basic morality, and into a focus on the specifics of daily beliefs and behaviour? Since when have we essentially set up the law as irrelevant to the population, because our laws (HRACT in particular) have defined so much behaviour as sacred to a religious or other belief system and as untouchable by our laws.
Only in Canada?
as one of the truly resentful, i would be shot before i would appear before an hrc. i guess the current crop of rcmp would probably do that.
Great post Kate. I agree with so many here I do not see much I could add. It does boggle the mind that some are unable to grasp the fact that freedom of expression/speech either exists or does not exists. I believe the moment the state started passing “hate laws” and certainly the HR Act was the start of the downhill slide. Once the state begins to make special laws for select groups, and that is what this is about, the concept of everyone being equal before the law is lost.
ET also covered another problem stemming from this. Let us suppose a protected religion argues they are entitled to practise human sacrifice for example. Must an exception be made to accommodate them, since they maintain it is their religion?
As for the Minister of Justice that was the last straw for me. The support given to those attacking our traditional freedom was bad enough, but to pay an American nutter to write this rubbish was adding salt to the wound. Please do not tell me we have lacking home-grown Canadian nutters able to produce the same.
As the old Yiddish proverb goes: “when I can no longer hurl insults I am forced to hurl stones”.
The real kicker ET is that only some religions are protected under the sanctity of religion. It is bad enough to have state appointed employees defining, entrapping, judging and punishing hate crimes. Worse still is the fact that by design the Christian majority can only ever be perpetrators but never victims. Even as a non religious person, I see the unfairness of that.
the talk is around Nuckleson and his support of the hercs mission, but, the harpacrats were ordered from uphigh to oppose the Martin bill and support the hrcs fully. A memo was sent and reported on, sorry no link.
WLM Redux – bang on, and that’s the longer-term societal concern, as Kate has noted: “it’s the truly resentful who are most likely to carry their frustrations beyond verbal release into murderous violence”…although I would not make the implicit connection to the unbalanced. Vigilanteism has a long history.
bluetech and fc: I’m so glad you are on the same page as me vis a vis Landolt and Byfield. They are true Canadian heroes.
Why does Canada have to lionize moonbat idiots while demonizing its truly heroic citizens? The gauge of our hurtling into the swamp–glug, glug, glug–is our shabby treatment of genuinely wise, prescient, and prophetic voices while giving the Order of Canada to the likes of David Suzuki and a cadre of other leftist sell-outs.
Who knows, bluetech? I might be in Ottawa in September!! 😉
red dunlop – without evidence, your statement is simply your own story. In other words, I don’t believe you.
bluetech and fc: I’m so glad you are on the same page as me vis a vis Landolt and Byfield. They are true Canadian heroes.
Why does Canada have to lionize moonbat idiots while demonizing its truly heroic citizens? The gauge of our hurtling into the swamp–glug, glug, glug–is our shabby treatment of genuinely wise, prescient, and prophetic voices while giving the Order of Canada to the likes of David Suzuki and a cadre of other leftist sell-outs.
Who knows, bluetech? I might be in Ottawa in September!! 😉
it’s probably good that you don’t ET.
You made me search it out http://www.lifesitenews.com/ldn/2008/feb/08021212.html
I gotta take back some of my statement tho–about higherups. Nuckelson still stands.
“Why does Canada have to lionize moonbat idiots while demonizing its truly heroic citizens?” – batb
Well, that’s the question of the entire last generation or more, isn’t it?
The answer is: Progressively (and I use that word in both its true technical meaning and its current trendoid meaning) the actual and the cultural marxists have been winning. They’ve taken over the heights of the culture, the dhimmi universities, the media, the public service, and the Courts. Now, like AIDS viruses, they keep turning out copy after copy of the same moonbat. So, small wonder that the copies lionize what they perceive to be as the original.
