Victory for some...

For the Soviet Union the Second World War ended 70 years ago. For millions in Eastern Europe, it was the beginning of another occupation by an utterly fascist system, an occupation that would last around 45 years. For German women it was the beginning of a massive rape wave, perhaps the biggest in human history, with Russian troops defiling any woman they could find. Women as old as 80 years and girls as young as 8 years were raped. Millions were raped, and hundreds of thousands died as a result. There were roughly 200 000 victims of rape in Berlin alone. These weren't merely reprisals for all the horrors that Nazis had inflicted on Soviet citizens; on their way toward Berlin, the Russians raped Belarusians, Poles, Ukrainians, Jews and even Russians liberated from labor camps and wives of German communists. This was officially encouraged, even if nominally banned. The higher-ups encouraged the mass rapes as a means to terrorize local populations and to reward Soviet soldiers. At the end of the day Soviet authorities, kinda like the modern Finnish justice system, did not consider rape a serious offense. Hitler himself had contributed greatly to the peril of German women (and civilians in general) by preventing the evacuation of German civilians in places such as East Prussia, where the Russians really went cavemen on the local population.

Unlike Germany, Russia, as a victor, has been unwilling to learn from history even though their current problems with their "near abroad" and with NATO expansion have everything to do with Soviet/Russian history of repression. Poland and the Baltic states are now NATO members because of their repression under Russian rule. World War II began with a joint Nazi-Soviet attack on Poland. Tens of thousands of important Poles were massacred by the Soviets during this first occupation period. Later, as the Germans were being pushed back, Stalin couldn't have cared less about liberating anyone; Poland was merely another territory to conquer and hold, which is why he prevented the United States from aiding Polish partisans (the Home Army) in their desperate struggle against Germany. Today's Ukraine is divided over Russia because Stalin first starved the Ukrainian population to death (Holodomor), then resettled the country with Russians. (Mistakes such as this and the purges almost cost the Soviets the war.) The entire population of Crimea was deported and replaced with Russians. After the war Stalin downplayed the importance of the Holocaust because the plight of the Jewish people didn't fit the general history of the "Great Patriotic War", and because so many Soviet citizens (including Ukrainians and non-Soviet Poles) had actively participated in the genocide.

Of course, there is little question the Nazis were worse. Had the Nazis won the war, Poland, for example, would have been colonized and its Polish population either exterminated or enslaved (and then exterminated), and its cities razed to the ground. As Bloodlands makes clear, when it comes to the systematic murder of innocent men, women and children, Nazis easily outperformed the Soviet Union. As far as the Nazis were concerned, murder was the objective. In the Soviet Union murder was a means to an end. Soviets killed Soviets; Germans killed non-Germans. Soviets killed before the war, Germans during the war. Stalin may have gotten a head start with the mass killings, but once the Nazis crossed the Molotov-Ribbentrop line in 1941, they more than made up for it, first by having the Einsatzgruppen shoot any Jews they could find, and then, as the war went on, by building gas chambers with which they could murder on an industrial scale. During the war, the Nazis perfected a psychopath-run (hence the "banality of evil") genocide machine, which enabled them to murder so many Jews in such a short time in such a difficult environment.

Below are several bits from Bloodlands:

"The men of the Dirlewanger Brigade burned down three hospitals with patients inside. At one hospital, wounded Germans who were being treated by Polish doctors and nurses asked that no harm come to the Poles. This was not to be. The men of the Dirlewanger Brigade killed the Polish wounded. They brought the nurses back to camp that evening, as was the custom: each night selected women would be whipped by officers and then gang-raped before being murdered. This evening was unusual even by those standards. To the accompaniment of flute music, the men raised a gallows, and then hanged the doctors and the naked nurses."

"...in roundups that took several days, the Germans and the Jewish police would blockade particular blocks or particular houses, and force their inhabitants to go to a collection point. Germans shot small children, pregnant women, and the handicapped or elderly on the spot. In larger towns and cities where more than one roundup was necessary, these measures were repated with increasing violence. The Germans were aiming for daily quotas to fill trains, and would sometimes pass on quotas to the Jewish police who were responsible (at the risk of their own position and thus lives) for filling them."

