Archive for the ‘law’ Category
Submission to the Tasmanian Human Rights Project
What follows is my submission to the Colin Brown Human Rights Project. This is a community consultation process carried out by the Law Reform Institute of Tasmania, at the behest of the Tasmanian State Government. The project is described here in more detail. It will culminate in a recommendation to Parliament for human rights legislation.
Introduction: [...]
Tasmania considering human rights legislation
Tasmania is considering bringing in a bill or charter of human rights, following the lead of the Australian Capital Territory and the state of Victoria. It has asked the Tasmanian Law Reform Institute to investigate the matter, consult with the community, and produce recommendations and a summary of the submissions it receives.
Australians don’t enjoy very [...]
Censorship in Australia
Freedom of speech in Australia is in far worse shape than generally understood. Frank Moorhouse, researching his essay, “The writer in a time of terror” came across first one and then a large number of extremely frightening examples of Orwellian censorship and government interference. The following article is based on an interview Moorhouse did with [...]
When good memes go bad
Complex systems can have emergent properties. In other words the interactions between the constituent elements of the system can give rise to events, patterns, and behaviours which are not easy to predict by examination of the individual elements in isolation. In fact I would say two other things about this:
To predict the future state of [...]
Imprisonment by executive order
This week I’ve found myself by turns angry and sad about politics for the first time since the Israeli bombardment of civilians in Lebanon. This time the reason, I think, is that I had begun to believe that the right wing assault on the foundations of democracy, freedom, and human rights had ground to a [...]
Loss of ideals
From Comment is Free a summary of Bush’s true failure:
America is dedicated to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Had Thomas Jefferson never written those words, it would be hard to invent better ideals to set against the philosophy of those who attacked America five years ago.
Those seduced by terrorism believe in neither life, [...]
Keep off the grass
Australia is probably typical of the English speaking west in that it’s citizens are being buried in an avalanche of red tape. The litigious society meets the risk-averse society and the answer seems to be bureaucracy.
We have occupational health and safety (OH&S); a whole raft of accounting related to the goods and services tax (GST) [...]
Earth First! and the FBI
Edgar Jacobi: Heh. Well, you know that kind of cancer that you get better from eventually?
Rorschach: Yes.
Edgar Jacobi: Well, that ain’t the kind of cancer I got.
Judi Bari and Earth First!
In the 1980s some environmental activists, including Dave Foreman, in the western part of the United States began consider using direct action and even sabotage. [...]
George Galloway tells it like it is
Funny and sad. George Galloway
has a few things to say to the US Senate.
The ethics of altruism
The Ethics of Selfishness was always intended as an introduction to this article, which broadly speaking deals with altruism. I wanted to outline a proposal for a system of public ethics which was sufficient in scope to provide a useful framework for legislation of society, business, and government - even between nations - but at [...]
Censorship in the UK, torture in Uzbekistan
Craig Murray was a UK diplomat who protested Britain’s complicity in torture and human rights abuses in Uzbekistan. He was subject to a smear campaign, although eventually cleared, and lost his job. He has written a book about the issue, but sections of it were changed at the insistence of the UK Foreign Office, who [...]
How to flout international law
States are sovereign; they determine their own laws and regulate their own actions. Interactions between states are therefore always to some extent a matter of realpolitik. Nevertheless there is a collegial system of law based on treaties, decisions by the United Nations along with whatever enforcement the members of that body agree on a case [...]
Continuing occupation atrocities
A catalogue of continuing atrocity by the US in Iraq.
An AP report including allegations of a multiple murder to conceal a rape.
This seems to be passing unnoticed, but the repercussions are disastrous. The story is
here.
Update:
The story has been changed on AP, to a rather more innocuous one about casualties. The original is
linked [...]
Is big brother watching?
TheWaz recently posted an article giving the link to the Wired magazine leaking of the documents involved in the AT&T NSA wiretap case brought by EFF. It boils down to the idea that if your internet traffic goes through any of the big US backbones then it is being reconstructed and monitored by the NSA [...]
IP and abundance
Some things have always been abundant, and some things have been abundant from time to time. Think about fresh air and water, or grazing land in the early part of white settlement of North America. Economics, however, can be defined in terms of managing scarcity.
Abundance makes economists nervous. There’s a feeling that people might lose [...]
Ballot stuffing in Ohio
Good proof that the Bush win in 2004 was fixed in Ohio has surfaced here.
Should be the biggest story on US news at the moment. I wonder if it is?
John Howard and refugee policy
Background: Refugees as political advantage.
Australia is famously a nation of immigrants, an idea which ignores a bunch of people who have been here for around 45 thousand years. The attitude of the white residents to further migration, however, has been split between a need for their skills and labour and a fear of competition for [...]
AT+T and wiretap of whole internet
Wired describes how AT&T may be attempting to conceal documents relating to a case EFF is bringing against it for funnelling it’s internet backbone into the NSA for monitoring.
Not that it comes as any surprise really that NSA would monitor the internet in detail. Get yourself a copy of PGP.
Culture, autonomy, and human rights
An attempt at a universalist approach to Human Rights, which if not culturally neutral, at least imposes an explicit moral underpinning rather than an implicit set of cultural values.
Liberals are conflicted people. It’s not a bad thing, it comes about because there’s not always one right answer to a question. Sometimes there are two right [...]
Evade China’s firewall
Anonymizer have produced a tool to allow Chinese web surfers to circumvent the national firewall, by encrypting communication and routing it through one of a number of IP addresses. Google.com should be accessible by this means.
The current site from where the software can be downloaded is here, but this will be changed from time to [...]
