Panpsychism and the challenge of unconsciousness

Most philosophies of mind agree on the division between conscious and non-conscious. Dualism postulates consciousness as soul-stuff separate from the blind matter, while various monists inspired by scientific materialism consider it to be an emergent epiphenomenon of matter/energy which is real, but once again fundamentally non-conscious. Both of these are equally unscientific views in that they have to use magic to explain the inherent paradoxes in their views. Dualism, to answer how the mind, which isn't material and cannot be detected by any material means, can yet interact with the material world. Epiphenomenalists, to explain how the non-conscious matter causes this utterly different conscious experience to emerge from it. Both of these questions may have answers, but nothing in the whole human knowledge allows us to even start formulating one. It just happens "somehow".

Functionalist views equating conscious experiences with information processing in material systems fare better in this regard, wholly avoiding the interaction problems of dualism. Note, by the way, that epiphenomenalism, no matter its monist pretensions, is still fundamentally dualist. Unlike traditional versions, it proclaims mind "unreal" and instead of two-way interaction, only matter is supposed to affect the mind. None of this changes the fact that such views divide reality into two utterly different substances. In any case, despite avoiding such problems, functionalism has some of its own. If information/matter is intrinsically conscious, how come everything isn't conscious then? Either we assume that there is some fundamental distinction between different kinds of informational processes, even if the material substrate is entirely similar and nothing that's understood about the relatively small differences offers even a slightest hint of solution to the problem. So it's the "just somehow" solution again. Or, we can go all the way to panpsychism, but not only does blathering about "how everything is conscious" sound like fluffy New Age mysticism, it also seems self-evidently absurd. If someone hits you in the head hard enough, you lose your consciousness, but it's not like all brain activity in your head stops. Besides, vast majority of that activity is always subconscious. We're aware of only a small fraction of what happens in our heads. But is this truly so, or is the idea of unconsciousness another one of those useful, yet ultimately mistaken illusions that abound in intuitive view of human mind?

I once read about an unfortunate person with considerable brain damage. He suffered from anterograde amnesia, that is, inability to form any new long-term memories. Since his working memory was intact, he could perform fairly complex tasks, have conversations and act deceptively normally, but the moment he let something go from his mind, it was gone forever. Effectively, the man was trapped in an eternal present. Occasionally he became aware that he didn't have any recollection of what had happened before, and felt that he had awakened from a long sleep, just become conscious for the first time. Once he wrote this down on a piece of paper. Moment later, he of course forgot all about it, and when he read what he had wrote, he was very puzzled. It was obvious to him that actually, it was now he was conscious for the first time, and somehow he had written about being conscious when he actually wasn't. So, he drew a line over that, and below it, wrote "NOW I am conscious for the first time!". Then he forgot it again, and was just as puzzled when he found the paper. He wound up repeating the cycle many times, and a paper filled with exclamations about finally having become conscious.

Others can safely say that the man was conscious all the time, of course. Likewise, we don't think we've been unconscious for most of our life, even if our memories cover only a small fraction of it. Others have memories of us having behaved in clearly self-aware manner during the gaps, there may be other proof our actions, and even if there isn't, we can safely assume that we were conscious years ago when awake and active, since we're conscious when we're awake now. Still, it is easy to imagine a hypothetical situation where there would be no such reasons to assume consciousness even if it actually was present. If the brain-damaged patient had been completely paralyzed as well, he would have just laid there (see this article about locked-in syndrome). If this additional damage had then been somehow repaired, the man would have risen up and said "Whoa! I just became conscious!" And this time an observer unaware of the memory impairment would have absolutely no way of telling this wasn't at all true.

I think we can safely assume that a knock-out hit disturbs brain enough to shut down memory formation and motoric functions. Therefore, if we had some conscious experiences during the time we spent crumpled on the floor, we'd have no way of communicating about them to external observers, nor any memories of those. Upon waking up, the period would simply seem an empty gap to us. Others, having perceived no indication of conscious activity, and knowing that they too had no recollections from such periods, would assume unconsciousness. None of this proves that we're actually conscious in some unstructured, primitive way during the time we seem not be. Simply that there's no way to tell.

Something similar may be happening in the case of subconscious mentation, as with the informational processes in our body outside the central nervous system (ie. the fairly complex analytic processes of human immune system). CNS isn't an unitary system; rather a network of interacting subsystems with no centre. Very little information processed by lower-order systems is relevant to the cluster of higher-order mental processes we call everyday consciousness. These deal with carefully filtered, highly abstracted information. Cortical networks directing hand to select a correct object with which to further some purpose need not be informed of status of every nerve ending any more than generals of Army High Command moving divisions need to know that Pvt Rock of 101th is homesick. If brain's subsystems are functionally differentiated, would not their associated conscious experiences be differentiated as well? Then, if explicit memory images we usually mean when referring to "memories" could in most cases only be formed by select few systems, we'd also be uncapable of recalling the other levels of conscious experience.

It's likewise with the human being and the outside world. Materially speaking, all is one. Your body and the surrounding air are composed of the same particles and quanta, occupying the same spacetime. Both are essentially empty, the face a bit less so. Still, they're also divided by a series of semipermeable boundaries. Skin, orifices, sensory organs... All designed to isolate the inside of body from the outside, while allowing in only selected kinds of matter and energy. Again, one could draw a vague parallel to the world of mind. If it is the same as the world of matter, if these two apparently dissimilar substances are actually aspects of a greater whole, then we'd expect the conscious universe to be both one and many. Brahman/Atman.

Surely, that last bit took this beyond the realms of sensibility? Hinduism is a religion, a bunch of mystical mumbo-jumbo, while philosophy and science are solidly rational endeavours. I'd expect such a reaction from many, but it betrays a feeble grasp about scientific approach to understanding the world as opposed to dogmatic following of scientific materialism. That is a metaphysical dogma that postulates that only matter and energy are real, reality consists of tiny parts and can therefore be understood by studying those parts, that mathematical laws underlie the operation of universe and so on. Now, it is a fairly sensible metaphysics as far as those go, but nonetheless, it is a philosophical dogma that requires faith should it be taken as truth. Science, on the other hand, is simply a method for formulating shared, provisional truths. It is using sense information and logic to build hypotheses about reality and then test them. It upholds no particular metaphysics, nor does reason. That most scientists are scientific materialists, that many confuse the method and dogma with each other, doesn't alter this fact at all.

Philosophy is less fortunate in the sense that it's incapable of testing its ideas. I cannot offer any experimental proof of conscious universe, even though that's where logic seems to take me. Of course, the path is dependent on disqualifying competing metaphysics for having to invoke obscure forces they cannot even begin to explain, but in the future they may find their explanations. One could say I have used Occam's Chainsaw rather than his Razor. For the moment, however, panpsychism appears to remain the simplest, clearest way of relating matter and consciousness to each other. Its sublime beauty and certain comfort I derive of it are ultimately irrelevant, of course, but a good thing nonetheless. If I have ended concurring with some ancient mystics, so be it. Perhaps they were onto something in some other ways, as well. This is not a justification for blind adoration or accepting their ideas on faith, obviously, but an exhortation for careful logical analysis freed from the confines of scientific materialism which, although often a superb tool, can also be a prison when taken as a sole truth.

Inhumanity of humanitarian immigration

It's long been a source of amusement and frustration to me that those most concerned about the welfare of Earth's wretched demand, even implement, policies that ultimately harm the poor. Amongst those people, there is enormous amount of wishful thinking and warm feelings, but little analytical thinking on what would actually give best results. Obviously, outside their circles there's even more ignorance and uncaring about all that suffering and extreme poverty; there are even people who take active delight in the heart-breaking plight of many, for it fills them with pride in themselves and their prosperous, peaceful societies. All this I see as betrayal of our common humanity and the global responsibilities of rich, powerful First World nations. Noblesse does oblige. However, at least uncaring has the virtue of not pretending to be a virtue, and it tend to maintain the status quo. That, although unsatisfactory at the very least, is easily preferable over the wreckage that failed utopian projects always leave behind.

In this age, one common way of showing off your ethicalness and caring heart is to favor so-called humane immigration policy. This means essentially that everyone in need of aid shall receive it. Every refugee that comes knocking at our gates, requesting a sanctuary from war, oppression or torture, must be given one. To turn him away, send him back to certain death, would be inhuman. Obviously, once he's here, he must be reunited with his family, if that didn't originally come in with him. Even if it's not in any danger, it's cruel to keep people apart from their loved ones. No solid proof of danger to their lives can be demanded, not even identity papers showing they come from a war-torn or brutally autocratic nation. It's absurd to assume that victims of torture, desperately fleeing into the dark of night, are in position to gather any kind of documentary proof.

This is by no means despicable or stupid way of thinking. Try to put yourself in the skin of some anonymous African. Your government or a brutal, capricious warlord (assuming there's even a difference) got mad at you for some ridiculous reason and sent a bunch of brutal, sadistic goons to seize you. You were mercilessly beaten, tortured and thought you're surely going to die. Somehow, however, you managed to escape (maybe a relative spent all his money to bribe some official to look another way), but knew that if you stayed in country, you would soon die agonizingly. So you ran, having heard that West sometimes gives people like you a refuge and clinging desperately to that hope, for it's all you had left. After a long, dangerous journey you arrived in Europe and requested sanctuary. However, you ran into a bureaucratic nightmare you couldn't figure out and officials on your case regarded you with little but suspicion, for you had little but your story and few scars to show for your pains. After years of nagging uncertainty, after several denied requests that every time shattered your hopes, the deportment order comes. Your story wasn't believed, your homeland had been deemed safe and you were going to be returned there. Think about the sheer desperation of that moment. It's impossible not to sympathize, impossible not to feel angry at the fact that this is precisely what happens all the time. For many empathetic people, the emotions can be very strong, and consequently, any disagreements with their ideas on refugee policies cause just as inevitable emotional counterreaction. Christ, what kind of cold-blooded monster dooms people to death and torture when he could help them? Surely, anybody who understands the situation and has any capacity for empathy at all will favor helping those who need help, humanely letting refugees into Europe. There can be no legitimate reasons to disagree, only stupidity, racism and cruelty. Thought stops.