"In October 1941, Mahileu became the first substantial city in occupied Soviet Belarus where almost all Jews were killed. A German (Austrian) policeman wrote to his wife of his feelings and experiences shooting the city's Jews in the first days of the month. 'During the first try, my hand trembled a bit as I shot, but one gets used to it. By the tenth try I aimed calmly and shot surely at the many women, children, and infants. I kept in mind that I have two infants at home, whom these hordes would treat just the same, if not ten times worse. The death that we gave them was a beautiful quick death, compared to the hellish torments of thousands and thousands in the jails of the GPU. Infants flew in great arcs through the air, and we shot them to pieces in flight, before their bodies fell into the pit and into the water.'"

"Having surrendered their valuables and documents, people were forced to strip naked. Then they were driven by threats or by shots fired overhead, in groups of about ten, to the edge of a ravine known as Babi Yar. Many of them were beaten: Pronicheva remembered that people 'were already bloody as they went to be shot.' They had to lie down on their stomachs on the corpses already beneath them, and wait for the shots to come from above and behind. Then would come the next group. Jews came and died for thirty-six hours. (...) One naked mother spent what she must have known were her last few seconds of life breastfeeding her baby. When the baby was thrown alive into the ravine, she jumped after it, and in that way found her death. Only there in the ditch were these people reduced to nothing, or to their number, which was 33,761."

"Jewish women suffered in particular ways. Despite regulations against "racial defilement," some Germans quickly developed a taste for rape as prelude to murder. At least once Germans carried out a "beauty contest" of Jewish women, taking them to the cemetery, forcing them to strip naked, and then killing them. In the ghetto, German soldiers would force Jewish girls to dance naked at night; in the morning only the girls' corpses remained. Perla Aginskaia recalled what she saw in a dark apartment in the Minsk ghetto one evening in autumn 1941: 'a little room, a table, a bed. Blood was streaming down the girl's body from deep, blackish wounds in her chest. It was quite clear that the girl had been raped and killed. There were gunshot wounds around her genitals.'" 

The Nazis also wiped out entire villages in counter-productive anti-partisan reprisals: for every German killed, hundreds of innocent civilians were murdered. Such operations took place not only in the East but in Western Europe as well. In the French village of Oradour-sur-Glane, a Waffen-SS company massacred 600 civilians by a mistake (in the sense that they intended to massacre the inhabitants of another village). The men were separated from the rest, shot and then burned (while still alive). The women and children were taken to a church which was then set on fire. Those trying to escape were shot with machineguns. A baby was crucified.

So, if anything good came out of World War II, it was the physical extermination of what Hitler called the "good ones" of the Germanic race; the barbaric, racist, warmongering Germans with psychopathic and sadistic tendencies.

But in the very long run, Communism outperformed Nazism: the big difference between Nazism and Communism was their longevity. Nazis fell far short of their extermination targets due to the quick self-implosion of the Herrenvolk. Communism was much more long-lived and thus managed to amass a higher body count.

The ramblings of a lunatic

Finished reading Mein Kampf (an English translation of it to be exact, not the one filled with notes). There's been a lot of debate among historians as to whether Hitler's policies once he became chancellor followed a careful plan or whether those policies (such as the Holocaust) emerged more spontaneously, as a reaction to changing circumstances. Some Nazi sympathizers even claim Hitler had no choice but to do what he did because of the hostility of his foreign adversaries. To me it's quite clear that everything that happened was laid out in detail in this book, written in the mid 1920s, and that no one in Germany or abroad could honestly claim they did now know what Hitler's intentions were.

Reading the book, it's obvious Hitler is bored by economics. He rants a lot about Marxism but very little about its economic implications. He sympathizes with workers and blames the bourgeoisie (and Jews) for the rise of Marxism among the working class. In his views, employers should consider the welfare of the community first and avoid excess discrepancies in wage rates. Hitler's views on capital and stock markets aren't too different from those advocated by the contemporary utopian-fascist Zeitgeist movement. In Hitler's mind, the ills of both Capitalism and Communism are fused together in the "International Jew" who seeks to destroy national economies through the stock market, thus forging some kind of a "Eternal Jewish Empire". To prevent that, national economies such as that of Germany must be liberated from "interest slavery" and the machinations of the stock market. Throughout the book, Marxism is practically considered synonymous with the Jew.

