Alex's latest post touched upon how unifying religion, and concomitantly culture, can be. In Toronto, social culture especially is strange, in that it tends to be very exclusive or dominated by introversion, shyness, and extreme forms of social etiquette. (Intentionally bump into someone in this fair city, and auto-pilot will prompt the other person to apologize profusely.)

As a fun experiment, I decided to sign up for JDate, a fairly large dating site for Jewish singles to connect. (Hint: I'm not Jewish.) The tight-knit mode of networking was truly impressive, and most of the people on the site tended to be marriage-minded. I've flirted with internet dating briefly in the past, and it was a much flakier experience. Also, most of the Jewish singles on the site were attractive professionals, so even provided with the pre-selection and screening the internet affords you, practically everyone was desirable in some way.

There is no stronger tie than religion and culture. Unfortunately, I'm not afforded either so the social initiative and the powers of charisma and personality rests entirely on me. I think more people than not are plagued with loneliness for the sheer effort it takes to constantly try and connect with people.

Politics is the new religion in dating, so I'm concerned about getting back on the market considering that most of my views are not status quo. When I decide to date again, it might do me well to convert.

High culture cannot exist in conjunction with capitalism, as I bear witness to every day in Toronto. This holds especially true in countries like Canada and America, where our nationalism is really just barely held together by legal documents. There is no persisting history of which to speak. Feasibly, if the connection between England was fostered more closely throughout the past couple of centuries, we might have developed some subsidiary traditions of which to boast. But really, there can be nothing outside of capitalism to fill the void of arts, tradition & culture.

We are already witnessing the dissolution of national authenticity in the old world as American hegemony finds its footing, as all that is left in Europe, Asia, arguably Africa, are mere vestiges of once rich traditions.

I hate to be a sentimentalist about this, or a knee-jerk social liberal mindlessly touting the wonders of Europeanism, but the truth is as long as money and profits are the baseline of policy, government, and society, the arts will always be seen as superfluous. What we have left of music, theatre, and television are base productions of what the masses enjoy mindlessly consuming.

This is a very Marxist perspective, but even if a cultural niche were allocated in a capitalist society, it would be so influenced by the dominant ideology of immediate gratification, high arts would have no way to develop itself. The question then becomes: can capitalism co-exist with Romantic (real, rich) culture?

An opera is not the same as a pop-song. A pop song is a catchy riff that will stay with us for a few weeks. It is unmoving. It is something that offers us immediate enjoyment.. A well-produced opera is something we have to look deep within ourselves, our psyche, to connect with.

Undiluted capitalism will only bring forth a great technological civilization devoid of the wealth of Romantic tradition, diversity of language and perspective, and a visceral link with our psyche. Nationalism does serve as a source of value in contemporary society.

"Immersing yourself in a virtual world is just as superficial and weak as immersing yourself in the world of putting on airs." - Anon.

Let me tell you a story. It's a short story about a girl in her mid-twenties. This girl was living a fairly quiet student life in the city she grew up in. Like many other young people like her, she studied subjects that would guarantee you'd never get a job, but are interesting to read in contrast to the boredom of bureaucracy and entertainment in Scandinavian societies. You can do that when the government pays the dues and the teachers don't care about your future.

This girl, we don't have to give her a name just yet, spent her time either playing computer games at home, reading up on university essays, or working in a clothing shop. Pretty cute, friendly. She even had a dog. Not a party freak. But there was something wrong. Something that made her life feel empty. If you met her in that shop where she worked or in her home, with her dog, you'd never be able to tell just by the look in her eyes. The emptiness was deep inside and only really known to her.

This emptiness came from a lack of context and vocation. In the Social Democratic society she was living in, she fulfilled the norms of what would be expected of young people like her. She was studying, she had a part-time job, some friends, and an animal. And still there was something clearly lacking. Her life was a line stretched between quiet boredom and occasional bursts of curiosity. She had no personal goals to strive for, no skills to harvest, no social community of which she was a part. She was a member of society, yet so strangely alienated.

So she let her life go on as usual, slowly feeling accustomed and at peace with the kind of monotonous lifestyle she'd managed to build with student loans, computer and dog food. Every day she fed the dog, every day she played at the computer, every day she wrote on her essays, and every day she spent a few hours at the shop, smiling at customers. But who did ever smile back at her? Who would dare to challenge her as an individual? Who would giver her love and let her give love back? She'd never dare to ask these questions--what if there were no answers?

I once met this girl. Her name was Indifference, and we parted soon after we'd met. I believe, and hope, she's never been more happy in her life that what she is today.

I've been seeing over the course of the last few weeks a phrase that sets my teeth on edge.

There is this phrase that just says all there needs to be said about exactly how free-thinking, how much ikhtiyar, people are exerting over their own destinies. Its a phrase that only rarely should be used and which I admit to have practically used:

It is clear that you need professional psychological help.

Sorry, didn't write it properly for you guys the first time. Let me fix that for you.

If you do not agree with me on my opinion about this issue, then you need psychological help.

Occasionaly, the phrase is better and more honestly portrayed like this:

I've gotten emotional over the matter of discussion at hand, I'm going to ignore any facts you state because you're the one who needs psychological help for shocking me.

The language in which we speak contains memes we transmit. What does you need psychological help mean? It means that:

• I, the speaker, am a civilised and sane human being in comparison to you.
  What this is truly meaning is that the modern speaker cannot handle conflict or aggression unless dealt with under strictly arbitrated rules. They cannot reconcile the animalistic and dark natures of themselves to the civilised ideal demanded of a human being. It's a sin of false pride.

Who would you rather be: the ones who lie to themselves and say they are all individual or the one who deceives society and present themselves as not?

• You are pathological. Since what you say is abnormal, that makes you abnormal. The extension from this is that divergent ideas cannot be tolerated and have no merit to be addressed.

  What this signifies as far as the modern zeitgeist is that everything we do is somehow diseased. When someone does something with some structure, they're being anal. When a person sets expectations on a significant other, they're being controlling. When a person doesn't want to choose everything themselves, they're being dependent. When a feminist has sex, it's rape. When you have a strange dream, you're repressing something.

