Category Archives: society

Girlfriends & the arrow of time

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di090729

“I want a girlfriend, too” says this barely legal teen from the anime Please Teacher. You’d think people would outgrow that want when they grow old enough to marry, but evidently not.

First off, let me preface this by saying that this is not a declaration of hate toward those I write about here.  Some of my best friends have girlfriends.  Well, at least one, but some very likable acquaintances too.  And in so far as I may seem to assert my smug superiority, remember that it is not mine, but belongs to all of humankind, reaching back to the dawn of civilization, and is free to receive by all who wish to be worthy of it, and even me who am not.

Now, as I said above, it is natural for a young boy to want a girlfriend. I don’t think I need to go into much more detail about that, at least today.  What I find disturbing is people aged 25, 30, or even 40, casually talking about their “girlfriend” or “boyfriend”.  And I don’t mean this merely in a linguistic sense, that they should say “womanfriend” or “manfriend” instead.  Although I suppose that would kind of highlight one aspect of this.

Basically what I react to is the lying, which I suppose is really a form of hypocrisy. This  fits with the phrase being quite common in the USA, whereas European languages tend to go for a somewhat more realistic phrase like “lover”, “fiancée” or here in Norway “kjæreste” (“dearest”) which used to be another word for fiancé/e.  Although I have seen the word corresponding to “girlfriend” seeping in here too, to some degree, probably because of the cultural wind from the west. Mostly we Scandinavians use the word “samboer” (cohabitant) however, if actually living together rather than just visiting.

Is the girlfriend just a girl who is also a friend?  Rarely, except sometimes when used by straight women.  Rather, it usually refers to some kind of informal or temporary spouse, or nearly so.  Sometimes an actual fiancée. Sometimes a part-time spouse, though I’d say that is rather uncommon.  Anyway, there is usually sex and some degree of mingled economy.

So why this immature name and, in some cases, immature behavior?  I can see how this took root among people whose main anchor in life was the next fix of their illegal drug. If I remember correctly, it was in this or some related milieu it first started to take off here in Norway.  But when I see it on a forum dedicated to self-improvement and personal growth, I have to wonder how it got this far.  What is wrong with following the simple basic regulations for civilized life that we have had since the Bronze Age at the very least?

I had started thinking about this before I left the city and went home.  I was still thinking about it as I was mowing the lawn (again!), and I asked myself once again: “Why can’t they just marry?”

At that point my mowing had brought me all the way to the hedge that separates me from the neighbors, and without planning to eavesdrop, I could not help hear the woman on the other side of the hedge ask someone: “Why can’t they just marry?”  I mowed on and did not get the full explanation, but evidently it was not quite that simple.

Well, evidently it isn’t quite that simple, and I suppose the childlike name of the relationship gives some clue as to why.   Despite being old enough that biologically they could have grandchildren, people are still “not ready” for the commitment of marriage. They are ready for the sex and the quarreling and frequently for having babies, though. WTF? And I mean that quite literally.

Here in Scandinavia there are certain tax and welfare incentives for single parents to remain single, but since long ago this only applies if they don’t have any children with the person they are currently living with. So there is the perverse situation that if you have a child together, you get richly rewarded for breaking up.  Evidently the mostly socialist governments we have had over the past generation felt that it is important that a child not grow up with both its biological parents. Anyone else, just not the actual parent.  I won’t elaborate on the idiocy of the Left this time, however.  Anyone with an ounce of common sense can see how crazy that policy is.  But even in the face of losing their tax breaks and welfare, there are numerous couples who stay together. But marry? No way.

Note that I am not the biggest ever fan of marriage.  I see duonormativity as way overhyped. You will never find the person who can make you happy, because you ARE the person who can make you happy.  Well, not counting God I suppose, but I think even God would do that mainly by changing you into a person who did happiness-promoting things instead of unhappiness-promoting things.  In fact, pretending to be a Christian or Jew or Hindu or Buddhist (probably moderate Muslim as well) and living according to their tenets would probably make the average person happier even if he did not for a moment believe in the supernatural.

