I pay my taxes to the company store

In the States, you may be paying taxes direct to your employer.

Reuters: Taxed by the boss

Across the United States more than 2,700 companies are collecting state income taxes from hundreds of thousands of workers – and are keeping the money with the states’ approval, says an eye-opening report published on Thursday.

The report from Good Jobs First, a nonprofit taxpayer watchdog organization funded by Ford, Surdna and other major foundations, identifies 16 states that let companies divert some or all of the state income taxes deducted from workers’ paychecks. None of the states requires notifying the workers, whose withholdings are treated as taxes they paid.

At first sight, this seems awfully familiar to any student of medieval history; it's tax farming. The rationale this time is that this is a way to pay subsidies to companies directly. It's still tax farming.

Any discussion of something like this inevitably degenerates into the usual leftist claptrap of public=good and private=bad. That totally obfuscates the real problem with arrangements like these, which effectively combine the worst of private and public: the lack of public oversight inherent in a private organization and the coercive power of a public one.

Kony, Jenna Talackova and Trayvon Martin

What does an Internet campaign to stop an African warlord have in common with a trans woman barred from a beauty contest and a black teenager murdered in cold blood by a vigilante? Simple: they're all symptoms of what may be our biggest problem as a society and a culture.

In each case, we react when presented with an individual example of injustice, but ignore the wider context. We enthusiastically share the Kony video, but does anyone care why people like him can run riot in Africa? Probably the single biggest reason is the poverty of most of the continent, which leaves governments powerless. One of the chief causes of that poverty is the agricultural policy of us, the world's developed nations. The majority of Africans are farmers, but we won't let them export their surplus to us. Instead, we subsidize farmers in the West to over-produce food, which we then dump on the world market, driving African subsistence farmers deeper into poverty. Is this even mentioned in, say, discussions on agricultural policy in the West? Nope. Indeed, most of the people I saw going on about Kony think that buying domestically grown produce and "supporting our farmers" is virtuous.

It's heartening that the Trayvon case has stirred up such an outcry. But most of the questions being asked are secondary or irrelevant. The real question isn't stand your ground laws or whether the shooter should have been arrested. The question is: how have you managed to create an environment where a suburban vigilante makes thousands of 911 calls solely to report black men in his neighborhood, shoots one of them for no reason, and not only avoids arrest but has his story unquestioningly believed by the police, who publicly defend him? The question isn't if a particular law or an individual police officer of department is at fault, or even the moronic question of whether the vigilante in question was a racist. It's how incredibly racist your society has to be for this whole sequence of events to unfold at all.

How does Jenna Talackova tie into this? As empirical proof. I offer you this tweet from the formidable Natalie Reed: "Miss Universe Canada petition got 20,000 signatures, Bill C-279 petition only 280. I really, really, really, REALLY hate humanity right now." Bill C-279 is a trans rights bill that you can read about here. So about a hundred times more people support trans rights than... support trans rights. Again, people think that a given individual shouldn't be mistreated because she's a trans woman, but they won't support a bill to end that mistreatment.

Part of the problem is psychological. As my co-blogger put it: "our brains can't multiply". We can, if we choose,empathize with a single individual, but we're really bad at empathy with a group. But it's more than that. The same reaction comes up all the time, in just about every political discussion; the copyright system, police brutality (especially the American practice of senseless SWAT raids and wholesale murdering of dogs), racism, corruption. Confronted with an individual example, people will decry and condemn it, but balk at any suggestion that there could possibly be a wider, even structural, problem. It goes far beyond sensible caution of sweeping political reforms; it's a wholesale denial of the very possibility that we might live in a society where systemic injustice happens.

In my opinion, it's simply a psychological defense mechanism that protects people from having to ask themselves difficult questions about the world they live in. It's hard to think about big political questions. Much easier to live in a fairy-tale world where society is fundamentally good and sound, and all problems are caused by evil individuals. Makes for better Hollywood movies, too. The problem is that it also leads people to passively condone, or even actively support, policies and structures that directly harm the people that they claim to sympathize with.

Iran and the bomb

Let's start with an excerpt from The Economist, on a possible air attack on the Iranian nuclear program:

Attacking Iran: Up in the air

But even if things went off without a hitch Iran would retain the capacity to repair and reconstitute its programme. Unless Israel was prepared to target the programme’s technical leadership in civilian research centres and universities the substantial nuclear know-how that Iran has gained over the past decades would remain largely intact. So would its network of hardware suppliers. Furthermore, if Iran is not already planning to leave the NPT such an attack would give it ample excuse to do so, taking its entire programme underground and focusing it on making bombs as soon as possible, rather than building up a threshold capability. Even a successful Israeli strike might thus delay Iran’s progress by only three or four years, while strengthening its resolve.

In other words, an air attack simply will not prevent Iran from acquiring a nuclear weapon.

From the print edition:

Proponents of an attack argue that military humiliation would finish the regime off. But it is as likely to rally Iranians around their leaders.

In my opinion also, the best possible thing that can happen to a paranoid xenophobic regime like Iran or North Korea is a limited attack on it. Think about it: the government chiefly legitimizes itself by creating a worldview where their state is under constant attack from a hostile surrounding world. It's totalitarianism 101. An attack on Iran would basically tell the population that the bearded crazies ranting about how the Great Satan America is going to attack them any minute now were right all along. In an article I link to later, Iran's opposition "Green movement" is quoted as saying that a US/Israeli attack is the worst possible thing that could happen to reform in Iran. There can be little doubt that they're right.

As an article in the Washington Monthly strongly argues, the whole notion of a nuclear-armed Iran as a horrible disaster for the whole world doesn't seem to be grounded in any actual strategic scenarios. On the contrary, Iran only seems to want a nuclear capability to deter the US and Israel. Not that any clear case for the air strikes is being made, either; the USAF chief of staff recently wondered what the objective of an air campaign might be, in fairly skeptical terms.

It should be remembered that Iran constantly faces an aggressive near neighbor with a considerable nuclear, biological and chemical arsenal and a propensity to invade nearby countries: Israel. Iran is also one of the rare nations that has had weapons of mass destruction used against it in the not-so-distant past; the conventional carnage of the Iran-Iraq war was horrifying enough, but Iraqi atrocities like the Halabja attack added an element of pure horror to the war. Iranian leaders are unlikely to have forgotten that the Iraqi chemical arsenal was provided by the very countries that are now so stridently opposed to Iran's nuclear program, or that the US helped silence reports of Iraq's use of chemical weapons against Iranian civilians.

Iran can also hardly be expected to forget that those same Western powers have for decades tacitly accepted Israel's nuclear arsenal, even keeping quiet when Israel actively participated in the apartheid-era South African nuclear program. From Iran's point of view, the West's position seems to be that while Western allies are allowed to use weapons of mass destruction against Iran, and countries like Israel and apartheid South Africa can develop a nuclear capacity, Iran can't. It's a policy that's hard to justify to its victims.

An attack on Iran would be militarily risky, wouldn't stop it from acquiring a nuclear weapon, and would seem to have no positive consequences whatsoever for the security and stability of the Middle East. And that's exactly why Israel is so likely to carry it out.

