Category Archives: Freedom

Finn Wolfhard says Jason Reitman allowed a lot of "leniency" with his performances on the set of 'Ghostbusters: Afterlife'.

The 18-year-old actor - who plays Trevor Spengler in the upcoming sequel, which is helmed by the son of 1984 original's director Ivan Reitman - has opened up about working on the film and what might surprise viewers about the shoot.

He told Collider: "A lot of it's practical, a lot of the effects are practical - the creatures, mostly, except for the flying ghosts are puppets.

"I mean, Jason allowed a crazy leniency when it came to performances, he allowed me to improvise a lot, which was awesome.

His script with Gil Kenan is so good that I almost never did, but when I had an idea I could go up to Jason and talk to him about it, that was pretty amazing."

However, his co-star Mckenna Grace - who plays Trevor's sister Phoebe - insisted she didn't feel the same sense of freedom when it comes to her actual performances.

She said: "With Jason, for me, it was really specific - less on the lines, but for the performance it was super specific."

That said, she was given some leeway with the script, and she was allowed to make her own jokes instead of following a set script for her character's quips.

She added: "One of my favourite things is that I tell a lot of jokes in the movie, and every single take I told a different jokes.

"Those were my jokes that I came to set with, so they're Jason's picks - Jason's favourites are in the movie. And there's a lot of scenes that were cut out and edited in the film."

Finn noted he actually forgot shooting other scenes when he saw the finished movie, but he can't wait for fans to see the deleted scenes in the future.

He said: "The cut is so incredible, I literally was like, 'Oh we shot other stuff? I don't even remember.' I'm excited for people - maybe they'll be on the BluRay or whatever, the deleted scenes."

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Finn Wolfhard was given a lot of freedom with his performance in Ghostbusters: Afterlife - Inside NoVA

Nov. 20As with what seems like every other Fox News correspondent, "Fox & Friends" co-host Brian Kilmeade has a side hustle in writing a series of history books.

Since "George Washington's Secret Six," Kilmeade has penned history books about Thomas Jefferson, Andrew Jackson and Sam Houston.

"The President and the Freedom Fighter: Abraham Lincoln, Frederick Douglass and Their Battle to Save America's Soul" is his latest history book.

And it is perhaps his best.

Like other books where titans of history meet, the majority of this book is spent chronicling the biographies of Lincoln and Douglass. Prior to meeting, Douglass penned many articles and gave many speeches mostly criticizing Lincoln and his presidential policies. Douglass was not always a Lincoln critic; he also praised some of Lincoln's moves to end slavery.

They met less than a handful of times while Lincoln was president. Though the meetings seemed to leave an impression on both of them.

However, Lincoln never had the opportunity to write memoirs so his full impressions of Douglass are unknown. Douglass lived three decades after Lincoln's assassination so his thoughts about Lincoln then and later are available.

Still, Kilmeade mines deep connections between the white President and the Black abolitionist.

And while the meetings are brief, readers benefit greatly from the biographies. Lincoln is reportedly the second most written-about person in the English language; only Jesus has been the subject of more books.

While many readers will already know the information about Lincoln in this book, Douglass' biography will be a revelation for many readers.

He built upon rudimentary reading lessons taught to him as a child in slavery to become a newspaper editor/publisher/owner, a famed author/memoirist and influential speaker. He escaped slavery as a young man to become one of the most famous men in America and one of the most famous Americans in other nations.

Kilmeade writes in an engaging style in a thoroughly researched book. He shares many points about the lives of both men but sticks to his theme of "The President and The Freedom Fighter."

Go here to see the original:

BOOKS: The President and the Freedom Fighter: Brian Kilmeade - Yahoo News

The World Health Organisation said last week that Europe was the hot spot of the pandemic right now, the only region in which COVID-19 deaths were rising.

The autumn surge of infections is overwhelming hospitals in many Central and Eastern European nations, including Ukraine, Russia, Romania, the Czech Republic and Slovakia.

Over the past several days, there have been many anti-vaccination marches in European nations as one government after another tightened measures.

Dutch police arrested more than 30 people during unrest in The Hague and other towns in the Netherlands on Saturday, following much worse violence the previous night.

Austria is going into a 10-day national lockdown on Monday for everyone after first imposing a lockdown on the unvaccinated. Christmas markets in Vienna were packed Sunday with locals and tourists taking in the holiday sights before shops and food stalls are forced to close.