Hitler does not explicitly state any plan to exterminate the Jewish people; but then again he didn't mention anything about that even as the Holocaust was under way. Still, it's quite obvious Hitler harbored such plans early on. He believes Jews would not be content with a state in Palestine because of their supposedly international character; such a state would merely function as a base of operations for the Jews' global quest to destroy all non-Jewish nation states. Regrettably, Hitler doesn't go into detail about the roots of his antisemitism. In his childhood and teens, he was even sympathetic toward the Jewish people for all the persecutions that had taken place in the past. Then, in Vienna, Hitler seems to have been brainwashed by antisemitic literature such as Protocols and Henry Ford's (the American car industrialist) writings. Why he decided to believe such obvious nonsense remains a mystery but then again the vast majority of people on this planet believe in something stupid, be that gods, homeopathy, astrology, UFO landings or 9/11 conspiracies. In the past persecution of Jews has served the self-interests of the persecuting parties (such as the financial and religious interests of spendthrift and zealous monarchs), but if Hitler had merely wanted to use Jews as scapegoats, he probably wouldn't have murdered millions of them in secret. Quite simply, Hitler was both an idiot and a racist.

Hitler is more explicit about exterminating opposing political ideologies and their proponents, expressing regret at the missed opportunity at the end of the World War to exterminate Marxists. Hitler believes that any half-assed attempt to destroy a doctrine is bound to be counter-productive. Therefore, any attempt to destroy a doctrine must be thorough and persistent, but even then such an attempt is almost certain to fail unless combined with a "spiritual revolution" (e.g., National Socialism against Marxism): "Any violence which does not spring from a firm, spiritual base, will be wavering and uncertain." He's also explicit about destroying parliamentarianism, even clearly stating the Nazis would participate in parliamentary institutions only to destroy such institutions for good. In this Gospel of Open and Explicit Intolerance, Hitler has, it seems, learned from the best:

"Here, too, we can learn by the example of the Catholic Church. Though its doctrinal edifice, and in part quite superfluously, comes into collision with exact science and research, it is none the less willing to sacrifice so much as one little syllable of its dogmas. It has recognized quite correctly that its power of resistance does not lie in its lesser or greater adaptation to the scientific findings of the moment, which in reality are always fluctuating, but rather in rigidly holding to dogmas once established, for it is only such dogmas which lend to the whole body the character of a faith."

"The greatness of Christianity did not lie in attempted negotiations for compromise with any similar philosophical opinions in the ancient world, but in its inexorable fanaticism in preaching and fighting for its own doctrine."

"Christianity could not content itself with building up its own altar; it was absolutely forced to undertake the destruction of the heathen altars. Only from this fanatical intolerance could its apodictic faith take form; this intolerance is, in fact, its absolute presupposition."

"The individual may establish with pain today that with the appearance of Christianity the first spiritual terror entered into the far freer ancient world, but he will not be able to contest the fact that since then the world has been afflicted and dominated by this coercion, and that coercion is broken only by coercion."

What is also explicitly stated is the Nazi policy of Lebensraum, that, in order to survive, the German nation must extend its frontiers at the expense of Russia and other territories inhabited by Slavic peoples. He criticizes the Second Reich for adopting a policy of trade & overseas colonies (thus putting Germany on a collision course with the British Empire) rather than of eastward conquest. This perceived necessity of soil acquisition seems to be another result of Hitler's poor understanding of economics: he believes more in Malthusian alarmism than technological progress and trade. Hitler also mentions the necessity to enslave lower races, comparing that to the exploitation and domestication of animals. What later became known as Generalplan Ost, a plan to conquer, enslave and exterminate tens of millions of people in Eastern Europe, is the core Nazi foreign policy doctrine through which everything else is viewed. In order to execute the plan, however, Germany's western front, i.e., France, the "mortal enemy" of Germany, must first be secured militarily, preferably with the aid of the British Empire. Hitler doesn't believe Germany's issues with France can be resolved through defensive strategies but instead pushes for a "final active reckoning with France". The resulting "destruction of France" would merely be a means to enable eastward expansion, not an end in itself. (Hitler seems to consider himself a realist as he emphasizes that Germany should never bother with humanitarian affairs but instead pursue the national interest vigorously, but of course his ideas come off as utopian, reckless and idealistic: Bismarck would turn in his grave. Hitler is not completely paranoid about France though; many French politicians and military leaders were calling for Germany's partition.)

