Media Advisory: Release of “THE PRINCIPLE OF POT” Documentary

Paul McKeever

***Media Advisory***

Attention: News/Assignment Editors, Reporters

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Marc Emery / Prince of Pot – Extradition

International Release of “THE PRINCIPLE OF POT” Documentary
To Precede Extradition Decision by Canadian Justice Minister

Movie to be released on YouTube.com at
12:01 AM (EST) on Monday, January 18, 2010

Just after midnight tonight, Ontario lawyer Paul McKeever will release Part 1 of “The Principle of Pot”, his new two-part documentary about the nature and motives of Marc Emery, the media-dubbed Prince of Pot. Part 1 runs 1 hour and 39 minutes. Part 2 will be released at a later date.

The launch is timed to precede a decision by Canada’s federal justice minister, Rob Nicholson, about whether or not to approve the extradition of Emery to the United States, where he faces years of imprisonment for having sold cannabis seeds, in Vancouver, Canada, via mail order. The Minister’s decision is expected within the next 81 days.

Emery’s opponents, and the U.S. authorities who demanded his arrest in Halifax, have attempted to portray Emery as a profit-motivated drug dealer. Part 1 of McKeever’s documentary will cover the period up to 1990; a period during which Emery was equally active as an advocate of individual freedom, but whose advocacy of individual freedom did not include campaigns concerning the issue of cannabis prohibition.

Being the result of countless hours of research, interviews, writing and editing, the video includes audio, video and textual information that has never been seen in any profile of Emery. Much of the audio and video having been drawn from the archives of Freedom Party of Ontario (with which Emery was active until 1990), it has never before been seen by the general public or media.

What: “The Principle of Pot” (Part 1) – divided into four segments (a playlist will be available)

When: approximately 12:01 AM (EST), Monday, January 18, 2010 (i.e., just after midnight on Sunday)

Where: http://www.youtube.com/paulmckeever (a playlist URL will be made available, and can be embedded on any web site without seeking permission from Paul McKeever to do so)

For further information, contact:

Paul McKeever

Confidential Cell Phone: ***-***-****
e-mail: pm@paulmckeever.ca

Part 1 – Content

Part 1-1: Emery’s birth; early political activity; Ayn Rand and Howard Roark (1979); the Libertarian Party (1980); three publications (1980-1983); Unparty (1981-83); the birth of Freedom Party (1984).

Part 1-2: The No Tax for Pan Am Games campaign (1984); the London garbage strike (1987).

Part 1-3: The campaign against the ban on Sunday retailing 1986-1990); jail (1988).

Part 1-4: The Calendars for Individual Freedom (1987-1989); no to elections / yes to erections (anti-censorship campaigns 1984 and 1989-90); leaving Freedom Party (1990); a new strategy (1990).

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This media advisory is being copied to Canada’s government, including Justice Minister Rob Nicholson, to Canada’s Members of Parliament
and to other governmental and non-governmental organizations interested in the matter of Marc Emery, and his possible extradition.

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PAUL MCKEEVER, B.Sc.(Hons), M.A., LL.B.
106 Stevenson Road South
Oshawa, Ontario
L1J 5M1

Tel: 905-721-9772
Blog: http://blog.paulmckeever.ca
YouTube Channel: http://www.youtube.com/paulmckeever

McKeever on McParland on Conservatives on Obama

The National Post is one of Canada’s two national newspapers. The “Full Comment” blog of the online component offers some good reading material. It is edited by Kelly McParland, a seasoned journalist.

