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.

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".

**

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.

Computer God Top Secret camouflage for “gifted” Ethiopians

TWiC #4: The craziest motherfucker who ever lived

They're serious. Look out for the Master Race Frankenstein Mind Control.

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.

The economics of emigration

Read Michael A. Clemens's paper Economics and Emigration: Trillion-Dollar Bills on the Sidewalk?, from the Journal of Economic Perspectives.

How large are the economic losses caused by barriers to emigration? Research on this question has been distinguished by its rarity and obscurity, but the few estimates we have should make economists’ jaws hit their desks. When it comes to policies that restrict emigration, there appear to be trillion-dollar bills on the sidewalk.

The paper goes on to argue that not only are the negative economical effects of emigration, on both the country of departure and arrival, overestimated, but that the positive impact on the world economy is greatly underestimated. For instance:

In historical cases of large reductions in barriers to labor mobility between high-income and low-income populations or regions, those with high wages have not experienced a large decline. For example, wages of whites in South Africa have not shown important declines since the end of the apartheid regime, despite the total removal of very large barriers to the physical movement and occupational choice of a poor population that outnumbered the rich population six to one. The recent advent of unlimited labor mobility between some Eastern European countries and Great Britain, though accompanied by large and sudden migration flows, has not caused important declines in British wages.

Or, in other words:

In my mind, what this simply means is that the most effective development aid we can give to third world countries is to let more of their citizens move here. This would lead to increased prosperity for us and them, or in other words, everyone. Most often, the economic argument against immigration is framed as in the video above. Perhaps the second-most common argument seems to assume that in each country, there are a fixed amount of jobs. Given that this involves jettisoning even the most basic understandings of how a market economy works, it's almost unbelievable that it can be advanced as an argument. To some extent, I suppose that speaks to the level of economic understanding imparted by our school systems.



There is no data that suggests that "unchecked immigration" would destroy Europe economically; on the contrary, there is data that much broader immigration would enrich the world immensely.

Some reading on Norway

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

New York Times: Breivik and His Enablers

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

Guardian: Anders Breivik's chilling anti-feminism

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

The Nation: Europe's Homegrown Terrorists

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

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

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

BBC: Norway and the politics of hate

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

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

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

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

And, finally, The Colbert Report.

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.

Racial thinking in fantasy role-playing

Years ago, I've run a couple of role-playing campaigns with ICE's Rolemaster standard system. For all its flaws, not least of which is encumbering the GM with a metric ton of tables and charts, it works surprisingly smoothly, and even if I wouldn't say I like it, I've found it useful. As a curiosity, one of the first things I ever wrote was a small article for a role-playing "netzine".

A while back I picked up a copy of ICE's RM supplement "Races and Cultures", from 2004. The way they published the system was that they came out with the basic rules, the Rolemaster Standard System (RMSS), and then started adding supplements to cover areas they'd only done sketchily in the basic ruleset. Some examples include the ludicrously overpowered Martial Arts Companion and various sets of magic rules.

Races and Cultures (R&C) aims to expand on character creation. In the RMSS, each character had a race, and if they were human, a culture. So dwarves and high elves were just dwarves or high elves, while humans were hillmen, mariners or something like that in addition to being humans. So humans had cultures, while everyone else just had race. As a side note, I have a personal gripe with R&C because it practically eliminates urban cultures, and a lot of the material on cultures is, to a person with even a nodding acquaintance with anthropology or cultural studies, ridiculous. But that's beside the point.

Now, using RM as an example, I'm going to argue that the vast majority of fantasy role-playing games reproduce European racism. I'm sure that some people reading this are going to be completely turned off by that, but bear with me. This is important.

As far as I know, one of the first civilizations to put an intellectual gloss on "us versus them" were the ancient Greeks. To them, the world was divided into Greeks and barbarians. "Barbarian" was a racial pejorative; while Greeks spoke Greek, the barbarians didn't even have real languages but just made a kind of "bar-bar-bar" noise when they talked. Modern Finnish also has several racial pejoratives for people from the Middle East and Africa based on the same idea.