Hitler is also, no surprise, extremely socially conservative. He sees women as passive beings whose job is to get married and start having children, he seems obsessed with STDs, prostitution and contraceptives, proposing early marriage as a solution. Also, like many conservative men, he drools over the idea of a teenage boy's well-trained body. Hitler makes numerous references to God, and believes his actions are guided by Fate/Providence, and sees many benefits in religions ("Precisely for the masses, faith is often the sole foundation of a moral attitude.") but doesn't come off as an adherent to any specific religious doctrine. He even employs God to support his racial views: if "defectives" are allowed to propagate, then in a few hundred years' time "you will find but few images of God, unless you want to profane the Almighty"; thus preventing these people from propagating would be "the most humane act of mankind". He also criticizes Jews on religious grounds, claiming theirs is not a religion at all: "The Jew cannot possess a religious institution, if for no other reason because he lacks idealism in any form, and hence belief in a hereafter is absolutely foreign to him (...) The Talmud is not a book to prepare a man for the hereafter, but only for a practical and profitable life in this world." Jesus is applauded for fighting the Jews' exploitation of religion for financial gain when he tosses them out of the Temple.

In addition to Hitler's views on the Jewish people, his views on the First World War illuminate his selective reading of history. Like many in Germany at that time, Hitler believed the war was not lost on the battlefield, conveniently forgetting the collapse of the Habsburg Empire, the constant influx of fresh American troops & supplies, and the lack of resources at Germany's disposal. While he viewed the alliance with the Habsburgs with disgust, he perceived the war as inevitable and ultimately fought for German freedom and independence. The lost territories would be regained, along with other German-inhabited regions, in due time and not through peaceful negotiations: "We must clearly recognize the fact that the recovery of the lost territories is not won through solemn appeals to the Lord or through pious hopes in a League of Nations, but only by force of arms." Of course Chamberlain tried to spoil his fun by completely giving in to his outrageous, unreasonable demands. With the gift of hindsight, we know that Hitler would have none of it, for in his mind "Germany will either be a world power or there will be no Germany".

The German people empowered Hitler with absolute authority to do away with democracy, institute racial laws, attack foreign countries and kill millions of people. They shouldn't have been surprised when bombs started falling on their cities.

Syria, finally

It seems that the good guys have finally decided to act against Syria despite protests from the likes of Russia. As I argued earlier, non-action in the face of the likes of Bashar Assad would only make it easier for dictators to crush internal revolts in the future. The chemical attack on a residential neighborhood near Damascus was a direct result of earlier do-nothing behavior. The regime had already tried out chemical weapons several months ago on a smaller scale (and fired SCUD missiles into residential areas) just to see what the West would do. The West did nothing but slightly increased its rhetoric, so the regime decided to move it up a notch. (This should also remind us of the importance of American hegemony: without it Assad would have gone completely cavemen on his own people a long time ago with Russia nodding in approval.) The regime's timing could not have been more arrogant and bold: the attacks were carried out while UN inspectors were not many miles away. To anyone living in the West Assad's behavior may seem irrational, considering the international environment and Obama's threats about crossing the "red line", but it's a fact that Middle Eastern dictators have had problems in the past understanding the civil, diplomatic threats that Western leaders issue. Even Saddam Hussein believed, to the very last second, both in 1991 and 2003, that the United States would not invade.

For the West, there should be no turning back now. If the regime is left unpunished, Assad will become even more ruthless. The reverberations of Western inaction would be felt elsewhere too: America's enemies are surely paying attention. Obama may be extremely reluctant to act but even he should understand that it never had to come to this: had he been more decisive before, all this could have been avoided. But Obama, with his doctrine of realpolitik, was caught completely off guard by the Arab revolts that beautifully demonstrated the power of ideas, ideas that Obama's predecessor believed were not as alien to the ordinary Arab as was commonly and fashionably thought. America can now demonstrate that it stands behind those ideas by putting its money where its mouth is instead of being obsessed with maintaining the status quo, i.e., the one where ruthless dictators are kept in power for the sake of stability, breeding resentment toward America among the common folks.

