Author Archives: Stefan Geens

Correction

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Johan Norberg, on a blog that now commendably has permalinks but not yet commenting or trackbacks,Allowing feedback on posts is like encouraging free trade in the market of ideas: contriving to only allow the export of ideas from one’s blog to the internet is ideological mercantilism. Of course, it is a blogger’s sovereign right to dictate such policies, though all good Ricardians know this leads to sub-optimal intellectual equilibria. rightly points out that it is religious extremism of all stripes, not only (or even predominantly) Islamism, that is responsible for the world’s recent massacres and ethnic cleansing episodes, and he cites the role of Hutu Christian funamentalist incitement in the genocide of the Tutsis in Rwanda in 1994. But then he also apportions blame thus (or, to be perfectly accurate, he cites a documentary he watched):

The Catholic Church and Western Christian democrats supported the murderous [Rwandan Hutu majority] regime before and during the massacres – especially the Belgians and their prime minister Wilfried Martens.

There is a (figurative) whiff of Michael Moore about the way in which the filmmakers, Peter and Maria Rinaldo, construct this argument. Yes, Martens is a Christian Democrat (he was prime minister only up until 1992, however, and in a coalition with the Socialists from 1988 on); yes, the west, including Belgium, supported the Rwandan government against a Tutsi insurgency from 1990 until the genocide of Tutsis by Hutu extremists began in earnest in 1994. But does the first fact have any bearing on the second? Hardly.

This does not lessen the blame that Belgium can be made to shoulder for its role prior to and during the genocide. It’s just that attributing Catholic motivations to Belgian policy in Rwanda in the solidly secular 90s is a rather outlandish charge, especially if you consider that from 1992 on, it was a Socialist, Willy Claes, who was Belgium’s foreign minister. I’m all for bashing the Catholic church, but I’d prefer not to see demons where there are none.

I am not sure Johan is aware that the Rinaldos approach their subject matter with an ideological leaning that tends to favor Marxist perspectives of current events, where imperialist western governments naturally ally themselves with reactionary conservative religious forces against progressive communist movements. I find all this a bit much — still, I haven’t seen the documentary, and so I am technically open to persuasion that the Belgians plotted to support the Hutu Habyarimana government out of a religious conviction that having lots of dead communist sympathizers was preferable to lots of dead Catholic extremists. In 1994.

Meanwhile, I myself can’t find any indication that Radio Milles Collines (RTMLC), the private Hutu radio station that directed the massacres, propelled the genocide with primarily religious invocations: Neither this extensive description of its broadcasts nor this one mention religion even just once. Radio Milles Collines did, however, start the rumor that Belgians had shot down the plane that carried the Rwandan and Burundian presidents, which led to attacks on Belgian peacekeepers that left 10 of them dead. This prompted their removal from the country, which facilitated the genocide. Hutu extremists wanted the Belgians out, and Belgium obligedHere is a primer on the genocide in Rwanda in 1994. And here is a primer on the dress rehearsal in Burundi in 1972.. This is what Belgium can rightly be faulted for (in addition, of course, to a disastrous colonial stewardship that favored the Tutsis and which institutionalized a cycle of mounting retribution between Hutu and Tutsi as soon Rwanda and Burundi became independent in 1962).

Perfect Day 2 (July 23, 2004)

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Perfect Day 1 was May 5, 2002.If somebody were to ask me to describe a perfect summer vacation day, it might go something like this: It would be sunny in Ireland, where I’d be, and I would spend the morning in the garden making progress listening to Henning Mankell’s Innan Frosten, in Swedish, on the iPod, while following along in the book, much as I promised Erik I would.

After lunch, I might take the bus into Dublin to pick up my copy of Prime Obsession, which would have been ordered at Hodges Figgis the week before. Then, I’d wade through swarms of Spanish English-language students just released from the day’s classes — all practicing their immaculate Spanish on each other — and make my way to the Irish Film Institute, which would be starting a Richard Linklater retrospective that day with a showing of Before Sunset, the sequel to Before Sunrise, a movie I saw twice in so many days in 1995 — once secretly, in order to avoid the barbs of so-called friends that I was showing the symptoms of terminal hopeless romanticism.

Before Sunset is 80 minutes of real-time conversation between Jesse and Celine as they meet in Paris, not so accidentally, nine years after a first encounter in Vienna in Before Sunrise. A Linklater retrospective would show both films, of course, but I’d resist the tempation to see them chronologically, preferring instead to try to resurrect memories from 1995, much as the protagonists do in Before Sunset. And the movie would stir the heart: perversely, in the intervening years, Celine has gotten herself an MA in international relations, while Jesse has become a novelist — where I am & where I’d like to be. And they’ve both lived in New York. No wonder their duet is even more compelling to me the second time round, if that’s possible.