In Greek thinking, all Greeks were individuals with their own motivations, desires and personality. If a Greek did something, and you wanted to know why he did it, you would find the reasons in his individual attributes. On the other hand, if a barbarian did something, it was because he was a barbarian. For example, a Greek who murdered a fellow Greek would probably do it because he was somehow disturbed, or maybe the other guy had insulted him, or whatever. If a barbarian killed a Greek, it was because of his "barbarian nature". Greeks were individuals with personalities, but barbarians were just animals driven by their animal natures.

This thinking went on to form the basis of all European racism since. Alert readers may notice powerful parallels between what I've just described and the discussion on immigration and Islam going on in Europe right now. In that discussion as well, European violent crime is caused by a complex series of forces and motivations, but immigrant crime is caused by the fact that immigrants are immigrants. The IRA, for example, are terrorists because they are pursuing a political agenda through violent means, but Hamas are terrorists because they're Muslims. This kind of thinking is still everywhere, and that's why it's interesting, and scary, to find it replicated in fantasy role-playing.

**

In fantasy, humans take the place of Greeks/Romans/white Europeans. As I said, in the original RMSS, humans had different cultures that determined their background and outlook, while Halflings were just Halflings no matter where they lived. In other words, for humans their cultural background determined a lot about the character, but for the other races, their race determined everything.

R&C tries to eliminate this by giving every character both a race and a culture. Now elves, dwarves and even orcs have cultures, too! However, it isn't quite that simple.

The writers of R&C couldn't bring themselves to jettison the determining role race plays in their world. Here's some pieces of text from the race entry for Common Men:

However, the prejudices of all Men, their affections and disaffections, are always subject to local circumstance. (...)

Religious Attitudes: Mannish religious practice generally conforms to the norms for their particular cultural template.

Preferred Professions: All professions are open to Common Men. (...)

Typical Cultures: A full range of culture options are available to Common Men. (...)

Character Concepts

Men are everywhere; they exist in just about every cultural niche, every profession, every situation in which an intelligent being can find himself.

Basically, humans don't have racial attributes in R&C. They can go anywhere, do anything, and their attitudes are a product of their culture and environment. To a 21st century person, this seems like a reasonable description, and I'm sure the ancient Greeks would have agreed.

However, when it comes to other races, it turns out they're not such a tabula rasa.

As a race, Dwarves have a universal reputation for ruggedness, practicality, unwavering loyalty - and stubbornness. They are intensely clannish and stand up for their fellow Dwarves regardless of circumstance and come what may. (...)

Character Concepts

A concept for a Dwarven character could take into account his inherent racial prejudice.

The entry for Dwarves also describes their distrust of elves, their hatred of the "evil" underground races, and their religious beliefs. Remember that these are racial characteristics; Dwarves are this way because they're Dwarves. In the R&C system, a Dwarf raised in a harbor city hundreds of miles from the nearest mountains would "instinctively" hate other underground races. The same thing goes for Halflings and Elves, too. And then there are the Orcs.

Prejudices: Orcs hate all other races (...)

Religious Attitudes: Orcs worship dark gods and calue nothing so much as power and dominion over others.

Preferred Professions: Common Orcs stick to the non-spell using professions: Fighter, Rogue, Thief. They are not intelligent enough to make good spell users and they never bother to try.

That last bit isn't even true, by the way: going by their stat bonuses and power point progressions, Common Orcs could actually become spellcasters. Except that they're expressly prohibited because of their race. In the "Character Concepts" section they lay it on particularly thick:

Orcs are living, breathing fighting machines. They exist for no other purpose than to do violence, and war and mayhem are all they ever really think about.

Again, remember that this describes any Orc anywhere, regardless of where or how they grew up. They can pick any culture template they like, but apparently none of it really applies to them, because the fact that they're orcs overrides any influence their environment could possibly have on them. For them, the culture template only provides adolescence skills and starting items.

**

So, the Races & Cultures supplement sets out to undo RMSS's confusion of race and culture, but ends up replicating it exactly. Elves were actually the only race that was in any significant way freed from the constraints of its "racial nature"; Dwarves are still always Dwarves, Halflings are always Halflings, and Orcs are always Lawful Evil, as the trope goes. It's a D&D trope, by the way, and it's alive and well in third edition D&D: elves are always good, orcs are always evil, humans are anything they want to be or end up being.