• What's wrong with all the above? Many things. Here's one. The problem in saying something is diseased is implying that it should be corrected. Regardless of whether it can be. Well, as anybody who's undergone psychotherapy can tell you, that's not true or easy. You are who you are. There are fundamentals that can't and shouldn't be influenced.

  You have to work with what you've got. e.g. If you're "controlling", you'll get along with someone "dependent".

  Why are we obsessed with calling all human actions diseased when accepting the unchanging parts of our natures is the path to happiness as what we cannot help being?

Psychology should be sparingly used. Abuse of psychology and psychiatry is nothing less than massive propaganda, a political and social tool to control a population. As exhibited by the easy clarity of the example of the target of homosexuality, what is psychologically healthy is what is considered socially normal.

For most human beings, there is nothing wrong with you! You are usually reacting in a sane way to a deranged human landscape: its the landscape that should be corrected and that can be corrected, not you. If someone went to war in Afghanistan, saw terrible unspeakable things and reacted to them in 'post-traumatic-stress-disorder' there is nothing wrong with him. Psychological help is a bandaid that effectively hushes up a much bigger problem: why send the man to a war unrelated directly to the defence of his country in the first place? Additional to this is the social problem, for any psychological problem you name, it is much more likely to happen given a lack of social support and meaning in life: in no small part due to materialism, superficiality of modern existence, a lack of cohesive communities caring personally for each other and dysfunctional families divorcing and collapsing.

Noone addresses the true issues behind mental health. A troubled mind is birthed from troubles.

Placing yourself beyond common norms now and then is good for you. People who are more social, strong, intelligent, practical or beautiful than the status quo will more easily advance in society. But the best part of knowing your own society well is that you eventually can breach its cultural norms to get ahead of others. Here's how you do it in Sweden:

• Instead of buying a lot of tools you'll rarely need, go and borrow them from a neighbor or total stranger.
• Whenever someone talks about politics, state clearly that you believe in the superiority of the Western civilization.
• While standing in queue in a store, ask the cashier out on a date if he or she is good looking.
• Occasionally accuse random people on your workplace of being Communists. Don't elaborate any further.
• If someone offers candy or chocolate at a gathering of any sort, be the first to grab a bunch and eat.
• While sitting on the bus or train, talk very loudly in the phone about how you're going to violently throw yourself on your girlfriend when you get home and sexually abuse her.
• Repeatedly state that abortion is a sin.
• If any discussion comes to revolve around America, passionately defend the foreign policy of George W. Bush and add that Obama is a scam.
• Whenever you feel cornered in a sensitive political discussion, suggest that anti-Semitism is on the rise in Sweden, and just about anyone can be a Jew hater.
• Swedes like to drink a lot on weekends but pretend to be health experts. The best way to make fun of this is to say that you believe in the State monopoly on alcohol in Sweden, which is why you go to Systembolaget (the monopoly store) to get drunk every Friday. "Then I drive home," you add.
• On the motorway, beep your horn to slow cars in front of you and then speed past them. Give people your finger if they give you angry looks.
• Be very orderly about traditions and frequently ask people if they're going to celebrate religious holidays that have been abandoned for 50 years.
• Regardless of circumstances, if you are offered meat at a restaurant together with co-workers, mention how you love meat, especially if it's bloody red and expensive. If someone adds he or she is a vegetarian, explain to them how meat tastes great.

There's a bunch of funny things to say or do in a culture, whichever it is, which will help you to dominate your surroundings and penetrate deeper into society. Only your imagination and mojo can stop you.

As someone who isn't a native speaker of English, I think it's funny that the words "demagogue" and "populist" are invariably used to mean something negative. Literally a demagogue is a leader of people, and a populist a people-ist. What's so terrible and wrong about those? Nothing, really, unless you think there's something wrong with people.

This tells us a lot about the politicians, journalists and others who use these terms to insult those they disagree with. They just plain hate people. Well, except for intelligent and enlightened people like themselves, of course. Just everyone else. They find us, their subjects, revolting.

Now, I like people in general, but that doesn't mean I'm all that interested in being ruled by them. My view was nicely summarized by anti-democracy economist Arnold Kling yesterday when he wrote: "I have a fear of the masses that would rival David Brooks'. But I have a fear of the elites that is even stronger".

The constitutional State is a balance between cultural cohesion and punishment through justice. I don't kill any person just because I get angry, partly because I've been taught it's a bad thing to do, and partly because if I did, I know I'd most likely spend a lot of years in prison. So I avoid killing as much as I can.

The relationship between culture and punishment essentially defines the nature of a society. In totalitarian societies leaders don't trust the public culture, so they enforce legal standards ensuring total obedience to common laws. In a mostly free society like America or Sweden there is a tradition of trusting the community, e.g. civil society, to deal with laws and morals.

A society that regulates its citizens too much is a product of a weak culture. It's no coincidence that Sweden is the most far gone welfare society in the world, as well as the most anti-cultural and anti-nationalistic place to live. It no longer emphasizes public interaction and consequences of individual action. Instead it relies on a gigantic welfare bureaucracy, designed to ensure everyone keeps in line, or else.

That "or else" in most societies means punishment. Committing a crime therefore rests upon a risk evaluation: Can I get away with this crime without there being a notable risk involved in me getting caught? This is why a society like America wants to cut back on the number of laws and is libertarian-oriented; if individuals are free to enact more impulses without breaking any law, fewer crimes can be committed and less government force needs to be involved. This is how Ron Paul argues when he's trying to legalize drugs. If people do it and they don't hurt anyone, why not let them do it?

But there's a problem involved with the freedom argument, as often highlighted by the fellas over at Amerika.org. The less guidelines and moral standards set by public culture or the State, the less cohesive the society will be, which in turn means there's greater risk of insecurity, corruption and anarchy. No society wants that. The only way to solve this problem is to emphasize public culture and the civil society, while backing it up with government force. Traditionally this is how we must understand ancient Greek political philosophy, Roman law, Christian morality, and the development of the Western civilization into tyranny, starting with Europe.

