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You're most likely right in believing that there is no God, that homeopathy is bullshit and so on. Those are definitely not the worst beliefs you can have.

But there is something that a lot of you seem to think: That you have reached some sort of point where you can look at the world objectively from. That you having the beliefs you have is completely based on your own rational thought processes and has nothing to do with the culture you live in, the information you've been fed from the outside world etc.

You do have prejudices. You have so many prejudices that it would be a hopeless task to fact check them all. Some of them are useful and more or less correct. Others are just wrong. But you wouldn't be able to navigate this strange world if you didn't have them, for instance if you didn't base how you treat people on ideas you have about how such and such people are. You can never be a blank sheet, a tabula rasa. You probably don't appreciate biblical references (I do! It has some interesting stories in it, and it has formed our culture in ways I doubt you are able to escape, however hard you try), but: You know the log in your eye? That's what you see with.
I understand that you care about having the Right Beliefs, or at least as close as you can possibly get.
You can use as much logical thinking as you want, but it won't help you if you don't have an understanding of context. What ideas and events have influenced you throughout your life, from your parents, the school system, the Internet and what ideas and events have influenced the people you're talking to/with/about?
Finding the time to have the Right Opinions about Life, the Universe and Everything is a privilege, and not very high on the list of elementary human needs. Beyond their physical and emotional needs, humans mostly just need a set of ideas that bring meaning to their life. Religion is often the safest way to get that. Coupled with heavy social pressure, it is also the easiest. And even then: People are more than their religions, genders, genitals, political ideas and favorite music. They're complex, but of course you have to simplify things to be able to engage with the world. Just keep the complexity in mind when you do so.
And remember that it's never an excuse, at least not after the first time.

By the way, you're not the end point of human thinking. You're just recycled half-assed 19th century positivists.

All even remotely successful empires and states in human history have had to rely on some sort of ideology to legitimize itself, from the God-kings of Sumer to fascist and communist states in the 20th century. Today, it's harder to spot than before. There are few signs of any personality cult. No great, overarching ideas. Just some mostly empty phrases about freedom, democracy and human rights.

But in a backroom somewhere, faceless suited figures hiss into the ears of "your" elected official: "THE MARKETS DEMAND IT." He obeys, and willingly complies with the markets' demands. There is little room for questioning. Politics is just administration and theatre. Nevermind the possibility that "the market" is not a metaphysical being, some sort of deity demanding regular sacrifices to save us from oblivion. Nevermind the possibility that what is really happening is that the decision-making process is being moved somewhere less accessible for us mere mortals. "THE MARKETS DEMAND IT." the voices keep hissing, impatiently.

The distinction between good - bad and non-sinful - sinful seems to have been partly replaced by healthy - unhealthy and normal - abnormal. Get exercise, eat healthy, be happy, or at least go through the motions and pretend to be. Social media leaves plenty of room for keeping a facade (the vague sense of being a fraud that gives you is useful by the way, it makes you less prone to going after the real frauds).

"We have discovered happiness," -- say the Last Men, and they blink. Perhaps we are a variation of the Last Men Nietzsche wrote of in Thus Spake Zarathustra.
^{(By the way I am skeptical of the idea that history of humanity is moving towards any sort of end point, other than our own eventual extinction. If we are approaching something similar to Nietzsche's Last Men, I doubt that those will truly be The Last Men. There will be something afterwards, and I don't think any of us will like it.)}

The world is full of nice people who are blind to the injustices around them. They appreciate human warmth. It keeps sentimentality in force, for it satisfies the craving for good feelings towards oneself and the world. One still loves one's neighbor and rubs against him, for one needs warmth. But this sentimental search for warmth and fuzziness is disconnected from the idea of having to do anything for other people. One might even have pity on those who suffer, but it is a distant thought that one personally should intervene and try to change the existing conditions. They refuse to admit that declarations of sincere compassion are binding and must be accompanied by deeds, they live in an imaginary world in which few things leave traces and where there are no serious consequences. People are offered the choice between Diet Coke and Diet Pepsi, but this brand of Diet Nihilism has little competition. I think we ought to give it some.

So, what are we to do?
Expand the definition of "normal" so it's a comfortable space to exist in for real people. Real people are weird. They can try to repress it, and many people try, but then it just oozes out at the other end and that can be truly TERRIFYING.
How?
By being and behaving like real people. Weird, but not zany. It might involve shouting at buildings. It definitely involves showing empathy. And not just to your own kin. It involves compassion, and anger, and getting involved in your surroundings. Realizing that the world does not revolve around yourselves, and that pretending it does eventually will break your necks. It involves not giving a few less fucks about the dominant ideologies of POSITIVITY and HEALTHINESS and NORMALITY, and instead just having a good time and being a decent human being. (This is very much a reminder to myself.)

It probably won't save us from anything. But at least we won't be playing Candy Crush while Rome burns.

Or Kill Me

I think these truths are pretty damn well-established:

• People are insecure bastards, young people even more so.
• A consumer economy depends on people buying more and more stuff.

Consequently, the emergence of a distinct youth culture in the 20th century opened up an entire new market: Profitting from young people's feelings of inadequacy by selling them stuff. The clever thing about this is that the stuff never remedies it completely. They promise you a sense of belonging if you buy this or that, it helps for a while but it doesn't last. So the kids buy more stuff. Repeat ad infinitum. They can never be enough.
I have an 8 year old half-sister, the pressure to conform is remarkable even at that age. And it doesn't get better.
Even young political radicals are afraid as hell of being tagged in a Facebook or Instagram photo with the wrong guy or not wearing the customary uniform. A communist kid is afraid of turning up at a meeting and being the only one without a keffiyeh.
I think it's important to realize that you can never be enough, never have enough, never do enough, not that way. You'll always feel inadequate when you view yourself in the imagined eyes of others.
You're afraid of being perceived as weak. You're afraid of being judged by others. You're afraid to open up to others. But if you do open up to someone, you'll soon find that it's not "you". It's WE. And you'll find that the fear is not isolating you from the rest of humanity, but us from each other.

