Författare: SAM

(Previously in Swedish on this webbsite 2017)

The tie is a very odd male accessory without any practical or actual function. It doesn’t warm us or cover our bodies. Most men just wear it to feel important, dressed up or to conform to their surroundings, and many men express that they feel ”naked” without their tie.

The tie is often associated with power, especially by those who lack real power. These men pull on a tie because other men with perceived power use one and think that a little bit of the power are inherent in this piece of fabric. But what exactly is a tie and why is it associated with power and masculinity?

Simply put, the tie is a fake penis that men hang around their necks. And why? Well, because it is not acceptable to show their real dicks. If you do, you are seen as perverted. Instead, men show a symbolic one. For these men, their self-confidence is based on that they are a man and this needs to be manifested and constantly proven, both to themselves and to their surroundings.

The masculinity must then have an important value for these men to have a function as self-confidence builder, there must be something to compare with, something that has a lower value. In this case, it will be the other half of the population, the women, those who lack a dick and therefore cannot or should not wear a tie. The tie thus becomes important because it shows that they are not women, they have dicks even if they only are allowed to show a symbolic ones.

When women try to break into men’s traditional territory, they sometimes try to adapt to the men’s world by dressing in traditionally male attributes such as suit-like clothing and sometimes even ties. But suit and tie on a woman is usually seen as a bit odd and something negative.     

But refusing to wear a tie among men can also be a way to show power. If you understand the norm but consciously violates them, can be seen as a sign of absolute power. Not wearing a tie in a context when you are expected to wear one can symbolizes that you have a position that  you can put yourself above the system. You don’t have to worry about the others, they don’t pose a real threat to you. Not wearing a tie expresses that you don’t need to have a symbolic penis around your neck to show that you are a real man. 

(Previously in Swedish on this webbsite 2018)

Christmas is important to me. The Christmas holidays, just like the holidays, are something to look forward to during the darker autumn months. And after Christmas we move towards the light. But also that we have something to gather around, something for all of us in common.

It doesn’t matter to me as an atheist why we actually celebrate Christmas. I like to go to church and listening to the Christmas gospel, but it also every time remind me why I am not a believer. I am simply not convinced that it is a Holy Spirit that has made the Virgin Mary pregnant based on the word in the Bible.

Why make it so hard to be a believer, why should I have to believe in something so absurd and something that is only confirmed by a person who claim to have received the message of their dreams? Why should we continue to believe this story in the 21st century? 2,000 years ago, this may not have seemed so strange, but today? The Bible’s stories of Jesus are full of oddities that had been told orally in many years before they finally been record with different purposes as a background. What was originally the basis for these stories is impossible to say.     

My interpretation of the incident with Maria’s pregnancy is that she became pregnant in the traditional way. Perhaps she had been raped, perhaps she had fallen in love, who knows, but to get pregnant out of wedlock was unacceptable for a woman. Mary, however, managed to convince the surroundings that she had become pregnant with a Holy Spirit. She, and perhaps people around her who wanted to save her, were simply very smart and convincing and probably even managed to subsume her story into some old traditions and legends to increase her credibility. On this lie, in my view, we build the whole Christian tradition. The very birth of this illegitimate child is the reason why we celebrate our greatest holiday of the year, Christmas. This Mary must be one of the most influential people in history. I am curious and would like to know more about this woman. Unfortunately, there is very little to be found.

Written by a heavy coffee addicted person.

(Previously in Swedish on this webbsite 2014)

Two hundred years ago, it was no big thing to be drunk at work. It was even sanctioned by the employer and sometimes the workers received part of their salary in spirits, sometimes during working hours. At that time, spirits were not considered as alcoholic beverage, but more as belonging to the daily diet.   Two hundred years later, anyone who drinks or is drunk at work is being fired or at the best sent to a treatment center. Alcohol at work is as bad as alcohol and driving.

But even today Swedish workers often get a part of their salary in drugs, coffee. Now surely, friend of order opposing that it is not possible to compare spirits with coffee. And this is in many ways correct.  But even coffee is a drug, strong enough to give a bracing effect and abstinence when you don’t get your daily dose.

I wonder what people in the future will say about our coffee drinking. Perhaps people then will be as horrified by this as we are about the use of alcohol in earlier days. What will they think about that employer buy expensive equipment for cooking the drug and encourage abuse during working hours by sanctioning special ”coffee breaks”? How will they judge our systematically use coffee to stay awake when driving or that we allow our minors to visit coffee-houses, and there also drink coffee? What will they think about that most of all citizens live every day in a coffee rush and become desperate if they do not receive their morning dose, even the young?