After dinner, there’d be a public lecture by Roger Penrose — around the corner and down the street — capping a week-long international conference on quantum gravity. Penrose would title his talk Fashion, Faith, and Fantasy in Modern Physical Theories, and he would illustrate it with transparencies of mermaids.

Penrose would point out that the famous (hypothetical) Shrödinger’s cat experiment still leads to a paradox in quantum mechanics: Whenever the cat is both alive and dead, the result of a superposition of possible states for a particle that decides the fate of the cat, there can also be an observer that is both happy and sad, until we observe him (or her). But we, in turn, might also both happy and sad, simultaneously, until observed by an outsider. The boundary for the macroscopic effects of quantum behavior seems to be arbitrary, in other words — or, at least, not well defined. This would be problematic, and hence quantum mechanics, while immensely useful, still requires a measure of faith. Penrose goes on to show a transparency describing an experiment, being built, that should probe this boundary.

cat.jpgpenrosetalk.jpg

And then I’d blog it. And that is exactly how I spent July 23, 2004.

Hawking in Dublin: Link dump

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Stephen Hawking gave his talk yesterday, the media came and went, and now the interpretations are beginning to trickle onto the web. The transcript — apparently the actual text Hawking’s computerized voice read, minus the visuals — is here. The New York Times has by far the best reporting I’ve read. Physics Forum has a thread (scroll to the end), and several blogging physicists chime in here, here, here and here.

The upshot, by consensus, is that Hawking’s proposal is a way to resolve in the semi-classical regime a paradox that is no longer a problem in the quantum regime, where the real search is now on for a mechanism whereby black holes release the information they contain back to the rest of the universe as they fritter away — with several viable options in the running.

In other words, most physicists in the field have long accepted that black holes have entropy and that this information is released back to us — not forwarded into other universes — as black holes die out. Besides denying science fiction writers convenient plot devices, what Hawking is doing is reconciling the advances quantum approaches have given us with the more “traditional” way of describing black holes.

His method is to postulate that, when observing a black hole from far away (in other words, when we look at the complete picture), it’s never possible to be sure what kind of black hole we’re looking at, or if it is a black hole at all. It’s a situation analogous to the famed double-slit experiment — easily the bizarrest thing I’ve ever experienced first-hand — where photons, having gone through either the left slit or the right slit, and detected individually, still aggregate to a classical interference pattern. So it goes with black holes, according to Hawking: They look like black holes from a classical perspective, but we can’t be sure, because of quantum uncertainty, what kind they are precisely — sometimes, they are pseudo black holes of the variety that do allow information leakage. When we collect all these possible black holes into the composite classical black hole that we see from afar, enough of them allow for information leakage to resolve the paradox. Or so says Hawking, in my limited understanding via other observers, most of whom seem slightly skeptical of the mathematical gymnastics in his talk.

In a way, this is a catch-up maneuver for Hawking, and one more vote in favor of the inviolability of the basic laws of physics. The search for a theory of quantum gravity just got a little easier.

Conference event horizon

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Dublin (where I happen to be on vacation) promises to be the scene of some pretty revolutionary physics next week, because Stephen Hawking has asked at the last minute to speak at the 17th International Conference on General Relativity and Gravitation being held here, claiming to have solved the black hole information paradox, one of main puzzles facing those toiling on quantum gravity.

By far the best context I’ve seen for what Hawking might say can be found on pages 93-94You need to register with Amazon.com, but when you do you can read those pages. (If you need to, do a search for “unruh”). of Lee Smolin’s most excellent (as in you really should read this book instead of other popularizations, including the rather mediocre stuff Hawking himself has written) book, Three Roads to Quantum Gravity. Those few paragraphs set the stage for the question Hawking purports to have answered: If black holes have entropy, how do they store this information? According to classical physics, this information is destroyed, which would break the second law of thermodynamics.

One possible solution was offered by Samir Mathur a few months ago, using string theory. What will Hawking sayUpdate 17/07: More hints here.? His conference abstract is suitably baffling. Will he flesh out Mathur’s approach, or come up with a completely new model — perhaps an equivalent solution using another theoretical base? Or will he be wrong? (It’s happened before.)

Tabun

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In this post, I build a theory as to why it is incredibly rude to ask a Swede which party they voted for in the last elections. Something to do with the size of the public sector and the size of the dominant party — I’m not quite sure myself.
 
One annoying side effect, however, is that this reluctance to state a clear political position makes it hard to argue politics over here. Imagine having a political debate with a Brit who is trying to avoid giving away whether he is Labour or Tory.
 