#1
Last night I dreamed that posted a link on Facebook to a song I had written. Lots and lots of people commented, hundreds, many of them I had no idea who were. My dream consisted of just watching the stream of comments coming, some of it read in the voice of those who posted them. Someone made some stupid remark, misogynistic I think, and this was replied to with long angry ranting. This was responded to with more angry ranting. In the end there was lots of caps lock and exclamation marks but no communication. People just shouted their opinions (completely unrelated to my song!) out loud with their ears closed and rode their own personal hobby horses to the brink of death. They didn't notice each other, they didn't notice other people's arguments. It was sad. I choose to interpret this dream as a metaphor for humanity.

#2
Isolation is nice. I like it, though you turn slightly crazy from it. You get a different perspective on how the world works, more unfiltered maybe. You get time to rethink things, think about how you relate to other human beings. I've noticed that I appreciate my interactions with humans a lot more now that I live in this cabin

But even though I enjoy solitude, I also need other people to avoid becoming lonely. Few things make me feel better than good conversations, or even just the quiet presence of another person.

I also need other people there to correct me, because sometimes I'm completely wrong. Many times. Terribly wrong.

#3
It is hereby decreed that:
LIFE is too short and nasty, and the world too full of shit, for good people to be allowed to walk around without being appreciated, without being let to know that they, by existing, make the/my world a little bit warmer, a little bit friendlier and a little bit more beautiful.

THIS DECREE SUPERSEDES ALL SOCIAL ANXIETY

#4
Note to self after today's dinner: Not everything needs to bathe in fat.

#5
The concept of normality is strange.
You can be a huge fucking asshole and still be considered normal. You can wear slightly weird clothes, behave slightly weird, talk slightly weird, look slightly weird and suddenly you're an outsider. It doesn't really surprise me then, that half of Norway seems to be mentally ill at times, when the idea of normality is so narrow that you almost need to be crazy to fit in. We live in an awfully conformist society. I want to fight for a warmer and weirder society with a more inclusive idea of what normality is.

#6
Eurovision. Russia wants us to "bury our guns" LOL

#7
All the children watched the Teletubbies
Except for Serge
He read Apollinaire's Les onze mille verges

#8
There should be scholarships for people who just want to live alone in the woods and drink beer and think about stuff.

(there are a lot more of them, I just have to separate the interesting ones from my attempts at gibberish poetry and thought experiments about sharing a joint with Franz Kafka)

(to be handed out on door-to-door visits)

WHO WAS ERIS?
"Thetis and Peleus had just gone off to the bridal chamber, conducted by Amphitrite and Posidon, when Eris came in unnoticed—which was easy enough; some were drinking, some dancing, or attending to Apollo's lyre or the Muses' songs—Well, she threw down a lovely apple, solid gold, my dear; and there was written on it, FOR THE FAIR. It rolled along as if it knew what it was about, till it came in front of Hera, Aphrodite, and Athene." Lucian of Samosata (125-180 AD), Dialogues of the Sea Gods

- Eris was the ancient Greeks' goddess of chaos, strife and discord.

- One day, Zeus was holding a banquet on Mount Olympus in celebration of the marriage of Peleus and Thetis (the parents of Achilles, you know that guy with the heel?).

- Because of her reputation for being a bit of a troublemaker, Eris was not invited. This is what we Discordians like to call the ORIGINAL SNUB.

- Angered by this snub, she threw a golden apple with the inscription kallisti ("for the fairest one") into the party, leading the goddesses Hera, Athena and Aphrodite to all claim the apple for themselves.

-Reluctant to favor anyone of those claims, Zeus delegated the task to a Trojan prince called Paris, poor sod.

- Hera offered power and Athena offered wisdom and skill in war, but Paris the hopeless romantic fell for Aphrodite's offer of the most beautiful woman in the world.

- This happened to be Helen, wife of the Greek king Menelaus. Paris took Helen with him to Troy, making both the Greeks and a lot of Gods awfully angry. The Greeks subsequently attacked Troy to retrieve Helen, and the Trojan War was suddenly a thing.

PREPARE FOR THE FINAL SNUBBING!

- This prank didn't do much to restore her reputation as a troublemaker, and Eris rarely got invited to the heavenly parties at Mount Olympus, leading Eris to feel even more snubbed.

- But now things are changing. Eris will soon be throwing a giant party for her followers, with 144,000 invitees.

- You are not one of them. We are.

- We will party wildly into eternity, dancing, drinking, shouting, screaming, having the greatest time ever. You won't.

- We will witness. Eris' glorious revenge over Zeus and company. You won't.

- HA HA. MILLIONS NOW LIVING WILL NEVER REALLY LIVE!

Hello, humans.
Be nice now, or I'll shove Jesus Christ up your butts so he STICKS.

Hello, child traffickers.
I'm donating your genitals for medical research. I'm generally a very forgiving and tolerant person who believes the best of everyone, but FUCK YOU. I'd rather shake hands with your feces than with you.

Hello, every single one of the hundreds of you who passed by the newly-dead corpse of a junkie in Oslo Central Station last summer without thinking anything other than "EW GET THEM OUT OF HERE"
FUCK FUCK FUCKETY FUCK YOU.

FUCK THE SOCIAL LAZINESS THAT MADE KITTY GENOVESE DIE.

Hello, this weird euphoric rage seizure I'm having.
Who are you? What are you? Why did you get into my body?

(I'll call it "observation from an exhausted angry wasteland")

dear people who lead
and you who lead them from behind
dear corporate bosses, dear bankers, dear statesmen
go on, drink your wine.
but unlike in your youth
now, to tell you the truth:

that's not cocaine,
that powder you're snorting

IT'S CRUSHED BABY SKULLS.

