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Path: utzoo!utcsri!ubc-vision!ubc-cs!acton
From: acton@ubc-cs.UUCP (Donald Acton)
Newsgroups: can.politics
Subject: Re: Star Wars North
Message-ID: <997@ubc-cs.UUCP>
Date: Mon, 1-Apr-85 13:23:50 EST
Article-I.D.: ubc-cs.997
Posted: Mon Apr  1 13:23:50 1985
Date-Received: Mon, 1-Apr-85 14:42:48 EST
References: <890@ubc-vision.CDN> <6@aquila.UUCP>
Reply-To: acton@ubc-cs.UUCP (Donald Acton)
Organization: UBC Department of Computer Science, Vancouver, B.C., Canada
Lines: 40
Summary: 

The following excerpt was taken from an article posted to can.general, and
can.ai.  I feel that my followup article is more appropriate to 
can.politics.

In article <6@aquila.UUCP> chris@aquila.UUCP (chris) writes:
>
>The possibility of war started by belligerent nations with nuclear weapons
>or the potential for creating them (examples: Israel, Iraq, Pakistan, India,
>Brazil, South Korea, or South Africa) then escalating into general war would be
>greatly lessened.
>

Have you checked your above opinions with the Canadian government before 
publishing them on the net? These might not coincide with the ones held by 
the government this week. To an ignorant western Canadian heathen this 
sounds like it could "cause or is likely to cause injury or mischief to
a public interest". A public interest could be citizens of any one of the 
above mentioned countries or special interest groups who feel your remarks 
have slighted them. After all at least one person has already taken you
to task for including Israel in your list. What if that same person 
and his friends (hypothetically of course) were convinced that by calling 
Israel belligerent you were encouraging the fringe elements of our 
society to physically attack Israeli citizens in Canada and hence should
be hauled into court? Would you like to have to prove that your statement
was true or that if it wasn't true you were ignorant of the current
"official" government sanctioned version of truth. 

Freedom of speech is being undermined in Canada by a government and
its mandarins who think that the average Canadian citizen is too 
stupid to think for themselves. If this insidious erosion of freedom of speech 
and the press isn't stopped now, we may soon find ourselves in a country
where we won't be able to talk about anything controversial unless we
spout the official government line. Maybe we should be more concerned 
about freedom of speech right now instead of SDI because without 
freedom of speech we will have no way of expressing our opinions on 
Canada's involvement in SDI. The inability to even talk about SDI in the
future is much more dangerous than involvement in the research aspects of
SDI now.

    Donald Acton