Sweden and Finland still enforcing mandatory sterilization

There's been a campaign going on in Sweden for a good while to change a law that requires people undergoing a sex change to be sterilized (read more here). Unfortunately, the Swedish Christian Democrat party is stopping the reform from happening. Meanwhile, in Finland, we have an identical law, but no-one cares, so there isn't even a campaign against it.

There was a pretty good text on the whole thing here, and I blogged about the Finnish legislation earlier (in Finnish) here.

2011 in review

Another year gone by. What did we get up to in 2011?

* We did our best to promote Goblin Camp, with a let's play kind of thing and a bunch of other posts. The game is still a going concern, and although there hasn't been an update for a while, I'm assured there will be. Eventually. Back in February, I put together really epic camp. The website is here; if you haven't tried it, do.

* There was an election in Finland, that led to no noticeable changes in Finnish politics. We have some really good-looking athletes, though.

* They killed 'Usāmah; I was skeptical about that being the death-blow to terrorism. Sadly, terrorism took a different turn shortly thereafter with the senseless attacks in Norway, the background to which we discussed. Steve Jobs also passed away, and we felt that his eulogies went too far.

* Throughout the year, we were alarmed by the police, as despite the death of "Osama", new threats to our precious bodily fluids continued to emerge. To combat these, we got everything from American police UAVs and the German police going all Gestapo on the German Pirate Party to the Finnish police hacking your phone. I also lost faith in Radley Balko, of The Agitator, for hithcing up with the Kremlin's propaganda machine, and my post on the topic inspired a TV show host to discuss my underwear.

* There was a lot of Minecraft. At the beginning of the year, I was still hanging around Epic Island, and we were impressed by music. We also weighed in on the Mojang - Zenimax legal battle.

* Apart from Minecraft, we liked Harms Way, but were disappointed by Mass Effect 2 being a sexist white supremacist game and by EA's various antics. The future looked bleak. In other media, we liked Detroit 1-8-7 and Sucker Punch, as well as the fantastic Robot.

* We all enjoyed some excellent music!

* Some memes were participated in, and scientology was addressed. We also started a series of posts on the Bible.

* There was, of course, a lot of hockey. At the very beginning of the year, the wrong guy was made MVP of the World Juniors, and later on Winnipeg got an NHL team. Sadly, our favorite NHL player called it quits. However, there were the world champs. In my preview, I had a good feeling about Team Finland, and even though Mats Sundin assured us it was impossible, Finland actually won. We were a little disappointed by the overblown coverage given to one particular goal, though.

Sadly, in the words of Jonathan Toews, the summer of 2011 was the worst ever for hockey. Not only did three NHL players pass away during the summer, but the plane carrying the KHL's Lokomotiv Yaroslavl team crashed, killing the whole team. Earlier this month, the New York Times published a series of stories on Derek Boogaard, an NHL enforcer who died last summer. I highly recommend reading them.

**

Maybe that's a bit of a sad note to end this post on, but as the new year comes around, it won't hurt to take a moment to remember those who aren't around to see it happen. Having said that, though, I'd like to thank everyone who read this sorry excuse for a blag over the past year, and wish you all a happy new year! See you in 2012.

Mojang Milestone

The Swedish indie developer Mojang recently sold the three millionth copy of their flagship product, the block placing game Minecraft. Congratulations, guys! Not bad for a game still in beta.



Minecraft was initially a one-man project by game developer Markus Persson, based on Infiniminer by indie developer Zachtronics Industries.



Here's a picture of Markus, also known by his nickname, Notch.



The success of Minecraft has allowed Markus to found his own game development company, Mojang AB.



While much of the work at Mojang is put in the ongoing development of Minecraft, Mojang has a second team working on a separate game, Scrolls.



As more and more people have become familiar with Minecraft, many people have become curious about the company's unusual name. I, too, wondered what it meant, but luckily my online detective skills allowed me to find the answer.

It turns out that "mojang" is Sundanese for "girl".



It's often used in a phrase "mojang Bandung", literally "girl from Bandung". Figuratively it means a pretty girl, Bandung having a reputation for beautiful girls.



Now that we've cleared the mystery of their name, let's have a look at what's going on at Mojang's offices.

