Please send more complaints

Macleans ^ | 4/23/08 | MARK STEYN

[Dawnsblood]

Last week's letters page included a missive from Jennifer Lynch, Q.C., chief commissioner of the Canadian "Human Rights" Commission, defending her employees from the accusation of "improper investigative techniques" by yours truly. Steyn, she writes, "provides no substantiation for these claims," and then concludes: "Why is this all important? Because words are important. Steyn would have us believe that words, however hateful, should be given free rein. History has shown us that hateful words sometimes lead to hurtful actions that undermine freedom and have led to unspeakable crimes. That is why Canada and most other democracies have enacted legislation to place reasonable limits on the expression of hatred."

Hmm. "History has shown us that hateful words sometimes lead to hurtful actions that undermine freedom and have led to unspeakable crimes." Commissar Lynch provides, as she would say, "no substantiation for these claims." But then she's a "hate speech" prosecutor and, as we know, Canada's "human rights" procedures aren't subject to tiresome requirements like evidence. So she's made an argument from authority: the great Queen's Counsel has risen from her throne in the Star Chamber and pronounced, and let that suffice. Those of us who occupy less exalted positions in the realm might wish to ponder the evidence for her assertions.

It's true that "hurtful actions that undermine freedom" and lead to "unspeakable crimes" usually have some fig leaf of intellectual justification. For example, the ideology first articulated by Karl Marx has led to the deaths of millions of people around the planet on an unprecedented scale. Yet oddly enough, no matter how many folks are murdered in the name of Marxism-Leninism, you're still free to propound its principles at every college in Canada.

[redpoll]

>>>It’s already arrived and it isn’t happy or light-hearted.

It’s called Diversity/Sensitivity training - no different than self criticism programs under Mao.<<<

I happen to agree with your sentiments... but Mao also slaughtered 30 million of his countrymen. If I don’t attend a diversity training seminar, I might get fired, but no one’s going to shoot me in the head and then charge my family for the cost of the bullet.

The problem is that some of us see the connection between Mao and diversity training, but most do not, so the slow decline into authoritarian rule continues. Since folks like you and I are out there, they’ll never get to the point of rounding us up for mass killings - after all, that would certainly prompt some of us to remember that the 30-06 we use to kill moose was designed to kill people. Unfortunately, slow erosion of rights is almost a worse fate, like a man with cancer who doesn’t know that he has a tumor but occasionally feels a twinge of pain here and there.

[JBGUSA]

redpoll wrote: Wil H >>>They have this HRC crap in Canada, and they have it in England, If the Dems win everything in November we’ll have it here too.<<< We allowed it on our college campuses for years without making a peep, too. I’m afraid that you’re right - and it won’t matter which candidate wins of the three. Like Johan Goldberg says, when fascism arrives in the United States, it’ll be a happy, light-hearted variety. No death squads. Just show up at the date and time on the summons. Pay the fine. You’re on probation, and we reserve the right to peek into your home and writings to make sure you’re not writing hate speech. You can attend a series of workshops to clean your record. Have a great day!

Which is exactly why the Dems won't win this November. We're too libertarian a country for that to happen.

[Dr.Deth]

Of course. The act of not acting in an insufficiently non-hateful way can itself be hateful. Whether or not the incident is a non-incident is incidental.

The master at work.