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This is a brutal attack on freedom of speech and expression. The people of the UK need to stand up and stand up quickly before they lose more of their rights and freedoms.
Just the imagine the tangled nightmare of how this is enforced. Who decides what is “hate speech”? What is the metric used? I cannot believe this is actually a thing in 2024.
That couldn’t possible happen in Canada…
Oh dear…
I agree with Tim’s analysis of what is going on in Ottawa and in Alberta. People are circumventing the ways that make a functioning democracy work, and it should be a serious concern to everyone.
“It has been said, often, during this crisis that you can’t live in downtown Ottawa without becoming very, very familiar with protests and demonstrations. They are a regular thing here. It’s the seat of government, after all. For me, they are a feature of the place, not a bug.
Demonstrations and protests (they are different but related, but we’ll save the details this time) are a critical part of a functioning, pluralistic democracy. They allow particularly contentious issues to bubble to the surface, to gain exposure and, potentially, drive change.
Successful demonstrations grab attention but more importantly, they focus that attention on solving a particular policy problem in a particular way. They succeed by highlighting actions that *can* be taken and usually suggest *how* they might be taken.
It should be crystal clear by now that what is happening in Ottawa is not that. The *demands* that are being made are like a ransom note from a B-grade thriller. They are unintelligible in the extreme. Even if a government wanted to comply, where would they begin?
In our system, each geographical district elects a representative who goes to Ottawa and participates in policy development and law-making on our behalf. Once we choose them, they are free to do as they please, governed by the rules and foundational laws of our country.
If we don’t like the job they are doing, we pick someone better the next time. And so on, and so on. But what about mid-term? What if we hate what the government is doing? What can we do? We can get together with like-minded people and demonstrate.It lets the government know we’re displeased and want a change. If the ask is doable, and popular enough, demonstrations can move minds… because representatives want to get re-elected, yes, but also because the willingness of people to protest, en masse, is compelling.
But there are rules. The constitution lays out the form and function of government… including rules on how to change the rules. A protest that demands changes to *that* has a huge hill to climb. It’s complicated stuff. (For reference go read up on Meech and Charlottetown).
Which brings us to where we are. The manifesto of this occupation makes myriad, confusing, incompatible demands. They make no sense at all, really. There is no effective way to act on them, even if we wanted to.
Even the simplest, “end the mandates” (which ones? For whom? Which level of government?) is far from simple. It would require careful policy work and balancing of interests. But there, exactly, is the problem. These occupiers are not interested in balance.
This occupation wants its way. And only its way. Not compromise. They are a large, violent toddler thrashing about on the kitchen floor of our democracy. “Give it to me, or I will break shit,” they are telling us. They don’t care about me or anyone else in downtown Ottawa.
They don’t care about you, or anyone who disagrees with them. They want *it*. And they will smash stuff, people, and institutions until they get it. And that is what they are doing. With each thrash of their chubby, spoiled, toddler limbs, they are chipping away at us all.
Which brings us to the cries for toleration and appeasement. Those cries are cowardly nonsense. It’s basic to democratic principles that you need to be tolerant of widely divergent views. It’s essential. But…
It’s vital to understand that the one thing that cannot be tolerated is intolerance, itself. Democratic governance breaks apart when intolerance takes over. It needs to be stamped out, marginalized, disregarded. It should not be given centre stage and the keys to the city.
Which is what we have done. Almost literally. Our officials have cleared out the kitchen to make as much room as possible for the rampaging toddler. They are fanning the flames of intolerance by giving it deep, rich oxygen. They are failing us.
Our officials are failing us because they do not understand the limits of the system they safeguard. We have reached those limits. They must begin to push back—hard—or we risk losing it all.”
This is what it looks like to take a stand for decency, transparency and democratic values in society. Douglas Murray offers his services to defend one of his intellectual foes, because her safety and freedom are being placed in jeopardy by violent males (see trans activists).
