Prayer, even silent prayer, could be a prosecutable offense in the United Kingdom, thanks to recent developments. Catholic priest Father Sean Gough from Birmingham, England, finds himself in the midst of a legal battle for allegedly violating a censorship zone banning prayer on public streets around an abortion facility. This marks the latest in a string of thought crime cases rocking fundamental freedoms in the U.K.
OTTAWA – Canada has sent one of its military planes to Haiti to help the country cope with escalating violence.
A joint statement today from National Defence Minister Anita Anand and Foreign Affairs Minister Mélanie Joly says Canada has deployed a CP-140 Aurora aircraft to help “disrupt the activities of gangs” in Haiti.
Gang violence has become a reality for those living in the Haitian capital of Port-au-Prince since last summer, with hundreds having reportedly been kidnapped and killed.
I hope it doesn’t break down.
Many people still sneer at Justin Trudeau for his silly costumes; soft-spoken, even boyish, demeanor; and overt love for all leftist tropes, whether racial, sexual, religious, or anything else. Those people are fools. Trudeau is a dangerous man who is rapidly creating a totalitarian government that grants rights only to those who march in lockstep with Trudeau’s leftist political and social beliefs.
New Brunswick Sen. David Adams Richards says he is concerned that the federal government’s proposed internet regulation bill, which is currently being debated in the Senate, will bring about a culture of censorship of Canadians.
“This law will be one of scapegoating all those who do not fit into what our bureaucrats think Canada should be,” Richards said in the Senate on Jan. 31 during the third reading of Bill C-11, also known as the Online Streaming Act.
“Stalin again will be looking over our shoulder when we write.”
Senator David Adams Richards tears apart Bill C-11, warning against censorship and government dictating what counts as Canadian culture. Powerful speech from one of Canada’s most acclaimed authors, having won Governor General’s Award for fiction and non-fiction and Giller Prize. pic.twitter.com/eU2BYWpeZs
— Michael Geist (@mgeist) January 31, 2023
Yea but it’ll be the Stupid Stalin.
Some political leaders maintain Canada’s free speech rights are in jeopardy. Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre has proposed having a “Free Speech Guardian” on university campuses. Alberta Premier Danielle Smith has created a new position—parliamentary secretary for civil liberties—for a similar purpose.
Free speech advocates, too, have said speech rights and free expression are being infringed upon in Canada, particularly since the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic, the Freedom Convoy protest last winter, and in light of upcoming government legislation that aims to regulate the internet.
I’m not quite sure when counselling people to make their bed every morning became a seditious act of far-right extremism, but according to a coalition in the nation’s capital, the two are linked.
Starting each day with a completed task such as tucking the sheets in is among Jordan Peterson’s tips in his book “12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos,” which has now been on Amazon’s list of best-sellers for 256 weeks. He may be internationally renowned as a leading public intellectual, but in Canada some people want him shut down.
The professional regulatory body charged with licensing and upholding standards for psychologists in the province has ordered Peterson to undergo remedial social media training, what he calls reeducation.
Jamie Sarkonak: Trudeau Liberals are filtering out dissent to their ‘anti-hate’ agenda
Internal emails show a question was added to a survey to weed out those critical of the government’s plans after too much negative feedback
Back in April, Canadian Heritage ran online consultations for a future “National Action Plan on Combatting Hate” that could introduce anti-hate laws and curb freedom of expression. While the department publicly encouraged “every person in Canada” to participate in a survey about what this plan should include, email records show that people were screened out if they believed that an anti-hate plan wasn’t needed at all.
This is a government deserving of your hatred.
At the height of the Black Lives Matter race riots by supporters of the racist hate movement, cities frantically threw up BLM murals the way Germany had once put up swastikas and Hitler posters. All Lives Matter, the universal idea of the acknowledgement of the value of all human life, in defiance of the BLM racial supremacist ethos, however was treated as a hate crime. A legal reckoning is slowly arriving for the constitutional twilight in which we spent 2020.
Too many in the media now seek to neuter free expression in the name of saving it.
Call it Cooke’s First Law: Whatever the story, however complex its details, members of the American press will react by announcing who must be forbidden to speak going forward.
That is what too many journalists are now — not firefighters, not mediators, not conveyors of vital information, but zealous obscurantists staffing would-be censorship agencies…
It’s easy to feel like free speech is on the decline in Canada. The number of reasonable opinions now considered cancellable offences is growing by the day.
But a recent decision from the Ontario Superior Court of Justice is good news for defenders of free speech. A moment of optimism was granted from the Ottawa small claims court on Nov. 10 when the court dismissed a lawsuit filed by Richard Warman, a lawyer and board member of the Canadian Anti-Hate Network (CAHN).
A little noticed federal lawsuit, Missouri v. Biden, is uncovering astonishing evidence of an entrenched censorship scheme cooked up between the federal government and Big Tech that would make Communist China proud.
So far, 67 officials or agencies — including the FBI — have been accused in the lawsuit of violating the First Amendment by pressuring Facebook, Twitter and Google to censor users for alleged misinformation or disinformation.
Victims of the Biden-Big Tech’s “censorship enterprise” include The Post, whose Hunter Biden laptop exposé was suppressed by Facebook and then Twitter in October 2020 after the FBI went to Facebook warning them with great specificity to watch out for a “dump” of Russian disinformation, pertaining to Joe Biden, with an uncanny resemblance to our stories.
… Now spool forward to November 2015 when Nohemi Gonzalez, a young American studying in Paris, was gunned down in a restaurant by the Islamic State terrorists who murdered 129 other people that night. Her family sued Google, arguing that its YouTube subsidiary had used algorithms to push IS videos to impressionable viewers, using the information that the company had collected about them. Their petition seeking a supreme court review argues that “videos that users viewed on YouTube were the central manner in which IS enlisted support and recruits from areas outside the portions of Syria and Iraq which it controlled”.
The key thing about the Gonzalez suit, though, is not that YouTube should not be hosting IS videos (section 230 allows that) but that its machine-learning “recommendation” algorithms, which may push other, perhaps more radicalising, videos, renders it liable for the resulting damage. Or, to put it crudely, while YouTube may have legal protection for hosting whatever its users post on it, it does not – and should not – have protection for an algorithm that determines what they should view next.
Or bring free speech to its knees.
Censored on one platform? No problem. Just buy another. That seems to be the situation for the rapper and fashion designer, “formerly known as Kanye West.”
Parler, on Monday, announced that Ye will acquire Parler from Parlement Technologies, which is expected to take effect by the end of this year.
Parler bills itself as “the world’s pioneering uncancelable free speech platform.”
PayPal’s fantasy about fining speechcriminals is a terrifying sign of the times.
Our corporate overlords are out of control. Just look at PayPal. It appears to have flirted with the idea of fining people for saying problematic things, for dealing in wrongthink. A briefly published new policy said users might have a whopping $2,500 seized from their coffers if PayPal believed they were engaged in ‘misinformation’ or ‘hate speech’. Just think about what an egregious affront this would have been not only to freedom of speech but also to the fundamentals of justice. Without a trial, presumably even without the right of representation, an individual or organisation could have been subjected to severe financial punishment on the say so of some hip moderator in California who didn’t like something they said. Tech tyranny is getting serious now.
