What Price Free Speech?

Canada. The question here is of censorship: Is it good or is it bad? The question is for a small minority who even care at all. Most not only don't care about the question, they don't even realize it's being asked seriously in this country in our courts and in our daily practical lives. Most people, if forced to say, will say what they think their friends and neighbors would say, having no real idea at all of the nature of the debate. Such is the nature of democracy. It does truly suck but it's better than any alternative to it.

The following quotation by haliburton Jan 05 2008 5:42 PM, comes from a George Jonas column in the National Post Newspaper.

Dean Steacy is an INTERNET "investigator" for the Canadian Human Rights Commission and Barbara Kulaszka, a lawyer representing a website owner)

MS. KULASZKA: " Mr. Steacy, you were talking before about context and how important it is when you do your investigation. What value do you give freedom of speech when you investigate one of these complaints?"

MR. STEACY: "Freedom of speech is an American concept, so I don't give it any value."

MS. KULASZKA: "Okay. That was a clear answer."

MR. STEACY: "It's not my job to give value to an American concept."

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Here's a bit more, by Tristan Emmanual, from World Net Daily:

It's not that Steacy rejects "freedom of speech." He simply doesn't believe in the concept of a pluralistic democracy where people actually have a constitutional guarantee that the government won't be able to silence them just because someone like Steacy says so. And the reason he rejects the concept of democracy is because in his world, and in the world of his cadre of "hate-crusaders," it is only his definitions that matter, not ours.

Crusaders such as Steacy are working to "cleanse" the Internet of critical opinions, ideas, and speech they don't like. And unfortunately for Canadians, they have the authority to assess fines of up to $50,000 and incarcerate would-be "haters."

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There has to be some record of this dialogue actually taking place, right? I won't just accept someone's word for it, even if it's on the Internet. Should I take Mark Steyn's word for it? No, not just because.. Here is what he writes on January 06, 2008 at NRO Weekend:

At the National Review/Thomas More College event in New Hampshire last night, several NR readers were kind enough to enquire about my prospects of "victory" against Canada's "Human Rights" commissars. I think they're best summed up by this exchange from the Warman vs Lemire hearing before the Canadian Human Rights Commission (page 4793). [pdf] Dean Steacy is the principal "anti-hate" investigator of the HRC....

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Page 4,793. Just in case you didn't down-load the pdf and didn't read the page in question, you might well wonder who Mark Steyn is and why I would trust his reference. Let's see:

[Steyn is] a vile little piece of work that writes for Maclean's under the name Mark Steyn. Steyn is yet another of the "chickenhawk" crowd - pro war, pro American aggression, and desperately phobic of the "brown-skinned menace" that he predicts will overrun Europe in a few generations. (I won't go into the details of Steyn's bird cage liner book - if you really want to read it, find it in the library or a used book store ... or at the bottom of a parrot cage)

Apparently, Mr. Steyn finds himself subject of a human rights complaint....

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Oh well. We should all be thankful we have the Canadian Human Rights Commission to save us from ourselves. We are not worthy. They do it for us anyway. How lovely.

Because very few people care about the question of free speech and democracy in general we end up with abuse by neo-fascists from the Left, not different really from neo-fascists from the Right. Some concerns end up in the middle, such as the one below.

Should we enable our determined violent enemies to organize themselves using our technology? We have a lot to think through. We won't make any serious moves til the majority of people are in some kind of agreement about whatever we do. It might take years before the people in general in the West conclude that Islam is a serious danger that must be confronted seriously. We in the meantime can look at what we think about our own positions. This piece is a concerned person's questioning. We can all do so of that to our advantage. Then we'll act in some way.