Happy birthday Enni Rukajärvi!

Happy birthday to Enni Rukajärvi, from the village of Rukajärvi in Kuusamo.

She's a snowboard slopestyle world champion and Winter X Games gold medalist, which is awesome.

Hottest female fighters in the world

We'll start off with an honorary mention for Regina Halmlich, who retired in 2007 but is a true pioneer of women's boxing. And hey, she was pretty foxy, too.

On to the list!

6. Zulina Munoz

La Loba, Mexico's gift to boxing, is darn cute.

5. Mia St. John

A tae kwon do black belt turned model turned pro boxer, she notched up 45 wins, including 18 knockouts, and has since turned to MMA. She also found the time to pose for Playboy.

4. Kina Malpartida

The 2009 WBA super featherweight world champion!

3. Gina Carano

Where do I start? Gina Carano, a Muay Thai fighter who took part in the first ever sanctioned women's MMA fight and is damn hot.

She's in a movie which I have to see, and was in Command & Conquer: Red Alert 3, which was fun. She's so tough that when Ewan McGregor punched her in the face on the set, he nearly broke his hand.

2. Eva Wahlström

Finland's second-hottest athlete is simply gorgeous.

She also happens to be by far the most accomplished female boxer in Finland's short history.

1. Natascha Ragosina

I said at the beginning that to qualify on this list, you have to be hot and good. Natascha Ragosina is not only beautiful, but deadly. She has a boatload of titles in boxing and kickboxing, and I'll let this image speak for itself:

She's a super middleweight, but this woman literally punches above her weight. Not only does she have a boatload of super middleweight championships, but she was also the 2009 WIBF heavyweight champion. Here's video of her defeating then-heavyweight champion Pamela London.

Now that's hot.

By the way, in case anyone is wondering why Laila Ali isn't on your list, this is your answer. She's retired now, but when she was still active, she refused to fight any of the top female fighters in her weight division, like Ragosina. That takes her off my list.

Natascha Ragosina is not only beautiful, but she can kick your ass. What more can you ask for?

Finland is destroying her national defense

Last week, the Finnish parliament announced sweeping cuts to the armed forces. Over the next two years, five bases will be closed and several units combined. Savings of up to 10% of the current defense budget are sought.

In and of itself, closing some bases doesn't materially affect Finland's national defense. The problem is that these closures are part of a longer trend of gutting the armed forces to save money. Finland is not a member of NATO, and is committed to maintaining an independent national defense. However, back in 2009, the chief of staff of the Finnish Army publicly stated that Finland is no longer capable of defending her territory. Since then, more cuts have followed.

The Finnish Army maintains practically no standing forces, instead relying on conscription to create a large reserve army. This wartime army, however, has been slashed to a third of its size over the last decade, and the current round of cuts will have a heavy impact on reservists' refresher training. Funding for materiel is basically non-existent, leading to the effective disbanding of Finland's mechanized forces, with the remaining tanks and IFVs divided between three "readiness brigades" mostly lacking tracked mobility.

It was of course inevitable that the end of the cold war brought pressure to re-examine Finland's security and defense policy. In fact, no reorienting has happened; Finland has chosen to maintain the facade of her cold war armed forces while in fact cutting their funding to the point where they are little more than a paper army. The process is dictated by party-political expediency: a comprehensive defense review would be politically risky, especially since the political left has successfully demonized NATO, and conscription had been enshrined as a sacred guarantor of the nation's security and manhood. Estimates of the actual costs of conscription to the national economy are simply ignored, and although some 30,000 conscripts are trained annually, neither the refresher training nor the equipment exists to create a capable wartime army from this vast reserve.

In short, Finland continues to operate a massively wasteful system of conscription which fails to produce a viable national defense. There is no political pressure or desire to address these issues; instead, defense policy is mined for populist talking points while the "big picture" is studiously ignored. Over the last few years, the Ottawa land mine ban treaty was acrimoniously debated, which in the current situation is like fighting over deck chairs on the Titanic. Similarly, when the current base closures were debated, several politicians made a great point of the fact that Finland's only Swedish-language unit, a marine brigade, was not disbanded. The marine brigade in question has a vital role in Finland's wartime planning, which is cheerfully ignored by politicians trying to turn the debate into a language-political one.

The net result is that Finland is currently unable to defend her territory or airspace, and unwilling to take any steps to change this state of affairs or even admit that it exists. Instead, most Finns either profess a blind faith in a non-existent national defense or deny the possibility of war altogether. Finland is currently defenseless in the face of potential military pressure from Vladimir Putin's Russia, and should Europe be re-divided into opposing power blocs, Finland will be re-Finlandized and return to the state of quasi-independence under Russian domination she was in during the cold war.

In destroying her national defense and refusing any international security arrangements, Finland is gambling heavily on peace in our time. At stake is her independence as a nation and the lives of her citizens. Despite paying a heavy economic price for maintaining an obsolete and ineffective system of conscription, she is more vulnerable today than at any other time in her history, and is constantly becoming more vulnerable. This gamble is not a policy consciously decided on, but an emergent property of her dysfunctional nationalism and political culture. Defense policy is subordinated to cheap populist point-scoring and the myth of inherent Finnish military prowess, which prevent any reasonable public debate.

Our current national defense consists of hoping no-one will attack us. If they do, we can't defend ourselves.

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.

SOPA and all that: the view from Finland

Yeah, I'm not blacked out because I'm lazy. But I'm delighted that so many websites, from Wikipedia on down, are protesting the idiotic legislation proposed in the US. US laws on copyright and the Internet make a huge difference for the rest of the world as well, especially since if the US passes a law like this, European legislators will inevitably use that as momentum to pass similar ones here, if they're not directly pressured into it by the States.

