The above political cartoon is from Alas! A Blog, where Ethics Alarms exile Barry Deutsch reigns. Barry was formerly a stand-out advocate for the Left on Ethics Alarms until he self-banished for reasons not relevant here. He’s a smart, ethics-savvy, informed, articulate and passionate straight down-the-agenda progressive; he’s also a political cartoonist by trade, an art form I believe has passed its pull date, and that now mostly serves as a device to make dishonest or simplistic arguments for knee-jerk partisans, kind of a visual Charles M. Blow column. I check in on Barry’s blog periodically, and when I did yesterday I was greeted by the above cartoon, drawn by Barry and written by his occasional collaborator Rachel Moore.
It surprised me, not because of its routine anti-Second Amendment message, for as I said, Barry’s progressivism checks every box. It surprised me because I find it astounding that anyone as informed as Barry would pick this, of all times, to unveil that cartoon.
Two days ago, the New York Times reported that the Ukranians were fending off the Russians in part because of armed civilians:
Here, as elsewhere in the fighting around Kyiv, the Ukrainian military achieved its battlefield success by deploying small, fast-moving units largely on foot that staged ambushes or defended sites with the benefit of local knowledge. Many such units are based in central Kyiv, commuting to the war zone by car.
This is not a perfect analogy to the situation that would arise should the United States government decide to “wipe out freedom,” but it certainly ought to be food for thought for those gun-hating zealots who ridicule the very idea that self-defense and the ability to present armed resistance to government tyranny are basic liberties worth protecting in the U.S. Continuing to make the most crude and insulting version of that argument at this time appears to expose an ideological position that is no longer susceptible to modification or reason.
If you like political cartoons, Barry is certainly a talented one , and you can support his art on Patreon.
Ethics Alarms 
“The First Amendment, and whatever the Canadian equivalent is (however weakly codified) does not protect actions that interfere with lawful commerce or disturb the peace to the point of mischief.”
Well I’m glad you asked!
Canada also has a constitution, although ours wasn’t predicated on the same base narrative as America’s. As an outsider looking in, America’s constitution is almost paranoid in nature, usually you don’t draft the founding documents to a nation’s governments under the auspices of governments being tyrannical and specifically with an emphasis on protection from that tyranny. I make no negative values judgement there…they work, in a stiffly rugged way. To highlight the differences between Canadian and American constitutional theory: Where the founders wrote “life, liberty and pursuit of happiness” in America’s declaration of independence, Canada’s founders instead wrote in “peace, order, and good governance”.
Our Canadian constitution is more malleable, and over the years, it’s been broadly re-imagined. Instead of enumerated amendments to the constitution, in 1982, Canada codified our rights in a portion of our constitution called “The Charter of Rights and Freedoms”.
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