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Why the coverage of the trucker protest should worry all Canadians

92 points by hui-zheng 5y ago

dqpb 5y ago
> We should also think about the Proud Boys and Sons of Odin who have gone to the rally to radicalize its participants. The on-the-ground experience of regular folks participating will be of being called Nazis, traitors, Klansmen, bigots, etc. Not only will this place greater distance between the participants and urban Canadian society; it will make them look less unfavourably on others who are called Nazis and Klansmen. How bad could those guys really be, they will ask themselves? Were they also smeared as part of a bum rap by shills for the pharmaceutical industry? Is there a name for this argument? I find myself making this same argument often, in a variety of situations. Something like "Failure to Consider the Externalities of Wrongful Accusation", but more succinct?
Daishiman 5y ago
- Sparyjerry 5y ago
  There are actually videos of people at the trucker protest shouting out those people, from their area at least and just because YOU haven't seen that doesn't mean it isn't happening. Those 'swastika' people always seem to be fully masked up, with even full face masks, hiding their identity. Just because they aren't beating them up in the street doesn't mean they aren't against them. You see some protests with some people burning down multiple buildings that are called mostly peaceful protests, and yet you are claiming because there may be 1 or 2 people out of 50,000 carrying a confederate flag that that is now represents the protest. Again, these people are against vaccine mandates and are not vaccine deniers - there is a big difference. Many countries have even removed all forms of vaccine passports and mandates because it has been proven that vaccines do not stop the spread of the virus. Canada is simply behind the curve in recognizing this.
  - Daishiman 5y ago
    - s1artibartfast 5y ago
      I think it is fine to disagree with the cause, but the insight was about rhetorical techniques in public thought and their prevalence over time. I think the point boils down to that people who disagree with the cause should ridicule the cause, and resist the urge build strawmen. Critiques of AnTifa rioters don't don't generalize to BLM protestors. Critiques of AOC aren't the same as critiques of democrats. Critiques of pedophiles are not critiques of privacy advocates. On some level, people making these generations know them not to be true, but we still repeat them.
    - db48x 5y ago
      > Does that mean I'm entitled to have others trust [me]? Yes, people should trust you. You should trust the people around you. You are entitled to trust merely by existing. This is not a bad thing! But the article is about the nature of politics in Canada; the protests themselves are actually off–topic. What do you think about the central thesis of the article, that any dissent in a party, protest, or other political movement is now treated as a scandal to be avoided by enforced conformity within the group?
      - Daishiman 5y ago
        > Yes, people should trust you. You should trust the people around you. You are entitled to trust merely by existing. This is not a bad thing! I have seen so many doctored PCR tests and so many antivaxxers lying about their vaccination status that I see no basis to do that on this particular topic.
    - aogaili 5y ago
      "the most childish cause for a protest ever." People losing their jobs, mental health issues on the rise, children not socializing, polarization and division, divergence from other core issues such as the housing crisis, loss of freedom and rights are not childish issues. There are long-term consequences when government locks down an entire country. Also, I don't understand the long-term strategy here? if 90% of the people are vaccinated and lockdowns are still used widely, then is this the norm now? Are we going to lock down every winter? Besides, I've lived in Canada for 20 years, every winter season the healthcare system is stretched, if you have flu and want a paper from the doctor to show to your employer you'll need to wait for 5+ hours at your nearest public clinic. Because the healthcare system is free cumbersome many abuse it.
- moistly 5y ago
  And now the truckers blocking the Coutts border crossing — preventing incoming truckers from doing their job and creating the very supply chain crisis they were warning us about! — have taken a run at the RCMP that were breaking up the blockade. “[Alberta Premier] Kenney calls for calm at border blockade, citing attempted ramming of RCMP members” https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/calgary/coutts-border-blockade-protest-alberta-1.6334990 https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/calgary/coutts-border-blockad...
- ipaddr 5y ago
  The author's point is one day the protests you care about will be judged in the same manner. Unfairly.
  - pjc50 5y ago
    .. that already happens though?
  - notafraudster 5y ago
    I think there are strong incentives for people to disagree with a protest to characterize it as more radical than it is. Likewise, there are strong incentives for moderates inside a protest to disavow radicals and forcefully defend the protest's reputation. Finally, there are strong incentives for radicals inside the protest to minimize or lie about their own radicalism. Doesn't the argument go "more speech, not less"? I'm really not troubled by the idea that different groups in society contest the meaning of collective action. 2020's George Floyd protests were widely decried in some circles, praised in others, praised with an asterisk in others still, and that's basically part of how society engages in collective meaning-making, so what's the problem? My guess is that the end consensus on this protest will be more or less exactly what it appears to be: a bunch of hayseed idiots, many of whom have fringe (even if not racist) views, briefly annoyed the fuck out of regular Bytowners in a quixotic and futile effort to achieve a set of unclear but mostly odious goals; a handful of them will end up choking to death in a hospital 6 weeks from now; and Canada isn't going to drop a widely supported rule that also makes no sense to drop (because the U.S. hasn't dropped their side, so unilateral changes won't actually benefit anyone).
