LAWS THAT PUNISH FOR HYPOTHETICAL HARM MUST BE ABOLISHED

By Denis Rancourt

Given the state of laws in Canada, it has become necessary to state the obvious:

An individual legitimately can be punished solely for proven actual harm that is also proven to have been caused by the individual.

In a free and democratic society, laws that punish an individual for harm that is hypothesized to have occurred, or hypothesized to have been caused by the individual, or hypothesized to have both occurred and been caused by the individual, are pathological in that such laws attack democracy itself in its foundation, as explained below.

Canada and institutions and corporations sanctioned by the State enforce many laws and rules that punish individuals for hypothesized harm, in which the State or State-sanctioned actor does not have to prove actual harm or actual cause.  With these laws, proving actual harm is not relevant in the prosecution, and is considered inadmissible and unacceptably wasteful of court and tribunal resources.

Instead, the prosecutor merely needs to argue that there is “likelihood” that unspecified harm has occurred to unspecified “victims”, which is caused via an unspecified mechanism by the accused. Here, the prosecutor can rely entirely on the “judgement” of the court or tribunal, or can bring an “expert” witness to give opinion evidence about the said “likelihood” of harm.

No victim will testify or be cross-examined. No evidence of actual harm, physical or psychological, will be entered. No victim will even be named or identified to the court. There is a total absence of evidence of actual harm caused by the accused person.

The proceedings are separate and distinct from any criminal proceedings of responsibility for actual physical or psychological harm against an actual and identified victim.

What are these laws, you ask? These are the so-called “hate speech” laws, the codes of conduct, and also the common law of defamation.[1][2][3]  These laws include:

• “hate speech” provisions of the Criminal Code
• censorship codes, rules or “guidelines” enforced by social-media corporations
• censorship rules and practices of employers regarding the personal actions of employees
• professional-ethics codes or rules regarding personal expression on public media
• codes of conduct on campuses
• common law of defamation

In all of these laws — in a total absence of proven actual harm, from mere expression of comment, opinion, thought or belief, excluding criminal harassment, intimidation or threat against any actual and specific person, often made through the filter of a public social-media platform rather than any face-to-face interaction — the punishments range from fines, to unlimited “damage” awards, to workplace or professional-association discipline, to loss of access to education, to loss of employment, to loss of professional certification, to lengthy jail terms or house arrests, and include gag orders or compelled speech enforced by imprisonment.

Such is the status of Canadian law, despite the fact that Canada has ratified the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, which expressly prohibits all such written or unwritten censorship laws.[1][2]

As a result, Canada has spawned a legal landscape not unlike that of past eras having blasphemy laws to prevent the alleged deleterious effects of the most offensive and subversive utterances of the day. This legal landscape vitiates the fundamental right of freedom of expression and incapacitates democracy itself.

The fundamental right of freedom of expression is the right that allows the individual free expression, and the personal agency that derives from free expression, even though the individual is confined by society’s changing and democratically agreed-upon rules.  Free expression is the right to express.  It is essential for personal development and emancipation.  It does not, in itself, confine others, and it is up to the individual to seek and secure receptive listeners. This is the essence of both personal growth and society. 

Beyond person growth within the fabric of society, freedom of expression plays a second role that is equally important. Democracy is susceptible to capture by a self-interested elite, and politics must not be solely a contest between dominant-elite special interests. The balancing force against runaway capture, in a democracy, is freedom of expression, together with freedom of association, which permit effective democratic participation, and are the true sources of the often touted “transparency” (whistle blowing) and “accountability” (popular opinion making).

Censorship, including censorship actuated with the pretext of preventing hypothetical harm, does not protect the individual.  It is a lockdown designed to frustrate the essential democratic process of expression, discussion, debate and argument, in an increasingly illegitimate and intolerant system. Its use by politicians in exploiting the oppression Olympiad in their partisan manipulations is unconscionable, as is its use in special-interest propaganda by litigation. 

