. No, "life is sacred" does not work both ways. The lives of law abiding people is sacred. The lives of people who agreed to abide by the rules of a civilized society is sacred. The life of those who have broken that trust by breaking into someone's home violating that person's right to remain secure in that home (not merely trespassing on their property) is not sacred.
Yes. It is. That's why the death penalty is not given for breaking and entering. In fact, we don't even have the death penalty in my country. It is considered barbaric.
If someone breaks into your ROOM in the middle of the night you might have a case. But if you hear someone break into your HOUSE and start rummaging around downstairs you should not have the right to murder them.
I know what your country guarantees its citizens. I disagree with it. You have no right to murder anyone who you are not sure is trying to actively murder you or someone you care about. If you hear someone in your child's room, you should have the right to walk in with a gun out, if someone is heading towards YOUR room, you should have the right to, again, get out your gun and point it at the door (but not fire as soon as that door opens unless you have a damn good reason to think the person is literally ABOUT to kill yo).
If you take your gun and then go downstairs AFTER the source of the noise then you are actively seeking out the intruder with violent intent and you can no longer claim to be worried about your own safety.
personally I believe criminals should have to work while in jail to benefit society but apparently they tried that and the private sector complained that they couldn't compete.
And rehabilitation is SUPPOSED to be one of the purposes of sentencing by the repeat offender rate implies that it isn't working.
I'm referring to the people saying "anyone breaks into my house and I will straight up shoot him in the face." Basically, unless the person is actively trying to kill you, you can't murder him because he broke into your house as, from what people seem to be saying, America (Texas at least) allows.
the law doesn't predate neighbors. The law is designed for a city/suburb setting where getting to a phone and calling the police is assumed to be relatively non problematic.
Also, the "retreat" law doesn't actually require you to leave your house. You can lock yourself in a room and call the police. The point is just that you should try to contact the authorities before taking the law into your own hands.
how many cases of break and enter result in rape, kidnap and murder? I mean, unless you're a stalker trying to rape a SPECIFIC person it's not exactly the ideal way to go about it since you have no guarantee the person will be alone in the house, plus it's noise any probably in a relatively high population density area and if you ARE a stalker trying to rape a specific person then you probably know how well their home defenses are and are pretty well prepared for whatever they have to defend themselves.
Same with kidnap. Assuming they're breaking it, it's probably planned ahead of time so they'll kinda... I dunno... wait until you aren't home to kidnap your children. Unless you leave your babysitter the location of the guns. And even then, they're probably doing it from the school or something.
The only real worry if you're in the house and someone breaks in is murder and, again, I have to point out, they don't actually have to break in for that. If they're willing to break down your door, make a huge racket and then shoot you they're probably also willing to knock, wait for you to answer and THEN shoot you.
If a criminal feels the need to actually break into your house, chances are, it's because they think you aren't home and they want to steal your shit. Because there are just much, much easier ways to perform other crimes.
the kind with cell phones that you can use to call the police while the criminal is still inside to come arrest him instead of trying to deal with him yourself desite having no actual law enforcement training.
You're assuming they KNEW the house had an occupant inside. Also, did you just imply that you feel the death penalty is an appropriate response to B + E and theft?
and we believe his life is valuable enough that you shouldn't be entitled to take it because he tried to steal your computer. "Life is sacred" works both ways.
The laws where I live were written to value human life above human property. There's no death penalty so you can't murder someone who you catch breaking the law unless the life of you or a third party is in IMMEDIATE danger because of it.
yes, if you use "excessive force". If someone breaks in and starts stealing your shit and you punch them in the face, tackle them to the ground, tie them up and immediately call the cops to come pick him up, you're committing citizens arrest. That is completely legal.
If you shoot them in the kneecap, then you're using excessive force. If they walk onto your lawn and you try to do the above: excessive force. If you threaten to murder them (ie. pointing a gun at them) excessive force. The excessive force law doesn't say you can't defend yourself, it says you can't do so with, (surprise!) an excessive amount of force.
EVERYONE was into eugenics back then. We did it in Canada, you did it in The States, europe was all into it. Basically the main reason it's viewed so negatively now is because of what Hitler did. The concept, while cold, is theoretically sound where by preventing those with inferior genes from breeding you get a superior race.
