Archive for the ‘Politics’ Category
Following is an exert of a conversation me and fellow brbcoffeer Elaine had:
(10:44:06 PM) Vegard: alright i can’t think of an awesome enough metaphor, so im gonna serve you with “drumroll” “trumpets” analysis of the norwegian society in 5 minutes!
(10:44:25 PM) Elaine: do it
(10:44:25 PM)Vegard: 1800s! norway is a poor farmer country. people live on potatoes and fish, family is important and there are manners!
(10:44:34 PM) Elaine: yay
(10:44:46 PM) Vegard: 1900s! norway becomes industrialized through a series of wars and a social democratic working movement
(10:44:59 PM) Vegard: 1960s! norway finds OIL, and becomes one of the richest countries in the world
(10:45:20 PM) Vegard: norway developes universial health care, governmental support and all such things so that noone ever has to feel alone and scarted
(10:45:23 PM) Vegard: scared*
(10:45:27 PM) Elaine: yay! oil!
(10:45:38 PM) Elaine: what a concept
(10:45:47 PM) Vegard: 1990! children are born growing up with the sence that everything will fall into their laps, and they never have to work hard for anything
(10:46:00 PM) Elaine: My birth year!
(10:46:15 PM) Vegard: 2010: the academical world is governed by people from all over th world working hard to achieve something, get a good career!
(10:46:41 PM) Vegard: while norwegians in academia abroad has this exact attitude: “i can always get a bachelor in something back home and work in some government corporation”
(10:47:28 PM) Elaine: hah
(10:47:28 PM) Vegard: norwegians socially end up afraid of black people, afraid of eachother, drinking too much alcohol, never greeting eachother, never standing up for old people on the bus, and if you dare smile at someone you don’t know you get labled crazy
(10:47:34 PM) Elaine: bahaha
(10:47:40 PM) Vegard: i present to you: norway. the most arrogant country in the world
(10:47:47 PM) Vegard: now with great fjords
(10:47:50 PM) Vegard: *conclusion*
(10:47:54 PM) Elaine: Wow
(10:48:04 PM) Elaine: *applause*
(10:48:08 PM) Vegard: *bow*
Social democracy: the wet blanket over society.
Until next time friends,
Vegard
Matthew 6:1-4 reads “Be careful not to display your righteousness merely to be seen by people. Otherwise you have no reward with your Father in heaven. Thus whenever you do charitable giving, do not blow a trumpet before you, as the hypocrites do in synagogues and on streets so that people will praise them. I tell you the truth, they have their reward. But when you do your giving, do not let your left hand know what your right hand is doing, so that your gift may be in secret. And your Father, who sees in secret, will reward you.”
Hide your good deeds. Do not broadcast what you have done for others, in anonymity it is even better. Essentially, these verses from Matthew say that those who broadcast what good they have done already have their reward in this life, and need not have one in the afterlife. Instead of showing others what you have done and what you will do for them, do it without reward.
As people we want to be treated well. We want other people to notice us and we have been taught that good things have rewards and bad things have punishments. This isn’t always the case. We should do good for the sake of helping someone out and we shouldn’t do bad because, hey, it’s bad. This reward system that we have set up is almost disgustingly sick. We are so greedy as people that we will not do good without a reward and will only do bad without punishments.
But I compel everyone reading to keep good deeds in the closet, hiding them from as many people possible. Do not broadcast something good for immediate reward if an eternal reward is crushed in the process.
Next, let’s talk about prayer. (It should be in the closet too!)
Matthew 6:5-6 reads “Whenever you pray, do not be like the hypocrites, because they love to pray while standing in synagogues and on street corners so that people can see them. Truly I say to you, they have their reward. But whenever you pray, go into your room, close the door, and pray to your Father in secret. And your Father, who sees in secret, will reward you.”
I think that this verse kind of condemns out loud prayer, or at least for the purpose it serves today. In out loud prayer, who has tried to sound more spiritually minded than you normally are? Who has tried to impress others with the fantastic words coming out of your mouth? I know for a fact I have. Instead of having honest prayer, I am blending in a lie with fancy words to impress other people, not the Lord. I am glorifying myself in the eyes of others, but only condemning myself in the eyes of the Lord.
