A few random Wikileaks thoughts

1. Are any condom manufacturers using this case for advertisement?

2. How difficult would it be for Assange or anyone else involved to add something to the cables? There are 251,287 cables; how easy it would be for anyone to find out if, for example, 251 272 are real and 15 are fake? Is this in fact a good opportunity for someone to manufacture something?

3. Aren't the people involved in the Assange witchhunt embarrassed? It does look really embarrassing.

Shit, this is really embarassing

Did Geert Wilders go nuts from all the stress?

He wants a 1000 euro yearly tax on wearing hijabs,

They used to have a beard tax in Russia, too, but at least they had two excuses: the year was 1705 and the czar who instituted the tax was, well, differently sane. What's Wilder's excuse?

No offense, but...

Jussi Halla-aho (a blogger, a politician and a friend of mine) got sentenced to a 330 euro fine for blasphemy, for mentioning that a certain prophet was a pedophile, and, as the court's decision says, generalizing it to the whole religion founded by that prophet.

The grounds for the sentence have some interesting moments:

1. The term "pedophile" that Halla-aho uses has a very strong pejorative meaning as such.

Hmm, would the court like to suggest some non-pejorative terms for the same concept? "The prophet had a very special kind of love for children"?

Seriously, the law uses such a concept as "intent to insult". I can well understand it in some contexts. For example calling somebody a faggot, a nigger or a whore, even if factually true, can be considered as doing it with intent to insult, because these are, in fact, the insulting words for the concepts for which there exist neutral words.

But how do you express the really negative concepts without the intent to insult? How do you say that somebody is a murderer or a pedophile, for example? I really wish the court would say "you can't call a murderer a murderer or a pedophile a pedophile, because it is always insulting" or, alternatively, "you should call a murderer 'a person who has illegally and intentionally caused someone's death' and a pedophile 'a person who has sex with severely underaged partners'".

2. You can't really apply sense and logic to religion.

Well, they got that right. If you apply sense and logic to a religion that encourages young men to fight and die in the name of their god, at the same time gaining more land and people for their community, all on the promise on heaven and 72 heavenly virgins, and on the other hand, allows the remaining male members of the community to have 4 wives per person, you might find an answer to the question "cui bono?". In, like, 10 milliseconds.

3. Blasphemy causes conflict between the parties depending on how important the religion is to them.

Is this some kind of admission that blasphemy against the religions whose representatives are more likely to riot is a more punishable offense than blasphemy against the other religions?

4. It would be different if Halla-aho were criticizing the mistreatment of some specific young Muslim girls.

I though he kind of did. We are talking about a specific girl here, right?

At least it's not a capital offense...

A friend of mine is on trial tomorrow. For blasphemy, among other things. In Finland.

That's one thing I'd never expected to say outside of the role-playing game context, but it does unfortunately happen to be the case in real life.

The blasphemy consisted of saying that a certain prophet (police be upon him) liked children in more ways than one. I'd rather not be more specific, lest the holy inquisition thinks that I harbor some impure thoughts as well.

Instead I'll quote from Ayatollah Khomeini, the respected Shi'a religious authority who married a 10-year-old girl at the age of 27 (Clarification of Questions):

#2410. If a person contracts for himself a girl who has not reached puberty and before she finishes her ninth year enters the girl he must never have intercourse with her in case he causes her path of urine and menses or that of menses and stool to become one.

#2459. It is recommended that one hurries in giving husband to a daughter who has attained puberty, meaning that she is of the age of religious accountability. His Holiness, Sadegh, salutations to him, bade that it is one of a man's good fortunes that his daughter does not see menses in his own house.

And lest we forget the Sunnis, Saudi Arabia's Grand Mufti Sheikh Abdul Aziz Al-Sheikh: "It is incorrect to say that it's not permitted to marry off girls who are 15 and younger. A girl aged 10 or 12 can be married. Those who think she's too young are wrong and they are being unfair to her."

Khomeini is dead, but I am sure the Finnish authorities can try the Grand Mufti if he ever visits here. For defamation of his religion.

Holy shit

For better or for worse, we (not only Finland, but the Western world in general), live in a society where the levels of freedom of speech are going down, and the desperate measures not to offend anyone are going up. I think that this is for the worse, but this is not the point of this post.

The point is that some motherfuckers are clearly more equal than others.

I don't even mean the religion of the perpetually offended in particular. Just the religion in general.

When a person starts believing in an invisible magical being, they are usually advised to cut down on alcohol and various illegal substances, and see a good psychiatrist. When sufficiently many people decide to believe in the same invisible magical being, they get to collect taxes, and teach about it in school, and we are supposed to pretend to respect them. Even if the being wants them to stone fellow citizens or do something similarly nice and respectable.

