1.) You are taking a government's word for it. As a US citizen, I can tell you that you should never, ever do this. My attitude with any governing entity is to trust but verify. If they don't provide a way to verify, assume they are lying. I'm a former Department of Defense and intelligence contractor. My experience working with these entities hardened my attitude to never take their word for it.
2.) You are ignoring the complete lack of due process with the account-freezing powers. Any Canadian citizen is a mere accusation or mistake away from being labelled as "being involved" with the protests and having their accounts frozen, with no ability to defend yourself or correct an error.
The complete willingness and seal-clapping from the majority of the Canadian public about allowing a violation of democratic norms, purely because it's directed at a minority whom they have dehumanized for years, has completely changed my view of the Canadian public. I've travelled in Canada extensively, and I'm dismayed to now realize they are even easier to mislead than the US public is. The utter shortsightedness of this is mind-blowing, with it's supporters seemingly oblivious to how quickly they can find themselves on the receiving end of it.
> 1.) You are taking a government's word for it. As a US citizen, I can tell you that you should never, ever do this.
This is a fundamental mistake. Just as you can't take your experiences from (let's say) IBM and assume that Google (or a startup, or a family business) operates in the same way, you can't take your experiences from the US government and assume that every other government works in the same way. As the only (mostly) democratic superpower, the US is a category of its own. It has global ambitions, and its government serves many purposes apart from the interests of its citizens. Other governments exist for other reasons and serve other purposes.
I'm not familiar with Canada. I don't know how its government operates or whether you should trust its word. However, I know that in another country, it's never "the government" that speaks but a specific agency or a specific official. Those all have known reputations and known biases. An informed person can often say with reasonable certainty whether you can take the government's word at face value.
As a Canadian it’s like living with a bunch of lunatics and I can not believe so many people are okay with this. All I can say is I will never miss an election again. We need Trudeau gone badly but he has a lot of support from the east and no other party is positioned to beat him in an election. The ndp have sided with him on so many things I can no longer vote for them and the choices are limited.
The fact that they are so angry at these truckers they are willing to give up due process in a court of law and think it is such a good thing the government can swoop in and freeze someone’s money. I think it is very dangerous and worry some unhinged person will lose it and go from protesting to attacking. I didn’t donate to these truckers and I never participated in any protests so suppose I don’t have to worry this time. I also like to point out that yes the truckers were breaking the law. This angers people so much. I always like to remind them breaking the law is actually an unsung right we have as Canadians. Yes we can go to jail but we are not put in a chair and tortured or killed or have our family rounded up and executed. And this is a good thing. It was only in the 1970s that Canada last locked up a man for life after his third offence for being gay. So thankfully people fought those laws and protested in the streets openly gay which was illegal. So personally I don’t know if I support these truckers but if they are willing to break the law and be arrested for what they believe in by defying an order to leave then I think it is great. I do not condone violence however and the few fringe protesters doing dumb things should be arrested and charged. But standing in the street refusing to leave that’s something we should be thankful we can do.
I think it's important that we draw a line in the sand about what is acceptable behaviour in society.
Protesting is a right.
Shutting down a city, while being fueled by disinformation networks controlled by foreign state actors, and being funded by foreign political interests, is a threat to national security.
The problem is that it is very difficult to pinpoint where to draw that line of distinction... but it is something we very much need to do, even if it is difficult.
Would you have supported the US government applying the metrics for when protests should be shut down, and all financial supporters have their accounts frozen without due process. for the BLM protests in summer 2020?
I am glad that didn't happen. The protests were mostly peaceful, but the fringe actors in the protest were dramatically more destructive and violent than anything in these protests. There aren't videos of violence by the truckers. I can find thousands of videos of violence by the fringe actors in the BLM protests.
Cities were shut down, entire city blocks were occupied for weeks on end with roads barricaded, police stations were burned down and/or occupied, courthouses were besieged, etc. All of these acts were perpetrated by a small percentage of the protesters.