Luckily, Swedish bloggers are a self-selecting group of opinionmongers, so among them this trait is less pronounced. And among Swedish SAIS friends, this trait was stomped out through years of ridicule.Jag har upptäckt en stor tabu i svenska samhället. Och jag har även en teori varför tabun finns. Jag har redan förklarat min teori till några svenska kompisar och de tycker att jag möjligen har rätt — och de säger aldrig sån saker, även om jag har rätt. Då får ni förklara varför jag har fel.

Tabu kan förekomma i alla sociala situationer, även mellan gamla vänner, men säkert på fester i Stockholm, när man pratar med människor som man känner inte så bra. När jag möter människor, tycker jag om att prata om politik. Och när jag pratar om politik, brukar jag fråga, “På vilket partiet röstade du förre valet?”

Det är jättesvårt att få ett svar på det. Många säger att det är en hemlighet. Och så började jag fundera. Man röster i hemlighet som garanti att man inte ska lida på grund av sitt val. Men det skulle väl aldrig hända i Sverige at man lider på grund av en offentlig röst, eller hur?

Hur. Här är min teori. Det börjar med anmärkningen att, som i alla länder, bästa anställningar i den Svenska offentliga sektorn är politisk anställd. Nu kommer två statistiker: Sveriges största parti — Sossar — fick 40% av röstar på valet, och 56% av svensk BNP kommer från den offentliga sektorn — båda siffror är högre än genomsnittet i andra länder. Det betyder att i Sverige, för flera människor än annanstans, framgång på jobbet menar att man måste stöda eller låtsas att stöda partiet som kan ger framgången — Socialdemokraterna. Kanske betyder det att man är partimedlem, även. Men: Även om på UD eller SOS man tror att du är Sossar, röstar du på Folkpartiet. I hemlighet, självklart.

Det är inget problem så länge det finns inga utlänningar som ställer oartiga frågor. Svenskar, som är artiga, skulle aldrig ställa varandra frågor om svaret möjligen behöver en lögn. Och därför är frågan tabu.

Finns lösning? Javisst. Ställa frågan på en annan sätt, så att man inte behöver ljuga: Till exempel, nu frågar jag: “Hypotetiskt, om Socialdemocrakterna inte funnits, vilket partiet skulle du stöda?” Det funkar lite bättre.

Åke Green Redux

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This week I forwent the pleasures of the internet for a stint of unwired living on Sandhamn, with moss and pine needles underfoot and the brushing of blueberry bushes against sandaled ankles on walks towards sunset viewsThe first of these two posts on Åke Green is here..

Returning to Stockholm, I found that my blog, abandoned, had done rather better at attracting comments than when I breathe down its neck. Inspired, I’ve gone off to do some further “research,” aka advanced googling, into how laws criminalizing hate speech against groups compare with libel laws for individuals in various countries. In particular, I wanted to clarify in my own mind whether there should be anti-defamation laws that protect groups, much like those that protect individualsWhat is the difference between libel, slander and defamation? Here is your idiot’s guide, with some amusing British examples as a manner of illustration..

It’s certainly an idea that’s been floated on the internet; and it has been argued for at length in at least one US law journal. I find the journal article shoots itself in the kneecaps rather effectively, however. Just read the abstract:

Abstract: In AIDA v. Time Warner Entertainment Company, currently before the Illinois Supreme Court, the American Italian Defense Association (AIDA) alleges that the television series “The Sopranos” portrays the criminal and psychopathically depraved character of the Mafia underworld as the dominant motif of Italian and Italian-American culture. The author, drawing upon his experience as co-counsel to AIDA, submits that the law should provide a remedy for racial and ethnic group defamation. It is paradoxical for the law to only allow a remedy for individual defamation. The current civil damage lawsuit for defamation is inapplicable because courts consistently deny damages for group defamation by refusing to recognize the individual harm caused by group defamation. Likewise, criminal defamation statutes are now found in fewer than half the states and rarely used by prosecutors. This Article proposes enacting a declaratory judgment statute at the state level to remedy group racial and ethnic defamation. This suggested remedy takes the form of model legislation in the Appendix to this Article.
 
I’m in the process of dealing with these Guido motherfuckers.
 
—Will Smith, in Enemy of the State (Touchstone Pictures 1998)

Had this not existed, The Onion would have been forced to make it up. I think the author, Professor Polelle — clearly a Guido himself — manages to use an example that illustrates perfectly what silliness such a law would engender in the US if legislated. Or Sweden, for that matter.