They get to publish pretty hardcore books, too. If somebody wrote the Old Testament or the Koran in the present-day Finland, they would have a pretty hard time publishing them, and would probably end up in court for agitating against somebody, or worse. I mean, even if we take only the anti-gay texts, it would be enough to convict the writers, and I am not even starting on the infidels.

Seriously. The stuff that those people are allowed to publish is filthy, downright unspeakable, and often contains direct incitement to murder. But since the unstable citizens who wrote it lived very long ago and had a very big following, it gets published.

One would think that organizations that inherently need to stretch the limits of the free speech that far would be very much for preserving the free speech and against all possible limitations on it. But no, the assholes (hmm, I should probably say "anuses") want respect! Respect enshrined in the law, no less, so that nobody would insult their armed-conflict-mongering holy books and their, ahem, age-of-consent-challenged prophets (police be upon them).

And since even they are not crazy enough to demand respect from each other, they want it from us, regular and mostly-secular people.

I should probably stop writing right here, because all I can think of is swear words, but I must say that sometimes I sort of wish the religious groups got what they are asking for, and had most of their literature and teachings banned for offending the other religions.

...and in tomorrow's news, we'll be burning a witch...

I can't fucking believe it: a man is being put on trial for blasphemy in 2009 Finland.

Let's not frequently and wrongly associate, comrades!

The UN General Assembly has drafted a resolution on combating defamation of religions. The draft I have linked to has been drafted by such famous human rights luminaries as Belarus, Uganda and Venezuela; I am not sure whether it's their job to write all the drafts or whether the next draft will be written by Saudi Arabia and Afghanistan.

Anyway, the General Assembly "expresses deep concern in this respect that Islam is frequently and wrongly associated with human rights violations and terrorism". They probably also wanted to express grave concern, but then thought better about it and decided not to mention the graves, just in case.

I can totally understand them. I also often express deep concern that my scale shows me the numbers that frequently and wrongly associate me with being overweight. I have a suspicion that eating less chocolate is more likely to correct the problem than a General Assembly resolution, but then I've never had a General Assembly resolution about my scale, so who knows... While they are at it, they should also express deep concern that my mirror frequently and wrongly associates me with not being 20 anymore.

But just for today I'll try to be politically correct and not wrongly associate too much.

OK, in the news:

The Religion of Peace, or maybe some different, previously unknown religion, or maybe militant atheists, has arranged a demonstration for peace in Mumbai. The demonstration seems to have suffered from a massive demo effect. So far, 125 people have found eternal peace, and 327 have been peacefully injured. The targets have been a railway station, two hotels, two hospitals, a cafe, police headquarters and the local Chabad house. Chabad houses are the houses of a large Orthodox Jewish sect, Chabad Lubavicher, and I am sure this one was taken for a peaceful dialogue between religions.

Besides Jews, the demonstrators wanted to have a peaceful dialogue with American and British citizens, preferably in places where the police cannot interrupt it. Dialogue with Indians did not interest them just as much, and they mostly just showed them the way to eternal peace.

In other news, Afghan authorities have arrested 10 Taliban (nothing to do with religion) members who are alleged to have thrown acid on 11 schoolgirls and 4 teachers a couple of weeks ago in Kandahar. Taliban denied everything and thinks that it is probably unfair to stereotype them on the basis of all the previous attacks against girls' schools. Indeed, the article says "the central Taliban organization is not the only armed group capable of such an attack in Kandahar, as other extremist militias such as Hizb-i-Islami and the Haqqani network have been blamed for actions in the province". Since we should not associate them with Islam, I think they were extremist Amish and extremist Buddhists (who are still avenging those Buddhas that Taliban destroyed.

Via Jihad Watch:

Damn, I was being sarcastic, but it sounds like this guy is seriously saying it was the Jews.

The shit has hit the fan

The last couple of days were full of politicians' talk about how horrible it is that Perussuomalaiset won, and whose fault that was.

This, however, is pretty unbelievable:

Tuija Brax, the Minister of Justice, says that the ministry will start teaching chairpeople of the city councils to censor anti-immigration, anti-immigrant and anti-minority speech (in the council meetings, I assume, not in the city streets).

First of all, speech inciting against racial, ethnic and religious groups is already banned by the criminal law. The law bans all public speech of the "kill the X" kind, and also of the "all Y are disgusting smelly assholes" kind. I am not sure whether or not city councils are "public" in the sense meant by the law, but what I want to know is whether Brax thinks that a) the elected city council members will say things mentioned above, or b) the elected city council members will say things like "I think we should also collect crime statistics by the country of birth of the perpetrator", and that this should be censored.