But pretending to be a barely legal teenager when you’re old enough to have grandkids is unlikely to make you happy, nor those around you.

Of course, you may vehemently disagree with most of the above.  That does not really bother me, since my happiness or lack thereof is very much unrelated to your marital status.  I’m not one of the “OMG your gaiety / polygamy / fornication is threatening my marriage GTFO!” types, although who knows how much of that comes from me not being married in the first place. One would assume that we singles threaten people’s marriage a lot more than e.g. gays do, unless one is (or is married to) a very bi-curious person.

But even if you disagree with me (and good luck with that), you have to admit that it is kind of cool to have my neighbor voicing my thoughts without even seeing me. Scratch up one more for time reversal!

Finished ripping CDs

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di090703

Two bags with my favorite CDs, which I once assumed I would leave behind when I died, hopefully far into the future. Now in the trash they go.

Finished at last! Every CD I could find is ripped to the hard disk, and a backup is made to an external disk.  The CDs from USA and Europe are stuffed in bags to throw in the trash, those that are not there already.  I keep the Japanese ones, for now. I originally planned to keep the CDs from my favorite artists:  Enya, Leonard Cohen, Chris de Burgh.  They are all awesome, compared to pretty much anyone else, in that the consistently make good songs and perform them themselves with great enthusiasm.  And they fill up all or much of the CD with good songs instead of spacing it out with one good song and 9 boring on each CD. So I was really planning to keep them, until the Jammie Thomas judgment. Now I am not planning to have an American or European CD in the house ever again.  Nor do I intend to buy any from online shops like iTunes etc.  They had their chance, and they blew it.  This means war.

I have decided on Sound Converter, a Linux program, to make all the tracks into MP3 files for easy streaming.  The Opera Unite music streaming program only handles that format.  Unfortunately it also panics at the sight of non-ASCII characters.  Perhaps it thinks they are malicious code?  I am still not sure what to do with my Japanese music in that regard, I have found English translations for one (DearS) but may have to either translate or transliterate the others manually, a Herculean task, although not Sisyphean.  As it is, just converting the hundreds of non-Japanese CDs will likely take weeks, as my Linux CD at home is so old, it is slow even with Xubuntu.

Once the tracks are converted, I intend to use Opera Unite to stream them so my friends around the world can listen to them.  That’s illegal, of course: According to the recent Norwegian law about intellectual property, it is illegal to play music for your family. You can only perform copyrighted works at home if you do so “without the help of strangers”. Since your stereo is almost certainly made by strangers, using it to play for your spouse and kids could get you arrested.

That is not very likely though, because the police is locked up in a long struggle with the government.  They are refusing to work overtime – crimes should please be committed during office hours until further notice.   Things have been going sour over a very long time:  The Norwegian police was reorganized, as are pretty much every tentacle of government, including the one in which I worked.  And like that one, the police also found themselves doing more work for the same pay, and less meaningful work as well. As far as I know this has been the outcome of every “reorganization” in public sector in Norway, as it probably is everywhere else.  Anyway, after years of this they have had enough.  So they are doing only what they absolutely have to do.  And this means as long as we have crazy people running around doing actual crimes, there won’t be police left over to make sure I don’t let my best friends listen to my favorite music.

Trade Day again

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di090702

Unfortunately, the rest of you is gradually going to get bigger and bigger too, until you’re just a quivering mound of fat.  Luckily it takes decades to run its course.

I had forgotten that the first Thursday of July is Trade Day (or Day of Commerce) in Kristiansand, year after year.  It seems to usually take me by surprise.  Not so the people of the surrounding countryside.  I did notice on the commute bus that it was fuller than usual.  In fact, there was hardly a free seat by the time we came to the city.  Still it was not until I saw the crates on the pavement that I remembered.

Extremely regular readers may remember that I have reported from Trade Day almost yearly. In particular the sight of an unusual number of chubby housewives, or something like that, invading the city for the occasion.  My primary theory is that they come from the surrounding countryside, but I have no explanation why women outside the city would be visibly fatter than those in it.  So I have also speculated that maybe these come from the same area as their slightly slimmer sisters, but that they stay out of sight except in dire emergencies, such as half price on frying pans.