This is precisely the same thinking as the original Greek racism and its descendants, and it persists throughout fantasy role-playing. A human's individual outlook and personality are shaped by his personal attributes and background, but a non-human's is a product of his racial characteristics. It is testament to how deeply rooted this thinking is that even a determined effort to break away from it, the Races & Cultures supplement, failed to do so.

To a large extent this is because the other races don't really have any intrinsic value. They're mostly there to define humans, not themselves. R&C is quite explicit about this:

Build: In a sense, it is useless to describe the body shape of a Common Man, because it is the baseline to which the shape of all other races and creatures are compared. All other reference points relate to the typical range of body types for Common Men, so to use those other reference points to try to define Common Men would create a circular description.

Obviously, this selection shows a terrible intellectual poverty. Surely one can fairly describe humans as, for instance, bipedal mammals with a given average height and weight? That isn't a circular definition. But more importantly, this piece of text very powerfully conveys the way the authors, and I daresay nearly all other fantasy RPG authors, think about the various races. Humans are the baseline, and everything else is defined by how it's different from humans.

This informs the racial thinking when it comes to culture and attitudes as well. Really, the definitions of the other races aren't there to define themselves, but to define humans. Dwarves are stubborn and prejudiced; compared to them, humans are open-minded. Elves are unworldly and haughty; compared to them, humans are humble and practical. Halflings are comfort-loving and gluttonous; compared to them, humans are rugged and Spartan. The other races serve to define us. In order to do this, they have to be denied the same subjectivity and freedom of choice that humans have, to preserve the caricature. A liberal, open-minded and cosmopolitan Dwarf would destroy the very idea of the Dwarf as a cultural marker.

The most drastic contrast is with Orcs, who in most fantasy role-playing games are little more than animals. Orcs are inherently evil and violent, and they hate everyone else. How could anyone not fight orcs? After all, they're always evil! Orcs are a handy way to escape any kind of moral dilemmas: killing orcs is always right.

The history of orcs in fantasy fiction is very informative in this respect. J.R.R. Tolkien "invented" orcs as we know them, and his orcs were originally elves who had been corrupted by the Great Enemy, Morgoth. So in Tolkien's world, even the orcs are ultimately victims, not offenders. In the Lord of the Rings, Tolkien has Gandalf express pity "even for Sauron's slaves". Much of the Lord of the Rings is informed by Tolkien's experience of World War I, and it's not hard to understand how witnessing the senseless slaughter of trench warfare would make him feel sorry even for the enemy.

After Tolkien, though, these distinctions have gone out of the window. To most of the English-speaking world, the Second World War was morally absolutely black-and-white, and the same mentality entered into fiction as well. Orcs are the Nazis of fantasy; fighting and killing them is so deeply, inherently right that it never needs to be questioned. In much of post-Tolkien fantasy, orcs have simply become cartoon villains.

Later, there's been a partial rehabilitation of orcs, and in many games and books they've come to symbolize strength and stupidity. The big, dumb, working-class orc has even taken on something of a class nature, and I say this as someone who abhors Marxism in any way, shape or form.

**

In conclusion, fantasy literature and games have become one of the most direct ways in which racism and racial thinking are reproduced. Given that fantasy is usually considered "young people's" reading, this is actually more than a bit scary. It's been fashionable in leftist circles to lambast Tolkien for this for decades, but I believe this is based on a fundamental, and to some extent deliberate, misunderstanding of his works and of the context he wanted to set them in. After the Second World War, Tolkien's imitators met with the other big strand of fantasy, pulp, which was usually explicitly right-wing, chauvinist and conservative. Conan the Republican is hardly an exaggeration in contemporary American terms. Two of the most influential pulp authors to modern readers were Robert E. Howard and H.P. Lovecraft; the first occasionally wrote blatantly racist stories, and the second we know was a nearly hysterical racist.

