I wish my family, friends, and all blog readers a successful 2009.

The picture comes from Time, but Israellycool provides the perfect caption:

He’s just a happy-go-lucky kinda guy whose interests include loving, dancing, partying and burning things while calling for the destruction of Israel.

(Photo by Hussein Malla.)

At a rally in Malmö earlier today, demonstrators carried banners comparing the Star of David to Hitler’s black swastika, Swedish newspaper Sydsvenska Dagbladet reports. Disgusting.

After reading through some of Sweden’s many communist blogs, I think I ought to add one New Year’s resolution to the two I announced yesterday. Since nearly all my comments in defence of Israel and human rights have been erased, I had better make it a rule not to write any comments on communist blogs with an anti-Semitic agenda. It’s a complete waste of time and only adds fuel to these bloggers’ conspiracy theories.

More rockets fired against unarmed civilians—one dead, many wounded.

I have received a comment and a couple of emails that suggest I am indifferent to the suffering of the Palestinian people. I am not. So just to be clear, I consider the escalating war in Gaza a conflict between Hamas and everyone else. It’s a war between a terrorist organization that targets people indiscriminately and a democratic state that tries to protect its citizens.

I want to be a better man in 2009. I am sick and tired of being overweight and hunted by an agonizing thought that life is slipping away while I am planning for great things to do in a distant future. I must get over my laziness and live now. To help me remind myself, I will name two things I want to prioritize in the year to come.

Firstly, I must write the book I have planned for many years. Over the past three years or so, I have collected material enough for a full-length manuscript on a subject that interests me. When I am down, or “realistic”, I always think of the obstacles. To spend hundreds of hours writing a book is a waste of time, I think to myself. Why would anyone publish a book by me in a tough competition with other writers? Well, why not me? For one thing, my handling of advanced adverbials is better than most, and I am a master of phrasal verbs! Thinking about it, why would no one else be interested in my book? My first New Year’s resolution is simple: I will begin to write the book that is already finished in my head.

Secondly, I must lose the weight I gained after I quit smoking. I do not miss the cigarettes, but I do miss being able to see my feet without having to lean forward. I realized a long time ago that I was caught in a destructive circle of unhealthy eating and low self-esteem. I must break free. My second New Year’s resolution is as simple as the first: I will go to the gym for exercise at least three times a week, and I will avoid eating sweet and fattening food I know is bad for me. The goal is to get the feet back in my field of vision.

I have a year. In December 2009, I will return to this entry and write a follow-up. Wish me luck!

In the past twenty-four hours, more than 150 rockets have hit civilian areas in southern Israel. Meanwhile, Hamas militants have been targeted and killed in Israeli air strikes. The strange thing is that European media and leftist bloggers seem more upset about killed terrorists in Hamas uniforms than they do about civilians being bombarded. Why is that? I mean, in all other war situation, the most fundamental and humane rule is not to target unarmed civilians. But for some reason, this rule does not apply to Islamist violence against Israelis.

I just learned that a Swedish group will demonstrate support of Hamas in Stockholm tomorrow. As a Swede, I’m ashamed on their behalf. I, for one, firmly stand by Israel in its fight against terrorism.

Andy Burnham, Britain’s minister of culture, wants to restrict access to websites not approved by the government. “If you look back at the people who created the Internet, they talked very deliberately about creating a space that governments couldn’t reach. I think we are having to revisit that stuff seriously now,” he says to the Daily Telegraph. “There is content that should just not be available to be viewed. That is my view. Absolutely categorical. This is not a campaign against free speech, far from it; it is simply there is a wider public interest at stake when it involves harm to other people. We have got to get better at defining where the public interest lies and being clear about it.”

What exactly is the public interest? Well, in Poland it usually involves banning gay websites, in Iran it’s about blocking Israeli websites, in China it’s considered in the public interest to make online British newspapers a no-go area, and in Sweden there has been repeated talk about prohibiting websites offering online poker and criticism of the war on drugs. In all cases, “the public interest” is nothing but a manipulative way to say “the government’s interest” or “the elite’s interest”.

Britain has long been one of the EU countries most reluctant to censor the Internet. It scares me that Britain has changed its position since Gordon Brown became prime minister. This is not the first time far-reaching plans to control and limit access to information comes from London.

Now more than ever, we need V.

(Via Wille Faler.)

My thoughts go to the Israelis who once again must fight against a terror assault from Hamas militants. In the past forty-eight hours, more than two hundred rockets have been fired into southern Israel from the Gaza Strip. At least one Israeli woman has been killed.

My thoughts also go to the Palestinian civilians who died in Israeli retaliation. Against all international laws, Hamas uses civilian homes for military purposes; they launch their rockets from civilian rooftops.

Update: The killed Israeli was a man.

I wish all readers a happy holiday. I may not post any new entries in the next few days, but I will be back scribbling on these cyberpages before New Year. In the meantime, I will think carefully about my resolutions. I want to be a better man in 2009.

Merry Christmas! Or as we Swedes would prefer it: Happy Yule!

Why not let a robot look after your children while you’re out? It’s now a real option.

I hope the manufacturers have read this list.

Desmond Tutu accuses South Africa of losing its moral high ground by failing to stand up to Robert Mugabe. “I want to say first of all that I have been very deeply disappointed, saddened by the position that South Africa has taken at the United Nations Security Council in being an obstacle to the security council dealing with that matter. And I have to say that I am deeply, deeply distressed that we should be found not on the side of the ones who are suffering,” Tutu says in an interview on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme. “We should have been the ones who for a very long time occupied the moral high ground. I’m afraid we have betrayed our legacy.”

Tutu is absolutely right. South Africa is the most important country in southern Africa, and without its support, Robert Mugabe wouldn’t have been able to terrorize Zimbabwe for so many years. South Africa’s reluctance to criticize its neighbour is a case of misdirected solidarity.

This is the only holiday decoration in our flat, photographed in poor quality with my mobile-phone camera. It’s all the Christmassy stuff we need to set the mood.

The Swedish online directory Hitta.se has photographed every street in Stockholm. I couldn’t resist looking at the street where I lived between 1991 and 1995. Those years were probably the most defining in my life so far. I was young, new in town, and I had just come out to friends and family. I have many fond memories from my flat on the third floor in the second building to the right in this picture.

