Ah, I arrived at the gate for my Berlin flight, and found that it’s delayed for 90 minutes. So I have time to dash off something. I think this is important, actually.
Yesterday Politico dropped a story about how “former GOP officials are sounding the alarm over Trump’s Orban embrace.” Gosh, where would we be without Former GOP Officials, eh? The story attempts to demonize anyone who has anything to do with the Hungarian prime minister.
Police are recording more non-crime hate incidents than last year despite a crackdown on the practice, according to official data.
Suella Braverman, the former home secretary, last year told police they should only log reports of hate incidents that were below the criminal threshold if there was a serious risk of harm and not just because someone was offended.
The changes, introduced through statutory guidance in June last year, followed “trivial” cases such as a man who ended up with a police file for whistling the theme tune to Bob the Builder at his neighbour, who perceived racial hatred.
We need to talk about Julie Sweeney.
She’s a 53-year-old English woman who used to live in Church Lawton, Cheshire, and she once had a Facebook account. Today, she’s in prison, serving a 15-month sentence after being convicted under new Criminal Code provisions in the United Kingdom’s Online Safety Act.
Few things in modern news media are as useless as the journalist who insists a legitimate news story is not, in fact, a legitimate news story.
There’s a lot of this going around these days.
Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg claimed last week that the federal government “pressured” his company, Meta, into censoring political content during the 2020 election and the Covid-19 pandemic.
A UK woman recently received a sentence of 15 months in prison for a Facebook post under the country’s new Online Safety Act, legislation that is similar in many ways to Canada’s proposed Online Harms Act.
The UK law, enacted in 2023, will come into full effect next year, but the part relating to “false and threatening communications” came into effect Jan. 31 this year and is already being enforced.
John Carpay is a rugged veteran of the beleaguered Canadian civil rights movement as founder and president of the Justice Centre for Constitutional Freedoms. Over the years he’s been the target of frequent unjust harassment, but is now in the throes of a particularly odious and hypocritical persecution, which should concern all Canadians. At the worst of the Covid pandemic, with oppressive lockdowns and requirements of vaccine passports, mask-wearing, distancing, and belligerent and unctuous enforcement of all these rules, most of which we now know to have been medically superfluous if not counterproductive, with disastrous results in all other respects, John Carpay was one of the great many Canadians who was disgusted by the hypocrisy of politicians and public officials rigorously imposing Covid rules while ignoring them themselves. Unlike most of the vast number of people who objected to these practices, he determined to do something about them. In 2021, he engaged a private investigator to see if the widespread rumours about the premier of Manitoba, its chief health officer, and its chief justice were in fact breaking Covid rules, were true. The investigator followed these men around but did not otherwise bother them, but in consequence of this activity, which was designed as a legitimate pursuit of the public’s right to know, John Carpay was briefly prosecuted in a spurious and politically motivated criminal action in the course of which he was briefly incarcerated, and the Manitoba Law Society inflicted upon him more than two years of disciplinary proceedings. Carpay agreed to a lifetime ban on practicing law in Manitoba and payment to the Manitoba Law Society of $5,000.
OTTAWA – In a contest between the Charter-protected freedom of expression and Ottawa residents’ right to the enjoyment of their property, there is no contest, the lawyer for “Freedom Convoy” organizer Tamara Lich argued Friday.
Lawrence Greenspon’s final arguments in the criminal trial focused largely on the fundamental freedoms that protect protest in Canada, and the failure of Ottawa police to enforce the law during the 2022 demonstration.
A salutary tale for our times. An Englishman who the judge condemned as a “keyboard warrior” has been jailed for three years for posts he made on Twitter/X during the recent UK riots. When Wayne O’Rourke from Lincoln first appeared in court, the BBC reported that prosecutors alleged his posts contained “anti-Muslim and anti-establishment rhetoric.”
Yes, you read that correctly: the police arrested the idiotic O’Rourke because they decided his online words were not only anti-Muslim, but also “anti-establishment.” Amid all the soul-searching chatter about the causes and consequences of the brief outburst of unrest in UK towns and cities, that should stand out as a warning for the future.
There will be a place in Canada’s history books for the divisive and dramatic blockade at Coutts, a busy border crossing between Alberta and Montana that saw a clamorous protest against COVID-19 health measures in 2022.
Although it stretched just 18 days, its repercussions continue in Canada’s courts, politics, national security and policing.
The refusal of the Supreme Court of Canada to hear the appeal of Jordan Peterson against the outrageous aggregation of injustices that have been inflicted upon him by academic and professional authorities and the lower courts neatly completes the self-exposure of the bankruptcy of our system of protection of civil rights — everyone’s civil rights. This treatment of Professor Peterson, Canada’s leading public intellectual and probably the most famous and esteemed Canadian in the world, is extremely important for what his case reveals and its implications for all Canadians.
“The Government of Canada will — wrongly — take British riots as validation of their vicious suite of legislation to control how we use the internet here.”
The recent spate of rioting in Great Britain appears to have subsided. However as the smoke clears, two things are left to talk about.
First, could this kind of rioting happen in Canada? Answer, probably not and if it did, it wouldn’t be for quite the same reasons. But the kind of free-speech crackdown employed by Westminster is exactly what Canadians can expect the next time we want to talk about government overreach in — let’s say a pandemic response.
Not so long ago we went to politicians for politics and comedians for comedy. Today, like many others, I watch politicians for amusement and listen to comedians for their political insights.
Whenever I want cheering up, I watch Kamala Harris riffing on a theme of her choice, or sometimes a Labour politician trying to explain why a woman can have a penis. By contrast Joe Rogan analyses political questions better than any of them, as does Noam Dworman, of New York’s Comedy Cellar.
Rowan Atkinson on free speech a few years ago, “When I heard of some of these more ludicrous offences & charges I remembered that I had been here before, in a fictional context…” 👏🔥 pic.twitter.com/BMuPcN4vf7
— Elena (@Xerendipitist) June 4, 2023
A man has been jailed for posting 3 memes over 2 days showing real images of Asian gangs with the words "Coming to a town near you".
That's it. 12 weeks for that.https://t.co/D7kMiFkuHD
— Steve Loftus (@LoftusSteve) August 12, 2024
Click through to the article. This is police state level goonery.
Two men convicted of mischief at the Coutts, Alta., border blockade are to learn their sentences later this month.
On Aug. 2, a jury also found Anthony Olienick and Chris Carbert guilty of possessing a weapon for a dangerous purpose, and Olienick was convicted of possessing a pipe bomb. But they were acquitted of the more serious charge of conspiring to murder police officers.
In Lethbridge Court of King’s Bench on Monday, Crown prosecutor Steven Johnston and defence lawyer Katherin Beyak agreed the sentencing hearing would begin Aug. 26.
The government of one of world’s greatest countries has decided its citizens are not worth protecting.
Along time ago in Baltimore, I sat outside an Immigration office with my pal, Tom Welsh, ready to answer questions about my worthiness for American citizenship. Because of my mother’s international bank job, I’d spent 20 years since arriving from Cuba as a U.S. resident rather than a citizen. Now a young adult, I looked forward to my entry into the winner’s circle. Tom was there to testify ahead of me that I deserved the high honor. Being slightly less conservative than me, he and I got into a heated political argument. When the Immigration woman came out and called his name, Tom glanced at me and said, “I don’t know now … ”
