"We can't expect them to learn Finnish, now can we?"

The minister of Labor and the fearless leader of the Greens, Tarja Cronberg, took part in a press conference on security policy in Helsinki on Tuesday.

Quite predictably she thinks that the war in Georgia has no bearing on Finland's security situation, there are no reasons to join NATO or to raise defense spending, etc.

She also demanded that the status on the Russian minority should be secured in the Baltic countries and in Finland, and suggested that Yle should have more Russian-language programming for this purpose.

"Regardless of what happens in Russia and what Russia does, Finland should take care of its growing Russian minority," she said.

However, she said, securing the status of the Russian-speaking minority is not about the security policy. She just happened to mention it during the press conference on security policy for no reason at all.

Why, I am touched. Cronberg wishes to take care of my poor little Russian-speaking self. Medvedev and Putin also just want to protect and take care of my poor little Russian-speaking self, in their own way.

When I was very young and roamed the street of St. Petersburg with less regard for personal safety than is strictly advisable, I found one and only one 100% indicator of an impending rape attempt: if a strange man suddenly volunteered to protect me from bad guys, it always meant that he was about to attack me physically, and the unsolicited words "I'll walk you home, there are a lot of hooligans around, it's not safe on your own" coming from a strange man always made me look for whatever could be used as a weapon.

By a strange coincidence, I feel the same way about politicians.

Seriously, though: what does Cronberg think to achieve by increasing the amount of Russian programming on Yle? Apart from licking Putin's ass, that is.

Russian-speaking people in Finland either speak Finnish, in which case they can watch and listen to the Finnish programming, or should be learning Finnish, in which case they'd do better to learn Finnish than to listen to the Russian programming. Does anyone, even the fearless leader of the Greens, really think that integration of the new immigrants is helped by providing them with entertainment in their native language as opposed to, say, providing them with more Finnish-language classes?

In the time since my arrival to the US we went from one Russian-language newspaper to five TV channels. From all I've seen it really did not improve integration, although at least part of the cause-and-effect went the other way (the less-integrable people came later and created demand for the Russian channels).

Russian-speaking people in Finland already have Russian bookstores, lots of Russian books in the public libraries, and three Russian-language channels that can be ordered on cable TV. What many of them don't have is a good working knowledge of Finnish. A new Russian channel would hardly serve that purpose.

Movies and seats

Been to the movies yesterday. Kung Fu Panda, which was OK, and the new Indiana Jones, which I liked better.

Made me wonder about a few things, not related to these particular two movies:

1. Why do most people seem to dislike the front rows regardless of their actual location, the size of the screen, the angle, the height, etc.?

2. Am I the only person who orders the tickets "one ticket to the movie X, row Y please"? How come they never seem to hear or acknowledge my location request? The conversation usually continues: "is row Z OK"? "No, I would like row Y, please." Row Y invariably has more free space than row Z.

3. What the hell is wrong with the people who want to get up and watch the end credits? I can understand people wanting to get out as soon as the end credits start, although I disapprove of it because they get in the way of those of us watching the credits, but why the hell some of the people who want to watch the credits themselves seem to have a problem with the idea that somebody behind them might want to watch them too, and that they are not quite transparent?

4. What's the point of having places for senior citizens on public transport? If there are no senior citizens around, they don't need them, and if they are around, isn't it nice to offer them a seat even if it isn't a designated senior citizen seat? Are the designated seats just so that everyone knows who should be the first to give up their seats to the elderly?

Professional risks

A guy in Oregon allegedly hired a contract killer to kill his wife.

The wife, a 51-year-old nurse, strangled the killer with her bare hands.

"What, you want services for your taxes?"

Vantaa is having problems with its budget.

Juhani Paajanen, the mayor of Vantaa, promises to take care of the children, the sick and the elderly. In the same article he says "people are now richer than before and pay a thousand euros for a trip for Thailand, but at home they are not ready to pay for their own health, and demand services from the city".

Here in one sentence is what is very often the problem with socialized services: as soon as the people have decided to pay for some service together and the Powers That Be have collected that money in taxes, the Powers That Be start imagining that the money belongs to them, and that anything they give back to the citizenry is largesse for which the citizens should be properly grateful, and which the citizens are certainly not entitled to.

Explaining slowly for Juhani Paajanen and the other differently intelligent politicians: these people who you are talking about have already invested quite a lot of money in their health, before they have ever paid for that trip to Thailand. It's called taxes. It happens to be 18.5% on their income in Vantaa. It should be in your budget, ready to be used for providing health care to the people. If it's not in your budget, you need to explain some things, you need to be explained some things, and the city probably needs another mayor. Preferably one who owns a calculator.

In principle I don't mind a system where private insurance provides coverage to everyone who will pay, and public health care only picks up those who cannot afford buying insurance. The people of Finland, however, for better or for worse, have chosen the public coverage for everyone, and complaining about the fact that they would also like to get it is not gonna win you any votes.

Protect our children from predators!

When I was a child, a lot of adults used to say things like "please don't hurry to grow up, it's so wonderful to be a child!"

I didn't quite understand what's so wonderful about it, and wondered whether the view of childhood as a wonderful time is some thing that only opens to you from the adult perspective, or a result of some severe long-term memory fault, such as old-age dementia.

I am 36 now, which is way older than many of those people were at the time, and I much say that the whole "childhood is wonderful" thing still hasn't opened to me. I mean, who wants to be small, weak, short, poor, ignorant and in most cases rather stupid, and have other people make all important and most unimportant decisions for them? (Oh well, I've known a few adults who did like others to make some decisions for them, but we've always used a safeword for that.)

My attempts to find out what exactly was so wonderful about childhood could be reduced to "don't have to think about anything", "don't have to do anything", "can sleep all you want" and "can play as much as you want". The first is very obviously untrue, a child is a very new person and has to think about all kinds of things all the time. Don't have to do anything? People keep telling you to do something all the time. Believe me, I would have noticed if this were not the case - the only reason I am not a world champion in laziness is that I was too lazy to show up for the contest. "Can sleep all you want?" When you are a child, they drag you to the daycare and to school in the middle of the fucking night. Proper sleep comes only after you get to choose your own classes and jobs, and is a poor substitute for coffee anyway. "Can play as much as you want?" Rrright. I can play as much as I want now, when I can afford nice toys, don't have homework, and don't have anyone telling me to go clean my room or to go get some of that sleep that children allegedly get anytime they want, and apparently anytime they don't want, too. Also, I can't fail to notice that the last line was mostly used in my childhood by the exact same people who have been loudly complaining about my playing since ever I was about 14.

Since most of those people are not in fact demented, I can only suppose that they want children to be children for a while longer because they find children cute and entertaining and are annoyed when they turn into adults with opinions, careers, sex lives, and god knows what else. This is an understandable feeling, but I don't think it should be encouraged in people. I really enjoy looking at cute male college freshmen in handcuffs, but I would feel a bit stupid writing in, say, HS forums that all cute college freshmen should be wearing them.

Anyway, childhood sucks and is full of various busybodies who keep telling you how to live your life. Not, mind you, that I really think that children should be allowed to do whatever they want. They are, after all, ignorant and stupid, and need to be taken care of to some extent, sometimes against their will.

Taking care of children against their will is, IMO, a necessary evil. I really don't think it should be a sport. And I have a very strong impression that it is indeed a sport, both for the kind of people who don't like to see children grow up, and the kind of people who just like to tell people how to live, get told to bugger off by all the adults on whom they try it, and then switch to children. The way I see it, children really are vulnerable to all kinds of assholes who enjoy telling others how to live, and it is our responsibility as adults to protect them from the moralizing dumbfucks who prey on them.

HS has an article about 10-12-year-olds waxing their bikini lines. Everyone is horrified, horrified!

Of what, pray tell? I could understand being horrified about parents forcing girls that age to undergo said procedure, but what can be possibly bad about the girls wanting it? Will their pussies fall off, maybe? Will the hair fail to grow back? (Believe me, it takes many, many rounds of diatermia to achieve that.) Will they change their mind and regret it before it grows back and want a proper full bush? (I suppose very few people have pubic hair long enough for that to be a long-term problem, and wouldn't this be a very good reason to forbid people with long hear hair from cutting it much shorter, at least if they happen to be children?) Will their friends laugh at them if their pubic hair doesn't stick out of their underwear?

The way I see it, the horrified citizens belong to the following three groups: the people who are horrified by the fact that a 10-12-year-old girl can think about things like that, as opposed to teddy bears; the people who are horrified that a 10-12-year-old girl can grow pubic hair to begin with (good luck with that crusade, folks); and the people who dislike the whole pubic hair removal thing to begin with, but failed to talk any adults out of it.

"Let children be children!" sounds the war cry, and almost always, like in this case, it means "force the children to be children, no matter how much they kick and scream and resist!". A 10-year-old is way too young to think about such things! She should be a child, and think of teddy bears or whatever. Right. I am sure that a 10-year-old with her pubic hair sticking out of her swimsuit because adults deemed her to young to remove it is totally thinking of teddy bears. I can even imagine in very vivid color where exactly she wants to shove them. After putting some spikes on them first.

The issue is quite familiar to me, in a way. In my childhood the girls in Russia did not use female swimsuits until they actually got some breasts. I got mine fairly young, and for some reason my family deemed me too young to have breasts or to use an adult swimsuit until the point when said breasts were a good size C. Spending quite a bit of time as a topless girl with tits at what were not, in fact, topless beaches, was quite an educational experience. The lessons I learned were a nose twist, a testicle twist, a chop to the base of the nose with the rib of your hand and the same to the base of the neck. If that's what you'd like to teach your innocent little girls, sensei Vera is at your service.