  - UncleMeat 5y ago
    One day? Leftist protests have been judged in this manner for a century. I see zero evidence that saying "oh, well, it was just a couple of nazi flags" will cause people to ignore anarchists who show up at leftist marches and burn cars.
- AniseAbyss 5y ago
  Thank you. If you are at a protest and someone is waving a Nazi flag? You are the baddie.
nkurz 5y ago
I found the intro a little confusing, but I think his conclusion is really strong and apt: I am not writing this piece to advocate for the protest and its participants. I am writing this piece to ask Canadians like me whether we want our future protests to be judged and covered by standards applied to the truckers today. I am asking us to think about what happens to the horizon of possibility for mass organizing when we throw in with the idea that actual, authentic grassroots protests are a thing of the past and the only legitimate public demonstration is one choreographed from above, its participants carefully disciplined into reading from an identical script or into silence. We should also think about the Proud Boys and Sons of Odin who have gone to the rally to radicalize its participants. The on-the-ground experience of regular folks participating will be of being called Nazis, traitors, Klansmen, bigots, etc. Not only will this place greater distance between the participants and urban Canadian society; it will make them look less unfavourably on others who are called Nazis and Klansmen. How bad could those guys really be, they will ask themselves? Were they also smeared as part of a bum rap by shills for the pharmaceutical industry? They will wonder if those folks also came to be known as these things the way they did. As a person who, because I dissented from the progressive consensus on a single issue, has been smeared as a transphobe, homophobe, pedophile, white supremacist, racist and ableist in the past year and a half, I can no longer simply accept the opinion of centre-left media on whether someone is a dangerous, bigoted member of the alt-right. I can no longer trust the government-financed Canadian Anti-Hate Network on whether someone is a dangerous hatemonger because many of my comrades and I are on their list. And not everyone is going to be like me and check those claims against the facts. Most people will just start ignoring those claims. There is a high price to pay when you decide to cry “wolf” over fascism in a political situation like our own, where the authoritarian threat is real and society-wide.
- jevoten 5y ago
  > I am writing this piece to ask Canadians like me whether we want our future protests to be judged and covered by standards applied to the truckers today [..] actual, authentic grassroots protests are a thing of the past and the only legitimate public demonstration is one choreographed from above, its participants carefully disciplined into reading from an identical script or into silence. Obviously this is completely wrong - the author thinks there is any kind of principled consistency in how movements are covered. Protests have always been covered selectively by the media. If journalists or media conglomerates support the cause, they prominently feature the most sympathetic parts of the protests, and downplay others. If not, they do the opposite. Had the author's views not been so in line with the establishment, he would have noticed this decades ago.
curmudgeon22 5y ago
I think the best bits from the article are: > Right-wing commentators sought to discredit these protests [1980's peace movement] by heavily featuring and platforming the most off-topic or the most radical protesters and then seeking to paint all protesters with that broad brush. This approach generally failed and was mocked by the mainstream press, who depicted the diversity of protesters and homemade signs as a sign of the depth of its support. ... > And, in progressive, urban Canada, this broad-brush guilt-by-association strategy exhumed from the 1980s appears to be working, no matter how intellectually lazy its journalistic practitioners are being. Let me rehearse the kinds of sloppy reporting we are seeing here:
- loceng 5y ago
  - 908B64B197 5y ago
    > The Trudeau-Federal government continues to try to pass bills for internet censorship - with active calls and propaganda align with their trying to promote the majority of Canadians to hate and fear - so they can silence those who won't toe the line, who don't agree with them. They can control the narrative on the state media, not the internet! That's dangerous (for them, not the people!). Wow. That sounds like par for the course. Didn’t his father even suspend constitutional rights (apparently that’s a thing over there?) for similarly dubious reasons back in the 70’s?
    - loceng 5y ago
      I don't know Trudeau senior's history very well. If you watch the video however Peckford shares some history - that Justin's father attempted to get his own version of the Charter of Rights passed, because he thought the provinces' leadership was being too unreasonable; trying to just get his own way without consensus. The judge in that case shut him down, and he was forced to go back to the table with the provinces - the judges citing that the provinces have sovereign power, and because the Charter is a Federal document that all provinces must agree to it. Like father like son, not shocking then to see Justin Trudeau promoting hate while violating the Charter itself.