The basic strategy of Israel since its founding has been the strategy of the "iron wall", best described by Israeli historian Avi Shlaim in his book of the same name. In short, throughout its existence Israel has deliberately maintained a high state of tension with its neighbors. Most of the time, little active effort has been required, but when it has, Israel has resorted to terrorism and provocations, and as a last resort, invaded its neighbors. This strategy of tension serves to keep Israeli domestic policies in line; with the constant threat of an external enemy, criticism of the powers that be can be stamped out as treason, and any external criticism dismissed as anti-Semitism. Israel's entire foreign policy rests on its image as a peace-loving victim of its innately evil neighbors; without that image the world would be too free to take a long, hard look at the way the Palestinians are being treated, and at other disagreeable aspects of Israel. The only lasting peace Israel can conceive of is one that it dictates.

This policy was last prominently seen in action in the criminal Israeli raid on the Turkish aid ship bound for Gaza. From a strategic point of view, the way Israel handled the situation was a disaster: nothing in the relief mission to Gaza was of sufficient importance to justify such a brutal attack, let alone the international outcry that followed - unless creating that outcry was one of the strategic aims of the operation: to once again "prove" to the Israeli people and their government's supporters abroad how the world is in league against poor, misunderstood Israel. The same motive has informed Israel's "settlement" program, which is deliberately designed to, among other things, sabotage the Palestinian peace process. It last accomplished this function when it was used to destroy the high-profile peace negotiations started by an astonishingly naive Obama administration.

An escalation of tension in the Middle East would be in Israel's interests as part of its continuing strategy of tension with the Muslim world. For that reason, they may very well present the US with a fait accompli in the form of an unilateral strike on Iran before the next presidential election. Because the topic of Israel simply cannot be addressed rationally in US politics, it would be electoral suicide for the Obama administration to not support an Israeli attack, no matter how counter-productive it would be from the point of view of US strategy. As long as US politicians continue to pretend that the United States and Israel have the same strategic goals, US Middle Eastern policy will be at the mercy of Israel's military adventurism. When this combines with the fact that US public discourse on Iran is completely detached from reality, Israel's design stands a good chance of succeeding.

In the long run, an Iranian nuclear capacity would probably stabilize the Middle East by making Iran more secure from intervention. The same thing happened with both the Soviet Union and China, even though hawks in the West prophesied disaster at the time. In its political history so far, the Islamic Republic of Iran had shown itself to be a largely rational state actor. So far, nuclear weapons in Muslim hands haven't led to a global or even local apocalypse. Treating Iran as a collection of genocidal lunatics to be cowed by a surgical use of American military power is repeating the same hubris that led to decade-long wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, with potentially far worse results. In fact, the one thing that could be relied on to push Iran's leaders toward unreasoning radicalism would be a brutal US-Israeli attack. And that may well be exactly what Israel's political leadership wants.

If the aim is stability and consequently security in the Middle East, it seems to this blogger that the best way to achieve it in the current situation would be through mutual deterrence, as pioneered and perfected between the superpowers in the Cold War. Erect the paraphernalia of Mutually Assured Destruction anew in the Middle East: mutual and third-party verification of weapons, arms control treaties, a telephone hot line, the lot. There should still be plenty of Cold War know-how around. Such an arrangement would represent an equitable solution that addresses both parties' need for security and the rest of the world's interest in a peaceful oil-producing region. Included in the negotiations would be Iran's support for terrorist groups like the Hezbollah, and Israel's assassination campaign against the Italian nuclear program.

In the real world, this will never happen, because the West seems to be unable to exert the kind of diplomatic pressure on Israel that would bring it to the negotiation table and actually agree to a solution. Even acknowledging that Israel has nuclear weapons seems to be an insuperable obstacle, let alone bringing them up for negotiations.

Another option would be for the United States to extend some kind of security guarantee to Iran; essentially a "non-invasion" promise similar to the one made to the Soviets on Cuba. This, too, seems impossible. President Kennedy could do it, President McCain might have; President Obama simply can't. Even if he somehow found the foreign policy willingness and ability that his administration has so conspicuously lacked, letting the right go berserk over "appearing islamofascism" could decide the election.

Once again, the most likely outcome is that stability in the Middle East will remain as elusive as ever; not because of any inherent characteristics of the region and its inhabitants, but as a consequence of the West's continuing insistence on treating Israel's interests as identical to theirs. As long as this dangerous illusion persists, the West's policy will remain essentially counter-productive to any lasting peace in the region.

It's almost inconceivable that the US, still embroiled in two wars (despite Obama's cold war-esque "withdrawals"), is contemplating intervention in Iran and even Syria to boot. Unless cooler heads prevail, the ongoing Middle Eastern entanglement (1990-?) and concurrent "war on drugs/terror/civil liberties" will become a national trauma to dwarf Vietnam, with far worse consequences for the stability of the whole world.

A new Falklands conflict?

Next month will mark the thirtieth anniversary of the Argentine invasion of the Falklands. I don't know if they've got an election coming up or something, but they'be been making noise about the islands again.

The Falklands war is still something of a sore point for Britain's political left, what with Margaret Thatcher being Antichrist to them. I've actually sat a British and Irish studies exam on a book that determinedly referred to the "Malvinas conflict". Unsurprisingly, the foreword went to some lengths - for an academic work - to abuse the then-Prime Minister.

To me, hearing leftists talk about the "Malvinas" is bizarre. Surely, apart from any hopefully mythical modern-day Stalinists, the left believes in democracy and self-determination? The population of the Falklands is British and has repeatedly made it clear that they wish to remain British. It's the Argentine claim that the islands are somehow theirs that represents pure imperialism. What makes the left-wing defense of the Argentines even more bizarre is that at the time of the war, Argentina was fighting the so-called "dirty war" against left-wingers and trade unions, with the same military that invaded the Falklands. One can only assume that the British left let their hatred of Mrs. Thatcher distort the picture.

If you wanted to be neutral, I suppose you could call them the Sebald islands after their probable Dutch discoverer, but I don't see any need to, as the Argentinians are, in my opinion, clearly in the wrong. In this case, it's the former colony that is the imperialist. It was on precisely these grounds that the United Nations found Argentina to be guilty of unjustified aggression back in 1982.

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Unfortunately, as much as Britain may have the moral advantage, they are at a decided military disadvantage when it comes to the defense of the islands. Should Argentina decide to invade again, the British would find it much more difficult to retake the Falklands in 2012 than they did in 1982.

By itself, the Argentine air force is hardly a threat. Their newest aircraft is the A-4AR Fightinghawk, an A-4 Skyhawk modernized with F-16 avionics. It's still a Skyhawk, the first examples of which entered service in 1956. Alongside them the Argentines essentially deploy the same aircraft, minus combat losses, that they fought the Falklands War with: Mirage III:s and V:s, and the Israeli upgraded versions of the latter. They also still fly the indigenous Pucará counter-insurgency aircraft, some of which are run on biofuel so they can fight a green counterinsurgency. In other words, Argentina currently maintains more or less the same air force that the British resoundingly defeated in 1982.

After the 1982 war, a major investment was made in improving the defenses of the Falklands. Mostly, this took the form of RAF Mount Pleasant, a brand-new airbase featuring what Wikipedia calls the world's longest corridor. Opened in 1985, RAF Mount Pleasant is home to No. 1435 Flight, which operates four Eurofighter Typhoons. Ground defense is provided by an infantry company from the Princess of Wales's Royal Regiment. Given its current obsolescent/obsolete state, the four Typhoons at Mount Pleasant and the Royal Navy ships in the area can probably see off the whole Argentine air force. But it's not quite that simple.

