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.

President demands right to murder citizens

Remember when I talked about how the Obama administration is actually working to make the human rights abuses of the War on Terror worse earlier? Here's more, via the Agitator:

Salon.com: Obama argues his assassination program is a "state secret"

At this point, I didn't believe it was possible, but the Obama administration has just reached an all-new low in its abysmal civil liberties record. In response to the lawsuit filed by Anwar Awlaki's father asking a court to enjoin the President from assassinating his son, a U.S. citizen, without any due process, the administration late last night, according to The Washington Post, filed a brief asking the court to dismiss the lawsuit without hearing the merits of the claims. That's not surprising: both the Bush and Obama administrations have repeatedly insisted that their secret conduct is legal but nonetheless urge courts not to even rule on its legality. But what's most notable here is that one of the arguments the Obama DOJ raises to demand dismissal of this lawsuit is "state secrets": in other words, not only does the President have the right to sentence Americans to death with no due process or charges of any kind, but his decisions as to who will be killed and why he wants them dead are "state secrets," and thus no court may adjudicate their legality.

Radley Balko calls this tyranny over on his blog. I don't know what to call it. It's sick to even imagine that an American president, or for that matter the head of state of any Western country, would openly demand the right to have citizens of his country murdered.

Yet here Obama is, doing just that. I really don't know what to say.

Those wacky Canadians

(via, surprisingly, Dinosaur Comics)

Now here's something you don't see every day, at least in the supposedly civilized West. The Ontario cabinet secretly changed the law just before the G20 summit, to give the police wider powers to arrest people. There's a story here.

At Queen’s Park, NDP justice critic and lawyer Peter Kormos said: “This law was not only passed in secret, it was kept secret.

“This is the stuff Kafka wrote novels about. Secret laws that the citizenry is not aware of are the hallmarks of tin pot dictatorships.”

The measure, carrying a penalty of up to two months in jail or a $500 fine upon conviction, was revealed after a 31-year-old York University master’s student refused to show identification near the fence and was arrested based on a regulation few knew existed. He was held for five hours in a pen at a temporary holding centre on Eastern Ave.

Later, the CBC reported that there actually wasn't a secret law requiring people to show ID near a police fence, but there was a secret law nonetheless:

Premier Dalton McGuinty still hasn't explained why cabinet passed the regulation change in secret, and then kept it secret.

Even though it wasn't accurate, the public was left to believe the province had given officers the power to demand identification and detain anyone within five metres of the G20 site.

All weekend there were reports of police stopping people throughout downtown Toronto — often in areas nowhere near the G20 zone — demanding identification and to search bags and backpacks.

Seriously. A country that calls itself a democracy passes laws in secret to give the police additional powers. I rather liked what councillor Howard Moscoe said:

“These are police state regulations — we fought wars to protect freedoms like these,” thundered Councillor Howard Moscoe.

Amusingly, we've done similar things in Finland, only more like a police state. Before the infamous Smash ASEM protests in Helsinki in 2006, police participating in suppressing the protests had been explicitly told by their superiors that normal laws on detaining people would not apply today, and they should detain anyone they think is suspicious and hold them overnight.

Let me repeat myself: they had been told that the law doesn't apply. And they went with that.

Of course, when things were sussed out later their superiors obviously denied having ever said that. Nonetheless, the Finnish parliament's ombudsman, who's in charge of investigating these things, found the police had acted directly against the law several times in suppressing the protests. Of course, because this is Finland, none of that matters: a couple of officers were given a meaningless reprimand for directly violating the laws they're supposed to be upholding, and policemen who ordered others to break the law got nothing at all.

So really, while Canada passes secret laws and doesn't tell people about it, Finland doesn't even bother. For another proud example of the Finnish police and the rule of law, see here.

Civil liberties, eh?

Burkhas and prostitutes

Recently, France banned the burkha. Funnily enough, European countries are using the same logic about the burkha and prostitution.

In the case of the Islamic headscarf, the argument is that most women who wear one are being forced to, and therefore the burkha is an example of the subjugation of women. And besides, no woman in her right mind would want to wear one anyway. So they're banned.

In the case of prostitution, the argument is that most women who do it are being forced to, and therefore prostitution is an example of the subjugation of women. And besides, no woman in her right mind would want to do it anyway. So it's banned.

How neatly we've arrived at restricting people's freedom in the name of protecting their freedom. It's all based on a simple idea: the government knows better than individual women what they should be doing with their bodies. In this sense, the burkha ban is the exact opposite of any kind of gender equality, because it's based on the same old notion that women's bodies have to be regulated by the state. Women can't be allowed to choose what they wear or what trade they engage in, for their own good. Of course, by this logic women can be deprived of any rights.