Some reading on Norway

I'm working on a longer post on what happened in Norway in Finnish. I'll try to return to the topic in English later. For now, here's some recommended reading:

New York Times: Breivik and His Enablers

What has become clear in Oslo and on Utoya Island is that delusional anti-Muslim rightist hatred aimed at “multiculturalist” liberals can be just as dangerous as Al Qaeda’s anti-infidel poison: Breivik alone killed many more people than the four Islamist suicide bombers in the 7/7 London attack of 2005.

Guardian: Anders Breivik's chilling anti-feminism

Breivik's introduction is entirely given over to a half-baked history of political correctness, "no aspect" of which, he tells us, is "more prominent … than feminist ideology". The PC-project is bent on "transforming a patriarchy into a matriarchy" and "intends to deny the intrinsic worth of native Christian European heterosexual males". But more than that, it has succeeded. The "feminisation of European culture" has been underway since the 1830s, and by now, men have been reduced to an "emasculate[d] … touchy-feely subspecies".

The Nation: Europe's Homegrown Terrorists

Unlike Muslims in the wake of Islamist attacks, Christians weren’t called upon to insist upon their moderation. No one argued that white people had to get with the Enlightenment project. But the bombings—and the presumptions about who was responsible—suggest that the true threat to European democracy is not Islam or Muslims but, once again, fascism and racists.

New York Times: Killings in Norway Spotlight Anti-Muslim Thought in U.S.

The man accused of the killing spree in Norway was deeply influenced by a small group of American bloggers and writers who have warned for years about the threat from Islam, lacing his 1,500-page manifesto with quotations from them, as well as copying multiple passages from the tract of the Unabomber.

BBC: Norway and the politics of hate

Back in 1985, I was in the US reporting on the emergence of right-wing militias. They were springing up across the Mid-West. Some were little more than gun clubs. Others trained men in uniform.

They believed that their idea of America was under threat. Many saw the federal government in Washington as the enemy, staffed with officials who were betraying America's core values.

A strong strain of paranoia ran through their conversation and publications. I recall a man showing me a grainy photograph, claiming it proved there were secret Russian bases in Michigan.

Most of this reflected the margins of a society and could easily be dismissed. But the idea that his government was the real enemy worked away inside the mind of a young man called Timothy McVeigh. Sometime later he packed a van with fertiliser and diesel fuel and blew up the federal building in Oklahoma, killing 168 people.

And, finally, The Colbert Report.

A moment of silence

After what happened in Norway this past weekend, this blog is taking a moment of silence. I may write more about this topic later, but for now I merely hope that the hate-mongers in all our countries would also take a moment and think about the consequences of building up a culture of intolerance, racism and hatred. What happened this weekend is a stark reminder of how inhuman and brutal the ideology of "immigration criticism" fundamentally is.

Richard Dawkins is an asshole

Richard Dawkins is someone I think very highly of. Or at least I used to, until he took a stand on the Internet to compare a woman's, Skepchick's Rebecca Watson's, that is, fear of sexual assault to his annoyance at someone chewing bubblegum.

Read Phil Plait's summary of events here. Finnish readers can also check out Kaj Sotala's blog here. Ms. Watson's own reply is here. Frankly, the only way I can describe this is that Richard Dawkins is not only being an asshole, but is adamantly refusing to acknowledge it.

This whole thing is just depressing. As I understand it, what Ms. Watson was saying, was that a dude was creepy to her in an elevator, and she thought it was creepy. Her advice to men: don't be creepy.

Of course, what with the culture wars going on, you don't have to go far down in Mr. Plait's comments section for this to start:

At this point you are basically advocating total segregation of men and women.

Men are not allowed to make even the slightest advance towards women.

And it goes on from there. On that forum, and on so many others, people are jumping on bandwagons, and the most popular one is dedicated to framing her view as an attack on all men everywhere. According to these feminazis, men aren't allowed to have a sexuality at all and aren't allowed to talk to women, and so on and so forth.

I would be intellectually dishonest if I didn't mention that a particularly obnoxious anti-feminist from my very own political party got on the same case, ridiculously summarizing this whole episode as feminists being enraged at a woman being asked to have coffee, because they think all men are rapists.