Of course, Italians are famously thin-skinned against insults, which is why cursing in Italian is so deliciously effective. Just this week, the country’s judicial system once again had to define precisely which insults are slanderous and which are legal:

ROME (Reuters) – A driver who told a parking attendant “You are nobody!” has felt the weight of Italy’s legal system, which ruled the seemingly innocuous words constituted slander — and fined him heavily.

I wonder if the driver would have been let off the hook had he been a registered Buddhist proselytizing his religion. Meanwhile, vaffanculo is fine, presumably as you are telling someone what to do instead of describing them, and so is calling a woman a rompipalle (ball breaker), because Italian women have been known to do just that, and the truth is an absolute defence in defamation cases.

Or so I thought. Italy’s approach to free speech is actually rather shocking: In civil cases, the truth is not an absolute defence against libel, to Berlusconi’s great delightBerlusconi, by the way, is very short, bald and fat, and for this he overcompensates, which goes a long way to explaining his disastrous reign. As one Italophile American friend says, so long Berlusconi is in power Italians lefties have no business complaining to him about Bush.. But even worse, Italy is one of the few western countries which still has criminal libel laws. Reporters Without Borders is on their case, and a proposed amendment to Italy’s defamation law, which would decriminalize libel, though still allow courts to ban journalists from writing, is currently wending its way through various committees.

A surprise (for me) is that there still are criminal libel laws on the books in some US states, though their use is rareHere is a great primer on libel law in the US.. Apparently, criminal libel convictions are always getting overturned on appeal, so nobody bothers. Still, it would be nice to drag the stragglers into the 21st century.

What does the Anti-Defamation League consider to be the best method of combating hate speech, notably anti-semitic speech? Tellingly, it doesn’t lobby for civil libel laws for ethnic groups, nor even criminal hate speech laws like the kind Sweden has. Instead, “ADL believes that the best response to the words of bigots and extremists is more speech: speech that reflects the ideals of American democracy and tolerance.” It proposes “penalty enhancements” for hate crimes in model legislation that serves as a blueprint for the law in most US states:

Expressions of hate protected by the First Amendment’s free speech clause are not criminalized. However, criminal activity motivated by hate is subject to a stiffer sentence. A defendant’s sentence may be enhanced if he intentionally selects his victim based upon his perception of the victim’s race, religion, national origin, sexual orientation or gender.

And of course, it is always illegal to shout “Fire!” in a crowded theatre or to incite violence in a crowd, but that’s because a direct causal connection can be established between the intent, the act, and the effect.

This, to me, is the ideal solution. It does mean that the onus is on society to respond to the speech of bigots like Åke Green with “more speech.” Laws which silence him are easier, but they require the conceit that the current mores of “right-thinking” citizens are universal, and the forgetting that until not too long ago, citizens like Green were considered right-thinking. Society should not be tempted to cash in its moral chips through laws which ossify the consensus, but instead should be confident that tolerance and liberalism are the most competitive and popular long-term strategies for maximizing society’s utility.

So where does this leave Sweden? The ruling against Åke Green, based on what I now think is a faulty interpretation of a hate speech law that was kept vague on purpose, is being appealed, and so it will quite possibly be overturned for one of many good reasons. But as it stands, because the test the court used for deciding whether the law had been broken was so broad, the ruling really does amount to a criminal libel law protecting groups. This puts Swedish law in a strange place, for had the pastor made the accusations in his speech against a specific person instead of against a group, he would be tried in a civil libel case.

Swedish law has been in strange places before, however; in two cases I know of, there has been an overzealous application to the internet. I’ve already written about the legal obligation of Swedish websites to warn their users if cookies are used. But another ruling in 2002, just before my time here and hence which I missed until now, found daily tabloid Aftonbladet’s publisher guilty of hate speech because an anonymous user had posted such speech on an unmoderated forum of theirs on the web. This case, too, was criminal, and the publisher received a suspended sentence in addition to being fined.

What does this mean for Swedish bloggers, who might decide that when they find hate speech among their comments, they prefer to leave it up so that they, or others, can better argue against it (or choose not to comment at all)? Would they now be guilty of hate speech if somebody complained to the authorities? This scenario hasn’t happened yet, but I think it’s only because Green and his ilk are predominantly backward, and haven’t discovered blogs yet. But they will, as will Swedish anti-semites and nationalists. Are Swedish bloggers going to have to start manually approving every comment submitted to their site in order to avoid jail because of a de facto criminal libel law protecting groups? As for me, they’ll have to pry unmoderated commenting at stefangeens.com from my cold, dead hands.

