"So what did Ofcom do? Naturally, it listened to the public, ignored the uncompetitive rent-seeking proposals from the commercial sector, adhered to EU law, and rejected the proposal. Well, that's what they did in a parallel universe. In this universe, Ofcom accepted the self-serving arguments of the companies they're meant to be regulating, ignored the public whose interests they were meant to be safeguarding, and gave the BBC what it asked for. Why did it do this? It's a secret. But not any more."

"Mr. Cooper starts to make a point - that allowing same sex couples marriage equality would also entitle opposite sex couples to domestic partnership equality - but he can't actually say what would be wrong with this, just that nobody can prove that it *wouldn't* be harmful so maybe it would. The judge doesn't buy it. You don't have to prove that same sex marriage is harmless any more than you have to prove that freedom of speech or the press is harmless, which it sometimes isn't.

(Aside: I didn't realize that the Prop 8 people want to discriminate against gays *and* straights. It's not just important that gays can't have marriage; straights also shouldn't have civil unions.)"

"The most common response I am seeing to the Maine referendum is, "How dare they think they can vote on my civil right to marry whom I please?!" Here's the thing: you don't have a civil right to gay marriage. We want to think of civil rights as forces of nature, but they are compacts within society. And gay marriage has not been defined as a civil right by the U.S. government..."

"Fathers will be able to take six months' paternity leave, the government has announced. The move will allow mothers to decide to return to work after six months and fathers to stay at home for the rest of the 12 months off allowed by law."

"There is a war being fought between customers and many of the firms they have to deal with. It is an asymmetric conflict - the little man versus the faceless, bad customer service monoliths."

On the little man's side there are only newspaper consumer pages and a rather handy selection of laws.

"The purpose of the Bryant letters is to spell out that the British Foreign Office policy of support for gay and lesbian rights is not just a formality, but instead a central part of the government's drive for human rights that diplomats are to champion as part of British foreign policy."

"'The minute I saw the faces of the agents, I knew I was in trouble. The first page of the Unthinkable script mentioned 9/11, terror plots, and the fact that the (fictional) world had become a police state. The TSA agents then proceeded to interrogate me, having a hard time understanding that a comic book could be about anything other than superheroes, let alone that anyone actually wrote scripts for comics. ...I cooperated politely and tried to explain to them the irony of the situation."

"A human rights group is calling on Abu Dhabi to take urgent action against the head of state's brother after video emerged of him torturing another man. ... The victim is seen being beaten, given electric shocks and crushed by a car.

"The best way to respond to what-aboutery is to state a simple truth. Say it slowly: there can be more than one bad thing in the world. You can oppose American atrocities, and Chinese atrocities. You can be critical of Israel, and of Islamism. You can condemn Dubai's system of slavery, and the fact people are detained without trial in Britain. You can stand independent of governments - including your own - and criticize anyone who chooses to abuse human rights. The world is not divided into a Block of Light, and a Block of Darkness; you don't have to pick a tribe and defend its every action. "

"In the more than twenty years that Human Rights Watch has worked in Latin America, no government has ever expelled our representatives for our work, not even the right-wing dictatorships guilty of far more egregious abuses than those committed by Chávez."

"Religious people could have the legal entitlement to discriminate on conscientious grounds against gay people after an employment tribunal ruled in favour of a Christian council worker."