You can watch the video that prompted all this nonsense here, and determine for yourself that she says none of the things she's been accused of. Seriously, she doesn't. She gives men everywhere a very good, reasonable piece of advice: don't be creepy.

Most of the response to this is just astonishing. Not only is what she actually said being totally distorted to make her look ridiculous, but the whole point of this concerted attack is that she feels wrong. How dare that woman feel threatened! Why, it's an insult to men everywhere.

Read Ms. Watson's rejoinder to the whole thing here; it's beautiful.

So here we are today. I am a feminist, because skeptics and atheists made me one. Every time I mention, however delicately, a possible issue of misogyny or objectification in our community, the response I get shows me that the problem is much worse than I thought, and so I grow angrier. I knew that eventually I would reach a sort of feminist singularity where I would explode and in my place would rise some kind of Captain Planet-type superhero but for feminists. I believe that day has nearly arrived.

I, too, would like to say that this is exactly what makes me a feminist. From my point of view, the people attacking Ms. Watson live in an insane world. She felt creeped out in a situation where I, at least, consider that it was totally reasonable, and in response to her saying that, men from Richard Dawkins on down attack her. Clearly she's not allowed to feel creeped out!

What makes it quite simply sinister is that this fits in perfectly with the attitude that so much of our society takes to sexual harassment, objectification of women and even sex crime. The victimization of women in our society is real, but far too often any attempt to draw attention to it is dismissed and ridiculed. Feminist critiques of the gender system are totally misrepresented as ridiculous strawman caricatures, and things like false rape accusations are played up far beyond their actual numbers to suggest that all these women are just being silly.

I'm constantly surrounded by this. I already mentioned the ludicrous caricature that a fellow Pirate party member presented of this particular incident. Earlier, another fellow blogger dismayed me on the topic of rape. I have the greatest respect for him as a person, but it's just shocking when he puts together blog posts with such utterly ridiculous strawmen as "feminists claim rape accusations can never be false" and so on. Just last week, Finland's Aamulehti published a particularly idiotic article where the author claimed that in America, men can't even get into the same elevator as women without facing a rape charge, with no evidence beyond the woman's word required.

This stuff is completely moronic and untrue, and the people peddling it are being maliciously dishonest. What's even worse is that by doing so, they're actively trying to make claims of sexual harassment and rape appear suspect, overstated and false. Bizarrely, they often justify themselves by claiming that they're pursuing sexual equality: a lunatic definition of equality where men's sexual needs are paramount, and women simply aren't allowed to feel differently. The Pirate party member I've mentioned also authored a proposal for increasing sexual equality, which included using the school system to, frankly, teach girls to put out more. When it was pointed out that this kind of approach would almost certainly increase sexual harassment, in his response the proposer simply ignored this. To him, it seems, sexual equality means the satisfaction of men's needs, and the adjustment of women to conform to men's needs. And he, in all seriousness, calls himself an "equality activist".

By attacking feminism, and especially by attacking feminist critiques of sexual oppression, these people are quite simply enabling more sexual harassment and sex crime. The more we create an atmosphere where complaints of sexual harassment are viewed as frivolous, the more we make sexual harassment acceptable. It's absolutely unconscionable and immoral to participate in this kind of activity. Given my "criminal record", it should be obvious that I'm all for highlighting problems of gender and sexual equality for both sexes; what I don't approve of is this idea that it needs to be done through undermining feminism and women's rights. That whole notion is based on turning feminism into a ludicrous strawman.

The single most appalling reaction I've encountered to this whole business came from a wealthy white man, who was absolutely incensed that people like Ms. Watson are treating men as potential sexual offenders. He was hurt by this sexism! So somehow, Ms. Watson feeling creeped out is transformed into not only her being a sexist against the man who was creeping her out, but an attack on the rights of a man half the world away. Never mind that neither Ms. Watson nor Mr. Plait made any claims that "all men" are anything at all, or even the fact that this "all men are rapists" notion mostly comes from rabid anti-feminists who are hell-bent on regarding the SCUM manifesto as feminism's Protocols of the Elders of Zion. In my opinion, nothing illustrates how bad the situation is as well as a privileged white man coming away from this incident feeling hurt because women feel harassed and threatened, and somehow that infringes on his rights.