This is tragic, for once again, road to Hell is paved with good intentions. While helping refugees is a good thing, in practice this policy would mean that any Third Worlder could receive vastly improved standard of living (for which he need not even work), far better prospects for future and greater political freedoms simply by telling a heart-breaking story. Might it just be imaginable that some might consider inventing one to be a small price for escape from poverty? Every year up to half a million illegal immigrants enter Europe, often risking their lives in the hands of brutal human traffickers or dangerous boat journeys, all without any certainty of what happens when they arrive. If not expulsed, they usually end up working without rights in degrading, awful jobs, even as virtual slaves on Spanish plantations. Many of them were deluded by overt hopes when they decided to move, of course. Yet it still tells something of the pressures that overpopulation and poverty exert on many countries. How many times as much would come if we made it much easier and raised the payoff at the same time?

There is nothing inherently wrong in seeking to better one's lot, of course. I know I propably would try to immigrate to Europe had I born in Africa, and if exploiting refugee system would get me in, so be it. Many Westerners have also left their homelands during the centuries. Yet it is sadly true that which is admirable on individual level can be very harmful on the level of groups. It was not White Man's racism, greed or exceptional cruelty that fueled the vast, brutal ethnic cleansing of North America. It was European settler/immigrant, who had left his homelands seeking usually very modest goals, such as a small farm on which he could raise a family and live in peace without stupid warring kings, intolerant priests and nosy officials making his life a misery. There is nothing bad with that, obviously, but unfortunately all those small strips of land really built up when they started to come in their millions. After the fractious, a bit naive Indians had allowed Europeans to entrench on their coasts, their destruction was only a matter of time.

Different times, very different situations, of course. Yet even if we're not about to be herded into reservations, allowing the masses of Third World to migrate in freely would still be a very bad idea. Bringing them in as refugees only makes it worse. Many of them lack capacity to contribute meaningfully to a modern economy, nor do most show much inclination to either work or seek training. Finland has a labour deficit in construction, docks and cleaning services, all areas dominated by unskilled and vocational school educated workers. Despite this, unemployment rate of many 3rd World nation citizens residing here is around 50-65%. Likewise, they are significantly more likely to commit crimes, especially robbery and rape. Other European countries have their own problem minorities, some of them much worse than ours. The explanations for all this are too complex to go in here, and always debatable, just like what conclusions can be ultimately be drawn. Right now I will simply state that reasons are one thing, and the fact that many immigrant groups are prone to deep, hostile alienation is another. This fact alone, no matter what exactly causes it and who's to blame, is enough to burden social security and increase crime. To some extent this is already a reality in Europe of 2007, and there's absolutely no logical reason to assume that massive expansion of these minorities would somehow make it all better.

Most people do not much like or respect freeloaders, criminals, or for that matter fake refugees. Allowing massive abuses of sanctuary system would only spread cynicism about all refugees. Contempt would then begin turning into hostility when people connected the dots between newcomers and increasing taxes, constant cuts in public services and the fear they feel when walking alone in the night. As always, there would be several reasons for that, but when much of the blame can justly be placed on outsiders, many are all too happy to pin it all on them. There would be lurid tales of shocking individual crimes, and dramatic, exaggerated accounts of immigrant contribution to pressing social problems. Some of them would be spread by people desperate to turn around the policy they see as disastrous, others maybe by those driven by more personal hatreds and prejudices. All would harden the public attitudes equally much. Far right ultra-nationalists would gain lots of essentially factual arguments and the kind of legitimacy they haven't enjoyed since World War 2. Eventually, what remained of modern Left would come to fondly remember the days when racism meant coarse jokes and fascism restricting further immigration.

There's no way out of this dilemma. Either the country allows vast abuses of refugee system, or upholds a inhuman policy which operates on cynicism, sends people back to their deaths and provides a perfect environment for spiteful little bureaucrats who get a kick of humiliating desperate people. The system can easily be a mix of both (it is, actually), but it cannot be neither. This is a result of situation where many have very strong motivations to lie about their situation as convincingly as possible, while our methods of checking out their stories are very weak. The element of uncertainty is rarely absent from the case of any refugee; often it is simply impossible to decide. All that remains is to decide is the default answer, whether you dislike false acceptances or false denials less. It's not some flaw fixable by some refinement of interrogation methods or smart policies, but a fundamental aspect of humanitarian immigration's character.

It's possible that one day neuroscientists develop a reliable lie detector, which would make current system plausible, but no timetable can be given for that apart from "not in near future". Apart from such technological solution, there's little left but go beyond tweaks and rewrite the rules of game entirely. As it stands, there's even more problems with humanitarian immigration, and they give us a hint about one possible answer. First, most refugees never end up requesting sanctuary from modern world, but for the sake of dependants or lack of resources, go no further than refugee camps at nearby countries. Second, living expenses in modern world are considerably greater than in developing countries. Therefore, our current system is an inefficient way of helping a fairly small fraction of refugees.

On the contrary, help directed at people in Third World refugee camps reaches a greater portion of people in need, is much more cost-effective and avoids the complicated dilemmas of humanitarian immigration. Certainly the conditions in many of them are rather terrible and some, such as Darfurian refugees' camps in Chad, have even been plagued by the same enemies from whom refugees originally fled. What would help them most? Taking a tiny part of them into Europe, or building schools, hospitals and dormitories on those camps, while sending some Rapid Reaction Forces to grind janjaweeds trespassing on Chad's territory into mincemeat? There is a problem of cheaters here too, though, for Chad's citizens are dirt poor, and might pose as Darfurian refugees to gain the same benefits. This could be countered by organizing refugees on tribal and family lines, while holding the whole group responsible for any miscreants in their ranks. Then again, I think it would be even better to simply open those schools and hospitals to all people in the region. Education and healthcare are important aspects of development aid in any case.

I'm not advocating a complete end to sanctuary system. I recall it was originally developed for dissidents from Eastern Bloc, and there are still people in corresponding situations. To make refugee camps a viable option, there must be mass movement of people. For a handful of political refugees they make little sense. They may not be safe in neighbouring countries, either. Of course the secret polices of some vindictive totalitarian regimes have assassinated refugees living in West as well, but at least it's a much bigger bother that way. Also, such refugees usually have more solid proof of their plight, and since they don't come in vast masses, any problems they might cause are very limited in scale (with the exception of Islamist agitators, who should be shipped back in pretty gift wrapping). Another exception could be made in the case of useful people. If some person works hard, follows the laws and respects the customs of host country, what does it matter on what grounds he originally came in? There have been propositions to found centers in Africa to hire labour for European job market; in my opinion these upgraded refugee camps could be good places for them. If organized properly, people can be tested there for suitability, they have plenty of time to study European languages and everything else they'll need here, and gratitude for aid they and their families have received could further their will to do their best once in Europe. Also, children who do well in school should be offered the option to continue their studies in Europe. All this would be a lasting boon for refugees once they return to their homes.

Humanitarian immigration may be an inferior alternative, but only from the viewpoint of refugees. They do not benefit, but there are other people who do:

1) European left-wing parties and more specifically their xenomanic members. Refugees who gain citizenship tend to vote for them, since they are so heavily in favor of generous social security, job quotas for certain minorities, hate speech legislation and "tolerance". In some European countries this is becoming an important factor in elections. In Belgium, immigration and ease of gaining citizenship is even an important part of government's battle against anti-immigration, separationist Vlaams Belang.
2) All kinds of minority affairs bureaucrats, multiculture coordinators, diversity drama therapists and anti-racism educators funded out of public purse. These people need minorities and ethnic tensions, for they have built their entire careers around them. The minorities must never be well integrated and content. A Turk or Chinaman running a restaurant is useful to economy, but utterly useless to careerists.
3) Intellectuals and activist youth with burning need to feel more ethical and intelligent than the stupid masses. Problematic minorities irritate most people and create racism, with quotation marks and without, which can then be venomously condemned. This proves their moral superiority and intellectual as well, since as we all know, racists are stupid and ignorant. Also it is great fun to shrug off the chains of proper respectful manners, which the racist subhumans are not worthy of.
4) Rich capitalists salivating at the thought of vast reserve of cheap labour, ignorant of its rights and more focused on ethnic than class conflicts. With the current welfare, most neither need nor wish to work, but once the system becomes overburdened, it obviously has to be drastically cut. This should make those uppity native European workers pretty pliable as well. Best of all, leftists do all your work for you.

It's perhaps not surprising that the advocates of humane refugee policy and open borders in general tend to come from these groups. In the course of my more cynical hours, I've felt that it's all nothing but a sham, disgusting exploitation of desperate people for some unbelievably petty, selfish goals. I don't know, though. The understanding of what's good for them may of course subconsciously direct their actions, but even if your own interest is what it's all fundamentally about, why not tell yourself you do it because you're so ethical and enlightened? You can both eat your cake and have it. Besides, many people with such opinions really seem to wish to do the right thing, more so than most. Problem is that their notions of right and wrong are determined mainly by emotions and peer pressure; that is, they are very much like everyone else, even if they like to think they are better (in this they are also so very mundane). Yet does it matter why people do what they do, if the results are so poor?