And in both cases, the legislation diverts attention from the real problem. In the case of prostitution, it's undeniably true that there is human trafficking and forced prostitution in all European countries. Instead of tackling that problem, though, the powers that be in Europe are simply sweeping its visible manifestation off the street, and lumping in college students who perfectly willingly prostitute themselves with victims of kidnapping and slavery. The practical result is that victims of human trafficking can't seek help, because in the eyes of the law, they're criminals, not victims.

Similarly, Muslim women are being oppressed, "even" in Western liberal democracies. The "even" is in quotes because all women in Western liberal democracies are being oppressed, so it's hardly surprising that Muslims should be, too. However, the French government isn't addressing that issue at all; they're simply banning what they think is a visible manifestation of it. At the same time they're increasing the alienation of Muslims in their society by directly pitting the state against their religion, which, if anything, is going to make things worse.

I want to make one thing perfectly clear: Banning the burkha is not going to liberate a single Muslim woman anywhere. As long as nothing is done about the domestic abuse and subjugation that women in our society suffer from, passing laws on what they're allowed to wear isn't going to affect anything. With or without a burkha, a beaten and oppressed woman is still a beaten and oppressed woman.

Both of these examples simply show how disgustingly spineless our elected governments are. We consistently refuse to address real problems, but instead try to sweep them under the rug. If no-one can see a burkha in the street, we can conveniently forget that women are being abused, beaten and even murdered by their husbands and families. If no-one can see a prostitute soliciting on the street, we can forget all about the thousands of victims of human trafficking. The Finnish government is using similar logic to ban begging in the streets. Just get it out of sight.

We're not solving problems; we're just hiding them, and even worse, sacrificing individual freedom to hide them. It makes me sick that something like the burkha ban is being held up as an example of fighting for women's rights, when, if anything, it's the opposite.

Law of the seven veils

I was going to blog about this French stupidity about banning Islamic veils on women, but it turns out I don't have to, because Martha Nussbaum already did for the NY Times.

That should cover the basics. In general, I find it hard to articulate how distasteful I find it that governments in the 21st century west are passing laws on what their citizens are allowed to wear. This time, we really are going back to the middle ages, because the last time these kinds of laws were passed was the sumptuary laws of the late middle ages.

Look how far we've come.

Finnish blogger in prison

Two years ago, I wrote about a Finnish blogger, Seppo Lehto, getting a two-year prison sentence. His crime was creating several blatantly fake blogs that purported to be written by Finnish civil servants. We may be in a third world country, but seriously, when you google a politician and find a ridiculously racist, infantile and insulting blog that focuses on the writer's genitalia and confesses to him being a KGB agent, really, you probably figure it's a joke.

In short, anyone with the Internet literacy of a brick understood that the fake blogs were juvenile parodies. I thought no-one took them seriously until it turned out that the Finnish police did. Lawsuits were raised, and as Hesari put it at the time, the crime was deemed "exceptionally serious" and Seppo Lehto was sentenced to two years and four months in prison for "aggravated libel". He also has to pay tens of thousands of euros of reparations.

After the sentence was passed, Seppo went on the lam. According to Aamulehti, the police finally caught him this midsummer as part of a random DUI screening. That tells you everything you need to know about the Finnish police's alacrity in policing search warrants, by the way. He's currently doing time at the Turku prison.

I just thought I should put this out there. Here we are, peacefully reading and writing our blogs, while in the country I'm writing this in, a man is going through a multi-year prison sentence for blogging.

Here's the problem: I can't accept that. At all. Honestly, I have no idea if anyone reads this blog regularly, but if you do, you may recall a couple of posts I did on rape in Finland. In this one, I related the story of a Helsinki police officer who got a two-year suspended sentence for raping a minor. He used his badge to get into her home and raped her. So he didn't go to jail at all. A lot of similarly "fun" examples here.

In the interests of full disclosure, I have to admit to a certain personal bias. I did prison time too, for not serving in the army. If I'd spent six months playing war and raped an underage girl instead, I wouldn't have.

I live in a country that puts people in jail for blogging, but not for rape. There's no way I can express how wrong that is. And the fun thing is that no-one cares. Every time there's a high-profile rape case where the guilty party gets off with practically nothing, there's a storm of public outcry, but within a few days everyone's forgotten all about it and gone back to watching The Hills or True Blood.

That's the way civilization ends: not with a bang but with indifference.