Prompted by an AFP report about American conservatives criticizing a speech that Barack Obama will be giving to school children, McParland today writes that, if conservatives can condemn Obama’s remarks as socialism, it is no wonder they cannot embrace socialist health care. The essence of McParland’s submission is that Obama’s speech just tells kids to work hard and do well in school, so conservatives who criticize the speech are holding back things like socialist health care because they see practically anything as a socialist plot. Read more

For the Aspiring Politician: What to Study

Today, I received a letter that asked me for some advice. The young man, who had chosen to leave university after two years of bad education in a university, asked what he should study as an aspiring politician. I gave him the following advice:

“When I was in high school, I asked a local politician what I should study in order to be a politician. He said: “Study whatever you want”. At the time, I thought he was just being rude; just saying “get out of the way kid, you’re bothering me”. However, I now know that he was right, at least in the sense that he would have defined “politician”. Read more

Freedom and the Proper Regulation of Speech

Freedom of speech. Ironically, it is a political subject about which most people talk without saying anything.

“Freedom of speech has limits”, some say, just before, reflexively, they trot out the inevitable “for example, you can’t yell fire in a crowded movie theatre”. I always imagine them silent, feeling legally bound not to tell anyone in the theatre that the snack bar is on fire. Read more

Reason versus “Self-Ownership”

There are those who believe that the mind cannot exist independently of the activities of the brain; that the mind and the brain are one; that the mind and the body are one. There are also those who believe that the mind and the body are separable or separate – for example those who believe that there is a soul which inhabits the body at birth, or perhaps at baptism, and which leaves the body when the mind dies. Your position on the separability of mind and body has a logical implication for your position on “self-ownership”. The reverse is also true: your position on the validity of the concept “self-ownership” implies your agreement with, or disagreement with, an underlying assumption concerning the separability or non-separability of mind and body. Read more

Hate Speech Complaint Time? Suzuki’s Powerwise.ca Site Promotes Anti-immigration

Look now, and you’ll find yet another piece of evidence that the current green movement is still just the old, German, Völkisch movement; a movement still motivated by a fear that there aren’t enough resources for everyone; a movement that, so motivated, seeks to reduce the earth’s population. The Völkisch movement got a bit of an historical black eye when supporting Hitler’s approach of murdering millions of Jews, and seizing the land occupied by non-German Europeans and Asians so as to make lebesraum for the Aryan “race” of blue-eyed, Volkswagen-driving blond-haired ubermen. So today’s Volkisch movement has replaced the swastika with a sunflower, masked its red nature in the colour “green”, and changed its approach: instead of eliminating all but the Germans, eliminate Germans too, by making it too expensive to procreate (or to produce anything, for that matter) in an industrialized country, no matter what your genetic make-up. Read more

Consent, Coercion & Legal Tender: Understanding Money & Banking, Part 6

Late last night I released Part 6 of my Understanding Money & Banking video series. Titled “Consent, Coercion & Legal Tender“, it deals only with currency (as opposed to credit). In particular it focusses one of the key differences between paper bank notes and gold/silver coins: the source of the value of each. Read more

Lobbying for Death

In response to my blog entry about David Archuleta, Mark Steyn, and Reason, a facebook friend commented, in part:

I’m worried what those law students will be trying to do once they pass the bar. Sounds like they want to criminalize people’s feelings and anything that may stir the pot in a direction they don’t like. Thought police anyone?

I replied:

Law is a description of the circumstances under which the government may deprive you of liberty or property. It can be consistent with the facts of reality (including the nature of man), or it can be contrary to the facts of reality.

To tell your child that a given religious belief is contrary to the facts of reality, or that it foretells a physical threat to ones liberty or property, may very well offend those who hold the belief, but it may very well save the life of ones child. All of the good feelings in the world won’t allow someone to survive. All of the ignorance in the world will certainly decrease the likelihood of ones survival/happiness.

Freedom requires that a government’s ethical standard be the life of a man qua man. That requires government always to be consistent with the facts of reality.

To call upon the government to seize control of a person’s liberty or property on the ground of emotion is to call upon the government to abandon human life as its ethical standard. It is to lobby for death.

Bad Arguments Against Censorship: “Better Democracy”

Seeing distinctions everywhere there is not a difference, Canada’s collectivist establishment is desperate to take down the governing collectivist “Conservatives“, and to replace them with the “natural governing party”, the collectivist “Liberals“. They hope thereby to achieve the titanic victory of doing away with the arch evil of redistributing wealth via tax credits to the “poor”, and instead redistributing wealth via righteous tax increases to the “rich”.