Insult isn't injury

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Last summer, on an island off the coast of Sweden’s bible belt, Pentecostal pastor Åke Green said some very nasty things about homosexuals in a sermon (in Swedish) entitled “Is homosexuality a inborn urge or a game evil powers play with Man?” You can guess what the answer was. He quoted liberally from the old testament to show homosexuality is a temptation of the devil, blamed the spread of AIDS on the legalization of homosexual sex, said homosexuality arises from wet dreams, excessive fantasizing, the porn industry, a positive image in the media, and that it is a gateway activity to pedophilia and bestiality, both of which are practiced predominantly by homosexuals. Basically, the kind of thing you get to hear on an average day in a Pentecostal church in backwater Louisiana or Mississippi.

He delivered his Sunday sermon to some 50 parishioners in fuming anticipation of a “gay day” on the island, invited the media to attend (none came), and then sent the transcript around to papers, one of which printed bits of it. For spreading his message thus, he was charged under a Swedish law originally intended to prohibit agitation against ethnic groups (hets mot folkgrupper), but which was expanded in 2003 to include homosexuals as a group. This was the first such use of the law, and Tuesday’s ruling by a local court was thus a test for its scopeThe motivation for extending the law’s scope was the fact that Nazi sympathisers have in the past incited violence against gays through speech at demonstrations, and there was found to be no explicit legal proscription against such speech. The original law was intended to protect Jews from skinhead malfeasance. Regardless of the quality of the law, I have no qualms with treating ethnic groups on a par with gays in this respect..

In the ruling, the court decided Green was guilty, sentenced him to a month in prison and fined him around $3,600. I’ve now read the ruling [Swedish, PDF; page 13 is missing in the PDF, but that part is covered here], and join David Weman over at Fistful of Euros in thinking that this decision is deeply flawed. At its core, it states that strident public speech making claims about ethnic groups or gays that can be construed as insulting is illegal, even if the speaker believes those claims to be true, and even if the grounds for such beliefs are religiousGudmundson has the press links..

This criteria for prohibited speech is far broader than one which prohibits speech which intends to incite violence. Here is the ruling’s nut sentence:

Den rättighet homosexuella som grupp har att inte utsättas för kränkningar måste, enligt tingsättens mening, vara mer skyddsvärd än Åke Greens rätt att få göra dessa kränkande uttalanden i religionens namn.The right of homosexuals as a group not to be exposed to insults must, in the opinion of this court, be more worthy of protection than Åke Green’s right to make these insulting statements in the name of religion.

Gasp. I have no problem with prohibiting speech that intends to incite violence. I do have a problem with a law, or an interpretation of a law — I’m still not sure which it is — that prohibits insulting speech. Such speech is certainly reprehensible, and it should be condemned as uncivil and boorish, but it should not be illegal. Despite the findings of this ruling, there is plenty of room for such speech in a vibrant, confident democratic society. I’d even say that the unfettered presence of such speech is essential, because it forces a society to continually assess what constitutes civil behaviour; it is only through such debates that a modern society can inoculate itself against the emergence of more virulent strains of bigotry. Legislation against such speech does away with this process.

Before we examine how this ruling came to regard insulting speech as “agitation” against defined groups, let’s immediately get one thing out of the way: Åke Green’s parishioners, God-fearing Pentecostalists that they are, did not attack gays after his sermon, and his sermon contained nothing that can be construed as condoning physical harm against homosexuals. There was no incitement to violence.

What then defines “agitation” against an ethnic group or gays (def: hets mot folkgrupper)? My own preferred criteria would set the bar at incidents wherein an agitator attempts to get others to commit violence against a group through speech. Clearly, this court saw different.

In the ruling, the law’s purpose for criminalizing agitation is cited as not intending to threaten scientific inquiry, free debate, religious freedom and minority opinions. However, the citation continues“Den innebär däremot ett fullt godtagbart krav på att även andra människors rättigheter och den grundläggande demokratiska principen om alla människors lika värde skall respekteras vid utövandet av dessa fri- och rättigheter.”, “it does involve a wholly reasonable demand that other people’s rights and the fundamental democratic principle that all people are created equal be respected when exercising these freedoms and rights.”

From this passage, the court infers that a courteous (“saklig“) discussion in which homosexuality is criticized would have been perfectly acceptable under the lawDoes this mean then that it wasn’t the content of pastor Green’s sermon but the strident manner in which he delivered it that violated the rights of gays? That’s not clear either. I can hardly imagine that making the same points as the pastor but with flowery language, a mellifluous voice and an apologetic smile is going to make a difference to anyone why cares to listen.. The court then says that “the law is clear in stating that speech which can be construed as insulting for homosexuals is forbidden according to Swedish legislation.”