Like conspiracy theories, part of the appeal of fantasy literature is that it often provides simplicity in the middle of a complex world. Unless you're a lunatic, the world just doesn't divide neatly into friends and foes who you can tell apart by their flags and uniforms. In this day and age, the kind of fantasy where elves are always good and orcs are always evil has a definite appeal.

There's nothing wrong with that in itself. All the partly leftist counter-movement to the perceived right-wing character of fantasy has managed to accomplish is to produce "intellectual" fantasy that usually collapses under the weight of its own pretentiousness and is only read by fellow travelers, or fantasy works that are practically indistinguishable from the ones they supposedly oppose. A case in point is Ursula LeGuin's Earthsea series, which makes a point of making the villains white and the "good guys" colored. How the author feels that upholding the fundamental idea of different "races" fighting each other is antiracist is beyond me, and anyway, the first time I read the books I didn't even notice that she'd swapped the skin colors, so to speak.

So I don't mean to endorse the left-wing "countermovement", because as far as I'm concerned, China Mieville is just as bad, if not worse, than Andy Remic. Mieville has accused Tolkien of furthering exactly the thinking I'm talking about here, which to me indicates that like many other Tolkien critics, he hasn't actually bothered to read the Lord of the Rings.

I don't really mean to endorse anything. I do, however, want to draw attention to the way in which fantasy role-playing games and literature perpetuate and reproduce a way of thinking that I find worrying and frightening. In fantasy, ethnicity is more important in determining a person's nature than culture, upbringing, environment or anything else. Our worldview is so permeated by racism that this is perfectly natural to us, and we accept it without question. After all, it doesn't matter how an orc is brought up or what he's like as a person, he's Always Chaotic Evil. Because he's an orc. Because that's just how orcs are. All of them.

And that's really racism in a nutshell.

Little green footballs

Here's an almost-year-old but fascinating New York Times article I ran into, on the Little Green Footballs blog. I'm paraphrasing heavily, but basically he started out as one of these "anti-jihadist" lunatics, but at some point realized, as he put it in 2009 to the Washington Independent, that:

“I don’t think there is an anti-jihadist movement anymore,” Johnson said. “It’s all a bunch of kooks. I’ve watched some people who I thought were reputable, and who I trusted, hook up with racists and Nazis. I see a lot of them promoting stories and causes that I think are completely nuts.”

So, why do I post a link to this now? Some of you might guess.

Last week, Finland's premier racist web forum was shut down for the night (HS). Conflict and controversy erupted, because Finnish racists are mobilizing themselves into a political party for the next parliamentary elections, with the solidly unimaginative title of "Change 2011". The founder of "Change 2011" decided to quit the web forum and the whole party (HS), in part because he found out that - shockingly - the party founded on rampant islamophobia and racism is full of crazy racists.

I wonder what he thought these people were on about when they posted their racist rants online and went on to form a web forum seemingly dedicated to bringing together Finnish racists? I mean, what did he think their political line was going to be? What puzzles me about both of the above examples is really just that. What kind of people did they think they were going to be associating with?

I have to admit it is somewhat fun watching this "movement" implode.

A snippet on immigration

From Johan Norberg:

Ok, the time has come to speak candidly about immigration and crime. American studies shows that there is a clear correlation: Immigrants are less likely to commit crimes than native-born. This is true for the nation as a whole, for cities with large immigrant populations and for cities along the US-Mexican border, as Radley Balko explains in Reason.

Read his blog for more. That's some immigration criticism for you.

Halla-aho charged with agitation and blasphemy

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

YLE: Halla-aho saa syytteen nettikirjoituksistaan

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

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

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

Syyte nostettiin Helsingin käräjäoikeudessa.

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

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

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

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

Motivating the troops, Israeli style

The Independent: Army rabbi 'gave out hate leaflet to troops'

The Israeli army's chief rabbinate gave soldiers preparing to enter the Gaza Strip a booklet implying that all Palestinians are their mortal enemies and advising them that cruelty is sometimes a "good attribute".

When people say that Palestinians are religious fanatics, one would do well to keep this stuff in mind as well.

Some others have commented on this news item as well. For a frightening look at the mental health of one particular man, go here.