(I don't wax my own pussy, but keep it more or less shaved; anybody making a serious attempt to interfere with this process, either by demanding that it should be waxed of by demanding that it should be left unshaved, and trying to force the point, will be summarily raped to death with a shovel. And now that you've read this, remember that I wasn't any nicer when I was 10.)

Refugee admissions, Finland and the USA

Checked out Finland's state budget for the 2009, or at least the refugee part of it. It has numbers for the previous years; I think I'd better talk about 2007, because it has already happened and the numbers are real, not estimated.

In 2007 Finland has admitted 1793 refugees: 657 quota refugees, 373 family members of previously arrived refugees, and 763 asylum seekers who actually got the residence permit.

Finland has also received 1505 asylum seekers. (Those 763 are part of that number, but in fact it's sort of complicated, because some of them have surely arrived the previous year.) The cost of the asylum seeker admission was 30 816 087€, about 20476€ per person. More specifically, 15 168€ per person living in a refugee reception center (1209 people), 42 692€ per lone child (96 people), 58 586€ per locked-up person (36 people) and 5 970 per person living somewhere privately (774 people).

Refugee admission cost 40 111 000€. It's about 22 371€ per person if we count the asylum seekers, and 38 943€ if we don't. In general, the input was 65 256 545 euros and the output was 1793 refugees plus, I assume, 742 unsuccessful asylum seekers. That's 36395 euros per refugee.

It's hard to find any up-to-date data on refugee unemployment, but the only one I found talks about the refugees that moved to Finland in 1991-1994 and their unemployment rates in 1995-2000. The unemployment rate went down steadily, and in 2000 varied between about 40% for Bosnians and Vietnamese and about 60% for Iraqis.

The US keeps a lot more detailed statistics in the Office of Refugee Resettlement's reports to Congress

The latest one is from 2005. In fiscal year 2005 the US admitted 53 937 refugees, plus 15 061 Cuban and 8 Haitian entrants, for a total of 69 006 arrivals. It has received $484.7 million to resettle the whole bunch. That's $7024 per person, and that's the total money the federal government used on refugees.

Refugee unemployment rate, as calculated for the refugees who've been in the US for less than 5 years, was 6.8%. That in spite of the fact that 60% spoke no English on arrival.

I recommend that people who are really interested in refugee admissions problems read these statistics by themselves, but here are a few tidbits:

- In the US refugees are currently eligible for federal assistance for 8 months. States and private organizations may provide more, or not. The aged and disabled are naturally supported forever.

- The support for unaccompanied alien children cost $53 771 000. There were 627 of those, $85759 per child.

- ORR used quite a lot of partnerships with private agencies. There are so-called Matching Grant programs, where ORR provides 2/3 of the money, a private agency provides 1/3, and some goal is set for how big a percentage of the refugees should be self-sufficient in 120 days after arrival.

For example the HIAS Grant Matching Program, whose services we have used when we arrived to the US, has received $2 208 000 in 2005 to serve 1104 clients. It ultimately served 1136, and under the Grant Matching Program had to add $1 104 000 of its own private contribution. That's $2915 per person, with 57% of refugees being self-sufficient within 120 days of arrival. (Damn, I feel cheap now.)

- Unemployment rate for all refugees was 6.8% in 2005, in comparison with 5.1% for all the US population. For the ones who arrived in 2005 the unemployment rate in 2005 was 20%. Employment rate was 58% for refugees, 62.7% for the US population.

- Out of the refugees not looking for work, the most common reason (41%) was school. Only a couple percent believed they have no chance to find work. Of the people who have worked at all, 17% found a job in the first month, 42% within the first 3 months, 63% within six months, 81% within a year.

- 20.9% of refugees who came to the US in 2005 had never been to any school. 11.5% had a university degree. 26.2% had attended a university. 59.8% spoke no English. 13.3% were fluent in English.

- Of the total sample (all refugees who arrived in the previous 5 years). 20.2% owned a home, 78.4% rented a home, 68.5% lived on earnings, 9.0% lived on public assistance, and 17.9% lived on both. I have no idea what the remaining 4.6% lived on.

There are a lot of reasons for the price tag differences in the Finnish and the US refugee programs, most notably the fact that the Finnish program continues to support the refugees for the next three years, and also the fact that smaller programs tend to use more per person than bigger ones. Still, isn't it time to send some Finnish refugee officials to learn something from their US colleagues?

The superpower

The events of the last few weeks reminded me of a moment in my school years in Russia.

Our geography teacher gave us a following speech:

"Many people complain that we don't have enough trousers. Trousers, however, are not important. They, like all the other textiles, are light industry. What's really important is the heavy industry, like iron and coal, so that we can produce enough tanks and win in Afghanistan."

This was, in fact, a bit surprising, because although the Powers That Be wholeheartedly shared this attitude to the heavy and light industry, open militarism was somewhat frowned up in The Most Peaceful Superpower. Not to mention all the talk about "winning" the event those official name was along the lines of "friendly help to the people of Afghanistan".

"I think trousers are a lot more useful than Afghanistan," said one kid who didn't have much sense of self-preservation. "Why did we invade Afghanistan anyway? Do they," he added hopefully, "maybe have trousers?"

The teacher resorted to yelling and didn't answer the question, of course. But later I realized that the war-ravaged Afghanistan of the Eighties most probably did have more trousers than our mighty superpower.

I hope it came in peace

A UFO has landed in my kitchen. It growls, it drinks water and eats coffee beans and farts into milk, and it teaches me to press buttons in a particular orders.

When I learn properly, it rewards me with a cappuccino. When I don't, it says "pshh".

Something wrong in the refugee policies

The conversation about evil communities who don't want to take poor little refugees, I mean hardworking young refugees, continues in Aamulehti.

Very often, when I start writing about my own time as a refugee, I start sounding like a grumpy old lady who is talking about how she used to go to school very day, 50 km in the snow, uphill both ways. I don't mean to, I really don't. The thing is, even though our treatment as refugees was certainly not up to the Finnish standards, we did have it much easier. One can talk all one wants about the evils of not having an official integration program of one's own, and the horrors of not having the taxpayers support the refugees forever, but nine months after coming to the US as refugees my parents bought their very own townhouse. Those people who are waiting for years in Finland in refugees centers for a municipal apartment in some community that doesn't want them, what have they got?

I know that the USA tends to select refugees more carefully than Finland, and that they send back the really antisocial element, but I don't believe that the quality of the refugee material is all there is to it.

The pervasive attitude here, both among the people who are for taking refugees, people who are against taking refugees, and everyone in between, is that refugees shouldn't be expected to work. People tend to view them as temporary visitors despite all the overwhelming evidence to the contrary, and as entitled to support rather than responsible to support themselves. (Let's leave the senior citizens outside the scope of this posting.)

Imagine that you are twenty, maybe without any useful skills. Imagine that you have left the war behind in Iraq, come to a rich foreign country and gotten the residence permit. Yeah, the people there are weird and speak a weird language, yeah, most prospective employers want you to speak it too, yeah, everyone is a bit suspicious of you. Still, nobody is shooting at you, nobody is kicking you out of the country, and there is free education if you want to learn something useful and make yourself more employable. Would you like to a) have a real job and a place of your own, or b) study something and have a room in the student housing, or c) do nothing at all and live with several other guys in a room in a refugee center, waiting for a municipal apartment that might or might not come? There certainly are people who would answer 'c' all by themselves, but I strongly suspect that behind at least 3/4 of them there is a social worker who says "don't worry about anything, we'll take care of you".

When we came to the US, we saw a social worker once. She gave us a booklet about life in Boston, told us where to apply for the benefits for the elderly and health insurance, told us that the rest of us would be fed for 4 months by the refugee organization, in which time it would be nice to find a job, and for 18 months more by the state, in which time it would be necessary to find a job, gave us the address of the college that arranges free English courses, told us where the jobs are advertised, and wished us a nice life and welcome to America. Yes, the people who write about the plight of refugees for Turun Sanomat would have a heart attack and all flowers would fall off their hats (now that I think of it I should have warned them in the beginning of this entry), but the jobs were promptly found. And they were reasonably good jobs, too. And it was a recession at the time.

And no, we were not the coolest refugees ever. Everybody found jobs: engineers, manicurists, teachers, gas station attendants, doctors, an Afghani woman working in a kosher bakery, you name it. The flower-hat aunts might have a heart attack upon hearing about the harsh fate of refugees in the US, but the numbers talk for themselves: the refugees who came to Finland in the early nineties had the unemployment rates from 40% to 60% in 2000, but in the US refugees had an unemployment rate of 3.4% in 2000. The unemployment rate (in 2000) was 5.4% among those refugees who arrived in 2000.

Ogogondia

"Ogogondia was a huge, widely-sprawled state and was not considered a Great Dictatorship only for two reasons: 1) the political disorder in Ogogondia was directly proportional to its geographical size, whereas 2) the international prestige of Ogogondia was inversely proportional to it."

("Огогондия была огромным, широко раскинувшимся государством и Великой Диктаторией не считалась только по двум причинам: 1) Политический разброд в Огогондии был прямо пропорционален ее географическим размерам, в то время как 2) Международный престиж Огогондии был этим размерам обратно пропорционален.")

This is a quote from Vladlen Bahnov's book How the Sun Went Out, or the History of Thousand-Year Dictatorship of Ogogondia, Which Existed for 13 Years, 5 Months and 7 Days. (in Russian). For some reason this quote has come to my mind often lately.