We in Finland should be especially wary, as we've had some nightmarish experiences with Internet censorship before. One of the first posts I made in this blog was a very poorly written rant on the Finnish "child pornography" censorship bill, which permitted the Finnish state police to set up a secret blacklist of foreign child pornography sites that ISPs would be voluntarily forced to block access to. Shortly after the list was launched, a Finnish website criticizing this was put on the list, in blatant violation of the law. After years in court and endless obfuscation by the Finnish police, the Finnish justice system decided that it had, in fact, been wrong to censor a Finnish page containing no child pornography under a law that allows censoring foreign-based child pornography websites. However, none of the police officers responsible could be reprimanded in any way, as they can't be expected to understand the laws they enforce. I'm not making that up.

So the previous time Finland tried a censorship blacklist, it took literally days to expand beyond its original purpose into censoring criticism of the police and government. In the same decade, in a country where smashing a disabled person's head into the wall while raping them doesn't get you a prison sentence, creating parody blogs does. Last year, the Finnish police requested a law banning "approving" discussions of child pornography, and of course, we now have Internet censorship again with the Pirate Bay ban. So in effect, Finland already has SOPA.

By the way, if you criticize any of this, the MPAA thinks you're a corporate pawn.

In the middle of all this, it would be good to remember that I'm writing this blog post on Blogger, and because of Sweden's FRA law, the Swedish military can read this as it's written, along with my personal e-mails and everything else I do online. Lately, some US jurisdictions have started shutting down cellphone services to hinder demonstrations, and similar moves are mooted in the UK.

The defining struggle of our time is between a "total state", bent on using information technology to monitor and regulate everything we do, and between a civil society that paradoxically uses that same technology to create new forms of communication that constantly elude those controls. Put simply, I believe that in the long run, our alternatives are an Orwellian surveillance state or a free information society. Will information technology be used to repress us or liberate us? That's what this is about, and it's the most important political struggle of our age.

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.

Finland's idiotic Pirate Bay ban

Just this week, the Helsinki district court has ordered Finnish ISP Elisa to block access to the Pirate Bay. Torrentfreak has the story in English.

As Ville Oksanen points out in his blog, the court decision goes to some lengths to justify the ban, even though they're aware that it won't work. They expect the ISP to block access to a website, without specifying either the domain names or IP numbers to block, or specifying the means to use. Indeed, the presiding judge admits that the block will be ineffective, but astonishingly, insists on it anyway.

Perhaps the best outcome is that the Finnish copyright lobby managed to elicit this public statement from one of the country's biggest telecom companies (via TF):

In a response to the ruling Elisa immediately announced that it will appeal the District Court’s decision. The ISP claims that among other things, the ruling is very unclear as it doesn’t state the specific domain names or IP-addresses that should be censored.

Elisa further says that the decision is practically irrelevant in the broader fight against online copyright infringement.

“The industry should focus on measures that can truly reduce piracy in practice, such as making content available online at a reasonable price and without artificial delays,” Elisa’s Henri Korpi said.

In other words, as Valve recently put it, "piracy is a service issue". That's pretty much what, for instance, various Pirate parties have been saying all along, but it's good to hear it from a big ISP.

This is just the latest chapter in an ongoing saga of Finnish Internet censorship. Previously, a "child pornography" blacklist was set up, and then used to go after a Finnish activist who criticized the police. The police defended themselves by saying that "collateral damage happens". We went to a demonstration on his behalf.

It was later found that blocking access to activist Matti Nikki's website was, in fact, illegal, but this being Finland, the police officers in charge of violating the law to infringe on Nikki's rights to free speech were let off, and he had to pay his own court costs because, really, it wasn't the police's fault that they flagrantly and intentionally broke the law.

The whole child pornography blocking scheme, with its secret blacklists of websites and whatnot, has since been abandoned, but the next step in implementing Internet censorship is being taken by the copyright lobby. In all this, the one thing that's remained abundantly clear is that no-one in the political or judicial process represents the interests of us, the citizens of this miserable country. Legislation, court decisions and everything else is dictated by the interests of the police and the copyright industry. This isn't how a democracy is supposed to work.

Jari Kurri's number

Now that the NHL premiere is in Helsinki, hockey fans in North America can once again see Hartwall Areena, the current home of six-time Finnish league champions Jokerit. NHL.com ran a couple of stories over the past week, and here's an excerpt from one:

NHL.com: Selanne adored as a national hero in Finland

Jari Kurri's No. 17 hangs from the rafters at Hartwall. Twice in fact -- once for his exploits with Jokerit and the other for his contributions to Suomi with the national team. Kurri was the first Finnish player to become an NHL legend, and Selanne is the second and his No. 8 will surely be there soon after he retires.

The funny detail is that while it's true that Jari Kurri used the jersey number 17 in the NHL and in the national team, he never used that number in Jokerit. Before his NHL career, he used #11, and during the 1994-95 lockout, he wore #71. Speaking as a lifelong Jokerit fan, it's just stupid that they've retired the number 17 for Jari, who never wore it in Jokerit.

An even more questionable retirement is Esa Tikkanen's #5. Tikkanen is a great player and a five-time Stanley Cup champion, but he only ever played 43 career games for Jokerit. In fact, his junior team was next-door HIFK, an elite Swedish-language yachting club. By rights, that's where his number should be.

Confusingly, while Tikkanen wore #10 in the NHL and #5 in Jokerit, Jokerit chose to retire his SM-liiga number, but in Jari's case, they left his SM-liiga number and retired his NHL number. That just doesn't make sense.