If the Canadian logic were applied, they all would have been shut down immediately. All financing would have been frozen. Organizers would have been jailed for "mischief". Something tells me you would have been against this. I certainly would have been against it, despite the fact that I was appalled by the violence I saw. (I was in Portland in summer 2020, and couldn't believe what I saw happening at the courthouse on a nightly basis)
Regarding the foreign money/ foreign disinformation networks:
Where is the evidence of this? Do Canadians not realize this is exactly what McCarthy did in the US? Every left-wing protest was labelled, with zero precision, as being "funded by the Soviets, and based off Soviet propaganda and spy networks." Never any evidence provided, ever. Are you not aware of how blatantly obvious this tactic is? Has someone performed a survey of the truckers to find out where they are getting their information from, and whether those sources are "foreign"? You and I both know they haven't. I feel like I'm listening to a 1950's businessman in a Mad Men like hat parroting the newspaper's talking points about radicals in the East Village, or guild members on a Hollywood movie set.
I welcome you to be the first person to quantify this for me. What percentage of the funds for these protests were "foreign"? As far as I can tell, the quantity is never specified, because it's not useful for the government to specify it. Any time someone waves their hand and says "foreign money" without quantification, I view it as a manipulative tactic. I simply don't believe the foreign money is remotely significant. If it was, Freeland would have cited it to aid in persuasion for the Emergencies Act. It was more persuasive to not cite the quantity. That tells me all I need to know. It's a deliberate smear tactic, and I welcome you to provide evidence to the contrary.
The Canadian news media landscape is incredibly broken. I thought it was bad in the US, but it's worse up there. To me, Trudeau is remarkably similar to George W Bush:
Mediocre intelligence
Charismatic and charming
Sailed along on his father's reputation with virtually zero
career aspirations for most of his life
Views dissent as unpatriotic
Beholden to a fringe religion/ideology that is dominant in his political party but not outside of it
Mobilizes swings in public opinion to "temporarily" remove civil liberties
He speaks in this syrupy, soothing voice that makes me think I'm listening to NPR (it's the public news radio here in the states, infamous for its sleep inducing qualities). But that NPR voice is saying incredibly misleading, demagogue-like statements that are the hallmark of authoritarian leanings. It's almost preferable if someone who sounds like Trump says he's going to implement a program to freeze bank accounts with no court review, because at least you expect it from a guy who speaks like a dictator. With Trudeau, it's like the optics of his appearance and demeanor blind a large subset of the population to what he's actually doing.
Canada is a parliamentary democracy, and the current governing party -- the ones who take all of the heat for every abuse -- are a minority government. They can fall at a moment's notice. Prime Minister in Canada isn't King, and instead is far less powerful than, for instance, the US president.
Yet *not a single case has been brought forward*. A couple of Conservative MPs have vaguely alluded to cases -- ones with almost no details, yet the few details that are brought up don't match any known donor lists (e.g. "Briane from Chilliwack") -- yet despite this being such an incredible hammer to take down this government, crickets.
So yes, I'll take the government's position on this.
"seal-clapping"
Ah, yes, "seal-clapping". That surely conveys the sincerity of your comment. Or we saw mass financing of public mayhem and realized that yes, this is a very real problem. It's a real problem that needs considerable solutions.
"purely because it's directed at a minority whom they have dehumanized for years"
A "minority"? This is perverse. By this measure, every deplorable subset is a protected minority that you will pearl clutch about. Won't someone think about the poor Nazis?
Financed mayhem will always come under the microscope.
Can you quantify this? Because I've seen zero quantification of this. Do you know the numbers? I have yet to hear anyone with your point of view point to a single specific number. Just hand-waving about FOREIGN MONEY that MIGHT BE FROM RUSSIA and TRUMPERS! Never is a single percentage mentioned in this regard. If it was remotely significant, mentioning the quantity would bolster the government's claim, and they would do so. They don't, which almost certainly indicates it's an insignificant amount.
