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?
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?
"how did we end up with a law enforcement apparatus that's this allergic to actually enforcing the law?"
That's a big question with a long history. They are scared of being sued, certainly. But if one restricts oneself to the last decade, it's hard to overstate the impact of ubiquitous smartphone use on law enforcement. Best and most helpful bug ever conceived, but also viral social media videos that can escape the usual narrative control mechanisms as per Gurri. A double-edged sword for sure.
So you are saying under Canadian charter rights the protesters do not have freedom of speech? They, the leadership of the truckers movement, are peaceful, they have promised to be peaceful.
The issue of how far "freedom of speech" extends into "freedom to make a public nuisance while speaking" is one with a long history. The words "Time, place and manner" come up a lot.
I don't think anyone has ever extended the concept of "freedom of speech" to mean that it's okay to break any and all laws necessary to bring attention to your speech.
My personal feedback: "So you are saying" followed by an accusation that obviously nobody would agree with "the protesters do not have the right to freedom of speech" doesn't sound like a genuine attempt to understand my position, it sounds like empty rhetoric.
I would clarify my ideas further but Melvin basically summarized for me by reading in between the lines of your accusation.
> "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"
I couldn't disagree more. The development of a societal reluctance to use violence and to spark violent confrontation is an obvious GOOD THING. Laws should be enforced with the minimum amount of violence necessary. The whole point of law (in a just society at least) is to deter violence, not justify it.
I agree that a just society should aim to minimize violence, I disagree with your premise that the point of Law is to deter violence. I would say that the point of law is to ensure a just society. The police, tasked with enforcing the law, are people who we've entrusted with using violence to ensure society remains just. Otherwise we could just replace them all with signposts that say "Please don't break the law" (This strategy employed by Ottawa police for the first two weeks of the blockades, with limited effect)
I also agree that laws should be enforced with the minimum amount of violence necessary. A group of people are currently breaking the law by participating in an 'unlawful assembly' - this law is in place to ensure just and fair use of communal resources e.g. roads, emergency services access, and legislative facilities. So, what is the minimum violence necessary to remove people who are saying "We will not move unless you physically force us to move"?
1. I'm not going to debate what "the point" of law is because it's a rhetorical dodge. There are a variety of points, and the points of "minimizing violence" and "ensuring a just society" largely overlap.
2. Now, the "minimum violence necessary" is likely 0 violence. This isn't a movie. Be smart, and realize that in the grand scheme of things, conceding an irrelevant issue is better than getting a bunch of people killed.
3. If we're going to be honest about this, we'd recognize that laws are often in conflict One of the most fundamental laws in Canada guarantees the right of people to assemble. It's quite probable you're calling for the police to break a fundamental law to violently uphold a tertiary procedural one.
4. If the goal is ensuring society "remains just", the use of violence has to be commiserate with the injustice. Like, it's pretty clear that murder is a gross act of injustice, and most everyone would be willing to see the police use force to prevent a murder. Clamoring for the police to go in and bust heads to break up a debatable crime that's normally punished with the approximate severity of a parking ticket... that seems less just.
5. If we're really going to take seriously that the government are smart people committed to "justice" and take seriously the worst accusations against the protesters, that they're a bunch of stupid, brutal nuts looking for a fight, does it not occur to you that maybe the smart, civilized, reasonable people should be smart enough to not give the nuts what they want? Or, more darkly, that the smarty-pants people know exactly what they're doing, and want to provoke a fight themselves?
In either case, the only way to win is not to play. There's no act of "justice" to be had here, even if (and maybe especially if) you think those protesters are a bunch of dumb SOBs, to see some of them killed and hurt, or to have a couple of cops get killed or in the process too. That's anger talking, but it's not righteous anger.
1. This isn't a rhetorical dodge, it's the stated premise of your argument. Edit: I already told you that I agreed "minimizing violence" and "ensuring a just society" largely overlap. But the Venn diagram here is not a perfect circle, you and I are arguing near the borders of it.
