If you ask the people in your three examples, they would say that it is the institutions that are guilty of squalid sins like carelessness, idleness, won’t-learn-and-don’t-need-to-ask, you-can’t-tell-me-anything-about-my-job, pride, jealousy and greed. Jordan Peterson versus creeping infantilization and control by a bloated bureaucracy stuffed with activists. The convoy versus an incompetent public health bureaucracy and a shameless government willing to politicize vaccines. The Palestine protestors versus a bloated bureaucracy getting rich from apartheid.
In the end, it’s pure raw politics. And what they’ve done is very effective. Peterson kicked off a huge political backlash against weird activistspeak in corporations and government. The convoy spurred governments to drop pandemic restrictions. Israel is increasingly isolated. Politics is sometimes messy, and the squeakiest wheels often get the grease.
I felt genuinely nauseous reading this. The idea that it is "pure raw politics" just confirms what I am saying about the moral corruption. I'm not talking about politics, I'm talking about the law.
The law is its own branch of government. It doesn't operate by the same rules.
The idea that ends justify the means, and breaking the law is how to get things done, and how this not just corruption, but corrupting, and if it's corruption in response to a system that is, or is seen as corrupt, is not an improvement.
In all of this, the law matters, and facts still matter. There are thousands of people dead, and there have been charges of war crimes in both sides in the Israel-Palestinian conflict, and "Israel being increasingly isolated" is supposed to be a win?
The problem with this stance about decisions being made by a "public health bureaucracy," is that none of that decision-making is not federal. It's all provincial. Public health orders were set by each province. The decisions about whether people could work, or businesses could open or close, were entirely provincial, and they were often disastrous, both in terms of lives lost, which were in the tens of thousands, as well as crashing health care systems. The provinces wouldn't give people sick leave. The provinces took over the Canadian economy. And almost all of them were conservative.
It was hell - hell for everyone. Some provinces lifted restrictions, and a whole bunch of people - including people involved in the Convoy - have had their lives ruined. I feel terribly for them.
It's exactly what I said, treating politics as theatre, thinking it's like pro wrestling where it's not real and no one really gets hurt.
If there is a single thing that people fail to realize when it comes to government, is that the decisions made by politicians and courts are routinely life and death decisions. In emergencies, that increases by an order of magnitude.
The law is a derivative of politics, and is therefore necessarily conservative and backward-looking. Politics ultimately trumps law in a democracy. Even the Charter Of Right And Freedoms has a "Get Out Of Rights And Freedoms Card" in the notwithstanding clause. When the political and legal systems refuse to address injustice, or perpetrate absurdities, we can get these spasms of civil unrest. That's the straw breaking the camel's back, or the people noticing the emperor's new clothes. The successful protests are missionary activities that succeed in changing the political conversation. They give a push for politicians to change laws.
The Winnipeg general strike was a lawbreaking endeavour, with organizers convicted for seditious conspiracy. But it led to labour reforms that we still enjoy today.
The convoy brought to light massive dissatisfaction with the increasingly absurd pandemic restrictions. The new border ban for unvaccinated truckers was the last straw, but the situation was already untenable. In Jan 2022, everyone knew that the restrictions were pointless. After the convoy, everyone knew that everyone knew that the restrictions were pointless. And they went away shortly thereafter.
The conversation on Israel has shifted markedly in the wake of Oct 7. There are sanctions against certain Israeli criminals, arrest warrants out for cabinet members, weapons export bans, and wide condemnation from the international community. This was unthinkable 20 years ago. Was it because of protests? I don't know, but western politicians can't ignore the Palestinian issue anymore.
If one listens to Peterson's early protests, he saw the pronoun stuff as just the final straw in an long-term activist-driven and bureaucratically-enforced set of policy changes meant to infantilize and micromanage society generally and the university specifically. He would have just been another anonymous crank if his diagnosis didn't ring true for a lot of people.
This is just the messiness of self-governance. There is no adult in the room that is going to keep everyone in line. The law is an important social construct, but politics is the ultimate recourse. The law operates within and is legitimized by the political system, and protest is part of the political system.
A lot of this is completely wrong, on the facts, in terms of history and politics and the law.
The Winnipeg General Strike, for example - which also occurred during a pandemic - was an unmitigated disaster for workers, and it did not lead to any positive reforms. People were fired and lost their pensions with one day of work left, and no concessions were gained.
And in fact, many reforms had already been passed and put in place. Workers comp, minimum wage, pensions, workplace protections and inspections, ending child labour and bringing in votes for women had all been passed in the years leading up to the strike. It's been mythologized as an "origin moment" for the leaders of political parties in what has been a complete whitewash of history.
