Archive for the ‘Ideology’ Category
Mondays are not at all like fridays… not at all! The weather sucks, I overslept a lot because I was up till 4 watching videos about the holographic universe, and this time I really did leave the headset at home. Oh, and to top it off, my buss is filled with annoying little firstgraders. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t hate kids, it’s just that when they band together, each individual’s annoyingness goes exponential…
Anyway, that’s the intro. It’s a little long, but I’m ready to move on. The only problem is, I really just got on here to whine about how badly my day started, so I’m not entirely sure how I should follow up.
I guess I’ll talk a bit about Israel, it’s been a long time since it’s been mentioned on this here site, which is a bit out of character for us, so someone has to make us predictable again, and it might as well be the chaotic one.
Israel, “the only democracy in the region,” is of course rabidly supporting “President” Mubarak of Egypt, the dictator who has ruled for three decades. This seeming contradiction of a democracy supporting a dictator is very surprising to absolutely no one at all. Why is that? Maybe it’s because Israel is hardly democratic at all. Any country that systematically opresses part of it’s people with a given ethnicity has no right to call itself a democracy!
But Burie, how can you say such horrible things!? There are surely Palestinians in the Knesset! That is true, there are a few, however record shows that they have never had a decisive vote in a single case, in if such a situation has ever been imminent, the vote is not held, and the matter has been decided in back rooms in discussions where the Palestinians have not been present. If that is hard for you to believe, I shall append links at the end of this blog to prove my accusation as soon as I get on a computer.
Furthermore, in order to continue their blockade of the Gaza strip, Israel is completely dependent on Egypt upholding their blockade, as Gaza has a small border to Egypt in the south. If Egypt were to develop into an honest to God democracy, which it will, mark my words, then they might not be so keen on ruthlessly oppressing an entire people any more. So you see, Israel is terrified of democracy spreading in the region. If it can no longer falsely call itself the only democracy, it can’t expect to be the only friend of the west either (although the US did support Mubarak, but that’s a subject for another blog). In Israel’s eyes, no longer having a monopoly on telling us the truth, we, the west might start to hear certain truths that do not agree with the truths that they’ve been feeding us. Most importantly, that Israel isn’t a democracy, and that Palestine is even worse off than even the most liberal media has dared to whisper of to date. For these reasons, the democratic revolutions in the region are extremely exciting.
This is my end station here, see ya!
I got my wisdom teeth removed yesterday, so I’m in a state of nostalgia that makes me mull over quotes. So… here are some quotes!
We don’t get a chance to do that many things, and every one should be really excellent. Because this is our life. Life is brief, and then you die, you know? So this is what we’ve chosen to do with our life. We could be sitting in a monastery somewhere in Japan. We could be out sailing. Some of the [executive team] could be playing golf. They could be running other companies. And we’ve all chosen to do this with our lives. So it better be damn good. It better be worth it. And we think it is.
–Steve Jobs
Cherish your solitude. Take trains by yourself to places you have never been. Sleep out alone under the stars. Learn how to drive a stick shift. Go so far away that you stop being afraid of not coming back. Say no when you don’t want to do something. Say yes if your instincts are strong, even if everyone around you disagrees. Decide whether you want to be liked or admired. Decide if fitting in is more important than finding out what you’re doing here. Believe in kissing.
–Eve Ensler
Once upon a time, I, Chuang Chou, dreamt I was a butterfly, fluttering hither and thither, to all intents and purposes a butterfly. I was conscious only of my happiness as a butterfly, unaware that I was Chou. Soon I awaked, and there I was, veritably myself again. Now I do not know whether I was then a man dreaming I was a butterfly, or whether I am now a butterfly, dreaming I am a man. Between a man and a butterfly there is necessarily a distinction. The transition is called the transformation of material things.
–Chuang Chou
We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit.
–Aristotle
The hardest challenge is to be yourself in a world where everyone is trying to make you be somebody else.
–E.E. Cummings
That Harry Potter is a true American hero.
–My Daddy
There is neither happiness nor misery in the world; there is only the comparison of one state with another, nothing more. He who has felt the deepest grief is best able to experience supreme happiness.
–Alexandre Dumas
Have you even been in love? Horrible, isn’t it? It makes you so vulnerable. It opens your chest and it opens your heart and it means someone can get inside you and mess you up. You build up all these defenses. You build up this whole armor, for years, so nothing can hurt you, then one stupid person, no different from any other stupid person, wanders into your stupid life… and you give them a piece of you. They don’t ask for it. They do something dumb one day like kiss you, or smile at you, and then your life isn’t your own anymore. Love takes hostages. It gets inside you. It eats you out and leaves you crying in the darkness, so a simple phrase like “maybe we should just be friends” or “how very perceptive” turns into a glass splinter working its way into your heart. It hurts. Not just in the imagination. Not just in the mind. It’s a soul-hurt, a body-hurt, a real gets-inside-you-and-rips-you-apart pain. I hate love.
