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ZorbaTHut  2yr ago (text post)   35668 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 26, 2022

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The Canadian government's actions against political dissidents over the last two years leave it a non-democracy regardless of election procedures. You can't have free, fair elections if huge swaths of political opinion are the target of state violence. After the use of the emergencies act against people protesting vaccine mandates, how certain can we be that Trudeau won't engage in similar attacks on his other political opponents when expedient?

"You can have protests as long as they are inconsequential enough for us to safely ignore" is not all that different than "you can't have protests".

We were literally told that the protest was inconsequential and not even a real thing that rises to the level of something worth ignoring for the first two weeks as it gathered steam travelling across the country -- you may have missed this due to living on the wrong side of the continent, but the swing in media coverage from "not a real protest, there's only like twenty trucks" to "OMG this is a threat to national security" once people actually showed up in Ottawa was extremely noticeable to those who watched it unfold.

No, they have an image of American cities burning and occupied for weeks by anarchists because they saw exactly that happen less than a year prior.

Yes, they are fools for being terrified by terrorism.

But then again, you brought up the thousands of people from your country who took to the streets during a pandemic for protests which did not and could not have any impact on the American justice system. So it seems weird for you to claim the right -

a) think they deserve special treatment,

And b) are being silly for caring about what happens in America.

The right only thinks they're special because they have never protested anything before.

This was in fact the very first and only time the Emergencies Act (1988) was invoked, for a protest or otherwise. Its predecessor, the War Measures Act, was invoked against a leftist Quebec Nationalist group... not due to a protest but after they kidnapped a diplomat.

was invoked against a leftist Quebec Nationalist group... not due to a protest but after they kidnapped a diplomat.

They also kidnapped and strangled a provincial cabinet minister from Quebec -- although I think the murdering was not until after Trudeau had invoked the War Measures.

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