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Posts Tagged ‘United States’

Um, that’s a surprise and a half. According to the new study on happiness around the world, Finland now ranks second after Denmark. I find it very hard to believe, coming from the country which has one of the highest suicide rates in the world and the country where joy comes in a liquid form sold from a government owned facility; Alko. However, we do have a saying which might explain this statistic a little bit: “The one laughing longest is the one on the best meds.” Depression is a nation wide problem, and is largely treated by popping pills, which do make people happier.

There is something else though that I think contributes to the findings more than that: Finns are quite bored with their image as the depressed nation. We’re not quite as bad as we sometimes let on, but we’re seriously not the happiest people on the planet. We may be the most contented people on the planet, but certainly not the happiest. I think that the wish to change our reputation a bit, a lot of respondents have felt compelled to exaggerate the good stuff – which of course wouldn’t be a bad thing to do on a more regular basis.

There are other factors as well, considering Finnish happiness, which probably should be brought up. We are easily satisfied. We don’t expect much of life. The feeling of happiness comes largely from the fact that you get what you think you deserve or what you have earned. I think that in USA for example, people expect a lot more from life than what Finns do, and therefore feel unhappier than the Finns do, even though they might have more or less the exact same standard of life. I know from my own life, that I am ten times happier in Tasmania than what I ever was in Finland. My worst day in Tassie is about as bad as the average day in Finland. And Australia didn’t even make the top 10! And the happiness here has nothing to do with how much money I make here, what I do for living or how big my house is, it is a direct result of what happens when I look outside the window. Instead of rain and asphalt I see green on top of green and beauty on top of beauty. If I had been born here though, I would probably think that by now I should have a house with a sea view instead of a house next to a high way on a semi-industrial area, and that might make me feel quite dissatisfied. In Finland I would not even expect to rent a house, let alone having a view besides the wall of the neighboring building seen through the window of my 60 square meter apartment that I pay an arm and a leg for. In comparison, for the amount of money we paid rent for a 2 room flat in Helsinki, we could rent a 2 family home on a massive lot in Hobart-area… But that’s just it. In Finland you wouldn’t expect to get anything more than 2 rooms. (That’s one bed room by the way.)

Finns are good at accepting things as they are. It is a great asset and a great hinderance at the same time. While we don’t suffer for not being able to do or have something, we accept it as it is instead of trying to change it. And that is what makes us so damned happy.

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I suppose I am taking a risk here, because I’m speaking in defence of the freedom of speech in a way… Apparently, being honest about your true feelings isn’t appropriate these days. Someone important might get offended. In this case, that someone important was Fred Smith of FedEx for a comment made on Twitter about their town by certain Mr. Andrews who was on his way to give him a presentation of a sort. The unfortunate Mr. Andrews didn’t like Memphis. It seems, that Mr. Andrews should have liked Memphis, or at least should have pretend to, and as he didn’t he got into a world of trouble for mentioning that on Twitter.

What I want to ask is that how petty do you have to be if you bother to write a 350 word letter about a tweet message that most people wouldn’t thought twice about without you bringing it up? Now we all know that Memphis is a bit of an eye sore from the airport point of view. Mr. Andrews never said why he didn’t like Memphis. Maybe he has an obnoxious auntie there. He also never mentioned WHICH town he didn’t like, but thanks to Fred Smith, we all know now that it was Memphis. Now I know, that if I ever go to US, Memphis isn’t probably the nicest place to go see. (Not that I would have anyway, so no big harm done there, or even if I had been thinking about going, the harm still wouldn’t be big I suppose.)

I once got into trouble by stating online that I couldn’t understand how people could live in Helsinki. To me it was way too noisy and there were no trees in sight, and every building looked alike. I lived in Helsinki for some years after that, and I still can’t understand why some people choose to live there. I said that online, and a (former) friend who lives in Helsinki was offended. I simply cannot understand why anyone would be so precious about their home town. Now that I live in Hobart, I LOVE this place. I absolutely ADORE it. But I do understand that some people will find it way too quiet for their taste; they even might say it’s not pretty as there are no neon lights and some of the houses and stores are a bit of an eye sore, but do I care if someone says that out loud on Twitter? Of course not! They have a right to their opinion, and it won’t change my love for Hobart one tiny bit. I happen to like those eye-sores as well. They add character. :p

I don’t know how the letter got online, but I suspect that unless Mr. Andrews got sacked for this he wouldn’t have dared to. However, it got online and Fred Smith should know that publicity these days goes both ways. Everything that can be legally published and a bunch of illegal stuff can become public information. (And here’s a tip, Mr. Smith. If you resort to personal insults toward the little guy in response to something so generic than someone not liking your town, it doesn’t really sit well with general public.) Now, I am one of the few people who don’t have to worry about what drinking party photos will be published of me on Facebook, because I’ve yet to have my first drink. I still feel it’s completely unrealistic to demand a squeaky-clean public image from the people around you, because the only people who can keep that up are very likely to suffer from narcissistic personality disorder, and you would not want to hire them if you knew. People are people, and we are very fast getting to know that we all have things in our lives that other people will judge. Be it your figure, your opinions, your way of life, your religion, someone will think you’re an abomination for it.