In general there has been a lot of discussion about the horrible things that Some People (tm) say about immigrants in general or some ethnic or religious groups in particular. Usually the discussion has deteriorated into claiming that these things are not true, but IMO a more relevant question to the people who think that the new anti-multiculturalist council members and their opinions are horrible would be: what kind of negative things, in your opinion, can one say about an ethnic or religious group, assuming that those things are in fact statistically true? (For the purpose of this question assume that the facts are presented in a neutral way.)

Valtionsyyttäjäkin on eläin

Tänään Espoon käräjäoikeus tuomitsi Mikko Ellilän kiihottamisesta kansanryhmää vastaan 60:een päiväsakkoon, ja määräsi hänet poistamaan tämän kirjoituksen blogistaan.

Ilta-Sanomien mukaan oikeus oli sitä mieltä että ihmisryhmien ominaisuuksista tai maahanmuuttopolitiikasta on oltava oikeus esittää kärkeviä ja erilaisia käsityksiä, mutta Ellilän lausunnot olivat "selkeän panettelevia ja solvaavia" ja loukkasivat heidän ihmisarvoaan (afrikkalaisten, oletan). Tai, Hesarin mukaan, "mies on kirjoittanut väitteet blogiinsa vain panettelu- ja solvaamistarkoituksessa".

Hmm. Ellilä kieltämättä kirjoittaa aika epäkohteliaasti, sekä tässä tapauksessa että muutenkin. Voiko tästä kuitenkin päätellä että tämä artikkeli on kirjoitettu vain ja ainoastaan panettelu- ja solvaamistarkoituksessa? Silloinhan voidaan melkein sanoa että koko mies on olemassa vain panettelu- ja solvaamistarkoituksessa. Onko siis vapaus esittää kärkeviä ja erilaisia käsityksiä, niin maahanmuuttopolitiikasta kuin muistakin asioista, tarkoitettu vain ihmisille joita on siunattu paremmilla sosiaalisilla taidoilla kuin Ellilää?

En ole lainoppinut, enkä oikeastaan tiedä kuinka laillista tai laitonta voi olla ihmisen tuomitseminen siitä, että hän ilmaisee itseään rumasti niinkin herkästä asiasta kuin rotu, ja muutenkin kuulostaa ilkeältä. Sen sen sijaan tiedän, että ainoa asia mihin hän kirjoituksessaan varsinaisesti kiihotti - tai kehotti - oli afrikkalaisten maahanmuuton vähentäminen. Mikä on sinänsä vain eräs käsitys maahanmuuttopolitiikasta.

Hesarin artikkeli myös väittää, että hän vertaa oikeuden mielestä halventavalla tavalla afrikkalaisia eläimeen. "Halventavalla tavalla" on tässä tapauksessa aika olennainen seikka, koska afrikkalainenhan on eläin, kuten kaikki muutkin ihmiset.

Ellilän omassa tekstissä lukee "ihminen on kuitenkin eläin, homo sapiens", minkä luulisi lakanneen olemasta solvaava ja panetteleva tieto jo aikoja sitten.

En nyt jaksa kirjoittaa tästä sen enempää ennen kuin olen lukenut sen oikeudenpäätöksen, mutta Matias Turkkilan raportti oikeudenkäynnistä oli aika mielenkiintoinen, suostittelen kaikille asiasta kiinnostuneille.

At any price!

Lately there have been a lot of people saying that child pornography is the absolute evil and children should be protected at any price. Absolutely at any price.

I totally understand the feeling. There are a lot of things I'd like to do at any price, especially if the price is going to be paid by somebody else. I am always looking for volunteers for my "get Vera a free beer at any price" project.

Jokes aside, there have been already a lot of people trying to explain why the price (secret censorship) would be too high. I'd like to concentrate on what would be purchased.

Do any of the "save the children at any price"-people ever stop to think what exactly they would be getting at any price? I don't even mean all the ways in which the censorship doesn't work - I mean the hypothetical case in which it would, in fact work to block all the web pages in question from all the people who would like to see them from Finland.

Let's also assume that we are talking about the real clear-cut cases of child pornography, consisting of photos and videos of clearly underage children engaging in sexual acts.