• A Christian missionary says God told him to have sex with his daughter and that she should think of her father as her husband.
• A Saudi sharia judge says an eight-year-old girl must remain married to the 58-year-old man her father married her off to.

Update: It seems God hates his friends too. Swedish blogger Christer Åberg—a full-time Pentecostal evangelist I often disagree with—lost his wife and newborn son yesterday. My condolences to him.

The Pope says that saving humankind from homosexual or transsexual behaviour is just as important as saving the rainforest from destruction.

(Seen in picture is the Pope as a young boy dressed in his Hitler Youth uniform. Hitler’s youth organization was very keen on doing God’s work and rid the world of people not qualified for human status.)

“Perhaps religious people simply are more tolerant,” writes Maria Hasselgren, nun and spokesperson for the Catholic Church in Sweden, in an article about how repulsed she is by sexually active people.

Nothing is funnier than people not realizing how ironic their statements are.

When browsing through my favourite American blogs I noticed some of them make a big deal about the news that fewer than previously expected will attend Barack Obama’s inauguration. So I thought the new projection hinted likely embarrassment on 20 January—until I read this in Washington Post:

Officials are casting doubt on an early projection that 4 million to 5 million people could jam downtown Washington on Inauguration Day, saying it is more likely that the crowd will be about half that size.

What the president wants, the president gets:

President Hugo Chavez ordered construction halted on a major shopping mall in Caracas on Sunday, saying the government will expropriate the unfinished building.

The Venezuelan leader said it would be out of line with his government’s socialist vision to allow the new Sambil mall to take up precious urban real estate—and that unbridled consumerism isn’t his idea of progress either.

Anyone who still thinks socialism is about people power?

At the end of every year, Andrew Sullivan allows his blog readers to pick the most “shrill, hyperbolic, divisive and intemperate right-wing rhetoric” of the year. He calls it the Malkin Award. Here are my three favourites from this year’s shortlist:

1. Peter Mullen:

“Let us make it obligatory for homosexuals to have their backsides tattooed with the slogan SODOMY CAN SERIOUSLY DAMAGE YOUR HEALTH and their chins with FELLATIO KILLS.”

2. Michael Savage:

“The children’s minds are being raped by the homosexual mafia, that's my position. They’re raping our children's minds.”

3. Orson Scott Card:

“Regardless of law, marriage has only one definition, and any government that attempts to change it is my mortal enemy. I will act to destroy that government and bring it down, so it can be replaced with a government that will respect and support marriage, and help me raise my children in a society where they will expect to marry in their turn. Biological imperatives trump laws. American government cannot fight against marriage and hope to endure. If the Constitution is defined in such a way as to destroy the privileged position of marriage, it is that insane Constitution, not marriage, that will die.”

Here’s the top-five list.

This short video explains why.

(Via Carl Svanberg.)

In an article published by The Daily Telegraph, Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury, expresses fears over the British Government’s handling of the financial crisis. He sees parallels to the rise of Nazism and claims Germany in the 1930s pursued a “principle” that worked consistently but only on the basis that “quite a lot of people that you might have thought mattered as human beings actually didn’t”. Even if Dr Williams stretches the argument against Gordon Brown a bit too far,* I think there are grounds for his fears, although I’m not sure he sees it the way I do. Considering his previous anti-liberal statements, I suspect he wants to see more of state interference. That, in my opinion, would be exactly what Nazi Germany should teach us not to do. What governments need to do now is to let the free market rid itself of bad businesses. Whenever a government intervenes, it tends to benefit the big, established corporations whose products are outdated and unpopular. At the moment, we see this happen when governments grant big loans and bailouts to the auto industry in order to preserve the production of cars no one wants to buy.

Dr Williams is right about one thing. Unemployment is dangerous. It hurts the poor the most and opens the way for populists who seek to blame minority groups. Although Nazism does still exist in Europe, the main threat to our societies comes from Marxism. Extremists who wish to blame the economic downturn on globalization and immigration find nourishment from Karl Marx’s fabricated conflict theory; which in short states that the entrepreneurs are to blame for poverty, and that society consists of social groups whose interests always conflict—if one group gains, other groups lose. The Marxist solution to everything is war, revolution, torture, and mass murder.

What we should learn from Nazi Germany is how easily Marxist ideas turn into organized slaughter of Jews, gays, disabled, and ethnic minorities. It may not have been Marx’s intention to kill off these groups specifically, but his conflict theory is so easily transformed into general hatred of any minority group that its xenophobic usefulness is more rule than coincidence. In every country that has tried to solve its economic problems with collectivism, people have been subjected to cruelty based on ethnicity, religion, or sexual orientation.

Ironically, Dr Williams is himself best known for his attacks on human rights and minority groups. Which, perhaps, brings us to the most important lesson to be learned from the rise of Nazism in the 1930s: the Christian establishment was there to cheer Hitler when he began to speak of moral uprising and a more just and fair economy.

Even though the idea of a free market ruled by people instead of governments is questioned by many at the moment, I will continue to argue that every attempt to replace liberty with authority is doomed to increase human suffering.

* Dr Williams doesn’t explicitly mention Gordon Brown, but, as Martin Beckford writes, he does make at least one apparent reference to the British prime minister.

According to biorhythm researchers in the United States, this forthcoming holiday period produces a year-high spike in sexual activity and conceptions. It seems strange to me. I thought all the fuss about Christmas with the wider family would make anyone rethink having children. Maybe it has something to do with that heterosexual gene I’m missing?

(I apologize for this silly blog post. I’m in strange Sunday mood.)

Ten nice pictures.

Lithuanian MEP Šarūnas Birutis is outraged over a gay-rights campaign. “A modern pluralistic society can respect individual choice, and opportunities to live as one likes,” he says. “However, it cannot be acceptable to equate cohabitation of sexual minorities with normal families.”

Yeah, you cannot compare children with straight parents to children with gay parents. Everyone knows the latter are unnatural. Right, Mr Birutis?

Update: More on homophobic Lithuania here. “Lithuania is one of the most homophobic countries in the EU. This has to be viewed as a fact,” says government minister.

In an attempt to combat “commercial fascism”, Venezuela’s socialist regime encourages rural people to trade in alternative currencies in local markets. However, as has been the case with all previous socialist experimentation, this new scheme would not work without repression. So, in order to make the non-fascist, non-commercial, alternative-currency markets work, the government have loyal subjects bussed in.

