Everybody's whining about freedom of speech

Prime minister Fredrik Reinfeldt and Minister of Justice Beatrice Ask.

Well, I'll just put in a pretty little picture of Der Führer and his prime documentarist Leni Riefenstahl in order to at least have a brief relation to film in this post. Or just to express my dissatisfaction with our (Sweden's) current right-wing government. Cheap humor, I know, but it at least makes me smile a little.

Things start to look interesting in Sweden because of the upcoming election this autumn, and sitting here on my balcony with a cigarette in my mouth and my netbook makes me feel a bit like Spider Jerusalem in the Transmetropolitan comics.

But what does this post have to do with classic cinema, and why do I lately suck at updating my blog? I have no answer to either question. Is it interesting to answer? No. In this post I turn to people like me who seldom read the news, but preferring to have someone else reading them for you and updating you on anything of interest. (I have to fight the demons, you know.) News about Iceland's volcanoes and Tiger Woods' indecencies tend to reach me anyway, whether I like it or not.

Now about Sweden. We currently have a lot of stupid people ruling our country (not surprisingly, of course), but in the light of an upcoming election some really ridiculous things are said. The most hysterical thing lately was our Minister of Justice Beatrice Ask's suggestion of sending pink envelopes to people suspected of buying sex. Whether they are guilty or not is obviously of no importance: just shun those bastards.

There were of course a lot of debates about this in the media: "What would happen if, for instance, the suspects daughter finds the envelope, crushing their family?" "If the suspect is innocent, couldn't public humiliation like that destroy his/her life?" Still, Beatrice Ask took a hell of a lot of time before reluctantly taking the suggestion back. It just feels so good that our Minister of Justice truly understands the concept of "being innocent until otherwise is proven".


"CLEANTERNET"

Now to the subject of today. I found this hilarious video today, that at first is not apparently a joke. It is aimed at a Swedish right-wing politician by the name of Cecilia Malmström, who in the name of being a European Commissioner for Home Affairs "proposed a directive ordering the access blocking of child pornography on the Internet" (Wikipedia). In other words: She wants to censor the Internet.

Well, I couldn't counter that preposterous thought better than the following video does. You can watch it with better resolution and without Swedish subtitles on the website, cleanternet.org, but if you're lazy you can just push the play button here and now. This is just wonderful.





The creator is a design student by the name of Alexander Lehmann (his blog, in English). He accepts donations in order to release it in several languages.
I just hope that SÄPO won't barge in on me for writing this post.

Update: I just wrote about how proud I was of Lehmann being Swedish, but I just realized that he was German. Damn it. Well well - same shit, no difference. Right?