Hacker News Reader

Comment by kerneloftruth | Hacker News Reader

The only thing sadder than the authoritarian measures adopted in Canada and Australia is the glee with which so many of their citizens embrace it.

View on HN

The only thing that's sad is that a bunch of enraged people aren't getting vaccinated during an ongoing pandemic and instead decide to break the law and cause untold sums in economic damage.

Getting these people off the street isn't authoritarianism, it's preventing the inmates from running the asylum.

Getting protesters at Parliament Hill arrested, fined, bank accounts frozen, and other people who support them (fining those who brings food and gas), isn't authoritarian?

Can't you make a distinction with the bridge blockade and the rest?

I think you can and should make a distinction between protests that are lawful and those that are illegal. If a protest isn't lawful any more, aiding it isn't either.

To me the Canadian government doesn't look authoritarian, it looks weak. For weeks you have people threatening public order as well as public health. To accommodate this implies that a minority can intimidate the majority of the population and legitimate authority through use of force.

Exactly right. We should allow protests, but only the ones that don't make the government look weak. As soon as the protest starts gaining traction, it needs to be declared illegal so that the minority cannot intimidate legitimate authority.

Like the Hong Kong protests? Those are illegal. I don't think your distinction is useful or clarifying. All that being illegal says is that the state has decided its not allowed.

Then write to your selected member of parliament and complain about it, help campaigns and candidates next election who better align with your view, or run yourself!

But you might be better served to first examine the reasons why so many Canadians are in favour of various restrictions that have been introduced (and eventually once again withdrawn), by every party and every level of government in the last two years. It's mostly because we have much more faith than our American counterparts that our institutions will do what's right for all Canadians.

> Then write to your selected member of parliament and complain about it, help campaigns and candidates next election who better align with your view, or run yourself!

What about an online petition or a bake sale?

Less sarcastically: there are frequently situations in which a majority may democratically decide to make a minority behave in a certain way. I think it is relatively clear from opinion polls that a majority of Canadians do not agree with the behavior of the truckers. So writing to an MP or running for parliament will probably be a fruitless strategy. Hence the protests.

It would be trivial to find unpleasant, widely-condemned situations in which you and I would probably be united in our opposition.

The difficulty comes when the minority being forced to behave in a certain way are non-appealing in some way. Democracies need to find a way of dealing with them. It will be horse-trading, negotiation, cajoling, appealing and arguing.

None of those strategies were applied by the Trudeau government before they became hysterical and tried to claim they were having a Canadian version of Jan 6th.

I am certain that many Canadians both do not agree with the apparent demands of the truckers and simultaneously do not agree with the application of the Emergencies Act.

I found this podcast interesting: three interviews with people who were doxxed as donors. I disagreed with the first two, but the third one seemed like a very sane person: https://www.canadaland.com/podcast/756-how-i-ended-up-suppor...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com