The Government Owns Your Body

...at least according to The Supreme Court of Canada.

Most at the CBC seem quite happy with this decision - that a 14-year-old-girl's rights were not violated when she was given a forcible blood transfusion against her wishes.

Read that again.

To me, this is one of the most horrifying decisions any court has ever made. The Court has said, essentially, that this girl did not own and control her body. Not even her parents owned and controlled her body. The Manitoba Child and Family Services department did.

For the record, I abhor the idiotic, superstitious nonsense that is religion and what it does to people. But so long as no one is harmed by this choice except the person making the choice or others that consent, then, yes, one is free to believe any mythological baloney they want.

Sometimes being free means letting people make choices that are not those we would make, or even choices that are wrong, or choices that are based on idiotic beliefs.

That girl was not being beaten, not being starved or otherwise abused against her will. She made the choice knowing the probable consequences. And no one but her would pay those consequences.

Ask yourself this - would you want some fundamentalist Christian sect or Muslim sect that somehow attained power to have this same power over your children, the power to invade their physical bodies against your wishes and theirs?

"Saving lives" is the same excuse used by the Chinese government to harvest the organs of Falun Gong prisoners. After all, if it means saving a life - especially the life of a child - why shouldn't the state be able to invade your body against your will?

It is the excuse the fetus fetishists use to try to take away a woman's right to choose or control her body as well.

That is exactly what this decision says - given a good enough reason (decided by them, of course) the state has the right to violate the bodily integrity of someone against their will, or against the will of their parents or legal guardians.

That is horrifying.

Don't let our natural instinct to help a child open us to giving the state the power to control our bodies. That is far worse than one 14-year-old girl making a bad or stupid choice and dying.

Left to Right - A perspective

With the latest electoral machinations going on in Quebec, the confusion that is the "left-right" paradigm has reared its head again. Despite the efforts of the Stageleft Bunker to bring some sanity to the discussion using the "quadrant" picture of political belief, clearly some people don't get it.

While the quadrant is much better than the old left-right idea, I prefer a simpler and more historically accurate line of reasoning as presented by Karl Hess in his book Dear America:

My own notion of politics is that it follows a straight line rather than a circle. The straight line stretches from the far right where (historically) we find monarchy, absolute dictatorships, and other forms of absolutely authoritarian rule. On the far right, law and order means the law of the ruler and the order that serves the interest of that ruler, usually the orderliness of drone workers, submissive students, elders either totally cowed into loyalty or totally indoctrinated and trained into that loyalty. Both Joseph Stalin and Adolf Hitler operated right-wing regimes, politically, despite the trappings of socialism with which both adorned their regimes....

The far left, as far as you can get away from the right, would logically represent the opposite tendency and, in fact, has done just that throughout history. The left has been the side of politics and economics that opposes the concentration of power and wealth and, instead, advocates and works toward the distribution of power into the maximum number of hands.

—Karl Hess, Dear America [emphasis mine]

Hess was a former Barry Goldwater speech writer and Republican hawk that went through a kind of conversion to anarchism in the 60's and 70's. It was through his travels across the spectrum that he came up with the above observations and I believe it is most accurate.

It is about authoritarianism and hierarchy, not who supports what program. Based on this then, out Canadian spectrum would look like this:


Libertarians------------>NDP->Liberals-->CPC-->Nazis/Communists-->Absolute Monarchs

Economically it resembles this:

Decentralized voluntary------------>Planned--Corporatist-->Planned Communist---> Feudal
Free Market----------------------------------------------------------------------->Total Control

So, as Sheldon Richman has observed, the true left are the libertarians and the anarchists, who most value freedom - both social and economic - while the right are those who wish to impose their authority - both social and economic - upon others. The imposition of authority can come directly from the state, or via crony capitalism and state intervention in the economy on behalf of the corporate elites.

In Canada then, we really only have varying degrees of authoritarianism in our mainstream parties. So, when a Conservatives says they are a libertarian, they are lying - as long as they are okay with state or corporate control and favors, they are not in favour of freedom. When a Liberal or NDP says they are concerned with your liberty, they are lying - as long as they wish to regulate and legislate your economic activity and behaviour, the are not in favour of freedom.

The only real difference between our parties are who their corporate and union friends are and who they will rule for.

Update:

As per Ron's comment below, I'd like to make it clear that I don't see much of a difference between the major parties. Sadly my ascii art capabilities are not up to the task. There are very little differences between them. The NDP would have you give up economic liberty for lots of (perceived) personal liberty and the Conservatives would have you give up personal liberty for lots of (perceived) economic liberty. The Liberals will take a bit of both, and tell you they are moderate. In the end, you are still ruled by people who will use force and coercion against you and tell you they are doing it in your best interests, when its really in their interests and that of their cronies, be they unions or corporations or both.