2. I'm not saying I want the police go in and shoot everyone in the face. I'm saying these people have caused significant disruption that has been declared illegal multiple times. Asking them to leave has not been enough. Issuing fines for illegally parked vehicles has not been enough. What do we do next? Arresting people is part of the necessary violence society employs every day to maintain order and justice.
3. They can express themselves all they like. But they need to stop disrupting the regular functions of the city of Ottawa. This is not a normal protest, Ottawa has those all the time, and is used to the temporary disruption caused by a march or a protest in the capital. There's no fundamental law that says you're allowed to blockade the roads of a city, especially for weeks on end.
4. See point 2
5. If telling people to leave for nearly a month and finally resorting to physical force to remove them causes physical conflict, you would proclaim the police to be the cause of the conflict?
'Not playing' means letting a mob of people appropriate the streets of the capitol for an indefinite amount of time. That doesn't sound like winning to me, that sounds to me like the complete failure of law enforcement (see my top comment).
> Laws should be enforced with the minimum amount of violence necessary
I agree, but the first part of that sentence is "Laws should be enforced". If I live in downtown Ottawa (or Seattle) and can't go about my daily business because there's trucks parked and blaring horns everywhere (or armed blockades) then laws are not being enforced.
Which law? The whole point is that laws are in conflict. The law that says "people are allowed to protest" is always potentially in conflict with the laws that say (collectively) "people should be able to go about your daily business".
What makes Bull Conner a (rightly) reviled figure in US history when he was just "enforcing the law?".
I've given my answer in another reply, which is that large scale protest confers legitimacy on itself. I'm not going to quibble about where that line is, but once you've got sizable number of regular citizens involved in protest, you can no longer safely treat it like some public nuisance. To state it differently, when the public itself becomes the nuisance, government can't (legitimately) just send in the goons and call it a law enforcement issue.
I refer you to Aesop's fable "Belling the Cat". If nobody's in the mood to incur the risk to enforce the law, it doesn't get enforced. I guess you could try to enforce the enforcement by compelling law enforcement to enforce something (or face discipline/termination) but what if they call your bluff and resign? And you have trouble recruiting? I guess you could try for a draft....but then you'd have to enforce that. And so on.
A recent example - in early 2020 NYS was attempting to enforce its lockdown and began recruiting people from multiple LE agencies to go out into the field. There was a wave of resignations. The lockdown ended a few weeks later based on...stuff
And I refer you to the Nuremberg defense. When authorities insist that law enforcement or military forces do things that are unlawful, unjust, or completely at odds with common sense, people will resign in protest.
+ Smarty-pants little PM stamping his feet, "Hey, go break up that peaceful protest!"
- Police, "But sir... they're just sitting there. And... my cousin is there."
+ Smarty-pants little PM stamping his feet, "Didn't you hear me you dumbass, get out the firehoses and police dogs!"
- Police, "Uh... no thanks".
In fairness, mass resignations happen for other reasons too, but the common element is usually that the authorities in charge are massively out of touch.
Don't get me wrong, I'm very much in favor of vaccine mandates. I think they should have been structured a bit more prosaically (nice, simple fines, instead of placing the burden of enforcement on employers, restaurants, movie theaters, etc)
I don't want to get in the weeds with comparisons to Nazi Germany or its aftermath. I think it's possible to believe in the justness and correctness of a law, while not being terribly keen about putting your life on the line to enforce it. Trucks are potentially deadly weapons, as we saw in Nice in 2016, and I don't fault people for putting their own safety first when they sense that they're outgunned (they are)
On the subject of enforcement of mandates themselves, it's been largely a ministerial/ceremonial - solemnly communicating to people that the mandate exists. I think if more people understood that, the mandates wouldn't have met with as much pushback as they did.
Another example I recently saw of too much being expected of a beleaguered government worker:
Walking home last night, in the dark, crossing Tillary St in Brooklyn, there was a traffic guard helping people cross the road. A cyclist yelled at her for not stopping cars from making "illegal left turns". I didn't get a chance to give the cyclist a piece of my mind: "Buddy, don't be a jerk. That's way above the lady's pay grade. Get a life."
> 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.