In my mind, the best analogy for the Mount Pleasant airbase is Singapore in 1941. The naval base at Singapore had been constructed to house the battlefleet Britain would send to the Pacific theatre. From there, it would have exerted a powerful deterrent - Mahan's "fleet in being" - on the Japanese. The Japanese pre-empted this plan by taking the inadequately defended base before the fleet could be deployed. The outnumbered defending EN forces were destroyed by asymmetric attack: aircraft against a battleship and cruiser. Having lost Singapore, the Royal Navy had to operate from bases in the Indian Ocean, and was unable to retake Singapore. The Navy had been ordered to defend Singapore, but denied the resources it needed.

Similarly, RAF Mount Pleasant could easily house enough air power to deter any Argentine invasion. But what if the Argentines pre-empt this plan? The present complement of four Typhoons may be more than enough to deal with anything the Argentine air force can send their way - in the air. However, a force of only four aircraft is appallingly vulnerable to asymmetric attack on the ground. Should those aircraft be disabled by sabotage or other means and the airbase be taken, how will Britain get it back? Without carrier-borne aviation, which Britain no longer has, any attempt to retake the islands would be in the face of Argentine air superiority. Even their obsolete aircraft could make life very uncomfortable for a naval task force, let alone an amphibious landing, depending on fighter cover from Ascension Island. After the inexplicable decision to retire both the Sea Harrier and Harrier from service, the Fleet Air Arm now operates no fixed-wing combat aircraft, and although the UK still has a single carrier (HMS Illustrious) in service, there are no carrier-capable combat aircraft in her inventory that could fly off her.

So while Britain found it difficult to put together a carrier task force to retake the islands in 1982, the same feat would be impossible in 2012, because the carrier task force simply cannot be assembled. The aircraft don't exist, with even the remaining Harrier GR9 airframes having been sold to the Americans. If the Argentines take the islands with a coup de main, the United Kingdom can't get them back on her own. Having dismantled her power projection capabilities, she would have to rely entirely on her allies for carrier-based air cover. This is a dismal prospect: the Americans are allied with Argentina, and are hardly likely to be interested in a shooting war in Latin America. The Spanish have a carrier, but the prospect of Spain going to war against Argentina over a British colony seems incongruous at best.

If Argentina invaded, British air superiority over the islands could only be realistically re-established by a French or Italian carrier group. That is the state of British sea power in 2012.

The first of the next generation of British aircraft carriers, the Queen Elizabeth class, is due to enter service in 2016. Until then, the Falklands are Argentina's for the taking, because British politicians did what no enemy ever could: destroyed the Fleet Air Arm.

Your corporate dollars at work

NPR: Prison Economics Help Drive Ariz. Immigration Law

Last year, two men showed up in Benson, Ariz., a small desert town 60 miles from the Mexico border, offering a deal.

Let me stop you right there.

If you've never seen Dark Star, you have to. It's seriously awesome. Okay. Go on.

Glenn Nichols, the Benson city manager, remembers the pitch.

"The gentleman that's the main thrust of this thing has a huge turquoise ring on his finger," Nichols said. "He's a great big huge guy and I equated him to a car salesman."

What he was selling was a prison for women and children who were illegal immigrants.

"They talk [about] how positive this was going to be for the community," Nichols said, "the amount of money that we would realize from each prisoner on a daily rate."

But Nichols wasn't buying. He asked them how would they possibly keep a prison full for years — decades even — with illegal immigrants?

"They talked like they didn't have any doubt they could fill it," Nichols said.

That's because prison companies like this one had a plan — a new business model to lock up illegal immigrants. And the plan became Arizona's immigration law.

Illegal immigration, you see, isn't just a politician's hobbyhorse to scare voters, but it's also big business.

One of my beefs with the political left is the notion that business is, basically in itself but especially in big corporations, inherently evil. As in this case, for real evil, you need the public sector. In 2010, the New York Times told us how this works:

NYT: Officials Hid Truth of Immigrant Deaths in Jail

Silence has long shrouded the men and women who die in the nation’s immigration jails. For years, they went uncounted and unnamed in the public record. Even in 2008, when The New York Times obtained and published a federal government list of such deaths, few facts were available about who these people were and how they died.

But behind the scenes, it is now clear, the deaths had already generated thousands of pages of government documents, including scathing investigative reports that were kept under wraps, and a trail of confidential memos and BlackBerry messages that show officials working to stymie outside inquiry.

A particularly gruesome example was showcased in 2010 in Idaho:

CorrectionsOne.com: ACLU suing Corrections Corp. of America

BOISE, Idaho — The American Civil Liberties Union is suing state prison officials and a private company, claiming violence is so rampant at the Idaho Correctional Center that it's known as "gladiator school" among inmates.

The ACLU said it would file the lawsuit Thursday against Nashville, Tenn.-based Corrections Corp. of America in U.S. District Court in Boise.

The lawsuit says Idaho's only private prison is extraordinarily violent, with guards deliberately exposing inmates to brutal beatings from other prisoners as a management tool.

The group contends the prison then denies injured inmates medical care to save money and hide the extent of injuries.

These are, indeed, corporate dollars at work, but the immigrant scare has been worked up by politicians, and the contracts for these facilities are arranged and approved by politicians. So in that sense, my headline there is a bit of a provocation. What it should actually say is "your elected representatives at work".

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Ha ha, say European readers. Those crazy Americans!

Think again.

NYT: Companies Use Immigration Crackdown to Turn a Profit

Especially in Britain, the United States and Australia, governments of different stripes have increasingly looked to such companies to expand detention and show voters they are enforcing tougher immigration laws.

Some of the companies are huge — one is among the largest private employers in the world — and they say they are meeting demand faster and less expensively than the public sector could.

But the ballooning of privatized detention has been accompanied by scathing inspection reports, lawsuits and the documentation of widespread abuse and neglect, sometimes lethal. Human rights groups say detention has neither worked as a deterrent nor speeded deportation, as governments contend, and some worry about the creation of a “detention-industrial complex” with a momentum of its own.

So we're doing the same thing over here, as well.

I wrote about Finland's expanding private security sector earlier (in Finnish), and made the point that our problem isn't the privatization. Because especially this country woefully lacks any kind of real liberalism - in the classical sense - these days, the only people who draw attention to these abuses tend to be the leftists. For them, it's obvious that this is an example of how evil capitalism is. Because if only the state would run detention camps, then everything would be all right.

Yeah. And that's not just a joke, either.

Our problem is that our countries lack any kind of legal safeguards that would prevent public enforcement agencies and the private agencies they, in effect, deputize, from running over our civil rights. Even worse, our culture is permeated by racism, which tells us that whatever happens to people in immigration detention centers isn't any of our business, so not only are they deprived of their rights, but no-one here cares that they are. It's that racism, that lack of legal safeguards and that lack of caring that enables the policies and people who run the violent business of immigration today. In other words, it's us.

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.

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.

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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.

Disagreement as violence

Last month, I wrote a post on this blog titled Dependency theory and conspiracy theory in response to one of Flavia Dzodan's posts at Tiger Beatdown. I left a comment there with a link to my post, and was a little disappointed when they chose not to publish that comment.

With that in mind, I was interested when Ms. Dzodan posted another text, this time on moderating comments: The troll is dead! Foxnewsification and the notion that all points of view are valuable. Again, I think that text makes several very good points:

I would venture that the internet troll took the first deathly blow in 2001 when hateful anti Islamic rhetoric became acceptable in most media. What was once brushed off as “trolling” became the standard. We saw the incendiary language get worse every day, certain slurs that were usually reserved for the back rooms of hateful sites repeated on news hours, commenting sections of news sites, blogs, etc. Any challenge to this bigotry used to be met with a chorus of “FREEDOM OF SPEECH!” utterances. As if every form of speech deserved a platform everywhere, as if it was the obligation of site moderators to allow any content without critical thinking. As if all content was equal.