To be sure, there are no easy solutions to the situation in Syria or the Greater Middle East in general. Arming moderate forces (probably easier said than done) within the opposition should alleviate the problem America faces with respect to Islamic rebels. Keeping boots off the ground seems like a no-brainer. As in Libya, air strikes and cruise missiles may be an effective and cheap solution (it should be noted that the West may wish for a regime change but doesn't seem eager to set that as an objective), contributing virtually nothing to America's long-term budget problems (which result from entitlement spending) while providing the kind of assets against the regime the rebels never could have dreamed of. In the long run, it can only be hoped that the ongoing revolutions mark the beginning of the end of autocracy in the Middle East, just as the 1848 revolutions did in Europe.

Why the North might want war

Many are asking what could North Korea possibly gain from an all-out war, a war that'd certainly lead to its own destruction. If North Korea really wants to provoke a war, it will be because of this:

(The Washington Post)

Their military equipment is at least fifty years old, nearing or way past its "best before" date. Soon it will be of little use and North Korea has absolutely no money (or anything for that matter) to obtain new equipment. And, with the Soviet Union long gone, they've got no real friends either. Combine this with the fact that the North Korean regime probably truly believes that the United States and South Korea are out to get them, just waiting for the right moment to invade, and you end up with a regime that believes it's running out of time. Either they set off what they believe to be inevitable now that they still have the initiative, or they wait and watch their (largely imaginary) military prowess decay and fade away, leaving behind a carcass of a country, to be consumed by the vulturous America and South Korea.

So yes, in the crazy, self-induced world the North Korean regime lives in, a war would make sense.

The price of a non-marketable good

Came across this crazy piece of news. A pair inherits an art piece ("Canyon") worth $65 million and has to pay an inheritance tax worth $29 million. The problem, however, is that the art piece includes a stuffed bald eagle, which cannot be sold since the bird is protected. (Obviously, if a stuffed bald eagle could be sold this would only encourage people to hunt them.) In other words, "Canyon" cannot be sold due to the stuffed bald eagle and yet the pair is stuck with a tax bill of $29 million. So how can it have a price tag of $65 million? How can a non-marketable good have a market value (the price of collectibles is obviously based on their market value, not some out-of-the-hat valuation)?

Even more worrying, the IRS is acting like the vengeful, petty bureaucrats that they are:

Placing a value on an item that cannot be sold is no easy feat. The venerable auction house Christie’s placed the value of "Canyon" at zero. The IRS initially put it at $15 million, then jumped the figure to $65 million when Sundell and Homem refused to pay, according to The New York Times.
The IRS, which declined to comment on the matter, is not only asking for $29 million in taxes, but also an $11.7 million “gross valuation misstatement” penalty, according to Forbes.

Inheritance taxes are nuts anyway. What exactly has the federal government done to deserve $29 million out of "Canyon"? They're simply robbing someone's estate.

Syria - what's taking so long?

The neocons are pushing for a regime change in Syria:

For the people and the fighters of Idleb, the fight goes on. They know that once Assad is finished with Homs and Hama, and once he thinks he can get away with it, he will turn his attention back to the north. Then it will be their turn, and the dictator will exact a bloody and terrible revenge for their effrontery.

What could prevent this is an effective coalition to counter the anti-Western one (Iran, Hezbollah, Russia) that currently underwrites the dictator. This Western coalition can only happen outside the auspices of the U.N., where Russia and China have already vetoed Security Council resolutions demanding Assad step down. (The Weekly Standard)

That was at the end of February. Now it's too late for the rebels in Idlib. Bolstered by Western inactivity, Assad resorted to tactics such as shellings residential neighborhoods.

The neocons, after years of ridicule, are still confident about their ideas, and why not? What has been happening in the Greater Middle East lately is more or less exactly what the neocons said would happen. Removing a constant, Saddam Hussein, from the Middle East helped alter what many considered a fixed status quo of autocratic regimes.

The intervention in Libya was a tremendous success. The cost of the operation has been estimated at about 3-4 billion dollars with the US being responsible for about a third of that amount. There were no casualties. In short, that's a lot of bang for the buck. In comparison, the United States spends nearly one trillion (a thousand billions) dollars on Medicare & Medicaid annually.