Finland is irreligious

According to a large study conducted in Finland and reported in Uusi Suomi, Finns are much more critical of religion than most other nationalities. As many as four out of five (4/5) Finns consider strongly religious people intolerant, and 60% believe that religion causes conflicts rather than promotes peace.



Only 20% of Finns unqualifiedly believe in God, while 10% don't believe at all. Eight percent define themselves as strongly religious, while less than a fifth don't define themselves at religous at all. When it comes to the public practice of religion, Finns are among the most passive countries in Europe.



This is actually quite impressive for a country where not belonging to a church was only decriminalized in 1923, there are still two state churches, religious teaching is still given in public schools and blasphemy remains a crime. I wrote more on the same topic last year, when over 15,000 people left the Finnish Lutheran church in the wake of a controversial debate on gay marriage.



Other events that have probably had an effect included a widespread child abuse scandal in the Finnish pentecostal movement. The abuse had been going on for years, with the knowledge of church "elders", who had even permitted convicted child abusers to be taken on as priests, because they felt that God had forgiven them (YLE).



In 2003, a Finnish free thinkers' organization set up an internet service titled eroakirkosta.fi ("leavethechurch.fi"), which allows members of the Finnish state churches to resign their membership with an electronic form. In 2004, they processed 10,000 applications; in 2010, it was 79,000.



In 2010, 19,2% of Finns didn't belong to any religious denomination recognized as such by the state (Tilastokeskus). A 2005 study estimated that 28-60% of Finland's population are atheists, agnostics or non-believers.



So although Sweden is the poster boy for atheist social democracy in American political polemics, maybe it should be us?

Happy birthday Viivi Pumpanen!

Happy birthday to the second-hottest Miss Finland of all time, second only to the incomparable Lola: Viivi Pumpanen!

Banning fictional child pornography is wrong

I'll let the Ottawa Citizen introduce the subject:

Ottawa Citizen: Crimes of imagination

Canada has charged an American and is threatening him with at least a year in jail because he came over the border in 2010 with comics on his laptop, comics the customs officer decided were child pornography. If he's convicted, he faces a mandatory minimum sentence of a year for importing the material. This case and others like it demonstrate the flaws in Canada's law.

According to the Comic Book Legal Defence Fund, the comics were in the "manga" style that originated in Japan (Astro Boy and Sailor Moon are examples of manga comics. Charles Brownstein of the CBLDF says he believes the comics in this case include images of stick figures in sexual positions).

The Canadian law criminalizes fictional child pornography, by which I mean pornographic material like drawings or text that features children, but that no real children were abused in the making of. I'll let the Citizen finish:

But Canada's current law goes beyond pornography that causes harm to children. It also makes some works of the imagination - stories and drawings - illegal if they depict people under the age of 18 in sexual situations. Many classic works of art might meet that definition, and the law does allow for a defence on the grounds of artistic merit. This puts the courts in the bizarre position of determining what is a work of art. Citizens cannot hope to know in advance what the law really forbids, and whether the judge will share their opinion of what is art. Policing the way you express yourself on a piece of paper or on your laptop comes awfully close to policing your thoughts.

Judges are not meant to be arbiters of taste; they are meant to balance rights in a free society. Imaginary people do not have rights.

Similar laws are in the works in Finland as well, where it will join other highly questionable laws that already make even the definition of child pornography arbitrary. In fact, Finnish courts are already not only determining what constitutes art, but also whether parody is succesful, because that is the determining criterion to whether a parody constitutes an IP violation. So in Finland, courts determining what is art won't be anything new.

If you think they're exaggerating about policing thoughts, by the way, Finland's state police have already applied for a law criminalizing talking about having sex with children in an approving manner. I so wish I was making that up.

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There are those who say that protecting children from sexual abuse is so important that we must do anything to stop it. Whatever one may think of this, laws against fictional child pornography fail on that count.

Daily Mail: Charity's anger at proposal to make child porn legal 'to protect children from abusers'

The research found that child sex crimes fell when child pornography was more easily accessible.

The discovery tallies with similar studies in Denmark and Japan, where child pornography is not illegal, that found incidences of child sex abuse were lower in those countries.

The conclusion of the new study is that ‘artificially-produced’ child pornography should be made available to prevent real children being abused.

Pornography was strictly prohibited in the Czech Republic between 1948 and 1989.

The ban was lifted with the country's transition to democracy and, by 1990, the availability and ownership of sexually explicit materials rose dramatically. Even the possession of child pornography was not a criminal offence.

Diamond and his team looked at what actually happened to sex-related crimes as it moved from having a strict ban on sexually explicit materials to the material being decriminalised.

Results from the Czech Republic showed that rape and other sex crimes have not increased following the legalisation and wide availability of pornography.

Most significantly, the incidence of child sex abuse has fallen considerably since 1989, when child pornography became readily accessible – a phenomenon also seen in Denmark and Japan.

They also found that the number of cases of indecent exposure and other, less serious, sex crimes fell dramatically in the wake of pornography becoming more readily available.

The researchers say: ‘As with adult pornography appearing to substitute for sexual aggression everywhere it has been investigated, we believe the availability of child porn does similarly.’

So not only are no children harmed in the making of fictional child pornography, its availability seems to decrease sex crimes against children. In general, pornography decreases sex crime, so this finding makes sense. I know that this cuts no ice with determined anti-pornography crusaders, who replace scientific data with claims that porn makes you gay, but the reality is that fictional child pornography, if anything, seems to make children more safe.

However, that's a terrible argument for not banning it. The Ottawa Citizen put it quite nicely when they said:

There's no point in having a right to free speech if we make exceptions for everything that people find distasteful or offensive.