For these reasons, the State must not provide laws that enable an influential elite in-effect to neuter vehement individual expression that has transformative potential. The State must not be allowed to thus erode and suppress individual agency. Instead, it is the duty of the State to protect individual freedom of expression. If democracy cannot be trusted, then there is no democracy.

Relation to recent work

In her 2018 book [3], Nadine Strossen brilliantly reviews the research showing that “hate speech” laws are harmful to society. While this scholarship brings current empirical support for abolishing “hate speech” laws, I don’t find it to be satisfying. We should not be reduced to making policy arguments regarding harm reduction in order to justify preventing the State from suppressing fundamental human freedom, or preventing the State from enabling elite interests and corporations from suppressing the said freedom. If history itself and the study of sociology[4] cannot inform us about the necessity to safeguard the fundamental human right of freedom of expression, then we are lost.[5]

Opposing “hate speech” law is not “free-speech absolutism”

Unfortunately, in the present climate of clamouring to ask the State to limit fundamental personal freedoms “for our own safety”, the arguments become polarized, and many have used the sophistry that the position of opposing the aberrant inherent features of “hate speech” law is equivalent to advocating for “free-speech absolutism”.  This is a false equivalency.

If the State were to strike down all “hate speech” laws, limit the codes of conduct to exclude “hate speech”, and strike down the common law of defamation (which presumes falsity, damages and malice), then there would still independently exist: the civil tort of malicious falsehood, the Criminal Code provisions against threats, coercion, intimidation, harassment, and so on; and all the laws against discrimination. The individual would not lose any of these common law, statutory and constitutional protections.

Limiting the State’s power to prosecute victimless speech crimes (presuming harm at large, and presuming causation) does not limit the State’s power to enforce crimes that have proven victims and cause, irrespective of the role of expression in these offences, and does not limit the individual’s means to obtain redress.

This article has been published at Dissident Voice, and at Research Gate.

Endnotes

[1] “Canadian defamation law is noncompliant with international law”, by Denis Rancourt, Ontario Civil Liberties Association report, 1 February 2016. http://ocla.ca/our-work/reports/canadian-defamation-law-is-noncompliant-with-international-law/

[2] “Towards a Rational Legal Philosophy of Individual Rights”, by Denis Rancourt, Dissident Voice, 15 November 2016. https://dissidentvoice.org/2016/11/towards-a-rational-legal-philosophy-of-individual-rights/

[3] “HATE: Why We Should Resist It with Free Speech, Not Censorship”, by Nadine Strossen, Oxford University Press, 2018, ISBN 978-0-19-085912-1. http://www.nyls.edu/faculty/wp-content/uploads/sites/148/2018/04/endnotes.apr2818.pdf

[4] “Self-organization and time-stability of social hierarchies”, by Joseph Hickey and Jörn Davidsen, 29 January 2019, PLoS ONE 14(1): e0211403. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0211403

[5] “Cause of USA Meltdown and Collapse of Civil Rights”, by Denis Rancourt, Dissident Voice, 7 September 2017. https://dissidentvoice.org/2017/09/cause-of-usa-meltdown-and-collapse-of-civil-rights/

La géoéconomie et la géopolitique entraînent des époques successives de globalisation prédatrice et d’ingénierie sociale

https://lesakerfrancophone.fr/la-geoeconomie-et-la-geopolitique-entrainent-des-epoques-successives-de-globalisation-predatrice-et-dingenierie-sociale

L’influence des conditions géopolitiques et économiques globales sur le tissu des sociétés nationales et sur la psychologie individuelle est le plus souvent sous-estimée par les commentateurs civils, notamment en ce qui concerne les sociétés occidentales dites « libres et démocratiques ». Les militaires, en revanche, ne sous-estiment pas l’importance des facteurs commerciaux et économiques généraux sur le tissu même d’une société et sur la psychologie de ses citoyens, du moins dans les pays en développement ciblés. ²

Cet article a deux objectifs principaux.