The idea that Peterson's fearmongering that if you don't call someone the name they ask you to, you'll go to jail, was taken credibly because he is seen as an authority, when he has no idea what he is talking about. A "diagnosis ringing true" is not the truth, which is part of the whole point I am making.
And it's also why the law is separate from politics in Canada and in the Westminster system, because politics must conform to the law, and the law is not just what legislators pass. There is also the common law, which is judge-made law based on precedent.
As for the pandemic restrictions, the idea that they were "increasingly absurd" when hospitals were still jammed to overflowing with people dying of covid is also revisionist history, and the mandate on vaccinations was about crossing the border into another country. Other countries, as a matter of legal and democratic sovereignty, can refuse entry to individuals who may spread an infectious disease.
It wasn't a "last straw" - the convoy was planned for months in advance, with the involvement of politicians, prior to the announcement of any such mandates, and as trucking associations who had been vaccinated pointed out, the industry was going begging for drivers within Canada, where no vaccine mandates were in place.
As for Palestine and Israel, there have been multiple attempts throughout the years to resolve it, including an actual agreement, the Oslo Accords, to create a two-state solution. The international criminal court charged both Hamas and Israel with crimes against humanity, including taking hostages, torture, killing civilians, and sexual assaults by soldiers.
That's not protest. What you're talking about is exactly what I am calling out as the problem, which is the total dehumanization of individuals and the belief that people are justified in breaking the law to achieve political goals. It's a form of both moral and legal corruption, and people tolerate it because they think they are justified or that they can do this stuff and still keep their hands clean from the consequences, which are usually a disaster.
I disagree with some of the narratives you put forward, but that is neither here nor there. The protest movements that are successful are necessarily successful because there is some real thing there that is worth protesting. Otherwise, the protest wouldn’t be successful.
We can see that with the predecessor to the Freedom Convoy - United We Roll. It didn’t achieve popular support because it was about weird western grievance/oil something or other. Freedom Convoy 2 fizzled because the pandemic restrictions were long gone.
Getting wrapped up in the minute details is missing the forest for the trees. If there’s an idea that gets thousands of people off the couch to march in the streets, it’s probably worth taking seriously.
They're not narratives. A narrative is a just-so story. I'm talking about fact-and evidence based history. That's part of the issue.
People may have a genuine grievance - and often do, but there is a long history of what used to be called "manias", riots and protests, especially during pandemics. People were relentlessly lied to about the nature of the pandemic - health, law, rights. They were actively misinformed, about covid, about vaccines, about public health orders, about who was responsible. It was accompanied by a deliberate international misinformation and propaganda campaign, including by the Canadian Centre for Constitutional Freedoms, Canadian and US media outlets.
People felt justified in acting that way because they had been lied to by individuals who told them that temporary, legal, state of emergency measures were not legal, when they were. Every court in Canada has ruled that, and rejected the arguments. This does matter. There was a deliberate and colossal effort to undermine authorities' legitimacy.
This doesn't mean people weren't suffering, and most of it was due to profound economic distress because provincial governments ordered people not to work, and ordered businesses to close in the interest of public health, while expecting them to bear the cost, and it broke a lot of people.
Throughout history, there have been mass movements and "crazes" driven by hate, fear, anger that aren't based on reality. Read "Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds" Witch hunts, the crusades, wars, and hatred whipped up against scapegoats. During the Black death, Jews were accused of poisoning wells and there were cities where thousands were killed. All that murdering got people out of the house and in the streets, but it wasn't Jews, it was bacteria being spread by fleas on rats.
The convoy protest in Ottawa had international backers, and advisors including Brad Wall. It was not an organic, grassroots protest, and it's stated goal - by organizers - was to topple the government, and have themselves installed.
These are people who were making death threats against politicians in 2019.
Your whole argument seems to be, "well it worked, so it must have been good somehow." That is the end justifying the means. It's considered a "win" because we're not supposed to think about all of the thousands of people who continued to die of Covid.
It's not theatre. It's not sport. It's a life or death business, but all people care about is a "win" for their side by any means possible. That is corruption, and it has been completely normalized.
I heartily disagree with the notion that people were fooled into rejecting the pandemic restrictions. It was clear in Jan 2022 that the vaccines weren't halting the spread, and that the hospitals weren't being overrun despite the unmitigated and widespread Omicron wave, and that further measures were pointless. It was obvious that lots of people were getting rich from the restrictions, and others were in major distress. I personally know more people who died from economic despair during lockdowns than from COVID. Trudeau decided to turn the screws on a small number of truckers, and the rest is history.
My point is that if thousands of people are out on the street protesting something, it's likely not because they've been fooled. You have to consider the possibility that you've missed something.
Protests don't make legal arguments, they make political arguments. The point is to demonstrate that a mass of people are in support of an idea, not to win in a court of law. Focusing on the legalese is missing the point.