Freedom is always worth fighting for, but only if we stand together.

Small towns seem to spawn self-defeatism among younger people. On the one hand, village youngsters feel very proud of where they come from. On the other hand, they become self-defensive as soon as they have to face the big city mentality. There may have been one time when I could relate to this. No more.

(After a pre-party, on the way to a club, a couple of village people from a community far up north begin to pull my nerves.)

Village guy: I heard you talk shit about the North.

Me: Huh?

Village guy: Yeah, why do you hate the North?

Me: I don't hate the North. I feel fine fine living here, but I miss the continental side of the South.

Village guy: We like it here, okay? People know each other, they care about each other, they feel a sense of belonging. You can go into a super market and talk to any person there.

Me: So? If you live in a small town with a population of 3000, of course you'll know everyone. The South is much more crowded, hence more aliens on the streets.

Village guy: Why is that negative?

Me: I didn't say it's bad, I'm just stating facts. I've spent almost all my life in small communities, so I believe I know what I'm talking about.

(Another village guy chuckles but backs off.)

Village guy: Sure. So tell me, why do you think the South is better?

Me: Each to his own. I prefer big cities.

Village guy: This is a big city, almost 100,000 people.

Me: That's the municipality, not the city itself. You rarely see a lot of people out on evenings and restaurants close down at ten. That's a not a big city to me, that's a fucking privacy settlement.

And so the argument went back and forth, mostly because I had one beer too many to say that I'm proud of what I am and where I come from, and if someone doesn't like that, he's free to kiss my ass. Whatever this guy's problem was, his village mentality is all too familiar. You love your community because you don't know anything else--until you face the reality of a huge, complex, diverse setting. Then you both feel like you've been missing out on something, while at the same time your only pride is a village identity. I am since long past that existential problem. Most village people will never get over it.

Out of curiosity me and a friend visited a metal club last Friday. The argument went something like "we're tired of the usual places to meet girls, this place has to be interesting." We couldn't be more wrong.

The DJ was a moron who suddenly stopped playing music, then began playing again, as if he'd never mixed music in his life. And only spotty, long-haired guys everywhere, jerking around the bar and screaming. Where were the girls? The few ones that seemed to exist were far from attractive and basically every rare hottie was already occupied on the dance floor, fending off four to five ultra-horny metal heads. Hilarious.

We also spotted a guy we'd almost gotten into a fight with some time ago. We left the place, pretty disappointed. Metal clubs work like punk clubs and feminist gatherings. These are places where homogeneous groups unite under something more central than socialization, like music or ideas. This means that if you like metal, you're likely to enjoy listening to music and drinking beer at a place like this. If you want to meet a variety of interesting people--forget it.

I've been to metal clubs before, but only for concerts, not really in search of pick-up opportunities. I don't really understand why you'd want to spend a night at a place where lots of nerdy guys are listening to techno-versions of Iron Maiden themes and fighting over a handful of unattractive girls. I guess it's a cultural thing.

Me and a friend nearly got into a fight with two cocky guys from Stockholm last night at the club. It reminded me of the reality of how the decline of Swedish welfare increasingly segregates people into safe white zones for upper middle class and dangerous multicultural zones for the lower middle class. The latter don't like the former, so the former feels its way of life is constantly under threat (hence upper middle class is liberal/Conservative and lower middle class is socialist). It's class war everywhere, you just have to keep your eyes open.

Sthlm guy: Where are you from?

Friend: X.

Sthlm guy: Ok, I won't be seeing you again.

Friend: Huh? I've partied around where you live, you people are a real drag.

Sthlm guy: Sure you have.

Friend: Yeah, you people bore me out.

Sthlm guy (intimidated): What the..

Me: What's your problem?

Sthlm guy: People from the South are the worst people I know.

Me: Hehehe.

Sthlm guy: You hate us, don't you?

Me: I don't have much against Stockholm, I haven't been there that much.

Sthlm guy: But where you come from you hate people from Stockholm?

Me: You're not very popular in Malmö, no. You wanna know why?

Sthlm guy: Yeah.

Me: We were Danish 300 years ago. You're the symbol of Swedish authority.

Friend of the Sthlm guy: Hah, exactly, fucking Danes!

Me: So? I'm proud of where I come from. Why aren't you?

Sthlm guy & friend (slightly baffled): Ehm..we ARE.

Me: Why then do you come off to me as so insecure?

Friend of Sthlm guy: ....FUCKING DANES!

Later on another friend of mine joined and ordered in champagne. The Stockholm guys were yet again baffled and took off, without the girls they thought they were going home with. The girls were staying with us. Pride, my friends, is essential to identity. Many people don't like to brag about who they are or where they come from, but if you criticize them, they will lash out at you. We are still only primitive animals and we feel most secure within our local community and tribe. Always be proud.

A list of the prominent Swedish composers that I like the most. Nothing more, nothing less.

Franz Berwald

Berwald is most famous for his three movement symphonies, not really recognized until after his death. Maybe like no other Swedish composer, Berwald had complete control over the symphonic format. His compositions follow a very logical structure and are rooted in a German classicist tradition. Indeed, one could call Berwald the Romantic Beethoven of Sweden. His blend of Classicism and early Romanticism continues to impress listeners outside of Scandinavia.

Favorite works: Sinfonie capricieuse, Sinfonie singuliére

Hugo Alfvén

Heavy Romanticist that came to play a key role in the Swedish nationalist consciousness. Listening to Alfvén's works one understands why: motifs packed with Swedish folklore, nature and singing. Alfvén wrote dramatic, wild and ecstatic music, and mastered the instrumentality of symphonic creation brilliantly. Certainly of strong personality, yet so very national in character that most Swedes find his music capturing the Swedish mentality, Alfvén is not to be missed.

Favorite works: Symphony 1 & 4, Midsommarvaka

Johan Helmich Roman

The father of Swedish music who brought Händel and baroque music closer to Sweden. The key work is the music of Drottningholm, written for royal entertainment, but thanks to its musical qualities now belonging in every Swede's music collection. The music ranges from joyful celebration to more melancholic scenes. History was written with these notes; undeniable beauty.