That was easy! All that is left to do now is to weigh the fundamental rights to freedom of religion and speech against this fundamental right not to be insulted. The solution, according to the court, is to use the principle of proportionality. One should try to avoid, as much as possible, insulting others when expressing your opinions — freely, of course. How did Åke Green do in this regard?

To find out, the ruling spends some time dissecting various parts of Green’s sermon. Another court previously decided, in January 2003, that merely citing and interpreting passages from the Bible or other religious texts cannot ever be considered criminal, even if the isolated passages in question can be construed as agitation against gays. Fortunately for the court, it finds plenty of bits in the pastor’s sermon that were not directly gleaned from scripture — it lists, for example, his assertion that bestiality and pedophilia is predominantly a gay thing, and that homosexuality is a cancer tumor in society.

It’s on account of these statements that the pastor is found guilty.

I’ve already explained why pastor Green should be allowed to call homosexuality a tumor if he wants to: It brings such opinions out into the open, so that he can be reprimanded in no uncertain terms by the court of public opinion, and so that society itself is moved to restate its values from first principles periodically, through debate. But there are other reasons why this law is atrocious. For example, which of the following scenarios are now also illegal?

  • A non-Muslim speaker at a feminist gathering rails angrily at Muslim men, accusing them of being predominantly misogynistic, as evinced by her personal experience from working at battered women’s homes.
  • At Friday prayers at Stockholm’s mosque, a preacher asserts the Protocols of the Elders of Zion are real.
  • A drunken Brit tells a lot of Irish jokes at an Irish pub in Stockholm. A lot. And they’re not funny. But quite mean.
  • A group of rather patriotic Turkish immigrants publishes a pamphlet in Sweden denying the Armenian genocide.
  • Some annoyed Stockholmers insult a group of Dutch tourists after a football match that Sweden loses, hurling all manner of vile stereotypes their way. A random Belgian eggs them on.

Yes, this is a Pandora’s box that’s been opened.

PS: I also think there should have been more concern for context in the ruling. For example, for a speaker at a Nazi-sympathizers’ rally to call homosexuals a tumor is, to my mind, worse than for a Pentecostal preacher to say the exact same thing. Why? Because Nazis have a history of trying to exterminate gays, while Pentecostalists do not. Walk into a Nazi rally wearing a yarmulke or rainbow colors and you should fear for your lifeBack in 2002, Matthew and I had a related discussion about KKK cross-burnings as an incitement to violence, and how they compared to Nazi rallies.. But walk into a Pentecostal church and you will get a verbal dressing down, at worst. Clearly, context determines what constitutes an incitement to violence. This was not, as far as I can tell, considered by the court.

State of the blogosvea

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Amazing how not writing for a week tongue-ties my three typing fingers. You can take the preceding sentence as evidence of that. At least there is behind-the-scenes progress on the blog redesign front. Just you wait — BLOG@STEFANGEENS.COM will soon the best-designed blog you’ve ever seen. Jason Kottke will be shamed back to the drawing board with his transitional XHTML; 456 Berea Street will never dare slide another door again; SimpleBits will go green with envy before you switch its sylesheet, and Tomas Jogin will give up blogging outright.

If the CSS references above stump you, you’re in luck. But since I’ve had CSS, XML and other TLAs sloshing around in my skull for the last week or so, let me just quickly put my musings down while they’re still fresh.

About Jason’s redesign: He’s on target. As you can see from the current designs of this blog and MemeFirstBut please don’t look behind the curtains of my site just yet. It’s a mess back there., I agree completely that boxes = bad. It’s the classic trap of doing something because new technology allows it. Having black text swimming in whitespace just like in a book is not a failure of the imagination; it is not an inability to embrace the possibilities of a new medium; rather, it is a recognition that over the centuries, printers have honed in on the most efficient means of passing information from the page to the mind. Sure, magazines will play with labor-intensive one-off design extravanganzas for the same reason peacock feathers exist, but for workaday reading — the daily habit — I want my text clean and sparse, and not upstaged by design flourishes that look good at first blush but soon thereafter proceed from cute to haggard. The less often you update a design, the more Lutheran it should beThat’s be a good name for a design bureau, come to think of it: Lutheran..

The thing I like least about SimpleBits is that option to change the color of the banner. Other than showing that this is possible, it serves no purpose. It certainly does not enhance my user experience. Color is also used frivolously on another noted recent redesign — that of Stopdesign. Each page gets a completely different color scheme. It’s too much; and it suggests indecisionWhy not have sitewide theme changes once every season instead?. Both SimpleBits and Stopdesign are the personal pages of possibly the most proficient web designers out there right now, and so they might feel compelled to crank it up — again, the peacock feather effect — but I do wish Stopdesign’s Douglas Bowman had taken a page out of his Blogger redesign and kept it simpleOne final parting observation: I don’t like three equally spaced columns, as Stopdesign now sports on some pages. The overabundance of symmetry jars, and I’m not given a sufficiently large clue as to where I should start exploring the page..