The difference between coffee and alcohol is great, especially in terms of harmfulness, but there are also clear similarities. Both are drugs and addictive. In the 19th century, spirits were more to be considered as food than intoxicants, the same goes for coffee today. Coffee may be too integral in the society today so we miss the similarity to other, illegal, drugs. Chewing KAT, for example, is described as having a similar effect to coffee, but is prohibited.

In about 100 years from now we might have reassessed coffee in the same way we reevaluated spirits, or we might have reassessed the danger of other drugs. Those who live will see.

I wrote this post in 2015. Today, the same reasoning can be used for our today huge consumption of series on Netflix and other subscription streaming services, something that then not was as huge as it is today.  

(Previously in Swedish on this webbsite 2015)

In the Western world, reading of crime novels has increased dramatically over the past 20 years. Crime fiction has been a popular type of literature for much longer than that, but something has happened in recent decades. It may seem rather trivial what people read in their spare time, but this can also be used as a mirror to highlight the welfare bubble of the 21st century.

Reading crime novels have a lot of similarity to drugs. What do you get out of reading a crime novel? Well, both are about escapism. You take refuge in an inner dream world where you are someone else, where you are respected, liked, smart and beautiful in a way that you do not feel you are in the real life. In the novels you can also fantasize about another more exciting and content life then your ordinary life.  

The increasing crime reading could be interpreted that we, in our secure welfare, are quite bored and not feeling in control of our lives. But to break up and try something else, we do not dare. Reading crime novels here acts as an anxiolytic and pacificating drug. The more we read and live in an inner fantasy world, the less room there is to think about real life and the real concerns we have, and that we should address.  

From a social point of view, this is a pretty “good” drug for the society. It pacifies us and keeps us at the production stage and keeps us to be good consumers. The drug also does not break us down physically and is also significantly less dangerous than other similar drugs such as gambling. But the similarity to drugs addictiveness is still obvious, when you have finished a book, there is a feeling of emptiness that leads to a craving for one more.

I wrote this post in 2014 regarding smoking and find it relevant to today’s discussion about mortality in Covid-14. We accept smoking even though this generates a mortality rate that is on par with the death rates because of Covid-14, every year. In added, a very large proportion of our healthcare is spent on treating the consequences of smoking. Perhaps it’s time for a ”corona”-debate about the consequences and costs of smoking? Smoking is also likely to be strongly associated with mortality due to Covid-14. Wrote an email to FHM about this and received a reply from Johan Carlsson who replied that they were looking at this.  You can read this on (Tankar och idéer om Coronapandemin).

(Previously in Swedish on this webbsite 2014)

I’m amazed every time I see the warnings on the cigarette packets on the shelf in the grocery store. One of the warnings reads:

”Smoking seriously harms yourself and people around you.”

A warning of the harmfulness of smoking must be found on all cigarette packets sold in Sweden based on a law based on at EU directive. The 14 different warnings are the same in all EU countries. 

If, throughout the EU, the harmfulness of tobacco is so sure that a warning text such as the one above or ’Smoking kills’ as one of the other texts states, one should reasonably immediately ban the product.

What amazes me is that these products are still on sale. The warnings say not ”Smoking can harm…”, or ”Smoking can kill”, here there are no doubts, this product is dangerous. It is also said that smoking harms people in the environment. This is even more serious. These products are sold everywhere, at all times of the day. 

In Sweden, we know that about 12,000 people die each year from smoking, in the world a total of about 4.9 million. Huge numbers. In addition, many children are not allowed to go on holiday or get good clothes because parents choose to spend their money on smoking instead of investing this money in their children. For all of us in Sweden, smoking costs about 30 billions Swedish krones (about 3,3 billions american dollar in december 2021) every year.

Isn’t it strange that tobacco can still be used in Sweden (or in the world at all) today in 2014? When its harmfulness is indisputable and the costs so high, it is irresponsible for the government not to immediately ban the product. I believe that the judgment in the future will be harsh on today’s decision-makers for not banning this product despite knowing about its harmfulness.

(Previously in Swedish on this webbsite 2017)

Read the other day in some Swedish newspaper (2017-08-18) about a new study that shows that the taste of wine itself means less for how we experience the drink than our idea of what it costs. The more expensive we think the wine is, the better we think it tastes. In other words, a cheap wine are perceived to taste better than an expensive wine if you shift the price tags on them. There are also many other studies that show the same thing about beer, food and chocolate. The conclusion the researchers in this particularly studie draw is that we really experience that a expensive drink tastes better irrespective of how it actually tastes. The brain deceives us.  

