Sunday, February 3, 2013

Conspiracies for the Hard of Thinking

I know, I've been quiet lately (as in, for nearly two years now). There is a reason, and I'll blog about that too in due time (the details are still a bit painful). Right now, I'll just tackle the issue that made me take up the blog again: right-wing lunacy in my native Finland.

The facts as they are known at this point: some people wrote a book covering the activities of Finnish right-wing extremists. At the book's release, a bunch of people showed up armed with (mostly) improvised weaponry. Security turned most of them away but not before one attending person was knifed in the back, fortunately not fatally. (To be fair, police inquiry turned up some weapons on the defending side as well: trouble had been anticipated.)

Now, this in itself is reprehensible and wrong. Getting a knife in the ribs is something that should never happen in a civilised society, and if anything, book releases ought to be specially protected, simply in the interests of freedom of speech. Not to mention that this was a political book, raising the question if the violence was also politically motivated.

But the immediately ensuing discussion was where it started getting weird.