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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Gee, ya think?
That a bunch of “scientists” felt it useful and necessary to establish this in the form of a peer reviewed study is just one more symptom of how completely insane our society is becoming.
“there is an absence of evidence that unvaccinated individuals display discriminatory attitudes towards vaccinated people,”
Says it all really doesn’t it? And then we get this:
“Consistent with this, the present findings suggest that contributors to the public good of epidemic control (i.e., the vaccinated) react with discriminatory attitudes against perceived free-riders (i.e., the unvaccinated).”
I have never been a free rider. The cheeky tw##s.
That line should read “self-perceived contributors to what they deemed the public good“. Those who screamed loudest about being vaxxed to save granny, who wore 10 masks to protect others, were usually those who were most scared for themselves and themselves alone. Going out to town centres for a wander round, then complaining about why so many other people had the audacity to want to do the exact same thing. The worst discriminators were, imo, people who were concerned for their health alone (nothing wrong with that as such, except they would happily have sacrified the health of others without batting an eyelid) combined with a nasty, controlling and snitching streak, who got off on bullying others and now felt not only safe to do so, but justified to do so, spurred on by the praise of a media and journalists who had prostituted themselves for big pharma bucks.
Much appreciated. Nails it.
At least two masks at the rear?
I’m the same: definitely not a ‘free rider’. As a freelancer who has to operate as a limited company director, thanks to our demented tax system, I didn’t get any work for almost six months, I lived off (and almost completely drained) my savings, which were created through being hugely disciplined through six backbreaking years building the business from the ground up, and still almost lost my company. I didn’t take a penny from the state: not one bit of the restraint of trade compensation I deserved, that was never offered to limited company directors… not even a bounce back loan. Nada. My experience is hardly unique in what remains of the freelance workforce. So, when I chose not to take the mRNA shot, it was people who had taken the police state’s money who were the free riders, not me. As I had taken nothing from a state that had turned against me, I was under no obligation to give anything back.
“As I had taken nothing from a state that had turned against me, I was under no obligation to give anything back.”
Damn well said. I think we on here should all take that statement to heart. It rightly sits alongside “never forget, never forgive.’
That’s perceived free-riders.
And why were they perceived as such — because our authorities told everyone that they’d be free-riders, because the vaccines offer protection from infection and thus the unvaccinated would benefit from the vaccainated.
But the vaccines don’t offer any such protection — yet the authorities haven’t come out and clarified the situation.
They daren’t state that the vaccines don’t offer protection as they’ll lose credibility in the eyes of the bewitched and the next round of restrictions will be harder to implement…
Indeed.
Well, quite.
We could point out that those who fell over themselves in their haste to be jabbed without reading the small print could well be causing the agony to be prolonged with the advent of immune-escape variants. Why do they think there was never a successful vaccine for the common cold?
It’s been a Salem witch-hunt for our times.
Count me out of the non-discriminatory unvaccinated.
It’s just ignorance and stupidity. If you are vaccinated – assuming the vaccine is effective – it doesn’t matter who else is or not. That’s the whole point! You don’t need a medical degree to understand that, just two neurones that synapse.
Vaccination has always been about self-protection and not group protection until recently when ‘protect granny’ became the sales slogan for ineffective mRNA experimental agents to enrich their manufacturers.
And because the majority of the population are mindless blobs, they bought the sales pitch and lined up to be experimented on.
Then when the stops transmission, stops disease lies were exposed, the mindless blobs all chanted in unison, ‘Less serious’ – another sales slogan.
And now that vaccinated people, young people, are dropping like flies, the blobs want to ‘move on’.
Pox on all of their houses!
.’Consistent with this, the present findings suggest that contributors to the public good of epidemic control (i.e., the vaccinated) react with discriminatory attitudes against perceived free-riders (i.e., the unvaccinated).
How can anyone with a brain take this magazine seriously? And I see others have – er – identified the huge problem with this so-called ‘scientific’ report.
Seconded.
