this is not the first time we've seen this happen in the past few years so at this point it's kind of baffling why any kind of political dissent even attempts to be funded on GFM. there's so many other avenues that could be used instead, why do people keep trying to use this one for this purpose?
I'm not following the whole thing but i think part of the controversy is the person collecting the money is suspected to have run off with it or suspected to intend to run off with it, or something.
Regardless, i doubt people waving swastikas and demanding that democratic leaders be replaced with a dictatorship is exactly the type of "standing up to government" gofundme envisioned.
These truckers (and most antivaxxers) somehow think they're as stigmatized as the Jews were during WWII so they often wear yellow stars, compare themselves to Anne Frank, and have signs with the SS moniker / draw swastikas over the flags to demonstrate how oppressed they are.. a few made it on TV while the MP was talking to the news crews. Whenever there's anything remotely anti-government the Gadsen/Confederate battle flags make an appearance too. Just delightful behavior.
Small nit-pick, it is disingenuous to write “Gadsen/Confederate” flag when those are two totally separate things.
The Gadsen flag for most people is a symbol of independence and freedom. Historically it was not associated with slavery, the confederate secession, or the civil war.
99% of the Gadsden flags in my area are flying alongside confederate flags — likewise most of them in the protest pics I’ve seen. I know the flag’s history predates the Civil War and that it once upon a time was devoid of the current undertones, but alas, it’s (IMO) irredeemably tainted.
Counter anecdote. I've never seen a Gadsden flag flown by a confederate flag. It's mainly flown by libertarians and others who respect privacy and freedom.
Either way, confederate flags aren't normally flown in racist intent. Most people fly them to represent their heritage. The Dixie line, Outlaw country, etc.
I wouldn't be surprised to see a libertarian from deep Georgia fly both and not be racist in the slight.
I think you need to leave your bubble and learn about the people you are trying to demonize.
I (loosely) know plenty of people who fly the confederate flag -- they're all awful shitty racists. Including some of my family members. They all claim it's for heritage reasons as well (which is weird because we're in "the north").
The rest of your post was some anecdotal observation that you've never seen a Gadsden flag next to a confederate one.
You don't see the irony in how you started off saying there's no relationship between the Gadsden flag and the Confederate flag (implying the former shouldn't be tainted by the latter) -- and then moved to a full-throated defense of the confederate flag? Anyway, if you can't see it, not sure what to tell you. Cheers.
Wow that is a well researched position, thanks for sharing. First of all I do think think all confederate flags should be retired. The confederate flags represent an enemy the US defeated. No American should feel pride about those flags.
However, you’ve provided image links with no context but your own. I am not sure what any of those images represented back in the time. I’m also having a hard time finding information to support your position. Additionally, the Alabama link looks like a bush maybe? Definitely do not see the Gadsden iconography, but maybe it’s just a bad scan.
I will say the Battle Hymn link is tenuous at best. The timber rattle snake on the flag is representative of the original rebellious 13 colonies (on the wiki if you want to read more). The rattlers are really only dangerous if stepped on, hence the phrase on the flag. In the hymn, “Crushing the snake under heal” has religious background, and represents extinguishing evil.
To me the flag represents that the people of this country have the right to oppose the government. That is a fundamental ideal in the US. In that context, it makes sense why some extreme fringe groups would co-opt the flag when opposing the government.
However, that does not mean the flag represents extremist views to the vast majority of people who like to fly it.
Finally, my original comment said it was disingenuous to associate the two so closely like you did. At least say “and” instead of “/“. Someone not so familiar might assume they are literally the same thing.
The South co-opted the flag as a similar symbol of "opposing the government" like the Revolutionaries had, but in their case it was to oppose the abolition of slavery.
Here's a better pic of the Alabama flag -- it's a cotton plant with a snake under it and the phrase "noli me tangere" (touch me not): https://i.imgur.com/UIUZM4p.png
Explicitly spelling it out with the serpent imagery "Slave states ... the only way of preserving our slave property [and] our liberty, is a union with each other": https://i.imgur.com/iHkVl0H.png
It's fine, you can fly whatever flag you want for whatever reason you want, just be aware that the literal worst people in the country are flying the same one and that it was the rallying symbol for slavers.
Thanks for the additional info. Where did you find out about this? Is there a good book or something? It’s all very interesting.
As far as rallies flying the Gadsden, they’re also flying the America flags.
I get what you’re saying, and I’m not one to make overt politic statements IRL in public, like flying any flag besides the US and maybe state.
Again, to me and a lot of people the Gadsen represents rebels against tyrants. It even represents that to the objectionable people who use it. However, the idea of rebelling in order to upheld human rights is fundamental to the US.
I am not willing to throw out the ideals or the iconography just because I disagree with the current (and confederate) rebels. I certainly agree with the flags original use when the US gained its independence.
So while I won’t be publicly flying the flag because I don’t like to make public political statements, I might just hang it somewhere privately. IRL conversations like these are incredibly valuable to me and I believe in the general sentiment of the Gadsden.
It was literally the secession flag for multiple states during the civil war -- to the point where the most famous battle hymn explicitly frames victory for the Union as crushing the serpent.
That may be an inconvenient truth for those who want to avoid its tainted history but it's definitely not nonsense.
Don't take my word for it -- feel free to peruse the selection at your local confederate flag dealer:
Those first three images seem pretty unequivocally using nazi imagery to critique Canada. So they aren’t Nazis, they are people complaining that Canada is acting like Nazis.
I haven’t followed this but have heard friends saying that Nazis are participating. I would expect that this means some Nazis were participating. But these images don’t show that.
>While Kohlmann contends that Free Saxons is not an extremist group, German authorities say it is clearly so. The co-founder, Stefan Hartung, is a member of the district council for Germany’s National Democratic Party, a neo-Nazi party. Kohlmann professed to seek the return of the Saxon monarchy and independence for the state.
>He said the pandemic is an opportunity to reach more people. A “much broader range” of demonstrators join the weekly walks on Monday than anti-immigrant rallies.
>He doesn’t have to reach out to people, he said. They are coming to him.
>“It’s exploding,” he said of the group’s social media presence. The Free Saxons’ Telegram channel had 48,000 followers in August 2021, it has now grown to more than 140,000.
But “waving swastikas” isn’t very interesting unless it signifies Nazis right? It’s not bad to use swastikas to critique governments if you think they’re acting like Nazis.
The intent of swastikas in that situation isn’t pro-nazi or anti-Semitic.
I’m not sure what real Nazis in Germany being anti-vax has to do with our conversation. RFKJr is anti-vax too, what does that matter about this convoy.
I was trying to figure out if there were Nazis in the convoy. It seems like there aren’t.
It may be offensive to you, but it’s orders of magnitude different from being a nazi or neo nazi or nazi sympathizer.
Nazis were/are violent sociopaths who are a threat to people. They’re scary. People making nazi metaphors and deeply offending you aren’t a threat to people. That’s not newsworthy to me.
It’s like the people who think the Soup Nazi episodes of Seinfeld are deeply offensive. Because they compare delicious soup to Nazis. If TV guide reported that nazi paraphernalia was in those episodes it would be misleading. Seinfeld wasn’t pro nazi and there was no risk of them doing nazi things.
There are many people of different colours at the protests. Do you paint them as nazi because someone had a flag? I saw a flag from Norway, is Norway suddenly behind this?
If you're a member of a group and that group pulls out a Nazi flag, do you leave the group or do you expect random passers-by to think for a moment that maybe you aren't a Nazi sympathizer?
"Oh, everyone knows ipaddr! He hangs out with a bunch of Nazis that protest to entrench "born white" as the de facto ruling class of the country, kill all the gays and trans people, and to have two separate sets of laws, one that only applies to them, and one that applies to everyone else, but he's sweet as can be!"
I wouldn't assume someone carrying a Nazi flag means all of those things. I wouldn't assume everyone was gay or supported gay rights if someone held a rainbow flag. I might assume the person holding the flag has support for the flag but it's not necessarily true.
If the Nazi flag had Justin Trudeau's face on it I would instantly get the message that Trudeau is a Nazi not support for a group from a foreign country in the 1930s.
Lot of people working in overdrive to excuse displays of Nazi symbolism these days. Never would have thought I would see it on y-combinator but here we are.
> If you're a member of a group and that group pulls out a Nazi flag, do you leave the group or do you expect random passers-by to think for a moment that maybe you aren't a Nazi sympathizer?
Does this mean that you should be able to immediately end any protest you don't like just by going to it and then pulling out a Nazi flag when you get there?
Actor or not, you can’t paint an entire protest based on a fringe group of people waving racist flags. Imagine if you had some radical far-left hate groups showing up to a BLM protest, it would be unfair to say their protest is all about those hate groups.
It baffles me why people continue to judge movements they don't like based on their worst members and movements they do like based on their best intentions. I don't agree with their position but most of the truckers aren't Nazis any more than most BLM participants were looters.
If the group you're in pulls out Nazi flags and you don't leave the group, then you're endorsing Nazism the same as if your group starts to break into a house and you don't leave the group then you're an accessory to breaking into a house.
If one person pulls a Nazi flag or throws stones at riot cops, he is an agitator and must be outed. Throwing your hands up and leaving will leave you running circles, and is not very mature.
That's a different story, as evidenced by the fact that you told a different story than the one I told.
If you're in a group and someone starts throwing stones at a cop, you help the cop get that person (at the very least by getting away from that person so you don't interfere with the cop). If you're in a group and a person joins the group and pulls out a Nazi flag, then you kick that person out of the group unless your group sympathizes with Nazis.
If I see Nazi flags and Swastikas being waved proudly, and I say, "Man, I can't believe there are Nazis over there, I thought we first world countries absolutely hated Nazis!", why would that be a me problem?
Boogaloo Boys are regularly present at BLM protests. Does the failure to kick them out mean the people around them endorse the murder of police and the violent overthrow of the US government?
I'm continually amazed at just how easy it is to get people to completely dismiss the legitimacy and message of any movement. All you need is for someone to take a few photos of a unidentifiable individual in the vicinity who is carrying a Nazi flag.
Kolfage was indicted, along with Steve Bannon and two other co-defendants, on federal charges of defrauding hundreds of thousands of "We Build the Wall" donors by diverting money that was raised to personal use. Federal prosecutors said that despite "repeatedly assuring donors" that Kolfage would not be paid, the defendants engaged in a schemed to pass $350,000 to Kolfage "which he used to fund his lavish lifestyle." Kolfage was separately indicted in May 2021 on federal charges of defrauding the IRS and filing false tax returns.
I'm not surprised at all that they're ensuring things like this don't happen again.
I'm still curious how these sites skirt banking regulations, for what is essentially what PayPal was originally (advertised as sending/ transferring money, but between delays and dark patterns, it really ends up in an account under their control, at least temporarily).
If they're going to lock or delete an account (regardless of reason), there should be a requirement that funds are either paid to the benefactor or refunded immediately.
There are clear definitions, regulations, and penalties for operating as a dollar holding/ transferring financial institution.
Especially since the percentage paid as a fee makes it essentially a defaulted account, or at least a service not provided and funds not returned.
These types of donation accounts have a long history at brick banks of helping those in need (while taking a hefty percentage off the top). It's not a new idea.
I suspect it's more likely this isn't lack of regulation, so much as a loophole or stretched legal definition. Maybe someone here is familiar with their regulatory classification. You don't launch something like this without reasonably ensuring the feds aren't coming after you.
> If they're going to lock or delete an account (regardless of reason), there should be a requirement that funds are either paid to the benefactor or refunded immediately.
Gofundme partially locked the funds because they don’t know who the benefactor is anymore (according to their official statement). Who gets the money? Does it just go to every person in the city with a semi truck or is it just going to some random person that we hope won’t take the money and run?
As for refunds, I would be willing to bet anyone that donated could go ask gofundme for a refund right now and get their money back. Sure they could mass refund everyone right away, but it seems like a bad policy to do a mass refund whenever the benefactor becomes unclear. It would be incredibly annoying to fund a huge project and the point of contact for the project quits and for all the funding to instantly get refunded.
I suspect it's a case of "show me the person and I'll show you the TOS violation", or whatever other reason that can be used to shut down donations as the cause goes viral and peaks.
It's a problem that is suspiciously one-sided, at least as far as 404ing/disabling the linked page, locking the account, and pausing donations while being resolved.
This Crypto bullshit has to stop -- ConstitutionDAO did not give ownership to its stake holders. It was a glorified IoU, a private fiat version of stock/equity into the so called Constitution copy. All the power was held by an LLC and two dudes.
