printI’m so very pleased that Ann Coulter has, by necessity, turned her wrath on one of the most oppressive instruments in the Canadian state, the Human Rights apparatus. The Human Rights Commission, a Kangaroo court, operates outside the Canadian courts, affording its victims none of the defenses or due process the courts afford. For example, mens rea, or criminal intention: the absence of the intent to harm is no defense in this “court.” Neither is truth.
The apparatchiks of this machine have designated certain groups as protected species. Thus, the bedrock of western law, the rights of the individual, is turned on its head. Based on your membership in a group, you get to claim protected species rights—and acquire a lien on the property of other groups, who become prime potential offenders. The quasi-judicial Tribunal then acts on these definitions in the substance of its decisions. It’s all great for social cohesion.
And the designations keep growing. Last I covered the quasi-courts, it was deliberating as to whether to extend protection against discrimination on the grounds of “social conditions.” In other words, much like in the US, you do not posses absolute rights to your property. However, over and above the infraction against freedom of association and property that is American Civil Rights law, the Canadian kangaroo code would make it an offense to refuse to rent your apartment, for example, to a welfare recipient.
Devastating complaints have been launched against individuals whose speech the protected species dislike, often bankrupting and destroying innocent individuals guilty of exercising property rights or expressing politically incorrect thoughts.
In a truly free society, the kind we once enjoyed, one honors the right of the individual to associate and disassociate, invest and disinvest, speak and misspeak at will. Simple. So long as your mitts stop at my mug, you ought to be free to do as you wish. (Including ingesting drugs and ending one’s life, for vices are not crimes. “If for harming himself a man forfeits his liberty, then it can’t be said that he has dominion over his body. It implies that someone else—government—owns him.”) People ought to be arrested only for crimes they perpetrate against another’s person or property.
Particularly apt is Ann’s swipe, in “Oh Canada,” at the mob mentality and congenital stupidity issuing from the free-thinking Millennials (whom I’ve described at length in “Your Kids: Dumb, Difficult And Dispensable”):
the Ottawa University Student Federation met for seven and a half hours to hammer out a series of resolutions denouncing me. The resolutions included:
“Whereas Ann Coulter is a hateful woman;
“Whereas she has made hateful comments against GLBTQ, Muslims, Jews and women;
“Whereas she violates an unwritten code of ‘positive-space’;
“Be it resolved that the SFUO express its disapproval of having Ann Coulter speak at the University of Ottawa.”
At least the students didn’t waste seven and a half hours on something silly, like their studies.
Update I (March 25): Where do you think “The Silly Sex?” would land this writer were she to return to Canada? Or “Women Who Wed the Wrong Wahhabi”? Or “‘Obsession’ By Muhammad”?
Update II: Coulter has never called for the conversion of Jews, as Myron (and lefties) contends. I’ve long since “Disentangled [That] Coulter/Deutsch Dust-Up”:
Although some Christian denominations have watered it down, a general filament of the Christian faith is the belief that salvation is predicated on accepting Christ. If Coulter were more than a brash, bonny (if bony) babe, she’d have explained that doctrine: To get past the Pearly Gates, Christians believe one has to accept Christ.
“But is belief in ‘perfection’ or ‘completion’ through Jesus tantamount to hostility to Jews?” asked Gabriel Sanders of the Jewish daily “Forward.” And he replied, quoting Yaakov Ariel, a professor of religious studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and a specialist in Jewish-Evangelical ties: “A conservative, Jesus-oriented faith doesn’t mean, in and of itself, that people are anti-Jewish. Some of the more favorable attitudes toward Jews have developed in Evangelical circles.”
Liberating tolerance, then, would mean intolerance against movements from the Right and toleration of movements from the Left.
I have just started to pick up on Herbert Marcuse, but his 1965 essay, Repressive Tolerance, really seems like the playbook being used by the other side. I guess Ann got a major dose of it Tuesday.