pluckyChuck 5y ago
Barrin92 5y ago
>More importantly still, I am trying to sound a cultural alarm bell about the exaltation of order, disciple and control as Canadians’ primary political values. The fact is that those values are authoritarian They're not just Canadian values and not really authoritarian. Contest for power is and has always been the primary function of the political. Politics is the business of deciding who orders, the fact that someone does is not in question, and a bunch of peace protesters or truckers had never any meaningful impact on anyone. The internal party politics of whoever is holding power is what matters. That goes for private companies or governments regardless of how often they talk about participation or inclusion or whatever else. So the actual observation here is that it isn't really relevant whether you're for or against the trucker cause, but and the author seems to agree, the only effect that the trucker protest has is that it makes them look exactly like what they're being caricatured as.
- fontenot-jon 5y ago
  you, politicians, militants, and others are using the term, "Power" wrong. your talking about, "Force." they are two entirely different things, you wont understand.
  - NotAFireDrill 5y ago
    Care to explain?
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
- pc2g4d 5y ago
  The belief that politics is primarily a contest for power is a very limited view of politics. Politics is also a means for idea exchange, collective weighing of priorities, debate, the proposal and then choice between competing visions, etc. Reducing it to being primarily about power is not only a disservice, but potentially a self-fulfilling prophecy.
  - Supermancho 5y ago
afpx 5y ago
Why turn HN into another political forum? Off-Topic: Most stories about politics [...] unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. [...] If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- s1artibartfast 5y ago
  I thought the piece was interesting, and not particularly political. It mostly focuses on rhetorical tactics in politics and begs the question of why do people knowingly use and accept strawmen arguments
- loceng 5y ago
  - dang 5y ago
    Please don't cross into personal attack and please don't do ideological flamewar on HN. We ban accounts that do those things, because they're not what this site is for, and destroy what it is for. You can make your substantive points without any of that, and as a bonus your comments will come out better and persuasive. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html Edit: we've had to ask you this sort of thing repeatedly in the past. Would you please take the intended spirit of this site more to heart and stick to the rules?
- Auracle 5y ago
  I really enjoy the political discussions that show up on HN. It’s the only place online where I can see both sides of something being debated intelligently. It’s also the only place where I can post something that goes against the grain of the majority and still be upvoted. That said I think the “if they’d cover it in the TV news…” is a good rule, just to limit discussions to novel topics.
loceng 5y ago
And if the mainstream media channels are misrepresenting the protestors so blatantly - what other "news" has been propagated to us that they've misrepresented, even subtly?
- mythrwy 5y ago
  The events of the last 20 years with accompanying media coverage have really made me question a lot of the "history" I was taught and accepted as fact.
  - loceng 5y ago
    Meanwhile there are some long-lasting situations like the Israel-Palestine conflict/crisis, yet there's clear, ongoing gaslighting occurring - in part due to political ties and economic relationships that bond, align interests; and societies and culture is held hostage and suppressed from responding if it's counter the mainstream narrative, mastering suppression, propaganda, and influence techniques.
helen___keller 5y ago
I know very little about Canadian politics and culture, but this is hardly a Canadian phenomenon. Rather this is an emergent behavior of internet and social media, that certain types of debate end in partisan convergence much more efficiently than they used to. The observations about the form of bias in question, as well as the observation about (lack of) dissent within the party, are really just minor details of a wider picture. The root cause is that hyper connectedness has reduced cultural and intellectual diversity among the vast majority. I don't say that as a positive or negative, just as a fact. By "cultural and intellectual diversity", I mean that the more a particular topic is featured on social media, the narrower of a spread the opinions on that topic become. (Intellectual diversity in the sense of what topics are discussed has exploded, however. I'm part of a massive online group dedicated to discussing changes in zoning and public transit. Imagine that 30 years ago.) This goes beyond politics too. I could write an essay about how games like MMORPGs are fundamentally different now that there's hyperconnected communities that distribute high quality information on playing optimally, and how game design has in turn responded to this. Effective use of reddit or discord or a wiki has essentially merged as part of the gameplay now for a very large percentage of users. The hyperconnected social internet fundamentally changed how we interact with ideas, from gaming to politics.
- 908B64B197 5y ago