Finnish police want to ban Internet discussions

More on Matti Nikki's page in Finnish. Briefly, the Finnish National Bureau of Investigation wants to put people in jail for engaging in Internet discussions that "take a seemingly approving view of so-called child sex". (my translation)

So much for human rights; we're not even allowed to talk any more if we say the wrong things. Over the last couple of years, more and more things people say on the Internet are becoming criminal offenses in this country. How do you fancy going to prison for a child pornography offense because you've said something that a Finnish policeman thinks is taking a seemingly approving view of child sex? If the cops get their way, you might soon.

Poland approves castration of pedophiles

Reuters: Poland okays forcible castration for pedophiles

(Reuters) - Poland on Friday approved a law making chemical castration mandatory for pedophiles in some cases, sparking criticism from human rights groups.

Under the law, sponsored by Poland's center-right government, pedophiles convicted of raping children under the age of 15 years or a close relative would have to undergo chemical therapy on their release from prison.

"The purpose of this action is to improve the mental health of the convict, to lower his libido and thereby to reduce the risk of another crime being committed by the same person," the government said in a statement.

I bring this up mainly because several people I know support this. Also, when a Finnish tabloid broke the story over here and included an online poll, 95% of respondents supported the legistlation. I'd like to take a moment to address the ethics behind this idea. Unless otherwise noted, data is sourced from Wikipedia.

In practice, chemical castration means that the prisoners will be forcibly given drugs that reduce their sex drive. Technically, they're not being castrated in the proper wince-inducing sense of the word, as nothing is being cut off or even permanently disabled. However, their hormone production is lowered, leading to changes in both body and mind.

Several US states have passed similar laws; for example, in California a prisoner convicted for a second time of child molestation may be treated with MPA if they are on parole, regardless of their wishes. The ACLU, in opposing similar legistlation in Florida, called it a "return to the Dark Ages". Their paper can be read here.

I'm sure some people are aghast that the ACLU could oppose something like this. After all, it's for the children. It's worth looking at the core of the ACLU argument, because it puts my first point very concisely.

Sexual assault is not about sex - that is a myth. This law reinforces the stereotype that men are sex-crazed individuals and that child molesters and sexual predators need to be drugged to control sexual impulses. In reality, sexual assaults are about violence, power and the humiliation of a survivor or victim.

Eliminating sexual desire or a body part, for that matter seems like a quick fix. No more trying to squeeze extra convicts into already overcrowded jails. No more spending money to feed and clothe another felon sentenced to life. Just get rid of the testes. But this law avoids the real issues.

Firstly I should point out that pedophiles and child molesters are not the same thing. Having said that, sex crime against children does indeed happen for a variety of reasons. Most child molesters have many other psychopathological issues apart from a sexual attraction to children, and it has been argued that it's the other psychological issues they face, most especially sociopathy, that drive them to commit crimes, not their sex drive. As a matter of fact, studies have found that several convicted pedophiles already have low testosterone levels to begin with, strongly suggesting that it isn't their testosterone that makes them commit crime.

This is really the same argument as with any kind of rape. Men do not rape because of their sex drive. Men who rape do so because they have deep-seated psychological problems. Quite simply put, diminishing their sex drive does nothing to fix the underlying causes of their crimes. In a very real sense, chemical castration doesn't treat the problem at all because of this.

What I just said is highly relevant, because none of the drugs currently used for chemical castration have permanent effects. If the person being treated stops taking the drugs, their effects will subside. What this means is that the drugs will only work if the person being treated is willing to keep taking them.

In general, the best results have been gained from a combination of pharmacological and psychiatric treatment, and basically, drugs that control sex drive are no different from any other psychiatric medication. In conjunction with therapy, they can work. Without therapy, though, the medication doesn't address the underlying problems at all. In many cases, all it gets us is a former child molester who no longer has as much sex drive as before, but is still the kind of sociopath who is capable of sexually abusing children.

What's more, given that rape is not primarily an expression of sexuality but an expression of power and control, actual sexual functioning would seem to be secondary. And as I said, the drugs will need to be taken for the rest of the offender's life for them to stay effective. What if they just stop taking the drugs? You can't force anyone into therapy if they don't want it.

**

There are also some very real human rights issues involved. Sadly, "pedophiles" are such a good enemy that for a lot of people, they don't have any human rights at all. Here's how the Reuters article I started this post off with continues:

Prime Minister Donald Tusk said late last year he wanted obligatory castration for pedophiles, whom he branded 'degenerates'. Tusk said he did not believe "one can use the term 'human' for such individuals, such creatures."

"Therefore I don't think protection of human rights should refer to these kind of events," Tusk also said.

His remarks drew criticism from human rights groups but he never retracted them.