I find the best way to maintain clear thinking when thinking about protests is to constantly double-check myself by imaginging that the protests are about something else.
If there's a protest by people I strongly disagree with, and I find myself thinking "shoot 'em all!" then I have to stop, take a breath, and imagine it's a protest by people I fully agree with, and check whether I'd still feel the same way. If I don't, then it's time for some more introspection.
Similarly if there's a protest by people I agree with, and I find myself thinking "ehh, just give them what they want" then I have to stop and check if I'd still feel that way about a protest I disagreed with.
Now personally I'm vaguely on the side of the truckers, kind of (I'm actually pretty neutral on vaccine mandates for truckers, an issue I've never thought about, but dislike the Trudeau government for other reasons anyway). Still, I don't have to work too hard to imagine a situation where in a few years you've got a thousand truckers in my own city, protesting in the name of a cause that I don't agree with. I don't think I'd be suggesting "just give 'em what they want" then, so I don't think it's fair for me to suggest it now.
I mostly agree, but where I disagree is the going down the slippery slope of imagining that "if we give them what we want now, they or someone like them will do the same thing again. Or to me."
I think there are obvious reasons why that's unlikely. It's not as if protests are a new phenomenon, they've been going on for thousands of years. And on the whole, protests are a good thing, even a necessary thing, which is why every civilized country has robust protections against protest that cloud "the law is the law" argument.
Anyway, protests, whether we agree with them or not, have a pretty standard playbook. You've got a group of committed believers, and, to the extent they gain support, a lot of sympathy, which may attract less committed protesters.
It's this popular support... the protests and sympathies of less committed "normies" that divides how protests should be handled. And likely whether a protest will be coming to your town in the future.
Because iIf you brutalize this group and say the they're just as bad as the committed believers, well, you're probably making more committed believers, and you're making martyrs out of the already committed believers.
Here's the thing... even if I disagree with something, I think as a political reality any cause that attracts a significant amount of this "casual support" is basically a legitimate grievance. Like, I think the stated goals of OWS were in a practical sense wrong and intractable, but they're opinions that a large group of the people I share the country with apparently support.
So... I can brutalize them, or I can throw a bone to the mass of them who, when all is said and done, aren't fanatics about the cause. Appease them (or ignore them and let them peter out if their causes are fantastical) and the mass nature and legitimacy of the protest goes away. When that happens, it becomes practical to use law enforcement on the core group (to the extent necessary) if they're especially bad.
I'd point out that this has already taken place. Your worry about the next trucker convoy disrupting your town seems unfounded because this has already been attempted several times, and every time it failed to gain popular support. Which made it practical to cut off the protest when it got way out of bounds.
The support and presence of lots of casual protesters is the key here. It makes it a political issue rather than a law enforcement issue.
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.
I'm not sure it's actually a "failure" if the majority barely want something at all, and a minority really, really don't want it, and the minority get their way. One can argue that democracy is better than oligarchy statistically, because fewer people get oppressed. But a minority being oppressed is still oppression.
You really have to ask if the issue is one that ought to be insisted on in the first place, or whether people should just be left to do what they want.
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?
That's because the people with the hands on the lever of power identified with the CHAZers and thought they were just misguided utes. I saw the same thing in my city when it was being destroyed recently. Local government was paralized because it was their friends and aquantences out there trying to fight for what they local government folks wanted, just a little bit too exhuberantly.
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.
Trudeau has shown himself to be incredibly incompetent in these kinds of matters, and it would not surprise me if his response gets him out of office in the near future.
That said, it could both be true that Trudeau has been terrible and that the government is being broadly supported by most people in removing the protestors. That tow truck drivers are supporting other truck drivers may not be very surprising, and may not indicate much widespread support.
"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.
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.
"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?
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.
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?
Read ‘A brief explanation of the cathedral’ by Curtis Yarvin on his Substack, Gray Mirror
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?
"how did we end up with a law enforcement apparatus that's this allergic to actually enforcing the law?"
That's a big question with a long history. They are scared of being sued, certainly. But if one restricts oneself to the last decade, it's hard to overstate the impact of ubiquitous smartphone use on law enforcement. Best and most helpful bug ever conceived, but also viral social media videos that can escape the usual narrative control mechanisms as per Gurri. A double-edged sword for sure.
