Tag: civil liberties

What the hell, Obama?

If you’ve read here over the last year, you’ll know that I’ve pretty much lost all hope that Obama is going to fix things–I’m willing to live with “won’t make it worse”, and clearly he was a better choice than the alternative, but I am labouring under no illusion now that he’s going to actually undo all the evils of… Read more →

A flurry of quick things

Am I the only one uncomfortable with “too difficult to prosecute but too dangerous to release” apparently being a legit category? Doesn’t that pretty much read as “we can’t prove you did shit, but we’re going to keep you in jail anyway”? I officially call bullshit on that. Of course it should come as no surprise given that the current… Read more →

Aside

Over the last decade I’ve become increasingly cynical about, and frankly afraid of Americans. Not all of them–I know they’re not all the same, and there are lots of them I love–but Americans in the aggregate. I had some hope that things were changing there last year, but when I read statistics like 58% of US voters favour the use of torture in gathering information–specifically in a case where there is no ticking bomb–I am more scared than ever. Factor in that the rate is even higher for younger people and I’m left wondering if there will be anyone left who understands that this isn’t how things should be. Those numbers about how many people think the US legal system is too worried about individual rights make me despair for humanity, and for the American voting public’s ability to read.

You can learn something new every day

I followed a stay Twitter link today that lead to this short discussion of how to deal with someone acting racist: I found that interesting enough that I spent some time looking at other vlogs from the same dude, which lead me to this one, East Coast Cats and Christopher Street Boys, which I particularly liked: I’m pretty New York… Read more →

When The Black Wind Blows

I’ve been very busy the last few days, with a combination of post-moving stuff (hey, look, we’re close to family now, and it’s the holidays), and with some important changes at work (on which I shall write a very journal-y entry shortly). Which explains why I haven’t already written about an utterly unacceptable, and miserably predictable, incident. Quite a bit’s… Read more →

Aside

I should note that I still quite like Feingold, even if he is doing the cutesy acronym thing.

Not up to par

Like many other liberal people, I pinned a lot of hope on the dramatic change from a Bush administration to an Obama one as being the end of several policy directions that I saw as abhorrent. Unlike many people on “the left”, I was consciously being rational about my expectations. I knew that Obama intended to govern as a “centrist”For… Read more →

Serious Ireland WTF?

Like many North Americans of Irish descent I quite often like to play up that aspect of my heritage–although in my case it runs more to quoting Yeats, listening to songs about killing the EnglishFace it, the rebels had better music., and drinking Guinness than to wearing KISS ME I’M IRISH shirts or drinking blechh green beers. From time to… Read more →

Putting it in context

If you think the fact that Feingold has to call out Obama is depressing, or that the failure to actually enact transparency over what happened with respect to torture under the Bush administration is depressing… well, you should probably stay away from Noam. Here’s a snippet from Chomsky’s recent article on the Torture Memos, which looks at the history of… Read more →

Feingold, once again, says what needs saying

For several weeks now I’ve been almost consciously avoiding reading any of the stories about how Obama is handling both the existing set of “detainees” and how his administration is handling demands for transparency and possible criminal prosecution for people who authorized the use of torture. I’ve been avoiding it because all signs point to an endless cascade of disappointment… Read more →

Thursday evening notes

Watching Maine becoming #5 this week, it occurs to me that while the process may be terribly slow from the perspective of people who just want to be treated equally (and I know I can only say that off-handedly since I already have all the privileges–white, male, straight, etc.) the whole thing is pretty much inevitable at this point. Even… Read more →

I’ll take good news where I can get it

I was… um… unthrilled to read this story in the Globe earlier this week: MP wants to reopen abortion debate December 28, 2008 at 11:59 PM EST WINNIPEG — The abortion debate is about to enter a “new era” of advocacy for the rights of the unborn, says a Conservative MP who recently took over the chairmanship of a secretive,… Read more →

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This work by Chris McLaren is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.5 Canada.