As someone who runs two blogs whose comments sections are moderated, I wholeheartedly agree. I get my share of personal attacks, and judging from the behavior of one of my Pirate Party comrades in the social media recently, I made him very angry indeed when I refused to publish a series of long-winded comments he left on a piece in my Finnish-language blog. There was a simple reason for that decision: he offered no counter-arguments to what I wrote, except to claim either that I was lying or that I was expounding "feminist lies" and being irrational. That isn't a counterargument, that's a personal attack, and I'm under no obligation to publish those. My blogs aren't a discussion forum. The reason I moderate comments at all is because when I started writing about immigration and racism, my blogs started to overflow with nearly identical ideological commentary, mostly consisting of personal attacks and trolling, from Finland's organized racists and their "useful idiots". So I basically agree with Ms. Dzodan: not all points of view need to be aired on every forum.

However, because my comment had just been rejected on her blog, I approached Ms. Dzodan's piece a little more skeptically than I might otherwise have. In her lead-in, when she describes the kind of objectionable contents Tiger Beatdown receives, here's what she lists:

However, MatrixMansplainer is not alone. We got a whole bunch of them on the Black Pete post. People who would accuse me of racism against Dutch people; those who would inform me that I should fuck off to whichever hellhole I came from; those who would write 800+ word comments explaining the many ways I was wrong; privilege deniers; garden variety White supremacists; rape threatening dudes.

My boldface.

Wait a minute. Racism, white supremacism, threats of rape and... disagreeing at length?

She then goes on to compare comments like this (racist, violent and, um, long) directly to violence:

We created “safe spaces” with varying degrees of editorial control. However, I have to wonder why are not all news sites and major blogs made “safe”? If in any other environment, people felt systematically unsafe, we would demand immediate change and measures of protection. If a club, a venue, a public space allowed people to be subjected to violence without actually taking counter measures, such places would most likely be shut down due to public outcry. However, this is what our media does.

She then quotes a comments policy from another site, and I totally agree with the quote:

A variety of points of view is all to the good, but a mere opinion not backed up by facts, reasoning or analysis is unlikely to get through. Moreover, not all points of view are valuable.

And goes on:

“Not all points of view are valuable”. This needs to be repeated. Any point of view that actively seeks to alienate, oppress or bully someone does not deserve to be exposed.

I'd be totally okay with this, if only my comment hadn't been left unpublished and my counterargument been ignored. I've re-read it, and for the life of me, I can't figure out where I was seeking to alienate, oppress or bully anyone. If there's any uncertainty on this, I can say that I certainly wasn't trying to do any of those things.

All this puts a slightly new spin on something Ms. Dzodan said in the comments section to the post I was trying to comment on:

For this one piece, I’ll make one thing clear: I am not going to approve any comments that base their critique on the idea that I am speaking out of “ignorance” and that I have no clue of what I am talking about.

It is fine to disagree with me, but to pretend that you (generic you), as a commenter, hold the truth and I am misguided and ignorant is a form of violence.

So wait: if I think that on a given, specific topic, I'm right and Ms. Dzodan is wrong, then I'm committing a form of violence? And therefore, my viewpoint is one that doesn't deserve to be exposed? I'll be frank: I'm very ignorant on a large number of topics, and for almost all of those, there are people out there much, much better informed than I am. Therefore, when discussing one of those topics, it may in fact be true that I'm misguided and ignorant and the person I'm speaking to holds the truth. It's certainly happened to me! But it seems it, a priori, can't happen to Ms. Dzodan.

Do you really believe that disagreement is violence? Really?

The logical outcome of this, for Ms. Dzodan and her co-moderators, seems to be that no comments that disagree with her will be allowed. That isn't creating a safe space, that's creating a political echo chamber where only the like-minded are allowed to speak. Disturbingly, that's what the comments sections of Tiger Beatdown increasingly resemble: a dozen or two iterations of "Good post!", and no content. Certainly no disagreement, informed or otherwise.

That's a very depressing comments policy. Luckily, Ms. Dzodan offers those of us who have our comments deleted some advice:

One would expect that this MatrixMansplainer would have realized, after so many weeks, that his comments are not welcome since I have systematically trashed them.

I suppose I'll realize that, then.

Mass Effect 2 is a white supremacist game

To begin, a disclaimer to avoid misunderstanding. I have no knowledge or opinions of the Mass Effect 2 designers' and developers' actual political views, so I'm not talking about them. What I intend to show is that Mass Effect 2 tells a story that shares many characteristics with the way white supremacist movements see themselves, and co-opts the player into sharing that narrative. Contains spoilers.

Despite being a big fan of the first Mass Effect, I really didn't like its sequel. I found ME2 incredibly disappointing in many ways, and I share many of the views put forward in this article. While the gameplay in itself was a big letdown, what made the game actively distasteful for me was the way it not only trampled all over continuity from ME, but it does this to make you participate in a white supremacist story.

In Mass Effect, the player encounters a rogue Alliance black project called Cerberus, which aims to create super-soldiers. During the course of the game, it becomes obvious that they've gone totally insane, fighting Alliance personnel, including the player character, and perpetrating all kinds of atrocities. They're basically Unit 731, only worse. In fact, if your character has the Sole Survivor background option, it turns out that the people responsible for the death of your former unit, who spent years torturing the only other survivor, are in fact Cerberus. Because the first game is quite immersive, I have to admit that by the end I figured my character had a fairly negative opinion of Cerberus, to say the least.

Having said that, it was a bit of a shock for me when the Cerberus we meet in Mass Effect 2 seems to have nothing to do with Cerberus from the previous game. In the second game, Shepard dies and is resurrected by Cerberus to work for them. The Cerberus operatives you meet enthusiastically explain to you that you've got it all wrong: Cerberus isn't a bad organization at all! They're an independent human supremacist group, bankrolled by a reclusive millionaire, and not some horrible terrorist organization that murdered your entire unit!

What makes the game truly shocking, and totally killed the series for me, was that your character is forced to go along with this. Yes, that's right: my character, who's an Alliance military officer and has seen first hand what Cerberus does, who indeed was mainly known before the events of the first game as the only survivor of a Cerberus atrocity, is now gladly putting on a Cerberus uniform.

It gets worse when you're introduced to your new ship, which is exactly like the old ship. There are even some of your old crew members on board, but they all seem to have entered some strange parallel universe, having renounced their former loyalties, if not even their personalities, and gladly joined a paramilitary human supremacist organization. If this smacks rather strongly of rewriting history in general and Holocaust denial in particular, that's because the game does. What's worse is that this isn't just a couple of characters talking. It's not like this is their version of what Cerberus is; instead, this seems to be the common view of everyone you encounter on Cerberus. Back in Mass Effect, Cerberus and its atrocities were headline news; now it seems collective amnesia has set in, to such an extent that the in-game documentation now gives a whole new view of Cerberus. You're also effectively prevented from seriously questioning it; such topics as the Sole Survivor background being pretty much taboo.

The absolute nadir of the game comes when you encounter a former squadmate from ME, who asks you how you can possibly be working with a disgusting terrorist organization like Cerberus. This isn't even lampshading, it's much worse: your character is being called out on the game's retconning. What are you supposed to say? My answer: because the game forced me to. I can't even begin to imagine what my character would say, because I'd pretty much lost all immersion in the world by then.

