I’ve always thought of Sweden as sort of like a window into the future of human life. It’s a bizarre place where poverty is virtually non-existent, the pop music is scarily well-produced and the furniture is appropriately minimalistic.
Which is why I was so surprised recently to watch Sweden collectively lose its fucking shit. This week has made me reconsider the fact that maybe the Swedes are just as crazy, arrogant and insipid as the rest of us. Maybe they don’t have it all figured out after all.
It all started off with the moronical controversy over VisitSweden’s Twitter account. It seems that the fools at Sweden’s tourism bureau thought it would be a good idea to let randos take over their Twitter feed and broadcast out whatever meatball-clogged brain drippings occurred to them.
As embarrassing as this was, the government of Sweden, actually stood behind the dumb-ass tweets:
It’s very important for us to let everyone take a unique viewpoint. Every one of our curators is there with a different perspective.
Sweden, this is fooking insane! You don’t have humiliate your own country and alienate millions of Jews just to make some stupid point about the democratic value of new media, or whatever. Most people are fucking idiots. Most people shouldn’t even be allowed to post Facebook status updates for their 123 friends. And when the average mook does make a fool out of you by saying a bunch of dumb shit into a live mic… YOU TURN OFF THE MIC. Don’t try to claim this is a “different perspective” worth paying attention to. Gah!
Ok ok, Bots, you’ve known (and loved) many Swedes. They’re very nice people. They’re mostly nothing like Sonja (and they’re not all musical terrorists like the people behind Abba). Sure, they will want to look at your penis but there’s usually no anti-Semitism involved. The Twitter fiasco was just a case of one bad Swedish apple äpple.
But then on Thursday, (thanks to Lucky), I learned that some random blonde-haired goofball has built a design-conscious chicken coop aimed at eradicating the scourge of chicken depression.
According to the chicken coop’s designer,
The double-curved wooden structure, designed to mimic the feathery embrace of a mother hen, consists of a lattice-like facade with alternating panes of wood and void to bring natural daylight inside. The roof and backside of the house are covered in wooden shingles to prevent rainwater from penetrating the cabin. The entire shed is nimbly balanced on spindly steel legs, not much thicker than twig branches, that whimsically hold the house aloft and distance the sensitive creatures from the harsh realities of the ground.
Then just last night Ctalk’s own Graviton pointed out to us that Sweden’s Left Party has advanced a local bill that would make it illegal for men to piss while standing up. If this passage doesn’t terrify every red-blooded American male, I don’t know what will:
Male representatives on the Sormland County Council in Sweden should sit rather than stand while urinating in office restrooms, according to a motion advanced by the local Left Party.
Known as a socialist and feminist organization, the party claims that seated urination is more hygienic for men — the practice decreases the likelihood of puddles and other unwanted residue forming in the stall — in addition to being better for a man’s health by more effectively emptying one’s bladder, The Local reported.
Feminists and socialists? Together? Just saying those words out loud makes my gag reflex kick in. I’m pretty sure American’s founding fathers Elvis Presley and Hulk Hogan would kick these peoples’ asses if they had the chance and weren’t both already long dead.
So of course when you combine these two ideologies of terror, the result is a post-modern, gender-free zone of local council bureaucrats trying to turn us into a bunch of pussy-boys who can’t even properly mark our territory by peeing on every possible surface in the bathroom (including the ceiling tiles).
Sweden, get your shit together.