I'm not a lawyer, but this reads like offering shares in a private company. No matter how you knock this up, a corporation or individual ends up with ownership and control in the real world. You need a real-world way to enforce whatever they promise, which is either through civil law via contract or criminal law via fraud.
All crypto is is a signature on a document. These documents are not guaranteed to hold up in court, especially when there isn't good case law around whatever you invented to get around existing laws.
That commenter seems a bit confused, yeah. But what is it shilling Don? Cryptocurrencies in general? I doubt they’re shilling the failed ConstitutionDAO?
“shills” to me are more like commenters such as rasengan, who is actively advertising his cryptocurrency-as-DNS nonsense whenever given the opportunity.
yes, an exchange would hold similar power if fiat was desired at all, but it wouldn't prevent the crowdfunding from taking place. and because the crowdfund would still occur, the recipient can find an exchange or trade desk that would do the trade for fiat. right now, fiat crowdfunding sites are acting as the platform and exchange while being beholden to a payment processor behind the scenes. in the crypto model, the platform is just a GUI over something that can be interacted with either way, and the exchange is separate and optional.
so because there are trillions of dollars in crypto value already and many individuals already own that crypto, they would just collect from them to their own address or smart contract. websites just become GUIs for helping that and are also optional. then if fiat is actually desired for the cause, they can call any random trade desk and do a big order for fiat and have cash in the organization's bank account. for their supporters that don't already own crypto, it would be some friction for them to acquire it, but forget about those people and don't view how it would work from their perspective as the main perspective.
More specifically there are some best practices that would prevent anyone, including a determined state sponsored adversary, from being able to seize or block this. Without the best practices there are some theoretical capabilities.
In any case, an organization like go fund me could not bow to corporate policy, public pressure, or a state backchannel, to prevent this.
So with or without due process, the people can still form capital and act.
The worst thing is that people celebrate when anything that takes power from the established get squashed.
People may not agree with these guys, but being selective here means that other legimate causes may not get funded.
And I'm pretty sure that crowfunded strikes scare the shit out of some of the big boys since it takes away their leverage. They are gonna stomp this out at the first opportunity.
What GoFundMe offers is a platform, easy place to fundraise for cause XYZ. Anyone can create a site and accept donation through crypto, but without the platform, it's a bit harder.
Also the biggest problem here is that the people fundraising weren't saying what they would do with the money, it's unclear if they were even part of the organizing committee or authorized to fundraise on their behalf.
Yeah, seriously. What is up with all that tar sand oil ruining our environment from Canada? Build your own pipelines and don’t ruin our tribal land down south, please.
Yeah, but general damage to the environment is better than destroying a specific group of people's homeland. Oil pipelines leak frequently. An oil leak in some tribal lands could poison the water and make the tribal lands unlivable for years.
Why is that less of a concern than the environment as a whole?
It's no more right to justify that than it would be to justify putting all of the country's debt on a single person or taking all of the pollution in the atmosphere but smothering individual children with it so that everyone else can breathe freely.
It adds a new risk that a pipeline could become damaged which could leak into the environment which could hurt land owned by one Indian tribe.
So we bring in huge ships with oil from the middle east that often run into trouble and spill into the ocean. The money we send allows dictators to force millions into slavery and prevents women from having basic human rights.
There are many reasons why a pipeline was preferable to the status quo
We could dig a canal from South Carolina to Oregon so that ships can travel from China to the East Coast of America with a minimum of detour and save hundred of thousands if not millions of gallons of ship fuel every year. That's more environmental savings right there.
It would also create millions of American jobs and pour trillions into the economy with the increase in speed and quantity of shipping that can arrive for distribution, and curtail piracy around the Horn of Africa.
I mean do we really think the pipeline was built for environmental reasons? Since when do oil companies make decisions to maximize environmental- friendliness?
A lawyer for the movement gave a press conference today, saying approximately the following. Because it is complicated for GoFundMe to distribute funds to individual truckers, GFM is exercising heightened due diligence, as they should. Meanwhile, the movement is setting up a nonprofit company, with all the proper auditing and accounting mechanisms in place. Once everything is ready, GFM will distribute the money to a trust fund managed by the company, and truckers will issue claims against the fund.
The money should first go to Ottawa residents besieged and subjected to 24 hour honking, diesel fumes and noise from engines running through the night.
Then there's revenue loss for the businesses forced to shut down and wage loss for their employees.
Class Action Suit could rightfully clean out the GoFundMe.
As an outsider this movement looks mostly peaceful and legit. Sometimes you have to endure some protests to get an idea/movement through. I respect them and hope their voice is heard. Canadian truckers are fighting for Canadians rights and freedoms.
Still, violent rioters are everywhere. Sadly, in Europe we're already used to them. Any excuse is valid for them to destroy public property. Some of them are "professionals" and travel to any protest in Europe just to vandalize and destroy. Some of them get detained and identified.
Even if GoFundMe don't want to support this campaign they should refund all the unpaid donations back to the respecting patrons quickly with an apology.
In Europe several countries are already removing all restrictions and allowing people to live like it's 2019 again (Denmark[1], Finland [2], UK[3]...). Even in my southern European country are slowly removing them.
COVID-19 is evolving from a pandemic to an endemic disease. Stop pretending that countries will be able to remove all traces of it. We'll have to live with it from now and on.
Things like vaccination passes have been proven useless against the latest variants (Delta, Omicron). Vaccinated and non-vaccinated spread the virus the same. And also both groups get sick of Omicron (even if this variant is "milder" I don't recommend going through it).
Outdoor masking makes no sense since transmission at open spaces is really low. Only indoors or in dense crowds (concerts, really busy streets) masks make sense and work. But... Only the FFP3 or FFP2/KN95 [4] have a good protection (cloth, surgical masks have only a little effect). And that protection is limited in time.
Oddly enough, countries like Canada, Australia, New Zealand instead of removing all measures seem to double down on them.
okay so this is an unlawful protest that has a detrimental impact on residents, the environment, and local business. Can someone explain to me why this is tolerated and why these people are not simply being arrested?
What it reminds me of is that 2014 standoff with the Bundy family on federal land in the US or farmers in France. Some groups can just do whatever they want apparently.
I don't really want to get into the weeds here, but when you take a step back and squint a little bit it's hard to tell if this message was written by someone complaining about Canadian Truckers or about the 2020 Summer riots. Maybe let's lean a little more towards letting people express themselves and not bringing in the people with guns?
There are peaceful ways to protest and expressing oneself, occupying a city this way and stealing food from a homeless shelter is not one of them that should be tolerated.
Edit: See my comment below for sources on homeless shelter
It is just not him saying this happened, of course he would use it for his political advantage.
I was just trying to show that the homeless shelter claim is beyond just random stranger on the internet ( he argubly is more credible than me however Low that maybe)
> While the sheriff's department said protesters at one point blocked entrances and exits at the hospital, no videos or photos confirmed that was the case.
[snip, most of the article about the shooting itself]
> Rather, video footage showed a handful of deputies standing in a driveway (apparently an entrance to the hospital’s emergency room), while the small group of protesters paced up and down a sidewalk feet away from them.
> At one point, deputies detained a journalist with LA’s NPR station, KPCC, who was reporting on the small protest, as well as a male protester who “refused to comply” with deputies’ demands to leave the area.
> The sheriff’s department said the reporter, Josie Huang, ignored deputies’ repeated commands and did not present “proper” press credentials. But she said and videos of her arrest show she didn’t have time or space to react to deputies orders before they shoved her and forcefully took her into custody. In one video, she can be heard shouting “I’m a reporter… I’m with KPCC” as officers push her to the ground. They cited her with obstructing justice, though KPCC is urging authorities to drop the charge.
Adding onto this to say that the LA Sheriff's Department has less than zero credibility when it comes to any matter concerning either race or protests against police action. They literally have violent and racist gangs operating in that department. There is a reason why "Google LASD Gangs" has become a meme in LA and LA-centric circles of the internet. It is a known problem and almost no one in power is working to fix it.
I'm not sure that article is useful to your point, as it states that the Sheriff's office was claiming they were blocking the hospital, but that "The Independent could find no evidence of them blocking emergency exits."
I called 911 during one of those summer 2020 riots and got put on hold for close to 10 minutes. Tough luck for anyone who had a heart attack or stroke during those riots I guess?
I had the exact same take on the riots in 2020 and I don't condone rioting in general. Disrupting public order, destroying property, or just causing economic damage and thinking the law is just some suggestion seems to be an increasing and pretty bad trend.
Expressing yourself is fine, disturbing public life because you don't get your will isn't. That's not how civilized societies resolve issues. This is now apparently a controversial take on multiple political sides.
I agree with you, but I also see violence as an inevitable consequence of growing inequality. If we continue to let wealth inequality grow, more and more people will feel the game is unfair, and choose to play another game, even if the "rising tide that lifts all boats" is lifting their boat somewhat.
It's not as if everyone who committed crimes while those 2020 protests were going on got away with it. They did arrest people.
And generally arresting looters and rioters seems quite popular on both sides of the political spectrum. They often didn't have anything to do with the protests, and were just taking advantage of the police being busy.
That was the messsage being blasted at max volume by CNN, NYT, WaPo, and the rest. They were outraged when the capitol police responded to far left insurrectionists setting the national mall on fire. So yes, it is safe to say that was a mainstream viewpoint.
I don't think the protests were actually popular among every single liberal, but it was considered taboo to say anything against them. I lost several friends during this period, expressing my concerns about the protests, and more specifically the organization behind them. I was called an Uncle Tom.
My former workplace hired outside therapists to attend to us people of color, and held special town halls and discussions. Meanwhile, I was losing sleep because the local strip mall was being looted, and I had to listen to gu shots all night. I spent one night sleeping on the floor of my living room with my guns due to reports of break-ins in my neighborhood.
I'll totally agree that it was a bit of a taboo to speak badly of the protests in some circles, but the enthusiasm for the whole thing quietly died among many people for exactly the reasons you describe.
Blocking a street for many days is typically considered illegal.
I'm not saying that they should be prevented from protesting (and I strongly disagree with that protest), just answering the question as to why this might be illegal.
Do you not think there are laws everywhere about blocking traffic? When you reach a destination in your car, do you just park in the middle of the street?
I'm asking you since you brought it up. And the question was not a hypothetical about someone parking in the middle of the street but specifics about what laws have specific people broken here.
I don't, but I think of it as normal, because commercial vehicles including delivery trucks do it all day every day in the area that I live in. They do it in the right lane of city streets that have two lanes each way, and they do it on streets where you have to cross over a double yellow to get around.
Aside from that, I have lived in the approximate center of a moderate sized city (metro area of ~1 million) and noticed that there are occasional, authorized events that take over and prevent any and all traffic. Bicycle races for instance.
Assuming one isn't vehemently against a protest in the first place, debating blocking traffic boils down to the technical requirements for permits and coordination with authorities. It's only a shocking breakdown of public order if people strongly oppose the underlying cause.
IIRC, bill C-51 defined this as an act of terrorism. Wonder how that's going to play out. When it's indigenous people blocking a pipeline, the SWAT teams come out.
>The whole point of protesting is to make ppl uncomfortable. Activists take that discomfort w/ the status quo & advocate for concrete policy changes. Popular support often starts small & grows. To folks who complain protest demands make others uncomfortable... that’s the point.
Some level of discomfort is ok. Some is not. There is a line somewhere. Usually it involves the level of violence involved (terrorists after all are just making people very "uncomfortable" [what's more uncomfortable than being blown up] to achieve a political end.).
To make the ad absurdum argument explicit: if your argument for why this protest is ok applies to 9/11 to the same extent that it applies to this protest, maybe its a bad argument. That doesn't mean that this protest is neccesarily not ok, just that this is a really bad argument to use to prove the point.
> unlawful protest that has a detrimental impact on residents, the environment, and local business
So every protest that has ever happened ?
If anything, the associated violence and demands of the protest are pretty tame in comparison to what the BLM or Indian Farmers protests demanded.
It is easy to dismiss the protestors because the reason for the protests sounds unimportant within our peer groups. However, a Democracy bestows equal rights onto people, and the validity of a protest is determined more so by its ability to be visible (the emotional fervor) than the merit of its points.
> Some groups can just do whatever they want apparently
Ottawa, being the capital, gets two types of protests. The legal ones who get a permit have their route planned out in advance, and the police shut down the streets while the protest occurs. It's sort of like a parade. It's inconvenient and annoying, but no single street gets shut down for more than a couple of hours.