So you are saying under Canadian charter rights the protesters do not have freedom of speech? They, the leadership of the truckers movement, are peaceful, they have promised to be peaceful.
That's not what I'm saying, try again.
No, I will not “try again.” That’s a taunt. I was genuinely attempting to understand you.
The issue of how far "freedom of speech" extends into "freedom to make a public nuisance while speaking" is one with a long history. The words "Time, place and manner" come up a lot.
I don't think anyone has ever extended the concept of "freedom of speech" to mean that it's okay to break any and all laws necessary to bring attention to your speech.
My apologies for taunting you then.
My personal feedback: "So you are saying" followed by an accusation that obviously nobody would agree with "the protesters do not have the right to freedom of speech" doesn't sound like a genuine attempt to understand my position, it sounds like empty rhetoric.
I would clarify my ideas further but Melvin basically summarized for me by reading in between the lines of your accusation.
> "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"
I couldn't disagree more. The development of a societal reluctance to use violence and to spark violent confrontation is an obvious GOOD THING. Laws should be enforced with the minimum amount of violence necessary. The whole point of law (in a just society at least) is to deter violence, not justify it.
I agree that a just society should aim to minimize violence, I disagree with your premise that the point of Law is to deter violence. I would say that the point of law is to ensure a just society. The police, tasked with enforcing the law, are people who we've entrusted with using violence to ensure society remains just. Otherwise we could just replace them all with signposts that say "Please don't break the law" (This strategy employed by Ottawa police for the first two weeks of the blockades, with limited effect)
I also agree that laws should be enforced with the minimum amount of violence necessary. A group of people are currently breaking the law by participating in an 'unlawful assembly' - this law is in place to ensure just and fair use of communal resources e.g. roads, emergency services access, and legislative facilities. So, what is the minimum violence necessary to remove people who are saying "We will not move unless you physically force us to move"?
1. I'm not going to debate what "the point" of law is because it's a rhetorical dodge. There are a variety of points, and the points of "minimizing violence" and "ensuring a just society" largely overlap.
2. Now, the "minimum violence necessary" is likely 0 violence. This isn't a movie. Be smart, and realize that in the grand scheme of things, conceding an irrelevant issue is better than getting a bunch of people killed.
3. If we're going to be honest about this, we'd recognize that laws are often in conflict One of the most fundamental laws in Canada guarantees the right of people to assemble. It's quite probable you're calling for the police to break a fundamental law to violently uphold a tertiary procedural one.
4. If the goal is ensuring society "remains just", the use of violence has to be commiserate with the injustice. Like, it's pretty clear that murder is a gross act of injustice, and most everyone would be willing to see the police use force to prevent a murder. Clamoring for the police to go in and bust heads to break up a debatable crime that's normally punished with the approximate severity of a parking ticket... that seems less just.
5. If we're really going to take seriously that the government are smart people committed to "justice" and take seriously the worst accusations against the protesters, that they're a bunch of stupid, brutal nuts looking for a fight, does it not occur to you that maybe the smart, civilized, reasonable people should be smart enough to not give the nuts what they want? Or, more darkly, that the smarty-pants people know exactly what they're doing, and want to provoke a fight themselves?
In either case, the only way to win is not to play. There's no act of "justice" to be had here, even if (and maybe especially if) you think those protesters are a bunch of dumb SOBs, to see some of them killed and hurt, or to have a couple of cops get killed or in the process too. That's anger talking, but it's not righteous anger.
1. This isn't a rhetorical dodge, it's the stated premise of your argument. Edit: I already told you that I agreed "minimizing violence" and "ensuring a just society" largely overlap. But the Venn diagram here is not a perfect circle, you and I are arguing near the borders of it.
2. I'm not saying I want the police go in and shoot everyone in the face. I'm saying these people have caused significant disruption that has been declared illegal multiple times. Asking them to leave has not been enough. Issuing fines for illegally parked vehicles has not been enough. What do we do next? Arresting people is part of the necessary violence society employs every day to maintain order and justice.