It think José Guerra, the former head of research at the Venezuelan Central Bank, says it well when he describes it as “a regressive echo of Venezuela’s semi-feudal past in which landowners paid their serfs in tokens that could be exchanged only for goods produced or sold on their estates.”

This is one of the things that made me question the naïve socialism of my youth: I figured something had to be fundamentally wrong with socialism when every attempt to move away from the free market and establish a collectivized economy lead us to neo-feudalism.

Yes on 8, a homophobic campaign organization, is asking the California Supreme Court to annul thousands of marriages. This same lobby group listed the “outrageous decision of four activist Supreme Court judges” as one of three reasons to vote against equality in the November referendum on same-sex marriage.

“Sixty-six countries at the United Nations have called for homosexuality to be decriminalised,” BBC News reports. “The US was the only major Western nation not to sign the declaration.” Joining a number of African and Middle Eastern countries, the United States wants to protect individual countries’ right to imprison and execute gay people.

Sometimes a picture says it all.

Sweden’s foreign-born population is expected to reach 14 per cent by the end of 2008, The Local reports. Nowhere is this change more visible than here in Malmö.

A couple of weeks ago, I was informally asked by party officials if I would accept a nomination for Member of Parliament. Yesterday, I learned that an official letter has been sent to me. I have made it no secret that I would be delighted to run for MP and represent the Malmö electorate and the Moderate Party in the Swedish Parliament.

The general election is not due until September 2010. The candidates on the party’s official ballot paper will not be finalized until 24 October 2009. Before that, registered Moderates will vote for their favourite nominee in a primary election.

In other words, my nomination is only the first of many steps in the process ahead. Nothing is certain. In politics, the world can turn upside down in a few days.

It will take months before I know if the party wants me on its ballot, but as of now I’m a candidate for Member of Parliament.

BBC writes about how scientists have debunked a few popular myths:

• There is no effective cure or method of preventing hangovers.
• You will not get fat by eating late at night.
• Sugar does not cause hyperactive behaviour.
• It is not true one must wear a hat because most heat is lost through the head.
• People are not more likely to commit suicide in the dark winter months.

Now you know.

This propaganda video—and the people taking pride in their hatred of others—echos the religious fight against racial equality a few decades ago: a minority group is portrayed as a momentous threat to civilization and the majority culture.

Professional politicians, editors of political publications, and employees of political organizations are supposedly disqualified from the Swedish “Political Blog of the Year Award”. However, there are plenty of questionable nominees on the official list published yesterday. I found twelve when I browsed through the list: Fredrik Pettersson, Anders Svensson, Johan Sjölander, Mathias Sundin, Mattias Svensson, Kaj Raving, Anders Wallner, Per Hagwall, Adam Cwejman, Hans C. Pettersson, Peter Gustavsson, and Markus Blomberg.

Personally, I think it is a bit silly to disqualify professional political pundits from the Political Blog of the Year award. It is reasonable to assume that the best political blog is written by someone whose job involves professional politics.

Update: More information in comment section.

From Towleroad:

Pastor Rick Warren of the Saddleback Church in Lake Forest, California has been chosen to give the invocation at Obama’s inauguration, the Congressional Committee on Inaugural Ceremonies announced today.

Warren, who hosted a ‘forum’ in which Obama and McCain participated during the campaign, was a vocal supporter of Proposition 8.

Had Proposition 8 been about discrimination against any other group, no one would even consider inviting Rick Warren to Washington.

So much for change we can believe in.

Added at 2:11: Gay-rights activist Rick Jacobs says what I just wrote, “Can you imagine if he had a man of God doing the invocation who had deliberately said that Jews are not going to be saved and therefore should be excluded from what’s going on in America? People would be up in arms.”

More from Politico.

It’s OK to bully a duchess.

The Working Committee on Constitutional Reform suggests the Swedish constitution gets an article prohibiting discrimination on basis of sexual orientation.

Apparently, Paul Krugman has found that mythical free lunch. My favourite Seattle progressives are ecstatic. I’m still not convinced though.

A new study published in the Canadian Journal of Human Sexuality suggests gay teenagers get pregnant more often than heterosexual teenagers do. From the Vancouver Sun:

The University of British Columbia study looked at adolescent health surveys of 1992, 1998, and 2003, which were random studies of about 70,000 students in Grades 7 through 12 in public schools across the province of B.C.

One of the reasons for higher pregnancy among sexual minority youth, say the report’s authors, is the stigma gay teens continue to face and the strategies they may engage in order to cope with that stigma.

For example, in 1998 among the teenage girls surveyed, 7.3 per cent of lesbians and 10.6 per cent of girls who said they were bisexual reported pregnancy compared with 1.8 per cent of heterosexual girls.

Among boys, the numbers were also higher that same year for gay teenagers, with 9.6 of gay males and 11.6 per cent of bisexual teen boys reporting involvement with a pregnancy, compared with 1.5 per cent of heterosexual young men.

(Via Chris Crain.)

At a joint press conference earlier today, three out of four parties of Sweden’s centre-right government announced they would put a same-sex marriage bill before parliament in the new year. The socialist opposition is expected to support such legislation. Only the conservative Christian Democratic Party opposes gay people being granted the right to marry.

As always, Christian newspaper Dagen manages to spin the news. According to its reporter, marriage equality is a threat to people who wish to discriminate against gays for religious reasons.

Josh Marshall: “Throwing a shoe at someone doesn’t signal respect in the Arab world the way it does in ours.”

Gee, I thought throwing your shoes at political dignities always signalled approval.

Background here.

I was lying in my bed when the earthquake hit this morning. At first, I thought my bed was about to collapse, but then my husband told me it wasn’t the bed—the whole house was moving. Later we learned that southern Sweden experienced its strongest earthquake since 1904. It measured 4.7 on the Richter magnitude scale.

The Local has more on the earthquake here.

There’s some quarrel going on among leftist intellectuals in Sweden. It’s about nature and its political significance. I can’t sleep, so I thought I put together a hasty comment on this charade.

In one corner, we have a group arguing that nature is a word (like “God”) some people use to legitimize oppressive social structures and discrimination against minorities. In the other corner, we have a group saying that nature sets boundaries to what people can do and therefore it’s silly to demand equal rights for all people. Of course, it wouldn’t be a socialist debate without some corny mudslinging. To label the other groups the most liberal or conservative seems as important as the subject itself.