By the time the Finnish viewer is seeing the child porn, the act of child abuse has obviously already happened. Somebody has for example had sex with a child and videotaped it. You can't protect this particular child from this particular event anymore. If the owner of the webpage puts child porn there with purely charitable intentions for the other pedophiles to see, the Finnish viewer is not really even contributing anything to the perpetuation of such crimes. However, if the child porn website is either charging the viewer for porn or lives by selling advertisement space, the Finnish viewer is bringing it some money and therefore encouraging creation of more child porn.

Now for the interesting question: how many users of child porn are there in Finland? Is there an estimate anywhere? Surely Suvi Linden must have at least some idea of the order of magnitude of this terrible problem. Somehow, I have never seen it mentioned anywhere. (I mean the actual users of child porn, not the people who just went through the police's list in order to count the child porn sites, and not the people who just generally jerk off to various legal pictures of children.) How many Finns use real child porn? How many of those contribute to it financially? How many of those do so on the web, as opposed to Usenet and mailing lists?

I'd like Linden to put an actual number to it, or at least an order of magnitude. As in, "we have created a secret censorship system in order to prevent the flow of N euros per year from Finland to the world's child porn industry". At least we'd know how much money we'd be diverting from child pornography at any price.

These evil pussyless demonstrators!

Reading Helsingin Sanomat web forums are usually bad for a person's sanity, even under the best of circumstances. I am not sure why I occasionally do so, but my theory is that it happens when my blood pressure is too low and I need to get it up a little.

Some of the debate about yesterday's anti-censorship demonstration was just unbelievable. Yes, I know that some people have a room-temperature IQ. Even in Celsius degrees. But this is going into the realm of the outside temperatures. In Helsinki. In March.

Besides the usual "but think about the children!" and "I don't understand what's wrong with censorship" and "you are all probably pedophiles anyway", there was a number of people who accused the demonstrators of having no pussy.

Yes, they were quite serious. Some of them meant that the demonstrators had no pussy of their own, and some of them meant that the demonstrators were unable to find any owner of a pussy to have sex with. The implication, I suppose, was that either a) having a pussy of one's own would make a demonstrator a person of a higher moral order, who would have the sense not to demonstrate against censorship, or b) having access to somebody else's pussy would drop the censorship down on a demonstrator's list of priorities. Real pussy-owners don't go to anti-censorship demonstrations, you know. A number of women mentioned that they were there, but it did not stop several people from claiming that there were no women.

Yes, I was there, and there was a number of other women. At home I checked my pussy, just in case. It didn't fall off, and seems to be in good working order.

But this is evil, evil speech!

As I have said earlier, the biggest threat to the freedom of speech is, of course, us. Some, however, are more so than others.

I wanted to write something about the current scandal with child porn Internet censorship, but I couldn't find a single printable word, so you better read a summary by Kai Puolamäki.

The Powers That Be have been just lovely lately. First, the state prosecutor Mika Illman (of the "criticism of foreigners is OK as long as it's not pronounced out loud" fame) wants to moderate forums, blogs, chats and IRC after the fact, like radio or TV, revealing not only a total lack of understanding of the technologies involved, but, a lot more disturbingly, a total lack of understanding of the difference between the public and the private conversation.

Man, we obviously can't even afford a moderator for the state prosecutor's office. How do you expect every IRC channel to have one?

The the Minister of the Interior Anne Holmlund informs us that chat forums are like all other places of entertainment, and therefore need to have somebody who'd keep the order, like in all other places of entertainment. Don't know where Ms. Holmlund hangs out for fun IRL, but if that place has people who keep order by telling everybody present what they are allowed or not allowed to talk about, I am sure glad I don't hang out there.

And now the Minister of Communications, Suvi Linden, is saying that talking about spreading child pornography as a test for freedom of speech is unacceptable. By this she is referring to the webpage of Matti Nikki, which is about the Internet censorship and has the list of sites banned by police's secret lists.

One thing I am curious about: if somebody puts up a site that lists all the stupid things the politicians have said lately, how long will it take for it to go on the secret child pornography list?

Freedom of religion

Maybe I just don't understand the whole concept properly. After all, I grew up in a place the "freedom of religion" meant "you can believe in whatever you want as long as you are really quiet about it". Practicing a religion in the Soviet Union in my time was very much like being gay in the US Army: don't ask, don't tell.

It's very nice that people are free to practice whatever religion they choose, much in the same way as it is nice that people are free to wear whatever kind of pants they choose, or have sex with whatever consenting adult they choose, or vote for whatever party they choose. What I find strange is that in many countries religion has special privileges over other life choices.