So really, when I see this kind of activity going on, it reaffirms my belief not only in feminism, but in the necessity of feminism. When someone like Richard Dawkins feels the need to speak up solely to belittle and ridicule a woman's experience of feeling harassed, it's obvious that we have a problem. When Ms. Watson regularly receives threats of murder and rape for speaking out, we have a problem. To far too many of us, women are still second-class citizens whose emotions and concerns can be dismissed, and even should be dismissed.

It's easy to think we live in a perfect world of gender equality, where feminism is no longer necessary. Then something like this comes along, and we're forcefully reminded that feminism is still very necessary. Sexual harassment isn't something to point and laugh at. It's especially reprehensible when privileged white men are the ones doing the pointing and laughing.

**

On the subject of response, I'd be remiss if I didn't note that this even made the front page of Conservapedia! You know, the Reliable Encyclopedia (tm) that's bowdleriz...erm, retranslating the Bible. What it said when I checked was this:

Boorish and uncouth atheist men are causing disharmony between the sexes in the atheist community.

Followed by a link to a ridiculous blog post on this very topic. Atheists: boorish, uncouth and fat. Yes, there is a Conservapedia page titled "Atheism and obesity", and even worse, somewhere there are people who think that that page is a reasonable argument.

And I'll finish with a humorous endnote: Skepchick also has a Swedish-language site, which I shouldn't have been reading in the middle of the night, because I genuinely misread the second item of this post as "Finskor har också känslor. Så även skaldjur."

Make poverty history - done.

One thing I really respect Playboy for is the wide variety of people they give space to in their pages. I just got my copy of the August 2010 issue, featuring an interview with Cornel West, an outspoken African-American professor at Princeton. In that interview, he made the most astonishing comment I've ever read in Playboy.

Playboy: Won't there always be poor people in America?

West: It's hard to say. There are no poor people in Norway. There are no poor people in Sweden. It depends on how your society is organized.

I had to read that three times until I believed that it actually says what it says. A Princeton professor is seriously telling us that there's no poverty in Scandinavia.

I can't believe it. Has the man ever seen Scandinavia? At least a while back one of the things one might notice in Oslo was the heroin addicts living in the public parks. And I'm sure that if the esteemed professor cares to, someone can show him the homeless people living under the bridges in Stockholm.

The only way I can make sense out of his comment is that he doesn't understand definitions of poverty. Sure, neither Sweden or Norway officially have any percentage of their population under the international poverty line. That does not mean there are no poor people in those countries.

For example, according to Statistics Sweden, a government body, in 2008 every sixth child under the age of 6 in Sweden lives below the poverty line. Child poverty is also growing in Norway. Incidentally, out of a total population of around 300,000,000, the United States had 660,000 homeless people (Wikipedia: that's just about 0,002% of the population. Sweden, with a population of circa 9,000,000 had 17,800 homeless (thelocal.se): 0,0019%, or just about 0,002% of the population. It's funny that although Sweden does have much less poverty, absolute or relative, than the United States, the amount of homeless people is apparently the same.

Is Scandinavia really so mythologized in the United States that a university professor can say something like that with a straight face? Does he really imagine that the Scandinavian countries have come up with a magical formula to eliminate poverty completely?

Certainly I agree with his broader point, that to a large extent the amount of poverty in a society is a function of how the society is organized. But to say that there are no poor people in Sweden or Norway is just so downright ridiculous that I can't take the guy seriously.

Sadomasochism on trial in Sweden

(via Tommi Paalanen)

thelocal.se: Swedish court considers sadomasochism case

A Swedish court is to consider the issue of how much sexual violence is legally permitted between two consenting partners in a case involving a 32-year-old man who came into contact with his 16-year-old sex partner via a sex website.

The teenager, on the instructions of the 32-year-old man, penned a letter declaring that she wanted to be "used, abused and thoroughly humiliated". When the pair met the girl was, among other things, locked into a cage and had clamps attached to her breasts, according to a TV4 Malmö news programme.

Police became involved after a relative of the girl noticed the bruises all over her body.

The prosecutor, Ulrika Rogland, has ruled out rape as the parties are accepted to have consented to their sexual liaison. But the court is set to rule on the issue of where the legal limits lie with regards to violence inflicted on another human being, even if they agree to it.

