Category: Basic Dictatorship

He Admires His Basic Dictatorship

Basic Dictatorship Media 55 Comments

Blacklocks “evicted” by the Trudeau press gallery.

Parliamentary Press Gallery executives accompanied by armed police on Friday evicted Blacklock’s. All questions were referred to a House of Commons employee. Blacklock’s said the eviction, first of its kind in the history of the National Press Building, was clear reprisal over its continued protests against media subsidies.

Eviction followed Gallery president Guillaume St-Pierre’s threat to “terminate” Blacklock’s membership. The eviction letter stated Blacklock’s managing editor Tom Korski was “impolite,” “disturbs the journalists around him” and “streams parliamentary committee hearings on his computer.”

The complaints were made by three reporters: Emilie Bergeron and Michel Saba of Canadian Press and freelancer Hélène Buzzetti, a former Gallery president. Fourteen other reporters assigned desks in the National Press Building did not sign the complaint.

“Failure to observe these prohibitions could result in further and potentially more serious sanctions including further and potentially permanent prohibitions,” wrote President St-Pierre, correspondent for the Journal de Montréal.

The Gallery refused to permit Blacklock’s to speak to the board of directors regarding reprisal complaints. “The executive did not invite oral representations,” said the eviction notice.

“We will now see the Press Gallery in court,” Blacklock’s shareholders said in a statement. “Our subsidized competitors met in secret, plotted punitive measures over petty grievances and served an eviction notice accompanied by armed police. Their conduct is outrageous.”

Blacklock’s is the only Press Gallery member eligible for federal subsidies that neither solicits nor accepts government funding. The eviction came one day after Blacklock’s published Access To Information records detailing a private meeting between 35 unnamed publishers and the Canada Revenue Agency on distribution of $595 million in subsidies.

Misinformation Watch: The Week In Review

Basic Dictatorship Cold Dead Hands The Libranos 20 Comments

On Parliament Hill, a Liberal government that claims to be terribly concerned about misinformation — and wants to regulate the internet to make it better — is either lying to fend off criticism of its latest gun-control push, or it has no idea what it’s doing. Even as it insists it is not going after hunting rifles and shotguns, it is clearly going after hunting rifles and shotguns.

But read on.

Wither Canada

Baiting The Left Basic Dictatorship The Libranos 70 Comments

David Solway has written a biting but truthful indictment of Canada in 2022:

It is very hard to maintain one’s composure when speaking to ordinary Canadians about the disaster in the making that is Canada today. I have engaged personally and via email over the last two years with literally hundreds of my fellow countrymen from all walks of life on the subjects of the national debt, the deficit, the sunsetting of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, the draconian and illegal Covid and vaccine mandates and the turbo maladies that flow from them, the various repressive bills sieving through Parliament, the vicious and lying government and media campaign against the Trucker Freedom Convoy, and the unconscionable behavior of the most vindictive, incompetent and unpatriotic prime minister in the history of Confederation.

With precious few exceptions—“precious” is a key word here—I have come away in a state of profound depression. Some readers of my writings as well as everyday interlocutors have accused me of pessimism, which may be true. I recall a remark of Leonard Cohen’s: “A pessimist is somebody who is waiting for the rain. Me, I’m already wet.” Sometimes I feel completely drenched.

h/t James MacMaster

The New Class

Basic Dictatorship The Deplorables 12 Comments

Glenn Reynolds;

Yugoslav dissident Milovan Djilas called these party hacks the “New Class,” noting that instead of workers and peasants against capitalists, it was now a case of workers and peasants being ruled by a managerial new class of technocrats who, while purporting to act for the benefit of the workers and peasants, somehow wound up with the lion’s share of the goodies. Workers and peasants stood in long lines for bread and shoddy household goods, while party leaders and government managers bought imported delicacies in special, secret stores. (In a famous Soviet joke, then-leader Leonid Brezhnev shows his mother his luxury apartment, his limousine, his fancy country house and his helicopter only to have her object: “But what if the communists come back?”) . . .

But the New Class isn’t limited to communist countries, really. Around the world in the postwar era, power was taken up by unelected professional and managerial elites. To understand what’s going on with President Donald Trump and his opposition, and in other countries as diverse as France, Hungary, Italy and Brazil, it’s important to realize that the post-World War II institutional arrangements of the Western democracies are being renegotiated, and that those democracies’ professional and managerial elites don’t like that very much, because they have done very well under those arrangements. And, like all elites who are doing very well, they don’t want that to change.

He Admires Their Basic Dictatorship

Basic Dictatorship Chinada Shiny Pony 21 Comments

Trudeau now claims to have confronted Xi Jinping on the basis of… fake news.

Related: Let me fix that cartoon for you.

Update: Global’s Sam Cooper is calling Trudeau a liar.

It’s Not About The Virus

Basic Dictatorship Claws of the Panda Wuhan Flu 12 Comments

The Spectator- Zero-Covid is the new one-child policy

Like China’s cruel and crude attempt at population control, zero-Covid has become an industry in itself with its own enormous bureaucracy and army of zealous enforcers, whose work is a measure of loyalty to the party and its leader. As with one-child, abuse has become routine, and voices warning of the obvious economic damage are suppressed or ignored. The one-child policy sought to control women’s bodies, zero-Covid is about broader social control. Both seek to tightly constrain the way people live their lives. Like one-child, zero-Covid has developed a political logic of its own, divorced from its original purpose of protecting health – a Frankenstein monster of a policy.

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