Oh, sorry, this was meant to be a post about the state of the Swedish blogosphere. I’ll try to keep it short from here on in.

Over the past few months, the Swedish blog scene has grown, and the result is that we now find ourselves at the cusp of the third great epoch of Swedish blogging, and there are some good English-language specimens to point out.

Generalizing now: The first epoch was characterized by a predominance of technologists and early adopters, as was the case everywhere else. They mainly blogged about technology and self-referentially about blogging, but this was a good thing, because it helped mature the technology sufficiently for the onset of the second epochI blogged the second epoch here.: The rise of the journal-ists, who embraced the ease of the blog medium and used it as a tool for personal writing on topics that mostly had nothing to do with technology.

And now, in the past six months, we’ve seen single-issue pro blogs come of age in Sweden. Some of these are predominantly in English: JKL Blog, for example, is group authored by a Swedish strategic communications firm. Media Culpa is penned by a Swedish PR professional. And pro-globalization writer Johan Norberg has been blogging for a just over a year nowSome Swedish language-only media/politics pro bloggers: Gudmundson, Erixon, Lindqvist Arrue., so he was a little ahead of the curve. We’re still waiting on the emergence of a Swedish Gawker or Andrew Sullivan, but to be fair, getting paid to blog in a language other than English sounds somewhat of a tall order right now. There just isn’t a critical mass yet of Swedish blog readers who aren’t also blog authors.

Finally, want to remember what web publishing was like circa 1997, before blogging? Take a look at The Local, an English-language news site about Sweden that launched three months ago: Once a week, it publishes a new issue with a roundup of the week’s stories in the Swedish media, translated and given a contextual spin.

What’s frustrating about The Local is that the publishers position the content right for their intended audienceThey have a good English-language overview of the Knutby trial, for example., but steadfastly ignore every lesson learned about web publishing over the past 7 years. Publishing “issues” is what web sites did before they realized this was a scarcity induced habit in the print world that has no justification on the web. Not publishing articles on the web as soon as they are ready means news is staler than it should be, for no reason.

Instead, if The Local were to adopt an irregular publishing schedule dictated by the availability of news, this would mean readers tend to visit more often, which means more impressive numbers to show advertisers — which The Local says it is trying to attract. And what’s with the reliance on email as a publishing tool? You can even get “bulk subscriptions” via email (?). Email is completely passé as a one-to-many communications technology — RSS syndication is the way to go on that front. Basically, this website needs to become a blog ASAP. When it does, I suspect it will become successful.

Top ten things I hate about Stockholm, VII

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The seventh in an occasional series.
 
Ten: Predatory seating
Nine: Culinary relativism
Eight: Preëmptive planning
Seven: Premature mastication
Six: Irrational discalceation
Five: Radiotjänst i Kiruna ABFour: Temporal engineering

It’s the longest day of the year, I’ve got front-row seats at Mosebacke terrace for a glorious slo-mo sunset that’s been turning Stockholm orange for hours, hot air balloons are wafting past a crescent moon, and I have the audacity to write about something I hate here.

Well, I have to. I’m writing a series about things I hate, not love, about Stockholm. To be honest, I was running out of subject matter, but that was before it was brought to my attention just last week that Midsommar — the summer solstice and Sweden’s most treasured day — is not on June 21 this year, but instead has been decreed to occur on June 26, because, well, it makes for a more convenient three-day holiday.

This is quite shocking. Latter-day druids everywhere are dancing around menhirs at this very moment; huge man-made structures in Latin America are perfectly aligned with the sun at great cost to previous generations; people in the Antarctic are suffering right now for this cause; and it is the one day that keeps Swedes going between November and March — but if nature has the gall to have the longest day happen on a day other than Saturday, Swedes reschedule it like it’s a dentist appointment.

How is this different from celebrating Christmas on December 27 — because the presents are cheaper? Cinco de Mayo on nuevo de Mayo? New Year’s on January 3? Would you mind? I thought so.

Last year, my first Midsommar did fall on a Saturday, so I was not then apprised of this cavalier attitude Swedes have towards the natural rhythms of nature. But I should have known better: Over the past 18 months, I’ve repeatedly butted against another example of this predilection for ruthless temporal engineering: The week-based calendar.

In my first Stockholm apartment, the hallway was swept by tenants according to a rotation posted on the communal bulletin board: Next to my name, it said “V.40-48-3-11…” Swedish readers already know what this means, but I had to ask a neighbor, who told me that it was my turn to clean on the 40th week of the year, on the 48th, och så vidare. And when might that be? “Look it up.”