The jarring continuity problems are so bad that the most sensible explanation for ME2 would seem to be that your character wakes up in a parallel universe. I've been struggling to find a good analogy to how the rebranding and whitewash of Cerberus felt for me. It's rather like if one were to write a story about an Israeli commando who wakes up from a coma to find that his unit has defected en masse to Hamas, and explain to him that Hamas isn't a terrorist organization at all but a pacifist charity. Or a British left-wing pacifist deciding that maybe the SS isn't so bad after all and joining it when he's told that the Holocaust was really just a lie. And Josef Mengele, who would have fit right in at Cerberus, was a good Samaritan.

**

If it was just that Mass Effect 2 is really bad at continuity, I could just chalk it up to the generally juvenile and subpar quality of the writing, which produces memorable scenes like this one:

The "ass" in "Mass Effect" seen in the picture is one of the new characters, whose only real game functions are to explain away your previous notions of Cerberus and, well, that. Speaking of characters, most of the recurring characters are also more like parodies of themselves, from Tali and Garrus both actively ridiculing the previous game and delivering frankly embarrassing fan service, to the totally ludicrous transformation of Liara that reminds me very strongly of the Mad parody of Steven Soderbergh's Traffic. Liara's reinvention as a gangster and "information broker", and Garrus's new personality as a sort of lame Turian Punisher, are not only ridiculous but again, offensive to the previous game. Remember the whole side plot with Garrus, where you investigate an unsolved case from his C-Sec days? Where you can guide him in either the "paragon" or "renegade" direction? Turns out you needn't have bothered, because he's going to go and become the Turian Punisher either way.

One of the new NPCs you recruit is Jack, a powerful biotic who was the victim of cruel Cerberus experiments and, unsurprisingly, hates them. You get the same old propaganda line from Cerberus and their on-board cheerleader: the great leader didn't know about it and so on. That may be an attempt at narrative ambiguity; either you believe them or you don't. But the problem with that is that you're not allowed to act on it in any way.

By the way, biotics have been completely nerfed, so you don't actually need her for anything. She only has special cutscene powers.

More jarring universe-breaking follows when you meet the ship's AI. That's right; in the first installment of the series, everyone completely freaked out when AIs were even mentioned, and now here they are, happily living on a ship with a built-in AI. The only person who even notices is Tali, and even she can just be talked out of it. Then again, you can talk her into happily co-operating with a Geth, too.

But the problem isn't just poor continuity: what's being done with Cerberus is morally distasteful as well. In Mass Effect, Cerberus was an organization dedicated to human supremacy and the creation of a "super-man" in order to defeat the aliens and conquer the galaxy for man's living space. Sound familiar? It should, because Cerberus seems to be rather directly based on the SS.

So in Mass Effect 2, you're revived by the SS, and two cheerful SS officers explain to you that you've got it all wrong! They have nothing against the Jews or Slavs as such, it's just that they're concerned with maintaining Germany's racial purity and standing in the world community. Of course, some individual SS members or member organizations, even, may have undertaken some suspicious activities in the past, but those have probably been misrepresented and anyway, they can't keep track of everyone. (The really atrocious examples are simply ignored, and you're not allowed to ask.) What matters is that their leader is a great man with a great vision for the future of our race. Surely you'll put on this SS uniform and follow his orders!

**

So right at the start of the game, you're forced to go along with rewriting history in a manner that rather too strongly resembles Holocaust denial. It then starts getting worse. Soon enough, you're initiated into the main plot of the game. Evil aliens are abducting thousands of people, and the Alliance government doesn't care. Therefore, it's up to the heroic racist militia of Cerberus to stop the evil aliens and save humanity. You see? It turns out the racists were the good guys! The government is corrupt, and its entanglement in a sinister one-galaxy government means it doesn't care what happens to ordinary folks. Luckily, the racist militia does care, and by defying the government, they save lives from the alien threat.

This is a narrative that could have been cooked up for a video game by a Midwestern racist militia or a European neo-fascist group. The main character is a brave government agent fighting on the side of good. He's resurrected by a racist group he's previously fought against, but finds out that after his death, the government has stopped caring about the people. Some of his former colleagues are now members of the racist group, and talk about their alienation with the goverment and its cover-ups of their heroic deeds and the coming alien menace. Only the enlightened elite that make up this militia group understand that the government's destructive policies of multiculturalism are leading to the destruction of the human race, but for saying this they're branded as racists. So the main character realizes that the racists are, after all, really the good guys, and the corrupt government is evil. He gladly joins a racial supremacist organization and battles the evil aliens.

In sum, Mass Effect 2 is the most disgustingly racist game I've ever played in my life.

Oh, sure, there are aliens on your team. That's not historically inappropriate; there were all sorts of nationalities in the Waffen-SS, too. The plot of the game still is that the government doesn't care if thousands of people are dying, because it's more interested in covering up alien attacks for some senseless nefarious reason, and people need armed anti-government racists to protect them from foreigners. I'm surprised they don't make you plant a truck bomb at an Alliance office building.

From what I've heard, in ME3 Cerberus will once again be your enemy. I wonder how they're going to pull that off. Retcon the retcon? Unless ME2 is rewritten out of existence (it was all a dream!), the fact will still remain that while the Alliance (federal government) stood by and did nothing, Cerberus (white supremacist militia) saved thousands of people from the aliens. Never mind that this whole notion of the Alliance being so corrupt and evil that they don't care about people any more comes out of nowhere.

I'd like to take this opportunity to suggest some more plot points for Mass Effect 3, in line with the new creative direction taken by ME2:

- the Alliance bans firearms and sends squads of aliens to collect them from human patriots
- main character discovers the "Protocols of the Elders of the Volus", proving the Volus are secretly allies of the Reapers
- the Council races join forces to create a New Galactic Order, a socialist one-galaxy government
- the New Galactic Order brands all humans with a barcode and bans the non-coded from buying and selling
- main character finds out that an ultra-secret cult, the Space Masons, secretly controls the Alliance

There's a lot of mileage to be covered here. The game could be called Mass Effect 3: The Shepard Diaries.

**

Mass Effect 2 was an insultingly bad game. If you were a fan of the first Mass Effect, ME2 went out of its way to slap you in the face. Instead of a dynamic, ambitious CRPG, we get a second-rate Gears of War clone that occasionally masquerades as a racist adventure game. Oh, and don't forget the planet-scanning mini-game, which was almost as much fun as stabbing yourself with a rusty knife.

The game also manages to be disgustingly sexist. As part of your crew, you have a sort of SS yeoman, who, of course, is a cute girl. If you get talking with her, it's possible for your character to develop a kind of romantic sub-plot with her. The consummation? A kiss? A sex scene? No.

You get to use her as a cabin ornament.

It's literally sickening. And, of course, there are no more same-sex romance options, because in the Space SS, that's just wrong.

In this hyper-sexist environment, what was merely poorly executed in the first game becomes actively troubling: every alien race is made up of a single gender. The only exception is the quarians, who seem to come in male and female; in neither of the games do we encounter a single krogan, salarian or turian female. On the wiki, we can have some reasons: the salarian "females are cloistered on their worlds out of tradition and respect". The krogan: "Female krogan rarely leave their home worlds, focusing on breeding in an attempt to keep krogan numbers from declining too quickly. The few remaining fertile females who can carry young to term are treated as prizes of war, to be seized, bartered or fought over." And even though there's no "fluff" justification for never meeting a turian female, we just...don't.