[Fear and lots of unjustified paranoia in Belarus - a bunch of impressions from a short stay in Lukachenkoland,]

Subtitle: Fear and lots of unjustified paranoia in Belarus - a bunch of impressions from a short stay in Lukachenkoland,

(Quickly scribbled down a few months after the actual trip.)

Other than the sounds of the profoundly weird Latvian language, the flight from Oslo to Riga was quite normal, like any regular European international flight really. The continuing flight from Riga to Minsk less so. The language switched to Russian, the aircraft was much smaller. We flew, shakily, over the misty woodlands of the former Soviet Union. There were us, two Swedes and about fifty others, fifty filthy Russian-speaking others.

We landed at what looked like the lair of a 70s James Bond villain. Some of the passengers got their luggage practically straight out of the aircraft, but we had already entered the shuttle bus to the arrival hall when we noticed our bags. Panic. We're in Belarus, and I think we just lost our luggage.
We walked up one anonymous, nearly unmarked stair to the right, bought the mandatory state health insurance, filed our visa applications and after a short wait, they gave us our visas and we could continue out of the airport. To our great relief we found the bags at the luggage belt.
Minsk-2 airport was gloomy and unfriendly, but in an indifferent sort of way. And unlike at JFK, there are no queues or cops everywhere with guns in their belts.
Few questions were asked and nobody ever got confrontational toward us.
We were relieved and slightly discomforted when we finally got out.

The two Swedish men on the plane seemed to be diplomats, but they bought health insurance and went through a similar visa procedure to us. Why? Well, in July a Swedish PR firm dropped a bunch of parachuted teddy bears carrying pro-democracy flyers from a plane over Belarus. Soon after, President Lukachenko fired a bunch of leading government officials for not bombing the hell out of those bears, and cut off all diplomatic relations with Sweden. The embassies on both sides are still closed.

Coming out of customs, we were met by a man who held a sign with my name on it. That's probably them, we thought, and got into his car. Then I got a text saying "Where are you guys? We're still waiting for you at the airport!". Panic #2. Where the fuck were we going now? To a secret KGB detention facility? Brother Leader Lukachenko's GULAG camps?
The hotel, apparently. The people in The Organization back in Norway had booked a hotel with an airport transfer voucher included, but failed to notify The Belarusians, who had to wait at the airport for no reason at all.

Minsk is a Stalinist masterpiece dotted with adverts for Lays Chips and McDonalds. The outskirts of the city are grim, grey and misty, with endless rows of identical numbered apartment blocks, in one of which Lee Harvey Oswald once lived. The city center is stunning. The parks are beautiful. The Palace of the Republic and the KGB HQ simply screams "WE ARE THE STATE. DON'T DARE FUCK WITH US." There's armed police and soldiers everywhere, so avoiding taking pictures seemed like a good idea to us.
The hotel was supposedly a high quality hotel back in the early 90s when there was still hope that Belarus would open up to the world, but was quite mediocre now. At the breakfast buffet "mixed vegetables" meant cucumber and tomato and "fruit" meant oranges. The import beer seemed watered out. The hotel room may or may not have been wiretapped, we decided to assume it was.
Belarus put us on the defensive, made us search for familiarity. We found a coffee bar that had some nice coffee and English language magazines in it. That helped. We also found several McDonaldses. Nobody spoke English there, but even with everything written in Cyrillic script it isn't that hard to order a Big Mac with Coke and kartoffelfry-something.

Our first morning in this new exciting country, we were picked up by the Opposition Activists. They were a bunch of friendly and trendy people (all in their 20s probably) who drove us to a small town an hour and a half drive away from Minsk. We listened to the Opposition Activists speak in Russian to a bunch of high schoolers who had come chasing rumors of a free lunch. Some of the speeches were translated for us, the essence seemed to be: "Hey, you can actually do something! You can make great culture an start an innovative new business! You have to get out of the old Soviet mentality of expecting free stuff for nothing." I noticed a slide with an angry, red smiley face accompanied by Marx and Lenin quotes, and then another slide with a green, happy smiley face and Ayn Rand and Von Mises quotes. UGH. LIBERTARIANS!?! How sad. I felt my enthusiasm about this project decrease a bit. Later I found out that they were not all libertards, luckily, but a broad coalition of "liberal" people, from center-left to hard minarchist. There are probably Ayn Rand quotes who are useful if you want to promote individualism in a society that sorely needs it, anyway. The kids who asked the "best questions" won a free lunch with the cool and trendy Opposition Activists.

Tom Friedman would have loved what happened next. The Opposition Activists spoke English with varying degress of success. Of the local kids, only one spoke English. Andrey had just spent the last 7 years or so in Greece. Because of his rusty Russian he didn't win the free lunch, but they let him sit with us during the lunch so we could talk. It was a fascinating conversation.
He preferred Greece to Belarus thousandfold. Andrey wanted to return there to study after graduating from high school. He was oblivious about Golden Dawn and said the protests there were just by lazy unemployed people. To him, Belarus was a vastly greater shithole. "Everybody hates the President, everybody's just drinking and drinking and drinking, and they have no hope at all for the future." He looked forward to returning to Greece, to somewhere where the world was flatter.

I don't know exactly how I feel about providing support to politically toothless libertarians, even in a grim dictatorship. At least the fact that they're politically toothless made it easier to get in and out, and enables them to be friendly, welcoming people. The other, vaguely left-or-center-or-something-liberal group The Organization cooperates with is insanely paranoid, full of infighting and secret police informants. But in this case, it seems my paranoia was completely unjustified, mostly because I went to Belarus to meet harmless people who do harmless, rather unproductive things. Belarus is still the worst dictatorship in Europe, but they don't arrest useless foreign political tourists for nothing. To conclude: This was fun and interesting for me, but it also seems pretty pointless in the broader struggle to bring Democracy^TM and Freedom^TM to Belarus.