"What I want to establish is that even if they say they are in agreement over this then you not allowed to seriously assault someone. It is on this issue that the district court has to issue a ruling, is this aggravated assault and was she able to agree to it?" Rogland said to the local Sydsvenskan daily.

The man's lawyer has expressed surprise over the charges and an expert on sadomasochism is set to testify at the trial.

The issue has never before been considered in a Swedish court, according to Lena Holmqvist, an expert in criminal law at Uppsala University.

"Now we will really get the issue tried - to what extent can consent preclude the need for violent sex," she said.

What's at stake in the case is simple: do you have rights over your body? It's inevitable the discussion will get bogged down in the age difference and the nature of BDSM, but these are totally irrelevant. Does a person have a right to be assaulted if they want to be?

If they don't, does boxing become illegal? Or hockey? We'll see what folkhemmet decides.

Heja Danmark!

I've been going on about Denmark, and I'm not stopping yet. They beat the US 2-1 in overtime to clinch a spot in the top 12, and it looks like they'll be taking some points with them, too. It's likely, far from certain, but likely that this year, Denmark will secure a spot in the top 8 for the first time and get to play in the world championship quarterfinals.

While beating both Finland and the US at the world champs is impressive, it's not unheard of. Each year, there are two first division championship tournaments, and the winners get to compete in the world championships the next year. Denmark won their tournament in 2002, and made their first appearance at the top level since the 1950's at the 2003 world champs in Finland. In their first championship game in 50 years, they beat the US 5-2 to send them to the relegation series. In the next round, they fought Canada to a 1-1 tie, but failed to make the top 8. By the way, that was the only game Canada didn't win that year.

The Finnish media especially has been giving a lot of credit to head coach Per Bäckman. I don't want to take anything away from his achievement, because he's been an excellent coach, but really, this isn't such a huge surprise. Most of the "small countries" at the hockey world champs always used to play a very boring trap defense, and compensate for their lack of individual skill with a lot of stick fouls. The Ukraine was especially notorious for this in the early '00s, and after the rule changes inaugurated in the NHL after the 2004-2005 lockout, a couple of those countries dropped right off the hockey map.

Denmark was never one of those. From their first days at the world champs, they played a spirited, offensive style of hockey that was totally different from the 0-1-4 clutch-and-grab of most other countries at their level. Despite some poor years in the later 00's, they hung on to a spot at the championships and occasionally gave some countries a very hard time.



These days, they have a couple of impressive NHL players. Frans Nielsen plays great for the New York Islanders, and Ottawa's Peter Regin was one of their best players in this year's playoffs, scoring a couple of goals and securing a spot on the Ottawa first line for a while. A standout player in the game against the US was the St. Louis Blues' Lars Eller. Perhaps their best NHL player is Vancouver's Jannik Hansen, who couldn't even make it to the games. A big part of the reason Denmark didn't make the Olympics was that the Olympic qualifiers were held in the middle of the NHL season.

But it takes more than a couple of NHL stars, no matter how impressively they play, and the real driving force behind Denmark's rise is their own indigenous hockey program. The third and fourth liners and the depth defensemen are playing at a much higher level than their counterparts were five or so years ago. The Danish hockey program produces bona fide players, and recently they restricted the number of foreign players on Danish teams to give their own guys more ice time. All this adds up to an impressive world champs run, and I'm delighted. As I said before, I've been a big fan of Denmark ever since they got to the world championships because of their fearless play, and this is a great time to be a Team Denmark fan.



Sadly, there are still serious flaws in the way the Danes play. Their team defense is somewhat mediocre, and they have the worst penalty kill in the entire tournament. In the second round, they'll meet up with Russia and Slovakia, and that might get ugly. Still, they're playing excellent hockey, so who knows how far they'll go?

A particularly delightful aspect of this Danish triumphal march is one I alluded to earlier on my Finnish-language blog. The Finnish media, and Finnish hockey pundits and players both, often complain about having to play against the "small countries". The games are just a waste of time, these countries shouldn't be allowed at the games, and so on, and so forth. Of course, they completely miss the fact that if the IIHF didn't allow silly "small countries" at the games, Finland would never have made it in. Now that Finland is teetering on the brink of the relegation series, maybe the Finnish media will finally shut up about "having to play these games". And that's a victory for hockey.