The now-governing Conservatives having taken the Liberals out of power by focusing on allegations concerning spending shenanigans, the Liberals have brainstormed and have come up with a plan of great, inventive genius and originality: focus on allegations concerning (largely unintelligible, and relatively boring) “in and out” spending shenanigans in the Conservative camp. The media know a story that writes itself when they see it so, eager to get paid for the writing they haven’t done, they’ve decided to put their minds on auto-pilot and just uncritically report whatever verbal grunt the Liberal establishment – both within and without of the bureaucracy – says about the alleged Conservative spending shenanigans.

Enter Gerry Nicholls, the former chief of the National Citizens Coalition in Canada whose columns now appear in Canada’s major dailies from time to time. In one of his columns, published in the Edmonton Sun on April 23rd, he had the right proposal:

…we should scrap all these election gag laws…

Cutting his rationale down to the essential quotations:

None of this is good for democracy.

That’s why we should scrap all these election gag laws designed to regulate political spending and to muzzle free speech.

[...]

Democracy works best when there is a free marketplace of competing ideas.

(emphasis added).

I want to address Gerry’s rationale but, before doing so, let us try to understand it a bit better.

I begin with Gerry’s use of the word “democracy”. Given how utterly corrupted the meaning of the word democracy has become, it is not entirely clear what concept Gerry is referring to when he uses the word “democracy”. Arguably, the best solution in this case is the process of elimination.

Consider first Gerry’s “minarchist” (as in: “the government that governs least governs best”) libertarian streak. Like many others, minarchist libertarians regard life, liberty and property as inalienable rights; as things that cannot be trumped by the whims of the majority. Therefore, it is extremely doubtful that, by “democracy”, Gerry is referring to “majority rule”.

“Damned to Repeat It: Part I – Libertarianism”

Consider next the idea that “democracy” is a concept that refers to the source of a government’s powers. When used in this way, democracy refers to the idea that governmental authority stems from man, upon whom the facts of reality impose morality. It is doubtful that, by “democracy”, Gerry is referring to the source of a government’s power because the existence/non-existence of a “marketplace of ideas” is as possible in a theocracy (which regards god as the source of a government’s power) as in a democracy.

As I see it, that leaves one likely inference: by “democracy”, Gerry means “elections”. This is a definition of democracy shared by countless talking heads, journalists, and political junkies, and by those who convinced George W. Bush that setting up elections in Middle East countries is the same as making those countries democratic. Although Gerry is free to respond to this article with a correction, I must conclude that when Gerry says that “Democracy works best when there is a free marketplace of competing ideas”, what he really means is that “Elections work best when there is a free marketplace of competing ideas”.

Now, let us consider what Gerry means by a “free market” in this context. In a free market of goods and services, every person gets what he pays for and pays only for what he gets. In a free market of goods and services, one would get only the election commercials one paid for, and would pay only for the election commercials one got. However, Gerry is not referring to a free market of goods and services: the issue here is not, for example, whether regulations have given one television network an unfair advantage over another. Gerry is referring to a free market of ideas competing for the minds and ballots of voters.

Now, forgive me, but I think Gerry is just talking loosely. Too loosely. In fact, I do not believe Gerry really even means “free market of competing ideas” when he uses the term. If he does, I do not believe he has thought it through very well.

Gerry is not alone, however. The reference to a “free market of ideas” is a common libertarian practice. It would not surprise me were I to discover that that practice owes its genesis to the fact that libertarianism is a movement that was spearheaded not by philosophers, but by pro-capitalist economists (such as Murray Rothbard). To the man with a hammer, every problem is a nail and, to a libertarian economist, every philosophical issue is an aspect of the free markets vs. central planning debate. However, applied to the situation of voters weighing arguments during an election and voting accordingly, the analogy proves to be flawed. In a free market, every individual gets the product he pays for with his dollars. In contrast, in an election, an individual does not get the idea he voted for unless the majority of other individuals voted for the same idea. In truth, even that is wrong, because the majority of people do not really vote for ideas: they vote for parties (especially for parties that have no ideas). Therefore, when Gerry writes “free market of competing ideas”, he is either wrong, or he does not really mean it.