If Asssad is allowed to survive, the Western world has effectively helped set an example that whenever there's a internal revolt, you should resort to brutal measures to suppress the revolt. Any "peaceful solution" that preserves Assad as the head of Syria, as supported by second-rate countries such as Russia and the always-irrelevant UN, would be a travesty, an idealist piece of paper that only serves to bolster Assad's grip on Syria. The West needs to do more than just freeze credit cards.

Strip clubs, pornography and feminists

The United States is an easy target when it comes to narrow-minded attitudes toward sexuality. Here's Texas, the heart of the Bible Belt:

In 2007, state legislators passed the Sexually Oriented Business Fee Act, which imposed the fee ["pole tax"] on nearly 200 establishments that feature live nude performances and allow the consumption of alcohol. The $5-per-customer entrance fee, which is imposed on the business and not the patron, is intended to raise money for sexual assault prevention programs and health insurance coverage for low-income people. (NYTimes)

This a form of collective punishment, which is kinda perverse in a country that values individual responsibility. The tax assumes that everyone attending strip clubs is responsible for the actions of a few rapists. 

Moreover, open attitudes toward adult entertainment have actually been found to reduce violence against women. So, if the aim is to reduce the incidence of rape, Texan lawmakers should consider subsidizing strip clubs rather than taxing them.

But at least it's still legal in Texas to take your clothes off for money. In the so-called progressive Nordic countries women's rights and liberties are being curbed by feminists (a female supremacist movement that opposes individual liberties and equal rights) to a much, much greater degree than some conservatives in the United States ever could. Here's Julie Bindel, a feminist author, writing about banning strip clubs and pornography in Iceland:

Iceland has passed a law that will result in every strip club in the country being shut down.

Even more impressive: the Nordic state is the first country in the world to ban stripping and lapdancing for feminist, rather than religious, reasons.

So, feminists are united with religious extremists in their contempt of women's right to make decisions about their own lives. Only their reasons differ.

Kolbrún Halldórsdóttir, the politician who first proposed the ban, firmly told the national press on Wednesday: "It is not acceptable that women or people in general are a product to be sold."

This is just idiotic. How is selling "yourself" at a strip club any different from selling "yourself" at an office? Nearly every profession is a mixture of inherent talent and obtained skill and those are the things you're selling. The labor market consists of people selling themselves. So, the problem is not that these people are selling themselves as "products"; the problem is that feminists don't happen to like this particular product even though it's none of their business. Feminists, like religious extremists, have a vision of what a proper woman is like (even their rhetoric is similar: "It is not acceptable that women..."). Any deviations from this standard are to be looked down upon. Feminists perceive women not as adult individuals capable of using their own discretion but as child-like members of a collective who are to do what the collective tells them to do.

Supporters of the bill say that some of the clubs are a front for prostitution – and that many of the women work there because of drug abuse and poverty rather than free choice. I have visited a strip club in Reykjavik and observed the women. None of them looked happy in their work.

What an idiot. If "not looking happy" or "working just to make ends meet" is a qualification for banning an occupation, I guess all of us are to be unemployed in the not-so-distant future. Simple-minded authoritarians like Bindel are not really helping the situation by not showing much of any respect for these women. If feminists and cultural conservatives actually respected women working in the adult industry (and taught their children to respect them as well), these women might have a better time at work and life in general. I'd guess that a big reason why some women in the adult industry don't feel appreciated is precisely because narrow-minded people like Bindel don't appreciate them as adults capable of making their own decisions. Instead, they're trying to force-feed the "you're a victim" mantra. This could also explain why drug abusers and poor people are overrepresented in the adult industry; only they've really got nothing to lose. Mainstreamization of pornography would attract more "mainstream" people. In fact, it's not surprising anymore to find that an adult entertainer holds an academic degree. Of course, feminists probably consider well-educated women who choose to work in the adult industry as traitors.