I am not unvaccinated.
I am unjabbed.
Big difference.
Kids, refer mRNA.
Tell me you aren’t wondering about some of the other jabs you’ve received.
The ‘elites’ did not appeal to moral obligations, they called for and demanded outright discrimination of the vaxxed. The general public was unfortunately only too happy and compliant in following suit, but discriminating against the unvaxxed was deliberate policy by our own governments, by our public health authorities, and by many so-called experts who had no qualms talking smack about people who didn’t roll up their sleeve.
The abstract reads like this was just leaders and society getting a little carried away for a good cause, with unfortunate consequences. No, for months on end these people were on television and across the media calling for full discrimination of the unvaxxed, saying things that rightly qualify as hate speech with, for example, France’s Macron using phrasing that would not have looked out of place in 1930s Germany, saying the unvaxxed were not citizens and deserved to be vilified – the only thing he left out was the word untermensch. Regulations were imposed that were directly in breach of national constitutions and international human rights conventions, how does violating the law qualify as appealing to a moral obligation?
I haven’t read the pdf yet, does it mention how the unvaxxed were blamed for the vaxx failing so miserably? Does it explain the perceived moral obligation here? The ‘elite’ pivoted from blaming us for the pandemic to blaming us for the political decision makers’ failure of due diligence, squandering billions of euros, pounds, dollars on toxic sludge that is definitely neither effective, nor safe. At that time it was clear they had painted themselves into a corner, having promised that the vaxx would set us free. So they deliberately scapegoated the unvaxxed. Moral obligation my arse.
Given the rumours coming out of woke basket case countries like Canada, I was genuinely afraid I’d end up being put in an internment camp, even in the UK, for not taking the mRNA drug. I look back on that era with so much disgust and anger. I actually had to contemplate the possibility – however remote – of having to go on the run or hire someone with a boat (plenty of those in my part of England) to get me out of the country. But where the Hell could I go?
For the fact that such remote possibilities even had to be contemplated means I want the Tory and Labour Parties, in particular, obliterated. Either way, any respect I had for the British state is gone. I live in England, I look after my elderly parents, I take enough freelance work to live off, but not as much as I could. I refuse to contribute anything else that can be taxed and support the state.
‘The community’ was turned into a backstabbing, discriminatory peer pressure unit by the state. At the end of the day, when all else fails, you look after those you love, control the things you can control and the rest of the world can burn. Thank God for this site or I might well have given into despair! Now I’m sitting tight hoping to see other people stop cooperating with the state in order to bring the whole corrupt edifice to the ground. I’ll be waiting a long time…
Those words, feelings and emotions matched my own. I tend to look on the dark side but some of the last three years have been truly horrendous.
I want to ‘build back better’ but only if and when our current establishment has been wiped off the planet.
The internment thing – I have a good friend living in Vienna, his wife’s family live near me here in NL. They normally come to visit at least twice a year. They couldn’t come last Christmas as they were under house arrest in Austria for not being vaxxed and being threatened with substantial monetary fines. They too were looking to get out of Austria. Just saw them today for the first time in a year and a half. Great to see them, but utterly pissed that it’s been so long because of demonic policies of criminal political leaders.
Yes, don’t bother waiting. The current political system in all Western countries needs to be torn down and built back up (something about trees of liberty and blood of tyrants springs to mind), but in the end, people are people – we’ll end up here again.
Above all, indeed, look after those you love, control what you can control and seek out like-minded people. Dividing people and families was the worst aspect of all this imo. When you’re feeling down, call in at a meeting of your local Sceptics Anonymous
Many times over the last 20 years I’ve said in conversation that humans haven’t really changed and that the atrocities of the past were the product of circumstances not of different people.
But never did I really think that our society was so fragile and could degenerate so much in my own life time to the point where I would see some of the same atrocities of the past.
These last 3 years have shown me.
I hate to say this but I expect worse to come. I see more insanity every day and a society in free fall.