And it's not just the agreeable protests that get permits. They pretty much have to give a permit to anybody who asks for one.
For the illegal protests like the G20 occupation and when the indigenous people blocked a freeway exit, the police come in fast and hard.
> If anything, the associated violence and demands of the protest are pretty tame in comparison to what the BLM or Indian Farmers protests demanded.
Not in Canada.
edit: there's a third type of protest, the small ones. You're welcome to stand on the sidewalk with a sign and yell as long as you don't interfere with anybody.
> legal ones who get a permit have their route planned out in advance
So the kind of protests that don't matter ?
A protest, by definition, is meant to display discontent from the masses because conventional means have failed. If a protest does not hit where it hurts, it isn't an effective protest. If shouting loudly worked, then twitter outrage would have been sufficient for pressuring the Govt. into accepting their demands.
A slight tangent, but this is exactly why I dislike 'permitted' or 'side walk' protests. You're walking down a pre-cleared street supporting an already popular movement with institutional support to show what exactly ? It reeks of the kind of slacktivism that has been memed to death over the last decade.
The people are clearly expressing their disillusionment with the overreach of the Govt. in terms of the intrusion of privacy permitted to the Govt. by law. If you are disillusioned by the system, of course you'd just extra-legal means to display your discontent.
Now, the Govt. ofc is allowed to react with force. If anything, I support removal of actively destructive protests with force. But, the current Canadian Govt. has supported far more egregious protests in the other nations (specifically the farmers protests and 2020 riots). So, I am enjoying a bit of schadenfreude seeing Trudeau get a piece of his own medicine.
This is all fine and dandy but these people aren't protesting the correct part of the government that has authority to enact the changes they want. That is, if we are talking about mask, and vaccine mandates. They need to protest their provincial governments for those changes.
The Federal demands they have are for our democratic government to resign and instill a dictatorship made up of people of their choosing...
Why the fuck should anyone listen to these people?
10,000 people marching through downtown get lots of attention and they get heard. They shut down the downtown core for most of a day, and inconvenience a lot of people. They attract lots of media attention.
One can listen to the organizers directly to find out who they are and what they want:
https://rumble.com/vtp2lw-freedom-convoy-organizers-press-co...
You may agree or not agree, but as an added bonus you'll learn something about the economics of the trucking business.
Please remember that whatever you think you’re learning about the economics of the trucking business, the people involved in this represent less than 10% of the truckers in Canada — and they also have no clue how little their protest matters as it is the _American_ mandate preventing the moronic holdouts from crossing the the border.
They explain their position on the American side of the problem in the interview itself. I have no idea whether they are right or wrong, but they are not morons.
You should seek to understand before parroting talking points like this.
First, federal jurisdiction includes: mandating vaccine passports at the border, firing employees in federally-regulated industries that are unvaccinated, and preventing unvaccinated Canadians from being able to travel via plane or train domestically. There is also evidence to suggest that the Canadian government pressured the US government into implementing their own mandate on cross-border transportation to match ours.
Second, over 30% of Canadians polled support these specific protests, and over 50% of Canadians want to see an end to all provincial and federal mandates. In the face of omicron there is zero science to support vaccine passports or other restrictions, and frankly there never was.
Third, many vaccinated Canadians like myself are supportive of peaceful protests aimed at restoring basic charter rights even for those we might disagree with. I've always thought it disgusting that Canadians cheered on while unvaccinated Canadians lost their jobs or couldn't send their kids to university... this is exactly why minority rights are so important.
Finally, it's common for protests to occur in Ottawa about all manner of issues because it's the nation's capital. Suggesting that none of the protestors understand who has jurisdiction over what is false.
Oh, I _do_ understand. I just happen to realize that the people who claim that there is "zero science to support vaccine passports or other restrictions, and frankly there never was" do not know the first thing that they’re talking about. There is substantial evidence in both epidemiological data _and_ in socio-psychological data that all of the measures taken over the last year have worked (and it is, in fact, the waffling inconsistency and grift of populist governments like Doug Ford’s which have caused the waves to slope the way that they have).
Amongst governments that have been driven by science and not by pseudo-scientific bullshit covering crypto-capitalist garbage (like New Zealand), the subsequent waves have been smaller and more contained—and they have _not_ returned to the levels of lockdowns required. What makes vaccine passports required are people who refuse to give the first damned care about their fellow citizens. AND THEY WORK. Vaccination appointment went _up_ when SAQ implemented vaccine passport requirements.
There are no charter rights being violated either by the lockdowns or by vaccine mandates. Your statement about "minority rights" is extremely disingenuous, as minority rights are not about people who _choose_ not to do something based on misinformation and disinformation, but on characteristics of who they are (skin colour, Indigenous, etc.), where they are from, the languages they speak, their gender and/or orientation, the culture from which they hail, and/or religions that they practice (and courts tend _not_ to pay much attention to any claim of minority status without historical evidence of discrimination against claimed minorities). The assholes in the Truck Tantrum are — by and large — WASPy conspiracy believers. They are the exact _opposite_ of minority, and exactly why they need to be laughed out of town.
I have no problem with them protesting. I also have no problem with laughing at them because they are claiming things which are demonstrably false and are whining over loss of privilege as if it were the same as real discrimination. People who _choose_ to be antisocial like the Flu Truck Convoy jackasses don’t get to claim that they’re discriminated against because society tells them to take a hike.
>The assholes in the Truck Tantrum are — by and large — WASPy conspiracy believers. They are the exact _opposite_ of minority, and exactly why they need to be laughed out of town.
Ignoring the question of if it's unlawful or not; mass arrests are kind of difficult to do, and mass towing is kind of difficult to do (and I don't know if tow truck drivers are aligned with those in the convoy, but they might be?). Neither of these things are without consequences, either. As long as the protesters are mostly peaceful and respecting property (which I think seems to be the case, but I haven't spent a lot of time looking into this), encouraging the group to disperse without use of force would probably have better outcomes than escalating the conflict with arrests or towing.
Now they can’t drive away the <N> trucks in downtown Ottawa. You just exhausted all your leverage with them when you decided to throw the book at them.
You call a tow truck driver. They say “I don’t have a class 3 tow truck, there’s no way I can move a semi.”
You call a class 3 tow truck driver. They know they’re risking their reputation with the trucking industry, so they refuse. If they’re the trolling sort, they say they have COVID.
Now what? There’s a lot of mess to clean up, and you don’t have the equipment you need to do it.
At some point in that line of events, where do the bulldozers come out? Is the government obligated to preserve the condition of vehicles that are effectively a roadblock? (It probably is, but at the same time .... how far are you going to get in suing the government for siezing/dismantling/bulldozing your vehicle?)
> okay so this is an unlawful protest that has a detrimental impact on residents, the environment, and local business. Can someone explain to me why this is tolerated and why these people are not simply being arrested?
I would say, just end those unlawful and unscientific vaccine mandates that have a detrimental impact on societies and businesses, so everyone can move on.
Said like someone with an incorrect idée fixe instead of actually looking at (a) jurisdictions where they’ve worked (b) actual epidemiological and socio-psychological science. There are mistakes made by scientists during this pandemic (downplaying the efficacy of masks for months). Recommendations on vaccine mandates and vaccine passports aren’t one of them.
> In freezing a lower court opinion that allowed the regulation to go into effect nationwide, the majority sent a clear message the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, charged with protecting workplace safety, overstepped its authority. In contrast, the justices said that a separate agency could issue a rule to protect the health and safety of Medicare and Medicaid patients.
So they made an exception for healthcare workers in order to protect "the health and safety of Medicare and Medicaid patients". Patients are only protected by vaccination of healthcare workers if the vaccine is sterilizing, which is not the case (science).
We’re talking about Canada. I don’t care what SCOTUS says because it has less than zero jurisdiction over Canada, where all of the lockdowns, restrictions, and vaccine mandates have _already_ passed multiple levels of constitutional review.
Strictly speaking, SCOTUS erred in its decision (other vaccine mandates in the past _have_ passed constitutional muster), but that’s unsurprising given that there are no thoughtful conservatives on the bench. Even Scalia, one of the most ignoble Justices to ever serve on SCOTUS was smarter than any other conservative on the bench now and would _likely_ have disagreed with this decision. Most of the recent justices have no business being on the court either as wholly unqualified or because of unconstitutional abrogation of duty by the legislative branch under Mitch McConnell.
If all it takes to invalidate this human right is a couple agent provocateur's causing some violence. Then protesting is essentially illegal for everyone. That's not how it works. Which is also why the ottawa police are backing off and saying the military has to do it. The military backed off saying nope.exe.
>Can someone explain to me why this is tolerated and why these people are not simply being arrested?
It's a peaceful protest that has every right to exist.
>What it reminds me of is that 2014 standoff with the Bundy family on federal land in the US or farmers in France. Some groups can just do whatever they want apparently.
Many great videos on there that make it abundantly clear that the media has quite falsely mislabeled this lawful protest. If I might make a suggestion, analyze your media source's bias. You seem to be listening to the yellow journalism.
A small number of people should not distract from the meaning of the protests. A few people did similar things during the BLM riots, do you think everyone involved with BLM is a Nazi or do you hold double standards?
>"But yeah, the last thing you should do to someone with a swastika flag is call them a Nazi. It's a cheap shot."
What you're actually doing is taking the evidence that unidentified individuals with a Nazi flag showed up at a demonstration involving thousands of people and ascribing that as representative of the entire movement. That's the cheap shot. There is no way for any protest movement to prevent some dudes from showing up with Nazi flags and getting their picture taken at it.
I once saw a LaRouche protest describe the same way. The LaRouchies are crazy, but they're not Nazis - What they'd done was Photoshop a picture of Obama with a picture of Hitler.
The people against this protest are literally for a closely aligned group of state and business interests to override private citizens' bodily and medical autonomy. It's hard to imagine something more fascist than the people against this protest.
I'm not even saying that to express support for the protestors, Fascism is a seductive ideology for a reason and it's currently exactly as popular as everyone thinks, it's just not confined to the 'other side'. It's getting increasingly absurd when someone labels people who, if they're doing anything wrong, are arguing for too many individual rights as fascists. People need to just accept that they're on the fascist side of the argument and proceed from there, acknowledging what their ideology does when it goes too far.
If you don't know the truth, at least try not to lie. Nothing I've seen in the dozens of downtown live streams jives with the smearing I've witnessed on places like r/pics and the news. It appears from the commentary that there is such vitriol towards the protesters that I wouldn't put it past some opposition group to fly defamatory flags that have no apparent connection to why they are protesting. A prominent trusted newspaper even ran a cartoon presenting the trucks as fascist... for protesting against a perceived government overreach. What kind of cognitive dissonance is going on there?
If your standard is a Nazi flag nearby means everyone is a Nazi then if some random person came to a rally or protest that you support you would consider yourself a Nazi right?
>"An Alberta MP said he was not aware a person was flying an upside down Canadian flag with a swastika on it behind him"
Someone used a red marker to draw a swastika on a Canadian flag. Big difference. I suspect it is being shared in such a way to make unengaged readers think that it was a bona-fide Third Reich banner.
Amazing that the 100 IQ elites all think they want a working class uprising, but when it happens they panic and smear them as every -ist and -ism label in the book.
It's fine to disagree with the protesters, but at least be honest about what they want. They've been squeezed off online platforms and out of mainstream discourse, and this is what happens when it bubbles over.
What gets me is the way that people will see a picture of a swastika and immediately brand everyone involved as a racist, but then turn around and say that any wrongdoing that happened during a protest for a cause they do agree with was just a couple of bad apples who had nothing to do with the movement. Does that really only happen on one side?
What if you don't see the swastika? Should you be branded a Nazi?
What happens if there is a good cause that you support and a random person comes with a Nazi flag? Should all the people leave? Protesting would effectively never be able to happen.
There was a video of them kicking out some dude with a confederate flag. I’ve only seen the Nazi flag in a couple pictures and seemed like it was never in the middle of the rally.
If you’re trying to discredit a group of people it’s pretty low hanging fruit to send people in with a Nazi flag for great photo ops to show the masses.
Dang, I watched you single out all of my comments, and then later go back for a second pass to flag the other posters too after you read my profile description, so as to preserve the illusion of impartiality. Calling my posts "flamewar comments" implies I'm being uncivil, and this is how the HN echo chamber gets groomed. Please be more conscious of your own biases in the future.
