Apparently, some apartchicks still don’t understand that ‘regulated speech’ is NOT ‘free speech’!!!
It is precisely due to self-appointed censors whose bureaucratic nature does not permit them to consider the nature of the rules they are enforcing (and whether or not they infringe upon human rights, free speech being first among them), but just enforce them because they are there to be enforced!
These are the modern-day brownshirts of our times – even if they style themselves as righteous enforcers of the rules!
These censors would oppress us, regulate our speech into complete silence, lest an idea that offends them – or, worse, informs others that they don’t have to give up their inalienable rights to these apartchicks – slips past our lips!
Give them some arbitrary rules and a little bit of power and they will use it to silence people and, if the people will not be silenced, to wreck their lives, like human wrecking balls!
We have to stand up to them.
For our sake – and for the sake of our children!
Xanthippa's Chamberpot 
September 21, 2013 at 00:05
Xanthippa:
It’s not just the “regulation” of speech, or the criminalization of motives over and above actions, or the culture of ratting out your neighbour, or the wholesale infringement of our rights for the sake of ill-defined “safety” and “security.”
It’s the whole package – the whole trend – and where it leads.
I can’t express how strongly the following excerpt resonates with the zeitgeist of contemporary Canada. Right here and now. Today:
What no one seemed to notice … was the ever widening gap … between the government and the people … And it became always wider … the whole process of its coming into being, was above all diverting, it provided an excuse not to think for people who did not want to think anyway … They gave us some dreadful, fundamental things to think about … and kept us so busy with continuous changes and ‘crises’ and so fascinated … by the machinations of the ‘national enemies’, without and within, that we had no time to think about these dreadful things that were growing, little by little, all around us … Each step was so small, so inconsequential, so well explained or, on occasion, ‘regretted’, that unless one understood what the whole thing was in principle, what all these ‘little measures’ …must some day lead to, one no more saw it developing from day to day than a farmer in his field sees the corn growing … Each act … is worse than the last, but only a little worse. You wait for the next and the next. You wait for one great shocking occasion, thinking that others, when such a shock comes, will join you in resisting somehow. You don’t want to act, or even talk, alone… you don’t want to ‘go out of your way to make trouble’ … And it is not just fear … that restrains you, it is also genuine uncertainty … And you are an alarmist. You are saying that this must lead to this, and you can’t prove it … But the one great shocking occasion, when tens or hundreds or thousands will join with you, never comes. That’s the difficulty. The forms are all there, all untouched, all reassuring, the houses, the shops, the jobs, the mealtimes, the visits, the concerts, the cinema, the holidays. But the spirit, which you never noticed because you made the lifelong mistake of identifying it with the forms, is changed. Now you live in a world of hate and fear, and the people who hate and fear do not even know it themselves, when everyone is transformed, no one is transformed… You have accepted things you would not have accepted five years ago, a year ago, things your father … could never have imagined.
– Milton Sanford Mayer
They Thought They Were Free: The Germans, 1933-1945
University of Chicago Press, 1955.
This was written about Nazi Germany in the dozen years leading up to World War II. That is why the uncanny parallels to present-day Canada are so chilling.
We know what comes next.
Yet we keep on following the same path.
Xanthippa says:
Exactly, CodeSlinger!!!!
And, most of us are too fearful of lawfare to speak up – because the process itself becomes the punishment!!!