In fact, that's the kind of free speech we have in Finland; our constitution guarantees Finnish citizens freedom of expression, except when constrained by law. In other words, our constitution gives us a right to say things that we're not banned from saying. Some right! The only place I can think of that doesn't allow its citizens to do things that aren't specifically forbidden is the fictional city of Raseir in the classic CRPG Quest for Glory 2, which boasted a street named "Everything Not Mandatory is Forbidden". So we, as Finnish citizens, have more rights than the inhabitants of a fictional computer game dictatorship.

Hooray!

But I digress. As a criterion for banning expression, the harm it causes is a dangerous guideline. In nearly every debate on free speech, someone quotes the example of shouting "fire!" in a crowded theater. It might be salutary to remember where the expression comes from: it was used by Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., to justify sentencing a man to six months in prison for distributnig anti-draft leaflets. It was the judge's opinion that inciting people against the draft posed a "clear and present danger" to the United States, and was therefore illegal.

This tug-of-war between the desire to criminalize dissent and uphold freedom of expression should serve to point out that the harmfulness or harmlessness of speech is insufficient in itself as a criterion. Harm is a flexible concept that can be stretched a long way, and if we subordinate free expression to a critetion of harm, are we really willing to ban anything that can be considered, or even proven, to have harmful effects?

Suppose that someone demonstrated that people who read detective novels are more likely to commit violent crime than people who don't? Or, to take a real-life example, someone came up with data to support the decades-old idea that comic books predispose childrne to crime? Would you then be willing to ban detective novels and comic books under the same criteria as fictional child pornography? After all, they'd be harmful. Remember that as far as we know, no form of expression can directly cause a person to commit a crime; all they can do is predispose. That's a matter of much correlation and very little causation.

This is why it's dangerous, and I believe in many cases morally dishonest to argue against banning fictional child pornography just by quoting its beneficial effect on sex crime rates. That isn't actually an argument in favor of freedom of expression; it's an argument that this particular kind of expression is beneficial and should therefore be allowed. It's a whole different story, and begs the question: if the data should be refuted by a better study, would you change your mind? And would you support the hypothetical comic-book ban if data in its favor were produced? If not, you're making a morally dishonest argument.

**

In other words, this isn't a question of whether fictional child pornography is beneficial or harmful, but of what the limits of free expression are. It's been shown time and again that juging expression by the harm it supposedly causes is a primrose path to censorship. I can't believe that even the most ardent anti-child pornography crusaders would want to live in a country where all expresion is regulated based on whether it's deemed harmful to society or not. There's practically no limit to what such a dystopia might end up banning. After all, people are healthier if they're happy; therefore things that make them unhappy make them less healthy, and are therefore harmful. Under this rationale anything could be banned.

The only rationale for the outright ban on child pornography is that a child was necessarily abused to create the image. It should be recognized that this is also a problematic piece of reasoning; technically, it could equally well be used to ban pictures of terrorist attacks. Even if we accept the ban on child pornography, we can't extend it to fictional child pornography using the same rationale, because no children were necessarily abused for its creation. We don't ban other fictional depictions of crime, even other fictional depictions of sex crime, so why should the sexual abuse of children be treated differently?

Any ban of fictional child pornography necessarily creates one of two disturbing precedents: either that expression can be regulated according to its harmfulness, or that when it comes to child pornography, a different standard of civil rights prevails. Finland is currently pursuing the latter policy. Neither should be chosen by a free country.

Finland has highest prices in eurozone, and they're about to get higher

Eurostat: Consumer price levels in 2010

In 2010, price levels for consumer goods and services1 differed widely across Member States. Denmark (143% of the EU27 average) had the highest price level, followed by Finland (123%).

This comes to us shortly after the end result of the parliamentary elections, the new Katainen cabinet, put together their agenda. One of the sticking points of the coalition talks was a rise in VAT, which the left-wing parties vocally opposed because of its impact on low-income earners. What they eventually went along with was a system that ditches the overall VAT increase, and slightly bumps up capital gains tax. Income tax will also be slashed slightly in the lowest bands.

At this point, the recently departed Peter Falk's best-known character would have turned around at the door and said "oh, just one more thing". Because they're also raising fuel duty by 10%, car taxes and Pigovian taxes on health and environmental, erm, things, including a broadening and raising of the controversial and badly implemented sugar tax. Also featured is a hike in waste duty and property tax.

So not only is Finland the most expensive country in the eurozone right now, but it's going to get even worse. Meanwhile, these tax hikes and the failure of the agenda to really address Finland's burgeoning deficit in any sensible way mean the whole economy is headed downhill fast. We're burdened with a huge public sector and tax burden to run a welfare state that barely functions at all and eats up a gigantic chunk of the economy. Simultaneously the political left is getting stronger, with the rise of the left-wing conservative-populist "Base Finns" and the collapse of the agrarian center-right party. In my opinion, if the current trend continues, it isn't going to be possible to put together a political coalition to fix the crumbling economy, because all parties except two are basically running on a platform of more taxes, more benefits. Together they're going to exert enough inertia that the deficit will simply not get fixed before it's too late. And then we'll go the way of Greece.

Helsinki Pride - this year, a big deal

The Helsinki Pride parade is this weekend; to be specific, tomorrow at 13:00 local time. The parade starts at the Senate square. If you're in Helsinki, be there, because this is a big deal.

Homophobia is having a bit of a resurgence here in Finland. Last year, the parade was attacked with tear gas by a tiny bunch of homophobes from somewhere up north, and since then, we've gotten a rabidly anti-gay interior minister and a huge growth in support for a Christian conservative party at the polls. In order to get the Christian democrats on board in the new coalition government, they jettisoned gender-neutral marriage for the next four-year term.