Repressive Tolerance
What illogical tripe. The only thing wrong with these students, and their professors, is a lack of indoctrination in the facts of life in the real world. They are products of an education system based on myth and and wishful thinking. Thinking themselves wise they became foolish.
I love the “Frank A-Houle” from Ann. She can be a knee-jerk namecaller but sometimes there are diamonds among the Coulterian manure. Nevertheless, her right to be obnoxious is sacred to me and fortunately a few (too few) on the left like Greenwald and Hentoff defend real free speech:
http://www.lewrockwell.com/greenwald/greenwald62.html [You call this a decent or even principled defense? The trendy worship of this sanctimonious worm escapes me.]
On the other side are the liberals tying Coulter and everyone in one basket of violent/bigoted/extremism ( see my post on http://barelyablog.com/?p=23361 ):
http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/03/24/house-of-anger/
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/24/opinion/24dowd.html
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/23/opinion/23herbert.html
and that is just for starters. You can hear threats against Stupak or Hoyer in the Washington Post. The media drumbeat will grow louder like a mainstream “Bolero” [nice] against the non-neocon, non-mainstream right.
Yes, Frank A-Hole was merely defending tolerant Canada against Coulter, a known abortion clinic bomber, Nazi murderess of Jews, poisoner of Hispanics, castrater of gays, enslaver of blacks, and defiler of the great Religion of Peace. [So why is Greenwald—who calls her all these things, but puts himself on a pedestal by allowing her her ostensible hate—so principled?!] That is how the game is played. Oppose the Federal Reserve and you are the Oklahoma City Bomber. Criticizing Social Security is the same as denying that men walked on the Moon. Free speech is for anyone from Kennedy to Kristol but, outside those boundaries, you must be silenced for tolerant free speech to prevail.
There is no ruthlessness that can’t be made more ruthless by the addition of self-righteous good intentions. The thugs, campus freelancers and ex officio Commission members, have a moral high ground so high they can no longer recognize anything other than their own moral superiority. Doesn’t bode well for miscreants (in both the contemporary and archaic use of the term).
Most people are fine with “free speech” for speech that they LIKE (such as David Irving’s Holocaust denial in Iran) or tolerate (insipid blather like David Brooks opeds) but draw the line at speech they despise such as Irving’s speech in Austria (a Greenwald point), Coulter to a PC leftist, or sexuality to a religious person. Thus, I credit Greenwald with defending Coulter right to speak in Canada unmolested by censors – better than 90% of leftists would grant Coulter.
I personally find her to sometimes be snide and nasty, although not calling for acts of violence. The former gets included in the general rubric of hate speech by the politically correct.
Even when avoiding nastiness, a specific EXAMPLE of how Coulter drives many “ballistic” is her advocating Jewish conversion. Naturally, if a Christian believes that only Christians rise to heaven and LIKES Jewish people, then she SHOULD wish for conversion. Conversion certainly does resemble the eliminationism of the Nazis. Nor does she advocate FORCIBLE conversion (e.g. the Inquisition). On the other hand, if all Jews converted, it would mean the end of the Jewish religion. So while advocating conversion is NOT really hate speech, it upsets many Jews.
I wanted to respond to Myron’s comment, “if all Jews converted, it would mean the end of the Jewish religion.” I’d note that many Jewish believers in Yeshua as Messiah observe the same religious rituals and traditions as those who do not believe Yeshua is Messiah. The latter group is waiting for the Messiah’s coming; the former believe the Messiah has already appeared.
Not only do America’s evangelical Christians respect and honor the Jewish people, many do their utmost to incorporate Jewish traditions (such as Passover) into their own practice.
Regardless, I understand that many Jews are upset about the subject of conversion, equating it with liquidation. This comes from the European background. America’s evangelicals pray for all to accept Jesus as Lord, realizing that conversion comes from a move of the Holy Spirit, and can never be forced.