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Weak democracies

By: psr, 2009-08-25

Scotland freed one of the Lockerbie bombing terrorists a couple of days ago, on ‘humanitarian’ grounds. The Scottish authorities are dumb. If the guy was jailed for killing over 200 people, he wasn’t very ‘humanitarian’ to others, was he?. Then, why free him on ‘humanitarian’ grounds? Why treat humanely someone who showed no humanity? Healthy or ill, the criminal is a criminal, and if he was senteced to life in jail, it is wrong to release him just because he is ill.

This is just another sign of the weakness of modern democracies.

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2009-08-25 | Braindead - Rights - World | Trackback | No Comments »

Language choice in Galicia

By: psr, 2009-06-28

The regional government of Galicia distributed a questionnaire among parents of schooled children. The goal is to find out parents’ preferences about which language (Spanish or Galician, or a mix) to use for teaching in school, to later design the “future language policies for elementary and secondary education in Galicia.”

The questionnaire had to reach parents directly, but a group called “galician coalition of linguistic normalization and dynamization” (CGENDL in Galician) has attached a letter (in Galician) to the questionnaire to mold responses in favor of one option (Galician). While this is bad enough (the questionnaire was supposed to be neutral), the letter rests on ludicrous claims:

1) “Galician is Galicia’s own language; it belongs to us all and we cannot play with its future”

This is irrelevant: …

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2009-06-28 | Braindead - Rights - Spain | Trackback | 5 Comments »

13-week monsters

By: psr, 2009-05-20

In the context of the abortion debate, agitated by the government of Rodríguez Zapatero with its new “Law of Reproductive and Sexual Health and of Voluntary Interruption of Pregnancies”, the Minister of Equality (yes… we have such a idiotic Ministry in Spain), Bibiana Aído, has marked the age limit for the human fetus to be considered human or not.

That is, the socialist government has turned itself into official philosopher and dictates who is human and who is not. This government must really have magical properties, because despite all absurdity they utter, they manage to keep considerable popular support.

What’s that about a 13-week fetus not being human? Is a one week fetus something other than human? What else is it? Possibly up until 13 weeks …

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2009-05-20 | Braindead - Rights - Spain | Trackback | No Comments »

Museum of Communism

By: psr, 2009-05-18

While walking around Prague last week, I ran into the following banner on a street wall:

Very nice.

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2009-05-18 | Europe - General - Rights | Trackback | No Comments »

Silence, please

By: psr, 2009-03-19

I usually condemn from this blog the Spanish penal code and the Spanish judicial system and its practices when they impose weak and slim sentences, but this time I have to applaud them (to some extent).

A bar owner in Barcelona has been sentenced to 5 years in jail for disrupting the lives of neighbors with the noise from the bar. The bar lacked operating permits, and did not comply with any regulation on soundproofing. Neighbors had to stand one year of loud noises at night, despite several formal complaints from neighbors to authorities about the noise.

Offenders like this bar owner know that the judicial system is slow and that sentences are rarely tough on them, so they risk skipping compliance with regulations, with their …

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2009-03-19 | Rights - Spain | Trackback | No Comments »

False privacy protection

By: psr, 2009-03-18

Finland’s Parliament passed a law allowing companies to track workers’ e-mail messages, but not to read the messages themselves. With this law in effect, companies will be able to retain information about the e-mails, such as the sender, recipient, the sent and received time and date, and whether the email contained attachments [ref].

Even with such a weak law (it does not permit reading the content of messages), some opposed it arguing it “gives employers more powers than the police, and could lead to an erosion of Finland’s proud heritage as a world leader in human rights” [ref].

It is rumoured that Nokia was pushing for such a law to pass (for it was dubbed “Lex Nokia”). If it were so, they should be applauded for …

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2009-03-18 | Economy - Europe - Rights | Trackback | No Comments »

Defenceless society

By: psr, 2009-03-01

Life imprisonment: yes or no. This debate has briefly appeared on Spanish media in the last few days, after a young woman was murdered in Sevilla. The Spanish penal code does not consider life imprisonment for any type of crime.

Those against this type of sentence argue that the Spanish Constitution does not admin life imprisonment, but in fact the Constitution does not mention it at all. It is absolutely untrue that life imprisonment is incompatible with the Constitution. They argue that such sentence would be “degrading”, and this is not allowed by the Constitution. However, this is merely a matter of opinion: is a 30 or 40 year jail sentence “decent”? is life imprisonment “degrading”?. They can both be …

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2009-03-01 | Rights - Spain - World | Trackback | No Comments »

Intellectual Property and liberties

By: psr, 2009-02-21

In a friend’s blog I see a critic of a statement by a representative of the Spanish Ministry of Culture: “Without intellectual property, there is no free thought”.

Well… this sentence is not untrue: Let us imagine a world without intellectual property. Anything created by an individual would be nobody’s, not even the individual’s own property. There is no recognition for that individual for all the work that led to the production of that idea, of that new thing. Without acknowledgement there is no incentive to put effort into anything, and without that effort there is no thought: not free, and not captive. There is nothing.

Part of the very nature of humans is to associate ideas with people who published them. Such …

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2009-02-21 | Economy - Rights - Spain | Trackback | No Comments »

Lies, from president Zapatero

By: psr, 2009-02-15

The following is an excellent article by Juan Manuel de Prada (www.juanmanueldeprada.com), published in spanish newspaper ABC on February 2, 2009, after the spanish president, Rodriguez Zapatero appeared on a TV show where a live audience can ask him anything they like.

Don’t swallow that lie, Izaskun
JUAN MANUEL DE PRADA
Monday, Feb 2, 2009

Much has been said about the many lies that president Zapatero, as he often audaciously does, spewed during his appearance in the TV program “I’ve got a question for you”. But it’s a known fact that current times demand stone-faced small-time politicians, and president Zapatero, no doubt, shines above any of his competitors to satisfy such demand. Zapatero unashamedly said he hadn’t promised full employment for his current term in office, and also that …

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2009-02-15 | Rights - Spain | Trackback | No Comments »

Fire

By: psr, 2009-02-15

Australia has been hit by enormous wildfires, and not-so-wild ones too. Now authorities suspect some of those fires were actually arson. This seems to be a recurring theme everywhere in the world where supposedly wildfires break out. It’s the same story in the U.S., Greece, Spain and many other countries.

However, this time in Australia, I was very happy to hear the prime minister, Mr. Kevin Rudd, call things by their name. He has called the fires “mass murder”, and he is absolutely right, although he’s probably referring only to the human lives lost in the fires. His words are perfectly applicable to the murder of wild life in the scorched forests, both fauna and flora. Finally a government official (the …

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2009-02-15 | Rights - World | Trackback | No Comments »

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Archive for the 'Rights' Category

Weak democracies

Language choice in Galicia

13-week monsters

Museum of Communism

Silence, please

False privacy protection

Defenceless society

Intellectual Property and liberties

Lies, from president Zapatero

Fire

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