This is the kind of thing I expect from really bad novels, not actual politicians, but there you are, he said it. In Poland, pedophiles are not humans, and therefore they have no human rights.

Okay, so it's just the opinion of their prime minister. But it's a frightening one. In past times, chemical castration has been used in, for example, Britain, to treat homosexuality. Renowned computer scientist, cryptanalyst and mathematician Alan Turing agreed to undergo chemical castration to avoid being sent to prison for homosexuality. A few years later, he killed himself.

That brings me on to what I find most disturbing about this idea. The treatment will lower a patient's testosterone levels, which I pointed out are already low in some pedophiles. This means radically changing not only the person's sex drive but also their body and personality in general. If they're forced to take these drugs for a prolonged time, the "treatment" really means personality change.

Are we okay with the idea that the government can change your personality?

The treatment affects the offender's entire sex drive, at worst effectively denying them any kind of sex life. Pedophiles divide into exclusive and non-exclusive; the first kind are only sexually aroused by children, while the latter sort also have "normal" sexual impulses. Only roughly 7% of pedophiles are exclusive, so if a blanket chemical castration is applied, it means depriving 93% of the "patients" of a normal sex life. If that isn't cruel and unusual punishment, then I don't know what is.

The medical fact is that pedophiles are, by definition, mentally ill. Most child offenders are also mentally ill. What they need is treatment, not just for their sakes but for our sake as well. If people suffering from these mental disorders are going to rejoin society, they need to be treated for our safety as well as their health.

As it stands, the Polish scheme isn't going to prevent sex crime against children. Many sex offenders already undergo therapy without it being forced on them by the law. For the remainder, chemical castration won't be a treatment, it will be a punishment. And not only that, but a punishment that isn't effective at deterring the crime it's supposed to deter.

**

All in all, compulsory chemical castration is inhuman and ineffective. The only purpose it seems to have is to get politicians cheap votes from the moral panic on pedophilia. No matter how strongly we feel about any kind of crime, we can't just abandon our concepts of human rights to punish the offenders. It's even worse if we punish them in a way that doesn't even deter the crime.

Also, on a wider note, legislation like this can open doors to really scary places. As I said, are we comfortable with the idea of government-mandated personality change? In a way, that's what forcing you to take hormone-altering medication is. As psychiatric medicine advances, if we start passing laws like this, why not prescribe personality change as a punishment for other kinds of crime as well? I'm not seriously arguing that there's a direct and slippery slope from this law to a mind-control society, but it's worth thinking about. If only because the combination of moral panic, blatant disregard for human rights and enthusiasm about medical solutions sounds very scary indeed.

The Surveilled Isle

It's not exactly a secret to most people that, in the words of Carl "CJ" Johnson, "I wanna emigrate from here". One of the destinations I'd been considering was Great Britain, but over the last ten years or so, I've had to drop it off my list of prospective countries to live in for good. Why? Because it's turning into the most frightening surveillance society in the history of the world.

A pinko conspiracy theory? Maybe. Here's an excellent article on the topic from a communist propaganda rag owned by an infamous Bolshevik:

Bloomberg: George Orwell Was Right: Spy Cameras See Britons' Every Move

Almost 70 years after George Orwell created the all-seeing dictator Big Brother in the novel ``1984,'' Britons are being watched as never before. About 4.2 million spy cameras film each citizen 300 times a day, and police have built the world's largest DNA database. Prime Minister Tony Blair said all Britons should carry biometric identification cards to help fight the war on terror.

``Nowhere else in the free world is this happening,'' said Helena Kennedy, a human rights lawyer who also is a member of the House of Lords, the upper house of Parliament. ``The American public would find such inroads into civil liberties wholly unacceptable.''

During the past decade, the government has spent 500 million pounds ($1 billion) on spy cameras and now has one for every 14 citizens, according to a September report prepared for Information Commissioner Richard Thomas by the Surveillance Studies Network, a panel of U.K. academics.

And it doesn't stop there. Just this week, two people in Britain were convicted for refusing to unencrypt data they own.

The Register: Two convicted for refusal to decrypt data

Two people have been successfully prosecuted for refusing to provide authorities with their encryption keys, resulting in landmark convictions that may have carried jail sentences of up to five years.

That's right. Five years in prison if you encrypt files on your hard drive and refuse to hand over the keys to the police.

Speaking of the police, it must be said that they're certainly doing their part. As part of their preparation for next month's Labour Party conference in Brighton, the British police are going to do door-to-door searches of the entire city to find Muslims.