I don't really mind people asking for various kinds of things, whether it's based on their religion or not. I don't mind them getting whatever they ask for, as long as it is not too much of a trouble. If Sikh cops want to wear turbans, sure, why not. If Muslim kids in school want halal food, sure, whatever, at least if there is enough of them to make it feasible (and if not, they can bring their own lunch). Vegetarians want vegetarian food, same thing. If sufficiently many people ask for something like that, why not please them?

What I don't understand is why the rest of us should consider the religious demands somehow "holier" than the secular ones, more worthy of being fulfilled, or, even worse, a separate right only for the people who really practice the religion in question. Either the religion is asking for something that cannot or should not be fulfilled, in which case it shouldn't, or it is asking for something that can be fulfilled, in which case it should also be fulfilled for anyone who is asking for it, regardless of whether an invisible guy in the sky supports the idea.

Lately the freedom of speech has been eroding here and elsewhere. There are IMO some perfectly legitimate restrictions to what one can say: incitement to crimes, slander, etc. But lately there appears to have developed a right not to be insulted, at least as a particular group of people (insults against the humankind as a whole are for some reason still OK), and the speech insulting various groups tends to be censored. I don't like it, but this is the current trend.

I would really like to know why religions, in their holy books and sermons, get to insult infidels, women, gays and whoever they want, while the rest of us are supposed to pretend to respect them? If you are not allowed to publish a webpage that collects news of crimes committed by foreigners in Finland and some rather rude personal accounts of same, how can you publish a book that calls for killing of engaged women who were raped in a city, or a book that demands that everyone who converts out of a particular religion should be killed?

Amerikkalaiset ja Julkisen Sanan Neuvosto

En yleensä vain laita linkkejä muiden ihmisten blogeihin ilman kommentteja, mutta tää on vain niin hyvä....

Insulting population groups

Mikko Ellilä got accused of incitement against a population group for this blog post.

The post is racist, in bad taste, and IMO wrong about biology being destiny, but what I haven't found there is any actual incitement (explicit or implicit) to do anything illegal against black people, or anyone else.

Yes, I know, the law also prohibits insulting a population group. Question is, what's an insult? Does it depends on the truth of the matter? Does it depend on somebody being insulted? Where are the limits of the free speech? Is it desirable to have a law that prohibits saying the truth about some group? How about speculation about things that might be true but not necessarily are (for example, scientific theories)? How about the things that are obviously untrue but presented as if they might be true?

The whole free speech vs. insulting a group issue is very complicated here in Finland (probably also elsewhere). During the whole Lynn-and-Vanhanen scandal a friend who knows more about the law than I do told me that one important factor is the medium: an article saying that ethnic group A is less intelligent than ethnic group B is quite acceptable in a scientific journal but can be considered incitement against an ethnic group if it is placed in a big popular newspaper like Helsingin Sanomat. The accusation that Ellilä got and posted somewhere (can't find it now) also mentions the pictures he uses in his blog as an aggravating circumstance, I am not sure why (the text is in bad taste, but the pictures are just pictures, none of them particularly insulting or tasteless).

Considering that the number of people writing in public has greatly increased and is still increasing, and so are various ethnic and religious tensions in Europe, isn't it time to have a public discussion about the limits of free speech and insulting population groups, and possible need for a new law, or for clarifying the old one? Lest we end up in a world where "Jos siihen sisältyy samalla ulkomaalaisten arvostelu, sekin on hyväksyttävä, jos sitä ei ääneen lausuta." ("If it contains criticism towards foreigners, his is acceptable, as long as it is not pronounced out loud.")

The questions I'd want answered are:

1. Do people really want to have a law that bans insulting groups of people? (Personally I don't, as long as they don't contain any actual incitement.)

2. Can the truth be considered an insult? If yes, to what extent does it depend on the particular words used?

3. What about the speculation, theories, etc.?

4. What about the obvious lies presented as speculation? (I might say "it is still being discussed whether or not Italians eat babies", but it is not AFAIK in fact being discussed by anyone in their right mind, and Italians do not in fact eat babies.)

5. To what extent does the whole thing depend on the venue? Do bloggers, writers of scientific articles, and people who call Americans stupid on Finnish web forums have to be just as careful as editors of HS?

6. When does the insult expire, and does it ever? Should all the racist writings of the old times be held to the current standards, and forbidden?

7. How about using them now? Can you read them in public and quote them in the current writings?

8. The whole issue with religions, insults and respect is deeply problematic: on one hand people are supposed to pretend to give some respect to other religions' writings and holy books, on the other hand the religious writings and holy books in question tend to be deeply disrespectful of other religions and atheists. But I think this should mostly be discussed in connection with another law, the one on blasphemy (ok, nowadays it's "religious peace").