AP

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Continued here:

Freedom! Freedom!: Clashes as tens of thousands protest Belgiums tighter COVID-19 rules - The Sydney Morning Herald

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Lawyers launch the Free North Declaration a call to defend civil liberties in this country

Author of the article:

Publishing date:

Many years ago, as a new law student, I had a moment of disbelief. Surely it doesnt really work this way, I thought to myself as I sat in an early class. The law, I discovered, is not a set of immutable rules, predictable and secure. Instead, it is rife with ambiguity, riddled with uncertainty, and subject to the whims, temperaments and follies of human beings who make and apply it. And yet, as I also came to realize, it has often worked well. The Western legal tradition, upon which the Canadian system is based, has protected individual autonomy better than any other legal system in history. The problem is that for decades that tradition, and the culture from whence it came, have slowly been eroding. And now, during COVID, when the law has let us down, there is a tide in the affairs of Canadians.

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Late last week, three colleagues and I launched the Free North Declaration , a call to defend civil liberties in this country, which lawyers and members of the public are invited to endorse. So far more than 6,000 have done so, including over 100 lawyers. The declaration outlines the ways in which legal authorities legislatures, governments, public health officials, professional regulators, administrative bodies and public institutions have restricted Canadians liberties during the COVID-19 pandemic. They have done so shrewdly, to attempt to remain inside the strict letter of the law and to avoid triggering protections in the Charter of Rights and Freedoms. Over the past year and a half, legal challenges to lockdowns and quarantines have mostly failed in the courts, whose decisions have largely embraced governments COVID narratives.

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Canada was in trouble as soon as COVID hit. Crises are an ideal time for the state to advance into territory from which it will not wish to retreat, I wrote in the Financial Post in April 2020. In this new era, we will discover that leaders of all political stripes have more than a little Lenin in them. It is 20 months since two weeks to flatten the curve, and Canadians liberties are under siege like never before.

Canadians liberties are under siege like never before

It may not seem that way if you are double-vaccinated and going to restaurants and concerts again, but keeping your hall pass will require booster shots on schedule. The caring arms of the pharmaceutical industry and public health are now reaching out to protect kids from nonexistent risk. The purpose of vaccine passports, authorities have acknowledged, is not to control spread of the virus, which vaccinated and unvaccinated both can do, but to pressure people to get jabbed. How much and for how long vaccines reduce the risk of infection are in dispute. Meanwhile, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has no record of any unvaccinated person spreading COVID after recovering from it. Masking persists everywhere, along with the idea upon which this tragedy began: Governments must keep us safe from viruses and the vicissitudes of life.

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The panic-demic did not start the fraying of the Western legal tradition, which has been underway for decades. In 1975, Prof. Harold Berman lamented that the idea that law transcends politics and is distinct from the state a feature of that tradition had yielded to the view that law is at all times basically an instrument of the state, a means of effecting the will of those who exercise political authority. The instrumentalist, managerial state runs on the arrogance of experts, who believe that ordinary people cannot make their way in the world without direction from them. As Friedrich Hayek wrote, there could hardly be a more unbearable and more irrational world than one in which the most eminent specialists in each field were allowed to proceed unchecked with the realization of their ideals. But experts now have control, and they do not plan to give it up.

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No longer does the individual have the right to act without regard for public good. Instead, authorities will return the freedom to make your own choices only when it is safe to do so. While we were sleeping, the individual became subordinate to the collective. People are apt to believe that the law will save them when things go bad, but simply taking cases to court wont fix this. The law is subject to cultural tides and currents, and when the culture goes askew, the law will provide little refuge.

Alone, the Free North Declaration will change nothing. It will not influence omnipotent moral busybodies exercising tyranny for the good of its victims, as C.S. Lewis put it. Nor will it move people comfortable with giving up responsibility for their own decisions. Instead, the declaration is for those who see that something is not right in this country, and who need to know that others see it, too and that there are still lawyers who will stand up for their freedoms. As Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn wrote, let each of us make a choice: Whether consciously, to remain a servant of falsehood of course, it is not out of inclination, but to feed ones family, that one raises his children in the spirit of lies or to shrug off the lies and become an honest man worthy of respect And he who is not sufficiently courageous even to defend his soul dont let him be proud of his progressive views, dont let him boast that he is an academician or a peoples artist, a merited figure, or a general let him say to himself: I am in the herd, and a coward. Its all the same to me as long as Im fed and warm.

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When the tide comes, we must take the current or lose the country. Please join us in the voyage of our lives.

National Post

Bruce Pardy is the executive director of Rights Probe and a professor of law at Queens University.