(Hopefully I'm going to work further on this, add some original thought and so on, but now: Sleep!)

When the Germans invaded Norway in April 1940, Nasjonal Samling, the Norwegian fascist party, reputedly had a few hundred members. At that point, the party was utterly incapable of governing anything. Luckily for them and their leader Vidkun Quisling, thousands of Norwegians joined NS and the membership reached a peak of somewhere around 50000 members in 1943. More importantly, somewhere between 150000 and 200000 Norwegians (out of about 1.4 million who were in work at that time) helped Nazi Germany build airports, military installations, and other infrastructure, and I believe Norwegian subcontractors of German companies are not included in that amount.

O.C. Gundersen was one of the main architects behind the Norwegian legal purge in the aftermath of World War II, in the post-war era he held various top government posts, such as Minister of Justice, ambassador to Moscow, Supreme Court Justice and more. During the invasion in 1940, while the Norwegian Army were still fighting in Northern Norway, the young aspiring Labour politician helped the Germans find thousands of workers to expand Trondheim's airports. This also happened in other parts of Norway. Oliver H. Langeland, leader of the Oslo branch of the resistance organization Milorg during the war, pointed this out in two books he released in 1948 and 1949. Many of his claims were declared null and void, his books were confiscated and he was effectively turned into a non-person. He is strangely absent in all Norwegian literature about WWII and military history older than a few years.

After the war, all members of Nasjonal Samling were collectively convicted of treason for being members of what was a legal political party at the time of the invasion (even though the Norwegian Constitution bans retroactive laws). Even inactive members were fined and labeled as traitors, and faced harassment in the media and the public. 25 NS members were executed, 22 of them with backgrounds in lower social strata, while most war profiteers came out of the war unpunished. Hundreds of Norwegian women who worked for the German Red Cross were convicted for having supported the Nazis. Thousands of so-called "German whores", young Norwegian women (most of them poor) who had sexual relations with German soldiers were interned in prison camps, allegedly to protect them from lynching and the rest of the population from STDs. The government also tried to send their offspring, so-called "German kids", to Australia (though that would probably have been better for them, because of extreme anti-German sentiment in the post-war years).

The short-lived Administration Council appointed by the Supreme Court just after the invasion ordered Norway's main navy yard, weapons and ammunitions factories to resume production, now for the benefit of Nazi Germany. None of these, mostly senior establishment politicians, were persecuted for their actions after the war. Neither were any of the members of Prime Minister Nygaardsvold's Labour government who were given warnings

When 550 Norwegian Jews were taken out of their homes and sent to Auschwitz in November 1942, it was organized by police inspector Knut Rød, who was tried and acquitted for his involvement in this because his actions "were necessary in order for him to perform the other, far, more important resistance work".
Everyone who weren't resisters from the outset of the war were guilty of treason, public figures proclaimed, while behind closed doors they fervently tried (successfully) to explain away their involvement with NS and the Germans. Many government officials stayed in their jobs during the entire war, followed orders from the occupation government, and designed the laws and provisions that got others (who also were "just following orders" and merely embodied their decisions) long jail terms.

In the polarized climate that followed, with "us" (good, decent Norwegians) pitted against "them" (the Germans and Nazi sympathizers), admitting that you're just a normal person who have made a lot of mistakes, during the war and otherwise, wasn't really feasible. You had to be a brave, patriotic Norwegian war hero like the rest of your compatriots supposedly were.

Hey buddy.
If you think depression is cool, you're DOING IT WRONG.
Feeling just a little sad, or cynical or nihilistic isn't depression.
Call me back when you've woken up in the morning one day and your bed is a trench a thousand feet deep with steep cliffs on all sides,
you have no motivation to do anything whatsoever, your life, your friends, your family, your education, your work and all the little things you usually enjoy mean absolutely nothing to you, you feel like just ceasing to exist forever.
Depressions can ruin large parts of your life, or it can be a wake-up call for a change in lifestyle. It may or may not help you get a more accurate view of the universe. But generally it's just a really shitty thing to go through.

Please stop belittling mental illness by wearing faux-depressions to appear "cool" or "intellectual" OR I WILL KILL A MOTHERFUCKER.

OR KILL ME.

(I just felt like writing something, and here it is.)

A few years (15? 20?) into the future. Unnamed developing African country. Internet access has become commonplace. All citizens are equipped with electronic ID tags. After years of stable economic growth, the economy stagnates. People look for scapegoats, ethnic conflict flares up.

So you kinda like your neighbor, but he's a *insert ethnic group* and you're not. Understandably, you wouldn't want to kill the cockroach personally. Okay. That doesn't make you a traitor or a weak man in our eyes. Well... just a little. But we have a solution to that! Just donate a few bucks to our Kickstarter project!
You could also just kill him and his extended family, get looting rights AND you also get this shiny new phone!
Add two more families, and you might win this FANCY NEW CAR
And maybe you want to have dinner with a celebrity? Or an all-inclusive luxury vacation to Mauritius? A fancy new home? You can get all this and more by contributing to our project either financially, physically or both. Clean up the nation and win great prizes!
And remember, kids: Red tags are enemies, blue tags are friends!

In the civilized world, wherever that is in 15-20 years, people will say "Dude. How mean people can be. Africans.."
And nobody will ever track down the money that flowed in from multinational corporations who for some reason wanted the annoying *ethnic group* to go. Perhaps their ancient holy grazing grounds houses an oil field? Arms deals will be made, and injustices self-perpetuate.

Community-based, crowdsourced, crowdfunded - welcome to Genocide 2.0!

Thoughts?
1. Weird timing.
2. I haven't noticed that many wars in Europe lately, so that must count for something.
3. The EU has done a lot to bring Eastern and Western Europe, and Germany and France closer together. North and South? Well..
4. Interesting that this comes from non-EU member Norway, where the EU is very, very unpopular (everything we ever hear is that they're going to take our snus tobacco, our postal services monopoly, our privacy, our workers' rights, our oil, our agriculture and our fish away.)