Although I’m not a socialist, I can somewhat sympathize with both camps. Yes, humans are limited by our biology and the physical laws in the environment we live in. No, that is no justification for passively accepting nature’s brutality as if human culture did not exist. It does, and that makes all the difference.

Biology professor Erik Svensson of Lund University seconds Naomi Klein, who allegedly argues that postmodernists have destroyed the Communist Movement by focusing on minority rights, identity politics, and social structures instead of fighting capitalism. To replace the market economy with a command economy, it seems, is more “natural” than being outraged by racism, sexism, and homophobia, which are all phenomena seen in nature.

Journalist Per Wirtén doesn’t like politics based on nature. But although he’s labelled a traitor liberal by his antagonist comrades, he stands far from the Lockean tradition of European liberalism. He refutes individual autonomy and predicts science will one day prove that we all depend on others. (No liberal has ever denied human dependence on others, but it’s a popular straw-man argument nonetheless.) Unlike true liberals, he doesn’t believe people are capable to run their own lives and distribute wealth fairly without state interference. Welfare states are needed so governments can make the correct decisions for people. The refutation of individualism will in effect legitimize totalitarian politics and allow the elite (“the society” in socialist newspeak) to set the rules for citizens’ private lives (which are not private anymore since there are no autonomous human beings).

To an outsider, the socialist debate about nature seems a bit absurd. It’s true that Per Wirtén and people like him disagree with Erik Svensson et alia on issues relating to minority rights and equality, but both are determined to scientifically prove altruism and elitism correct and individualism and market economy wrong. In doing so, both camps are destined to create a normative society by force, a society that leaves no room for any atypical elements. So, does the question of nature versus social structures really matter? It does, but I would say that it becomes irrelevant when all people discussing it are socialists. Who cares if the elite legitimizes its state-enforced rule by theories based on nature or postmodernism?

From the Box Turtle Bulletin:

It looks like Maine may emerge as the next battleground for same-sex marriage. Equality Maine had 250 volunteers at 86 polling places on election day asking voters to sign postcards supporting same-sex marriage to send to state legislators. Equality Maine’s goal was “only” 10,000 signatures; they collected 33,190. Meanwhile, the Religious Coalition for the Freedom to Marry has been holding press conferences around the state to build support for same-sex marriage.

A set of sex education material sent to Swedish schools suggests the very idea of being gay is enough to send a shiver down one’s spine. I beg to differ. The idea of being gay gives me a warm and fuzzy feeling. To suddenly wake up straight and unable to snog my husband is a scary thought though.

“When a president wants to signal that an issue really matters, there is nothing like a czar,” Laura Meckler of the Wall Street Journal writes. “President-elect Barack Obama is making clear that many issues matter to him.”

Consequently, America will soon have an energy czar, an urban-affairs czar, an economic czar, a health czar, a car czar, and a consumer czar to go with the already existing drug czar.

This, my friends, is big-government politics going nuts. And the thing about expanding governments is that they tend to create the need for ever more expansion. It’s like a pyramid scheme, only legal.

In a mocking tone, Mickey Kaus suggests Barack Obama gets himself a super czar to deal with all his other czars:

We need a Czar Czar, to crack the whip on all the czars. ... P.S.: Also a federal czar policy. Right now, czar decisions are made on an ad hoc, case-by-case basis, with no attempt at czar harmonization.

Mark my words: I would not be surprised if the new administration installs a super czar one day. We’ve seen this happen in other countries, so it’s been done.

Left-wing and right-wing extremist groups like us to believe they are each other’s opposites, that it’s a coincidence both use the same methods to intimidate democratic politicians, fight the police, and destroy property of ordinary citizens. This Swedish cartoon sums it up: a neo-Nazi and a communist fighting over who will throw the stone through the window.

Sikhanyiso Ndlovu, information minister in socialist dictator Robert Mugabe’s government, says Britain is to blame for the cholera outbreak in Zimbabwe, which has left hundreds dead. As always, the misery had nothing whatsoever to do with the regime trying to sidestep natural market realities by implementing a command economy.

A new survey conducted by Bengt Held suggests 87 per cent of Swedish MPs will support a bill legalizing same-sex marriage. With the exception of the Christian Democrats, a large majority of MPs from all parties support such a bill. MPs for the Christian Democrats—the only parliamentary party opposing marriage equality—are overwhelmingly against a reform. Only one of their twenty-four MPs is said to be in favour of gay couples being able to marry.

Tor Billgren has more in Swedish here.

It’s in English, and you can watch it here.

This is like something from the world of crime fiction, only it’s for real:

An actor portraying a suicide bid accidentally slashed his own throat on-stage after a horrifying prop mix-up, prompting an attempted murder inquiry.

Daniel Hoevels, 30, collapsed with blood pouring from his neck after using a real blade instead of the blunt stage knife.

He was taken to hospital after the dramatic scene at Vienna’s Burgtheater in Austria.

The audience had been in raptures, unaware the actor was facing his own demise for real.

But when he failed to greet their applause for the show’s spectacular special effects with a bow they separated fact from fiction.

Unless oil prices go up, Venezuelan semi-dictator Hugo Chávez is finished pretty soon. With forty per cent inflation and not enough dollars, yen, and euros, his revolution is doomed to collapse. Of course, he could have avoided this had he not nationalized the oil industry and killed off all private entrepreneurship. But being a revolutionary man, learning from experience is not his style. Investor’s Business Daily writes:

The sad thing is that Venezuela’s Chavez has learned nothing from history. He’s ignored every lesson from the past, confident oil would remain high forever, while claiming he’d created a new paradigm. Venezuela’s “Bolivarian Revolution,” built around one-man rule by Chavez, was “different,” he insisted.

After posting a surplus of 12.5% of GDP this year, and spending at least 4.5% of GDP on a stimulus package of soup kitchen offerings, Chavez is now down to his last $87 billion in reserves, having created nothing of permanent value. Next year, S&P estimates a wild swing into deficit by Venezuela, forcing devaluation.

I will save a bottle of champagne for the day Chávez is forced out of office and Venezuelan democracy is restored.