In the first game, the stated reason for never seeing a turian female was, as per the wiki, insufficient time and resources. I can believe that, and I'm certainly not saying that every permutation of alien race and gender needs to be represented in every sci-fi game. Still, for every major alien species we meet, the females are cloistered on their homeworlds or kept as chattel, or are just inexplicably absent. The quarians are the only exception, and when it comes to the more exotic aliens, gender isn't even mentioned but the assumption seems to be that everyone is male. The more unusual alien species are confined to brief walk-on roles, so they're not very relevant. Notable among them are, of course, the volus, a mysterious race of merchant profiteers with prominent noses whose race is denied membership in the galactic council because it's inferior.

And then there are the asari. Even though the asari have only one gender, the in-game Codex describes them as an "all-female" race, surely a mindless statement. The Orion slave girls of Mass Effect, the asari look and act like blue-skinned human women. They're promiscuous bisexuals who, despite looking very human, are inexplicably sexually desired by all of the major races of the Mass Effect universe. The asari can be found throughout the galaxy as strippers and prostitutes, and the game makes sure to bring some loose blue women your way for flirtation and more regularly.

So each major race maps nicely onto a gender. The turians, krogans and salarians are all men, and the asari are all women. The former provide NPC soldiers and scientists, while the asari get by on their biotic powers. As a point of note, while ME1 included a female soldier, in Mass Effect 2 your squad members divide neatly along gender lines. The men are soldiers or scientists, or at best semi-biotics, while the women are biotics, plus a thief added in the downloadable content. In other words, in ME2 women need special powers to be useful team members, while men can just pack a gun and come along.

Yes, it's a man's life in the Mass Effect galaxy.

So, if you've always wanted to be a space nazi, heroically rescuing the overwhelmingly white and heterosexual human race from evil space foreigners, this is the game for you. It made me want to vomit.

Dependency theory and conspiracy theory

There was a post at Tiger Beatdown titled "Occupying Europe, when the colonizer reclaims wealth", by Flavia Dzodan. Anyone familiar with leftist discourse knows what's coming from the title, but to prime myself for some intellectual activity this week (I'm writing this Monday morning), I'll go through the motions with it. What I'm trying to do is criticize the worldview that I perceive is behind the text.

A long time ago, when I took a course to become a kickboxing instructor, I was taught to give feedback in the form of a metaphorical hamburger; a prime example of the McDonaldization of education, if you will. The idea is that first you give positive feedback (a bun), then criticism (the meat), and finish off with more positive feedback (the other bun). I like the metaphor, because to me, it implies that the positive reinforcement equates with the useless carbohydrates of the buns, while the criticism is the meat of the whole thing. That's an anachronism, as the example was given at a time when any Finnish person would have thought that "karppaaminen" ("low carb-ing") refers to a type of fish.

In the spirit of this advice, I'd like to start by saying that I very much approve of the author's criticism of "importing" the 99% slogan from the US "Occupy" movement. As a European, I am in general dismayed that so many European political movements seem to be importing agendas directly from North America. For example, it's recently become something of a meme here in Finland to rail against tax breaks for the rich; indeed, I've even seen people claim that our entire budget deficit is caused by tax breaks granted since the early nineties. According to an authoritative study, the opposite is true: tax progression has remained essentially the same, while taxes on low- and medium-income earners have fallen considerably more than for high-income earners. But because tax breaks for the rich are on the agenda in the US, the same must be true here.

However, there is a fundamental issue I disagree on:

The European Union’s wealth is the wealth of Empires. Mainly the British, Dutch, Spanish, Belgium, French, Italian, Austro-German and Portuguese empires. This is the wealth built on the backs of the African slave trade and the colonization of lands as distant from each other as the African continent, the Americas, Asia and Australia. This wealth is made of unspeakable suffering and economic deprivation for those in the colonized territories. This wealth is also made of resource depletion and subjugation of native populations. This wealth that never belonged to Europe to begin with.

In other words, all you Occupy Whatever protesters with your bizarre neo-swastikas: you're not being leftist enough. All that evil financial capital was created by robbing the Third World:

The very same wealth people now Occupying these public European squares reclaim as their own, demanding it is re-distributed while it was generated as a result of Europe’s occupations in the first place. And yet, none of this is examined or contextualized. Most people operating under the illusion that this wealth they are reclaiming is rightfully theirs, that they are entitled to it.

Though the author gives us the "very basic premises of dependency theory", cribbed from the Wikipedia page, and dresses up these claims with it, what becomes obscured is that dependency theory is, first and foremost, a theory on the current relationships between countries and markets in the world system. It is not, and does not justify, the historical claim that current European prosperity is "made of unspeakable suffering and economic deprivation for those in the colonized territories". This is a much broader claim, and one that I take great issue with. Many dependency theorists do advocate such a historical worldview, but the difference between the theory of international relations that is dependency theory and that historical worldview must be kept in mind.

**

This claim was formalized as the theory of the "development of underdevelopment" by sociologist Andre Gunder Frank in the article by that name. His specific claim was that the underdevelopment of Latin American countries was not caused by "the survival of archaic institutions and the existence of capital shortage", but by the international capitalist system, which exploited them for profit.

It's important to see this criticism in context. Frank, and dependency theory in general, was reacting against views of development that saw underdevelopment as principally the fault of the underdeveloped countries themselves, either because they hadn't managed their economic development properly, or even because they were racially inferior. The latter view has been put forward recently here in Finland, and figures in Finnish discussions on development aid, for instance.

While much of the dependency theorists' criticism of existing models of economic development was good and necessary, Frank threw the baby out with the bath water when he claimed that underdevelopment is entirely caused by the world system. If this was true, then Hernando de Soto's (the economist, not the conquistador) reforms would have had no effect. De Soto has led the way in improving standards of living in developing countries precisely by removing antiquated obstacles to economic development and improving the ability of ordinary people to participate in the economy. His success has shown that such obstacles do play a vital role in restricting economic development. By reforming property rights and arguing for a decriminalization of coca growing, de Soto managed to make life so difficult for the Shining Path Peruvian Maoist terrorist organization that they tried to kill him. Read more about de Soto here.

Despite endorsements from people like Kofi Annan ("Hernando is absolutely right") and Bill Clinton ("the world’s greatest living economist"), de Soto infuriates left-wing commentators precisely because he's offering a capitalist solution to underdevelopment. Perhaps the most eloquent defence of de Soto I can offer is to link to the Grauniad, which dedicated a "review" to attacking de Soto, but managed to offer no concrete criticisms whatsoever beyond accusing him of being a front man for international capitalism.

De Soto's work quite concretely demonstrates that legislation and culture in the underdeveloped countries do play a major role in restricting development, even today. To lay everything at the door of a faceless, ill-defined "international capitalism", a left-wing hobbyhorse similar to the Stalinist "international bourgeoisie", is at best a single-cause fallacy.

As a historical view, the idea that Western development is caused by non-Western underdevelopment is fundamentally absurd. It rests on a zero-sum view of world wealth, where Western prosperity cannot be the result of progress within Western society, but must be created by taking resources from other societies.