Twitter @PardyBruce

We are Canadian lawyers. In our country, civil liberties are under unprecedented attack. Governments, public health authorities, universities, public and private employers, municipalities, and businesses are trampling Canadians rights and freedoms. Our free society is at risk.

COVID rules restrict citizens abilities to work, shop, travel and socialize. They erode civil liberties strategically, attempting to not run afoul of the law or to trigger protections in the Charter of Rights and Freedoms such as liberty and security of the person, the freedoms of association, assembly, expression, conscience, religion, and mobility rights. Where COVID rules appear to have violated the Charter, courts have deferred to the state to take whatever measures it deems necessary, whether demonstrably justifiable or not.

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Legislatures have passed statutes that delegate broad discretionary powers to unelected public health officials, who then create draconian legal restrictions by fiat, without public scrutiny or open debate. These directives give private and public employers cover to suspend and dismiss workers who insist on their right to decide their own medical treatments. In our system of law, no principle is more important than the right to control your own body and to make your own medical and health decisions. An anxious populace, swept up in a deliberate campaign of fear, now believes that individual liberties upon which our liberal democracy is founded are dangerous and selfish. A growing collectivism that demands safety at the expense of autonomy shapes public policy.

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Courts have embraced the pandemic narrative, some taking judicial notice of the nature of risks of the virus and safety of vaccines to adults and children. But the facts are anything but settled. Courts are supposed to be neutral. On COVID, as on any other contentious subject, their mandate is to find facts exclusively upon the evidence adduced by the parties in the courtroom. Instead, courts appear to have taken a side on COVID. Access to justice and the rule of law are now at risk. Unvaccinated persons are banned from juries, throwing into question the ability of all to obtain a fair trial heard by a jury of their peers. Irrational policies born of panic affect no one more than disadvantaged communities who already suffer from lack of access to justice.

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The right to privacy and control of personal medical information has been abandoned. Disclosure of vaccination status is becoming a requirement for working, travelling, entering public and private establishments, crossing the border, and sometimes medical treatment. Those who cannot or will not disclose face aggressive social disapprobation. Vaccine passports create the infrastructure for a global digital surveillance system. Institutions that last year were prohibited from collecting individual medical history now demand it as a condition of employment or admission. University and college students are being denied their education for refusing to disclose their own medical choices.

Medical regulators have become dictatorial. They have warned doctors not to express medical opinions that might conflict with official COVID policies, effectively censoring them, and directed them not to certify grounds for medical exemptions from vaccination requirements, rupturing the physician-patient relationship and breaching the principle that only a practitioner who has examined a patient is equipped to give a diagnosis. Human rights commissions, which until recently championed expansive interpretations of human rights, have issued edicts narrowing grounds for accommodations.

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COVID rules are inconsistent and irrational. Authorities enforce them selectively and preferentially, coming down hard on common people while turning a blind eye to the privileged. COVID vaccines do not prevent people from becoming infected or from transmitting the virus to others, but only unvaccinated persons are banned or required to undergo testing. People who have recovered from COVID and therefore have natural immunity are still subject to vaccination mandates even though the purpose of vaccination is to mimic natural immunity. Governments, public health authorities and employers advise that COVID vaccinations are safe, but pharmaceutical companies have been granted immunity from liability and no employers will accept legal responsibility for side-effects or adverse events, whether minor or serious, suffered by their employees who take a vaccine that they do not want. The risks posed by COVID vaccines may be in dispute, but they are not zero. Particularly for children and healthy young adults, they may be riskier than the virus.

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We fear the erosion of our free society. We question the single-minded fixation on a virus that poses little risk to most people. We protest the uncalculated harms that COVID policies are causing to peoples health, livelihoods, relationships, and mental states. We oppose the mass hysteria and anxiety that governments and the media are fuelling. Most of all, we object to the deterioration of our civil liberties and the failure of our legal institutions legislatures, governments, administrative bodies, and courts to protect them.

We are appalled by what is happening in our country. We call for the immediate end of vaccine passports and mandates. We propose a public inquiry into the handling of all aspects of the declared pandemic. Canadians should have control of their own lives and have the right to make their own decisions about their health, medical treatments, personal information, travels, and associations. Canada is supposed to be a free country governed by the rule of law. Restore it now or risk losing it for good.

Original signatories:

Bruce Pardy, LLB, LLM.

Lisa Bildy, JD, BA.

W. Christopher Nunn, BA (Hons), LLB.

Stephen J.W. Penney, JD, MA.