The Christian Right never misses an opportunity to blame gay people for things that goes wrong. According to Right Michigan, the financial trouble of automakers DaimlerChrysler, General Motors, and Ford Motor is due to these companies offer health benefits to their employees’ same-sex partners. The homophobes suggest General Motors alone would save twenty-five million dollars by eliminating benefits to partners of same-sex couple.

It snows in Houston, Texas.

Swedish socialist Göran Rosenberg is predicting the collapse of libertarianism. The current financial crisis is proof that the free market is bad and that people cannot set the rules for themselves, he argues. He welcome that bailout plans and nationalization of banks and industry give governments increased powers.

Like so many Swedish socialists, he uses totalitarian terminology by treating “society” as synonymous with “government”. Nothing could be further from the truth. Society is any group of people, even minorities. Government, on the other hand, is at best the elected representative of the majority of people in a certain country. But to think that the government knows best what people want, and therefore has the right to dictate the economy, is truly totalitarian.

Citizens are not part of a social organism with one mind and one will. All people are individuals with individual needs. Libertarianism is the ideology that defends each person’s right to his or her individuality. Totalitarianism rejects the same.

Marxist socialism and Hegelian conservatism is based on the idea of social organism. Problem is that this view is incompatible with liberty and the true nature of humanity. No matter how good intentions, totalitarianism always results in oppression.

I think the future will disappoint Göran Rosenberg. Libertarianism is not dead. Even if many seek comfort in a nanny government in troubled times, most of us are not prepared to give up our liberty.

Socialist leaders always blame the Western world for their own mistakes. A fanciful conspiracy theory is their answer to every criticism. Now BBC News reports that Robert Mugabe has said his regime has successfully halted a cholera epidemic that killed 800 people. “Because of cholera, Mr Brown, Mr Sarkozy and Mr Bush want military intervention,” the dictator says. “Now that there is no cholera there is no case for war.” How typically Marxist of him.

Just to let you know, my blogging will be sporadic the next few days due to heavy workload.

While thousands of pigs, cows, and turkeys are being slaughtered for Christmas, some people organize demonstrations against animals being used in pornography. I think they are hypocrites. Even more of a hypocrite was the woman handing out flyers outside my local shopping centre. She was dressed in a fur coat and leather boots. Come to think of it, I should have taken a picture of her instead of this poster at the car park.

In Sweden, most nurseries are financed through taxation, which means everybody must pay for some people’s children. Socialists think this is a fair. I disagree—which is no surprise considering I’m one of those suckers who aren’t getting anything for their tax money.

Adding to the annoyance is the fact that most people seem to think services paid through taxation are free. Socialists do their best to entertain that misconception. So it doesn’t really surprise me that a new survey suggests only twelve per cent know how much it costs to have a child in day care. One in three thinks the price tag is 1,500 Swedish kronor (€123/$183) per child and month. The real price tag is 13,100 (€1,248/$1,602).

Some seem to think so. “For the first time in human history, world government of some sort is now possible,” says Australian historian Geoffrey Blainey.

Megan McArdle is right:

First rule of politics: small groups get favors from the politicians they support only to the extent that it does not annoy large groups who voted for those politicians.

This rule should be taught in schools. Then radicals could actually accomplish something instead of just moaning and shouting in the fringes.

A student who does a survey on bloggers wants me to name a favourite blog, a blog that has inspired my own blogging. It’s a simple question, but it’s difficult to answer. I subscribe to about a hundred blogs, and all of them offer something I like. But if had to pick one, it would be Glenn Reynolds’s Instapundit. I like its style, although it’s more of a news source than a personal blog. If I had to pick a Swedish blog, it would be Niclas Berggren’s Nonicoclolasos. Its style is very different from Instapundit’s, but I like its academic tone, which makes it distinct from the polemical jargon favoured by many toplist bloggers.

Other blogs I like are seen in the sidebar listings.

PS: If you want to nominate your favourite Swedish blog for the Blog of the Year award, you can do it here. (If I understand the rules of the competition correctly, my blog is disqualified since I’m a “professional politician” of sorts, so don’t waste your vote on me.)

Bad news from Washington DC:

Congress and the White House inched toward a financial rescue of the Big Three auto makers, negotiating legislation that would give the U.S. government a substantial ownership stake in the industry and a central role in its restructuring.

Make no mistake: no matter what the coward politicians will call it, this is socialism. And it is now highly likely that other countries will follow suit and nationalize their industry. In the long run, this might set us back to the time when countries—not companies—competed on the global market. Learning from history, this is what causes war and instability. Of course, socialists and nationalists are only too happy to see a rerun of the twentieth century. But for the rest of us, this is surely a bad omen.

A reminder of what things were like when eastern Europe was under communist rule:

This year marks the 75th anniversary of one of the most horrific chapters in the history of the Soviet Union: the great famine the Ukrainians call Holodomor, “murder by starvation.” This catastrophe, which killed an estimated 6 to 10 million people in 1932-33, was largely the product of deliberate Soviet policies. Inevitably, then, its history is fodder for acrimonious disputes.

Ukraine—which, with Canada and a few other countries, observed Holodomor Remembrance Day on November 23—seeks international recognition for a Ukrainian “genocide.” Russia denounces that demand as political exploitation of a wider tragedy. Some Russian human rights activists are skeptical of both positions.

Meanwhile, the famine remains little known in the West, despite efforts by the Ukrainian diaspora. Indeed, the West has its own inglorious history with regard to the famine, starting with the deliberate cover-up by Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times correspondent Walter Duranty.

In the late 1980s, the famine gained new visibility thanks to Robert Conquest’s Harvest of Sorrow: Soviet Collectivization and the Terror-Famine (1987) and the TV documentary Harvest of Despair, aired in the United States and Canada. A backlash from the left was quick to follow. Revisionist Sovietologist J. Arch Getty accused Conquest of parroting the propaganda of “exiled nationalists.” And in January 1988, the Village Voice ran a lengthy essay by Jeff Coplon (now a contributing editor at New York magazine) titled “In Search of a Soviet Holocaust: A 55-Year-Old Famine Feeds the Right.” Coplon sneered at “the prevailing vogue of anti-Stalinism” and dismissed as absurd the idea that the famine had been created by the Communist regime. Such talk, he asserted, was meant to justify U.S. imperialism and whitewash Ukrainian collaboration with the Nazis.