Some would say it does. European Union has been developing so-called regional protection programmes, which are supposed to enable the neighbouring countries of crisis zone, or the transition countries, to help refugees. This is a step in right direction, and I certainly do welcome it. Amnesty International, all in favor of "humane" policy, doesn't. In 3/2007 issue of Finnish department's newspaper, the programmes are criticized amongst other reasons for: "The motives of programmes have been questioned. Generous donations to build up border security have been interpreted as EU's wish to stop disliked population groups from entering its territory." Now, this is undoubtedly somewhat correct. I certainly prefer to keep out such groups that strain economy, add to insecurity and are a boon to racist far right. But let's assume that the motives aren't practical, but racist. I'll bet my neck that there are plenty of people who have latched into ideas like these described in this essay as a politically correct way of saying "no niggers wanted!". What of it? If racism can be channeled into supporting Third World refugees in a less problematic, more cost-effective way than what we have today, isn't it only a good thing? Better than to have it directed into hating the unwashed masses here, right?

It comes down to one of these age-old philosophical dilemmas: Is an act good or bad depending on what it caused, or why it was done? It's a multi-faceted, complex question, but in this context it ultimately comes down to a very much simpler one. How many people are helped? We are talking about real human beings, with all the fears, dreams and that vast capacity for suffering. As such, it is irresponsible and rather repulsive to focus like a laser beam on whether someone wants to help them in their plight because he irrationally detests them, let alone oppose it because of such motivation. The refugee himself certainly doesn't care if he receives medicine and dry bed because of racism, or never gets them because of someone's warmth and empathy. Even if we still wish to reserve the right to detest racists, we shouldn't either.

Some philosophical quagmires

I have noticed that many philosophical problems and odd conclusions of some theories hold a common basis. They are actually illusions, born of not taking the principles in question far enough, but rather using other, more familiar principles together with them. I'll draw my examples from utilitarianism and nihilism, two schools of thought that please my mental aesthetics.

Nobody can avoid hearing or thinking sometimes that "nothing really matters". If all values are inside our heads, mere subjective preferences, doesn't it indeed logically follow that there are no objective values and therefore everything is ultimately pointless? Well, if nothing matters, then the fact that nothing matters doesn't matter either... But there's a logical error in play as well, which can be revealed through simple rephrasing: If there are no objective values, then objective value of everything = 0. In fact, the lack of anything valuable outside human heads means that there is no point in speaking of "ultimately" anythings. Only subjective preferences exist, and those can vary wildly. If something matters to you, then it matters to you. That's all there is to it.

Rather similar mistake is made by cultural relativists who claim that all cultures are equally good and worthy, because there is no objective method for arranging them into any hierarchy. All well and good, but without such method it is just as impossible to state they all are as good as each other. For any subjective observer cultures are self-evidently unequal, since they express different facets of humanity in very variable ways. This holds true for the cultural relativists just as much for others -- just witness how a typical specimen reacts to homophobic or misogynist attitudes barely a fraction of those held by many Middle Easterners, for example. Honest cultural relativist might think that his values are not universal, and others may have perfectly legitimate reasons for preferring something he detests, but it doesn't follow that he has to like or even tolerate such things.

In both cases, thinking is being built around the subjectivity of values, but the ghost of objective values is still flitting around. Instead of being banished, as it logically should be, every subjective set of preferences is simply given the same objective value. It is a easy mistake to make. When young, we intuitively conflate together both value types, and understanding of subjectivity develops step by step, not all at once. It is easy to forget the last one.

Utilitarianism encounters similar problems, most clearly expressed in some popular criticisms against it. One is the scenario where a person causes something good by doing something very nasty, for example a drunk driver speeding into some pedestrians and ending up killing an uncaught serial killer. Was this act good or evil? Utilitarianism would say it was good, since the consequences were good, yet drawing this conclusion feels uncomfortable. This, I think, is due to the intuition that good acts ought to be rewarded, and only bad to be punished. Yet this is deontological approach. Utilitarianism, if taken to its logical conclusion and not switched to another view in the middle of example, requires acts to be met with that which gives greatest benefit. So it was great that the killer died and cannot murder any more. Nonetheless it is seen as beneficial to society to punish people severely for drunk driving and manslaughter. Therefore, that's what should be done.

Another critique of utilitarianism states that it is often impossible to precisely calculate the consequences of actions. Even when possible, it might be long, hard work, pointlessly so in most cases. These are valid criticisms, but they aren't arguments against the principle of consequentalism itself, merely the idea that our deeds should be chosen by applying some form of ethical calculus. In fact utilitarianism applies to the ways of determining the preferred actions just as much as everything else. Since determining their consequences exactly is so hard, and time used to determining proper actions is a resource as well, utilitarianism actually invalidates itself in its naive form. More useful is to apply heuristics, or rules of thumb associated with preferred outcomes. In practice this is very close to old-fashioned ethical systems with their do's and don't's, which is hardly a coincidence. We have had such systems because they are fairly simple, fast and work adequately. The difference is not seeing those as inflexible mandates, and recognizing that while they do usually work, they are by no means perfect means of attaining the best consequences. If the case is important enough that one can spend quite a while thinking about it, and following ethical rules would seem to lead to some rather unpreferable outcome, then careful weighing of pros and cons has its place.

Just like nihilism, utilitarianism is an unintuitive way of thinking that develops gradually. It is easy for residues of rule-based morality to stay in the brain. Another problem is seeing these two approaches as somehow mutually exclusive, when in fact rules are so fundamentally important part of any realistically applicable utilitarianism. When consequential thinking is taken to its logical conclusion, this does indeed become apparent, but once again, such is usually easier said than done.

Terror's rotten roots

Many people are fond of explaining Islamist terrorism by blowback theory; that is, they attack West in retaliation for our crimes against Islamic world. This can be seen as an explanation, and also as a justification. The same individuals with some sympathy for the latter option often include socioeconomic factors in their explanation. In addition for being a strike of the powerless against the injustices of world, terrorism also springs of frustration and despair of poverty. This is also our fault, because as we all know, exploitation is the sole determinant of wealth differences. Rich individuals and nations prosper because they rip off the poor. Viva la Marx.

As a partial explanation, blowback is a real no-brainer. To deny that the plight of Palestinians, support of Arab dictators and Iraq War cause resentment towards US and West would take massive, willful blindness. Including poverty has some merit, as well, though it fits better as one explanation for the spread of Islamism, and the domestic terrorism in Middle East and North Africa. A society full of young men with no prospects for future is an explosive one, and a fertile breeding ground for all kinds of extremism. However, no matter how fanatically some Pakistani goat herder or slum youth in Cairo might hate West, he doesn't make a good terrorist. That requires language skills and a capacity to blend in modern society, neither of which he has. Contemporary Islamist terrorists have come from the upper strata of Arab societies, or from the middle classes of European Muslims, who really aren't economically deprived in any meaningful sense. Of course, to act as a jihadi in Afghanistan or Iraq is a different matter... but I digress.

So, these explanations certainly aren't entirely worthless, but are they sufficient? If they were, what implications would that have? Consider South and Central America. These regions have rampant poverty, both in the absolute and relative sense. Slum dwellers and many rural Indians are poor in the extreme, yet the upper classes live in great luxury. Income differences in the region are some of the greatest in the whole world. Also, it is here that United States has acted in nakedly imperalistic way for a long time. They have supported dictators and terrorists, engineered coups, militarily intervened and even outright invaded couple times (Grenada '83 and Panama '89). The economic relationships have been characterized by exploitation of South by US corporate giants. Really, compared to all this America has been a charity to Muslims. If anti-imperialist backlash and economic deprivation would suffice to explain terrorism, US would have been a target of merciless and extensive Latino-Caribbean terrorism for over a century.

Perhaps the International Patriarchal-Imperialist Conspiracy is hiding the evidence, but as far as I know, those groups haven't made a single terrorist attack. How come? Perhaps they do hate our freedoms after all?

In my opinion that is yet another partial truth. Certainly, there are elements in Western culture that Islamists view with utmost loathing. West self-consciously elevates man-made laws above God's law and its own explanations of universe above divine revelations. White whores cavort in the streets semi-naked inciting innocent Muslims to rape, actually daring to think they are somehow equal to men. Homosexuals and other filthy perverts aren't punished for their moral sickness, but allowed to spread their degeneracy. Sayyid Qutb, one of the founding intellectuals of modern jihadism, came to see Americans as "a reckless, deluded herd that only knows lust and money" during the time he spent in USA -- and this was almost 60 years ago, long before the sexual revolution of Sixties and the general liberalisation of lifestyle. What do you suppose he would have thought about this?

So the Western culture is decadent and worthless, the antithesis of Islam. In itself this might not matter. Unfortunately, according to every measure, West is stronger and more prosperous by far than Muslim world. It is intolerable that these disgusting little creatures, not even proper infidels anymore for they have no faith at all, stand above the favored of God. It makes complete mockery of the Salafist idea that Muslims became weak when they ceased to follow the good, original ways. If society's strength is tied to the favor of Allah, what could possibly explain the power of West? It gets worse, for by no means do all Muslims share their poisonous contempt. Rather, a complex mixture of ambivalent emotions seems to dominate, admiration mixing with unease about our debaucheries and bitterness of their own relative weakness. When there is hate, it has political roots, not cultural. Western ways have already metastasized into Islamic cultures, and there's an everpresent danger of further spread as long as West stays superior and Muslims do not firmly reject them. This hardly seems a threat to Islam right now, but Christianity didn't seem to be under any more threat when it started compromising with modernity, and just look at it now.