"Why don't you take proper care of these useful citizens?"

Turun Sanomat has lately published a few articles (here is one) about how the towns around Turku are not doing their share in admitting and taking care of refugees, and see them as a burden.

Some refugees even live in a refugee center for years before getting a place in some community.

We are talking about refugees here, not about asylum seekers who are waiting to have their applications processed. Turun Sanomat does not go into details of their status, as in refugee vs. residence permit for humanitarian reason, but unless either I or Turun Sanomat or both don't understand something, we are talking about the people who have already received some legal right to reside in Finland, and are free to move around as they please, like any other Finnish resident.

Jaana Väyrynen, a social worker in SPR's Turku refugee center, says that most of the refugees waiting for a place in some town are active people and speak Finnish, who don't need any special care, normal people with normal individual needs.

Just regular folks, people. Not any kind of burden on the community.

Maybe I don't understand something here, but if they are just regular folks who are not any kind of burden on the community, why are they waiting for those communities to provide them with a place to live? As opposed to, say, renting or buying an apartment like the rest of us do? You know, they rent apartments to people who have the money to pay the rent.

Not that I think refugees should never be any burden on their community. Some of them, for example, happen to be elderly, some happen to be handicapped, some happen to be very newly arrived, etc. But it does sound a bit silly when communities are pressured to resettle them there because they are allegedly not a burden to the community.

I have met a lot of refugees, both in the US and in Finland, who were just regular folks who placed no burden on their community whatsoever and could take care of themselves. I don't need to be convinced that they exist, I know it. I am just pretty sure that they are not among the people who are waiting for a placement in some community around Turku. Because people who can take care of themselves do not by definition need such a placement.

Mind you, some of those folks might be useful citizens in the future, and deserve our support, etc., etc. It's just weird to ask for support by claiming that these are the people who don't really need it.

The Iraqi guy whom they mentioned in one of the articles is a particularly unfortunate example. 24 years old, of which 3.5 have been spent in the refugee center. Maybe there is something to this story that either the guy himself or Turun Sanomat do not mention, but otherwise, WTF? During this time he could have either used his valuable skills (assuming he had any) to find a job and rent an apartment, or applied to some educational institution, and gotten himself a room in student apartment.

I knew an Iraqi refugee once. Unlike the guy in the example, he was in his late fifties. OK, it helped that he was in the US, and that he already spoke English, but within a couple of months of arriving into the country he did get himself a job in a supermarket. Somehow, I suspect that a 24-year-old who could not manage the same in 3.5 years is not very likely to become a productive citizen in a near future.

Disproportionate response

Two years ago Putin accused Israel of disproportional response to Hezbollah's abduction of its citizens. I wonder now whether by disproportional he meant "out of proportion to Israel's size"?

What do the following organizations have in common?

Arabikansojen ystävyysseura, Aseistakieltäytyjäliitto, Helsingin Sadankomitea, Helsingin yliopiston Sitoutumaton vasemmisto, Irakilaisten pakolaisten kv-federaation Suomen osasto, Irakin naisten yhdistys Suomessa, Irakin ja Iranin työväen kommunistisen puolueen Suomen osasto, Kommunistinen nuorisoliitto, Loviisan rauhanfoorumi, Lääkärin sosiaalinen vastuu, Maan ystävät, Naiset rauhan puolesta, Naisten kansainvälinen rauhan ja vapauden liitto - Suomen osasto, Pand - Taiteilijat rauhan puolesta, SKP, Sosialidemokraattiset nuoret, Sosialistiliitto, Suomen demokraattiset lakimiehet - DEMLA, Suomen kristillinen rauhanliike, Suomen rauhanliitto - YK-yhdistys ry, Suomen rauhanpuolustajat, Vasemmistonuoret, Vihreät nuoret ja opiskelijat.

I think that you can guess the answer to my question, but in case you haven't: these are the groups that have organized the big demonstration against the war in Iraq in Helsinki on 15.2.2003.

Today I have attended a demonstration against the war in Georgia. The groups that organized it were Suomi-Georgia Seura and Kokoomusnuoret. Every single group mentioned in the first paragraph of this post was absent.

I can totally understand the organization of Iraqi refugees not giving a shit about Georgia, but I have just looked through the webpages of all the organizations who have the word "peace" (rauha) in their names, and of all of them only Suomen rauhanpuolustajat even mention the Georgian war at all, in a rather ridiculous article.

Singing

In all my Russian schools, and AFAIK in at least most of the Finnish schools of my friends, there were obligatory music lessons where people were allegedly taught to sing. Except that they weren't. People were ordered to sing, and given good grades if they could and bad grades if they couldn't, but I don't remember anyone actually teaching us to sing at any point, in the sense of explaining to us how to do it. Either you could do it, or you couldn't. I was an adult before I realized that singing is in principle teachable.

Now that I think about it it's quite weird. I started wondering whether the same was the case with any other subject, and it wasn't. In any subject there were people who could just naturally do it without any input from the school, but the point was to teach stuff to the ones who couldn't. The people who were not gifted in math were taught at least some math, the people who couldn't spell well were taught the proper spelling, the people who had absolutely no talent or experience in drawing were taught to draw at least somehow, but the people who did not know how to sing were just ordered to demonstrate this fact and given bad grades. In every single school that I'd been to.

I wonder why. I also wonder whether there is any place who teaches singing to adult people who don't have any talent and aren't planning to do anything with this particular skill except maybe singing some drinking songs at some party.

Brink of war

"Russia and Georgia are on the brink of war", said a number of Internet news sources. Personally, I think that by the time one side is shooting the other's airplanes down, and the other has crossed the border in tanks, the brink has been left behind, but let it be.

It's not that I think Georgia should have sovereignity in South Ossetia now and forever. South Ossetians clearly don't want to be a part of Georgia, and in general multiethnic states don't seem to work very well in the Caucasus. For all I care all those little ethnic areas in the Causacus can start their own countries.

As long as South Ossetia is a part of Georgia, however, and is not recognized by anyone, including Russia, Georgia does have sovereignity there. Coming there across the border in 150 tanks might be considered a little act of war, even if it's to protect one's own citizens.

Hitler-card is a bit overused, but the parallel does come to mind. Hitler's troops entered Czechoslovakia ostensibly to protect the ethnic German minority there. We all know how that ended.

Russians are a lot more practical, though. Protecting one's own disgruntled ethnic minority abroad requires having an actual disgruntled ethnic minority to protect, which in turns involves putting that minority there if it isn't there yet, and making it reasonably disgruntled if it isn't. Russians, on the other hand, protect Russian citizens abroad, which is a lot easier, because it's much easier to find an already-disgruntled group (pretty much every group in the Caucasus is already disgruntled) and make them Russian citizens than to find actual Russians and piss them off at whatever country they live in.

The Russian ethnic minority in Georgia is, incidentally, only 1.5% of the population. But that's no problem - let's offer the Russian citizenship to all the people of South Ossetia, all the people of Abkhazia, etc. And voila - you instantly have your very own people in the neighboring country, to protect with your very own tanks. Nice.

Finalnd's Prime Minister Matti Vanhanen has declared that he is for peace. He did not say whose peace, but he is expected to apologize for the war real soon now.

Sosialistiliitto, our own tireless fighter for peace, is apparently all on summer vacation, because it failed to demand peace (anyone's), stage a protest, organize a demonstration, or indeed mention the whole thing. Since the last entry on their "against the war"-page is from July 13, 2006 and refers to the war between Israel and Lebanon, the vacation has clearly been very long.

I ain't dead

Lots of stuff to do at work, intense social life, Ropecon, you get the idea.

I should probably go home and sleep but I forgot how to.

Bikinis at the swimming pool, what is the world coming to?

A woman was lying in the sun near a swimming pool in Tapuli park in Helsinki in her bikinis while her children were playing in the pool, when some park employee showed up and told her to put her clothes on.

The chief of the play parks, Leena Timonen, said that bikinis are not forbidden as such, but every employee gets to decide what is appropriate.

Oh, dear... A swimsuit is inappropriate in a park near a pool.

For those who don't know: it's not unusual in Helsinki to lie in a park in a swimsuit. I am sure there are people who disapprove of that, but then there are people who'd disapprove of anything. This culture is in general quite relaxed about nudity, let alone swimsuits. Sauna culture and so on.

Moreover, since we are talking not just about a person lying in the sun by the pool, but a person whose own 5- and 7-year-old kids happen to be in the same pool, I can't really think of any other appropriate clothes, since the parent in such a situation should be ready to go into the pool and get the kids out of there should the need arise.

Timonen says: "We have a lot of people of immigrant origin, who might be offended by revealing clothing. But these rules are not made just for them."

Excuse me? "Immigrant origin"? "Might be offended"? Might be just an unfortunate choice of words, but a) if we talking about people of immigrant origin (which for me implies that they are either children of immigrants or at least have been here long enough to become Finnish citizens), as opposed to people who just got off the plane last week, shouldn't they have already learned what is considered appropriate in Finland? And b), have any of them actually expressed offense, or are we banning things on the basis of what we think they might be offended by?

Moreover, what if they are offended? Even leaving aside the Religion of Permanently Offended, and assuming that all the offended ones are native-born ethnic Finnish Lutherans: since most of the population doesn't seem to mind swimsuits, why should we always go with the ones that demand more clothes? I can understand to some extent going with the demands of people who demand less noise and less smell, since those are rather penetrating and hard to turn away from, but why should we automatically consider it a right not to see anything one might not like?