The problems with it were A) at the time racism was not just allowed but accepted as scientific fact so "inferior" got defined "irish or black". B)It was implemented violently and with little if any consent (us Canadians, being the polite folks we are asked the people involved to sign an agreement to be chemically castrated. Of course, the fact most of the people we asked to sign were mentally handicapped, illiterate or unable to read english or french for other reasons is an unfortunate side effect of making the world a Better Place(tm)/stepford-government-impression). C)We didn't understand evolution or genetics very well yet and D)to be effective and NOT cruelly totalitarian it would require people to willfully agree to not reproduce because someone decided they were inferior. which no sane person would do.
Remember, eugenics wasn't about killing originally, it was just about preventing breeding. Hitler decided to set the whole murder ball rolling.
Sorry, I find eugenics a fascinating subject of study, all science from before medical ethics kicked in is terrifyingly brilliant in it's efficiency and callousness. I'm not a sociopath, but I love reading about what people who were did. It's such a perfect example of how despite what people say, we ARE, as a race, getting better.
So, now that I have that out of my system... ah, I see. I thought you were trying to blame modern democrats for racism and eugenic practices and claiming current abortion clinics existed for the sole purpose of "keeping minorities in their place".
As for your claim that the rich have no influence over the tea party or socialist movements, I have to disagree on two fronts.
first) Saying they're no longer involved and therefore the tea party is a separate organization is like saying that if I set off a rube goldberg machine I'm not responsible for the end result. Is it still a grassroots movement if various powerful entities tilled the lawn, planted the seeds and applied a healthy dose of fertilizer?
Second) Just because you can't see their influence doesn't mean it isn't there. The tea party and libertarian movements do benefit a lot of very powerful people and just because they're good at astroturfing doesn't make the grass real. It just means they're good at what they do. Even if they're only behind 1/10th of the movement these days, all they need to do is keep it doing what it's already doing and they're happy. They don't need massive influence anymore because they're happy with the current state of affairs.
Personally I don't know anything about who funds the tea party or how genuine it is. I think the people behind it are wrong in their assumptions about government and are only hurting themselves but they think the same about me so I don't consider myself in a place to judge. I'm just pointing out why your points may be flawed.
I believe you have your correlation and causation mixed up sir. Areas with high minority populations tend to be, for a number of historical reasons, lower income. Lower income areas tend to have more cause for abortions due to high rates of prostitution, less availability of birth control (the pill,morning after or otherwise, not being affordable) higher rates of risky behavior like drug abuse and unprotected sex and less ability to afford a child should they accidentally get pregnant. So it makes perfect logical sense for those areas to be more likely to have abortion clinics. Furthermore, abortion clinics aren't necessarily government run so they exists where ever the demand is perceived to exist. Oh, and as for communism. By definition communism would actually remove our current government system, putting a few people in control and screwing the rest of the party so it's HIGHLY unlikely that any party is supporting it.
The problem with your idea is that giving someone power has now been empirically show to take away their empathy, guilt and remorse and turn them into hypocrites.
It doesn't matter who you elect. "Power corrupts" is not an idiom anymore, it's a scientific fact. The only way to fix this is to make the people with the power to make changes feel powerless and since they're the only ones who have the power to make changes this doesn't really work for several reasons.
Oh, you think that because the police do abuse their power sometimes that's the same thing as them having that power legally and openly flaunting it in public? Because during the G20 that was what happened. Like I said, I saw people in the subway up against the wall without their shoes on. That's what made it a god damn police state.
I am not stupid enough to presume that if a police is power tripping that I can just wave my rights in his face and walk away. That was the first thing when we were taught arrest/detention law (protip: I'm not an internet lawyer; I have 3 semesters of legal courses) But during the G20 it was a completely different environment where you had to worry about being grabbed and arrested for no reason anytime you went near the summit area.
Wow. OK. No. No they can't. Not legally anyways. Please see the following handy guide regarding police rights. They need either probably grounds that you've commit or are about to commit an indictable offense (that's a felony for any American's watching at home) or you need to be actively committing a summary (misdemeanor) offense. Otherwise, they cannot arrest you. They can DETAIN you after giving you a legally valid reason and even then you have the right to a lawyer.
The arrests and detentions at the G20 violated most if not all of these rules.
Good for you! I didn't get arrested either. Lets start a club with stickers! See, I can be needlessly condescending to dismiss your actual points too.