That the soulless beasts meddle in Muslim affairs, militarily humiliate them and occupy their lands is of course yet another reason for hatred, but it's not just that. The exploitative practices of West give a suitable excuse for their power and Muslim weakness, neatly tying in with Marxist worldview so popular in West itself. They disgrace Western sympathizers and liberal reformers, giving credibility to the idea that West is indeed enemy of Islam. They become an important tool for propaganda and recruitment, perhaps the most important one, for few Muslims are really all that eager to return to 7th century, especially when contemporary Islamist states such as Sudan or Taliban's Afghanistan have been everything but utopian. If they weren't the sentinel of Islam, the only ones fighting against its most deadly enemy, they would have far less to build on, and no excuses whatsoever for the failure of their ideology to build a strong societies wherever they've had power.

Therefore, while the Islamists do hate us for what we are, it is Western policies that help them gain converts and sympathy. As such, they desperately need us to be their enemy, and can be expected to work towards that end. One of the most imporant tricks of any guerrilla or terrorist organization worth anything is to trick its more powerful enemy into indiscriminate reprisals that cause havoc amongst innocents and translate into support for organization largely responsible for them. Perhaps 9/11 was neither defence against imperialism, or some insane, pointless blow against a hated culture, but a calculated provocation. If so, it was certainly a smashing success. With Iraq War, Uncle Sam became Osama bin Laden's recruiting sergeant, and by opening a battlefront on Arab lands, it gave opportunity of fighting for those Islamists with no capacity for international terrorism.

Could we then pull a rug from under their feet by adopting some "ethical" foreign policy, that is, one every Muslim can be happy about? Perhaps in a long term it would have such an effect, but it would be of no immediate help against this ideology's adherents. They would still need us to be their enemy, still have the same reasons to provoke us. Excuses can always be found (from the situation of Europe's Muslims for example, which will never be satisfactory for them), and even if they would seem flimsy to many, once the provocation succeeded, such details would be soon forgotten. How much anger about 9/11 there has been on Arab Street since Iraq War? The realignment of Western foreign policy would be represented as their victory, product of great fear that they struck in the withered hearts of enemy. It might give them the boost they need to seize control of many Muslim states, especially since we'd have to abandon support for friendly autocrats currently keeping them in check. Certainly European Islamists and the criminal scum of Muslim ghettoes would become even more aggressive and arrogant. The inevitable backlash against this would then of course provide ample justification for terrorist attacks. Of course all this is rather academic, for USA will not force Israel to fold to Arab demands and West cannot risk Middle Eastern oil falling in hands of hostile regimes.

Action can be taken against terrorist networks. Their leaders can be seized or assassinated, their communications and finances disrupted. Military force can be used against countries that have very clearly thrown in their lot with extremists. Bombing of Libya and invasion of Afghanistan caused relatively little furour, propably in large part because West had casus belli in both cases, unlike with Iraq. Western intellectuals could stop aiding Islamist propagandists by depicting us as uniquely aggressive, imperialist force, and claiming the sorry state of Third World is primarily result of our actions. It is questionable whether such methods would win the war on jihadi terrorism, but at least they wouldn't make things worse. In a sense that would be enough to "win", for as long as terrorism stays at current low levels, it is ultimately of no consequence. Even if jihadists managed to ramp up their campaign considerably and kill WTC's worth of civilians every year, it'd still be absolutely nothing compared to such killers as tobacco or traffic accidents, both of which have demonstrably failed to destroy the free society. The effect of terrorism is the terror it causes in people ignorant of its irrelevancy; its danger to us the ways in which we overreact to that terror. Every time we lash out blindly in anger rather than in cold-blooded, surgical manner, build up ridiculously expensive surveillance systems of questionable worth, or compromise our liberties for marginal improvements in security, terrorists win.

What kind of racist are you?

Racial differences in intelligence is a subject in which you just can't win. As everyone knows, to be ethical, intelligent human being, you must believe that every human population is just as intelligent on average, and there are no hereditary differences between them. Problem is, these two unquestionable truths are mutually exclusive.

The effects of extreme poverty on people are multifaceted and harsh. As our standard of living has risen here in West, average height of people has risen, as have the IQ scores (phenomenon known as Flynn Effect). The validity of IQ as measure of intelligence can always be debated, as can the relative importance of different factors. Clearly, however, there are several important environmental ones. A child in some poor nation starts his life in a womb of malnourished mother with at least couple parasitic infections. As he grows up, he will suffer from the same woes, his diet being unsatisfactory in both quantity and quality. He'll fall ill often, and has to share his nutrition with some uninvited little guests in his body. His body will never have quite enough nutrients it needs to build itself up, and brain will suffer along with the other parts. Drained of energy to some extent, the child won't be as active and curious as he could otherwise be, and thus his brain will not receive some of the stimulation it needs to develop. His environment makes this even worse. Overworked, exhausted and relatively dull mother of seven has little time or energy for individual attention or discussions not related to practical matters at hand. The child will most likely live in some rural village where every day is like other, where nothing much ever happens apart from the same deadening routine. He won't get many years of school. His culture will be more or less superstitious and conservative, unfamiliar with abstract, logical thought and unfriendly to intellectual curiosity.

Compare this to modern West. The diet of child born here is adequate even at its worst. Epidemic diseases are mostly under control, parasitic infections (with few mild exceptions such as Toxoplasma gondii) have been crushed and healthcare system has the whole arsenal of modern medicine to treat those who fall ill. By global standards, almost all parents are highly educated, some extremely so, and they have relatively few offspring. Children are usually educated for over ten years, and their environment is rich in information. Even the TV zombies receive lots of diverse stimulation compared to their kin in Third World, and for those with even a touch of inquisitiveness, sky's the limit. The culture, for the most part, respects intelligence and knowledge, tolerates divergent ideas and encourages the solution of conflicts through non-violent means. We could be doing much better still, but even now, our children live in environment far more conductive to development of intelligence than most others on this world.

The worst environment is without doubt sub-Saharan Africa, where every factor mentioned exists in extreme form. Therefore, if we assume that there are no hereditary differences in intelligence between populations, Europeans are on average more intelligent than Africans (immigrants and refugees living in Europe included). To believe in this is to be a filthy racist. On the other hand, if we assume that every group is just as intelligent, Africans would have to start from a higher level. There would be a racial hierarchy of cognitive capacities, and since we in West value intelligence so highly, some races would simply be better than others in our eyes. That's at least as racist, even if it would make us the subhumans.

So which one is it for you? A warm-hearted humanist would go with the latter option, I think, for it'd mean that the poorer, more ignorant and oppressed some people is, the better it really is. While not discounting the possibility of slight hereditary variations in some sub-components of intelligence, I personally choose the former. However, I don't think that intelligence is the only, or even primary determinant of human worth, even if I do value it highly. I also do not think that the proper response to recognizing these environmental differences is arrogance and contempt. In my opinion we should respect our achievements, continue building on them, and do what we can to help others follow our footsteps. We shouldn't assume that Third World immigrants would, as a group, perform just as well as natives in modern information economy, even if all other things were equal. All this is undisputably racism according to its many newer definitions. Take it as you will.

Empathy and third-person perception of qualia

There is mind and there is matter. Between them, a fundamental divide exists. One can be observed, the other not, apart from experiencing it through being. This strict dichotomy between first- and third-person views feels intuitively correct, and seems usually to be taken for granted even by those who deny the concept of universe divided into two fundamentally distinct substances. Such denial, of course, becomes somewhat shaky if consciousness is indeed intrinsically unobservable. There would be a very basic level divide in existence then, mandating some degree of dualism, if not full-blown one.

In this essay I will argue that there is no such divide. Qualia of others aren't any more unobservable in principle than any physical characteristic. The fallacy of unobservability shall be shown by two examples of perceiving consciousness: One real though limited, other theoretical but clear.

Consider empathy. Most humans are capable, to a varying degree, of observing the whole rich repertoire of conscious and unconscious communication of others. With this information, they can construct an inner model of mental states that caused those communicative acts, and respond to them in appropiate manner. This construct usually has affective as well as cognitive component. In other words, empathetic human being feels what others feel. Qualia of emotion perceived.

Foul play and sophistry? Empathy is, after all, based on perceiving the external correlates of consciousness, and those are very much physical. It might seem that consciousness itself is again safe from observation, the divide intact. However, defining observation as perceiving the thing-in-itself has the unfortunate side effect of making all physical objects impossible to observe as well. You aren't seeing these letters themselves, nor your monitor. What you see is an inner model constructed by your brain out of information from your eyes, that based on stream of photons from whatever you're looking at. What kind of stream arrives does correlate with its physical characteristics, which permits a construction of model very useful to your interaction with the world - but a construct it stays, nonetheless. In fact the nature of this observation-construct might differ from the observed thing more in the case of physical objects. In empathy brain is modeling brain, in other cases things very different from itself. This leads to striking differences, such as the entirely arbitrary distinctions existing in the models of actually continuous phenomena. The wavelength of visible light is not really divided into parts, nor are there two qualitatively different states of temperature.