Favorite works: Drottningholmsmusiken

Joseph Martin Kraus

Like Berwald, Kraus was of German ancestry, which is reflected in his music. Often (incorrectly) referred to as "Sweden's Mozart," Kraus forged a new path by embracing the Sturm & Drang era at the time. As a result, his music varies between the Classicism of the Enlightenment and the Romanticism of the early Romantic period. The tension between often solemn, light passages and abrupt, emotive motifs create a rich listening experience that deserves a whole lot more attention.

Favorite works: Sinfonia C sharp minor, Symphonie funèbre

Lars-Erik Larsson

Neo-classicist composer who wrote a lot of pastoral works containing ancient Greek motifs. There's a clear Romantic dimension to Larsson's works, which nevertheless always maintain a clear, rational structure, making it perfect for choir. Not much to say, except that he is one if the better-known composers in Sweden, and his pastoral suit is not to be missed.

Favorite works: God in disguise, pastoral suit

Oskar Lindberg

Lindberg composed on the organ, which was common at the time, and was an in-and-out Christian Romantic with strong pantheistic leanings. Pompous, heavily emotive and religious music expressing Biblical themes and evoking the landscape of Swedish nature. Vastly overlooked.

Favorite works: Organ sonata g minor, Sorrow music, Old carol from Dalarna

Wilhelm Peterson-Berger

Very much debated and disliked to this day, Peterson-Berger was a music critic - and a very mean-spirited one, attacking just about every contemporary Swedish composer. Some still argue whether he ever really mastered the symphonic craft, especially counterpoint. What people do agree upon is that his collected piano works, Frösö flowers, is a wonderful piece of music. Peterson-Berger was a Nietzschean Romanticist, heavily nationalistic, and has remained a musical symbol for the beautiful northern parts of Sweden. No wonder.

Favorite works: Frösöblomster

Wilhelm Stenhammar

Very often played today around Europe, Stenhammar belonged to the line of Scandinavian composers who were baffled by Bruckner and Wagner, but realized that in order to not sound like Wagner, they had to invent a new musical language. Still, Stenhammar's moderately Romantic works reek of Wagner's pompous atmosphere and Bruckner's dense motifs. The unique personality of Stenhammar is his tuned-down (or "aristocratic" as it's been described) dramatic language, never really certain of itself and thus always touching the melancholic. His later works are therefore his most mature expression.

Favorite works: Symphony no 2, Piano concerto no 2

Steve Sailer writes about an LA Times article on US Marine training and gives us an excellent excuse to make fun of guys who like video games.

Military researchers have found that two groups of personnel are particularly good at spotting anomalies: those with hunting backgrounds, who traipsed through the woods as youths looking to bag a deer or turkey; and those who grew up in tough urban neighborhoods, where it is often important to know what gang controls which block.

Personnel who fit neither category, often young men who grew up in the suburbs and developed a liking for video games, do not seem to have the depth perception and peripheral vision of the others, even if their eyesight is 20/20.

Picking on gamers is way too easy, though. The article also shows that having a significant chunk of the population hunt for sport is very useful in war. This is a case where American culture and society are clearly superior to Europe - in most of the US a lot of regular folk hunt because it's often cheaper than buying beef from a butcher, whereas in Europe hunting is an expensive elite hobby. I know that if every villager could cheaply hunt in Europe we'd soon eat all our deer because our population is too dense except for parts of Scandinavia and maybe some of the former Soviet bloc. Large numbers of rural hunters are, unfortunately, just not a possibility for most European countries - the lower supply of game animals per capita necessarily drives up the price of hunting.

The article does point out an alternative which is readily available to European governments, and that is to make their cities so crime-ridden and hostile that their inhabitants develop good threat-assessment skills. I doubt that it's worth the downside, however.

Here's to American redneck gun culture, then!

Normally in the West we only steal land and people from the third world, but apparently, when our collective imagination dries up, we also steal its myths:

Apolinario Chile Pixtun is tired of being bombarded with frantic questions about the Mayan calendar supposedly "running out" on Dec. 21, 2012. After all, it's not the end of the world.

"If I went to some Mayan-speaking communities and asked people what is going to happen in 2012, they wouldn't have any idea," said Jose Huchim, a Yucatan Mayan archaeologist. "That the world is going to end? They wouldn't believe you. We have real concerns these days, like rain."

Bernal suggests that apocalypse is "a very Western, Christian" concept projected onto the Maya, perhaps because Western myths are "exhausted."

In a sense, they're probably right. The West went dead hard progressive after the Second World War, and coincidentally decided that society was going to improve, forever, thanks to liberal democracy. You only need so much research to recognize this to be a load of crap. If Pixtun & Co are right, Westerners have come to the same realization and now attempt to make up for their progressive attitude by adopting apocalypse myths.

Maybe we should regard ideas of global race wars, water worlds, burning planets and world government tyranny as important fantasies, but useless prophecies? Looking at history, this seems to make sense; the Vikings probably didn't actually believe their world one day would be consumed by fire and monsters, but it reminded them of the cyclic nature of societies. After all, the people we stole these Mayan myths from seem to care more about lack of rain than a calendar running out. In fact, if any doom is coming our way, it's collective failure thanks to a few doomsday nutcases stealing all the attention away from real problems, here and now.

So while admittedly it's entertaining to read about religious apocalypses, and convenient to project them unto reality when things don't go your way, you're probably better off worrying about an empty fridge or a late work assignment, than you are obsessing about a world that isn't going to end.

Alfred's summer recollections of Germany (I, II) reminded me of an Oktoberfest (well, kind of, it was held in April) in Hannover a few years back. This week my university held a smaller Oktoberfest, so naturally I had to show up and check out the place. To avoid essay form, here are a few impressions I remember from those nights out:

1. Studio music sucks. A real Oktoberfest features live music from local bands. This way you can sing along (read: mime the facial gestures of other Germans) and achieve some kind of communal spirit, which is the essence of an event like this anyway. Playing "Deutsche Volk Hits" 6 hours on repeat doesn't cut it.