  Keep in mind Canada has two parallel media spheres. One of them is completely controlled by the state and the other the private sector. Of course the government funded journalists working for the government approved and funded broadcaster are going to side with… the government! That shouldn’t surprise anyone. What I find interesting are all the sighting of these “radical” protesters with Nazi and confederate flags that are fueling the narrative that this demonstration really is led by the alt right. All of them are masked and there has been very little progress in identifying them but they sure were amply photographed and used as evidence by the state media. How weird is it that nobody can ID most of them? In the 1970’s the state media and government similarly tried to pin mailbox bombings to a group called the FLQ… until an RCMP agent was caught literally red-handed (with severe burns and a torn off fingers) planting bombs in a mailbox to pin it on the FLQ! [0] The feds then confessed to more than 400 illegal search and seizures, criminal trespass, breaking and entering and arson incidents and the bomb planter admitted he “had done much worse for the feds”. Who was prime minister during that time? You guessed it, Justin Trudeau’s father. What a coincidence. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_controversies_involving_the_Royal_Canadian_Mounted_Police#Break-ins_and_bombing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_controversies_involvin...
ChoGGi 5y ago
He mentions cherrypicking, but the co-organizers of the gofundme/convoy seem to not like Muslims[0]? Tamara Lich and B.J. Dichter, neither of whom are truck drivers, are currently listed as the organizers of the GoFundMe page. Dichter was a late addition, only added this week. Lich, born in Saskatchewan, now hails from Medicine Hat, Alberta, where she served as an organizer for Yellow Vests Canada, a regional coordinator for the separatist Western Exit or “Wexit” movement in Alberta, and now as the secretary for the Maverick Party – another separatist movement and fringe political party. Attending and boosting Yellow Vest events starting in 2018, Lich social media posts from the time show her, in one moment, calling out some hateful rhetoric within the movement, while also posting Islamophobic articles of her own, like conspiracies about the “Muslim Brotherhood” operating in Canada. Dichter’s website shares The Quiggin Report, and Dichter himself shares similar Islamophobic sentiments in public. In 2019 he claimed that “Islamist entryism” is “rotting away at our society like syphilis.” “[The Conservative Party of Canada] is suffering from the stench of cultural relativism and political Islam,” he said during the first PPC conference held in Gatineau, Quebec. “It is suffering from the stench of extremism that same way in third-world countries suffer from extremist groups, separatist groups, communist guerrilla factions, paramilitaries, organized crime, and more.” [0] https://www.antihate.ca/the_freedom_convoy_is_nothing_but_a_vehicle_for_the_far_right https://www.antihate.ca/the_freedom_convoy_is_nothing_but_a_...
- DiggyJohnson 5y ago
  Genuinely curious, how is what you're doing here not cherrypicking as well?
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
- foxyv 5y ago
  I kind of wonder why we are seeing nothing but ad-hominem attacks on the protestors themselves rather than addressing the issue they are protesting. What does the white supremacist, anti-muslin, and xenophobic views of some of the protestors have to do with the COVID mandates that they are protesting?
jmull 5y ago
I don't know (or care much) about the details of Canadian politics but these complaints sound like BS from my perspective. E.g., if a group uses a statue to promote their cause -- probably specifically because people care about the subject -- is it fair to complain that people don't like it? As if they are entitled to positive attention for associating themselves with the statue, but somehow should be exempted from the negative attention? It makes no sense. More laughable is the suggestion that it's unfair to believe protesters are associating themselves with Nazism when they use the swastika as a protest symbol. Maybe they just think it's a cool symbol, like sewing kid in the Curb Your Enthusiasm episode? And the complaints about the narrative sound like a guy aggrieved that gravity is trying to hold him down! Narratives will emerge from a movement (unless it's simply ignored). That an unfocused movement with disparate groups/motives/goals, without strong leadership won't produce and sustain a focused, favorable narrative seems like a foregone conclusion. If your movement doesn't craft the dominant narrative, then someone else will. Can you really expect them to craft just the one you wanted? That's hopeless. I think this guy is yelling at the clouds.
- defaultprimate 5y ago
  - dang 5y ago
    "Please don't comment on whether someone read an article. "Did you even read the article? It mentions that" can be shortened to "The article mentions that."" Also, please don't cross into personal attack. You can make your substantive points without that. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
  - jmull 5y ago
    The swastika is a very, very powerful symbol, and a very, very dangerous one. If you use it, you might as well be lighting a stick of dynamite. When it blows up -- you understand that it will blow up, right? -- and hurts you, that's on you. Not the news media for failing to carefully direct the blast in a direction you think (but not necessarily everyone who used it thinks) they should. > the homogeneous, empty-headed masses Well, this is how you're characterizing the people you should be trying to persuade to your cause. That's not going to work! Here's a principle you can make a lot of hey off of: if some group seems like idiots doing something completely stupid and irrational, then it's actually probably you who isn't understanding something critical. If they aren't a group of people with literal brain damage, the problem is almost certainly that you don't understand something important about them. Dig in and find out what it is. This will pay off very substantially for you.