To take a fairly specific example, it has long been a commonplace for certain leftists to assert that the British "industrial revolution" was built on profits from imperialism and the slave trade. However, it has been pointed out by David Richardson that less than 1% of the domestic investment in Britain during the Industrial Revolution was made up of profits from the slave trade. Furthermore, while it's indisputable that the Atlantic slave trade had a grave human impact on Africa, the idea that it impoverished and destroyed the entire continent is ridiculously exaggerated. It obscures, among others, the fact that there were also Africans who themselves made a considerable profit from selling other Africans into slavery. In my opinion, the bald generalizations offered by supposedly "post-colonial" Marxists that cast all white people as aggressors and all black people as helpless victims are just as racist as the racist views they purport to replace.

Even some Marxist historians like Bill Warren agree:

There is no evidence of a process of underdevelopment…The evidence rather supports a contrary thesis: that process of development has been taking place…and that this has been a direct result of the west.

I wouldn't go as far as to say that the economic development of the entire world, at any stage, is a direct result of anything done by the West, but the simple truth is that throughout the history of the world, all societies have developed economically, and some societies have developed faster than others. This speed has varied, and indeed at times turned negative, and the forms the development has taken have also varied. Development and "undevelopment" have both taken place at all times and in all cultures; there is no truth to the racist ideas that only white westerners can bring about economic prosperity, or that African culture - as if there were such a thing as an "African culture" - is somehow inherently inimical to development.

At its heart, economic development is endogenic. This is not to suggest that exogenic factors can't play major or even decisive parts in specific processes, but it's long since become obvious to me that these kinds of rejoinders of the blindingly obvious are necessary when writing about anything even remotely political. But historically, it has primarily been the endogenic development of a culture or society that determines what its economy is like and how prosperous it is. There is no single cause; the circumstances a society is in, including various environmental variables like natural resources and climate, power relations within the society and of the society with others, cultural and economic structures within the society and a bewildering array of other factors, conspicuously including decisions made in and by the society, determine what path of economic development it takes. If unraveling this was easy, then economic history wouldn't be an academic discipline.

It's precisely the complexity of economic development that makes single-cause explanations like "international capitalism" or the blithering nonsense of Jared Diamond's guns, germs and steel so inadequate. They attempt to reduce a massively complex series of interrelated historical processes to a single cause, and frankly, when they go beyond that to assert that this single mechanism still functions today and people offering alternative views are on its payroll, they enter the realm of conspiracy theory.

These zero-sum theories don't make any sense on their own merits. If the underdevelopment of the so-called Third World is entirely a result of Western capitalism, does this mean that before the advent of the Age of Discovery (which, frankly, is an appallingly Eurocentric term), fundamental global inequalities of wealth didn't exist? If so, how did the diabolical Western capitalists acquire the means to appropriate the wealth of other nations? Surely they had some competitive advantages to start with. These zero-sum views reduce world economic history to a simplistic nonsense of a pillaging West and a pillaged Rest, and don't hold any water when faced with even an elementary knowledge of history.

Even worse, by casting the entire "Rest" as a unitary block of victimized cultures, they completely deny the rich history and heritage of, say, Arabic and Islamic culture, not to mention China, by reducing them to simple victims of Western imperialism who, unable to defend themselves, succumbed to the superior invader. No thought is given to the notion that these societies have their own history and their own processes that might be worthy of study. This simplistic view of the other as an eternal, impersonal suffering victim in fact reinforces the very Eurocentric, orientalist orthodoxy that its proponents claim to oppose.

**

The Tiger Beatdown article goes deeper into the land of conspiracies in its account of the Libyan civil war:

And now, to prove that none of this Dependency Theory is a thing of the past, in a very recent display of neo-colonial power, NATO forces, the pan European military arm, occupies Libya, a former Italian colony, supporting the “good guys”, the rebel insurgent group whose idea of justice was to sodomize Gaddafi minutes before his execution (Warning for extremely graphic content). Europe, once again, behind the pillage of bodies outside their territory, because that’s another concept that Europe laid out the foundations for: the idea of what Judith Butler very aptly named “the non grievable” lives.

By implication at least, the author seems to be claiming that the Western intervention in Libya is grounded in economic policy, and is part of this transfer of wealth from the Rest to the West. This is utterly ridiculous. No arguments or facts in its favor are advanced, beyond simply stating that the intervention occurred. And surely, if we are to mention atrocities committed by the rebels against al-Qaḏḏāfī, we might also remember that his regime was hardly benevolent? It seems odd to posthumously cast the Libyan dictator as a victim of Western economic repression, but these are the strange lengths to which Marxist conspiracy theories will go.

The leftist attitude to Western intervention is frequently a sort of Catch-22. If the West intervenes in a country like Libya or Iraq, then the intervention is an instance of Chomsky's "New Military Humanism"; an exercise in economically motivated power politics that in itself proves how evil and acquisitive the imperialism that is Western capitalism is. If, however, the West does not intervene, as in Syria or most conflicts in sub-Saharan Africa, then its callousness and disregard are proof of how evil and acquisitive the imperialism that is Western capitalism is. In the eyes of these critics, the West is damned if it does and damned if it doesn't.

**

To end on some more positive feedback (the lower bun of this hamburger, if you will), I'd like to turn to racism again.

All European Empires were built on this notion of “the Other”, the non human that was only good in so far as she could produce labor and resources and, in turn, more children to be exploited. Nowadays, these ideas constantly framed as “the immigrant menace” and the inevitable raising of xenophobia and racism; European governments passing laws demanding more and more stringent requirements to access a documented residency status. The non Western immigrant that did manage to acquire a residency, forced to learn the language of the country or risk deportation. The old colonial practices now enforced on European territories under the guise of “cultural preservation” and “integration”.

Again, I can't agree with the Marxist notion that "the other" is economically defined, or that the other is acceptable as a producer of labor and resources. To proper racists, the racially constructed Other is inherently repulsive and must be kept away, not from economic interests but from pure political prejudice. In Finland, for instance, the main anti-immigrant party is also heavily in favor of reducing Finnish dependence on international trade and, at worst, almost a striving for autarchy. Certainly this view doesn't see the immigrants as economic resources to be exploited: on the contrary, pseudo-Fascist movements see the immigrant as a threat to the health and integrity of the "national body". In my opinion, to see European racism as economically motivated is senseless, as such a theory as to its origins and motivations entirely fails to account for its political manifestations without pseudo-conspiracy theories of "false consciousnesses".

However, in the context of the current European "debate" - which it hardly is by any sensible standards - on immigration, it's important to highlight the very real racist nature of these policies of "assimilation". Fundamentally, they insist that immigrants have no right to their own culture or language, but must abandon their identity and take on a new one, imposed by the hegemonic culture. In other words:

Nowadays, European States (the Netherlands and Denmark are two such examples) have laws that demand Non Westerners learn and speak the local languages or risk fines or, failing to comply, eventual deportation. Their right to occupy a space subject to assimilation.

This is precisely the kind of immigration policy that Finnish political racists are advancing: immigrants must "assimilate", i.e. give up their identity, or be forcibly deported or otherwise penalized. We should recognize that this is inhuman. For instance, a Finnish racist movement states in its election program for the previous election that everyone has a right to their own culture and language. They then go on to state that immigrants must assimilate and abandon their own culture, or be deported. It could hardly be made clearer that to these movements and their supporters, immigrants aren't people at all. In Finland, even the biggest left-wing party, the Social Democrats, campaigned with a slogan calling for immigrants to assimilate.