In order for us to rebuild the old order has to be demolished so I too expect it to get a lot worse but we must be prepared to stand our ground!
Absolutely. At the end of the day, we all only really know the history of our own lifetimes, the rest is – well, history, something remote and consigned to books. Which is why we keep repeating it.
Like you, I have been shocked to see how quickly people jumped on the fascism bandwagon. I cannot emphasise enough how, throughout my entire life here in the Netherlands, the atrocities of WWII were spoken of again and again and again, a major part of education at all levels, every May raising the flag and saying ‘never again, never forget’. Yet within a period of months people were happily allowing flagrant violations of fundamental rights and actions that were carbon copies of the tactics used in the early 1930s. Yet when this was pointed out, one was told time and again that it was a disgrace to even suggest such and to make the comparison. No, the disgrace was to pretend that it wasn’t happening.
Many here may have already read or heard the speech, but if not, I recommend having a look at the speech Marian Turski, an Auschwitz survivor ,gave in January 2020. Inform as many of the ‘collaborators’ as you can of the speech and then ask them to point out just how the last few years were different.
A small example from Adelaide, South Australia.
As well as being denied employment for not submitting to the jabs, many people were denied participation in civil society, e.g. going to the theatre and sporting events, and also playing sport, e.g. golf.
I’m a member of a golf club and was barred from entering the club premises due to my unjabbed status.
This might seem very minor in the scheme of things, but it’s actually part of the insidious plan to punish people who wouldn’t comply, to expel them from society, cancel them out.
It was the golf committee which made the decision to ban people from the age of 12 years and up to enter the club. This was at a time when the state borders were opening and people were terrified of ‘the virus’ due to non-stop media fear-mongering. Older people in particular were afraid, and had no qualms in demanding that younger people be jabbed to purportedly protect them.
Now countless people of working age and children have been jabbed, with no idea of the long-term consequences, including the impact of repeated jabbing.
It’s not just about the potential for jab adverse reactions though, this is also a deeply political situation, with the ‘Covid crisis’ and the jabs being used to steal personal autonomy and bodily integrity.
Current and future generations are being set up to be compliant, and subject to punishment if they refuse to submit.
We’re on the precipice…if people don’t pushback now, tyranny will be entrenched.
Spot on.
Here’s an idea for Toby: facilitate the setting up of Sceptics Anonymous branches all over the country. I would be happy to start one in mid-Cornwall
Great idea.
Beautifully put
Well said… I, too, lived in fear and dreaded conversations about the ‘vaccine’ as I’m the only unvaccinated person I know (personally, if you know what I mean).
I recently had a procedure, as we say nowadays, in a private hospital and had to say that I wasn’t vaccinated. The admin person seemed very surprised so she obviously hadn’t met many of us. The nurse who looked after me told me she believed masks were useless and that she had had 2 shots but wasn’t having any more. She was vaccinated to keep her job so that she could afford to look after her parents and her daughter. She wasn’t appalled she I said I wasn’t vaccinated. We had quite a conversation – the scales had definite fallen from her eyes.
I agree 100% with your comment. I would add that we are both retired and so have never experienced discrimination at work and we live far enough away from our families who were vaxxed. The Daily Sceptic and couple of other websites were lifelines for us. Our viewpoint on life has dramatically changed now that we have lost total trust in the British Establishment. There is no going back.
Yes DomH75, the treacherous Tory and Labour parties must be obliterated. Same in Australia with the Liberals, Labor and Greens and others.
As well as the treachery of the sitting governments against the people, the so-called ‘opposition’ parties went along with the scam wholeheartedly.
We seem to be dominated by uni-parties, which are serving the same globalist masters, and dominating and exploiting the people.
So shocking what they achieved with the ’emergency laws’ which stripped us of our rights, with free movement and association trashed, and people muzzled to boot, as well as placed under surveillance by QR code check-ins, and subjected to testing, testing, testing…along with the weaponised Covid needles.