92 points by hui-zheng 5y ago

dqpb 5y ago

> We should also think about the Proud Boys and Sons of Odin who have gone to the rally to radicalize its participants. The on-the-ground experience of regular folks participating will be of being called Nazis, traitors, Klansmen, bigots, etc. Not only will this place greater distance between the participants and urban Canadian society; it will make them look less unfavourably on others who are called Nazis and Klansmen. How bad could those guys really be, they will ask themselves? Were they also smeared as part of a bum rap by shills for the pharmaceutical industry? Is there a name for this argument? I find myself making this same argument often, in a variety of situations. Something like "Failure to Consider the Externalities of Wrongful Accusation", but more succinct?

Daishiman 5y ago

Sparyjerry 5y ago
There are actually videos of people at the trucker protest shouting out those people, from their area at least and just because YOU haven't seen that doesn't mean it isn't happening. Those 'swastika' people always seem to be fully masked up, with even full face masks, hiding their identity. Just because they aren't beating them up in the street doesn't mean they aren't against them. You see some protests with some people burning down multiple buildings that are called mostly peaceful protests, and yet you are claiming because there may be 1 or 2 people out of 50,000 carrying a confederate flag that that is now represents the protest. Again, these people are against vaccine mandates and are not vaccine deniers - there is a big difference. Many countries have even removed all forms of vaccine passports and mandates because it has been proven that vaccines do not stop the spread of the virus. Canada is simply behind the curve in recognizing this.
- Daishiman 5y ago
  - s1artibartfast 5y ago
    I think it is fine to disagree with the cause, but the insight was about rhetorical techniques in public thought and their prevalence over time. I think the point boils down to that people who disagree with the cause should ridicule the cause, and resist the urge build strawmen. Critiques of AnTifa rioters don't don't generalize to BLM protestors. Critiques of AOC aren't the same as critiques of democrats. Critiques of pedophiles are not critiques of privacy advocates. On some level, people making these generations know them not to be true, but we still repeat them.
  - db48x 5y ago
    > Does that mean I'm entitled to have others trust [me]? Yes, people should trust you. You should trust the people around you. You are entitled to trust merely by existing. This is not a bad thing! But the article is about the nature of politics in Canada; the protests themselves are actually off–topic. What do you think about the central thesis of the article, that any dissent in a party, protest, or other political movement is now treated as a scandal to be avoided by enforced conformity within the group?
    - Daishiman 5y ago
      > Yes, people should trust you. You should trust the people around you. You are entitled to trust merely by existing. This is not a bad thing! I have seen so many doctored PCR tests and so many antivaxxers lying about their vaccination status that I see no basis to do that on this particular topic.
  - aogaili 5y ago
    "the most childish cause for a protest ever." People losing their jobs, mental health issues on the rise, children not socializing, polarization and division, divergence from other core issues such as the housing crisis, loss of freedom and rights are not childish issues. There are long-term consequences when government locks down an entire country. Also, I don't understand the long-term strategy here? if 90% of the people are vaccinated and lockdowns are still used widely, then is this the norm now? Are we going to lock down every winter? Besides, I've lived in Canada for 20 years, every winter season the healthcare system is stretched, if you have flu and want a paper from the doctor to show to your employer you'll need to wait for 5+ hours at your nearest public clinic. Because the healthcare system is free cumbersome many abuse it.
moistly 5y ago
And now the truckers blocking the Coutts border crossing — preventing incoming truckers from doing their job and creating the very supply chain crisis they were warning us about! — have taken a run at the RCMP that were breaking up the blockade. “[Alberta Premier] Kenney calls for calm at border blockade, citing attempted ramming of RCMP members” https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/calgary/coutts-border-blockade-protest-alberta-1.6334990 https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/calgary/coutts-border-blockad...
ipaddr 5y ago
The author's point is one day the protests you care about will be judged in the same manner. Unfairly.
- pjc50 5y ago
  .. that already happens though?
- notafraudster 5y ago
  I think there are strong incentives for people to disagree with a protest to characterize it as more radical than it is. Likewise, there are strong incentives for moderates inside a protest to disavow radicals and forcefully defend the protest's reputation. Finally, there are strong incentives for radicals inside the protest to minimize or lie about their own radicalism. Doesn't the argument go "more speech, not less"? I'm really not troubled by the idea that different groups in society contest the meaning of collective action. 2020's George Floyd protests were widely decried in some circles, praised in others, praised with an asterisk in others still, and that's basically part of how society engages in collective meaning-making, so what's the problem? My guess is that the end consensus on this protest will be more or less exactly what it appears to be: a bunch of hayseed idiots, many of whom have fringe (even if not racist) views, briefly annoyed the fuck out of regular Bytowners in a quixotic and futile effort to achieve a set of unclear but mostly odious goals; a handful of them will end up choking to death in a hospital 6 weeks from now; and Canada isn't going to drop a widely supported rule that also makes no sense to drop (because the U.S. hasn't dropped their side, so unilateral changes won't actually benefit anyone).
- UncleMeat 5y ago
  One day? Leftist protests have been judged in this manner for a century. I see zero evidence that saying "oh, well, it was just a couple of nazi flags" will cause people to ignore anarchists who show up at leftist marches and burn cars.
AniseAbyss 5y ago
Thank you. If you are at a protest and someone is waving a Nazi flag? You are the baddie.