But I won't be because I'm not a tool. I'll just explain why your situation was probably different from mine
How close to the summit do YOU live? Because I was a 10 - 15 minute walk away and to pass through (or around) the main patrol area every day when I had to go to work or wanted to go out anywhere downtown. And you know what? When I went to bars in the evening, I had a blast and everything was fine. Saw a few helicopters overhead, though that might have been unrelated but other than that, no police presence on west College. Of course, on my way home I passed a house party a few blocks from Chinatown being broken up by 5 police cars which struck me as a tad odd, and over the top, but ya know, they were probably intentionally causing problems... at their house... at 1:00... with no loud music playing.
The day after the big smashup I was told by my neighbors to change because I was wearing a black t-shirt and therefore was probably going to get arrested or detained. This is not say that I would have been, just that people were afraid enough to alter their clothing to not arouse police. Also, you see all those people who are getting off without charges because it turns out they did absolutely nothing and were just arrested for the hell of it? That's because people were being arrested arrested for the hell of it while doing absolutely nothing. Which is the type of thing that only happens in a police state where you're allowed to arrest people for doing nothing and detain them for hours on end. Which is what Downtown Toronto was during the G20 for those of us who lived near the summit.
Cute. But people were detained without a reason given, for hours at a time without any charges brought against them and without being allowed to even know the rule they were being accused of breaking (which turned out not to exist).
For those of us living downtown, near the perimeter it was genuinely frightening. I would come out of the subway to see groups of 3 or 4 cops putting random people up against the wall and doing everything short of strip searching them. Some people would get arrested. They didn't tell them why, they just put them in the holding areas for hours on end, in the rain. They claimed that the law prevented any testimony from going over a police officer's word. The security team they hired were not even legally registered to work in Ontario.
I was physically manhandled while walking down the street to my home and told that I couldn't go that way and when I asked how far the blockade went (because it was kind of directly between me and my home) the cop, or rentacop or whatever he was told me to go around NOW or be arrested. I had to wander 15 minutes south to finally get around the damn thing because I was afraid to approach any of the police.
For that weekend there was no due process, no rights, no recourse. It WAS totalitarianism.
The government hired the scientists to give them advise, the government then ignored the advise because it didn't line up with the decision they had already made. This is an entirely valid thing to go to the media about.
It is a waste of taxpayer's money to have the tests done if you don't care about the outcome. It is, as stated, morally questionable (at best) to make decisions that you know go directly against scientific evidence for political expedience or to hire scientists for the sole purpose of adding legitimacy to your beliefs.
ALSO, the statements that the adviser was fired over were completely valid. He presented the PM with the facts, the PM read them and then went on to make public statements that went against them. This is know as "lying" and when the highest authority in the country is doing it, then it is entirely valid to go to the media and call them on it, especially when what they are lying about is your work.
The government did not say "we acknowledge that these drugs are less harmful than alcohol but are still keeping them illegal for other reasons" they flat out said "these drugs are very dangerous".
No, I DISAGREE with conservatives. I don't like Harper. The difference is that the Conservatives use the system to pass measures I disagree with, Harper actively abuses the system to do things he should not be allowed to do.
I am assuming that by soviet we were referring to totalitarianism and suppression of information. If you're talking about distribution of wealth, then yes, this is less soviet than previous governments, however that would make you off topic so I assume you meant the first thing. Dissolution of the government to prevent a vote of no confidence is totalitarian by removing power from the rest of the parties to secure his own position. The G20 incident was just straight up totalitarianism in action. The second prorogue was to avoid having to answer for the torture debacle and therefore falls under suppression of information.
My point is that if you have a person whose title is "Drug adviser" then you should assume that they will give you advise regarding drugs. To fire them because you do not like the advise they give you is unethical (and really, should probably be illegal), ignoring the advice, while politically expedient, is immoral and makes their position irrelevant since you don't actually want an adviser, you want a yes man.
It is not the Drug Adviser's job to tow your party line. It is to gather the best and most accurate data they can and use it to create the most informed advise available. If the politician is trying to cover up findings that go against their ideology then it is not the drug adviser who is in the wrong for going public, it is the politician who is in the wrong for lying to the public.
Which would be a great point if I were responding to the original article. But I wasn't. I was responding to your claim that this is the "least soviet" government yet.
Yes, the government is often prorogued. Because that is what you do when a parliamentary session ends. Every election there is a prorogue. This is what the mechanism exists for. Saying that Harper is justified because prorogues have happened before is like saying that arresting someone arbitrarily for speaking out against the government is justified because arrests happen a lot. He is using the mechanism for something other than it's intended purpose. If parliment were a video game his actions would be classified by the term "exploit".