More to the point, would those park employees like to ban clothing that they think might offend me (take a wild guess what)? No? Didn't think so.

For the record: I, as a representative of the immigrant (and not "of immigrant origin") community, hereby declare that bikini or even full nudity in the park do not offend me. I could list here what articles of clothing do offend me, but I am afraid that state prosecutor Illman is lurking around the corner. In any case I don't want those banned, either. Because - novel as this idea might be - I think that their right to wear whatever they like in a public place is more important than avoiding offending me.

The amazing world of gay Iraq

CNN has a piece on the difficult life of gays in Iraq. Some Iraqi men hate homosexuality so much that when they find a gay 16-year-old they spend the next 15 days raping him. Yes, I am sure there is some obscure planet in some alternate reality where that might make sense.

What doesn't make sense is this: "Rami said he once fell in love with a man who was part of the Mehdi Army, a Shiite insurgent group loyal to the radical anti-American cleric Muqtada al-Sadr.Their relationship eventually soured."

Dear gay children: when you grow up, do not start relationships with Shia terrorists. I heard they sometimes go sour.

On tolerance and hypocrisy

Lately I've often seen people say that others are hypocritical when they pay lip service to tolerance, while at the same time they don't really like the people or phenomena that they pretend to be tolerant of.

What is so hypocritical about it? Isn't this what the whole concept of tolerance really means? When we say that we are tolerant about something, we mean that we are ready to put up with something that we don't like, are suspicious of, or are uncomfortable with. Sometimes people of course use the word when they mean that they are perfectly comfortable with something that they believe the wider society is intolerant of. In either case, however, the whole concept of tolerance implies that somebody somewhere disapproves of the thing we are being tolerant of. People rarely say that they are tolerant of hugs and chocolate.

I think tolerance is a good thing in general. (Like almost everyone else, I think that there are things that should not be tolerated, but this is not the point.) It is a good thing that for most of normal people in the Western society there are things - or people - that they don't like, but are still not willing to forbid or persecute. And frankly, I resent the idea that if I am tolerant of something or someone I have to pretend to like it or them.

Yes, most people believe that the severely retarded or the recovering drug abusers should be helped, but most people don't have to have anything to do with either of those groups. This is normal. To those who think that this is hypocritical and people should learn to embrace those groups or stop being tolerant - think twice what you are asking for. People are never really gonna like either of those groups, because statistically they mean trouble. What they are saying, in essence, is "I am ready to pay taxes so that the state can take care of those people, but preferably not right near my home". Do you really want them to say "I don't want any of those near my home, so there is no point in taking care of them anyway" instead?

(Yes, in the end they usually turn up situated near somebody's home, but almost everyone hopes it wouldn't be theirs. And one can play the same thing hypocritically - for example saying they we don't want them near our homes and condemning others for saying the exact same thing - but I don't think there is anything inherently hypocritical by thinking that they should be taken care of, but not wanting them around.)

One can be tolerant of blacks without wanting to live in a neighborhood with many of them, tolerant of immigrants without wanting to open the borders for everyone, tolerant of homosexuals without being comfortable with the idea of homosexuality, tolerant of single motherhood without thinking that this is just as good as having two parents, tolerant of low-hanging pants while thinking they are ugly, and tolerant of marijuana without smoking any. One can argue with at least some of these positions (for example one can argue about the effects of single motherhood with statistics, but arguing about whether or not low-hanging pants are ugly is not very productive), but none of them make people who hold them inherently intolerant.

If a white guy in the US interviews a black job applicant without giving a second thought to his or her race, but wouldn't even think of buying a home in a neighborhood with more than 5% of black residents, and then votes for a black presidential candidate for whom he would not have necessarily voted if he were white, and then is very concerned when his daughter starts dating a black guy, and then meets the guy and is a bit uncomfortable but concludes that the guy is OK, and then ends up happily playing with his half-black grandchildren, this does not usually come from his evil hypocrisy, intolerance or any kind of cognitive dissonance: this comes from the fact that in a lot of urban white people's experience a black employee is just an employee like any other, a black neighborhood always means more crime than a white one, a black president would be a new and cool thing to have, and a new black family member is a surprising and somewhat alarming development that one usually gets used to.

I don't see any point in making tolerance an all-or-nothing concept. This goes against the very concept of the thing, pisses off the people from whom said tolerance is demanded, and is only useful to the kind of people who want to be the only tolerant guy on the block. I think that a society where all things would be clearly divided in everyone's eyes into the Perfectly Good Things/People That Are Just As Good As Any Others on one side and Evil Things/People That We Should Not Tolerate Under Any Circumstances on the other would be, in fact, extremely intolerant.

To Katri Manninen, part 2

Katri's answers to my previous post are here.

"Oh and when I say stuff that you don't need, I mean like buying a tv to EVERY room (including bathroom), clothes, shoes and purses that you don't use, home appliances that you don't use, knick-knacks you don't use... "

You see, that's my problem with the original article: you seem to believe that you know what everybody needs better than they do.

There are people who have use for a TV in every room, and there are people who derive some joy from owning some wearable stuff that they don't actually wear, or gadgets they don't actually use. I like owning a lot of earrings (I buy a pair during almost every vacation, and sometimes several at a time, in spite of the fact that I have only one pair of holes in my ears and don't even use those every day. I just like having a big box full of earrings, with full knowledge that some of those won't ever be worn), and I would probably like to have a TV in every room if I watched TV to begin with.

I also happen to value overseas vacations, high-end kitchen knives and expensive Belgian beer. I am sure for lot of people those are useless crap. My own category of "useless crap no one ever really needs" includes all manner of salmiak and licorice candy, all professional haircuts, motorcycles, all kinds of camping equipment and a lot of other things - except that I have long observed that a lot of people are quite willing to pay perfectly good money for all of the above, and concluded that this happens not because the evil advertisement has brainwashed them to buy totally useless crap, but because they find all that stuff useful or pleasant in the ways that are clearly beyond my ken.

"Vacations need more planning, that's why I would say they are rarely bought on whim and therefore are rarely unnecessary."

That's why I found it very strange when you used them as an example in your original article, especially since you seem to like them yourself. The other two examples you used were leather-upholstered furniture (is fabric-upholstered OK, or is all furniture useless crap?) and a new car (surely you must know that all the people who use cars on a regular basis must replace them every once in a while - so how do you know whether or not a car purchased by somebody else is useful or useless to them at the moment, and whether it was purchased because they think they need it "in order to be admired by other people"?).

"When you die, you can take your memories with you -- but not all that crap you bought."

Errr... when you die, you don't take anything with you, neither memories, nor material things. You can of course argue about the metaphysics of death and posit an afterlife where the person exists and has access to their earthly memories, but in this case you can just as well posit an afterlife when the people still have all their earthly property, or some astral projections thereof.

Unless, of course, you mean "take with you" as "erase from this life", in which case I fail to see why it should be considered a good thing. In fact my memories are quite useless after I die, whereas my ice cream maker can still be used by family or friends to make perfectly good ice cream. Wouldn't this rather make the case for buying stuff and opposed to paying for immaterial fun like vacations? But I digress...

"Do you ever use certain brand names? Why do you think you thought at the first place that they're better than some other stuff? And do you really think that they're so much better than any other (cheaper) brands?"

Yes, I do, quite often. The established and more expensive brands are often that way for a reason, and sometimes not, and sometimes this is the reason that I would pay the extra money for, and sometimes it isn't. For example shoes made by brands such as Ecco, Clarks, or Gabor tend to be much better than similar-looking cheaper equivalents. (Sometimes the cheaper equivalents are just as good, but you can only find that out by buying and wearing them, and with only one pair of 4 or 5 turning out just as good it's not worth it.) OTOH, I have never been able to detect much difference between expensive and cheap jeans, and therefore never buy expensive ones. While in shoes paying extra for a name brand to guarantee goodness makes sense (for me, anyway), in sparkling wines it doesn't: IMO the only reason to pay real champagne prices, as opposed to sparkling wine, is because you can be quite sure that champagne is drinkable, and the same cannot be said of all the other bubbly, but once you've tried sufficiently many and know what you like, this is not a factor. In general I'd say the more longevity and reliability is a factor, the more I am likely to stick with a brand that either has a good reputation for it, or I have a good experience with.

"Or maybe you just have to go to Walmart and see what people are putting in their shopping carts -- and then pay attention how they are paying for it. Yup, it's almost always "credit" not "debit"..."

This is just part of the culture and has nothing to do with whether they can afford the stuff they buy.

Credit cards are a much older phenomenon than debit cards in the US or at least my part of it (when I was young in MA, we did not have debit cards at all, just credit cards and ATM cards), and at least for a while after they appeared, they were not insured against theft, while the credit cards were. Therefore there was no reason whatsoever for a person to own a debit card, let alone use one. Even now after many years in Finland I have never found any use for those things, and would certainly never pay with a debit card anywhere I can pay with a credit card.

Your points about the kids from disadvantaged backgrounds having less opportunities to learn useful stuff at home are quite true, and also about good and bad example. But as for learning to be careful about credit, it's really pretty simple, well within every normal person's intuitive understanding: read the fine print, and don't spend more than you earn on the regular basis. There are some otherwise intelligent people who have trouble with the implementation of this, but after burning themselves once or twice they tend to avoid credit in the first place. I don't think I'd ever met a person, disadvantaged or otherwise, who'd have trouble with the very concept.

"If you ruin your credit, you're pretty much screwed here -- I've seen that happening around me. And it's scarily easy to ruin it."