2. Good beer is important. It's tiresome to walk up to the bar and notice they mostly serve bland ales. This place had quite a few Belgian style ales and a few Swedish porters, some of which were decent. No rauchbiers until Friday. If you open up a place and celebrate an Oktoberfest, you party from day one with the best beer you can offer, preferably from local places if possible.

3. People want something heavy to eat. You can't serve hamburgers and nachos at an Oktoberfest. Back in Hannover I was served pork meat and some kind of hot potato salad. The meat was so perfectly cooked; so gentle it would melt in your mouth. After one of those dinners, you couldn't move for an hour. This is what people want, because they usually get really hungry after being at a place like this the whole evening. When you're done eating, you can concentrate on drinking and singing instead.

4. Real Oktoberfests don't have "guards" - German women are rule of law. Everyone who has ever been to a real German beer party knows what I'm talking about. Nobody--and I mean nobody dare laying a hand on the women who carry out food and beer. Observe how many liters of beer and plates of food they can carry at once without so much as flinch, and you have the answer. They could probably beat down a bull if they had to. Better keep yourself friendly with the ladies.

5. When non-Germans arrange German fests, make sure students aren't involved. Students have only three things on their minds: grades, sex, alcohol. Well, sort of makes sense for poor students, but it's a bad ingredient for a really pleasant Oktoberfest. Since this party was arranged by students, the closest you could come to German atmosphere were half-drunk nitwits with Jägermeister suspenders and paper hats. Yuck. I feel sorry for the dude who bid 30 euro for a pair of those suspenders. If he'd waited for the next pair, he'd gotten them at half the price. He could have added a few euros and bought himself a pair of Lederhosen instead, which otherwise is mandatory during an occasion like this.

6. If you serve beer, make sure you know what you're doing. If I ask where a particular beer is brewed, I don't expect this answer: "Uuh...I guess...uh...wait...let me look...how do you see that?" Moron.

7. Bring people together, not apart like we always do in Sweden. In Sweden everyone is busy doing their own thing, but if you make the slightest attempt to bring people together, they will love it. What a poor community culture we have, which is reflected at a time like this when people are supposed to sing together and hold cheers for strangers you wish well. Instead we get drunk in small private groups, then make half-assed attempts at becoming friends with random people at the bar. To my knowledge, not even Germans would consider that a social option at an important celebration.

There's more, but I think I've managed to summarize how many of these evenings unfolded. Unlucky our university couldn't put up a better Oktoberfest, because it really is one of the finest aspects of contemporary German culture, and an excellent opportunity to check out local beer sorts, chat with strangers, and participate in competitions. If you ever make it to Germany during autumn, don't hesitate to check out the real deal. For the rest of us, we'll stay home and pretend we're somewhere else.

My favorite leftist writes about the uselessness of Unesco in this week's Tuesday Morning Quarterback:

Last week, Bulgaria's Irina Bokova bested Egypt's Farouk Hosni to become the new head of Unesco, the United Nations cultural agency. The vote was politically charged because Hosni was accused of anti-Israel bias, of which there is already way too much at the United Nations. Then again, to the Arab world this looks like a determination that it's fine to denounce Muslim governments but criticism of the Israeli government makes you persona non grata. There is a simple alternative to avoid future clashes of this nature: abolish Unesco. Why does the United Nations even have a cultural agency? Culture is and ought to be a free realm where individual artists and national or regional groups create and safeguard their own ideas. It's ridiculous that the United Nations claims a role in deciding what aspects of culture are worthy and what aren't. When Unesco was founded in November 1945, global communication was close to nil -- maybe back then there was a valid international purpose in attempting to spread cultural information. Today, in an era of Wikipedia and instant global MP3 downloads of all forms of expression from seungmu dancing to Iranian techno-pop, Unesco is a wasteful tax-subsidized anachronism that does little but provide a luxurious lifestyle to a self-absorbed U.N. aristocracy. People don't need their culture supervised for them -- the whole point of culture is that people create it for themselves. Let's get the United Nations out of an arena where it has no business.

This is an excellent point, and applies just as well to all governments, not just the UN. Sure, some forms of art are still expensive to produce and not economically viable without either government support or private donors - symphony orchestras come to mind - but so much of culture has gotten far cheaper to produce over the past decade or two that it really doesn't need to be supported. It doesn't even matter whether it's useful or not. We can laugh at Sweden's rulers for financing "feminist porn", but really the need to subsidize just about any kind of filmmaking is gone. It's gotten so cheap that one of my bands is getting a simple promo video made for nothing more than copies of a few of my other bands' releases and a shirt.

Any member of the upper middle class in a developed country can afford to produce a full-length film these days. Plenty of them are pretentious enough to do it, too. They no longer need to be encouraged with your money anyway.

Part I

I took the train from Kassel to Munich early one weekday morning. I slept at the station, and the night got particularly cold. However I did have a choice of where to sleep. Either I could have stayed at the front of the station on a flat and almost comfortable bench, but possibly find myself periodically molested by wandering tramps and other strange twilight vagrants, or I could have relaxed in perfect solitude along any of the train platforms, on benches that looked like they were designed for enthusiastic masochists. I chose the latter option.

Tired and cold and with a spine bent to the side a little bit I stumbled onto the train with my bulky backpack around my shoulders. On my way down the carriage I clumsily nudged anyone brave or ignorant enough not to remain far behind their armrests. I sat down in front a large, content-looking German lady, who greeted me, heard my imperfect attempt at the language, and I believe she started telling me about where she lives. I wasn't particularly conscious by that time, and I fell asleep as soon as she stopped, waking up to see a mercifully empty seat in front of me. The train station around Munich turned out to be incredibly claustrophobic, especially on a hot day with almost 20kg on your back. I met my friend and we left as soon as possible towards the south, towards Kochel am See; the name implying its position by a lake.