If you ask the people in your three examples, they would say that it is the institutions that are guilty of squalid sins like carelessness, idleness, won’t-learn-and-don’t-need-to-ask, you-can’t-tell-me-anything-about-my-job, pride, jealousy and greed. Jordan Peterson versus creeping infantilization and control by a bloated bureaucracy stuffed with activists. The convoy versus an incompetent public health bureaucracy and a shameless government willing to politicize vaccines. The Palestine protestors versus a bloated bureaucracy getting rich from apartheid.
In the end, it’s pure raw politics. And what they’ve done is very effective. Peterson kicked off a huge political backlash against weird activistspeak in corporations and government. The convoy spurred governments to drop pandemic restrictions. Israel is increasingly isolated. Politics is sometimes messy, and the squeakiest wheels often get the grease.
I felt genuinely nauseous reading this. The idea that it is "pure raw politics" just confirms what I am saying about the moral corruption. I'm not talking about politics, I'm talking about the law.
The law is its own branch of government. It doesn't operate by the same rules.
The idea that ends justify the means, and breaking the law is how to get things done, and how this not just corruption, but corrupting, and if it's corruption in response to a system that is, or is seen as corrupt, is not an improvement.
In all of this, the law matters, and facts still matter. There are thousands of people dead, and there have been charges of war crimes in both sides in the Israel-Palestinian conflict, and "Israel being increasingly isolated" is supposed to be a win?
The problem with this stance about decisions being made by a "public health bureaucracy," is that none of that decision-making is not federal. It's all provincial. Public health orders were set by each province. The decisions about whether people could work, or businesses could open or close, were entirely provincial, and they were often disastrous, both in terms of lives lost, which were in the tens of thousands, as well as crashing health care systems. The provinces wouldn't give people sick leave. The provinces took over the Canadian economy. And almost all of them were conservative.
It was hell - hell for everyone. Some provinces lifted restrictions, and a whole bunch of people - including people involved in the Convoy - have had their lives ruined. I feel terribly for them.
It's exactly what I said, treating politics as theatre, thinking it's like pro wrestling where it's not real and no one really gets hurt.
If there is a single thing that people fail to realize when it comes to government, is that the decisions made by politicians and courts are routinely life and death decisions. In emergencies, that increases by an order of magnitude.
The law is a derivative of politics, and is therefore necessarily conservative and backward-looking. Politics ultimately trumps law in a democracy. Even the Charter Of Right And Freedoms has a "Get Out Of Rights And Freedoms Card" in the notwithstanding clause. When the political and legal systems refuse to address injustice, or perpetrate absurdities, we can get these spasms of civil unrest. That's the straw breaking the camel's back, or the people noticing the emperor's new clothes. The successful protests are missionary activities that succeed in changing the political conversation. They give a push for politicians to change laws.
The Winnipeg general strike was a lawbreaking endeavour, with organizers convicted for seditious conspiracy. But it led to labour reforms that we still enjoy today.
The convoy brought to light massive dissatisfaction with the increasingly absurd pandemic restrictions. The new border ban for unvaccinated truckers was the last straw, but the situation was already untenable. In Jan 2022, everyone knew that the restrictions were pointless. After the convoy, everyone knew that everyone knew that the restrictions were pointless. And they went away shortly thereafter.
The conversation on Israel has shifted markedly in the wake of Oct 7. There are sanctions against certain Israeli criminals, arrest warrants out for cabinet members, weapons export bans, and wide condemnation from the international community. This was unthinkable 20 years ago. Was it because of protests? I don't know, but western politicians can't ignore the Palestinian issue anymore.
If one listens to Peterson's early protests, he saw the pronoun stuff as just the final straw in an long-term activist-driven and bureaucratically-enforced set of policy changes meant to infantilize and micromanage society generally and the university specifically. He would have just been another anonymous crank if his diagnosis didn't ring true for a lot of people.
This is just the messiness of self-governance. There is no adult in the room that is going to keep everyone in line. The law is an important social construct, but politics is the ultimate recourse. The law operates within and is legitimized by the political system, and protest is part of the political system.
A lot of this is completely wrong, on the facts, in terms of history and politics and the law.
The Winnipeg General Strike, for example - which also occurred during a pandemic - was an unmitigated disaster for workers, and it did not lead to any positive reforms. People were fired and lost their pensions with one day of work left, and no concessions were gained.
And in fact, many reforms had already been passed and put in place. Workers comp, minimum wage, pensions, workplace protections and inspections, ending child labour and bringing in votes for women had all been passed in the years leading up to the strike. It's been mythologized as an "origin moment" for the leaders of political parties in what has been a complete whitewash of history.
