Doing some research on the GDPR and Article 22 says,
The data subject shall have the right not to be subject to a decision based solely on automated processing, including profiling, which produces legal effects concerning him or her or similarly significantly affects him or her.
Have I won? …
Anthony Barnett in 2010, and again last week,
The device of a referendum is itself, as Stuart Weir has written, an awesome machine that should be handled with respect. Referendums need rules and a context and they need to be preceded by a well-founded debate. That leads to democracy. Otherwise they become populist tools in the hands of manipulative neo-dictators
The two links are to Open Democracy articles. …
I had reason to look up a Martin Luther King quote, I was looking for the content of character phrase,
I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.”
It’s caught on Youtube here…. …
Jacob Rees-Mogg suggests that May create 1000 peers to get Article 50 approval through the Lords, he seems to forget that when Lloyd George tried this last time, over 100 years ago, the King refused on the first asking and made him fight a general election which didn’t go so well for him. …
One down, 320 to go. Stephen Phillips has resigned from the House of Commons, actually with Goldsmith also taking a sabbatical the Tory majority is down to 10. …
The High Court states, in the Article 50 hearing, that the Royal Prerogative cannot be used to overturn statute law. …
Jarred Anderson wrote an interesting little piece on Pulse, questioning how the right to be forgotten can be implemented in the block chain; in my view a false dichotomy since the right to be forgotten is being applied to search engines and the regulators’ need to prove non-repudiation will probably override citizens rights to privacy. It is even more interesting that he catalogues the jurisdictions implementing a strong right to privacy as Argentina and the EU; both places with histories of fascist, neo-fascist, stalinist regimes and murderous secret police forces. …
While I am sympathetic to the advocates of a “progressive alliance” working for a government committed to a Parliament elected by proportional representation, I do not think unilaterally, or even in conjunction with the Greens, withdrawing Labour’s candidate from the Richmond bye-election as proposed by is the right thing to do. Labour should of course consult its local membership and consider the candidate chosen by the LibDems but Labour’s voters in Richmond, who vote Labour for local councils, the Mayor of London, and the GLA deserve to be able to express their preference on the ballot paper. It is arrogance to think they can be directed! …
A short piece in the Guardian about the USA, arguing that ownership of guns is not a human right. These are arguments that most Europeans and probably most US citizens would approve. One of the problems in the US, is the “paradox of the Republic”; a Republic guarantees rights and protections to its citizens only, it refuses to recognise the universality of human rights. Human Rights are universal, the basis of world citizenship.
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I really can be a dense sometimes. When rump new labour resigned from the Shadow Cabinet last July. there were two noticeable absentees, Tom Watson and Jonathan Ashworth, both people one would expect to have supported the coup. Watson we assume failed to put his job on the line because getting it back would have involved fighting another Deputy Leadership election which he may well not have won. Ashworth was famously removed from the NEC earlier this month, this would have happened at the point he resigned from the Shadow Cabinet. I suspect that he didn’t do so in order to stay on the NEC. Which way did he vote on the freeze date, the rigging of the registered supporters class, the membership of the star chambers, and the gerrymandering of the NEC membership? …