To earnestly detail the entirety of the hike would take far too much time and probably wouldn't be interesting. Basically, we travelled eastwards across mountains and forests from Kochel am See towards Lenggries, another town by a lake, then eastwards again to Tegernsee and Schliersee. It was all very beautiful. At this point, we took a train towards Königsee and spent the rest of our time walking around the area there. We had initially planned our route using Google Earth. This small detachment from reality meant that we hilariously overshot our actual possible accomplishment by around 300%. Whilst we were on the computer, we thought nothing about nonchalantly dragging a straight path directly over every stretch of mountains we found, giving no thought to what the reality on the ground would actually be like.

Hiking through remote parts of alpine Bavaria is simply soul purifying. When the sky isn't falling down, it is a serene mixture of physical exertion, clean blue skies, a largely unmolested natural environment, stunning vistas and an infrequent procession of amiable ramblers passing you by. The locals have dotted the mountains with these pretty wooden adaptations, fashioned from fallen tree trunks, that siphon off emerging water from springs and rivers in various playful ways. As well as being delightful to rest by, they also make it far more convenient to collect water for your bottle. The humble soundtrack of tinkering cowbells from every valley is a welcome sensation. However, if you've never attempted it before, don't convince yourself for a second that hiking isn't incredibly difficult work, despite this pleasant description. At the foot of your first ascent, a distance that looks like it's a mere stone's throw away will actually feel like thirty minutes of carrying a much, much larger stone on your back. Our first mountain ascent was characterised by three minutes or less of hard slogging for every ten minutes or more of recuperation.

Finding places to camp in the mountains is sometimes a problem. Owing to the inherent characteristics of mountains, i.e. their inclination to slope upwards, finding a suitable camping site can be rather difficult. On the rare occasion you do find level ground you will most likely be banging in your tent pegs next to a breezy one hundred metre drop, and attempting to tie your legs to the nearest fir tree. Trying to sleep on any appreciable slope can be a very unsettling experience, in the most lateral sense of the term. Imagine that it's late at night and you've been hiking since early in the morning. Your tent is up, your sleeping mat is rolled out, and then you lay down inside your sleeping bag, realising your exhaustion. After a few seconds you notice a slight willingness for the sleeping bag to inch towards the lower side of your tent, but you dismiss it as unimportant and go to sleep. After an hour of sleep you calmly wake up. Mildly astonished, you perceive that your head must now facing the other way, your knees have come to rest just above your chin, and your hands are helplessly locked in a contortion behind your back, having unconsciously turned 180 degrees during a gradual and unsettling descent towards the bottom corner of your tent. Despite all preventative measures, this exact process will happen several times further during the night.

It is much more preferable to find shelter at an alpine hut instead. A mixture of youth hostel and pub, these wooden structures are placed in the more remote regions of the Alps along the longer hiking routes, to allow the more serious walkers time to travel much deeper and higher into the mountains without having to brace the capricious nightly environment. To stay the night is quite cheap and you sleep on simply designed bunks that you share with other hikers. The bar offers wholesome food and frothy local beer, both of which are much appreciated after a long hike. The local Bavarian community forms around these huts, with the atmosphere inside being superbly warm, in stark contrast to the dark and cold air outside. I stayed twice in two of these dwellings, and the first time I recognised the faces of half a dozen other ramblers who reached the place before me, having seen them on various stages of the mountain beforehand. We had some local beer, and a man played German folk music on his guitar whilst his wife kept in harmony with the lyrics. The second time we slept in a hut my friend and I played chess as a storm raged outside. This close to the scene of the lightning, every time the lightning struck it was like a bomb had been let off. I finished the night with a shot of local spirits, which immediately took me several hundred metres higher up the mountain.

After this second night in a hut we were near the end of our journey. I was initially intending to carry on walking past the hut, towards a more difficult stretch of path that led steeply down the mountain towards the St. Bartholomew church by Königsee. My less confident friend would walk back towards the town. However I had been informed by a Bavarian at a different hut that a lady had fallen and died the day before whilst trying to negotiate the tricky passage, and infrequent crosses inscribed with memorials to dead loved ones confirm the deadly capability of the mountains. He went on to mention that with care there is no need to be worried on the route, but with the skies overcast and the ground still wet from the night before, I decided not to attempt it with the burden on my back, and turned to take the easier path back down towards the north.

When you're down from the mountains, there are many interesting things to tell about civilised Germany too. Like the time I sat down on a bench in Lenggries and came to realise that I was sitting next to a spitting image of Michael Schumacher, who was eating a bread roll at the time. The youth hostels in Germany are actually used by young people in the community as a centre of recreation, but this is quite annoying if you want a place to sleep the night instead of having to pitch your tent in what will come to be an apparently very irritated farmer's field in the morning. I once walked past a school that looked like a concentration camp.

After an extreme night of weather in the mountains, at the heart of which we had pitched our tents, we descended cold and wet towards the town and rented a place at a camping site until the next day. This was where I realised my tent had completely given up the ghost, and for it to cope with just one more meek evening shower was evidently far too much to ask. The roof started to unload drops of water with increasing frequency, and the wonky door proved itself as a highly efficient water chute, the end of which disappointingly sent most of the water inside. I erected an intricate system of water bottles and other camping paraphernalia to correct the canopy into dropping the water harmlessly onto the ground outside, but a brief bluster of wind scattered the instruments and forced me to gather up my possessions like a madman for an undignified rush into my friends tent.

Despite my several mishaps, the overwhelming impression of my time in Bavaria has been that the Bavarians are simply a brilliant people. The rest of Germany has infamously mixed opinions on the area, many being none to keen on the folk. But my blessed experiences with almost every individual I met there have been deeply treasured. An elderly couple on a short hike who, on our first day, noticed we were hopelessly lost without a map, so they gave us theirs and drove us all the way back to our starting point. A man who walked out of his way to take us to the train station, and then patiently showed us a method to purchase cheaper train tickets. A young hiker, stranded on a rainy night at the same train station as us, who gave us a helpful sum of his experience before the storm ended and parted from us with a gift. I'd already forgotten many of the other kind souls even before I returned home, but had I the capacity, I could give an endless and endlessly grateful account of people who offered favours beyond their mere justification, or heard my fractured German requests for directions and were only too pleased to help. Bavaria, along with Austria, has become my favourite European retreat; it's an extraordinary land.