What a sinister way of saying that I do things in sequence! Would I could do it in parallel—the time it would save—but my yogic powers don't go that far.
I didn't look at your profile description. I'm not moderating you, or anyone else, in particular. It's just a job, and quite routine.
Comments can be flamewar without being uncivil—there are lots of ways to spread flamewar. One is generic ideological rhetoric. Please stop posting like that here: it's boring, and makes HN threads much worse. We want curious conversation, and generic ideological rhetoric is the far opposite of that.
"Echo chamber" is the sort of thing people say when they imagine that the system, the moderators, and the community are biased against them. But the opposite team feels exactly the same way. It's a mechanical bias:
In theory I agree wholeheartedly, however in practice HN consistently allows off-topic far left political spam while marking any attempts to combat it as a "flame war". This phenomenon is more than a psychological bias: it's a self-reinforcing artifact of HN's demographics.
I offer you a challenge:
I will provide you with quantitative data that I am correct on this issue, and in return you remove the restrictions on my account.
First, the restrictions on your account are because you've been breaking the site guidelines. The way to get those removed is to provide evidence that you've stopped breaking the guidelines and won't break them in the future. That has nothing to do with any of this other stuff—it's not as if being right about bias or demographics (if in fact you are) would make it ok for you to break HN's rules, although people often act as if that non sequitur were true.
Second, it's not obvious how to study this kind of thing quantitatively without making interpretive calls, and whoever controls the interpretive calls completely controls the outcome of the study. In other words, all this would do is reproduce the same cake at a meta level, just with a distorting layer of pseudo-objective icing. The chance that anyone with strong ideological passions is going to run some quantitative analysis about this and come up with anything but the conclusion they already believed, is approximately zero. Has there ever been any study of this sort that did that?
I'm not saying that a good quantitative analysis is impossible, but it would need to rigorously account for this effect (of people reading into the data what they already perceive and believe). How to do that is not obvious, and any 'offer' that comes without a serious plan for it screams bogusness to me. I don't mean to imply that you're intentionally making a bogus offer, just that one would be foolish to take it.
Besides all that, the one empirical analysis you've offered so far ("I watched you single out all of my comments, and then later go back for a second pass to flag the other posters too after you read my profile description") was completely imaginary. That's hardly unique to you—it's just devilishly difficult to perceive these things objectively. The mind simply can't resist its own narratives.
All of my comments have been made to break through the HN echo chamber, and if I can objectively demonstrate my hypothesis that lopsided moderation is reinforcing that same echo chamber, then the entire notion of the restrictions being due to supposed violations of the guidelines is a moot point.
My initial thinking is to use a text classifier to assign political alignments, or lack thereof, to HN comments. From there I can compile statistics about each of the comment classes. This entire process can be done in an executable jupyter notebook for visibility and verification of results.
> All of my comments have been made to break through the HN echo chamber
You could justify anything that way. That is the sort of thing garden-variety trolls come up with.
> then the entire notion of the restrictions being due to supposed violations of the guidelines is a moot point
That doesn't follow from your premise at all.
Edit: btw, I thought I'd deleted this - I think it failed to go through because of a network failure. I tell people not to do these tit-for-tat things and try to avoid them myself for the most part (which often means succumbing to temptation and then editing or deleting after the fact). Since you've replied, though, I'll leave it up now.
Dang, it's your choice. We can all learn something from this small scale experiment and come out a little more well informed on HN's community dynamics, or we can let it grow into something larger. Again, totally up to you.
The ACLU rather famously defended the nazi rights to free speech. Are they evil?
The paradox of tolerance is just an excuse to oppress the people you disagree with. Actual nazis are a minute fraction of the population. People see the idiocy and point it out.
Meanwhile, Communism has killed a couple hundred million people (vs 6 million for the nazis) and you can see tons of communist flags at any of the recent left-leaning protests.
The tolerance paradox doesn’t get even the thought of a mention when this happens. It’s just a tool of ideologically driven sophists.
Yeah. It's easy to kick Nazi's out of the groups I join, because so far no group I've ever been a part of has been attractive to Nazis. I would wager that's the case for most people.
It's a racist conspiracy theory and a common bad faith white nationalist talking point. It doesn't matter who says it, you should not bring it up as messageboard scorekeeping.
The charitable interpretation of bringing this up and making it part of your public internet footprint is 'in a heated discussion about strongly held political beliefs, you inadvertently referenced a white nationalist talking point'.
The uncharitable one is 'you're a nazi'.
That's the only thing I'm trying to convey to you.
The charitable interpretation of your post and making it part of your public internet footprint is 'in a heated discussion about strongly held political beliefs, you inadvertently said something is a conspiracy theory when it is not.
The uncharitable one is 'you support white replacement'.
That's the only thing I'm trying to convey to you.
Hitler was a vegetarian. Hitler was a Nazi. Does that mean vegetarians are Nazis? I don't think so. Just because some Nazis point something out doesn't mean that everyone who points it out is a Nazi.
But Naziism isn't a particular flag or moustache that everyone feels reflexive intellectual disgust towards. It's a seductive ideology harnessing the reflexive disgust of large groups of people. It's not defeated by punching or shooting 'the bad people' but by moral humility and careful consideration of second-order effects at the ballot box.
No moral self-examination, disgust of the outgroup, arguing against private citizens' medical and bodily autonomy... does any of that sound familiar? What do you do when you realise you were the Nazi all along?
Perhaps i missed it, but how many other protests in canada involve defiling grave sites, stealing food from the homeless, etc.
I can certainly agree that humans tend to demonize the sins of the other while turning a blind eye to their own side's, but is that really what is happening here? To me it seems like this protest is of a different type.
The BLM protests ended up in a lot worse. A few murders, a LOT of property damage, and a whole lot more. And yet they were largely supported by the media despite the bad apples.
(Not saying they were 100% peaceful,i know there was some unrest in montreal, but my understanding is it was quite minor and nothing like what you are describing)
No, they don’t. You won’t get a reply. There were BLM protests across Canada, but they were widely considered to be peaceful, and the turnouts were minuscule compared to Those in the us.
My understanding is that they were very clearly comparing the Canadian government to Nazis, not expressing support for Nazis, but at this point I'd have to see photos to be sure.
My own image searches only turn up upside-down Canadian flags, "Fuck Trudeau" slogans, and stuff about "freedom". I'd have to think that if somebody really wanted to undermine them and had such a photo, they'd have posted it.
It does describe the protest as "mostly peaceful". As that phrase is a little notorious, I laughed a little. Since NYT staff spend a lot of time on Twitter, I imagine they know the significance. But hey, if it was peaceful and they said so, then they've done their job ok there.
The headline does have some negative connotations: The convoy "descends on Ottowa" (not, I dunno, "protesters gather to demand justice").
And there is one sentence that is incendiary enough that it really needs more context:
"Some of them carried Canadian flags upside down; at least one flag had swastikas drawn on it."
This invites the reader to draw one conclusion, but the meaning may be something else, as in my first paragraph.
So I'd have to see to be sure. But no photos are forthcoming.
Wearing a mask and mass genocide are not the same thing, they're not even in the same ballpark. If anything it weakens their entire argument. If you have any understanding of the holocaust you can in no way shape or form compare it to taking precautions during a global pandemic with a mask in public. All I see is a bunch on people that so badly want to be viewed as victims. I don't like wearing a mask either, but if me wearing a mask reduces the spread of a virus that has literally killed millions, I'll wear it, it doesn't hurt me, I'm not going to cry about it or use nazi symbolism to make a case.
I'm not following you. The Jews were forced to wear the star of David as a form of humiliation. The people today wearing them are doing it by choice and it's in poor taste.
People are being forced to wear masks as a form of humiliation. People are being forced to present their vaccine cards as a form of humiliation. People are choosing to wear stars of David as a comparison of the two.
I can explain it to you, but I can't understand it for you.
This is blatantly false, and the Jews didn't have a choice which is why no one takes these pretend victims seriously. If you're feeling humiliated that says more about you then it does the people that understand how simple barriers(masks) work. Thanks for the explanation, it's laughable at best.
You have to wonder if they know how absurd their comparisons are.
It's weird how people want so, so badly to be in some counterculture. And to be "owed" something, in the moral accounting. That Green Day song plays in my head, with the music video: "I Want to be a Minority!"
I guess we sort of have a word for this, ressentiment? It's close, but not exactly.
Jews were allowed to move around without their stars of David - in the ghettos, literally the origination of the term. Jews were not allowed to take part in wider public life without them.
People in Soviet Union (and in Russia, still) have to carry an internal passport (distinct from the regular passport, that is called smth like "foreign-travel passport" in Russian). The cops can legally stop you on the street and ask for ID. If you don't present your internal passport (or similar), they may take you to the police station "to determine your identity" at their discretion. Happened to me personally with an expired internal passport on my literal birthday that it expired on, I was about to go to a police station cause I didn't have much cash on me for a bribe, but they decided to let me go because hey, it's my birthday.
Vaccine cards (I am vaccinated and boosted and would have done it based on my own decision making) feel significantly similar to me. As in Russia, when dealing with totalitarian aspects of government, I find it easier to just comply, but if I had more free time on my hands I would refuse to show the card on principle. Needless to say politicians advocating for these would never get my vote...
That really depends on what you look like. I used to have long hair and wear leather jackets and band t-shirts and I was stopped about once every 2-3 months... then I got a job, cut my hair, etc. and I was stopped a couple times in 4 years. But, I had a girlfriend who lived in student dorms, and Central Asian guys living there claimed they get ID checked pretty much every day.
That's what's beautiful about giving government arbitrary power that is so broad it is not always used "in reality" - it gives individual actors discretion to discriminate. Like with literacy tests to vote, war on drugs, etc.
Moscow cops have a sixth sense for non-natives. Even I was not looking like one, I was stopped, like, 8 times during my 3-months gig there. Carrying a few bank notes in the passport was an ordinary practice.
Personally I obviously have never ever done this, but this friend of mine and his friends, throughout the aughts, have had to give trivial bribes to cops a few times. It's like real-life microtransactions. Usually with something like smoking in a non-smoking area as a pretext, the key is that cops would immediately go for the bribe schtik - they would tell him how they now need to bring him to the station to write up the protocol, and probably nobody would bother with such a small thing and they'd just let him go eventually but the mayor or whatever is not there right now, he's out on some assignment, so he'd have to wait for him to return for a couple hours for the protocol to be written up properly, and hey he is from the neighborhood and so he knows the station is actually a 20-minute walk too, completely out of the way, so maybe he can, like, go buy a pack of cigarettes, and as he opens it, absent-mindedly stuff the "change", let's say X, into the pack?.. and then they'd ask him for a smoke as he returns from the store and he gives them the pack and he can go?..
This is just poor student level; I bet others paid much more, Moscow road police were legendary, although I didn't drive so cannot confirm.
That said I think it's a separate issue from unprompted ID checks, although one could facilitate the other.
I never paid anything to any cop; nor that I needed or wanted to. Neither did you, it seems.
As to friends or friends of friends, etc. - this is not really serious talk.
Police ask for ID in Russia too? This might sound crazy, but police do this in the United States too. Failure to ID in certain situations (arrest) can lead to additional charges. Expired identification in the US is also invalid too.
Again, I'm not seeing the connection you're trying to make and if you want to see similar tactics employed by police in the USA, I recommend YouTube. The interesting part is I have a vaccine card and I've never been asked to present it. Then again, I was immunized to serve anywhere in the world when I joined the military and saw it as a perk when I travelled abroad.
That is in context of an arrest. In Russia, legally it's like a country-wide stop and frisk (stop and ID) with no requirement of suspicion or anything. Usually people who look like immigrants or some sort of "less-desirable" demographics get checked more, but sometimes they do just stop completely random people.
I totally get it, but there is big difference between a police officer demanding photo ID unlawfully which happens often in the US to similar demographics and a business saying in order to keep my workforce safe I need proof of vaccine.
The mandates are not that though. The mandates are government forcing the business to demand the card, and shutting them down (with police) if they don't feel inclined to enforce it.
>What gets me is the way that people will see a picture of a swastika and immediately brand everyone involved as a racist,
There's actually pretty large bounty to identify the person who was holding that nazi flag. The assertion is that this was not one of the protesters at all. Afterall the trucker convoy is quite diverse given so many truckers are Indian.
I don't think this is a working class thing. The unions don't seem to be supporting it and a significant portion of the truckers don't seem to be on the side of the protesters.