By the time Coplon wrote, however, the Soviet regime was dying. The partial opening of Soviet archives soon confirmed the extent to which Stalin and his henchmen knowingly used hunger to punish resistance and beat the peasantry into submission. Among the finds was a direct order by Stalin to cordon off starving villages and intercept peasants trying to flee in search of food.

The really sad thing is that people to this day spend time not only defending communism, but Stalin and the Soviet Union too.

If this smug jet-set environmentalist is offered a government job, I will throw up.

We should learn from the dinosaurs’ mistake:

An asteroid that struck the Earth 65 million years ago wiped out the dinosaurs and 70 per cent of the species then living on the planet. The destruction of the Tunguska region of Siberia in 1908 is known to have been caused by the impact of a large extraterrestrial object.

“The international community must begin work now on forging three impact prevention elements—warning, deflection technology and a decision-making process—into an effective defence against a future collision,” said the International Panel on Asteroid Threat Mitigation, which is chaired by former American astronaut Russell Schweickart. The panel made its presentation at the UN’s building in Vienna.

The risk of a significantly sized asteroid—defined by the panel as being more than 45 metres in diameter—striking the Earth has been calculated at two or three such events every 1,000 years, a rare occurrence, though such a collision would dwarf all other natural disasters in recent history.

This is why we need to colonize Mars as soon as possible. We need a backup planet.

Internet piracy has never been an issue I’m interested in. I never download films or music illegally. I like DVDs and buy my music from iTunes. However, this diagram sort of explains one pro-piracy argument to me:

Rather than being state agencies, Sweden’s colleges and universities ought to be made into independent educational institutions, says Daniels Tarschys, who just authored an enquiry into the autonomy of higher education in Sweden. “This would give them substantially more freedom of movement, while at the same time taking the interests of society and tax payers into account by through public supervision and control,” he writes in an article published by Dagens Nyheter.

I agree. The dependence on the state is a huge problem in Swedish academia. We need to liberate the universities from state interference. I would prefer complete privatization, but Tarschys seems to offer a decent compromise.

Apparently, Francis Bacon once said, “A little philosophy makes men atheists: A great deal reconciles them to religion.” In his Natural History of Religion, David Hume explains how it works:

For men, being taught, by superstitious prejudices, to lay the stress on a wrong place; when that fails them, and they discover, by a little refection, that the course of nature is regular and uniform, their whole faith totters, and falls to ruin. But being taught, by more reflection, that this very regularity and uniformity is the strongest proof of design and of a supreme intelligence, they return to that belief, which they had deserted; and they are now able to establish it on a firmer and more durable foundation.

If nothing else, this makes a strong case for the need of Popper-style falsification.

Andrew Sullivan predicts a grim future of quality journalism:

To give my own example: I started blogging eight years ago. My once quirky blog, born in time to cover the 2000 election campaign, has steadily grown in traffic over the years, but this year, with the election campaign and a media revolution, it went into the stratosphere. In October last year my blog got 3.5m page views; in October this year it had 23m page views. The story of the campaign, in other words, did find a readership (and page views of big online papers soared as well). The growth just didn’t occur in newsprint, and the next generation of readers—those now under 30—barely knows what a newspaper is.

Now compare my little blog’s traffic with The Baltimore Sun, a big metropolitan paper with a long history and great reputation, featured most recently in the HBO series The Wire. It had 17.5m page views in October; The Dallas Morning News got 12m; The Atlanta Journal-Constitution got 14m. The operation largely run out of my spare room reached many more online readers than some of the biggest and most loss-making papers in the country. The economics are remorseless: as news goes online, the economic model for papers cannot survive. If advertising follows page views, the game will shortly be over.

The terrifying problem is that a one-man blog cannot begin to do the necessary labour-intensive, skilled reporting that a good newspaper sponsors and pioneers. A world in which reporting becomes even more minimal and opinion gets even more vacuous and unending is not a healthy one for a democracy. Perhaps private philanthropists will step in and finance not-for-profit journalistic centres, where investigative and foreign reporting can be invested in and disseminated by blogs and online sites. Maybe reporter-bloggers will start rivalling opinion-mongers such as me and give the whole enterprise some substance. Maybe papers can slim down sufficiently to produce a luxury print issue and a viable online product. There’s always a hunger for news, after all.

Or maybe, as I urged in this space a few years ago, you should take a moment to savour the piece of grubby newsprint in your hands this Sunday. Because it is going to disappear far sooner than most analysts predict.

Some of George W. Bush’s fiercest Hollywood critics will visit the White House as recipients of the Kennedy Center Honors. Although Barbra Streisand—whom is one of the honoured guests—says she will be on her best behaviour, I would love to see her face when shaking hand with archenemy Bush.

Police took 470 activists into custody at yesterday’s demonstrations in Salem, a small suburban community southwest of Stockholm. The police say it was a “successful day”. Seems odd, but maybe it was from a police perspective.

More on the demonstrations here and here.

On Monday, 1 December, four British teddy bears became the first soft toys to reach the edge of space. It’s a milestone of sorts—like Laika, only cuter and softer.

I recommend you read this Swedish article on queer theology by theologian Jayne Svenungsson.

According to an international survey reported by the Times of Malta, nearly a fifth of employees in Europe, Asia, the Pacific, and North America say their work makes them ill or unhealthy. I think the survey is right, and I blame the office environment.

I few years ago, I worked for an international computer manufacturer. I loved the job but loathed spending my days in a cubicle. The constant noise of ringing telephones and chatter gave me a daily headache. The open office landscape—which is now the most common in bigger companies—made me irritated and uncomfortable, and I think many people share my need for some privacy and calm to do a good job.

The Archbishop of York seconds Desmond Tutu. Good.

Sweden’s prime minister is wrong when he suggests buying Christmas gifts made in China “haven’t done much to secure Swedish jobs”. In fact, the import of Chinese goods creates more jobs in Sweden than goods manufactured domestically. Globalization is good not only for exporters, but for importers as well. That is what’s so great about free trade: all parties make deals that benefit them all—there are no losers in free trade. Protectionism, on the other hand, has no winners.

Blogge says it well.

Swedish media—high on moralism—loves to report rumours about Amsterdam ridding itself of coffeshops and brothels. But this time not only the usual suspects report about an imminent crackdown:

Amsterdam has unveiled plans to shutter up to half of its famed brothels and marijuana cafes as part of a major clean-up of its ancient city centre.