nkurz 5y ago

I found the intro a little confusing, but I think his conclusion is really strong and apt: I am not writing this piece to advocate for the protest and its participants. I am writing this piece to ask Canadians like me whether we want our future protests to be judged and covered by standards applied to the truckers today. I am asking us to think about what happens to the horizon of possibility for mass organizing when we throw in with the idea that actual, authentic grassroots protests are a thing of the past and the only legitimate public demonstration is one choreographed from above, its participants carefully disciplined into reading from an identical script or into silence. We should also think about the Proud Boys and Sons of Odin who have gone to the rally to radicalize its participants. The on-the-ground experience of regular folks participating will be of being called Nazis, traitors, Klansmen, bigots, etc. Not only will this place greater distance between the participants and urban Canadian society; it will make them look less unfavourably on others who are called Nazis and Klansmen. How bad could those guys really be, they will ask themselves? Were they also smeared as part of a bum rap by shills for the pharmaceutical industry? They will wonder if those folks also came to be known as these things the way they did. As a person who, because I dissented from the progressive consensus on a single issue, has been smeared as a transphobe, homophobe, pedophile, white supremacist, racist and ableist in the past year and a half, I can no longer simply accept the opinion of centre-left media on whether someone is a dangerous, bigoted member of the alt-right. I can no longer trust the government-financed Canadian Anti-Hate Network on whether someone is a dangerous hatemonger because many of my comrades and I are on their list. And not everyone is going to be like me and check those claims against the facts. Most people will just start ignoring those claims. There is a high price to pay when you decide to cry “wolf” over fascism in a political situation like our own, where the authoritarian threat is real and society-wide.

jevoten 5y ago
> I am writing this piece to ask Canadians like me whether we want our future protests to be judged and covered by standards applied to the truckers today [..] actual, authentic grassroots protests are a thing of the past and the only legitimate public demonstration is one choreographed from above, its participants carefully disciplined into reading from an identical script or into silence. Obviously this is completely wrong - the author thinks there is any kind of principled consistency in how movements are covered. Protests have always been covered selectively by the media. If journalists or media conglomerates support the cause, they prominently feature the most sympathetic parts of the protests, and downplay others. If not, they do the opposite. Had the author's views not been so in line with the establishment, he would have noticed this decades ago.

curmudgeon22 5y ago

I think the best bits from the article are: > Right-wing commentators sought to discredit these protests [1980's peace movement] by heavily featuring and platforming the most off-topic or the most radical protesters and then seeking to paint all protesters with that broad brush. This approach generally failed and was mocked by the mainstream press, who depicted the diversity of protesters and homemade signs as a sign of the depth of its support. ... > And, in progressive, urban Canada, this broad-brush guilt-by-association strategy exhumed from the 1980s appears to be working, no matter how intellectually lazy its journalistic practitioners are being. Let me rehearse the kinds of sloppy reporting we are seeing here:

loceng 5y ago
- 908B64B197 5y ago
  > The Trudeau-Federal government continues to try to pass bills for internet censorship - with active calls and propaganda align with their trying to promote the majority of Canadians to hate and fear - so they can silence those who won't toe the line, who don't agree with them. They can control the narrative on the state media, not the internet! That's dangerous (for them, not the people!). Wow. That sounds like par for the course. Didn’t his father even suspend constitutional rights (apparently that’s a thing over there?) for similarly dubious reasons back in the 70’s?
  - loceng 5y ago
    I don't know Trudeau senior's history very well. If you watch the video however Peckford shares some history - that Justin's father attempted to get his own version of the Charter of Rights passed, because he thought the provinces' leadership was being too unreasonable; trying to just get his own way without consensus. The judge in that case shut him down, and he was forced to go back to the table with the provinces - the judges citing that the provinces have sovereign power, and because the Charter is a Federal document that all provinces must agree to it. Like father like son, not shocking then to see Justin Trudeau promoting hate while violating the Charter itself.

