Every cloud has a silver lining.

Each Finnish taxpayer is lending 300e for the Greek government without guarantees. Others are better informed to write about the loan itself, so I offer a few positive notes about the debate.

Greek voters have double handicap on future time orientation. Firstly, they are a Southern country. Therefore memories of long, harsh winters and the need to prepare for them are not circulating in their bloodstream. Secondly, their average score on a specific list is the lowest of all Euro countries.

Usually such nations get preferential treatment in public debt debate (example). Scrupulous Western imperialists and capitalists get the blame. With Greece, the blame for nonpayment is finally placed where it should be - on the borrower who refuses to pay. Finally the common taxpayer walks on the loaner's shoes.

The Greek have darker skin color than Finns. Despite this, the racism card has not been played. Finally skin color does not give people freedom from the consequences of their actions.

Many people say that Greece should not have joined Euro in the first place and the banks should not have given them loans, and these financing options prolonged the crisis and made it worse. When we talk about Finns, it is acceptable to say that instant loans and credit cards cause trouble for some, although for the majority they provide a valuable service. Finally we can say that some countries are too immature to handle loans like grown-up Western democracies.

Media is full of reports about demonstrations and strikes where the Greek people oppose the cuts on their benefits and tax evasion options. These get nothing but condescension and laughter. Usually there is a double standard where the feeblest complaints from victim groups are valid and should be accommodated. Finally the double standard is breaking down.

Despite the cost to the man on the street, we are not seeing attacks or hate speech against the Greek people. Finally the public debate contains a recognition that despise towards some group's lower performance does not mean hate, violence nor discrimination.

In short, when Finns deal with their own money their public debate is much sharper. Let's hope that these same honest attitudes spread to rhetoric about developing countries, ending the monopoly of the compassion industry.

Pay raise to Finnish soldiers in Afghanistan

The video describes the challenges faced by embedded tactical trainers (ETTs). ETTs are American soldiers who are training the Afghan army to mind their own backyard. The video mentions complete lack of discipline, rampant drug use, corruption in promotions and wrong kind of soldier material as main problems.

When the Finnish or American soldiers exit Afghanistan, in five years the locals will revert back to their own ways. It's insane to believe that you can just train them into Finnish ways like any Finnish conscript. Their background, culture, institutions and genes are very different from us.

The foreign military presence will hopefully give them enough time to establish stable institutions and rebuild infrastructure so that Afghanistan will continue as a democracy, instead of sliding back into being a fundamentalist totalitarian state (or was it feudal warlord anarcy?), and that's a huge improvement. But they are going to stay half illiterate, corrupted, drug-addled and poor no matter how much military support and development aid is wasted on them. Western presence is a light, passing breeze compared to the internal logic of 30 million Afghans.

Jyri Häkämies increased the pay of Finnish soldiers by at least 500e per month, which is money well spent on valuable work.

Those who oppose wasting taxpayer's money should remember that there are less than 200 Finns there, so multipliers stay small. Also, they will be brought back to Finland - it's not a permanent black hole for taxpayer's money like suggestions to raise development aid to 1% of GNP.

Peacekeepers to Afghanistan

Instead of importing refugees to Finland, it is better to mind the crisis where it happens. So let's pay well to the brave souls who voluntarily risk their lives to make godforsaken hellholes livable.

Recently HS reported that low salaries made Finnish officers reluctant to go to Afghanistan. On the other hand, there are 2000 Aghans in Finland. Most of them live by social benefits - the latest statistics from 2005 tell that their unemployment percentage is a whopping 64%, and this counts only those in the labor force. This does not mean they are poor - according to today's MOT program, many Afghani families get benefits which are comparable to a Finnish worker's salary.

It's an insane result of the leftist obsession of victimhood that people who risk their lives to maintain rule of law in Afghanistan hardly benefit from it, while refugees who cheat their way here get a handsome increase in living standard for being idle. The opposite way would be better.

Update: A substandard post was rewritten into tolerable.

Shooting sprees are good for Finland, because we are now more recognized.

According to a Haitian consul in Brazil, the earthquake was good for Haiti, as it made their country more recognized. Finland is more developed country also in this respect, we can make global headlines by killing just 6 people rather than 60000.

He also blamed the ills of his country on the fact that every place where there are Africans is fucked.

The last frog that leaped from his mouth, that the practise of macumba and muti and other witchcraft has brought a curse on Africans, is actually an excellent metaphor for the fact that no matter where they go and no matter how much development aid they get, they still can't build a civilized country.

As long as we exclude imperialism - importing enough smart fraction from outside to keep the countries out of trouble - no one has the social technology and knowledge to solve their problems. So it is anything but a joke to talk about illiterate goat herders at the same time as benevolent superintelligences and uplifting and genetic engineering - transcendental technology really is needed before their societies can organize themselves to provide what we consider basic human rights.

To cut the consul some slack, most of his relatives live in Haiti and he hasn't heard about them since the earthquake, and he thought he was talking off record. Who wouldn't be out of his mind in such situation.

In Haiti, a recently failed state is setting new standards in just how dysfunctional a government can be in the face of a crisis. Based on HS reports they don't seem to be doing much anything.

Functional states have an institution called army which is supposed to be a master of logistics in hostile terrain. Not in Haiti. They are not getting excavators to collapsed buildings. They are not getting injured people from streets to faraway cities with free hospital beds. Nor can rescue aid squads get transported to needed locations - HS reported that only 6 out of 27 squads had actually reached Haiti.

Fortunately, civil society is stepping in to maintain order - but not by rule of law but by rule of gun for the few minutes it takes to grab the valuables and run.

HS follows a crisis relief squad which carries a few Finns. They expect a few Haitian soldiers to join them in the border to protect against threat of robbing, which has happened to some food convoys. In some other country, those soldiers would be doing crisis relief by themselves.

My father visited Dominican Republic some years ago, and also Haiti for one day. He said that there were security guards with shotguns at every corner of the public enterprises, indicating very low trust and very low rule of law.