If you ruin your credit, you're pretty much screwed here too, especially since there is no personal bancrupcy in Finland and there are a lot of strange places that refuse to sell stuff - for example insurance - to people with bad credit.

I disagree, however, that it is easy to ruin one's credit rating. It can sometimes happen to people through no fault of their own, or with a minimal fault of their own, through all kinds of emergencies: disease, death in the family, prolonged unemployment, business falling apart, freelance jobs suddenly being hard to come by, etc.). However, the scenario that you describe takes a staggering amount of irresponsibility, usually over a prolonged period of time:

"First you want to buy stuff, that you can't afford, so you get yourself some of those nice credit cards, that they advertise you in the mail -- all you have to do is to send back the preapproved application and voila -- you're on your way to buying stuff you don't need and too often also ruining your credit. You max them out -- your credit score goes down. You miss a payment, your credit score goes down even more. Your credit score goes down -- your interest rate goes up to 22% and more. Soon you'll struggle to stay behind the payments. But then you get luckily an offer for a new credit card -- with a smaller credit limit, and you use that to pay the other credit card -- except soon that new card is maxed out too and now your credit score goes down even more..."

That's a very bad thing to do. Jumping from a bridge, also very bad. :)

Seriously, I have several of those credit cards that you get through a pre-approved application (in the US), and several more that you get through an immediately-approved application here in Finland. I am not sure about how much credit they provide when put together, but it really doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out that maxing them all out would be a bad idea.

I suspect that gross and continuous misuse of credit is some kind of psychological problem that some people have. It doesn't, however, make them slaves, and it certainly doesn't make the stores that sell stuff to them, the banks that extend credit to them, or the employers for whom they work to afford all this any kind of slavemasters.

"Or maybe you bought a house a year or two ago, when the prices were inflated -- and now you're struggling to make your mortgage payments."

Why? It's quite unpleasant to have negative equity, of course, but if you haven't lost your job or something like that you still have the same mortgage payments as before and still can make them as before. Unless you've taken one of those subprime ARMs that has a low initial interest that rises later, on the assumption that you refinance before the rate goes up, and now you can't refinance because of the negative equity. Which some people have surely done, but which is a risk they were willing to take.

"Or you really think you can "buy now, pay later", just to find out that you end up paying way more than you ever should have."

You can buy now and pay later, I do it all the time. Of course, if you want to buy now and pay much later, you have to pay extra for it.

In short (oh well, too late for that): credit that banks give to people is a valuable service that they provide to the consumers and that the consumers are willing to pay for. There are consumers that have trouble using it responsibly. A lot of them notice it (some, unfortunately, only after ruining their credit history) and then stop using credit. Some of them don't stop, which is quite unfortunate for the people in question, but which does not, IMO, make them slaves.

To Katri Manninen

Katri Manninen decided to answer my recent post where I criticized her column in Metro.

Thanks for the answer, Katri, I appreciate it. I'll answer here, the comments are too short.

"I wonder when was the last time you lived full time in the U.S. and if you've actually hanged out for extended periods with the U.S. citizens (and especially illegal immigrants) who struggle to survive with their minimum wages?"

The last time I lived full time in the USA was in 2001. I have hanged out, and worked, for extended periods with the U.S. citizens and legal immigrants who lived on minimum wages, and also with the ones who lived on SSI (the money provided to the poor elderly and handicapped by the federal government). As to illegal immigrants, they are not supposed to be there in the first place. You can't seriously blame any country for being an inconvenient place for illegal immigrants to live.

"I'm sorry if my point didn't come across from my column, which was that also many Finnish people are on their way towards the same kind of voluntary slavery -- therefore we can't really judge "Americans" for what is happening here."

Yes, this point did come across at the end, I just didn't find it all that important. For me the issue was not so much whether you were talking about the voluntary slavery in the US or in Finland, but with the whole concept of "voluntary slavery". Basically, you came across as saying that the lower-class people (forget the nationality) are not intelligent enough to figure out what they really want or don't want to buy.

I am not trying to say that advertisement - on TV or otherwise - doesn't affect consumers' choices. I just think that it's both stupid and extremely condescending to consider this phenomenon slavery, that the whole expression "voluntary slavery" smacks of 1984 (I believe the exact quote is "freedom is slavery"), and that while advertisement can well affect whether one wants to lie on the beach in Aruba or in Gran Canaria, most people, including the ones of the wrong side of the IQ bell curve, are in fact capable to decide for themselves whether they want to buy a sofa, a vacation or neither.

Just for curiosity, Katri: how enslaved by your consumer choices do you feel? When you decide to take a vacation, do you feel like you've made the decision yourself, or is it some TV-induced brainwashing voluntary slavery? This is not a rhetorical question: I tend to see all the discourse on this topic as extremely condescending in the "of course I have free will and think before I buy, it's only those other people who are enslaved and brainwashed" way, but sometimes I wonder whether at least some of the people who write articles like yours genuinely feel that they themselves are not quite in control of their own consumer choices. Do you, personally, feel in need of the personal freedom war that you urge your readers to start today?

"I'm sorry if I sound like a leftist feminist, but I do believe that the better a country/society treats its children and mothers, the better it will do economically, environmentally, spiritually and morally (?)."

As opposed to the childless adults and fathers?

"As of now I've never seen an industrialized country that would mistreat it's women and children as horribly as the U.S. does."

So, how does it mistreat us? I have been both a woman and a child in the US, and I am curious. Didn't feel particularly mistreated at any point.

(Yes, I am more or less sure you mean that the social security net for them is not as strong as you want it to be. First of all, I don't consider this mistreatment. Second, the social security net for single mothers with dependent children is already stronger than for any other groups of population, except the elderly and the disabled.)

OTOH, maybe we shouldn't start an argument about taxes and services. It will be endless.

"Of course I can't speak for other people, but I have no problem to criticize ANY nation in the world -- including my native country of Finland."

But of course. Almost nobody ever has any problem criticizing their own country. But have you in fact ever criticized the big eastern neighbor in print?

Not that I would think worse of you if you hadn't - I am sure there are many countries I myself would love to criticize but have never gotten around to criticizing.

"In addition to that I think "Americans" who believe that the U.S. is somehow better or more powerful than any other nation, are living in the denial. I totally agree that in the 50's and 60's this was one of the best places -- if not THE best place -- in the world to live. Even 70's and 80's were pretty good, but the life in the U.S. at the end of the first decade of 2000 is unfortunately no picnic."

Life is unfortunately no picnic anywhere, and the US is certainy not perfect.

As to the US being more powerful than any other nation militarily, this is a simple fact. No need to be in denial of anything, just compare the size of the armies, the budgets, etc. Not that this fact would be a good source of jealousy, except for people who feel they personally might have use for an army.

As to whether the US is a better place to live than Finland or some other European country: depends on your lifestyle, of course, but there are some general trends. I have obviously chosen Finland, and I can at least say that IMO in general for an urban single person Helsinki is a more pleasant place to live than Boston. Objectively, however, there were 13045 Finnish-born foreigners living in the US in 2000, and 2354 US citizen foreigners living in Finland in 2007. The statistics are not nearly a perfect match, since the ones in the US were taken in 2000 and show residents who were born in Finland and are not US citizens, and the ones in Finland were taken in 2007 and show residents who are US citizens and not Finnish citizens, but I think the discrepancy is large enough to notice that more people prefer to move from Finland to the US than otherwise.

In any case my main point was not to argue about the US and how it should or should not be improved, but to point out what I see as gross misuse of the concepts of freedom and slavery.

Anyway, good luck there in Hollywood!

I am having a Green moment, the end of the world must be near

I am a simple woman, and, like the vast majority of the world's population, don't know shit about climatology. I really don't know to what extent the world's temperatures are rising in the long term, and how much of it is caused by human activity and carbon emissions. As far as I can see, most scientists who study the issue say that the temperatures are rising and human activity is a significant contributing factor, some say otherwise, nobody is quite sure of the extent of it, and the whole issue is intensely political.

I do, however, usually know a religion when I see it, and I can plainly see that many people are using global warming as a religion, some as the kind of religion that says that everything they do is sinful and they need to atone for it, most as the kind of religion that says that everything their neighbors are doing is sinful, and gives them unlimited license to disapprove of those neighbors.

Not that this is ultimately the fault of the global warming, mind you, or even the related science and politics. I am sure that if tomorrow the scientists proved beyond any reasonable doubt that the world is in fact cooling, or staying the same, most of those people would find some other reason to disapprove of the neighbors. The global warming movement has made disapproving of other human beings just for the living disturbingly mainstream and disgustingly socially acceptable, but many people's tendency to look for any excuse to disapprove of the neighbors is much older (original sin, anyone?).

I also tend to know bullshit when I see it, at least when there is a huge steaming pile of it. I don't even mean the kind of politician who makes his career out of global warming, flies everywhere on a private jet and has a home that consumes 20 times as much electricity as an average American home. This is just, you know, politicians being politicians. I mean the kind of politicians who sound totally convinced that the global warming is the most urgent and horrible thing threatening the humankind, and at the same time snub their noses at the most obvious though not totally perfect solution: the nuclear power.

Let me see: they consider the global warming to be a major and imminent disaster caused mainly by carbon emissions, they know that nuclear power produces a lot less carbon emissions, and they consider building more nuclear power plants to be an unworthy solution because, let's see:

a) disposal of nuclear waste is an issue (a major and imminent disaster kind of issue?),
b) nuclear power plants can be attacked by terrorists (doesn't it make terrorists an issue, rather than nuclear power plants? and aren't they reasonably well protected?),
c) building nuclear power plants leads to nuclear proliferation (because, I guess, the USA, Russia, China and India totally need a new nuclear reactor to get hold of some nukes? oops, they already have some... or because Finland will make nukes as soon as they build another nuclear power plant? yep, that must be it),
d) nuclear power plants are expensive (as opposed to the consequences of global warming?).

