Caylan Ford Profile picture
Aug 11, 2022 7 tweets 2 min read Read on X
I struggled for a long time to understand why people are often ‘cancelled’ for making true statements in good faith. This didn’t compute for me; there’s nothing immoral about saying true things.

After lots of conversations w/ ‘cancellers’, I understood the problem…
I consider truth to be a form of the good. It’s noble to try to apprehend the order of the cosmos and the laws of nature—which are beautiful and just—and attune ourselves to them. In a disagreement, I take for granted that truth is an authority to which both parties can appeal.
People in thrall to ideology do not believe that truth is a good. They don’t think the universe is well ordered, or that the laws governing it are just. Because they perceive reality as defective and wrong, appeals to truth are meaningless. It has no moral authority.
As I was once told by someone who participated in my own cancellation: it doesn’t matter what’s true. What matters is what *should* be true.

In Marxian terms, “philosophers have hitherto only interpreted the world in various ways. The point, however, is to change it.”
Proponents of cancel culture believe that if they can stop the accurate observation and description of reality—e.g. by corrupting the meaning of words, delegitimizing hard sciences, and through the threat of social ostracism—they can actually change reality.
Sadly for them, and happily for the rest of us, the fundamental order of being can’t be actually changed, because it lies outside man’s control. In the war against reality, reality always wins.
Further or in the alternative, they don’t believe in the objective existence of truth. The “givenness” of reality is denied, and the order of being is imagined as something that is essentially under man’s control. Truth is whatever (human, earthly) power says it is.

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More from @caylanford

Mar 22
This interlocutory decision published today relates to my $7M defamation claim against the NDP and others.

For years, the Alberta NDP has escaped legal accountably. That seems to be coming to an end.

The mills of the gods grind slowly, &c

canlii.org/en/ab/abkb/doc…
Tl;dr: In 2019 the Alberta NDP defamed me in an apparent effort to force me off the ballot.

But the Alberta NDP doesn’t legally exist. Its registration as a political party is based on an invalid 1977 trust deed. The trustee also doesn’t exist. So I had no one to sue.
For the entire time that the Alberta NDP was the governing party of Alberta, it was operating with no legal standing. It could commit fraud, defamation, or breach contracts, and the victims would have no recourse.

In my reading, this also contravened the Elections Act.
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Read 6 tweets
Sep 15, 2022
As some of you know, following my 'cancellation' three years ago I filed a defamation claim against the responsible parties, including the Toronto Star, NDP, Broadbent Institute, CBC, and others.

Here's a quick update (thread)
caylanford.com/blog-1/2020/11…
In 2019, the lead defendant in the claim, Karim Jivraj, spent months peddling false claims against me to the national media, including an allegation that I expressed sympathy for white supremacist terrorists in a private conversation (the record of which was never produced).
That allegation was republished first by partisan actors (I was running for office at the time), and then national news outlets. That the accusation was false didn't stop it from causing immediate and catastrophic professional, social, financial and reputational harm.
Read 8 tweets
Nov 19, 2021
“We speak of totalitarianism as the image of the boot stomping on the human face forever. This is not a boot, but an algorithm in the cloud: emotionless, impervious to appeal, silently shaping the biomass.”

thehub.ca/2021-11-19/cay…
QR code-based internal passports have been mandated with no clearly defined purpose, no means of measuring success, no limiting principles to constrain their application, and no off-ramps.

We may be sleepwalking into a permanent state of exception.
The digital passport regime is clearly not aimed at optimizing individual health outcomes; vaccine mandates are blind to a person’s specific circumstances and their unique risk-benefit profile.

So how can they be understood?
Read 11 tweets

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