They Hate Us for Our Freedom

In a rare, but not unprecedented, unanimous 9-0 judgment earlier today, the Supreme Court of Canada struck down the security certificate sections of Canada's anti-terrorism laws. The Court said that these certificates violated the Charter of Rights and Freedoms. Every judge, man or woman, left or right, Liberal appointed or Conservative appointed, agreed.

Not surprisingly, the Court has essentially ruled that it is unconstitutional for the state to hold a person indefinitely, without charge or trial or being able to see the evidence against them. For those of us that value freedom and liberty, this is absolutely obvious. Those kinds of powers are usually exercised by totalitarian, fascist and dictatorial states like Cuba, the former Soviet Union, South Africa under apartheid, Saddam's Iraq and Pinochet's Chile to name but a few. Canada is not, nor should not be in this league.

The Court, in essence, has balanced the real danger of terrorism versus cost to our civil liberties of these draconian measures and civil liberties rightly won.

Let's put the "problem" into perspective:

In 2004, according to the US State Department, approximately 2000 people were killed world wide from acts of terrorism. In the past 20 years, about 5000 Western civillians have died "due to jihadist and Arab insurgent violence", including Lockerie, Bali, Madrid, London and 9-11.

Canada hasn't had a terrorist attack since 1985, when Air India was bombed. Last year, the "Toronto 17" were apprehended while possibly planning an attack (though the real threat may have been exaggerated and the 17 may have been coaxed into action by the government's own mole) without resorting to extraordinary police powers or judicial measures.

According to Michael Rothschild, a former business professor at the University of Wisconsin, your odds of being killed in a plausible terrorist attack in your lifetime are 1 in 1282:

Even if terrorists were able to pull off one attack per year on the scale of the 9/11 atrocity, that would mean your one-year risk would be one in 100,000 and your lifetime risk would be about one in 1300. (300,000,000 ÷ 3,000 = 100,000 ÷ 78 years = 1282) In other words, your risk of dying in a plausible terrorist attack is much lower than your risk of dying in a car accident, by walking across the street, by drowning, in a fire, by falling, or by being murdered.

Further, prescription drugs are 16,400% more dangerous than terrorism.

So in response to this minuscule danger, the government decided to allow the state to arbitrarily detain people without charge or trial indefinitely while not allowing them to see or challenge the evidence against them. Today the Supreme Court said "Not so much."

Now given this logic and the clearly totalitarian nature of the law, one would expect that most people who value freedom and liberty would be overjoyed at this development. Sadly, this isn't so. As Canadian Cynic points out, some are quite devastated by this:

• Socialist Gulag: "For the second time in a week the Liberal elites in this country provided aid & comfort to those who wish us harm all in the interest of maintaining slavish devotion to that damn charter."


• Civitatensis: "Friends of Osama?"


• Canadian Blue Lemons: "Who will rid us of these pestilent priests and protectors of the enemies of our society?"


• Dr. Roy: " Canadians are less safe today thanks to the fiberals and the fiberal supreme court."


• mesopotamia west: "Court in Bed with Terrorism."

There are others. I am amazed that people still think that security certificates and indeed the other sections of the anti-terrorism act are necessary considering the (lack of) magnitude of the problem.

Are these people really so scared by the remote possibility of dying in a terrorist attack that they would gladly give the state - hell anybody - the power to throw them in a tiny prison, essentially forever?

Are they truly that cowardly?

I almost wish they were. I believe with these people it is something deeper and more sinister. As the Vanity Press discussed yesterday, I think it occurs because these people are projecting their own hatred of our freedoms outwards. They want to do exactly what they say the jihadis what to do - take away our liberty and impose their moral view on everyone, to use the full force of the state to make society in their narrow image of reality. How else can one explain people that on one hand, do not want the government to have the power to force someone to do their job when it comes to marrying gay couples, but are more than happy to grant that same state the power to detain and imprison people indefinitely without charge or trial, on the other hand? They agree with what they say the jihadis believe - that we are corrupt, morally bankrupt, promiscuous and on the verge of collapse. They propagate these things despite all evidence to the contrary, as demonstrated here and at the Vanity Press.

Read just some of those posts above. They see enemies everywhere, in society, in different religions and even in other political parties. They want the power the state wields over all of us, in order to be able to change us to their liking, by force if needed. They abhor the idea that people can be different from them, live different from them and even think they are wrong. The Supreme Court saying 'no' to that power is what angers them, not the thought that the terrorists are under every bed. They abhor us being free, acting as we like. Each one of them want to be rid of the Charter in order to force upon us some fix for some perceived moral outrage in society - abortion, gay marriage, women's rights, non-white immigration or the lack of Christianity in our institutions as examples.

My liberty, freedom and way of life is not threatened by religious zealots on the other side of the world, who may hate us because of bad Western foreign policy decisions over the last 50 years, it is threatened by these people. They are here, right now fighting hard to get the power of the state to do to us exactly what they claim to fear from the terrorists. They are a far greater threat than terrorists will ever be. They are the terrorists best friends.

They hate us for our freedom.