A good friend of mine put it this way, and he’s right:
—-
So far, the “peaceful” protestors have desecrated the national war monument and the Terry Fox statue, flown multiple Nazi flags and Confederate flags and large numbers of “Fuck Trudeau” signs, stolen food from a soup kitchen, assaulted and threatened reporters, thrown rocks at ambulances, smashed car windows, threatened anyone wearing a mask, defecated on the lawn of a house flying a pride flag, harassed mall workers so badly that they had to close the stores for their safety, blocked paramedics and health care workers from getting to the hospital, intimidated Ottawa residents so badly that many are afraid to leave their homes, and openly threatened to murder the prime minister and overthrow the government on the exact spot Cpl Nathan Cirillo was murdered defending the seat of government from a gunman.
Putting a paper sign and a hat on a statue isnt really desecration. The fact that they are attempting to overblow this tiny action makes me trust the media and the Canadian government even less.
In what world is this a working class uprising? It has no meaningful ties to any labour movement, and it’s stated goal seems to be to force Trudeau to over rule provincial — not federal — mask mandates. All because this disorganized, disruptive and aimless rabble believe wearing a piece of cloth on your face is the deeply offensive and tyrannical.
Has anyone actually been squeezed off online platforms for saying they are against mask mandates? I’d be SHOCKED if you could find any evidence to back that up. People HAVE been denied access to PRIVATELY OWNED social media companies because they spread hate, unfounded political conspiracies and worryingly misleading medical misinformation.
Surely you’re not saying that there’s significant overlap between these two groups?
> Has anyone actually been squeezed off online platforms for saying they are against mask mandates?
Not masks, but I've been banned from most of Reddit for posting CDC stats about covid vaccines, questioning their value for younger people, and recounting adverse reactions in people I know, as well as questioning lockdown measures. I don't use any other social media.
> worryingly misleading medical misinformation.
Most of that worrying misleading information is now acknowledged to be "science" now- like the fact that the original vaccine does not make a difference between likelihood of spreading Omicron. Or getting banned for ascribing the Lab Leak theory, which is pretty much accepted as the most likely cause.
> In what world is this a working class uprising? It has no meaningful ties to any labour movement, and it’s stated goal seems to be to force Trudeau to over rule provincial — not federal — mask mandates.
If it were only about mask mandates, this protest would have occurred a year ago. It's about bodily autonomy and right to work. Just because no other labor movements seem to care yet, doesn't mean this isn't a labor issue. I understand that it's a provincial issue largely, but the federal employee vaccine mandates are just that- federal.
And people have an issue with the federal guidelines, and federal pressure on provinces to fall in line. Much like the Biden admin has been "strongly encouraging" illegal federal mandates, but simply penning them and waiting for courts to challenge them. And incredibly incendiary statements blaming the pandemic on the unvaccinated instead of a host of other more relevant issues like our always-at-capacity healthcare system.
And this is just conjecture, but people do suspect federal involvement in non federal matters. Trudeau, in his recent address from his lake house, has a portion of his speech not directed at us- the general public, rather he addresses other politicians in a really creepy, dystopian tone.
> 'think long and hard about the consequences of your actions.'
Either way, people are sick of the lockdowns and government overreach, none of which has been particularly effective, while simultaneously being detrimental, especially to those at the bottom of the socioeconomic ladder. Not everyone has the privilege of working from home.
I'm not going to address all your remarks because I don't have time, and also because I think you're last point is the most salient:
> Either way, people are sick of the lockdowns and government overreach, none of which has been particularly effective...
How could you possibly know this? We don't have an alternate universe we can examine to see how things would have gone globally without public health measures.
> while simultaneously being detrimental, especially to those at the bottom of the socioeconomic ladder. Not everyone has the privilege of working from home.
Yah, I do fully agree that the public health measures pursued have had a negative financial impact on those more economically vulnerable who work in low paying jobs. But at the same time, these are the people who most need protection, as they don't have much job mobility and have to work on the front lines. You know what's worse than getting paid less? Dying from covid, or being unable to work because of COVID, or suffering the long-term effects we don't fully understand yet. I've heard so many horror stories from people working in grocery stores, etc, where there are mask requirements (In some cases, implemented not because of government legislation, but rather because the private businesses decide it's appropriate) that are routinely ignored by customers. These customers, when confronted, often become verbally or physically abusive (AFAIK there was a story about a security guard being murdered somewhere in the states).
Just FYI, I work in a customer facing job (onsite IT), and have been working in an office with a large number of people for almost the whole pandemic. I have to a wear a mask 8-9 hours a day. I say this because I don't want you to assume I'm arguing in favour of something that I won't be subject to.
>Yikes. In what world is this a working class uprising? It has no meaningful ties to any labour movement
This is why I'm skeptical of the push towards unionization I see of late. I'm from a working-class neighbourhood. I first heard about this protest on social media from high school friends who went into blue-collar professions. This is as grassroots and working class a movement as I've ever seen. But because it's not endorsed by major unions that have to negotiate with major employers, it's seen as 'not legitimate'. The argument seems to be that a labour movement needs a managerial class at the top or it's not really workers uniting. Ironically, the managerial class is somewhat besieged at the moment because it's possible to automate a lot of the organisation we used to perform, such as what is needed for something like this. Whether there's Koch brothers funding behind it or not, the Freedom convoy enjoys incredible working class support, to claim otherwise because it lacks 'officialdom' is an irony I hope we can all laugh at someday.
>n what world is this a working class uprising? It has no meaningful ties to any labour movement,
I see it as a working class uprising. Trudeau called them a 'fringe minority' but such a minority also requires the military to remove them? They also need their funds frozen?
>and it’s stated goal seems to be to force Trudeau to over rule provincial — not federal — mask mandates. All because this disorganized, disruptive and aimless rabble believe wearing a piece of cloth on your face is the deeply offensive and tyrannical.
Mask manadates have been ongoing for 2 years. What's new is that on Jan 15th Canada's federal government made vaccination mandatory for truckers. Provinces are powerless here, CBSA is entirely federal. CBSA will be enforcing this rule mostly at the border.
So truckers who never even cross the border are still potentially subject to proving they are vaccinated. Though that's far less probable and on top of that a high percentage of truckers are fully vax.
And no, I don't agree. I'm for a universal vaccination mandate. The government isn't, however. The spokeswoman talking to CBC actually wouldn't answer any questions about their protest or goals, so all I have is speculation as to what they actually want.
If that was actually the case — they are asserting the Canadian government are literal Nazis — that's offensively stupid. It's also kind of a convenient excuse, and probably the only way you could positively 'spin' displaying such a blatant hate symbol.
We both know that's not the real reason they are displaying it though. Organizations and governments are frequently accused of being the second coming of Hitler's National Socialist party, but in what distorted reality does it make sense to accuse your opponent of being fascists by flying a hateful, fascist flag. That's not how things work.
> How do you know what's going on? Are you there?
Are you really asking me if I'm embedded in a protest movement that has defaced the Terry Fox statue and raided a homeless shelter? No, I'm not. But a quick google uncovers a quote from the 'movement's' spokesperson, who was asked about the proudly displayed symbols of hate:
> When asked specifically about the swastika, he brushed the question off: “People troll, do stupid things, whatever. Who cares?”
That doesn't exactly fit with the narrative you presented, and suggest they don't have an explanation for why members are showing hate symbols. And so it's logical to assume that the members displaying these ridiculous hate symbols are doing it because they are hateful people, who feel these symbols are the best way to communicate their message to the rest of the world.
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[ 3.7 ms ] story [ 299 ms ] threadRegardless, i doubt people waving swastikas and demanding that democratic leaders be replaced with a dictatorship is exactly the type of "standing up to government" gofundme envisioned.
https://images.theconversation.com/files/443549/original/fil...
https://albertapolitics.ca/wp-content/uploads/CooperMain-900...
https://albertapolitics.ca/wp-content/uploads/Flags1-238x300...
https://albertapolitics.ca/wp-content/uploads/Flags2-300x245...
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/FKMstBjXsAcY0C4?format=jpg&name=...
https://i.cbc.ca/1.6173258.1631709823!/fileImage/httpImage/i...
The Gadsen flag for most people is a symbol of independence and freedom. Historically it was not associated with slavery, the confederate secession, or the civil war.
Either way, confederate flags aren't normally flown in racist intent. Most people fly them to represent their heritage. The Dixie line, Outlaw country, etc.
I wouldn't be surprised to see a libertarian from deep Georgia fly both and not be racist in the slight.
I think you need to leave your bubble and learn about the people you are trying to demonize.
Also, you ignored the rest of my post to further live in your delusion of a racist enemy to play hero against.
The rest of your post was some anecdotal observation that you've never seen a Gadsden flag next to a confederate one.
Here's the Gadsden flown by secessionists in Civil War Georgia fighting to maintain and expand slavery: https://www.nps.gov/articles/000/images/Dontreadonme.jpg?max...
Here's the Alabama secession flag (which they flew because they wanted to keep slavery): https://archives.alabama.gov/images/noliflag.gif
In fact, the Gadsden symbol was so ubiquitous as a symbol of maintaning slavery, they had political 'cartoons' of Eagles dismembering snakes in Union papers: https://repository.library.georgetown.edu/bitstream/handle/1...
It actually made it into the Battle Hymn of the Republic as well,
> "I have read a fiery gospel writ in burnished rows of steel…Let the Hero, born of woman, crush the serpent with his heel."
Here's both with a Swastika being flown in Charlottesville before the Unite the Right rally: https://www.virginiamercury.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/08/C...
Here's one from Milwaukee from someone protesting the initial lockdowns in 2020: https://www.gannett-cdn.com/presto/2020/04/19/PMJS/67a2a7dc-...
Hope that's helpful background into why many people associate the two flags.
But you know mindread better than what everyone else is thinking.
I know plenty of people, plenty of music, plenty of shows (general lee), plenty of culture that involves the confederate flag without racism.
It's a flag. You aren't making the world a better place by crying imaginary racism. Go crusade something else to feel better.
You're one of those people who need religion but think you're too smart for it.
However, you’ve provided image links with no context but your own. I am not sure what any of those images represented back in the time. I’m also having a hard time finding information to support your position. Additionally, the Alabama link looks like a bush maybe? Definitely do not see the Gadsden iconography, but maybe it’s just a bad scan.
I will say the Battle Hymn link is tenuous at best. The timber rattle snake on the flag is representative of the original rebellious 13 colonies (on the wiki if you want to read more). The rattlers are really only dangerous if stepped on, hence the phrase on the flag. In the hymn, “Crushing the snake under heal” has religious background, and represents extinguishing evil.
To me the flag represents that the people of this country have the right to oppose the government. That is a fundamental ideal in the US. In that context, it makes sense why some extreme fringe groups would co-opt the flag when opposing the government.
However, that does not mean the flag represents extremist views to the vast majority of people who like to fly it.
Finally, my original comment said it was disingenuous to associate the two so closely like you did. At least say “and” instead of “/“. Someone not so familiar might assume they are literally the same thing.
Here's a better pic of the Alabama flag -- it's a cotton plant with a snake under it and the phrase "noli me tangere" (touch me not): https://i.imgur.com/UIUZM4p.png
Here's South Carolina's secession flag: https://i.imgur.com/14Yuw3G.png
Another Georgia one that General Sherman captured: https://i.imgur.com/Hk41Xy7.jpg
Explicitly spelling it out with the serpent imagery "Slave states ... the only way of preserving our slave property [and] our liberty, is a union with each other": https://i.imgur.com/iHkVl0H.png
Union propaganda, "Down with the traitors serpent flag": https://i.imgur.com/A0wKKZx.png
Union envelopes: https://i.imgur.com/g7ljHSf.png
KKK adopting it to protest civil rights: https://i.imgur.com/uDq7IZ4.png
Flag proudly flies on the homepage of the largest white supremacist site on the internet: https://i.imgur.com/WWYL6T9.png
100% of confederate flag rallies will have Gadsdens flying and ~100% of extremists who attack the government will fly it too (From the Vegas killings: https://i.imgur.com/yHWJCM8.png, at the home of one of the extremists who plotted to execute Michigan's governor: https://www.mlive.com/resizer/OrmrIm147a1JxQUsKvBPGOdTt2U=/9..., at the Unite the Right rally: https://i.imgur.com/EG6roQa.jpg)
It's fine, you can fly whatever flag you want for whatever reason you want, just be aware that the literal worst people in the country are flying the same one and that it was the rallying symbol for slavers.