"When I woke up the first morning, I discovered that my husband had been turned into a giant insect. I will certainly not recommend this hotel to any of my friends!"

I'M NOT KIDDING YOU. CLICK HERE (and then "start").

[Considers casting curse upon football club]

www.nordlys.no/sporten/article6232013.ece (Norwegian)

Considers casting curse upon football club
Referee Mikkel Nils Sara demands an excuse from Lyngen/Karnes. If he doesn't get that, he considers casting a curse upon them. The last club he cast a curse upon got relegated.

L/K came with allegations of match-fixing after the 1-2 defeat in Hammerfest in the weekend, after they had seen assistant referee Sara with a betting coupon at a gas station in advance of the match.

Now Sara demands an apology. The last time he asked for it from a football club, and did not get it, it ended up with him casting a curse upon Hammerfest in 1999.

The team lost game after game, eventually was relegated before coach Terje Hansen settled with Sara. In the meantime, he and the club tried several rituals to get rid of the sorcery - including fishing herring that he sacrificed at a sacrificial stone in Kvalsund.

- I take this seriously, it's serious accusations they make. I have never in my life bet on games I was refereeing. I hope that Lyngen/Karnes give me a call and apologize, and pretty quick. I demand that they do, Mikkel Nils Sara tells Nordlys.
If L/K refuse to apologize, he does not rule out doing what he did in 1999.

Now he's waiting for the team from Northern Troms to make contact.

- We'll see what happens. Maybe they'll contact me, says Sara, who experienced a phone storm yesterday.

He feels that L/K has taken the matter to a level it does not belong on.

- I can hardly talk about it when it sinks so deep. This is a low point, says Mikkel Nils Sara.

First, a few definitions, from the Wikipedia article on this Norwegian tradition/ritual of mass conformism

The russefeiring ('russ celebration') is a traditional celebration for Norwegian high school students in their final spring semester. Students that take part in the celebrations are known as russ. The russefeiring traditionally starts on 1 May and ends on the 17th of May, the Norwegian national day. Participants wear coloured overalls, drive matching cars, vans, or buses, and celebrate almost continually during this period. Promiscuous sex, drunkenness and public disturbance on a mass scale has been the most prominent impact of the celebration in recent decades.

Cards (Russekort)
Most russ have personalized calling cards featuring their name, their photograph and a short slogan. These cards are swapped with other russ and handed out to children and family members. To many children, collecting russ cards is an important activity during May, culminating on May 17.

This is a common russekort template.

So, PD. What I want from you is:
1 small image.
a fake address
a fake phone number
a short text (less than 150 characters)

GO.
This is YOUR opportunity to have your work seen by dozens of kids in the Eastern North Belgian countryside!
(I might translate it into Belgian to make it easier to understand.)

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/howaboutthat/9310530/Half-cat-half-machine-Dutch-artist-turns-dead-cat-Orville-into-the-Orvillecopter.html 

 

Is there a correlation between Beliebers (rabid Justin Bieber fans) and the sort of people that would gladly electrocute a person if told to do so (cf. the Milgram experiment)?

Add more, plz.

[This is a significant part of my thoughts at any given moment:]

This is a significant part of my thoughts at any given moment:
I should probably talk to that girl.                                                                   I should probably put up more posters                  I should probably make that call.                                                                                                                                                           I should probably do my homework.                      I should probably read more books.                           I should probably get out more.                                     I should probably socialize more.                                                                                   Maybe I'll buy myself a lawn mower.                                                        Maybe              I should work harder at school.                  Maybe I'll take a weekend trip to Kyrgyzstan.                                                   Oh, how I wish I could buy myself a reed organ.                                                                          I should probably get a job.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                        I should                                                                                                                                                                                               Probably                                                                                                                                                                                Maybe                                                                                                                                                                                Wish                                                                                                          I should probably get my driver's license soon                                                                                                                                                   I should probably



And this is a bridge:

Now, let's try to connect the two.
The bridge passes over a small river. Obviously, someone has been here before you. Someone built that bridge. Others have been in the same situation as you. And succeeded. Others have fought their anxiety and tried to talk to that cute girl or guy you always notice at school or the record store or whatever. Others have been out of money but managed to save up enough for a reed organ or a vacation to Kyrgyzstan or whatever. They tried to cross the bridge. The bridge is a bit unstable, so they either managed to cross the bridge or fell off it and into the water. The river is not particularly deep. If you manage to drown you are either very unlucky or multihandicapped, basically. The only thing that will happen to you if you fall off the bridge is you'll get wet. The water's cold, and getting wet is uncomfortable, but it's not the end of the world. You can get up easily, and either run away or try to cross the bridge over to the Magical Forest of Adventure and Unknown Things.

Remember, there are larger rivers in the world. The river that you just crossed is just a tributary of a larger river. Some rivers don't have bridges. Those are real challenges. You drown, you die.

But here, at this moment, right now, the challenge isn't really that big. Getting paralyzed by uncertainty over things you can handle easily is not very useful. It's as counterproductive as can be.

That's it. I'm saving my anxiety for the situations where death and life actually are at stake.

turns me into Billy Joel. HELP!

[agreed]

I live in what is generally assumed to be one of the happiest, best, most wonderful countries of the world, namely Norway.
I sometimes feel like I live in a bubble.
If I do okay in school, my chances of getting a relevant job after completing my formal education are high. Our few terrorists are home-grown. Together with Iceland and Liechtenstein we form an exclusive little club of countries who want to be part of the EU but not really*. My advantageous situation is mostly because of a bunch of oil (that used to be located) somewhere beneath the North Sea, that I don't really feel any connection to**.

I feel like I should be happy, but the only thing I feel is an uncomfortable feeling of emptiness.