So I would like to take this opportunity to give my unqualified support for the demand that the "Occupy" movement, in Europe at least, concern itself with the "others" of our society as well:

Travelers and Roma people constantly evicted from European spaces, their right to Occupy anything denied while a complacent media enforces their status as “Other” and as such, undeserving of the right to inhabit spaces that should be reserved for legitimate Europeans. Because, let’s be clear here once and for all: only people who are legitimized by the State can occupy anything. The rest, the undocumented immigrants, the refuges, the Roma, the asylum seekers, had their right to occupy revoked. However, the European Occupy movement is not widely addressing this deprivation and their role, as rightful subjects, in it. Instead, I insist, the movement claims a bigger portion of the tainted pie.

To echo the point I made earlier in my Finnish-language blog post on transgender rights in Finland, Mahathma Gandhi has reputedly said that a nation is measured by how it treats its lesser members. I object to the idea that, say, the non-cisgendered or immigrants are somehow "lesser" members of society than the more outwardly conforming, but I'll again suggest a rewording: a movement for socio-economic change can be judged by who it wants to enact socio-economic change for. So far, the Occupy movement is a movement of the mainstream, for the mainstream, and the Others remain marginalized.

Ron Paul and the media

First of all, watch this video.



For the best commentary I've yet seen on why that happens, read this text from one of the Economist's bloggers.

I think Mr Paul's influence on the ideological cast of American conservatism has been underestimated and underreported, but to take even his influence, if not his candidacy, more seriously would require the talking haircuts and the newspaper typing corps to wrestle with a charged set of geopolitical and economic topics they would rather continue helping Americans not understand.

Over the last decade, I've been more and more disturbed by the direction politics is taking on both sides of the Atlantic. All our polities seem to be less and less willing to engage in any debate on real issues, and instead all major political parties and the media seem dedicated to confining political debates to symbolic non-issues. A perfect Finnish example is the current fixation on immigration policies, which, frankly, are the least of our problems right now. But none of the big systemic problems with the Finnish economy are even mentioned in the media, or were the subject of any real discussion during the parliamentary elections. Instead, candidates tilted at windmills of their choosing, which gave an impression of politics without any actual content.



Pretty much the same thing is happening in the US, where Ron Paul seems to be one of the only candidates who even brings up real political issues. And for that, he gets resoundingly ignored by the media.



Our representative democracies are mostly shams. The whole representative political system is a theater, constructed to deceive us into thinking that we have some input into the political decision-making process that goes on in our countries. In the meanwhile, the real political elite, which in Finland consists of the party bosses, senior civil servants and others, make the real political decisions, which includes deciding what non-issues the plebes will be allowed to "debate". Real issues will be kept off the media radar.



It'll be interesting to see what non-issues the coming US presidential election will be fought over. Rest assured that no big questions on America's future will be addressed, because that way lies the kind of treatment Ron Paul gets.



**



As a postscript, I add a word of caution, in the form of a New York Times op-ed, to anyone who thinks the Tea Party is a positive force in US politics.

And while the public image of the Tea Party focuses on a desire to shrink government, concern over big government is hardly the only or even the most important predictor of Tea Party support among voters.



So what do Tea Partiers have in common? They are overwhelmingly white, but even compared to other white Republicans, they had a low regard for immigrants and blacks long before Barack Obama was president, and they still do.



More important, they were disproportionately social conservatives in 2006 — opposing abortion, for example — and still are today. Next to being a Republican, the strongest predictor of being a Tea Party supporter today was a desire, back in 2006, to see religion play a prominent role in politics. The Tea Party’s generals may say their overriding concern is a smaller government, but not their rank and file, who are more concerned about putting God in government.

You know, if the fact that Bachmann seems to be nuts didn't tip you off.

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.

The international drug war

On the one hand, Connecticut, USA:

BI: Connecticut Decriminalizes Marijuana Possession

Governor Dan Malloy of Connecticut is expected to sign a bill passed by the state House of Representatives last night decriminalizing the possession of marijuana in limited quantities.

Wrapping up what the New York Times today called the state's "most activist, liberal legislative session in memory," the House voted 90 to 57 in favor of SB 1014, which would punish possession of a half-ounce or less with fines, rather than criminal charges.

First-time offenders would be hit with a $150 ticket; repeat offenders would get at least $200 but a maximum of $500 per offense.

According to the Hartford Courant, supporters hope the bill will save taxpayers money and provide "fairer treatment of those caught with small amounts of the substance."

Connecticut's non-partisan Office of Fiscal Analysis estimates the bill will save the state nearly $1 million and net upwards of $600,000 in new fines.

Connecticut joins the 13 other states in the U.S. - including two of its neighbors, New York and Massachusetts - that have already decriminalized the possession of marijuana in limited amounts.

That's not exactly legalizing it, but it seems to be about as close as they can get. And sign it the governor did, saying:

“Final approval of this legislation accepts the reality that the current law does more harm than good – both in the impact it has on people’s lives and the burden it places on police, prosecutors and probation officers of the criminal justice system. Let me make it clear - we are not legalizing the use of marijuana. In modifying this law, we are recognizing that the punishment should fit the crime, and acknowledging the effects of its application. There is no question that the state’s criminal justice resources could be more effectively utilized for convicting, incarcerating and supervising violent and more serious offenders."

What I especially like is the recognition that putting people in prison for smoking pot is ridiculous.

And on that note, the other hand: Russia.

Guardian: Russia defies growing consensus with declaration of 'total war on drugs'

Drug dealers are to be "treated like serial killers" and could be sent to forced labour camps under harsh laws being drawn up by Russia's Kremlin-controlled parliament.

Boris Gryzlov, the speaker of the state duma, the lower house, said a "total war on drugs" was needed to stem a soaring abuse rate driven by the flow of Afghan heroin through central Asia to Europe.

(...)

The Global Commission on Drugs Policy said in a report last week that there needed to be a shift away from criminalising drugs and incarcerating those who use them. Gryzlov, however, claimed that "criminal responsibility for the use of narcotics is a powerful preventative measure".

Special punishments should also be considered for dealers, he added: "Sending drug traders to a katorga [forced labour camp], for example. Felling timber, laying rails and constructing mines – that's very different from sitting in a personal cell with a television and a fridge while you keep up your 'business' on the outside."

While it remains unclear how many of the measures will become law, other leading members of United Russia – which is headed by Vladimir Putin, the prime minister, and which dominates the duma – said they supported the initiative.

The plans follow an admission by Medvedev in April that Russia's fight against drug addiction had failed. He called for radical measures such as mandatory drug tests in schools.

Possession of small quantities of psychotropic substances in Russia carries an administrative fine of up to 15,000 roubles (£330), but Gryzlov indicated it would now result in a jail term. The state should offer narkomany (addicts) a stark choice, he said: "Prison or forced treatment."

I mean, there's a solution to the "problem" of prison luxury: send them to the Gulag!

Here's one direct consequence of their war on drugs:

Injecting drug-use is also accelerating Russia's HIV crisis because – unlike most other European countries – methadone treatment is banned and needle exchange programmes are scarce, meaning the virus spreads quickly from addict to addict via dirty syringes. An estimated one in 100 Russians are HIV positive.

You'd really think that if they're so concerned with popular health in Russia, they might consider an AIDS epidemic to be somewhat more dangerous than people smoking pot. And because it's technically impossible to write about politics in Russia without doing the joke, here's the setup:

Some of Russia's detox clinics still use "coding", a controversial therapy in which patients are scared into thinking terrible consequences (such as their testicles falling off) will result if they mix drugs with medicines which are actually placebos.

And here's the joke:

In Russia, the pot smokes you.