Are those politicians totally stupid, or do they think that their voters are? In either case, why would anyone who cares about global warming, or even anyone who doesn't, vote for them?

I have decided to participate in the fight against global warming by not voting for any politicians who are against nuclear power, and also not voting for any politicians who claim to care about global warming and are undecided on nuclear power. I also promise to highly disapprove of any of my neighbors who fail to do the same.

From specific to general, from general to specific

In various conversations, both on the Net and in real life, the following pattern emerges:

X: Group A does this (or is that, or is better/worse than group B in something).
Y: Not, they don't. I know quite a lot of people from group A who don't do this.
X: Well, obviously I didn't mean all of the group A, I was saying that statistically group A is significantly more likely to do this thing than group B.

X kind of does have a point here. One can say "men are taller than women" without having to qualify that one means that men are on average taller than women, not that every single man is taller than every single woman. It is more convenient to say "men are on average taller than women" to distinguish this from the case when a statement is true in case of almost every man, as in "men have penises and women don't", but IMO the statement "men are taller than women" is not in any way an abuse of English language, even if you don't add "on average".

Speaker Y and other similar ones (there is quite a lot of them) are often blamed for derailing the conversation, purposely misunderstanding what the other speaker meant to say, and failure to understand that the conversation does not concern specific cases, but the general case. These accusations can be fair or not, depending on the context.

What is interesting is that there is quite a lot of people with the opposite problem, ones who clearly have difficulties with going from the general to the specific, and while a lot of people point out to them that they are wrong in other ways, I've seen very few people explain to them in general that this is neither logical nor a sensible way to conduct a conversation.

A conversation like this:

X: Women prefer men who have a car.
Y: There is quite a lot of women who like men who don't have a car.
X: Yeah, yeah, I was not talking about every woman in the world, but on average women prefer men with cars.

is quite understandable, from both sides and on many levels. The participants are not sure how universally X's statement was meant or understood, and are seeking to understand each other. X might be annoyed because in X's opinion X's statement is obviously not meant to mean all women, just the majority. X often accuses Y of failure to understand that such general statements are not meant to apply to every member of a class. Obviously not meant to.

The problem is, this is not in fact obvious. And the reason it is not obvious is that by this point Y, and probably also X, has participated in many conversations that go the following way:

Y: I've met a few new guys lately, but nobody I am really interested in so far.
Z: That's because you would only date a guy with a car.
Y: No, I don't care about that, they were just not my type.
Z: That's just what you are saying, but I know you want a guy with a car. Women always do.

Z is being entirely unreasonable here: he/she is, in fact, taking the implied statement "women prefer men who have a car" to mean every single woman, and is clearly not ready to accept an example to the contrary. However, I have never seen anyone accuse Z of being unable to understand that general statements so not apply to every specific case. This accusation is usually reserved for Y in the previous conversation.

So: why do the people who try to deny a general statement as if it were a universal statement by citing specific counterexamples get accused of not understanding the nature of general statements, and why do people who try to extend a general statement into a universal statement by denying existence of counterexamples not usually get accused of the same?

I decided to welcome my new evil overlord

No, I don't mean either of the candidates in the US presidential election, I mean coffee.

After having noticed that my new habit of drinking 6 espresso shots in one sitting is not going anywhere, I read up on the health effects of coffee and decided I can afford them, and am not going to try to fight it.

Now, step two: convincing my bosses to purchase a device for making espresso at work.

Power in unity

Belgium's permanent government, formed after 9 months of rather constipated effort, is falling apart after having functioned for 4 months. Not a very good efficiency coefficient. The Prime Minister Yves Leterme handed in his resignation yesterday.

It is kind of funny that Belgium's motto is literally "Unity creates Strength". In German, one of the three official languages, it is "Einigkeit macht stark", which nowadays sounds almost as grimly self-ironic as "Arbeit macht frei".

To add a minor insult to the major one, there just was a small earthquake there, as if the country literally wants to fall apart.

The resignation has yet to be accepted by the king, and the politicians are already arguing over whether to form a new caretaker government or have a new election.

I've heard they have even fewer nerds on the North Pole

Helsingin Sanomat says that police doesn't have enough nerds. Yes, using this particular word. They mean not enough nerds as employees, not as suspects.

BTW, isn't it a somewhat strange word to use in this context? I don't find it negative and IMO it can be colloquially used in the sense "IT professional", but first of all it can mean many other things, and second, it's very colloquial. Sort of like writing "HKL would like to hire more smurfs".

But more to the point: the Police Data Management center has moved to Rovaniemi two and a half years ago. That's Rovaniemi, Finland, population about 60000, in the middle of fucking snowy nowhere. They moved there from the capital area, population about a million, and 800 km away. In doing so, they naturally lost most of their employees.

And they don't have enough IT professionals to hire out there? Gee, I wonder why.

Dicks might want your ass, watch out!

Via the Agitator:

In Flint, Michigan, one of the most violent cities in the US, police chief David Dicks started a war against sagging pants and showing asscracks. The evildoers will be punished by 93 days to a year in jail and/or fines up to $500.

Immediate family, one way

I have always thought that parents and adult children were considered immediate family by the US immigration system, but now I checked and realized that this is not in fact the case, or rather, much more amazingly, it is the case only one-way: an adult US citizen can bring a foreigner parent as immediate family, but a US citizen cannot bring an adult child as immediate family. (They can, however, bring them as less-immediate family, but that involves a long wait.)

I wonder what is the reason for this? Oh course, a person has only two parents and in theory an unlimited number of children, but I suspect that in general US citizens have fewer foreigner children than foreigner parents.

Now I am officially pathetic

I have a thermos bottle with mocha with me at work.

Addiction?

What the hell? How can an adult person develop a sudden coffee addiction out of the blue?

I have normally drunk about one espresso shot's worth of coffee a month, if even that. In the last 24 hours I've had 6 shots, I am making more right now, and I am already wondering how I'll survive 8 hours of work tomorrow without it, and whether a thermos is an answer.

Lower classes don't know what they really want, or Happy Independence Day

In the subway today I picked up the free newspaper Metro. It had a column by Katri Manninen, Paljon Onnea Orjavaltio! (Happy Birthday, Slave State!). "Why, thank you," I thought.

While I have never felt any personal guilt about slavery in the US (never owned a single slave myself, or voted for slavery, I swear), I can well understand black people wanting to remind us about it every once in a while. We have a whole Black History Month for that every year. It is a lot less clear to me why Katri Manninen would like to do the same, especially considering that the American readership of the Finnish-language Metro is probably somewhat limited.

She doesn't talk about it much, though. She starts with informing us that that the equality that the Declaration of Independence mentioned in 1776 did not at first apply to women and black slaves. As opposed to, I suppose, all those other countries in 1776, who did not have our Declaration of Independence.

She goes on to say that it took 232 years to have the first presidential candidate who is not entirely while, and almost have had a woman candidate. I certainly hope she meant "first non-white candidate who has a good chance", since I have paid attention during the Black History month, and remember that there were several black presidential candidates from smaller parties before Obama, and black people who'd participated in primaries. Shirley Chisholm ran for the Demoratic nomination in 1972, Alan Keyes has tried to get the Republican nomination every damn time for god knows how long, and Lenora Fulani was the first black person to actually be on a ballot in all 50 states in 1988. The first woman to run for the US presidency was Victoria Claflin Woodhull in 1872.

That wasn't, however, Manninen's main point. She wanted us to know that America is still based on slave labor. Because, you know, it's hard for a poor person to get an education, and then they get low-paying jobs, and after a hard day's work they watch TV. The only purpose of the TV programming in the US is to keep people in front of it long enough to brainwash them into thinking that they are not happy without a leather sofa, vacation trip or a new car, and having to pay for all of the above keeps them in low-paying jobs.

For fuck's sake. One can like and dislike countries as one pleases, but how pathetic is it to "celebrate" an independence day of a country by writing a newspaper column about how its lower classes are slaves to television? Granted, she also says that we should all start our war of liberation with ourselves and ask ourselves whether we want to buy stuff we don't need, and understand that self-esteem cannot be bought from a store.

Well, I am glad that Katri Manninen seems to understand that lower socioeconomic classes are on average less intelligent than the middle classes, but I don't think they are quite as stupid as Manninen imagines. (And if I did, in fact, think so, I would have the sense not to say so in public.) On the basis of my admittedly limited experience I'd say that on average they are capable of understanding whether or not they really want to buy something. And people who are not aware that a TV has an "off" button tend to live in the institutions where nice nurses help them with it.

Not to mention that the line about being brainwashed into wanting a vacation trip is a bit rich coming from a person who lists travel as one of her hobbies on her webpage and whose blog's latest entries describe her five-week trip across the US from Florida to Los Angeles. I see: Katri Manninen, a Master of Arts in scriptwriting, can appropriately enjoy travel and even write about it in her blog, but my ex-supermarket-coworkers Carol and Marsha, when they feel like going to Florida to get some sun, need to be told by their betters - for example Manninen - that they have been brainwashed into that by TV and that they don't really need that trip.

(If I found the wrong person's webpage and there are two scriptwriters named Katri Manninen in Finland, they both have my most humble apologies. I, however, doubt that this is the case.)

Russia Day was about 4 weeks ago. I wonder if Manninen has written a column titled Happy Birthday, Eastern Aggressor?