So all in all, we're going through a bit of a backlash against sexual liberation here. In view of that, and especially because of the terrorist attack last year, it's important to show support for the cause. I'll be there.

Happy birthday Lola!

It's about time we pay tribute to the hottest Miss Finland ever, Lola!

She was crowned Miss Finland in 1996 under her maiden name Lola Odusoga. She's called Wallinkoski now that she's married, which is way more boring. She was also Miss Scandinavia and second runner-up Miss Universe, and she's pretty darn hot.

Back in 2001 or thereabouts, she annoyed people by appearing in lingerie in a series of ads:

But whatever she appears in, she's definitely the hottest Miss Finland of them all.

Happy birthday!

The hottest Finnish athlete of them all

In April, sports site The Bleacher Report ranked Finland's Kiira Korpi number one in their list of "sexiest international athletes". I'm sorry, but they're wrong.

Is Kiira beautiful? Of course she is.

She has old-time film-star good looks and is a heck of a figure skater, so sure, she belongs on the list. Especially after that number with the cop outfit.

The problem is, she's not the hottest athlete in Finland at all.

For starters, there's Eva Wahlström, former amateur European silver medalist and current pro boxer, who is not only Finland's most successful female boxer ever, but also damn hot.

However, the title of Finland's hottest athlete belongs squarely to world champion and multiple European champion Hanna-Maria Seppälä. I mean, look at her:

Case closed!

Different ID cards for foreigners

According to Helsingin Sanomat, the new Finnish ID card project is getting some bad feedback from European anti-racism coalition ENAR. The new system will feature blue ID cards for Finnish citizens and brown ones for foreigners. Sweden's Nöjesguiden agreed and thought the project was amusing because of Finland's relatively low foreigner population. Finland's Hufvudstadsbladet also questioned the move.

Finnish nationalism being what it is, the social networks are awash with outrage. How dare they criticize us! The sad thing is that attitudes in this country have become so polarized that if someone even implies the word racism, people have a knee-jerk reaction to it and don't even bother to look at the issue. Why on earth should a foreign national living in Finland be forced to broadcast the fact that he's a foreign national? Just a few weeks ago, when Finland won the ice hockey world championship, foreigners and Swedish-speakers were attacked and threatened on the street for, well, being foreign.

"How can anyone possibly be opposed to something like this?" they ask on the social networks, as if they can't understand how it might be discriminating to make a certain part of the population carry distinguishing IDs. A few years ago, the same conversation was had when the Finnish police announced they would be stopping and searching "foreign-looking" people in Helsinki to ensure they were in the country legally. When it's foreigners who are involved, even people who are highly critical of the Finnish government and police will immediately leap to their motherland's defense, especially if it's criticized by foreigners like Swedes.

The real point is that in this atmosphere, it's a little odd to find Finnish officialdom making a move like this. There's no pressing need to introduce this scheme right now, in the middle of a very acrimonious social divide on immigration and racism. It makes you wonder if they're taking sides. And what's worse is the fact that it's almost certainly impossible to have an actual discussion about this, because a certain, very vocal, class of people in this country immediately fly off the handle at the least implication that something racist might happen in Finland.

There's a good Finnish proverb involving sticks and dogs that would work well here.

Policing the Internet in Europe

First of all, the Matti Nikki saga continues in Finland. I wrote about it years ago, and here's a press release from Electronic Frontier Finland back in 2008 explaining the whole thing. In brief, Internet activist Matti Nikki runs a website that criticizes the Finnish and EU authorities' inefficient anti-child pornography actions. For this, his Finnish site, which doesn't contain pornography, was censored by the Finnish police under a law that allows censorship of foreign child porn websites.

Just last week, the Helsinki administrative court decided that the police were wrong to censor Nikki's site and ordered it removed from the block list. Bizarrely, they maintained that while the intent of the law was clearly to censor foreign websites that contain child pornography, the police couldn't have understood the law, and are therefore not to blame. In my Finnish-language post on the topic, I linked to Radley Balko's summation:

When I’ve written about the arrests of citizens who record or photograph cops over the last couple years, I’ve repeatedly pointed out the double standard that exists when it comes to ignorance of the law. Citizens are expected to know every law. Break one, and you suffer the consequences. Ignorance is no defense, even when it comes to vague, obscure, or densely-written laws. But when law enforcement officials—the people we pay to enforce the criminal code—when they prove to be ignorant of the law, when they illegally detain, arrest, and jail someone based on a mistaken understanding of the law, they rarely if ever suffer any consequences.

The same standard operates here, as we now have a decision from our administrative court that effectively releases the police from any culpability for misinterpreting a law. The court entirely failed to address the fact that the censorship constitutes an attack on Nikki's constitutionally guaranteed freedom of speech. In my opinion, the sole reason Nikki's website was extralegally censored was his criticism of the Finnish authorities. The cops have just been let off the hook for that.

**

Meanwhile, in Germany, the police are taking a hand in the general elections:

Falkvinge.net: German Pirate Party’s Servers Confiscated In Police Raid — Two Days Before Election

Around lunch today, the German Pirate Party (Piratenpartei) sent out an alarming tweet that spread like wildfire. “Our servers are offline due to police intervention. Do not panic, this is our turn. More information to follow.” The German police had taken the Piratenpartei out — two days before general elections in a state in Germany.

Apparently, the French police force had asked its German counterpart to secure evidence in an investigation that was not related to the Piratenpartei, and some of this information was on one of the Piratenpartei’s servers. Rather than accepting assistance from the Piratenpartei in securing this particular piece of information, the police instead chose to seize the entire server farm and take it offline.

