A couple of days ago I had a bit of a rant about police misusing (or at a minimum, appearing to misuse) authority to stifle criticism. A few minutes ago I had a nice rant about Harper’s proposed privacy changes, with an implicit text of “you can’t trust these people to handle private data correctly without strict legal oversight”. And… Read more →
Tag: rights
What, You Don’t Trust “Policing Services” Implicitly?
Canadians who are interested in the conditions under which it’s legal for private information and documents to be shared might want to take a good long look at Bill C-29. I’ll quote a bit from the legislative summary below, but in essence one of the things this bill says is that any documents/information the police (or anything that meets the… Read more →
Must Also Be Seen To Be Done
I had thought that three of the things that were important ideas in Canadian jurisprudence were: 1) That citizens had a right to free speech, 2) that the government in all its forms has a prescribed amount of power, with well delineated limits on where that power stops, and 3) that it was very important for the justice system to… 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.
A short comment on the US Health Care Debate
I’ve been mostly keeping my nose out of the US debate–I don’t understand the debate, since I look on a certain level of access to quality health care as a right of all me–but I do want to point out the comments of John Gary Maxwell, a 40 year veteran surgeon. You should read the whole piece, but here’s a… Read more →
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 →
Aside
“The correlation between U.S. aid and human rights violations has long been noted by scholarship.” Just because Chomsky is a thinker who’s ideas are best considered at a length beyond that of a soundbite, doesn’t mean he doesn’t know how to throw in a finely polished and cutting bit of snark as an aside. And that article the snark is nested in–that also bears reading.
“We can only see a short distance ahead, but we can see plenty there that needs to be done”
I was pretty pleased last week to see the British PM get around to issuing an apology for their government’s treatment of Alan Turing. Being a computer geek, and a bit of a crypto amateur, the things done at Bletchley Park generally, and by Turing specifically (and not just during the war), are things of interest to me. Being a,… Read more →
Way To Go America, Part 2
While I’m at it, here’s a little something Will clued me in to. There are other human rights that the UN is trying to craft declarations of, as part of its continuing efforts to establish some baselines for civilized national behaviours. These are two quotes from what are essentially meeting minutes from a committee meeting wherein 8 such new resolutions… Read more →
Way To Go America
Did you read where earlier this month, as part of the celebration of the anniversary of the U.N.’s 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights, France and the Netherlands sponsored a new non-binding UN declaration extending the rights guaranteed in the UDHR to homosexual and transgender people? Out of the 192 countries in the UN, only 66 signed. This is perhaps… Read more →
