Today the Free Speech Union of Canada officially launched its website fsucanada.ca, and it is my distinct honour (forcing Substack to use Canadian spelling here) to be its inaugural Chairman of the Board.
As any of you who read me regularly know, free speech is an issue of great importance for me, and I am essentially a free speech absolutist. It also became clear to me in the past year or so how tenuous this right currently is in Canada. For example, the current Government tabled an Online Hate Bill that I have written about, that is chilling in its intent. If this bill were to become law, if someone suspects you are likely to engage in any form of speech they might interpret as hate speech online, and if they complain, the Government would have the right, essentially, to shut down your social media access.
When I have told others about this, they always bring up Minority Report, the Tom Cruise science fiction film in which criminals are apprehended before they commit crimes because technology that foretells the future labels them as future offenders. But the Online Hate Bill is in many ways worse. First, what people may be shut down for, in a reasonable democracy, should not be considered a crime. Second, to give a mere unsubstantiated and perhaps even anonymous accusation this kind of legal weight is ridiculous.
This proposed legislation is just one of the more egregious examples of efforts to restrict speech, including politically incorrect speech, that some may find offensive. So, when Toby Young contacted a group of us last year to explore whether we might consider forming a Free Speech Union in Canada to partner with the Free Speech Unions in UK, Australia, New Zealand and elsewhere, I was quite eager to become involved.
The non-partisan, non-profit membership organisation dedicated to the defence of free speech in Canada. It will engage in numerous activities. It will lobby to defeat anti-free speech legislation like the Online Hate Bill, and will actively promote public events and discussions designed to defend free speech. It will provide resources that members and others can use to understand their free speech rights and the potential impact of free speech violations, and it will work to help defend free speech rights of members, including in some cases helping individuals with possible legal battles, including providing legal representation.
Funds for FSU Canada will come from donations and membership dues. I long for the day when the organisation will become unnecessary and irrelevant. But until then, this new beginning, with a great board, working with Executive Director Lisa Bildy, marks an important first step to fight the dangerous erosion of one of the most important rights that citizens in a democracy should have.
Lawrence M. Krauss is a theoretical physicist, the President of the Origins Project Foundation, and the author, most recently of The Edge of Knowledge: Unsolved Mysteries of the Cosmos. He serves as the Chairman of Free Speech Union of Canada. He blogs at Critical Mass on Substack.
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Par for the course from a load of professional arse-sitters, spouters and generalised planet savers, educated in subjects specialising in the latest fashionable drivel.
Incapable of doing a real job, a serious day’s work or understanding the principles of physics.
Keep up the good work, Mr Pile. In the long run, physics will prevail over fallacy and folly. Just a matter of when.
Reading your comment Art, it just occurred to me that Rayner is emblematic of the malaise afflicting our ‘governing’ party. Your three points in order: 1. She isn’t educated at all. 2.She’s never tried a ‘real job’ having been steeped in Trade Union lore prior to local government, then politics. 3.I doubt she could spell physics. ‘Room for improvement.’ as her end of term report might read would be a colossal understatement.
Ms Nobrayner is a bit of an outlier among the spouting classes. Having said that, anecdotally the two working people currently re-roofing our house have worked it all out for themselves. Work doesn’t get much more real, or educational, than being up on a roof at 8.15 in a cold, frosty February sunrise.
Been there, got the tee-shirt. Re-roofed our 8m x 5m barn in Yorkshire 40 years ago. Nothing like jumping in at the deep end. Never again!
I am not convinced it has much to do with understanding of physics. I know little about physics. There are useful idiots who find comfort in the religion of signalling their virtue, and there are others who just want to lord it over everybody and have cottoned on to “climate change” (or “pandemics”) as a good way to do that.
You know more about physics than you give yourself credit for. Less about O- and A-levels, more about grasping reality. Most career politicians don’t get that – witness Miliband (who has a physics A-level…).
Agreed on motivations – in my experience, one half of people revel in telling the other half what to do. The other half just wants both halves to work it out for themselves. Controllers vs responders, chalk and cheese mindsets.
Each to their own, live and let live. You see what you see, I see what I see, best we can do is each say what we’ve seen and discuss from there.
Some people seem to want to be told what to do.
As far as physics goes, I think it’s a case of doublethink or “there’s none so deaf as those that refuse to listen”.
