there's been some expected analysis from your typical free-speech conservatives, like margaret atwood (who americans don't seem to understand is a right-winger in canada) who are mostly concerned that the government is trying to attack christians, which is largely paranoid nonsense that comes through a conservative party propaganda filter. the idea that speech restriction laws are an attack on christians is something that right-wing politicians promote in order to raise money from their base. there's absolutely no empirical basis for the claim, no history of the government attacking christians and no evidence that this is what trudeau cares about doing. in fact, trudeau is the most pro-religion liberal prime minister since the 1800s and has a distinctly social conservative streak. unlike his father, he's been vocal about his belief in "religious rights". on this issue, he sounds more like his father's opponents than he does like his father.
in response, the government has tried to suggest that the law will be moderate and the judges will react proportionally. if the response is alarmist because it promotes potential for abuse, and perhaps it is, and it certainly does, the government is trying to calm people down by essentially arguing that the judges won't actually enforce the law anyways, and there consequently isn't anything to worry about.
i'm concerned about the nature of the discourse, because this is in fact a scary law and it does in fact threaten to infringe on your rights and freedoms but the narrative being framed - that it's an attack on christianity, and christians don't need to worry - has no basis in reality and threatens to merely obfuscate the issue. in fact, most people would be perfectly happy to pass laws telling christians to shut up and fuck off because most people despise christians and are annoyed by the constant attempts of christians to interfere in their personal decisions. this framing is likely to generate support for the law, not opposition to it. this issue needs to be reclaimed by real liberals and actual speech activists and reframed in terms of actually real and actually realistic concerns.
anybody living in reality should be able to instantly see that this law, which is being written and advanced by a muslim, is intended primarily to "protect" muslims from criticism. this isn't an attack on christianity, it's the first step in a back door imposition of sharia law.
the reality is that i detest islam. i detest islamic values, i detest islamic beliefs, i detest islamic behaviours and i detest islamic culture. i don't like them, i don't like what they believe and i don't like how they act. what is the government trying to tell me in passing this law, ordering me that i'm not allowed to detest somebody?
am i supposed to just pretend that i like them?
am i supposed to just be quiet, as more and more of these sorts of law pass, and my rights and freedoms are slowly chipped away at?
i'm going to be naive. i'm going to pretend that there isn't some plan here, and that this isn't the start of the islamic colonization of canada. remember: muslims are not a victim of colonization, muslims invented colonialism. islam is a racist colonial system of hierarchical dominance and violent control, which is exactly what our leaders in the west wish they had.
when somebody tells you they detest and dislike you, it seems to me that you have two potential reactions. you might decide you don't care, which is what i would do; if somebody told me they detested me, i'd tell them to fuck off and go kill themselves. the other choice is that you might decide that you do care, listen to the reasons you're detested and try to change yourself so that you're no longer detested. the reasons that islam is detested by some, including myself, are absolutely valid. islam is a horrible system of thought and it needs to drastically alter itself to avoid being detested.
ordering me not to detest you is just providing evidence as to why i detest you in the first place.
i expect in the end that the courts will uphold my right to detest people, but the bill needs to be challenged, and not by the christian right and not via the framing of their delusions of oppression. let's understand what the bill actually is and challenge it's actual goals on actual face value. if we let margaret atwood and jordan peterson do this, we're going to lose.
atwood has repeatedly rejected and denounced any interpretation of the handmaid's tale that attempts to tie it to an attempt at islamic colonization of america, despite it being an obvious satire of the iranian revolution. i'm not sure if she's commented on that point, but what the novel is is an attempt to imagine what would happen if an iranian revolution happened in the united states, which was not a crazy idea in the early 1980s, in the context of the rise of the moral majority and the political dominance of reaganism. the parallels are too heavy-handed; it's not debatable. she doesn't like these comparisons, though, and insists it's strictly a canadian fantasy, from an evolved loyalist perspective. ok.
but, she's missing the point of her own text, because she's old. i semi-recently saw a debate between chomsky and right-wing israeli, where he utterly failed to draw the connection to manufacturing consent, because he's been half there for 20 years, and might only be a quarter there nowadays.
hitchens died too young, and it was his own fucking fault, but this speech should be the starting point in opposing the online harms bill, as he nails it fifteen years before it happened.