It hurts. I think many Norwegians share that feeling. I can't see any other reason why they seem to be in a constant quest for an artificial stimulant that can kill the pain. Around 1990, the Disposable Heroes of Hiphoprisy sung about "television, the drug of the nation". Television is only one drug. We also have alcohol, fitness centers, painkiller pills, sweets, potato chips, gaming consoles, church burnings, computers and other legal or illegal drugs. Life has become an endless series of (mostly futile) attempts at killing pain.

(And they ask why kids do (illegal) drugs? At first, it seems like a welcome escape from a world filled with meaningless and disinteresting artificial stimulants. But the drug is just another artificial stimulant. Eventually, it becomes meaningless and disinteresting to you, but now you also have an addiction that's devouring you from the inside. And it seems fucking impossible to get out of it.)

This is why I want rename you, dear Norway. From now on, you will be called the Kingdom of Paracetamol-Ibuprofenia. I have named you after the countless middle-schoolers who eat painkillers during recess like they're lunch snacks. It's not only middle-schoolers who do it, by the way. Everyone does. WORKERS OF THE WORLD, MUNCH PAINKILLERS

Lenin McCarthy,
Just gave a similar rant to his dad. He liked it, and agreed. It's hard to be a rebel these days.
Reminds me: In 1960, an essay collection written by 11 young Norwegian students was released, called I mangel av opprør (in English it would be something like "In absence of rebellion"). I haven't read it, but if something similar were to be done today, the title could very well be identical.



_{*I'm all for the idea of a united Europe, personally. IMHO, Europe won't be happy until the last Englishman is hung with the guts of the last German, stuffed and placed on a podium just outside the European Parliament building.
**I live in a forested river valley in one of the two land-locked counties of Norway.}

(Inspired by the day trip I made to Oslo yesterday with my family)

The ever-shifting sands of the man-made urban desert scare the hell out of me.
Tall grey monsters of concrete and glass.
Spiralling roads and junctions, populated by colorful wheeled insects who all keep at least one human inside their bellies, just to spit them out when the journey ends.

The insects, called cars, are ruminants. They remake man in their own image, through a seemingly endless procedure of chewing, regurgitating, chewing, regurgitating; making them ever more immobile, ever more dependent, ever more digestible.

Less sophisticated than Cro-Magnons, these constructions speak to me in muffled grunts and groans.

Somewhere deep inside, this city has a soul. Old churches, townhouses and parks, sailing steadily through tumultuous waters of urban growth and decay, telling stories about long gone days. These buildings have a history, but they're not just history. They're still in use, existing simultaneously in the past and the present. These buildings live, other buildings just are.

For every concrete colossus that is built, a tiny shrivelled piece of the city's soul flakes off.
The city changes.
I fear change.
I change.
I fear.
I fear-change.

My inner reactionary now wants to stage a coup d'état, with the sole aim to abolish all post-1900 architecture. A final solution must be found to die Modernismus-frage!
I immediately reject the fantasies of my reactionary self. Everything changes, all the time. I'll have to accept that, and encourage the good changes and  fight the bad changes, with democratic means if possible. The soul of a city is a cause worth fighting for.

Some cities don't have souls. Living in a soulless city is death.

This city has one. This singular city, from which no man departs until it has marked him. Living in it must be like getting sucked off by a shark.

We're not the most active board on the internet anymore, I guess you know that already. So I have a couple of suggestions that perhaps might help us increase our activity and get back to getting stuff done:

1.
I think PD should officially endorse Dr. Ron Paul for U.S. President. I can't really come up with any good reason why we shouldn't. He wants to end the war on drugs, pull out of Iraq and Afghanistan, repeal the Patriot Act, yeah, just a lot of things any good Discordian would agree with. The U.S. is in need of a different kind of leader, and Dr. Paul is the right one. He also has a lot of supporters on the internet, and I think it would be awesome if we could point some of them in our direction.

2.
You PDers should seriously do more drugs. They help us gain new perspectives on things, and they also make us feel good. When we gain new perspectives and feel good, we can post loads more on PD about the new ideas we get. Doesn't matter what drug you choose, heck, I tripped on cough syrup a few days ago and it was FUCKING AWESOME. You should try it.

3.
I think one of the main reasons why people are leaving this ship is because they get the impression that we've left Discordianism. I don't see many prayers to Eris, accounts of people having seen the fnords, invitations to Discordian parties where we eat hot dog buns, or anything, really. Sad but true, friends. I'm afraid we've been straying from the true path.

4.
I notice that the Aneristic Illusion forums have been pretty active. Lots of good societal criticism there. But there's one thing I don't get. Why don't we do something about it? Why don't we do something about the cause of all the problems in the world today, namely the government? The government props up the corrupt banks and multinational corporations. The government is corrupt itself. It steals our money, it spends our money on things we don't want, ineffectively at that. The only way out of this is anarchy. That's why I think we should work together to abolish the current violent and corrupt system and replace it with a system of anarchy, freedom and peace. That's a real Discordian thing to do, IMO.

If you decide to follow my advice, I'm certain we will get hundreds of followers, lots of activity, and we'll get to spread shitloads of discord all over the world. Or, we could keep on doing it this way, and Malaclypse the Younger will keep on turning in his grave because of us. Are you with me or against me? Are you a Greyface, or a real Discordian? Take it or leave it.

5 tons of flax,
Lenin

I've been writing songs for about two years now, in every genre imaginable, but mostly quirky-sweet alternative pop songs. I hereby present some of my personal favorites (one of which is an attempt at metal):

The Daily Mail (Every time you read the Daily Mail a kitten dies)
Pekka (Metal in Google Translate Finnish. About a guy named Pekka who lost his wallet in the sauna. He suspects that a cave troll took it.)
Three-Headed Turtle
New Mexico

Language is loaded with metaphor. Time is money. Ideas are buildings. Life is a journey. Good is up, bad is down. Anger is a hot fluid in a container. They're not necessarily the right ones. A while ago I read about a tribe in South America who talk about the future as being behind them, and the past as being in front of them. Sort of makes sense, considering we can "look at" the past and not-so-much the future. We walk backwards into the future, our eyes fixed on the past, as the (supposedly) Maori proverb goes.