I think few people would drink wine if it did not contain alcohol. After all, it’s a drink you have to ”learn” that it tastes good. The fact that we started drinking wine from the beginning was probably partly because that the alcohol in the wine kills bacteria, which made people less sick compare than if they drank water that often was contaminated.

One explanation for that we are fooling ourselves here, I think, is because of that wine itself isent a tasteful drink. But we believe that there are people who can experience this and can understand the difference between a good and a bad wine. This characteristic is associated with the upper class. Wine, like many other things, become a status marker in the social hierarchy, particularly important for those who aspire to belong to a social group/class or other status group to which they does not naturally belong. We all strive to make a class trip, one way or another. Having the ”right” taste is an important part of this journey. 

I sometimes drink wine but mainly for cultural reasons and to feel a little ”grown up”, hardly for the sake of taste. I prefer Coca Cola and other soft drinks, water and juice and usually stick to these drinks.

(Previously in Swedish on this webbsite 2014)

Margareta Larsson, member of the Swedish Parliament for the party Sverigedemokraterna, expressed yesterday (17 June 2014) in a parliamentary debate that artists who paint female genitalia in schools should be punished with prison sentences.  According to Larsson should the artists be convicted for sexual molestation of a minor. The causes of Larsson’s anger is that the painter Carolina Falkholt  depicted vaginas in colorful works at secondary schools in Halmstad and Nyköping. The paintings have been under great debated. The former Leader of the Left Party, Lars Ohly, replied to Larsson that these view of art and culture that she represents is the same as that prevailed in the 1930s Germany and that it is abhorrent and very remarkable that it is said by a member of Sweden’s  parliament.

I completely agree with Lars Ohly, but I also think that there are similarities with Russia’s ban on ”propaganda” for homosexuality aimed to children. The argument is used that you want to protect children when you want to ban something that is both completely normal and harmless – in these cases homosexuality and images of female genitalia, but with which some in society feel uncomfortable.

As for the images, I also can’t understand who should be ”protected” from having to see these images. Half of the population (including schoolchildren) have one themselves as the pictures they want to ban show, the other half of the population is hardly upset or frightened to see what the pictures show. And given all the depictions of violence that exist everywhere in society and are widely accepted, images of our bodies should never be particularly upsetting. And it’s also hard to understand how Larsson thinks when she wants to imprison the artist. Falkholt has just completed a paid work at the schools. It should be the school managements, who have bought the art and is responsible for the display of it, who should be punished if someone should be punished.

But Margareta Larsson have of course the right to have this opinion and argue for it. The problem in this case is that she speaks as a member of the parliament.  When she here, in a parliament debate, states that the courts should change the practice in how they should judge, she is guilty of, as part of the legislative power, to try to influence the judicial power, which is forbidden in Sweden. Whether she does this consciously or if she does not understand the seriousness of it, she has proved to not respecting the democratic rules in Sweden.

(Previously in Swedish on this webbsite 2017)

Zara Larsson is one of Sweden’s greatest artists now, both nationally and internationally. This brings bad blood to many, and she suffers criticism for almost everything she says and does. This young woman was now criticized for her acceptance speech when she received an award at the Grammy Awards the other day. She mentions in that speech that she was glad she finally got rid of her braces. For this, she was accused of being self-absorbed. Dennis Dahlqvist, a 55-year-old cultural critic active on SVT (Swedish television, a public service media) said the following:

”I think of Zara Larsson, who is amazing in many ways, but how a young person becomes so famous so quickly, and then just talks about their braces. It can’t lead to anything other than getting sickly self-absorbed.” 

My theory to this reaction to Zara is that he perceives her way of putting the Grammy Award in relation to his removal of the braces as a mockery of everything he stands for and have dreamt of. After 55 years, this Dennis Dahlqvist has managed to reach a position as a music critic in SVT. For him and for the entire critics’ union, prizes like Grammys are very important. Zara Larsson, who is 19 years old and has already achieved a position in the music world that this Dennis probably dreamed of achieving throughout his life (but at the age of 55 has only achieved a position where he gets to talk about those who succeeded) trivializes this, according to Dennis’s view. She does not show the expected reverence for the Holy Grail. For Zara, this is probably just another prize (which doesn’t really mean anything) and she has achieved far greater heights already in her career. Just think of her performance at the opening ceremony of the European Football Championship in 2016… Middle-aged men who try to put young girls in place I think are quite disgusting, but at the same time interesting because this also highlights these men’s perception of themselves as failing individuals.

Zara Larsson, I think I have seen this through and laughs a little indulgently at these men, she is career-wise already at the age of 19, on a completely different planet, and can be a guide for other young people.