Doing this to a democratic party — Germany’s sixth largest, actually — two days before an election is nothing short of a democratic sabotage.

I have nothing to add. You'd think that in Germany, of all countries, they'd be a little leery of sending in the storm troopers to suppress a political party, but I guess not.

World champions 2011

Here's some pictures I took of the world championship celebrations in Helsinki on Monday. Unlike most pictures on my blog, these ones I actually took myself, so they're covered by the same CC BY-NC-SA 3.0 license as the text. Enjoy!

Even Helsinki's biggest department store got in on the act:

The flood of people started on Aleksanterinkatu...

...watched over by black helicopters:

For any foreign readers, I should explain that Finnish people don't do this kind of thing. In my lifetime, I only remember two other times like this: the previous world championship in 1995 and when GWAR won the Eurovision Song Contest.

They must have done pretty well on those Finnish flags.

Like I said, this isn't exactly normal for us. There were people on top of tram stops:

Kappeli restaurant:

Kauppahalli:

Traffic signs:

And traffic lights!

You could easily pass this one off as a picture from a revolution in Helsinki.

We're being told that there were nearly 100,000 people present.

Despite appearances, I don't think that's actually a neo-Nazi rally on top of a collapsing roof.

There were fireworks, somewhat pointless in the bright sunlight...

...which did cover the Orthodox cathedral in St. Paulesque smoke.

Even the crane operator got in on the celebrations.

And here it is: the world championship trophy. That's as good a look at it as we got!

And finally, on what could be construed as a nauseatingly patriotic note, a powered paraglider. It isn't; that just happens to be a perfect picture to end this post with.

Winning!

First of all, the divine Maria Sharapova won at Rome:



But more importantly, there was the hockey world champs in Slovakia. Luckily Mats Sundin explained to Aftonbladet that it's absolutely impossible for Finland to defeat Sweden in the finals.

The Swedish media agreed, with Aftonbladet posting a cute picture of a baby lion on their front page, to highlight just how "child's play" it would be to defeat Finland.

Good thing that didn't happen.

I mean, gosh, that would be embarrassing.

Here's a Swedish hockey song from the last time it was impossible for Sweden to lose to Finland in the finals.

I Got Election - a brief guide to the Finnish parliamentary elections of 2011

This Sunday, the small and boring country of Finland convenes at its schools and other voting posts to elect a parliament. As I happen to live there, I thought I'd explain what's going on.

* The system *

Using the d'Hondt method of proportional representation, the Finnish people will elect 200 members of parliament from 15 electoral districts. One of them is the autonomous region of Åland, annexed by Finland against the wishes of its Swedish-speaking inhabitants in 1918 and an unwilling participant in Finnish politics ever since with its single representative in parliament. The other 199 are elected from mainland Finland. Last time around, in 2007, as much as 65% of the electorate turned up to cast almost three million votes.

After the elections, the party with the most seats in parliament is designated to form a cabinet. Normally, the chairman of that party becomes prime minister, and he puts together a coalition of parties to form a cabinet that commands a majority in parliament. Almost all cabinets are based around two of the "big three" parties, with assorted smaller parties tagging along to make up the numbers.

The Finnish political system is incredibly dysfunctional. All real political decisions are made behind closed doors by the leaders of the parties, who control their MPs' votes in parliament, although the Greens pretend they're different by allowing the occasional few to vote against the party line. As a result, the real mechanisms of Finnish politics are invisible to the public and impervious to their influence, except every four years when the voters effectively get to decide which member of the good old boys' club gets to speak a little louder than the others.

I'll describe each party in terms of their social attitudes (liberal - conservative) and economic policies (right-wing - left-wing). These are all terms that need to be taken in a Finnish context; for example, in the field of economic policy, all parties, including the ones described as right-wing, are generally committed to maintaining Finland's gigantic public sector, massive income redistribution through a Byzantine welfare system and huge agricultural and area subsidies. Similarly, most socially liberal parties will not be opposed to male conscription or favor the separation of church and state, to take a few examples.

In reality, the practical differences between Finnish parties, or at least the ones large enough to be taken seriously, are minute. For most of the 1990s, the country was ruled by the "rainbow cabinet" that included almost every party in parliament, including the extreme right and extreme left. Those two parties held the two treasury appointments. That they were able to do so in concert should really demonstrate to everyone one that Finnish politics is basically a sham to deceive people into thinking that the country isn't actually run by an oligarcy of civil servants and party bosses.


* The players *


Agrarian Party (Keskusta) - 50 seats

Officially named the "Center Party" or whatever, the Agrarians are just that, the largest party in every electoral district north of the back of beyond. They were the largest party after the 2007 elections, and were thus in charge of forming the current cabinet. It was headed by the former prime minister, who later met a woman on the Internet but lied that he'd met her in Ikea, and became embroiled in a scandal over election contributions to his party. He is generally considered to be guilty of blatant corruption, but no charges were filed because there is no corruption in Finland. He was eventually replaced by someone else.

The Agrarians are socially conservative and economically mildly right-wing. While their conservative roots might otherwise make them economically more right-wing, their only real agenda is pork-barrel politics: Agrarian MPs are elected from the rural districts on the understanding that they will maintain Finland's gigantic agricultural subsidies and bring a few infrastructure projects their district's way every now and then. As a result, Finland produces sugar and a huge surplus of food, and is decorated by several massive, beautiful bridges that lead absolutely nowhere. It is expected that the party will be somewhat hurt by the election money scandal, but in the end, the pork barrel will carry the rural field like it always has.