I rarely quote the bible, but this is such a perfect opportunity: Judge Not Lest Ye Be Judged

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There’s more to this story yet. Please read the comments made by Terbil Towl explaining who exactly wrote that letter… May that be a lesson in thinking before typing in anger.

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I will warn you now, that there will be a lot of swearing going on in this post. A lot. I am so fucking angry you cannot believe me. I recently watched an episode of Australian RSPCA stories. A man dropped off a litter of kittens in front of a veterinary clinic and was fined. In USA though, you can drop off CHILDREN at a hospital door and not be procecuted.

Now I understand where this law comes from. It is a better option for killing newborns and dumping them into the bin for sure. Is it the only option for it, I don’t think so.

This is yet another way to make teens more irresponsible when having sex, after being brainwashed against using birth control as “they shouldn’t have been having sex in the first place”. Abortion laws and pro-life people are not helping.

I would approve easy, what ever your reasons -type of adoption, where the child would be given into the care of an orphanage, or where ever these kids would end up to. Through orphanage probably before being sent to foster homes. It would give the child something to work with in the future, when he would wonder why he was abandoned. The mother should anonymously give information about her circumstances and reasons for the decision, to be given to the child at an appropriate age. That is what adopted kids usually want to know, why did she do this? Why was I abandoned? It doesn’t matter who the mother is, where she came from, but what matters is why she left me. This information should then be stored at some database or what ever, and I would encourage the mother to give something personal to the child. Like a pedant or something romantic, just to make the child feel special in some way. They could even be given a number, that both of them would have in case they would want to track each other down later, when circumstances change and you want to know what happened to the child/the mother. That number could be stored without any information into a database, until the child or the mother releases their information for that number. Once both parties had filled their info, they could be informed of each other’s details.

But this law encourages just.. FUCK ME! If you can’t face a sympathetic face that will take care of your child, what kind of a person does that make you? Put a bag over your head or something, but for fucks sake, how EASY AND FUN does ones life really have to be?! The USA’s manner of taking care of teen age pregnancies is just straight out of medieval times, and should have no place in a modern society.

In Nebraska, you can drop of practically adult children when you get tired of them. How likely is it, that they would end up dead anyway? I am so freaking mad about this. I understand it, but it still makes me want to scream and shoot the people doing it. Curiously, I’m not as furious about the thought of babies getting killed. They won’t have to live with the trauma of being DROPPED OFF and abandoned. Sometimes I wonder if people actually remember at all what it was like being a child. It wasn’t fucking all fun and games people! It was traumatic, scary and fucking stupid at most times. If people cannot do right by their children, they should be aborted instead of abandoned at door steps somewhere. I mean if you can face killing a child, do you seriously think that you cannot face someone who will ask you a couple of questions and take the kid off your hands? Wouldn’t you feel a tad better if you knew you gave the kid all you could, a REASON?

I have also troubles following the logic that says decriminalising the lesser crime would keep people from murdering their children. I mean if it’s really a fear of the punishment, wouldn’t it be logical to drop the child at the hospital anyway, regardless of the punishment? But this is not about logic from the infant killers point of view, it is about panic. No infant murder will be prevented by this law.

Argh. Who am I kidding. Getting rid of a child should not be made easy. Preventing an unwanted pregnancy and aborting it should be however. It’s that fucking monkey Bush again who is forcing people to go to extremes like this. But for fucks sake, what would you do if you were 15, pregnant and feeling guilty for having a kid? You knew you had this option to get rid of it… Would you take it or go through the complicated procedure of legal adoption? This is nothing but an encouragement to do just that. Never mind the newborns in trash bins. They are a mere minority in this, sure it is AWFUL, but certainly it doesn’t have to come to this, if things are handled right from the start. CONDOMS. Just give them condoms for fucks sake, and make them make the hard decisions if they mess up without them!

I’ve always said that kids don’t come with a return policy, but apparently I was wrong. In some countries (not to mention any fucking names), it is BAD to have sex, it is BAD to use contraception, it is BAD to abort, but hey, it’s perfectly FINE to abandon your kid without a word. You stupid fucking cunts.

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I am not quite sure why this has been bugging me so much lately… Maybe it’s because I moved from one edge of the world to the other, and noticed how little things actually changed. There are some changes of course, which I find exciting, and then there is everything that stays the same. The similarities are mostly American origin. I’ve blogged about related issues before, so I won’t go into detail with that, you know what I mean even if you didn’t read the earlier posts. And I want to point out that I am most definitely not anti-US, but pro-rest-of-the-world. I love American people, Read the rest of this entry »

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