The Next Anglo-Scale Crisis Will be in Data Protection

Billy Hawkes has his work cut out for him

I've argued for some time that the problem in Ireland is not one of light-touch regulation, but of culture. The failure that led to such catastrophic circumstances was not down to Lehman Brothers, or the Global Meltdown, or Anglo, or the Financial Regulator, but culture. A culture that said 'go on sure you'll be grand,' a culture that basically said take what you can get away with, so long as you don't get caught, a culture that told politicians - jovially - that the only thing, the *only* thing they had to protect was their seat.  That caused an abdication of leadership and responsibility, an absence of ownership, and a complete abandonment of the principles of the nation. So we are - as they in Leinster House so wearily put it - where we are. The implication of that phrase, of course, is that we do not learn from our mistakes, we forget about the past, and we fix the problem we are faced with rather than contemplating the uncontemplable - that we are fundamentally wrong about all sorts of important stuff that's really hard to fix.

Twitter Trolls: Permanence, Insanity, Defamation and Forgetting

Daniel Sickles, the first man acquitted by
reason of temporary insanity in the US

Daniel Edgar Sickles died in 1914 at the age of 95.  He had had a successful and long life, as a military leader at Gettysburg, US Ambassador to Spain, and Congressman.  He also had a colourful life, plagued by scandals, the highlight of which - if it can be called such - was his acquittal for the murder of his wife's lover, for the first defence in the US courts of temporary insanity.  While there was some unease with the verdict, the public outcry was most pronounced when it became known that he had returned to his wife, who he had publicly branded a harlot.  The people of 1859 were fickle, it appears, and not all that well grounded in legal philosophy and considered righteousness; plus ca change, then.