In any case, they are back, and they are fatter than ever.  In fact, I think this is getting too far. Perhaps I should say, even I think so.  I find chubby women decorative, but this goes beyond merely chubby.

I’ll briefly repeat my observation of body mass and femininity.  Skinny women, with some few exceptions, tend toward the boyish, or “unisex” perhaps more correctly.  When they fatten up, they normally become more womanly:  Their cheeks grow rounder, their breasts grow larger and heavier, their hips and buttocks grow larger and rounder, and their thighs softer.  But at some point – which varies from family to family, it seems – this process stops.  Perhaps all the feminine fat cells are filled to the max. Whatever the reason, further weight gain seems to just settle wherever there is free space on the body, gradually transforming their feminine curves to a quivering mound of fat.  And once again, they become near indistinguishable from their equally fat brethren. Unisex again.

There is also the detail that it looks unhealthy.  At some point you know that these people will have a problem walking up stairs or a hillside, in extreme cases perhaps even on flat ground, though there are still few of those around here.  But we are starting to see more and more American conditions.  And we know that Americans spend a lot of money on their health and get rather less health for it.  Some claim that this is because socialized medicine is inherently superior in some way.  I think it can all be explained by the fact that most Americans are fat and lazy.  And now we’re getting there too, even the women.  It reminds me of a comment I once saw to the effect that America is a shining lighthouse, and the purpose of a lighthouse is so other people can steer clear of it, not straight at it!

Apart from that, the day was hot but despite the blue sky there was a fairly strong breeze that kept the city from overheating completely.  There was much less wind in the valley where I live, however, so I did not get the house cooled down until right now, around midnight.  Even then it is barely bearable.  Sleep quality (and even quantity) suffers from the heat.  Ironically the basement is downright chilly.  I should have rented that instead, I sometimes think.

I can’t imagine how people can stand being fat in this weather.  Fat is a good insulator, to the point where whales and seals use it to survive the cold of the arctic waters. And unlike clothes, you can never take it off. Wouldn’t it be nice if humans put on weight in the autumn and lost it again in spring? In Brian Aldiss’ Helliconia trilogy there is such a mechanism, but then again the seasons there last for centuries.  I suppose “bone fever” is not really an alternative here on Earth. Although I do expect to lose a few pounds during the Mexican flu, if I survive it.  And it seems all but a few people do.  But that is a concern for another time, if ever.

Jammie Thomas pays my music

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di090619

In the trash they go. There will be no new ones.

Jammie Thomas, one of the most ordinary people in the western world, was just fined nearly 2 million dollars for having made 24 songs available for upload on the file sharing service Kazaa. (The songs became available for upload because she downloaded them – this is the nature of most file sharing systems.)

I get the impression that the court’s decision did not spark much controversy in the USA, and this seems reasonable:  Americans are used to farcical trials, where the best paid lawyers win more or less by default; so much more when the opponent does not belong to the ruling ethnicity. For us Europeans it seems strange, but once you get to know a number of Americans, you realize how little faith they have in the judicial system.  And if neither the particular crime nor punishment has any direct consequence for you, you just ignore it.  Mind your own small business.

The reaction here in Scandinavia is very different.  A wave of hate  and contempt is sweeping Norway (the homeland of “So sue me” DVD-Jon) and neighboring Sweden (harbor of The Pirate Bay). Particularly the younger generation vow to never buy a CD again. I am not sure they will stick to that always, but probably as long as they can effortlessly download the songs from file sharing sites.  Certainly whatever sting their conscience may have offered them before is now gone, nay reversed:  A deep sense of righteous glee filling them each time they get to stick it to the fascist recording industry and the corrupt governments that allow it to run rampant over the back of the poor.

