frabbit

The outcome of those deliberations will be to some extent obscure and subject to yet further interpretation and arguments.

That doesn't in, and of itself, make democracy stronger.

I would argue that the use of this Act has already weakened democracy in Canada because it shows that the only response the political systems has to a very minor disruption is to use acts that everyone understood to be for much more extreme situations.

This has already deepened many people's cynicism about the idea of this form of government.

Kind of a hard thing to prove. I don't feel safe due to climate destruction. Can we invoke the Emergencies Act against the Canadian fossil fuel industry and the automotive parts manufacturers to make me feel better?

In addition this interview by en ex-CSIS (Canadian spycops agency) employee suggests that the funding is getting to the organizers by some means other than those which go directly through payment processors. It would be interesting if these measures were also actually ineffective. I was a bit skeptical of her claim that bitcoin ATMs in Ottawa were a likely source though:

https://thebigstorypodcast.ca/2022/02/15/trying-to-follow-th...

https://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/politics/conservative-m...

And it is unfortunate that many Canadians do not understand that they are living in a state in which the parliament can be suspended by the unelected representative of the Queen (prorogation -- the same issue that led to Australia deciding they wanted to change their constitution) and that the not withstanding clause makes a mockery of the Charter.

Hopefully this wakes a few people up and gives some new impetus to the reform movements.

It's one of the less charming facets of Canadian culture.

But yes, tiresome to see people trying to claim that they know the mind of the people.

We`ll see next elections: I bet Conservatives will do well and the Liberals will decline and the NDP will be wiped out. Jagmeet Singh has managed to extract the worst possible position from this.

Sounds like democracy costs money to police. It would be much easier to just be able to "clear out" downtown (as the CBC puts it).

In this interview with a resident of the downtown area who seems to have had to initiate legal injunctions while the police and apparently all the city authorities did nothing I am torn between sympathy for someone being inconvenienced and a sneaking feeling that an unpleasant situation is being exaggerated: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-G86OL0YyHw

I was watching those after listening to the excellent Bungacast which tries to dissect the recent use of "trauma studies" to understand the evolution of the neo-liberal state under its most recent pressures https://bungacast.com/2021/12/14/231-new-class-analysis-ft-c...

Canada does not seem as though its ready to deal very minor, low-level political dissent and is incompetently defaulting to maximum authoritarianism.

Latest news seems to be that a woman was trampled and seriously injured by a police horse.

They are saying they cannot deal with the situation normally while simultaneously refusing to meet with the truckers and eschewing ordinary policing for weeks beforehand.

Yanis Varoufakis is onto something with the death of of social democracy and capitalism and their mutation into something new and nasty.

Can't wait to see what happens when the irreversible climate change starts to affect people's standard of living.

All this after weeks of doing little to nothing and apparently not negotiating with the protestors.

This would all be understandable, but questionable, in a war situation. It is very disturbing, to say the least, to see the sledgehammer of this act being used to crack the relatively small nut of a noisy, inconvenient petition for redress of wrongs by people who seem to still accept that they are citizens of a democratic state.

(Also, this is all the fault of the USA. Or the Russians. )

This seems confused and and misguided.

All it means is that it survived the selective pressures to which it was historically exposed. It doesn't mean they were the best of all possible species, just the best (given the environment) compared to the others at the time, solely at the task of making more copies of themselves.

I've had my eye on this sort of thing for a while: https://www.viatekproducts.com/products/nubreeze-electric-dr...

Our local outpost plays hideous CanCon music in the mornings and repeats the same low-information density press releases disguised as news. There is little that is combative or thought provoking and lot of self-congratulation.

I have been especially un-impressed with their lack of willingness to address the abuse of power by the RCMP at the Fairy Creek protests including the detention of one of their own videographers; their supine acceptance of the insane tar sands projects; their lack of aggression in pursuing the Trudeau administrations failure to address the horrendous mistreatment of autochthonous people people and communities.

These days I mostly read The Tyee¹ and listen to Canadaland²

1. https://thetyee.ca/ 2. https://www.canadaland.com/

That said, the author of the original article lost me when she trotted out the silly line about transgender Filipinos.

Highly recommended if you just want to get started.

1) the claim that the wearing of masks would impede law enforcement, including the passing of statues especially against masks on demonstrations

2) the claim that Muslim women wearing full religious head coverings could not be tolerated in public spaces because it was obvious that it would make it impossible to judge the mood or other psychologically important signals normally exchanged in public

None of this seems to have been true. Sure, there probably is some small validity to some aspects of those claims, but they seem to have been hugely exaggerated.

I still like and use it, but that smacks of an especially sneaky variant of censorship.

The Grayzone / Moderate Rebels definitely take an independent, outsider slant on important stories with an upfront, stated intent of being anti-imperialist, but they do not fabricate stories. That makes them a superior source to the NYT (let's invade Iraq) or any of the CNN, MSNBC outlets pushing anti-Russia and anti-China hysteria.

Wikipedia is too useful and important to be left in the hands of people with marked political biases.

Then they get home and become cops.

When are the suppressed Abu Ghraib tapes coming out?

It's all terribly sad isn't it?

Best thing we can do it sweep it under the carpet and make sure it's easy for all the people who might be upset by it to not see it.

Also, anyone interested in this that wants to listen to an amusing, critical take could do worse than the TrueAnon podcast: https://soundcloud.com/trueanonpod