Rights vs Tactics

Earlier in the evening I was getting angry as reports began to emerge about Coulter's speaking engagement at the University of Ottawa being cancelled. To be fair, the earliest reports were kind of hysterical, citing a violent mob of 2000 protesters. I should have known better than to take certain social media streams seriously, especially in the early stages of a story. After all, I'm a Gemini not a Scorpio. Scorpio's are well know for their dishonesty under pressure.

I still don't totally know what the tone of the protest was. Violent? Intimidating? I rather doubt it, but the truth will come out. At first I was thinking that mobs are poor tactics to counter bad thinking, even hate speech. Shouldn't we as liberals and progressives operate on a different level?

Then I started thinking about our rights and freedoms in a broader sense. Under sections 2a,b and c of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, the students were entitled to free expression, peaceful assembly and freedom of association. Now I see that those students were right to get in Coulter's face and let her know what they thought. It was a perfect demonstration of free speech and what most Canadians think of the trash of the far right. I would give anything to have been in that protest.

The problem is that conservatives will poodle hump this leg for some time to come as yet another example of liberals being violent, against free speech, and generally demented. It's bullshit of course. Coulter has said so many violence-inducing things that you could not list them all in one place. Yet the QR77 talks shows and the Calgary Herald hate speech advocates will be all over this, framing it as a problem with the "left".


So my problem is weighing those bad optics and expected distortion against the fact that the students exercised their free speech in a beautiful and effective way.

I'm proud to be a support of rights and freedoms. Less proud to be from a city where media pundits support Coulter, not because of free speech, but because they like what she says. Please recommend this post

Anti-Racism Rally - Calgary

Canadian cities are generally not like European or even American cities in the sense that we do not have a long memory of conflicting ideologies waging bloody battles in our streets. During the Vietnam war and the Civil rights movement there was almost constant violence in American cities as protesters clashed with police, or political rallies got out of hand.

I went downtown today add my humble presence to an anti-racism rally not really knowing what to expect, but thinking that Calgary has generally been a really peaceful city. I knew ahead of time that there would likely be a clash between the anti-racism rally and the Calgary chapter of the Aryan Guard.

The anti-racism rally started at Calgary Hall with a strong police presence and a vibrant atmosphere. I would say the crowd numbered around 300 and was demographically quite young. In the meantime the Aryan Guard coalesced their members in the North East and came downtown shortly after 3pm. They began marching from 10st West toward City Hall but got pinned down at the C-Train station at 7th Avenue and 5th Street. At this point they had no where to go with anti-racism protesters and police on all sides.

Eventually the police broke a line for them and they headed north to 6th Avenue. This is when it turned ugly. There was throwing of objects and veteran Calgary Sun columnist Rick Bell got injured with the end of a flag pole. A few arrests and other minor injuries.

A bus was brought in and the Aryans were shipped out of downtown.

At the end of it I'm left scratching my head as to where we are heading in our urban culture. And it comes at the end of a week when our buffoon of an Immigration minister thought out loud about how immigrants need to integrate. I cant help it - I think that mentality is a direct play into the hands of racists. Please recommend this post