pluckyChuck 5y ago

Barrin92 5y ago

>More importantly still, I am trying to sound a cultural alarm bell about the exaltation of order, disciple and control as Canadians’ primary political values. The fact is that those values are authoritarian They're not just Canadian values and not really authoritarian. Contest for power is and has always been the primary function of the political. Politics is the business of deciding who orders, the fact that someone does is not in question, and a bunch of peace protesters or truckers had never any meaningful impact on anyone. The internal party politics of whoever is holding power is what matters. That goes for private companies or governments regardless of how often they talk about participation or inclusion or whatever else. So the actual observation here is that it isn't really relevant whether you're for or against the trucker cause, but and the author seems to agree, the only effect that the trucker protest has is that it makes them look exactly like what they're being caricatured as.

fontenot-jon 5y ago
you, politicians, militants, and others are using the term, "Power" wrong. your talking about, "Force." they are two entirely different things, you wont understand.
- NotAFireDrill 5y ago
  Care to explain?
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
pc2g4d 5y ago
The belief that politics is primarily a contest for power is a very limited view of politics. Politics is also a means for idea exchange, collective weighing of priorities, debate, the proposal and then choice between competing visions, etc. Reducing it to being primarily about power is not only a disservice, but potentially a self-fulfilling prophecy.
- Supermancho 5y ago

afpx 5y ago

Why turn HN into another political forum? Off-Topic: Most stories about politics [...] unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. [...] If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

s1artibartfast 5y ago
I thought the piece was interesting, and not particularly political. It mostly focuses on rhetorical tactics in politics and begs the question of why do people knowingly use and accept strawmen arguments
loceng 5y ago
- dang 5y ago
  Please don't cross into personal attack and please don't do ideological flamewar on HN. We ban accounts that do those things, because they're not what this site is for, and destroy what it is for. You can make your substantive points without any of that, and as a bonus your comments will come out better and persuasive. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html Edit: we've had to ask you this sort of thing repeatedly in the past. Would you please take the intended spirit of this site more to heart and stick to the rules?
Auracle 5y ago
I really enjoy the political discussions that show up on HN. It’s the only place online where I can see both sides of something being debated intelligently. It’s also the only place where I can post something that goes against the grain of the majority and still be upvoted. That said I think the “if they’d cover it in the TV news…” is a good rule, just to limit discussions to novel topics.

loceng 5y ago

And if the mainstream media channels are misrepresenting the protestors so blatantly - what other "news" has been propagated to us that they've misrepresented, even subtly?

mythrwy 5y ago
The events of the last 20 years with accompanying media coverage have really made me question a lot of the "history" I was taught and accepted as fact.
- loceng 5y ago
  Meanwhile there are some long-lasting situations like the Israel-Palestine conflict/crisis, yet there's clear, ongoing gaslighting occurring - in part due to political ties and economic relationships that bond, align interests; and societies and culture is held hostage and suppressed from responding if it's counter the mainstream narrative, mastering suppression, propaganda, and influence techniques.

helen___keller 5y ago

I know very little about Canadian politics and culture, but this is hardly a Canadian phenomenon. Rather this is an emergent behavior of internet and social media, that certain types of debate end in partisan convergence much more efficiently than they used to. The observations about the form of bias in question, as well as the observation about (lack of) dissent within the party, are really just minor details of a wider picture. The root cause is that hyper connectedness has reduced cultural and intellectual diversity among the vast majority. I don't say that as a positive or negative, just as a fact. By "cultural and intellectual diversity", I mean that the more a particular topic is featured on social media, the narrower of a spread the opinions on that topic become. (Intellectual diversity in the sense of what topics are discussed has exploded, however. I'm part of a massive online group dedicated to discussing changes in zoning and public transit. Imagine that 30 years ago.) This goes beyond politics too. I could write an essay about how games like MMORPGs are fundamentally different now that there's hyperconnected communities that distribute high quality information on playing optimally, and how game design has in turn responded to this. Effective use of reddit or discord or a wiki has essentially merged as part of the gameplay now for a very large percentage of users. The hyperconnected social internet fundamentally changed how we interact with ideas, from gaming to politics.