"Financed mayhem will always come under the microscope"
Here in the US in the summer of 2020, we had entire city blocks burned to the ground, multiple police stations burned, a Federal courthouse besieged by suburban white kid radicals in Portland, a church set on fire across the street from the White House, had armed radicals occupy a neighborhood and police station in Seattle (mostly peaceful, but there were a few dozen incidents of minor violence and then a couple of murders towards the end) for months. The bad actors setting fires and perpetrating violence were a minority of the protesters. Most were simply exercising their first amendment rights. At no point did anyone freeze bank accounts, despite massive outpourings of donations from individuals for things like food, and more nefarious things like bailing out jailed rioters. It was a GOOD thing that nobody had their accounts frozen. It was immoral and wrong to allow a small number of bad actors to be used to delegitimize the entire movement. Therefore, the US government didn't do anything to rob these protesters of their rights to protest. And at no point, not for a single second, was the news media rooting for the police over the protesters. Certainly not the mainstream news in the US that has the vast majority of the mindshare. Not NPR, not CNN/ABC/NBC/CBS/MSNBC/NYT/etc.
By contrast, the truckers have been entirely peaceful. In a world where every human has a video camera in their pocket, there are no viral videos of violence perpetrated by the protesters. No viral videos of protesters hurling racist epithets. Instead, 2 videos showing lone actors carrying hateful flags (Confederate flag in Canada???? Really?) A few statues got vandalized in minor ways, but they got far more coverage than statues of Lincoln in the US did when they were vandalized and toppled by rioters.
"Won't someone think about the poor Nazis?":
So the truckers are Nazis? One person was photographed with a Swastika flag, and they are all Nazis? Do you apply the same judgement when you see protests in line with your laptop-class fashions carrying hammer/sickle flags? Or left-flavored anti-semitic flags, which always pop up in the fringes of fashionable left-wing protests?
It's blatantly obvious you have dehumanized all of these people based on propaganda and political bias. We all know why this is:
The truckers are part of a highly unfashionable political movement. And amongst the laptop class, fashion is king. If you dissent from the government in a manner that is fashionable to the elite class, you are a hero. Fringe elements who perpetrate violence are depicted as not representative of the movement. Maximum sympathy is provided. But unfashionable? Suddenly, a single incident of violence doesn't deserve the label "mostly peaceful", you get zero sympathy, and the media is aggressively cheering on the removal of your rights. You get labelled "deplorable" (that's the word you just used above) which is subjective and revealing of dehumanization.
I'm a lifelong liberal, I've never even voted Republican. I always hated the censorious, rabidly illiberal echo chamber of the GOP that was created by them allowing themselves to be taken over by Christian fundamentalists. The constant judgement, the constant othering and dehumanization of political opponents. Today, the center left parties in Europe/Canada/US are all on this train. I'm reminded of the old Black Panther Party quote: "Scratch a liberal, and you'll find a fascist."
I will not be voting Democrat in November, and look forward to ending all support for the party until they stop championing aggressive violations of civil liberties and government/corporate allied censorship. I say this as a person who has spent cumulative weeks volunteering for campaigns, including writing software for the Obama 2012 campaign as well as the 2014 midterms in Florida, where I did 5 figures worth of free labor for targeting applications for minority registration drives. I'm done, and people with your illiberal belief system inhabiting the center left is why. I'd rather vote for dumb rednecks who treat me like an adult than folks like Trudeau who think that an NPR-like soothing voice can cloak the authoritarian, paternalistic inclinations of their actual words.
If you keep this up we're going to end up having to ban you, especially because you appear to be using HN primarily for this. That's a clear abuse of the site, so please stop.
What is the line here? Isn't the entire thread, including comments I'm responding to, political? I've had an account for 10 years.
I get the sense that whenever I'm in any thread where many others are making similar, political comments, somebody gets upset and flags mine and I'm the one punished. The parent comments are all political. So what is the line between flame bait and commenting on politics?
The most recent occurrence listed was me stating to someone they were suffering from cognitive dissonance in June. If you actually look at that comment, it's not exactly a brutal insult.
I think you do a great job moderating and I don't envy the task. I just feel like there are certain kinds of users who flag everyone that disagrees with them and gives me the impression that political comments that do not go against certain dominant ideologies never get flagged but mine do.
My recommendation is that if HN does not want political discussion on the site, they shouldn't allow political links to be posted. My comments were directly related to the digital jail article's contents. I don't really see how any conversation around a government freezing people's bank accounts as a form of digital punishment cannot be political.
> If you dislike democracy because your guy isn't in charge, you don't like democracy and should just accept that fact and save the rhetoric.