The Daily Express: POLICE ‘GESTAPO TACTICS’ OVER TERRORIST FEAR AT LABOUR CONFERENCE

POLICE plans to quiz thousands of people in a seaside resort to check they are not terrorists were branded “Gestapo-style” tactics last night.


Squads of officers will carry out door-to-door interviews to weed out potential threats to the Labour Party Conference in Brighton next month.

Home owners and workers will have to produce passports, birth certificates, driving licences, proof of employment, and even provide the names of referees to show they are of good character.

They will also be quizzed on their religion to see if they have connections with Muslim fanatics. Critics said the “Gestapo” tactics were another sign that Britain is lurching towards an autocratic state.

An autocratic state? Nonsense! Autocracy, dear critics, means a system of rule by a single individual. It is patently absurd to suggest that Great Britain is becoming an autocracy. Try something like this instead:

After all, door-to-door searches to find people suspected of a heinous offense like an ethnicity or a religion were a specialty not of autocracies but of certain other forms of government that tended to have "soc" somewhere in their name.

I suggest anyone even slightly interested in this topic read the brief article from Bloomberg.com that I linked to above. Great Britain is turning into a truly terrifying place. I'll close with a last quote from that article:

In the bowels of New Scotland Yard, the headquarters of the London police force, a windowless room contains a giant bank of TV screens where the city is monitored around the clock. At the touch of a button, officers can focus on any neighborhood and zoom in on people's faces.

Police hunting the killer of five prostitutes in Suffolk were able to gather 10,000 hours of footage from in and around Ipswich.

By 2016, there will be cameras using facial recognition technology embedded in lampposts, according to the Surveillance Studies report. Unmanned spy planes will monitor the movements of citizens, while criminals and the elderly will be implanted with microchips to track their movements, the report says.

Rape is legal in Finland

As I wrote previously, I'll be going to jail this summer for refusing to serve in the army. There's one kind of criminal I'll be extremely unlikely to meet there: rapists.

Phil, who I stole the title of this post from, quotes Helsingin Sanomat:

According to a news report aired by the commercial television network Nelonen on Sunday, courts in Finland have been handing out relatively lenient sentences in cases of sexual assault - even in some which have led to physical injury.
Nelonen examined all sex crime cases handled by Finnish district courts over the past year and found out that prosecutors and courts have considered acts involving injury to the victim, or in which the woman’s home has been violently broken into, and even in which the victim has been kept a prisoner for several days, to meet the definition of “coercive sexual contact”, a category of sexual assault considered less serious than actual rape.

The new category was introduced to Finnish law in 1999. Opponents of the new definition predicted at the time that the change would lead to more lenient sentences in sex crimes.
The Nelonen report found that more than half of those convicted of actual rape have to serve real prison time. Less than one in ten of those convicted of the lesser crime have had to serve custodial sentences.

The original purpose of the introduction of “coercive sexual contact” as a lesser category of sexual assault was to encourage the prosecution of cases in which one partner was not a fully willing participant of sexual contact, but which are not seen to qualify as full-blown rape.
The Nelonen report suggests that the change has had an opposite effect - that of letting real rapists off with lenient sentences.

My boldface. I apologize for the bad Hesari english, but the point is fairly clear. The original Nelonen story is here. There's some shocking stuff in it, some of which I'll summarize in English here.

**

There are three kinds of rape in Finnish law: rape, aggravated rape and "coercive sexual contact". Here is an example of "coercive sexual contact", a lesser crime than rape, from the Nelonen report:

A man, born in 1977, forced a woman to have sex with him in the disabled persons' bathroom of a restaurant by hitting her head into the wall and twisting her arm behind her. The woman could not call out for help because the man held his other hand over her mouth. Earlier that evening the same man had tried to forcibly kiss her in the restaurant. The state prosecutor demanded a sentence for coercive sexual contact, because the violence used was mild and the act was performed under mitigating circumstances. The public court decision does not set out these circumstances. The man was given a seven-month suspended sentence and ordered to pay 1000e in reparations.

Understand this: in Finland, if you beat a disabled woman's head into the bathroom wall and rape her, you are not going to prison.

The inept HS English tells us that "more than half" of those convicted of rape go to prison. What that actually means is that 54% of rape convictions result in a prison sentence where the convicted person actually goes to jail.

54%. Remember that a case like the one described above is seen, even by the prosecution, as less than rape. A rape must involve serious violence. Even then, only half of those convicted go to prison. Only 10% of those convicted of "coercive sexual contact" actually go to prison.

**

This is sickening. If you refuse to go to the army, the state has no qualms about putting you in jail. I'm receiving a far more severe sentence than the majority of Finnish rapists will ever receive. That's what passes for justice in this country.

