Interesting Links for 27-10-2017

[andrewducker]

Disney Channel makes history with first gay storyline

(tags: Disney lgbt )

Support for Weed Legalization Has Reached a New High in the USA

(tags: marijuana legalisation usa )

56% of NI 18-44 year olds support a United Ireland

(tags: NorthernIreland ireland )

Women in Scotland allowed abortion pill at home

(tags: abortion Scotland GoodNews )

Mental health: 'My employer's support saved my life'

(tags: mentalhealth work )

Famous Historical Witch Hunts

(tags: satire solemn society witchcraft )

Walmart will soon have robots roaming the aisles in 50 stores

(tags: robots shopping )

A Deep Dive Into ‘Grand Designs’, the Greatest Show on British Television

(tags: architecture design uk tv housing class )

These 10 Careers Pay Women More Than Men

(tags: jobs gender inequality )

How Facebook is making itself less useable in order to make more money

(tags: Facebook OhForFucksSake )

Reddit Limits Noxious Content by Giving Trolls Fewer Places to Gather

(tags: racism abuse forum web discussion reddit )

Rare ghostly image of Mary Queen of Scots discovered hidden beneath artwork

(tags: history art scotland )

Australian High Court Bars 5 Lawmakers Over Citizenship

(tags: australia politics )

Olivia Colman to replace Claire Foy as Queen Elizabeth II in series 3 and 4 of The Queen

(tags: queen royalty uk tv )

Female Westminster staff warning each other about sex-pest MPs in secret WhatsApp group

(tags: government uk abuse women )

Comments

Ireland

[danieldwilliam]

56% in favour a united Ireland is quite some shift.

A unified island would offer the neatest solution to dealing with the Brexit border issue - unless you are in the DUP. It's a bit of shame Sein Fein don't actually turn up to Westminster where they could vote on e.g. having a referendum on a unified Ireland in say January 2018.

I wonder if the Irish government will propose a referendum as part of the Brexit process.

I'm not sure that younger Scots without Thatcher memories are more pro the UK than otherwise. My memory was that the younger you were the more likely you were to support Scottish independence but not by as much pro-independence activists liked to think. (E.g. just waiting until the old people died didn't automatically result in a Yes vote.)

Ireland - Ireland - Together Standing Tall

[danieldwilliam]

One unexpected bonus a united Ireland is that they wouldn't need their second national anthem for rugby.

[danieldwilliam]

About the only constitutional provision dafter than the Australian restriction on dual nationals is Article 155 of the Spanish Constitution.

The Australian constitution allows any foreign country that wants to spoof its elections the ability to do so by making any candidate a citizen on election day.

[andrewducker]

Like so?

http://www.huffingtonpost.com.au/2017/08/15/section-44-means-all-politicians-may-be-disqualified-from-parlia_a_23078690

[danieldwilliam]

What seems to have tripped up all of the Australian politicians is that they were the "victim" of obscure rules granting citizenship of other countries as a right.

It's easy to imagine a situation where someone accidentally gains citizenship of a country as it changes its citizenship rules. If, for example, the UK decided to grant anyone who had served in the Gurkha regiment British citizenship and it turns out that your Australian great-grandfather had been an officer in the regiment during the Second World War for six months.

That sort of thing happens often.

A more aggressive example. Russia decides to troll the Australian elections and the Duma passes a law granting honorary Russian citizenship to anyone who fought the Nazis during the Great Patriotic War and their decendents and includes in the definition of "fought" any civillians who were subject to area bombing or forced to evacuate.

Or North Korea grants citizenship to anyone who has ever visited the territory of North Korea and their decendents - which would include the 3rd Royal Australian Regiment. That's unlikely but suppose the Leader of the Opposition was the daughter of a Korean War veteran.

I'm not saying anyone would do such a thing but it points to poor constitutional drafting that such a thing is possible and that genuine accidents have denied the electors 7 elected representatives.

[andrewducker]

Oh yes, and for no good reason I can see.

If your representative is a double agent for another country then you can vote him out.

[danieldwilliam]

Well yes.

And it's not as *not* being a citizen of a particular country stops you being an active supporter of that country - see British spy rings of the past and probably the future.

Hell, I'm probably more *loyal* to a state that doesn't exist than I am to either of the ones I hold citizenship of.

I don't think I have a problem with a country requiring that its senior office bearers and magistrates have demonstrably undivided loyalties. I mean, I'm not an active supporter of the idea that in order to serve well and faithfully in the legislature of a country you *must* be a citizen of only that country but the notion doesn't strike me as obviously wrong.

But if you're going to do that you have to have put some thought in to drafting the provision so that it doesn't act in a way that is undemocratic.