You think the war measures act like the Emergencies Act is "democracy"?
Blacks, indigenous and hispanics have the lowest rates of vaccination in both Canada and US. If you think they are all "attempting an insurrection with daily QAnon rallies", you are living in alternate universe. I was there at the protest for 3 weekends and many of the people I met were vaxxed but opposed mandates. My buddy I was there with was also vaxxed but he took it because of coercion from the federal government because he works for them. There were nurses who took care of COVID patients for 2 years, gained natural immunity from infection and then were fired for not taking an unnecessary shot. There was even a vaxxed lady whose grandmother is 108 years old, had been given 4 shots and yet the nursing home isn't allowing them to meet in person due to COVID. These aren't political points which you are trying to make.
The second part of your comment tells me you aren't able to have a civil dialogue without ad-hominem attacks. Please read HN's guidelines before making such comments:
Would you please stop doing political/ideological flamewar on HN? It's not what this site is for, and it destroys what it is for. We ban accounts that do it, regardless of what ideology they favor or disfavor, so please don't.
> Yet Trudeau invoked the same act which was renamed in 1980
You seem to be profoundly misinformed.
> When BLM burnt down billions of dollars worth of businesses
BLM burnt down billions of dollars worth of businesses in Canada? Wow, I guess I must have missed that news cycle.
The "whatabout BLM" tactic is so tired.
> I don't know why you care about skin color so much
Right.
> No clue what Qanon has anything to do with vax mandates
You know, I asked myself the same question. I wondered "why does the stage in Ottawa keep talking about WEF, the Rothschilds, poisons in children's cereals, child sex rings, Donald Trump, 5G, the conspiracy that all of the media is lying to you and some guy grifting off your cause is telling you the truth, etc". Why did so many participants keep talking about so many things but vaccine mandates. Why is the entire ecosystem, and so many supporters and supplicants of this movement so caught up in QAnon nonsense among other conspiracies? Glad you share the confusion.
> You are basically spouting corporate media nonsense
Here it is. I literally stated what I directly observed, and have heard (from people like you), and you wave it off as "corporate media". Did you perhaps spit at CBC reporters while you were busy honk honking?
Would you please stop doing political/ideological flamewar on HN? It's not what this site is for, and it destroys what it is for. We ban accounts that do it, regardless of what ideology they favor or disfavor, so please don't.
Edit: you've been posting about nothing else for literally weeks now. That's seriously uncool, and we've had to ask you more than once before not to do this:
Worse than that, it appears that you've abused HN badly with many previous accounts and been banned many times in the past.
All that put together is so egregious that I've banned this account. Please don't create accounts to break HN's rules with. If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe that you'll use the site as intended in the future.
"Edit: you've been posting about nothing else for literally weeks now."
This is beyond parody. It's as if your moderation is purpose driven to elevate and amplify disinformation, and that actually useful, meaningful discussion has disappeared from this site.
Congratulations, HN continues its descent to utter irrelevance. Now featuring literally daily QAnon nonsense, which you never moderate or threaten bans about (even after the few reasonable users try to flag and moderate). It's incredible that every one of my comments, in response to grossly ignorant nonsense, were highly upvoted by users. Then along comes dang, enabler of alt-right QAnon horseshit.
Cheers.
1.) You are taking a government's word for it. As a US citizen, I can tell you that you should never, ever do this. My attitude with any governing entity is to trust but verify. If they don't provide a way to verify, assume they are lying. I'm a former Department of Defense and intelligence contractor. My experience working with these entities hardened my attitude to never take their word for it.
2.) You are ignoring the complete lack of due process with the account-freezing powers. Any Canadian citizen is a mere accusation or mistake away from being labelled as "being involved" with the protests and having their accounts frozen, with no ability to defend yourself or correct an error.
The complete willingness and seal-clapping from the majority of the Canadian public about allowing a violation of democratic norms, purely because it's directed at a minority whom they have dehumanized for years, has completely changed my view of the Canadian public. I've travelled in Canada extensively, and I'm dismayed to now realize they are even easier to mislead than the US public is. The utter shortsightedness of this is mind-blowing, with it's supporters seemingly oblivious to how quickly they can find themselves on the receiving end of it.