Tuesday, May 10, 2011

Canada: Criminalizing The Hyperlink

Conservative Party of Canada                           Image via Wikipedia
Mark Steyn:
Who'll determine what's "hateful material"? Three types of people: Weird self-aggrandizing creeps like Warman; ambitious social engineers like the BCHRT judges who just fined a stand-up comic 15 grand for putting down a heckler homophobically; and just plain stupid bureaucrats, like Shirlene McGovern, who "investigated" Ezra Levant at Alberta taxpayers' expense for years and couldn't be bothered to learn the differences between the real Mohammed cartoons and the fake ones. None of these people is qualified to tell you how to live - or whom to link to. Yet they will. Because to them it's entirely natural to do so, regardless of which party is in power. And, on those rare occasions when a nominally right-of-centre party finds itself with a parliamentary majority, enough of its members are inclined to string along. There's so much of this stuff around it's barely "ideological": it's just the zeitgeist, the air we breathe, isn't it?
Most of the time the Conservative Party of Canada isn't very conservative. My theory: it knows it will get killed by the media the minute it steps out of line and issues a truly conservative policy. It's largely a tamed poodle. Overly-sensitive about the media? It probably hasn't forgotten when Preston Manning's pronouncement that he stood for the "equality of all citizens" was blasted by the media as being blatantly racist (the left-leaning Liberal multicultural enterprise relies on identifying ever more distinctions and differences among its citizens worthy of government attention).

Hope you'll read the whole article.
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4 comments:

Anonymous said...

Which came first the link or the hate speech and how do you prove it?

This shows a complete lack of understanding of the dynamic nature of the web.

I liked it better when Canada was more free.

Alain said...

Sorry but now with a large majority, I cannot and shall not excuse the CPC for governing as Liberals. Manning never had even a minority government, so it was not that difficult for the Media Party to destroy his reputation and that of the Reform Party.

ChuckT said...

It isn’t as if the CPC pulled this out of a hat. In 2005 we became a signatory of the Additional Protocol concerning Acts of Racist and Xenophobic Nature Committed on Computer Systems. In that protocol (Chapter II, Article 3):

“Each Party shall adopt such legislative and other measures as may be necessary to establish as criminal offences under its domestic law, when committed intentionally and without right, the following conduct:
distributing, or otherwise making available, racist and xenophobic material to the public through a computer system.”

So, there is a reason behind this seeming madness. And other countries (presumably) have done this before us without destroying the internet or exposing everyone with a blog to the threat of lawsuits.

BallBounces said...

I'm going to have to look up "xenophobic".

"... nothing intellectually compelling or challenging.. bald assertions coupled to superstition... woefully pathetic"