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Canadian military saw pandemic as opportunity to test propaganda techniques

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Re: Canadian military saw pandemic as opportunity to test propaganda techniques

#131

Post by dragonwriter »

LegitShady wrote: post #130
dragonwriter wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> its easier in canada No, its just explicit in Canada, where in the US it is, for the federal government, found implicitly in the tension between positive grants and negative restrictions in the Constitution, and, for States, the actual limits are only implicit in vague language (the 14th Amendment “Due Process” clause, into which much of the content of the Bill of Rights has been read in a form applicable against t…

In the us there are grey areas. In Canada they can just ignore it if they can convince a judge to say it doesn't apply, and the judges are political.

> In the us there are grey areas. In Canada they can just ignore it if they can convince a judge to say it doesn't apply

You realize that those are just two different ways of saying the exact same thing, right?

> and the judges are political.

While the judicial branch in the US is sometimes distinguished from the elected “political” branches, federal judges and especially thise of the highest court which serves as the ultimate arbiter of Constitutional interpretation are very much tied into partisan politics; if that hadn't been clear before, all doubt of that was erased during the Reagan Administration (continuing similarly thereafter), and the further heightened judicial political drama of the Obama and Trump Administrations has bolded and underlined that for anyone who still somehow had doubts.

Re: Canadian military saw pandemic as opportunity to test propaganda techniques

#132

Post by dennis_jeeves »

clockworkhavoc wrote: post #20

"Who rules Canada?" Flaherty (1988) https://sci-hub.se/https://www.jstor.org/stable/20025198

Didn't read the whole thing, but overall captures the essence of the relationship between Canadians and their rulers:

"We Canadians are usually quite satisfied, sometimes smugly so, with our achievements as a country."

"Politics, at least in good times, is thus regarded as a form of spectator sport that regularly matches the standard offerings of television. The best political philosophy, from this perspective, is to rotate the rascals in and out of office"

Re: Canadian military saw pandemic as opportunity to test propaganda techniques

#133

Post by dennis_jeeves »

m0zg wrote: post #67
rpmisms wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

100%. We still have some very strong protections built into our Constitution, but we all know that we need to actively fight to keep them in place.

What's particularly irritating is we've been through a milder variant of all this already with 9/11 and Patriot Act, and yet it seems people have learned little to nothing at all. A cockatoo has a longer attention span than the Western public.

Trite to say - but history repeats...

Re: Canadian military saw pandemic as opportunity to test propaganda techniques

#134

Post by dang »

mcrae wrote: post #78
dang wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Please don't reply to a bad comment by breaking the site guidelines yourself. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html Edit: it looks like you've been doing this repeatedly lately. Would you mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart? We'd be grateful.

You’re right, sorry!

Appreciated!

Re: Canadian military saw pandemic as opportunity to test propaganda techniques

#135

Post by dang »

sbakzbsmx wrote: post #37
mcrae wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You clearly have no idea what you’re talking about. The War Measures Act [0] is a law that grants government powers in times of war or insurrection. There was, you guess it, an insurrection in the 70s [1] and the it was appropriately triggered. Also the whole article describes an operation that even senior military commanders were unaware of — what possible connection could there be to the PM? Pure dumb speculation.…

A half dozen frenchmen playing pretend revolutionaries an insurrection? Lets play: So they killed Pierre Laporte, and kidnapped some British bloke. I raise you: - The IRA - ETA - Just about every political movement in France - Black panthers - the white militia movent Thats without leaving the West. You really want to compare the FLQ to those guys?

Would you please stop posting flamewar comments to HN? It destroys what this site is supposed to be for: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.

Also, would you please stop creating accounts for every few comments you post? We ban accounts that do that. This is in the site guidelines too.

You needn't use your real name, of course, but for HN to be a community, users need some identity for other users to relate to. Otherwise we may as well have no usernames and no community, and that would be a different kind of forum. https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...

Re: Canadian military saw pandemic as opportunity to test propaganda techniques

#136

Post by iforgotmypass23 »

amcoastal wrote: post #126
lithium_throw wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which makeshift morgues? Which people dying in the streets? Remember that video from China in early 2020, showing people literally dropping in the street? You can't be talking about that, surely. >And where do those beds and oxygen come from? Are they not "bed numbers and equipment"? Remember how I explained that the total number of patients treated every month in the UK since March 2020 is less than average?[1] It v…

In the US the treatments are absolutely limited by bed availability. And towing around a statistic like "less people are being treated" is the entire point the not shill world is trying to make. Do you know why less people are being treated? Because the beds are full of people with COVID and hospitalized COVID patients take longer to treat than most other hospital stays. So the beds are being filled and not emptied a…

Here's the data on bed availability where I live (Wales):

https://statswales.gov.wales/Catalogue/Health-and-Social-Car...

