Funny because it's true
Here
are some individual snippets from Tommi's old posts that I don't think
are worth publishing in full, but are delightful on their own.
Speaking of poetry: the literary crowd has now been expressing their opinions for a week in the newspaper Turun Sanomat. I have to wonder what would happen if some Miss Finland or Idols candidate ever blurted out something equally self-centered and confused.
The so-called "social skills" simply consist of being able to lie in a credible fashion, to warp facts to the direction that the majority likes, and to adapt to an environment where constant babble and disturbances prevent all higher-level cognitive functions. Social skills are a way to blackmail resources from people around you, but there is nothing to morally support in them.
It is not enjoying reclusion and introversion that inherently depress or bother anybody, but the constant disturbance that extroverts and their apparatchiks who believe in "social skills" use to ruin the daily lives of introverts. In a time when other minorities have their defenders, couldn't any group advance the cause of having the human-centered howler monkeys to leave quiet people alone?
Last night I watched the pinnacle of silver screen art, "K2". I certainly no longer wonder how Ozzie is still able to keep hiding. Americans spend their time in mountains mainly fighting each other to settle their old grudges about women. Osama should just hide behind a rock until the yankees in their expensive haircuts kick each other's asses and grow as persons to respect their families.
Due to the old-fashioned way that I was raised I occasionally feel bad for the effiminate male heroes of American movies. On the other hand, if half a century ago the war had ended differently so that instead of these gym-sculpted crybabies, the foot soldiers of the World Police were real men like Erwin Köster and Josef Matula, who are calmly efficient and who draw a strict line between work and play. That would be nice from the point of view of an emotionally stunted northern European such as myself, but if the World Police happened to be evil, we'd certainly be in big trouble.
Since everyone knows what a psychopath or a borderline personality is like, does there exist a word that means a person who is totally unable to distinguish between cheaters and honest people?
If I ever change my name to something else, it must be something like Johnny Walker Firewall Fougantine so that everyone would assume that I was a convict. After all, our whole cultural industry teaches us that users of hard drugs and murderers are handsome and stylish, and they are shows as examples to both the young and the old in every TV show. Pretty soon the characters of Sesame Street will spraypaint graffiti and study the hand signals of drug dealers.
If you could take any person of the distant past (and remember, at most one in million was an emperor or such), bring him to our time, give him the weekly food stamp allotment of a chronically unemployed person and take him to a typical supermarket, he would probably think that he had died and gone to heaven, assuming that he would not just faint.
Even though the history of philosophy consists of the assumption that reality is inexplicable, these days you have to pull stunts comparable to making the Eiffel Tower vanish to even momentarily cover the obvious fact that natural sciences really do explain everything.
If there was a doctrine, a philosophy or at least a teaching method that would enable people to easily acquire useful new knowledge about natural sciences, it would have been discovered a long time ago due to its massive demand. The nation that invented it would already have a colony in Mars and would rule the rest of the world, assuming that it even felt any need to do so.
There is no sign of anything like this happening, but the basic skills of math and science keep disappearing in all nations. Laws of nature are still difficult and possible to grasp only with sufficient mathematical skills, and all newer research just strengthens the hypothesis that any potential new theories will not be any simpler or less mathematical.
Last week I listened to an explanation about the events in Sex and the City. It's funny that fiction is so very explicit these days, when in real life people have to spend years in therapy because they were offended by incorrectly timed flirting.
I'm really annoyed with the moronic fantasy that there will be some kind of societal collapse after which strong individuals ride rocket bikes between ruins of skyscrapers dressed as Indians. If I have understood correctly, this idea is called cyberpunk (a popular genre of science fiction in 80's).
Such dystopias look especially ridiculous here in Lapland. The poor and desolate post-collapse societies tend to have a surprising amount of heated indoor space for the bandit gangs to live in, there is fuel to burn and especially everybody seems to have sufficient food and protection from cold weather. As you walk home from our local university you can see five smokestacks spewing greenhouse gases that were generated from imported oil, so it would be interesting to think about what would happen if oil imports suddenly ended. People would be evacuated to schools to stay warm, and if the the disruption was much longer, perhaps more nuclear power would be built, as it would be a smart thing to do already. In any case, I seriously doubt that anyone would bother to slog around the thick banks of snow as a shirtless apocalyptic warrior who wears a viking helmet, the way that these authors seem to imagine it will happen in all seriousness.
Does anybody miss anything about these "new media Internet expert" companies? When they dropped like flies a few years ago, which of their products do you now miss? Right. And once again: right. But this is not the first time that people whine about how horribly unfair it is that other people are not willing to pay for things that they don't want or need.
The best evidence for the hollowness of moral arguments and moral philosophy can be revealed by simply examining how the word "must" is used.
Couldn't somebody invent a drug or alternative medicine that causes permanent sterility in women, and advertise it as a kicky rebellion against the oppressive mores of the Western patriarchy? Any woman stupid enough to take it would probably be a horrible mother, so the whole mankind would benefit massively for making her remain childless.
Last weekend at the summer cottage I observed animals and noticed how infinitely stupid they are.
In this era of rainbow families the classic "Heather Has Two Mommies" is an excellent read. Somehow it reminds me of the "postgender" club a few years back that wanted to question and erase traditional prejudices and restricting concepts. It was this very gang that I got my trademark tagline "I oppose the concept of dating" from. The postgender believers thought that if you just didn't use the words "dating" and "gender" (or if everybody had to right to arbitrarily define what all words mean) everyone would be happy and liberated under the loving eyes of the kind Mother Nature. The personal life of every postgender activist that I knew was sheer crisis and chaos, and every one of them was a regular customer of mental health services. Finally the club collapsed as its members one by one left quietly, having grown tired of the idiocy. It's too bad that they never completed the educational book that they were writing for young people, since this writing process was never affected by the catastrophic history of their own relationships. But you'll see, as soon as the old idiocies have been sufficiently forgotten, somebody will re-invent even this nutty ideology.
New Age is essentially a learned form of psychopathy. Its practitioner sees herself as a channel of positive energy whose every act is good and beautiful. There is no point expecting her to show any self-criticism or repentance, since she just does what the universal energy tells her to do. The fact that some unenlightened and boring man cannot understand her cosmic wisdom couldn't interest her any less.
Comments