Rejoice!

I guess I should explain I've been a huge fan of Team Denmark ever since they climbed back into the hockey world championships in '03. And yesterday?



TSN: DENMARK UPSETS FINLAND AT WORLD HOCKEY CHAMPIONSHIP

Cologne, Germany (Sports Network) - Frederik Andersen stopped 36 of 37 shots as Denmark shocked Finland, 4-1, at the 2010 World Ice Hockey Championship on Saturday.

Frans Nielsen tallied twice, with Peter Regin and Julian Jakobsen scoring once each for the Danes, who didn't even qualify for the 2010 Winter Games but opened up Group D play with the tourney's first surprising final score.

Just rejoice!

Swedish town applauds rapist

This is basically that one South Park episode where they have a convicted murderer freed because he's from South Park.

The Local: Girl raped and rejected by Swedish community

A storm of outrage has met revelations by Sveriges Television (SVT) that a 14-year-old girl from a small Swedish community was raped at her school only to be rejected by her friends and adult society when she reported the attack.

I could quote all of the article, and I could write a book about this whole topic. I intend to return to it in future posts, but for now, suffice to say that this is an old, old story, here taken to tragicomic extremes.

A 15-year old boy raped a 14-year-old girl. Despite his initial denial, there was forensic evidence and witness statements supporting the girl, and he confessed and was convicted. Despite this, the community decided that it must somehow all be her fault. At the end-of-term ceremony at the local church, he was celebrated as a hero.

Later that same night, he raped a 17-year-old.

The community he lives in believes that this, too, is a fabrication, and the boy is innocent of both crimes. He is a local hero.

This is the year 2010, in Sweden. You can rape two underage girls and be the town hero for doing it.

The Pirate Bay trial gets worse

The ongoing Pirate Bay case is, to put it simply, astonishing. In latest news, it turns out the presiding judge is a member of Sweden's biggest pro-copyright associations.

The Guardian:

The judge who presided over the recent Pirate Bay trial has denied he had a "conflict of interest", after a Swedish radio station revealed he is a member of the country's main copyright association.

Sveriges Radio, described as Sweden's answer to the BBC, said that judge Norström is not only a member of the Swedish Copyright Association but also sits on the board of the Swedish Association for the Protection of Industrial Property, an organisation that lobbies for tougher copyright laws. The four co-founders of Pirate Bay were found guilty last week of charges relating to copyright infringement.

Judge Norström today denied his involvement with the two pro-copyright organisations constituted a "conflict of interest" in his ability to preside over the most high-profile trial involving illegal filesharing in European history.

My sincere, heartfelt thanks to the Guardian for that beautiful last sentence.

The way this case has been prosecuted absolutely defies belief. In my uncharitable moments, I'm tempted to say that the Swedish justice system is totally corrupt. Of course, ours is no better.

By and large, the Nordic countries are believed to be, and believe themselves to be, almost incorruptible. This is mostly because we stick to a ridiculously narrow definition of corruption. Finns and Swedes imagine their justice systems are incorruptible because traffic cops won't accept cash bribes. The real corruption here is systemic, and the Pirate Bay trial is proving it to anyone who can be bothered to look.

Remember that previously it turned out that the police officer in charge of the investigation, as well as the investigation into crimes against the Pirate Bay, was given a 6-month consulting job by Warner Brothers immediately after the investigation was over. I don't know how that's any different from accepting a cash bribe.

It's difficult to judge the historical impact of events as they're unfolding. However, I think it's fair to say that a trial like this can hardly increase the legitimacy of the state and the judiciary. What is the new effect on an entire generation of watching their peers sentenced for something they're all doing, something none of them consider illegal, and then of seeing that the organization that delivered the verdict is totally corrupt?

It's increasingly looking like the War on Drugs and War on Terror are going to be joined by the equally impossible War on Piracy. The losers in this war are all of us who see our human rights curtailed, our public institutions corrupted and the legitimacy of our polities eroded.

In my opinion, the whole Pirate Bay case is as clear a demonstration as anyone could wish for that even in 21st century Europe, money trumps justice every time.