As far as rallies flying the Gadsden, they’re also flying the America flags.
I get what you’re saying, and I’m not one to make overt politic statements IRL in public, like flying any flag besides the US and maybe state.
Again, to me and a lot of people the Gadsen represents rebels against tyrants. It even represents that to the objectionable people who use it. However, the idea of rebelling in order to upheld human rights is fundamental to the US.
I am not willing to throw out the ideals or the iconography just because I disagree with the current (and confederate) rebels. I certainly agree with the flags original use when the US gained its independence.
So while I won’t be publicly flying the flag because I don’t like to make public political statements, I might just hang it somewhere privately. IRL conversations like these are incredibly valuable to me and I believe in the general sentiment of the Gadsden.
That may be an inconvenient truth for those who want to avoid its tainted history but it's definitely not nonsense.
Don't take my word for it -- feel free to peruse the selection at your local confederate flag dealer:
https://ruffinrebel.com/product-category/gadsden/
https://rebelnationok.com/page/2/?s=gadsden&post_type=produc...
Or show up to your local Klan rally:
https://contexts.org/files/2017/09/Charlottesville_-Unite_th...
If you want to fly a patriotic flag in the US, I'd suggest the American one.
I haven’t followed this but have heard friends saying that Nazis are participating. I would expect that this means some Nazis were participating. But these images don’t show that.
The confederate flags just seem like jerks.
But yes, Nazis are getting involved with the anti-vax protests, on the same side as Trump, not on Science's side.
In Germany’s east, far-right extremists find footholds in escalating anti-vaccine protests:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/01/30/coronavirus-...
>While Kohlmann contends that Free Saxons is not an extremist group, German authorities say it is clearly so. The co-founder, Stefan Hartung, is a member of the district council for Germany’s National Democratic Party, a neo-Nazi party. Kohlmann professed to seek the return of the Saxon monarchy and independence for the state.
>He said the pandemic is an opportunity to reach more people. A “much broader range” of demonstrators join the weekly walks on Monday than anti-immigrant rallies.
>He doesn’t have to reach out to people, he said. They are coming to him.
>“It’s exploding,” he said of the group’s social media presence. The Free Saxons’ Telegram channel had 48,000 followers in August 2021, it has now grown to more than 140,000.
The intent of swastikas in that situation isn’t pro-nazi or anti-Semitic.
I’m not sure what real Nazis in Germany being anti-vax has to do with our conversation. RFKJr is anti-vax too, what does that matter about this convoy.
I was trying to figure out if there were Nazis in the convoy. It seems like there aren’t.
Nazis were/are violent sociopaths who are a threat to people. They’re scary. People making nazi metaphors and deeply offending you aren’t a threat to people. That’s not newsworthy to me.
It’s like the people who think the Soup Nazi episodes of Seinfeld are deeply offensive. Because they compare delicious soup to Nazis. If TV guide reported that nazi paraphernalia was in those episodes it would be misleading. Seinfeld wasn’t pro nazi and there was no risk of them doing nazi things.
This[2] is one example how protesters react when they try to infiltrate the actual crowd.
[1]: https://twitter.com/stobione/status/1489320295764660228
[2]: https://twitter.com/MrAndyNgo/status/1488325761572478981
Also very far-right and nazis groups have joined the protest and were close to the organizers
https://www.antihate.ca/the_freedom_convoy_is_nothing_but_a_...
"Oh, everyone knows ipaddr! He hangs out with a bunch of Nazis that protest to entrench "born white" as the de facto ruling class of the country, kill all the gays and trans people, and to have two separate sets of laws, one that only applies to them, and one that applies to everyone else, but he's sweet as can be!"
No one is going to waste the brain power.
If the Nazi flag had Justin Trudeau's face on it I would instantly get the message that Trudeau is a Nazi not support for a group from a foreign country in the 1930s.
A nazi flag is a taboo topic with certain imagery attached. These protesters think Justin Trudeau has been acting like a nazi would.
You may agree or not but don't fail to understand the message.
Does this mean that you should be able to immediately end any protest you don't like just by going to it and then pulling out a Nazi flag when you get there?
It's very basic stuff here.
If you're in a group and someone starts throwing stones at a cop, you help the cop get that person (at the very least by getting away from that person so you don't interfere with the cop). If you're in a group and a person joins the group and pulls out a Nazi flag, then you kick that person out of the group unless your group sympathizes with Nazis.
If they are having counter protests e.g.seperate protests within proximity but clearly distinct, then no.
If they're going to lock or delete an account (regardless of reason), there should be a requirement that funds are either paid to the benefactor or refunded immediately.
There are clear definitions, regulations, and penalties for operating as a dollar holding/ transferring financial institution.
Especially since the percentage paid as a fee makes it essentially a defaulted account, or at least a service not provided and funds not returned.
These types of donation accounts have a long history at brick banks of helping those in need (while taking a hefty percentage off the top). It's not a new idea.
I suspect it's more likely this isn't lack of regulation, so much as a loophole or stretched legal definition. Maybe someone here is familiar with their regulatory classification. You don't launch something like this without reasonably ensuring the feds aren't coming after you.
Gofundme partially locked the funds because they don’t know who the benefactor is anymore (according to their official statement). Who gets the money? Does it just go to every person in the city with a semi truck or is it just going to some random person that we hope won’t take the money and run?
As for refunds, I would be willing to bet anyone that donated could go ask gofundme for a refund right now and get their money back. Sure they could mass refund everyone right away, but it seems like a bad policy to do a mass refund whenever the benefactor becomes unclear. It would be incredibly annoying to fund a huge project and the point of contact for the project quits and for all the funding to instantly get refunded.
It's a problem that is suspiciously one-sided, at least as far as 404ing/disabling the linked page, locking the account, and pausing donations while being resolved.
This is why things like ConstituionDAO can happen.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ConstitutionDAO
If it’s good or not is another topic, but it is definitely possible to skip banks and other middlemen.
All crypto is is a signature on a document. These documents are not guaranteed to hold up in court, especially when there isn't good case law around whatever you invented to get around existing laws.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30194128
“shills” to me are more like commenters such as rasengan, who is actively advertising his cryptocurrency-as-DNS nonsense whenever given the opportunity.
so because there are trillions of dollars in crypto value already and many individuals already own that crypto, they would just collect from them to their own address or smart contract. websites just become GUIs for helping that and are also optional. then if fiat is actually desired for the cause, they can call any random trade desk and do a big order for fiat and have cash in the organization's bank account. for their supporters that don't already own crypto, it would be some friction for them to acquire it, but forget about those people and don't view how it would work from their perspective as the main perspective.
Could governments hypothetically not block those transfers/confiscate the wallets?
Again, speaking out of ignorance so forgive the dumb question.
More specifically there are some best practices that would prevent anyone, including a determined state sponsored adversary, from being able to seize or block this. Without the best practices there are some theoretical capabilities.
In any case, an organization like go fund me could not bow to corporate policy, public pressure, or a state backchannel, to prevent this.
So with or without due process, the people can still form capital and act.
People may not agree with these guys, but being selective here means that other legimate causes may not get funded.
And I'm pretty sure that crowfunded strikes scare the shit out of some of the big boys since it takes away their leverage. They are gonna stomp this out at the first opportunity.
Also the biggest problem here is that the people fundraising weren't saying what they would do with the money, it's unclear if they were even part of the organizing committee or authorized to fundraise on their behalf.
Why is that less of a concern than the environment as a whole?
It's no more right to justify that than it would be to justify putting all of the country's debt on a single person or taking all of the pollution in the atmosphere but smothering individual children with it so that everyone else can breathe freely.
So we bring in huge ships with oil from the middle east that often run into trouble and spill into the ocean. The money we send allows dictators to force millions into slavery and prevents women from having basic human rights.
There are many reasons why a pipeline was preferable to the status quo
It would also create millions of American jobs and pour trillions into the economy with the increase in speed and quantity of shipping that can arrive for distribution, and curtail piracy around the Horn of Africa.
1. https://pstrust.org/rail-vs-pipelines
Edit: link: https://rumble.com/vtz6fg-freedom-convoy-2022-press-conferen... starts around 5:00
Then there's revenue loss for the businesses forced to shut down and wage loss for their employees.
Class Action Suit could rightfully clean out the GoFundMe.
But regardless, I would say the protest has been "firey, but mostly peaceful".
Activists take that discomfort w/ the status quo & advocate for concrete policy changes. Popular support often starts small & grows.
To folks who complain protest demands make others uncomfortable... that’s the point."
Perhaps you suffer from a false dichotomy. "You are not immune to propaganda."
What about the losses because of lockdowns? Who will pay for those?
Still, violent rioters are everywhere. Sadly, in Europe we're already used to them. Any excuse is valid for them to destroy public property. Some of them are "professionals" and travel to any protest in Europe just to vandalize and destroy. Some of them get detained and identified.
Even if GoFundMe don't want to support this campaign they should refund all the unpaid donations back to the respecting patrons quickly with an apology.
In Europe several countries are already removing all restrictions and allowing people to live like it's 2019 again (Denmark[1], Finland [2], UK[3]...). Even in my southern European country are slowly removing them.
COVID-19 is evolving from a pandemic to an endemic disease. Stop pretending that countries will be able to remove all traces of it. We'll have to live with it from now and on.
Things like vaccination passes have been proven useless against the latest variants (Delta, Omicron). Vaccinated and non-vaccinated spread the virus the same. And also both groups get sick of Omicron (even if this variant is "milder" I don't recommend going through it).
Outdoor masking makes no sense since transmission at open spaces is really low. Only indoors or in dense crowds (concerts, really busy streets) masks make sense and work. But... Only the FFP3 or FFP2/KN95 [4] have a good protection (cloth, surgical masks have only a little effect). And that protection is limited in time.
Oddly enough, countries like Canada, Australia, New Zealand instead of removing all measures seem to double down on them.
[1] https://www.irishtimes.com/news/world/europe/denmark-eases-c...
[2] https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/finnish-government-remo...
[3] https://www.reuters.com/world/uk/uk-pm-johnson-drops-covid-1...
[4] https://www.irishtimes.com/news/ireland/irish-news/q-a-what-...
What it reminds me of is that 2014 standoff with the Bundy family on federal land in the US or farmers in France. Some groups can just do whatever they want apparently.
Edit: See my comment below for sources on homeless shelter
[1] https://ottawa.ctvnews.ca/ottawa-homeless-shelter-staff-hara...
[2] https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2022/1/31/canada-trudeau-deno...
[3] https://www.reuters.com/world/americas/police-say-ottawa-tru...
[4] https://www.nytimes.com/2022/01/31/world/canada/trudeau-truc...
Since this protest is making him look bad, I’d take what he says with a grain of salt.
I was just trying to show that the homeless shelter claim is beyond just random stranger on the internet ( he argubly is more credible than me however Low that maybe)
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/la-hospita...
> While the sheriff's department said protesters at one point blocked entrances and exits at the hospital, no videos or photos confirmed that was the case.
[snip, most of the article about the shooting itself]
> Rather, video footage showed a handful of deputies standing in a driveway (apparently an entrance to the hospital’s emergency room), while the small group of protesters paced up and down a sidewalk feet away from them.
> At one point, deputies detained a journalist with LA’s NPR station, KPCC, who was reporting on the small protest, as well as a male protester who “refused to comply” with deputies’ demands to leave the area.
> The sheriff’s department said the reporter, Josie Huang, ignored deputies’ repeated commands and did not present “proper” press credentials. But she said and videos of her arrest show she didn’t have time or space to react to deputies orders before they shoved her and forcefully took her into custody. In one video, she can be heard shouting “I’m a reporter… I’m with KPCC” as officers push her to the ground. They cited her with obstructing justice, though KPCC is urging authorities to drop the charge.
https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/blm-deputies-compton/
Expressing yourself is fine, disturbing public life because you don't get your will isn't. That's not how civilized societies resolve issues. This is now apparently a controversial take on multiple political sides.
And generally arresting looters and rioters seems quite popular on both sides of the political spectrum. They often didn't have anything to do with the protests, and were just taking advantage of the police being busy.
I beg to differ. Any attempts to contain the mass violence were decried as "Trumpist fascism".
It's not odd to publish editorials from activists when a bunch of protests are going on. That doesn't mean everyone is on board.
My former workplace hired outside therapists to attend to us people of color, and held special town halls and discussions. Meanwhile, I was losing sleep because the local strip mall was being looted, and I had to listen to gu shots all night. I spent one night sleeping on the floor of my living room with my guns due to reports of break-ins in my neighborhood.
