Canadian Politics Today

I had an esteemed right-of-centre companion on another board, and I even friended him on Facebook with my real persona after he had 3 kids.  Well, he just shocked me by posting an article that the InfoWars ban on social media is the first step of a ban on right-wing thought.

And now this is making me think that we are not evolving democracy as we should. 

The reason is: one of the foundational premises behind allowing free speech is that the public will allow bad ideas to die.  But that's not happening because:

- we don't have a public anymore we have anonymous masses
- those masses can communicate anonymously and instantly to millions of people and have influence
- the old media went away after being published: newspapers went out of date, and physical copies went out of sight.  Digital media is persistent.
- there is too much information that is germane to running a government now
- hypnotizing a narcissistic public with **** information is too easy

I have been posting these ideas for a little while.  And there's nothing left- or right- politics about this to my mind.

Here's Aldous Huxley writing to George Orwell, on why his vision of the future was more realistic and foreshadowing our current state:

Within the next generation I believe that the world's rulers will discover that infant conditioning and narco-hypnosis are more efficient, as instruments of government, than clubs and prisons, and that the lust for power can be just as completely satisfied by suggesting people into loving their servitude as by flogging and kicking them into obedience. In other words, I feel that the nightmare of Nineteen Eighty-Four is destined to modulate into the nightmare of a world having more resemblance to that which I imagined in Brave New World.

http://www.openculture.com/2018/08/aldous-huxley-george-orwell-hellish-vision-future-better-1949.html

I had an esteemed right-of-centre companion on another board, and I even friended him on Facebook with my real persona after he had 3 kids.  Well, he just shocked me by posting an article that the InfoWars ban on social media is the first step of a ban on right-wing thought.

And now this is making me think that we are not evolving democracy as we should. 

The reason is: one of the foundational premises behind allowing free speech is that the public will allow bad ideas to die.  But that's not happening because:

- we don't have a public anymore we have anonymous masses
- those masses can communicate anonymously and instantly to millions of people and have influence
- the old media went away after being published: newspapers went out of date, and physical copies went out of sight.  Digital media is persistent.
- there is too much information that is germane to running a government now
- hypnotizing a narcissistic public with **** information is too easy

I have been posting these ideas for a little while.  And there's nothing left- or right- politics about this to my mind.

Here's Aldous Huxley writing to George Orwell, on why his vision of the future was more realistic and foreshadowing our current state:

http://www.openculture.com/2018/08/aldous-huxley-george-orwell-hellish-vision-future-better-1949.html

That would shock me too. Anyone supporting InfoWars should be kept on a leash.

It's not that simple. Jewish lawyers at the ACLU don't fight for the rights of the Klan to hold rallies because they support them.
Washington DC, a mostly black city, just granted a permit for a white power demo. They didn't do it because they support white power.

I think there is a discernible difference between supporting the rights of free speech and ignoring complete consspiratards such as Alex Jones.

Unless they did something illegal.

If they do something illegal they go to jail. Banning is about not inviting them to the party.

- we don't have a public anymore we have anonymous masses
- those masses can communicate anonymously and instantly to millions of people and have influence
- the old media went away after being published: newspapers went out of date, and physical copies went out of sight.  Digital media is persistent.
- there is too much information that is germane to running a government now
- hypnotizing a narcissistic public with **** information is too easy

We live in a new age for sure.  I think there's actually too much info now in a way, and the angry voices from everyone just seem to drown each other out, at least to me, it's just white noise.

Info pre-internet was published from far fewer sources, and was more professional and appealed to a more varied audience across the spectrum.  Now we have more democracy of ideas, everyone can have a youtube channel or twitter account or blog.  It also make it much harder to cut through the noise, so often the most sensational or controversial voices get more attention, not always the most reasonable.  Corporate media also needs clickbait for views for ad dollars so the blonde bimbos read the news.

PBS Newshour is a bland broadcast, and also the most professional and least ideological IMO.  Frontline is also very good, and Ken Burns.  Maybe we need more media outlets funded by ordinary viewers like you.

On the plus side, the internet means facts are at your fingertips if you know where to go.  For now, I say avoid Twitter mostly, and call out bogus links on Facebook with evidence.  I'm somewhat confident a solution to this miss will naturally come.  The pendulum will swing. We've seen a somewhat successful pushback against the intersectional/SJW college bullies.  Maybe people will eventually get sick of the bubbles and demand professional journalism again.