Let's end this post on a positive note:

Let’s look at attitudes towards women – studies of men who had seen X-rated movies found that they were significantly more tolerant and accepting of women than those men that didn’t see those movies, and studies by other investigators, female as well as male, essentially found similarly that there was no detectable relationship of the amount of exposure to pornography and any measure of misogynist attitudes. No researcher or critic has found the opposite, that exposure to pornography – by any definition – has had a cause and effect relationship towards ill feelings or actions against women. No correlation has even been found between exposure to porn and calloused attitudes toward women.

Lisää kieltoja ratkaisuiksi ongelmiin

Pettämätöntä logiikkaa:

Sisäministeri Päivi Räsäsen (kd.) mielestä ravintoloissa tapahtuvaan seksikauppaan puututtaisiin parhaiten kieltämällä seksin osto Ruotsin malliin.

Räsäsen mukaan ostokielto selkeyttäisi pelisääntöjä.

- Toimintaan pystyttäisiin aina puuttumaan, tapahtuipa se sitten yleisellä paikalla tai ei, hän sanoo lehdelle. (Iltalehti)

Pari päivää sitten uutisoitiin, että tullin haaviin jäi kevään ja kesän aikana lasti laittomia potenssilääkkeitä. Kerta oli tuskin ensimmäinen, eli voimme olettaa mustan pörssin lääkekaupan olevan jonkin sortin ongelma. Räsäsen logiikan mukaisesti ehdotan lääkkeiden oston kieltoa. Samaan hengenvetoon ehdotan pelien ja elokuvien ostokieltoa, jotta piratismiin "pystyttäisiin aina puuttumaan".

Kristillisdemokraattien Räsänen nähtävästi käyttää asemaansa sisäministerinä hyväkseen ajaakseen kristittyjen sairaita seksuaalinormeja Suomen lakiin.

Tragedy in Norway and the assault on individual liberties

Since Anders Behring Breivik used to play Modern Warfare 2 with the intended purpose of learning military tactics, why don't we ban the game? This is pretty much the line of reasoning dozens of politicians have utilized in the wake of recent school shootings in various countries. This is the line of reasoning Finnish politicians and wannabe politicans are now utilizing to further their political agendas in the wake of the mass murder in Norway. Our Minister for Foreign Affairs, Erkki Tuomioja, wants to put restrictions on online "hate speech", specifying hate speech as speech that encourages people to do what Breivik did. (I haven't seen such hate speech myself, kinda like I have never seen child pornography on the internet even though some politicians make it sound as if you can't get far without running into such pornography.) More specifically, he wants to restrict the use of aliases which champions of free speech have historically used in order to avoid persecution. Dissidents in China, the Middle East and so on rely on anonymity. He also wants to restrict gun ownership rights, saying that "no one needs" guns with magazine capacity at or above 30, as if it were up to him to decide what people need.

It's a disgrace that the actions of a single madman are used as a pretext to curb individual liberties, liberties that belong to everyone, liberties that the vast majority of us use in a responsible way. This is why there aren't many lessons to be learned from the massacre. Anti-immigration "racists" are no more responsible for what Breivik did than Modern Warfare 2 is. A quick look at Breivik's political positions reveals that the guy is a mess if anything, combining Christianity, liberalism (he cites classical liberals such as F.A. Hayek, Ludwig von Mises and even Ayn Rand who was a staunch atheist), conservatism, anti-Marxism, Islamophobia, nationalism etc. in his writings. None of these in particular makes him mad. Breivik was mad in believing that his actions would spark a European civil war that'd end by the year 2083. If anything, this resembles Charles Manson's reasoning (Manson believed that the murders he orchestrated would ignite a race war that'd inevitably be won by blacks) and Masonic conspiracy theories (Breivik was a Freemason). Moreover, Breivik's writing is incredibly child-like and idiotic, as revealed by the fact that he actually proposes using Modern Warfare 2 as a military simulator and World of Warcraft as a means to hide your real activities.

So, look no further than the fact that Anders Behring Breivik was both a lunatic and an idiot. You're not helping anything by attributing Breivik's behavior to video games and broken marriages like this Swedish terrorism expert does, citing video games and his parents' broken marriage as causes of his "personality disorder". Should we draw the conclusion that you belong to some kind of a risk group if 1) your parents are divorced and 2) you play Modern Warfare 2? How many millions does that make? I'm sure many of you can name a few who meet the requirements. But how many people you know who could actually start shooting kids? Our "anti-immigration" politician Timo Soini said it best: "We're talking about a single fanatic, a psychopath and the murders he committed."