The city says it wants to drive organised crime out of the neighbourhood, and is targeting businesses that “generate criminality,” including prostitution, gambling parlours, “smart shops” that sell herbal treatments, head shops and “coffee shops” where marijuana is sold openly.

“By reduction and zoning of these kinds of functions, we will be able to manage better and tackle the criminal infrastructure,” the city said in a statement.

It said it would also reduce a number of business it sees as related to the “decay” of the centre, including peep shows, sex shows, sex shops, mini supermarkets, massage parlours and souvenir shops.

I lived in Amsterdam for many years and I can’t imagine the city centre without its Red Light District being what it is today. I think the local politicians make a huge mistake if they destroy what is unique about Amsterdam.

I’m so sick and tired of violent neo-Nazis and commies pretending they are anything but images of each other. Swedish newspapers are filled with stories about their day of protesting one another. I’m sick of these hooligans.

Added at 22:33: Here is more of the same, from Germany.

But the link goes both ways. New research suggests intelligence is such a reliable indicator of underlying genetic fitness that it has been chosen by members of the opposite sex for many generations. This process of sexual selection is the reason people have become so brainy.

Maybe this explains the fag hag phenomenon?

South African Archbishop Desmond Tutu says Zimbabwean dictator Robert Mugabe should be forced to resign:

“I think now that the world must say: ‘You have been responsible with your cohorts for gross violations, and you are going to face indictment in The Hague unless you step down’,” Tutu, a Nobel peace prize winner, told Dutch current affairs TV program Nova.

Asked if Mugabe, who has been in power since independence from Britain in 1980, should be removed by force, Tutu said: “Yes, by force—if they say to him: step down, and he refuses, they must do so militarily.”

Tutu, who was one of the continent’s leading voices against the former apartheid regime in South Africa, said the African Union or the Southern African Development Community (SADC) would have the capacity to remove Mugabe, 84.

“He has destroyed a wonderful country. A country that used to be a bread basket—it has now become a basket case,” Tutu said.

Tutu is absolutely right.

King Bhumibol Adulyadej of Thailand is celebrating his 81st birthday today. To say anything bad about this man or the monarchy can give you fifteen years in prison. If you are in Thailand, that is. Fortunately, The Economist is published in Britain, so it can afford to print a critical article about the Thai monarch.

I was in a good mood this morning. After reading the newspapers, I decided I wanted to make some pancakes and went shopping for the ingredients. When I came home, I had some coffee and watched television for an hour. Then I read through my pile of unread emails. That’s when I learned that one of my colleagues died two days ago. I knew she was ill because she’s been on sick leave for a while, but I wasn’t expecting this. Now I’m feeling blue and sit numb listening to Sade.

I hate death. I don’t fear my own death. In fact, on some days I look forward to it. But I hate other people’s death. And I never quite know how to act or feel when someone I know dies. The whole thing makes me uncomfortable. On days like this, I wish I still had that childhood faith in God so I could blame someone for the gross injustice that is death. I suppose that is one reason religion appeals to so many.

(Seen in picture is Death dancing on a hill, a scene from Ingmar Bergman’s The Seventh Seal.)

Six local politicians want to ban “unrestrained demonstrations” in Sweden. The right to demonstrate is protected by the Swedish constitution, and it should be recognized as a fundamental right. However, I do realize that mass rallies in smaller towns are a problem. In recent years, rightist and leftist socialist groups have turned small towns and communities into war zones. Later today, Salem—a Stockholm suburb—is expected to be invaded by fascists and communists who want to fight each other like hooligans. This has become an annual event, and local politicians must be excused for wanting to see an end to it. But limiting the constitutional right do demonstrate one’s opinion in public is wrong. There are other ways to tackle the violence and criminality associated with extremist groups. One is to allow the police the use of tear gas, water canons, and rubber bullets.

Forget terrorism and economic turmoil, this is the week’s most important news story. I’m outraged!

(This entry may contain humour and sarcasm.)

Online newspaper The Local has asked a panel of eight if it thinks Swedish taxes are too high. Surprisingly, everyone seems to think a sixty per cent tax level is acceptable. One of the panellists says, “Paint me red and call me a socialist, but I do not think Swedish taxes are too high when one considers what one gets in return.” Well, I be glad to paint you red because you think like a true socialist. It’s good for you if you feel you get a lot for the money you hand over to the authorities, but the problem with high taxes is that only people adapted to the elite get to benefit from it. High taxes and the big-government welfare state create a system where the people depend on the good will of top politicians. It’s democracy turned upside down. In effect, we pay the government to run our lives for us. For the many who don’t have any children or refuse to adapt to the mainstream, life is reduced to that of a milch cow.

I’m reminded of this empirical fact when I read about the ongoing cholera epidemic in Zimbabwe. Had Zimbabwean dictator Robert Mugabe not replaced the free market with a command economy, this once very prosperous country would not have slumped into devastating poverty. Decades of failed economics have turned much of the country into a filthy slum without proper sanitation, which is the cause of any cholera epidemic.

I cannot understand why people still make new attempts to save an ideology that never created anything but misery. In a way it’s understandable that academics and politicians in Europe and North America like Marxism considering they don’t produce anything of true value and therefore must find some justification for their existence—and what better way to do that than fondle an ideology that preaches equality through elitism? But I cannot understand why people fighting against real poverty would find any comfort in a theoretical system that never made life better for the poor.

A couple of weeks ago, Swedish television channel TV8 launched two new programmes about religion and spirituality: one had a distinct atheist approach; the other had an outspoken Christian theme. In the first ratings since the programmes first aired, the atheist show has gathered more than twice the number of viewer. It seems Swedes prefer the atheist take on religion and spirituality.

Homophobia with a catchy tune.

Adel Hussein, a freelance journalist in northern Iraq, has been put in prison for violating a public decency law by writing a story about “the physical effects of homosexual sex”. He is to spend six months behind bars. The public prosecutor has also filed a lawsuit against the magazine’s former chief editor and the publisher.

From the Sydney Morning Herald:

Angry parents have beaten up Santa and three of his elves after taking their children to visit a “rip-off” Christmas grotto in England.

Visitors who forked out £30 ($69) a ticket to enter the grotto were promised a Christmas wonderland where “dreams really do come true”.