Oh, I expect you’re right for too many of the people too much of the time. Bring up Feynman and Popper and watch eyes glaze over. Cue Dietrich Boenhoeffer on stupidity…
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ww47bR86wSc
“…Against stupidity we are defenceless. The stupid person even becomes critical – and when facts are irrefutable they are just pushed aside as inconsequential, as incidental.”
I don’t think using the word “stupidity” in that way is overly useful. I think most people understand “stupid” in the sense of being intellectually challenged, inarticulate, incapable of higher order reasoning. If “stupid” people “go on the attack” then they are malicious. I know malicious stupid people and highly moral ones.
Let’s not get too hung up on a single word. I’m assuming Boenhoeffer used it in good faith in the circumstance of the time he was up against.
I’m sure he was wiser and certainly more courageous than I am.
We’re now fully in the grip of a socialist, central planning regime.
It’s been advancing for 100 years but now all the major and essential elements of our economy are for all intents and purposes centrally planned.
The remaining pockets of free market are in small enterprises. Sandwich shops, bits of the tech industry, basically the scraps.
Indeed. If memory of O-level history serves right, all those canals, railways and Victorian sewers had little to do with the governments of the time, and everything to do with men with spades and civil engineers of genius.
Credit where credit’s due, government did rule the waves, abolish slavery and foster civil engineering on foreign soil (but gets little historic thanks for it from present day arse-sitting and spouting classes).
Basically all the bits that are being forced out of business by the blob/govt.
You could mage an argument that the last 50 years or so of history have all been ‘about oil’. As one philosopher proposed ‘things’ change into their opposites over time… so perhaps the current history being formed is about ‘fake oil’. Oil you don’t extract and use to fuel (pun) the economy and standard of living.
Can we borrow Elon Musk
What happens in America never stays in America.
A large number of exceptionally fat backsides in the climate change/green energy taxpayer rip off business will be emaciated shadows of their former selves by 2015….
Bring it on.
Government Hates Wealth Creation
This one does – but of course they do, because they are socialists.
Socialism leads to denial of reality, poverty, economic collapse, totalitarianism, famine and death. History abounds with examples.
Socialism. Always. Fails.
“Labour’s manifesto promise to “create new high-quality jobs, working with business and trade unions, as we manage the transition””
Do governments create jobs? Don’t “jobs” arise because people want their needs fulfilled? Didn’t people do work thousands of years before we had “governments”?
Government create non-jobs that the private sector won’t because they see no value in them. The secret of the success of Donald and Elon is that they are successful businessmen and understand value for money. Governments can destroy jobs and 100 days on from the worst budget in history from probably our worst Chancellor this one is doing just that. With inflation about to rise again after the brief blip in December, the Bank of England has been forced to gamble in reducing the interest rate to prop up the failing economy. I see far too much optimism in rate reductions for this year. And don’t expect to see your mortgage rate come down as they are driven by 10 year bond rates.
100%
Yesterday is a good illustration of the variability of renewable power. At the start of the day wind was producing 14GW, by the following midnight it had dropped to just 4GW. Try coping for that sort of variation without reliable, dispatchable energy
January is obviously a critcal month in UK. The percentage graph from Gridwatch shows nuclear as grey, gas as dull orange and wind as pale blue.
PS You can see how pathetic solar is by the little flashes of yellow where the sun broke through.
It’s worth mentioning that the chart is %age of power generated. The nuclear power generated does not peak each night – it continues at the same level of power but represents a larger percentage because less is generated/required overnight.
On the other hand, solar…
Right now CCGT (gas turbines) contributing 54.46% towards our 42.91 GW demand today in spite of a glorious clear sunny February day in East Yorkshire (solar 6.43%).
Only slightly on topic, I fell about laughing this morning watching the article about vegan pets on GBNews. The woman from PETA (not British by the way), said that vegan foods for dogs is readily available, nutritious and reduces your dog’s carbon footprint. She then held up a tin consisting mainly of jack fruit. This comes from tropical countries, so massive food miles and carbon footprint and costs about £3.00 per 400g tin. Pedigree chum costs £1.00 per tin. What planet do these idiots come from?
You’re so right. And did you see the item on dog meat ‘made in the lab’ (for the lab??) guaranteed to reduce your dog’s carbon footprint!