Empathy is, of course, defective instrument. Communicative acts aren't perfect indicators of mental states. Humans lie, they fake emotions, they conceal them. Even without all this, the amount of information conveyed is small relative to that contained by some brainstate, and as such, any picture based on it is bound to be rather crude. Constructing a thought-experiment involving neither of these restrictions proves illustrative. Imagine a futuristic descendant of today's FMRI machines, with spatial and temporal resolutions fine enough to read the activity of even individual neurons. This instrument is connected to a device capable of stimulating or inhibiting the brain activity, again at any level wished for. The system reads the brainstates of persons A and B. It selects some part of person A's state, for example that correlating with his verbalized thoughts. Then it constructs a functionally identical replica of that pattern, and uses the brain manipulator to write it into B's head. As a result, B thinks A's thoughts. The principle could be applied to emotions, sensory experiences, essentially every conscious thing that's happening in the brain. Of course it is unlikely that the resulting experience would be identical to original, with differing brain structures and inevitable entanglement of the replica with other patterns in B's brain. Still, as noted, no realistic concept of perception can demand this.

All in all, the apparent unreachability of qualia rests on inaccurate intuitions on the nature of perception, as well as our inadequate natural capacity of observing the brains of others. Medieval scholar, if he had somehow became aware of ultraviolet light, might very well have considered it qualitatively different from visible light, since it is invisible and impossible for him to observe. In a certain sense he would have been correct, but today we know that no such difference exists in the world - solely in the minds of those incapable of perceiving UV wavelengths. His mistake would have been perfectly understandable, but no less a mistake for that.

Transcendental Carnation

There was definite amusement in Rofocale's eye cluster as he turned to look at me. His twin mouths were curved in wry smiles.

"Are you quite sure you want to do this?", he asked.

"Quite totally", I replied.

He said nothing, just went on smiling. A feeling of unease crept over me. Rofocale had a stubborn habit of making me feel like that. Time and time again, his behaviour could be more than a bit alien. And the cellular bubble he lived in certainly didn't help. It was filled with disturbing details which never revealed themselves until specifically looked for, but nonetheless filled the room with unnerving ambience of which you inevitably came aware, anxiety crawling all over you.

I shrugged. This was the time of renewal. I was shedding my skin. The symbolism was perfect and timing absolutely right, and one eccentric with his distorted doodles certainly wouldn't scare me off.

"And you think you're ready now?", he said suddenly.

"Yeah. I suppose I am."

His smiles sharpened into sneers.

"No, you're certainly not. Nobody ever is. I told you that you're going to experience a total transformation of what you consider reality. Things you are going to see will be far beyond your conception as it is. You cannot begin to prepare for what you cannot even begin to understand."

A moment's silence.

"So I ask you again. Do you think you're ready?"

"No", I said. I was a bit amused, but hid it well. Rofocale's rhetoric could be impressively bombastic, but it seemed to me that he spouted it mostly for his own amusement.

"That's my boy."

Rofocale whistled sharply, and a slimy fist-sized slug-creature oozed its way out from beneath his bed. Its two little tentacles, sprouting from its head, were curled around a small glass pipe. It wriggled up his front leg, leaving a foul trail behind, and finished its odyssey on his lap. Rofocale promptly picked up the pipe and popped the little slug into his mouth. "Crunch", went the teeth. I sat there, picking absent-mindedly at my now rather loose skin. He spit the remains of that little thing into a small cup he had procured from one of his skin folds, and started adding different reagents which seemed to come in all colours of a mutant rainbow. Finally he blew a little gout of flame into it from his mouth.

"Showing off your dragon genes, old pal?", I inquired in a light tone of voice. He sniffed in a way which was propably meant to be arrogant, but failed miserably.

"Showing off is a sign of infantile dependency on sources of approval outside your own self, and I'm so obviously above that", he lectured while scraping the dried-up mixture into the pipe. "Now... you going to smoke up, or just joke around?"

"Give me that pipe."

In a smooth arc, his tentacle brought the instrument of intoxication next to my face, and I plucked it into my claws. For a moment, I gazed upon it, lost in thoughtless contemplation and sudden welling of fear. Then I gathered my determination, torching the bowl and breathing in deeply. The acrid smoke tore at my throat, but I held it in as I was told, then exhaled slowly.

...the billowing smoke exploding with infinite possibilities, each wisp a reality of its own, torn and reborn and fused into the parallel worlds in vast neverending procession...

...sudden realization that all my existence was nothing but tendrils of smoke twisting in the air, and within this one eternal moment, a mighty storm was rapidly gathering force...

I finished exhaling. And then the drug hit me like God's personal sledgehammer. I had time to realize that I was about to die, but not enough to start caring. In the briefest moment, the room lost its boundaries, melting into a mass of undifferentiated sensation. For another fleeting fraction, the bubbling chaos froze into a purest crystal structure around the teeth of snickering Rofocale; then it exploded with soul-shattering force, tearing my individual self apart in a flash of blinding torment.

Timeless, all-enveloping void.

There was a sound that shimmered in the emptiness, a tinkle of divine windchime with utmost sad beauty. Then there were more, and forms were born of their melody, bright pulses of propability wandering in that pregnant non-space. Each time they met, they let out that wondrous, graceful chime. And now there were billions of them, no, a number beyond numbers. They had merged into an ocean of light that pulsed with vast cosmic harmonies. It spoke to itself in that music, a raw godlike intelligence devoid of words or comprehension, of anything but sheer infantile joy at the act of babbling itself.

This primal perfection was broken by the dynamics of harmony. While at the edges of this Godhead, the particles of light were converting ever more non-existence into being, inside it the pulses were creating dense nuclei of radiance. New sounds: cathartic scream of release, a hum of alchemical synthesis giving birth to new elements of speech. Around these cores, a gradual waning of music into ever more silent whispering.

A star, now. Floating in the darkness, screaming its ecstatic torment in storms blowing into silent depths. Smaller orbs circled around it for loops after loops, some freezing and some aflame. The third one came to be neither; happily nestled in its zone of comfort, it came to find an equilibrium between ice and inferno. Something alien was born in its murky waters, a complex sentence of such sophisticated persuasiveness that it was able to convert other particle conglomerates into copies of itself through this bewildering process of absorption, processing and division. Soon it had conquered all the planet's seas, but already, it had diversified into myriad of forms. Within each creature, there burned a singleminded, molecular dedication to feed and replicate, almost frightening in its intensity.

The broth of life fermented and boiled, crawling onto barren shores and covering them in a skin of green. The primal cells still permeated every niche, but other beings lumbered above them, vastly greater in both scale and complexity. Within them, the united consciousness of first beings had been broken into myriads of fragments, but some of those shone and sang with radiant expertise never seen before. The biological web itself, with its countless light-drinkers, parasites and predators of sedentaries and mobiles both, was now a vast symphony playing against the background of screaming sun. Many times it was wracked by terrible agonies as the web collapsed in a gargantuan orgy of death, but every time, it rebuilt itself in ever greater glory.

There was a further narrowing of experience. A troupe of scrawny, battered apes emerged from the cover of tropical forest into a plain covered by long grass. The leader was in pain from a gash in his stomach, but even at his moment of defeat, knew better than to show signs of weakness. A stronger band had invaded their territory and driven them from the safety of dark green canopies and dim diffused daylight. The nameless leader, without thoughts as such, still knew the terror that his surviving underlings now felt, for it froze his blood as well. Yet in him it was tempered by something else, a steely determination with a strangely familiar feel. For a moment, the leader rose on his hindlegs and gazed above the surface of swaying grass. Determination...

Another, larger ape, a young male in his prime, stood in a great formation with thousands of his kin on the plains of Telamon. He had words and concepts swarming in his mind, superb capacity to interpret his inner world with symbolic models of that model. Yet right now they only fed his fear. He knew that the barbarian horde had been trapped between two consular armies and was therefore in vastly disadvantaged position, but the stupid Gauls showed no sign of understanding that they were going to lose, waving their weapons and howling warcries with supreme self-confidence. And he was right there in the front rank of his maniple, among the first to face their inevitable screaming charge. It wasn't his own death that he feared so much, it was that he had been married just six months earlier and he knew how terribly his death would hurt her. She had put up such a brave front when he had left, but had not been able to disguise her eyes. For a moment the desire to be anywhere but here became almost overwhelming. Only then, near his breaking point, it came upon him. Man cannot choose whether to die or not, only how to face his death. I know who I am. I am Roman, and will face my death like one. She will do the same. When the orders came for maniples to advance, he marched forwards in grim silence.

The experience detached from the individual consciousness another time, but now, a question remained. He knew who he was, but who am I? I felt shocked at the realization that I existed, but had not realized it until now. The questions crowded into my head one after another. Where am I? Why am I here, wherever that is? Just what is happening anyway? Overwhelming confusion. There were swarms of alien colours swimming all around me in this shapeless space, and ethereal sounds echoing some distant melodies, but they provided me with no clues. I remembered there had been fear, then determination and some act, but what was it?

I turned my perception to a body that had come to my attention -- it belonged to me, I realized it now. Apparently I was lying on some soft surface, breathing in and out. Then, almost as soon as I became aware of my breath, I recalled the answer. I was here because I had breathed in something. A drug. Some vastly powerful drug. Terror surfaced. How is it possible to come down if I'm this high? But another part of me knew very well that I was doing just that right now. The rioting colours were gradually dimming, and I remembered even more. For example, I had eyes to see with. Promptly, I opened them.

Lucy's weirdly adorned bedroom was crawling with brightly glowing serpents of crimson and gold. The dark-haired angel herself was sitting on the nearby sofa, watching me with eyes filled with brilliant light and a wry smile on her lips. I turned my eyes away and looked at the ceiling, undulating and pulsing with unknown rhythyms.

"Oh Christ", I breathed. "Jesus motherfucking Christ. What the hell..."

Lucy giggled merrily.

"I told you that you weren't ready for it, didn't I?"

For a moment I didn't have strength to a respond.

"It was... it was..." I struggled desperately for words.
"The word you're looking for, doesn't exist. I think you already put it about as well as anybody can."

