Canada poised to repeal its blasphemy law

June 12, 2017 • 10:00 am

Since 1892, Canada has had an anti-blasphemy law on the books, to wit (from the Criminal C0de):

296. (1) Every one who publishes a blasphemous libel is guilty of an indictable offence and liable to imprisonment for a term not exceeding two years

  • (2) It is a question of fact whether or not any matter that is published is a blasphemous libel.
  • (3) No person shall be convicted of an offence under this section for expressing in good faith and in decent language, or attempting to establish by argument used in good faith and conveyed in decent language, an opinion on a religious subject.

R.S., c. C-34, s. 260.

Now the bit about being exculpated if you give a critical opinion on religion “in good faith and decent language” might seem to be the loophole. But as Peter Bowal and Kelsey Horvat note in a quote given by Canada’s Centre for Inquiry (a group that has long crusaded against that law), the law “remain[s] the most serious form of crimes (indictable), and contain broad, archaic wording which makes their criminal application and enforcement difficult as well as controversial today.”  Bowal and Horvat also indicate that “there is no guidance in the criminal code or in any judicial interpretations as to what “publishes”, “decent language” or  “a religious subject” mean, or generally what constitutes a blasphemous libel”.

The law hasn’t been used much, though in 1980 it was used to charge a theater with showing Monty Python’s “Life of Brian,” though the charges were dropped.

Now, according to Global News and verified by the Government of Canada’s website, an bill to amend Canada’s criminal code has been introduced in the House of Commons by Justice Minister Jody Wilson-Raybould, who represents Vancouver/Granville (she’s a Liberal, of course).  That law not only clarifies provisions of the sexual assault laws, but repeals section 296, with the repeal buried in a list of archaic and unenforceable laws (my emphasis in the bullet points):

Obsolete and/or redundant provisions

The proposed legislation would repeal several Criminal Code offences that were enacted many years ago, but that are no longer relevant or required today, including:

  • Challenging someone to a duel (section 71);

  • Advertising a reward for the return of stolen property “no questions asked” (section 143);

  • Possessing, printing, distributing or publishing crime comics (paragraph 163(1)(b));

  • Publishing blasphemous libel (section 296);

  • Fraudulently pretending to practise witchcraft (section 365); and,

  • Issuing trading stamps (section 427).

It’s about time to strike from the books a law prohibiting religious blasphemy, which doesn’t belong in a progressive country. This hasn’t passed yet, but I’m betting it will.

That doesn’t solve all of Canada’s “first amendment” issues, though, as there are numerous “hate speech laws” that are still on the books, and have been used. See the Wikipedia article on “Hate speech laws in Canada“. Here are two examples of “hate speech” that shouldn’t have been prosecuted, though in both cases I find the opinions prosecuted to be detestable:

In 2005, the Saskatchewan Human Rights Tribunal fined Bill Whatcott, leader of a small group called the Christian Truth Activists, $17,500 because he distributed flyers that had controversial comments about homosexuals.[38] The matter ultimately went to the Supreme Court of Canada where the decision was upheld in part.

In Citron v. Zündel TD 1/02 (2002/01/18) the Tribunal found that the respondent had theories of secret conspiracies by Jews. The respondent posted his theories to the Internet. The Tribunal found that the tone and extreme denigration and vilification of Jews by the respondent was a violation of s. 13(1). The Tribunal ordered the respondent to cease and desist his discriminatory practices.

Neither of these cases would have been prosecuted in the U.S. Let Ernst Zündel promulgate his anti-Semitism and Holocaust denial without being jailed. After hearing him, we can educate ourselves about the evidence for the Holocaust, and he can always be met with counter-speech. For further arguments about why we should let “hateful” speech be aired, read Mill’s On Liberty. 

h/t: Gregory

Ken White on free speech and hate speech

June 12, 2017 • 8:45 am

Ken White, who’s identified as “a 1st Amendment litigator and criminal defense attorney at Brown White & Osborn LLP in Los Angeles” writes a lot at the legal website Popehat. One of his pet issues is freedom of speech, and I call your attention to his new piece in the Los Angeles Times, “Actually, hate speech is protected speech.” It’s a good piece and gives the proper legal responses to six comments that are often in the air from the authoritarian wing of our Left. I’ll show White’s responses to three particularly pernicious tropes (indented):

  • “Not all speech is protected. There are limits to free speech.”

This slogan is true, but rarely helpful. The Supreme Court has called the few exceptions to the 1st Amendment “well-defined and narrowly limited.” They include obscenity, defamation, fraud, incitement, true threats and speech integral to already criminal conduct. First Amendment exceptions are not an open-ended category, and the Supreme Court has repeatedly declined to add to them, especially in the last generation. Merely observing that some exceptions exist does not help anyone determine whether particular speech falls into one of those exceptions. It’s a non sequitur.

