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Comment by throwawaysea | Hacker News Reader

This is a good point and if this law were enforced fairly and equally across all political causes, I would support it. Infrastructure is not, in my view, appropriate for political persuasion. It feels coercive in the same way ironically, that vaccine mandates are. However, I worry that often times these laws are enforced by whoever is in power in a one-sided manner. This was definitely the case in Seattle - we had a socialist city council member who helped BLM protesters break into city hall (a sort of manufactured protest event) but any hint of moderate or conservative protest and you can expect to be held to the letter of the law.

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No, you don't seem to get it. This is happening in Canada. The laws here are different from Seattle. The question of how this law is enforced has zero application to the BLM protests stateside. GoFundMe has made the choice to operate in Canada, and they're going to make inconsistent-looking decisions because the laws simply aren't the same on both sides of the border.

Hmm - I might be missing something, but I think we are in agreement? I was just making a point that laws need equal enforcement to be just, regardless of jurisdiction. The Seattle mention was just to provide an example of a law being unequally enforced. I also agree that GFM may make different decisions for different locations to comply with the local laws, and also agree that protests should not displace the use of infrastructure like roads.

No. Arson, attacking police and forcefully occupying a public space are all illegal in Seattle too. Pretty sure arson is a felony. Someone was murdered in CHAZ.

Your theory doesn’t check out.

Are those acts defined as terrorism in that jurisdiction?

Does it matter?

I’d assume the penalty for funding felony arson and murder aren’t that different from funding terrorism.

Unless you're specifically paying someone to engage in arson and murder, which isn't the case, it's not illegal. Funding terrorists is illegal in a way that funding someone who happens to be a felon isn't.

I desperately wish that were true, but alas, that has not been been the case for several decades. It's cool to indefinitely detain and torture suspected terrorists, haven't you heard? Folks didn't care when it was just Muslims, but we all lost our rights to the war on terror.

Bill C-51 was written to enable the government to silence dissent. That's a right we all need. But it was passed at the height of the Idle No More protests, which many of the truckers out there would be vehemently opposed to. Politicians gain power when they can use fear and hate to fuel divisions and justify the erosion of our rights.

In practice it's quite different. For example if you send money to a suspected terror group your bank will block the transaction and freeze the funds (that is, they don't even get you your money back), even in the absence of any crime.

They won't do this for regular criminals. Even if they know that a transaction is probably related to criminal activity, the bank will just file a report and complete the transaction. Except for terrorism financing and sanctions evasion, it is entirely the job of Law Enforcement to act on reports.

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