[avatar:/bilder/avatars/mikaela.jpg]Mikaela[/avatar] and I dressed up to get down yesterday evening, as we headed to S:t Eriksplan, where people who all were connected to a certain community assembled. The community in question, SKOM, is an electronic one where I used to hang out a lot for the past ten years or something like it. Mikaela was also into SKOM for a while, until we both left it, a couple of years ago. You can describe the system as a BBS with a couple of twists.

Pelle Fröling organised and hosted the event together with [avatar:/bilder/avatars/fdp.gif]Frederic[/avatar] who was dressed up. I wish I'd brought my camera, but then again I'd just get unhappy with the ordeal. I'm very much looking forward to purchasing the Nikon D70 (even though I've somewhat still got my eyes on the Canon 350D). Anyway, people were buzzing away merrily. A lot of people from the days of yore turned up. I was happy to meet most of them, actually.

Even a "nemesis" of mine turned up. I'll explain: a few years ago, Mikaela and I were at a party. During it at one point, Mikaela spoke to a person from this community, who told her she shouldn't be together with me; he said I'm the type who spends all of his money on expensive films, who doesn't look to the future and to make a long story short, in essence indicated that Mikaela's relationship with me wasn't meant to survive. He told Mikaela all this while I was not around. As I was chatting away with somebody, Mikaela came to me, looked sad and told me she wanted to leave. I asked her why. She told me she just wanted to leave, but I knew something was bothering her.

Now, I'm not a violent person, but after I got her to tell me the reason to why she was sad, I asked her to wait for me, and quickly hunted down the slanderer. He was sitting in a chair laughing away, so I confronted him by holding a hand to his forehead, pushing him back into the chair and hissed something in his ear about what a snake and a coward he was, and that if he wanted to add anything to this fact I'd be glad to go outside and punch him to pieces. He was scared by this. Even I was! I'm not the fighting type of person, but this...slandering? The lowest of the low. Anyway, he tried to explain himself which was to no effort. Of course I didn't physically attack him as I said I would, but instead told him to telephone me when he was sober if he ever wanted to make amends with me, so that we could talk about the ordeal. He never phoned me, so there you go.

People were quite nice. It was fun to meet most people again! I gave Pelle (who's politically quite far to the right) a DVD with Bill Hicks. Will he do wonders to Pelle's political tastes? Hmm. It'll make him laugh, anyway. It was also fun to see that Klara wore v1 Blackspot Sneakers! When we spoke about this, Pelle joined the discussion. "Nike has given a lot of money to third-world countries," he argued. "Well," I retorted, "it's interesting to see that Nike is busy calculating how many thousands of a second they can save when kids are making their sneakers in sweatshops in third-world countries." This ended the discussion. David, Klara's husband, agreed and exclaimed "Ha! 'The Corporation!'" which we've both seen. In that documentary, which I strongly recommend to anybody who's in the least interested in globalisation issues, an organisation picked up proof that Nike actually did that calculation. Horrible, really.

Today I read this BBC article and found out that Göran Persson, the prime minister of Sweden, has spoken out against the ways women are portrayed in the Swedish media, i.e. "it's bad and it's gotta change". It's true. Even though Sweden is the "most feministic country in the world", gender-equality still doesn't exist here. From the article:

"Wherever you go in Sweden today, you see pictures of young women nearly undressed," he said in his address to a Social Democrat women's congress.

"We must distance ourselves from this degrading... almost pornographic offering which we see in certain media."

This might lead to "regulations" on the press. I'm not with that, as I'm against censorship in all of its forms, but when the editor-in-chief at Aftonbladet cries out, I'm sure Persson's pulling a few good strings, anyway, saying Swedish media is slowly turning out to become just what the English mags (e.g. The Sun) are today. We'll see how this turns out, but right now, any debate around this is sorely needed. The flicka.org-project is not enough when they're working against all types of commercial companies, e.g. the rag-mags, the cosmetic companies, popular trash-TV, et.c. Ten years ago our rag-mags weren't a tenth as bad as they are today. Celeb-thrashing, gossiping about the TV soaps, et.c. No matter what the media is, this is just utterly anti-intellectual and anti-feministic. By the way, see my old example of this type of Swedish trash posing as journalism here.