Le premier est de démontrer dans quelle mesure le système financier global détermine la réalité nationale et régionale dans la vie et la sécurité des populations, y compris aux États-Unis et dans le monde occidental en général, en mettant l’accent sur les deux principales transformations de l’après-guerre, qui ont débuté en 1971, après l’annulation des accords de Bretton Woods, et en 1991, après la dissolution de l’Union soviétique.

Le second est de décrire le changement tectonique en cours qui a suivi la dissolution de l’Union soviétique en 1991 en des termes plus larges qu’on ne l’envisage habituellement, et comment ce changement motivé et coordonné a été chronologiquement accompagné par : une accélération spectaculaire de la « globalisation » commerciale et financière, et une campagne sans précédent d’ingénierie sociale des classes moyennes supérieures occidentales, visant à faciliter une exploitation opportuniste des nouvelles circonstances globales, par les États-Unis et l’élite globale, qui a abouti par contrecoup aux Gilets jaunes, au Brexit et à Trump… (Dans un sens, « les Russes l’ont fait. »)


Pour un « résumé des points clés » avec description des données socio-économiques à l’appui, voir la section Conclusion.

Denis Rancourt's conspiracy theory today about the world

By Denis Rancourt

I posted this on Facebook and it generated some interesting discussion.

This is just a conspiracy theory but I think there may be a war raging between (the) two Western elite factions these days:

(1) USA globalists who enforce the US dollar as the global currency, using violent intimidation and destruction, wherever judged necessary, tied to military industrialism and USA corporate interests, (motto: energy, etc. must be traded in US dollars, and we will print lots of dollars...) and

(2) more distributed (USA-UK-EU-G7...) financier globalists who manage the US dollar now but who could manage any global currency and who don't want a world of competing blocks not subservient to a unique world currency (motto: let us handle the money, for optimal stability and development). These boys are more artful at steering the UN, and at social engineering using global imagery (climate, gender equity, etc.), rather than nationalistic sentiment.

This working model helps to interpret many things. Both groups do not want a rising China and Eurasia that goes its own way with currency exchange. Group(1) wants to beat China/Eurasia (MAGA). Group(2) would prefer to entice China/Eurasia into a "more fair and balanced" global exchanges currency.

Republicans are more Group(1), Democrats and "liberals" more Group(2), educated at Harvard. You can put almost any Western leader into one or the other: Macron, Trudeau, Trump, etc. And the visible heads of the two groups are really showing their teeth more than usual. Eurasia is a huge pressure making them fight.

Israel, in my view, is clearly tied to Group(1). It exists by US dollar global currency to enforce said currency requirements in the ME.

Group(1) has the guns. Group(2) has the greater elite networks. Fascinating fight.

For related analysis see my report:
“Geo-Economics and Geo-Politics Drive Successive Eras of Predatory Globalization and Social Engineering: Historical emergence of climate change, gender equity, and anti-racism as State doctrines”, by Denis G. Rancourt, Ontario Civil Liberties Association, OCLA Report 2019-1, April 2019.

Interview of Denis Rancourt by Jamarl Thomas

Democrats & Republicans Use Identity Politics As Cover For Economic Devastation...

Wide-ranging interview of Denis Rancourt on Nader's Show

Freedom of speech is on the endangered list: full interview

[First published HERE.]

Journalist Dr. John Cooper recently published this article in LawNow:

In Canada and elsewhere, freedom of speech is on the endangered list

Here is the full interview with OCLA Researcher Dr. Denis Rancourt, which Dr. Cooper made in preparation for his article. The interview was organized through OCLA. It represents the spontaneous answers of Dr. Rancourt, not an official position statement.

Q: What are the major challenges journalists face with respect to press freedoms (e.g. access to sources, reduced access to information, fear of government intervention, arrest, etc)?

A: First, we must define journalist. The Supreme Court of Canada, in decisions related to freedom of expression, recognizes two overlapping categories of journalists: Career or salaried journalists working for large media corporations (corporate journalists), and citizen social-media or blogger journalists working independently under a variety of arrangements (social-network journalists). These two categories of journalists are broadly recognized as influential in society, and are often competitors in shaping or consolidating or compartmentalizing public opinion.