They ONCE attempted to hold a vote of non-confidence to remove a minority leader with large amount of seats and a relatively small percentage of the popular vote. A completely legal and precedented action which exists for that EXACT situation. Harper responded by using an action which is meant for wartime situations, transfers of power and emergencies to further his political agenda. The second time had nothing to do with a vote, he just was trying to avoid the torture scandal.
The Grits and NDP have not forced an election because it (A) would not make a major change as the Tories still would get around the same number of seats (the left vote is still divided to harshly for either party to get more seats than the tories despite the fact that the population as a whole is more left leaning, which is why the no confidence vote was used) and (B) we've had too many elections lately which people don't like and don't want to pay for.
No, the problem was not the violence, the problem was that the violence was allowed to rage for over an hour while peaceful protesters were being arrested under a law that it turns out, never existed. I understand the need for higher security, I live in Toronto and was fine with the increased police presence, but the police did nothing to stop the violence (seriously, over an hour going straight north on Yonge street: the police should have been there in under 2 minutes and started arresting people before they even made it to the Eaton Center) and acted more like a brute squad suing authority they didn't actually have to arrest people who weren't actually doing anything wrong and didn't actually pose any threat.
Not to mention the ridiculous budget allocated to the project for things like a temporary man made lake which served no purpose and cut into tax dollars while health and education continue to be underfunded.
Google DID exclude the other parties. It might be due to incompetence and laziness but it's just as likely that it was malice, and Harper's track record for unscrupulous actions isn't doing him any favours in tipping the scales towards accident.
You mean the case where the drug adviser did scientific studies on the danger of various drugs and posted their findings (which is pretty much exactly what the title "drug adviser" implies they should do) that went against the governments current drug policy and instead of altering or even more carefully examining the policy (on the advice of their adviser) they fired him?
Because really, I'm on the "the government was completely in the wrong on multiple levels" camp on that one. Both for ignoring his advice and for firing him.
A politician who does what is most likely to get himself reelected instead of what is in the best interest of the people is not a politician who should be in power.
Slashdot Mirror
. No, "life is sacred" does not work both ways. The lives of law abiding people is sacred. The lives of people who agreed to abide by the rules of a civilized society is sacred. The life of those who have broken that trust by breaking into someone's home violating that person's right to remain secure in that home (not merely trespassing on their property) is not sacred.
Yes. It is. That's why the death penalty is not given for breaking and entering. In fact, we don't even have the death penalty in my country. It is considered barbaric.
If someone breaks into your ROOM in the middle of the night you might have a case. But if you hear someone break into your HOUSE and start rummaging around downstairs you should not have the right to murder them.
I know what your country guarantees its citizens. I disagree with it. You have no right to murder anyone who you are not sure is trying to actively murder you or someone you care about. If you hear someone in your child's room, you should have the right to walk in with a gun out, if someone is heading towards YOUR room, you should have the right to, again, get out your gun and point it at the door (but not fire as soon as that door opens unless you have a damn good reason to think the person is literally ABOUT to kill yo).
If you take your gun and then go downstairs AFTER the source of the noise then you are actively seeking out the intruder with violent intent and you can no longer claim to be worried about your own safety.
personally I believe criminals should have to work while in jail to benefit society but apparently they tried that and the private sector complained that they couldn't compete.
And rehabilitation is SUPPOSED to be one of the purposes of sentencing by the repeat offender rate implies that it isn't working.
I'm referring to the people saying "anyone breaks into my house and I will straight up shoot him in the face." Basically, unless the person is actively trying to kill you, you can't murder him because he broke into your house as, from what people seem to be saying, America (Texas at least) allows.
the law doesn't predate neighbors. The law is designed for a city/suburb setting where getting to a phone and calling the police is assumed to be relatively non problematic.
Also, the "retreat" law doesn't actually require you to leave your house. You can lock yourself in a room and call the police. The point is just that you should try to contact the authorities before taking the law into your own hands.
how many cases of break and enter result in rape, kidnap and murder? I mean, unless you're a stalker trying to rape a SPECIFIC person it's not exactly the ideal way to go about it since you have no guarantee the person will be alone in the house, plus it's noise any probably in a relatively high population density area and if you ARE a stalker trying to rape a specific person then you probably know how well their home defenses are and are pretty well prepared for whatever they have to defend themselves.