908B64B197 5y ago
Keep in mind Canada has two parallel media spheres. One of them is completely controlled by the state and the other the private sector. Of course the government funded journalists working for the government approved and funded broadcaster are going to side with… the government! That shouldn’t surprise anyone. What I find interesting are all the sighting of these “radical” protesters with Nazi and confederate flags that are fueling the narrative that this demonstration really is led by the alt right. All of them are masked and there has been very little progress in identifying them but they sure were amply photographed and used as evidence by the state media. How weird is it that nobody can ID most of them? In the 1970’s the state media and government similarly tried to pin mailbox bombings to a group called the FLQ… until an RCMP agent was caught literally red-handed (with severe burns and a torn off fingers) planting bombs in a mailbox to pin it on the FLQ! [0] The feds then confessed to more than 400 illegal search and seizures, criminal trespass, breaking and entering and arson incidents and the bomb planter admitted he “had done much worse for the feds”. Who was prime minister during that time? You guessed it, Justin Trudeau’s father. What a coincidence. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_controversies_involving_the_Royal_Canadian_Mounted_Police#Break-ins_and_bombing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_controversies_involvin...

ChoGGi 5y ago

He mentions cherrypicking, but the co-organizers of the gofundme/convoy seem to not like Muslims[0]? Tamara Lich and B.J. Dichter, neither of whom are truck drivers, are currently listed as the organizers of the GoFundMe page. Dichter was a late addition, only added this week. Lich, born in Saskatchewan, now hails from Medicine Hat, Alberta, where she served as an organizer for Yellow Vests Canada, a regional coordinator for the separatist Western Exit or “Wexit” movement in Alberta, and now as the secretary for the Maverick Party – another separatist movement and fringe political party. Attending and boosting Yellow Vest events starting in 2018, Lich social media posts from the time show her, in one moment, calling out some hateful rhetoric within the movement, while also posting Islamophobic articles of her own, like conspiracies about the “Muslim Brotherhood” operating in Canada. Dichter’s website shares The Quiggin Report, and Dichter himself shares similar Islamophobic sentiments in public. In 2019 he claimed that “Islamist entryism” is “rotting away at our society like syphilis.” “[The Conservative Party of Canada] is suffering from the stench of cultural relativism and political Islam,” he said during the first PPC conference held in Gatineau, Quebec. “It is suffering from the stench of extremism that same way in third-world countries suffer from extremist groups, separatist groups, communist guerrilla factions, paramilitaries, organized crime, and more.” [0] https://www.antihate.ca/the_freedom_convoy_is_nothing_but_a_vehicle_for_the_far_right https://www.antihate.ca/the_freedom_convoy_is_nothing_but_a_...

DiggyJohnson 5y ago
Genuinely curious, how is what you're doing here not cherrypicking as well?
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
foxyv 5y ago
I kind of wonder why we are seeing nothing but ad-hominem attacks on the protestors themselves rather than addressing the issue they are protesting. What does the white supremacist, anti-muslin, and xenophobic views of some of the protestors have to do with the COVID mandates that they are protesting?

jmull 5y ago

I don't know (or care much) about the details of Canadian politics but these complaints sound like BS from my perspective. E.g., if a group uses a statue to promote their cause -- probably specifically because people care about the subject -- is it fair to complain that people don't like it? As if they are entitled to positive attention for associating themselves with the statue, but somehow should be exempted from the negative attention? It makes no sense. More laughable is the suggestion that it's unfair to believe protesters are associating themselves with Nazism when they use the swastika as a protest symbol. Maybe they just think it's a cool symbol, like sewing kid in the Curb Your Enthusiasm episode? And the complaints about the narrative sound like a guy aggrieved that gravity is trying to hold him down! Narratives will emerge from a movement (unless it's simply ignored). That an unfocused movement with disparate groups/motives/goals, without strong leadership won't produce and sustain a focused, favorable narrative seems like a foregone conclusion. If your movement doesn't craft the dominant narrative, then someone else will. Can you really expect them to craft just the one you wanted? That's hopeless. I think this guy is yelling at the clouds.

defaultprimate 5y ago
- dang 5y ago
  "Please don't comment on whether someone read an article. "Did you even read the article? It mentions that" can be shortened to "The article mentions that."" Also, please don't cross into personal attack. You can make your substantive points without that. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- jmull 5y ago
  The swastika is a very, very powerful symbol, and a very, very dangerous one. If you use it, you might as well be lighting a stick of dynamite. When it blows up -- you understand that it will blow up, right? -- and hurts you, that's on you. Not the news media for failing to carefully direct the blast in a direction you think (but not necessarily everyone who used it thinks) they should. > the homogeneous, empty-headed masses Well, this is how you're characterizing the people you should be trying to persuade to your cause. That's not going to work! Here's a principle you can make a lot of hey off of: if some group seems like idiots doing something completely stupid and irrational, then it's actually probably you who isn't understanding something critical. If they aren't a group of people with literal brain damage, the problem is almost certainly that you don't understand something important about them. Dig in and find out what it is. This will pay off very substantially for you.