The idea that Peterson's fearmongering that if you don't call someone the name they ask you to, you'll go to jail, was taken credibly because he is seen as an authority, when he has no idea what he is talking about. A "diagnosis ringing true" is not the truth, which is part of the whole point I am making.
And it's also why the law is separate from politics in Canada and in the Westminster system, because politics must conform to the law, and the law is not just what legislators pass. There is also the common law, which is judge-made law based on precedent.
As for the pandemic restrictions, the idea that they were "increasingly absurd" when hospitals were still jammed to overflowing with people dying of covid is also revisionist history, and the mandate on vaccinations was about crossing the border into another country. Other countries, as a matter of legal and democratic sovereignty, can refuse entry to individuals who may spread an infectious disease.
It wasn't a "last straw" - the convoy was planned for months in advance, with the involvement of politicians, prior to the announcement of any such mandates, and as trucking associations who had been vaccinated pointed out, the industry was going begging for drivers within Canada, where no vaccine mandates were in place.
As for Palestine and Israel, there have been multiple attempts throughout the years to resolve it, including an actual agreement, the Oslo Accords, to create a two-state solution. The international criminal court charged both Hamas and Israel with crimes against humanity, including taking hostages, torture, killing civilians, and sexual assaults by soldiers.
That's not protest. What you're talking about is exactly what I am calling out as the problem, which is the total dehumanization of individuals and the belief that people are justified in breaking the law to achieve political goals. It's a form of both moral and legal corruption, and people tolerate it because they think they are justified or that they can do this stuff and still keep their hands clean from the consequences, which are usually a disaster.
I disagree with some of the narratives you put forward, but that is neither here nor there. The protest movements that are successful are necessarily successful because there is some real thing there that is worth protesting. Otherwise, the protest wouldn’t be successful.
We can see that with the predecessor to the Freedom Convoy - United We Roll. It didn’t achieve popular support because it was about weird western grievance/oil something or other. Freedom Convoy 2 fizzled because the pandemic restrictions were long gone.
Getting wrapped up in the minute details is missing the forest for the trees. If there’s an idea that gets thousands of people off the couch to march in the streets, it’s probably worth taking seriously.
They're not narratives. A narrative is a just-so story. I'm talking about fact-and evidence based history. That's part of the issue.
People may have a genuine grievance - and often do, but there is a long history of what used to be called "manias", riots and protests, especially during pandemics. People were relentlessly lied to about the nature of the pandemic - health, law, rights. They were actively misinformed, about covid, about vaccines, about public health orders, about who was responsible. It was accompanied by a deliberate international misinformation and propaganda campaign, including by the Canadian Centre for Constitutional Freedoms, Canadian and US media outlets.
People felt justified in acting that way because they had been lied to by individuals who told them that temporary, legal, state of emergency measures were not legal, when they were. Every court in Canada has ruled that, and rejected the arguments. This does matter. There was a deliberate and colossal effort to undermine authorities' legitimacy.
This doesn't mean people weren't suffering, and most of it was due to profound economic distress because provincial governments ordered people not to work, and ordered businesses to close in the interest of public health, while expecting them to bear the cost, and it broke a lot of people.
Throughout history, there have been mass movements and "crazes" driven by hate, fear, anger that aren't based on reality. Read "Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds" Witch hunts, the crusades, wars, and hatred whipped up against scapegoats. During the Black death, Jews were accused of poisoning wells and there were cities where thousands were killed. All that murdering got people out of the house and in the streets, but it wasn't Jews, it was bacteria being spread by fleas on rats.
The convoy protest in Ottawa had international backers, and advisors including Brad Wall. It was not an organic, grassroots protest, and it's stated goal - by organizers - was to topple the government, and have themselves installed.
These are people who were making death threats against politicians in 2019.
Your whole argument seems to be, "well it worked, so it must have been good somehow." That is the end justifying the means. It's considered a "win" because we're not supposed to think about all of the thousands of people who continued to die of Covid.
It's not theatre. It's not sport. It's a life or death business, but all people care about is a "win" for their side by any means possible. That is corruption, and it has been completely normalized.
I heartily disagree with the notion that people were fooled into rejecting the pandemic restrictions. It was clear in Jan 2022 that the vaccines weren't halting the spread, and that the hospitals weren't being overrun despite the unmitigated and widespread Omicron wave, and that further measures were pointless. It was obvious that lots of people were getting rich from the restrictions, and others were in major distress. I personally know more people who died from economic despair during lockdowns than from COVID. Trudeau decided to turn the screws on a small number of truckers, and the rest is history.
My point is that if thousands of people are out on the street protesting something, it's likely not because they've been fooled. You have to consider the possibility that you've missed something.
Protests don't make legal arguments, they make political arguments. The point is to demonstrate that a mass of people are in support of an idea, not to win in a court of law. Focusing on the legalese is missing the point.