Two significant censorship stories:
Here in Canada, Member of Parliament Charlie Angus has put forward a bill, C-372, that would criminalize any speech claiming the benefit of ‘fossil fuels’, punishable by $1,000,000 and two years in prison. Promotion of said fuels is defined broadly and vaguely as:
a representation about a product or service by any means, whether directly or indirectly, including any communication of information about the product or service and its price and distribution, that is likely to influence and shape attitudes, beliefs and behaviours about the product or service
We’re in uncharted waters here, when insane people run the country, and want to make the rest of us insane – or at least speak or act insanely – by force of law. Insanity may be defined as an unhinging of one’s mind from reality – the opposite of truth. In the real world, the only way to heat Canada, and get around Canada, is by ‘fossil fuels’, unless Mr. Angus has some secret plan to place small modular nuclear reactors in every village, and fit them into nuclear-power vehicles. Solar and wind, to put it mildly, just won’t cut it.
And speaking of a cool million, that is what Mark Steyn has been ordered to pay Michael Mann in his what go down in history as the defamation trial of the century. Mr. Steyn, twelve years ago – yes, the right to a speedy and quick trial is no longer a right it seems – criticized the famous, or infamous, ‘hockey stick graph’, which started the climate-change hysteria, the one that shows global temperatures staying the same for much of history, then spiking in the year 1880. Steyn also criticized one of its primary authors, the aforementioned Mann, who took great umbrage, for he seems a prickly, sensitive sort. There are any number of problems with that graph, its own connection to reality dubious, if not deceitful.
Mann’s lawyer’s final statement summed up the agenda:
These attacks on Climate Scientists have to stop, and you now have the opportunity—
‘Attacks on Climate Scientists’ means ‘criticism of climate scientists’ which means ‘criticism of climate science’ is now more or less illegal, and you will be seven-figures in punitive damages.
To say that this verdict puts a pall on free speech is an understatement. And this before we get to the censorship of any questioning of the Covidian regime. The doughty Mark Steyn about to court again against OfCom – the censorious censoring body of British broadcasting – for raising questions about the efficacy of the mRNA ‘vaccines’, and the putative harm they have caused, which now seems beyond any reasonable doubt. But, of course, we can’t the hoi polloi thinking that, can we?
If the Galileo affair taught us anything, it’s that any scientific hypothesis, along with its author(s), must bear up to scrutiny, questioning, debate, withering and heated criticism, even words that may faintly mock and ruffle sensitive feathers. For the more sensitive those feathers, the more it signifies that one is not really confident in what one holds to be true. Their models and their theories are brittle, and break easily and cease to work when faced with reality – like electric vehicles and wind farms on a minus 40 morning in Alberta. So rather than convince others, they coerce. But science cannot proceed by such means. Its very nature implies free inquiry and constant questioning.
Both Monsieurs Angus and Mann don’t want that, and doth protest too much, methinks. The truth will win out in the end, as it always does, even if we must go through much suffering to get there. Such as these want to punish to protect their pet theories. They may have their day, but that day is drawing to a close.
D.C. Jury Awards $1M in Damages to Suppress “Climate Denialism”