MONTREAL – A jail sentence of just three months for a man convicted of promoting hatred against Jews could trivialize the crime, a Quebec court judge said Wednesday as he questioned the Crown...
I know Canada doesn’t do the whole “free speech” thing, but damn. Jail for “unapproved writings” seems like way too much power for the government to have.
Well, I have to see it differently. 3 months in jail for advocating for the downfall and (inevitably consequential, I would say) death of a particular group of people seems pretty trivial, considering that this guy has had a long history of writing these materials. I would say even if these aren’t “unapproved writings”, they sure are fucking reckless - this is someone advocating for hateful people to lash out at another group. He writes for a Neo-Nazi website, he’s quite literally a Nazi. This is the equivalent of a corporation getting a financial fine for [insert corporate crime / corruption here] that amounts to no less than a slap on the wrist, it would mean effectively nothing to continue doing what he’s doing.
You could argue that maybe he did, in fact, change his ways. Maybe he really is not the guy he was any longer. But for any aspiring paid hate-mongering writers, this isn’t enough of a deterrent to stop them from whipping up the hate in our neighbours. I think we’ve all seen the kind of nonsense that happens South of the border when radically hateful propaganda hits too much of the masses - I personally feel that it’s in our interest to not have our national discourse go down that dark and dreary path, or else it’s more Trucker blockades, Jan. 6th Capitol riots and other awful things to come.
I know Canada doesn’t do the whole “free speech” thing, but damn. Jail for “unapproved writings” seems like way too much power for the government to have.
Well, I have to see it differently. 3 months in jail for advocating for the downfall and (inevitably consequential, I would say) death of a particular group of people seems pretty trivial, considering that this guy has had a long history of writing these materials. I would say even if these aren’t “unapproved writings”, they sure are fucking reckless - this is someone advocating for hateful people to lash out at another group. He writes for a Neo-Nazi website, he’s quite literally a Nazi. This is the equivalent of a corporation getting a financial fine for [insert corporate crime / corruption here] that amounts to no less than a slap on the wrist, it would mean effectively nothing to continue doing what he’s doing.
You could argue that maybe he did, in fact, change his ways. Maybe he really is not the guy he was any longer. But for any aspiring paid hate-mongering writers, this isn’t enough of a deterrent to stop them from whipping up the hate in our neighbours. I think we’ve all seen the kind of nonsense that happens South of the border when radically hateful propaganda hits too much of the masses - I personally feel that it’s in our interest to not have our national discourse go down that dark and dreary path, or else it’s more Trucker blockades, Jan. 6th Capitol riots and other awful things to come.