“To Todd’s credit, her thinking about trans matters means she has emerged as one of a growing number of women who are realising that trans rights and women’s rights do not necessarily rub along in the most peaceful manner. In fact, they grind rather horribly against one another in certain places. Like some religions, you might say.
Prominent among the people noticing this are feminists like Todd who have spent their whole lives extolling all the correct views before stumbling upon trans. So now they hire meeting halls and book seminar rooms up and down the country to crawl towards truths that everyone else already knew. Some among their number — and Todd would appear to be among these — incur the wrath of that segment of the trans lobby which seems to think the best way to make everyone believe you are a lady is to go around threatening to punch people in the face if they refuse to call you ‘Miss’.
Todd’s story has come to national attention because it was announced that she had received threats on social media which meant she now required physical protection from trans activists. Of course, claiming that you have received threats on social media is one of the 21st century’s easiest short-circuiting hacks for privileging your own opinions, and personally I would treat the need for anti-trans protection with a pinch of salt. There have been some very ugly and unpleasant trans protests outside women’s meetings in recent years and the police have on occasion permitted a level of intimidation that is wholly unacceptable. Yet despite occasional violence, we probably shouldn’t overstate the risk of trans terror.
Still the development is an undeniably sinister one. ‘We all have to defend the right of people to have freedom of speech and freedom of debate,’ Todd said last week, adding she and her employers did not want to wait and see if she’d get ‘hit in the face’. And so at present two male staff members apparently arrive at lectures before Todd in order to ‘diffuse’ any negative reactions.”
Lessig speaks to the notion that the media divide in American culture lies near the root of many of the countries problems when it comes to their democratic process.
“What is the role of education in a democracy? Must the electorate be informed? What happens when we are operating with a different view of reality?
Obviously it’s incredibly important that people understand their democracy. They understand the facts about what’s going on in the world and they begin to use their values in light of the facts to press for one set of policies over another. So we need some level of education. But we have moved from a world where much of a public education about matters of public import was provided by broadcasting and into a world where we can’t rely on that anymore. People are going to be less reliably aware of important issues––at least in a way which is grounded on a common set of understandings or a common set of facts. So it’s going to be harder for us as a people to resolve certain questions when those questions require common judgment.
For example: the question of impeaching the president. If the Congress goes through with the impeachment, and the Senate goes through with trying the President, there will be a very significant proportion of Americans who cannot believe the results, and a significant proportion of Americans who take the results as completely obvious. And that’s true regardless of what the result is. And that’s because we built this world where people live in these separate tribal bubbles and they don’t have an understanding of facts held in common. That’s a product of the media environment.
We’re not going to solve that, in the sense that we’re going to get to a place where we all know the same stuff. We need to think about solving it without trying to get everybody to the right place. We need alternatives to everyone being in the right place. That’s why I talked about things like the civic juries that can help people decide issues. That would enable reflective and informed judgments of the people, as opposed to unreflective judgments of the people. Regularizing that dynamic would be a critical part of what we need to do.
Will the result of the Impeachment hearings also illustrate something about whether our democracy is representative?
The reality of today is that any impeachment is going to be conducted in an environment where politicians can see the people and the people can see the politicians––but the people don’t see a common set of facts that the politicians are supposed to be viewed against. That’s because a significant chunk of the people are going to view the facts through the lens of MSNBC and another are going to view the facts through Fox News, and those two realities are going to conflict. They don’t agree; they don’t see the world in the same way. So that conflict is really debilitating, because it’s going to lead to one side believing something deeply unjust has occurred. That kind of recognition or belief is really invidious, poisonous to democracy. It’s something we should recognize as new. When we’ve had impeachments before, either the public was invisible, like with Andrew Johnson, or the public came to a similar judgment, or was driven to a similar judgment, like in the context of Nixon. So this change is very significant.”