The Gathering (Kokoomus) - 51 seats

Yes, I know, they're officially the "Coalition Party" or something immensely boring like that. Frankly, a Highlander reference is much better. If you prefer the Dutch heavy metal band, that's fine too.

Currently in cabinet, the Gathering is socially slightly conservative and economically right-wing. Long the bastion of Finnish right-wing politics, the Gathering was out of power during the Cold War when Finnish politics were subject to Moscow's veto. Since the fall of the Berlin Wall they have wielded the sceptre of fiscal responsibility (in Finnish terms) as the only party to come out decisively in favor of combating Finland's burgeoning debt deficit with public sector cuts. Wikileaks would also have us believe that they plan to have Finland join NATO, but few people in this country will take an effeminate Swedish alleged sexual predator's word on anything. Nonetheless, passionately hating the Gathering is the favorite activity of Finland's red-green angry young people, who blame them for everything, which makes them Finland's equivalent of the Republicans or Tories.

When the 2007 election results came in, the Agrarians were the largest party in parliament with 51 representatives; the Gathering had 50. Since then, one of the Green MPs has defected to the Gathering, and the Agrarians lost the captain of Finland's national bobsleigh, erm, curling team to defection, making the Gathering currently the largest party. They're expected to stay that way, which means that in all likelihood they'll be in charge of forming the next cabinet.


Social Democrat party (SDP) - 45 seats

After their Soviet-backed Finnish communist revolution was defeated in 1918 by the simultaneous German-backed Finnish fascist revolution, those Social Democrats who hadn't either fled to the Soviet Union or been shot by the Whites in a concentration camp got down to the business of moderate left-wing politics. They like to claim responsibility for the Finnish welfare state, kind of like how the Russians have at some point claimed that every invention in the world was actually invented in Russia. The Social Democrats are to Finland's central labor union what Sinn Féin was to the IRA.

The Social Democrats are socially middle-of-the-road and economically left-wing. For a while, it looked like they were in danger of being usurped by the Green party after losing eight seats in the previous elections, but the economic crisis has seemed to revive the Social Democrats' flagging fortunes and they remain one of Finland's "big three" parties. Their main focus is on opposing public sector and welfare cuts.


Leftist Alliance (Vasemmistoliitto) - 17 seats

After Finland lost the Second World War, the Soviet Union mandated that the previously banned Communist party be allowed to reform. It did so as the SKDL, which was the Moscow-based Finnish Communist Party's front organization in Finland, i.e. of the guys who fled to Moscow after the civil war. After the Soviets went the way of the dodo, the SKDL soldiered on and has since metamorphosed into a vaguely angry, anti-nuclear young leftist party run by a former football hooligan.

The leftists are socially liberal and economically about as left-wing as it gets, at least in parliament. Their fortunes have been boosted by the economic crisis and the blatantly dishonest nuclear policies of the Green party, which they oppose with dogmatic anti-nukeism.


Green Party (Vihreät) - 15 seats

The Finnish environmental movement started when some people chained themselves to logging machines or something back whenever, and they've since made the transition from a couple of eccentrics in cardigans to a major political party that's been in cabinet since the early 90's. Getting their hands on the reins of power has come at a price, and the Greens' critics accuse them of selling their principles. At the same time, their stand in favor of gay marriage and against racism has made the Greens to conservatives what the Gathering are to left-wingers: the fount of all evil. One particularly prominent Internet racist who's running for parliament maintains that Finland is actually run by a cabal of Green feminist women who are in cahoots with the liberal media.

The Greens are socially liberal and economically vaguely left-wing. The Green party is decidedly anti-nuclear, which has manifested itself in practice by them being in several cabinets that have voted to build more nuclear power plants. They also consider themselves social liberals, which is carried out in practice by voting for repressive Internet censorship laws and the right of employers to spy on their employees.


Swedish Party (Ruotsalainen kansanpuolue) - 9 seats

The Swedish party exists for the sole purpose of forcing Finnish schoolchildren to study Swedish and making sure Swedish-speaking Finns can waltz into any public facility in the country and demand service in Swedish. Swedish-speaking people vote for them.

The Swedes are socially liberalish and economically sort of right wing. In practice, they'll participate in any coalition government that maintains the status quo in language politics.


Christian Democrats (Kristillisdemokraatit) - 7 seats

Finland's version of Christian Conservatives, the Christian Democrats occasionally cause media outrage by being themselves. Last year, they triggered a mass exodus from the Finnish state Lutheran church by pointing out on state television that buttsex makes Baby Jesus cry.

The Christian Democrats are socially conservative, by which they mean that they hate gays, and economically middle-of-the-road. Religious loonies vote for them.


Finnish Fundamentalist Party (Perussuomalaiset) - 5 seats

The name of the party is actually quite difficult to translate. Last I checked, their official English-language name was "True Finns", which has probably been selected to imply an earlier Finnish political movement (aitosuomalaiset). "Perus" properly translates as basic or fundamental, as in basic course or fundamental principle. So in my opinion, it's either the Basic Finns or the Finnish Fundamentalist Party, and I prefer the latter. I also earlier suggested calling them the Base Finns.

The Finnish Fundamentalists are socially conservative and economically left-wing. The roots of the party are in an agrarian populist movement called the SMP, run by Veikko Vennamo back in the past. Their previous populist insurgency was headed by the late Tony Halme, better known to pro wrestling fans as Ludwig Borga, and yielded few results.