Sounds awesome until I come to your place banging pots and pans all night and blocking your driveway, for an extended period.
As long as someone else is paying the price, standing on principle is easy.
What makes it unlawful?
I'm not saying that they should be prevented from protesting (and I strongly disagree with that protest), just answering the question as to why this might be illegal.
Aside from that, I have lived in the approximate center of a moderate sized city (metro area of ~1 million) and noticed that there are occasional, authorized events that take over and prevent any and all traffic. Bicycle races for instance.
Assuming one isn't vehemently against a protest in the first place, debating blocking traffic boils down to the technical requirements for permits and coordination with authorities. It's only a shocking breakdown of public order if people strongly oppose the underlying cause.
The Coutts border crossing and highway is currently blocked. This is in contravention of the Critical Infrastructure Act as highways are included.
After how many court proceedings?
Please, give me examples of what you'd consider "lawful" protests of any significance.
That's not civil disobedience, at all.
That's just civil obedience.
https://twitter.com/aoc/status/1334184644707758080
Some level of discomfort is ok. Some is not. There is a line somewhere. Usually it involves the level of violence involved (terrorists after all are just making people very "uncomfortable" [what's more uncomfortable than being blown up] to achieve a political end.).
To make the ad absurdum argument explicit: if your argument for why this protest is ok applies to 9/11 to the same extent that it applies to this protest, maybe its a bad argument. That doesn't mean that this protest is neccesarily not ok, just that this is a really bad argument to use to prove the point.
So every protest that has ever happened ?
If anything, the associated violence and demands of the protest are pretty tame in comparison to what the BLM or Indian Farmers protests demanded.
It is easy to dismiss the protestors because the reason for the protests sounds unimportant within our peer groups. However, a Democracy bestows equal rights onto people, and the validity of a protest is determined more so by its ability to be visible (the emotional fervor) than the merit of its points.
> Some groups can just do whatever they want apparently
Yep.
Ottawa, being the capital, gets two types of protests. The legal ones who get a permit have their route planned out in advance, and the police shut down the streets while the protest occurs. It's sort of like a parade. It's inconvenient and annoying, but no single street gets shut down for more than a couple of hours.
And it's not just the agreeable protests that get permits. They pretty much have to give a permit to anybody who asks for one.
For the illegal protests like the G20 occupation and when the indigenous people blocked a freeway exit, the police come in fast and hard.
> If anything, the associated violence and demands of the protest are pretty tame in comparison to what the BLM or Indian Farmers protests demanded.
Not in Canada.
edit: there's a third type of protest, the small ones. You're welcome to stand on the sidewalk with a sign and yell as long as you don't interfere with anybody.
> legal ones who get a permit have their route planned out in advance
So the kind of protests that don't matter ?
A protest, by definition, is meant to display discontent from the masses because conventional means have failed. If a protest does not hit where it hurts, it isn't an effective protest. If shouting loudly worked, then twitter outrage would have been sufficient for pressuring the Govt. into accepting their demands.
A slight tangent, but this is exactly why I dislike 'permitted' or 'side walk' protests. You're walking down a pre-cleared street supporting an already popular movement with institutional support to show what exactly ? It reeks of the kind of slacktivism that has been memed to death over the last decade.
The people are clearly expressing their disillusionment with the overreach of the Govt. in terms of the intrusion of privacy permitted to the Govt. by law. If you are disillusioned by the system, of course you'd just extra-legal means to display your discontent.
Now, the Govt. ofc is allowed to react with force. If anything, I support removal of actively destructive protests with force. But, the current Canadian Govt. has supported far more egregious protests in the other nations (specifically the farmers protests and 2020 riots). So, I am enjoying a bit of schadenfreude seeing Trudeau get a piece of his own medicine.
The Federal demands they have are for our democratic government to resign and instill a dictatorship made up of people of their choosing...
Why the fuck should anyone listen to these people?
10,000 people marching through downtown get lots of attention and they get heard. They shut down the downtown core for most of a day, and inconvenience a lot of people. They attract lots of media attention.
This protest is only 250 people.
The pearl-clutching about this protest has been something else.
First, federal jurisdiction includes: mandating vaccine passports at the border, firing employees in federally-regulated industries that are unvaccinated, and preventing unvaccinated Canadians from being able to travel via plane or train domestically. There is also evidence to suggest that the Canadian government pressured the US government into implementing their own mandate on cross-border transportation to match ours.
Second, over 30% of Canadians polled support these specific protests, and over 50% of Canadians want to see an end to all provincial and federal mandates. In the face of omicron there is zero science to support vaccine passports or other restrictions, and frankly there never was.
Third, many vaccinated Canadians like myself are supportive of peaceful protests aimed at restoring basic charter rights even for those we might disagree with. I've always thought it disgusting that Canadians cheered on while unvaccinated Canadians lost their jobs or couldn't send their kids to university... this is exactly why minority rights are so important.
Finally, it's common for protests to occur in Ottawa about all manner of issues because it's the nation's capital. Suggesting that none of the protestors understand who has jurisdiction over what is false.
Amongst governments that have been driven by science and not by pseudo-scientific bullshit covering crypto-capitalist garbage (like New Zealand), the subsequent waves have been smaller and more contained—and they have _not_ returned to the levels of lockdowns required. What makes vaccine passports required are people who refuse to give the first damned care about their fellow citizens. AND THEY WORK. Vaccination appointment went _up_ when SAQ implemented vaccine passport requirements.
There are no charter rights being violated either by the lockdowns or by vaccine mandates. Your statement about "minority rights" is extremely disingenuous, as minority rights are not about people who _choose_ not to do something based on misinformation and disinformation, but on characteristics of who they are (skin colour, Indigenous, etc.), where they are from, the languages they speak, their gender and/or orientation, the culture from which they hail, and/or religions that they practice (and courts tend _not_ to pay much attention to any claim of minority status without historical evidence of discrimination against claimed minorities). The assholes in the Truck Tantrum are — by and large — WASPy conspiracy believers. They are the exact _opposite_ of minority, and exactly why they need to be laughed out of town.
I have no problem with them protesting. I also have no problem with laughing at them because they are claiming things which are demonstrably false and are whining over loss of privilege as if it were the same as real discrimination. People who _choose_ to be antisocial like the Flu Truck Convoy jackasses don’t get to claim that they’re discriminated against because society tells them to take a hike.
Okay bigot.
Now they can’t drive away the <N> trucks in downtown Ottawa. You just exhausted all your leverage with them when you decided to throw the book at them.
You call a tow truck driver. They say “I don’t have a class 3 tow truck, there’s no way I can move a semi.”
You call a class 3 tow truck driver. They know they’re risking their reputation with the trucking industry, so they refuse. If they’re the trolling sort, they say they have COVID.
Now what? There’s a lot of mess to clean up, and you don’t have the equipment you need to do it.
- How many bulldozers do you have nearby?
- How many bulldozers do you have nearby that are on the government's side here?
- Where's your nearest hole or parking lot big enough to put a couple thousand trucks in, indefinitely?
- Who's going to pay for that? Your truckers are in jail, so you threaten to...jail them if they don't pay?
It's Canada, not Xinjiang. The worst they can do is jail you in a cushy prison for longer, with people who already counted the cost.
I would say, just end those unlawful and unscientific vaccine mandates that have a detrimental impact on societies and businesses, so everyone can move on.
https://edition.cnn.com/2022/01/13/politics/supreme-court-va...
> In freezing a lower court opinion that allowed the regulation to go into effect nationwide, the majority sent a clear message the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, charged with protecting workplace safety, overstepped its authority. In contrast, the justices said that a separate agency could issue a rule to protect the health and safety of Medicare and Medicaid patients.
So they made an exception for healthcare workers in order to protect "the health and safety of Medicare and Medicaid patients". Patients are only protected by vaccination of healthcare workers if the vaccine is sterilizing, which is not the case (science).
Strictly speaking, SCOTUS erred in its decision (other vaccine mandates in the past _have_ passed constitutional muster), but that’s unsurprising given that there are no thoughtful conservatives on the bench. Even Scalia, one of the most ignoble Justices to ever serve on SCOTUS was smarter than any other conservative on the bench now and would _likely_ have disagreed with this decision. Most of the recent justices have no business being on the court either as wholly unqualified or because of unconstitutional abrogation of duty by the legislative branch under Mitch McConnell.
Could you elaborate on what makes the protest unlawful? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedom_of_assembly
If all it takes to invalidate this human right is a couple agent provocateur's causing some violence. Then protesting is essentially illegal for everyone. That's not how it works. Which is also why the ottawa police are backing off and saying the military has to do it. The military backed off saying nope.exe.
>Can someone explain to me why this is tolerated and why these people are not simply being arrested?
It's a peaceful protest that has every right to exist.
>What it reminds me of is that 2014 standoff with the Bundy family on federal land in the US or farmers in France. Some groups can just do whatever they want apparently.
https://notthebee.com/article/come-and-laugh-with-me-at-the-...
Many great videos on there that make it abundantly clear that the media has quite falsely mislabeled this lawful protest. If I might make a suggestion, analyze your media source's bias. You seem to be listening to the yellow journalism.
What you're actually doing is taking the evidence that unidentified individuals with a Nazi flag showed up at a demonstration involving thousands of people and ascribing that as representative of the entire movement. That's the cheap shot. There is no way for any protest movement to prevent some dudes from showing up with Nazi flags and getting their picture taken at it.
I'm not even saying that to express support for the protestors, Fascism is a seductive ideology for a reason and it's currently exactly as popular as everyone thinks, it's just not confined to the 'other side'. It's getting increasingly absurd when someone labels people who, if they're doing anything wrong, are arguing for too many individual rights as fascists. People need to just accept that they're on the fascist side of the argument and proceed from there, acknowledging what their ideology does when it goes too far.
I mean I guess you can just pretend the swastikas and rebel flags aren't there. If that makes you feel better.
>"An Alberta MP said he was not aware a person was flying an upside down Canadian flag with a swastika on it behind him"
Someone used a red marker to draw a swastika on a Canadian flag. Big difference. I suspect it is being shared in such a way to make unengaged readers think that it was a bona-fide Third Reich banner.
It's fine to disagree with the protesters, but at least be honest about what they want. They've been squeezed off online platforms and out of mainstream discourse, and this is what happens when it bubbles over.
What happens if there is a good cause that you support and a random person comes with a Nazi flag? Should all the people leave? Protesting would effectively never be able to happen.
Source: https://thepostmillennial.com/canadian-trucker-convoy-confro...
If you’re trying to discredit a group of people it’s pretty low hanging fruit to send people in with a Nazi flag for great photo ops to show the masses.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
I didn't look at your profile description. I'm not moderating you, or anyone else, in particular. It's just a job, and quite routine.
Comments can be flamewar without being uncivil—there are lots of ways to spread flamewar. One is generic ideological rhetoric. Please stop posting like that here: it's boring, and makes HN threads much worse. We want curious conversation, and generic ideological rhetoric is the far opposite of that.
"Echo chamber" is the sort of thing people say when they imagine that the system, the moderators, and the community are biased against them. But the opposite team feels exactly the same way. It's a mechanical bias:
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...
I offer you a challenge:
I will provide you with quantitative data that I am correct on this issue, and in return you remove the restrictions on my account.
Second, it's not obvious how to study this kind of thing quantitatively without making interpretive calls, and whoever controls the interpretive calls completely controls the outcome of the study. In other words, all this would do is reproduce the same cake at a meta level, just with a distorting layer of pseudo-objective icing. The chance that anyone with strong ideological passions is going to run some quantitative analysis about this and come up with anything but the conclusion they already believed, is approximately zero. Has there ever been any study of this sort that did that?
I'm not saying that a good quantitative analysis is impossible, but it would need to rigorously account for this effect (of people reading into the data what they already perceive and believe). How to do that is not obvious, and any 'offer' that comes without a serious plan for it screams bogusness to me. I don't mean to imply that you're intentionally making a bogus offer, just that one would be foolish to take it.
Besides all that, the one empirical analysis you've offered so far ("I watched you single out all of my comments, and then later go back for a second pass to flag the other posters too after you read my profile description") was completely imaginary. That's hardly unique to you—it's just devilishly difficult to perceive these things objectively. The mind simply can't resist its own narratives.
My initial thinking is to use a text classifier to assign political alignments, or lack thereof, to HN comments. From there I can compile statistics about each of the comment classes. This entire process can be done in an executable jupyter notebook for visibility and verification of results.