My reactions are more mixed. I developed a pretty large software package for certain businesses a couple decades ago, and I remember the murderous rage I felt at the thought of people stealing it.  I would not particularly mind seeing them in debt for the rest of their life – actually how I felt at the time was that they were not really human and their lives worthless.  Of course, this is true most of the time for most of us, but I was still projecting much of that then, thus the intensity of feeling.  Objects and random strangers cannot incite such intense emotions, they always need to have an anchor inside us.

For the young and angry virtual mob, the anchor is no doubt the reasonable fear because they too have been sharing songs online, and probably more than 24 of them at that. The thought that their entire lives could be ruined any random day and that there is nothing they can do about it would be pretty upsetting.  (This does not in any way change the fact that this was a gross miscarriage of justice and should never have happened.) Personally I have bought and paid for my hundreds of CDs, which I am throwing away, except for the Japanese ones.  I am even more motivated to get rid of them now.  I do not really want to have physical objects in my house associated with the cRIminal Association of America and its lickspit running dogs here in Norway.

Actually downloading music used to be legal here in Norway, until the current mainly Social Democrat government changed it. Their minister of culture is still supporting the record label industry, whereas the state’s less political privacy watchdog is pulling in the opposite direction.  This is no great wonder, for the Social Democrat leadership is strongly in favor of the European Union, from which we got the current law.  This again makes sense since the EU is dominated by Social Democrats. As such it has an extensive bureaucracy with many leading positions that may be available to former politicians who have been good at wagging their tail, and with no more need for elections to maintain your status.

When I was young – in the 1970es – we had cassette recorders, which people used to play music casettes they had bought, but probably more often songs they had recorded from the radio or copied from one another.  This had been going on since the days of the spool tape recorder, about half a century ago.  Kids these days have probably not seen those contraptions, but I have one stashed away in a closet here, as well as a couple tapes with songs copied form Light knows where.  (Although by far most of my tapes are recordings of meetings at conferences in the Christian Church, popularly known as Smith’s Friends. I am keeping these for as long as the tapes may still last, or I do, lest they be lost forever.)

OK, that’s a pretty roundabout entry.  But I am currently working on getting Opera Unite running stably on my machine, so I can stream all those thousands of songs I have bought and paid to friend and family.  (Who else but friends and family would wade through a blog like this?)

I will come back to the actual address of my music streaming server if I get it to work stably. So far it stops working on my home machine with Windows, my old Linux machine is too weak to pull it, and the new Linux machine is only active a few hours a day.  But my intention is good, at least.  ^_^

The awakening society

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di090418

I think it’s really cool when people try their best to help others. (Instead of, say, watching anime all evening…)

Awakening, Enlightenment, Higher Consciousness – we tend to associate this with hermits, Zen monks and New Agers going “ooommm”. Awakening to higher states of consciousness is indeed a very private, personal thing. But consistently living at a higher level of consciousness has consequences for those around us, as has living at a low level. What would happen if the average citizen put a little more “ooommm” in their life?

I am not proposing that you do this instead of caring for your kids or earning your own living. Rather, that one takes some time from watching TV (which is usually actively harming the mind. ) The television keep you in a constant state of moderate stress with its frequently shifting images, while you are helpless to influence what you see. This wears down your body and brain. Meditation is a scientifically proven anti-stress. Or you could choose any other “sitting practice”, such as prayer or lectio divina (holy reading) if you are religious (which is not as bad as it looks – the guys on TV are not representative of real religion). For those fearful of both religion and mysticism, at least set aside some time each day for contemplation of beauty, whether it is a piece of visual art or a timeless musical composition. The scientifically inclined may want to experiment with brainwave entrainment.

Meditation and other “sitting practices” make you more aware. Biologically, they reduce stress and restore natural rhythms to the body. Mentally, they calm the frenzied churning of the mind so you can think and feel more clearly. Subjectively, the constant “now” that we live in seems to expand, infused by eternity. But what about the social dimension?

First off, the growth in awareness is not something new and magical. All of us have grown in awareness through our life. We started as a purely biological parasite with no awareness whatsoever. We gradually became aware of ourselves and the distinction between self and (m)other. Then we grew in awareness through many years of play and learning, a time of great confusion that hopefully lessened as more of the pieces came together. When we grew up, we learned to think beyond the purely selfish and beyond the moment. You can say our circle of awareness expanded in space as well as time. This process continues in some adults, and they become mature. Others don’t.

