Authoritarian and Totalitarian Democracies

[R011]

6 minutes ago, lucklucky said:

You seem to be disingenuous, these are typical targeting laws that are designed to be applied to only people that upsets the power that be. This is a law made for lawfare. If you are in your corner they will not go after you, but if you upset the regime they will got to all laws in the books to target you.

You may be right.  Some fringe right wing jerks might get targetted in the few months this law is in effect before it's revised or repealed.  It's not a good law, but it isn't the creeping totalitarianism you seem to think it is.

[rmgill]

4 minutes ago, R011 said:

You may be right.  Some fringe right wing jerks might get targetted in the few months this law is in effect before it's revised or repealed.  It's not a good law, but it isn't the creeping totalitarianism you seem to think it is.

Ughh.  You mean any truckers who don’t want to be constrained by ridiculous laws and are accused of being transphobic, racists by the PM who’s been in black face more than a 20s entertainer? 

[sunday]

Slippery slope, thin side of the wedge...

[glenn239]

18 hours ago, rmgill said:

Ughh.  You mean any truckers who don’t want to be constrained by ridiculous laws and are accused of being transphobic, racists by the PM who’s been in black face more than a 20s entertainer? 

 During the Trucker's Convoy in Ottawa, the Feds overstepped their authority and started freezing bank accounts, in one case it was a single mother, for the crime of donating $20 to the convoy on a Go Fund me page or something like that.  (It was quickly reversed as public opinion mounted).  They had a big inquiry afterwards to look at the use of emergency federal powers, but nowhere was it established or even asked why the government froze the bank account of a single mother for donating $20.

 

[rmgill]

And was anyone held accountable for exceeding legal authority?

[bojan]

Why would anyone be held accountable? Only fascists and commies hold people accountable.

[R011]

23 hours ago, rmgill said:

Ughh.  You mean any truckers who don’t want to be constrained by ridiculous laws and are accused of being transphobic, racists by the PM who’s been in black face more than a 20s entertainer? 

No.

[Rick]

On 5/12/2024 at 1:02 AM, R011 said:

As even noted on the post above, old hate speech is only prosecutable of it can be removed and has not been.

I ask because I do not know, but is the Bible considered "hate speech" in Canada?

[glenn239]

18 hours ago, rmgill said:

And was anyone held accountable for exceeding legal authority?

No, no one was held accountable for freezing bank accounts, the story just sort of dropped after the action was reversed.

[Tim the Tank Nut]

the slope isn't slippery.  It's a nearly straight down incline coated in Teflon and silicone spray.

The interesting thing is that it implies that totalitarianism is genetically hereditary.

[rmgill]

Or he was just raised and steeped in it. 

[R011]

18 hours ago, Rick said:

I ask because I do not know, but is the Bible considered "hate speech" in Canada?

No.

[sunday]

Or not yet, for some translations.

[lucklucky]

Anti-Liberal religious fanatic country obviously prosecutes those that disrespect their deities.

 

Quote

 

“All of us at Lime condemn these vile acts in no uncertain terms,” Lime Director of Government Relations Hayden Harvey told The National Desk. “At a time when our teams at Lime are beginning pride celebrations around the globe, it is disturbing to see the hate taking place in Spokane.”

Lime has now implemented a “no-go zone” over the crosswalk, meaning scooters driven over the mural will be remotely shut down. According to the company’s website, entering a “no-go zone” will cause a Lime vehicle to “gradually come to a stop,” forcing a rider to walk their scooter until it is outside the zone.

 

 

https://www.thepublica.com/lime-scooters-will-now-shut-down-if-driven-over-pride-flag-crosswalk-in-spokane-wa/

[rmgill]

Meanwhile how many other forms of graffiti are protected or at least allowed? 

[lucklucky]

Witness the subtle destruction of democracy in Great Britain. Authoritarianism by lies and deceit.

Quote

 

Don’t, for the moment, consider whether mass immigration is a good or bad thing; instead focus on a point that I hope we can all — left, right, rich, poor, black, white — agree on: the importance of truth-telling. It was Aristotle, after all, who intimated that without some minimum level of candour a polity cannot survive.

Now, consider that Blair said in 1997 that he would ensure “firm control … properly enforced” — and then presided over an intake of 633,000 between 1998 and 2001. In 2005 he said that “only skilled workers will be allowed to settle long term” and promised “an end to chain migration” — and then net migration reached over quarter of a million despite a deep recession, not least because of movement from the new EU states. The government claimed this would be a trickle of 13,000 migrants a year; it turned out to be 1,500 per cent higher.

But if this was merely deceitful, it is difficult to locate the term for what followed. In 2010, 2015 and 2017 the Tories promised to cut immigration to the tens of thousands. In every manifesto. In ink. What happened? Immigration rose to an average of 300,000 a year over the period, totalling over 1.4 million for 2022-23 — a period in which free movement had ended and a high proportion of the intake were dependants of low-wage workers from non-European nations.

People often wave such figures away, saying: “Oh, Britain has always been a nation of immigrants”, which is perfectly true. But if you look at a graph of inflows over the past thousand years, let alone the past hundred, this represents a spike of an unprecedented kind, something that will echo decades — perhaps centuries — into the future. Again, whether or not you think this inflow is overall a good or bad thing, you can’t deny that it has altered the complexion of the UK in ways both subtle and profound.

Now consider another trend over roughly the same period: trust in politics has plummeted to lows that are, again, unprecedented. This may sound a minor issue but it is anything but. Advanced social science tells us trust was the secret to the rise of the West, the invisible forcefield that incubates a healthy, prosperous society. But now we in the UK are living through an age in which trust is slowly — almost imperceptibly — dissipating from public life.

 

From The Times via https://www.samizdata.net

[Stuart Galbraith]

Oh Puhleez.