The overriding threat to press freedom for corporate journalists is near-absolute absence of professional independence. Journalists pander to the stated and unstated directives of their publishers. Careerism and job security rule the press office. This has been amply demonstrated in many academic studies. To the extent that the corporate media is a regulator in the democratic system, there has been complete regulatory capture.

Western corporate-media and business-media journalistic freedom existed after the Second World War, thanks to rapid economic growth and opportunities for small and medium-size publishers to sell advertisement to a large array of advertisers. Increasing globalization and corporate mergers (of both corporate advertisers and corporate media), and direct security-State oversight and infiltration, have closed that transitory window of freedom.

In the present era, corporate media really is “fake news”, both in content and by avoidance or omission of content that is vital to democratic societies in States involved in world affairs. It is propaganda. Its utility for analysts is in informing us of what the establishment wants us to think, and, therefore, in identifying some of the establishment’s main preoccupations.

Since corporate journalists are not unionized and do not have professional associations empowered by statute, they do not even have systemic or structural professional independence, compared to the circumstances of judges, academics, engineers, lawyers, doctors, and teachers. Furthermore, virtually all corporate journalists are now educated in specialized professional schools, and are thereby groomed to serve editors and publishers. Jeff Schmidt, author of “Disciplined Minds”, has brilliantly surveyed the grooming of professionals.

That is the elephant in the room regarding the now mythical press freedom of the corporate media. There are a few old guys left, who can negotiate assignments, but their headlines get trashed. Otherwise, the proverbial “two sides of the story” are carefully confined, and more and more frequently there is only one side, since the “other side” only serves as a repugnancy magnet, as with classic propaganda.

The challenges to press freedom for social-network journalists are quite different. Here, there are direct structural assaults against this democratized form of media. The assaults include: barring from the publication venues, blatant censorship following publication, demonetization, shadow banning, corporate manipulation of search results, and so on. In addition, Canada, for example, is implementing laws to regulate the censorship of independent media, using express pretexts that include: foreign interference in elections, preventing “hate”, and generally preventing “undesirable” views declared to be harmful to society. We can add the spectre of civil defamation law assaults, and Criminal Code prosecutions for victimless crimes of expression, all of which the Ontario Civil Liberties Association has consistently attempted to push back. This is a censorship era. We are at the level of the Soviet Union regulating access to photocopying machines.

Q: How are some of these challenges handled?

A: The challenge of corporate media press freedom is handled, primarily in three ways.

First, the dominant near-monolithic propaganda is challenged by a less-dominant opposing corporate media. Here, the finance-sector backed, Democrat-aligned, dominant corporate media is challenged by a lesser USA-domestic-based energy and military-manufacturing sectors backed, Republican-aligned, corporate media.

Second, the two competing corporate media, in this limited-view media-scape world, draw on social-network technology to boost their influence, thus somewhat levelling the coarse imbalance of means between the two camps. Trump tweets, social-media stars leak into corporate coverage as commentators, and so on.

Third, and most significantly, independent social-network journalists release vital reports and information that otherwise would never see the light of day. Sometimes, the information is so compelling and reaches such a wide audience that the corporate media cannot ignore it, and struggles to recast it. This is the undeniable contribution of Wikileaks, which is mostly ignored by the corporate media and academics, but which has exposed the greatest known systems of corruption and crimes in the Western world.

There are many others than just Julian Assange in social-network journalism — in a large organic network of contributors, publishers, whistleblowers, leakers, and researchers — but the vicious and sustained attacks against Assange most graphically proves the influence of social-network media, and its threat to the corporate media propaganda edifice.

Regarding loss of publication venues and censorship, social-network media handle this by exploiting windows of alternative venues and the ever changing technological landscape, in the same way that pamphleteers of the past exploited press technology, from silk screens to photocopiers and guerilla radio transmitters.