We should not start restricting our liberties simply because some lunatics abuse theirs. For lunatics, any excuse will do. We just have to live with it (and punish these individuals when they do act); that's the price of liberty. Otherwise, if we do start restricting our liberties, there's nothing left to live for. This is why I'm more worried about what our politicians will do now than I'm worried about the next attack. Restricting the use of online aliases would alone be a greater tragedy than the massacre in Norway.

----

There's a very serious lesson to be drawn from all this and that is that the Norwegian state failed in what is the most fundamental responsibility of the state; protecting individuals from criminals. While the massacre was ongoing the local police did nothing but wait for a SWAT unit that then ran into some difficulties before finally making it to the island. It's also telling that Breivik didn't shoot himself once he was done. When news of the incident started to emerge I immediately assumed the killer had committed suicide. Then I remembered that Norway is like Finland: murderers can expect lenient sentences and prison conditions are actually quite comfortable.

Keynes on reparations

Finished reading Keynes's The Economic Consequences of the Peace, published in 1920. A few notes:

-Keynes recommended that Germany should be made to pay no more than £2 billion in reparations. The actual size of the bill was initially settled at £24 billion, which Germany is still paying. The antagonists of the story are the French, who wanted Germany to bleed (going as far as insisting that German private property abroad should be expropriated), and Wilson, who was just too weak to resist the French. In fact, the book could be used to argue that France caused the Second World War.
-In retrospect, it seems that Keynes was wrong about the economic consequences of the peace. As the German economy grew in the '20s, it became more apparent that the problem with reparations was political and that Germany regained its status as an industrial powerhouse faster than expected (at least until the Crash of 1929). The reparations didn't ruin the economy but the psychological effects of the Treaty of Versailles were effectively used by the nazis to seize power. Before Versailles, Germans were led to believe by the Allies that peace would be built on Wilson's Fourteen Points. Because of French opposition and Wilson's weakness, it didn't turn out that way.
-Two numbers struck me, as they always do. Germany had a population of nearly 70 million in 1914, before the outbreak of the war. Russia had a population of 150 million around the same time. Today Germany has just 80 million and Russia 140 million inhabitants. To get a better picture of the effects of the two world wars on the populations of these two countries, compare their demographic story to that of the United States which had around 100 million inhabitants in 1914 and has 310 million inhabitants today.
-Keynes recommended arranging some huge international loan to help Europe rebuild. Keynes argued that in practice the lender would have to be the United States. This didn't come to fruition but this is exactly what happened after the Second World War in the form of the Marshall Plan. Also, apart from the Soviet Union, the Allies turned out to be far more lenient toward Germany after the Second, at least after initially contemplating plans to turn Germany into a cripple. (The onset of the Cold War surely contributed to this.)

Some quotes:

"The policy of reducing Germany to servitude for a generation, of degrading the lives of millions of human beings, and of depriving a whole nation of happiness should be abhorrent and detestable, -abhorrent and detestable, even if it were possible, even if it enriched ourselves, even if [it] did not sow the decay of the whole civilised life of Europe. Some preach it in the name of Justice. In the great events of man's history, in the unwinding of the complex fates of nations Justice is not so simple. And if it were, nations are not auhorised, by religion or by natural morals, to visit on the children of their enemies the misdoings of parents or of rulers."
...
"If we aim deliberately at the impoverishment of Central Europe, vengeance, I dare predict, will not limp. Nothing can then delay for very long that final civil war between the forces of Reaction and the despairing convulsions of Revolution, before which the horrors of the late German war fill fade into nothing, and which will destroy, whoever is victor, the civilisation and the progress of our generation."
...
"But who can say how much is endurable, or in what direction men will seek at last to escape from their misfortunes?"

Hate to be proven right

As I was saying:



A bunch of anonymous clowns, whose apparent role models include the Italian Blackshirts (with the exception that the Blackshirts at least had the guts to show their faces) and the Hitler Youth, riot in Copenhagen. Even the habit of smashing store windows as part of an attack on capitalism is something they may have picked up from their German idols. The only thing holding these fascists back is the fact that they're in the minority.