Same with kidnap. Assuming they're breaking it, it's probably planned ahead of time so they'll kinda... I dunno... wait until you aren't home to kidnap your children. Unless you leave your babysitter the location of the guns. And even then, they're probably doing it from the school or something.
The only real worry if you're in the house and someone breaks in is murder and, again, I have to point out, they don't actually have to break in for that. If they're willing to break down your door, make a huge racket and then shoot you they're probably also willing to knock, wait for you to answer and THEN shoot you.
If a criminal feels the need to actually break into your house, chances are, it's because they think you aren't home and they want to steal your shit. Because there are just much, much easier ways to perform other crimes.
the kind with cell phones that you can use to call the police while the criminal is still inside to come arrest him instead of trying to deal with him yourself desite having no actual law enforcement training.
You're assuming they KNEW the house had an occupant inside. Also, did you just imply that you feel the death penalty is an appropriate response to B + E and theft?
and we believe his life is valuable enough that you shouldn't be entitled to take it because he tried to steal your computer. "Life is sacred" works both ways.
The laws where I live were written to value human life above human property. There's no death penalty so you can't murder someone who you catch breaking the law unless the life of you or a third party is in IMMEDIATE danger because of it.
yes, if you use "excessive force". If someone breaks in and starts stealing your shit and you punch them in the face, tackle them to the ground, tie them up and immediately call the cops to come pick him up, you're committing citizens arrest. That is completely legal.
If you shoot them in the kneecap, then you're using excessive force. If they walk onto your lawn and you try to do the above: excessive force. If you threaten to murder them (ie. pointing a gun at them) excessive force. The excessive force law doesn't say you can't defend yourself, it says you can't do so with, (surprise!) an excessive amount of force.
EVERYONE was into eugenics back then. We did it in Canada, you did it in The States, europe was all into it. Basically the main reason it's viewed so negatively now is because of what Hitler did. The concept, while cold, is theoretically sound where by preventing those with inferior genes from breeding you get a superior race.
/stepford-government-impression).
The problems with it were
A) at the time racism was not just allowed but accepted as scientific fact so "inferior" got defined "irish or black".
B)It was implemented violently and with little if any consent (us Canadians, being the polite folks we are asked the people involved to sign an agreement to be chemically castrated. Of course, the fact most of the people we asked to sign were mentally handicapped, illiterate or unable to read english or french for other reasons is an unfortunate side effect of making the world a Better Place(tm)
C)We didn't understand evolution or genetics very well yet and
D)to be effective and NOT cruelly totalitarian it would require people to willfully agree to not reproduce because someone decided they were inferior. which no sane person would do.
Remember, eugenics wasn't about killing originally, it was just about preventing breeding. Hitler decided to set the whole murder ball rolling.
Sorry, I find eugenics a fascinating subject of study, all science from before medical ethics kicked in is terrifyingly brilliant in it's efficiency and callousness. I'm not a sociopath, but I love reading about what people who were did. It's such a perfect example of how despite what people say, we ARE, as a race, getting better.
So, now that I have that out of my system... ah, I see. I thought you were trying to blame modern democrats for racism and eugenic practices and claiming current abortion clinics existed for the sole purpose of "keeping minorities in their place".
As for your claim that the rich have no influence over the tea party or socialist movements, I have to disagree on two fronts.
first) Saying they're no longer involved and therefore the tea party is a separate organization is like saying that if I set off a rube goldberg machine I'm not responsible for the end result. Is it still a grassroots movement if various powerful entities tilled the lawn, planted the seeds and applied a healthy dose of fertilizer?
Second) Just because you can't see their influence doesn't mean it isn't there. The tea party and libertarian movements do benefit a lot of very powerful people and just because they're good at astroturfing doesn't make the grass real. It just means they're good at what they do. Even if they're only behind 1/10th of the movement these days, all they need to do is keep it doing what it's already doing and they're happy. They don't need massive influence anymore because they're happy with the current state of affairs.
Personally I don't know anything about who funds the tea party or how genuine it is. I think the people behind it are wrong in their assumptions about government and are only hurting themselves but they think the same about me so I don't consider myself in a place to judge. I'm just pointing out why your points may be flawed.
I believe you have your correlation and causation mixed up sir. Areas with high minority populations tend to be, for a number of historical reasons, lower income. Lower income areas tend to have more cause for abortions due to high rates of prostitution, less availability of birth control (the pill ,morning after or otherwise, not being affordable) higher rates of risky behavior like drug abuse and unprotected sex and less ability to afford a child should they accidentally get pregnant. So it makes perfect logical sense for those areas to be more likely to have abortion clinics.