This scares me. Not sharing a common set of facts is essential to functioning society. What’s worse is that the same phenomena is happening in Canada. I hazard to guess that the majority of my fellow residents of Alberta do not take the time to reach outside their media bubble and sample the waters of the ‘other’ side. I hear it in the online debates and talking with my fellow citizens, a decided lack of common ground and lack of agreement on shared facts when it comes to the governance of the province of Alberta.
Talking across the divide is very difficult and often ends in insults and more pertinently no forward movement toward a nuanced understanding of the issues at hand. And as Lessig says, the lack of common reference, is toxic for democratic societies.
The CBC’s reporting on Hong Kong:
“The anti-government protests present one of the biggest challenges facing Chinese President Xi Jinping since he came to power in 2012. And with the ruling Communist Party preparing to mark the 70th anniversary of the founding of the People’s Republic on Oct 1, the crisis in Hong Kong has come at a sensitive time.
Beijing has struck an increasingly strident tone over the protests, accusing foreign countries including the United States of fomenting unrest.
Scenes of Chinese paramilitary troops training at a stadium in the city of Shenzhen, which borders Hong Kong, gave a clear warning that mainland intervention by force is possible.”
These protests are not going to end well.
China is a world power and has the political and economic clout to do whatever the hell it pleases in Hong Kong.
I foresee an abrupt media black out coinciding with the military going into Hong Kong and reestablishing the correct type of order for the area. It will be bloody and ruthless, but necessary from the government of China’s point of view. Real democracy is a threat to the status quo and is intolerable state of being for the elite classes.
The protesters must be prepared for this eventuality and decide whether they are willing to pay the price in blood for their freedom. There is no other way to purchase liberty.
We’ve had a few pieces on the disconnect between the public and the political process. This essay by Richard D. Wolff looks to answering the question why, despite there being two different political parties in the US, that the overall arc of the US body politic maintains the same general direction.
“In short, “democracy” has been applied to societies whose political/residential sphere was at least formally democratic but whose economic sphere was decidedly not.
The ideological rigidity of most brands of anti-statism across US history served nicely to keep the focus forever on state/public versus individual/private in thinking and acting about social change. Democracy was redefined in practical terms as the liberty of the individual/private from the intrusion of the state/public. The democratic quality of the individual/private enterprise – the central structure of the economy – was exempted from analysis or even from view in terms of its structural incompatibility with democracy. Legalistic equations of capitalist corporations with individual personhood also helped to distract attention away from the undemocratic structure of the corporation. Likewise, the US government’s commitment to a “democratic foreign policy” fostered the reproduction elsewhere of the same undemocratic economic structure that characterized the US.
The right wing of US politics has long understood and responded to social movements for equality and democracy as threats to capitalism. Its leaders built their coalitions by working to mobilize public opinion against those movements as threats to the “American way of life.” It built its ideology on the notion that democracy meant a state kept from intruding on the lives and activities of persons and enterprises rendered as equivalently “individuals.” Equality to them meant equality of opportunity, not outcomes: and then only if opportunity was strictly disconnected from the wealth, income and social position each individual was born into.
The left wing of US politics has always tried hard to sustain the notion that capitalism was not only compatible with egalitarianism and democracy. It would also be strengthened, not threatened, by moving capitalist society closer to equality and democracy. In practical terms it contested against the right wing by insisting that the mass of people – the workers in capitalist enterprises – would become disaffected from and disloyal to capitalism if it indulged its anti-egalitarian and anti-democratic tendencies. Capitalism, it argued and argues, will be strengthened not threatened by less inequality and more democracy.
Both left and right – and their expressions in the leaderships of the Republican and Democratic Parties – live in fear, conscious or otherwise, that the mass of people, the working class, will become disaffected from capitalism. “Populist” is the currently popular epithet that expresses this fear. Both parties contest for the support of the leaders of capitalism – major shareholders and the corporate boards of directors they select – by offering their alternative strategies for avoiding, controlling, or safely channeling mass disaffection with capitalism.”
Want to know moar, citizen? Check out Manufacturing Consent by Noam Chomsky.
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