Giving Gerry the benefit of the doubt, what he really means is not “a free market of competing ideas” but: the absence of censorship. I do not think I have mischaracterized his argument – “Democracy works best when there is a free marketplace of competing ideas” – when I strip it of ambiguous jargon and loose metaphor to translate it plainly as: elections work best in the absence of censorship.

Assuming my translation is correct, I agree with Gerry that election finance laws impose an instance of censorship, and I agree that election finance laws should be scrapped. However, I submit that Gerry is entirely wrong when it comes to his rationale for scrapping election finance laws. As with all matters of government policy, the essential and defensible rationale for striking down election finances laws is: such laws are contrary to the survival and happiness of human beings.

The facts of reality – including facts that pertain to the nature of man – are such that no man can achieve his own happiness if he is prohibited from acting upon his own rational decisions. Freedom, properly defined, is control over ones own life, liberty and property. Without freedom – without that control – the rational decisions upon which a mans survival and happiness depend cannot be acted upon. Without freedom, a man’s mind is, in effect, paralyzed. An unfree rational man is the functional equivalent of a newborn baby or, worse, a vegetable. His survival is dependent upon the whims of those who feed, house and clothe him. And, though he can be relieved of pain and suffering, his happiness is impossible, because happiness is the result of a personal achievement: the successful pursuit of ones rationally-chosen values. Such achievements require freedom.

The role of government is to ensure that each individual is not deprived of control over his own life, liberty or property without his consent. By so defending freedom, a government defends human life.

Fining or imprisoning a person for spending his own money on a perfectly peaceful service – message distribution – is a deprivation of a person’s freedom; in particular, it is a deprivation of a person’s control over his own property. Such deprivation is wrong not because it prevents elections from working best and not because it is thought to be unneeded, but because it opposes and undermines the living of a rational life; of a human life.

Elections can work better in the absence of censorship, but that is only because the absence of censorship makes rational thought, discussion and action possible…possible, but – contrary to what Gerry implies – not inevitable. If, in the absence of censorship, nobody bothers to think rationally, elections will not – by any rational standard – work any better than they do under conditions of censorship. Irrationality cannot intentionally cause anything good because it cannot intentionally cause anything at all. If all ideas and discussions during an election are irrational, irrationality might cause “democracy” to be worse in some sense or another, but the censorship of some irrational expressions will not: adding more irrational arguments to a debate does not a better democracy make.

Ayn Rand, in Respect of “Respect”

I today received a message from a youtube viewer, who wrote:

I just came across the work of Ayn Rand. What is the explanation of Ayn Rand about what the word respect means.

I replied as follows:

I don’t believe Ayn Rand gave the word any definition that is peculiar to her philosophy. She pretty much used the word in the various ways it is defined in dictionaries.

Generally speaking, to “respect” is to look at or acknowledge the existence/identity of something (e.g., to “respect”/identify the fact that a man is a man and that, because of what that implies for the rational pursuit of ones own happiness, it is wrong to take his life, liberty, or property without his consent…even if his views/beliefs are utterly irrational).

In some, but not all contexts, the word “respect” means, also, to hold a thing in high regard; to value it. In this latter sense, an Objectivist would (for example) “respect”/value rational egoism, but not altruism or irrational egoism (e.g., hedonism).

In yet another context, “respect” means “concerning” (as in “With respect to his politics, he is black and white. With respect to his ethics, he is many shades of gray”) or “manner” (as in “…the same attribute cannot at the same time belong and not belong to the same subject and in the same respect.”)

I’m not trying to be obtuse. Perhaps you can give me the context in which you mean the word “respect” to be used?

Cheers,

Paul

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