You could justify anything that way. That is the sort of thing garden-variety trolls come up with.
> then the entire notion of the restrictions being due to supposed violations of the guidelines is a moot point
That doesn't follow from your premise at all.
Edit: btw, I thought I'd deleted this - I think it failed to go through because of a network failure. I tell people not to do these tit-for-tat things and try to avoid them myself for the most part (which often means succumbing to temptation and then editing or deleting after the fact). Since you've replied, though, I'll leave it up now.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
The paradox of tolerance is just an excuse to oppress the people you disagree with. Actual nazis are a minute fraction of the population. People see the idiocy and point it out.
Meanwhile, Communism has killed a couple hundred million people (vs 6 million for the nazis) and you can see tons of communist flags at any of the recent left-leaning protests.
The tolerance paradox doesn’t get even the thought of a mention when this happens. It’s just a tool of ideologically driven sophists.
Alex King, one of the cofounders: https://twitter.com/VestsCanada/status/1159997274900041729
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_genocide_conspiracy_theo...
https://www.c-span.org/video/?c4872045/user-clip-joe-biden-a...
We aren't talking about a random person, but one of the most powerful in the world.
The uncharitable one is 'you're a nazi'.
That's the only thing I'm trying to convey to you.
The uncharitable one is 'you support white replacement'.
That's the only thing I'm trying to convey to you.
Hitler was a vegetarian. Hitler was a Nazi. Does that mean vegetarians are Nazis? I don't think so. Just because some Nazis point something out doesn't mean that everyone who points it out is a Nazi.
all modern causes are normal people on both sides with a few crazies because thats how populations work
There is no reason to ever allow Nazis to have any sort of freedom. We literally had a world war about this.
No moral self-examination, disgust of the outgroup, arguing against private citizens' medical and bodily autonomy... does any of that sound familiar? What do you do when you realise you were the Nazi all along?
There is zero excuse for any group to put up with it.
What would it take for you to have an 'are we the baddies?' moment? Is symbology all that matters in that regard?
My original point stands, if you don't kick out a Nazi, your being absorbed into a Nazi movement.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z51xeox0Jlg
I can certainly agree that humans tend to demonize the sins of the other while turning a blind eye to their own side's, but is that really what is happening here? To me it seems like this protest is of a different type.
(Not saying they were 100% peaceful,i know there was some unrest in montreal, but my understanding is it was quite minor and nothing like what you are describing)
My own image searches only turn up upside-down Canadian flags, "Fuck Trudeau" slogans, and stuff about "freedom". I'd have to think that if somebody really wanted to undermine them and had such a photo, they'd have posted it.
How bad is the reporting? I checked the NYT; https://archive.fo/Jny6X
It's not awful in any obvious way.
It does describe the protest as "mostly peaceful". As that phrase is a little notorious, I laughed a little. Since NYT staff spend a lot of time on Twitter, I imagine they know the significance. But hey, if it was peaceful and they said so, then they've done their job ok there.
The headline does have some negative connotations: The convoy "descends on Ottowa" (not, I dunno, "protesters gather to demand justice").
And there is one sentence that is incendiary enough that it really needs more context:
"Some of them carried Canadian flags upside down; at least one flag had swastikas drawn on it."
This invites the reader to draw one conclusion, but the meaning may be something else, as in my first paragraph.
So I'd have to see to be sure. But no photos are forthcoming.
I can explain it to you, but I can't understand it for you.
It's weird how people want so, so badly to be in some counterculture. And to be "owed" something, in the moral accounting. That Green Day song plays in my head, with the music video: "I Want to be a Minority!"
I guess we sort of have a word for this, ressentiment? It's close, but not exactly.
Vaccine cards (I am vaccinated and boosted and would have done it based on my own decision making) feel significantly similar to me. As in Russia, when dealing with totalitarian aspects of government, I find it easier to just comply, but if I had more free time on my hands I would refuse to show the card on principle. Needless to say politicians advocating for these would never get my vote...
That's what's beautiful about giving government arbitrary power that is so broad it is not always used "in reality" - it gives individual actors discretion to discriminate. Like with literacy tests to vote, war on drugs, etc.
This is just poor student level; I bet others paid much more, Moscow road police were legendary, although I didn't drive so cannot confirm.
That said I think it's a separate issue from unprompted ID checks, although one could facilitate the other.
Again, I'm not seeing the connection you're trying to make and if you want to see similar tactics employed by police in the USA, I recommend YouTube. The interesting part is I have a vaccine card and I've never been asked to present it. Then again, I was immunized to serve anywhere in the world when I joined the military and saw it as a perk when I travelled abroad.
There's actually pretty large bounty to identify the person who was holding that nazi flag. The assertion is that this was not one of the protesters at all. Afterall the trucker convoy is quite diverse given so many truckers are Indian.
The CBC has been caught creating propaganda so many times: https://www.mississauga.com/news-story/7081133-opp-shuts-dow...
My favourite is this one: https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/north/dear-qallunaat-white-pe...
Don't worry, the CBC clears says "racism against white people does not exist" right on that page. CBC is on the record they don't hire white people anymore: https://nationalpost.com/news/canada/cbc-no-caucasian
—-
So far, the “peaceful” protestors have desecrated the national war monument and the Terry Fox statue, flown multiple Nazi flags and Confederate flags and large numbers of “Fuck Trudeau” signs, stolen food from a soup kitchen, assaulted and threatened reporters, thrown rocks at ambulances, smashed car windows, threatened anyone wearing a mask, defecated on the lawn of a house flying a pride flag, harassed mall workers so badly that they had to close the stores for their safety, blocked paramedics and health care workers from getting to the hospital, intimidated Ottawa residents so badly that many are afraid to leave their homes, and openly threatened to murder the prime minister and overthrow the government on the exact spot Cpl Nathan Cirillo was murdered defending the seat of government from a gunman.
In what world is this a working class uprising? It has no meaningful ties to any labour movement, and it’s stated goal seems to be to force Trudeau to over rule provincial — not federal — mask mandates. All because this disorganized, disruptive and aimless rabble believe wearing a piece of cloth on your face is the deeply offensive and tyrannical.
Has anyone actually been squeezed off online platforms for saying they are against mask mandates? I’d be SHOCKED if you could find any evidence to back that up. People HAVE been denied access to PRIVATELY OWNED social media companies because they spread hate, unfounded political conspiracies and worryingly misleading medical misinformation.
Surely you’re not saying that there’s significant overlap between these two groups?
how would you describe it?
Not masks, but I've been banned from most of Reddit for posting CDC stats about covid vaccines, questioning their value for younger people, and recounting adverse reactions in people I know, as well as questioning lockdown measures. I don't use any other social media.
> worryingly misleading medical misinformation.
Most of that worrying misleading information is now acknowledged to be "science" now- like the fact that the original vaccine does not make a difference between likelihood of spreading Omicron. Or getting banned for ascribing the Lab Leak theory, which is pretty much accepted as the most likely cause.
> In what world is this a working class uprising? It has no meaningful ties to any labour movement, and it’s stated goal seems to be to force Trudeau to over rule provincial — not federal — mask mandates.
If it were only about mask mandates, this protest would have occurred a year ago. It's about bodily autonomy and right to work. Just because no other labor movements seem to care yet, doesn't mean this isn't a labor issue. I understand that it's a provincial issue largely, but the federal employee vaccine mandates are just that- federal.
And people have an issue with the federal guidelines, and federal pressure on provinces to fall in line. Much like the Biden admin has been "strongly encouraging" illegal federal mandates, but simply penning them and waiting for courts to challenge them. And incredibly incendiary statements blaming the pandemic on the unvaccinated instead of a host of other more relevant issues like our always-at-capacity healthcare system.
And this is just conjecture, but people do suspect federal involvement in non federal matters. Trudeau, in his recent address from his lake house, has a portion of his speech not directed at us- the general public, rather he addresses other politicians in a really creepy, dystopian tone.
> 'think long and hard about the consequences of your actions.'
Either way, people are sick of the lockdowns and government overreach, none of which has been particularly effective, while simultaneously being detrimental, especially to those at the bottom of the socioeconomic ladder. Not everyone has the privilege of working from home.
> Either way, people are sick of the lockdowns and government overreach, none of which has been particularly effective...
How could you possibly know this? We don't have an alternate universe we can examine to see how things would have gone globally without public health measures.
> while simultaneously being detrimental, especially to those at the bottom of the socioeconomic ladder. Not everyone has the privilege of working from home.
Yah, I do fully agree that the public health measures pursued have had a negative financial impact on those more economically vulnerable who work in low paying jobs. But at the same time, these are the people who most need protection, as they don't have much job mobility and have to work on the front lines. You know what's worse than getting paid less? Dying from covid, or being unable to work because of COVID, or suffering the long-term effects we don't fully understand yet. I've heard so many horror stories from people working in grocery stores, etc, where there are mask requirements (In some cases, implemented not because of government legislation, but rather because the private businesses decide it's appropriate) that are routinely ignored by customers. These customers, when confronted, often become verbally or physically abusive (AFAIK there was a story about a security guard being murdered somewhere in the states).
Just FYI, I work in a customer facing job (onsite IT), and have been working in an office with a large number of people for almost the whole pandemic. I have to a wear a mask 8-9 hours a day. I say this because I don't want you to assume I'm arguing in favour of something that I won't be subject to.
This is why I'm skeptical of the push towards unionization I see of late. I'm from a working-class neighbourhood. I first heard about this protest on social media from high school friends who went into blue-collar professions. This is as grassroots and working class a movement as I've ever seen. But because it's not endorsed by major unions that have to negotiate with major employers, it's seen as 'not legitimate'. The argument seems to be that a labour movement needs a managerial class at the top or it's not really workers uniting. Ironically, the managerial class is somewhat besieged at the moment because it's possible to automate a lot of the organisation we used to perform, such as what is needed for something like this. Whether there's Koch brothers funding behind it or not, the Freedom convoy enjoys incredible working class support, to claim otherwise because it lacks 'officialdom' is an irony I hope we can all laugh at someday.
@yesenadam, any concerns about my wording?
I see it as a working class uprising. Trudeau called them a 'fringe minority' but such a minority also requires the military to remove them? They also need their funds frozen?
>and it’s stated goal seems to be to force Trudeau to over rule provincial — not federal — mask mandates. All because this disorganized, disruptive and aimless rabble believe wearing a piece of cloth on your face is the deeply offensive and tyrannical.
Mask manadates have been ongoing for 2 years. What's new is that on Jan 15th Canada's federal government made vaccination mandatory for truckers. Provinces are powerless here, CBSA is entirely federal. CBSA will be enforcing this rule mostly at the border.
So truckers who never even cross the border are still potentially subject to proving they are vaccinated. Though that's far less probable and on top of that a high percentage of truckers are fully vax.
They're not OK with trucks going honk honk to the point of entertaining the idea of military intervention.
The hypocrisy and contradictions is expected at this point but never ceases to amaze me.
truckers are protesting the mandates so people can do what they want
live or die on their own terms
thats what your last sentence is saying then so you agree?
And no, I don't agree. I'm for a universal vaccination mandate. The government isn't, however. The spokeswoman talking to CBC actually wouldn't answer any questions about their protest or goals, so all I have is speculation as to what they actually want.
its literally on every truck
it says reducing some other activities to help with covid but not 80% of resources going to it
How do you know what's going on? Are you there?
We both know that's not the real reason they are displaying it though. Organizations and governments are frequently accused of being the second coming of Hitler's National Socialist party, but in what distorted reality does it make sense to accuse your opponent of being fascists by flying a hateful, fascist flag. That's not how things work.
> How do you know what's going on? Are you there?
Are you really asking me if I'm embedded in a protest movement that has defaced the Terry Fox statue and raided a homeless shelter? No, I'm not. But a quick google uncovers a quote from the 'movement's' spokesperson, who was asked about the proudly displayed symbols of hate:
> When asked specifically about the swastika, he brushed the question off: “People troll, do stupid things, whatever. Who cares?”
That doesn't exactly fit with the narrative you presented, and suggest they don't have an explanation for why members are showing hate symbols. And so it's logical to assume that the members displaying these ridiculous hate symbols are doing it because they are hateful people, who feel these symbols are the best way to communicate their message to the rest of the world.
>That doesn't exactly fit with the narrative you presented
dang, this (subthread & whole thread) is all kinds of fucked up, please take a look.