To inspect the full list of lawyer signatories, or to sign the Declaration, visit https://www.freenorthdeclaration.ca

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Bruce Pardy: COVID has cost Canadians their freedom. It must be restored - National Post

You know this man. He sits in the middle row of your classes, raises his hand meekly but talks in a voice akin to the sound of scratching on a blackboard. The man will ask you to please repeat yourself, please speak louder, erasing his privilege with an unutilised eraser. (If youre smart, you know hes choosing not to listen to you). Hes not a sexist; he says please, he asks you to repeat yourself because he values your voice, and hes not (not) like other men. Little Americas Sharif Barkati is such a man, and Zain Saeeds prose grants him a disintegrating pedestal.

Saeed exercises the epistolary form of storytelling through Sharifs letters to his favourite novelist Laal Ghazali. These letters are directions before they are stories. Laal, along with the readers, is told what to expect. Although Sharif writes from prison, he spends far too much time asking the reader (who, according to him, is only Laal) to listen.

His promise is of a story thatll sell in America. This story, my friend my story says Sharif, has everything, and it does. Saeeds perhaps purposeful sketch of Sharifs humblebrag outlines his character. It reeks of desperation, an exaggerated desire to amplify ones voice; Sharifs telling doesnt show, but Saeeds does.

This story, my friend my story has everything: there is blood, there is mystery, there is a man bursting through the chains of society, there is illicit love, there is suspense, there is sin and there is redemption; there are even lessons to be learnt. Scrap the rest of your books! They are saltless; it is time for the truth; that is why they will publish you here but not in America.

The cleverness of the prose lies in its evasiveness, its ability to unravel the bandages that gauze Sharif, like the Invisible Man after hes beaten to death by a mob. And Saeed has Sharif do all of it: the bandaging, the beating, the unravelling. For a story where the narrator is a character, and I know it seems like weve read many of those, Saeed gives the narrator only the illusion of controlling the telling. And he doesnt do this for an arguably insignificant trait as originality, but to underscore the significance of the epistolary: intimacy.

Most of the fiction is seen from the first-person point of view. But theres a fleeting shift after the arrival of Sharifs big break: a partnership with TJ, a moneyed Pakistani-American, in the form of a colossal compound on the Karachi coast, full of bars, cafes, clubs, and the people of Karachi strolling about, hand in hand. The opportunity to stroll hand in hand is an immoral marriage of leisure and markers of affection (read: fornication), whose understanding is particularly crucial to the novel because the compound, the Pyramid, protests the ambiguous and conditional recognition of obscenity in Pakistani law.

Sharif doesnt want America as much as he wants America inside Pakistan. Hes like that man who thinks starting a menstrual cup drive will solve sexism. (As if I want to hear how to put a cup inside my vagina from a cisman). Anyway, I digress. Saeed counters my annoyance with Sharif with one of the greatest gifts: a second-person POV prose that doesnt try too hard.

He introduces the reader to the Pyramid like a concierge who clears his throat with vehemence so that you tip him. But the concierge isnt juvenile, no; he coughs because he knows youll want to tip. As is often with this POV, it stirs the readers grounding in the fictional world, jarring them just enough to realise theyve reached the lift hill of a rollercoaster. Ill shut up; you should just read the quoted text.

It is overwhelming. You do not know what to do. Other visitors like you are scattered throughout this side of the compound, stationary, mouths hanging open. There are bright families walking hand in hand, licking white ice cream cones. Young men and women are sitting in circles, debating hotly. You catch the words sex and bodies being spoken loudly in those groups, and you tremble.

Desperate for some order, you look around, and see the one thing you understand a food cart and march towards it, bumping into shocked or happy people on the way, but you do not care. You understand food, it will make it all okay.

If I had to nit-pick, the only failure of the narrative is how it facilitates Sharifs pretended understanding of class as a young boy. Although he writes in the past tense, his letters fail to acknowledge that he (now) knows why his first love, Laila, doesnt sit up front with her chauffeur. (Even the characters name is appropriate because Sharifs obsession is akin to that of Majnun).

But he does acknowledge his obsessions and goes so far as to illustrate them as admirable confessions. And oh, Sharifs virtue-signalling makes the reader wonder why hes not a liberal arts student with a Twitter account.

It shouldnt come off as a surprise that Sharif is a broken record. He consistently confesses his abstinence (I did not drink or smoke up with them, but I did not judge either). This, coupled with his word choices (he uses the word appendages to acknowledge penises), his use of language reflects his inability to escape the prison of what is acceptable, whatever that means.

