The US blogosphere is in a lather over a video of US Sen. Bob Ethridge (D-NC), looking tired and emotional, grabbing a student who tried to question him on a DC sidewalk. Glenn Greenwald wants the Senator charged with assault. Lest we be too smug, remember how then-Prime Minister Jean Chretien, apparently sober, throttled Emploment Insurance protester Bill Clennett at a Flag Day rally in 1996, throwing him to the ground and breaking one of his teeth. A third party did lay a charge of assault against Chretien, but the Attorney General of Quebec declined to proceed with the case....

17 June, 2010

Salon's Glenn Greenwald notes the lead paragraph in a New York Times story Saturday: WASHINGTON — The 48 Guantánamo Bay detainees whom the Obama administration has decided to keep holding without trial include several for whom there is no evidence of involvement in any specific terrorist plot, according to a report disclosed Friday. The report itself concludes that "for many detainees at Guantanamo, prosecution is not feasible in either federal court or a military commission."  Greenwald comments: They can't even be prosecuted in the due-process-abridging military commissions we invented out of whole cloth for those who can't be convicted in a real court.  In...

30 May, 2010

An Ontario Divisional Court ruling has thrown the The Coast's craven cave-in to an HRM Fire Service lawsuit into sharp relief—along with an imprudent ruling by Nova Scotia Supreme Court Justice Heather Robertson. The Chief and Deputy Chief of the fire service asked Robertson to order The Coast to release identifying information about individuals who posted anonymous comments about alleged racism in the fire service on the newspaper's website. The officers said the comments, since removed, defamed them, and they needed the identities of the authors to pursue a suit for defamation. Having lured readers into posting anonymously, the Coast tossed them...

12 May, 2010

At a web app developers' conference on April 21, Facebook unveiled a breathtakingly ambitious program to reorganize the way personal information is shared on the Internet. The changes, known as Open Graph, are hard to summarize simply, but they include the use of cookies, login codes, and Facebook "like" buttons on other companies' websites, to automatically share user information and preferences with other websites, which then use that information to personalize a user's browsing experience. More detailed explanations here and here. With 415 million users, Facebook offers web developers a powerful incentive to play ball, and they have flocked to embrace the...

02 May, 2010

How does a government that takes human rights obligations seriously handle warnings of detainee abuse? It would be too easy to ignore these warning signs, only to find that detainees previously held by UK have been mistreated while in Afg hands. The fallout of that, as we have seen from Canada’s experience, would, at best, be unwelcome. Read on: Source. Hat tip: Cheryl Cook via @DougSaunders...

21 April, 2010

The former idealists who built The Coast into a substantial Halifax institution let down their readers and their craft today by failing to contest an order to help identify people who posted controversial opinions on their website. Madam Justice Heather Robertson granted an application by HRM Fire Chief Bill Mosher and Deputy Chief Stephen Thurber, who say the posters made allegations of racism, cronyism and incompetence against them. I want to stress that Contrarian has not read the comments in question, or the article that provoked them, and I have no opinion as to the merits of the dispute. But...

14 April, 2010

Writing on the US website The Daily Beast, Ottawa patent consultant and occasional Globe and Mail columnist Sheema Khan condemns Quebec Premier Jean Charest's bill to ban the traditional Muslim niqab. In a stand reminiscent of Maurice Duplessis's Grande Noirceur, Charest would ban religious veils on grounds  they "subjugate" women. Khan, who holds a PhD in physics from Harvard, nails the double-standard at play: The most vehement reactions against face-veiling have come from women, who have projected their own fears, assumptions, and judgments onto attire worn by a minority within a minority. They think of the bad old...

09 April, 2010

The Globe and Mail's Tabatha Southey uses the same Pullman quotation to cast a harsh spotlight on an embarrassing Canadian example of political correctness run amok, courtesy of that habitual offender, the British Columbia Human Rights Commission, a tribunal whose main activity seems to be punishing the exercise of a human right it doesn't much care for: speech. Hat tip: Kady O'Malley...

03 April, 2010

English novelist Philip Pullman’s latest book, The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ, has provoked threats of a Christian fatwa against him. At a public forum this week, Pullman responded to an audience member who complained that “to call the Son of God a scoundrel is an awful thing to say.” Yes, it was a shocking thing to say and I knew it was a shocking thing to say, but no one has the right to live without being shocked. No one has the right to spend their life without being offended. Nobody...

02 April, 2010

[caption id="attachment_4532" align="alignleft" width="150" caption="Pedro Almodóvar"][/caption] Last Thursday, the Cape Breton Island Film Series showed Pedro Almodóvar's Broken Embraces, which Roger Ebert describes as, "a voluptuary of a film, drunk on primary colors, caressing Penelope Cruz, using the devices of a Hitchcock to distract us with surfaces while the sinister uncoils beneath." It's a lush, layered melodrama, with lots of surprises hidden among its folds, including this utterly unexpected footnote to Contrarian's conversation about whether medical science should try to "cure" Down syndrome. The central character, Harry Caine (Lluís Homar), is a movie director who turns to script-writing after a brutal car...

20 February, 2010
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