Finland prides itself on being a "just state" on the model of the German Rechtsstaat. What this means in practice is that our Parliament passes laws that leave actual decisions on legality and sentencing almost completely up to the courts. In the case of sexual assault, the courts and prosecutors routinely apply the lesser penalties, even in cases where this seems to be bordering on insane.

And that's not all they do. At the end of 2008, public feeling in Finland was inflamed against the Eastern Finland appeals court (HS), because of a case heard in November 2008. There, the appeals court found that five adult men, previously sentenced for the rape of a 15-year old girl, were not, in fact, guilty of rape.

The girl had been given alcohol until she was drunk, tied to a bed and raped by all five men. The Eastern Finland appeals court decided that the men were guilty of sexual abuse and aggravated sexual abuse of a minor, but not rape. According to the court, it could not be proved that the men themselves had gotten the girl drunk and tied her to the bedposts; therefore they could not be found guilty of rape. Their sentences were halved. (HS)

So, to recap: not only is beating a woman's head into the wall and sexually assaulting her not rape, but tying a drunk minor to a bed and gang-raping her isn't rape either.

Iltalehti has summed up several interesting previous decisions of the same appeals court over the 2000's:

* In October 2003, a 33-year-old man's jail sentence for rape was changed to a suspended sentence because of his employment history. He had held a steady job for a long time, and his employer had decided to terminate his employment if he went to jail. He didn't have to!

* In September 2003 a 33-year-old man's prison sentence for attempted rape was commuted to a suspended sentence because he had no previous convictions and had paid a large sum in reparations.

* In September 2002 a 27-year-old man had his prison sentence commuted to a suspended sentence and community service, again because of his job.

**

Finnish courts and prosecutors will, even in cases involving physical violence, not even call for a sentence for rape if the sentence can be handed out as "coercive sexual contact". Of those sentences for rape, barely half actually end up in prison. Of those who do, if they're in Eastern Finland, clearly a trip to the appeals court is worth the trouble, as if you have a good enough job, you won't have to go to prison.

As a feminist and as a human being, I'm disgusted. Overall the Finnish justice system seems dedicated to bending the law in favor of men convicted for sexual assault. Do we really want to live in a society where physically assaulting a disabled person and forcing them to have sex with you is not a serious offense? In a country where an appeals court believes that it's possible that a drunk 15-year-old girl tied herself to a bed in order to be raped by five adult men? I'm sorry, coercively sexually contacted by five men.

I'm not even going to start on the common problems of sexual assaults and domestic violence, like the fact that most go unreported. The way our justice system handles even those that are reported is appalling.

A brief comparison: Finnish internet pundit Seppo Lehto got two years and four months in prison for creating obscene web pages insulting and defaming Finnish politicians and civil servants (HS). The guy who beat a disabled woman's head into a wall and raped her didn't get a prison sentence at all.

From my own perspective as a person actually going to prison in a month or so, this is totally bewildering. I've refused to complete my "civilian service" and because of that, I'm going to jail. If I had, instead, attacked and raped a woman in a bar, I wouldn't be going to jail. I just can't get my head around that.

That's the country I live in. And I'm not proud.

Lithuania to ban discussing homosexuality

At amnesty.org

The Lithuanian parliament has voted in favour of a measure that would prohibit the discussion of homosexuality in schools and ban any reference to it in public information that can be viewed by children. The Seimas voted by an overwhelming majority on Tuesday to move forward to a final vote on an amendment to the "Law on the Protection of Minors against the Detrimental Effect of Public Information".

I love the name of that law.

Once again, a legistlature wants to protect the vulnerable from information. I mean, it says so right there in the title. Aren't the Lithuanian people fortunate to have a parliament that protects them from harmful information?

An optimum population

BBC: Attenborough warns on population

The broadcaster Sir David Attenborough has become a patron of a group seeking to cut the growth in human population.

On joining the Optimum Population Trust, Sir David said growth in human numbers was "frightening".

Sir David has been increasingly vocal about the need to reduce the number of people on Earth to protect wildlife.

And so David Attenborough joins the most frightening lunatic fringe of the environmental movement: the "population control" nutcases.

There's another article on the BBC website, titled "Population: The elephant in the room", in which the writer makes the case for population control:

It's no far fetched possibility. Increasingly, environmental scientists insist we have overshot the Earth's carrying capacity.

I believe they are right; the proof is everywhere. Our inability to live as we do, at our current numbers, without causing pervasive environmental degradation is the very definition of carrying capacity overshoot.

This is pure garbage, and it's sinister garbage at that.