An interesting trend I've seen in book publishing are more people writing self-help books who have zero professional credentials.  Skimmed a few, some are great and some are terrible.  "The Subtle Art of Not Giving a ****" is just by a blogger, but it's brilliant.

For some people, free speech is all or nothing. They prefer the American model, where virtually anything goes. Everything else is up to someone whose neutrality can be suspected, to judge. And they don't trust that neutrality. If you can ban one thing, you can ban anything, is their belief. I'm a little more practical than that myself.

I appreciate that practicality.

For my part, my younger self thought the Canadian approach to censorship (ie. to ban hate speech) was superior and would lead to a more stable society.  As time went on, my position changed as I saw no discernible difference in the US and Canadian societies with respect to hate speech.  I even felt that Human Rights Commissions overreached when pursuing comedians for jokes and so on.

In the 2000s, though, I heard a radio address by Michael Savage (while in the US) that I thought crossed the line and was again glad that we had the laws we did.

And now, we are in an age that we could have never planned for - let alone the founding fathers.  We have a permanent class of mass-media **** disturbers who are gaming the constitution in order to profit from disunity.  This cottage industry uses as its fuel the worst element of paranoid and gullible media consumer and produces poison, hate and even violence as a side-effect.

I am reluctant  to use government to stop this phenomenon but otherwise people are not letting these bad ideas die and they need to, or even need to kill them.

1. Info pre-internet was published from far fewer sources, and was more professional and appealed to a more varied audience across the spectrum.  Now we have more democracy of ideas, everyone can have a youtube channel or twitter account or blog.  It also make it much harder to cut through the noise, so often the most sensational or controversial voices get more attention, not always the most reasonable.  Corporate media also needs clickbait for views for ad dollars so the blonde bimbos read the news.

2.  PBS Newshour is a bland broadcast, and also the most professional and least ideological IMO.  Frontline is also very good, and Ken Burns.  Maybe we need more media outlets funded by ordinary viewers like you.

3. Maybe people will eventually get sick of the bubbles and demand professional journalism again.

4.  An interesting trend I've seen in book publishing are more people writing self-help books who have zero professional credentials.  Skimmed a few, some are great and some are terrible.  "The Subtle Art of Not Giving a ****" is just by a blogger, but it's brilliant.

1.  The scope of government and the complexity defies any one public that can turn the ship with a vote.  As such we have had parties that largely agree, and the election of Trump is actually a "choice" and a phenomenon of that problem.

2.  There are indeed news sources that are BETTER than in the past that are emerging.  Canadaland, and the five thirty eight are two examples.

3.  My idea (which I have been promoting for over ten years now) is for the government parties to get together to REDESIGN how our issues flow through parliament in an apolitical way.  This would include:

    - Moving some complex issues to all-party committees with public citizen groups for discussion and effectively removing the politics from how they work.  You could still have the government sending over-all objectives but more of a high-level five-year-plan kind of thing.

    - Reducing the scope of government by turning execution agencies into crown corporations or even bringing in private companies to manage them

    - More web engagement, more discussion, more change, more agility

    - Take monitoring of government out of the realm of "the press" and make it public.  Allow for more failures, smaller failures, public failures to encourage change and improvement

4.  Yes, professionalism is kind of a curse.  I read a long screed about the phenomenon of "professional grief counsellors" as an unnatural solution to crisis.

That's fine, freedom of speech only applies to government interference. You don't have the right to express whatever you want on a platform that belongs to someone else. They owe you squat.

That's totally correct.  But when it comes to banning unwanted speech by a private org like twitter or a university or a website like this, there should be specific rules in place on what is and isn't allowed and it needs to be properly & evenly enforced, otherwise it just becomes a propaganda outlet where inconvenient or "unwanted" speech outside the administrators viewpoint/ideology/narrative bias is silenced.  Which is what happened to Linsday Shepherd.

This creates legitimacy.  Most news outlets calling themselves journalism will choose to publish or not publish stories and cover them in certain ways based on the ideological bias they wish to communicate and not on any established ethical or professional code.  They have every right to do that, but it should be called what it is: propaganda.