38 Comments

Thank you for this! Would appreciate your thoughts on this question: apart from getting new institutions, is there another way to reverse the trend of declining trust in institutions?

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Not going to go too deep with my comment, and I hope I'm simply stating the obvious but - This whole thing is a complete failure of law enforcement, and is rather distressing and confusing to me. The sheer reluctance of the police to use force because they're worried about potential violence is absurd. All laws must eventually be enforced by violence, how did we end up with a law enforcement apparatus that's this allergic to actually enforcing the law?

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> One cannot give in to such demands even if one wanted to, as those opposed could do the same thing and you get caught in the middle. So if a small minority has the power to shut down your country, you need to find a way to stop that.

You need to think more clearly about this. This kind of line in the sand argument is emotional fear-mongering parading as rational thought.

The trucking vaccine mandate was dumb and mostly just a thumb in the eye to groups the liberals didn't like. Reverse it. Get rid of the legitimacy of the protest. Reasonable people will peel away. The small minority of whackos can then be easily dealt with (if they have to be) or ignored.

That was, and still is the logical thing to do but every step the government goes all Joffrey Baratheon ("I am the king! I will punish you.") and ignores TywinLannister ("Any man who must say, "I am the king" is no true king.") it erodes its power and legitimacy.

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Democracy has a clear failure mode: when a majority wants something a little, and a minority *really strongly does not want that thing*.

There are safety valves built into most democracies to handle these problems:

1. Allowing Protest

2. Sticking to the rule of law, and fair treatment

3. Coalition building

4. Spending money on political causes (rather than just votes).

The Canadian government seems intent on destroying all of these safety valves.

Minorities in a democracy need to believe that they won't just get crushed out of hand by the majority. That if they really really want something, they can demonstrate their desire for that thing and overcome whatever the majority only weakly wants.

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We didn’t respond this harshly when we had people take over many blocks of downtown Seattle and declare themselves their own government. We actually accommodated them. We shut down I-5 every night for weeks so that protesters could safely dance on it.

In the end we kicked them out after their second murder. Maybe that’s what the Canadians are waiting for, some kind of protester violence they can use as justification for forceful removal?

But in the CHAZ we had untrained randos patrolling with rifles. It was inevitable that they’d be used. Do the trucker protests have rifle patrols?

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I am a little surprised at how much credence you seem willing to lend "government and security sources" in descriptions of what is going on. Considering how willing the Canadian government officials are to openly say things that suggest they can't even see proper behavior from where they are standing, I am very heavily discounting the claims made by unnamed sources (politicians and officials) that seem designed to make the government look good.

Particularly when they claim there is little support, yet can't pay tow truck companies enough to remove vehicles because apparently all the companies and drivers support the truckers. Tow truck operators need to be "compelled" to remove the trucks, because there is no amount of money that will get any number of Canadian tow truck drivers to head down and pull out some trucks? From all appearances it seems that Canadians are pretty sick of their government, no matter how much Trudeau stamps his feet and claims to be the popular one.

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"it is about cutting off anyone involved from the entire financial system"

First they came for the sex workers*, then the "sex offenders"**, then the drug dealers, then the gun owners, then the legal drug dealers...

The non-consentual unbanking of the disfavored has been simmering for a long, long time. Same thing with the disintermediating technologies - good luck selling your services or items on a safe, legit website like ebay or amazon if they fall into the wrong categories and introduce "reputational harm". This is a change in degree, not in kind.

*Shit, not intended but no way I'm editing that out.

**And remember, that includes teenagers taking pics of their naughty bits at the request of their partner and drunks peeing behind a tree in the park at 2AM.

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A pretty good explanation for the difficulties in towing the big rigs:

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/ottawa/ottawa-protest-truck-tow-remove-1.6339652

The gist seems to be that:

1. Towing an 18 wheeler is fucking difficult. It requires specialized equipment and specialized skills. And several times more difficult if the truck has been deliberately disabled.

2. Heavy tow truck operators do not want to jeopardize commercial relations with heavy truck operators, their bread and butter customers.

3. Heavy tow truck operators fear violent reprisals against their employees. Apparently, this happened in Alberta when attempts were made to tow. I also saw a direct quote from an Ottawa operator saying the same thing, in another article.

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"My government and security sources ... a cadre of seasoned street brawlers whose primary goal is to further erode the legitimacy of the state"

Oh come on, Gurney! Straight out of 007. This sounds way too Hollywood and totally made up. The more one asks the obvious questions, the more it occurs to one just how implausible this claim is.

Canada has at most triple digits of seasoned brawlers and they only do it when they're wearing skates. Can we get even a name of this shadowy cult of Canadian anarchist parking-lot ultras with their tight military discipline and dreams of canuck imperium and maple supremacy? "Pucks for the Puck God! Sticks for his Stick Throne!"

Maybe the sources could protect their own sources and methods and just give us the identities of some of their leaders and known associates, so we can verify their criminal backgrounds of dozens of charges for battery let alone see the broken noses and cauliflower ears in their mug shots?

I am not questioning Gurney's self-proclaimed "hard men gaydar" spider sense, or accusing him or his sources of lying, exactly, but with this line they are trying to fool us, or they are being fooled.

Intel reporting in many countries is less distinguishable that what happens in contemporary nth-degree hearsay 'journalism' than a lot of people suspect. "X is reporting that Y is reporting that Z is reporting that an unnamed source said ... "

It only takes one person to play the first segment of this human-centipede process to introduce unsubstantiated nonsense into the system and for it to then be taken seriously and repeated and parroted so that, by the time you are done, getting multiple reports about the same thing seems like 'corroboration' rather than a collection of fruit stemming from the same poisoned tree.

But just like in journalism, some nonsense is too juicy, plays too strongly into confirmation bias, and serves too important a purpose so it operates just like 'clickbait' and is 'too good to check'. In this case, it seems that Canadian government officials feel it is important that it become accepted that there really is this special, "not just angry truckers!" 'threat' out there, or that they really believed it and were justified in doing so, and that they have secret knowledge - "we'd love to share it with you eh, but, you know, secret syrup and all that" - why they have to treat these events with a whole different level of seriousness, and which legitimate the exercise of special tools and authorities.

Speaking of the government, how is the investigation going on identifying who those 'hackers' really were? What are the prediction market odds for when some cyber law enforcement agency announces the arrests of these completely private actors?

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This post assumes a consensus on the need for the Convoy to end.

Why is it so important to break up this peaceful protest?

The reasons I’ve heard are:

1- They got them some “hard men”. And boy aren’t they just the hardest of hard brawlers even though they’re not brawling.

2- They’re breaking some traffic laws. That’s the excuse for breaking up every protests ever.

3- “a small minority has the power to shut down your country.” This is deeply hyperbolic and fear monger-y.

The Freedom Convoy is a litmus test for your commitment to freedom of assembly. What I’m seeing is a class of neurotic pseudo intellectuals who see violence where there is none and yet will advocate for solutions leading to violence. Of course no one in their social class will be the ones carrying out any of those incendiary actions. You couldn’t pay me any amount of money to be a cop in that situation right now.

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Twitter changed its policy a while ago and now allows hacked material

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