I should write on this at greater length, but I can't be bothered to right now. Suffice to say that despite the catchy name of the looney bin Attenborough has joined, there is no such thing as an optimum human population. Any balance struck between "people" and "wildlife" is an arbitrary, political one. There is no optimum. Demands for population control can't, logically, be demands for optimums or deep ecology-like "species equality", they're always arbitrary.

Basically, therefore, population control entails restricting the right of people to have children in the name of a political goal. Here's a fun quote from the other article I mentioned:

Some activists insist acting to influence population growth infringes on human rights; they maintain that it is best to leave the problem alone.

Let's dispense with this confused notion right now.

Yes, there have been past abuses in the name of "population control".

There have been abuses of health care and education too, but the idea of reacting by abandoning any of these causes is absurd.

Yes, because using government power to stop people from reproducing is exactly like health care and education.

Any talk of population control is, by definition, talk about human rights, in this case restricting them. This is one of the issues in which human rights and environmentalism clash dramatically.

In deep ecology, for instance, the priorities are clear:

The flourishing of human life and cultures is compatible with a substantial decrease of the human population. The flourishing of nonhuman life requires such a decrease.

Here "flourishing" is an arbitrary term, but the message is clear. Nonhuman life must be allowed to "flourish", therefore human life must be reduced.

Deep ecology claims to advocate "equal rights" for all living things. That's a funny definition of equal rights when one form of life must be systematically displaced in favor of others.

**

I personally maintain that deep ecology and all other movements are misanthropic, inhuman and against all concepts of human rights as we hold them. They appeal to some innate cruelty in people that makes them seek solutions in hecatombs, not in policy. It's no coincidence that the Jokela school shooter in Finland was a student of Pentti Linkola, a deep ecologist: he was a misanthope, and so was Linkola. Under Linkola's philosophy, the Jokela school shooting was a good thing as people died.

Population itself does not correlate with ecological damage. It's what the population does that causes damage. The article I quoted mentions, among other things, desertification in Africa as a result of overpopulation. Now this is just stupid. Desertification in Africa is caused by deforestation, largely a result of slash-and-burn farming but overall of using trees for firewood.

If your solution to this problem is "less people", then those fewer people will keep practising slash-and-burn agriculture and cutting down trees for firewood, and the problem will continue. On the other hand, a smarter way to fix the problem would be introducing modern agriculture and nuclear power. Then the trees don't need to be cut down any more.

Of course, this would mean advocating technology. As a rule, modern-day environmentalists prefer ludditism and hecatombs to technology. I believe most "deep ecologists" get such a kick out of being extreme and advocating insane solutions that they'd be deeply unwilling to make a sensible environmental case for, say, solving the desertification problem in Africa. Instead, they prefer the kind of sweeping proclamations like "we must reduce population" that have no basis in reality and can't be translated into policy. In my opinion, that isn't environmentalism.

**

No call for reducing the human population is anything but misanthropy, very much by definition. The whole idea is founded on the mistaken belief that the world is approaching or even, to some lunatics, exceeding, its carrying capacity. It's doing no such thing. This planet could easily house billions more humans.

We're extremely unlikely to ever even approach the limits of our carrying capacity. If there's one thing we've seen, it's that once societies reach a certain level of sophistication population growth simply ends. None of the developed nations of the world are growing at very high rates.

If you really want to stop population growth, start working toward bringing the Third World up to our level of affluence. That will effectively reduce human population growth across the planet to marginal levels.

Then again, that would mean advocating technology. And for the environmentalist movement, technology is evil. So I guess not.

UN bans blasphemy

Reuters: U.N. body adopts resolution on religious defamation

GENEVA (Reuters) - A United Nations forum on Thursday passed a resolution condemning "defamation of religion" as a human rights violation, despite wide concerns that it could be used to justify curbs on free speech in Muslim countries.

Okay, so it's a non-binding resolution, but a resolution by the Human Rights Council nonetheless.

I'd write a longer blog post, but can't really be bothered. As blasphemy is already illegal in Finland, there's no way this can possibly affect us.

I wonder when we Europeans, collectively, will realize that we're slowly giving up most of the defining freedoms that make us a free society. In Finland we're already not allowed to criticize the police too strongly, say mean things about religions or say something that a prosecutor can interpret as being racist. Our Internet traffic is monitored by the Swedish army and soon by our employees.

There is a sustained assault on our basic freedoms going on, and no-one really cares.

Halla-aho charged with agitation and blasphemy

No sooner do I say I'm sick of it than the "race doctor" himself is back in the news.