3. They can express themselves all they like. But they need to stop disrupting the regular functions of the city of Ottawa. This is not a normal protest, Ottawa has those all the time, and is used to the temporary disruption caused by a march or a protest in the capital. There's no fundamental law that says you're allowed to blockade the roads of a city, especially for weeks on end.
4. See point 2
5. If telling people to leave for nearly a month and finally resorting to physical force to remove them causes physical conflict, you would proclaim the police to be the cause of the conflict?
'Not playing' means letting a mob of people appropriate the streets of the capitol for an indefinite amount of time. That doesn't sound like winning to me, that sounds to me like the complete failure of law enforcement (see my top comment).
> Laws should be enforced with the minimum amount of violence necessary
I agree, but the first part of that sentence is "Laws should be enforced". If I live in downtown Ottawa (or Seattle) and can't go about my daily business because there's trucks parked and blaring horns everywhere (or armed blockades) then laws are not being enforced.
Which law? The whole point is that laws are in conflict. The law that says "people are allowed to protest" is always potentially in conflict with the laws that say (collectively) "people should be able to go about your daily business".
What makes Bull Conner a (rightly) reviled figure in US history when he was just "enforcing the law?".
I've given my answer in another reply, which is that large scale protest confers legitimacy on itself. I'm not going to quibble about where that line is, but once you've got sizable number of regular citizens involved in protest, you can no longer safely treat it like some public nuisance. To state it differently, when the public itself becomes the nuisance, government can't (legitimately) just send in the goons and call it a law enforcement issue.
I refer you to Aesop's fable "Belling the Cat". If nobody's in the mood to incur the risk to enforce the law, it doesn't get enforced. I guess you could try to enforce the enforcement by compelling law enforcement to enforce something (or face discipline/termination) but what if they call your bluff and resign? And you have trouble recruiting? I guess you could try for a draft....but then you'd have to enforce that. And so on.
A recent example - in early 2020 NYS was attempting to enforce its lockdown and began recruiting people from multiple LE agencies to go out into the field. There was a wave of resignations. The lockdown ended a few weeks later based on...stuff
And I refer you to the Nuremberg defense. When authorities insist that law enforcement or military forces do things that are unlawful, unjust, or completely at odds with common sense, people will resign in protest.
+ Smarty-pants little PM stamping his feet, "Hey, go break up that peaceful protest!"
- Police, "But sir... they're just sitting there. And... my cousin is there."
+ Smarty-pants little PM stamping his feet, "Didn't you hear me you dumbass, get out the firehoses and police dogs!"
- Police, "Uh... no thanks".
In fairness, mass resignations happen for other reasons too, but the common element is usually that the authorities in charge are massively out of touch.
Don't get me wrong, I'm very much in favor of vaccine mandates. I think they should have been structured a bit more prosaically (nice, simple fines, instead of placing the burden of enforcement on employers, restaurants, movie theaters, etc)
I don't want to get in the weeds with comparisons to Nazi Germany or its aftermath. I think it's possible to believe in the justness and correctness of a law, while not being terribly keen about putting your life on the line to enforce it. Trucks are potentially deadly weapons, as we saw in Nice in 2016, and I don't fault people for putting their own safety first when they sense that they're outgunned (they are)
On the subject of enforcement of mandates themselves, it's been largely a ministerial/ceremonial - solemnly communicating to people that the mandate exists. I think if more people understood that, the mandates wouldn't have met with as much pushback as they did.
Another example I recently saw of too much being expected of a beleaguered government worker:
Walking home last night, in the dark, crossing Tillary St in Brooklyn, there was a traffic guard helping people cross the road. A cyclist yelled at her for not stopping cars from making "illegal left turns". I didn't get a chance to give the cyclist a piece of my mind: "Buddy, don't be a jerk. That's way above the lady's pay grade. Get a life."
> 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.
I find the best way to maintain clear thinking when thinking about protests is to constantly double-check myself by imaginging that the protests are about something else.