Independence Day

Damn. It's Independence Day, and I am stuck here and not even having a day off. Oh well, at least it's sunny and I can grill something.

It's my choice, anyway, because I don't like being in Boston in summer, but I still miss it. Finnish Independence Day is unfortunately a totally different thing, because Finns got their independence without slightest consideration for whether or not it would be convenient for future generations to celebrate it by grilling outside. I guess they had other priorities, but I would still drink to the wisdom of the Founding Fathers, who founded our nation in July. They probably also had a barbecue.

Happy Independence Day, in case there is some crazy American who is reading my blog today instead of grilling.

In the news

Robert Williams, the torturer-rapist about whom I wrote a couple of weeks ago, has been found guilty on 44 charges. The sentencing is on July 24.

While we are on the subject of people who have disqualified themselves from human race, Zimbabwe's Marxist president Robert Mugabe seems to have "won" his election, using methods (don't click if you get nightmares easily) that are quite grotesque even by local standards.

Mugabe said that the opposition will never govern while he is alive. If I were one of his advisors, I'd be screaming "No, man! Don't give them any ideas!" But that's probably why I am not an advisor to a third-world dictator, but just a blogger in Helsinki.

In any case, if the opposition decides to deal with him in the same way as the opposition of Equatorial Guinea has dealt with their President for Life, Francisco Macias Nguema (his life as a President for Life ended by a firing squad), nobody will miss them much. Not even the UN, who is still thinking whether to express deep concern or grave concern.

Seriously, there are green hairy things in my fridge who could lead a country better than Mugabe, although I suspect that this is a general rule: any green hairy thing from any fridge can lead a country better than any Marxist.

In other news, Western immorality keeps invading Yemen: another 9-year-old filed for divorce If it continues like that, soon all the 9-year-old girls in the country are divorced.

Life: books and Tallinn

Been recovering from flu, working, and socializing. Finished my book catalog project (a list of all my books and DVDs in Tellico). Finished reading The Deer and the Cauldron. Been to Tallinn.

The Deer and the Cauldron is a most entertaining book, but it's huge and pretends to be a trilogy. It has three physical volumes, but only one story arc - books 1 and 2 end "in the middle of nowhere". Don't try to read it if you don't have all three books.

It's a wuxia novel that features a protagonist who is neither heroic nor any good in kung fu, and is set in the early Qing empire amid attempts at Ming restoration.

Tallinn was as pretty as ever, even though it started raining as soon as we decided to go back to the boat and were passing through a place where there was nowhere to hide.

Viking Express turned out to be a very pleasant boat.

Better now

Not dripping from any orifice for a change, although my throat is still sore. Spent all the Juhannus at home. On Sunday I was probably already in the condition to grill something, but nobody else was anymore.

In the meanwhile I found various pieces of hardware from all over my place, assembled a computer that needed assembling, installed a scanner that needed installing, used a vacuum cleaner (no, I am not dying, seriously, was just sort of bored) and sorted out Turkey and Paris pictures.

Last month in Paris I broke my long-term moratorium on buying music CDs, and bought Les Fatals Picards' latest CD, Public. Now I finally ripped it and am listening. I don't even remember when was the last time when I'd been so satisfied with a CD. I highly recommend it.

BTW: does anyone use actual CD players anymore, as opposed to ripping the CD and listening to it on you computer or mp3 player? The whole idea seems so quaint somehow.

No rest for the wicked

As soon as I stop dripping from one end, I start dripping from the other. Sorry.

Dripping my ass. I am sneezing so hard I half-expect HS news to report a minor earthquake.

Being sick sucks. Taking a sick day one day before Juhannus is kind of suspicious and embarrassing too, even though I was quite visibly sick already on Wednesday afternoon.

Now all the normal people are somewhere grilling and I am home sneezing. Nice. Maybe I'll be in the condition to grill and party tomorrow, but I doubt it.

Had a fever, too, which for me is a monumental historical event. Ibuprofen helped, although it never helped before.

A Russian flu medicine:

Take a 0.5 liter cup. Put 3 tbsp of frozen raspberries and 2 tbsp of sugar in there. Add tea, leaving space for vodka. Add 6-7cl of vodka.

It might not really work, but after a few of those you really don't care anymore.

The first rule: don't ask

This is just so wrong:

A salon owner, Sarah Desrosiers, was looking for a junior stylist. She received dozens of applications, including one from Bushra Noah, a Muslim woman who wears a hijab. She did not want to hire a woman who wouldn't show her own hair at work, because she believes that a stylist's hair needs to be shown to "provide clients with a showcase of different looks", and she asked Bushra whether she would be willing to take her hijab off while at work. Bushra said no, and didn't get the job. Bushra sued.

In the end Sarah did not hire anyone for the position.

Bushra sued for £15,000, later increased to £34,000 to compensate for all the hate mail she received, although I am pretty sure Sarah didn't write it all. The court ruled that Bushra's claim of direct discrimination failed, but her claim for indirect discrimination had succeeded, and ordered Sarah to pay £4,000 for "injury to feelings".

Mind you, I think Bushra definitely has a point. Except in very specific cases (models, for example), I am very wary of businesses using employees as decoration, to the point where I at least might actively boycott a business for that. The idea of stylists' own hair serving as a necessary inspiration for a customer seems quite silly to me, and opens a rather nasty can of worms, such as the question of whether a bald person can and should be legitimately discriminated against while applying for hairdressing positions, or fired from a hairdressing job. IMO people do not specifically seek out hairdressers wearing hairstyles they themselves would like, and people seem to visit hairdressers of the opposite sex without complaining much about the lack of inspiration provided by their hairstyles.

Of course it might also be that after 15 years in the field Sarah knows something about it that I don't. Nevertheless, if there were a real discrimination case - if Bushra's resume were the best, and Sarah hired a less-qualified person because of the hijab issue, I would be all for Bushra.

The disturbing thing about the case is not that a hijab-wearing woman wants to work as a hairdresser, it's that people get convicted for discrimination on such flimsy evidence, and that Sarah, basically, got convicted only for trying to negotiate the issue.

Bushra was not the best applicant, the hijab was not her only problem, and nobody actually got hired for the position. She only knew that hijab was an issue at all because Sarah asked.

I don't know enough about British law to figure out whether the court or the lawmakers were to blame, but if you are a society trying to protect a minority group from discrimination, punishing prospective employers for trying negotiate potential minority-related issues with them is a somewhat counterproductive idea.

What Sarah and other salon owners learned from this experience is that either you don't invite Muslims to the interviews at all, which might be a fairly easy thing to do if you get dozens of resumes for one position, or you do invite them, but weed out everyone who remotely looks like they might want to wear a hijab, without ever actually asking about it. Yep, a great step for equality. Backwards.

Bushra "has given up her ambitions to become a hairdresser and is studying travel and tourism at Hammersmith and West London College while working part-time in a shop". No shit, after becoming Britain's hairdressing industry's most famous least desirable job applicant whose hurt feelings cost £4000. Muslims might be a protected group, but people who sue everything in sight sure aren't.

I wonder how much of the hate mail that Bushra got was from Muslims working or aspiring to work in the hairdressing industry in UK. "Way to go, sister! Now we can't get any interviews at all!"

Disqualified from human race?

Stories like these (this link really could cause you nightmares, think before you click) occasinally make me wonder whether I am wrong in my disapproval of death penalty.

Short summary: Robert Williams forced his way into a woman's apartment, raped and tortured her for 19 hours, threw bleach in her face, slashed her, made her swallow lots of Tylenol (she did, and it caused liver failure), tried to make her gouge her own eyes out with a knife (she didn't, try to kill herself instead, failed), then when she lost consciousness, tied her down, set her apartment on fire and left. She regained consciousness, melted her restraints on the fire, and escaped. He, being apparently way on the wrong side of the IQ bell curve, immediately used her ATM card in an ATM with a video camera, and was arrested a week later during a burglary in Queens.

It's not that I think that all rapists should be killed. I am sure that most rapist are just people like everyone else (uhm, not really) and that after a few years of prison most of them are capable of understanding that what they did was wrong, or in any case that the price/performance ratio of this kind of fun is rather poor.

It's when rape becomes one of the least serious crimes on the list that I start wondering whether they should be in fact disqualified from human race for shoving.

Let's see what else Mr. Williams has accomplished in his 31-year-old life. Apart from raping, torturing, mutilating and trying to kill that particular woman:

- in 1996 he shot a neighbor 4 times while trying to rob him of a chain. The neighbor survived, and so, unfortunately, did Williams. He got 8 years for the effort.

- during the 8 years in prison, he has assaulted other inmates and guards, and thrown shit at people. He committed 28 infractions and was denied parole 3 times. In the end the parole board had to let him out. They wrote in his file "as a candidate for your release at this time, your readiness is in doubt" when they released him.

- he was also tried for attempted murder as a juvenile. The outcome of this trial is sealed, and I am sure some people are wrongly accused, but somehow I doubt he was a just choir boy in the wrong place.

- he has committed unprovoked assault on somebody in a street a couple of years ago.

- he was arrested six days after the rape, at he scene of a burglary in Queens. Just passing by, I am sure.

This is not a post in favor of death penalty, but I think it's quite enough here to figure out that this guy is never going to become a real person. Not to the point of deserving be released, and not to the point of deserving any human contact. I just hope that when he is convicted, they put him in a single cell. Your average rapists and murderers don't deserve that for a roommate.