But of course, he does say fuck he must, or its a compromise on character. And Saeed refuses to do that, evident from the way the letters spend a sickly amount of words on why Sharifs story is one worth writing.

By god, dear Laal, write my story, and I swear to you they will come flocking, friends and readers both, and may you then come find me and grant absolution for the sins of my past.

The novel shatters the American Dream, untangling the knots of what makes a nationality a commodity. Salespersons who sell this commodity arent here for your money; theyre here for your freedom, to save you from the so-called weight of the veil (...please take my advice, think about casting these off your head soon. Theyll hold you back).

Saeeds dialogue cracks the exterior of the saviour: both domestic and foreign (You need our help for that). In his fiction, the media acknowledges any breach of religion as the return of colonialism, and perhaps it could be. But theres danger in shrouding all semblance of freedom under the umbrella of history.

Clerics, politicians and university professors debated for hours and hours a good thing, I guess, at least they were doing something on the merits and consequences of such an act, on whether something like this could even be allowed. Some news channels, particularly the English ones, ran black-and-white reminders of the British, our colonisers, set to melancholic music.

What I loved most about Little America was a paragraph that exposes TJs office, which, like a panopticon, allows him to watch everyone. The insanity of the saviour, his voyeurism, peeks at us through that paragraph. Im not going to ask my editor to quote it because you should read Saeeds book. Youll be doing yourself a favour if you read about something seemingly quotidian as freedom. But most of all, youll realise that the word freedom isnt interchangeable with American.

Little America, Zain Saeed, Penguin Viking.

Read more here:

Zain Saeeds debut novel asks if the American brand of freedom can mean release for some Pakistanis - Scroll.in

Eternity has run stories talking to Christians taking part in demonstrations for refugees and climate change, so fairs fair we should give space for the views of those who took part in the rallies concerned with lockdowns and vaccine mandates and other issues on the weekend. We ran a story reporting that only a minority of Christians are against vaccine mandates, but we want to be respectful of those sisters and brothers who protested on the weekend.

Kate is a Queenslander who has us asked her not to use her real name. She is active in Christian ministry.

1) What was it like to be at the March which city?

I went to the Brisbane March for Freedom. Im not sure of the total numbers, but one policeman I passed said more than 50 000. Other estimates I have seen since have said 100 000. It was festive but orderly and peaceful. It was also very moving to hear snippets of peoples stories or to read them on their scrubs, t-shirts or placards.

I was very encouraged by the number of extended families walking together, with grandparents pushing grandkids and sometimes grandkids pushing grandparents! People were warm and friendly there was a real sense of camaraderie despite the wide range of people from different backgrounds and beliefs about the vaccines themselves.

2) What were your main reasons for going?

I have never done a protest march like this before yesterday. I went for the sake of many of my friends and their families who have lost their jobs or years of study or future opportunities because they cant or wont succumb to a medical procedure that they are entirely within their human rights and responsibility not to accept.

And I went for those who have already been coerced into making a medical decision they were not comfortable with. I went because so many of them cannot get a valid exemption because their GPs feel muzzled by AHPRAs (Australian Health Practitioner Regulation Agency) directions. These friends are doctors, dentists, receptionists, teachers, students, chaplains, caf owners or simply folk who just want to keep visiting their aging parents.

I went because I personally know vaccine-injured people and have read [about] testimonies of thousands of others and seen the data on the variety of international adverse event reporting systems.

I went because I recently learned that statistically, it takes a peaceful protest of only 3.5% of an impacted population to affect change according to western history. I went because it is a lawful way to contribute to the shaping of our democracy.

I went because getting a vaccine is no longer about protecting your neighbour since the data is clear that no matter our vaccination status we are all equally able to transmit the virus. (See editors note*) I went because I want Australia to be investigating and implementing far better ways of tackling Covid than this all eggs in the vaccine basket approach. I went because I have felt more and more convicted that evil prospers when good people do nothing. Im tired of doing nothing.

*(Editors Note: Eternity asks that medical assertions be backed up with a peer-reviewed study. Kate has not provided one but there is a recent study reported in Lancet Infectious Diseases. The study shows that vaccinated household contacts were better protected than unvaccinated ones, and breakthrough infections were mild. Peak viral loads showed a faster decline in vaccinated compared with unvaccinated people, although peak viral loads were similar for unvaccinated and vaccinated people. It also found that vaccines continue to reduce the chances of infection from Delta, but have much less effect in fact minimal on transmission.)