[andrewducker]

I'm not sure that citizenship is an indicator of loyalty. It might be for some people, but I wouldn't want to rule out someone from Belfast from being a judge because they had the right to an Irish passport.

[calimac]

We have an odd rule in the US - it's in the Constitution - saying that the President (but not members of Congress) must be a "natural-born citizen", but it doesn't define what that means. It wouldn't apply to merely having dual citizenship, as Australia's does. This is the rule that would supposedly have rendered Obama ineligible had he been born in Kenya, but even that's not clear, as Ted Cruz was in exactly that situation - born abroad, mother a US citizen, father not - and that didn't seem to affect his eligibility.

[aelf]

My understanding is that the age of Obama's mother at his birth was the issue - she didn't meet the metric of having been a citizen for 5 years after age 16, since she gave birth when she was 18. Since he was born in the US, he was automatically a citizen. If he'd been born outside the US, he wouldn't have been.

Ted Cruz's mother was older when he was born, and met the citizenship length requirements for passing citizenship to a child born outside the US.

[calimac]

Well, there's two ways you could read that. One would make it impossible for any such mother under the age of 21 to give birth to a citizen in these circumstances. That seems implausible to me.

The other would say that it refers to the possibility of her having been a non-citizen less than 5 years ago, but ignores that if she was under 16 at the time. Thus an older woman who'd become a citizen less than 5 years ago wouldn't count, but a young one who'd been brought to the US as a child would count. That reading would make sense.

Obama's mother had been a citizen of the US all her life, and I believe she had never yet left it. (One of several reasons it's utterly bizarre to imagine that she'd flown all the way to Kenya just to give birth. Why would she do such a thing?)

I don't know what the relevant law actually said. In fact, I found a reference to it, but trying to parse the legal language made my head hurt.

[aelf]

The law is 10 years a citizen, with 5 years being after age 16. It matters for both Obama and Cruz because both of them had non-citizen fathers. It matters for Cruz, because he was born out of the country. His mother was born a US citizen (as was Obama's), had been a citizen for more than 10 years (as had been Obama's), 5 years of which were after age 16 (Obama's mother did not meet this requirement, Cruz's mother did).

There were a number of articles about this at the time, if you're not interested in reading the actual law. Most of them spell it out fairly plainly. It may seem implausible, but much of what determines citizenship in various countries is quite particular.

[calimac]

It wasn't that the laws were particular that roused my skepticism. Laws are often very particular. It was this particular particularity.

Turns out that you don't have the rule quite right. But that's understandable; it's confusing. It's "the congressional law on the books when Obama was born required a foreign-born child to have at least one citizen parent who had been physically present in the United States at least five years after age 14. Obama's mother did not clear this bar, because she was only 18 when she gave birth. So this birth had to happen in the United States to make her son a citizen at birth."

[aelf]

I had gone to snopes to refresh my memory, and they quote the 16 years of age. Further looking does give sources with both 14 and 16. Interesting. I guess the law shifted at some point.

In any case, the version you consider implausible (that children born outside the US, to a non-citizen father, to a mother with citizenship but under a particular age, are not natural born citizens) is the accurate reading.

I suspect we may see some rulings on these particular situations if one ever happens for real. Given there were people floating questions about McCain since he was born outside the US (though we claimed the Panama Canal Zone), even though both his parents were US citizens and he was born on a military base. Clearly we need a Puerto Rican to run for President.

[calimac]

I'd trust a noted constitutional law professor from Yale and Columbia above Snopes on a legal question.

The niggles raised about McCain were never seriously pursued. A stronger case would be George Romney, Mitt's father, who ran for the Republican nomination in 1968: he'd been born in Mexico of expatriate American parents. But that never became an issue, albeit it might have had he gotten the nomination. But I suspect it wouldn't have been held against him. Even a foreign-born Obama might not have been ruled ineligible by the sense of the constitutional clause. What the provision actually does is keep people like Henry Kissinger and Madeleine Albright out of the line of succession.

[calimac]

I wonder if the cast changing of the Queen will feel like Darrin. He was the husband character in Bewitched, a US 1960s tv comedy about an ordinary suburban housewife who happens to be a witch. The actor cast as Darrin had to quit halfway through the run for health reasons, so they just replaced him. No onscreen explanation, just poof. It felt a lot creepier than any of the witch stuff.

[andrewducker]

Yeah. I think they would have issues no matter what they did - two seasons per actor seems reasonable, and avoids having to use ageing makeup which might be even creepier!

[drplokta]

The opinion poll on Ireland doesn't say what the poll question actually was. So I wonder how many of those 56% support a united Ireland as a province of the UK, like it was before 1922, rather than as an independent republic.

[andrewducker]

Full figures next week apparently:
https://m.facebook.com/LucidTalk/posts/1561035020625826