  • “You can’t shout ‘Fire!’ in a crowded theater”

 

  • “Hate speech is not free speech”

This popular saying reflects our contempt for bigotry, but it’s not a correct statement of law. There is no general 1st Amendment exception allowing the government to punish “hate speech” that denigrates people based on their identity. Things we call “hate speech” might occasionally fall into an existing 1st Amendment exception: a racist speech might seek to incite imminent violence against a group, or might be reasonably interpreted as an immediate threat to do harm. But “hate speech,” like other ugly types of speech we despise, is broadly protected.

  • “We must balance free speech and other interests”
  • “‘Fighting words’ are not protected under the First Amendment”
  • “Maybe this speech is protected now, but the law is always changing.”

The Supreme Court’s approach to constitutional rights can change very quickly. For instance, it took less than a generation for the court to reverse course on whether the government could punish gay sex. But for decades the court has been moving towards more vigorous protection of free speech, not less. Some of the most controversial and unpopular speech to come before the court — like videos of animals being tortured, or incendiary Westboro Baptist Church protests at funerals — have yielded solid 8-to-1 majorities in favor of protecting speech. There’s no sign of a growing appetite for censorship on the court.

I’m not sure how torture of animals can be construed as “free speech”, even as artistic expression, unless it doesn’t violate animal-protection laws.

Go read the piece to see the legal take on the other three statements.

h/t: Grania

Readers’ wildlife photos and video

June 12, 2017 • 7:45 am

We have a photo and a video today. First, Tara Tanaka (flickr site here, vimeo site here) sent a video of a giant American alligator (Alligator mississippiensis) who lives on her property. It’s positively primeval—and scary! Her notes on “Mr. Biggun” (be sure to watch the video on the site and in full screen; click on “vimeo” at lower right):

In January I posted a video of what I thought was our largest alligator. We later found her nest and babies, and I renamed her ‘Mrs. Biggun.’

A couple of months ago I looked out the window, and for the first time saw two gators at the same time, so I grabbed my digiscoping gear and headed out in the yard to video them. I chose the closest one to focus on, and as I videoed him he really didn’t look that big — UNTIL he pulled himself up on ‘gator island.’ When I saw his jaw mine dropped. Lesson learned: you can’t judge a book by its cover.

When I originally videoed Mrs. Biggun it was just before we hired someone with a mechanical harvester to remove the floating islands that were choking out the swamp and open water. Since our gator had a favorite spot to sun, we marked with flags and had David leave that little section, and we named it ‘gator island.’ You can see the original vegetation in the video of Mrs. Biggun, and what’s left in this one.

Reader Barbara Wilson (location not mentioned) sent some photos of an insect and plant, along with some notes:

This is the very opposite of a “spot the ___” photo.  The White-lined Sphinx Moth (Hyles lineata) caterpillars were by far the thickest organisms out in this scabby area, except the flowering Bitterroot (Lewisia rediviva).  The caterpillar is protected by camouflage, tiny hairs, and a single yellow eyespot on its butt.

Here it is:

Dr. Andy Moldenke, who identified these photos, says these moths are migratory and that this year they are moving by the millions.

Here is another view of the rocky habitat, showing the Bitterroot, which appears to flower right out of the rock.

Lewisia rediviva has leaves earlier in the season, but if the weather is dry they wither before the flowers arrive.

Second feral kitten captured, named “Not Jerry Coyne”

June 12, 2017 • 7:00 am

Stephen Barnard in Idaho has been trying to trap a feral cat and her two kittens; yesterday he succeeded in getting the second kitten, which appears to be called “Not Jerry Coyne” since the first one, caught two days ago, was named after me (“Jerry Coyne the Sixth“). The siblings (below) look very similar, though you can tell by their condition which was caught most recently. I asked Stephen how he caught the second one, and he appeared to have used the first kitten as bait.

I trapped another kitten, which I think is the last one. It’s an identical twin to Jerry Coyne the Fifth. No sign of the mother.

I’ll probably take this one to the shelter tomorrow morning. It’s a really good shelter, lavishly supported by rich animal lovers in the Ketchum/Hailey area.

They’re eating regular canned cat food. What worked was (1) putting the crate with Jerry Coyne the nth by the trap, and (2) setting a hair trigger on the trap. The two kittens are overjoyed at being reunited.

Not Jerry Coyne is on the right. It’s been eating like a pig.