However disappointed families have spoken of a “glorified car boot sale” with a Nativity scene painted on a billboard, a broken ice-skating rink and huskies tied up outside their kennels in a muddy field.

The park has now been renamed “Winter blunderland” and Britain’s consumer watchdog has received 1300 complaints.

I’m not condoning violence, but I wish I had been there to see the angry parents hit those elves.

Where’s global warming when you need it?

Tor Billgren and other prominent gay bloggers around the world appear shocked by the religious hatred of gay people expressed by the Catholic Church in recent days. And they are right; the Vatican’s opposition to a UN resolution banning imprisonment, execution, and corporal punishment on grounds of homosexuality is grotesque. But it should not surprise anyone that the Vatican lobbies so hard to keep violence against gay people legal. After all, the current pope was the man who described gay people as “intrinsically disordered”. In some backward way, the Pope probably thinks he is helping us by denying us human rights. In 2004, the Pope—then Cardinal Ratzinger—expressed his thoughts on gay people and the law in an interview:

Q: Homosexuality is a topic that regards love between two people and not just mere sexuality. What can the Church do to understand this phenomenon?

Cardinal Ratzinger: Let me say two things. Above all, we must have great respect for these people who also suffer and who want to find their own way of correct living. On the other hand, to create a legal form of a kind of homosexual marriage, in reality, does not help these people.

In other words: Gay people need to be discriminated against. It is for our own good—to prevent us from getting the deluded idea that we are equal to others. We are not, because, as Ratzinger says later in the interview, we are first and foremost “destructive to the family and society”. The society better rid itself of such evil creatures.

Note at 21:19: Misspellings fixed.

Democracy in America reports about Joe the Plumber’s book tips for the Christmas holiday, and a commenter writes:

I nominate Joe the Plumber to be next host of Meet the Press. Surely his deep insight and intellectual honesty make him an obvious candidate for this nation’s next great political mind. If not the host, I would at least like to see him as a regular round-table panellist.

Well, it would certainly add some humour to Meet the Press.

I’m all for rugby players posing nude and want to do my bit to encourage such behaviour.

Prince, the artist who made simulating masturbation on stage an art form, comes out as a conservative prude:

When asked about his perspective on social issues—gay marriage, abortion—Prince tapped his Bible and said, “God came to earth and saw people sticking it wherever and doing it with whatever, and he just cleared it all out. He was, like, ‘Enough.’”

Many gay people are angry, but I just think it’s sad.

I just read an interesting article about oil wrestling. It is one of the most popular sports in Turkey. The wrestlers wear tight short leather trousers called “kispet”, and they cover themselves with olive oil. In a match, the wrestlers try to put their hands down their opponent’s kispet as much as possible. If the kispet is tightly waisted, it is difficult to get a hand past the waist. The wrestler who manages to put his hand down his opponent’s kispet can get a firm grip of the trousers and force his opponent on his back. He has then won the match.

A peculiar sport.

“Iceland is considering switching to the euro even without a green light from EU institutions and despite their warnings against such a unilateral move,” the EU Observer writes. If Iceland goes ahead with this, they will join Kosovo and Montenegro in adopting the euro without being members of the EU.

Secularism is coming to Spain:

In the northern city of Valladolid, Judge Alejandro Valentin ordered the Macias Picavea School to remove religious symbols from classrooms and public spaces, arguing that the presence of these symbols in areas where minors are educated can promote the idea that the state is closer to Catholicism than other religions, the Edmonton Journal reports.

His decision came in response to a 2005 request by a parent and a local secular association which argued for the decision on the grounds that the Spanish constitution guarantees "freedom of religion" and ensures the "secular and neutral" character of the state.

Cardinal Cañizares responded to the decision, saying “it is an attempt to impose a new culture, a project of humanity that implies an anthropological and radical vision which changes the vision that constitutes our identity,” an identity Spaniards have received “from our predecessors.”

“Forgetting God is like forgetting and denying man himself, even if we hardly admit it,” the cardinal said, according to SIR. This leads to a “pathological situation” which permits abortion, euthanasia, experimentation on embryos and their exploitation for economic purposes.

I don’t think it’s necessary for a secular state to remove all signs of religion; but if the cardinal is right, and the removal of crucifixes will lead to legalized euthanasia and more stem cell research, I’m all for it.

It is the twentieth World AIDS Day today, and an estimated 33.2 million people are living with HIV. As always, I will wear my red ribbon and remember lost friends.

Interesting developments on Europe’s most stubborn island:

Britain is considering joining the eurozone as a direct consequence of global financial turmoil, European Commission President Jose Manuel Barroso said Sunday.

“We are now closer than ever before. I’m not going to break the confidentiality of certain conversations, but some British politicians have already told me: ‘If we had the euro, we would have been better off’,” Barroso told a weekly French news programme, referring to the fall in the pound’s value since markets and liquidity meltdown earlier this year.

“The British have an enormous quality, one of many, that is they are pragmatic,” he said on the panel of a joint RTL-LCI radio and television broadcast. “This crisis has emphasised the importance of the euro, and also of Britain,” he added.

Sweden rejected joining the euro in a referendum in 2003. Some liberal politicians recently suggested it’s about time to consider a second vote on the issue. I think they’re right. I want Sweden, Britain, Denmark, and other EU countries with national currencies to adopt the single currency as soon as possible.

Speaking of the EU, in this week’s issue of The Economist, the anonymous—and often Eurosceptic—columnist who writes under the pseudonym Charlemagne, praises Europe for its surprising labour flexibility. I’m one those who have lived and worked in another EU country, and I have often be astonished by the pessimism expressed my some Eurosceptic socialists and conservatives who seem to think language barriers make it impossible for people to take advantage of Europe’s open borders. Unfortunately, these merchants of doom make others think they are right. They are not. The European Union has its faults. Its bureaucracy is hideous, and its institutions need a radical makeover. But sound criticism should not prevent us from acknowledge that we are the first Europeans in centuries who are able to live, work, and travel freely thanks to the establishment of this union.

This progress towards a free and united Europe would be helped by Britain and Sweden joining the euro.

Hugo Chávez: “I’m sorry, comrades, but it’s all about me, me, me.”

It’s not a Chávez quotation, it’s a paraphrase of British comedy Absolutely Fabulous. It could, however, be the words of any commie in power. One thing all communist rulers have in common is the deluded idea that no one but themselves knows how to do the job.