YLE: Halla-aho saa syytteen nettikirjoituksistaan

Helsingin kaupunginvaltuutettu Jussi Halla-aho (ps.) saa syytteen blogikirjoituksistaan. Syytteen nostamisesta päätti apulaisvaltakunnansyyttäjä Jorma Kalske.

Jussi Halla-ahon katsottiin syyllistyneen uskonrauhan rikkomiseen ja kiihottamiseen kansanryhmää vastaan.

Halla-ahon katsottiin laatineen kesällä 2008 nettiin kirjoituksen, jossa islam ja sen pyhät instituutiot yhdistettiin pedofiliaan. Nettikirjoituksessa esitettiin myös, että ohikulkijoiden ryöstely ja verovaroilla loisiminen on erään kansanryhmän kansallinen tai geneettinen erityispiirre.

Syyte nostettiin Helsingin käräjäoikeudessa.

In brief, Finnish municipal politician, would-be MEP and political racist and islamophobe Jussi Halla-aho is being charged with ethnic agitation and blasphemy. The charges stem from blog posts he wrote in 2008 where he claimed Islam is a religion of institutionalized paedophilia and that laziness and welfare sponging are racial characteristics of the Somali people.

In a nutshell, that is why I oppose this kind of legistlation. If overt racism is criminalized people like Halla-aho won't speak their minds, because it's illegal. As I've said before, many of the things he's said make it clear that he's a racist and an islamophobe. Without free speech, he wouldn't say those things. And I believe he should have a right to say those things, even if I do find them personally distasteful.

Legally speaking, looking at the previous case of Mikko Ellilä and others, it seems certain Halla-aho will be found guilty and fined. The Finnish laws on ethnic agitation and "disturbing religious peace" (=blasphemy) make any speech that "insults" an ethnic group, people or religion a crime, and as Halla-aho has clearly done that, he'll probably be found guilty.

As I've said previously on this blog, I oppose Jussi Halla-aho and I oppose the ridiculous restrictions Finnish law places on the freedom of speech. So basically my stand on all this is that it sucks. I'm off to watch F1.

A year in censorship

It's now been exactly one year since Matti Nikki's website lapsiporno.info was censored by the Finnish police. My post on the topic from a year ago is here. Since then, nothing has changed.

To make a long story short, Nikki's website criticizes the Finnish police's anti-child pornography measures, because they're anything but that. For this, access to his website has been blocked and remains blocked from Finnish ISPs. He is also supposedly under investigation for distributing child pornography, for the "crime" of posting the URLs of websites the police have blocked access to, which do not contain child pornography. Unsurprisingly, the criminal investigation has made zero progress, mostly because it's blatantly obvious to everyone that there's no way the case could ever stand up in court. The police aren't investigating him to prosecute him, they're investigating him to smear his name in public.

Nikki's website can be accessed via its direct URL, http://hack.fi/~muzzy/lapsiporno/, which, inexplicably, is not blocked. The site contains excellent writing on child pornography and the efforts to get it off the Internet, and contains, among other things, a charming letter from a Finnish prosecutor in which he explains that even though the police tell the media that you are a suspected child porn distributor (without an ounce of evidence) and block access to your website so that if someone types in the URL, they see an official police message saying the site they're trying to access contains child pornography (it doesn't), none of this constitutes slander or an unjust accusation, both of which are crimes in Finland.

Then again, Nikki's website isn't a crime, but it is blocked and being investigated as a crime, so it makes sense that things that are crimes are not being investigated. Right?

As befits a democracy, where political power comes from the people and belongs to the people, there is absolutely fuck all any of us, including Nikki, can do. He's comlained to the Finnish Chancellor of Justice, which is the only legal recourse he has, and nothing has happened. In my opinion, you would have to be incredibly naïve to believe anything will happen.

As the Nikki case amply demonstrates, this is a country in which citizens have absolutely no rights against the state. We're watching the police break the law by censoring Nikki's website every day, and there isn't a thing any of us can do about it.

Welcome to Finland!

Suvi Lindén and getting naked

A nadir of sorts was reached in Finnish politics today when minister for communications Suvi Lindén (Reichsführer-SS des Infrastruktur und Kommunikazion) gave this interview in defense of Lex Nokia:

MTV3: Lindén: Työnantaja voi käskeä riisuutumaan

According to Lindén, under current Finnish law, your employer can require you to undress for a physical inspection to prevent you from carrying out industrial espionage.

There are two problems with this.

Firstly, the whole idea is so shocking to any concept of human rights and dignity.

Secondly, it isn't even true. (HS: Työoikeuden professori tyrmää yritysten ruumiintarkastukset)

This woman is a minister and an MP. And an idiot.