The irony is that Lithuania fought long and hard for its independence from the Soviet Union. Freedom of speech was at the top of the agenda. And now, after eighteen years of post-communist democracy, it introduces a law that bans free speech. Joseph Stalin would be so proud.

Expanding copyright law to bar online access to copyrighted materials without the copyright holder’s consent, or to bar linking to or paraphrasing copyrighted materials without the copyright holder’s consent, might be necessary to keep free riding on content financed by online newspapers from so impairing the incentive to create costly news-gathering operations that news services like Reuters and the Associated Press would become the only professional, nongovernmental sources of news and opinion.

The next natural step could be to ban the mentioning of copyrighted materials in academic writing without prior consent.

Gay men from around the world show their solidarity with a Turkish victim of honour killing. This, my friends, is identity politics at grass-root level.

Background here.

A new insight into the intellectual meltdown of the Left, this time delivered by Swedish professor Bo Rothstein. In short, he argues that “identity politics” is to blame for the problem many European socialist parties have at the polls. In other words, it is the idea that minority groups should enjoy equal rights that is to blame for the lack of voter enthusiasm for socialism. So, to gain popularity, Rothstein prescribes—although not spelled out—a return to traditional bigotry, with policies based on racism, sexism, ethnical prejudgements, and homophobia.

This is yet another example of the complete lack of respect for individuals and human rights I wrote about yesterday.

Rothstein’s article is available in English here.

* It is often difficult to distinguish the communism of Anders Svensson from the hateful conservatism of the Religious Right. Svensson excuses forced marriages and denies that honour killings are a problem, arguing—like the Christian Right—that statistics can be used to determine the seriousness of a crime. This, naturally, results in a reasoning that legitimizes the oppression of minority groups that are often the target of hate crimes.

The extreme right and the extreme left are often hard to tell apart, and one thing that makes it so is their complete disregard for the fact that people are individuals and not large groups whose problems are best solved by simple mathematics and handheld calculators. Honour killings, forced marriages, and hate crimes are only small problems if you ignore the impact it has on the victims.

Cartoon by Yaakov Kirschen.