Instead I guessed, and clearly wrongly, as everytime I thought it was my turn somebody else cleaned ahead of me that week. Nobody said anything, though. Maybe they were embarrassed about their calendar, and with good reason, as I have just had to delve into its fiendish machinations for the sake of this post. It is emphatically Napoleonic in its arbitrary rigidity: You’d think week 1 is always the week the new year starts on. You’d think wrong — In 2004, week 1 starts on Dec 29, 2003; in 2005, week 1 starts Jan 3, 2005. 2004 has 53 weeks, 2005 52. I’m surprised anyone cleans at all.

At a work-related meeting last week, I was asked if I would be in Stockholm during the 33rd week. “What, do I look pregnant to you?” is the retort I stopped myself from using, instead asking for a translation into western dates.

Maybe the adoption of the week as a calendaring tool was the gateway to all this insouciance regarding Midsommar: After all, it’s not as if the holiday is being moved out of week 26, so what’s the fuss?

The letter, part 4: Meeting Margaretha

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If you haven’t yet read parts one through three, you can read all four parts chronologically here. In fact, it’s a good refresher for everyone, as the first post dates back to almost a year ago.

I’ve been meaning to deliver the letter to Margaretha, but for a variety of reasons the opportunity did not present itself until earlier this week, when she and her daughter and I agreed to meet at Tranan after workI was early so I spent half an hour in Stockholm’s public library and its remarkable reading room, designed by the renowned Swedish modernist Erik Gunnar Asplund..

I sat myself at a table, ordered a glass of wine and waited, somewhat nervously, with the letter in my bag. I was on the lookout for a woman in her early fifties accompanied by her daughter. Margaretha arrived alone, however, and as neither of us knew each other, there was some hesitation before we ventured to introduce ourselves.

Within minutes, it was clear we were going to get along wonderfully (in Swedish). She is engaging and witty, and I realized I lucked out with my letter delivery. Monika, her journalist daughter, soon joined us. They share the same gestures and flash the same smile. It’s obvious they are close.

I produce the letter. Margaretha produces photo albums from 1970. She’s even managed to unearth a photograph of the letter’s author, Bengt M—, courtesy of a move in the last few monthshim.jpg. Here he is doing his military service, from the exact period they were going out. From her photo album, here is a picture of Margaretha doing her studenten, a high school graduation ritual, a month or two before the letter in question was written:

her.jpg

And then, over the course of an hour or so, she fills in the details. When Margaretha graduated, she was was going out with Bengt, who was doing his military service. That summer, she moved to Stockholm to study while working at the central bank. For a few months she stayed at student housing at the address to which Bengt addressed the letter.

Within weeks of arriving in Stockholm, however, she had met and was dating Rolf, who also worked at the bank. Bengt was not aware of this when he wrote the letter, in which he mentions visiting her in Stockholm in the coming days. He did visit, and she broke up with him then. Margaretha winces a little when telling this part. Apparently, Bengt asked her why she couldn’t just have phoned him the bad news, thus saving him the trip. A debate ensues with her daughter about what the etiquette is for breaking up in such circumstances. Bengt didn’t get angry, however, just disappointed, Margaretha says. He was gentle and kind.

She met Bengt one more time, during the Christmas holidays later in 1970, when things were still a bit awkward, and they lost touch after that. The group of friends they had in common also drifted apart over the years, though most of them still live in the same area in southern Sweden.

Margaretha married Rolf, the man she broke up with Bengt for; they’ve had two children and lived in Luxembourg and Gothenburg before settling in Stockholm. It turns out that when I called, the children were under the impression their dad was her first love. But how many of us know the details of our parents’ pre-marital love lives? I certainly don’t, and it will stay that way unless somebody calls me with news of a long-lost love letter addressed to my mother from somebody patently not my father.

After I called and Margaretha saw the letter online, she looked for Bengt M— online, found him living in the area where they grew up and called him. He remembered her without prompting. In brief: He is a construction engineer and recently divorced. This summer, Monika is travelling to southern Sweden, and she says she will try to meet up with Bengt, so he can tell his side of the story. When she reports back, you’ll read about it here.

Then, it was time for photo ops:

Note the lovely Swedish summer weather.letter0002.jpg

letter0003.jpg

As to what this letter was doing on a ledge on St. Marks Place — that mystery remainsMargaretha and Monika, if parts of your story got lost in translation, need clarification or if you want to add anything, please go right ahead.. I don’t think we’ll ever uncover its trajectory, from student housing in Stockholm in 1970 to the sidewalks of New York in 1999.