(Yes, I am aware that I am getting ahead of the events, and he is just a suspect so far. However, when a suspect has been identified by the victim, a neighbor and an ATM camera, and left some of his DNA on the scene, I think I am justified in making an educated guess on the outcome of the trial.)

WTF experience of the day (gross medical things)

Waking up, removing a shrimp tail stuck to my nose, getting up to make some tea, noticing blood dripping on the floor.

The few seconds spent waiting whether or not the blood will stop were not fun. It did stop, or at least slow.

They do warn you about bleeding after inserting a IUD, but they never say how much and how long is normal. Called the medical advice hotline, they told me to visit a doctor on Monday if I don't get better, or immediately if I get worse.

Where did all the Russian stores go?

Life has been nice and fairly peaceful lately. Went to two parties on Saturday, one friend's birthday (coffee, cake and Wii) and another friend's graduation party (a lot of fun in spite of lots of scary strangers). Saw a fight in Lepakkomies (an awful-looking bar in Sörnäinen). Catalogued most of my books (2.5 bookcases left).

BTW, does anyone know a nice Russian ISBN server? Nice as in one that actually answers, and has books in its database. I usually use all the Amazons and Helmet for other languages.

Also, does anyone know where did Eestin Herkut move to from Kolmas Linja? They had an ad about moving somewhere to Pasila in one of those free newspapers, and I promptly lost the newspaper, and googling didn't help any. And where did Kalinka go from Itäkeskus?

Yesterday went to the old Eestin Herkut, in hope that they have a sign on the door, but instead of the sign they had a new store there, also selling Estonian food. There was a middle-eastern-looking man in there, who said that the owner has changed.

I took the change with suspicion, but finding dulce de leche there totally endeared me to the middle-eastern guy and the rest of the new owners. (That's вареная сгущенка for the Russians; the best I can explain it to Finns is "kinuskia metallipurkissa".) Now let's also hope that the new owners order more ice cream. And while they are out of ice cream: where did the old store move to?

Kirbasova revisited: what use is she?

The Kirbasova affair keeps dragging on, and reading conversations about it on various web forums is not good for one's sanity, but gives cause for a variety of interesting observations.

1) So far I haven't seen anybody at all, be they for or against Kirbasova, claim that a mother is not an immediate relative. Could it be that in general Finnish people consider mothers to be immediate relatives? Who would have thought?

2) The people who think that Kirbasova should be sent back generally base it her uselessness for Finland's economy: that she is old, sick, helpless, will pay no taxes, use social services and in general be a net loss. This is all undoubtedly true, but the really interesting thing is that what these people are saying is in fact the direct opposite of what the authorities are saying: the authorities think she is not old, sick or helpless enough to be allowed to stay.

I have long maintained that immigrants must be useful (with the exception of refugees, who should just be law-abiding and try their best to be also useful). "Useful", however, is not measured just in terms of taxes. Finland, like all the other civilized countries, lets citizens and resident noncitizens bring their immediate family members. It is not, especially in case of Finnish citizens' family members, based on any financial use of them. They are useful because some Finn wants them here, and no other usefulness is necessary.

You can marry a foreigner, bring him or her here, and have him or her covered by the social safety net. Yeah, it's nicer from the point of view of the taxpayers if both you and them work and pay your taxes, but you can be unemployed and marry somebody unemployable. You can even be a sick old person and marry another sick old person. Even one who comes from a country that doesn't pay them a decent retirement pension. It is your right as a Finnish citizen.

In fact, if I happened to feel really charitable tonight (don't worry, I am not), I could ask for the old lady's hand in marriage, and they would let her stay. And I am not even a citizen.

The question is not whether Kirbasova can be useful to anybody financially. A Finn happens to want and need her, and that's all the use there needs to be. The question is whether Finns in general consider their parents to be immediate family members, and it seems that the answer is yes.

Yes, I realize that this argument can be reduced to the absurd, and some Finn can claim that he or she needs to move a whole little Sudanese village here for his or her personal happiness. No, I don't think this is a good idea. OTOH, I don't think it's absurd to give Finns the same right to bring their family members here as the other EU citizens living in Finland already have.

As for those who are afraid that all the immigrants' parents immediately move here and the state will have to support them: not gonna happen. To begin with, most of their living parents are probably already here. Inkerilaiset moved here in whole families, refugees and suchlike moved here in whole families, or were and are able to bring their families as refugees. Estonians are EU citizens and can bring their parents as they please. About 40% of foreigners come from the civilized countries, and if their parents move to Finland, their pensions will follow. Of the remaining immigrants, some percentage is young enough to have come with their parents to begin with, and some percentage is too old to have living parents.

Finland can't feed all the poor elderly of the world. Not even all the poor elderly who happen to have been persecuted political activists. Finland should, however, at least try to feed the parents of its citizens, even when said parents don't happen to be Finnish citizens themselves, and don't come from a country that pays them a decent pension. There isn't that many of them.

Why do people sleep together?

I've always wondered why so many couples like to sleep together, even if they could afford separate rooms and separate beds.

When you sleep together, you have only half the usual bed space. The bed gets too hot, the other party snores, farts, steals your blanket, steals your pillow, rolls right into the middle of the bed, pushing you out, and accuses you of doing all of the above in the morning. Or else you can't fall asleep properly for fear of doing all of the above to the other person. Or you wake up during the night and want to read in bed and have some tea, but can't do it because of the other person.

It's fun to have sex or simply hang out with a guy in bed, but usually when one of us starts to fall asleep, I want to be out of there and in another bed.

Don't get me wrong, I am not surprised that some people enjoy sleeping with each other. But why so many?

Privacy über alles

Went to get my X-rays today (for the overly curious: they are the X-rays of the 6th tooth on the right side of my lower jaw, to find out exactly what king of work that tooth will need). Had to fill a form, so that they can burn it on a CD and send it to the address provided in the form.

No, they can't send it by email. Privacy, you know.

I don't know whether that's their own rule, or a law, or some EU directive, but shouldn't I be able to waive my privacy under the circumstances, if I so choose? And shouldn't somebody teach the use of PGP to them?

The folks who were too privacy-conscious to use email had absolutely no problem with having me fill out the form and give them the mailing address without checking for any kind of ID, even though they don't know me from Adam. Or from Eve, anyway.

Now I really am worried about my privacy. God knows what kind of evildoers can get a copy of the X-ray of that tooth and somehow integrate it into a porn video and post it on Youporn.

Well, at least we know that we are not discriminating in favor of our own citizens...

Kirbasova's daughter turned out to be a Finnish citizen. Which means that her best bet at living with, and taking care of, her mother, is to move to Sweden and bring her mother there. Our lawmakers in their infinite wisdom wrote an Aliens act that makes it easier for any other EU-citizen (plus citizens of Iceland, Norway, Switzerland and Lichtenstein) to bring family members than for a Finnish citizen.

But that's not all: the Swedes have apparently done the same. So while it makes sense for Kirbasova's family to move to Sweden, the Swedes who happen to be in the same situation should all come here.

I've always known that the EU is all for the mobility of its citizens, but I didn't expect its member states to go about it quite that forcefully.

All independent paralyzed elderly, unite!

The Finnish Immigration Service has decided to deport Maria Kirbasova, a half-paralyzed senior citizen who was one of the founding members of Soldiers' Mothers organization in Russia, and who was hoping to get to stay with her daughter.

Because, you know, a mother is not a family member. Not to mention that a half-paralyzed senior citizen dissident in Russia is in less danger than a young robber in Somalia.

I understand all the people making fun of the officials who say that in other cultures people have a different concept of what a family member is, and the concern about third-world people bringing all their extended family here, but IME Finnish people usually do consider their parents and children to be family. Even when said children turn 18.

(As an aside, the third-world people will bring their extended families anyway, mostly by using various refugee and quasi-refugee statuses. I should know - you wouldn't believe all the variety of distant relatives we managed to bring in the US. Completely legally, mind you. Not that I am complaining - we have been very grateful for the opportunity, and the people we brought have all become law-abiding citizens, and mostly highly tax-paying ones, too - but I could never understand why we got to bring even the kind of relatives none of us had ever seen before, such as my father's cousin's new husband, whereas the citizens have to wait years to bring their parents, children or siblings.)

But I digress. The law, and the Immigration Service's webpage say that Finnish and non-EU citizens get to bring their non-family relatives if those are totally dependent on them. If an elderly person who has rheumatism, is half-paralized, lives in a country where services for such elderly are not available and has no other children there does not qualify, then who does? Does one have to be dead or something?

Yes, I share the skepticism of some commenters about the daughter's ability to support the mother if her condition gets worse, but that's not the point here. You can't simultaneously make a law saying that only the sick and dependent old people get to come here, and simultaneously complain about their being, uhm, sick and dependent and old. Not unless you want to look really stupid, anyway. Not that this consideration has bothered our lawmakers, officials and courts much lately.

A really interesting detail that Hesari doesn't mention is that these are the rules for Finnish citizens and most non-EU citizens. The rules for the EU-citizens (excluding Finland), and citizens of Switzerland and Liechtenstein are different. They get to bring children up to the age of 21, as opposed to 18, and parents that they are taking care of (don't have to be totally dependent), and also their mother- and father-in-law.

Where is the sense in this? Some EU-regulation, sure, but couldn't they write the law so that Finland's own citizens wouldn't be treated any worse than EU citizens? Kirbasova's daughter, if she is a Finnish citizen, can probably freely move to Sweden, and bring her mother there. And if Swedish laws are just as perverse, their citizens who need to bring their parents can move here and bring them here. Yes, this would increase the mobility within the EU, but is there any common or even uncommon sense in this?