Q: With the advent of a dense and intense social media landscape, how challenging is the issue especially in light of concerns over ‘fake media?’

A: The “concerns over fake media”, expressed by the dominant corporate media and its associated pundits and politicians, is a crass pretext for outright State and corporate censorship. The said pretext is an assault against the presumption that citizens in a democratic society have the ability to judge and decide if they are allowed access to the broadest possible sources of information. The population will have been infantilized to the degree that it will accept the said pretext as legitimate.

Q: How confident are journalists in the ability of their media outlets to protect their free speech rights?

A: As a general rule, corporate media journalists are part of corporate media, and do not have a valid concept of or a surviving individual impulse for journalistic independence, nor are they given the time and freedom to research, except at the elite level where editorial wishes are fully assimilated.
There are exceptions, as rare reports, that prove the rule, but red lines are never crossed. There are also exceptions with specific journalists at niche outfits, such as reports in the Haaretz newspaper of Israel. But these repeated exceptions can only exist in societal circumstances in which they can have no substantial influence beyond selling copy to a niche audience or serving as a lightning rod for the dominant paradigm.

Social-network journalists, on the other hand, are confident that the technological venues they rely on for publication will always be assailed by dominant forces. They reasonably have little confidence that the courts can effectively protect their freedom of expression rights, nor do they have the resources to use the courts, nor does pro bono law exist anymore that would be of use in this regard, because of corporate capture of the legal profession.

Furthermore, the Supreme Court of Canada has not exactly been progressive in its freedom of expression decisions. It likes to distinguish “useful expression in a democracy” from “expression not worthy of protection”, it condones the common law of defamation, which violates universal standards of protection of freedom of expression, and it regularly makes regressive applications of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms loopholes that are sections 1 and 32.

Q: What changes have you seen over time (i.e. is press freedom being reduced? Is it growing?)

A: There can be no doubt that suppression of freedom has progressed, from the post-war Bretton Woods economic era, to the popular movements of the 1960s and 1970s, to the establishment’s coordinated assaults against democracy of the 1980s, to the aggressive new era of globalization starting in the 1990s, to the global corporate and finance mega-merger sprees of the late 1990s and mid-2000s.

The economic and institutional and statutory transformations were accompanied by large-scale social engineering of attitudes and beliefs, related to the emergent culture of “safe spaces”, and of “hate speech” as being assimilated with physical or psychological violence against specific and identified individual persons.

These economic and societal transformations have been outlined in the Ontario Civil Liberties Association’s published “OCLA Report 2019-1”.

Q: Are there more challenges/barriers to journalists reporting on the important issues at hand?

A: With corporate media, in a nutshell, there cannot be a “challenge” in preserving press freedom where there is no press freedom.

With social-network journalism, the challenges are endless, because social-network journalists threaten the mental landscape being fabricated and maintained by the bosses of the economy, via corporate media and institutional capture. As such social-network media is targeted for capture and confinement.

Q: What do you think the future holds for journalists in terms of freedom of speech and freedom of the press?

A: This is the future. 1984.

Mossbauer spectroscopy software "Recoil for Windows" now available as a free download

By Denis G. Rancourt

I'm now providing the free Mossbauer spectroscopy software "Recoil for Windows", originally developed in my laboratory.

Interested scientists can go here:

https://www.researchgate.net/project/Free-Moessbauer-Spectroscopy-Software-Recoil-for-Windows

Or, directly read the QUICK INSTALLATION GUIDE AND RECOMMENDATIONS for Recoil, here:

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/333981757_QUICK_INSTALLATION_GUIDE_AND_RECOMMENDATIONS_for_Recoil

The analysis methods used in Recoil have a strong scientific basis. For example, the scientific article describing a main fitting module in the program ...

“Voigt-based methods for arbitrary-shape static hyperfine parameter distributions in Mössbauer spectroscopy”, DG Rancourt and J-Y Ping, Nuclear Instruments and Methods in Physics Research B (NIMB) B58, 1991, 85-97.

has been cited more than 500 times, according to Google Scholar.