To be frank, in that action, I am being a douchebag. Out loud prayer is meant to be honest and true. It doesn’t have to be a well worded, spiritually arousing tangent about the good of others. It doesn’t have to be fancy, it just has to come from the heart.
THIS IS WHERE THAT CLOSET PRAYER COMES IN. Instead of participating in douchebaggery, closet prayer makes us Kings only in our own eyes and the Lord’s eyes. We aren’t trying to impress any other human being. There is no need to lie, because no one will hear.
So essentially, the idea to impress others only screws you. Don’t seek attention and do stuff in secret.
I love you, have an amazing day.
Hi.
So, I am currently reading a book called “the Shock Doctrine: rise of disaster capitalism” by Naomi Klein. I have not read all of it, I am currently lost somewhere in the third chapter. But it is sufficient that i feel the need to point at Milton Friedman, the guru of right-wing contra-revolution and laugh.
He is basically the guy who started the ideological movement of rightwing fanatics from University in Chicago, a group of dumbfucks that figure if you cause enough trauma to a country, you will subsequently have the opportunity to introduce a sort of *shock-capitalism* to said country because whatever opposition will be distracted by the trauma of war, invasion, ethnic cleansing, genocide, you name it. So then you have the window to introduce the ultimate free market, with deregulated toll barriers, tax cuts, privatization and the works.
So, this theory was first and foremost a theory, one of those “on-paper-only” “food-for-discussion” things. Until the coup in Chile 1973. Salvador Allende had been ruling the country for some time, democratically chosen and socialistic. Nationalisation, developmentarism, you name it. It was great. He got killed by Augusto Pinochet and his followers. The contra-revolution had started.
And the country which had been at a steady 3% unemployment got, thanks to Freidmans policy, as high as 30%. People got poor and had to spend (calculated) 74% of their paychecks on bread alone, something which before this capitalistic contra-revolution was less than 14% of their income due to price regulations. Over the course of 10 years, Freidman and his friends argued for more shock, more capitalism, less state interferance, saying it would fix everything. It didn’t. For everytime that puppet Pinochet deregulated and privatized, the people got worse off. Chile went from a stable planned economy in which its people flourished, to the laughing stock of the economical world. 307% Inflation, bitches!
Not until Pinochet got his mind twisted somewhat in the right direction and started nationalizing shit, Chiles economy got a little better.
So the point of this history lesson? It is to collectively (the best way) laugh at how the contra-revolution failed to do what it was supposed to, through free markets and privatization make the economy stable and the country rich, and instead it ruined the country completely.
No wait, that’s not funny, it’s infuriating and pathetic. Suppose we’re gonna have to keep fighting, then.
There are some religious things that religious people do that absolutely irk me. What is that, you may ask? I’ll tell you what!
I was on the facebook last night, and I commented on something about the United States not having a set language (so
people from other countries shouldn’t have to learn English to come here) and not being a Christian Country—because it isn’t—and some young girl (young being like… fourteenish. DON’T JUDGE ME) who has grown up in the Bible Belt of West Virginia all her life started getting pissed at me over it. This gal told me to “not ever start about Christianity, please and thank” because “God is [her] savior and [she] loves him with all of [her] heart.” Apparently she assumed that because I don’t believe the exact same thing as her, she would need to announce it to my three hundred facebook friends that she loves God with all of her heart—making it look like I disagree with that statement.
I used extensive examples showing how Christians justify their hate through their Religion—and she even angrier, because apparently Christians are blind and don’t see what they have caused. Justifying hate through Christ is disgusting. The goal of Christianity is to be like Christ, and I’m pretty sure Christ wouldn’t want to kill “them queers” or hate people of other religions. We justify hate and make excuses for not loving. It is absolutely disgusting. The girl informed me that the hate is okay, because Jesus died for our sins. That is ABSOLUTELY POSITIVELY NOT THE CASE. (the hate part, not the Jesus part…)
OKAY, so as Christians we say that Christ died for our sins, allowing us to sin. That doesn’t mean that Christ wants us to sin or that our sins are “okay.” We are taking that forgiveness and using it as a primary shield against eternal damnation instead of a safety net, as it should be. As Christians, as religious folk, as human beings, we should strive for perfection though we know it is unattainable. We cannot accept our sin and not try to change it because Christians aren’t perfect; trying to change that hate—that sin—is what separates the men from the boys. God understands that we make mistakes, but he sure as fire expects for us to try to resolve those mistakes and those bad habits we have. We cannot use Christ’s sacrifice as an excuse for our own sins—that’s not the point.