I shot her an affectionate look. As usual, she was right. Wasting no more energy on useless attempts at verbalization, I laid there on her bed watching the serpents slowly slither into hiding, exhausted but happy in the post-orgasmic chill after my coitus with universe. A shadow of memory flickered in the back of my mind, of some twin-mouthed grinning demon I had apparently seen at some point during my hallucinatory reverie. For some reason this memory made me feel odd unease for a second, but then, it vanished like a wisp of smoke into wind.

Daath
October 2006
Kaikki oikeudet pidätetään ja pahoinpidellään.

Alien Child

Dedicated to Sacculina Carcini


I.

The insect bit Harry's armpit the night he was drinking beer on the terrace of his father's old log cabin, listening to the wind whistling through tree canopies and bird calls echoing from the nearby dark lake. It barely shook him out of his reverie. Some clean and wholesome relaxation in the tranquility of nature, a welcome interlude from the spastically speeding life of metropolis. Yet hardly one without downsides. Harry glanced at his smarting armpit, saw that the insect was still there and mistook it for a tick. Its swollen body sat on his skin, apparently gorging itself on sweet blood.

Harry was feeling too calm and amiable to really mind this miniature vampire's theft of his blood, but he had heard about ticks spreading diseases, and thought it wise to get rid of it. He didn't just rip it off, knowing how a proboscis left in skin could cause an infection, but went inside cabin to get some butter to suffocate the insect. He opened the refrigerator, feeling quite pleased with his practical knowledge, and was just reaching for butter when the tick fell off. It landed on the floor and laid there motionless.

"I'll be damned", thought Harry and probed the tiny thing with his finger. It was dead. "Didn't you like my blood?" He shrugged, mildly amused, and then returned to terrace with another bottle of beer in his hand.

He returned to the city two days later, refreshed and ready to tackle his life head on. In the office, he bragged to a co-worker about being such a badass that even insects die of fright when messing with him, got a barbedly witty reinterpretion of issue and had a good laugh.

When the hunger started three weeks later, he had forgotten everything.


II.

Harry scowled at computer screen, a vile headache throbbing behind his eyes. The program still refused to compute properly despite five hours of debugging. It should have been clear by now, but his head felt fuzzy, and it seemed that he created a new error for every one he fixed.

"What do you say we call it quits for today and go grab a beer?", a co-worker's voice inquired.

"Ah, fuck off." replied Harry, with a hint of malice. He didn't lift his gaze from the screen, but could feel the hurt puzzlement nonetheless. Somehow it didn't bother him. He had been on the edge all day, and this unwanted intrusion into his cubicle felt deeply irritating.

The intruder left without saying another word. Harry tried to return to program but found out he had no interest in it at all. Perhaps it was indeed time to call it quits. Go put something in his stomach. He had gorged himself at McDonalds before launching himself on that program, but felt famished by now. Damned fast food, Harry thought. You stuff yourself with it, feel bloated for a while and before you guess, you're hungry again. He left the office building feeling a bit hostile and drove to a nearby mall, thinking of buying a pizza or something like that, a fast and easy dinner to take his mind off eating.

In supermarket he was suddenly struck by the sheer amount and variety of food that surrounded him. To think he had treated eating as a mere function! His mouth watered when he gazed at those juicy meats, crisp vegetables, succulent sweets and delicious treats, all just waiting there for him to choose what he wanted. In no time his cart was overflowing with all kinds of foods and his hands trembled with feverish anticipation. It wasn't until he was loading them into his car that he thought how abnormal this almost sexual desire was for one as relatively dispassionate about eating as he. But the emptiness gnawing at his stomach soon distracted him.

Harry prepared a feast, eating a massive steak with heaps of french fries, bowl of salad and several heavily laden sandwiches, all flushed down with a litre of beer. Afterwards he settled on the couch, sighing with contentment, to watch the evening's TV shows.

Few hours later, when it was time to go to bed, he was hungry again.


III.

The next days were awful. He felt lethargic and dizzy, and soon he was having sporadic attacks of muscle pain. His efficiency as a worker suffered an almost total collapse, for he couldn't summon an interest in programming or a will to work despite the lack of it. Whenever he got started, he soon found himself munching on some snack he had brought with him. Nothing but eating truly aroused his interest anymore. Life between meals was becoming a gray blur, but when it was time, Harry ate like a starved pig. Still, it seemed like even the heaviest meal couldn't keep the hunger away for long.

Around other workers, Harry felt uncomfortable and somehow harassed. There were strange looks, he thought, muted whispering and conversations abruptly terminated when he came to sight. Often he felt like screaming in their faces, and was invariably rude whenever talked to. For the most part he tried to isolate himself in his cubicle, venturing out only with great reluctance.

By the fourth day, the dull ache in his muscles was persisting most of the time. Now Harry felt ill enough to go see a doctor. He complained about the pains and tiredness, but didn't venture to mention his vastly grown appetite. It was just too weird.

The doctor was confident that it wasn't anything serious, and that Harry should keep a long weekend and rest well. His lips curved into reassuring smile, but to Harry, it looked phony and treacherous. He muttered a few thankful words, and then made a fast exit as soon as he could, dark suspicions welling in his mind. Only when he had reached the privacy of his car did he slowly calm down.

"The doctor is right", he thought. "I need to rest. I'm getting paranoid."

He visited a supermarket on the way home.


IV.

Harry got to rest all right. He laid on the couch for the whole weekend, staring at TV with expressionless eyes. It rarely mattered what program was on. For most of the time, his brain was so empty that even the depressingly stupid soap operas felt watchable. There was tranquility to be found on that couch, a state of waking sleep. If he tried to stand up, he would become aware of his aching body and how drained he felt. Only things that motivated him enough were a painfully full bladder and that recurring need for food.

It was obvious that he was becoming horribly dirty, but it was not until Sunday that he could summon enough determination to haul himself into shower. Feeling lightheaded, he leaned on shower stall's wall while absentmindedly lathing his grimy skin with soap. In few moments his fingers wandered upon something.

A small, hard knob had formed in the flesh of his right armpit. Stunned, Harry stopped soaping himself, then began probing the surroundings, applying some pressure. There were thin tendrils snaking out from the central mass, like a network of wires under his skin. He traced them, finding them to disappear in some places only to resurface elsewhere. The net was thickest in his right arm, but there was no escaping the fact it was everywhere, growing inside him.

At the realization, his mind went blank, instinctively trying to block out the appalling reality. Numbly he turned on the shower and stood there staring at wall, water raining down on him. It was scaldingly hot, but Harry didn't mind. It made him feel like he was fighting against the invader, burning its foul flesh to ashes. He stayed in the shower, clinging to his denial and illusions, until hunger returned like an explosion of emptiness inside him.

After finishing a large meal, he had regained a measure of calm rationality. It could not be denied that things were desperately wrong, and could not be expected to get better by themselves. Obviously he needed professional care, and needed it quickly.

Yet soon Harry started having second thoughts. He had never heard of anything like his affliction. If this was some weird, new disease, would doctors be able to help him? Would they even want to? His stricken body would be a valuable object of research for whitecoats, to be experimented on and coldly dissected once it gave up its grip on life. Harry had read on Internet about government and pharmaceutical industries running secret clinics where foulest kinds of human experiments were conducted. Once he had dismissed all this as delusional ranting, but now he began to wonder.

He walked to the window. Out there, it was raining. Water flowed down the glass, distorting the view, but he could still see that gray concrete jungle spreading in all directions. It all looked so very depressing and hostile. All those icy stares, boiling hatreds and beastly acts of violence. The city's dark emanations enveloped him, filling him with dread and revulsion.

Harry drew the curtains shut. He would call the doctor tomorrow.


V.

With each passing day, he found a new excuse to make that call the next day. A mere idea of being in the presence of other human beings grew steadily more horrid. He phoned work and said he was quitting, refusing adamantly to visit office for any reason whatsoever. During the next few days, his phone rang every now and then. One day, gripped by terrible rage at its insipid tones, Harry recorded an answering machine message that he hoped would insult every caller, switched his phone off and threw it into trashcan. Then he went and dismantled the doorbell. For the rest of day he felt safe and calm, as if he had erected an impassable barrier between his safe haven and the terrible outside.

A week passed. Harry's hair started falling off. His penis grew numb. Muscle aches faded away, replaced by sharp pains in his abdomen. Most of that time Harry spent in empty-eyed stupor, staring at TV or lost in paranoid fantasies about the demon apes lurking outside. Every now and then he understood how insane his state of mind was, but those thoughts were just powerless observations that soon slipped away.

Then he ran out of food. Desperate, he scavenged every unused crumb and morsel, even resorting to going through his trashcan. But to no avail. His ever terrible hunger could not be satiated by some pathetic, half-rotten leftovers. It dawned on him that he would have no choice but to brave the outside. The realization struck him like a collision of two tidal waves, his frothing mind jerked around by paralyzing terror and all-consuming need. It took hours, but eventually the constantly strengthening hunger got upper hand.

Harry looked at himself in the mirror. He had become thin and pale, with those few tufts of hair left standing up randomly from his head. The skin of his face had tightened around his skull, giving him eerily cadaverous appearance. He scowled at the reflection, having no illusions about what the others would think about it.

Few minutes later he walked out of the door, wearing a hooded jacket carefully adjusted to cover his face as far as possible. Even in the car, Harry felt exposed, and when he reached the bright white glare of supermarket lamps, it was as if he was swimming in the ocean of cold rage. Humans stared at him, barely suppressed violence in their eyes, and behind him he could almost hear knives being sharpened. Few times, when the tension became unbearable, he almost lashed out himself. Yet in the end he didn't, for nothing could be allowed to jeopardize the mission of getting the nutrients.