3) What gave you hope (maybe the Christian presence) and was there something challenging?

I was greatly encouraged by the Christian presence there. Numbers of Christians carried banners with gospel messages and many were handing out gospel tracts. Their placard messages were ones of hope and love for the world. I was also encouraged by a complete absence of ridicule of those who have chosen to be vaccinated.

While there were signs questioning the safety and efficacy of the vaccines and plenty of signs expressing unhappiness with our political leaders, I could not see a single reprimand or ridicule of vaccinated individuals. There was only great concern for their safety and freedoms.

4) What sort of church do you go to?

I am a member of the Presbyterian Church in Queensland.

David gives his perspective on the Sydney rally

My wife & I attended the rally in Sydney yesterday.The crowd was very eclectic.

We live in [North West Sydney] and attend St Pauls Anglican Church Castle Hill.We have both had 2 Covid vaccine shots, but are upset for many of our friends & colleagues, who for various reasons have declined to take the vaccine at this time.

We took the vaccine after much research and decided overall it was good for us to do so. When we took the vaccine there was no hint of vaccine mandates or vaccine passports.

As a business owner with 15 staff, I will, to the best of my ability not discriminate against those who choose not to Covid vaccinate.

As much as is practical, I personally will hold off attending places until after 15.12.2021, when vax papers are no longer required.

I do not want to live in a society where medicine is mandated and/or a society that actively discriminates on those grounds.I am shocked at how righteous some act towards those who chosen to remain unvaccinated.

Why not send this to a friend?

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Why I went to the freedom rally - Eternity News

At last, we have someone teaching us real history. Real history is that India did not win freedom in 1947. What it gained at that time was a charity gift from Britain, bheek, meaning alms, such as a housewife gives a beggar. Freedom as distinct from bheek came in 2014, thanks to the BJP and Narendra Modi.

No BJP leader has put it so neatly. So who did it now? Kangana Ranaut. Who she? A film actress. But she is not just any tuppeny actress. She knows politics and understands what is good for her and what is bad. She also has an advantage others dont have. Which is that her understanding of politics is limited by her not understanding the relevance of characters like Gandhi and Nehru and Patel and Bose.

With selective facts at her command, Kangana R. has clear views on real history. Ahimsa, she tells us, gets you bheek, not freedom. Poor Gandhi. He had sacrificed his life for ahimsa. Generations of Indians had hailed him as Mahatma because of his ahimsa philosophy. They all lived in vain because they never had Kanganaji toadvise them.

It was clear that Indians were a dumb lot. We never realised that history teachers, intellectuals and columnists were all cheating us all these years. They were filling our minds with a load of bull and we never knew it. Now we know, thanks to Kangana, our saviour.

After pushing the likes of Mahatma Gandhi into the pits, Kanganaji strikes a VIP pose and declares: I will return my Padma Shri award if anyonecan prove that I have disrespected freedom fighters.

That sounds like a grand sacrifice. Returning a Padma? A statement pregnant with threat and sacrifice at the same time. But she must have known that she was on safe ground. How can something like disrespect be proved. Disrespecting freedom fighters is one thing, proving it is quite another. Kanganas Padma Shri is safe as long as our countrys conventional approach to citizens rights holds good.Clever,isnt she?

It is entirely possible that, after 70 years of Independence, a generation has grown up for whom names like Gandhi and Nehru are just names. Kangana R. certainly showed no signs of understanding the significance of the struggle put up by the Gandhi-Nehru generation, their long years of imprisonment and the lathi-charges they faced. Kanganaji saw all this as low-class pursuits by people who had no respect for law.

The bluntness with which she expressed her views showed how proud she was about half-knowledge. Referring to the annual tributes people pay to the memory of Gandhi and others like him, she said these rituals were not just dumb but highly irresponsible and superficial. How many Indians would join her in this assessment? And who is she to pass such a judgment on what people in general feel?

Varun Gandhi, no respecter of the establishment, had a more realistic approach to things. The mentality that makes one defame thousands of freedom fighters is, he said, madness and anti-national. Kangana revealed her own madness when she applied one brush to paint the whole lot.

Her attack, let it be noted, was relentless and apparently rooted in what she saw as historical facts. She even produced old newspaper clippings to show that Gandhi never supported activists like Subhas Bose or Bhagat Singh. One clipping focussed on an article headlined: Gandhi, others, had agreed to hand over Netaji. The article said that Gandhi, Nehru and Jinnah had said yes to a British judge that they would hand Bose over to the authorities if he entered Indian territory. Kanganas caption to the report was: Either you are a Gandhi fan or Netaji supporter. You cant be both. Choose and decide.