–Neil Gaimon; The Sandman
So I started this book for English (that I read four years ago and forgot about… but don’t mind that!) and I finished it in the same night. I thought it needed a post.
The book, which I thought was going to be whiny feminism, was about an African American woman who married very young.
All her life, she fantasized and idealized love. It was something that swept her away; it was something that was sacred in nature and, frankly, perfect in every way, shape, and form. And then, she got to the marrying age. Her grandmother (mother figure) in the book married her off to some financially stable bloke and she was treated like a pack mule. Always complaining, she did not notice the good he was providing. The shelter, the food, the water were all ignored because she didn’t love him. But a love like that doesn’t exist. The perfect relationship doesn’t exist.
She ran away from husband number one for husband number two. He was a dreamer who treated her like a princess. But that wasn’t good enough for her. She needed to be respected, to be a part of everything, to be the center of attention. She stayed in her self-inflicted misery for twenty years until husband number two, a rather prosperous man, died. Then she went to husband number three.
It was the story of a woman who dreamed too much as a child and whose unrealistic ideals screwed up the rest of her life. This is the classic situation I bitch about daily. Is we aren’t realists, if we are optimists or even idealists, we will be screwed up. We will never be happy; we will never have the ability to be happy. The world will not become that fairy tale we’ve always hoped for because life actually sucks. Idealists are the worst.
The weekend passed I spent in Oslo at the Rød Ungdom “Red Youth” film-festival, ProgFilm. I learned some, met some cool and nice people, some old friends, and two of our fellow-authors: Bjørn and Vegard. Huzzah.
The lecture I will focus this entry on was about feminism and sexual harassment. The movie was the sweedish “Hip hip Hora!” (Loosely translated: Hip hip Whore-ay!, but it’s more funny in sweedish…) and the speaker was Hanna Helseth, author of the book “Generation Sex”.
The lecture, and the book, is about sexual harassment, how young girls and women are expected to act a certain way, and how girls who have one-night-stands, or at least are said to have one-night-stands, easily gets labelled as a whore, of cheap. And it’s about sexual assaults, and how they are easily labeled as “reciprocal sex” if the girl/woman has a rumour for sleeping around.
These kinds of lectures always leave me thinking a lot, mostly about how terrible the world is. Middle- and High-school teachers tell their female students that guys pinching their asses is just a childish way of flirting, and that it’s meant tp be a compliment. And girls who dare speak up against it gets labelled as lesbian, “tight” (not in the good “ay, we tight, bro”-way…) and boring. Sometimes even a-sexual, meaning not having any interest in sex – Anti-sexual.
On the other hand: The girls who flirt with these guys, maybe even has a couple of boyfriends, or makes-out with guys sometimes at parties gets the blame for it if they get raped or assaulted in any other way.
How is this fair?
I believe in Simone deBeauvoir when she says that you’re not born a woman, you become one. I believe that society tries to shape girls and women to fit in the mould of “The Perfect Woman”. Not too flirty, not too out-spoken, pretty and insecure.
I have never fit into this mould, because my mother told me to speak my opinions, say no if I didn’t want it, say yes if I did want something, and just generally to be happy with the girl/young woman I am. To this I am thankfull, and I believe that it has made a lot of stuff easier for me. Guys learn quickly not to mess with me, I feel free (most of the time), and I wish that all girls could have this knowledge. A mould isn’t a good thing, because we’re all different, and we should let ourselves be different. And society should learn to accept these differences.
And most importantly: We have to respect ourselves and each other, in order for guys to respect us. Don’t call your girlfriends whores, or your “less-masculine” friends gay. Don’t speak down to a girl because she chooses to have sex, the same way you shouldn’t speak down to girls who chooses NOT to have sex. These are individual choices to be made my the individual person.
I think that was it from the soapbox for this time…
-Frida
… Please? And could you also stay away from Nestlé, McDonald’s, and L’oreal while you’re at it? It just so happens that these megacorporations fuel the Israeli settlement-machine, and hire only Israelis, plus they do some other nasty zionist stuffs. Anyway, that’s the dumbed down version of it, you can read a more eloquent one over at mpf.org.my.
Happy boycotting!
Now I know a lot of you don’t believe in personal boycotts, because you feel like it doesn’t affect such massive corporations at all, and I suppose you’re partially right, but the same argument is often used by anarchists for not using your vote during elections. Another argument that you get a lot is that there are so few doing the boycott, so it’s not like the election thing at all, but that’s just all the more reason to start! If your friends are doing a boycott, it’s a lot easier for you to follow, so someone just has to be the one to start.
And lastly, to those of you on the other (wrong) side in this issue, I’ll get back to you in a later blog post 🙂
Song of the blog: Long Live Palestine Part 1&2
Yours truly
Bjørn