If there's a protest by people I strongly disagree with, and I find myself thinking "shoot 'em all!" then I have to stop, take a breath, and imagine it's a protest by people I fully agree with, and check whether I'd still feel the same way. If I don't, then it's time for some more introspection.
Similarly if there's a protest by people I agree with, and I find myself thinking "ehh, just give them what they want" then I have to stop and check if I'd still feel that way about a protest I disagreed with.
Now personally I'm vaguely on the side of the truckers, kind of (I'm actually pretty neutral on vaccine mandates for truckers, an issue I've never thought about, but dislike the Trudeau government for other reasons anyway). Still, I don't have to work too hard to imagine a situation where in a few years you've got a thousand truckers in my own city, protesting in the name of a cause that I don't agree with. I don't think I'd be suggesting "just give 'em what they want" then, so I don't think it's fair for me to suggest it now.
I mostly agree, but where I disagree is the going down the slippery slope of imagining that "if we give them what we want now, they or someone like them will do the same thing again. Or to me."
I think there are obvious reasons why that's unlikely. It's not as if protests are a new phenomenon, they've been going on for thousands of years. And on the whole, protests are a good thing, even a necessary thing, which is why every civilized country has robust protections against protest that cloud "the law is the law" argument.
Anyway, protests, whether we agree with them or not, have a pretty standard playbook. You've got a group of committed believers, and, to the extent they gain support, a lot of sympathy, which may attract less committed protesters.
It's this popular support... the protests and sympathies of less committed "normies" that divides how protests should be handled. And likely whether a protest will be coming to your town in the future.
Because iIf you brutalize this group and say the they're just as bad as the committed believers, well, you're probably making more committed believers, and you're making martyrs out of the already committed believers.
Here's the thing... even if I disagree with something, I think as a political reality any cause that attracts a significant amount of this "casual support" is basically a legitimate grievance. Like, I think the stated goals of OWS were in a practical sense wrong and intractable, but they're opinions that a large group of the people I share the country with apparently support.
So... I can brutalize them, or I can throw a bone to the mass of them who, when all is said and done, aren't fanatics about the cause. Appease them (or ignore them and let them peter out if their causes are fantastical) and the mass nature and legitimacy of the protest goes away. When that happens, it becomes practical to use law enforcement on the core group (to the extent necessary) if they're especially bad.
I'd point out that this has already taken place. Your worry about the next trucker convoy disrupting your town seems unfounded because this has already been attempted several times, and every time it failed to gain popular support. Which made it practical to cut off the protest when it got way out of bounds.
The support and presence of lots of casual protesters is the key here. It makes it a political issue rather than a law enforcement issue.
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.
I'm not sure it's actually a "failure" if the majority barely want something at all, and a minority really, really don't want it, and the minority get their way. One can argue that democracy is better than oligarchy statistically, because fewer people get oppressed. But a minority being oppressed is still oppression.
You really have to ask if the issue is one that ought to be insisted on in the first place, or whether people should just be left to do what they want.
Ya, I was saying it was a failure in the sense that it threatens the integrity of a democratic system.
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?
I haven’t seen any reports of armed patrols in Ottawa, but a weapons cache was seized in Alberta, and several protesters arrested.
The leaders of the truckers have promised they will remain peaceful.
That's because the people with the hands on the lever of power identified with the CHAZers and thought they were just misguided utes. I saw the same thing in my city when it was being destroyed recently. Local government was paralized because it was their friends and aquantences out there trying to fight for what they local government folks wanted, just a little bit too exhuberantly.
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.
Trudeau was showing a 16% approval rating .
Trudeau has shown himself to be incredibly incompetent in these kinds of matters, and it would not surprise me if his response gets him out of office in the near future.
That said, it could both be true that Trudeau has been terrible and that the government is being broadly supported by most people in removing the protestors. That tow truck drivers are supporting other truck drivers may not be very surprising, and may not indicate much widespread support.
"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.
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.
"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?
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.
Because it qualifies as a siege, complete with machines that can and have been used for terrorism in the past. There's nothing "peaceful" about that.
Twitter changed its policy a while ago and now allows hacked material
Do you have a link to the change?