[Courtesy of sandb]: The post has been given a substantial plastic surgery. There is nothing as weird as Vlad III the Impaler going on.

Apart from having become more civilized, why don't we hang pirates anymore? Well. It's cruel, of course. There are many good reasons for why not to hang people, and at that, many good reasons for not having a death penalty at all.

Update: Prof. Keechang Kim has now provided two blogposts in English on the matter: On Zombie MPs and suggestion in parl and the strangeness of the DDoS attacks:

I realise that I may sound slightly sarcastic about the parliament's efforts to be diplomatic when I'm picking out only the parts of Tunisian praise.

Actually the parliament has, at times, been very critical of the development of human rights in Tunisia. See for example the parliamentary debate from February 2010 where all political groups praise the Tunisian developments except Greens/EFA and GUE/NGL who say:

Hemma hos pojkvännen har vi diskuterat Tunisien en del över de senaste dagarna. Eftersom vi båda engagerat oss i piratpolitik och speciellt situationen i Tunisien flödar informationen från alla möjliga vinklar. Jag har, i en kraftsträngning, följt Tunisiens relation till EU sedan 1995.

Major protests broke out in Tunisia following the self-immolation of a student in late December. The demonstrators are protesting unemployment and government violence, and as opposed to a previous norm of protests from spontaneous worker unions the recent uprisal seem to engaged a much larger part of the population to participate.

In the Nigel Farage speech against the EU president Herman van Rompuy he not only succeeds in insulting the EU-president in a relatively amusing way, but he also points to the silliness of the Belgian nationstate. And I'm not talking about the six parliaments and unstable federal governments (elections approximately every two years, latest on June 9th 2010) but their telecoms industry.

I Nigel Farages harang mot EU:s president Herman van Rompuy för några veckor sedan lyckas han inte bara med att på ett ganska träffande, men elakt, sätt förolämpa EU-presidenten, utan också påtala fånigheter i den belgiska nationalstaten. För min egen del kan jag sympatisera med honom, men då inte på grund av dess sex parlament eller ostabila federala regering (omval i snitt vartannat år, senast 9 juni i år) utan på grund av deras telekomindustri.

Politiker får inte vara politiskt inkorrekta. Att stödja civil olydnad är dock, i alla fall i Sverige, inte någonting onormalt. Vänstern gör det, Miljöpartiet gör det, LUF gör det, många socialdemokrater och moderater, även om konservativa element och SSU båda ställt sig emot företeelsen.