Perhaps replacing the current underlying metaphors present in our language with radically different ones could provide us with a completely different reality tunnel?
There's a little problem here, though. The ideal would be to create an entire new, weird-ass language. Most likely, I would be the only speaker of that language. And what's the purpose of a language if you can't use it to communicate? Even if I were to start using metaphors like TIME IS AN INCREASINGLY CROWDED SEGREGATION ERA BUS AND YOU'RE A NEGRO ("This has been a very fun night. Unfortunately I have to leave now because whites want my seat and I'm not a temporal Rosa Parks.") and LIFE IS A GRAPE ("One day we will all meet the grape-stone. Christians believe that Jesus Christ sacrificed himself to give all humans stoneless grapes.") in everyday language, people would have difficulty understanding me. Anyway, I think just being aware of the fact that these metaphors are there can provide us with some perspective. Using the underlying metaphors of our language creatively, for instance by stretching them ad absurdum ("the Art Deco marble columns of Marx' theory about money are sloppily crafted"), can help us and others become aware of them, and recognize that other metaphors could potentially be just as fitting in their place.

Thoughts?

A lot of libertarians, Randites and the likes use arguments about Rights. That they have the Rights of self-determination and self-ownership that trumps all other considerations.  And that therefore, it is their Right to avoid paying taxes, to run brothels and shoot heroin. Of course, this is stupid. No man is a friggin' island. But, where do those Rights come from? A lot of libertarians are atheists, but seem to have no problems with the idea that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights.

The Rights they are speaking of didn't magically appear to John Locke in huge golden letters written in the sky a summer's day in 1687. They are purely social constructs, introduced by those in power so that they could stay in power even after the people got tired of feudalism. That doesn't mean that rights are bad. Becuase of them, in many countries we now have something resembling education, health care, gender equality and other very nice things. But they didn't just appear. Some people, somewhere, fought for them.

Anyway, please stop invoking Rights in political arguments. If you think the War on Drugs is infringing on your Unalienable Right to Smoke Crack Cocaine in Your Mother's Basement, then I have a hard time finding any sympathy to offer ya. Same if you think the Norway's criminalization of buying sexual services is infringing on your Unalienable Right to Take Advantage of Vulnerable Men and Women. Both are harmful, but you're not the one who is suffering in the long term. The people who are suffering are the people who die in the Mexican drug wars. And the Nigerian women who go to Norway in the hopes of a better life, only to get forced into prostitution, where they have to do demeaning work for little pay, with little to no access to health care and other public services.

So fuck you, deontological libertarians. And fuck you consequentialist libertarians as well.

Or Kill Me.

(I think I will expand on this later, when I'm not dead tired, it's not 1:26 am and I don't have a French exam the next day)

Ahí está la dificultad.

Que pasa Pancho Villa?

[EVERYBODY?]

I used to think I was completely different from my peers. That I was more sophisticated, intelligent and for some reason deserved to be treated differently from them. I often found myself wondering when people would at last discover my genius and let me skip high school and go to university right away. Only my social phobia (and perhaps my habit of trying to be at least somewhat nice to other people) kept me from coming across as a complete and utter asshole. I took solace in the idea that I was not at all like my fellow 11-12-13-14-15-16 year olds, who were shallow, ignorant and egoistic. I was careful with alcohol, in stark contrast to the mindless, decadent drunkenness that prevailed among my classmates and other people my age. All the other kids only cared about vulgar things like sex, drugs and sports, but I was cultivated, read books (even non-fiction ones) and held the final solution for every problem imaginable.

As I've matured (I am still in the process of doing so, hopefully), I've at least partly come to grips with the fact that I was wrong. I am very much like my peers, and I was even back then. It was only last weekend I fully realized that. Friday night I went to a party, got relatively drunk (for the first time in my life), puked in the hosts' wardrobe and on one of his textbooks, and did other stupid things I've either forgot or don't feel like telling you. Later I tried to apologize to the owner of the textbook and the wardrobe, and he answered something along the lines of "Meh, it's fine. Everybody has done that once, and it's okay that it happened at our place."  

EVERYBODY? My delusion of personal exceptionalism has been severely damaged.

http://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Comunicato_4_ottobre_2011/en

Can't say I'm surprised.

, but this year's local and regional elections here in Norway seem to be all about elderly care.

Exciting.

At least this is more proof that Norway is a relatively safe and stable country where most people are doing fine, and where I most likely will find a steady job after I finish my studies, even if I choose to study Sociology, Music History or anything else that anti-intellectuals like to call useless. I like that.

On the other hand, I am disappointed (but not surprised) that Norwegian politics has been reduced to throwing money after the interest groups who shout the loudest, while groups who are unable to vote (kids, most drug addicts, illegal immigrants) are largely ignored.

My conclusion: Norway is rich, but dull.

In July 2011, the Norwegian Minister of Justice announced a new and exciting way of dealing with young people convicted for minor drug offenses, because putting them in prison obviously doesn't work. It is called "motivational dialogue". The idea is, let the little criminal talk to someone who can help them make better choices and become better and more motivated persons (without drugs, of course).  "This is a new and exciting way of dealing with young people convicted for minor drug offenses, because putting them in prison obviously doesn't work," the Minister of Justice said enthusiastically to a group of journalists at a press conference.