For my part, I hope they can be kept together, as the first one has already been adopted, and maybe the nice tenant who took Jerry VI can also take Not Jerry Coyne.

Voilà! They look at lot like the original Jerry Coyne the Cat (bottom photo), reared by Kätzchenmeister Gayle Ferguson in New Zealand:

Jerry the First:

Monday: Hili dialogue

June 12, 2017 • 6:30 am

It’s almost halfway through June already: Monday, June 12, 2017. The students are gone for the summer now, giving my campus a very different feel. It is quiet and unoccupied, but soothing, too. It will also be hot this week, with today’s high of 94° F (34.4° C). It’s National Peanut Butter Cookie Day, a delicacy I will eschew (as a friend of mine once  responded jokingly when I said that about a food, “I’ll chew it, too!”). In the US it’s “Loving Day,” commemorating a Supreme Court decision in 1967, Loving v Virginia, striking down a ban on interracial marriage (read “blacks and whites” in 16 US states. The case was recently made into a good but not a world class movie.

On this day in 1776, the Virginia Declaration of Rights was adopted, which influenced the revolutionary government, forming a model for the next month’s Declaration of Independence. On June 12, 1942, Anne Frank got a diary for her 13th birthday present; the recent is history. In 1963, NAACP field secretary Medgar Evers was murdered in Jackson, Mississippi by a Klan member. Precisely one year later, Nelson Mandela was sentenced to life in a South African prison for sabotage. And 30 years ago, in 1987, Ronald Regan stood at the Brandenburg Gate and told Mikhail Gorbachev to “tear down this wall.” And it happened! Remember this? (The famous statement is right at the end.)

Four years later, Boris Yeltsin was elected Russia’s president. On this day in 1994, an “unknown” killer (we know who it was) murdered Nicole Brown Simpson and Ron Brown in Los Angeles. Due to a bad prosecution and the jury’s cluelessness about DNA, O. J. Simpson was acquitted of the murder. Finally just one year ago today, Omar Mateen murdered 49 and injured 53 in an attack on a gay nightclub in Orlando, Florida: the worst mass murder (aside from terrorist attacks) in American history.

Notables born on this day include Egon Schiele (1890; only 28 years old and an immense talent), Djuna Barnes (1892), Weegee (1899), George H. W. Bush (1924), Anne Frank (1929; see above), Jim Nabors (1930), and Chick Corea (1941). Those who died on this day include Edmund Wilson (1972; a great literary critic), Gregory Peck (2003), and all those people in Orlando.

Schiele was a very great painter, and had not the laws of physics cut his life short, we’d have many more wonderful works. Here’s a landscape (Krumau, 1916):

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Malgorzata tried to make rose-petal jam last year, but it didn’t work. Hili comments on the enterprise (I l love rose-petal jam and rose-petal Turkish delight):

Hili: Can preserves really be made out of rose petals?
A: Yes, they can.
Hili: It can’t be tasty.
In Polish:
Hili: Czy naprawdę robi się konfitury z róż?
Ja: Naprawdę.
Hili: To nie może być smaczne.

Reader Barry found a tw**t that documents a kitten being rescued from a pipe:

https://twitter.com/Koksalakn/status/872670721477976064

And cats (poorly) drawn in a medieval manuscript:

Evergreen State and postmodernism

June 11, 2017 • 12:30 pm

Over at Quillette, which is really the go-to place fostering progressive Liberalism and criticizing Authoritarian Leftism, Michael Aaron has a new piece on the Evergreen State College affair called “Evergreen State and the battle for modernity.” It’s a good read, and deals more with the forces behind the fracas than the messy details of campus troubles.

Aaron revises the old Left/Right dichotomy into a trichotomy: postmodernism, traditionalism, and modernism. Traditionalists are basically anti-progressivists of the conservative Republican stripe, postmodernists are Regressives who “eschew any notion of objectivity, perceiving knowledge as a construct of power differentials rather than anything that could possibly be mutually agreed upon”, and modernists are “those who believe in human progress within a classical Western tradition.” Postmodernists hew to critical race theory (see the list of its key elements on Wikipedia).

Like me, Aaron sees this mess as a turning point—or at least a “crossroads” in modern society, though that may be a bit hyperbolic. I think it may be a crossroads for how we look at student behavior, but of course those students will become the next generation of decision-making adults, so we’ll have to see (if we live!). A few of its final paragraphs (read the whole thing):

In the end, the Weinstein/Evergreen State affair poses a significant crossroads to modern society, extending well beyond the conflict occurring on campus. Evergreen State represents the natural culmination of postmodern thought—roving mobs attempting to silence dissenting thought merely based on race, informed by far left theories that weaponize a victim status drawn solely from immutable, innate traits. Unfortunately, I cannot place full blame on the students either, as they have been indoctrinated with these ideas on the very campus that is now serving as the petri dish for applied postmodernism.