Furthermore, abortion clinics aren't necessarily government run so they exists where ever the demand is perceived to exist. Oh, and as for communism. By definition communism would actually remove our current government system, putting a few people in control and screwing the rest of the party so it's HIGHLY unlikely that any party is supporting it.
The problem with your idea is that giving someone power has now been empirically show to take away their empathy, guilt and remorse and turn them into hypocrites.
It doesn't matter who you elect. "Power corrupts" is not an idiom anymore, it's a scientific fact. The only way to fix this is to make the people with the power to make changes feel powerless and since they're the only ones who have the power to make changes this doesn't really work for several reasons.
Depending on what ethnic/religious group I belong to? Yeah, I'd say I would try to block vote.
Oh, you think that because the police do abuse their power sometimes that's the same thing as them having that power legally and openly flaunting it in public? Because during the G20 that was what happened. Like I said, I saw people in the subway up against the wall without their shoes on. That's what made it a god damn police state.
I am not stupid enough to presume that if a police is power tripping that I can just wave my rights in his face and walk away. That was the first thing when we were taught arrest/detention law (protip: I'm not an internet lawyer; I have 3 semesters of legal courses) But during the G20 it was a completely different environment where you had to worry about being grabbed and arrested for no reason anytime you went near the summit area.
Wow. OK. No. No they can't. Not legally anyways. Please see the following handy guide regarding police rights. They need either probably grounds that you've commit or are about to commit an indictable offense (that's a felony for any American's watching at home) or you need to be actively committing a summary (misdemeanor) offense. Otherwise, they cannot arrest you. They can DETAIN you after giving you a legally valid reason and even then you have the right to a lawyer.
The arrests and detentions at the G20 violated most if not all of these rules.
Good for you! I didn't get arrested either. Lets start a club with stickers! See, I can be needlessly condescending to dismiss your actual points too.
But I won't be because I'm not a tool. I'll just explain why your situation was probably different from mine
How close to the summit do YOU live? Because I was a 10 - 15 minute walk away and to pass through (or around) the main patrol area every day when I had to go to work or wanted to go out anywhere downtown. And you know what? When I went to bars in the evening, I had a blast and everything was fine. Saw a few helicopters overhead, though that might have been unrelated but other than that, no police presence on west College. Of course, on my way home I passed a house party a few blocks from Chinatown being broken up by 5 police cars which struck me as a tad odd, and over the top, but ya know, they were probably intentionally causing problems... at their house... at 1:00... with no loud music playing.
The day after the big smashup I was told by my neighbors to change because I was wearing a black t-shirt and therefore was probably going to get arrested or detained. This is not say that I would have been, just that people were afraid enough to alter their clothing to not arouse police. Also, you see all those people who are getting off without charges because it turns out they did absolutely nothing and were just arrested for the hell of it? That's because people were being arrested arrested for the hell of it while doing absolutely nothing. Which is the type of thing that only happens in a police state where you're allowed to arrest people for doing nothing and detain them for hours on end. Which is what Downtown Toronto was during the G20 for those of us who lived near the summit.
Cute. But people were detained without a reason given, for hours at a time without any charges brought against them and without being allowed to even know the rule they were being accused of breaking (which turned out not to exist).
For those of us living downtown, near the perimeter it was genuinely frightening. I would come out of the subway to see groups of 3 or 4 cops putting random people up against the wall and doing everything short of strip searching them. Some people would get arrested. They didn't tell them why, they just put them in the holding areas for hours on end, in the rain. They claimed that the law prevented any testimony from going over a police officer's word. The security team they hired were not even legally registered to work in Ontario.
I was physically manhandled while walking down the street to my home and told that I couldn't go that way and when I asked how far the blockade went (because it was kind of directly between me and my home) the cop, or rentacop or whatever he was told me to go around NOW or be arrested. I had to wander 15 minutes south to finally get around the damn thing because I was afraid to approach any of the police.
For that weekend there was no due process, no rights, no recourse. It WAS totalitarianism.
The government hired the scientists to give them advise, the government then ignored the advise because it didn't line up with the decision they had already made. This is an entirely valid thing to go to the media about.