I thought I was done proclaiming the superiority of lowbrow entertainment to high culture for a while, but Steve Sailer has written an interesting column about country music which is worth passing along. It contains many interesting thoughts, but I'll pick just one, as it's applicable to so many spheres of life:

Country songs sung by women now tend to be You-Go-Girl sassy, aimed at Oprah fans. Male singers, on the other hand, get to be sappy, to make fun of themselves, and do other things that wouldn’t be considered appropriately “empowering” for women to do. Not surprisingly, allowed a wider choice of songs, there are more male stars.

Yup... empowerment can be quite limiting. On the other hand, guys do have some limitations as well - they can't exactly sing about shooting their wives or girlfriends, not unless they first shoot the guy the woman is cheating with, and preferably then proceed to shoot themselves. Chivalry isn't completely dead yet - guys can't just shoot girls. Girls, on the other hand, can give us great songs about shooting their men:

Now, the reason I've been posting about these subjects lately is that I spent the last week of August at an arts and music festival which reminded me of just how alien those arts people are. I really should say something nice about them, though, after shitting on them for two weeks. So I will.

At an afterparty, I saw all sorts of artsy people who complain all day about the tastes of the general populace happily dancing to James Brown, Spice Girls and Katy Perry songs, so perhaps they are not really all that weird after all. The afterparty provided good anecdotal evidence for the pretty songbird hypothesis, as a lot of the girls in bands were very good-looking.

Inevitably, two guys came into conflict over a girl. It didn't come to blows, though, just a bottle of water poured over somebody's head. They talked it out, hugged and apparently made peace so completely that they didn't even glare at each other angrily for the rest of the evening. On the way back from the afterparty I saw a small group of people silently dancing in the middle of an intersection. They started singing, which predictably enough led to one of the locals opening a window and yelling at them to shut the fuck up before she calls the cops. The group apologized politely and quietly went home.

For all I know that kind of behavior might be reasonably normal among peaceful Westerners, but here it is rather shocking. The middle-class arts-and-culture crowd does have its positive sides. These people may be weird, and they may loathe anyone normal, but they really are remarkably nonviolent and peaceful.

That concludes the nicest thing I'll ever say about middle-class people, and the only nice thing I'll ever say about arts people.

Part II

Last week I returned from Germany, having spent a total of three weeks there either hiking or staying with friends. I thought I may as well attempt to interest readers with an account of my journey and some of my observations of the land and its people.

My first week was spent around the border between Hessen and Lower Saxony, which is pretty much in the middle of Germany. I had a few nights at a friend's house in the city of Kassel, before having to move on to get some hiking practice. The region in and around Kassel is heavily associated with the Grimm Brothers; it is there where they grew up together and collected many of their fairy tales, and they would have doubtless gained literary inspiration from their natural surroundings.

Unfortunately you won't at all mind forgetting about Kassel. I've read some of the Grimm fairy tales in the original German, and not at any time did I imagine them taking place inside a budget supermarket or in-between a block of flats inhabited mostly by middle eastern engineering students. You can take a walk anywhere around the town and feel like all you've been doing is negotiating the arcades of a shopping mall. The centrepiece of the town - a simple circle of fountains surrounding an open space - is disappointingly arbitrary, as if a unimaginative ten year old had designed it on Sim City. The only grand-looking area of the city is positioned into irrelevance, perched as it is awkwardly onto the side of the main thoroughfare. The city is not unfriendly, nor especially ugly - it just lacks character.

The city would not be memorable at all were it not for the Bergpark Wilhelmshöhe; Kassel's saving grace and a marvellous showcase of park design where sweeping paths work their way up a small mountain, beginning from a castle on the western edge of the city. The beauty lies in its ability to charmingly lead you from side to side up the slope of the mountain; entering the dense woodland on either flank ambushes your sense of direction before you must turn once again to approach the central garden space from a different angle and a higher elevation. In this way, every crossing of the park offers a new and unexpected revelation of the same landscape below. Secluded pathways, lakes, boulders, rivers and ruins also help provide a sense of childlike adventure on your way up towards the top. A statue of Hercules stands on the very peak, which unfortunately was obscured by repairs at the time of my visit. I chose not to venture back down the way I came after noticing a footpath to the side that pursued an enchanting return route through the adjacent forest.

My next few days were spent around the town of Hannoversch Münden. To walk there from Kassel takes almost a day, but the scenery is pleasant, and the frequent cyclists often give greetings or encouragement. My favourite was a cheerful “gut gewandert!” which would mean something like “well hiked!” in English. Hannoversch Münden is actually somewhat of a hidden gem, a venerable looking town nestled between two stretches of forest in Lower Saxony. At its heart lies an old church around which the local community is focused, and if you head towards the forest in the north you may possibly get to see people mincing around in camp medieval costume due to the fairy tale tradition in the area. I came across one of these surreal parades after having spent several hours walking around in a circle and asking lonely lumberjacks how to get the hell out of there. After that I decided to sit down for a while.

I took a train to the nearby town of Göttingen one day, but didn’t really get much of a chance to see it. The main thing I noticed is that the place is literally full of attractive women. And they all seem to ride bicycles. Either that is a very generous government-sponsored initiative for the benefit of everyone else in the town, or the local cycle dealer has some rather perverse special offers.

Politics is serious business in central Germany. In these sort of towns there is about a 150% chance of seeing an anti-fascism sticker on any given rubbish bin. This means that there will be one relatively new sticker still intact and another, much older sticker that looks as if it has been half scraped away by an outraged neo-Nazi who happened to pass by. I also saw one young boy whose contradicting slogans on his punk attire made him look as if he was hilariously proclaiming his maverick allegiance to the centre-right ground of mainstream politics. “Troops out of Afghanistan! But only after we hand over policing and military control to a peaceful and democratically elected government!”

