Shudder in dread, gentle readers, for I continue to live on.
I wish it was a slow news week, but - alas! - the world seems to keep wanting to just keep doing things, and so here I am with a few of the news events that have leapt out at me in the past week. Of course, this is nothing close to representative of all that's been going on, but mainly the stuff that's gotten the biggest "!" factor out of me lately.
First, in something which made the Moron Incident in Canada some time ago look like nothing terribly important, we have someone who had until recently been a British cabinet minister shooting his mouth off in a significantly harsher way than you'll typically see from people in the public eye. I'll forgive his giving his commentary for the Guardian, considering the significance of what he's had to say.
With the exception of countries the United States has been actively fighting or threatening to fight, Mr. Meacher's words have been the harshest (that I've seen) to come out of any high-ranking or formerly high-ranking government official. To say nothing of the fact that he explicitly accused the current US administration of fabricating the causus belli with regards to Iraq in order to pursue an agenda of global domination. In doing this, he's also gotten major organizations like the BBC to catch hold of names of groups such as the Project for a New American Century, a militarist thinktank with a number of members in the current administration's executive branch. Mr. Meacher has of course been roundly dismissed by both the British and American governments - particularly insultingly by the latter - but with luck his statements will draw not only ire but notice, and it should be interesting to see where this particular loose-cannonade will lead in days to come. Either way, this far exceeds "what a moron" for both accuracy and entertainment value...
On the other side of the pond, we have some silliness coming from the Canadian Alliance, as they accuse Jean Chretien of rigging Supreme Court decisions in order to further the gay marriage agenda. Stephen Harper - to me, anyway - is coming across as something of a paranoid loonie here, spinning a tale of the Liberal party appointing judges years in advance and selectively losing court cases so that the Supremes in Ontario and federally could "write" new laws to destroy society.
Anti-liberal (and anti-Liberal) demagoguery has been on the rise for this issue for the past couple of months, but this is a rather significant change in the style. Up until now, opposition to the new marriage law has been based on a couple of standard sound bites - "the court has no business making laws," "marriage has always been between a man and a women so it should always remain so," "Chretien's opposition to a referendum is antidemocratic," and so on. It's hardly difficult to dismiss most claims like this - the court did not make a law, but simply declared it unconstitutional and required a replacement as per constitutional law, and judicial activism is generally a good thing anyway; appeals to tradition ignore tendencies like the "traditional" prohibition against women or minorities voting, serfdom, theocracies, etc; the issue is one of rights and not popular opinion, and there is a reason the term "tyranny of the majority" came into being. What the Alliance has pulled this time involves a far more serious accusation, namely that the federal government is secretly controlling the judiciary.
Since the introduction of the new Constitution and Charter in 1982, the Canadian judiciary has rather rapidly become one of the most powerful and most independent judiciaries on the planet. The sacrosanctity of their independence is at such a level that they are essentially isolated from the rest of the government when they're not announcing court decisions; MPs, MLAs and a few cabinet ministers have had their political careers come to spectacular ends by making the mistake of even appearing to have a hand in the judicial process. Most of the elements of the Canadian judiciary - the strict appointment rules, rather than something so dangerous as electing the judges; their separation from Parliament; their judicial activism, etc - have resulted in supreme courts which are safe to, and therefore quite willing to, wade into the political fray now and then, point at a law, and announce, "this is Not Right!" While it is the job of the legislature to create the laws, and (ideally) to keep on top of them as times change, the courts exist to provide a kick to the pants and force changes which would otherwise be unnecessarily slow in coming.
Finally, I bring you a third piece of news for the day, just because aggravation must always come in threes: A couple of kids have apparently decided to go play live-action Grand Theft Auto. When the dust settled, they'd shot up a few cars and ended up killing one person and wounding at least one other. This is of course absolutely horrible, and the idiots deserve to get jumped on a couple times by the law for this stunt. However, that's not what raises my hackles. What does that is the fact that the families of the victims are suing not the families of the shooters or anything, but The producers of Grand Theft Auto in the hopes of getting them to, and I quote, "cough up money so victims and families can be compensated for their pain."
Excuse me?
Nevermind the problem that they're essentially ignoring the gunmen in this situation, nevermind that they're going directly to the video game producers and releasing the shooters' families of responsibility, nevermind that they're suckered into the delusion that these games are targetted at children strictly because they're games, and only children play games. Am I the only one who sees the absolute greed in that above statement? "Cough up money" to "compensate" people for their pain? I wasn't aware that a human life could be made well by however many scores of millions of dollars you're going to demand for your clients, Mr. Thompson. It's cases like these that make me lose my sympathy for the families of victims. There's a wish for justice, and there's a wish for profit. Situations like this strike me as little more than expecting cash awards from a third party for someone's actions, and I suppose if you do that sort of thing, you go for whoever has the deepest pockets...
I mean, people still are responsible for their own actions. Aren't they?
Aren't they?
Posted by zibblsnrt at September 7, 2003 02:05 PM