Never in his life had Harry felt so relieved as when it was finally over and dozen bags of cans and packages rested safely in his safe haven. Every muscle in his body wailed with agony, as if he had just ran a marathon, but none of it mattered when he felt he'd never have to go outside again.

Humming a happy little tune, he went to relieve the pressure in his bladder. Such was his relief that he barely noticed the unhealthy gray colour and utter lack of sensation in his member, or that hardly a trickle came out. But when a sharp stab of pain struck between his legs and his shriveled penis fell off, landing in the toilet bowl with barely audible "plop", he woke up.

Hardly believing his eyes, Harry stared at the little gray thing sinking beneath water. Somehow, it brought home the insanity of all that was happening to him. Slowly, he began to weep, first softly, then convulsively. The tendrils pulsed inside him like a malevolent laughter.


VI.

Being summarily castrated by the thing in his flesh was a shocking experience for Harry, but only the first of many. He was being reconstructed for inhuman purposes. An orifice opened up between his legs, scabby, inflamed and leaking sticky fluids that smelled of sickness. Flesh around his nipples swelled into gross parodies of woman's breasts. And his stomach bulged outwards, ever faster, until he couldn't even see his own feet.

Days later, Harry took another look at the mirror. He rarely wore his ill-fitting clothes now, so there was nothing to hide the monstrosity that had been his body. It had been drained of muscle and fat so thoroughly that he looked like a concentration camp prisoner, with stretched skin and sharply jutting bones. The tendrils were clearly visible now, crawling beneath his skin like a rampant cancer. All that was terrible, true abomination, but that gaping red hole between his legs and grotesquely swollen belly were even worse. It shuddered with life, and when Harry put his bony hand on it, he could feel the warm vibrancy underneath. Every drop of vitality in his body had been concentrated there.

Finally, Harry understood what had been happening. He hobbled back to his soiled bed, grabbed a pen and paper, and scrawled two lines.

I have an alien child growing inside me.
I've become nothing but its hungry mouth.

Gradually his fear and hatred started to evaporate, replaced by sublime pride and fierce protectiveness. Wasn't he a mother now? Wasn't he pregnant with a child, a privilege given to no man before? How selfish had he been, despising it for sucking him dry, when there was nothing nobler in the world than a parent sacrificing himself for his child! A small tear of happiness flowed out of Harry's eye. Truly he was blessed.

Last rays of sunlight filtered through the heavy curtains. In the gloom, Harry smiled languidly and closed his eyes.


VII.

Like a puppet on strings, Harry rose from his bed. He swept aside the curtains and pressed his clammy forehead against cold glass. Beyond the dreamy haze that fogged his head, was a city covered by darkness and rain. It had been a realm of terror for Harry, but this night it was all different. He felt a strange attraction towards it, some vast, undefined need.

In his belly, squirming had begun. The waking, restless mass was pushing downwards, against muscle gates barring the way out of its nest. This hurt Harry, but it was delicious pain, a hot, wet pressure whispering promises of orgasmic explosion. For first time in weeks, he felt truly happy, his head awash in smoky euphoria and all the little pains gone, having made way for that heavenly agony between his legs. Harry understood that the great work was nearing its completion; that he had but one thing left to do.

Wearing nothing but a trenchcoat, baggy pants and hastily tied boots, Harry flew out of his apartment. The rain was violent and freezing, but he didn't even notice, for in his mind he ran like a gazelle. His long and graceful leaps were taking him past concrete mountains and metal trees that shone with harsh light. He ran towards a destination he barely knew, guided by vague recollections of some dark, enclosed space. At the thought of it, a new climax of pain hit him, like a needle of white hot metal jabbed into his abdomen from inside. Harry stumbled and almost fell, grabbing a lamppost with one hand and his crotch with another. For a moment he hung on, moaning with pleasure and trying not to erupt right there.

Soon he was on the move again, driven by the insistent burn that had become the center of his existence. In a couple of minutes he arrived at a nearby city park, and found what he had sought. There was a football field, and next to it, a small building where players could change clothes. Underneath was a narrow gap full of rubbish and junk, place where no human ever bothered to look. It was just so perfect.

The pressure was now building fast. Frantically, Harry kicked off his shoes and pants, kneeling on the wet gravel and leaning back to point his hole into the gap. A tremor went through his body, and then, heralded by excruciating agony, came the explosion. A flood of tiny white larvae erupted out of his crotch, mixed with blood and pieces of dead tissue. Awash in pain and pleasure both too intense for him to bear, Harry wailed helplessly. His body was locked in a rigid spasm while his belly went on spraying its inhabitants under the building. It went on for ten seconds, each of which felt too long to ever end. But finally the convulsion ended, his muscles relaxed and he dropped on the ground. A few more larvae crawled out of his orifice. It was over.

He had a short moment of clarity. His lovely child had been a legion of filthy larvae, as if he had been some piece of rotten meat on which flies bred. The understanding filled him with horror and shame. Yet in a matter of seconds these feelings were submerged in another flood of parental love. Harry stood up, full of worry about what would happen to his children should the humans find out what had happened on this spot. His rational side wailed its protests in silent desperation, but to no avail. Working rapidly, Harry scrubbed the worst stains of the wall and gathered all straggling larvae he could find, gently placing them beneath the building. Then, naked but for his trenchcoat, he ran off into the night.

It was still dark when he stopped, and freezing rain still fell. He stood on some anonymous asphalt sidewalk, feet torn and without any idea of where he was. There was terrible void inside him, and weakness that gripped his whole body. Soaked to bone and frozen, he could still feel something warm trickling down his legs. He lifted his coat, and in the harsh glare of street lamps, saw his blood relentlessly streaming out of the orifice. It fell on asphalt hammered by the rain; in a moment it was washed away.

Harry took few stumbling steps into an side alley, and slid down its wall until he had reached a sitting position. So empty he felt now, so hollow. Yet there was also peace inside him, as if he had served his purpose, and could finally be laid to rest. "Perhaps I'll just stay here for awhile", he muttered, closing his eyes. Gradually he began to sink into a tranquil warmth. His head nodded, and soon dropped against his chest. Rain continued falling down upon him, but Harry no longer knew or cared.


Daath
November 2004
All rights repressed

In defense of hate speech

"A person who spreads statements or other information among the public where a certain race, a national, ethnic or religious group or a comparable group is threatened, slandered or insulted shall be sentenced for ethnic agitation to a fine or to imprisonment for up to two years."

-Finnish law on ethnic agitation

"Effective methods are needed to deal with discrimination. Especially important is to stop people from using publicity to maintain anti-immigrant attitudes. Racism on Internet must be put down with heavy hand."

-Minority Ombudsman Mikko Puumalainen, Aamulehti 14.4.2007


The secular Satan has many faces: intolerance, racism and ethnocentrism. He manifests himself in violence and slurs, while his emanations warp the structure of society, mysteriously keeping the minorities oppressed even in the absence of much apparent discrimination. No weapon can go unutilized when fighting this bastard child of white man's arrogance and sad little fears, for it is his evil that keeps the innocent, virtuous People of Colour, womyn and differently abled human beings in subjugation, squalor and despair. Paladins of tolerance, unite!

One could run with the hyperbole until almost every reader would come to see this as a rant, perhaps funny, but hopelessly strawman-like to properly describe the attitudes of modern left-wingers. Fair enough. There are considerable numbers of intelligent people on the left, men and women of idealism tempered by realism, perfectly capable of seeing the shades of grey even in such sensitive issues such as racism. All the more surprising, then, that so many positions of power are now occupied by raving lunatics of left, who really do seem to believe that Western culture is the fount of all evil, and who ends up on the top in the classic exploiter-exploited relationships of world is somehow a question of virtue (evil white people oppress the good because they're evil), not one of power and strategy. Their naive policies have played a large part in constructing the already explosive, gradually worsening situation Europe has with its Muslims and other minorities. One would think that, with the failure of their utopian plans growing more and more apparent each year, the far-left multiculturalists of Finland would be gradually backpedaling from their positions. Our nation has barely started walking down their road, and a change of course to some more promising policy without losing any face would still be easy. I mean, what kind of leftist would want to become an author of demographic shift done in a way that will inevitably lead to increased ethnic tensions, ghettoized minorities stuck in poverty and crime, rise of far right and so on?

Quite a few, it turns out. The streams are diverging. While many anti-racists seem to have grasped the need to refine their worldviews considerably, and the discussion on immigration is becoming more open, the more extreme leftists are drawing quite a different conclusion. Finland still needs an ethnic makeover. The problem is still whites and their racism. We didn't fail in the blind tolerance of multiculturalism, fundamentally flawed understanding of xenophobia or the intrinsically limited effectiveness of anti-racist education. We failed in our insufficient tolerance, too little propaganda and far too much tolerance shown to racism in all its myriad forms. Efforts must be made to rectify the situation, and at the front of crusade stands our Minority Ombudsman Mikko Puumalainen. Having bravely struck down the monstrously racist candy wrappers, the Commissar has now turned his righteous fury on Internet racism. His first target is the infamous hate propagandizer Mikko Ellilä, whom he asked police to investigate for his hate speech.

