Posts by Citizen of Nowhere 20 posts • joined 20 Mar 2019
The Scottish First Minister has been pleading with the Westminster government to consult with and agree common approaches throughout this crisis. I'm not sure I understand why given how incompetent the central blunderment in London is on just about every front. Or by cooperation did you actually mean doing what they are told by Westminster and shutting up no matter what cack is being excreted there?
>anyone specifically taking a picture of me is going to have to answer some questions - if I notice, that is.
Which is fair enough. I am a photographer in my non-work time and on some few occasions when someone objected that they were in a photograph I have taken, I have always deleted them. Even though there is no legal obligation on me to do so, just seems like the right thing to do. When told by the police, or by security guards, on the other hand, that I cannot photograph in a public space ("you're including a private building" -- irrelevant; "our company has image rights" -- no, you really don't; "you can't photograph here because we say so" -- on what legal basis?) I may move on, but the photographs stay on the memory card.
The contents of the speech do not really support the statement that "anyone can take pictures or record you for any reason they like". Just one example, from the speech: "Last year a peaceful demonstrator against the arms trade, with no criminal record, succeeded in the Court of Appeal in a claim for invasion of privacy after he had been photographed by the police."
Who you are, who is doing the photographing/recording and their reason for doing it, are all taken into account in cases where invasion of privacy is alleged in a UK court. It is true that we do not have laws which explicitly grant "image rights" as some other countries do, but its a bit more nuanced than you suggest.
>I still don't know the difference between a country and a state.
A state is a largely legal construction based on international law and recognition of one state by another. A country or even more so, a nation, may or may not also be a state and of course there are all sorts of disputed situations. The Kurds see themselves as a people, a "stateless" nation if you will. Tibet is a country, but China considers it a Chinese territory (in the legal sense of territory) whereas its government in exile consider it an occupied sovereign state. There are many, many examples of peoples who consider they are a country or a nation but which have no state which expresses that at the level of sovereignty under international law.
If we look at the case of the United Kingdom, both England and Scotland ceased to exist as separate sovereign states as of the date at which both were incorporated into said United Kingdom. It would be hard to argue that either ceased to exist as countries or nations, however. Separate legal, educational and religious systems were maintained, and there is a [purely symbolic] border between the two. It would also be hard to argue that being either English or Scottish is not a primary part of the identity of most of the inhabitants of those two countries, even if they have shared a unitary state for 300-odd years, and leaving aside the thorny question of how much that specific identity is or is not in conflict with the shared identity of Britishness for any particular individual.
>Is Catalonia a country?
Not according to the constitution of Spain.
The UK, on the other hand, according to its constitutional arrangements, is composed of 4 countries. That many of the residents of its largest constituent part believe their country to be its only constituent part (and certainly the only one which counts) is something which is becoming increasingly obvious to the residents of the other three. So, they may get their wish and reality will end up matching their current misconception.
Leaving aside questions about whether he is now a better person, or what is fair, a person with some very specific past actions and beliefs found himself in a very specific position in the present. It is not hard to see why those past actions and beliefs made his maintaining that present position untenable. In a completely different position his past might never have caught up with him in the way it has now done.
>there were plenty of cases mentioned in the article where they already had the evidence they needed
This. There really is no excuse for blatant trawling, retention and divulgation (including to suspects' lawyers) of personal data, backed by intimidation of alleged victims (we may not prosecute if you do not let us take a phone dump and do what we like with it).
From the article:
"Levin has indeed been an active member of the community. A glance at the changelog for the 5.0.15 Linux kernel is peppered with his sign-offs, often along with Greg Kroah-Hartman, a fellow at the Linux Foundation. It was therefore not surprising to see Kroah-Hartman vouch for Levin. Kroah-Hartman pointed out that Levin has full write permissions to the stable kernel trees..."
I agree with you that it would have been better to enforce a super-majority in 1975. It would not have changed the result as 67% voted in favour of continued membership. Where we might disagree is that repeating past mistakes for no good reason other than you made them in the past doesn't make any sense to me.
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