To end this first part of my adventure, I will mention that it’s nearly election time in Germany, the main clue being the posters up all over the place reminding you what party is prejudiced against whom. The most interesting thing I noticed is that the would-be class warrior has much more choice in Germany than they do here in the UK, as you can see:

Social Democratic Party - “We’ll tax the rich!”
The Left - “We’ll really tax the rich!”
The Marxist-Leninist Party of Germany - “We’ll fucking kill them!”

If you care for more, it’s all about Bavaria in my next piece.

Once in a while I run across someone who argues that civilization is in decline and, as an argument, contrasts the music of, say, Mozart against Kayne West. That's just plain silly. A reasonable comparison might be between Mozart and Harry Partch, and indeed countless words have been written about whether serious art music, and highbrow culture in general, ain't what they used to be. But what about the music us regular folk enjoy? Is Kayne West really worse than his predecessors from 50 or 500 years ago? I don't really know enough about West or his roots to answer that question well, but I can do a similar comparison for a style I'm more familiar with - country music. It is a direct descendant of what is now called old-time music or old-timey, which in turn is descended from the folk music of the British Isles, and it's certainly not an example of high culture.

So how do the musical tastes of American rednecks compare to those of their peasant ancestors? We want to look at the longest possible period, so let's start with a song with some really old roots - "The Devil And The Farmer's Wife". A song has to be pretty good to survive being passed down orally for so many centuries.

Moving forward in time and across the Atlantic, "Soldier's Joy" is one of the old-time standards that all fiddlers must know.

In the 20th century we come to what we actually call country music - let's pick "I Walk The Line" as an example.

Finally, as an example of a big modern country hit, let's take "Angry All The Time". This gives us four songs which entertained American rednecks and their ancestors over the course of several centuries. Sure, it's only four data points, and this isn't a scientific investigation, but at least the comparison isn't complete nonsense.

I see no big obvious decline. If anything the more modern songs have more complicated arrangements and take more skill to perform. It looks like the entertainment choices of "the herd" have gotten a little more sophisticated over the past 1000 years. It's very possible that our elites have bought into a ridiculous set of ideas about music and art in the Romantic period, and all high art has gone off the rails since then, but that's their problem. Those of us who don't give a crap about high art seem to be doing just fine, thank you.

Ilkka Kokkarinen is back to blogging and brings to our attention this piece of student newspaper nonsense about the Jonas Brothers, an American band apparently very popular with kids in their early teens:

“It positions women’s sexuality as being out of control and part of the natural world where as men embody reason and control.”

Gender inequality is alive and well in this 3D experience, and it’s most evident when phallic symbols like hot dogs and police batons are probed at the audience.

At one point, Nick and Joe bring out squirt guns and cover the audience in white foam. The girls scream and giggle excitedly, not realizing they’ve been symbolically cummed on.

“It’s the cum shot,” says Whittington-Walsh in agreement. “So he’s actually reaching climax, both of them, and the girls aren’t … The gun is the phallic because symbolically they’re (the Jonas Brothers) these fascist Gods. They want to dominate, so they’re dominating the woman, they’re controlling the woman.”

I hope our Fascist readers take note and worship the Jonas Brothers as their Gods. Because that's what they are. A sociology professor says so. The professor thinks the non-Fascist children should find someone else to worship:

So as the pop music cycle continues, it’s really the tweens who suffer. They’re presented with the same packages time and time again, just the names and looks change. The only way to combat this youth-culture homogenization is by getting youth to think critically, or as Whittington-Walsh points out, “they’re just going to keep wanting that kind of fluff, they’re not going to go out see the Che movie.”

So... kids should look up to bloodthirsty murderers instead of pop stars? I humbly disagree. Most people who despise the very existence of such music, though, seem to be driven not by an insane ideology but by simple resentment.

Besides these subliminal messages there is no actual depth or meaning to the music. The whiney heterosexist lyrics rotate around falling in love, finding the perfect girl only to lose her. Granted, the boys do play their own instruments and write their own songs — unlike many past ‘boy bands’ — but their presentation is typical of the flashy boy band concert.

With a giant backing band, equipped with a string section and pyro-techniques, the Jo Bros rely on visuals to entertain the crowd. It’s a technique that’s been in use since seventeenth century opera, says David Snable, a popular music teacher at Ryerson University.

“I know people want a lot of visuals, that’s a part of it, but certainly having fireworks and 3D detracts from the actual sound of what you’re hearing,” he says. “Your mind goes into sensory overload.”

On the sound quality of the Jo Bros, Snable describes them as, “a cute tune, [with] inane sort of nothing words, a bit of a beat. Certainly no sophisticated harmony … They don’t know anything about musical subtleties.”

The formulaic pop that’s supposed to please the masses is part of the capitalistic music-marketing machine that’s been in full force since the 1930s.

Can't you just see the bile dripping from those words? It's curious to see that a "popular music teacher" hates popular music this much, but then again he's working at a university and probably doesn't actually teach anyone who wants to play popular music how to actually do it. He seems representative of large numbers of people working in the arts and culture fields who are dismayed by the mere existence of anything which is entertaining or fun or (to quote one of Ilkka Kokkarinen's older posts) "speaks in rational manner to normal people who have real jobs". They are, exactly as Michael Blowhards says, "strange, out-of-control, vindictive people with loony and burning fantasies about their deep-down superiority to the rest of us", "who have banked their lives on the idea that 'normal' is evil". They have failed to interest normal people in their products, have failed to prevent others from giving normal people something they actually want, have failed to prevent normal people from being interested in normal things, and are left to seethe in impotent rage. I can enjoy pointing at them and laughing - lucky for me I have never pretended to be a gentleman.

Sure, the Jonas Brothers may not be all that great. (I wouldn't know, I haven't heard them.) There may be better music about romance out there, but so what? Expecting millions of 12-year-olds to enjoy and understand Mozart's operas or even a more adult song such as Cole Porter's "Love For Sale" is about as absurd as Anton Webern's assertion that "the postman on his rounds might someday be overheard whistling an atonal tune". Ain't gonna happen. Let our high priests of culture be dismayed and let our kids have fun listening to whatever they find meaningful and enjoy.