It is June 2012, and we're in a sleepy little town in the south-eastern part of the country. In a small room in the basement of the local police station sits a slightly confused police officer. A couple of days ago he was delegated to hold the first "motivational dialogue" in this small and largely uninteresting police district. The Justice Department had sent out a document that described the concept in detail, but he had put it down after a few pages. He couldn't make much out of the vague and bureaucratic language. Better to just improvise, then, he thought. He was going to talk to a 17 year old kid who had been caught by the police with a few grammes of cannabis on him. Who knows, maybe I'll make a difference to a young person's life today. Perhaps he's been using it to escape from an abusive family, and he just needs someone to talk to. Or maybe ...we'll see.

Just before 18:00, the appointed time for the dialogue, a young man enters the room. This is definitely not the lethargic and worn out high school dropout he had expected. This is a well-dressed and charming young man, who confidently shakes his hand and introduces himself as if this is just another business meeting. He is about to finish his second year of high school, he has good grades and in his spare time he enjoys engaging in politics and playing the piano, apparently. 

The policeman is at loss for words:  "You seem like an intelligent and well-reflected young man, right. But why did you do this? It doesn't make sense."

"I suppose you don't understand," the young man began, "because you refuse to admit the possibility that one can in fact make a rational, well thought out decision to take drugs. Before I decided to buy myself those grammes of cannabis that you so helpfully confiscated from me, I consulted several peer-reviewed scientific reports on the effects of cannabis usage. I made sure I had been mentally stable for long enough. I consulted experienced users on where to get the best possible quality for the lowest possible price. It was all one hell of a personal cost-benefit analysis, and when the motivational dialogue shit was introduced last year it finally tipped in the direction of me deciding to try it out. It seemed fun, and the consequences seemed minimal as long as I managed to avoid getting addicted to it. Also, drug prohibition is pissing me off. People shouldn't be put in prison for doing things that only harm themselves, they should be offered treatment. People shouldn't be punished at all for doing things that does no harm to anything or anybody. A handful of people I know have smoked pot. They're no different from us normal people, and I don't think any of them have taken any harm from it *. The prohibition is in conflict with the scientific evidence, it feeds a large illegal economy, it is resource-demanding for the authorities, and harmful for most of the parties involved. Now that doesn't make sense."

The policeman thought about this for a few seconds before he answered.
"I guess I'll have to file a charge for possession of illegal substances for you then. See you in court!"

* One of them started thinking she was a burrowing rodent, but that stopped after a while.

[NOT]

Today was 17. mai, the Constitution Day of the Kingdom of Norway. When I got home from the celebrations, I found a poll on Facebook: "Should we get a day off from school after May 17th?" About 1000 had voted no, and about 22000 had voted yes. I voted no, and this is an extended and translated version of my comment to said question:

What happened to taking responsibility for our own lives? It was your own, independent choice to spend all that energy on celebrating 17. mai, and now you have to deal with the consequences. You all knew very well on beforehand that there's a school day tomorrow. It's in your fucking schedules. Don't read them? That's your problem. You could have chosen to celebrate 17. mai in a much less energy-consuming way, and then turn up at school fit and well-prepared next morning. Or you could just get your *insert low one-digit number" hours of sleep (if any sleep at all) and go to school the next morning anyway, and hope you'll survive that. Or, if you really want a day off? Then just NOT go to school tomorrow! Of course, it'll have consequences. Since you already have made that wise, well thought out choice of playing the sub-contrabassoon in a marching band, being drunk, eating twelve tons of  ice cream or whatever you chose to do on this particular day, I assume that you took those consequences into consideration. Maybe you even asked the school administration very nicely, and in due time before the schedules for this semester were set up, to give you and the rest of the school a day off after 17. mai. No, I don't think you did. If you had tried, you would have found that most sane people will take your suggestions seriously if you supplement them with logical arguments. And since there are many more or less logical arguments for getting a day off on May 18th, the school would probably have found a Teachers' Planning Day or something that they could move to that date. Did that happen? No. Probably because nobody asked for it. After what I can see, the first complaints started coming on MAY 17TH 2011, 9:30 PM. If you had tried a year or so earlier, you might have succeeded. Good luck trying next year. And good luck with getting up tomorrow.

Or Kill Me.

(DISCLAIMER: This text was written in 20 minutes by a tired Norwegian teenager and might not make sense.)

I was lying on the couch in my living room, trying to sleep. Then a lot of people I know started to come in and they sat down in chairs beside me.
On the table beside the couch there was a bottle of Santa's Special Christmas Tonic Water. My friends were constantly warning me against it, saying it tasted like shit and was completely useless for mixing drinks.

Then we went to a café and I had three glasses of Fanta.

Then we went to a huge house where some American orphans lived by themselves. The house was a mess, and there were broken bottles of beer and litter everywhere.

On the second floor there was a huge flat screen TV where I watched a movie about a man who had divided the land area of the world in thousands of regions (he gave them silly names like PUDDI and PENIS). Wearing his medieval costume he visited all the regions while singing his stupid song (with the names of all the regions in it). I found the movie extremely boring, so I switched to another channel.
There I saw a documentary about a holiday called Serbo, which is celebrated each Christmas. All Serbians are required to walk from door to door and convert Catholics to Serbian-Orthodox Christianity. A clip showed a quarrel between a Serbian nutjob and a Catholic nutjob. I didn't find that very interesting either, so I left the TV.

Downstairs, my friends and the Americans were sitting and talking about how messy it was there and that somebody should clean the mess up.
After a while one of the Americans started cleaning up the room.
"Why didn't you pay the bill?" one of my friends suddenly shouted at me.
"What bill? ...oh, fuck. That one. Shit," I answered.

I left my friends and the orphans again, and walked downstairs to what I thought was the basement. But for some reason the stairs led me to the third floor. On the third floor, there was just one big room. More stairs led to the upper corner of the room, where a lot of water was flowing out of a hole. I climbed up to the hole, found a knob and twisted it in the most unimaginably counterintuitive way possible, and then the water stopped.

And then suddenly I was a Japanese soccer star.