The creation of the Covid industry out of thin air…who has benefited from this exploitation of the people, under the guise of a virus/disease it was known from the beginning wasn’t a serious threat to most people?!
Unbloodybelieveable what these bastards got away with in the past nearly three years, and many of the perpetrators are still in situ!
And what about those who received the ‘honours’…for serving who exactly…?
So much to be investigated and exposed about this biggest crime in history.
Hear, hear.
Magic words.
I glanced over it.
The authors rave about the goo being a very safe and very effective scientific and organisational miracle and discuss none of its many flaws or any of the many reservations of those who denied to have it.
All they are wondering about is the discrimination, its nuances and some possible reasons for it.
They just suggest to be a bit softer next time.
It could have been written by Emily Oster, and was probably written for the same purpose.
Thanks for saving me the time
I seem to remember Nature being one of the cheerleaders for the “pandemic”.
They can f*** off.
Wonderfully f#c###g restrained.
Like others in health care, I had to “risk my life” early in the “pandemic”, without any known prevention or treatment (remember there were no “vaccines” or remdesivir, and no other treatments work), and being applauded by the politicians and public.
Then, when the “vaccines” arrived, The politicians and MSM suddenly and publicly called me an idiot, dangerous, “anti-science” if I refused the jab, and then told me I couldn’t work.
And we need a study to tell us there was discrimination?
And that I’m a freeloader?
What we really need is a study into why people, who spend years complaining about lying politicians, all of a sudden decide to trust and believe them just because there is a ‘crisis’ going on, and continue to believe them even as each lie gets exposed in record time (fear rots the brain, I suppose there’s enough studies on that).
We also need a study into why we have spent years not trusting big pharma, particularly the US Democrat party, loads of tv series with episodes focusing on the fraud and deception, addictions and diseases caused by unscrupulous legal drug pushers, but someone sneezes and all of a sudden they walk on water and live only to serve us – the fact that they got rich beyond their wildest dreams was just a happy coincidence.
The contempt for the people who were deemed heroes at the start of the pandemic is a particular blot, I can imagine how angry you must be.
I don’t think we need a study. I always felt that people are inherently stupid, but now I know. People will do what is easiest, what is popular, not what is right. We can never change that – it’s human nature.
Btw – and I’m not totally sure why I’m saying this other than still recovering from an England beaten (again), alcohol induced hangover – but your posts are much appreciated. One of the most interesting and well articulated contributors.
Thank you! Hey, I’ll take any lovely compliment like this, alcohol induced or not
I’d throw in a blushing emoji, but my very basic computer skills do not extend beyond a smiling or winking emoji.
If it’s any consolation, NL got booted out Friday night. I don’t follow football as such, but am actually glad – if NL were to have come up against Morocco, regardless of who won, we’d end up with worse unrest than we’ve had so far after every match Morocco won.
Well said Jane. And thanks for your empathy.
The amount of discrimination I suffered as an unvaccinated person over the last few years is orders of magnitude greater than the discrimination I experienced in the 38 years I have been black. No comparison.
Interesting observation. Do you know more people who feel like that?
It’s a message that is worth putting out, it might help it sink in more with those who believed they didn’t do anything wrong.
Proud to be unvaccinated. Proud to be discriminated against. It’s what makes me me and them them. The simplest mass test of character in history. We’re the ones that didn’t waiver, the ones that questioned, the ones that didn’t fall for the propaganda, the ones who wouldn’t bend. Think about this group, they have everything that you would fear on a battlefield. They f*ckin us, but they know we are very, very dangerous. We just need to get our shit together and charge those fragile lines. Shand up. Speak out. The sheep are in need of fresh grass.
Much appreciated.
Millions of people in Australia were told they’d lose their job if they refused to consent to being pierced by the Covid needles – No Jab, No Job.
For a period, unjabbed people were also discriminated against in being denied entry to restaurants, major retail, theatres, sporting events, sports clubs etc – No Jab, No Life.