OK, so perhaps Ellilä isn't infamous. Very few people have even heard of him; whatever his eventual fame, it'll begin with this case. Perhaps he isn't hate propagandizer either. His writing style is certainly aggressive, his worldview very much black and white, and there's plenty of material to use selective quotation on. He has advocated the retraction of citizenships from unproductive or criminal members of non-native ethnicities so they'd be forced to leave, and compared the operation to pumping out the sewage. In "Yhteiskunta Koostuu Ihmisistä" (Society Consists of People), the essay that so enraged Puumalainen, he considers the sorry state of African socities manifestations of black genetics -- born stupid and aggressive, they live that way too in Africa and in West as well, if not strictly controlled by white law. And there's more. Ellilä is a racist, pure and simple. However, at no point has he advocated violence. He claims to see every person as an individual, thus avoiding the classic racist mistake of extrapolating perceived group averages into some individual. Much of what he has wrote deals with libertarianism, media criticism and other issues. While I consider him to be crudely mistaken on many counts and consequently don't care much for his opinions, I fail to see what makes them a real threat. Certainly he wasn't really worth bothering with.

The legal case is muddled. On one hand, Ellilä hasn't ever incited people to violence or any other illegal act, merely used his right to free expression. On the other hand, there is a Finnish law forbidding the spreading of "threatening, slandering or insulting" statements about some groups to the public, and Ellilä certainly has slandered and insulted many. It may be that police decide not to press charges, but if they wish to push on, perhaps egged by Puumalainen, they propably can. It is impossible to tell yet. What is clear at this point, on other hand, is that Commissar has screwed up again. He has chosen precisely the wrong way to fight against racism, which is kind of shame, because it really should be resisted. However, he's helping to delegitimize his whole extremist ideology with this ridiculous moralist jihad of his, and that's a good thing. To treat this illness, we must first wean ourselves of medicines that hurt more than they help.

Why do I consider his actions so irrational, so counterproductive? Why not punish Ellilä and others like him? Intellectual racists may not incite violence as such, but they can give words to inchoate prejudices of others, give people rational justifications to seeing minorities as inferior and discriminating against them. They may gain the ears of those in power, even gain power for themselves. I do think that the role of native European racism in our ethnic problems is often vastly exaggerated, but it does have a significant one, and it may easily grow worse. Lashing out might force him to curb his rhetoric and deter others. And surely outlawing hate propaganda isn't a real offense against the principle of free speech? No sane person complains about not being allowed to scream "fire!" in packed movie theater, either.

Let us start from the martyr's crown. Imagine an American government official indicting Noam Chomsky for anti-American propaganda and inciting terrorism (by implying that terrorist attacks are perfectly legitimate resistance against US imperialism, to spin up an example). How would people react to such a trial? Some might welcome it, some would grumble. Those people, however, never were the audience of Chomsky and other such writers, so their reaction is largely irrelevant. The target audience however, student intellectuals and left-wingers everywhere, would be enraged. They would see a state and official ideology unable to confront the ideas (or as many would put it, the truth) it doesn't like, and thus is forced to use coercion against their authors. Such would be the predominant response in the population which, state worried, might get influenced by the wrong ideas. And it gets worse. Whatever punishments Western governments are willing to inflict are no deterrent to dedicated ideologue. On the contrary, the long-term benefits are in some sense greater. A trial raises the thinker's profile in today's vast chaos of media persons, authors and bloggers. Sometimes considerably so. A conviction, for its part, is the martyr's crown.

It is in the nature of repression that it will crush any resistance from anyone if harsh enough, yet in many cases it turns out only to increase the enemy's resolve. The breaking point is often surprisingly high, and many people aren't capable or willing to go that far. If a squeamish state nonetheless punishes dissidents, it usually ends up only feeding the hostility of target's group and alienating their sympathizers. The target can posture as an oppressed victim, even if the prosecution failed in the end. If previously a nobody, he's now marked down as someone who merited state crackdown. He'll be able to tell people "what they don't want you to know". Moderate thinkers with lives beyond their ideals may perhaps be deterred by the possibility of legal sanctions, but extremists, the more dangerous type, might even hope for a trial. This dynamic is apparent in Ellilä case. The man himself is combative, not at all intimidated by the feeble threat of "fines or up to two years imprisonment". He has climbed on the cross and is shouting loud from there. The news has spread very fast in Internet, especially through various nationalist blogs and webpages. American rah rah -nationalist Little Green Footballs with over 100,000 daily hits also took note of issue. People are exploiting the case to bolster their arguments about dangerous multiculturalists, Islamization of Europe and PC threat to free speech. Basically, the case is now a tiny international embarassment for Finland, with potential for growth if Ellilä goes to trial. It is also being used as propaganda material by the ideological enemies of Puumalainen. Well done, sir! Truly you are a gift that just keeps on giving.

The hate speech legislation can be counterproductive in practice, but it's also problematic in principle. What exactly is the difference between hate propaganda and harsh, brutal (and perhaps grossly erroneous) criticism of some group? There must be some fairly clear delineation, because the law must forbid the former, but protect the right to latter. Of course the current Finnish law, which forbids "slandering and insulting" groups, fails in the second count. It is the interpretation and implementation that really counts, though, and here we find how the contemporary European delineation really is defined. Apparently it revolves around the identity group of accused. Native Europeans can get into legal trouble for racism towards any coloured people, for anti-Islamic attitudes and of course anti-Semitism. Others are pretty free to sneer on outsiders of their choice. Muslims for their part are welcome to anti-Semitism and even Holocaust denial, if they don't advertise it too much. However imams can get slapped with deportations or other penalties for "incitement to terrorism" charges. These are also rather vague statutes and begging to be abused, even if only professional hatemongers have been targeted so far. What, I wonder, will happen in 2017 to some radical imam who calls the infidel culture decadent filth and preaches that it is every believer's duty to defend ummah by whatever means necessary? Not to mention that if there is someday a cultural and political shift to far right in Europe, these laws will be reinterpreted in rather interesting ways.

Exactly how dangerous it is to allow hatemongers freedom to slander and insult? It should be noted that much of what they say and write is extremely crude and blatantly offensive. Arousing contempt and loathing in most, they can often work contrary to their purposes. Reichsführer Pekka Siitoin gave Finnish neo-Nazis an Untermensch face, while the sermons of radical Islamist imams are causing wariness and hostility in many. In public it is also possible to humble them in debate and make their pig-headed ignorance apparent to all. Perhaps they happen to have some good points too? We'll never know if you censure the whole subject. In fact, the whole practice of taboo subjects implies that we're somehow afraid of the power of dissenting views, which makes little sense if we really have truth on our side. Many an intellectual might say that ordinary citizen fails to comprehend the complexities of modern world, and instead goes for simplistic stories exploiting emotions, like racist propaganda. There is a grain of truth in such view. A construction worker here might fall to far right, a confused young Muslim there to Islamism, because they were for various reasons unable to resist peer pressure and skilled manipulators. Still, I cannot see the people in general as an amorphous mass, to be kneaded at will by social engineers and propagandists. Most people do have more or less common sense at least, and it's not that easy to incite significant, lasting hatred in them. Far better, of course, if you're deliberately inflaming some real problem or conflict, but here, the issues are what really count, not anything that is said of those. And anyway, it is precisely in real world disputes and problems that we can least afford censorship. We can't just dance around everybody's feelings then, expecting that everybody avoids saying "slanderous, insulting" things. That would effectively paralyze the whole debate. We need real solutions to our problems. Ignoring them because you find them politically inconvenient is a time-honored strategy, but it won't make the problems go away.

How then to separate from each other the harsh, unpolite criticisms, and incitement to hatred, which on the contrary rarely helps and usually hurts? In social interaction it is possible to gradually sharpen our response; if someone says something simplistic and offensive, we can glare, argue back or express our distaste in various ways. Or we can bash his head in, as in the good old days, if he makes us angry enough. With such complex repertoire we can in theory navigate well within these murky waters, where people exaggerate to make a point, generalize, and often provoke others on purpose... Yet also spread hate while hiding behind pretty words and denials of any ill intent. Law, however, has to define an exact criteria for what is a crime, and I fail to imagine a set that wouldn't either allow only the most blatant hatemongers to be convicted, or allow the conviction of legitimate critics of some group that law "protects" in practice as well as in principle. We can put in place second type, loose laws, and trust that the spirit of law will live in its implementation. However, as the case of Ellilä has shown, it can't always be counted upon. And even if there weren't clumsy, overtly partisan officials ready to bend the law, the courts will make mistakes, and private individuals will try to abuse the system with false allegations. We do know that many members of officially victimized minorities like to accuse natives of racism whenever something is said or done that they don't like (whether this is due to cynical calculation or sincere belief, I don't know). Surely we shouldn't have laws that encourage such behaviour, and potentially start clogging the judicial system with utterly pointless accusations. Once racism can refer to pretty much anything, for the most part perfectly innocuous, the death of stigma currently hovering around it is only a matter of time.

So, maybe convicting people for hate speech just spreads bitterness and aggravates those that the propaganda might have influenced. Maybe the boundaries of the entire concept are hopelessly unclear. It might still be proper to punish it, if it were truly hurtful. There's no doubt that a black person would find Ellilä's "Society Consists of People" stupid and offensive. But really, why should he give a damn about what some guy on Internet thinks of blacks? One of the ill effects of official anti-racism and contemporary victimhood cult is the degeneration of our capability to simply not care. Many radical feminists are ten times as extreme and hostile with their misandry, as Ellilä is with his racism. Should I be crying over things that Dworkin, Solanas and others have said about my sex? Or have I been wiser in alternating between ridiculing and ignoring them? They've done all they humanly could to offend men, but I simply chose not to play their game. As I see it, ignorant claims and vapid insults are simply a sign of third-rate minds; it is the offender who is shamed, not the target. To be hurt by them means absolutely nothing apart from you getting hurt.

Why we do have these laws, then, if they are so obviously pointless? That's a story for another time.