Phenomena in the society today...

I read a blogposting yesterday by a woman, Jenny W. (in her thirties I think, and married to a white man with whom she has a small son? So she isn't very old and is also married to or living with a white man!) which triggered this blogposting and many thoughts - and emotions. A blogposting with the heading (my amateur-translation) “Mohohohahah… Why (I have such difficulties with) white guys?”

She starts it with (my quick amateur-translation):

”OK, the freak-society IS here. I.e., the society where you laugh at other peoples’ ill health and sufferings, or with other words everything the Jackass-programmes have shown a longer time.

In the Jackass-programmes [I haven’t seen them, and didn’t know about them earlier. Their home-site?] young white men with impregnable [ointaliga] bodies have chopped, cut, burnt and tormented themselves in a sort of reality-slapstick/gladiator-plays-TV, which have been unassailable [oantastliga, not allowed to question] because the young men have themselves chosen to expose themselves for this. But the indisputable development of events [odiskutabel händelseutveckling] which lies in the pipeline for these sorts of programme-ideas are though a grave pushing of boundaries, where pain and bodily injuries are made to humour, which then imperceptibly [omärkligt] but implacably [obönhörligt] are made 'funny' in circumstances where people have chosen not to get hurt. But, hehe, isn’t it quite fun hey… Look when that CP-guy is sort of tripping over [snavar]… hehe, it’s mean, but, sorry folks, that’s who I am.”

This Jenny has read about the reactions to the hacking of a home-site of epileptics in USA in (young men’s) blogs here. A hacking which has caused epileptic attacks in some users and attacks of laughter in others (I didn’t know about this earlier either, which certainly is no loss actually!!). She suspects that what has been entirely destroyed (my free interpretation) in these young white men’s world order is the distinction between what one can laugh at and what one allow oneself to laugh at.

I am thinking of a lot of other phenomena in society.

Contempt for weakness…

What are they laughing at actually? Are they laughing off what they themselves have had to stand? But this is no excuse at all for their later behaviour.

And people are scorned, scoffed at for writing as they are writing, even if they aren't harming anyone and not forcing anyone to read what they have written…

Humiliation-TV...

See Bob Scharf’s essay on Reality-TV from the psychohistory-list.

And our current government has fired the highest boss for the Swedish Public Employment Service or AMS in Swedish Bo Bylund all of a sudden. With no real motivation. Quite authoritarian. The critic is hard from the trade-union’s part it stands in the paper today.

“An incredibly bad personnel-politics”

they say. And a woman in the trade-union wants an investigation/inquest of the conditions for the employment for governments’ offices, how they look, and how one do when the employees (highest up?) become “liquidated”.

Yes, what sort of tendencies are there in society today? Many boundaries are pushed everywhere? And quite authoritarian behaviours are allowed (not least in politicians, knowing "our best" for "Our own good" see Mller's "For Your Own Good - Hidden cruelty in child-rearing and the roots of violence", in our current government not least, but also in our former prime-minister Göran Persson. Yes, where are the roots lying)?

See a female leader-writer about the affair with Bo Bylund in the leader "Arbetsförmedlingen söker ny chef" this morning.

Additional thoughts: what sort of models are our politicians? Quite arrogantly (mis)using their power?

The leader-writer in the link above ends her leader with thinking that the (political) opposition has a great responsibility in creating an offensive opposition-politics in this case (how unemployed are treated, and the demands on them as they have become and are here today) and be clear in how the safety-systems shall look in the future. I agree.

But as it looks now we have to get used to that the right are demolishing and pulling down more and more of the Sweden which is known in the world (??): security/safety for all.

No, I didn’t vote for the current government (and I will never vote for these parties)…

Read: “Why People Don’t Trust Free Markets. The new science of evolutionary economics offers an explanation for capitalism scepticism” by Michael Shermer (also see here about him). It ends as follows:

“The strongest reason for skepticism of capitalism, however, is a myth commonly found in objections to both the theory of evolution and free market economics, and that is that they are based on the presumption that animals and humans are inherently selfish, and that the economy is like Tennyson’s memorable description of nature: ‘red in tooth and claw.’ After Charles Darwin’s The Origin of Species was published in 1859, the British philosopher Herbert Spencer immortalized natural selection in the phrase 'survival of the fittest,' one of the most misleading descriptions in the history of science and one that has been embraced by social Darwinists ever since, applying it inappropriately to racial theory, national politics, and economic doctrines. Even Darwin’s bulldog, Thomas Henry Huxley, reinforced what he called this ‘gladiatorial’ view of life in a series of essays, describing nature ‘whereby the strongest, the swiftest, and the cunningest live to fight another day.’

If biological evolution in nature, and market capitalism in society, were really founded on and sustained by nothing more than a winner-take-all strategy, life on earth would have been snuffed out hundreds of millions of years ago and market capitalism would have collapsed centuries ago. This is, in fact, why WorldCom and Enron type disasters still make headlines. If they didn’t — if such corporate catastrophes caused by egregious ethical lapses were so common that they were not even worth covering on the nightly news — free market capitalism would implode. Instead it thrives, but just as eternal vigilance is the price of freedom, so too must it be for free markets, since both are inextricably bound together.”

It stands for instance about Shermer at the Swedish site of wikipedia:

"Shermer har skrivit flera böcker som försöker förklara den allestädes närvarande tron på irrationella eller obevisade fenomen. 'Why People Believe Weird Things: Pseudoscience, Superstition, and Other Confusions of Our Time' handlar om flera udda idéer och grupper, inklusive kulter /.../. Han har ägnat hela böcker åt förintelseförnekelse ('Denying History,' skriven tillsammans med Alex Grobman), och tron på Gud ('How We Believe')."