Many people are still under jab mandates for employment, e.g. in the health sector. They’re being locked into submitting to the Covid needles on the demand of the government and employers, denied ‘valid informed consent’.
And yet it’s been confirmed to me by the Albanese government that: “Informed consent should be obtained for every COVID-19 vaccination, as per usual consent procedures for other vaccinations”. See my email to health minister Mark Butler: https://vaccinationispolitical.files.wordpress.com/2022/10/mandated-covid-jabs-are-health-practitioners-indemnified-without-voluntary-informed-consent.pdf
Similarly, over a year ago, the regulator of health practitioners, AHPRA, confirmed to me that: “Practitioners have an obligation to obtain informed consent for treatment, including vaccination. Informed consent is a person’s voluntary decision about health care that is made with knowledge and understanding of the benefits and risks involved”. See the letter from AHPRA: https://vaccinationispolitical.files.wordpress.com/2022/10/mandated-covid-jabs-are-health-practitioners-indemnified-without-voluntary-informed-consent.pdf
Obviously people can’t give ‘voluntary’ informed consent when they’re being coerced by jab mandates!!!!
Why haven’t doctors’ professional organisations and others called out the obvious conflict between the oppressive government jab rollout, and the obligation for ‘valid informed consent’?
It’s incredible what’s happened in Australia, in a supposed ‘free’ country, millions of people subjected to mandated medical interventions!
To recruit the health practitioners to press the jabs, the former government led by Scott Morrison announced to the health practitioners they had special medical indemnity to cover them for administering the Covid jabs – but it now turns out this was a lie, and they don’t have this special indemnity.
And they’ve been a party to jabbing people under mandates, so how can they have gotten valid informed consent?
This is such a huge scandal, and most people here have no idea of the seriousness of the situation, including that children at little or no risk of Covid have been jabbed too.
Our major problem is no mainstream media is reporting the story…and the pressure for people to be jabbed continues.
Re my correspondence with Mark Butler, minister of health, this link provides mention of the ‘informed consent’ quote: https://vaccinationispolitical.files.wordpress.com/2022/12/response-re_-are-health-practitioners-covered-for-indemnity-insurance-re-the-covid-jabs2.pdf
And, of course, informed consent would also involve letting the jab recipient know beforehand of the possible side-effects of the gene therapy, which they did not disclose. The fact the FDA knew of the terrible adverse effects that would be reported, but they omitted to include these in the informed consent process, is obviously criminal. I’m alluding to that now infamous slide in the FDA presentation, which you can see in the below link.
Were kids mandated in Australia too, in order to access various activities, venues or higher education, for instance? And do any of the vax injured have the ability to sue their employer if they incurred harm as a result of taking the jab under duress in order to keep their job? Or sue the government? The clot shot manufacturers obviously have no liability ( win-win for them! ) so somebody needs to be held accountable. As Ed Dowd has shown with his data, it’s not just deaths but disabilities and people taking sick leave from work is the highest it’s ever been in the US compared with before the vax roll-out. Is the same happening in your neck of the woods?
https://outraged.substack.com/p/covid-vaccination-of-children
Some kids were mandated, e.g. to access the golf club!
But the mandates in the main have been for employment, but states such as Victoria and Western Australia set mandates across the board for a period, making it very difficult to do anything without the jabs. It’s been atrocious with people being coerced into submitting to these medical interventions…can’t believe this has happened in what was supposed to be a free country. I don’t think people here fully realise the importance of what has occurred, the assault on personal autonomy and bodily integrity.
in regard to the jab manufacturers, they’ve been provided indemnity by the government – but will this stand up if the jabs prove to be a fraud?
Lots of unknowns at the moment.
First off this scandal has to be exposed in the court of public opinion, the people need to find out what has been done to them under the guise of this manufactured crisis,
“Everybody knows that the dice were loaded/Everybody knows that the fight was fixed/Everybody knows that the boat is leaking/Everybody knows that the captain lied/Everybody knows/That’s how it goes”
Leonard Cohen