Look, its a simple matter of politicians over promising and under delivering. Now tell me where that hasnt been a basic truth over the past 2000 years? In the information age, lies are harder to avoid, because they sit online for decades for someone to do a basic fact check. Did anyone really fact check Ronald Reagan or John F Kennedy back in the day? Of course not.

One can say that Brexit, which accelerated the migrant crisis, is one more reason why people distrust politicians. Though to my memory, it was mainly merchant bankers and insurance salesmen that bankrolled Brexit, and the Conservative party was sucked down into their negative vortex.

Britain hasnt trusted politicians since the 1970's. This is absolutely nothing new. What is new is that in desperation we keep voting for charlatans and idiots, because the party processes keep forwarding people wholly unsuited for high office because they look new and appealing. You can see where this led with Boris Johnson and Jeremy Corbyn.

[Ivanhoe]

6 hours ago, Stuart Galbraith said:

One can say that Brexit, which accelerated the migrant crisis, is one more reason why people distrust politicians.

How did Brexit accelerate the migrant crisis?

[sunday]

1 minute ago, Ivanhoe said:

How did Brexit accelerate the migrant crisis?

By making all those nationals of a EU country new immigrants according to law, probably. Big crisis!

[lucklucky]

From Democratic Germany a pearl of Totalitarianism by authorities. The process is the punishment.

Twitter MicLiberal user posted quotes from authorities and other famous people attacking those skeptical of COVID vaccines. He is being prosecuted.

Quote

 

Cologne prosecutors charge Twitter user for the crime of assembling a list of Covid-era insults that politicians and celebrities directed against the unvaccinated

Calling for people to be jabbed against their will? Totally legal in Germany. Pointing out that others have called for this? Potentially a violation of the criminal code.

 

 

Quote

 

You might be wondering what crime MicLiberal can possibly have committed by drawing attention to these already-public statements. The most honest answer is that his thread achieved millions of views in a matter of days, and at a very awkward moment – precisely when everyone was beginning to regret all the illiberal and wildly intemperate things they had said in the depths of the virus craze. He had embarrassed some very vain and powerful people with their own incredibly stupid words, and today many are of the opinion that that ought to be a crime in and of itself.

Alas, things have not yet deteriorated that far. Thus the police and prosecutors were left to scour our dense thicket of laws for a more plausible offence. They decided that their best chance lay with a novel provision of the German Criminal Code (Paragraph 126a). This provision makes it a crime to “disseminate the personal data of another person in a matter that is … intended to expose this person … to the risk of a criminal offence directed against them.” On 28 July, two days after MicLiberal posted his 25 tweets, Cologne police filed a criminal complaint against him, and afterwards the Cologne prosecutor’s office brought charges, arguing that MicLiberal had suggested that the people he cited were “perpetrators” and therefore associated them with “fascism.” The district court declined to approve the charges, but the prosecutors appealed to the regional court, where the judges saw things differently. They believed that a prosecution was warranted because of the “heated social debate” surrounding Covid measures, and because MicLiberal’s audience was composed of “homogeneous” like-minded people, who (in the summary of the Berliner Zeitung) “could either form groups or encourage individual members to commit acts of violence.” MicLiberal had furthermore assembled his citations from a website that the judges deemed guilty of an “anti-government orientation.”

 

He was acquitted but the prosecutors want to appeal.

 

 

Edited June 18, 2024 by lucklucky

[sunday]

Business as usual in the neo-GDR.

[Stuart Galbraith]

On 6/11/2024 at 8:14 PM, Ivanhoe said:

How did Brexit accelerate the migrant crisis?

Ill just quote a BBC report that gives a few indicators. This is from 2021.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-59369179

The problem for the government is that you cannot simply pull up the drawbridge. Controlling the country's borders requires international agreement and co-operation.

For the moment, with few bilateral deals in place, and outside EU arrangements, Brexit has made the situation more complicated, not less.

For example, the Home Office has introduced post-Brexit rules barring people who have come through a "safe" third country from claiming asylum in the UK. Those deemed "inadmissable" should be removed.

So, of the more than 25,000 who have crossed from France in small boats this year, how many have been returned? Tom Pursglove, the minister with responsibility for tackling what the government calls illegal migration, was asked exactly that last week, - by Adam Holloway and Yvette Cooper, MPs on the Commons' Home Affairs Committee.

His answer was five - five people arriving by small boats on UK shores this year, have been returned to EU states since January.

When part of the EU's "Dublin" arrangements, Britain requested the return of approximately a quarter of asylum cases to our European neighbours.

Now outside the European Union, the UK currently has no return arrangements with any EU country. The government proposed a post-Brexit replacement for the Dublin arrangement - but the EU turned it down.

[urbanoid]

Yeah, well, the solution is not to send them to other European countries, but back to their shitholes. But that requires guts.

[Stuart Galbraith]

Well for one thing, it requires lots of people to go and inspect their cases for the people that are already here. Until then, they take up lots of hotel rooms, destroying history like RAF scampton and generally being a bloody nuisance. That didnt happen for the simple reason the Conservatives got fixated on the Rwanda plan, which can never deliver repatriation on anything like the level expected, and cost an arm and a leg going it.

We need to work with Europe to deal with the problem, because it, like Putin, is a European security problem. But tories being tories had a fixation that cutting ourself off from Europe would solve the problem. It didnt, it just meant fewer people we could deal with to help solve the problem

Its not about guts. Its about being intelligent enough to figure out a plan that works, rather than playing loudly to the cheap seats and achieving fuck all, which is precisely what has happened for the past 14 years, and probably rather longer than that.

[urbanoid]

Just locate them, put them in the detention camps, then onto the planes to their home countries and be done with it. As the word spreads, less will be coming, as it usually requires substantial money.