It is no coincidence that, while society outside the walls of campus looks on with disbelief, administrators to this point have been siding with the students. For if they were to repudiate the actions of the students, they would also need to repudiate the ideology with which they have been brainwashing them. In other words, taking a stand against the students would require administrators and professors to re-evaluate the meaning and value of the entire raison d’etre of their adult professional careers. Holding on to madness is a way of forestalling dealing with the grief that comes with the realization that one’s higher purpose has been a fraud. I am not sure of the final outcome, as this kind of process is long, difficult, and very, very painful.

But this internal struggle serves as a microcosm for the larger battle occurring in society between the ideas behind modernism and postmodernism. And the stakes are extremely high. As Weinstein articulated in his Rogan appearance, “Let’s put it this way, I believe at the moment coalitions are unholy alliances between two things. In this case you have the real equity movement, which are people who wish to end oppression, and then you have another movement that wishes to reverse oppression, and they don’t know that they are different because until you reach equity, they are pointing in the same direction.” For the sake of basic humanity and decency, let’s all hope that the Evergreen State affair has finally exposed this vital distinction.

As Bret Weinstein has said, the Evergreen faculty may be more to blame than the students, who probably came to the school not yet indoctrinated by postmodernism, and the Evergreen curriculum is full of it. Regardless, the school needs a thorough shake-up, starting with firing President George Bridges.

 

A remarkable study: decoding how human faces are identified in the primate brain

June 11, 2017 • 11:00 am

I really dislike posting about a paper that I don’t fully understand, but I guess I’ll have to, as this one seems pretty important. The best I can do is summarize it briefly and give a link so that those of you above my pay grade can look at the messy details. The paper, with only two authors, Le Chang and Doris Tsao of Caltech, was published in Cell (reference and free link at bottom), and involved functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and electrodes that probed individual neurons in the brains of two rhesus macaques (Macaca mulatta).  (It’s amazing how far technology has advanced!)

The monkeys were presented with images originally derived from 200 human faces, with data taken on a set of 50 landmarks involving both shape and features like eye color and skin tone. Chang and Tsao then constructed composite faces based on various combinations of these landmarks. After identifying a small patch of the macaque brain as being involved in face recognition, they then probed the  firing of individual neurons in this region when macaques saw the faces. Using various statistical analyses incorporating the correlation of each neuron’s firing with the measurements used to construct the facial images, they then figured out an algorithm that best translated the firing patterns into the multidimensionally constructed face.

Once they did that, they could “reverse engineer” the firing patterns alone into facial images; that is, they could test their algorithm by using measurements of firing alone and their model to predict the appearance of new faces seen by the macaques. The remarkable thing is that they could do this with amazing accuracy monitoring only 205 neurons!

Below are a set of reverse-engineered faces (“predicted face”) derived from neuronal firing alone and then compared to the actual image the macaques saw. You can see the remarkable fidelity. What this means is that, as far as we know, the investigators cracked the code of how a facial image is translated into patterns of neuronal firing in the brain.

What does this mean? Well, it means we’re a lot closer to understanding how the brain translates images into neuronal firing, though of course it tells us little about how that firing is reprocessed by the brain itself into an image, for that’s a matter of “qualia”, or consciousness. But it does unravel the complicated nexus by which a whole group of cells work together to create facial images, which of course are crucial for primates recognizing individuals.

One site reporting on this, ZME Science, notes two practical implications:

The researchers can translate from neuron activity in a brain to a human face; from brain activity to visual information. In addition to cracking the code of a brain in a living animal, this study also discovered how brains recognize faces. Before, it was believed that each face cell codes one specific face. However, now we know that each cell represents one piece of visual information that combines with all of the others to form a face. Perhaps human brains also have their own code that works in a similar way. In addition to crime applications, the research could help machine learning for recognizing faces, such as photo recognition on Facebook.

I’m not quite sure what the “crime applications” are unless they ask a victim to envision a perpetrator and use the neuronal firing (instead of a police artist) to get an image of that perp. But that seems impractical. The measurements of neuronal firing might be translatable into computer code, though this too is above my pay grade. Right now I’m just amazed that this was done, and how accurately the investigators could reverse engineer firing into images using so few neurons. I’ll let others speculate about the practical applications.

h/t: Steve

____________

Chang, L. and D. Y. Tsao. The Code for Facial Identity in the Primate Brain. Cell 169:1013-1028.e1014.