Like many would say in this region, we cannot justify “killing them queers” or lynching those who do not follow Christianity with our own religion. God wouldn’t want that. Pick up the mother fucking Bible and read it yourself. Yeah, yeah, I know about Leviticus, that’s the one that also said not to crop in cycles, wear polyester cotton mixes, or breed mules. What the hell did Christ say? To love thy neighbor? I guess He only meant the Christian neighbor. Or the white neighbor. Or the male neighbor. Certainly not the “queer” neighbor or the non-Christian neighbor, that’s ridiculous! God forbid we start loving other people and treating them correctly. It’s a shame that as Christians we are such disgusting people.
That’s all. See you next time.
I’m terribly sorry, my optimistic environmentalist friends, to inform you all that Earth Hour is absolutely useless. Now you are probably thinking that I’m some right-wing conservative, yelling about how CO2 isn’t pollution or some shit, or that I’m gonna pull a Carlin and say that the planet is just fine, and that we’re the ones that are fucked. While that last statement is true, I’m an optimist like you, and I believe that we can unfuck ourselves, if we just get our heads out of our asses and start acting.
So what does that make me? I’m an environmentalist, an optimist, and a socialist, so I should be all for this awesome Earth Hour thing, right? Wrong! It is wrong because I made the mistake of following the advice to question everything, and I didn’t like the answers I found very much. There are some pretty uncool things going on with Earth Hour, things that most of you might not know about, but you will after you’ve read this blag.
So first, let’s look at what big players are participating in the event. There’s Coca-Cola of course, not the most environmentally friendly of the bunch, charged with depleting the ground-water in India. Then there’s HSBC, the extremely green bank, which of course has an entire division devoted to oil and gas investments. Pretty much exactly the same can be said about Wells Fargo. Are you starting to see the first issue here?
Pictured: Assholes
Rich douchebaggy corporations use Earth Hour to appear “greener” without actually doing anything to help the environment. The CEOs know, of course, that being massive douchebags in the dark is just as profitable as being huge dicks in the light, and if they can boost their public opinion by doing it too, well shit, Christmas came early… Again.
Next, let’s look at the glaring logical whole in the whole thing: Earth Hour doesn’t actually fix anything! I feel tempted to say that it doesn’t accomplish anything, but that would be a fallacy. It does make us feel like we’re doing something for the world, like we are in some small manner taking part of something greater than ourselves. As we all have seen throughout history, there is nothing quite as dangerous as mass suggestion. In this case I don’t think there’s any risk of a genocide or anything, but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t be wary of disaster. While the CO2 is getting ready to sneak up on us and force it’s giant metaphysical penis up our collective sphincter, mankind will be busy flipping light-switches.
We’re not very good at this…
And now for the solution. The first part is really easy to fix, WWF simply needs to ban bad corporations, political movements, etc. from “participating.” Now WWF obviously can’t stop these people from turning off their lights every once in a while, and even if they could, that would be a ridiculous thing to do. However what they can do is not allow them to be front figures, and just don’t give them any undeserved credit. This will restore Earth Hour’s credibility. The second part is more tricky, as it is kind of a fundamental flaw. How do you fix a broken basis? Well this is where I apparently contradict myself by saying that I don’t think the second part necessarily needs fixing!
Earth Hour does one thing well, and that is reminding everyone that things aren’t exactly going so well for us right now, and the more such reminders we get, the more likely it is that we get tired of the nagging and get off our lazy asses and do something about it! For instance we could veer to the political left, start switching off oil-rigs instead of lightbulbs, start implementing existing filtering technology at existing refineries, and research alternative energy-sources. You know, certified douche-free stuff.
I think I might have stumbled upon something genius in that last sentence. I think the new world policy should simply be to act like douchebags all the time. But that’s crazy-talk! As if there could be such a thing as a douche-free world, why, what an amusing joke. Lol socialism, am I right?
Fuck yeah!
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Song of the blog: Fireflies