This time around, the Fundamentalists are still something of a protest movement, basically running on a platform of populism, disaffection with the larger parties, opposition to welfare cuts and jingoism. Their candidates include several members of a quasi-fascist organization called Suomen Sisu, dedicated among other things to preserving the racial purity of Finland, who have focused their energies on mobilizing Finnish racism into a political force euphemistically referred to as "immigration criticism". They are largely responsible for immigration being one of the major talking points of the election, and have brought about a situation where, in the middle of an economic crisis, one of their leading candidates refuses point-blank to even discuss economic policy, because he's only interested in the nefarious effects of African immigration into Finland. Among their other candidates is a Belgian holocaust denier who has confessed in public to enjoying prostitutes.

The Fundamentalists have also produced, among other things, a cultural program that calls for the elimination of state funding to "postmodern art" and the encouragement of patriotic art that celebrates Finnishness. They are also opposed to Finland's membership in the European Union, and development aid. As far as any economic program can be discerned, it is a broadly left-wing one, against cuts and in favor of increased taxation. Before the elections, the former captain of Finland's national curling team defected from the Agrarian party to the Fundamentalists, and proposed solving the economic crisis and the poverty problem by printing money.

In the 2007 elections, the Fundamentalist Party more than doubled their share of the vote, from ~1.5% in 2003 to 4%, netting a total of five seats. Since then, their popularity has skyrocketed with the rise of political racism and discontent with the ruling parties, to the point where the wildest opinion polls have them displacing one of the three major parties.

Other (Borgerlig Allians -yhteislista) - 1 seat

The representative from Åland. Damned if I know anything about politics in Åland. Hell, they don't even let mainland Finnish people buy land there without a special permit. For all I know, when the rest of us have elections, these guys re-enact the Wicker Man and have the guy with the best costume represent them.

* Also starring *

There's a whole melange of parties without representatives in parliament trying to acquire some. Here's a couple.


The Pirate Party

Judging from their election propaganda, the Finnish Pirate Party is in favor of smoking pot, ass-raping record executives and employing immigrant women as prostitutes. I'm a member, but having just written that, I'm not entirely sure why. I don't smoke pot, so it's probably the hookers.


The Independence Party

A rabidly anti-EU party that boasts several seemingly insane candidates dedicated to opposing the New World Order that threatens us all with gay marriage, hoaxed moon landings and chemtrails. It is actually so difficult to tell whether or not their candidates' blogs are parodies that I'm not sure this party actually exists.


The Finnish Workers' Party

An avowedly socialist party, the chairman of the Finnish Workers' Party participated in a "small parties'" debate on Finnish state television. The presenter described his party as representing Russian interests in Finland, and the chairman didn't contradict him. They boast such candidates as a Finnish vicar who is in favor of reintegrating Finland into Russia, and a Finnish academic who organized a rally opposing Sofi Oksanen's latest book because it was anti-Soviet. The rally was attended by him, a bunch of Putin-Jugend from Russia and the Finnish Islamic Party. Apparently the Islamic Party's chairman and the academic in question have the same KGB handler.


The Communist Workers' Party

The People's Liberation Front of Judea to the Finnish Workers' Party's Judean People's Liberation Front, the Communist Workers' party demands the introduction of a planned economy on Marxist-Leninist principles. I can't think of anything to follow that sentence with.


* Major talking points *

Here, at this virtual water cooler, I'll sum up what Finland is talking about leading up to these elections.


That Freedom Party woman who thinks the New World Order is poisoning us with chemtrails

Seriously, what the fuck.


Immigration

The biggest hot-button topic of the election is immigration. Specifically, immigrants from Africa who are taking our jobs and raping our women, according to our vocal "immigration criticalists" (THEY TOOK OUR JOBS!). Now, even though immigration criticalitists insist that all Africans are criminals and all Arabs are terrorists and we mustn't let them into our country to sully our precious bodily fluids, you're not allowed to call them racists, so we have to call them immigration criticalizers.

For context, Finland has the least foreign-born inhabitants per capita of practically any European country. We also spend at most something like 1% of our state budget on issues related to immigration. So in terms of reality, this is a non-issue. However, through several blogs aggressively dedicated to the idea that all foreigners, or at least all differently colored foreigners, are evil, the immigration criticalizationists succeeded in making the impervious horror of immigration the mega-issue to end all issues of this election.

Previously, in the municipal elections, the simple device of running a blog that sensationalized crimes committed by foreigners and was rude about Islam propelled an obscure academic into the Helsinki municipal council with a landslide. Once in that council, he proceeded to do absolutely nothing about anything. He is the man who, in the middle of an economic crisis, refuses to answer questions about economic policy or the deficit, and in general seems to have no opinions on anything except that foreigners are unspeakably evil. And on that platform, he's practically a lock for parliament.

I genuinely believe that future generations of Finnish political historians are going to look at the early 2000's, when our state and economy are teetering on the brink of collapse, and then look at the issues we were spending our time on and wonder what the hell was wrong with us.


The rise of the Finnish Fundamentalists

The biggest talking point of them all is that according to the polls, the Fundamentalists may get big enough to actually factor into the cabinet negotiations. The craziest predictions at one point had them winning the elections outright, installing a Catholic populist with a nonsensical political agenda as our prime minister. In retrospect, that appears exaggerated, but it seems sure that their share of the vote will go way up from the 4% they drew last time.

In a way, the Fundies are like Obama: a hell of a lot of people seem to have an unreasonable faith in them being somehow different from other politicians. It's going to work out the same way.


The EU

What have they ever done for us anyway?

**

So there you go; you're ready for Sunday! As you watch the elections, remember that according to a poll, half of all candidates want to limit access to the dangerous and potentially lethal dihydrogen monoxide. No, really.

Good night, and good luck.