It is a waste of taxpayer's money to have the tests done if you don't care about the outcome. It is, as stated, morally questionable (at best) to make decisions that you know go directly against scientific evidence for political expedience or to hire scientists for the sole purpose of adding legitimacy to your beliefs.
ALSO, the statements that the adviser was fired over were completely valid. He presented the PM with the facts, the PM read them and then went on to make public statements that went against them. This is know as "lying" and when the highest authority in the country is doing it, then it is entirely valid to go to the media and call them on it, especially when what they are lying about is your work.
The government did not say "we acknowledge that these drugs are less harmful than alcohol but are still keeping them illegal for other reasons" they flat out said "these drugs are very dangerous".
No, I DISAGREE with conservatives. I don't like Harper. The difference is that the Conservatives use the system to pass measures I disagree with, Harper actively abuses the system to do things he should not be allowed to do.
I am assuming that by soviet we were referring to totalitarianism and suppression of information. If you're talking about distribution of wealth, then yes, this is less soviet than previous governments, however that would make you off topic so I assume you meant the first thing. Dissolution of the government to prevent a vote of no confidence is totalitarian by removing power from the rest of the parties to secure his own position. The G20 incident was just straight up totalitarianism in action. The second prorogue was to avoid having to answer for the torture debacle and therefore falls under suppression of information.
My point is that if you have a person whose title is "Drug adviser" then you should assume that they will give you advise regarding drugs. To fire them because you do not like the advise they give you is unethical (and really, should probably be illegal), ignoring the advice, while politically expedient, is immoral and makes their position irrelevant since you don't actually want an adviser, you want a yes man.
It is not the Drug Adviser's job to tow your party line. It is to gather the best and most accurate data they can and use it to create the most informed advise available. If the politician is trying to cover up findings that go against their ideology then it is not the drug adviser who is in the wrong for going public, it is the politician who is in the wrong for lying to the public.
Which would be a great point if I were responding to the original article. But I wasn't. I was responding to your claim that this is the "least soviet" government yet.
Yes, the government is often prorogued. Because that is what you do when a parliamentary session ends. Every election there is a prorogue. This is what the mechanism exists for. Saying that Harper is justified because prorogues have happened before is like saying that arresting someone arbitrarily for speaking out against the government is justified because arrests happen a lot. He is using the mechanism for something other than it's intended purpose. If parliment were a video game his actions would be classified by the term "exploit".
They ONCE attempted to hold a vote of non-confidence to remove a minority leader with large amount of seats and a relatively small percentage of the popular vote. A completely legal and precedented action which exists for that EXACT situation. Harper responded by using an action which is meant for wartime situations, transfers of power and emergencies to further his political agenda. The second time had nothing to do with a vote, he just was trying to avoid the torture scandal.
The Grits and NDP have not forced an election because it (A) would not make a major change as the Tories still would get around the same number of seats (the left vote is still divided to harshly for either party to get more seats than the tories despite the fact that the population as a whole is more left leaning, which is why the no confidence vote was used) and (B) we've had too many elections lately which people don't like and don't want to pay for.
No, the problem was not the violence, the problem was that the violence was allowed to rage for over an hour while peaceful protesters were being arrested under a law that it turns out, never existed. I understand the need for higher security, I live in Toronto and was fine with the increased police presence, but the police did nothing to stop the violence (seriously, over an hour going straight north on Yonge street: the police should have been there in under 2 minutes and started arresting people before they even made it to the Eaton Center) and acted more like a brute squad suing authority they didn't actually have to arrest people who weren't actually doing anything wrong and didn't actually pose any threat.
Not to mention the ridiculous budget allocated to the project for things like a temporary man made lake which served no purpose and cut into tax dollars while health and education continue to be underfunded.
Google DID exclude the other parties. It might be due to incompetence and laziness but it's just as likely that it was malice, and Harper's track record for unscrupulous actions isn't doing him any favours in tipping the scales towards accident.
You mean the case where the drug adviser did scientific studies on the danger of various drugs and posted their findings (which is pretty much exactly what the title "drug adviser" implies they should do) that went against the governments current drug policy and instead of altering or even more carefully examining the policy (on the advice of their adviser) they fired him?
Because really, I'm on the "the government was completely in the wrong on multiple levels" camp on that one. Both for ignoring his advice and for firing him.
A politician who does what is most likely to get himself reelected instead of what is in the best interest of the people is not a politician who should be in power.
The rules we don't know about because the people who know about them are being cut off from the media?