The acute problems in any society comes from those who are severely lacking maturity. The rank and file criminal falls squarely in this category. Unable to think beyond his selfish wants to empathize with others, unable to see the consequences of his actions in future time, he acts without forethought or afterthought, tossed by the waves of his excitement and the manipulations of others. Their severe lack of maturity is seen in their toddler-like sense of entitlement.

But crime is not the only fruit of low awareness. Unreflected sexual behavior brings broken hearts and unloved children, not to mention the spread of diseases ranging from nuisance to slow, painful death. Impulsive shopping causes shortages further ahead and sells us into varying degrees of slavery. It is also one of the biggest sources of family tension. And it destroys the environment by squandering resources and overflowing the landfills with yesterday’s shiny things.

In our social life, lack of awareness and maturity quickly gets on other people’s nerves. Those who are more mature think we are idiots for being whiny and self-centered for no reason. Those who are not more mature still think we are idiots, but because we hog the spotlight and don’t realize that they are the center of the universe. While having common enemies may still keep us together, deep and lasting friendships are hard to maintain unless we have grown to care about others and give them room to be themselves. Instead we get dysfunctional pairings between the needy and the intrusive, or between the martyr and the persecutor.

These pairing frequently form the basis of family life as well. But while an immature person may be great fun in the bedroom, they are that much more vexing elsewhere. And the worst of the horrors is an immature parent, which brings the madness on to the next generation, distorting their tiny minds and making it hard for them to grow and mature naturally themselves. Luckily some in each generation manage to find other role models, or we would have been doomed to an endless cycle of madness.

Now, it would be cool if we all reached Satori, Nirvana or whatever your name is for the ultimate Enlightenment. But my claim is that just a little more awareness would do a world of good. For the criminals, this would unfortunately have to be enforced from outside. But the rest of us have the choice to set aside a little time on a regular basis to work on our consciousness. And it is the regular practice that does it, even if it is only a little.

What would life be if people were a little more mature? They would be calmer, not showering you with their stress like a wet dog shaking itself before you. They would be happier, more content and grateful; instead of whining so much, they would smile more and be excited about opportunities for themselves and others. They would be less selfish, more willing to share, more trustworthy and more willing to trust others. They would have more friends and fewer rivals. They would be wiser, managing their time and money better. They would show up in time and not having to run off in a hurry; they would live simpler lives and have a little time and money to spare for those who actually need a helping hand. They would not be quick to judge others, but on the other hand they would be able to admit their own mistakes and even apologize and try to make things better.

Life in a more aware society would not be paradise or utopia. While meditation and wisdom may protect against many accident and illnesses, eventually we all sicken and die. Finite resources would still be finite, even if we used them more wisely. There would presumably still be earthquakes, hurricanes and tsunamis. But everyday life would be a lot better than it is now. And it is pretty good now compared to how it used to be. There is nothing that keeps us from making a better world for ourselves and your children. Nothing but our own excuses.

Long Friday again

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I am writing this on Good Friday, arguably the holiest day in the year here in Norway. For while most people here doubt that Jesus returned from the dead, at least in any literal or physical sense, they certainly believe he died. Not all are equally excited about this, of course, but out of respect for our 1000 years of Christianity and the values those years imparted, the country grinds to a halt already on Thursday and is utterly closed down on Friday. Only life-saving work is still done, like in hospitals and on animal farms. Not without reason is this day called Langfredag (Long Friday) here in Norway. It certainly gives time to think, although most of us go out of our way to avoid that. With computers everywhere these days, that’s pretty easy. But even before the Information Age, most city people traveled to the mountains to spend the holy days skiing. That way they did not need to go to church, as there were no churches there, and hear the creepy story about suffering and redemption.

(Long essay deleted here for theological reasons.  And also because 10 PM became 3 AM.)