The price increase announcement from Netflix has me pissy. I.was planning to cancel satellite this month in favor of just Netflix and an antenna. I will still cancel the satellite, but I may cancel Netflix as well. Just more time for reading.
I first saw this on Slashdot via Twitter this morning, and I wanted to comment then. Then I check Twitter this afternoon, only to find @stephenfry has now twitted about it and that I’m no doubt about to see a lot of Retweets from other people about this and it’s time to get my own two cents in (which, sadly will not fit into 140 characters):
Ireland Criminalizes Blashphemy
I was involved in a pretty in-depth discussion on this exact subject a little over TWO YEARS ago. Technically, the headline being spread should probably be “RE-criminalizes” since blasphemy’s existence as a crime is not new to Ireland (Defamation Act, 1961). The discussion took place back in law school in my Comparative Law class (best class I had in my three years, hands down). A classmate of mine presented a paper on blasphemy laws in Ireland and the UK (this was little over a year before the UK repealed their blasphemy law…I wonder if C sent them his paper???). If I could dig up the paper and get a hold of C. for permission to post, I would.
It was a good paper and generated a lot of discussion (so much that it cut into the time I had to present my paper on equality law in Canada—believe me I was not upset). What gets me now (aside from the headline that makes like blasphemy as a crime is something new) is while I know that the passage of this new bill that more actively defines blasphemy is a bad sign, at the time of our discussion we were far more disturbed by the fact that blasphemy was something codified into the constitution. I think a few classmates were willing to dismiss the fact that it was codified as just a remnant relic to the Irish Constitution, especially after the 1999 case in which the Irish Supreme Court more or less neutered Blasphemy based on the lack of definition. I remember thinking—and several others voiced this as well—that it would make sense to amend the constitition to remove it as, well, obviously it was unnecessary these days. We also suggested that by not taking steps to remove, especially in light of the relatively recent 1999 attempt to use Blasphemy charges, that perhaps there was a bit of a dark cloud here, that in leaving it there it was a sign that some part of the Irish constituency might still want to use the old relic.
The urge to yell “I told you so,” is rather overwhelming right now.
In the absense of C’s paper to share, here’s a History of Irish Blasphemy Law from MichaelNugent.com which had a lot of good info on how the history of the situation fits together. Obviously the Slashdot link gets to you to a story on the more recent politics of the move.