Strong in her convictions and stronger in asserting them, Kangana said on one occasion: Those who fought for freedom were handed over to their masters by those who had no courage, no burning/boiling hot blood to fight their oppressors, but they were power-hungry and cunning. Offering the other cheek is no way to get Azadi, she said, because all youd get is one more slap. Choose your heroes wisely.

She should choose her enemies also wisely. It will do her cause no good to denigrate the efforts made by the Gandhi-Nehru generation in their own style that suited their times. It can of course be argued that criticising Gandhi-Nehru is not necessarily disrespecting them. But such criticism will be a failure to appreciate the historical realities that were dominant at the time.

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Correction: Freedom came in 2014 - The New Indian Express

The Saint Lucia Freedom Coalition, formed recently to galvanize support against COVID-19 vaccine mandates and obtain a voice for the organisation in the management of COVID-19 here, believes that vaccine hesitancy will convert into resistance.

We are a growing movement. We have the majority of the population on our side three quarters of the population have not been vaccinated despite the very intense media campaign and as more of our information comes out it will become more difficult for the non-vaccinated to become vaccinated because we believe that vaccination hesitancy is now going to be vaccination resistance, Freedom Coalition leader, Fremont Lawrence said.

Nevertheless, he made clear that the group was not planning any violent protests.

There may be protests in terms of civil disobedience. We will follow the example of Martin Luther King and Mahatma Gandhi they did not advocate violent protests. But we might very well have marches and we might be engaging in civil disobedience hoping the unions will join us and theres industrial action that they can contemplate. I want to make it clear that I am not a violent person and I will not advocate violence in terms of us protesting for our rights, Lawrence told St Lucia Times.

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But he said the Freedom Coalition was hoping to discuss with the authorities to obtain a seat at the local COVID-19 management table.

I think if we engage the government and engage the Saint Lucia Medical and Dental Association and they are receptive, then I think we can have fruitful discussions, he observed.

Nevertheless, he said he did not want to preempt what would happen. Instead, he wants to be positive and believes the authorities will let good sense prevail since the Freedom Coalition and the unvaccinated represent a significant population.

Lawrence declared that information from several countries, including Gibraltar, Israel, and Vermont in the United States, indicates that fully vaccinated people are becoming infected and even dying.

As a result, he described the assertion that COVID-19 vaccines would protect people as a lie.

In addition, Lawrence reiterated earlier comments that people in Saint Lucia who take the vaccine are experiencing adverse effects. Still, he said that the authorities here have not indicated whether a monitoring system is in place.

He says his group wants the authorities to publicise information regarding the vaccines adverse effects on people who take it.

The group disclosed that it would be disseminating information via social media since some of the mainstream local media may not want to do so.

Lawrence said the information would help people to make decisions regarding COVID-19 vaccination.

On Saturday, the Freedom Coalition held a news conference at Derek Walcott Square, Castries, and said it is planning other events around Saint Lucia.

Lawrence said that generally, the group believed that the event went well given the late plans for the press conference and that notices went out late.

We believe the small group that was there was very attentive, very receptive and they really appreciated what we did. We outlined our position on the vaccine and the vaccine mandate the authorities are trying to impose on us and why it was against our sacred and constitutional rights, Lawrence recalled.

According to the Freedom Coalition leader, the event ended on a musical note with those in attendance singing songs that included Bob Marleys Small Axe and One Love.

There was an atmosphere of love and defiance in terms of we are not going to take the vaccine because we dont believe its safe, he told St Lucia Times.

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Read more:

COVID-19: Freedom Coalition Believes Vaccine Hesitancy Will Become Resistance - St. Lucia Times Online News

Is RDA a Jew-hating group?

You seem to be a long way behind the rest of us mate - Every group should be an anti-Jew group because they want you exterminated. Thats fact.

At no point in its history has RDA confronted, or even fully acknowledged, the use anti-Semites have made of the organisation. The RDA castigates outlets who report on its tolerance of neo-Nazis in its milieu as propagandists for the Victorian government. Meanwhile, anti-Semitic incidents connected with the anti-lockdown movement continue to occur from stickers claiming Jews committed the September 11 attacks, to Judaicised depictions of Dan Andrews with horns and a skullcap appearing at RDA-affiliated rallies.