To pick out two dates, roughly at each Covid peak:

16 Apr 2020: 3,033 general beds occupied, 3,200 general beds available. 190 ICU beds used, 204 ICU beds available.

25th Jan 2021: 7,840 general beds occupied, 1,459 general beds available. 218 ICU beds used, 49 ICU beds available.

The publicly-available statistics do not support the notion that our hospitals are in dire straights due to sheer numbers of patients, nor the idea that they were full to bursting with Covid patients. As I have said repeatedly, they were emptier than usual.

Further, denigrating anyone who disagrees with you as "shrill" does you no favours.

Edit: Hopefully you understand why I'm upset about this topic. I suffered with a very young family under effective house arrest for many months, and many further months of restrictions (some of which are ongoing), as well as the inevitable long-term effects on my country, all to "protect the NHS". As the figures clearly show, at the peak of the first wave, the hospitals were less than 50% full.

The immediate question is - what on earth else has gone wrong?

Re: Canadian military saw pandemic as opportunity to test propaganda techniques

#137

Post by subject119 »

arcticbull wrote: post #30
chuckee wrote: post #4

> A military investigation determined what the Canadian Forces public affairs leadership was doing was “incompatible with Government of Canada Communications Policy (and the) mission and principles of Public Affairs.” I would hope that deploying the military against your own citizens is against more than just an executive branch policy that can be changed at any moment.

It's not, in Canada. The government may elect to invoke the War Measures Act [1]. Pierre Trudeau did this when he drove tanks into Montreal to quash the Québécois nationalist terrorist organization, the FLQ in the October Crisis of 1962 [2]. [edit] Posse Comitatus is more of an American thing - for the record the War Measures Act was subsequently replaced with the Emergencies Act [3]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wik…

[dead]

Re: Canadian military saw pandemic as opportunity to test propaganda techniques

#138

Post by pasabagi »

southerntofu wrote: post #103
chuckee wrote: post #4

> A military investigation determined what the Canadian Forces public affairs leadership was doing was “incompatible with Government of Canada Communications Policy (and the) mission and principles of Public Affairs.” I would hope that deploying the military against your own citizens is against more than just an executive branch policy that can be changed at any moment.

It's worse than that. Of course the government can call the army against its own population, that's what armies were for before modern "crowd control". Counter-insurrection doctrines were specifically developed to reduce the bloodshed from military interventions so that social control and political repression would be more socially acceptable. Without even talking of the most famous colonial wars during which these t…

I think France has a particularly bad record in this regard, having both pretty lively politics, and Napoleon's 'whiff of grapeshot' in its DNA.

Still, this is more or less the basic pattern of how nations and armies work together. For example, the fascist coup that started the civil war in Spain was originally stymied by the fact that many of the insurrectionary military units were stuck in Africa in the Spanish colonies.

The problem with armies is that even with the best of intentions, you end up using them, and if you use them, sometimes you win and end up having to do counterinsurgency in conquered territory. Then you get a whole load of people coming back home who started their professional career thinking of the population around them as the enemy, and have all the counter-insurgency methodologies as reflex and came of age in an enviroment where such things were normal.

From a UK perspective, it's always interesting to follow the careers of people in the early 20th century, as they move from one counter-insurgency to another, and they take techniques with them from one conflict to another, so you get guys who learned to torture people in Ireland ending up torturing people in post-war Greece, then they get jobs as police officers in the UK, and you can't help but wonder what they might have done there, what attitudes they brought to the job.

Re: Canadian military saw pandemic as opportunity to test propaganda techniques

#139

Post by throwawaylinux »

gotorazor wrote: post #116
throwawaylinux wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Weren't there a lot of fearmongering whoppers of budget black holes, economic collapse, shortages and famine, increased risk of war, etc., coming out of remain? How do you judge which side lied more?

They are literally running out of petrol right now. Grocery store shelves empty. Still year one.

I didn't say there would be no positives or negatives to either side, I said there were lies from both sides. Which there clearly were.

I just find it strange that people think one side has the high ground because they didn't lie to the public quite so much, according to people who lied to the public.

Re: Canadian military saw pandemic as opportunity to test propaganda techniques

#140

Post by LargoLasskhyfv »

howaboutnope wrote: post #51
throwaway0a5e wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not even "plausible deniability". They don't even need to ask for these things off the record because the generals are not idiots. They know what their bosses want well enough that nobody need ask. You see this behavior all throughout government.

"anticipatory obedience" https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vorauseilender_Gehorsam Sadly the article only exists in German because, well, the most well known example of it is how people acted under Hitler.

I see links to Japanese and Chinese too. Can't use them, though.

Anyway, https://www.deepl.com/translator works perfectly via cut&paste from .de to English for this.

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