I studied at a liberal arts university back in the late 1960s and I can attest that the epidemiological progress of the condition was already well advanced then. A lot of us had been inoculated earlier in our lives, so we survived with just a transient episode, but the vaccine isn’t as common now as it used to be, the profs are getting nuttier all the time, and most of the cases are now chronic and wasting.
I still have some vainglorious hope that something will happen to turn our civilization around, that maybe the Steyns, Levants, and Kates, who are this generation of Byfields and Landolts, with our support can win the culture wars or, failing that, something transformational could happen to make the moonbats realize that they’ve been wrong all along (didn’t GWB say something about the futility of that recently?). One would think with an aging society, that eventually some common sense would come to dominate, but, apparently, there are no fools like the old fools.
Of course, I had even higher hopes back in January, 2006, but they have turned out to be pretty ephemeral also.
How did I come so late to this thread?
Ted Byfield and Gwen Landolt, both of whom I’ve had the pleasure to meet, are major heroes of mine. (bluetech, fc, and batb know what I’m talking about.) These two fine Canadians and Christians have done yeoman service for all of us, for the past many decades, by keeping the barbarians at bay–as much as one can in this day and age.
And, even if we lose now, Gwen Landolt, by laying down a legal paper trial, via REAL Women’s many court interventions–at its own expense–will have, for future generations, given the lie to the trendy, destructive social engineering imposed on this largely unsuspecting, but stupidly naive, country.
Ted and Gwen are Canadian prophets–sadly, not honoured in their own land. ‘Twas ever thus. God bless them!
http://motls.blogspot.com/
Maybe I should have posted it here:
Over to you President Klaus:
In the context of our legal traditions, a completely new and unknown principle advocated by the bill is the presumption of guilt. The new version of §133a, paragraph 3, of the civic legal code that says: “When the accuser presents actualities in the court that could imply that the accuser was directly or indirectly discriminated …, the defendant is obliged to prove that the principle of an equal treatment hasn’t been violated” is utterly absurd. It contradicts our legal principles and traditions but also the European ones and it could lead to new wrongdoings and injustice.
http://motls.blogspot.com/
Maybe I should have posted it here:
Over to you President Klaus:
In the context of our legal traditions, a completely new and unknown principle advocated by the bill is the presumption of guilt. The new version of §133a, paragraph 3, of the civic legal code that says: “When the accuser presents actualities in the court that could imply that the accuser was directly or indirectly discriminated …, the defendant is obliged to prove that the principle of an equal treatment hasn’t been violated” is utterly absurd. It contradicts our legal principles and traditions but also the European ones and it could lead to new wrongdoings and injustice.
So now if you ask a pot smoker not to smoke in front of your business, the price is $20,000 ?? This can*t stand!
Medical pot you say? Nonesense! Diabetics refrain from injecting meds in or around reastaurants.
I*m live and let live. You can smoke pot if you like. No problem there.
No way is it logical to collect 20 grand or more just because you are asked to smoke away from a coffee shop.
Insanity in Canada. Temporary, I hope. = TG
Great wisdom in what you say Kate. Every action has a reaction of equal power, even if its down the line a while. Good or bad.
How these “Educated elite” don’t see this fundamental natural law is beyond me. No justice, people will then do it themselves. Same with self protection to save our families. Those who meddle in 800 years of legal tradition should know this. But I guess Empire building trumps reality every time.
When the bad outweigh the good. Usually there is hell to pay. Both on a social scale with individual attitudes & actions. As I have said before even rabbits fight back if cornered.
The decomposition of Canada has been under way for 40 years. Its hard to see any path now except eventually the bulldozers with the Toleration camps. Its not like Canada has not seen concentration camps before eh?
Vote Liberal. The slide to Hades will be quicker ,than hopefully a recovery from the dark faster. Than a slow wasting away under the Neo-Tories When even the Supreme Court supports tyranny in the guise of individual rights. You know your in trouble. It will take a miracle to change the course of this Titanic, to many rats on board.