Craig Kelly has not clearly acknowledged or spoken out against the antisemitism among his affiliates.Credit:SMH

Craig Kelly has taken a page from the RDA book, adopting a similar combination of disinterest and outrage when asked about the spread of anti-Semitism among his affiliates. In September, Plus61J brought the issue to Craig Kellys attention, providing him with a cache of evidence about how neo-Nazis are endorsing him and using the freedom movement to endanger the safety of the Australian Jewish community. We asked if he would disavow endorsements received from such groups. In his response, Kelly stated: I have many close friends that are Jewish and declared that any insinuation that he had any connection to anti-Semitism whatsoever was false and highly defamatory.

Together, RDA and the UAP have sent a dangerous message to extremists in the anti-vaccine and anti-lockdown community: you can deny the Holocaust, you can promote conversations on the Jewish question, you can share articles from neo-Nazi websites, and you can bring racist placards to our rallies and we will not reject you. We may not share your views, but we will bring you onto our channel, we will allow you to use our online spaces for recruitment, and we will deny in the strongest possible terms that you have any presence in our movement.

Both the RDA and the UAP have denounced political violence and urged protestors to be peaceful. Such denouncements, while welcome, have not been enough to alleviate the concerns of the Australian Jewish community. It is not unspecified violence that is the issue, but a very particular form of demagoguery and fanaticism that shows few signs of abatement.

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There is nothing racist or fascist about questioning vaccine mandates and lockdowns. These are new measures, new shared experiences, and they have understandably generated public debate. However, it is in the interests of all involved for the leaders of the anti-lockdown movement to emphatically disassociate themselves from the neo-Nazis in their wings.

If RDA or the UAP were to release a statement acknowledging and condemning the spread of anti-Semitism in their movement the effects would be immeasurable. These two actors are the darlings of the freedom movement, with the largest audiences and the most engaged followings. A strong signal from them would disrupt the pipeline of recruitment and push the anti-Semites back into the shadows.

Without intervention, the road of escalation leads only one way. It has no natural limits. It is the nature of hate groups to push their demands as far as external conditions will allow. What happens next will depend on Kelly and the moderate wing of the anti-lockdown movement.

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Read the original:

Darlings of the freedom movement must denounce the anti-Semites in their wings - The Sydney Morning Herald

Published: 11/18/2021 3:42:27 PM

If America has a civil religion, voting for the first time is a baptismal act. Like baptism, it is also a profound act of intergenerational nurture, through which we welcome the young to take their place amongst us.

So why are states making it more difficult for new voters to vote? According to the Brennan Center for Justice, in this year alone 19 states have enacted 33 laws that make it harder for Americans to vote. Let me tell you: it was already pretty damn hard.

I work at a university alongside a team of staff and students who offer year-round, 50-state voter services to our campus community, which is located in one of the most voter friendly states in the union. Despite these advantages, our students some of the brightest young people in the country still lose the chance to vote for the first time because of lack of basic voter information, limited access to the printer, copier and/or stamps they need to submit their voter registration, confusing (sometimes contradictory) instructions from their local election authorities, absentee ballot procedures with ridiculously high barriers (seven states required notarized absentee or mail-in ballots in 2020), long lines at the polls which interfere with classes or campus jobs the list goes on.

Despite these barriers (add in a global pandemic and an election haunted by threats of violence), college students voted in record numbers last fall. The problem with American voters isnt apathy its opportunity.

Thats why we desperately need the Freedom to Vote Act to implement national standards for federal elections. We have to reconsecrate ourselves to a government of the people, by the people, for the people a government we choose at the ballot box.

In a perfect world, the Freedom to Vote Act would be a bi-partisan bill with the full-throated support of every patriotic American from Anchorage to Miami. Thats not the world we live in. Right now, the filibuster is preventing the Senate from debating the Freedom to Vote Act just like it was used to delay civil rights legislation during Jim Crow. And so (hey ho), the filibuster has got to go. The stakes are simply too high to protect a loophole procedure not even original to the Senate rules. If voting is a sacred rite, the filibuster is a synod bylaw.

I applaud Sens.Warren and Markey for calling for the end of the filibuster and for the passage of rigorous voting protections. Our representatives must do everything they can to secure our most fundamental freedom. And we must do everything we can to welcome new voters to the beloved community and perpetuate the faith in democracy we hold so dear.

Ruth Curry is a resident of Turners Falls and a civic engagement professional in higher education.

The rest is here:

My Turn: Why we must pass the Freedom to Vote Act - The Recorder